Ajax isn't progress, it's actually a step back. Most people have been happy to actually use some sane advanced language for doing web sites. There is Java, JSP, PHP, Ruby, Python, Perl, ... And then there is Ajax. One of the main components is JavaScript. That language most of us would have loved to forget. Forever. Ajax brings you back into the dark ages of internet development, with browser incompatibilities, it features memory leaks, and many Ajax apps (such as live.com) will run unbearably slow on older computers. Such as my 1.8 GHz P4M laptop. If they work at all - live.com just shows "Loading..." for me right now. Have you ever looked at some of the actual Ajax code? This isn't the future, this is the dark ages coming back! [MJ Ray replies that I didn't mention accessibility issues with Ajax. That's true; I'm aware of them, but this post focuses on Ajax doing away with all the advances in programming languages and software engineering... The in-accessibility of Ajax stuff is worth an own blog post sometime]

Aigarius Blog mentions "government's BAA" in passing, but doesn't allow comments (stupid buggy maths test), so I note this here and trackback: BAA plc was privatised in the mid-1990s and is currently being bought by the Ferrovial Consortium. Government may behave like it's still theirs, but it's just another market-dominating privatised corporation.

Lynn Cycling Forum meets on Fri 18 August. There's a draft agenda including the old favourites of parking and ongoing council works but should something else should be discussed too?

One big benefit of free software is that there's lots of helpful advice on the web. One big problem of free software is that there's lots of dodgy advice on the web. Examples:

1. Solving a connection problem with ssh by switching to "default permit".
2. "Web resources mention that I may need to recompile Apache especially to support PHP".

Got more? My advice - try to learn the implications of a change before running untrusted commands from the web.

How do you blog in more than one language? Variations on the same question arise at conversationblog and problogger. Anyone got any good suggestions or further links?

An updated java-package will hit unstable in the next mirror pulse. Apologies to all for the delay; my discretionary time and that of my sponsors has been rather sparse for some time now. There are at least 9 bug reports addressed in the release. All users who have a JRE or JDK packaged by a previous version of java-package are encouraged to first remove their existing packages and then install an updated one generated by 0.28. Again, sorry for my low level of productivity for Debian, but paying my bills and being a new dad has been quite taxing (albeit rewarding) the past nine months.

South Wales Echo: Road sign leaves Welsh-speakers bewildered tells how council roadmenders near Cardiff put up a sign saying "Inflammation of the Bladder Return" instead of "Cyclists Dismount". A local Welsh-speaker said mistranslations were common 'but we don't often get them quite as insane as this.' (seen via Wheelism).

Some google-fans have started using google as a verb, as in "to google" instead of "to web-search". I've not been doing that and now it seems Google is sending legal letters asking people to stop using it as a verb [The Independent]. Google wants to be part of the language, but not too much.

Adam Rosi-Kessel mentioned mobile phone design principles. The Motorola in the comments sounds a bit like the ancient L7089 I use, apart from the volume buttons don't beep when sound is off. I wish I could hack the firmware on it to fix a few of the more annoying bugs, like the 'make a noise to be quiet' stuff. On the plus side, it can map voice tags to menu options and the phone book, it switches off silently, it has decent-size keys and display text. I hate Nokias. Every model I've ever seen or used has keypads which are far too small and flat to ever be usable. Is there good design and easy hacking out there in mobile phones?

Lars Wirzenius posted about understanding meaning agreeing or accepting in "everyday language". I don't think it does. It only means that in some limited situations like "I don't want you to do that ever again: understand?" It's much more everyday for it to mean knowing about something or comprehending it. If you've seen bizarre accusations on debian mailing lists after someone claims to understand someone else's point of view, maybe this is why? I can understand it, but it's a PITA. Yes, it's a possible interpretation, but it's not often the most probable.

I found a small loop in koha's z39.50 search results page which did:

(define (output-page)
  (display (current-results))
  (if (pending-results?) (output-page)))

On the face of it, that makes sense. The problem comes if all searches complete between the display and the more-results? test: if so, the last batch of results won't be displayed. So far, I've only noticed it causing a problem on fast connections. I've fixed it in CVS to do:

(define (output-page)
  (let ((refresh? (pending-results?)))
    (display (current-results))
    (if refresh? (output-page))))

Worst case, it displays an unnecessary page. If only all bugs were so shallow.

I've really enjoyed reading the recent writings of Joseph Reagle on Wikipedia and online communities. Somebody sent me his Notions of Openness essay. I think it's an excellent complement to Jonathan Nolen's Open Company Test for those of us who are working in the Open Source/Open Content/Open Communities nexus. Anyways, Joseph Reagle's blog is a good read if you're interested in the WP and sociology of wiki and Open Content. I note that he quotes and references Biella Coleman's great work on Debian; I think it's pretty cool that this field of study is expanding. Joseph will be giving a talk titled Is Wikipedia Neutral?'' at Wikimania; I'm looking forward to it. tags: joseph reagle blogs debian wikipedia biella coleman open communities open company wikimania

Welcome to this 1st issue of DeDuBu contest, the monthly championship of the dumbest bug reported to the Debian BTS. The challengers

• Florent Bayle with #355455 (trying to overwrite /usr/lib/libpano12.la', which is also in package libpano12)
• Samuel Hocevar with #207349 (fortune-mod: internal error) and #177244 (chromium: Infringing on Bruce Springsteen's Copyright)
• Benjamin Drieu with #177128 (fetchmail initialisation fails on AIX 5.2 on JFS2 filesystem)
• James Westby with #374599 (cupsys: bug reporter is hallucinating) and #371032 (cupsys: Upgrade to 1.2 broke printing on local parallel GDI printer)
• Ken Bloom with #340111 (jython doesn't perform static initialization of classes called by other java classes)

How the vote has been done Five Debian related people voted for these bugs: Pierre Habouzit, Pierre Machard, Julien Louis, Mohammed Adn ne Trojette and Julien Cristau. Full ranking Bugs

• #177244 (chromium: Infringing on Bruce Springsteen's Copyright) (28 points)
• #207349 (fortune-mod: internal error) (26 points)
• #374599 (cupsys: bug reporter is hallucinating) (16 points)
• #177128 (fetchmail initialisation fails on AIX 5.2 on JFS2 filesystem) (15 points)
• #355455 (trying to overwrite /usr/lib/libpano12.la', which is also in package libpano12) (10 points)
• #371032 (cupsys: Upgrade to 1.2 broke printing on local parallel GDI printer) (9 points)
• #340111 (jython doesn't perform static initialization of classes called by other java classes) (8 points)

Challengers

• Samuel Hocevar (54 points)
• James Westby (25 points)
• Benjamin Drieu (15 points)
• Florent Bayle (10 points)
• Ken Bloom (8 points)

The winners

• Bug: #177244 (chromium: Infringing on Bruce Springsteen's Copyright)
• Challenger: Samuel Hocevar
• Bug reporter: Kingsley G. Morse Jr.
• Voter: Pierre Habouzit with the nearest ordered tierc : [1] #177244, [2] #207349 and [3] #355455.

About DeDuBu

Mark:

You've been somewhat disingenuous in your quoting. The full phrase is "Since Debian has no authority to hold money or property, any donations for the Debian Project must be made to SPI, which manages such affairs". That is, the "Any donations for the Debian Project must be made to SPI" isn't saying "Money must be given to SPI because we don't trust anyone else", it's saying "Money must be given to SPI because we can't accept money ourselves". It's a historical bug, much like "Debian's Developers are currently members of SPI by virtue of their status as Developers" (untrue and the sort of thing that you'd normally complain about".

it looks to me like the DPL endorsing someone not approved by SPI maybe isn't a properly-made decision

"SPI has no authority regarding Debian's technical or nontechnical decisions" could be used to argue against that, since it clearly indicates that the approval (or not) of SPI can't be used to block decisions made by the rest of the project. Perhaps this section of the constitution was badly written? Good Lord, etc.

Advocating expulsion! For wanting to avoid involvement with an unethical, buggy business venture of some UK DDs!

Or, alternatively, for going on and on and on and on and on and on and on about an argument that you've already lost and wasting absolutely no opportunity to bring it up in any possible new vaguely related forum. Sort of like your "religious hate campaign" and "violation of the UN human rights declaration" routines. Entirely coincidentally, I've been facing the latter from a co-worker who keeps accusing me of having stolen her Windows XP CD. I mention this merely as an amusing aside.

I would have commented rather than making a post of my own, except that you don't seem to have any mechanism for providing publically viewable comments. Coincidentally, this is the same reason that I didn't comment to say that I didn't like the way you fold your posts.

(Edited to fix spelling)

In June 2005, Ian Jackson chastised me for directing a UK donation away from Debian-UK Society (DUS), quoting a chunk of debian rules: "In particular, the Constitution says that [a person] must not actively work against these rules and decisions properly made under them'." Then I looked and I found the Constitution also says: "Since Debian has no authority to hold money or property, any donations for the Debian Project must be made to SPI, which manages such affairs" so anyone directing them elsewhere is actively working against that rule. I hate bureaucracy, so I find it amusing when the rules appear to support actions that I didn't check beforehand.

18 July 2006: Three diverse footnotes: one reply mentioned about leaving lights on being better than switching them off then on, but that's no longer true, according to the Energy Saving Trust's FAQ; someone else pointed me to athcool as a way to lower power consumption (and heat output) of some Athlon-based PCs and reported a 36 quid a year saving from it; finally, I'm not sure if this suggestion is serious and I doubt it works in England yet: "Grow a grapevine over your conservatory. It gives you lovely green shade during the hot weather, plus (given a bit more global warming) a chance to enjoy your very own wine!"

Update: Eventually, there was a useful post about not folding blogs [Vitavonni] (since refined on Digital-Scurf Ramblings) which addressed the first and third of the bullet points I made (topic split and text length). I was disappointed how many people (on planet debian in particular) seemed to jerk the knee on this and follow the crowd with simple "No" posts that added little useful to the debate. Blogging isn't a simple vote: you need to justify yourself to have most effect. Worst of all were the few who seemed not to notice how long this blog's feed has been folded - without complaint from anyone!

Added a link to Bertilow's Macros after seeing them on sce. I think they convert various things like x-sistemo to accented letters, but I've not tried them yet.

The main series has now finished. I've a few more emails to answer yet and a few more useful links that I've been sent. Someone suggested summarising the series and I think that's a good idea: 1. Switch off instead; 2. Understand your building; 3. Section your building; 4. Vent at night; 5. Close against the sun; 6. Use plants and fans; 7. Water the pavement and hang out the washing; 8. Don't use air-con, but if you must, use it wisely. If you can read French and would like to learn more, try Fra cheur sans clim' by Salomon and Aubert from Terre Vivante. Hope you enjoyed it and good luck not melting this summer!

Is English Enforcement in free software programming a growing problem? I was surprised to see a call for all programs to be English-only [cakebaker] from a Swiss software developer. Half of the time, supposedly-English-speaking programmers use nonsensical variable names, so who cares if they mean something in another language? It may even help someone if they know that language. Not all programmers are monoglots and English-enforcement isn't healthy. Even many English-first-language(1L)-speaking programmers don't use English properly, having grown up in places like the USA or England since they stopped teaching language and grammar at school. What's a bit more language butchery between friends? [...]