After the Debian new packages, removal and bugs feeds (see the previous blog posts), I also plugged a feed with the last uploads in the archive:
Debian uploads on Identi.ca
Debian uploads on Twitter As a reminder, here is the list.
For identi.ca:
Debian uploads
Debian NEW queue
Debian bugs
Debian removed packages For Twitter:
Debian uploads
Debian NEW queue
Debian bugs
Debian removed packages

I bought a ScanJet N6350 a few years back, in the belief that it would work. After all, you write free Linux drivers for all your printers, and when those printers are multifunctional printers with scanners, you do make sure the scanner bits of those printers work too. So it shouldn't be too hard to write a Linux driver for that scanner too, right? Apparently it is. For some reason that I can't imagine, you decided that my money is worth more than my stress levels.

• The HP ScanJet N6350 is a combination USB/network scanner. That's great; I don't need it to be right next to my laptop all the time. Having the ability to get it sent to me by email (as your product page claims it can do) reduces my workload. Unfortunately, what you didn't mention on the product page is that the scanner is pretty dumb; it does network, yes, but the only way in which it can send emails is by using some application running on a system on the other end of the network connection. That's pretty silly. It wouldn't be so bad, however, except...
• ... the system on the other end of the network connection has to be running Windows. That's right, you didn't write a Linux driver for some reason. You also didn't publish the network protocol, and even the USB connection seems undocumented. So I can't use Linux to scan my documents. It wouldn't be so bad, however, since I already have a Windows XP virtual machine lying around somewhere, mainly because there's this satellite navigation system builtin to my car that also requires it; I just installed your scanners oftware on that machine, and I can scan. Except...
• ... whenever an error occurs in the scanning process, the UI locks up completely. I can't retry the last page that I was trying to scan, and often I can't even save the document anymore, either; I have to rescan the whole document. That wouldn't be so bad, except...
• ... the ADF is total crap. If I put more than a few pages on the feeder, and they've got some horizontal folds in them (as is likely with snail mail that came out of an envelope), I'm very likely to end up with a paper jam, or with multiple pages sucked into the feeder at once, causing an error and a loss of my scanned document. That wouldn't be so bad, except...
• ... the process for finishing one scan and starting the next involves stopping and starting your whole scanning software, which takes a rather long time. As such, I'd prefer to just scan a whole stack of incoming snail mail in one go, and then use pdfsam to split up the PDF file. But then I have to babysit the scanning process so that I don't get any errors; but I fail at that about as often as I succeed, meaning, it usually takes a long time to get through the stack.

Dear HP, you suck. I fail to understand how the basic loss of functionality after a failed scan managed to get through your testing. I fail to understand why you think Linux users should be able to print, but not scan. And I especially fail to understand why I should waste my time with such an expensive device that can't even perform its basic functionality with more than 10% success rate.

phpMyAdmin has been accepted for Google Summer of Code 2013. So if you are a student and thinking about how to spend this summer, you might want to join us. This year we will have fresh mentor blood and we have prepared dozen of ideas, so in case you are interested, it's really the time to start to work on your application. We require you to contribute before GSoC, so that we can see you can handle the code and our tools. All details you might need are available in our applicant guide. Our requirements might sound strict, but without them, we would drown in hundredths of applications with no clue how to decide, so do your homework and prepare perfect application. If you have any questions, get in touch with us on mailing list and get ready for April 22th, when you can submit the application.

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Review: Judge Sn Goes Golfing, by John Scalzi

Artist:	Gahan Wilson
Publisher:	Subterranean
Copyright:	2009
Printing:	2012
ISBN:	1-59606-479-X
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	32

As you may have guessed, this is yet another short story by Scalzi that was rolled into the Subterranean Scalzi Super Bundle. This one is a bit longer than the ones I've previously reviewed, and is also illustrationed. Unlike some of the others, it's not available on-line for free... as a written work at least. There's an abridged audio version available for free from Subterranean Press's web site, though. Like the other stories I've reviewed so far, it's humor, but I think it's a bit more successful and substantial than the previous short stories. Judge Bufan Nigun Sn is an extremely foul-tempered alien judge who loves to golf, despite being terrible at it. He's a sort of circuit court judge for a larger galactic civilization, of which Earth is now part. (There's a smattering of background world-building, but it's not the core of the story.) Golf is his passion, in several senses of the word: his habit of getting into nasty fights with his fellow players and otherwise making public and occasionally injurious scenes has gotten him banned from every course in the Washington DC area, both public and private. Except, that is, for Dulles Woods, a dire, badly-maintained course designed via nepotism and theft whose business model is primarily based on letting the people banned from every other course golf there. And charging them extra to let caddies accompany them. The plot of this story is about a particular game of golf, dramatically foreshadowed by the opening sentence. But the story is really about Judge Sn's relationship to golfing and to the notorious Dulles Woods. It's one of the better jobs I've seen of writing a thoroughly unlikable person into a gloriously foul-tempered charm. It's also a story about a golf course and golfer who thoroughly deserve each other, and about how it feels to suddenly have something go right after grinding out hours and hours of work on a hobby that is supposed to be fun but manages to fall into some horribly compelling middle ground between enjoyment and rage-inducing frustration. Speaking as someone who is known to grind out video game completions while swearing at the television, I can sympathize. I got thoroughly hooked by Scalzi's descriptions of Judge Sn's mental state and enjoyed this story far more than I expected to. Sadly, when the plot does finally arrive, I thought it was a letdown. Scalzi throws in a highly improbable coincidence to create action, and while that's a legitimate plot technique (particularly in humor), it works best when the author goes back afterwards and fills in the back story of the coincidence. Pratchett does this extremely well. Scalzi, alas, doesn't really bother, and while suspension of disbelief isn't as relevant for this sort of story, I thought it was a missed opportunity. The ending seemed to be missing some sort of punch or background twist. That said, I really liked the character study and I think the story is well worth the 99 cents it's still selling for on the Kindle (and quite possibly other platforms; I haven't checked). If buying short stories on the Kindle is something you want to do, I recommend this one to your attention. Rating: 7 out of 10

We are happy to announce that the shogun machine learning toolbox will participate in this years google summer of code :-) SHOGUN is designed for unified large-scale learning for a broad range of feature types and learning settings, like classification, regression, or exploratory data analysis. In case you are a talented student interested in implementing and learning about machine learning algorithms - we are looking for you! We have collected a number of ideas [1] that we consider worthwhile implementing. And don't forget to apply [2]!

[1] http://shogun-toolbox.org/page/Events/gsoc2013_ideas

[2] http://google-melange.appspot.com/gsoc/org/google/gsoc2013/shogun

Hello everyone! I am very excited to report about the awesome progress we made with Tanglu, the new Debian-based Linux-Distribution. First of all, some off-topic info: I don t feel comfortable with posting too much Tanglu stuff to Planet-KDE, as this is often not KDE-related. So, in future Planet-KDE won t get Tanglu information, unless it is KDE-related You might want to take a look at Planet-Tanglu for (much) more information. So, what happened during the last weeks? Because I haven t had lectures, I nearly worked full-time on Tanglu, setting up most of the infrastructure we need. (this will change with the next week, where I have lectures again, and I also have work to do on other projects, not just Tanglu ^^) Also, we already have an awesome community of translators, designers and developers. Thanks to them, the Tanglu-Website is now translated to 6 languages, more are in the pipeline and will be merged later. Also, a new website based on the Django framework is in progress. The Logo-Contest We ve run a logo-contest, to find a new and official Tanglu logo, as the previous logo draft was too close to the Debian logo (I asked the trademark people at Debian). More than 30 valid votes (you had to be subscribed to a Tanglu Mailinglist) were received for 7 logo proposals, and we now have a final logo: I like it very much Fun with dak I decided to use dak, the Debian Archive Kit, to handle the Tanglu archive. Choosing dak over smaller and easy-to-use solutions had multiple reasons, the main reason is that dak is way more flexible than the smaller solution (like reprepro or min-dak) and able to handle the large archive of Tanglu. Also, dak is lightning fast. And I would have been involved with dak sooner or later anyway, because I will implement the DEP-11 extension to the Debian Archive later (making the archive application-friendly). Working with dak is not exactly fun. The documentation is not that awesome, and dak contains many hardcoded stuff for Debian, e.g. it often expects the unstable suite to be present. Also, running dak on Debian Wheezy turned out to be a problem, as the Python module apt_pkg changed the API and dak naturally had problems with that. But with the great help of some Debian ftpmasters (many thanks to that!), dak is now working for Tanglu, managing the whole archive. There are still some quirks which need to be fixed, but the archive is in an usable state, accepting and integrating packages. The work on dak is also great for Debian: I resolved many issues with non-Debian dak installations, and made many parts of dak Wheezy-proof. Also, I added a few functions which might also be useful for Debian itself. All patches have of course been submitted to upstream-dak. Wanna-build and buildds This is also nearly finished Wanna-build, the software which manages all buildds for an archive, is a bit complicated to use. I still have some issues with it, but it does it s job so far. (need to talk to the Debian wanna-build admins for help, e.g. wanna-build seems to be unable to handle arch:all-only packages, also, build logs are only submitted in parts) The status of Tanglu builds can be viewed at the provisoric Buildd-Status pages. Setting up a working buildd is also a tricky thing, it involves patching sbuild to escape bug #696841 and applying various workarounds to make the buildd work and upload packages correctly. I will write instructions how to set-up and maintain a buildd soon. At time, we have only one i386 buildd up and running, but more servers (in numbers: 3) are prepared and need to be turned into buildds. After working on Wanna-build and dak, I fully understand why Canonical developed Launchpad and it s Soyuz module for Ubuntu. But I think we might be able to achieve something similar, using just the tools Debian already uses (maybe a little less confortable than LP, but setting up an own LP instance would have been much more trouble). Debian archive import The import of packages from the Debian archive has finished. Importing the archive resulted in many issues and some odd findings (I didn t know that there are packages in the archive which didn t receive an upload since 2004!), but it has finally finished, and the archive is in a consistent state at time. To have a continuous package import from Debian while a distribution is in development, we need some changes to wanna-build, which will hopefully be possible. Online package search The Online-Package-Search is (after resolving many issues, who expected that? ) up and running. You can search for any package there. Some issues are remaining, e.g. the file-contents-listing doesn t work, and changelog support is broken, but the basic functionality is there. Tanglu Bugtracker We now also have a bugtracker which is based on the Trac software. The Tanglu-Bugtracker is automatically synced with the Tanglu archive, meaning that you find all packages in Trac to report bugs against them. The dak will automatically update new packages every day. Trac still needs a few confort-adjustments, e.g. submitting replies via email or tracking package versions. Tanglu base system The Tanglu metapackages have been published in a first alpha version. We will support GNOME-3 and KDE4, as long as this is possible (= enough people working on the packaging). The Tanglu packages will also depend on systemd, which we will need in GNOME anyway, and which also allows some great new features in KDE. Side-effect of using systemd is at least for the start that Tanglu boots a bit slow, because we haven t done any systemd adjustments, and because systemd is very old. We will have to wait for the systemd and udev maintainers to merge the packages and release a new version first, before this will improve. (I don t want to do this downstream in Tanglu, because I don t know the plans for that at Debian (I only know the information Tollef Fog Heen & Co. provided at FOSDEM)) The community The community really surprised me! We got an incredible amount of great feedback on Tanglu, and most of the people liked the idea of Tanglu. I think we are one of the less-flamed new distributions ever started . Also, without the very active community, kickstarting Tanglu would not have been possible. My guess was that we might be able to have something running next year. Now, with the community help, I see a chance for a release in October The only thing people complained about was the name of the distribution. And to be really honest, I am not too happy with the name. But finding a name was an incredibe difficult process (finding something all parties liked), and Tanglu was a good compromise. Tanglu has absolutely no meaning, it was taken because it sounded interesting. The name was created by combining the Brazilian Tangerine (Clementine) and the German Iglu (igloo). I also dont think the name matters that much, and I am more interested in the system itself than the name of it. Also, companies produce a lot of incredibly weird names, Tanglu is relatively harmless compared to that . In general, thanks to everyone participating in Tanglu! You are driving the project forward! The first (planned) release I hereby announce the name of the first Tanglu release, 1.1 Aequorea Victoria . It is Daniel s fault that Tanglu releases will be named after jellyfishes, you can ask him why if you want I picked Aequorea, because this kind of jellyfish was particularly important for research in molecular biology. The GFP protein, a green fluorescent protein (=GFP), caused a small revolution in science and resulted in a Nobel Prize in 2008 for the researchers involved in GFP research (for the interested people: You can tag proteins with GFP and determine their position using light microscopy. GFP also made many other fancy new lab methods possible). Because Tanglu itself is more or less experimental at time, I found the connection to research just right for the very first release. We don t have a time yet when this version will be officially released, but I expect it to be in October, if the development speed increases a little and more developers get interested and work on it. Project Policy We will need to formalize the Tanglu project policy soon, both the technical and the social policies. In general, regarding free software and technical aspects, we strictly adhere to the Dbian Free Software Guidelines, the Debian Social Contract and the Debian Policy. Some extra stuff will be written later, please be patient! Tanglu OIN membership I was approached by the Open Invention Network, to join it as member. In general, I don t have objections to do that, because it will benefit Tanglu. However, the OIN has a very tolerant public stance on software patents, which I don t like that much. Debian did not join the OIN for this reason. For Tanglu, I think we could still join the OIN without someone thinking that we support the stance on software patents. Joining would simply be pragmatic: We support the OIN as a way to protect the Linux ecosystem from software patents, even if we don t like the stance on software patents and see it differently. Because this affects the whole Tanglu project, I don t want to decide this alone, but get some feedback from the Tanglu community before making a decision. Can I install Tanglu now? Yes and no. We don t provide installation images yet, so trying Tanglu is a difficult task (you need to install Debian and then upgrade it to Tanglu) if you want to experiment with it, I recomment trying Tanglu in a VM. I want to help! Great, then please catch one of us on IRC or subscribe to the mailinglists. The best thing is not to ask for work, but suggest something you want to do, others will then tell you if that is possible and maybe help with the task. Packages can for now only be uploaded by Debian Developers, Ubuntu Developers or Debian Maintainers who contacted me directly and whose keys have been verified. This will be changed later, but at the current state of the Tanglu archive (= less safety checks for packages), I only want people to upload stuff who definitely have the knowledge to create sane packages (you can also proove that otherwise, of course). We will later establish a new-member process. If you want to provide a Tanglu archive mirror, we would be very happy, so that the main server doesn t have to carry all the load. If you have experience in creating Linux Live-CDs or have worked with the Ubiquity installer, helping with these parts would be awesome! Unfortunately, we cannot reuse parts of Linux Mint Debian, because many of their packages don t build from source and are repackaged binaries, which is a no-go for the Tanglu main archive. Sneak peek And here is a screenshot of the very first Tanglu installation (currently more Debian than Tanglu):

Something else I am involved in Debian for a very long time now, first as Debian Maintainer and then as Debian Developer and I never thought much about the work the Debian system administrators do. I didn t know how dak worked or how Wanna-build handles the buildds and what exactly the ftpmasters have to do. By not knowing, I mean I knew the very basic theory and what these people do. But this is something different than experiencing how much work setting up and maintaining the infrastructure is and what an awesome job the people do for Debian, keeping it all up and running and secure! Kudos for that, to all people maintaining Debian infrastructure! You rock! (And I will never ever complain about slow buildds or packages which stay in NEW for too long )

Even though I haven't had much time to dedicate to http.debian.net lately, it has been up and running, or should I say serving?

Part of its job is to detect mirrors that have temporary issues or are entirely gone, down, unavailable. It does so, and many other things, by monitoring the so-called "trace files". A very important one being the "master" (or "origin") trace file.

With the recent integration of backports into the main archive, the master trace file of the backports mirrors also changed. Long story short, this change caused backports mirrors to no longer be considered by the mirror redirector as candidates. As long as they were up to date.

After the usual mirror synchronisation delay, more and more mirrors were disabled and subsets of "up to date" candidates re-calculated. This reached a critical point when only one mirror was left in the database. The mirror had not been synchronised for a couple of weeks.

This mirror is located in Costa Rica, and as the only candidate left in the database it was the only one used to serve requests for the backports archive. No matter where the client was located in the world.

The issue was later noticed and the necessary updates to the mirrors master list made. Mirrors started to be re-considered as they were re-checked (with some delay due to the rate limiter) and the subsets re-calculated. In a few hours everything was back to normality.

Correctness and fault-tolerance don't always get together very well...

The GNOME Foundation started the Free & Open Source Software Outreach Program for Women, OPW, in 2010. In the January-April 2013 round, many other FOSS organizations joined the program. We are happy to announce that Debian will also join in the next round from June-September and we'll offer one internship. You can find more details about Debian's participation in the program at Debian OPW page. Call for mentors and projects OPW allows applicants to work on any kind of project, including coding, design, marketing, web development... The Debian Google Summer of Code projects will be offered also as possible projects for OPW, but GSoC only allows coding projects. If you have any idea of a non-coding project and you want to mentor it, please contact us in the soc-coordination mailing list adding [OPW] in subject. OPW works in the same way as GSoC except Google doesn't play a part here. The same advice that is provided for GSoC mentors works for OPW mentors. Call for participants The main goal of this program is to increase the number of women in FOSS, so all women who are not yet a Debian Developer or a Debian Maintainer are encouraged to apply. There are no age restrictions and applicants don't need to be a student. If you want to apply, you must follow three steps:

1. Choose a project from this list. There are two lists, one for GSoC and another with non-coding tasks that can be only offered by the OPW. Those lists may change and add or remove more projects in the next few weeks.
2. Make a small contribution to Debian. Projects will add a task the applicant must complete as part of the pre-selection process. If no task is provided, you are welcome to ask the mentors of the project. You can also make a different extra task of the one listed to show your skills and interest.
3. Create a page in the Debian wiki with your application. You can do so under pseudonym, but in that case, please give us information about yourself privately by email to the coordinators listed in the Debian OPW page!

We are pleased to announce the 15th annual Debian Conference (DebConf14) is to be held in Portland, Oregon, USA in August 2014, with specific dates yet to be announced. Portland is an open source hotspot in the Pacific Northwest of the US. It is a technologically savvy community, home to Intel and the adopted home of Linus Torvalds. The city plays host to many Free Software conferences including OSCON, and is where Linux Plumbers originated. The local team has been involved in mulitple DebConfs in the past, and is excited to bring their experience and ideas to fruition in a city well-positioned to host such a prestigious event.

This is my monthly summary of my free software related activities. If you re among the people who made a donation to support my work (114.19 , thanks everybody!), then you can learn how I spent your money. Otherwise it s just an interesting status update on my various projects. Simple-CDD and debian-cd I tried to use wheezy s version of debian-cd and simple-cdd to generate an automatic installer. In this process, I filed a couple of bugs on simple-cdd (#701963: type-handling package is gone and should not be listed in default.downloads, and #701998: the --keyboard parameter is not working with wheezy s debian-installer) and I commited fixes for a few issues in debian-cd:

• r2518: adjust Makefile for new xorriso requirement
• r2520: add missing depends on dosfstools
• r2521: use --no-check-gpg when querying debootstrap
• r2522: make debian-cd work with a mirror without sources)

Debian France I completed the new website for Debian France and I put it online. Later I merged some supplementary enhancements prepared by Tanguy Ortolo (and I gave him commits rights at the same time). I tried to update our Galette installation to the latest upstream version but I reverted to the former version after having encountered two problems (filed here and here). In the process, I created a Debian package for galette (you can grab it on git.debian.org). I also suggested an idea of improvement for Galette s paypal plugin and it has been quickly implemented. Thus I updated the plugin installed on france.debian.net. Kali related work It s been a few months that I have been helping the Kali team to prepare this new Debian derivative. Now that the derivative has gone public, I can attribute some of my Debian work to my collaboration with the Kali team. This month I contributed a few features and fixes to debian-installer and live-build:

• #702257: new preseed entry to disable CDROM entries
• #703072: hid-generic module is missing from input-modules udeb (affecting experimental kernel only)
• Fix win32-loader support in live-build

After the launch, we registered Kali in the derivative census. Paul Wise quickly reported some misfiled bugs from early Kali users and I discovered that reportbug was not behaving properly even though we correctly updated base-files (see #703678 on reportbug and #703677 on lsb-release). Misc packaging work

• I sponsored a new upstream version of dnsjava because it s required by Jitsi.
• I prepared rebuild 0.4.1.1 and uploaded it to testing-proposed-updates for a RC bug fix.
• I uploaded Publican 3.1.5 to experimental and filed #703514 to request a new upstream version of docbook-xsl that is needed by Publican.
• I filed #703995 to fix apt-setup s handling of the apt-setup/multiarch preseed option.

DPL election I also spent quite some time to read and participate to the discussions on debian-vote since it was campaigning time for the DPL candidates Thanks This was a rather active month if you take into account the fact that I got a second son Lucas on March 6th. See you next month for a new summary of my activities.

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I've occasionally used KPhotoAlbum for a few years and eventually added many tags to the pictures. But I've decided I wanted to try other tools, and digiKam seems to be the best option from the many reviews I've read. Still, there's apparently no automatic feature to import into digiKam the tags set in KPhotoAlbum. Fortunately, some smart people have implemented Perl tools allowing to overcome this issue. The process involves modifying the pictures to save the tags inside the files, using the IPTC standard. Then, digiKam will be able to load the tags from the modified files. Here's a copy of the (translated) kphotoalbum2iptc.pl script (the original as in french) I copied from this blog post (in french too). I've been able to generate .deb packages for the required 2 perl libs dependencies using the method described in the referenced post , with : dh-make-perl --build --cpan Image::Kimdaba and dh-make-perl --build --cpan Image::IPTCInfo

Thanks to Pierre Doucet and Bruno Adele for sharing this. Hope this helps.

I'd decided ahead of time that I wanted to use Internode as my ISP, and had ordered a Naked DSL service from them and also decided to bundle my mobile phone with them as well. For reasons that only made sense to me 7 years ago, I've been paying Telstra to keep my mobile number going, but I've long since lost the SIM. My current phone has a micro-SIM anyway, so I needed a replacement SIM. My grand plan had been to order the SIM, order the number port from Telstra to Internode, and then, well, profit from the moment I stuck the SIM in my phone. Unfortunately the port didn't go through as planned, and I was left incommunicado for the better part of two and a half days. I felt like I had my hands tied behind my back not having a mobile data service. It was also mildly annoying not being able to call people or be contactable, given the amount of running around I was doing. But it got resolved and is fast becoming a distant memory. The DSL service required a Telstra technician to come out (I'm not actually sure why) and that was scheduled for Thursday. I happened to catch him while he was at my building's MDF, and had a bit of a chat with him. He was a Scotsman, and I didn't get all the details, but he was going on about how he was only there to operate on the exchange side of the MDF, and I'd have to get someone else to jumper it up to my apartment. This wasn't what I expected from an installation service, but sure enough when I finally got around to plugging the ADSL modem in on Saturday morning, there was no line sync to be had. A call to Internode confirmed that he'd only jumpered it up to exchange side of the MDF. What was even more annoying was I'm pretty sure I saw him yanking out jumper wires from the MDF when he was working on it. Jumper wires that connected the exchange side of the MDF to my apartment. I was not thrilled with the idea of waiting (and paying) for a cabling contractor to come out and hook up a couple of bits of jumper wire, so I put out a call on Facebook for a Krone tool and a tone generator, and Brent was able to come through for me. He dropped the gear around while I was out shopping with Kristy, and when we got back, I located the pair for my unit, and rejumpered the existing jumper wire that I'm pretty sure the Telstra technician had disconnected. Lo and behold, my ADSL started working. I felt pretty proud of myself. It's fun operating at Layer 1 every now and then. The FRITZ!Box Fon WLAN 7270 is quite the beast of a box. Not only is it an ADSL modem, it's a wireless router, DECT base station, VoIP thingy and an answering machine! I've managed to connect my Engin account up to it, so once I get a DECT handset, I'll be able to make VoIP calls through it. I don't need to run Asterisk any more.

On Monday I took part in my first triathlon, a "sprint" distance race organised by Thames Turbo Triathlon Club.

I look after a bunch of servers, working for Bytemark that is not a surprise, but I only touch a very small number of desktop systems.

precious - My desktop

This is the machine upon which I develop, check my personal mail, play my music & etc.

steve - My work machine

To keep the working from home separation going I have a machine I only use for work purposes.

travel/travel2 - EEPC box

I have two EEPC machines, a personal 701 and a work-provided 901. Honestly these rarely get used. One is for when I'm on holiday or traveling, the second for when I'm on-call.

Yesterday I got round to upgrading both the toy EEPC machines to wheezy. The good news? Both of them upgraded/reinstalled easily. Hardware was all detected, sleeping, hibernation, wifi, etc all "just worked". Unfortunately I am now running GNOME 3.x and the experience is unpleasant. This is a shame, because I've enjoyed GNOME 2.x & bluetile for the past few years. The only other concern is that pwsafe appears to be scheduled for removal from Debian GNU/Linux - the list of open bugs shows some cause, but there are bugs there that are trivial to fix. For the moment I've rebuilt the package and if I cannot find a suitable alternative - available for squeeze and wheezy - then I will host the package on my package repository. In conclusion: Debian, you did good. GNOME, I've loved and appreciated you for years, but you might not be the desktop I want these days. It's not you, it's me.

I was really not doing well by yesterday, I had developed quite the runny nose. I've discovered that it's neigh on impossible (from my sample set of two pharmacies) to get pseudoephedrine over the counter in this country. In the US, you have to provide ID and they report all purchases to the government and if you start buying too much, they come and kick down the door of your meth lab. Here, you seem to need a prescription. One pharmacy told me that 1 in 10 pharmacies will sell it over the counter. I ended up with the Australian equivalent of Afrin, which I don't particularly like, but it at least dried up my nose. Discussions on Facebook suggest that I may have been dealing with second-rate pharmacies, and the "big ones" would be more useful. I was also advised to try begging and pleading for Claritin-D. The damn meth labs have ruined it for everybody. It's too bad they can't come up with an additive that is safe to ingest, but would fuck up the meth cooking process. Not content with only two marathon shopping days, Kristy came back for a third day of driving me all around town, as my quest for a sofa bed and a dining table continued. It turns out that one does not simply walk into a furniture store and walk out with a sofa bed (or a dining table, for that matter). These things all seem to be on boats from China, or at best interstate warehouses, and most places can sell you something they know is in transit at best, but they're loathe to sell floor stock (for obvious reasons), and they seem to not have anything in a Brisbane warehouse (plenty of stuff was in Sydney or Melbourne and they'd ship it up). Plushhad a chaise sofa bed that had a nice sprung mattress, and was due in late this month or early next, and they would lend me something in the meantime, so they got my business. I look forward to having something to sit on. We then had an epic time at Bunnings getting all sorts of random household stuff, with the obligatory sausage sizzle before and after. Oh, how I have missed proper sausages! It turns out I'm looking for something that doesn't seem to exist over here, Rubbermaid don't seem to make the plastic "shed" cupboards in Australia, so I'll have to look elsewhere (Clark Rubber seems to make something approximately like what I'm looking for). Then I picked up some towels from Westfield Chermside and resumed the search for a dining table. I was really liking the idea of at least one bench seat, and we finally found a matching table, a bench seat, some shelving and a coffee table that would work as an entertainment unit, at OZ Design Furniture. They had a 20% off sale that made it all fairly reasonable. The entertainment unit was available immediately, and the rest of the stuff should be delivered in a couple of weeks. That just leaves finding some dining chairs that will go with it. OZ Design Furniture had the most unusual delivery charging system. They charge by the flight of stairs. Living on the 2nd floor does have its disadvantages. At least I won't be moving out of here any time soon. By the end of the day, I was totally done, but very happy to have finally sorted out the elusive remaining bits of furniture. I had my first night sleeping in my new home.

According to the update here, the signing keys are supposed to be replaced by the hardware vendor. If vendors do that, this ends up being uninteresting from a security perspective - you could generate a signed image, but nothing would trust it. It should be easy enough to verify, though. Just download a firmware image from someone using AMI firmware, pull apart the capsule file, decompress everything and check whether the leaked public key is present in the binaries.

The real risk here is that even if most vendors have replaced that key, some may not have done. There's certainly an argument that shipping test keys at all increases the probability that a vendor will accidentally end up using those rather than generating their own, and it's difficult to rule out the possibility that that's happened.

comments

Besides my RTL work on Libreoffice, every once in a while I just go over the regular commit log to see what have changed. I don t necessary understand each line in the commit, but do get the general idea from the commit message. Being more dependent on the commit messages makes me review them more thoroughly (hence the topic of this post). As many projects, Libreoffice has notifications of commits related to bugs reports when the bug number is properly mentioned in the commit message. This is very useful for other developers and also for QA people. After verification of a bug is fixed, I often use the commits listed on the bug report to cherry pick them to an older branch. Going to search for an unreferenced commit isn t much fun. One of the things I notice is different ways people reference bugs from not referencing them at all to referencing them in various ways like linking to the bugs system, just writing the number (without the fdo# prefix) and other creative ways This is also true for first time contributors, which might not know the standards or the rules . When I see such a case I usually put a manual notification in the bug report, and mail the author of doing so. For new or sporadic contributors this is also an opportunity to welcome and thank them for the commit and even encourage future contributions. I have been asked why aren t that info on the wiki, so I went looking and found out the info is in the right place under the Development/GetInvolved page. The relevant part is:

When you type a commit message:

• start the first line with a bug reference like fdo#12345, if you have one for your commit (see details below)
• use the rest of the first line as a concise summary of your changes
• the 2nd line remains empty
• and starting on the 3rd line you can explain how and what changes have been made for what reasons.

Thanks in advance and happy coding (:
Filed under: LibreOffice

Over the week, around noon CEST, we had:

• Monday: 44 total
• Tuesday 43 total
• Wednesday: 49 total
• Thursday: 53 total

The UDD bugs interface currently knows about the following release critical bugs:

• In Total: 718
  • Affecting wheezy: 51 That's the number we need to get down to zero before the release. They can be split in two big categories:
    • Affecting wheezy and unstable: 32 Those need someone to find a fix, or to finish the work to upload a fix to unstable:
      • 9 bugs are tagged 'patch'. Please help by reviewing the patches, and (if you are a DD) by uploading them.
      • 1 bugs are marked as done, but still affect unstable. This can happen due to missing builds on some architectures, for example. Help investigate!
      • 22 bugs are neither tagged patch, nor marked done. Help make a first step towards resolution!
    • Affecting wheezy only: 19 Those are already fixed in unstable, but the fix still needs to migrate to wheezy. You can help by submitting unblock requests for fixed packages, by investigating why packages do not migrate, or by reviewing submitted unblock requests.
      • 9 bugs are in packages that are unblocked by the release team.
      • 10 bugs are in packages that are not unblocked.

How do we compare to the Squeeze release cycle?

Week	Squeeze	Wheezy	Diff
43	284 (213+71)	468 (332+136)	+184 (+119/+65)
44	261 (201+60)	408 (265+143)	+147 (+64/+83)
45	261 (205+56)	425 (291+134)	+164 (+86/+78)
46	271 (200+71)	401 (258+143)	+130 (+58/+72)
47	283 (209+74)	366 (221+145)	+83 (+12/+71)
48	256 (177+79)	378 (230+148)	+122 (+53/+69)
49	256 (180+76)	360 (216+155)	+104 (+36/+79)
50	204 (148+56)	339 (195+144)	+135 (+47/+90)
51	178 (124+54)	323 (190+133)	+145 (+66/+79)
52	115 (78+37)	289 (190+99)	+174 (+112/+62)
1	93 (60+33)	287 (171+116)	+194 (+111/+83)
2	82 (46+36)	271 (162+109)	+189 (+116/+73)
3	25 (15+10)	249 (165+84)	+224 (+150/+74)
4	14 (8+6)	244 (176+68)	+230 (+168/+62)
5	2 (0+2)	224 (132+92)	+222 (+132/+90)
6	release!	212 (129+83)	+212 (+129/+83)
7	release+1	194 (128+66)	+194 (+128/+66)
8	release+2	206 (144+62)	+206 (+144/+62)
9	release+3	174 (105+69)	+174 (+105/+69)
10	release+4	120 (72+48)	+120 (+72/+48)
11	release+5	115 (74+41)	+115 (+74/+41)
12	release+6	93 (47+46)	+93 (+47/+46)
13	release+7	50 (24+26)	+50 (+24/+26)
14	release+8	51 (32+19)	+51 (+32/+19)
15	release+9
16	release+10
17	release+11
18	release+12

Graphical overview of bug stats thanks to azhag: