Since I received a terrifying amount of insults via mail for not implementing this feature request after my last blog entry, where I asked for help developing rng, I’d like to make my position about this issue clear.
Why I was opposed to implement it:
The blog has been quiet but I'm not. 
PKG_CONFIG_LIBDIR=/usr/arm-linux-gnu/lib/pkg-config dpkg-buildpackage -aarm (until dpkg includes the pkg-config setting when it will cross build with just d-bp -a)
Lars Wirzenius recently released, and packaged for Debian, a simple script to make release tarballs. He calls it Unperish.
It makes me wonder how many other people use that kind of system?
Of the top of my head the only similar thing I can recall using is Brad Fitzpatrick's ShipIt - another moduler/plugin-based system (Perl rather than Python this time.)
For my needs I tend to just write a Makefile which has a "dist" target, and then I have a simple script called "release". This runs:
I just noticed, that Python Jabber transports have been migrated this
weekend to Google Code and first people started to contribute.
I especially like the fact, that first contributors are Czech guys and
they're fixing encoding problems :-).
Let's hope that this activity will also help to improve Debian package
which is not really in good state, but I promised not to hijack it till
the end of year ;-) (so for now I temporarily hack it in my
repository).
PS: I know ICQ is evil, but I don't have enough power to force all my
contacts to start using Jabber.
My personal web site - which actually
is not particularly interesting, IMHO - used to get in a lot of traffic via
Google. It was highly ranked on several quite interesting search terms. For
example, it's still number 1 on the search term "Halbleiterlaser"
(semiconductor laser), which is the topic of my secondary school thesis. So I
still win against Wikipedia on this one. For "flowers" I sometimes and up at
#1 in Google image search (causing lots of people to hot-link certain images
from my site... might be with some geo targeting though?) But I've lost other
battles to Wikipedia by now, such as the search term "Liebeskummer"
("lovesickness"; I have some old old poetry online that people dig a lot; this
still makes up the biggest share of my visitors)My rankings have dropped quite a lot the last year, down about 50% within a
year. I don't know if this is because I'm blogging a lot less, because I'm not
updating it often enough or because Google doesn't like the redesign as much as
it did like the old one. (The redesign was 2 years ago, followed by a drop in
visitor numbers but a recovery to like 70% within a month)Algorithmic changes of Googles ranking are just another possible reason; I
always felt as if my placement was highly overrated anyway.I added at a Google sitemap some months ago and other things that people expect
to help with their site being well included, but it didn't stop the numbers from
going further down. For obvious reasons I didn't buy any links or anything; I'm
not making my living with that page or anything, it's just a pet project
thingy. (So obviously, don't make me any SEO offers for my page!)Still it's a pity: I used to have a couple of really major placements on
Google - so much that I've had some inquires if I'd like to sell my personal
homepage (nah, I don't want to have to get a new email address!), offers by
reputable and huge dating sites to put up ads on my page and surprisingly
high offers for including my web page in link farms - but I'd have issues with
that (I'd like to keep control of what my page contains; including content that
might get Google to ban my page is scary), and it would have required me to run
my page on PHP (ugh).I wish there was an easy way to just keep the rankings I mysteriously had
acquired the last years. :-) For some time it looked like I had some magic
SEO capabilities, and friends suggested I should consider actually going into
the SEO business. My page is still overrated by Google, but it seems like it
has lost much of it's magic.P.S. A fun story followup: I've just noticed that someone in a french cooking
forum hotlinks to a photo of mine, claiming that he had cooked the food I did.
Isn't that hilarious? Should I substitute that image with a g*atsee?
There's no way around it: I'm a bit of a Rails fanboy. While it's got it's
glitches, it's certainly made the part of my life that involves writing
web applications a hell of a lot easier, and introduced me to the wonder
that is the Ruby programming
language.
However, there are plenty of times when Rails just isn't a good fit.
It's not particularly simple to deploy, it's quite heavy, and it does
have a definite learning curve. So, when I need to write something
simple, I've just used Ruby's built-in CGI support. But I will do so no
longer. For I have found Camping.
The name doesn't make a whole lot of sense, and until you come to grips
with Why The Lucky Stiff's weird sense of humour, the docs will probably
make you think that acid trip you took several years ago has just kicked
in again. However, the purpose of Camping is pretty easy to
understand: it allows you to make simple (CGI level) web "applications"
using Rails-like (or more properly, MVC) concepts,
which are fairly easy to write and deploy.
If you're familiar with Rails (or probably most of the other Rails-clones
that have sprung up in other languages) then Camping will probably
smell at least faintly familiar. You have routes, which map URLs to
controller actions, which retrieve models and feed them to a view which
sends results back as HTML. From that perspective, Camping is easy to
learn -- it's core concepts can piggyback on existing knowledge, and you
can get started very quickly.
Using your Rails-fu, however, will only get you so far. For one thing,
the API is similar-but-different enough that while your first couple of
simple experiments will probably Just Work, getting more complex things
done will either fall under the "different" or "difficult" headings.
That isn't meant to be a slight on Camping, though -- if you
want to do horribly complex things, then you're heading into
territory best served by Rails anyway. But there is a bit of a middle
ground where the utter simplicity of Camping is stretched a little, but
it's still more appropriate to write a Camping app than a Rails app, and
it's important to remember that you're not using full-blown framework
when you thump up against something that's beyond-trivial in Rails, but
is not quite so simple in Camping.
Camping is a microframework -- it says so right there on the front page. Why's
intention is that Camping will always be provided in less than 4kB of
code. So you're never going to get, for instance, the broad range of
HTML helpers that Rails' ActionView provides to make writing HTML
templates so easy, or the Prototype JavaScript framework shipped with the
main code. If you don't want to blow a steam pipe, then, when starting
out with Camping, you need to think "this is a lot easier than
hand-writing CGIs" instead of "this is a lot harder than writing a Rails
app".
There are a few things that are undeniably a pest in Camping, though. The
docs are a little incomplete and hard to follow (even when you account
for Why's "unique" style of writing), and some of the coding tricks that
are employed in making the framework can make debugging a bit tricky.
They're not showstoppers, but it's worth knowing about them in advance so
you don't go nuts when you're first using the framework.
If you're not the sort of person who needs small, self-contained web
scripts, then I'd say you'll probably never get much benefit out of
Camping. On the other hand, if you're still writing your CGIs against
the "bare(ish) metal", then I would strongly encourage you to
take a look at Camping, to make your life just that little bit more
delightful.
If you’re using a Virtuozzo-based VPS running Debian Testing or Unstable (and probably other modern Linux distributions), you will probably run into problems regarding the patches used in the default kernel and glibc 2.7, which were properly described in the debian-glibc mailing list.
Tektonic, my current provider, will upgrade the kernel this weekend but if you’re really in a hurry, you can set your VPS on repair mode, download a 2.6 version of libc6, install it from the repair VPS using dpkg –root=/repair –force-all –install … and restart your VPS. It will boot up, but lots of things that depend on versioned packages of libc6 won’t work correctly, most notably OpenSSH and PAM.
The problem is due to non-standard TUX optimization patches implemented over Red Hat’s standard kernels, which seem to be quite popular in Virtuozzo-based VPSs (at least it seems that Strato, Tektonic and Unixshell use them?)
ssh some.host ssh next.hostwhere some.host is your jumphost. Add as many some.host as you want into this chain. We are all lazy and don’t want to type that by hand, one ssh is enough for everybody. Hurray, ssh already provides what we need, namely the ProxyCommand directive, it’s just not known as much as it should be. For this example imagine I have to ssh via the following host chain to get out: kosh -> vir -> babylon5 -> sheridan and also want to have my local port 2525 forwarded to sheridans port 25. The following config snippet (.ssh/config) is doing that[2]
Host yay ProxyCommand ssh -q -A -X vir ssh -q -A -X babylon5 'nc -w1 sheridan 22' LocalForward 2525 localhost:25 Host vir ProxyCommand ssh -q -A -X kosh 'nc -w1 %h %p'The effect of this is:
Host foo.gl bar.gl ProxyCommand ssh -q -a -p 443 -x gluck.debian.org 'nc -w1 $(basename %h .gl) 22'Add as many other config options as you want. The effect is:
Now is the time to join and give to Free Software Foundation. 2008 is going to be extraordinarily important year for free software. Eben Moglen likes to quote Gandhi's "first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win" progression when describing the free software movement. As I pointed out when I joined the FSF board, we're beginning to see powerful interests fighting free software. It's going to increase in the next few years. Things will probably get a lot uglier for free software before they get better. We can win but things are far from settled. The FSF is the front-line organization in this fight and we need a robust and proactive foundation, and an active and involved membership, if we're going to win. Here are the issues that I'm going to pushing the FSF to pursue in the next year. Expanding activism outside our traditional technologist communities: In part through the work of projects like Defective By Design, we've seen the tide turn for DRM on music in what what may be the FSF's greatest success last year. I'm going to push the FSF to continue the campaign to attack DRM for video, eBooks, and the other places it is cropping up. The most remarkable thing to me about Defective By Design is that its participants and supporters are not, for the most part, people who develop or use GNU/Linux or even know what GNU is! If advocacy for software freedom involves a conversation we can only have with people who understand what POSIX is and how one uses it, we've already lost. Through DbD, BadVista, and other projects, the FSF has made major strides in the last year. It need to do much more and needs your support to do so. Get proactive about software patents: As a community, we've had our head in the sand about software patents for far too long. There are companies and patent trolls sitting on massive, growing piles of software patents. They are not our friends and they do not mean us well. One cannot write non-trivial software today without running a serious risk of infringing patents. The software patents minefield we've found ourselves in is a very fundamental threat to the success of free software and we've already begun to see the first casualties and costs. We must eliminate software patents. Now. The US is very important in this fight (much patent law is "exported" from the US) and almost no organization is working on software patent elimination there. Not enough people are thinking and acting strategically on this issue. The FSF is planning to make major steps in this fight in the coming year and we need your support to do so. Web services and the changing face of software: This last year, I worked to help launch the new version the AGPLv3. The license addresses the role of copyleft for software like web-services which, due to the legal particulars of the GPL, did not extend to the purveyors of web services. Of course, access to source code does not make the users of all web-services free (e.g., the GMails and the Facebooks). Nobody seems to know what freedom for webserver entails. There might not even be good answers. In the next year, I'm going to push the FSF to help start several conversation and to begin to follow up on what I think was an important first step with the AGPLv3. While this is not a major organizational priority yet, it's a major action item that I will be pursuing through the FSF. If you feel strongly about this issue, whatever your position, become a member, stay involved as these projects develop, and have your voice be heard. We don't know the answers yet and we need your input as much as we need your action.Please, support the FSF in the efforts listed above, and in others, by giving generously. If you're not a member, please join the FSF as an associate member. If you are already a member, please consider making a tax-deductible donation. The FSF is a very lean, very humble organization of passionate and dedicated individuals working tirelessly for software freedom. Every little bit helps. Members pays USD $120 ($10/month) and student members pay half that. FSF has members across the world -- where a weak dollar often makes it even cheaper. Member support and participation builds capacity and credibility for the foundation and keep the organization responsible, responsive, and in tune with our community.
ssh some.host ssh next.hostwhere some.host is your jumphost. Add as many some.host as you want into this chain. We are all lazy and don’t want to type that by hand, one ssh is enough for everybody. Hurray, ssh already provides what we need, namely the ProxyCommand directive, it’s just not known as much as it should be. For this example imagine I have to ssh via the following host chain to get out: kosh -> vir -> babylon5 -> sheridan and also want to have my local port 2525 forwarded to sheridans port 25. The following config snippet (.ssh/config) is doing that[2]
Host yay ProxyCommand ssh -q -A -X vir ssh -q -A -X babylon5 'nc -w1 sheridan 22' LocalForward 2525 localhost:25 Host vir ProxyCommand ssh -q -A -X kosh 'nc -w1 %h %p'The effect of this is:
I first heard about the Open
Source Jam Zurich somewhere at BlogCampSwitzerland
2.0 (which was more a TechCrunch7 than a BlogCamp — why
did the organisators call it BlogCamp?) and subscribed to its Google Group.
At Linuxday.at, hansmi (who seems to
It's now three weeks since I am officially a Ph.D. student at the University
of Limerick, but I've been too busy to do anything about it.
Today, I finally updated my research webpage and sat down to tell you the tale of how
I successfully defended my research, but failed to leave the country the next
day.
As is customary in the British system, I initially enrolled at UL as a Master
student. In October, I then applied for a transfer to the Ph.D. track,
submitted a transfer report
and prepared for a live defence, according to the UL code of practice.
On 23 November, I presented my research
to my examiners, Dr. P r gerfalk and Patrick Healy, who found my work to be at Ph.D. level
and approved of my transfer.
I was moderately nervous going into the presentation, not really knowing what
was expected of me. In the end, however, the presentation went well and the
ensuing discussion provided valuable feedback. Thank you, P r and Paddy, as
well as Norah (who chaired), and
Brian (my supervisor) for all your time,
help, and support.
After the defence, Mel waited outside with
a beer in hand, and it being Friday and all, I happily popped the cap and
drank. Plans to head to The Stables gave way
to chilling on the couch in 110 (my home away from home), before we headed to
town for the Kila gig.
We arrived early, had some beers, enjoyed the show, had some more beers, went
home, and had some more beers to Guitar Hero,
and when I crawled into bed, I was shocked to find out that I had lost all
track of time and it was in fact already 5:30 on Saturday morning, instead of
the perceived 2 o'clock.
See, the source of this shock was a plane that left Dublin the next day around
noon, and a rental car that was to get me there, leaving the house at 8. But
when my alarm shattered my drunk dreams at 7:30, it quickly became clear (or
well, everything was blurred, actually), that I would have a hard time getting
into the car, and I would certainly never manage to navigate it to Dublin,
a three hour drive. So I called up the airline and the rental company and
rescheduled for the next day (only one flight from Dublin to Zurich a day),
and went back to dreamland.
I am entirely unsure whether my Ph.D. transfer defence was enough of a reason
to get smashed. I still had a good time, though as always in Ireland,
especially with this crowd
NP: The Flower Kings: The Rainmaker
Next.