Debian JP leader.
I have been selected as Debian JP leader for 2008.
This is my third consecutive term since 2006, and will be the second full term since 2007.
Mutt
Fran ois Marier has recently been posting some interesting entries about the Mutt mail client upon his blog. His tips are pretty basic, but that doesn't make them less useful. So here's my tip of the day: reply_regexp. When you're viewing a mail, and you choose to reply it the subject of that mail is the basis of your message's subject. For example given a message with "Subject: hello" your reply will typically have the subject "Subject: Re: hello". This is real rocket science here, people. Imagine you're using SPAM filtering which tags messages it isn't sure about with a prefix "UNS:". Suddenly things don't look so hot, as you might end up with a mail with the subject:AdvertisingSubject: UNS: Re: HelloReply to that mail, whilst being half-asleep, and what do you get? You get this:Subject: Re: UNS: Re: HelloBad. Ugly. Wrong. The following snippet in my ~/.muttrc file correctly deals with this case:set reply_regexp="^(((UNS:[ \t]) [rR][eE]:[ \t])*)+"Neat. Cool. Nice.
I've paid for some advertising upon the LWN.net site. (No link, I'm not trying to game things here.) I didn't know what to expect, but I was willing to risk the expenditure as a way of saying thanks to them for their great content. (Because of my Debian Project membership I get a free LWN subscription, as do all developers. see here for details if you're a developer without a subscription.) I've paid $30 and that has given me a months run of my advert, with clickthroughs hovering around 1%. Not horribly bad at all! I probably won't repeat the experiment for the forseeable future, but I'm glad that I did it at least once. If you have something appropriate for a Debian-based audience don't forget you're welcome to advertise upon the Debian Administration website for free - See the Advert FAQ for details.ObQuote: The Craft Update: jquery was accepted yesterday. Today I uploaded a new version to more closely align it with the javascript-policy.
I'm currently looking for a printer. I want a Laser printer,
black & white should be enough, but color may be ok too if not
too expensive (especially toner). I guess I prefer a network one,
even if I don't really understand the way everything should
work.
As I understand it, a network printer just listens on a defined
port (9100/jetdirect or ipp/63), and prints jobs sent by a spooler.
There is no integrated spooler, so there are two solutions:
I had an "Aha!" moment today when I came to a Wittgensteinian realization that while the sense of a piece of code corresponds to the formal behaviour of that code, the meaning of the snippet is the set of possible contexts where this code could be used. This idea has changed my view of teaching programming (I have been teaching Python in a local school for a couple months now).
This attitude is nothing new, but for some reason I have not come across it, or rather, I have never seen it applied. (The fashionable problem-based learning thing has some similarities, but isn't quite it.) Having an idea to start from, it was not hard to find good articles expanding the idea. I especially liked Robert Strandh's short writeup on idioms and Elliot Soloway's Learning To Program = Learning To Construct Mechanisms And Explanations (1986). Experienced programmers will not learn much, but anyone dealing with CS education, teachers and students alike, ought to have a look.
The moral is that emphasis should be placed on reading exemplary code ("experienced programmers do X this way") rather than definitions ("function Y does Z"). Programming seems to be closer to language use than to mathematics, and teaching methods should reflect that.
Some readers might not now that Debian is in this annual process where we vote for our Leader for the following next year.
UI fonts of OpenOffice.org Writer and XFCE thunar are really not the same
... years of seeing this ugly font and being force to scale the OpenOffice.org UI display to 80%.
I just found the solution!
All his related to a X settings: Xft.dpi. People are suggesting around to set it to 96 or something like that. I just decide to use the one i can find xdpyinfo (does it make sense?) and send the result to X settings using xrbd.
Here is the script $HOME/bin/xfce4-xft.sh:
#!/bin/sh xrdb -query Xft.dpi grep Xft.dpi > /dev/null && exit 0 RESOLUTION= xdpyinfo grep resolution sed "s/.* \\([0-9][0-9]*\\)x.*/\\1/" TMP= mktemp trap "rm -f $TMP" EXIT echo "Xft.dpi: $RESOLUTION" > $TMP xrdb -merge $TMPCopy/paste/chmod a+x this file. And then add a file $HOME/.config/autostart/xfce4-xft.desktop to autostart the previous script:
[Desktop Entry] Encoding=UTF-8 Type=Application Name=XFCE-XFT Comment=Fix XFCE Xft.dpi settings Exec=/home/gildor/bin/xfce4-xft.sh StartupNotify=false Terminal=false Hidden=false(replace /home/gildor/ by your own home directory) Thats it. Your Xft.dpi will be fixed depending on the configuration of your X server. This allow you to have a laptop and a desktop with different screen resolution. I am waiting the email from bugzilla.xfce.org to submit this script to XFCE bug tracking. Enjoy. Update: Following the comment of this entry, another better solution is to use openoffice.org-gtk which works out-of-the-box with a clean UI. I don't even have to force OO to gnome style. Thanks to Dan Callahan, Vasilis and Corsac for their suggestion.
OK, after a mainboard replacement by HP, I have my AMD64 HP Pavilion DV6000 (DV6615ea) back and a quick update has given me working wireless! The last remaining obstacle has gone - the most recent 2.6.24 kernel update includes working support for the Broadcom Corporation BCM94311MCG wlan mini-PCI (rev 02) in the b43 kernel driver.$ uname -a
Linux dwarf 2.6.24-1-amd64 #1 SMP Thu Mar 27 16:52:38 UTC 2008 x86_64 GNU/Linux
$ dpkg -l 'linux-image-2.6*'
linux-image-2.6-amd64 2.6.24+13
linux-image-2.6.24-1-amd64 2.6.24-5
Apr 4 20:07:06 dwarf kernel: b43-phy0 ERROR:
YOUR FIRMWARE IS TOO NEW. Please downgrade your firmware.
Apr 4 20:07:06 dwarf kernel: b43-phy0 ERROR:
Use this firmware tarball: http://downloads.openwrt.org/sources/broadcom-wl-4.80.53.0.tar.bz2
Apr 4 20:07:06 dwarf kernel: b43-phy0 ERROR:
Use this b43-fwcutter tarball: http://bu3sch.de/b43/fwcutter/b43-fwcutter-009.tar.bz2
Apr 4 20:07:06 dwarf kernel: b43-phy0 ERROR: Read, understand and _do_ what this message says, please.
Are you rebasing or merging? seems to be the 64 thousand
dollar question over in vcs-pkg
discussions. Various people have offered their preferences, and
indeed, several case studies of work flows have been presented,
what is lacking is an analysis of the work-flow; an
exploration of which methodology has advantages, and whether there
are scenarios in which the other work flow would have been
better.
Oh, what are all these work flows about, you ask? Most of the
issues with packaging software for distributions have a few things
in common: there is a mainline or upstream source of development.
There are zero or more independent lines of development or ongoing
bug fixes that are to be managed. And then there is the tree from
which the distribution package is to be built. All this talk about
packaging software work flows is how to best manage asynchronous
development upstream and in the independent lines of development,
and how to create a coherent, debuggable, integrated tree from
which to build the distributions package.
The rebasing question goes to the heart of how to handle the
independent lines of development using git; since these lines of
development are based off the main line of development, and must be
periodically synchronized. Here is a first look at a
couple of important factors that will have bearing on that
question, and packaging software for a distribution using Git in
general. This is heavily geared towards git (nothing else does
rebases so easily, I think), but some of the concepts should be
generic. I am not considering the stacked set of quilt patches
source controlled with Git in this article (I don t understand that
model well enough to do an analysis)
As a teaser, there is a third answer: neither. You can just add
an independent line of development, and just let it sit: don t
rebase, and don t merge; and in some circumstances that is a
winning strategy.
./debimg debimg.cfg. This will create an ISO image named
Well not directly, but MySQL is and they will also accept our projects.
So if you are student interested in getting some money for improving
free software, you're welcome to contact us. We have written down our
ideas to wiki, but feel free to come with your own thought. But
don't forget that deadline is this Monday!
While talking about this improving phpMyAdmin, phpMyAdmin team would
also like to take part in Hackontest, so vote and suggest there
features for us! If you have no idea for phpMyAdmin, Debian is also
taking part there ;-).
In my previous satire about SCO UnixWare, some SCO people of course didn’t think it was very nice. So, I guess I need to explain more about why I wrote the “review” the way I did.
But, first the comment:
Obviously any human being can recognize satire. There is obvious motivation on behalf of SCO’s PR department (correct me if I am wrong on where this comment originated; I did just some basic Google lookups, and also, this is a PR tactic known as “dead agenting”) to ignore the fact that this was clearly a satirical review. I would say, “perhaps SCO doesn’t understand why it is criticized,” but I believe it is obvious that they know why people are being critical and satirical of their company and their efforts.
I would like for everyone to think, for a moment, about how things could be if SCO didn’t take the litigious strategy that they have taken over the past 6 years. SCO UnixWare could have remained a successful product, and could have in reality become a major asset to the open source world. SCO could have been the good guys here, but instead they chose a path of litigation instead of innovation.
In the Open Source and Free Software world, innovation is what is seen as important. Companies may be in some sense rival to each other, but when it comes down to it, everyone appreciates and respects the work that everyone else contributes to the ecosystem. When people do not contribute in a positive way, or worse, betray their peers like SCO has done, it opens them up for criticism.
As I see the situation, I think that SCO’s current tactics as a company represent those of someone who is paranoid. People who are paranoid attack first, instead of defend their position. So, while I am sure this is a pointless question, I believe it must be asked anyway: “What would SCO UnixWare have been like if they did not take a litigious strategy against Linux users?”
If you look at it like this, it doesn’t really matter if we’re right, or SCO is right on who has the basic cases (well, it does, but we all know how that’s going to come out anyway).
Why does SCO keep pursuing a strategy of litigation when the feasibility of this strategy is at best, unknown? To some extent, I think it is now a matter of morale. After all, it’s bad if you have to admit that the strategy you have taken for the last six years, was wrong. In some ways, you could say that SCO’s current strategy is cult-like.
Furthermore, if any SCO people are interested in doing an interview about this whole matter, I encourage you to comment back, and I’ll be happy to publicize SCO’s viewpoint of this. It’s only fair.
Today I woke up and found that nenolod.net expired. What? I hadn’t even received any expiration notifications from them.
So, I immediately renewed and transferred to another registrar, and they sent me an e-mail with some hilarious excerpts begging me to stay with them:
GoDaddy.com, Inc. delivers superior value. Here’s how: 1. Guaranteed renewal priceI’m not sure why I need any of these in a domain registrar. After all, it’s just a domain. I don’t think I will be missing these guys much. So if anyone was trying to send me mail and it didn’t go through, sorry about that.
2. Risk-free, money-back guarantee transfers
3. More FREE, value-added services with every domain
4. Consistently lower prices
5. Best-in-industry live customer support, 24/7
6. Fast, easy bulk domain transfers and registrations
7. Just-right, affordable hosting options
8. Superior domain search and management tools
9. Fierce protection of your personal information
10. Unique, valuable and innovative software and services
The Tour of Britain organisers emailed me to announce their launch. The race this year will be 7th - 14th September (starting stage 2 in my old stomping grounds of MK and finishing stage 3 in Burnham on Sea, the next town south from my home) and they announce daily coverage on itv4
A client of mine seeks a document management system to be run on
a Linux machine, and I have no experience in this domain. I am
turning to you for help, dear lazyweb, my client will make a
donation to a FLOSS project of your choosing in return.
I define document management system as an online file storage
for OpenOffice.org/Word documents, spreadsheets, PDFs, and
pictures. Thus, this is less about content management than about
file storage and organisation, aimed at collaboration.
The following are the sought features:
An email saying that Nectarine now has three, new dedicated streams for music is not spam, and it never will be. You can now find one stream for chiptunes, one for oldskool songs, and one for songs only included in a demoscene production.
And yes, this is the right time to sign up for Solskogen 2008.
Chronicle
I've made a new release of the chronicle blog compiler, primarily to allow the "Subject:" header to be used for new blog subjects. (That allows new entries to be automatically posted via email, with an appropriate procmail setup. I'll add one as an example shortly.)RSS Utility
Whilst on the subject of RSS creation (huh?) I've written a tiny utility which will create an RSS feed from a list of text files. It will also create an index.html file to match. To see why this is useful you could view my recent changelog. I think there is a need for a small tool to read files and create feeds from them - like mod_index_rss does, but without messing with Apache. If there is any interest I'd be happy to release the code, as-is it doesn't use a template..Anonymous Hosting?
Online privacy is important. Mostly when this is discussed it is in the context of client-side anonymity. Looking at it from the other side, though, How do you host a website anonymously? You could register the domain via a proxy, or with bogus details. But if you host the site yourself the IP address may be traced to the hosting provider, and that may be used to trace back to you. So, the alternatives? Well you could use a hosted site such as livejournal / wordpress / googlepages / etc. But pretty surely they'll be able to trace content back to you - and if you don't host it there's a high chance they'll just pull it if you talk about "bad things". (I guess you could use TOR for uploading / your connections there.) So, going back to the question. How can you host something, easily accessible to the world, without risk of your identity/association being discovered?ObQuote: HellRaiser
I'm, obviously, ignoring FreeNet. Two reasons for that:I almost think the best way forward would be to write a site which was a proxy for a file-sharing protocol, then link people to items that way. Relying on the swarm to host the files.. The downside is that you'd have to have a convincing argument for when RIAA comes calling, suggesting that you're sharing their stuff too. If it wasn't a general purpose proxy then the deniability is gone, and if it is you're at risk of general copyright infringement claims. Hard problem. Shame.
- It's slow, has no search-engine goodness, and is unproven.
- It requires an atypical client. Aunt Milly won't be able to surf Freenet...
mysql> CREATE TABLE User_ ( mysql> ... mysql> ) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1; Query OK, 0 rows affected, 1 warning (0.04 sec)One warning, but we're running this as part of an import, so we'll fail to spot this and even if we did, we wouldn't be able to get it back out of mysql because SHOW WARNINGS only shows the last command. So let's look at the table we just created:
mysql> show create table User_\G
*************************** 1. row ***************************
Table: User_
Create Table: CREATE TABLE User_ (
...
) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1
1 row in set (0.00 sec)
Eh? what's going on? We asked for InnoDB, but have got a MyISAM
table. Lets look at the engines available.
mysql> show engines; +------------+----------+----------------------------------------------------------------+ Engine Support Comment +------------+----------+----------------------------------------------------------------+ MyISAM DEFAULT Default engine as of MySQL 3.23 with great performance MEMORY YES Hash based, stored in memory, useful for temporary tables InnoDB DISABLED Supports transactions, row-level locking, and foreign keys BerkeleyDB NO Supports transactions and page-level locking BLACKHOLE NO /dev/null storage engine (anything you write to it disappears) EXAMPLE NO Example storage engine ARCHIVE YES Archive storage engine CSV YES CSV storage engine ndbcluster DISABLED Clustered, fault-tolerant, memory-based tables FEDERATED YES Federated MySQL storage engine MRG_MYISAM YES Collection of identical MyISAM tables ISAM NO Obsolete storage engine +------------+----------+----------------------------------------------------------------+ 12 rows in set (0.00 sec)Oh, so innodb has been disabled. We can fix that easily by removing skip-innodb from my.cnf.
root@cmsdb01:/var/log# grep skip-innodb /etc/mysql/my.cnf root@cmsdb01:/var/log#But hang on a second, that's not in the config file. What's going on? It turns out that the reason InnoDB is disabled is because of the innodb_log_file_size setting not matching the files on disk.
root@cmsdb01:/var/log# grep innodb_log_file_size /etc/mysql/my.cnf innodb_log_file_size = 512M root@cmsdb01:/var/log# ls -lh /var/lib/mysql/ib_logfile* -rw-rw---- 1 mysql mysql 5.0M 2006-12-19 18:39 /var/lib/mysql/ib_logfile0 -rw-rw---- 1 mysql mysql 5.0M 2006-12-19 18:39 /var/lib/mysql/ib_logfile1Rumour has it that you can just stop MySQL, delete these log files and start MySQL again. I'm yet to try this as the server in question is in production use. The alternative is to change the innodb_log_file_size setting to match the file. So in summary the problems with MySQL are:
Here you are: balsamic
vinegar flavoured with figs or honey ..., tasty eh?
(dedicated to gareuselesinge)
PS unfortunately at home I'm still without
network connectivity (unless you count poorly working, up 1
random hour per day, stolen wi-fi as connectivity), so I won't be
able to work on Debian et al. a lot from home in the next few
weeks.
Next.