...which was wise voting, going by his part in the DUS fiasco ... still relevant because it went unfixed for a year and Steve McIntyre helps run that business ... [more on my site]

Apparently, the Google Web Accelerator [is] considered overzealous and it can combine with Javascript-abusing web applications to cause data loss... [read more]

March 2006 traffic discussed audacity cdrtools cpp darcsweb doc-rfc-*? emacs21 eterm flamerobin fst gnoemoe grass ibpp imagemagick keyspan mozilla-* panda3d portaudio tetex-base subwiki ttf-dejavu wget wildmagic x264

March 2006 traffic discussed audacity cdrtools cpp darcsweb doc-rfc-*? emacs21 eterm flamerobin fst gnoemoe grass ibpp imagemagick keyspan mozilla-* panda3d portaudio tetex-base subwiki ttf-dejavu wget wildmagic x264

I had so many plans for this weekend, but the first of them ate the entire two days. In working on the next release of java-package, I came across some serious issues with alternatives creation that had crept in under my watch when I first became involved with the package. It was one of those times where accepting a huge patch with tons of files introduced an error that I missed; that’s part of the trouble with some patches you receive; they are submitted with someone only thinking of a very specific problem for the moment, with no thought for the package-wide implications and any technical debt the suggested resolution may incur. There was nothing for it but to slog through the install and remove scripts for all 8 JREs and all 8 JDKs looking for the bug’s presence. Sixteen hours later I had corrected the issues and tested the install of all the JREs and JDKs on i386. I had a professor once who asked what was necessary to earn a PhD. After some of the more pompous asses in my class had spouted out their opinions, the professor stated, “a hard butt.” He said it wasn’t about being brilliant so much as it was about being persistent. The friends I have met since then who have shared their PhD stories have confirmed my professor’s allegation. I think Free/Open Source Software development is like that; what does it take to participate? A hard butt. On that note, my sore butt is getting out of this chair. Oh yeah, kudos to Mr. Burrows on aptitude 0.4.0; I love the changes. Control-T alone was worth the wait.

Version 0.27 of java-package has hit the unstable archive today. Thanks to the encouraging (or maybe urging) ;-) of my colleagues in the Debian Java™ Packaging Project who still primarily run on PowerPC, support for the IBM Java2 5.0 JREs and SDKs (currently in beta) has been added with this release. Hopefully that provides some relief for PowerPC and s390 users who have been languishing in Java™ 1.4.2 land until now. Even if your JRE or JDK version was supported by a previous version, I encourage you to repackage it with this latest java-package. A massive revision to the alternatives installations has been carried out, and users should find that all of the expected executables in a JRE or JDK bin directory now have alternatives entries installed. The exceptions would be kinit, klist, and ktab. Our handling of system preferences for Java is still being and hammered out; quite an unwieldy thing what with the alternatives and all that.

It’s sad to see MJ Ray, our savior and future DPL, engaging in a hate campaign against AJ. It brings a tear to my eye. (Note: the above statement is sarcasm. If you don’t get it, see this, this, this, and this. See, I can claim that criticism I don’t agree w/ is “hate speech” too!)

Last night, the IRC debates for the ongoing DPL elections were held. Having a record number of seven candidates, it was at least from a candidate point of view very chaotic, the time between questions was not enough to both properly answer the questions and also read the responses of the fellow candidates. However, for the public, I guess the tempo was quite okay. I hope it's been an informative event for Developers, even though the nature of such debate doesn't allow for in-depth discussions. See the debian-vote mailinglist for that. Only about 24 hours left to answer questions... need to hurry. When finally reading though the debate answers now, I noticed Anthony Towns saying:

thanks to the wonders of blogging, there's plenty of opportunity to talk about things in a fun interesting way even when they're not finished, or not important enough to warrant a mailing list post

While I believe there's room for some regular reports on various Debian internal projects like I mentioned in my platform, this made me finally get around to actually creating a blog, something I've been meaning to do for over a year. And of course, I needed to because all the other teletubbies have a blog too! Anyway, I'm glad the campaigning period is nearly over, so I have more time for such things as a lintian upload, some PTS hacking, or study. And of course decide on my ballot for the DPL voting period.