I've been extremely busy with labwork lately, trying to get a second paper ready for submission in the coming months. It's taken an obvious toll on my free software work, but that's life I guess. The upside is that the other night I realized why a year and half's worth of experiments kept turning up with negative results that seemed to contradict our other results. It turns out that this experiment was conceptually flawed, and even though I wasted a year and a half on this I did learn something even from those negative results that should go in to the final paper. I'm actually relieved, because even though I don't have all the data yet I can really see how the paper will end up, so I can start writing soon. Oftentimes knowing why something is wrong so you can fix it is even more important than being right.

I set up an ikiwiki to help organize my lab data a few weeks ago, and it's been a huge win. Joey really did a fantastic job on the program and I can't imagine using a wiki that doesn't share a very similar design for any of my personal stuff. I showed my boss some of my data using it and now he wants me to set up a wiki for the lab. He actually wants me to show off my wiki to give my lab members a feel for the idea. Since ikiwiki doesn't seem to be appropriate for my lab members, I'm going to have to look in to the giant list of wikis to figure out the exact right one for my lab's requirements. This is something I never expected to be doing in grad school.

Because there's no way my brain can go without doing a little bit of programming, I finally sat down and wrote myself a small shell script that lets me grep through pdf's, which is something I couldn't find googling around. If you have a lot of pdf's like I do and don't something like beagle or tracker churning away in the background constantly just so you can search them, this is very helpful. It's obviously very crude, but it gets the job done nicely. It relies on the pdftotext program; hopefully it'll be of use to someone.

I've been digging in to my copy of UNIX Power Tools lately, trying to pick up new UNIX and vi arcana, which is something I haven't made a real serious effort to do in a long time. It's been surprisingly fun to try and replace old habits with things that I know are better but don't use. A good example is that I usually will fire off a new subshell in vim when I should really just suspend vim and use my original shell to save time. Re-examining the basics of how I use the system has been a lot of fun, and has made me a lot more comfortable with the simple day to day tasks.

keeps the release away. That's why, following Sesse last year, I started to work on (at least), one RC bug a day. If I do that alone, and that no new RC bugs are opened^[1], we will release in 460 days; now if 10 DD do the same, it becomes 46 FWIW, today, I made Luk (Claes) reassign and downgrade #470453 and sent a DELAYED/2 NMU for #470002. And you, what did you do for the release ?

I've created a small contest together with several other guys. We'll try to get as much as possible spams on a emailadress. The people with the most spam and viruses on his emailaccount will win. I think a good starting point is to publish here, we'll see. Some other things which could end in having success are:

• write the emailadress into the footer of each emailadress as spamtrap.
• subscribe to several websites
• write some guestbook entries with this emailadress

If you have other ideas how to get as much as possible spam to this address please write a Comment to this post to the Discussion page. Thanks in advance The emailadress which should recieves as much as possible spam is: winnie@qsc218.credativ.com.

Planet Debian now has Javascript to facilitate the persistent hiding of particular feeds. The code is still in flux, but appears to work. Comments welcome, especially from people better at Javascript than myself! The way it works was chosen to minimise the changes requred:

• Each entry is wrapped within a new <div>
• The DIV has an ID & a CLASS attribute added.

At load-time the function hideHosts() is called. If a comma-separated cookie called "excludes" is present this is split and iterated over. For each domain-name in the list the current document is searched for elements having a class prefixed with that hostname - if any match and they have an ID defined (regardless of what that might be) they are hidden. And thats it. The changes to the template were minimal; each index entry already has a "link" attribute, so I just had to add this:

 <div class="<!-- tmpl_var name='link' escape='html' -->"
         id="<!-- tmpl_var name='link' escape='html' -->" >
 ....
 </div>

Because the ID and LINK attributes are URLs there is a little mangling, and inefficiency. But I didn't want to change the core of the PlanetPlanet to define a "hostname" attribute for each feed member... In an ideal world I'd add "class='feed, $link'" and then iterate over that at load-time to attach handlers, and an ID appropriately. But that is a little scary.. If it works in IE great. I've tested Firefox & Ephinay ObQuote: Terminator II Update: Moved javascript into external file, and removed the image toggling, it seemed to fail and I'm not sure why. I will investigate.

(To be fair: It is not theirs, Tolimar will be the godfather. But they do it with a perfection.) No Tags

(To be fair: It is not theirs, Tolimar will be the godfather. But they do it with a perfection.) Personal

So, you know, SCO has been suing various people in the Linux community for the last few years, claiming that some code in Linux was stolen from them. So, I’m willing to bet that a lot of people were wondering: what exactly is SCO UnixWare? Well. Have I got a treat for you. Thanks to this wonderful thing called the Internet, you too, can experience SCO UnixWare in it’s full glory. Right, so! I wouldn’t want to stop you from experiencing perhaps, the most enterprisy OS ever. Lets get it on. Installing the OS — the most enterprisy installer ever. The SCO installer is the most ass-backwards convoluted thing someone could have ever invented. It’s downright bloody insane. But, a picture is worth a thousand words, or something like that. This is the boot splash screen. You’ll see it a lot. The release 7.1.3 text goes back and forth a lot, kinda like the Windows XP startup screen except with less artistic talent. After a little while, you boot into a language selection screen. You choose English, and it presents you with: You press F10 to continue. Pressing F10 is kinda like rolling a 2d6, except it’s more enterprisy. You’ll be pressing F10 a lot. It asks you to enter a license key. But, SCO doesn’t really care about licensing it seems. You press F8 to tell it that “you don’t have a license”, and it gives you the option to use an “evaluation license which expires in 60 days”. You choose yes, you anti-capitalist pirate. Don’t worry, at this point, the SCO installer has probably phoned home and told them to add you to their SCOsource litigation. It starts unpacking drivers, and asks you if you would like to use the driver configuration utility. You exit out of the driver configuration utility. It asks you for the system hostname, and installation method. Time to partition your hard drive. Finally. This is what it’s all about. Wow, that was easy wasn’t it. You press enter three times, kinda like the free software OS we know and love. It asks you what packages you would like to install. You choose the default. Mostly because I couldn’t be assed. Now you go back to setting up the network??? You think back, and recall vaguely that you set up the network already. Apparently you didn’t, as it now wants you to manually configure your ethernet adaptor, despite the fact that it autoconfigured itself moments ago. You enter in some information to make it happy. It asks you to set the clock. You enter in some data and press F10. It asks you to set up a user, set the root password and set the system security level. It asks you to accept the license agreement, in a very enterprisy way. Infact, it’s so enterprisy you don’t have to read the actual license. You choose “display licenses”; because you’re curious. You see the following copyleft licenses: It asks to be sure you really want to install this enterprisy OS. You hit F10, acknowledging your willingness to sell your soul to satan SCO. Installation begins, you wait about 20 minutes, and the thing is finally installed. You look up and see it installing netscape. You sigh, as you know what that means. It installs documentation. You nearly fall asleep. Wasn’t that percentage meter more a little while ago? You go back to whatever you were doing. Finally, it “sets up UnixWare”, and tells you that it has finished. You hit Enter. But, you forgot to eject your CD. Ok, you reboot finally. It boots back into unixware, and you get presented with the bootsplash: It boots up for the first time. It asks if you would like to install anything off of CD2 or CD3. You choose no, and it spams you about some update support contract thing. It decides to rebuild your kernel for some random reason. By rebuild, I mean, “relink using binary blobs”. But, I digress. The system reboots, because it rebuilt the kernel. The system boots, you’re presented with even more advertising. This concludes our look at SCO UnixWare. I hope you’ve found it fun. There’s more fun images in this directory, including a mollyguarded shutdown and much more.

Theorem: If aptitude is used, set to automatically remove unneeded packages and every not willingly installed package is marked auto, the system’s cruftiness is always 0.

Because of some modifications at my Real Life Orkplace, I decided to reduce other duties to get a better chance to deal with my new duties. So i requested help for my four packages in the Distribution

RFH: jove

My first package. A small, but powerful Emacs-relative, with all those uneeded things stripped which makes emacs fat. Maybe these days especially useful for small memory devices, as it gives you emacs-likeness for the price of nvi or ae. I have no idea how well it works in a real utf-8-environment.

RFH: milter-greylist

A greylist-milter which makes running a mailserver somehow possible for me. it keeps away about 2/3 of spam, which leaves me with only 400spams/day. I already have two contacts who want to help with that.

RFH: nn

No news is good news, but nn is better. This is a USENET reader, for those people who grow up with Webforums and Blogs: This could be still the most effective way to celebrate flamefests, gather information or communicate with people sharing same interests. And nn has in my opinion the best UI for it, and makes it easy and fast to find interesting articles and skip others. Well, Upstream Development has ceased to exist around 1994. I think if no one takes over, this package will become finally useless when IPv6 gets widely used (right after the release of 'Duke Nukem Forever') and it also doesn't deal well with non iso-8859-1-charsets. So best for this package would be to rewrite it from scratch (my dream: message/mime-handling/threading from mutt, scoring from slrn, and UI from nn) because the User Interface is much better than those of all still alive Newsreaders i tried.

RFA: synergy

This is my most popular package, which makes it possible to share one mouse and keyboard over many computers and displays. (It is available for UNIX/Linux, Windows and MacOS) This is a very very useful software, and i use it permanently. Sadly the Upstream Development mostly ceased to exist, and so i put this to RFA (instead of RFH) because many Debian-Users use it according to popcon. This software should be taken over by someone who is able to help Upstream. There is a RC-Bug, which caused the package be pulled from testing.

Interesting is that while filing those RFH/RFA all the same day, i only got responses for the packages which scores lowest in popcon, (24 for milter-greylist, 1196 for synergy).

Intel is always seen as good guy, who is writing open source drivers, releasing at least some specifications for hardware. Unfortunately it is not always the case. If you want to use their new embedded solution - Menlow CPU and Poulsbo chipset, they provide you lot of crap. Basically what you get is a zip file containing several Microsoft Word documents, badly formatted text files (end of lines at each 80 chars), PDFs and some zip and tar archives. If you look to one of these archives, you will get binary graphical installer, which will install license, uninstallator and yet another set of tarballs. These tarballs finally contain binary and source packages you need to make graphics work on this platform. Maybe somebody did this to practise various ways of compressing and distributing things, but it is really amazing how many times you need to decompress several archives to actually get to the things you want. Unfortunately at the end you will find out that libgl1-mesa-dri-psb binary (DRI driver for graphics) has no sources and Intel is not willing to give them to you. Bad luck if you have slightly different distribution than one of these which are supported (FC6, Midinux-build9, ubuntu-gutsy, ubuntu-hardy) and the provided binary simply crashes.

Airports visited in the past week: 4 (rising to 6 in 12 hours or so)
Terminals visited in Heathrow: 2
Terminals enjoyed in Heathrow: 0
Vending machines in groundside of Heathrow terminal 2: 2, hidden near the men's toilets
Temperature of "ice cold" Coca Cola from vending machine: 5 C
Currencies currently carried: 4
Passports currently carried: 2
Fuses blown in airports: 1
Belonging to me: 0
Gross vm86-related hacks perpetrated: 1
Number of x86 instructions to emulate in order to achieve the above: 21
Number actually emulated as yet: 0

Those of you who haven't been too busy not paying attention will already know my whereabouts on the 13th of October and why my alibi is weak but that's another story for another time, but also that I'm in Recife from tomorrow afternoon until some time on Sunday and Porto de Galinhas from then until Wednesday in order to present at Bossa to talk about Ubuntu Mobile and the challenges involved in turning a Linux desktop distribution into something suitable for devices that are less large than your face. Sadly, logistical errors on my part mean I won't have any demo hardware with me, but there's always some potential for other synergy. Please don't beat me to death. Ow. Not the face. Please, not the face.

I've uploaded a new make package to fix the memory corruption bug which I recently tracked down, with kind permission from the maintainer. I've also been working on a Debian Planet filtering/exclusion system. I've put together a (working) online demo, and I think I could probably inject it via greasemonkey without too many problems. (I'm a little reluctant to install that addon, because I suspect the security implications are severe). Still it was a nice hack, and actually reminds me that I like javascript these days. The demo will probably disappear in a week or two, but otherwise works as expected - just a couple of GUI issues to solve. (As with the Debian Planet search this isn't tied to our install, and could work on any PlanetPlanet installation.) Maybe it isn't the friendliest of ideas, but I think it is a good one regardless. ObQuote: Last King of Scotland

Back in February, I worked on packages providing badly encoded changelog files. With the removal of gmanedit from testing and unstable (Gnome 1.x removal process) and the ack that perl wrongly changelog encoding is mostly upstream's changelog (which will be hopefully fixed), I think its OK, now, to announce that this lenny release goal is achieved. Thanks to Bas Zoetekouw who did the mass bug filing which helped a lot tracking this down. We could now imagine tracking down badly encoded debian/copyright files... PS: above, "badly" means "using national encoding"...which is generally ISO-stoneage^W8859-1.

It’s been a while I’ve not talked about my packages. I’ve been preparing a xulrunner trunk upload for a while now, and I must say that while I’m not totally happy with evolutions in Mozilla codebase, I do appreciate that a significant amount of the patches we were applying have been applied upstream. And even more will be applied when Firefox 3.0beta5 is released. I even got patches that were *not* in Debian to be applied. Thanks have to go to Reed Loden for all this. Another nice thing on Mozilla trunk is that they finally stopped patching sqlite, which means we can now have Mozilla linked against the system one. It is even more important now that libnss uses sqlite, too. And now that we have libcairo 1.5 in experimental, and recent enough nss and nspr in unstable (uploaded a few days ago, creating some mess with iceweasel, iceape and xulrunner), we have all the necessary bits to have (most of) the bundled libraries replaced by system ones. The sad thing is they did implement APNG (animated png) in their bundled libpng, so, to have APNG support, we need to either patch libpng or use the bundled one. I’ll see if I can just disable APNG for the moment. I hope to be able to upload the package to experimental on saturday or sunday, based on the firefox 3.0pre4 codebase. Iceweasel should follow a few days later.

Before I start on this, note that SPI's next board meeting is next Wednesday at 1900 UTC on irc.oftc.net #spi and logs should appear here and on spi-general less than a day after. I expect the agenda will appear here. Last Tuesday morning, someone asked about SPI holding copyrights. On Tuesday afternoon, I answered with the policy and the only practice example I found. SPI's policy is fine. SPI's practice seemed unclear. On Wednesday morning, I clarified that reply to one board member and made a suggestion to one who seemed to want to ask a lawyer. On Sunday afternoon, after a staggering number of posts which weren't really getting anywhere, I tried to drag it back to the practice example a bit rudely, but that's the level the discussion had fallen to by then. It didn't go down well. It seems rude is fine from other people, but not me. Damn baggage. There was a sequence of posts telling me that SPI members weren't even allowed to ask about this task. I replied to one on Tuesday morning and took the useful bits off to debian vote. Yesterday, I lost my cool, really, and posted too much, replying to all the stupid posts suggesting that you can only ask if you wear the right hat, and one or two particularly ugly personal attacks. Sorry about that. Meanwhile, over on IRC, a draft solution to the problem has been developed/found. So all's well in the end. I give big thanks to Jimmy, Sam and Lucas in particular and a big apology for responding to the mailing list abuse.

Yesterday, I submitted my diploma thesis (one day before the deadline — yay!), so I will hopefully have much more time to work on my Debian packages again.

I won’t be visiting the US in the forseeable future. For some time I have been concerned about the malfunctioning legal process and other related issues that arose from the so-called “War On Terror“. But the most recent news is that the TSA may just copy all the contents of your laptop or even steal it [1]. Law enforcement agents can search property if they see evidence of a crime in progress or if they have a search warrant. They can seize property as evidence in a trial, but if the property in question is not illegal then it will be returned afterwards. The TSA take property from travellers without any reason for doing so and do not return it. This is not law enforcement, it is banditry. It’s bad enough catching a late train while carrying a laptop and risking a junkie trying to steal it. When bandits have police protection (as the TSA do) then it becomes an unacceptable risk. The TSA have recently apologised for making people remove iPods and other devices from their luggage [2]. Strangely this has been interpreted by some people to mean that the TSA won’t be stealing data and hardware from travellers. I’m sure that if the TSA was going to stop searching laptop hard drives and confiscating laptops then they would have announced it. From now on I will avoid entering US territory (even for connecting flights), except in the unlikely event that someone pays me an unreasonably large amount of money such that I am prepared to travel without electronic gear. I know that some people in the US won’t like this (some people flip out when anything resembling a Boycott is mentioned). I am not Boycotting the US, merely avoiding bandits. If the fear of bandits hurts your business then you need to get a law enforcement system that can deal with the problem. On a related note, check out the TSA Gangstaz [3] video, funny.

• [1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/06/AR2008020604763.html


• [2] http://www.boingboing.net/2008/02/06/tsa-apologizes-to-bl.html


• [3] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7AWw7t5zj0

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