Search Results: "tar"

1 July 2007

David Welton: 10 Years of Debian

I'm not sure of the exact date - if my memory serves me correctly, it was sometime during the summer of 1997 - I was given an account on Debian's server (located, at the time, in Beaverton, Oregon). I didn't go on to upload my first package until October of that year, as I had landed my first programming job at the same time, at CKS Partners. The "new maintainer process" in those days consisted of Klee Dienes calling me up and checking that I was a real person, had a pgp key, and wasn't completely clueless. It was a very different project in many ways than it is today - much smaller, much more informal, and of course much less well known in the world at large. Some elements were in place, though - my recollection is that the "flame friendly" atmosphere, while perhaps not quite as accentuated as it at times appears today, was firmly in place even back then. In '98, '99', and 2000, the Linux world was an exciting place to be. I still recall reading about the database companies deciding to release their products on Linux, reading The Cathedral and the Bazaar, and going to one of the first big commercial Linux conferences, in San Jose, in early 1999. Debian was well poised to take advantage of Linux's growth, too. Under Bruce Perens' leadership, several key elements of Debian had been put in place, like the social contract and free software guidelines. Fortuitously, Jason Gunthorpe was working on apt in that time period as well, which was another key element in Debian's success. One of the things I've always admired about Debian in the open source world is that it is in some ways a "stepping stone" project, meaning that it's a good way for people to start getting involved with free software, to get their toes wet "giving something back", without already being an expert hacker. It's easier to maintain a package of code, if you're willing to put in the time and attention to details, than to, say, write a new kernel module, or some other piece of critical C code. I've seen a number of people take this route - they get started with Debian, and as they go, learn more about the packages they work with, and perhaps even get involved with them "upstream", as they acquire skills and knowledge. By no means is everyone in Debian in that situation, though - there are some really first rate hackers, who tend to be the small core of people that really make Debian zing along. Indeed, being an autodidact in the world of computers, outside of one very forgettable term of C++ at Lane Community College, has given me an immense appreciation for the enormous opportunities open source affords in terms of learning - and especially hands-on learning. How many other fields let you work from anywhere in the world with an internet connection, with anyone else who is interested in the same subject, at whatever time you want, with tools that you can download entirely for free? It's really an intoxicating sensation realizing that you can do anything you want if you are willing to put the time in to learn how. The learning opportunities are one of the many things I'm grateful to Debian for. These days, I'm really not involved much with Debian anymore. I mostly run Ubuntu, which I think has perhaps improved on some of the social aspects of Debian (although Mark's zillions of dollars certainly play a large role, too). In terms of free software, I don't have as much time, and dedicate more of it to my own projects like Hecl. I still love the idea of open source software, but I'm also older and wiser (or more cynical?), and must face the reality that without scarcity, you have nothing to trade with others for things like food. Due to my lack of activity, perhaps I should resign, but ... I really don't want to, and who knows, maybe I'll have more time, and an "itch to scratch" at some point in the future. Who knows what the next ten years hold for Debian?

Biella Coleman: The Worst of the Web: Punditry 2.0

Tonight, instead of minding my dinner, which did burn, I was drawn into and extended a pretty fiery IRC conversation on debian-devel on a topic that does not like to die: the merits and demerits of Wikipedia. It is not worth summarizing the conversation here for it followed a pretty predictable arc. There were those who thought Wikipedia was novel and valuable, others who saw it as a pit of bad facts, and inaccuracies and a few others who saw it in ways negative and positive. I found the conversation somewhat ironic, because I usually find myself defending free software to outsiders much in the same way I was defending Wikipedia to free software developers. I tend to be in the camp of admirers, and for many reasons, although, of course, I also was arguing that it is too early to judge the value of Wikipedia as it is in its infancy. Like Debian, since Wikipedia is an institution that has changed *a lot* in its short history, it is hard to make any hard and fast conclusions about its worth, impact, etc, although more modest and qualified claims are certainly in order. The only reason I feel like I can argue anything about Wikipedia is because I am currently reading a dissertation on Wikipedia by Joseph Reagle. He not only has really insightful things to say about the collaborative culture driving the online encyclopedia, but also about the prolific commentary that has closely followed the heels of Wikipedia in the last few years. Just today, he wrote a blog entry entitled, Punditry and The Web 2.0 debate, which so hit the nail on the head on the problems–not with Wikipedia–but with the peanut gallery (commentary) on Wikipedia. As he notes, the problem is often not with the so called correct or incorrect judgments on Wikipedia (or other Web 2.0 phenomenon) but with the very debates themselves, because many of them are built on a shaky foundation of sand, but this punditry, as Joe rightly calls it, is nonetheless worthy of critical examination:
.. while I follow the discussion with interest, I actually don’t find it substantively engaging. Many of the arguments, particularly Gorman’s, tend to be characterized by unsubstantiated claims and the purposeful construal of nuanced issues as extremes — propping up strawmen for subsequent potshots. As I’ve already indicated, while it might bring pundits a sense of righteousness and attention, in the end “Time, not arguments, will utlimately tell.” (And, for this reason I appreciate Larry Sanger’s continuing efforts to implement his vision.)Why, then, do I find this discussion of interest? Punditry, communicative disorders, and history. First, I’m trying to come to an understanding of “punditry,” and I think Gorman’s recent bloggings is an exemplar. My sense is that sometimes people argue for arguments’ sake. That is, even if they genuinely believe the thing they are arguing for, attention, not persuasion, is the goal. (In a sense, perhaps it is a high-brow, and perhaps more genuinely held, form of trolling — another interesting phenomenon.)
While punditry has always existed, there is no doubt that the Internet has accentuated and facilitated this form of (often male) communication and it is great to see someone tackle this topic. Because let’s face it, there is a lot more “garbage” spewing from Web 2.0 or Wikipedia commentary compared to than the actual Wikipedia articles themselves.

30 June 2007

Eric Dorland: Random

One thing I'm really missing is Montr al in the summer time. Particularly the Fantasia Festival, where I would usually take in twenty-odd movies over a couple of weeks and I've been going for years. It was great. New York doesn't seem to have anything that compares, except maybe The New York Asian Film Festival. But that seems quite a bit smaller and more focused. I'll still check out it out though.

It's been nearly 7 months since I've moved here and time has really flown. Work has consumed most of my life and it's been amazing, but I'm starting to feel like it's lacking in certain areas. I've barely seen most of Manhattan and it's really not that big. I need to make sure I get the balance right.

DebConf 7 was fantastic, doubly so since I got to share it. My BoF was not that popular (which is what I expected) but people were interested and audience participation was high, so I was pleased. I sort of divided my time between the conference and being a tourist, so I hope no one felt like I was ignoring them. Edinburgh was an amazing city, really very beautiful. It felt good to be connected with this place (my mother was born in Perth, not too far away). Simon, Martin and Kai, you guys rock!

Speaking of DebConf, I should have cornered Keith for some troubleshooting. I bought a spiffy new desktop recently with a 965G chipset and plugged in an SDVO card and tried to get dual monitor set up going. After much Googling I found that Xrandr is apparently the new cool way to configure this, but information is pretty scarce. I can't seem to get them to both work at the same time. There could be problems because they have different resolutions (one is a 22" wide screen and one is a regular 19"). The lack of information about this is slightly frustrating and tells me either no one is trying this or no one else is having problems. Neither is good :)

29 June 2007

Romain Francoise: Review Board: web-based code review

We've started using Review Board for code reviews at work. It's pretty nice: setting it up is trivial (it's built on top of Django), it's fast enough (using mod_python), email notifications Just Work, and the user interface is sexy, even if it has a few quirks. It even does syntax highlighting in diffs, which is convenient. The only nit is that our workflow sometimes requires reviews of code that has already been committed in the repository, so having a revision browser in the request form would be a plus. But in any case, it's much more convenient than using email for review!

Update: fixed link.

MJ Ray: Sustainability, Search Engine Traffic and free software webmasters

Regular readers may remember that I'm a vocal critic of some search engines and the unreliability of their fast-changing algorithms. One day you're top ten and the next you're gone. If you're building your business on search engine referrals, you're building your castle on shifting sands. SEOBook: Website Sustainability: What Percent of Your Traffic Comes From Search Engines? has good advice:-
"one of the best moves you can make for the sustainability of that site is to lower the percentage of traffic that comes from search"
That's one reason why I'm glad to see the suggestion of etbe: Advertising Free Software Projects - nearly every free software project would be better off improving their web sites, adding cross-links and building more sustainable traffic, instead of wasting resources competing in the Google-ad Games. Unless you've got the thousands of pounds a year that successful AdWords marketers spend, your Google-ad success will probably be short-lived, as people with more money will outbid you for keywords that work. It's even less sustainable than search result traffic, because it's consuming your financial resources as well as your vounteer time. Meanwhile, most free software project webmasters I know are over-stretched, but many wannabe-contributors seem to want to nuke the entire site to rebuild it with their pet tool. Those offers are really about their ego more than helping the project, in my opinion. They want to Get Themslves Noticed, but I've seen far too many unfinished site rebuilds to like those offers. In fact, I don't think any good webmaster would offer a rebuild without the site owner asking for it - even in the rare cases where I really strongly want to restart a site, I explain why and ask permission first, not just wade in with an offer to nuke-and-rebuild. If the site owner says no, I move on: there's no shortage of work here, after all and very few free software projects pay their webmasters. So, if you want to help a free software project, ask their webmasters for suggestions and access to the site source code.

Martin F. Krafft: DebConf7

I am sitting at Frankfurt airport in between flights home from Edinburgh (not anymore, but that's where this post was born). It's been an intense 2.5 weeks of DebConf7, which has been unlike other DebConfs for me in two respects: this was the first time I actually went to DebCamp, the week leading up to the conference, which is designated to teams and individuals with development goals to achieve during the week. And I was also actively involved in the organisation of the conference, which was unexpected, but a very good experience I am not going to miss next year. Well, it wasn't unexpected. When I booked my flights in January, I had decided to arrive a day early and leave a day late to be able to lend a hand. In between then and the conference, my life turned somewhat upside-down and I had forgotten everything about these noble goals of mine. So when I arrived at the conference venue on Saturday morning with thoughts of netconf circling my head, I was surprised to find everyone buzzing about (how na ve of me) and somewhat clueless as to how I should merge in: my wrists didn't really hold up to heavy lifting, and my knee certainly didn't enjoy stairs, of which there were plenty on the way up to the top floor, where DebCamp was taking place. After trying and being mostly ridiculed by the other organisers ("friends"... ha!), I set out to accomplish some other tasks more suited to my bodily condition, such as wiring the hack lab to accomodate 40 geeks for the first week. That took me most of the day, but at least the space was ready for Sunday morning and the official start of the camp. My goal for the week was netconf and I made good progress until I ran into a wall on Tuesday and had to back off and rethink my design. Reinhart Tartler and Enrico Zini dedicated their time to listen to my design and the problems and helped me clear the mess up and helped me reduce complexity and converge on a straight-forward, event-based design. As the newly appointed DebConf press officer and one of the organisation volunteers, I did not get any further for a few days, as I was manning the front desk or preparing and releasing my first press release (with the help of several others), which lead to a lovely story on The Register and doubled the number of attendees that preregistered for DebianDay (which marks the end of DebCamp and the start of DebConf). I blame the geeks in skirts, actually. Silly bunch, but not quite as silly as those attendants who could get a laugh out of the underwear question for two weeks in a row. Up to this point, I had managed to keep a perfect balance between netconf, orga-team, and sleep. So good, apparently, that when the orga-team t-shirts arrived, Uncle Steve made it quite clear that I should be getting one, even though I had spent considerable time on netconf, am sure some of the others must have worked twice the amount, and I was still quite well rested then. But they gave me a shirt and thus I became part of the orga-team. And even though it was rough at times, running around during the day, filling spare minutes with netconf brain-work, and enjoying nights that got longer with every day of the conference, I am glad and proud to be a member of this team now. It took me until after the official start of the conference to return to the netconf code, but with the new design, I got most of the framework to a point where it could obtain static and dynamic addresses from configuration files as well as DHCP servers in time for my presentation on Tuesday (the recording of which shall be linked from the netconf homepage as soon as it's available). Of course, nothing worked on screen in front of the audience, but noone really expected that anyway. and then I took it all apart for further simplification, so by the time night fell, the slides from the talk had already become outdated as I moved to yet another design, which is even simpler and which allowed me to sketch complex scenarios, such as DHCP after WPA. For two days, I made good progress, but the time available for hacking decreased noticeably, as I kept volunteering for more tasks that needed doing, and more and more people turned up. Somewhere in between, Keith Packard took hostage of (and fixed parts of) my broken X40 laptop, but that's the meat of another story. And on some other night, our leader Sam, in his official capacity as DPL, presented me with the instantiation of my innermost desires as consolation for my hosital stay: a pony. Just look at that smile! With 400 attendants, this year's DebConf continued the trend of immense growth of the event, and while it's great to witness this increase in popularity among attendees and sponsors, who make it possible each year to fly more people to the destination, I am also rather sceptical. The problem is less the additional load on the organising team the next 100 people are going to be easier to accomodate than the previous 100 were. It is more that the conference is losing focus. More people make you spend less time with the same folks, and as the number of non-contributors increases, the social element starts to outweigh the technical element. I am not condemning the social element, but to paraphrase the words of my favourite Debian developer, it's painful to come to DebConf or even IRC with a project and questions just to find that the people are generally more interested in being social, even to the point of preventing technical discussions. I realise that this is a sensitive subject as the issue of various cabals keeps coming up frequently and it does not seem right to start limiting the audience to this conference, but unless we consider the matter, DebConf might deteriorate similarly to other conferences, which have enjoyed enormous growth as well before it was too late. I think we must make sure that people understand that we are, after all, a technical project and must not lose touch with out roots. Of course, I may also be overreacting, after a week of intense coding and many other stress factors I continued working hard on netconf and helping with the organisation throughout Friday, briefly taking time off to prepare a presentation on my Ph.D. research, which was very well received, as well as a workshop on Debian packaging with modern (distributed) version control systems, which yielded around a dozen new subscribers to the vcs-pkg mailing list. But now, back to netconf. All things considered, I was making good progress, but not getting netconf into a releasable state just yet. I can parse /etc/network/interfaces files and get data from DHCP servers, even configure interfaces with those, but it's all still work in progress as I have not yet bothered to implement such basics as default gateways or DNS servers. But the framework is in place, and I am very happy with it as everything I keep adding falls into place beautifully. To mark the end of my netconf development sprint at DebConf7, I scheduled a code introduction session on Friday, where around 15 people turned out to get a walkthrough of the code and explanation of some of my design decisions. The session was recorded and will be available on video shortly. I think it turned out to be a very good idea; I found myself intrigued by someone else's code before until that someone took the time to explain what was going on. I sincerely hope that this introduction helps bootstrap a few people's experiences with the code and yields more contributors! Even though we ended almost every single evening of the two weeks in one of the surrounding pubs, the last few nights were definitely the most enjoyable. On Thursday, the local team had organised a Ceilidh with a band teaching us geeks how to dance the Scottish way, and the venue stayed open for two hours longer than before, causing most people to come out for beer or bouncing about. On Friday and Saturday, the folks of InfoSeed let us use their comfy couches (in the basement of the conference night venue) and we chilled to music and massages, while on Sunday, after a very tiresome day of cleaning up, the noticably lesser number of survivors hung out at the Forest Cafe for some so-so live music, few beers, and an early journey to bed, where a Dutch Muppet kept us entertained for at least another hour. The best about Monday, my day of return, must have been that the airline lost my backpack, which saved me from having to lug it around in Zurich, and made for a great moment on the phone with the baggage tracing service, who announced that my bags would be delivered in about 6 hours between 20:00 and 22:00 just as the door bell rang and the courier dropped off my bag. I'll be back in Argentina, unless something goes seriously wrong. And I'll be on the orga-team again. If you guys stop holding your meetings on Monday night. Thanks to everyone who made DebConf7 possible. I am proud to have been able to contribute, but the real work was done by a few others. You know who you are. NP: Solar Project: Five

Evan Prodromou: 9 Messidor CCXV

Last-minute note to Montreal BarCampers, hackers, entrepreneurs, designers, coworkingers, designers and other troublemakers: Tara Hunt is coming into town and I invited her to have lunch with local folks in the scene. We'll meet at 1PM, at La ka, since half of us will be there anyways. I've reserved space for twelve, but that can expand pretty easily. For those who don't spend 60% of their time there, La ka is at 4040 blvd St. Laurent near the corner of Duluth. URL: http://www.laikamontreal.com/ Please feel free to come and to invite others you think would like to meet Tara and vice versa. And feel free to Contact me if you've got questions or comments. I'd especially like to hear if a lot of people are coming, since I might need to expand the reservation. tags:

GPLv3 iPhone So, I'm as excited as everyone else to hear that the new Apple iPhone will be available today with a new GPLv3 Free Software license. A bold partnership between Apple and the FSF! tags:

New Oceans OK, so, that's a big lie. But wouldn't it be cool if it were the truth, and you could get a cool and good-looking Open Source phone? That way, you wouldn't only get Web 2.0 applications, without an API for the local machine. You could write local apps for the phone itself, and you could even re-write the phone OS if you want. Looks like pretty soon we'll have these Open phones. According to the http://lists.openmoko.org/pipermail/announce/2007-June/000013.html announcement on the openmoko-announce list, FIC will start taking orders on the first generation Neo 1973 on July 9. So, given that we've got an Open Source alternative to the iPhone coming down the pike in just a week or so, why is anyone working on iPhoneDevCamp? tags:

Joey Hess: google notebook

There's a photo of me going around the interwebs with a strange caption that misses what was going on. The real story is, after my notebook's power supply died, I tried out this other weird notebook that Google had obtained, apparently from some alternate universe, and was giving away at the conference. It was very nice and small, and had impressive touch-screen data-entry technology (though I kept losing the stylus), and amazing battery power. Seems the data I put it in might stick around for a good hundred years, without any recharging. I was happy to not have to hook a clunky British power adapter up to it. It was also impressively easy to enter arbitrary unicode character such as BOPOMOFO LETTER EH, RUNIC TVIMADUR SYMBOL, and THING I SCRIBBLED DURING BORING PRESENTATION WITH CEDILLA BELOW. Downsides: No wifi or other network (didn't check GSM), very limited storage space (only a few dozen Kibobytes I think), an atrocious text editor that made moving text around way too hard, and had a really bad font, difficulty deleting things (the obvious way to delete something often accidentially removed nearby files as well -- and didn't actually regain any storage space), and very limited encryption (best I could get out it was rot-13). On the network front, there is apparently some "Postal Mail" app that can be used to send mail, but it can take like, weeks, and charges per message. And yeah, no solitare at all, though there was this hangman app. All in all, I was happy to get my Fujitsu back, though I might hold onto this Google notebook thing for emergencies. Won't be porting d-i to it anytime soon though.

28 June 2007

Michael Prokop: synergy - share mouse and keyboard

Quoting the project homepage:
Synergy lets you easily share a single mouse and keyboard between multiple computers with different operating systems, each with its own display, without special hardware. It’s intended for users with multiple computers on their desk since each system uses its own monitor(s).
It really rocks, especially as it works for Linux/Unix as well as for Windows and Mac OS. The setup is simple: just run ‘aptitude install synergy‘ on your Debian system(s) or grab the sources/binaries for the other platforms. Assuming you want one screen named meilenschwein on the left, and another client named funkenzutzler on the right: 
mika@funkenzutzler ~ % cat .synergy.conf
# synergy configuration file
section: screens
   funkenzutzler:
   meilenschwein:
end
section: links
   funkenzutzler:
      left = meilenschwein
   meilenschwein:
      right = funkenzutzler
end
Now start synergy on the “server” running “synergys -f –config ~/.synergy.conf” and start it on the client using “synergy -f $SERVER”. That’s it. Make sure to check out the security page.

Jacobo Tarrío Barreiro: A little bit of everything

July 5th, 2007 will be the 10th anniversary of the Debian Social Contract. Also, on July 5th, 2007, I will be flying to Dublin to start a new job at Google Ireland the following Monday. Today (well, technically yesterday now) was my last day at Allenta. It’s been several good years, with nice and funny coworkers (and friends), learning and doing lots of very varied stuff. However, after several years I felt a need to do something a bit different. It appears that working at Google is all the rage now, so I decided to jump on the bandwagon ;) Oh, yeah, I’m excited about living in Dublin, and about working at Google. I already have so many plans, I’ll be happy if I manage to undertake 1/10 of them ;-) If you live in or near Dublin and want to meet, feel free to call or email me. My Spanish phone number is in the Debian developer database or in all of my domains’ WHOIS records. My email addresses are all easy to find. As I don’t know what kind of Internet access I’ll have outside of work (assuming I will not be out exploring the city when not working), it’ll probably be a bit hard for me to keep up with mail and with the Galician debconf template translation stuff. Today I’m in the 12th position in the ranking, with only 12 strings left to catch the Brazilian Portuguese team. I know that the Catalan team wants revenge from when I overtook them. It’s your opportunity, nois! :-)

Steve McIntyre: Slowly recovering...

Debconf's over for another year - people have gone their separate ways, taking their newly-shared sense of purpose (and germs!) back home with them. Speaking for the organising team, I think we can justifiably be proud of ourselves - we seem to have pulled off a Debconf! Not everything worked perfectly or quite as we expected/wanted, but in the end I don't think we had any major issues. Fundamentally, it seems that all the attendees enjoyed themselves immensely and lots of productive work and socialising happened. That's the important bit! Thanks to all of you that turned up and helped us to make the conference a success this year, especially the volunteers who dived in to fetch, carry, man the front desk, run the cameras, organise the day trip, etc. And also (of course) to the sponsors who paid for the event - we love you all! The orga team still have some small bits to finish up before we declare things completely finished, though. We've still got some bits and pieces left in Edinburgh yet, waiting to be returned to their respective owners. And we're going to make a start on the post-conference report shortly. That's a place where conference attendees can help us again - we're looking for short write-ups of your experiences at the conference and a good selection of photos to give an impression of how things went. If you're able/willing to help, please mail the debconf-team list. Thank you and goodnight.

Jan Wagner: performancing.com and privacy

Today I was crawling through my mail logs for various reasons.
I was really surprised, that I saw a mail to a dedicated mailaddress which I’m using for communication with performancing.com. I was short checking, if this mailaddress is anywhere published at performancing.com, but couldn’t find anything. A one liner over the last week of mail logs:

# zgrep performancing /var/log/mail.info* grep clam wc -l
26 For a address only used for communicating with one organisation (used as contact mail address) this seems a bit too much traffic and this are only the mails, which was accepted by the MTA. So the questions comes to my mind …. what happens with the addresses at performancing.com? Maybe I missed something? , ,

Alastair McKinstry: Fun Filenames

Ok, some interesting output from a build script of a nameless code I'm working on: 
...
scanning lib[10].a ...
scanning lib[11].a ...
scanning lib[12].a ...
scanning lib[13].a ...
scanning lib[14].a ...
scanning lib[15].a ...
pgf90 -Wl,--start-group ./master.o -L. -l[1] -l[2] -l[3] -l[4] -l[5] -l[6] -l[7] -l[8] -l[9] -l[10] -l[11] -l[12] -l[13] -l[14] -l[15] -Wl,--end-group -llapack -lblas
./lib[2].a(cprep1.o)(.text+0x181d): In function  cprep1':
...
Next time, think of someone trying to find these interesting files. People using regexps, ok ? What do these 'libraries' contain, anyway ? Tags , ,

Gerfried Fuchs: Lysistrata

Yesterday we had first night for the play Lysistrata in which I also have a role. It can be called a success—people congratulated us and laughed a fair bit. Babsi and me even got a special applause for our scene. I was a fair bit astonished to see Bamschabl from the Austrian comedy duo "Muckenstrunz und Bamschabl" in the audience. It seemed like he enjoyed it, at least. If you don't know what to do tonight or tomorrow—there are still two nights left that we play. It's shown in the Scala (no, not Mailand but Vienna) on Wiedner Hauptstraße 108, starts at 20:00 and the admission fee is € 5,— (or € 3,— for pupils and students). See you there!

MJ Ray: Comments about another W3C WG and WGs in general

Alex Hudson commented:

"Similar comments about another W3C WG: http://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1181118077&order=-1&count=1 W3C should be about authoring material for the web. It seems at the moment, they're more concerned with the stuff that happens after authoring - e.g., how stuff relates in "the semantic web". IMHO we still don't have any powerful tools for authoring either, so the idea that authoring tools will automate many of the "bolt on accessibility" tasks is pretty naive."
After implementing pingback, I have some respect for hixie. It's disappointing but not surprising to read those comments. Not sure what is meant by powerful authoring tools there. My tools are powerful, but I know they're not easy for new users. As I'm getting old and cynical, I'm not sure whether power tools can ever be correct and truly easy - just look at the pigswill spewing out of some Web 2.0 sites. niq sent me a link to the WCAG Samurai Errata and commented:
"The problem with WCAG 2, as with WCAG 1, is precisely that it's a Work of Committee, and seeks to represent too many irreconcilable viewpoints and egos. In some cases, even the ideas behind it are inconsistent. Many (myself included) regard accessibility as being about ensuring a reader with a physical disability can make use of a site (think Steven Hawking). That's also what HTML is designed to support. Others are concerned with the mentally impaired, also a worthy cause, but one that becomes counterproductive when its advocates fail to distinguish between a site that's inherently inaccessible because it presents a complex and challenging subject, and one that's unnecessarily difficult due to poor presentation. Add the two together, blend in some stupidity, and you get "accessible" sites full of classic "friendly" little illustrations like a "helpful" government booklet, and a horribly intrusive "alt" to explain each pointless "ethnic mummy and child" picture."
I think a Work of Committee could be useful, as long as you have the right committee. Thinking about that, I found the group membership list and I'm not sure that's the right committee. For example, I think the ex-Adobe Google-worker must surely have an irreconcilable conflict of interest (inappropriate use of Adobe's Flash and PDF formats and Google's Web Apps have done more than many to harm accessibility in the past IMO), yet is a leading light of WCAG 2.0 - maybe that's why it's gone so dark? Update: Thijs Kinkhorst comments:
"As I read in the draft, suggestions are still possible until the 29th, not the 27th of June."
I'm sure that's different to the email which started me writing this, but please go comment and see if we can make WCAG-2.0 useful.

Cameron Dale: Making DebTorrent Work With APT

It's been a while since I've given a status update for my Google Summer of Code project to create a BitTorrent proxy for downloading packages using APT, so here it is. I've been working hard on integrating support for APT into the DebTorrent program. I've almost got it working perfectly, now it's just a matter of testing to make sure all is well. The functionality works like this: There are two things I really like about this. One of the best is the backup HTTP downloader. It insures that if you're an early adopter and there are no peers, or if the package you're requesting is rare and can't be found in any connected peers, the download will still occur in a reasonable amount of time (taking no more, or less, mirror bandwidth than if you had just been using APT directly). The other thing I like is that you get the BitTorrent-style peer-to-peer downloading, with simple HTTP proxying thrown in for free. You can run DebTorrent on a single computer on your network, and have the others connect to it to initiate downloads and request packages. I haven't done any serious time testing, but I estimate it currently only takes twice as long to use as a regular APT update and download from a mirror. Most of that slowdown is because it currently only processes a single request at a time from APT, which is not very efficient for BitTorrent systems where downloading from multiple peers is how the highest download speeds are achieved. I have been talking to the APT maintainer, Michael Vogt, about a better way to do this, probably by adding a new APT transport method for DebTorrent (i.e. debtorrent:// instead of http://). This will not only speed up the downloads, but also hopefully provide better feedback to the APT user, as currently it will seem nothing is happening until the download comes in all at once at the end. My work has unfortunately been slowed by other commitments, and bugs. I have two papers to submit to a conference by Monday, but after that I should be back full time on DebTorrent. I also spent a long time tracking down and fixing a bug in the underlying BitTornado code (which lead to much rejoicing at 3am), only to find it was fixed in upstream's CVS. (Doh!)

MJ Ray: Tour de France on ITV and others

Despite their TV trailers and it being only 10 days away, there's still nothing on the itv sport site about the Tour de France coverage, but I can see the early stage details on tvtv now. The bulk of the coverage is on itv4 with some highlights repeated around midnight on itv1 and itv4. Unusually, the first stage is also on itv1, so terrestial analogue viewers can see what the fuss is really about, instead of the ceremonial final stage. Eurosport International is being good and covering everything live and in highlights, as ever. (Eurosport Analogue is free-to-air in English and German; Eurosport Digital is FTA in German.) The British Eurosport schedule seems something between the International and itv schedules described below. Strangely, it seems that the weekend afternoon live coverage is also on itv4, which doesn't usually start transmission until 18:00. I guess itv play or citv may be closing down early to make space. In detail: Presentation of the teams - Friday 6 July, live on itv4 from 18:30 (preceded by Liege-Bastogne-Liege highlights at 18:00), repeated on itv1 00:00, on itv4 00:30. Eurosport show it recorded 10:45-11:15 Saturday morning. Prologue - Saturday 7 July, live on itv4 14:45-19:00, live on Eurosport 15:00-18:30, highlights on itv4 00:30 Stage 1 - Sunday 8 July, live on itv4 from 10:30-16:10, live on itv1 10:50-11:50 and 15:15-16:00, live on Eurosport 10:00-16:00, highlights on itv4 19:00, repeated on itv4 00:30 As far as I can see so far, weekday stages look likely to be live on Eurosport from 13:00-16:30 (covering the start live at whatever time and maybe with highlights between that and the main live coverage) with highlights on itv4 19:00, repeated on itv4 after 23:30, highlights on Eurosport after 21:00. I expect most weekends to be a similar coverage pattern to the Prologue and the final stage to be covered like Stage 1, similar to last year's final stage. Also, France 2/3, ARD/ZDF (listings) and maybe RTBFSat will cover the race live too. Any other free-to-air satellite coverage?

MJ Ray: Last Chance for the Working Draft of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0

As a result of commenting on some problems in CUBA's Jam Busting June site I was made aware of the Working Draft of WCAG 2.0 or the Not-Working Draft, as I think it could be called. If you want to comment on it yourself, you had until the end of 27 June 2007 (US EDT, I assume). Put simply, it's too confusing for both web developers and site managers. Even the Quick Reference is rather long for practical use. It's very indirect - it's not even clear whether xhtml over HTTP is preferred. I submitted a comment about that - also rather disappointing to find that W3C appear to fail to use stripslashes() when needed. I submitted another comment about the backwards step of allowing Javascript-required sites to be called accessible. Javascript is dangerous for accessibility and bad for power consumption. What the blue blazes is an AJAX-only webmail doing as one of the accessibility examples? I see that notable sites have already criticised WCAG 2.0. While I don't necessarily agree with everything they say, this is a very disappointing situation. Will WCAG 2 be rescued? Are accessible-friendly webmasters screwed if WCAG 1.0 is replaced by 2.0 in our national standards? It lets all the Flash-only cowboys claim WCAG-conformance as long as they note their site relies upon Flash. (Question: is a site still WCAG-2.0-accessible if it requires Flash to view the note that says it requires Flash?) Should we start looking towards MACCAWS, WHATWG, expanding IETF to cover the web, or starting another democratic/meritocratic standards body?

27 June 2007

Jacobo Tarrío Barreiro: All Mexico All

For several days now, I have been seeing messages like this in my logcheck output: 
Jun 27 19:24:07 maestro postfix/smtpd[14339]: warning: malformed domain name in resource data of MX record for neolookups.com: *.mx.*
Obviously, the MX entry for the domain neolookups.com (and all its subdomains, apparently) is 0 *.mx.* . It turns out that you cannot search for *.mx.* on Google, so I ask you, dear Lazyweb, is this one of the latest tricks spammers use to try and thwart antispam countermeasures?

Rob Taylor: the taste of sweet crack

I’ve been gradually pushing on in my free time on gobject-introspection, so I can make the dbus-glib bindings decent. A couple of months ago back I started hacking up a code scanner to generate the introspection xml,using code from gtk-doc, but using perl regexps to parse C just made me feel dirty… Johan Dahlin pointed me at Sparse, a front-end parser for c developed by some of the kernel guys. The only problem is that it doesn’t have language bindings (or even, seemingly, a stable abi). So I’ve just submitted a patch to sparse that adds an executable ‘c2xml‘. c2xml will dump the parse tree of the input file as a simple xml structure, suitable for manipulation by some python or suchlike. That could then be used to, say, generate c api descriptions, documentation and language bindings or make code navigation or refactoring tools. I like it!

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