I have a laptop with Debian, cell phone (Nokia N70) with bluetooth and this howto describes how to connect to the internet.

Connect USB bluetooth dongle to the laptop and check it:

$ hciconfig
hci0:   Type: USB
    BD Address: 00:02:72:D2:23:12 ACL MTU: 310:10 SCO MTU: 64:8
    UP RUNNING PSCAN ISCAN
    RX bytes:686 acl:0 sco:0 events:22 errors:0
    TX bytes:337 acl:0 sco:0 commands:21 errors:0

Scan for the phone:

$ hcitool scan
Scanning ...
    00:19:79:86:EB:BC       Nokia N70

Create a serial device for communicating with the modem in the phone:

$ rfcomm connect /dev/rfcomm0 00:19:79:86:EB:BC 3
Connected /dev/rfcomm0 to 00:19:79:86:EB:BC on channel 3
Press CTRL-C for hangup

(A dialog will popup on the phone asking me to allow the laptop to connect.)

Connect using wvdial:

$ wvdial
--> WvDial: Internet dialer version 1.56
--> Cannot get information for serial port.
--> Initializing modem.
--> Sending: ATZ
ATZ
OK
--> Sending: ATQ0 V1 E1 S0=0 &C1 &D2 +FCLASS=0
ATQ0 V1 E1 S0=0 &C1 &D2 +FCLASS=0
OK
--> Modem initialized.
--> Sending: ATDT*99***1#
--> Waiting for carrier.
ATDT*99***1#
CONNECT
~[7f] #@! !     2 # $@# ! $ %\ " &   *    g %~
--> Carrier detected.  Starting PPP immediately.
--> Starting pppd at Wed Nov 28 12:58:55 2007
--> Pid of pppd: 4378
--> Using interface ppp0
--> pppd:  [08][06][08] [10][06][08]
--> pppd:  [08][06][08] [10][06][08]
--> pppd:  [08][06][08] [10][06][08]
--> pppd:  [08][06][08] [10][06][08]
--> local  IP address 172.24.171.97
--> pppd:  [08][06][08] [10][06][08]
--> remote IP address 10.6.6.6
--> pppd:  [08][06][08] [10][06][08]
--> primary   DNS address 62.141.0.2
--> pppd:  [08][06][08] [10][06][08]
--> secondary DNS address 213.162.65.1
--> pppd:  [08][06][08] [10][06][08]

And that's it, I am connected.

Prerequisities

$ wajig install wvdial bluez-utils

And setup the /etc/wvdial.conf file:

$ cat /etc/wvdial.conf
[Dialer Defaults]
Init1 = ATZ
Init2 = ATQ0 V1 E1 S0=0 &C1 &D2 +FCLASS=0
Modem Type = USB Modem
Baud = 460800
New PPPD = yes
Modem = /dev/rfcomm0
ISDN = 0
Phone = *99***1#
Password = doesnt_matter
Username = doesnt_matter
Stupid Mode = 1

Well, I havn't seen this recently. Maybe because aptitude has rename 'upgrade' do 'safe-upgrade', to make it obvious, that 'dist-upgrade' might do unwanted things.Back when I was the maintainer of the galeon webbrowser package, I got bug reports and reports on IRC each time the mozilla packages was updated.The galeon package used to have a conflict with mozilla of any newer major version than the one it was built with. This was a good thing - mozilla APIs were chaning, and when Mozilla was upgraded from let's say version 1.5 to 1.6, it would break galeon. Galeon would at least need to be recompiled or might even need source changes. So there was plenty of reason to add this conflic.People were using 'dist-upgrade' all the time, and what dist-upgrade did then was to upgrade the mozilla package by removing galeon. And they couldn't even install galeon back again, because the new mozilla had replaced the old mozilla in unstable. And each time, I basically had to tell people "well, you shouldn't have used 'dist-upgrade', it's for upgrading between major version of Debian, not for daily use.In fact, running dist-upgrade right now would uninstall 'iceweasel-dom-inspector' for me. I guess this is exactly due to the same reasons.I'm wondering whether we should maybe do a 'uninstall-ok' list (or 'dist-upgrade-hints') and ship it with the distribution. I'd then modify the 'dist-upgrade' command to

• removing any package in this 'hints' list to satisfy dependencies is okay (i.e. as it is now for any package)
• prompt for confirmation for any other package

Note that I'm not suggesting to automatically remove any package. It also is not supposed to be a list with all packages that ever were removed. But just packages where it's known that they might need to be removed. Nor is this list meant to do away with aptitudes automatic uninstalling of packages that were only installed to satisfy dependencies. (If you are still using 'apt-get', you should really consider to use 'aptitude' instead. It will automatically uninstall all those 'libfoo13' packages for you if you use it consequently. Whenever you install a package with 'apt-get', aptitude won't know if it was manually selected or automatically, and assume manual.)So let's say there was experimental-browser in some revision, built with mozilla version 1.7, and conflicting to mozilla 1.8. The browser is discontinued, and ends up in the 'uninstall-hints' file. If the user does a dist-upgrade, it will be removed as usual.However, if 'galeon' has such a conflict and is still alive, it won't be listed in unstables 'uninstall-hints' file, and thus not considered for automatic uninstallation. So people who unnecessarily run dist-upgrade will still suffer less (unless they chose to remove it anyway!)However, if the user has built his own 'custom-webbrowser' package, it will cause a bigger warning when running dist-upgrade, because aptitude doesn't have that package in the hints file. So the users of local packages actually have a benefit here, too.P.S. Sorry; I don't have time to follow planet debian these days. Still if you have feedback it's recommended to use planet or the mailing lists!

These are all just 'first-builds' so problems could well lie ahead but I have now built a set of cross built packages for Emdebian (ARM) that edos-debcheck says is installable for a basic GPE installation. Only one package remains as a problem - gpe-filemanager builds fine but the current dependencies of libgnomevfs mean that gconf is required which doesn't give an option to disable ldap which is something I would rather do without. Certainly, existing GPE installations do without ldap but that could just be because these tend to use older versions of the particular libraries.
The GPE team status report covers the rest of the package set with links to the Debian and Emdebian packages.
I've got a few ITP's to close and a few more to open and close before the full GPE toolset is available (and I need to work out what has happened to the source package for gpe-terminal) but things are looking good.
All the cross building problems were in the base packages and a few of the lower level system libraries - the X libraries and GPE applications cross build very easily, thanks mainly to CDBS support in emdebian-tools.
The hard task lies ahead - configuring the packages so that Emdebian can support pre-built installation images for specific devices with their specific hardware configuration (and nothing else).
I'm expecting a 70% reduction in the amount of space required for the same package set relative to Debian.
When browsing the Emdebian package set you may think that 1,736 packages (or so) is a lot but this is mainly down to the Emdebian Tdeb implementation which splits out each translation for each package into a package of its own.
The next stage of the Tdeb process is to migrate those packages into a separate repository and finish the development of langupdate. Then, each user can choose to install only the .mo files required for their specific needs instead of getting 250Mb of translations for languages that are unsupported on their machine anyway.
The main deviation from the existing tdeb proposal is that Emdebian needs finer granularity so that gettext translations are separate from translated manpages - because Emdebian doesn't include any manpages.

I bought me a cheapo webcam the other day and the first thing (meh… actually the second. The first thing I had to do was obviously getting this little piece of plastic working…) I wanted to do was making a time-lapse video of me working on my diploma thesis or something. With a little help from google and the friendly folks at debian-user-german I finally got it working. What you need: camserv, wget and mencoder. Assuming you have your webcam working with v4l, camserv will provide snapshots of your cam via http://localhost:9192, so the following script will make a snapshot every second until you kill it:

#!/bin/sh
while [ 1 ]; do
    wget http://localhost:9192 -O  date +%s .jpg -q
    sleep 1s
done

Let it run for several hours and then create the movie with the following script:

#!/bin/sh
mencoder "mf://*.jpg" -mf fps=25 -o output.avi -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:mbd=2:trell=yes:v4mv=yes

Hint: coding, juggling and even sleeping at your desk looks cool in time-lapse - eating or singing your favorite songs while listening to them does not I recorded myself for ca 12 hours and the resulting video was like 130 megs large. The result looks pretty funny, but since there was a lot of the not-so-cool-looking eating and singing stuff in there, I’m afraid I can’t even show it to my closest friends Hint for users having problems getting proper images from camserv: I had to change max_frames value to 1 in the [socket] section of /etc/camserv/camserv.cfg to get proper single images via wget. I find the camserv solution to get the images from the webcam rather suboptimal, has anyone a smarter solution? NP: Gianna Nannini - Bello e impossibile

The german parliament has passed a law for retention of all communication data for a period of at least 6 months lately - despite all protests from various groups, organizations and experts.
Only the opposition (the Greens and the FDP/Liberals) voted against the law (and some single persons of the other parties). Some, who voted for the law, said later that they consider the law being against the constitution (Grundgesetz) and that the Federal Constitutional Court (Bundesverfassungsgericht) will bring the law (or parts of it) to fall.

When you wonder what this is all about, you may want to read the article "Personal Data Is Now on the Record in Germany" by Rose-Anne Clermont.

There will be a complaint of unconstitutionality (Verfassungsklage) against that law. It's going to be the biggest complaint so far with about 20.000 petitioners. The protests are still going on.

Anyway, data rentention is happing all the time whenever you communicate, but it's a new change that every communication data has to be recorded for at least 6 months. Prior to the new law, data retention was only allowed for billing purposes. Now it's the default and not only Police and Courts are allowed to access the collected data, but organizations like RIAA or MPAA are aiming at getting access as well.
Basically there is no communication privacy anymore.

Given the other "security laws" lately, like the new biometric passport, the Passenger Name Records (PNR), it's really threatening our privacy and democracy. And yet it's still unproven that this will cause less terror.

When Ubuntu announced public availability of Personal Package Archives, I thought it might be good to use it to provide up to date Gammu related packages. After successful registration I uploaded Gammu package and no reaction so far, so I'll wait. However this memorised me that I wanted to use OpenSUSE Build Service for same purpose some time ago. I filled in registration and as I didn't receive any email about being accepted, I absolutely forgot about that. Now just tried to log in and it works. So you can now have access to latest Gammu, python-gammu and Wammu packages for most recent RPM distributions (Fedora 7, Fedora 8, Mandriva 2006, Mandriva 2007, openSUSE 10.2, openSUSE 10.3, openSUSE Factory, SLES 9 and SLE 10). I could not test them so any feedback is welcome :-). You can find all packages on overview page or directly in download folders. Playing with spec files after long time was quite painful, but I got to it after I managed the hardest thing - how to make build dependencies which will work on all these distros. I hope I will be able to announce similar service for Ubuntu users using PPA, but now I have to wait for some reaction on my source uploads.

Finally, thanks to anibal, I got my pgp signature by a DD, now I can continue my NM process. Besides that, I'm working right now on avoiding gdm as build-depend of xscreensaver, I haven't figure out how yet but I'm pretty sure that soon I will found out, and got pgpdump updated today to 0.26! Just waiting for anibal to upload it.

We had a nice trip the rest of the way home from our Thanksgiving in New Jersey today. This morning we had breakfast in the Holiday Inn Express that we stayed in (very nice, new, clean, good pool and exercise room -- a good value for $109/night dual queens). We then spent the rest of our morning shopping at the Whole Foods Market. It's the closest Whole Foods to our house in Montreal -- hold it, no, it looks like the one in Portland (Maine) is closer. Who knew? We picked up a lot of hippy-dippy personal hygiene items that we can't seem to find in Montreal, and I also got a few bottles of wine to take across the border. I got a bottle of 2003 Andrew Will Cellars Champoux Vineyard -- an interesting Columbia Valley red blend, mostly Cabernet Sauvignon that I think will cellar nicely for a couple of years, but not too urgent. And I also picked up a 2004 Hanzell Vineyards Chardonnay, Sonoma Valley, which I also think will sit nicely for a year or so. We'll see -- I'm not really big on cellaring yet, but I'd like to give a few wines a try. We stopped in Amherst (Massachusetts) for lunch at the Amherst Brewing Company, which has good pub grub, generous portions, and really nice house brews available. We also dropped into a few bookstores. Books are a great cross-border purchase for Canadian residents, since their cover price is usually ridiculously skewed. For example: I got a Paul Auster hardback that was labeled at $22 US, $28 Canada. That's with the loonie trading at US$1.01! Our drive up to Montreal was pretty decent, although we had a ton of rain and snow that made the actual driving kind of sucky. We stopped in a cruddy gas station in Sharon, Vermont that didn't have a bathroom (doh!) and didn't stop much afterwards until Burlington. We got dinner at a great place in downtown Burlington, Burlington Hearth (AKA American Flatbread). Great oven-fired pizza, organic ingredients, nice atmosphere, more microbrew. Fabulous. We got across the border all right, although I needed some time to get my new work permit for 2008. Then a long snowy drive back home, where my friend Damien from Austin is staying with us for this week during MIGS. Should be a fun week -- we have lots to catch up on. tags: travel massachusetts wine vermont burlington amherst montreal

Is there an existing system which will allow me to query Apache logfiles via an SQL string? (Without importing into a database first). I've found the perl library SQL::YASL - but that has a couple of omissions which mean it isn't ideal for my task:

• It doesn't understand DISTINCT
• It doesn't understand COUNT
• It doesn't understand SUM

Still it did allow me to write a simple shell which works nicely for simple cases:

SQL>LOAD /home/skx/hg/engaging/logs/access.log;
SQL>select path,size from requests where size > 10000;
path size 
/css/default.css 13813 
/js/prototype.js 71261 
/js/effects.js 37872 
/js/dragdrop.js 30645 
/js/controls.js 28980 
/js/slider.js 10403 
/view/messages 15447 
/view/messages 15447 
/recent/messages 25378 

It does mandate the use of a "WHERE" clause, but that was easily fixed with "WHERE 1=1". If I could just have support for count I could do near realtime interesting things... Then again maybe I should just log directly and not worry about it. I certainly don't want to create my own SQL engine .. it just seems that Perl doesn't have a suitable library already made which is a bit of a shocker!

I recently was giving away some old P3 and P4 machines and was surprised by the level of interest in P4 machines. As you can see from my page on computer power use [1] the power use from a P4 system is significantly greater than that of a P3. The conventional wisdom is that the P4 takes 1.5 times as many clock cycles to perform an instruction as a P3, the old SPEC CPU2000 results [2] seem to indicate that a 1.5GHz P4 will be about 20% faster than a 1GHz P3, but as the P4 has significantly higher memory bandwidth the benefit may be significantly greater for memory intensive applications. But generally as a rule of thumb I would not expect a low-end P4 desktop system (EG 1.5GHz) to give much benefit over a high-end P3 desktop system (1GHz for a desktop), and a 2GHz P4 server system probably won’t give any real benefit over a 1.4GHz P3 server system. So in terms of CPU use a P4 doesn’t really offer much. One significant limitation of many P3 systems (and most name-brand P3 desktop systems) is the fact that the Intel chipsets limited the system to 512M of RAM. This really causes problems when you want to run Xen or similar technologies. I have a few P4 1.5GHz systems that have three PC-133 DIMM sockets allowing up to 768M of RAM (it seems that PC-133 DIMMs only go up to 256M in size - at least the ones that cost less than the value of the machine). Another issue is USB 2.0 which seems to be supported on most of the early P4 systems but none of the P3 systems. 512M of RAM is plenty for light desktop use and small servers, my Thinkpad (my main machine) had only 768M of RAM until very recently and it was only Xen that compelled me to upgrade. The extra power use of a P4 is significant, my 1.5GHz P4 desktop systems use significantly more power than a Celeron 2.4GHz (which is a much faster machine and supports more RAM etc). Low-end P4 systems have little going for them except for 50% more RAM (maybe - depends on how many sockets are on the motherboard) and USB 2.0. So it seems strange that people want to upgrade from a P3 system to a P4.

• [1] http://doc.coker.com.au/environment/computer-power-use/


• [2] http://www.spec.org/cgi-bin/osgresults?conf=cpu2000

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PDF on Kindle I've seen plenty of good commentary on the Amazon Kindle. Robert Love's hands-on review and follow-up cover both Linux-hacker and regular customer views. But there's one question that I haven't seen answered elsewhere: Why doesn't the Kindle support PDF natively? I think the answer is simple: The Kindle's 800×600 e-ink screen has too few pixels to render a typical PDF file readably, and its refresh rate is too slow for comfortable scrolling. The only practical solution for most PDFs is to extract the text and convert it to a reflowable format like HTML (which Kindle users can do with Amazon's $0.10 wireless service or free PC-based service). The US$700 iLiad (with 64% more pixels) is much better for PDF reading, but will still run into trouble with some files. It seems that the current generation of ebook readers comes with a decision—cheap, e-ink, or PDF: choose any two. The refresh problem is one reason I'm not sold on e-ink. I'm curious to compare the Kindle screen to my XO laptop, which seems like an interesting compromise between normal LCD and e-ink displays. Disclaimer: I work for Amazon, but I don't know anything about the Kindle except what I learned from the user's guide and from playing with one at the office.

Long weekend of travel and family, and now we're back on our way to Montreal. I spent most of Thanksgiving weekend with my father's family in New Jersey, where he and my mom both grew up and where 4 of his brothers and sisters still live (and their kids, and so on). We left Montreal on Tuesday afternoon, had dinner in Albany, and got down to Newburg (New York) in the early evening. The next morning we spent several hours at the nearby Woodbury Common Premium Outlets, which was about as crass and consumeristic as it sounds. But the loonie is still strong, and it's nice to buy some clothes. I especially like buying things a few sizes smaller than what I had to get a few months ago. Wednesday night we got into Hillsborough, NJ, where my Aunt Barbara lives, and visited with her and her family. Barb has four great kids -- Phillip (16?), Maddy and Vicky (14?), and Nick (13?), who are all my cousins despite being at least 20 years younger than me. When Amita June was too tired to move we hit the hay for the night, and in the morning we all hung around playing Wii sports (even AJ!), and had a hearty dinner in the early afternoon. Then we went to my Uncle Paul's for dessert, coffee, and a nice 2003 Ramos Pinto Vintage Port that we brought along. Friday and Saturday we spent at my Aunt Helen and Uncle Marty's house in Highland Park (New Jersey). They have a great 100-year-old house right by the Raritan River, and it was really nice seeing them. We had dinner with Paul and his wife Eileen on Friday night, and we saw the lighting of the Christmas tree in Princeton. Today we started the two-day trip home. It's not really that long a drive -- about 6-10 hours, depending on the route and kind of weather -- but we like to split it up into two days, since we have a 2-year-old aboard. We stopped in New York (city)/Queens to see our friend Jen for brunch at a nice place called Quaint, where I got a good house-cured salmon and Maj had an excellent bowl of granola. Amita got some nice challah french toast, which she wolfed down with the help of her kind parents. Tonight we stopped in the Pioneer Valley in Massachusetts to sleep over. I like this part of MA, and the New York Times had a recent article about its bookish culture, called In the Valley of the Literate. We had a nice quick dinner at Bueno Y Sano in Northampton, and we'll stick around tomorrow for more shopping (books! Whole Foods!) and a little site-seeing before we head home. It'll be good to be back in MTL, though. I miss my bed, and we only have a few weeks there before we're off again to California for Christmas time. tags: travel thanksgiving newjersey amitajune shopping pioneervalley

Montreal SantaCon Speaking of Christmas, one of the things we'll be shopping for tomorrow is santa costumes. Friday, November 30th is SantaCon Montreal 2007. SantaCon is a world-wide anarchic cluster-together of goofballs and lunatics who go rampaging around their town from bar to mall to bar in full Santa costume (or Mrs. Santa, or elves, or reindeer, or something similar). Everyone's invited, nobody's in charge, and a fun time is had by all. SantaCon started in the 90s in San Francisco (like everything), but I never managed to go. I finally went to SantaCon in Austin in 2001, and had an amazingly good time. My pals at The Ministry of Truth have photo evidence here and here and here. There's nothing like overflowing a bar with 100 of your new best friends, all dressed like Santa, dancing and goofing off and having a good time. It brightens up everyone's day. Anyways, we'll be picking up Maj the beginnings of an outfit here on the US side of the border, so she'll be able to accessorize with her own bits and pieces. I'll probably pick up a couple of spares for friends in Montreal, too. I'm really looking forward to the event -- it should be a good time. There's a Facebook event for people who go for that kind of thing. tags: santacon montreal cacophony santarchy santacon2007 santaconmontreal2007

le Sans Fil to go municipal I was excited to read (via Steve Faguy) that our beloved local community wireless group, le Sans Fil will be providing wireless to many parks and open spaces around Montreal. This is great news for Montrealers -- the city had previous vowed up the street and back that it would never have a municipal wireless program of any sort. So good deal. It sounds like it's going to be a tough job -- I don't think wiring up outdoor spaces for wireless is anywhere near as easy as doing caf s or homes. And I think it's going to be tough to show value -- after all, people are only outdoors in parks in great numbers during the few warm months of the year here. And when people are out in parks, they're not usually checking their email -- they tend to do more outdoorsy things. But my guess is that park culture will adapt to the new resource pretty well. Congrats to SF -- I think they're a great organization that's up to this new challenge. tags: montreal ilesansfil muniwifi

It seems there is a long standing tradition to post a “Hello Planet” entry when being added to a new planet. Well Hello http://planet.debian.org , My name is Brandon Holtsclaw, and have done a bit of Debian and Ubuntu work over the last few years ( and hopefully will continue to do-so ). Only my posts taged with “planet-debian” are fed here so hopefully I wont spam totaly “unrealated to debian” things. Thanks Mako for getting me all setup. If you would like to see all my posts or know a little bit more about me you can follow these few links ( or drop me an email ):
http://www.imbrandon.com/
http://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=brandon@imbrandon.com
https://launchpad.net/~imbrandon Nothing more to see here … move along.

timbl’s blog may have the highest signal-to-noise ratio on the web. Not a whole lot of signal, but zero noise. This piece on the “graph” puts the development of social networking services in solid historical perspective. It’s not great propaganda, but covers all the key conclusions. In particular:

In the long term vision, thinking in terms of the graph rather than the web is critical to us making best use of the mobile web, the zoo of wildy differing devices which will give us access to the system. Then, when I book a flight it is the flight that interests me. Not the flight page on the travel site, or the flight page on the airline site, but the URI (issued by the airlines) of the flight itself. That’s what I will bookmark. And whichever device I use to look up the bookmark, phone or office wall, it will access a situation-appropriate view of an integration of everything I know about that flight from different sources. The task of booking and taking the flight will involve many interactions. And all throughout them, that task and the flight will be primary things in my awareness, the websites involved will be secondary things, and the network and the devices tertiary.

Technorati Tags: timbl, Tim Berners-Lee, FOAF, social networking, Facebook

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The radeonhd xorg driver recently gained full RandR 1.2 support, I’ve tested it out moments ago and it works. It just works. (DIE fglrx, DIE DIE DIE). Joy and happiness today, and thanks to Julien CRISTAU, it’s even packaged in experimental (I owe you a beer, obviously). Now, given that we now have a working video driver, and an opensource one even, let’s think about implementing something in pommed for that nice little video switch button that’s on F7. I don’t really know how to go about implementing the video switch feature. Either I’m doing it in pommed in the form of a shell script that will have to “steal” the user’s X session, or I’m doing it in the frontends, which will obviously be a bit easier. Which raises another question: shell script around xrandr, or RandR support in the frontends? That latter option doesn’t look terribly appealing to me, as it involves quite some code that will have to be maintained up-to-date wrt RandR evolutions, and that also means being backward-compatible with older RandR versions etc. So it’s probably going to be only a simple shell script, executed by the frontend. I’d like more input on this, so if you have a take on how it should/could be done, please drop me a mail. Otherwise you’ll have to live with whatever I’ll come up with ;-)

It's quite some time since I didn't blog about D-I i18n and the number of new languages we'll support in the next Debian version, lalala... A few works are on their way, indeed:

• Splitting the huge number of strings in D-I (1686) by priority, to avoid requesting translators a 100% complete file to get their language activated, while some of the strings are really obscure stuff for exotic architectures and not often used installation methods. That work is on its way, slowly and I expect something in the next weeks.
• Keeping the existing languages up-to-date. I'm not very annoying with the fellow translators these days. We have about 20 complete languages and many just need a quite small work to be complete again. Indeed, the quite slow pace of D-I development these days 'helps' (but that slow pace is indeed quite worrying: I'll probably get back on this in the near future)
• New languages under work:
  • Kannada (language from India): still waiting for the first commit...:-(
  • Telugu (also from india): ditto
  • Malay: though vey close from Indonesian, not much activity. The translator currently has other priorities. The file is filled with strings taken from Indonesian and basically needs review
  • Xhosa: hosed. The translations were taken from a very old Ubuntu installer, as result of a translation work funded in the past by Mark Shuttleworth (Xhosa is one of the official languages from South Africa) and nothing happened since then.
  • Marathi (language from India). Work happened and 780 strings need review, but it is hosed right now. I expect talking with the translator at foss.in
  • Irish. The translator, Kevin Scannell, is very active in Irish l10n but currently focuses more on end-user apps. The work might resume at some time
  • Welsh. Waiting for my friend Daffydd Harries to come back on it.
  • Kazakh. Has been quite active but hosed right now. Not much news from the translator
  • Northern Sami. Desperately needs a translator. Debian-Edu want it (the language is used in some schools in Norway)
  • Malagasy. The translator (who studies in France) no longer works on it
  • Persian. Moray Alan recently got contacts in Iran with people who might be interested in resuming the early work of Arash Bijanzadeh
  • Icelandic. The translator is still active from time to time. Most Icelandic people do not seem very interested in getting software localized in their language because they consider that enough ppl in Iceland are comfortable enough with English. That's obviously a big mistake (how can software be adopted by local authorities if it is not localized) but I never succeeded convincing more than 1 person.
  • Urdu (official language for Pakistan). Got some contacts and we completed the New Language Process...but the person then vanished.
  • Amharic. The translator is really active but busy with his job (he's a sailor on commercial ships!). I expect him to complete his translation and he will certainly benefit from prioritization.
  • Armenian. Very recent contacts. I expect the first commit soon
  • Lao. Basically lost contact with the translator
  • Serbian. I'm still waiting for the very active community in Ubuntu to get in touch with /me and work on a common translation. However, someone recently contacted me to work directly on Debian. Maybe expect some good news for one of the very last missing European languages
  • Occitan (regional language from France). Same than Serbian.
  • Kashmiri (language from India). Very recent contact. The translator seems really motivated. I'll probably meet him at foss.in
  • Konkani (language from India). Got a contact today..:-)
  As one sees, the activity is sometimes disappointing: I get contacts, we work on the new language process, then people disappear...but I guess that's to be expected with very little l10n communities. I still have some hope to add at least a few languages for lenny.

What does this topic mean? Hmh... Maybe you don't know Goran Bregovi , a magical Bosnian musician, one of my all-time favorite artists. I have long loved Eastern European music (but I was mostly familiar with the Klezmer style, linked to Ashkenazi Jews but not necessarily performed by them anymore (i.e. Kroke), but it is thanks to Goran that I got familiar with the Balkan style... What can I say about it? It has an addictive rythm, and it has the folk sound of (even very similar instruments to) the Mexican tambora. It is a must-hear genre, in short. There are many magical Balkan music groups, I cannot just recommend one - But if I could, it would be Goran's :)
Now, why is he sending me northwards? Because Goran Bregovi is coming to Mexico - To the Northern city of Monterrey, some 1000Km north from Mexico City - He will be performing at the Forum Universal de las Culturas Monterrey 2007, on September 22, at the Explanada Plaza 400 a os.
I know already of a couple of friends who are definitively going, who are searching for the best airfare... This will be something to remember!

I've been working on updating my online film list since Thursday evening.I have some code which will convert static data-files containing film entries into a browsable HTML site. The next job is to actually go through all our DVDs and make sure the lists are correct. I've updated all our TV shows, and I've made an initial pass at making sure all our films are present but it'll take me a few more days to ensure the lists are completely correct. In the past I used to browse my list of films via my mobile phone to make sure I didn't buy duplicate films (more than once in the past I had managed to do that!) These days I don't seem to need to, but it is nice for organizing and it appeals to my love of lists.. I'm not sure which is worse, me doing it or Megan taking one look and saying "That's so cool!".

I've given the idea of centrally configuring my hosts another go. Previously I had some meta packages that would pull in packages, but that's not very interesting. Furthermore the archive I set up didn't scale, dpkg-scanpackages plus makefiles aren't really fun to use. Now, I have a set of cfengine scripts that gets distributed as .deb. That sounds messy, but connecting reprepro with the right .dput.cf makes updating a breeze. cfengine itself is a beast not easily tamed. It has some weird ideas about timeouts and when (not) to execute scripts. So far I'm only using "editfiles" in this setup to do tweaks like comment HashKnownHosts in ssh_config, add some sources.list entries, add %adm to sudoers, etc. Next step will be to also automatically push config into chroots, and to pull passwd.db and friends for use with libnss-db.

Thanks for the comments/mails on my previous post. I've now started the migration properly. All code currently held upon cvsrepository.org will be moved to http://repository.steve.org.uk/ - a nice system-agnostic name. So far I've only setup the pages for two project (my dotfiles and ~/bin) but I'm happy with the process, and the naming scheme appears sane to me now. Using sub-domains I need only install one CGI which is a big win, and using a simple set of templates + mod_rewrite all projects get the same look and feel. I've still got to tweak the stylesheet a little, but otherwise I'm happy with things. I can host both public and private repositories, and that all works magically. Of course the huge win is no longer needing to run a pserver for CVS! All future checkouts will be via HTTP, and the rare few people with commit access will be able to do so over SSH. Once things have been migrated I'll cause the cvsrepository names to redirect to the new locations, and keep that up until the domain expires as a transition period. (I think +1 year :)) The other job for the weekend is releasing a fixed security update for Samba, to fix the regressions.... That is in hand, but the buildds are being slow. If they're not all done I'll release it anyway today/tomorrow. I'm annoyed that I handled the timing so badly, but I hope that people don't hate me for it.