At my Institute, we get the El Financiero newspaper - I like it quite a bit. It's very well balanced, with opinions from all of the political and economical points of view. Of course, it has huge business and market sections which I don't usually even care on looking at, as I won't understand much anyway. Those sections usually include advertisements for potential courses and businesses.
Today, Nadezhda showed me an ad that's just beautiful - It shows off the level of commitment and seriousness a company has. It is so beautiful that it deserves me copying it in Spanish and translating it for your further enjoyment. Of course, if somebody stumbles upon this advertisement at my personal blog - I don't know them, they might just be serious but clueless :)

GRUPO DE ASESORES PROFESIONALES
CONVOCA
A acad micos, investigadores, intelectuales, economistas y expertos en reformas estructurales para el an lisis de las siguientes:

• Econom a y finanzas
• Educaci n y empleo
• Seguridad y desarrollo social
• Pol tica y Energ a
• Reforma del estado

Para integrarse a un equipo serio y propositivo de Profesionales en estas reas que brinde asesor a puntual sobre las antes descritas.
REQUISITOS: Titulados con Maestr a y/o Doctorado. Contar con publicaciones especializadas.
Interesados enviar CV al correo electr nico:
juan_zzz_at_starmedia_dot_com
juan_3zzz_at_yahoo_dot_com_dot_mx
Bosque de Ciruelos No. 140, piso 12, oficina 1202, col. Bosques de las Lomas

And now, for your further amusement, in my hastily translated English, as faithfully as I can do it.

GROUP OF PROFESSIONAL ADVISORS
INVITES
Academics, researchers, intelectuals, economists and structural reform experts for the analysis of the following areas:

• Economics and finances
• Education and employment
• Social security and development
• Politics and Energy
• State reform

To join a serious and propositive team of Professionals in the above areas that gives punctual advice regarding the aforementioned.
REQUIREMENTS: Holders of a title, with M.Sc. or Ph.D. studies. Having specialized publications.
Interested people, send your CV by email to:
juan_zzz_at_starmedia_dot_com
juan_3zzz_at_yahoo_dot_com_dot_mx
Bosque de Ciruelos No. 140, piso 12, oficina 1202, col. Bosques de las Lomas

Yes, several of the redaction mistakes are in the original text (and several more were introduced due to my English translation, of course).
Anyway... Would you believe in the seriousness of a professional-looking group of economists, paying around US$2000 for 1/4 page in one of the leading Mexican newspapers? By the way, their offices are located at one of Mexico City's most exclusive, expensive areas. But... For $ deity 's sake... COME ON! Please tell juan_zzz to get a decent-looking mail and domain! Having their main contact addresses at two free mail providers, Starmedia and Yahoo, does no service at all to their professional image! How can people still not pay even a bit of attention to those basic details?

The first lesson was about wrong assumptions that people do when it comes to i18n. This article is mostly targeted at developers which want to support i18n properly, in particular, plural forms.

This is my second n?getetxt lesson.
This is about making your update-po target to include all the strings you want localized in the pot file.

Probably, at some point you, as a developer have written something like:

print("You won %d point%s", points, points>1?"s":"" ) ;


Well, is nice and dandy that you want to make the proper choice of words when you have more than one point. I appreciate that, but you are doing it wrong. There is a tool for that, as I explained before.

Now, lesson 2.

You have understood what you have to do, but you just hate typing ngettext/gettext all over the place, so you probably defined something like:

#define _(X) gettext(X)
#define _n(sg,pl,n) getext(sg,pl,num)

So now you can write trhis piece of code:

print(_n("You won %d point", "You won %d points", points), points ) ;

The problem: how to convince xgettext to add those strings to the pot file?

Nothing simpler... just add _n as an additional keyword when invoking xgettext... but you have to specify that this is a definition for ngetetxt, so, you will end up having in your update-po target something like this:

xgettext ../src/*.c --keyword=_ --keyword=_n:1,2


TADA!

I spent most of this past weekend (a long weekend in Canada, thanks to our royal heritage) writing documentation for the DebTorrent code. The original BitTornado code was seriously lacking in this area, having only 670 lines of comments out of almost 20,000 total lines of code, which is 3.5% if you're counting. (In fairness, this may be due in part to it being based on the original bittorrent client.) Since Python is supposed to be known for it's well-documented code, I decided to tackle this shortcoming sooner rather than later. It's also a good opportunity for me to become familiar with all of the code. I'm only about halfway there, but the end result of my weekend's worth of work is this diffstat:

DebTorrent/BT1/Choker.py             99 ++++++++
DebTorrent/BT1/Connecter.py         313 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++
DebTorrent/BT1/Downloader.py        448 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++-
DebTorrent/BT1/Storage.py           418 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++--
DebTorrent/BT1/__init__.py            9
DebTorrent/BT1/btformats.py          47 ++++
DebTorrent/BTcrypto.py              147 ++++++++++++
DebTorrent/ConfigDir.py             248 +++++++++++++++++++++
DebTorrent/ConnChoice.py             12 -
DebTorrent/CurrentRateMeasure.py     69 +++++-
DebTorrent/__init__.py               14 +
DebTorrent/bencode.py               193 ++++++++++++++++
DebTorrent/bitfield.py               89 +++++++
DebTorrent/clock.py                  53 ++++
DebTorrent/download_bt1.py          380 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++-
DebTorrent/inifile.py                70 ++++--
btcompletedir.py                     25 ++
btcopyannounce.py                    20 +
btdownloadheadless.py               111 +++++++++
btlaunchmany.py                      56 ++++
btmakemetafile.py                    19 +
btreannounce.py                       6
btrename.py                          11
btsethttpseeds.py                     6
btshowmetainfo.py                     6
bttrack.py                            6
setup.py                             20 +
27 files changed, 2809 insertions(+), 86 deletions(-)

I've also started using the epydoc program to automatically generate some documentation web pages for easy browsing of the code. So far it's worked out great! So well that I decided to use some of the new features available in a recent beta release that was not yet in the debian archive. The packaging seemed simple enough, so I created my own package containing the new upstream version, which is now available in my repository.

The machine (formerly) hosting this blog was a dedicated server. I’ve got nothing bad to say about the hosting company, but it had the usual pitfalls of dedicated hosting. It was very expensive, which is why I split the service with two friends. We underutilized it. They didn’t provide backup services, so I ran my own using rdiff-backup - I won’t tell you how long I ran it before I bothered to set that up, though. And when something went wrong it could take quite a while to get the machine fixed and running again. Fortunately that only happened twice in all the time we were there. Anyway, our contract with them was up in February, and we decided not to renew. Since all of us were insanely busy at the time we decided to pay the higher monthly rate for three months to give us some time to migrate off. Which of course I left to the last minute. This blog is one of the first services I’ve moved to my new hosting at Slicehost. I don’t have a lot to say about these guys yet, since I haven’t had any trouble. The only downside was catching them at a somewhat turbulent and resource-starved time as they dealt with a wait list for orders, so it took a month for me to get one. They’re working on that problem, though. Towards the end I was checking every two days or so how long it said I’d have to wait. Note to everyone, progress bars that don’t progress are just infuriating. But I happened to check one day during the five minute window between when they sent me confirmation and when my mail client checked for new mail, and poof there it was. This is virtual hosting - Etch on Xen - thus the “slice” naming. They’re a heavy on automation shop, which fits right in with my style. And there is something so viscerally awesome about entering your credit card number, clicking OK, having their software allocate and create a virtualized disk, bootstrapping Etch onto it, and showing you its IP and root password. It doesn’t get much better than that. So far I’m happy. I took the opportunity to move to WordPress, away from my old hacked up Blosxom installation. WordPress imported entries easily, although I had to manually fudge the RSS file to prevent it from inserting a log of bogus <br> tags that I didn’t want in the middle of my paragraphs. I probably could have gotten comments imported too, but I didn’t bother - sorry folks, well, it’s not like there were a whole lot of them. The Debian WordPress packages work fine, although the configuration is a bit messy; my biggest complaints were the centralized upload and themes directories so that I had to mess around with symlinks in /usr to get everything going. Maybe I’ll actually use it more I hacked up the GUIDs a bit by hand, so this shouldn’t flood planet, but here’s hoping. Next step: migrating email service to the new system. Always a joy.

Tomorrow I will be attending a cremation for the second time in two weeks - at the same crematorium even: Den en Rust in Bilthoven. (You won't believe how detailed Wikipedia treats the subject of cremation) Two weeks ago my friend and former flatmate BAAS (eng.: BOSS) died at the age of 34 after nine years of cancer. Still it came as a surprise to me: we've gotten a bit "used to" BAAS being subject to therapy every once in a while, recovering, and then starting the whole circle right over. It was a good service that highlighted the diverse social circles he was active in, and was concluded with a gathering that featured a lot of drinks and snacks. Tomorrow the service will be dedicated to my uncle Koert, who died last week at the age of 60, also from cancer. I surely didn't expect to return to "Den en Rust" that soon. I'm wondering what the service will be like, although it's in the same place, it will probably be quite different.

Since one week eGroupware 1.4RC1 is available. Peter did upload it into experimental and I did repackage it for etch, for a smarty integration (dpkg -i for > 15 packages sucks).
You can download it by using the following line in sources.list:

deb ftp://ftp.cyconet.org/debian etch-backports main non-free contrib Please note that you also need installed egroupware-egw-pear.
If you experience troubles, report your bugs upstream. backports, Debian, opensource, Packaging, planet

kde 3.5.7 is now available in debian unstable on several architectures. Hopefully the rest will catch up when some bugs in other packages are fixed. Feel free to upgrade - but please please please - log out of kde and back in after you have upgraded and before you start filing any bugs.

In response to my Battlestar Galactica post of yesterday, Jonathan Carter wrote:

I just switched to VT4 and all I got was a login prompt :/

Grin. Obviously I didn't mean that VT4.

I should have known better than to even hint that life was getting back to normal. We're back on weekends and overtime at work. Personal life is also a bit hectic. So, Debian stuff is postponed in favour of sleep in most cases. I'll clear what bugs I can, but new code is at the bottom of the list. On the good side, my daughter Caoimhe, started Walking! Its good to get home and see the kids. Spring is coming. I'd like to get out and see some of it. Tags blogging, family, caoimhe

I just saw an ad on VT4 that they're going to be broadcasting the excellent Battlestar Galactica series—that is, the reimagined version. Caught me by surprise there, because I was actually expecting Kanaal2 to broadcast this—they're usually the SciFi channel in .be. Not that this matters, of course. Luckily, they're also going to broadcast this at an excellent time slot: Sunday at 23:25 (or something), meaning, not prime time; as a result, I might actually be able to follow it this time around. Living together with people who like to watch prime time pulp would make watching this rather impossible during reasonable hours, otherwise. Not this time. As it happens, I bought the original 1978 version of Battlestar Galactica only a few weeks ago. That one's a bit dated though, and not half as much fun.

Tonight I turned 27. By chance, this fell onto a Tuesday, and there is a great dancing party every Monday. This monday, there was also a great band, the Souvenirs. They're pure fun and great for dancing - so I obviously opted to celebrate my birthday there.This probably was the nicest birthday party I've ever had: lots of friends showed up (though mostly girls, but thats fine with me :-)), we danced a lot. And danced. And danced. :-) And I'll probably spend some more hours today dancing later this day.And with dancing I mean: Swing, Lindy Hop, Balboa. I just love this music and these dances. So playful, sometimes cheeky - swinging...

Would you like to swing on a star
Carry moonbeams home in a jar

Todays music was also great, a nice speed and patterns you could play with... I don't know what it is, adrenaline?, that makes dancing so much fun. And probably the communication. Dancing is all about communication. There was this class titled "Moves that make the follow smile" once... That is the best moment in a dance, when you managed to lead the follow into some slight variations or some fun move matching the music, it worked out great and you see this flash of delight in their face... this "I'm not sure what we just did, but it felt just so right"-smile. The "I didn't know we could do that"-smile. That's what I'm striving for. Sometimes there are some moments in a song where this works out great, and occasionally there is a song where it works out through most of the song. These are the really great moments when dancing.Sorry, no pictures or videos. Just memories.Keep on swingin'!I'm really looking forward to events such as Senigallia (Summer Jamboree) or the Munich Lindy Exchange.And of course our regular events here in Munich, such as our Thursday open air get-together at Hofgarten, sundays in Salon Erna and mondays in Cord.

On the Power of a Blog (and of the Vatican) That the Vatican in Italy is a relevant institution able to (directly or indirectly) influence the media is not a big news, actually is not even a news. So it does not come as a surprise that the BBC documentary "Sex Crimes and Vatican" about the so called Crimen Sollicitationis (dated 29 September 2006) has never been mentioned on popular italian newspapers and televisions ... until a couple of days ago. So far so "good". What annoys me quite a bit is that the day after Beppe Grillo posted something on the subject on his blog (which according to the author is in the top ten of most read blog on the net, even though I've never checked the validity of such claim) the news is first on Repubblica, one of the most read italian newspaper, and then topic of a national debate for its possible presentation on an italian tv show, held by Michele Santoro. Come on, of course journalists do not need a blog to get their news. Someone please make me think something else than that seeing a post on a popular blog removes the shyness of journalists about "disclosing" such a news to Italians...

Sometime someone connects his computer to mine using a network cable, to transfer some files or similar. In a perfect world, both computers would run something like zeroconf or avahi-autoip, and IP adresses were taken care of. But in the real world, this is not often the case. Then, this would be easiest:

$ ifconfig eth0 192.168.42.1
$ simpledhcpd eth0

Where simpledhcpd would, without any configuration, start listening for DHCP requests on eth0 and serve IPs from the just configured subnet. No configuration file, no leases, not even a deamon mode. Just Real Simple IPs for your ad-hoc-network. Does that already exists?

I just got back from taking Zach Copley to the airport, and for the first time in a few days I'm sitting in front of my desktop computer again, trying to get back on track. I think it's probably a good idea to get my notes about RoCoCoCamp down on electronic paper while the experience is still fresh in my mind. (I wrote about the first day in Journal/29 Flor al CCXV). Saturday morning I got up considerably later than I had the day before, and I took my time getting to SAT. Which was OK, since things went much smoother in the morning. The only really annoying thing about Saturday was that I had to wash about 50 cups by hand -- we'd run out of clean cups, and I couldn't figure out how to run the dishwasher. It didn't take long, but it meant that I had my head down in the sink as people came in and didn't get to spend as much time talking to them. I was glad to hear that people had a good time going to L'Utopik on Friday night. Apparently a few people who'd flown in late on Friday got a chance to meet up with the experienced crew at L'Utopik, so they were well-prepped for Saturday. Probably the biggest buzz of the pre-sessions was SJ Klein's pair of functional OLPC laptops. They were cute and fun -- I got a few minutes to play with them, and I enjoyed the interface tremendously -- although it took me a few tries to open it. People were fiddling with them throughout the day -- including Amita June, who came late in the afternoon -- and Tristan P loquin even blogged about them. My first session was about wiki and other technologies, which I titled Wiki And.... (I borrowed the name from Last Exit to Brooklyn, in which it seems no-one eats anything but "coffee and".) My main point was that a) wiki people tend to overuse wiki where other software tools may be more appropriate and b) we need to be careful with impedance mismatches when using wiki with technologies with other cultures behind them. Wikis and blogs mismatch; wikis and forums mismatch. You need to work out ways to make them work culturally. As a proof-of-concept that there are ridiculous applications for wiki, I created in about 3 minutes before the session the wikiclock. It's a computer clock that runs on wiki technology: the time is kept up-to-date by human beings editing the page, rather than with software. I was so pleased with myself that I twittered about it, and from there it's taken on a life of its own. The clock is implemented on the amazing minimalist system pageoftext.com. I heard about p.o.t. from Liz Henry's April report from Palo Alto Wiki Wednesday, and I think it's totally great. It's a cross between a pastebin and a wiki -- like an open-edited ImageShack for text. Brilliant. The second session I did was a hyper-focused one on a particular Semantic Web problem. Both Wikitravel and Open Guides have tons of information on "places" in various cities. (That is, restaurants, bars, nightclubs, hotels, museums, parks, etc.). It would be good to export our data on these places to each other, so we could possibly keep them in sync. For example, if a restaurant changes its hours , that info could be updated on The Open Guide to London and automatically synched to the Wikitravel page on London. So we went over some ways to do this kind of interchange; we'd brainstormed before about it on the Open Guides' RDF Workshop, but it was good to sit down with Earle Martin and do some face-to-face hacking on the idea. We don't yet have a vocabulary for it, but we'll get something going on the new wikirdf.org site (which also emerged from this session). I had a great lunch with a lot of people from RoCoCo on the terrace at the Bar St. Sulpice, about 8 blocks away on rue St. Denis. The sun was out, it was cool, and we had a very nice time. It was especially nice to see Marcus Bornfreund and Tina Pipers of Creative Commons Canada, who'd come to talk about the PDwiki, a project to collaboratively document Canadian works in the public domain (see Canadian Public Domain Registry Announced). We talked quite a bit about the social challenges of getting a community excited about such a dry subject, but I think we got some good ideas about it. In the afternoon I led a session on MediaWiki. We were lucky enough to have Tim Starling sit in, and he told everyone about the new developments going on with MW. He's refactoring some very deep parts of the storage and rendering sections of the code, which will result in considerably better reliability, performance, and flexibility. I think it sounds great. I had to work the registration desk for the last session of the day, which was pretty great because I ended up baby-sitting Anoushka Jaroski-Biava for most of the time. But I missed Robin Millette's cool talk about BuzzyBee, which looks to be really fun to play with. We rounded out the evening with music, pizza, and beer at the SAT. tobias.dj played some great dance music, and we had some wiki-collaborative VJ-ing using the SAT's fancy screen systems. All the kids were there -- Mark and Allegra's daughter No ma as well as Amita June. Fun. Sunday morning I didn't have to start coffee until 9AM -- luxury! We had a great Open Space Technology convergence -- a way to turn the discussions of the previous few days into action items for going forward. I did a convergence session on the future of RecentChangesCamp. We had most of the interested parties available (except for the RCC Portland organizers, who had to fly out early that morning). We made some decisions about future RCCs, and we made some plans for next year's RCC -- in the Bay Area (California). Last night we brought back the Keiki gang to our house, since it was great to have them all in Montreal for the event. We did a big brainstorming session on next steps to launching the project, and we also did some graphic design review of potential logos. We have some great designs coming; I'm really happy we got Sarven Capadisli and Bridget to work on the site. I had to crash out at 10:30PM -- Amita and I fell asleep together -- but others were up late talking and thinking. I don't know how they did it -- I was all talked out by the end of RoCoCo. All in all I had a fantastic time -- the event far surpassed my expectations. It was hard -- too hard. I bit off far more than I could chew. But I think we did a good job of establishing Montreal as a technology city -- Wiki City Canada -- in the international mind, and I think we also brought together some really interesting people for some fruitful and productive work. You can see some of the projects that came directly out of RoCoCo on the FutureChanges page -- an ingenious name courtesy of Pm. And there are some indirect ones that we can expect soon. tags: rocococamp recentchangescamp wiki open space montreal barcampmontreal keiki wikiclock pageoftext

Cause and solution So, Technorati has a good listing for rocococamp items, but I especially liked Steve Faguy's post: Wiki: The cause of, and solution to, all of life s problems. Steve was an extremely game participant in the event, which I think was pretty incredible. He wrote a good overview of wikis in the Montreal Gazette this year. A funny thing happened on Friday evening during the daily wrap-up known as "Evening News". We had Open Space's minimalist instructions posted on the walls of the SAT, so people would see and remember them. Steve pointed out that the first of Open Space's "four principles" is grammatically incorrect: Whoever comes is the right people. He said, "In the spirit of wiki, I'm going to correct it right now!" And to applause, he got up with a marker and changed the "is" to "are". This stimulated an interesting discussion. One person noted that the "is" is there because possibly only one person could show up for a session, and that's OK. Finally, Brandon CS Sanders stood up and said, "I like 'is' because when we come together like this, we form a cohesive group, however temporary -- 'a people'. So I'm going to change it back." And he did -- to lots of applause, again. Steve came up to me at the end of the night, laughing. "I got reverted! I should have started an edit war!" It was a hoot; he's got a good sense of humour. tags: stevefaguy rocococamp wiki openspace brandoncssanders

On Sunday 20 May, I rode in the Leukemia Research Weston-super-Mare Bikeathon which "has so far raised in excess of 120,000 for the charity." I finished the course of about 23 miles in a bit over 2 hours. That was slightly slower than I expected, but I hadn't anticipated the batched mass start (20 riders set off every 30s or so) and the relatively slow speed of the large group ride to the first hill where the short course filtered off. I wasn't the fastest or the slowest by a long way. The first hill, Bleadon Hill, was new to me and it was a bit of a pain. It was rideable, unlike the hill nearest me, but it continued upwards at a challenging gradient for a long time. I'd estimate it's about 4km and mostly over 5% - I'll not be riding it again in a hurry. The view from the top was almost worth it (even if it didn't photograph well, looking almost south at 11am) but then you remember that you've just ridden up there from sea level and everything aches. Getting down from that hill was also fun. The descent was through Canada Coombe, which looks about 10% down for about 1km and it's a narrow uneven road with loose gravel washed onto the road. Then it was a fairly direct link north to Locking and Worle, a flattish loop from the crematorium to Ebdon, Bourton, Icelton and Wick St Lawrence (which felt good, like I could ride it forever - it's amazing how easy a well-tuned bicycle feels) and back to town via Sand Bay and Kewstoke. The picture is of me outside the pavillion at Clarence Park, just after finishing. The pack contained repair kit, water, food, rain gear and extra top, none of which was needed. I didn't pack sun block or insect-repellent, which would have helped (although thankfully not vital)! Thanks to everyone who sponsored me. If you still want to contribute, please put it in the comments form with an email address, and/or email me directly.

bill watson commented:

"Excellent report. I'm a member of Co-op Group (Northern) and also United. United is an extremely well run outfit with well maintained shops. They also have about 30 petrol stations, mostly in Yorkshire and Greater Manchester. The fear from United members, on the proposed merger, is that focus will be lost and regional investment diluted. United are also trialing factory made shop units which are erected on-site (similar to the way McDonalds do it). This gives a turnaround time of about 16 weeks from start to shop opening. There is one not far from me (Ditton) and it's very popular. The United website United Acquisitions gives lots of info on this and other things."

I've mixed feelings on modular build (McStores?) - it makes the construction greener, but there seems little information on the long-term energy use of the store. Maybe it's simply unknown yet. The offer of a finder's fee for new store sites is interesting. I wonder if that will spread to the Co-operative Group after the merger. As I understand it, the fear from tCG members is that we're getting a lot of new members and a new chief exec who seems to have a very different focus to the members. I'm sure we'd be happy to see well-run and well-maintained shops, but will it mean even more centralisation and all the mistakes that means? Like stocking no Somerset Cheddars in some Somerset stores, with the confusing excuse that (as far as I could understand - see previously-mentioned answers to AGM food questions) no supplier offers enough units that meet the specifications or it's unsuitable for our type of stores ("Welcome"). I'm glad so many people liked the report, anyway.

<div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'> <h1><a name="hi_planet_iso8859-15_to_utf8_with_netatalk_magic" id="hi_planet_iso8859-15_to_utf8_with_netatalk_magic">hi, planet // iso8859-15 to utf8 with netatalk magic</a></h1> <p> <em><strong>Hi, Planet!</strong> <br/> Welcome to my blog, and thanks to <a href="http://blog.zobel.ftbfs.de/" title="http://blog.zobel.ftbfs.de/" rel="nofollow">Martin</a> for subscribing me. I m not going to bother you with any details about me, if you have any questions feel free to ask me on <a href="http://freenode.net/" title="http://freenode.net/" rel="nofollow">freenode</a> or <a href="http://www.oftc.net/" title="http://www.oftc.net/" rel="nofollow">oftc</a> (in case you re wondering: my nick is bzed).</em> <br/> <br/> After a longer time of planning we ve upgraded our main file server at <a href="http://www.architektur.tu-darmstadt.de" title="http://www.architektur.tu-darmstadt.de" rel="nofollow">work</a>: New machine, new storage (7TB - woohoo!), Etch instead of Sarge and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8" title="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8">UTF-8</a> for file names instead of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO8859-15" title="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO8859-15">ISO8859-15</a>. Everything not a too complicated thing, except for renaming the about 10,000,000 files from ISO8859-15 to UTF-8 in a proper way. <br/> In theory this is easy, as <a href="http://packages.debian.org/unstable/utils/convmv" title="http://packages.debian.org/unstable/utils/convmv" rel="nofollow">convmv</a> happily takes care of the problem. But this did not work for us unfortunately, as we re not only providing NFS and Samba services, but also AFP (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Filing_Protocol" title="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Filing_Protocol">Apple_Filing_Protocol</a>) via netatalk. Years ago you had to choose ISO8859-15 if you wanted to allow your Apple and Windows users to see the same, non-broken file names - not only because AFP didn t support UTF8 before version 3, which came out with OSX<a href="#fn__1" name="fnt__1" id="fnt__1">1)</a>. Normally you d think that a server would not allow a client to write a file with a file name which includes not supported characters - again, OSX and netatalk go their own way here:<br/> Characters which are not supported by the underlying file system are character(!)-wise encoded using the <a href="http://netatalk.sourceforge.net/2.0/htmldocs/configuration.html#id2898845" title="http://netatalk.sourceforge.net/2.0/htmldocs/configuration.html#id2898845" rel="nofollow">CAP encoding</a>. So we had to find a way to </p> <ul> <li> convert file names from ISO8859-15 to UTF-8 </li> <li> replace CAP encoded characters by the appropriate UTF-8 character </li> </ul> <p> Luckily netatalk ships the <a href="http://netatalk.sourceforge.net/2.0/htmldocs/uniconv.1.html" title="http://netatalk.sourceforge.net/2.0/htmldocs/uniconv.1.html" rel="nofollow">uniconv(1)</a> util<a href="#fn__2" name="fnt__2" id="fnt__2">2)</a> which is able to take care of this problem. It also updates the CNID<a href="#fn__3" name="fnt__3" id="fnt__3">3)</a> Database at the same time. There s two things you need to take care of in case you re using the dbd <a href="http://netatalk.sourceforge.net/2.0/htmldocs/configuration.html#CNID-backends" title="http://netatalk.sourceforge.net/2.0/htmldocs/configuration.html#CNID-backends" rel="nofollow">CNID backend</a>: </p> <ul> <li> uniconv assumes that <em>cnid_metad</em> is listening on port 4700, you need to start it first. Don t run afpd at the same time! </li> <li> If you ve specified external CNID dbpaths in your <em>AppleVolumes.default</em> (normally they re located in the root of each volume, prone to be deleted by users accidentally), you need to move the .AppleDB directory into your volume s root directory, otherwise uniconv will create a new CNID database. Just move it back as soon as uniconv is finished. </li> </ul> <p> Be careful: uniconv assumes that all colons in a file name are part of a CAP encoded character. That s not a problem as long as you have only Mac and Windows clients accessing your server, as both systems do not allow colons in file names. In our case we found a number of cache files from Nautilus (which is running on our sunray/Solaris web-surf terminals as default browser) with colons in the file name. I hope no user will miss them <img src="http://bzed.de/lib/images/smileys/icon_wink.gif" alt=";-)" /> </p> <p> Including a final synchronisation of all files to the new storage, about two hours it took uniconv to convert the file names and a aunch break, we were finished after about 14 hours of work. Until now it seems that our users didn t notice the change at all, except for those who realized that they have much more free space now. Looks like a successful weekend so far! <img src="http://bzed.de/lib/images/smileys/icon_biggrin.gif" alt=":-D" /> </p> <p> <strong>update:</strong> full html in the feed. </p> <div class="tags"><span> <a href="http://bzed.de/tags/debian" class="wikilink1" title="tags:debian" rel="tag">debian</a>, <a href="http://bzed.de/tags/linux" class="wikilink1" title="tags:linux" rel="tag">linux</a> </span></div> <a href="#fnt__1" id="fn__1" name="fn__1">1)</a> and uses a NFD variant of Unicode normalization (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8%23Mac_OS_X" title="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8%23Mac_OS_X">UTF-8#Mac_OS_X</a>), but netatalk takes care of this and translates it into the NFC form, which is used on most other platforms <a href="#fnt__2" id="fn__2" name="fn__2">2)</a> it s called netatalk-uniconv in Debian and shipped with <a href="http://packages.debian.org/stable/net/netatalk" title="http://packages.debian.org/stable/net/netatalk" rel="nofollow">netatalk</a> <a href="#fnt__3" id="fn__3" name="fn__3">3)</a> Catalog Node ID, another crust from old Mac <acronym title="Operating System">OS</acronym> versions </div>

With great help from Ouattara Oumar Aziz an new version of SBackup is shaping up in the svn repo and a day ago I created a public beta version - 0.10.4~beta10 which can be downloaded here.
Please report any bugs or regressions to Sourceforge bug tracker. Also an update for translations and new translations can be added. You can either translate in Launchpad or download the template file from the SVN. But beware that there are more translations in Launchpad then in the SVN at the moment, so check there first.
If no blocker bugs are found, we could see a new stable release of SBackup in a weeks time. I am sure that a lot of people will be happy to hear that :). Edit: For some reason, the DEB on the Sourceforge site was cut to third of its size, I uploaded a new version, it should be fine now. And by popular request here is a screenshot, note that by using simple timing the /etc/cron. daily,weekly,monthly folders are used and thus anacron runs the backups if the computer was off at the scheduled time.

* As Jaldhar announced at Debian-IN mailing list, Ikiwiki has been setup (obvious, by him only!) on Debian-IN Page. Still some minor issue need to be solved (Unfortunately, I know only very basic of perl!). You can login with your Alioth username and can change relevant things there. Today, I updated aspell-bn,or,pa,ta,te packages (upload due), And made it Lintian-Free for Debian-IN Packages (And yes, Thanks to Soumyadip) Update: Jaldhar’s mail hit to mailing-list after my blog post. Here it is.