Most of the time when I lookup the IP addresses used in FTP and SSH scans, they belong to some network in china. And apparently the last two times when the Asus website was modified (this time exploiting another unpatched vulnerability in Microsoft Internet Explorer, with .ani files), they were loading exploit code from certain servers in China. Well, I guess you just cannot trust their regime; if it isn't actively encouraging the hacking activities, it at least completely fails to do something about them (you might recall that China tries to censor much of the Internet, but apparently they aren't able to firewall off hackers going out?). It's hard to tell what their motivations are. I guess it's military interests (i.e. having points of attack in case of a war) combined with industrial espionage. To me this means, that I can't really trust developers from China, and that I better double-check their code. While I don't assume them to be bad guys, you never know what their government might force them to do. Sorry about that.

First time I've had the chance to see a Debian release - I waited before blogging and all my boxes have upgraded smoothly. Some had already moved to testing from unstable a while ago and it's great that I can now move some to stable. One or two can even go directly from unstable to stable.

Well done to everyone involved!

Interesting point for me: 1,881 packages are going into testing tonight! Ouch!

(I've got a few updates for unstable but those will keep for a day or so until things settle down a bit.)

Hopefully, the NEW queue will start moving too - one reason to vote for Sam Hocevar was to speed up admission of packages that result from splitting an existing source package. pilot-qof introduces some new binary packages and it is frustrating that simply reorganising existing code causes the same delay as a completely new source package. Sam also expressed an interest in embedded work which is always a good sign.

Okay, I guess I m expected to say something. You ll probably notice I m not exactly bouncing around in a great explosion of joy. I ll keep that for the upcoming obligatory yay for Etch post. As much as I m saddened by a few reactions of perplexity or sometimes even bitterness, I hope the ha, in your face! attitude targeted at other candidates will eventually fade out, too. I really didn t think I would win (at least before all those people started e-mailing to tell me they voted for me). My initial goal was only to make people think I could win, so that other well-placed candidates would pick up the good stuff in my platform or adapt to it. I didn t really care about me being DPL. Well, apparently this didn t go exactly as expected and here I am. That said, I m of course happy that my candidate of choice won :-) And it s good that we had more voters than last year. I d also like to thank all other candidates for running. Despite disagreements and given how much I advocated teams in my platform, there s obviously things we ll be able to do together, I just don t know the details yet. I have already been offered help on many topics, including from people with whom I ve disagreed or even quarreled and that s really heartwarming. It will be a great year. For the datamining lovers here, you may want to use this alternate tally sheet that makes grepping more meaningful. Votes are rewritten as a comma-separated preference list: 3567,4,1289 means ranked options 3, 5, 6 and 7 equally, then option 4, then options 1, 2, 8 and 9 equally and could be a --19111-- or a 331211133 vote (which mean exactly the same to the voting software but not necessarily to the voter). To know for instance how many people ranked NOTA above all other candidates, use grep '^9,' (that s 19 people, by the way). To know how many people put at least 5 candidates below NOTA, use grep '9.*,\([1-8].*\)\ 5\ ' (and that s 119 people!).

Huzzah! etch is released! Congratulations to the release managers, Debian-Installer developers, and all the DDs that make Debian a great operating system. tags: etch debian release

Happy Easter We had a good Easter morning at our house today. I got up around 5AM and packed plastic Easter eggs with about half candy and half healthy fruit (grapes and kiwis) and hid them around the house. There's still snow on the ground outside, so I decided not to hide any out there. Amita noticed as soon as she got up ("EGGS!!"), and ran around the house picking up eggs, breaking them in half, and eating the grapes inside. She also got an improvised Easter "basket" -- they didn't have baskets at the store, so I got a little Easter gift-bag instead -- with apples, a chocolate bunny, and a stuffed duck. Pretty good haul. This afternoon we're going out to a cabane sucre -- a traditional "sugar shack", where maple syrup is made. We'll have a big dinner, go on a horse ride, and listen to some traditional Qu bec music. It's my first time going, and I'm pretty excited. tags: easter cabane sucre easter egg hunt maj amitajune chocolate bunny maple syrup

Grindhouse Nicolas Ritoux, his girlfriend Karine, and I went to see Grindhouse on Friday night. It was a pretty fun film -- a double-feature by Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino, more-or-less modeled after early-'70s C-movie gore-fests. Rodriguez's half, "Planet Terror", was really good -- a campy gross-out with nods to horror-film clich s and T&A jiggle goofiness. The monsters were gross, the characters were dark, and stars Rose McGowan and Freddy Rodriguez put in great performances. Best of all were the computer-modified soundtrack and photography, which gave a great impression of cheap, skippety, second-run film stock. I wish I could say the same about Tarantino's half, "Death Proof". After a full-length "Planet Terror", it was too slow and boring -- I almost walked out. Tarantino has always done a great job with the patter between characters in their on-screen "down time": driving in cars, waiting in bars, making plans on the phone. But the first half of "Death Proof" was about watching people you don't like say stupid things to each other while waiting for other people you don't care about. The second half, on the other hand, was pretty great. But it was almost entirely an extended car chase in beefed-up 70s muscle cars, which, like, how could that not be awesome? A New Zealander beats up Kurt Russell with a 2-meter lead pipe, and Rosario Dawson does a pick-axe kick on his throat. Cool. All in all, worth the price of admission, but the first half of "Death Proof" dragged down what could have been an excellent film. tags: grindhouse robert rodriguez quentin tarantino planet terror death proof

St. Laurent Maj, AJ and I went furniture shopping yesterday afternoon. We need to find a new, big couch for our new house, as well as a few other minor pieces. We're ditching those pieces of cheap disposable Ikea furniture that we built up over the years and trying to put together a house that's built to last. Shopping for furniture in Montreal is made considerably easier by the fact that maybe 2 dozen furniture stores are crammed between Duluth and Mont Royal on av. St. Laurent. We visited around 10 stores, just walking up and down these few blocks. Amita June loved running around the stores, and we had to keep her from pulling down giant crystal ornaments on her head. We had lunch at Taqueria Mex (not bad, but not like home) then I went to meet Niko at La ka while Maj took the baby home for a nap. We hung out at La ka for most of the day, working and talking, and ended up sitting around with a hungover Boris and Michael for a while. It's La ka -- if you sit around long enough, everyone in Montreal's Internet scene is going to walk past at some point. tags: laika la ka stlaurent furniture taqueria mex boris niko michael

Duluth is on fire So, a friend asked if I meant Duluth, Minnesota in the above entry. And that made me wonder: are rue Duluth in Montreal and Duluth, MI named after the same guy? Per Wikipedia, the city is named after Daniel Greysolon, Sieur du Lhut, a French explorer who died in Montreal. Surely it's the same fellow...? Does anyone know who Duluth street is named after? tags: duluth street minnesota montreal

Etch is out, thanks for all those who worked hard during the release. Time to party, but for those that are hungry to push their packages from experimental to sid, make sure to not start tons of not coordinated transitions and breakage, if in doubt about what to do ask the release team (debian-release@lists.debian.org). Don't make sid and testing such a nightmare from the first day, keeping uploading new upstream releases to experimental for a while, ask for testers (tons of them) and move to sid non-RC buggy stuff now! Help us get Lenny ready.

Now that Debian Etch is released, we can finally start working on Lenny. For me, amongst normal package maintainer tasks, this includes:

• (definitely) a small-sized ttf-bitstream-vera to ttf-dejavu transition (dejavue replaces vera).
• (definitely) a middle-sized libungif4 to giflib transition and removal of libungif (getting previously patended library back, #392160).
• (most likely) large-sized ncurses transition (enabling wheelmouse support, #230990).

However, I'm seeing mass bug filing times coming! :) ...right, and parties too.

The last few days have been quite difficult for me and right now I feel like a looser and winner at the same time as I never did before. In a way I feel that I won, since our platforms were so similar my ideas weren't that bad then and the project ack'ed that. The other side is that I'm just above NOTA and not closer to sam.

Anyway, I've already offered more help to the project (that refused) and for Sam. Time to go back to the shadows and keep co-maintaining more than 150 packages that you love to use, and maybe start more two or three subprojects... Thanks for those who voted for me, I hope to see you all during the next debconf and Guilherme, for working hard to keep my act together.

I'd like to propose a Init Hackfest for Debian when etch is released. Debian includes several init systems, including sysvinit, runit, minit, initng and upstart. However, only sysvinit is really supported, and others can be used in a compability mode (and most of their benefits are gone then). So there is some work to be done here. Some init scripts probably could also use some cleanup. :-) Shortly after the release of etch is probably the best moment to work on such key parts such as the init system, since many packages are affected. I suggest to provide patches to the package maintainers and do uploads to 7-day delayed. If you are interested, maybe you could add your name to the wiki page? I also think the mailing list initscripts-ng-devel at alioth is appropriate for discussion.

I'm so please to see that this feature has finally launched. For quite a while now, I've wanted to be able to just say, "here's home", "here's work", "here's where we do the grocery shopping", etc, on Google Maps, so I could show mainly the family back home where everything was relative to everywhere else. I'd started looking into the Google Map API, but lost interest because it wasn't easy to do quickly. Too much lat/long stuff for my liking. So the "My Maps" thing is great, just what I've always wanted.

I've been added to Planet GNOME (thanks jdub!), and this post is just to say hello! I havn't been a large GNOME contributor so far (I was the Debian maintainer for Galeon some years ago, thats about it), but I recently started a small DBus related project (for exploring the DBus APIs of programs), dbus-inspector, which is now hosted in the GNOME subversion repository. Other GNOME-related projects I'm thinking of:

• DBus hook, an application that allows you to easily setup ECA rules (event-condition-action) for DBus signals. E.g. to start your music synchronization tool when you plug in your mp3 player, whatever, in a rather generic way. Mount your network file server when you connect to your home wireless network, etc. - preferrably in an easy to understand way
• MP3val GUI, right now a tiny PyGTK wrapper around the MP3 validation and repair tool mp3val (you can't imagine how many MP3's are broken in one way or another, fortunately most errors are ignored by most players or only affect e.g. seeking) could use some extended functionality.
• Pyroman, a firewall configuration tool with some nice capabilities (rollback on error, debugging, very fast and efficient, Python or XML configuration files) could use an easy to use UI. It doesn't expose you to all the complexity of iptables, but instead lets you work in a "client, server, service" way of configuring the firewall, generating a somewhat sane layout of tables automatically.
• Flow analysis and visualization of iptables rules

I'd like to say thank you for all the great work you did. Having been a Galeon power user, I'm by now quite convinced of the "keep it simple" approach, and I have the impression that not having so many options means that I get more work done (since I don't waste time playing around with infinite options). Thanks for that. And for providing me with a pretty and unobtrusive work environment for the last 8 years or so.

The answer to my previous question is "to be". That happened thanks to a bunch of people, in no particular order:

• Jens Sidel, for committing and suggesting early activation and advices about switching to PO format
• Christian Perrier, for being a really nice guy and for being the person that made me click and start contributing to Debian
• Kobayashi Noritada, for magic po4a related commands
  
• Frans Pop, for actually activating the thing and for advices
• Andrei Popescu, for the multiple patches sent and the late hours sacrificed on the Romanian localization altar
  
• Stan Ioan Eugen, for the work done on the translation done for 1.119, multiple comments and comments done at really late hours last night
• Dan Damian, for being the first person to translate the Release Notes in Romanian, at my suggestion
• Ru e Zeno, for comments and suggestions
• Denis Barbier and Martin Quinson for creating po4a
• Nicolas Fran ois (aka nekral) for maintaining po4a
• Javier Fern ndez-Sanguino Pe a, for making calls to translations and sacrificing the Spanish translation while working on the English text to bringing it in shape
  
• anyone that I forgot or don't know about and had a role in making this possible
• silent reviewers on the debian-l10n-romanian list - I wish you started speaking instead of unsubscribing

Updates:

• David Roundy, for creating darcs with its nice darcs send feature which allowed parallel work
  

That is the question. Well, not personally[0], the Romanian translation of the Release notes.

If you would have asked me yesterday, I would have said the plan is "to be".

Plan: make sure that a decent enough text is committed in CVS at all times.


What happened? Let me see...

(Time stamps are for EET - UTC+3 now - unless specified otherwise)

- pack in the morning
- take luggage to work
- buy train ticket before going to work
- ask on list to take action if I don't act by 03:00am EET (00:00 UTC)
- send the translation as is (25u), maybe the connection at my parents is broken
- leave from work directly to the station
- meet a pair of lovers in the train
- he is so into her
- she plays him like the fool he is
- translate on the train
- 5u and the battery is at 8%
- no "darcs rec", hdd consumes battery
- close lid instead of hibernating
- mini-panic, mini-panic[1]
- resume and hibernate - those percentages seem to change sooo slowly
- arrive home
- Internet connection works, good
- continue updates
- reach 100%
- send first complete draft of the translation for inclusion
- parallel review gathering up to 4 people on #debian-ro for review
- joke seriously about me not being able to send the translation
- ask again for action from the team, if needed
- 02:30 - translation seems to be mature, less an less problems are found, should be committed
- 02:40 forgot to ask activation, new mail
- ??? - turning point?
- send mail... error
- can't send mail with the request to activate Romanian
- provider's network seems to be isolated
- realize I don't know if the commit request reached its target
- frustration eased up by the already made requests to take action, if needed
- 04:30 - power goes out
- no ping from GW either
- 04:30:01 - decide to write a blog about this day
- start in zim
- write a first nice draft - with some exciting writing style
- zim looses my article when trying to remove a link-ified timestamp
- start gedit
- break the plug of the network cable[2]
- 09:09 not even the GW is reachable
- 05:10 sleep
- (expected) 06:30 wake up
- (expected) check the network connection
- translations committed ???
- thank to people / take action yourself ???
- 07:00 (04:00 UTC) Romanian translation and CD images status: ???
- sometime during the day - publish article


[0] pure unintentional rhyme
[1] I never lost files with a Linux FS, but I have the mandatory fear
[2] is not fixed in the socket

There's no business like snow business. I'm excited to have stumbled across the Snowfort, the cool new collection of Scheme libraries put together by Marc Feeley and his band of clever fellows at University of Montreal. Snowfort is cool because it's a cross-platform library of modules. There are at least a half-dozen leading Scheme implementations out there, and probably another dozen or two respectable ones. The "Snow" project has built abstraction layers over the major implementations, and then started building portable libraries for important services like HTTP, MIME encoding/decoding, CGI and Asterisk plugins. I think this is a cool effort; it's definitely needed in the Scheme community, as a step past the admirable but limited SRFI process. I'm going to convert a couple of my Scheme packages (XML-RPC, HTTP content negotiation, others) to be "snowballs" instead. My main concern right now is that the snowball format doesn't seem to integrate well with R RS libraries. I hope that's something that's adapted soon to future-proof these cool tools. tags: scheme modules umontreal library r6rs r rs

Today I experienced segfaults when I try starting opera (yeah it's unfree, closed-source, but better than firefox ; )

If you experience something like this:
zsh: segmentation fault opera

Then this might be interesting for you. Opera stopped working with new X libs (I had my dist-upgrade today, but this problem is not Debian specific) and starts coredumping.
The opera desktop team released a hotfix for this which works (at least for me).

You can grab it on: http://my.opera.com/desktopteam/blog/2007/04/06/hotfix.
See http://bugs.debian.org/417816 for more information.

UPDATE:
There is a hotfix2 now. The Opera team writes "A few users reported some sideeffects". I don't know what sideeffect is exactly here but I noticed random crashes with the hotfix. I guess that's what they wanted to say
Get it on http://my.opera.com/desktopteam/blog/2007/04/07/hotfix-2

UPDATE: the hotfix2 also randomly crashes Another workaround should be to set the color depth in xorg.conf to 16 but that also sucks. From what I know so far is some kind of unicode issue. So yeah it's unfree, closed-source and you have to wait a bit for a fix

UPDATE: The issue should be fixed with: http://my.opera.com/desktopteam/blog/2007/04/08/all-good-things

These days I picked up the Debtags AI topic again (so yes, development is alive, not the AI). Some people will remember this topic, it was a Google Summer of Code project. The project didn't really complete back then. Since my thesis isn't coming along too well (I don't know how to explain to my professor what I'm trying to achieve...), I've been playing around with different stuff. So I've picked up the Debtags AI again. Back at the end of the GSoC or sometime later last summer, I had started a rewrite of the Debtags AI stuff in C++ for performance reasons. I also had some ideas on how to make it scale better and on how to improve the results. I think I've reached an interesting state now; training time of the AI is down to a few minutes (remember it was a few days when the GSoC started?), so I managed to cut off another order of magnitude. Evaluation of a text against the database (i.e. for every tag) happens in the fraction of a second. This AI is turning out quite well now. I have one more idea for a trick that could improve the results from an algorithm side, and one from the data side. Enrico is already looking at how to integrate it with the web apps. :-) And I also want to scale it up further. How about using it to classify web pages by their text content? I already have an idea on how to get some good training data... maybe I should consider writing a business plan instead of a diploma thesis...

For a few months I have been spending a lot of time using a Mac running OS/X for 40 hours a week. Recently a discussion started at a client site as to whether Macs or PCs should be used for future desktop machines.

The Apple hardware is very slick, everything fits together nicely and works well. For example my Apple monitor connects to my Mac via a single cable that supplies power, USB, and the video signal. My USB keyboard and mouse connect to my monitor. So my Mac has only three cables connected to it, power, Ethernet, and the monitor cable. The same thing on a PC would require an additional USB cable going to the PC and an additional power cable going to the monitor.

That is just one trivial example of how Macs are slick.

The advantage of a PC is that installing Linux is much easier and better supported (the vast majority of Linux users have PCs). The benefits of slick hardware are greatly diminished if it's only partly supported in terms of drivers and/or getting answers to technical questions on the net.

Another issue is that of software compatibility. When doing Linux work having a desktop machine that runs X is a significant benefit - even if all your work is text based. The Apple X server that I have installed never worked properly and it's a hack like the various Windows X servers. To make things worse the current versions of OpenOffice for Mac use X and therefore don't work for me - I've been told that the next version of OpenOffice will fix this.

Then there's the issue of price. For a Mac you would want to have a machine with an Intel CPU which means a recent and expensive machine. For a PC the benefits of a 64bit machine over an old P3 or P4 are very small. For all the work I do a refurbished IBM or Compaq P3 machine would provide all the performance I require, have better software compatability than a Mac, and cost only $120 for a machine.

Also I imagine that some common and cheap PC expansions (such as KVM switches) would cost a lot more for a Mac.

You can run Linux on a Mac, but what's the point? You lose some of the hardware features so the Mac becomes an expensive PC that's not entirely compatible. I'd rather have a P3 PC on my desktop than the latest Mac.

But I wouldn't rule out recommending a Mac to other people. People who have no-one to help them run Linux are best advised to use a Mac. Of course Windows isn't viable due to security problems.

Our local supermarket, Village Market (whose domain name seems to have disappeared) is generally pretty good considering its small size. Oddly, though, they don’t carry a single special kosher for Passover product. Not even a box of humble Matzah. Rachele asked the putative owner about the lack of Passover foods, but a week into the holiday there doesn’t appear to have been any progress. The lack of kosher-for-Passover products is particularly surprising in our community which has a fairly sizable Jewish presence. In fact, I would be surprised if there were a single large supermarket in all of Massachusetts that doesn’t carry at least have a few token items during Passover. Even from a purely economic perspective, it must be irrational to not carry these items. The overall U.S. Kosher market is over $35 billion annually. I’m not sure what percentage of that is Passover goods, but it must be substantial. I know lots of Jews who observe Passover dietary rules even when they make no attempt to follow any other kosher laws. I’ve even observed people eating shrimp on matzah! Village Market needs to get with the times. (And fix their website while they’re at it.) Update: Steve in the comments asked for a source on the economics of Passover. I found this:

Out of an estimated $250-billion worth of kosher food sales annually, more than 40 percent take place during the Passover season, Lubinsky said.

I’m not sure how to reconcile the $250 billion here with the $35 billion figure I found elsewhere, except perhaps the former figure may not be limited to the United States, or perhaps it is retail rather than wholesale.

Russell blogs about his new 22" cheap TFT monitor. You lucky bastard.
I use a 17" Dell LCD monitor at work (sorry, cannot recall the model), and I've been quite pleased with it. Granted, 1280x1024 isn't what I had gotten used to (1400x1050 on my previous laptop and previous work machine), but it does the trick - And for my current laptop, I went for a smaller machine, with a 12" wide-screen 1280x800 monitor. I still find the monitor somewhat small, and the missing 224 pixels _are_ noticeable - but the size is well worth it.
But what I've been playing at work with is changing the monitor orientation - This 17" Dell monitor can be set up vertically (1024x1280), and xrandr will merrily change the orientation. So far, I'm happy with this setup. I still feel there are some video-related quirks, and maybe the pixels are a bit off (i.e. black letters in a white background have a bit of a shadow), maybe it was visible as well in the regular configuration, but not as noticeable. But well, I feel it easier to work with for most of my work cases - For having a full-screen browser, each row is smaller and more rows fit on screen - It's quite pleasant. For doing Web development, having a horizontally split screen (one above of the other) between Emacs and the browser is quite natural. And when I use more than two frames (i.e. for following logfiles or debugging multi-factored breakages on servers ;-) ), well, they are small enough that it's similar to having the ol' regular layout.
I'd still like to get a second video card and monitor. I remember working that way in the job I left four years ago, and it was very comfortable.
BTW, Russell, for your needs I suggest you to try Ion. After all, who really needs to have a root window/background after all? :-)

Yesterday night, Elisabeth planned a surprise for me (birthday time) and had tickets for the concert of Gotan Project at Le Grand Rex, Paris. It was indeed the fFirst time I ever went in that concert hall, which is indeed a huge old-style movie theater with comfortable seats, room for legs, nice art-deco decoration. Great after a normal work day..:-) The music of Gotan Project is a nice and elegant mix of electronic music and argentinian tango influence, featuring French, Swiss, Argentinian and Franco-Argentinian artists. Something I enjoy since it was started by Philippe Cohen-Solal a few years ago. The "band" made it well for a music that is mostly a studio music. Ten arsists on stage and the proeminent and warn voice of Cristina Villalonga. The artists were "home" mostly as the band born very close to the Grands Boulevards and, therefore, the atmosphere was friendly, with artists clearly being happy to be there. And, as a surprise, the closure featured Saian Supa Crew as guest artists for a great mix of French rap and the GP electrotango. Overall amazing experience and I hope this won't be the one and only concert we attend for 2007. After all, Peter Gabriel should be touring over Europe and I always try not missing his concerts since 1977. For those interested, the Lunatico tour dates for Gotan Project are available here.

It looks like some of us might be a little busy this weekend. If all goes well, then it looks like next weekend may be busy too. Yay!