Rumor: the B in "blog" actually means beta. Original text of this post: You know you've been exposed to too many Web 2.0 applications when you start to think the B in the blogger.com logo is for "beta". I was like WTF, are they making "beta" to be all of their logo now? And yes, I know about it being a shortened version of "weblog", likely coming from the pun "we blog".

I saw my first Sun workstation about 15 years ago, in 1992. I was a business student at Purdue University, and a childhood love for computers had just been reawakened. I was spending countless hours in the basement of the Math building, basking in the green phosphorescent glow of a Z29 and happily exploring every nook and cranny of the Sequent Symmetry upstairs. It didn’t take too long to discover, though, just a short walk away in the computer science building, several labs full of Sun workstations. Suddenly, the Z29 didn’t have quite the same allure. A few months later, I walked over to the registrar’s office and changed my major to computer science. (OK, advanced tax accounting had something to do with it too.) Everything I know about computing I learned on those Sun workstations, as did so many other early Linux developers; I even had my own for a while, after I joined the University of Arizona computer science department in 1997. But within a year, the Suns were starting to disappear, replaced by Pentiums running Red Hat Linux. More and more people coming through university computer science programs were cutting their teeth on Linux, much as I had on Sun. Pretty soon, Sun was increasingly seen by this new generation as the vendor who didn’t “get it”, and Sun’s rivals did a masterful job running with that and painting the company literally built on open standards as “closed”. To those of us who knew better, it was a sad thing to watch. The last several years have been hard for Sun, but the corner has been turned. As an outsider, I’ve watched as Sun has successfully embraced x86, pioneered energy efficiency as an essential computing feature, open sourced its software portfolio to maximize the network effects, championed transparency in corporate communications, and so many other great things. Now, I’m going to be a part of it. And, so, I’m excited to announce that, as of today, I’m joining Sun to head up operating system platform strategy. I’m not saying much about what I’ll be doing yet, but you can probably guess from my background and earlier writings that I’ll be advocating that Solaris needs to close the usability gap with Linux to be competitive; that while as I believe Solaris needs to change in some ways, I also believe deeply in the importance of backward compatibility; and that even with Solaris front and center, I’m pretty strongly of the opinion that Linux needs to play a clearer role in the platform strategy. It is with regrets that I leave the Linux Foundation, but if you haven’t figured out already, Sun is a company I’ve always loved, and being a part of it was an opportunity I simply could not pass up. I think the world of the people at the LF, particularly my former FSG colleagues with whom I worked so closely over the past year and a half: Jim Zemlin, Amanda McPherson, Jeff Licquia, and Dan Kohn. And I still very much believe in the core LF mission, to prevent the fragmentation of the Linux platform. Indeed, I’m remaining in my role as chair of the LSB—and Sun, of course, is a member of the Linux Foundation. Anyway. Watch this space. This is going to be fun!

Two years ago today, Terah and I had gone to visit my grandpa in the nursing home. His health was not good. After we visited him and ate dinner, we drove home. Not long after we got home, we got a call saying that grandpa was doing worse. We went back to the nursing home, but he had passed away before we got there.

I don't remember his wife, my grandma. She died of cancer when I was just a year old. I was the only grandchild she knew, and everyone tells me how much she liked to see me.

I had no idea, late that evening two years ago, that this March would find us living on their farm. I remember visiting the farm one or twice after that. It seemed so eerily still, knowing grandpa would never be back, yet remembering all the time I spent here. The house wasn't doing so well. Would it survive?

Recently, we started noticing these:



These are daffodils and tulips that my grandma planted back when she was doing well, probably before I was born. They have had little or no care for more than 25 years. They have survived lawnmowers, car tires, large rocks, drought, fire trucks, rabbits, and trenchers. And they still came up this year!

Thanks, grandma, for the welcome home gift.

Roger Cicero will be going for germany to the Eurovision song contest. With his song "Frauen regier'n die Welt" ("Women rule the world"), which he sings with the impression of being able to himself rule any woman. :-) His mix is very uncommon: it's swing, but with german lyrics, about love and life, flirting and with a well-dosed amount of macho in it, but not serious but always joking and cool. YouTube has some video clips with his music. Note that I don't think "Frauen regier'n die Welt" is his best song. Scroll down at least to "Murphys Gesetz" ("Murphys Law", and congrats for not incorrectly adding an apostrophe, it's correct this way...) Last.FM has some excerpts from songs I like better. I don't know if 'we' have any chance with him (last years' winner was Lordi, some 'schocker' hard-rock-heavy-metal band dressing up like halloween monsters), but he won't come out last for sure. Demographics of the Eurovision contest aren't too favourable for germany, nor are are European relations. But being a swing dancer, this is just really cool, because it gives my hobby a wider audience. :-) P.S. If you want to learn Swing dancing in Munich: the Lindy Hop course at Boogie-Bären starts again this tuesday, and I can also recommend the classes of Swing and the city (thats Cat and Chris); there is a beginners and intermediate workshop next weekend with world champions Markus & Bärbel together with Cat and Chris. And of course every monday there is a teaser class at Cord. P.P.S. I'd really love to see Roger Cicero perform together with some good Lindy dancers as show act. Probably a different song then, though.

As I'd semi-intended to after last week's renewal of hatred towards my current in-line skates, we popped into Skates on Haight yesterday while we were in San Francisco, and I acquired a pair of Rollerblade Crossfire TFS' The store was pretty nice. Small, but no other customers, so I got pretty good customer service. I have to wonder if I did the same level of due-diligence before purchasing as I did last time: I bought the first pair they recommended and I tried on. That said, they have a nicer closure system than the Bauers I had previously. They've got a ratchet-style strap at the top, a bit like some snowboard boots, and they've sort of got laces. They have some thin "string" and an interesting bit at the back that you grab and yank on to tighten the string, and there's a separate release catch to loosen it. A bit hard to describe. I've done a few test runs around the apartment complex today while I waited for the washing, and so far they seem not too bad. My biggest problem is I've got wide feet, so I have to find the happy medium between having the laces tight enough to have good ankle support, and not being too tight as to squish my feet. If the weather is good tomorrow and I can drag my arse out of bed at a reasonable time, I'll try skating to work.

I’m stuck of the requests linking php5 on backports.org against “MySQL5″.
You need support of MySQL5 or the mysqli extention for your php5 packages for sarge? So the packages on backports.org are not what you want. The packages are compiled against libmysqlclient12 (mysql 4.0) cause all apache modules (on backports.org) are compiled against this version. Linking php5 against an other version will lead you in trouble when using these apache modules and php5 together, cause sarge doesn’t support “versioned symbols”. For more information see the threads on php-maint or
backports-users! If you install packages from backports.org, you should read the latter one anyways. backports, Debian, opensource, Packaging, planet

This weekend I went to the Ballarat install-fest, mini-conf, and inaugural meeting of the Ballarat Linux Users' Group (BLUG).

This was the second install-fest, the first one was quite successful so it was decided that there was demand for a second. I suggested that what we should do is get some of the more experience members of LUV to attend and give talks about their areas of expertise and make a mini-conference. I also suggested that we
hire a large vehicle to take a number of people to the meeting. Both my suggestions were accepted.

So on Friday evening I was in a Kia XXX with five other people from LUV on our way to Ballarat.

On Saturday we had the install-fest. We started at about 10AM, there were about a dozen people getting help installing Linux and many more attending the mini-conf and just hanging out. For lunch we had a BBQ. In the afternoon I gave a talk on SE Linux and then a brief impromptu talk on Poly-Instantiated Directories while the next speaker was setting up their laptop.

At the end there was the inaugural meeting of BLUG. The president was appointed, and there were some brief discussions about when to schedule meetings. I suggested that BLUG meetings should be either the day before or the day after LUV meetings to increase the incidence of speakers from other regions attending both meetings, my suggestion was being seriously considered at the time the meeting adjourned - LUV is a larger group and has better ability to get speakers from other regions. It was also agreed that a
weekend combined LUV and BLUG meeting would be arranged twice a year.

I traveled back to Melbourne by train which was cheap at $9 and comfortable. There was even a power point in the carriage (which I didn't use as my laptop was charged and the location was not convenient). For the next such event I'll try and arrange a group to travel on the train together.

The next thing to do is to find other regional centers in Victoria where we can do the same thing. Bendigo might be a possibility.

Also if you are a member of a LUG in a city please consider the possibilities for helping form a LUG in a regional center that's nearby. I would be happy to provide whatever advice I can to help people replicate this success in areas surrounging other cities, so please email me if you have any questions.

Debian is participating in the Google Summer of Code again. Russell Coker offers to mentor SELinux projects, and so do I. I'm available for mentoring SELinux and Debtags related projects in particular. This years idea pool in the Debian Wiki. Make sure to also check last years idea pool (some of which will no longer be open, though). And of course your idea doesn't need to be on these pages already; we're of course interested in anything that goes beyond that. One thing with SELinux I'm particularly interested in is install scripts. That is quite some work to do, and you might want to automate it somewhat. Debian install scripts can be quite complex. Some things are obvious such as restarting services on upgrade. But some scripts do much more. SELinux uses a deny by default approach (which is the only sane security approach, btw.); in particular this means that many Debian install scripts will be failing. Right now, package postinst scripts are being run with the full permissions of the apt-get domain. It would be good to reduce that to a "postinst" domain. It would be a possible GSoC project to analyze which permissions package postinst scripts need, and if we can e.g. add a "postinst extended" domain for just a few postinst scripts that really need extended permissions. An example for extended postinst tasks in Debian (I don't think Redhat, Fedora or Gentoo does that yet): precompiling all python modules for all installed python versions (and to avoid having programs try to precompile them on demand, which will result in audit errors and such). I wrote a module for that called python-support. It adds a restricted domain which can exactly do this task of precompiling Python. But there is other such stuff, such as updating the menus, managing alternatives etc. But feel free to suggest your own ideas.

Aaarrgh! Trying to post the last blog entry revealed that my wireless connection had simply died. Various restart options failed (ifdown/ifup, dbus restart etc) so the realisation dawned that the binary blob that gets the Airport Extreme card working is not always coming out of suspend correctly. This time, I did a full restart (shutdown -r now) but I hope this isn't necessary every time. Next time, I'm going to see if a quick suspend / unsuspend is sufficient - watch this space....

A common criticism of fluorescent lights is the inability to use dimmers, as mentioned in Julien Goodwin's blog.

However with some thought at the time the lights are installed this problem can be solved. The first thing to keep in mind is that an infinite number of levels of illumination (analogue scale) is not really required. In most cases two or three levels should do.

If you have two compact fluorescent lights that use 5W and 10W then you have the options of 5W, 10W, and 15W. If you have a large room to light (such as a lounge room) which needs 30W of fluorescent lighting for full illumination then you could have six 5W globes dispersed and have anything from one to six of them turned on to give different levels of illumination.

Of course if you don't plan electrical work then it's easiest to just use incandescent lights in those areas. As long as the areas that use the most light for the longest time have fluorescent lighting it shouldn't make too much difference.

In response to a post on Planete Beranger, saving energy DOES matter. Sure you saving a few KWh isn't going to make much difference on it's own, but when a million other people do the same it all adds up.

The lack of public transport in the US causes more problems for the country than just environmental damage. It hurts the economy by making it more difficult for people to get to work. It will hurt the defence forces in the (unlikely) event of an invasion (trains are the best way of moving large numbers of troops, heavy weapons, and military supplies. It also hurts the national interest in decreasing the ability to react to civil emergencies. For example the entire population of New Orleans could have been evacuated in time using a single platform of a European station. If every city had multiple stations that had a reasonable number of platforms and multiple redundant train lines then evacuating civilians and bringing in emergency equipment and workers would be very easy. In the Netherlands train lines often run on top of dikes, this means that the dikes are very strong (if they can sustain the weight of a freight train then they aren't going to be washed away by a wave) and that trains can still operate while flood waters are rising. If New Orleans is to be rebuilt to it's former glory then the Americans should consider a similar design.

Large cars are a temporary issue. As fuel prices rise people will choose smaller cars. Also hopefully people will start to realise that 4WD and SUV vehicles are actually less safe than cars and stop buying them for perceived safety.

The Chinese government doesn't worry about the same environmental issues, however they have more agressive targets for renewable energy use than most countries. It's not a matter of being nice (they aren't), but of looking out for their own self interest. It's a pity that the governments of the US, Australia, and EU countries have not yet done the same - but it will happen eventually.

As for supermarkets using open fridges, if the vent the heat outside the building then it will be just part of the building air-conditioning system. Every adult dissipates about 100W of heat when at rest, when shopping it would be more than 100W. Get 100 people in a supermarket (not the peak business time) and 10KW would have to be removed by the A/C system without counting heat from lights (fluorescent lights dissipate about half their energy as heat, they are much more efficient than incandescent lights but much less than LEDs),
and heat from other machinery.

Finally, if you want to see changes in government policy then join your local Green party!

6 weeks since my last post here, which I guess sums up how busy I am with things, primarily off-line but with a reasonable amount of development work coming out too. Thanks to Radu Spineanu xen-shell made it into the archive, and work has restarted on a multi-dom0 Xen control panel. So far there is a node daemon, a central server, and a shell-based admin tool, all written in Ruby. Coming soon a web-based control panel, implemented in Ruby on Rails. Exciting times.

[UPDATE: I'm closing comments on this post, because the spammers have discovered it -- dnb]

Lars says:

The uncomfortability of Synaptic may be partly due to the fact that it is
a different model from Windows: you get all your programs from one place,
instead of anywhere on the Internet, partly due to just not using Synaptic
much at all, and partly due to Synaptic not being perhaps as easy to
understand as possible. I personally find Synaptic to be very nice, and
use it regularly, but I am biased by having used Debian package managers
for over a decade.

Now, synaptic is a lot nicer for users than scary console frontends like aptitude. But it's really a tool for "power users". Here's a quick list just of what I see when I start it (bearing in mind that my UI design skills suck):

• The "quick introduction" screen that pops up is way too long. The fact that it needs to be so long is already bad.
  
• There's a huge, and I mean HUGE list of sections down the left. What are these? Which one do I look in? For that matter, what is "gnome", and are "shells" programs for the seashore?
  If I want to find software for processing video, do I look in "graphics" or "multimedia"? (and what are these funny "(contrib)" markers?) Which of the huge number of packages in each section do I want? From the point of view of a new user (especially), this categorization is useless, not to mention often wrong or misleading.
  
• The four buttons in the lower-left, which change the display, are a good idea, but they don't say what they do. A label saying something like "Group By" would go a long way here.
  
• I think the version numbers in the main display probably provide too much information for a novice user. They won't really know what to make of them, and if they need the information it can be provided on demand; as it is, it's just one more distraction to sort through while looking for what they really want. The extra space could, e.g., be used to provide more room for the status column (currently labeled "S").
  

So much for superficial observations. There are a few more things that I see that are worth more discussion.

Mechanics of selecting packages

To change the state of a package, you click on the unlabeled little box to its left, then select the correct option from a list containing "Unmark", "Mark for Installation", "Mark for Upgrade", "Mark for Reinstall"...you get the idea. Even if only one option is valid, the menu still appears with all but one option grayed out, and you have to select the one you want.

This is complicated, cumbersome, and surprising. It also introduces terminological confusion, since "Unmark" isn't really what you think of when you go to cancel an installation or whatever.

The best option I can think of here is a pulldown menu (which I believe the GTK+ list widget (god, I almost wrote "control") supports). The menu should default to the current state, e.g., "not installed", and should have options that describe what will be done with the package, e.g., "install", and so on. Only valid actions should appear on the menu. The Package menu should probably adapt in the same way as you select packages. I don't recall offhand how GTK+ menus work, but if possible commonly used commands like "remove" should be closer to the mouse when the menu appears than uncommon commands like "reinstall".

Another choice I can see, if you want to avoid menus, would be something like this: have two checkboxes, one for "install" and one for "upgrade". "install" would be checked for installed packages and not checked for not-installed packages. Checking or clearing it would mark packages for installation or deletion. "upgrade" would mark or unmark packages that were installed for upgrade. Of course, this introduces a redundant column for not-installed packages, which I don't like. It also seems to me that it would be less obvious what's going on for new users. But it would be more efficient for power users (who should all be using aptitude anyway ;-) ).

Progress bar madness

I haven't extensively used synaptic, but several core misfeatures of apt and our archive pretty much guarantee that if it displays progress bars for key operations like loading the cache or updating the package lists, the progress bars either run multiple times (i.e., don't actually tell you how close to finishing you are) or actually go BACKWARDS -- yes, BACKWARDS.

The great package hunt

Maybe the biggest problem is that unless you know what package you're looking for, basically all our package interfaces are useless. There are lots of fancy searching features you could add, but actually a quick test in synaptic suggests to me that this would be going in the wrong direction. Unlike aptitude, synaptic includes descriptions, and searches for stuff users might actually want (like, say, "burn CD") seem to turn up relevant results (i.e., software that burns CDs).

I'm sure the search algorithm could be improved (with inexact matching, better indexing (a package description suffix tree?), etc), but the big problem I see is that you tend to get back several dozen results, many of which are libraries, development packages, command-line software or software that doesn't work; some of the other software is software that can burn CDs but whose purpose is not to burn CDs (e.g., backup software).

How can we solve this? The first thing that springs to mind for me is to use popularity-contest data to weight the list. I know it's not terribly accurate, and it has some skewing problems (stuff in the default install will be favored), but I suspect it would greatly bias the results in terms of software that's useful to many people (using the "recently used" tallies might especially help here).

I don't have many other good ideas on the searching problem; I've seen vague suggestions of counting reverse dependencies, but this doesn't seem like a good metric of useful software to me; trying to extract more information from the short and sometimes inaccurate package descriptions seems like a really hard problem to me. (Google can do cool statistical analysis partly because it has so much data to work with AIUI; even a single Web page typically has orders of magnitude more information than a package description)

Another issue is the problem of finding related software once you've installed one piece. We have "suggests" and "enhances", but they aren't exactly displayed in a prominent or easy-to-understand way by any frontend. I think it might be good to display a clickable list of suggested packages somewhere visible (e.g., at the top of the description box) when the user has selected a package for installation. We could even display a little bar, like on (eg) Amazon: "Debian suggests installing these packages..." ;-)

It might also be interesting (if this is considered acceptable; since the data is anonymous I don't see a problem) to analyze the popcon data to find out what packages are being installed in tandem. I don't know if we have enough information to do it, but it could turn out to be really useful to be able to click on a package and see other packages that are popular with users who installed that package. Going back to online stores again, those "other people who bought 'Types and Programming Languages' also bought 'Introduction to Category Theory'" links are amazingly useful, and something similar would probably be a big help in Debian.

I've started using Yahoo Pipes today, and it's pretty cool. I wouldn't go so far as to call it a "milestone in the history of the Internet", but there are a few interesting use cases. Say for example if you're an avid reader of Planet Debian and you don't like the French Revolutionary Calendar, then you can use Pipes to filter out entries whose title matches a French Revolutionary month and enjoy a 100% revolution-free Planet. Or you could split matching entries into a separate feed, or just use regexp replacement to translate them into something else, etc. The possibilities are endless.

There's also a handy Babelfish module, so you can create a pipe that takes Planet Debian, translates it to French, then back to English. Hours of fun!

This isn't all housing, but much is: seen via vitavonni A. Copy the list below to your own journal and:
Bold the actions you are already taking
Underline the actions you plan to start taking
Italicise the actions that don't apply to you B. Add one (or more) suggested action(s) of your own C. Leave a comment here, so that she can track the meme to your journal, and copy your suggested action(s) back to the master list. Update: the sodding original is only open for comments from livejournal customers. Silly. Very silly.

1. Replace standard incandescent light bulbs with compact fluorescent light bulbs
2. Choose energy efficient appliances
3. Wash clothes in cold(er) water
4. Turn the thermostat of your hot water tank down to 50C (125F) - I've put it to 60C, but it's not possible to go lower at present, thanks to stupid location of the tank meaning the hot water runs at least halfway round the edge of the house before getting to a point it needs to be hot. When I replace the water heating, this should be possible.
5. Install a programmable thermostat (or turn the heat down over night and when you're out of the house)
6. Register with the [Canadian Marketing Association's] Do Not Contact Service to reduce the amount of junk mail delivered to your house. - Substitute MPS. Must do this.
7. Eat less meat (particularly feedlot beef) - but what's a feedlot?
8. Walk, bike, carpool or take public transit as often as possible - I live in the countryside, yet still move large packages on my bike.
9. Make sure you know what can be recycled in your area, and try to recycle as much household waste as possible
10. Compost using an outdoor compost bin or an indoor vermicomposter
11. Clean or replace filters on your furnace and air conditioner - air con would be evil here.
12. Buy local, organic or fair trade food where possible
13. Reduce air travel
14. Wrap your water heater in an insulation blanket - it's got a spray-foam cover and the outside is cold to the touch. Wrapping the loft tanks in insulation jackets made a big difference.
15. Use a clothesline instead of a dryer whenever possible
16. Plant a tree - soon
17. Buy fresh foods instead of frozen
18. Keep your car tuned up and your tyres inflated to their optimal pressure
19. Use biodegradable dishwashing liquid, laundry soap powder, etc.
20. Drink tap water (filtered if necessary) rather than buying bottled water
21. Turn the tap off while brushing your teeth
22. Unplug seldom-used appliances and chargers for phones, cameras, etc., when you're not using them - well, I switch them off at the wall
23. Plug air leaks and draughts around doors and windows with weatherstripping - need to fix a couple of windows, but it's beyond me and local tradesmen seem crap at responding.
24. Switch from disposable to reusable products: food and beverage containers, cups, plates, writing pens, razors, diapers, towels, shopping bags, etc.
25. Consider garage sales, Freecycle, eBay, or borrowing from friends/family before buying a new tool or appliance
26. Reuse bathwater, maybe to flush the loo, water the garden, etc.
27. Make sure your roof is well-insulated.
28. Always wear a jumper/sweater and socks indoors unless it's warm enough outdoors to go without both.
29. Run your vehicle on biofuel/sustainable fuels
30. Set up a grey water barrel to use when clean water isn't necessary
31. Put grey water on your garden immediately without storing it.
32. Install tanks to collect rain-water from your roof for watering the garden, washing your car, etc.
33. Don't keep windows open when your heater is on
34. Turn off lights that you don't need
35. Stop your engine when waiting more than 10 seconds
36. Install a solar panel on your roof for water heating - who fits them in England? I hate roof-work.
37. Ask your bank for an online-only account - I have one, but won't move the rest until they make it secure.
38. Try to make more use of daylight
39. Walk and run more - I'm not walking for the hell of it. Waste of energy.
40. Wrap loft water tanks in insulation jackets where possible
41. Lower the power consumption of your computer with cpudyn, device power managers and similar tools
42. Use non-air-con ways to keep cool whenever possible

Today is the second day in which I find that my laptop does not resume properly from sleep and I start to wonder why. None of he old problems, blank screen, no reponse...

This time it just looses the GNOME session. I saw two segfaults on the console, on resume: one from iceweasel and one from another app. Then gdm comes up.

I think is xorg's fault or gnome-core. Why? Well, it didn't happened 4
days ago and I have these in the dpkg.log (grepped for upgrades only):

2007-03-12 00:19:04 upgrade xorg 1:7.1.0-13 1:7.1.0-15
2007-03-12 00:19:04 upgrade xvnc4viewer 4.1.1+X4.3.0-20 4.1.1+X4.3.0-21
2007-03-13 03:10:34 upgrade libeel2-data 2.14.3-3 2.14.3-4
2007-03-13 03:10:35 upgrade libnautilus-burn3 2.14.3-8 2.14.3-8+b1
2007-03-13 03:10:35 upgrade libnautilus-extension1 2.14.3-9 2.14.3-11+b1
2007-03-13 03:10:36 upgrade nautilus 2.14.3-9 2.14.3-11+b1
2007-03-13 03:10:37 upgrade nautilus-data 2.14.3-9 2.14.3-11
2007-03-13 03:10:51 upgrade nautilus-cd-burner 2.14.3-8 2.14.3-8+b1
2007-03-13 03:11:00 upgrade gnome-mount 0.5-2 0.5-3
2007-03-13 03:11:24 upgrade libxine1 1.1.2+dfsg-2 1.1.2+dfsg-3
2007-03-13 03:11:25 upgrade lintian 1.23.27 1.23.28
2007-03-13 03:11:26 upgrade unionfs-tools 1.4+debian-3 1.4+debian-4
2007-03-14 09:46:32 upgrade foomatic-filters 3.0.2-20061031-1.1 3.0.2-20061031-1.2
2007-03-14 09:46:32 upgrade libntfs-3g0 1:0.0.0+20061031-6 1:0.0.0+20061031-6+b1
2007-03-14 09:46:33 upgrade ntfs-3g 1:0.0.0+20061031-6 1:0.0.0+20061031-6+b1
2007-03-14 09:46:33 upgrade ekiga 2.0.3-4 2.0.3-5
2007-03-14 09:46:48 upgrade gnome-desktop-environment 1:2.14.3.5 1:2.14.3.6
2007-03-14 09:46:48 upgrade gnome-core 1:2.14.3.5 1:2.14.3.6
2007-03-14 09:46:48 upgrade gnomemeeting 2.0.3-4 2.0.3-5
2007-03-14 09:46:48 upgrade libgraphicsmagick1 1.1.7-12 1.1.7-13
2007-03-14 09:46:49 upgrade graphicsmagick 1.1.7-12 1.1.7-13
2007-03-14 09:46:50 upgrade obexfs 0.10-3 0.10-3+b1
2007-03-14 09:46:51 upgrade graphicsmagick-imagemagick-compat 1.1.7-12 1.1.7-13


I'll turn back time with snapshot.debian.net and see if I get back my resume ...


Notes:

• I use Etch, almost no packages from Sid or Experimental...
• no, I didn't submit a bug yet; although this is not RC from Debian's PoV, it sure feels like this kind of regression shouldn't happen...
  

I don't usually do these, but this one could be fun for planet debian:

You Are 20% Nerdy You are definitely not nerdy - in fact, you probably don't know any nerds. You probably care a little too much about your image. No one will know if you secretly watch Star Trek reruns! How Nerdy Are You?

I think most of my few points are linked to debian development... this is partly why the idea of more "social conformance" testing for new maintainers worries me. It could mean I'll always stand out like a bizarre blue-haired hacker.

Via Universal Hub, retail employee fired for blogging. This is not uncommon, but notable in that the blog had no work-related content nor, apparently, was it done on work time:

Drew started his own personal blog. On it he did not mention Mercenary, did not link to Mercenary, did not sell or offer any products or services that might be construed as competing with Mercenary. It just wasn’t about Mercenary. He didn’t even use his own name. His boss learned about the blog when coworkers passed around the posting with the adorable photo of his newborn son. His boss then fired Drew by leaving him a voicemail that Drew picked up when he got home from the hospital.

Although my employment law is rusty, I doubt the employee has a colorable claim against his previous employer. (Private employment is generally not subject to any First Amendment protections.) Any change here is going to need to be more cultural than legal. Ten (maybe even five) years from now, I suspect people will wonder what all the fuss was about. (Some have suggested that the blogger was actually fired for having a baby. If that is true, it likely would be actionable.) Technorati Tags: Blogging, Employment, Free Speech

No, this is not a joke. Since my upgrade to Xorg 7.2, I can't run tomcat from eclipse anymore. It fails with

java: xcb_xlib.c:50: xcb_xlib_unlock: Assertion  c->xlib.lock' failed.

The workaround is simple: start tomcat with

DISPLAY= tomcat5.5/bin/startup.sh

Yes, if you 'hide' the graphical interface from tomcat, it works... WTF is it with Java? (And yes, this is a bug in Java, not in libx11) Interesting side note: Eclipse still works. And in contrast to tomcat, it actually is supposed to use X11. But it probably always goes through GTK. P.S. setting LIBXCB_ALLOW_SLOPPY_LOCK=true doesn't help.

OpenOffice.org is an office suite offering various integrated applications, such as a word processor and a spreadsheet. Originally developed by StarDivision, StarOffice was acquired by Sun who released it as free software as OpenOffice.org in July 2000. While Sun still maintains fairly tight control over the development of OpenOffice.org, many other vendors, in particular Novell, are important contributors to the project. The project had a fairly long release cycle of about 18 months to accommodate StarOffice, the commercial product from Sun. There were many delays, making it hard for vendors to decide which version to include. OpenOffice.org moved to a three month release cycle after their long-delayed 2.0 release, published 26 months after 1.1. The new release cycle is viewed as a positive development by contributors who get their features and fixes out to users faster. Nevertheless, at the end of 2006 a discussion took place in which a six month interval was suggested. Apparently users didn't want new features every three months and the short interval between releases put a lot of pressure on the QA team.

Version	Date	Months
1.0	2002-05-01
1.1	2003-09-02	16
2.0	2005-10-20	26
2.0.1	2005-12-21	2
2.0.2	2006-03-08	3
2.0.3	2006-06-29	4
2.0.4	2006-10-13	3
2.1.0	2006-12-12	2

Past problems

• The long release cycle of 18 months, bound to the commercial StarOffice product, meant that little testing occurred for a long time because developers believed the release was far away.
• Many changes accumulated during the long development phase, making testing towards the end very difficult, and leading to a big bang' release.
• Features were put in very late, even during the beta cycle, because of the perceived 18 month delay to the next release.
• There was very little code review. The QA team only tested the program.
• Vendors shipped unreleased versions because the significant delays during the 2.0 cycle made planning impossible.

Solutions

• After the 2.0 release, the project moved to a 3 month release interval. This model promises a tight feedback loop with users.
• Because planning is now possible, collaboration between vendors on the same code base is far easier.
• The faster release cycle and more collaboration among vendors has promoted code review.
• Motivation in the project has increased because people see their contributions getting out to users within a reasonable time.
• The release process has become more transparent, allowing voluntary contributors to take a more active part in release preparations.

Outstanding problems

• There are discussions about changing the release interval to six months. There is some evidence that some users do not want new features every three months and that the aggressive release cycle of three months puts a lot of pressure on the QA team.

My Thinkpad has started to run hot recently. If I do anything CPU intensive then it will heat up to >80C and then turn itself off. When idling it seems to stay at about 60C when the ambient temperature is about 24C.

It used to not be like this, a couple of years ago I cracked a GPG pass-phrase by using my Thinkpad (as well as a few other machines) to run a brute-force attack lasting a few months. So a couple of years ago I could run at 100% CPU time for months on end and now I can only do that for a few minutes.

It seems that my Thinkpad may have accumulated dust in it's fan from years of running 24*7. I run my Thinkpads 24*7 so that they can download email and large files while I'm asleep, because Linux suspend options have been lacking until recently, and because I use my laptop for a large portion of the day.

The problem I am having is similar to what I had with a previous Thinkpad. Are Thinkpads unable to handle 24*7 operation?