Search Results: "tar"

26 February 2007

Annabelle Tully: FOSDEM

So its post-FOSDEM already… Time flies when you’re having fun.
I arrived Brussels at around 10AM friday, met Tulitar, who was just as clueless as me regarding where the hell we were going. We ended up meeting a nice group of people on the train who incidently neither knew where they were going, but were following someone who did. We eventually got off at the right place and met Dave, who also had no clue where the hostel was.
After being slightly lost and meeting some other Debian people, we finally got in at the hostel where we had to lock baggage in the basement as we could not check in before three. Tired as hell, we left out and met Jeroen and a few other people and headed for the chocolate museum. Belgian chocolate is /awesome/. They had solid dark chocolate sculptures and even chocolate CLOTHING.
After the chocolate museum, everyone left back for the hostel and passed out, except me, who was still eager for more city exploring and/or beer. I met up with Martin and left to get some asian foods before the famous beer gathering. I’m convinced we tried every beer on every page of every beer charter of every pub we visited. Belgian beer is by far the best I’ve ever had. ‘Duvel’ is one of my top favourites.
During the beer gathering we thought it’d be a really good idea to discretely throw coasters at the people sitting below, us hiding at the top of the pub. Ended not as discretely as it started, hundreds of coasters flying throughout the room. Pure entertainment gold, but seemed to piss off the organizers and bar-people, and Martin was noble enough to take the blame even if I blatantly started it all with my childish ways.
The next day was started with getting lost AGAIN, because I could in no way remember where the hostel was. Interesting start of the day. I think I’ve lost count on the amount of times I’ve gotten lost in Brussels at this point. On our way to the FOSDEM venues we also found an entire area of brussels where they just don’t sell sandwiches. The day ended with much delicious Belgian beer consumage.
All in all it was fun and interesting. I also discovered that they are way more lenient with airport security in Belgium. I had tons of liquids and creams in my bag, and they didn’t comment it at all OR put it in little plastic bags. Despite me happily not feeling like a terrorist, the flight back sucked. It was an hour delayed, and when I landed there was even more snow in Norway than there originally was when I left. Missing the green grass of Belgium.
Now please, people, upload pictures from FOSDEM and give me the URL! :-)

Sam Hocevar: Zzuf talk

If you missed my lightning talk about zzuf at FOSDEM, don t worry: I missed it too. But the slides are online (sources too) and they should really be self-explanatory on how to start.

Michael Prokop: argument list too long

A problem everyone stumbles across (at least) once: 
% tar zcf stats_2005.tar.gz stats_2005*
zsh: argument list too long: tar
The reason? Too many files for the ARG_MAX limit. ARG_MAX defines the maximum length of arguments to the exec function (more precise: bytes of args plus environment for exec), defined in /usr/include/linux/limits.h on your Linux system: 
% ls -la   grep -c stats_2005
9037
% getconf ARG_MAX
131072
% cpp << EOF   tail -1
#include <limits.h>
ARG_MAX
EOF
131072
%
Ok. But how to work around the issue? Possible solution for GNU: 
% find . -name 'stats_2005*' > filelist
% tar zcf stats_2005.tar.gz --files-from filelist
Without the temporary file (filelist in our example): 
% find . -name 'stats_2005*' -print   tar zcf stats_2005.tar.gz --files-from -
zsh provides zargs (but AFAIK it doesn’t work with gzip in the same command line due to the way zargs works, so create the archive in one step and compress it in another step later): 
% autoload zargs
% zargs -- stats_2005* -- tar --ignore-failed-read -rpf stats_2005.tar
The approach works with other tools than tar as well of course, usage example for afio: 
find . -name 'stats_2005*' -print   afio -o -Z stats_2005.afio
Depending on the type of problem (rm, cp, mv,…) you can choose differented approaches as well, some further examples: 
% for file in stats_2005* ; do rm -f -- "$file" ; done
% perl -e 'unlink <stats_2005*>'
% zsh -c 'zmodload zsh/files && rm -f -- stats_2005*'
% zsh -c 'autoload -U zargs; zargs -r ./stats_2005* -- rm -f'
% ksh93 -c 'command -x rm -f -- stats_2005*'
% find . -maxdepth 1 -name 'stats_2005*' -print0   xargs -r0 rm -f
% find . -name 'stats_2005*' -print0   xargs -0 mv -i --target-dir=/destination
% zmodload zsh/files ; mv -- stats_2005* /destination

25 February 2007

Adam Rosi-Kessel: Grimmelmann and Kozinski on Law

I recently came across two old and unrelated writings about law, both of which are worth reading, especially for people with strong opinions but no formal training. The first is this piece, entitled Seven Ways in Which Code Equals Law (And One in Which It Does Not), by recently-appointed New York Law School professor James Grimmelmann and EFF Legal Director Cindy Cohn. Several observations are particularly appropriate for the slashdot crowd (and, to a lesser extent, certain members of the Debian community and others who grew up on a diet of BASIC, Pascal, and then C and later perl). I especially like this bit about “hacking the law”:
Some people, seeing this connection, and remembering the values of good code, try to improve the legal system by treating it as a computer. People come to me with ideas for hacking the law. The government says that cryptography is a weapon, they say, but the Bill of Rights says we have the right to bear arms. So that means we have a Constitutional right to use cryptography. But the legal system isn t a computer. If you can t convince a judge that what you re proposing is consistent with the values underlying a law, your argument will go nowhere. People go to jail every year because they think they ve found a way to hack the Sixteenth Amendment. The income tax is illegal, they say, or, The income tax is voluntary, see, it says so right here, and then they get convicted of tax evasion and sent to jail. We did convince several judges about the Constitutional dimension of cryptography, but the claim started from the values of the First Amendment, not a mechanical reading of its words. It s a category mistake to treat the legal system as just another architecture with its own specialized language. Code and law are different ways of regulating; they have different textures. All of those people who are required to make the legal system work leave their mark on its outcomes: they make a certain amount of drift and discretion almost inevitable. Code doesn t have such a limit: it can make perfectly hard-nosed bright-line rules and hold everyone in the world to them. Code is capable of a kind of regulatory clarity and intensity that law can only state, never really achieve.
I don’t entirely agree with the other article, entitled What I Ate For Breakfast and Other Mysteries of Judicial Decision Making by outspoken Ninth Circuit Judge Alex Kozinski (unofficial site maintained by Aaron Swartz, wikipedia entry). For example, I think critical legal studies has resulted in some interesting insights, some of which actually have practical applciation. Still, Judge Kozinski makes an important point about the numerous factors that act as a check on discretion in judicial decisionmaking:
It is popular in some circles to suppose that judicial decision making can be explained largely by frivolous factors, perhaps for example the relationship between what judges eat and what they decide. Answering questions about such relationships is quite simple - it is like being asked to write a scholarly essay on the snakes of Ireland: There are none. But as far back as I can remember in law school, the notion was advanced with some vigor that judicial decision making is a farce. Under this theory, what judges do is glance at a case and decide who should win - and they do this on the basis of their digestion (or how they slept the night before or some other variety of personal factors). If the judge has a good breakfast and a good night’s sleep, he might feel lenient and jolly, and sympathize with the downtrodden. If he had indigestion or a bad night’s sleep, he might be a grouch and take it out on the litigants. Of course, even judges can’t make both sides lose; I know, I’ve tried. So a grouchy mood, the theory went, is likely to cause the judge to take it out on the litigant he least identifies with, usually the guy who got run over by the railroad or is being foreclosed on by the bank. This theory immodestly called itself Legal Realism. Just to prove that even the silliest idea can be pursued to its illogical conclusion, Legal Realism spawned Critical Legal Studies. As I understand this so-called theory, the notion is that because legal rules don’t mean much anyway, and judges can reach any result they wish by invoking the right incantation, they should engraft their own political philosophy onto the decision-making process and use their power to change the way our society works. So, if you accept that what a judge has for breakfast affects his decisions that day, judges should be encouraged to have a consistent diet so their decisions will consistently favor one set of litigants over the other. I am here to tell you that this is all horse manure. And, like all horse manure, it contains little seeds of truth from which tiny birds can take intellectual nourishment. The little truths are these: Under our law judges do in fact have considerable discretion in certain of their decisions: making findings of fact, interpreting language in the Constitution, statutes and regulations; determining whether officials of the executive branch have abused their discretion; and, fashioning remedies for violations of the law, including fairly sweeping powers to grant injunctive relief. The larger reality, however, is that judges exercise their powers subject to very significant constraints. They simply can’t do anything they well please.
Finally, I will link, but not embed, this video of the Anna Nicole Smith court order, for an entirely different perspective on the legal process. You almost don’t really want to have to see this stuff.

Christian Perrier: fr: 99.654%, cs: 93.438%, de: 82.990%, sv: 80.142%, vi: 77.568%

One step beyond. This is the madness that happens when uncoordinated uploads are done. This time, this has been an old dbmail upload that was rotting in NEW for two months and had been resurrected from there. So, my target is moving again, the very exact day where I intended to announce that French has reached 100%. We're now again in a call for translations for this package, just the same day I had gotten rid with debsecan, the former target mover. Today's uploads: tvtime, amavisd-new, openslp, smsclient (by its maintainer), gpsd, fdutils, apmd.

Andreas Metzler: being right is not better

I try to evade reading/hearing/watching weather forecasts whenever possible, however I cannot escape them all time. If I do not I am usually annoyed. If you think about it that is not surprising, probabilities are against me. Usually I have preferences how I would like the weather to be to start with (Currently: A little bit below zero with snowfall from monday to thursday, snowfall stops on friday - to allow grooming - and sunshine with temperatures slightly below zero on the weekend.) and the weather forecast announces something else. Depending on the weather I get I end up with this frustration matrix
wishforecastweatherfrustration
aaano
aabyes
abayes(unprepared due to unfavorable forecast)
abbyes
The outcome is even worse than could be expected since the weather forecast itself is biased, announcing "possible snowfall of up to 30cm at 1000m elevation" even if there is just a 10% chance for more than 5cm.

Ross Burton: Lack of Tasks/Evolution Synergy

I'd noticed back when Dates was started the libecal was failing to notify Dates when events in Evolution changed, and vice versa. This was magically fixed when Dates moved over to ESource, so I didn't continue investigating it. However, Tasks doesn't use ESource yet and people had noticed that if you add items to Tasks, they don't appear in Evolution or the panel. This is a major problem, so I build EDS and debugged the problem. Turns out that the system tasks store is at ~/.evolution/tasks/local/system/ but when using ESource it is at ~/.evolution/tasks/local/system (note the lack of a slash) and as backends are looked up using literal string comparisons, these don't get the same backend so you don't get change notifications, and even worse modifying the task list with one application will overwrite the other's changes. Luckily the fix was trivial, and I hope that it gets reviewed soon.

24 February 2007

Wouter Verhelst: The cool kids

Primary school is a long time ago. Still, every time I buy me some new toy, I somewhere in the back of my head wonder how this will have an influence on my social standing. I have this Nikon D50 since a few months now, and have brought it to FOSDEM. Mostly to take pictures, but, well, I did think it'd make me look good—at least slightly so. Turns out everyone and their dog has one. Guess I'll need to take my flute next time. Or, well, convince nattie to sing Aria 14, and then follow that up with Aria 15.

Jan Wagner: OpenWRT 0.9 / X-WRT 2.75

Last week I updated my WRTSL54GS to OpenWRT 0.9 with X-WRT 2.75. Since my box has an USB port, I was missing a way to umount mounted usb storage. Looking deeper into it, I noticed that partitions get mounted by ‘/etc/hotplug.d/usb/01-mount’ like this:

# mount
[…]
part1 on /mnt/disc0_1 type ext3 (rw)
part2 on /mnt/disc0_2 type vfat (rw) The correct devices are missing. A patch is available:

mount.patch Okay … So far, so good. Now some tweaking to webif^2 for umounting attached usb storage devices. Here comes the patch:

umount-button.patch Umount Buttons , , , ,

John Goerzen: Rebase Considered Harmful

Today I was musing about different version control systems and merge algorithms. I've been thinking specifically about how I maintain Debian packages in Darcs. I tend to import upstream tarballs into one branch, and maintain the Debian packages in another, simply merging when a new upstream is released.

Now, there seem to be two prevailing philosophies on how to handle merges in this case. I'm thinking here about merges back to upstream. Say I want to contribute my Debian patches to them.

  1. Commit "clean" patches upstream. Don't have a bunch of history -- the fixing typos commits, the fixing bugs commits, or the merging to track new upstream releases. Just something like a series of diffs against the current head.
  2. Bring across the full history, warts and all, and keep it around permanently.


git encourages option #1, with its rebase option. Darcs encourages option #2 (though some use its amend-record option to work more like #1).

As I got to thinking about it, it occured to me that git-rebase would be very nice if you are going to use philosophy #1. In short, rebase will remove your local patches from a repo, update it to the latest upstream, then re-apply your local changesets -- aborting to have you fix any conflicts. This is as opposed to a more traditional merge, where you add the upstream changesets to your local branch and then commit new changesets to resolve conflicts. (So a rebase would be totally useless in situation #2)

I got to thinking about this, and started wondering what would happen to people that I'm working with that in turn work off my branches. And sure enough, the git-rebase manpage says, "When you rebase a branch, you are changing its history in a way that will cause problems for anyone who already has a copy of the branch in their repository and tries to pull updates from you."

I maintain, therefore, that git-rebase is evil and should be avoided. It only works for a situation where someone maintains a private branch of a project, never shared in any way except to submit patches to an upstream. Forget it if you have a team maintaining that branch, or want to post that branch online for others to help with (as I do with my Debian darcs package). Even if you keep it private now, do you really want to adopt a work process that forces you to keep it private forever, or else completely change how you work?

And this brings me back to the original question of patch philosophy. Personally, I dislike philosophy #1. I'd much rather have the full history of a change, warts and all. Look at the Linux kernel example: changesets that introduced bugs that made it into the official tree have their fixes documented, but changesets that introduced bugs that were fixed before being merged into the official tree could be lost to the public due to rebasing by submitters. Is that really what we want? I don't think so.

With Darcs, tagging is very cheap and it is quite trivial to write an "apply a changeset bundle" script that makes a before tag, applies a series of patches, and makes an after tag. One could then run a darcs diff between the two tags to see the net effect on the repository, or could still look at the individual patches. (Or, you can avoid tagging and manually specify the "from" and "to" patches.) I find that a much better model: you can have it both ways. I'd think that most modern VCSs ought to support some variant on that, too.

And I think that git-rebase should be removed on the grounds that it encourages poor version tracking practices.

23 February 2007

Biella Coleman: On Mole-patrol

So last year as I entered the job market, I posted less “personal” blog entries and have more or less kept with the tradition except with the occasional post, especially when it concerns my mom. Right when I moved to Canada, I broke with this tradition and wrote a longish entry about my moles which I thought of as a public serive announcement to get people to go on mole patrol, because really, that is the only way to deal with recalcitrant moles. Of course, I am on constant mole-patrol and a day before I left Puerto Rico, as my sister moved her hair away from her neck to pull it back, I noticed a funky looking mole. Now, it was not all that weird but a little weird and I was like, go go go to the dermatologist and check it out. It took a few weeks to get an appointment and then they took it out, bioposied it, and indeed, there was melanoma. Everyone was shocked because, well it is shocking news to get and if anything, I thought the mole would have abnormal cells like mind did. She thankfully was pretty calm throughout the whole process (I attribute it, in part, to the fact that she does not spend too much time on the Internet, where you can arm yourself with a lot of good, but often downright frightening information). A few days ago, after a battery of tests, we found out that the melanoma was very small and contained and they had taken everything out. So for now, we are on the clear but it means constant mole partrol for her and I… Melanoma runs in families and as kids we also ran around on the beach so this issue is not going to go away. But I guess it is good that I had my scare in August, otherwise I would have never given her mole a second thought. I probably would not have made myself stare as I did at her hidden moles, every chance I had. So anyway, again, go to your dermatologist and check your moles. Or at least go on mole patrol. It is well worth the hassle…

Edd Dumbill: XTech 2007 schedule: behind the scenes

After a couple of months' hard work, I've posted the schedule for XTech 2007. And, though I say so myself, it looks good. XTech 2007 grid You can read more about the schedule itself over on the XTech web site, but I thought it would be interesting to explain how we got there. The people bit  After the call for participation, we wound up with 200 proposals in the system. From there, the target was to get down to 5 tutorials and 68 presentations. Each proposal contains an abstract of at most 500 words. I enlisted a small army of reviewers (69 in all) to help, and assigned four or five reviewers to each abstract. 829 reviews were assigned in all. The reviewers work blind, so they don't get to see who the proposer is.
After the review, I read every score and proposal, and created a shortlist of the best scoring proposals plus those that had spuriously low scores given their quality. From this shortlist the hard graft of preparing a draft schedule started. We had already decided in advance on our usual format: four parallel tracks of browsers, core tech, applications and open data. I then filled in the schedule, aiming to create themes for days, or at least for the 2-session blocks. The draft schedule and details of those shortlisted but who missed the cut were circulated among the committee. After some iteration and feedback the final schedule emerged. Picking tutorials was a little different, as this is done by myself and the committee directly. The constraints on choice are more commercially-oriented. Experience has shown we need mainstream topics that people will be happy to pay for. Even so, each year we try to include one emerging topic. Last year, it was Rails. This year, it's OpenStreetMap.
Choices made, I then notified the speakers, awaited their confirmation, and reached the point where we could publish the schedule. The mechanics of it all A glib reading of the above would make it all sound quite simple. And this year I'm pleased to report that it was a lot simpler than previous years. We have been able to use Expectnation from beginning to end, which has streamlined a lot of the work.  Expectnation's my super startup that's taking up the time that XTech and fatherhood don't! I'm about to tell you why it's wonderful, so please forgive a little pride.
Gathering the proposals was easy once the CFP had been set up inside Expectnation. I set up three calls: one for presentations, one for tutorials, and a secret one that the public doesn't get to see. (We always need a secret one for people who have very good reasons why they didn't make the public deadlines.) Request response The review phase Recruiting reviewers was done by Expectnation's request system. This lets me send a request to a large number of people simultaneously, and collect their responses via the web app. (Previously, this had involved email, spreadsheets and wasted time.) The chart you see to the right shows the breakdown of the response to this request. If a reviewer said 'yes', they added a note to say which types of proposal they would review, and signed up for an account in the system. I then passed through every paper assigning four or five appropriate reviewers. A quick search each time allowed me to look for the right reviewers, and ensure no one reviewer got overloaded with work. Once reviewers were assigned, I headed over to the Mailroom department. Expectnation has a large number of configurable mailing targets, one of which is "reviewers with work to do". I emailed each reviewer with details of how to get on with the reviewing. Every reviewer then logged into Expectnation, saw the proposals they needed to review, and used the interface to efficiently score the proposals. One big lesson here is that it needs to be very efficient if you want to get the best reviewers, who are often the busiest. Another wizzy graph enabled me to keep track of the reviews, and the mailroom let me send out a reminder to those reviewers who hadn't finished their work yet, when the time for the close of reviewing drew near. Picking the papers Gridding out XTech 2007 Expectnation lets me sort and filter proposals pretty flexibly, so I went through the papers for each track in turn, ordered by their review score. Anything scored 3 or higher (4 is best, 1 is worst) was almost certain to be shortlisted. I read all the reviews and the abstract, and moderated any score that was unusually low (for some reason, reviewers rarely overrate proposals!) The next step was to set up the empty grid, shown in the top half of the diagram to the right. Here I added the empty time slots to the rooms we had, and assigned putative tracks to each of the rooms (they can be swapped around later if needed.) After that, the scheduling can start, shown in the second half of the picture to the right. Each empty slot can be assigned a paper from the shortlist for the relevant topic. That way it's easy to "paint on" talks into each room and quickly get a sense for the overall flow of the conference. Once it was time to finalize matters, I mass-marked all the scheduled papers as accepted, which automatically sent a notification to the presenters, using the same request system as for reviewers. When a speaker confirms, their proposal status changes and they appear in the final public grid. From there, I am able to use the mailroom again to inform speakers of the information they need to know. Additionally, speakers can log into the system at any time to see when they've been scheduled to speak.
Gridding out the conference in Expectnation is probably the biggest timesaver of all. Previously this involved a lot of sketching on paper or a spreadsheet, and a lot of manual work notifying people, and then more work creating the timetable to go on the web site. Now, both the grid and a full web of abstracts and speaker details are generated automatically. What next? As you can probably tell, I'm rather excited about both XTech 2007 and also about the work we're doing with Expectnation. What's next for XTech is the process of publicising the conference among attendees, recruiting session moderators, and also the writing of papers by the presenters. As the conference draws nearer, the attendee-level interactive features of Expectnation will kick in, allowing personal scheduling and rating of sessions. What's next for Expectnation is that we're ramping up to our 1.0 launch. We're working with a handful of early adopter customers right now, and are always interested in new use cases. As we get nearer the end of the first tranche of engineering work, we're going to gear up the publicity effort and start explaining to the world why we're special. As usual, I'd love to hear questions, feedback and suggestions.

Martin F. Krafft: The Inet

The folks of I, Cringely published some thoughts by a guy called David Harrison, who proposes to replace the ICANN-dominated DNS infrastructure with a new kind, which is backed by new technology and stricter rules from the start. I would really like to see the "Independent Network" ("Inet") be run by the open-source community. And I think we should get started soon. If there are people knowledgeable of whois databases and the DNS protocol, let's get in touch. If you're going to be at FOSDEM 2007, let's do it live!

Holger Levsen: debian-community.org

I wanted to write a much longer blogpost about debian-community.org before FOSDEM, where I'll have a opportunity to present the idea in some greater detail anyway. But as we are about to leave from the Debian-Edu gathering in Soissons, I guess my time will not allow it.

So I will not waste much time to describe here, what debian-community.org is about, you can read about most of the ideas on the webpage already anyway. I have quite some more ideas and concrete plans, which I will reveal in Brussels and after that on the site itself.

And for those, who cannot make it to FOSDEM (or just to my presentation, which is at the end of the schedule) the DebConf videoteam will also (try to) record the talks in the Debian room at FOSDEM - we'll see if that will work :-)

Besides being aware since some time that Debian has developers and users and (officially) nothing in between, there were two talks at LCA2007 which inspired me to start debian-community.org: the talk by Jono Bacon about the ubuntu community and the keynote from Kathy Sierra about passionate users. I suggest you watch both, they both are very insightful. If you are really low on time, I really suggest to find some. And if you can't, watch Kathy's :-)

But personally I think both are a must see. They changed my way of thinking about Debian, the OS, the project and the community. Thanks Kathy and Jono!

Oh, last but definitly not least: please join the #irc-channel, the list (both linked on the website) and get involved. Especially if you want to help to shape your local(ized) debian community!

Ross Burton: Tasks 0.1

I've just tagged and rolled a Tasks 0.1 tarball. Tasks is a simple To Do manager, using GTK+ and libecal (part of Evolution Data Server). It isn't very featureful at the moment, but it's progressing nicely: I'm using it already. Tasks I'll be adding this to the OpenedHand Projects site shortly, but for now here is a tarball.

MJ Ray: Debian: Links for 2007-02-23

While we're fixing some network problems, here is a musical interlude^W^Wset of links...
Explaining Debian at parties
'Do not try to convince people to try it out or you will become a support hotline. Instead, tell them about LUGs and mailing lists (and how cool it can be) and put the challenge on them: "if you try it, those are your support channels. Are you up for it?"'
Index of /~joerg/templates
Explanations of some common reasons for getting REJECT from ftp-master.
gravityboy: Politics
"If we're going to make interactions between developers more civil and friendly and less personally hostile then we need a different kind of stick. Maybe a carrot of sorts is in order too?"
Consensus and community review in open source and open standards Decentralized Information Group (DIG) Breadcrumbs
'this is quite a stretch with respect to the normal dictionary meaning of "consensus"'
Social Drag
How many Debian Developers are dressed in Social Drag?
debian Gender Research
More research to add to the surveys page
#354950 - ITP: gauche-readline -- A readline-like library for the Gauche Scheme implementation - Debian Bug report logs
Contemplating sponsoring again.
The joys of English cuisine are abomination in God's sight Ted Walther's Private Diary
Blast from debian past: Ted Walther's gullibility for stereotyping is an abomination in God's sight and those foods are hardly typical English. For instance, the only one on his PS list that I've eaten recently is flapjack (not flapjacks, which is something else and not English AFAIK) and I can only remember eating five of the list in the last year. Also, the linked site seems to concentrate on processed pap from multinationals and supermarkets, rather than real trad English food. Example: "Yorkshire puddings are basically a bread type product. You can use them in place of dinner rolls." Why not make 'em a bit harder, cook 'em a bit longer and you can use them for cobbling the street instead? Yorkshire pudding should be a baked batter with a soft middle and a crisp puffy edge. Nothing like bread. And don't get me started about the pasties. Honestly, if you learn about food from such sources, no wonder you'd think it an abomination.
Re: Position Statement to the Dunc-Tanc "experiment"
"had somebody wanted to kill (or inflict maximum damage) to the project, he couldn't have done any better than the current DPL"
Releas-o-meter
Interesting idea - why no cron-run copy on the web?
EUPL v 1.0 revokable ?
One that may appear in a future 'bits from debian-legal' - it seems the EU are popularising a type of termination clause. Yay.
Future of Debian Weekly News
As I hoped, Joey is explicitly calling for sponsorship for DWN production.
DPL 2007, Current Candidates
still don't have a title is keeping a list of DPL candidates, so I won't put one up this year.
#411041 - request for debian-l10n-persian mailing list - Debian Bug report logs
Tell all your persian-speaking friends to show their support!
Interprete I cite, you cite, I rant
Lack of references is a problem on lists like debian-legal where explaining everything again can drive you insane and still not convince some people.
Lucas Nussbaum's Blog State of software for Suspend to RAM/Disk ?
More tips on the "Will I Work Or Not?" suspend problems.
only on debian-devel - she.geek.nz
> Am I mistaken or this is a flame on how to flame ?

Simon Richter: Threads

Miriam, coroutines have the same problem as threads, futures and all the other interesting concepts out there: they are perceived as a magic bullet when they are merely one tool in the great toolbox. Whether a tool is appropriate depends on the job. Postgres, for example, handles each connection in a separate process, which adds a lot of complexity to their internal structures as all concurrent accesses need to be handled properly. However, SQL's transaction and isolation semantics make a single-threaded implementation almost as hard to implement, so the correct answer was to use threads. The biggest problem with threads is data consistency, and this is where almost all negative examples originate: some variable was not declared volatile, some lock not held long enough, some set of locks taken in the wrong order. A rule of thumb should be: if your threads need to interact, then you should not be using threads. If you have to compute something which will take longer, it is absolutely fine to start a new thread, but then you will have to protect the inter-thread communication appropriately. What is appropriate depends on the problem again; in most cases it will be message queues which allow the other thread to handly the request when it is in a safe state. Coroutines come in at a point where "you should not be using threads", by essentially allowing me to write a producer-consumer model as if it were threaded, and then letting the compiler build a nonthreaded version from that. In the C++ world, most algorithms can not be combined directly because they are written as a consumer/producer loop and cannot be suspended -- coroutines will make that possible.

Evan Prodromou: 3 Vent se CCXV

I was up late last night upgrading Wikitravel from MediaWiki 1.8.3 to the new 1.9.3. It took a long while, since the 404-handler caching extension that I built for MediaWiki a couple of years ago (which keeps Wikitravel running on a single, albeit quite big, server) is pretty invasive, and a lot of things had changed with the way users and stuff worked, so I had a lot of hacking to do. But it's stable now, even if some watchlist stuff is a little funky. Doing major upgrades is a real bear for me, but I'm happy when it's over. tags:

Home people Maj had her final oral exam in her French class tonight, which left me and Amita June home alone to fend for ourselves. We had a lot of fun. First, I had to do the day's dishes (lunch and breakfast) that were sitting in the sink. I brought the footstool around to the sink from our laundry room, and she stood on it and helped me with the dishes. After I'd finished washing a dish, she'd carefully fill it up with water, dump it out, then put the dish in the dishrack next to her. Pretty good for 18 months old. That went so well that I moved the stool over to the kitchen table where I cut tofu and vegetables for dinner. I gave her pieces of pepper, cabbage, and carrot while I was working, and she nibbled on them a bit and then practiced chopping them... with the handle of her mother's toothbrush, which she'd stolen out of the bathroom earlier in the day. After dinner, we had a bath, then we read some books, and then she went to sleep on my shoulder while I walked around her room and sang, like she's been doing for the last 2 months. It was another good night. tags:

Soft launch We launched two new Wikitravel versions overnight, too: Catalan Wikitravel and Finnish Wikitravel. Catalan recently, uh, catalyzed from a blog post by Carme Pla . Readers and the Catalan-speaking community rallied to our Catalan Wikitravel Expedition and got the project rolling. I got the site set up last night and they've started translating key help, style manual and policy guidelines already. Mean, Finnish had been simmering on the back burner for a while, so we got it launched at the same time. My friend and colleague Jani Patokallio is a Finn and a longtime and well-respected Wikitraveller; I'm glad he's taking leadership of the project. Finns have such disproportionate contributions to Free Software and Free Culture; I'm glad to have that Freedom Powerhouse Country all working together on Wikitravel now. And, y'know, I'm going to totally rack up a ton of HugAFinn points off of this. Actually, now that I think of it, I have no idea if "Carme Pla" is a real name or even a plausible personal name in Catalan. It sounds like it to me, though. tags:

coComment A couple of months ago Don Marti recommended that I check out coComment, and I made a mental note and then forgot to follow up. But I started using the system a few days ago, and now I wonder how I ever lived without it. coComment is a Firefox plugin that keeps track of when you post a comment on a blog or some other comment-handling system. It then keeps track of the conversation that happens after you comment. I have a lot of standing keyword searches on Technorati and Google Blog Search, and if people are talking about a subject I'm interested in, I'll usually jump in and talk about it. But sometimes I'll go back months later and see that people asked me questions and continued the conversation without me. So coComment is exactly the kind of cross-the-Internet aggregation service I need. tags:

Sage Speaking of keeping up with blogs, I've realized in the last week that I've outgrown Live Bookmarks for following RSS feeds. Rather than going with a Web-based RSS reader like Google Reader or Bloglines, I opted instead for the in-browser reader, Sage. It's simple, it does what I need it to do, and it supports OPML so I can move my subscriptions somewhere else if something better comes along. Good piece of software. My best candidate for something better coming along? Probably if I get my Netvibes home page customized well enough to handle my 50-60 feeds. And maybe when Netvibes gets smart and becomes and OpenID identity provider (or at least figures out a way that you can log into your ID when you start a browser session). tags:

22 February 2007

Ben Armstrong: make-live -p gnome-junior

Ever since I started working towards a Debian Jr. livecd back in November, I’ve played off and on with qemu, approx and debian-live. Yesterday, I took another kick at the can. Being frustrated with make-live’s inability to combine two package lists, Daniel Baumann came to my rescue, promptly commiting and then releasing live-package 0.99.23-1 with three new package lists for Debian Jr. So now we have something to play with. Try it out. Install live-package 0.99.23-1 or later, configure /etc/make-live.conf to set LIVE_MIRROR to your favourite mirror (I use the apt caching proxy approx to avoid re-downloading the same packages from one run to the next) and pick an image and type to build, e.g. 
$ sudo make-live -t usb -p gnome-junior
This makes a ./debian-live/binary.img that can be put on a 1G usb key flashdrive. We have more work to do to polish this. Particularly, since the GNOME and KDE flavours are larger than a 700M CD, some fat could be trimmed. If you’ve tried it, I’d love to hear your ideas on debian-jr@lists.debian.org.

21 February 2007

Joachim Breitner: News from the XaraLX front

What happened so far: Pretty much one year ago, Xara released a Linux port of there XaraX vector graphics suite under the GPL, and everyone was happy, as it is a pretty good piece of software. A small portition of the program, the drawing library CDraw, was still distributed as a non-free binary blob with the prospect of freeing it later. to prepare for that, I created a debian package in non-free. About half a year ago, development as slowed down as the company s team was tight into other tasks and outside contributions were still few.Last thursday someone asked on the mailing list for news on the freeing of the CDraw library, starting an unseen surge of new posts on the list, from Xara employees, free-time developers and outstanders. Besides some unnecessarily rude messages, it was an interesting discussion on how a small non-free part of a program seems to scare of a lot of developers from working at the otherwise free program at all. It also became clear that Xara, recently being bough by MAGIX, will not release the CDraw library any time soon, being afraid that others might use the code to compete their commercial Windows version of XaraX.The solution, it seems, will be an internal fork that uses Cairo to render if the CDraw binary is not available. This will, at least for a while, cripple XaraLX, it will most likely be slower than the supposedly very fast CDraw, but it will be fully free software. At least the Xara guys don t oppose the plan, so there is hope that it will succeed. And who knows, maybe they will release CDraw when they see that a real free software does attrackt outside contributions.

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