In my previous post ( to this Debian section), I've mentioned we were preparing an event focused on direct contribution. Well, we've done it and it was very successful!. The event name we've choose was invol crate+, which means "involve yourself" and the plus sign meaning "more", since that was the main idea behind the event. We've worked for a couple of months, this includes live and online meetings, (even we all live in Lima sometimes it's quite difficult to match our spare time) and a lot of online work. We've just published the event report (currently in Spanish only, translation in progress). The main things I'd like to highlight is the fact that we got people doing real work and breaking the ice from "I want to do something, but I'm quite not confident to get on the teams" to people discussing work-related issues on our l10n-spanish list. I wanted to people directly learn and use the tools we do and also the infrastructure, so at some point I made the decision of make them directly work on our team's infra, this of course got some people inquiring if I was running a parallel project and complain about the quality, later I had to explain what was this rush of translations and that we were running this workshop and, yes, I knew the work was not going to be as we usually expect but they were quite new and we didn't have much time for have them learn all our policy, terms and all things one knows after being on the team for a while.
My girlfriend also involved herself and did some translation work and took pictures for me, cute. However, since I had an horrible issue with my main domain for email, and also because my time constraints, I didn't have much time to follow them up but I'm glad about what they did and that some of them are very encouraged and still working on the list. One of our goals was to get at least one people "hooked" on the direct contribution I'm glad to see we over-passed this goal. The report has the in-depth details, like number of participants, talks, also the problems we faced, as Diego describes (no, don't believe him, I wasn't acting as the contact/manager guy all the time, word). We had a dinner later with some of the people who still had energies or were hungry ;).
There is a pictures gallery at our website, also the talks slides, the videos are still on processing. We'll publish them once they are ready, like everything in Debian of course ;). Finally, I want to say that this was a great personal experience to transmit the things I've learnt and having people to feel that they also can do it, but even more: doing it!. Sometimes online chat or mailing lists are quite cold for transmitting this knowledge to newcomers. Usually they got scared after one tells them they have to read a lot, or they just got frustrated by their inability to understand the team work-flow at the very beginning. I'd like to thank our wonderful band, or squad (you named it, we can get it for you), who is responsible for making this happen. We are already working on the long-term (call strategic if you like it) plan for the up-comings invol crate+. We've already made a shot-term plan for this year and started to work on the next invol crate+, be ready.
Of course thanks to Peru Pacifico Institute where we hosted the event. We had a post-event meeting with them and directors are very happy with us and with the success, they are willing to work together again on the future. Also to our helpful sponsors, speakers, friends and relatives who support us.

There aren’t many features I grew fond of with CVS that I haven’t yet found a satisfactory solution for in Darcs. One of them was, until today, sending commit mails to mailing lists. There are a number of more or less ugly hacks floating around the net, but I never found them very satisfactory, so I wrote my own. Darcs-monitor will send email to a specified recipient about new changes added to a specific darcs repository. It can be run as an apply posthook (resulting in near-instantaneous “push” emails), or periodically from Cron, or occasionally by hand, whatever seems most convenient. You can get it by darcs at http://antti-juhani.kaijanaho.fi/darcs/darcs-monitor/ (darcsweb available), or as a tarball at http://antti-juhani.kaijanaho.fi/software/dist/. It depends on mtl and HaXml and is written in Haskell, naturally. It has been tested only with GHC 6.6 so far. For installation and usage instructions, refer to the README. Please note that this software is very new and thus can be buggy. As with any email-sending software, bugs can result in major annoyance; user caution is warranted.

In the past, live-package was only able to build ISO images and netboot tarballs. Then, I added the 'usb' target and as of today, with live-package 0.99.20-1, all autobuild flavours are also available as images for USB memory sticks. As before, the images can be downloaded from http://live.debian.net/.

Have you ever wondered how you can easily capture a console session on Linux (and probably most other Unix-like OSes) without the need for special video recording software? Here's how: you can use the script(1) command (part of the bsdutils package).

• Start the script command. Without parameters the sessions will be logged to a file called typescript. You can also supply a filename on the command line: script mysession.log.
• Type whatever you want to record...
• End the recording session with exit or CTRL-d.
• You can now view the file with less -r mysession.log (it contains line feeds, escape sequences etc., so a simple text viewer will probably display garbage). You can even print it with lpr(1). Or simply display it on the terminal with cat mysession.log.

An even cooler feature is that you can replay a script with the correct timing information:

• First you have to also record the timing information using the -t switch: script -t 2>mysession.timing mysession.log.
• You can then replay the script: scriptreplay mysession.timing mysession.log.

See the script(1) and scriptreplay(1) manpages for more details.

I went to the Astronomy Festival on Jan 27 organised by Galway Astronomy Club. Worth seeing; it attracted about 100 people (the Hotel conference room was full); successful for a town like Galway, so frequently covered in Cloud. Dr. Lucie Green save a good talk on Solar Physics, describing the different methods we now have of exploring the Suns behaviour, Flares, Sunspots, etc. and the different missions such as SOHO and the new STEREO mission to observe the Sun. Prof. Chris Dainty gave a clear presentation describing the state of the Art in Adaptive Optics, and work his group has been doing, both in Astronomy and pushing AO into other fields, such as opthalmology (treating the eye as the obstacle and observing the retina behind) and productising A.O. for 'non-professional' use. He hopes in the near future to be able to provide Adaptive Optics to Amateurs (price range around Eur 5000, status: not ready yet, the first units would be for 'University Dept' observatories, costing 20-30k, in the next year or two). Of particular interest were one by Prof. Dick Butler, head of the Chemistry dept. here in NUIG; it was on Organic Chemistry and meteorites. He is a long-time amateur astronomer but professional chemist; he was particularly interested in the organic chemistry of the Murchison meteorite. After pointing out the out the false alarm of ALH 84001, he gave a convincing presentation of the extra-terrestrial origin of complex organic compounds, including amino acids, etc. in the Murchison meteorite. In particular he disputed claims that the meteorite was contaminated, pointing to the Deuterium enrichment of the compounds within; as the C-D bond is stronger that C-H, Carbon-Hydrogen compounds are more likely to be broken up by extraterrestrial radiation that their deuterium variants, leading to deuterium enrichment over terrestrial equivalents. Later he gave a nice summary of conditions on Saturn's moon Titan, pointing to its rich supply of organic compounds, showing that when hit by meteorites, lakes of water would be possible for several hundred years at a time, as the impact craters cooled, and called Titan a utopia for organic chemistry exploration. This seems to make the idea of panspermia: life originating off-Earth more plausible. For a while now I've had a book (found in the Bargain bin somewhere) by Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe, From Grains to Bacteria, a collection of papers documenting their belief that they've discovered bacteria in free space via spectroscopy. I must admit my spectroscopy is not up to challenging them; time to dig deeper and fish it out. Dr. Aaron Golden gave a very interesting talk on Brown Dwarfs: Planets or Pulsars that he and his students have been doing. Basically it turns out that while Brown Dwarfs have long been seen as the 'runt' of the Stellar world, stars that didn't make it, some of them it seems are Pulsars. (He's invented the acronym SPUDs: Sporadically Pulsating Ultracool Dwarfs, for them; maybe it'll help people remember that Pulars were originally discovered by an Irishwoman, too). This was first seen by Andys Postgrads Greg Hallinan and Steve Bourke - (see the papers). Kinda interesting as Aaron studied under Dr. Andy Shearer in NUIG working on Pulsars, so knew a bit about them, and had seen behaviour like this before, with a bit of a clue what might be causing it. It was wierd going to this talk; Andy hired me to work in ICHEC, and we have an office in NUIG; Greg and Steve work down the hall, and indeed, I see them occasionally working on our computers; but didn't know what they'd been working on until now. So, it appears that these Brown Dwarfs (they've seen Pulsar behaviour in several) have Starspots (details here and here; some hot-off-the-press stuff: rumour has it he was checking the results of observations from the night before to ensure they didn't disprove what he was about to say). Aaron was pointing out the coherent maser behaviour was similar to that seen at Jupiter, leading to its strong radio emissions. I didn't get to talk to him about it in detail, but the idea of an Object with both sunspots and clouds sounds fairly exotic and interesting. Beyond that, the Festival was a good opportunity to see what Irish Amateur Astronomers have been doing, and meet some interesting people. Kudos to all those who organised it.

One of the benefits of Xen is that it allows a machine to be easily rebooted. Remote console and remote power management technologies are either expensive or implemented on the motherboards of expensive machines. With Xen the virtual machines can be managed without such expense and also with less effort.

This raises immediate possibilities for training sys-admins. One problem with training system administrators is that they need to have servers to administer and the mentor needs to be able to easily access them and fix them when they become unbootable. Xen makes these problems easy to solve on cheap hardware.

Monash University has for many years had a machine named Yoyo which is used for training sys-admins. It's not expected to be up as much as machines that are run by experienced sys-admins (hence the name) but I expect it would still have better uptime than a lot of corporate servers.

Unfortunately until recently there were no options available to people who weren't Monash students for learning about system administration. To solve this I want to run some sys-admin training with a server.

My plan is to set up a machine running Xen at a server room and provide a basic Debian install in a domU. I will then give the root password to a small group of trustworthy people (who I have known for some time or who are local and can be verified) and start the training. My plan is to set up a mailing list for emergency communication on one of my servers and have the trainees set one up for regular use on the domU. I will provide DNS secondary service and have an NS record for yoyo.coker.com.au point at the machine in question so the first task for them would be to run a DNS server.

I won't have unlimited bandwidth so I will track the bandwidth use from the dom0, and I will use the dom0 to make backups of the system via LVM snapshots.

The terms of service etc will be mostly copied from the Monash machine.

Please let me know if you have any suggestions for how to run this.

Hopefully this will work out and other people will want to do the same. If you run such a machine then please add a comment to this post with the URL for information on it.

I had the most wonderful dentist appointment this morning. bbollenbach was so excited over this dentist http://www.smilemontreal.com/ - but it seemed mostly because they use lasers to do any fillings or whatnot.

I started off by going to their website to get the phone number, and found a web form there. I filled in information asking for an appointment. I got an email back on a Sunday night from the dentist saying that someone would contact me during the week. They were nice enough to call during the evening (which was funny, since I'd given them my work number assuming they'd call during the day, but I was here anyway that day) and booking the appointment was easy.

I got an email saying that they'd booked the appointment and a link I could click to get an iCal appointment. This didn't work in the Google Apps for Your Domain setup, but might if I were using local mail.

A day before hand I got an email asking me to confirm that I would make the appointment by clicking a link.

The place is a little further away from M tro Vend me than I'd thought - it's beside the Westmount Public Library. I walked in to find a nice spacious waiting room. The office manager / receptionist was very friendly, and this continued through to dealing with the hygienist and the dentist himself. I usually *hate* hygienists - most of the ones I'd met before hand had been dentists from overseas whose accreditation's hadn't been accepted here. So understandably bitter and annoyed. My only other good hygienist had been at the clinic in Toronto, but that was also the dentist who tried to convince me that there were no risks with using mercury fillings, and that she was exposed to it much more anyway, so why was I so insistent on white fillings anyway? (Worth noting that my plan *covered* white fillings, so it wasn't an issue of price or anything.)

The dentist was also a really calming presence, and answered my questions with a smile. I need to go back, so I'll know more about what he's like then. But so far I suspect I've found a keeper.

Postr 0.5 is out. This has a few fixes:

• Catch errors throw by EXIF or IPTC parsing
• New flickrpc (cleaner code, works with Python 2.5)

You can follow the development in the Bazaar branch, or get the Postr 0.5 tarball.

Or: Collateral Damage by the Cult of Celebrity. Or: The Hidden Costs of Downloading Porn. (No, I've not seen the film filked in the post title.) I got a work call from the advertising manager of one of my customers. They are just starting out with pay-per-click adverts. I understand that it's been working OK for the last few months, increasing their number of sales and general interest by enough to cover the cost. In general, each time they refined their campaigns or spent a little more, they saw a positive result. I got a call because since the start of February, they were suddenly spending a lot more money, without any corresponding results. Was there foul play? Had a competitor noticed their adverts and kept clicking them from different browsers? In short, was someone running a click-fraud attack on them? This is the sort of question I enjoy. (I did a statistics degree, but I don't use it directly in most of my work.) I massaged the logs and computed some general-purpose statistics. First, I looked for obvious attacks: were any particular machines or domains responsible for most of the clicks? Most non-IT people use the same ISP at home and at work, in my experience, so if it was a particular competitor, I'd expect to see lots of clicks from one domain. Nothing really stood out. The next thing I looked at was the geographic locations, very roughly. The pay-per-click adverts are targetted at European users on European sites. If it was some sort of distributed denial-of-service attack, I'd expect to see some increase in American and Asian traffic. Where were visitors coming from? I looked up locations by the first part of the IP address, which is crude, but good enough for this. You could even do something similar with the the xkcd ipv4 map - it looked like most of the addresses were in Europe, which is what I'd expect. There was one interesting US grouping, but that turned out to be one of the ad networks checking their ad links were still valid. So, I compared the time distributions of clicks now with clicks a month ago (when the ads were working fine). There were increased numbers of clicks just before 9, just after 17 and midnight-4 local time. I could dismiss the clicks just outside 9-17 common work hours as people looking to buy for their hobbies, but midnight-4 is a bit strange. Looking in more detail, the midnight-4 clicks were coming mostly from ad placements on one site. Looking at that site, it seems they specialise in 'sexy videos' of celebrities. Needless to say, that was not my customer's intended target market! I used that information to look at the whole dataset and see how much of the increase was due to that one site. Almost all of it was from there. Scores per night. Did any of those visitors stay long? Nope. It even looked like some of them were just private web spiders, downloading a page and all links from it, which I guess people might use to bulk-download videos overnight. So those results were sent to the advertising manager and they've updated their campaigns to exclude that site and any others related to sexy videos. It reminds me of the John Wanamaker quote

"Half of my advertising is wasted, I just don't know which half."

Maybe by working out statistics from the logs, we can reduce it from half for web ads - or at least limit it to half?

Some day, I feel like we, translators, are constantly hunting a moving target, which constantly moves away. So, yesterday, the very same day Neil Williams uploaded dpkg-cross with completed debconf translations for a few languages, including mine, the atokx maintainer uploaded a new version of his package. And, of course, as one would have expected, he felt the need to change the bloody debconf templates and, therefore, break AGAIN the translations. Not to mention the *awful* use of English in these templates. There are days like today where you really really need to have a virtual but very hard cluebat. Of course, I took it the diplomatic way and sent a polite notice asking for more consideration to translators next time.

After using BitlBee as Jabber client during the last years, I recently switched to Gajim, a Jabber client written in pygtk2. It supports some important Jabber features which I really miss in BitlBee, for example group chat, gpg encrypted messages and priority adjusting according to the current status. After some tweaking of my ion3 setup (floating winprop for Gajim windows, getting trayer started in the dock to catch the Gajim trayicon, some additional keybindings for gajim-remote (which unfortunately requires dbus)), it's perfectly usable in my environment.

This morning, we woke up to find out that /www.gwolf.org/data/phoo/2004_11_03/Vicuna.jpg>Vicu a, our most senior cat, had passed away. She was 13 years old, and appears to have went away peacefully, shortly before our wakeup time.
She chose our home - In March 1994, the first night my mother, brother and me spent at our current home, we woke up with scared, little meow sounds. We found her over our fence - it took us years to finally understand how a baby cat could have got there.
I don't want to start describing all the ways in which Vicu a brought love and light to our life. She gave us such great gifts over her life. We will surely miss her.

Jeff Waugh talks about Devil's Pie in his interview with Linux Format (issue 87).

However, there's this really cool thing called Devil's Pie, which is an extra little thing you run. It just plugs in and you can completely script the way Metacity works, using Lisp. Much in the same way you could with Sawfish, except for being a plugin and being directly focused on scripting the window manager. You can do amazing stuff. The work on that has actually been sponsored by Pixar.

Thanks Jeff! Any more of this and people will start thinking I'm paying you... NP: Flight 602, Aim

I’m back in Dublin, trying madly to lose the Californian mannerisms. Starting sentences with ‘So …’ is the most pernicious. It’s excellent to be back; there’s a great sense of camaraderie here, and people are easier to approach. It’s also good to have easy access to daylight — even though there’s less of it, I get to look out of a window. I had been intending to go straight from the airport to where I’m living temporarily, but I forgot its address so went to work instead. I’m so grateful to B and his wife for putting me up for the time being, but of course I’m now looking for somewhere in Dublin to live — preferably close to the Google office. So if anyone out there has a room to spare in Dublin for a non-smoker with simple needs, get in touch. I seem to have found the key to avoiding jet-lag. Stay up the night before you fly, so you sleep on the plane. When you wake up, your body clock will be so disoriented that it’s easy to persuade it to re-sync to wherever you are. It’s great to see colleagues again, but of course I’m now missing friends and colleagues from California. On the whole, however, Dublin is an upgrade. I’m even enjoying the rain. It gets so tedious in California, to know that the whole week will be 22-25°C, with no rain. Of course, the great benefit of Dublin is that it’s only an hour’s flight from Durham and the family. I’m seeing them on Friday!!

As is the norm, around this time debian goes crazy and tries to elect a new leader. I was talking to blank about his ill-formed plan to stand, and put to him the three questions that should be put to every candidate:

1. Are you going to go MIA?
2. Are you going to start flamewars?
3. Are you going to be evil?

Correct answers to these are worth discussing...

I’m the happy owner of a Linksys WRT54GL. OpenWRT is nice, but … well. Debian is just nicer. And I couldn’t resist the idea of running Debian on this little MIPS system. Since there’s clearly not enough space available on the Linksys, I decided to install etch in a chroot, that I would mount using NFS. Joey tried that already, the Debian wiki provides some information, but I use another technique. First, on another system (an i386, I debootstrap’ed a mipsel etch, using –foreign. This tells debootstrap not to run the second stage:
debootstrap –arch mipsel –foreign etch /space/debian-mipsel http://ftp.fr.debian.org/debian Then, I modified /etc/exports to allow the router to mount that chroot:
/space/debian-mipsel 192.168.1.1(rw,sync,no_root_squash) I mounted it on the router:
ipkg install kmod-nfs
insmod sunrpc
insmod lockd
insmod nfs
mount -t nfs star:/space/debian-mipsel /debian -o nolock
mount -t proc /dev/null /debian/proc I set up some swap space on the NFS mount (mandatory, or debootstrap’s second stage will fail):
ipkg install losetup
ipkg install kmod-loop
ipkg install swap-utils
dd if=/dev/zero of=/debian/swapfile bs=1M count=100
losetup /dev/loop/0 /debian/swapfile
mkswap /dev/loop/0
swapon /dev/loop/0 I chrooted inside /debian, and ran debootstrap’s second stage:
chroot /debian /bin/bash
debootstrap/debootstrap –second-stage When you are done playing, you can disable the swap space and umount everything:
swapoff /dev/loop/0
losetup -d /dev/loop/0
umount /debian/proc
sleep 1 # or umount /debian will fail
umount /debian If you want to re-mount everything, all you need to do is:
insmod sunrpc
insmod lockd
insmod nfs
mount -t nfs star:/space/debian-mipsel /debian -o nolock
mount -t proc /dev/null /debian/proc
losetup /dev/loop/0 /debian/swapfile
swapon /dev/loop/0
chroot /debian /bin/bash That first stage/second stage split in debootstrap is really cool: it’s an easy way to run Debian anywhere, only requiring to be able to chroot at some point.

... is the working title of my diploma thesis. Tomorrow I'll hold the introductory presentation on my topic in the research seminar. This is to explain my project to other members of the working group, so they can give me feedback and suggestions. What I'll be doing:

• extend the existing IkeWiki semantic wiki with a simple calendaring function
• investigate use cases for calendaring in a wiki context
• eventually develop a simple query language, that allows non-tech-savy users to do common queries and rules; others will probably be given full SPARQL or some extension on top of it (for temporal calculations)

Where I am:

• I think I know where I'm heading
• I've started hacking on IkeWikis internals
• IkeWiki actually queries the database via SPARQL to retrieve relevant temporal information and displays them in a simple calendar view
• I have some months to go for finishing my thesis

Difficulties:

• Repeating events. Actually a very common thing. I havn't seen a calendaring software that could handle more than just the simplest tasks. Please name a calendaring software that can do "the last wednesday each month which is not a national holiday".
• Custom time types: working days, work time (8-18 on work days), holidays, ...
• Sub-events. Should actually be pretty easy in a semantic wiki, but defining the semantics right and making an okay UI can get tricky
• Non-gregorian calendars (I'll probably not handle this)
• Ambiguity in expressions. If you have a meeting scheduled for some day at 10:00, duration: 1 day, it probably doesn't end at 10:00 the following day, but at 18:00, end of the working day it started. If the meeting starts at 17:00, duration 1 day, it probably ends at 18:00 the next day...
• Various technical stuff, including:
• XSLT sucks for datetime handling. It can only process very few formats; XSLT 2.0 has format-dateTime, but it can't format a duration for all I know. Still IkeWiki is using XSLT a lot.
• SPARQL is a pain for negation handling; you can do "IF NOT EXISTS", but it's very ugly. But this is common in calendaring: "if there is not another event at the same time, the office hour is wednesday at 10am"
• Ajax. Ikewikis UI makes heavy use of Ajax, but that makes development and debugging much harder; often you won't see the actual error message (or have to dig in some messy logs), because it's all obscured somewhere in XMLRPC and JSON calls

Fortunately, we have a rather strong research group here in Munich. There are experts for query and transformation languages (e.g. Xcerpt, SPEX - Querying XML Streams), temporal calculations (Computational Treatment of Temporal Notions, CTTN) and time modeling Calendar and Temporal Type System CaTTS); and I'm also working closely together with the author of IkeWiki and Xcerpt. And of course they're all nice people to work with!

Don't you just hate it when you pick up some software, start using it and immediately crop into three distinct bugs? Today's frustration is brought to you by ESR. Our motto: It's not my design that's broken, it's the equipment. And if you try to add configuration options to adjust better to the equipment, I will refuse your patch.

I was on a friend’s machine looking to copy some of his software.

$ dpkg-repack <pkg>
bash: dpkg-repack: command not found

So, here’s a hacky and woefully incomplete replacement for dpkg-repack.

#! /bin/sh set -eu
[ 0 != $(id -u) ] && echo “Must be run as (fake)root” 1>&2; exit 1; pkg=$1; pkgdir=$(mktemp -d “$pkg.XXXXXX”)
mkdir “$pkgdir” dpkg -L $pkg tar cf - –no-recursion –files-from - (cd “$pkgdir” && tar xvf -) install -d -m 755 “$pkgdir/DEBIAN”
dpkg -s “$pkg” sed ‘/^Status: /d’ > “$pkgdir/DEBIAN/control” dpkg-deb -b “$pkgdir” .
rm -rf “$pkgdir”

Works For Me ™. Update: it was pointed out that wordpress had prettified the code, turning pairs of dashes into em-dashes and other atrocities. so I’ve uploaded the script: [fake-repack]