Rules of the game:
Link to the person who tagged you.
Post the rules on your blog.
Write six random things about yourself.
Tag six people at the end of your post and link to them.
Let each person know they ve been tagged and leave a comment on their blog.
Let the tagger know when your entry is up. I have no idea how to select random things about myself, but I can select some non-randomly, by my own whim:

1. I m 31 years old and I m only now in the process of getting my driving license (as my Finnish readers well know).
2. I eat too much canned fish.
3. I think I found perfection when I bought my current winter shoes they have extra-friction soles and they have saved me from many falls due to bad walking weather.
4. I tend to get bored when I don t have way too much to do and when I do, I tend to get stressed.
5. I could do better in my apartment cleaning.
6. I was a teenager when the Finnish banking system (almost) collapsed in the early 1990 s. The current difficulties seem a bit ho-hum after that.

Via Niobe. I don t feel like tagging anybody just now feel free to consider yourself tagged if you feel like it.

Depressed. I tried to add a new partition with gparted, and somehow all of my partition tables are gone. I don't know how to recover from here... Too bad. Does it have a problem with FAT and GPT partition tables? ... and I recovered partition table from /var/log/installer/partman.log. Gparted tip; I can specify 'unit B' to use the values I can see in partman.log. Good luck that power didn't run out...

I'm not sure how you can pre-announce something in a way that cannot be later faked. The best I can imagine is you write it in a text file and post the size / hash of the file.

steve@skx:~$ ls -l 10-march-2009
-rw-r--r-- 1 steve users 234 Jan 12 21:40 10-march-2009
steve@skx:~$ sha1sum 10-march-2009
99d1b6d625ed4c15a3be2be5fec63c17941c370d  10-march-2009
steve@skx:~$ md5sum 10-march-2009
1a0e68b8fbb3b0fe30e5b4a9413ceeec  10-march-2009

I don't need anybody to keep me honest, but I welcome interesting suggestions on more neat ways to pre-confirm you have content that hasn't been changed between being written and being released...? I guess you could use GPG and a disposible key-pair, and then post the secret key afterward, but that feels kinda wrong too. Update of course you could post the detached signature. D'oh. Shamir's Secret Sharing could be another option - posting just enough pieces of the secret to make recovery possible with the addition of one piece that was witheld until the later date. Jake wrote a nice introduction to secret sharing a couple of years ago. ObFilm: L on

Mail server isn't broken anymore. But the concept of email itself looks broken to me. I have 97391 unread e-mail in my inbox.

Debian

Re: Blog rewrite upcoming

Erich, it seems that you got TONS of recommendations for different blog software, so you probably already received a recommendation for Chronicle: The Blog Compiler, it is written by Steve Kemp inspired by Joey's ikiwiki. I've been also wondering about using ikiwiki and/or chronicle. :-)

From the privacy-issues-department...

This is in my draft for a long time now...

Nico, I never understood what was so private about your debian.net page (Thanks WayBackMachine!).

PS: Happy 2009!

Matt, if you want to have something Pythonic that is as comprehensive as Rails is, look at TurboGears. Look at version 2.0 that is currently is in beta. The documentation is incomplete, but it is rather usable already. It is built around Pylons providing a neat pre-configured package of everything you need to develop a good website. And if you don t like parts of it, you can replace parts of it with other things or even write your own parts. Other people prefer Django, but it is too monolithic, non-modular and heavy to me.

Broken mail server. netfort.gr.jp isn't accepting mail for me this morning. It's currently broken somewhat.

MapReduce with Parallel Make Ted Gould s post about transcoding music files using Make got me thinking about combining Make and RecordStream into a barebones MapReduce framework. As a demonstration, I wrote a partial solution to Tim Bray s Wide Finder challenge, to calculate hit counts from web server logs. More details (and code).

Making a simple PerlResponseHandler that does something like this:

sub handler  
    my($r) = shift;
    $r->content_type("text/plain");
    $r->print("You suck.\n");
    return Apache2::Const::HTTP_BAD_REQUEST;
 

doesn t make what you d be expecting. This is because mod_perl assumes, since you are specifying content type and something to print, that this is a legit and valid (200-ish) request. This is what you get:

POST http://myserver/resource --> 200 OK
Connection: close
Date: Mon, 05 Jan 2009 23:02:57 GMT
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
Client-Date: Mon, 05 Jan 2009 23:03:00 GMT
Client-Response-Num: 1
Client-Transfer-Encoding: chunked
[ some headers snipped ]
You suck.
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0//EN">
<html><head>
<title>200 OK<</title>
</head><body>
<h1>OK</h1>
<p>Your browser sent a request that this server could not understand.<br />
</p>
</body></html>

So, yes, I was expecting to return a 400 Bad Request return with just You suck on the response body. mod_perl disagrees, which, kind of sucks if you are trying to make a RESTful service with mod_perl HTTP handlers and filters. To avoid this behaviour, this is one way to go:

sub handler  
    my($r) = shift;
    $r->status(400); # or the one you are interested in
    $r->content_type("text/plain");
    $r->print("You suck.");
    return Apache2::Const::OK;
 

You can also take a look at status_line that overrides status. You can also avoid the content_type method call if you are sloth enough. Now, this is what you get:

GET https://myserver/resource --> 400 Bad Request
Connection: close
Date: Mon, 05 Jan 2009 23:27:08 GMT
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
Client-Date: Mon, 05 Jan 2009 23:27:10 GMT
Client-Peer: 209.234.249.38:443
Client-Response-Num: 1
[ some headers snipped  ]
You suck.

And so, beer awaits.

One change and one addition to my current European tour. First, it looks like we'll be skipping Amsterdam this time and heading straight to London from Zagreb on the evening of January 10th. We'll still plan to arrive in Cambridge before the 13th. Second, I'll be giving a redux of my Revealing Errors talk at Mama in Zagreb on January 10th at 14:00 as part of the normal skill sharing meeting. It's the longer version of my OSCON keynote with many more examples. Folks who have seen earlier versions of the talk seem to think it's a lot of fun. If you are in or near Zagreb, you should come!

This morning, I got a mail that made me very happy. I followed it up a bit, and some hours later, echoed it over the pkg-ruby-extras list. And, yes, a blog posting won't hurt :)
I have done some rantings on why it is so painful to integrate cultures such as Debian and Rails. Those rants were part of quite a large rant-net and attracted a fair share of traffic/comments over here. Flamefesting over your blog is fun! :-) but anyway, I am delighted to say that at least some people worth their weight in code were watching, interested.
The mail I got this morning (yes, follow the links above!) was from Hongli Lai, one of the very nice people at Phusion - The people behind Phusion Passenger (a.k.a. mod_rails) and Ruby Enterprise Edition. Yes, people with a very different mindset to mine (specially when it comes to being a 100% Free Software person).
Hongli invited me to try their new DebGem service (still in Beta, although quite usable as it is). They are offering an auto-built full repository of Rubyforge, translated to Debian packages. They are currently supporting Debian 4.0 (Etch) and Ubuntu 8.04 and 8.10 (Intrepid and Hardy). And, yes, installing any arbitrary Ruby module is now just as easy as aptitude install libsomething-ruby. For over 20,000 Gems.
There is a catch, yes. The service is currently free, while they finish the public beta period. Their pricing is available.
Best luck to you guys. And... Shall you enjoy fierce competition from Debian proper! ;-)
[Update]: They just posted the official Beta announcement for DebGem

2009 starts. I'm still playing with android.

The following went out to the R-announce and R-SIG-Finance mailing lists a few days ago. The conference already has a very strong lineup of invited speakers, and we are now asking R / Finance users from both academia and industry to submit suitable one-page abstracts:

Call for Papers The Finance Department of the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC),
the International Center for Futures and Derivatives at UIC, and
members of the R finance community are pleased to announce R/Finance 2009: Applied Finance with R on April 24 and 25, 2009, in Chicago, IL, USA Confirmed keynote speakers include:

Patrick Burns (Burns Statistics)
David Kane (Kane Capital)
Roger Koenker (U of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign)
David Ruppert (Cornell)
Diethelm Wuertz (ETH Zuerich)
Eric Zivot (U of Washington)

We invite all users of R in Finance to submit one-page abstracts or
complete papers (in txt/pdf/doc format). We encourage papers both on
academic research topics and related to use of R by Finance practitioners.
Presenters are strongly encouraged to provide working R code to accompany
the presentation/paper. Datasets need not be made public. Please send submissions to committee@RinFinance.com.
The submission deadline is January 31st, 2009.
Submissions will be evaluated and submitters notified via email on a rolling basis. Additional details about the conference will be announced as available. For the program committee:

Gib Bassett, Peter Carl, Dirk Eddelbuettel, John Miller,
Brian Peterson, Dale Rosenthal, Jeffrey Ryan

See you in Chicago in April!

Currently I am on vacation and I will come back after the 9th of January.

(posted from my Nokia E71 on free wireless)

Over the next few days, I m looking at the most popular articles from this site and my previous news website during 2008. I ll be doing it in three parts. Popularity is measured by page views from local access logs, but some articles were actually more popular in the months after they were first posted, so it s not completely accurate, but let s be forgiving over the holidays, OK?

January

I must have been writing rubbish because nothing got that popular at the start of the year, but some of my older pages continued to be popular throughout 2008:-

• Online Banking with GNU/Linux, Firefox-based browsers or Free Software (started in 2007) - I really should move that list to another address because I think it s going to be around for a while.
• alt.satellite.tv.europe Frequently Asked Questions (first posted in 2006) - again, could do with a better home.
• Annoying blog comment misfeatures: letter images - until people recognise the limitations of CAPTCHA , this is probably going to be a popular page.

February

• SPI Meeting Wed 27 Feb 1900Z irc.oftc.net/#spi - I think this started my regular meeting announcements, which has been a surprisingly popular series and has expanded into a whole category of SPI articles here.
• The Myth Of Deregulation - this was meant to be a marginal rant. Its popularity (and the subsequent comments - some of which were unpublishable or their authors requested removal) surprised me and so I started writing more about social enterprise, cooperatives-sw member businesses and how they interact with GNU/Linux software and web development.

March

• Annoying Judge Resurrects Software Patents in the UK - notable only for pointing out that Symbian is not a UK company. It was probably news to some software developers, which is probably why it made my popular articles list.
• Debian Project Leader IRC Debate or it might have been Random recent threads from planet debian - for the first part of the year, I m looking at what page spiked on which day, but I posted twice a few days apart, so I can t tell which article on the page was popular.

April

• UK mobile micropublishing choices? - for the trip that motivated that article, I used twitter, but I m actually updating identi.ca over XMPP from my mobile now.
• Better Free Software Organisations? - I ve read the Yunus book mentioned in the comments on the Advogato repost of this article and I ve a review which will appear on this site later. It includes a bit of a flaming of the simplistic and IMO factually-incorrect dismissal of cooperative businesses, so I wonder if it will get a few responses from Yunus-fans.
• Explaining web site improvements: what s important to you? It seems that April was a good time for asking questions: this is a third popular question-based article. The website discussed has now been approved and ordered from TTLLP, but the work is not yet scheduled.

That s the first few months of 2008 done. I ll post the next few months in a couple of days. Hope you re enjoying the holidays if you re having them. I m sure I am

Mika and I are going to be in Europe for the next few weeks. The tentative plan seems to include these stops:

• Berlin (December 24-31) - Attending the CCC
• Stuttgart (December 31-January 3) - At/around Akademie Schloss Solitude
• Undetermined location in Slovenia (January 3)
• Belgrade (January 3-8)
• Zagreb (January 9-11)
• Amsterdam (January 11-13)
• Cambridge (and or) London (13-15)

I've got very little planned in the ways of talks or meetings with free software folks and would, as always, be open to arranging these. If you are in or near any of these places and want to plan a dinner, drinks, keysigning, talk, etc., don't hesitate to get in contact with me. I'll try to keep this wiki page updated with details on the latest plans.

The Debian Python Modules Team is discussing which DVCS to switch to from SVN. Ondrej Certik asked how to generate a list of commiters to the team s repository, so I looked at it and got this:
emilio@saturno:~/deb/python-modules$ svn log egrep "^r[0-9]+ cut -f2 -d sed s/-guest// sort uniq -c sort -n -r
865 piotr
609 morph
598 kov
532 bzed
388 pox
302 arnau
253 certik
216 shlomme
212 malex
175 hertzog
140 nslater
130 kobold
123 nijel
121 kitterma
106 bernat
99 kibi
87 varun
83 stratus
81 nobse
81 netzwurm
78 azatoth
76 mca
73 dottedmag
70 jluebbe
68 zack
68 cgalisteo
61 speijnik
61 odd_bloke
60 rganesan
55 kumanna
52 werner
50 haas
48 mejo
45 ucko
43 pabs
42 stew
42 luciano
41 mithrandi
40 wardi
36 gudjon
35 jandd
34 smcv
34 brettp
32 jenner
31 davidvilla
31 aurel32
30 rousseau
30 mtaylor
28 thomasbl
26 lool
25 gaspa
25 ffm
24 adn
22 jmalonzo
21 santiago
21 appaji
18 goedson
17 toadstool
17 sto
17 awen
16 mlizaur
16 akumar
15 nacho
14 smr
14 hanska
13 tviehmann
13 norsetto
13 mbaldessari
12 stone
12 sharky
11 rainct
11 fabrizio
10 lash
9 rodrigogc
9 pcc
9 miriam
9 madduck
9 ftlerror
8 pere
8 crschmidt
7 ncommander
7 myon
7 abuss
6 jwilk
6 bdrung
6 atehwa
5 kcoyner
5 catlee
5 andyp
4 vt
4 ross
4 osrevolution
4 lamby
4 baby
3 sez
3 joss
3 geole
2 rustybear
2 edmonds
2 astraw
2 ana
1 twerner
1 tincho
1 pochu
1 danderson
As it s likely that the Python Applications Packaging Team will switch too to the same DVCS at the same time, here are the numbers for its repo:

emilio@saturno:~/deb/python-apps$ svn log egrep "^r[0-9]+ cut -f2 -d sed s/-guest// sort uniq -c sort -n -r
401 nijel
288 piotr
235 gothicx
159 pochu
76 nslater
69 kumanna
68 rainct
66 gilir
63 certik
52 vdanjean
52 bzed
46 dottedmag
41 stani
39 varun
37 kitterma
36 morph
35 odd_bloke
29 pcc
29 gudjon
28 appaji
25 thomasbl
24 arnau
20 sc
20 andyp
18 jalet
15 gerardo
14 eike
14 ana
13 dfiloni
11 tklauser
10 ryanakca
10 nxvl
10 akumar
8 sez
8 baby
6 catlee
4 osrevolution
4 cody-somerville
2 mithrandi
2 cjsmo
1 nenolod
1 ffm
Here I m the 4th most committer And while I was on it, I thought I could do the same for the GNOME and GStreamer teams:
emilio@saturno:~/deb/pkg-gnome$ svn log egrep "^r[0-9]+ cut -f2 -d sed s/-guest// sort uniq -c sort -n -r
5357 lool
2701 joss
1633 slomo
1164 kov
825 seb128
622 jordi
621 jdassen
574 manphiz
335 sjoerd
298 mlang
296 netsnipe
291 grm
255 ross
236 ari
203 pochu
198 ondrej
190 he
180 kilian
176 alanbach
170 ftlerror
148 nobse
112 marco
87 jak
84 samm
78 rfrancoise
75 oysteigi
73 jsogo
65 svena
65 otavio
55 duck
54 jcurbo
53 zorglub
53 rtp
49 wasabi
49 giskard
42 tagoh
42 kartikm
40 gpastore
34 brad
32 robtaylor
31 xaiki
30 stratus
30 daf
26 johannes
24 sander-m
21 kk
19 bubulle
16 arnau
15 dodji
12 mbanck
11 ruoso
11 fpeters
11 dedu
11 christine
10 cpm
7 ember
7 drew
7 debotux
6 tico
6 emil
6 bradsmith
5 robster
5 carlosliu
4 rotty
4 diegoe
3 biebl
2 thibaut
2 ejad
1 naoliv
1 huats
1 gilir

emilio@saturno:~/deb/pkg-gstreamer$ svn log egrep "^r[0-9]+ cut -f2 -d sed s/-guest// sort uniq -c sort -n -r
891 lool
840 slomo
99 pnormand
69 sjoerd
27 seb128
21 manphiz
8 he
7 aquette
4 elmarco
1 fabian
Conclusions:
- Why do I have the full python-modules and pkg-gstreamer trees, if I have just one commit to DPMT, and don t even have commit access to the GStreamer team?
- If you don t want to seem like you have done less commits than you have actually done, don t change your alioth name when you become a DD (hint: pox-guest and piotr in python-modules are the same person)
- If the switch to a new VCS was based on a vote where you have one vote per commit, the top 3 commiters in pkg-gnome could win the vote if they chosed the same! For python-apps it s the 4 top commiters, and the 7 ones for python-modules. pkg-gstreamer is a bit special

And there it is. We now can have Planet Debian in other languages than english. The first one is Spanish but the framework allows for any number. In case you do want to have Planet Debian in a different language, follow this steps: (2LETTER means the 2char ISO Code of your language. Like es for the spanish one, de for a german, etc.)

• Checkout svn://svn.debian.org/planet-debian/trunk/config and look at the config.ini.tmpl
• Rename it to config.ini.$2LETTER
• Edit the values in it that are marked to be edited. Feel free to translate the footext variables, they are used in the html template.
• Send this file to the Debian Planet Maintainers. No need to commit yet, it wont get automatically activated, we do have to take two steps on the host planet runs on before that happens.

You need to have 10 feeds ready and filled in in the file you send us. All the feeds should provide a category that has entries with only the language for this new instance. (Otherwise it won t make sense to create a Planet instance for a language ) Planet now features a link section called Planet I18N right above the Subscriptions. That will always list the currently active other language Planets. The various planets share the common files like CSS, graphics and all the hackergotchis.

---

It was a bit of work to get to the point where we are able to add multiple planets to the system. First I had to upgrade the code behind it to a newer one, Planet Venus instead of Planet Planet. Main advantage being that it uses multi-threading to fetch the feeds, greatly speeding up that part. And this weekend I had to rewrite all the templates, going away from old (and simple) htmltmpl format to one based on Django. Htmltmpl simply has no way to deal with our Planet now anymore, especially as it has no way to access all config file values. Which I need for the translated strings, or I would need one template per language. Which would be insane. Various other things in Django also make Django templates a way easier thing to deal with, for example simply saying

  % firstof var1 var2 var3 "nothing" % 

instead of having a huge if-then-elsif-elsif-lalala chain. And we do have that multiple times.

The next week I m going to Berlin (and some days to Frankfurt). I ll be in the 25th Chaos Communication Congress (25C3). I ll be out of home from 24th Dec until 7th Jan. It ll be a non-traditional holidays, be far away from family. But, in the other hand, it gonna be awesome be and talk in a CCC and spend a Christmas Eve in a plane and a New Year s Eve in Brandenburg Gate with friends. See you there?