We went camping this weekend near Nominingue, northeast of Mont Tremblant. It was fun -- we met our friends Jeff and Anne-Marie, who'd biked there from Tremblant during the day. Maj and Amita June and I brought tons of food and big tents and stuff in the car. Our drive up was nice; Amita kept saying, "Camping!" every few minutes to emphasize how excited she was about going camping. She's getting much better about longer road trips. She entertains herself, reading books or telling herself stories or looking out the window and thinking out loud. Occasionally we sing songs or color together. The night was rainy, though, and Amita June slept in a dry but loud tent all night. At about 6AM she woke up angry. "Purple house, NOW!", she said, talking about our house in Montreal, with purple trim. "Shhh, Amita!" Maj said. "We're sleeping in the sleeping bag. We're camping!" "NO CAMPING!" said Amita. So the two of them got up and walked down to Lac Nominingue, while I got some rest. Later that morning, all the people in the campgrounds around us were smiling. "No camping! Camping no!" became a pretty popular refrain. Ah, well. At least they had a sense of humour about it. tags: amitajune laurentides camping travel maj jeff annemarie

Inefficient days Long day today. Brian got back from Halifax (Nova Scotia) on Friday, so we once again have a full house. Which is fun, but it makes it hard to work at home. I went out to Caff ArtJava near our house early this morning, but their le Sans Fil? connection was down. So I came home to pick up my bike to ride to La ka, but the back tire had a hole in it. And I didn't have a pump. Gar. So I spent a couple of hours working out that situation, and by that time I needed to go pick up our moving van. Maj found a great teak "wall unit" on Montreal Craigslist, and we need the shelves for our living room. So I got a van to pick up the pieces -- it was far too big to fit in our car. And, since my friend Niko wanted to go to IKEA, I traded him an afternoon with the van for help with my wall unit. He and Maj went off to IKEA as planned, and me at Amita went to the wading pool at Parc La Fontaine. It was a great time, although it's a long walk. I've had a hard time getting Amita onto the back of my bike -- she got pinched once when we were putting on her helmet, and since then she's wanted nothing to do with helmets, bikes, or nothing. If I force her helmet on and stick her in the seat, she loves it, but it's hard to trick her into it. She screams bloody murder when I try to put the helmet on her. But the pool was fun -- we chased each other up and down through the water. She fell asleep during the walk home, and I managed to get a little work done this afternoon. But Maj and Niko got back around 5:30, and Niko had a comedy show at 7PM and couldn't help me out -- the welcher! So I got Brian to come instead. The furniture was heavy -- really heavy. Teak is a heavy dang wood. Getting it out of the guy's house was really hard, and getting it up to our second-floor living room was Sisyphean. I'm amazed we didn't break any limbs. But at the end of it all, we had a great-looking new living room, and Maj had made a delicious gazpacho with polenta on the side. Yum! Hopefully the rest of the week is going to be more productive that today. Niko and I launch a new site at next week's DemoCampMontreal3 (as he so lugubriously pointed out in this blog post). And another group of partners will be launching kei.ki during Wikimania 2007, which is coming up soon. On top of that, we leave on Thursday for my brother's "commitment ceremony" in San Francisco, announced about 2 weeks in advance. We were lucky we had lots of miles so we could make the trip, but it still really cuts down on our Montreal summer experience. tags: maj furniture craigslist amitajune brian niko teak

The Weston Mercury repeats that a Recycling review will be carried out as a result of "staff will just take it for granted that green waste is in the green lorries" allegations, but no new news. Guardian: Fortnightly collections not always the answer, say MPs so hopefully that will discourage any more one-measurement-fits-all moves. Centred on Cambridge, cam.misc posters are describing what really happens when your recycling gets missed Meanwhile, the WWN reports about The 300K Mistake so I think some signs may need recycling. Come back Tea's - your town needs you!

• Debconf 7 was just awesome: It was great to meet up with hendry, daniel, otavio and marco from the Debian Live crew, as well as countless others.. I’m already putting some pennies aside for Argentina.
• I managed to graduate with a 2:1, which was enough to get accepted on my Masters course which starts in September. I still need to find somewhere to live though. Congratulations to everyone else who finished this year!
• Google SoC work is going okay. I was recently in that uncomfortable position where I had taken a wrong turn and was getting less and less motivated to correct myself. However, I now have much more Pythonistic interface around the configuration files, as well as a working wizard based on the gtk.Assistant widget. Now I just need to get the expert mode cleaned up pretty soon and then proceed in fixing up some issues in the underlying shell scripts. I’ll prepare a quick screencast and write about this in more detail again soon.
• LugRadio Live was pretty good. I was manning the Debian stall on the first day: David Watson brought along a TFT and a Debian mirror on a Linksys NSLU2, which was great when demoing Debian Live images as well as the experimental graphical builder. If I had a faster machine it would have been nice to provide some sort of ‘custom live CD service’ for passers by. The second day was interesting and I managed to get to a few talks, as well as meet up with some of the other Bongo guys.
• Yet more groupthink is underway with GUADEC just up the road in Birmingham. I will have to miss Wednesday due to my graduation ceremony and having my flat stripped bare by my parents — just sleeping bags for my brother and I until hometime on Saturday. GUADEC feels slightly different to the other events I’ve been to — I’m not a Gnome developer so there are a lot of unfamiliar faces, but maybe this will make me change my mind: Telepathy does look awesome, and I’ve had ideas about writing a decent mind-mapping tool for some time now…

On the subject of conferences, I’m also planning to attend AngloHaskell, LinuxConf Europe amd PyCon UK. Let me know if you want to meet up or need a place to crash.

It has been almost two weeks of silence from be because I was enjoying vacation on Sicily. Now I've read almost all mails and getting back to work ;-). There were opened lots of bugs in Gammu bug tracker, so it is first thing I need to look at. Fortunately there were no new bugs on my Debian packages, so at least this part will be easy (and only Sonata package needed upgrade, which has been done right now).

I seriously lack originality on that title above. Nevertheless, that gives some clues on what I’m up to: I rode my first airplane flight ever to Cebu with Jerome last Sunday to meet up with the rest of the pioneering team of Winston’s new startup, Morph Labs. Since it was a Sunday, there wasn’t much talk about work, but we did get to play with some of the new stuff we will be using, like Macbooks, iPhones, Airports, and a Mac Mini. Hint-hint indeed Thus began the first day, on a Monday. We got up to speed (from a 3-to-7 AM hibernate,) configuring the rest of the Macbooks, getting the HSDPA modems to work, laying out an ad-hoc WiFi net for the moment, and starting to plan out the directions the company will take. So far, so good. More to come, on Second Life Morphs. (I seriously need to express myself better.)

The Foundation AGM will take place at 5pm in the ABH.

There are a gazillion HOWTOs out there for flashing a BIOS image without having to resort to ugly "boot DOS from floppy" or "run Windows *.exe file from BIOS vendor" and other ugly stuff. Unfortunately, the proposed solutions are equally ugly (e.g. creating custom CD-ROMs which contain the "floppy" with DOS/Windows flash tools). Folks, this is so much simpler than you think: The flashrom tool (GPL'd, written for LinuxBIOS purposes, but works perfectly fine with proprietary BIOSes, too) will easily do what you want, on a running Linux system. No floppy crap, no CD-ROM crap, no DOS/Windows crap, no rebooting crap. Install it:

$ apt-get install flashrom

Detect whether flashrom knows about your chipset/mainboard/BIOS chip:

$ flashrom

Read the BIOS image into a file:

$ flashrom -r backup.bin

Write a BIOS image (proprietary or LinuxBIOS) on the ROM chip:

$ flashrom -wv newbios.bin

WARNING: This will overwrite your current BIOS! Make sure you know what you're doing! For the Debian-challenged, flashrom is available in source form too, of course:

$ svn co svn://linuxbios.org/repos/trunk/util/flashrom
$ cd flashrom
$ make

The list of supported chipsets, mainboards, and ROM chips is limited of course, but it's constantly expanding. Contact us on the LinuxBIOS mailing list if you want other hardware supported (or even better: if you have patches!). In many cases adding support for new hardware is pretty easy...

I was checking idly this morning whether there was a 64-bit version of Macromedia Flash yet (there isn’t but they claim to be working on one; yes, I do know about gnash). While searching I learned about nspluginwrapper, which was quite gratifying; I have always thought that ought to be possible, but the one time I took a stab at it I got hopelessly lost in the plugin API and had to be evacuated by helicopter. If nspluginwrapper works, it will kill two of the reasons I run a 32-bit firefox on my amd64 desktop (flash and the Acrobat plugin). I have firefox working quite nicely using schroot, but there are some inconveniences - like having to mount my sshfs filesystems once outside the chroot where I want them and once inside the chroot so that I can access them in firefox. And having to keep a ton of stuff installed in the chroot, too. Of course that leaves the one other gaping omission: there’s no official 64-bit Sun Java browser plugins yet. Blackdown had a 64-bit browser plugin, but there were a number of reports of its crashiness. And there was a lot of ambiguity in the web pages I found about whether IBM’s JRE had one or not. So I fought with IBM’s registration today (their database server must’ve been horked this morning…) and downloaded their Jave 5 JRE. Well, it doesn’t. No plugin except for IA32 and PPC32. I’m guessing from the links in the documentation that the guts of their browser plugin still come from Sun. Sun claims that JDK 1.7 will have such a plugin, but no one seems to have seen it yet. I think the only realistic way this will work out is to try building one from OpenJDK, and that’s more work than I have time for this evening. Back to the chroot for now…

On several occasions I have watched part of a TV documentary on gifted children, but I have never been able to watch one completely because every one that I have seen has been offensively wrong. One thing that they always seem to do is say that gifted children have special needs and often claim that they have problems socialising. This sounds quite reasonable, but if that’s the case then why would you make such children perform tricks on TV? Putting the children on TV is a very poor example of journalism and often of parenting - the parents’ desire to boast about their children’s performance (and implicitly their own parenting skills) is apparently more important than protecting the children. I think that the only situation in which gifted children should have their talents demonstrated on TV is if their skill is related to the performing arts. Not that TV coverage is necessarily good for children who have abilities related to performing (a casual scan of the news regarding adults in Hollywood shows the problems that people have dealing with fame), but it’s something that they will be driven to anyway. Also if they are going to demonstrate the intelligence of a child on TV then they really should make sure that they don’t demonstrate a lack of intelligence (on the part of the child as well as the producers). Asking a child to provide a definition of a word is often used as an example of intelligence (when it’s really an example of vocabulary). In one documentary a child defined a philanthropist as “someone who has a lot of money” (according to dict on my system it is “Love to mankind; benevolence toward the whole human family; universal good will; desire and readiness to do good to all men“). In another a child defined a genius as “someone who knows a lot“, while the definition of genius is not clear and there is some disagreement about what it is, most people agree that it’s about ability not knowledge. Being able to recognise when you don’t know something and admit would surely be correlated with intelligence… Telling a child that they are a genius or telling them their IQ seems like a bad idea at the best of times, and doing so in front of a documentary camera crew isn’t the best of times. Children are able to determine how their skills compare to others, there are more than enough attitude problems in schools related to skill comparisons without encouragement from adults. When I was in high school a friend who studied a martial art refused to tell me which belt he wore - he had been taught that such things shouldn’t be discussed outside the dojo to avoid creating a hierarchy based on belt rating in the community. I think that the same thing could be applied to IQ ratings. The term genius is grossly overused generally, I believe that showing greater than average ability in one area is not enough to qualify. I think that the minimum criteria would be to produce dramatic new developments/inventions in one area of research (EG Albert Einstein or Stephen Hawking) or to advance multiple fields of science or art (EG Leonardo da Vinci) would be the minimum criteria. I had people call me a genius when I was young because I won prizes in maths competitions, was good at programming computers, playing chess, etc. The main criteria for achieving such things is to avoid wasting time on sport - in a school run by idiots with a focus on sport this was more a tribute to being stubborn than being smart! The TV documentaries mention many things that gifted children supposedly require, but strangely I don’t recall any of them mentioning the need to meet adults who are significantly smarter than average! You might think that this is the most obvious thing. The Big Brother and Big Sister programs of mentoring children who are at risk of crime and drugs apparently provide significant benefits, something similar for gifted children might do some good, probably more based on meetings of a few intelligent adults with a small group of intelligent children instead of the BB-BS model of one-on-one meetings. Washingtonienne seems like a good example of the need for this. There are some useful print articles however, this article in The Age makes some good points, it’s particularly interesting to note that some schools lie about special programs to support gifted children to attract students (someone should name the schools that do this). But then you get awful ones like this, naming the child in such a situation is irresponsible journalism. The girl in question may be forced to change her name to escape google when she’s older. It’s strange that it’s illegal to name a child who is involved in a court case but it’s not illegal to name them in such an article (let’s hope that the journalist used pseudonyms). Also you might expect an organisation such as Mensa to have someone smart enough to realise that bringing such attention on a 2yo is not in the child’s best interests. Does anyone know of a good TV documentary about gifted children? I guess that it would be extremely difficult to make one without showing the children on TV so that would restrict the film maker to children who’s abilities are related to the performing arts.

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I was considering to switch jabber servers for a while, especially because my old JabberID joachimbreitner@amessage.de was not really nice. But I was always afraid of having to add, authorize and request authorization for all my old contacts, so I kept postboning that.Today, my Jabber hoster had some problems and all rosters were empty. While they will probably fix it later, I thought this is a good time to finally set up my own jabber server. The procedure was, thanks to Debian, almost ridiculously simple (apt-get install ejabberd). I then only changed one piece of configuration (no self-registering for other users) and I was ready to go!I followed neingeist s advice and did not name my new Jabber ID jabber@joachim-breitner.de (which would fit to my e-mail-address mail@joachim-breitner.de), as some clients would then use jabber as my nickname. Instead, you can now reach me under nometa@joachim-breitner.de . If I was on your roster before, you will have to re-add me sorry for the hassle. I hope it will be the first and last time.For those who do not know what Jabber is: Jabber (or XMPP) is an instant messaging protocol, providing similar features as ICQ or MSN. The important difference is that it is not tied to one provider: While ICQ and MSN users can t chat to each others, all Jabber users can chat with each other, no matter on what server they are much like e-Mail. There are some free Jabber servers such as jabber.org or jabber.ccc.de, some commercial (but also free to use) such as Google Talk, GMX or Web.de, and lot s of privately run servers such as mine. Try it!

A few people commented on my last post asking for details about how I configured exim and dovecot to have the fake scott+canonical account and separate Maildir tree. exim4 router configuration The first key part of the configuration is to configure exim4 to split the local part into a user name and a suffix. This allows a local part such as “scott+canonical” to be split into the user name “scott” and the suffix “+canonical”. This is configured by adding the following two options to the appropriate routers in your exim4.conf:

local_part_suffix = +*
local_part_suffix_optional

The first option defines the suffix; normal practice appears to be to use both “+” and “-“, but since I’d previously used “-” with qmail I opted to use “+” only so that I didn’t confuse myself during the transition. The second option allows the suffix to be optional, so that mail to “scott” is still delivered normally. Now mail to “scott+canonical” will be delivered to the “scott” user. Forwarding configuration The next task is to ensure that mail is actually forwarded to this address; for me this was a configuration performed by the Canonical sysadmins to ensure that my work e-mail is actually delivered to scott+canonical on my own mail server. Filtering configuration Since both personal and work e-mail are now both being delivered to the same user account on my home mail server, I need to filter the mail into separate folders. This can be done by checking the $localpartsuffix variable in Exim filter .forward files, e.g.:

# Exim filter
if $local_part_suffix is "+canonical"
then
    save Maildir/Canonical/
endif

Now incoming work e-mail is filtered into a different mail folder, while personal mail is delivered into the primary one. I’ve used similar filter instructions for mailing lists, mailman messages, Launchpad mails, etc. to filter into appropriate folders. Where the mail is personal, it is filtered into (e.g.) Maildir/.Lists/upstart-devel/ Where the mail is for work, I add /Canonical/ to the path, (e.g.) Maildir/Canonical/.Lists/linux-hotplug-devel/ This means that the Maildir/ directory is my personal INBOX, with sub-folders immediately under that and beginning with a period; and the Maildir/Canonical/ directory is my work INBOX, with sub-folders immediately under that and beginning with a period. This defines two trees in a manner compatible with dovecot. There’s no particular reason that Maildir/Canonical/ has to be under Maildir/, it could have been Maildir-Canonical/ and this would still work. I simply wanted them in one place to ease backups. Dovecot configuration Now we need to configure dovecot to permit login by a fake (“virtual”) user, with a different Maildir tree, so that I can configure them as two separate accounts. The first set of changes is to dovecot.conf to add an additional authentication source. Modify the “auth default” block to add a new “passwd-file” passdb in addition to the “pam” passdb (or whatever your system is using).

passdb passwd-file  
  args = /etc/dovecot/passwd
 

This lets us authenticate virtual users, but we also want to set their attributes, so we can use the same file as a userdb in the same “auth” block.

userdb passwd-file  
  args = /etc/dovecot/passwd
 

Dovecot will now check both PAM and this file for user information. We now simply need to add a line to this file to specify the virtual user and set up the alternate Maildir tree.

scott+canonical:PASSWORD:1000:1000::/home/scott::userdb_mail=maildir:/home/scott/Maildir/Canonical

The format is that of an ordinary passwd file; the first two parts give the passdb authentication credentials and the rest give the userdb information. I’ve set this user to have the same uid, gid and home directory as my real “scott” user. The final part changes the mail environment for this virtual user, instead rooting it at Maildir/Canonical/ Client configuration The mail client will need two accounts adding; one for “scott” and the other for “scott+canonical”. It will see two separate folder trees for each account. An unexpected bonus is that the reply account is now automatically set for me, since I’m replying from the specific account rather than from a single general one.

A hot topic this past DebConf7 was git. I've bought into the hype, so I decided to take the plunge and move my Subversion repositories to it. A lot of people seem to be willing to part with their history when making the move, but I'm some what irrationally attached to it.

Most of my Debian packages are in one big SVN repo, which used to be one big CVS repo (I used cvs2svn to move). So I decided to pull apart each source package into its own git repository. I started with git svn clone like so:

$ git svn clone -A authors --trunk=trunk/libclass-makemethods-perl \
  --branches=branches/libclass-makemethods-perl/upstream \
  --tags=tags/libclass-makemethods-perl --no-metadata \
  file:///home/svn/debian libclass-makemethods-perl

And this gives a git repo that can track an SVN repo. But I want to go all the way, no turning back. So I made a little script to clean up this repo called clean-git-svn:

#!/bin/sh -e
tags= git branch -r   egrep 'tags/[^@]+$' 
echo "$tags"   perl -ne \
  'chomp($_); my $head = $_; s,\s+tags,debian,g; print "git tag $_ $head^\n"'
for i in $tags ; do echo "git branch -r -d $i"; done
upstream_tags= git branch -r   egrep ' +[0-9][^@]+$' 
echo "$upstream_tags"   perl -ne \
  'chomp($_); s,\s+,,g; print "git tag upstream/$_ $_^\n"'
for i in $upstream_tags ; do echo "git branch -r -d $i"; done
echo "git branch upstream current"
echo "git branch -r -d current"
echo "git branch -r -d trunk"

This will output a bunch of git commands that will make this a more "gitified" repo. I make no guarantees this will work, you should probably hand check your history with gitk to make sure this won't screw anything up. If your the part you're converting also came up from CVS, you'll probably have a bit of a mess on your hands that will need more manual cleanup. gitk is really an amazing visualization tool and can help a lot here. Once you're satisfied just pipe it into /bin/sh. Since git svn mostly can't track where you merged in your SVN repo, make sure you merge the upstream branch into master as soon as you can. It will save you a lot of conflicts later, trust me.

One thing I miss from svn is svn export. Does an equivalent command exist in git? You would think there would be an option you could pass to git clone to do this but I can't seem to find anything.

On Thursday I bought a $99 (discounted from $199) MP4 player from Aldi (a German supermarket chain that has recently opened up here). The player is a Tevion model M6. By a long way it’s the cheapest and nastiest piece of consumer electronics that I have ever owned. It has very flimsy construction (feels like it will crumple in my pocket - not like a solid iRiver) and poor design all around. The viewing angle of the LCD screen is very small, so if I hold it close to my face then the viewing angle will be wrong for at least one eye. There are two power switches, an electronic one on the top (which is also sometimes used as an escape key for menus that don’t recognise the key labelled as ESC) and a slide switch at the side. When I use the electronic switch to turn the power off the back-light will usually flicker - I guess that they wanted to have an electronic switch and then put a mechanical switch in the design when they couldn’t get it working. The menus are strange, they have a game menu that only has Tetris - why not have a Tetris menu instead? The FM radio function doesn’t seem to work and the option to select a European frequency range is lost when the power is cut, along with all saved station frequencies. I never got around to testing the voice-recording function (one of the reasons for purchasing the device) as it failed in too many other ways. The device has an AVI of Barbie Girl by Aqua and also a MP3 with a text file that has the lyrics for Karaoke, this is probably the only good feature of the device. Unfortunately it appears to have some sort of DRM as it gave a padlock icon and stopped working after I played it a few times (fortunately it’s unable to store settings so a power cycle solved that problem). When I connected it to my PC via USB it showed two devices, /dev/sda and /dev/sdb. /dev/sdb gave an IO error (apparently due to not having an SD memory card installed) and and /dev/sda was not in any format recognised by file -s /dev/sda. I’m going to have to return this, even $99 is too much for a device of such quality. Maybe I’ll buy an iRiver to do this if they sell one without DRM.

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Started with a cleanup of the account database, to get the official Developers count back to some reality. The first run did include about 400 people, where one or more of the listed categories applied. It started very good - my first run of my script just generated a bounce for every single mail I tried to sent. Turns out its not ok to have “To: user@debian.org user@debian.org>” in your mail text, the setup on master.debian.org doesn’t like this. Oh yes, it really helps to use the right variable for the username part, which doesn’t have the domain appended. Oh well. Then I got that part right, and master did accept all my mails. Just so that I could discover another mistake in my script. Only a cosmetical one, but it helps if you set the From address to the wat alias, not your own, after you finished testing, in case you want to have replies go there directly. Tsss. Now I have to bounce those mails there. Anyway, those are minor things noone, especially the people who got a mail, need to care about, it all just works for them if they reply. And I already got about 40 bounces back, so already nearly 40 accounts to disable. Not all 40, because a few contain enough information so i can try a resend of the mail to a little modified recipient address. The rest is just so that I can’t do anything about them. Well. Ok. There are two people that are using one braindead idiot wanna-be antispam solution which requires you to send some token somewhere to get your mail delivered. Usually I just delete mails then and dont care if they lose, as they obviously do not want to receive mail. I am not sure if I should do it in this case, even if I would like to. After all its their lack of sanity that they do not receive mails… I also got around 60 replies to the pings, with a good number of them resigning from Debian and some others that reconfirm they are active (and mostly point me to their activities). The next WaT run will start about 4 months after this one. Now - 4 months after the previous is over (which would be 6 months from now) or after it started? Probably the first and then have 3 runs a year or something similar. I’m still looking at my scripts to gather the data to enhance them in a way that makes it easy. Like - If someone replies with “Im active” in this run I would like to recheck this if the same user is still a possible WaT target a few runs later.

I just realized that tonight is the last minute to place your bet about the day the 500000th Debian bug will be reported. And I didn't even bet myself yet!

So we're here in sunny Vilnius sprinting on bzr. I thought I'd write up some of what we've achieved. On Thursday Wouter got most of the nested-trees branch merged up with bzr.dev, but about 500 tests failing ;). Jelmer has introduced a new parameter to the sprout api call on BzrDir called 'limit_to_revisions' which if supplied is a set of revisions which forms a strict limit on the amount of data to be fetched. This is intended to be the API by which the desire for limiting history - to achieve shallow branches/history horizons - is communicated at the 'bzr branch' or 'bzr checkout' stage. This API is tested so everything passes, but nothing chooses to implement it yet. I was hacking on commit (somewhat indirectly) by working on the repository-wide indexing logic we will require if we wish to move to a more free-form database with semi-arbitrary keys mapping to opaque data (at the lowest level). I got a core GraphIndex up at this point. Once complete this should drop the amount of I/O we perform during commit by half. There was some other hacking going on too - Tim Hatch did some tweaks to bzr-hg, Jelmer some bzr-svn, and so on. On Friday we carried on on the same basic targets: Wouter fixed the 500+ failing tests so now its only in the 5-10 range, and has been debugging them one by one since. Jelmer implemented the limit_to_revisions parameter all the way down to the knit level, for non-delta compressed knits (e.g. revisions.knit), which made knit1 repositories support the parameter and got the 'supports' branches of the interface tests being executed. I developed CombinedGraphIndex, and have sent the low level Index stuff up for review, and followed that up by implementing a KnitIndex implementation that layers on the GraphIndex API to allow the use of .knit files without .kndx. This new index API allows us to switch out the indexing code and format much more easily than previously - the knit index logic is decoupled from the generic indexing facilities. It also allows us to record arbitrary-parent compression chains. Finally Jelmer implemented the wishlist item for bzr-gtk of a notification area widget that can be used to enable bzr-avahi watching, and share commits with the local LAN/get notified of commits on the local LAN. Today is the last day of the sprint, and I hope that we'll get the nested tree branch passing all tests, the limit_to_revisions parameter causing delta-compressed knits to only copy data outside the listed parameters to the first full text, and have an experimental repository format that uses the new index layer for at least a couple of its knits (e.g. revisions and inventory, or revisions and signatures).

Following Zack's and Lucas' posts regarding group maintenance of packages: Do I have to AOL with you guys? Yes, I also agree with Zack's both 1 and 2. And I also want to share the bit of experience we have got in this regard in the pkg-perl group. In our case, group maintainership has often saved our collective butts. We have also debated somewhat which way should our packages' maintainership be handled. In the end, our packages' maintainer will (most usually) be the pkg-perl group itself, subscribed through an alias that reaches all of us. Then, every group member that feels identified with the package lists himself as an uploader (note that this does not necessarily have a relation with the last uploads, at least not as strongly as in what the KDE and Gnome groups do, according to Lucas' post - it's closer to the pkg-ruby-extras handling). Of course, there are some packages which I have NMUed in the group's pool - packages I prefer not to have listed in my maintainer page, as I don't usually care too much about them, but I happened to be able to fix a bug with them.
Now, what about the roles of the different group members? Each of us has some skills that make him better for part of the task - i.e., we have an amazingly knowledgeable member, Niko Tyni. He just fixes all the bugs that baffle us. Honest, my best kudos to Niko, he is a good part of our team's success. And then, we have hard-working people as Gregor Hermann, who not only fixes also nice amounts of bugs, but also writes and runs general QA tests throughout our over 300 modules. Neither of them is a DD yet. And of course, many other hard-working folks. Some of us are DDs and try to upload promptly - and, of course, also try fixing bugs. So far, we are in good shape, and we tend not to lag too much. I have taken some vacation periods (both announced and unannounced - sorry :) ), but to my surprise and amazement, my packages tend not to be buggy - Why? Because there is a real team looking after them, and in the end, we keep an eye on each other.
For the pkg-perl group, group maintenance has really worked. We collectively maintain more packages than it would be reasonable for all of us added together as individuals, and they are in a better shape. There are several things we can make better, and we do try to address them - it is not yet heaven, but... :) I'll elaborate later, when I finish a text I'm preparing for presenting at YAPC (it's not that long, of course - During Debconf, I showed advances of it to several people... I just have left it aside). Right now... Well, I have 3hr of sleep left before we leave for a daytrip to the beautiful (but hot and humid!) Veracruz Huasteca. See you on Sunday/Monday!

Early this year I deployed a server. As part of my normal procedure I ran the Memtest86+ memory test program (which showed no errors) before deploying it. After some time running the machine started to become unreliable, yesterday it crashed twice and I had to replace it. I ran Memtest86+ before removing it from where it was installed and found several memory errors. When a server crashes I highly recommend running Memtest86+ before removing it so that you at least know the cause of the problems. As I want to use the machine elsewhere I want to discover the cause of the problem. The machine has two DIMM sockets (I’ll call them A and B) and two DIMM modules (again I’ll call them A and B). After getting the machine home I first tested the machine with DIMM A in socket A (and DIMM B removed) which passed, then I tested it with DIMM A in socket B which also passed. I removed DIMM A and tested DIMM B in each socket and those tests passed. Then I installed both DIMMs and again the test passed! I now realise that I made a mistake in removing a DIMM when I got the machine home. I should have tested it again with the DIMMs in place. If the problem was due to heat or a poor contact made worse by vibration then the problem might have gone away during the trip home - it would have been handy to know that I would be unable to reproduce the problem! My mistake here was to change multiple factors at the same time. When diagnosing faults you should try to change one thing at a time so that you will know what fixes it! Now, I am wondering what I should do next? Assume that it was just a bad contact and put the machine back in service? Suggestions appreciated.

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I've made some progress on the bootstrapping idea :) As a proof of concept I wrote a simple script which will download *all* the required RPM files for an installation of Fedora-Core 6. (i386) This downloads 348 .rpm files, which is about 700Mb. (I'm downloading way more files than I need, because I'm not using dependency-discovery yet....) However the proof of concept works. I can successfully chroot inside the unpackaged directory tree - so I think it is sufficient to persuade me that I can dynamically determine which RPM files need to be installed. This avoiding the problem which rpmstrap suffers from. (ie. having a static list of specific RPM version to fetch.) If you'd like to test my script, hardwired as it is, (did I mention ugly?), then feel free. In terms of requirements you'll need:

• wget
• rpm
• alien

Note: I'd expect this script to take in the order of 30-40 minutes to run. It is pretty noisy though, so you'll know it hasn't died! The script will live here for a day or two:

• http://steve.org.uk/Software/tmp/fc6

PS. Don't run this as root. Please.

One of the coolest features of grml IMO is grml-tips. grml-tips is a collection of tips you can request via a keyword. For example if you want to know how to use grml-x just run ‘grml-tips grml-x’:

mika@meilenschwein ~ % grml-tips grml-x
Start X window system (XFree86 / Xorg / X.org):
% grml-x $WINDOWMANAGER
Usage examples:
% grml-x fluxbox
% grml-x -mode '1024x768' wmii
% grml-x -nosync wm-ng
--
mika@meilenschwein ~ %

So as soon as you invoke ‘grml-x $keyword’ and if the grml-tips collection includes something with $keyword inside you’ll get it. I use that on daily base because all the hard-to-remember command sequences or dangerous commands like mdadm, sfdisk,… are easy to use this way. But how about keywords not being availble in grml-tips collection yet? What about keywords other users request but don’t get a match? Thanks to formorer we have a submit feature within grml-tips since version 0.4.1:

% grml-tips nfs
Sorry, could not find a tip for 'nfs'.  
Do you want to submit the keyword 'nfs' to grml's keyword database?
The grml team will write tips for the most requested and useful keywords.
To use and contribute to this feature you'll need a working networking connection.
No personal data will be transmitted to the database.
Send "nfs" to grml's keyword database? [y N]
Keyword 'nfs' has been submitted to grml's keyword database.
Thanks.
%

Now being the maintainer of grml-tips I can check what users want to get through querying the sqlite database which stores the submitted keywords. Dear paranoid users: by default the keyword is not transfered to the database of course, you have to manually press ‘y’ to submit it. It’s not the default behaviour but an option. And there’s really no personal information stored inside the database, all I can query looks like the following:

$ID nfs grml 1.0-1 Release Codename Sonnenbrand [2007-07-13] 1184261151

Oh and thanks to Nico we also have our 24/7 support slave within the #grml channel:

19:37 <     mika > grml-tips: grml-x
19:37 < grml-tips> matches: http://www.grml.org/tips/index.html#23

And if our support guy does not work as expected:

19:38 <     mika > grml-tips: does-not-match
19:38 < grml-tips> Sorry, could not find a tip for 'does-not-match'.
If you want to submit a tip please mail it to tips (at) grml.org - thank you!

… and once a week I get a cronjob-triggered mail sending me all the keywords without a match. Cool, ey? All what’s missing now is a bot that writes all the missing tips on its own. Conclusion: make it easy for your users to submit information you might be interested in - to help your users.