Search Results: "will"

23 February 2007

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!

Ian Murdock: Microsoft and the innovator s dilemma

Henry Blodget: “Google’s current offerings–Gmail, Docs & Spreadsheets, etc.–bear all the markings of a classic disruptive technology. As Harvard professor Clayton Christensen observed, disruption begins when a dominant market leader has built so much functionality into its core products that it has begun to over-serve its core customers. Some of these customers, realizing that a simpler, cheaper product will do, abandon the old technology. At first, this does not concern the incumbent, as it maintains a chokehold on the highest margin business–the high-end customers who need most of that complicated functionality and support. But, gradually, as the lower end product gets better, and the incumbent is forced to migrate to even more complex and expensive solutions, more of the overall customer base defects. And, then, voila, one day the incumbent wakes up and discovers that it is DEC, Sears, or AOL…and by then it’s far too late to do anything about it.”

Julien Blache: pommed: PowerBook and iBook testers sought

I’m just done listing all the PowerBooks and iBooks (G4) models ever released, so it’s time to test. I expect some of the machines to work out of the box, while some others will require some tweaking. Please read the ChangeLog and test the current SVN. We’ll have a new release in a week or two, pending completion of the keyboard backlight overhaul and config file support in gpomme.

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 ?

Christian Perrier: Why my free space vanishes...

With all NMU work, I keep many copies of many packages on my local HD. However, I was recently still puzzled by my disk space slowly decreasing in the /home partition of my laptop. Today, I found why:

bubulle@mykerinos:~/travail/debian/nmu-debconf/INTENT/geneweb> du -s
~/.devscripts_cache/bts
1931348 /home/bubulle/.devscripts_cache/bts

As I do much work offline, I use the "bts cache" feature intensively to be able to access to bugs of packages I NMU for l10n. And, of course, I never clean this out. So, apprently, I need to make a major cleanup and I will claim 2GB out of my /home partition (which is 15GB). Should be good..:-)

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.

Eric Warmenhoven: TiVo!

I’ve been seriously thinking about leaving Brocade for a few months now. They’ve always been great to me, and I’ve enjoyed working there. But I’ve been there for nearly five years, and it was my first real job out of college, so I’ve decided I want to try something different. I especially want to get out of the storage sector; even though Brocade is really a networking company, their primary business (and everything I’ve ever worked on here) has been Fibre Channel, which is really only used for storage. I’ve been monitoring jobs.joelonsoftware.com, and in early January (just after I had gotten Lisa a new Series 3 for Christmas) I saw a listing for TiVo. So I decided to apply. After a phone screen and two on-site interviews with a variety of people, they offered me a job, and last Wednesday, I accepted. My last day at Brocade will be next Friday, March 2, and my first day at TiVo will be Thursday, March 8. It’s finally been announced at Brocade; otherwise I would have posted this sooner. It’ll be nice to work on something that I actually use again. (I’ll be working on the TiVo service for Comcast DVRs.) It’s easier for me to be self-motivated when I’m working on something that is potentially going to benefit me, outside of just the usual compensation. That’s the whole motivating factor of open source, at least in theory, right? I know it’s why I worked on gaim. Also, it’s a lot easier to explain to people. Telling people I work on a Fibre Channel Router, if they don’t know anything about storage, is just gibberish, and trying to explain it is aggravatingly time-consuming. Anyway, wish me luck.

Gunnar Wolf: Talk submitted for YAPC::EU

I just submitted my talk proposal for YAPC::EU, which will be held in Vienna in late August. The topic? Integrating Perl in a wider distribution: The Debian pkg-perl group.
I took part in YAPC::NA (Yet Another Perl Conference - North America) in 2001, in Montreal, and YAPC::EU (you guessed right: Europe) in 2002, in Munich. While in Munich, I met Debian's Erich, Weasel and the late Jens. It is a very nice conference with all kinds of Perl-heads, apt for different experience levels. the talk I am proposing will be about what do we work for in Debian, how can we get a better synergy from our upstream group and (oh, this point is quite itchy - specially in strongly opinioned communities such as Ruby's! Perl people are quite nice to play with, however, but still...) what do we (as Debian maintainers) request from them in order for life to be smoother.
Of course, I only submitted the talk. The CFP has just been launched, and so far, mine is the fourth talk offered - It can still be rejected (as it is not really related to Perl development, the heart of YAPC), but I guess it will be deemed interesting by the Perl monks reviewing them.
In any case, hope to see you in Vienna as well!

22 February 2007

Dirk Eddelbuettel: Yahoo! URL changes and Finance::YahooQuote, and hence Beancounter, breakage

Looks like Yahoo! Finance changed their server layout. Data scraping via tools like my Finance::YahooQuote, and those that use it such as my Beancounter toolkit, are therefore inoperational. As a first quick fix, apply the following patch to YahooQuote.pm:

--- YahooQuote.pm.orig  2005-07-17 13:10:20.000000000 -0500
+++ YahooQuote.pm       2007-02-22 18:50:07.000000000 -0600
@@ -34,7 +34,7 @@
 $VERSION = '0.21';
 ## these variables govern what type of quote the modules is retrieving
-$QURLbase = "http://quote.yahoo.com/d?f=";
+$QURLbase = "http://download.finance.yahoo.com/d/quotes.csvr?e=.csv&f=";
 $QURLformat = "snl1d1t1c1p2va2bapomwerr1dyj1x";        # default up to 0.19
 $QURLextended = "s7t8e7e8e9r6r7r5b4p6p5j4m3m4";        # new in 0.20
 $QURLrealtime = "b2b3k2k1c6m2j3"; # also new in 0.20

I will hope to have a first new package out later.

Christian Perrier: fr: 99.908%, cs: 93.640%, de: 82.801%, sv: 80.317%, vi: 77.965%

Stats are progressing again, as expected, and they should continue to do so tomorrow as mysql-dfsg-5.0 and mixmaster were uploaded by Christian Hammers and Peter Palfrader respectively. 100% still hoped for Saturday, fingers crossed. Today's uploads: fontconfig (again as I screwed the first upload), towitoko and webcalendar. A giant call for updates has been sent for dbconfig-common, one of the biggest packages in those which use dbconfig-common (101 strings). A long delay is given to translators, given the size of the file, and Sean Finney will upload the package as of March 4th. I ponder sending a call for new translations for geneweb, my pet package, which "only" has 23 po-debconf translations..:)

Eddy Petrișor: Useful and unknown feature of apt

Note: this feature was at least unknown to me.

If you have a local mirror and one which is further, you will most surely have the local mirror listed first in your /etc/apt/sources.list so that apt tries to download first from the local mirror. Nothing new here.

Add a laptop to that mix and moving frequently to another place, let's say office at work, where the link to the second mirror is waaay faster than the one to your home local mirror.

How do you make updates/installations via the most speedy connection, no matter if you are at work or near the local mirror at home?

Simple (if you count simple something I had to figure out in 1 months or so - to quote partially aj :-); apt will use that mirror if you comment out the lines that point to your local mirror and will use those without the need to run update.

Are you getting my drift? So, how does that add up? Throw in there laptop-net and its feature to replace files depending on profile and you got it all almost sorted out (you'll have to make a restore feature based on the $ PROFILE /before-deselect hook).

So, to conclude, here are the instructions:

install laptop-net
create a profile for the local mirror connections (there is a skeleton example in /etc/laptop-net/profiles/_skel with some examples and pointers, please read the README, at least) that is meant for the place where you have the local mirror
create the files.d directory in the new profile and add there etc/apt/sources.list (with the intermediate directories) the variant that has the local mirror specification uncommented
modify $ PROFILE /before-deselect hook script to replace the sources.list file with one that does have the local mirror lines commented (I created a files-back.d/ directory whose contents is copied over the / directory, exactly like laptop-net does itself for files.d/; that is not actually a backup, but is good enough)

Now you should be able to always install from the fastest mirror at all times.

Holger Levsen: OLPC questioned

Tuesday I gave a talk about debian-edu to members of the Emma s community, who are - among other activites - refurbishing old computers, make them usuable again by installing debian-edu and (keep or) send them to Africa. They looked quite puzzled when I mentioned our cooperation with OLPC and what OLPC intends to do: send new computers to developing countries! I resolved this by saying that I think both approaches are useful, as this will spread access to technology and knowledge faster ;-)

While fixing my slides after the talk (which btw are based on the same talk held at LCA and were now translated to french) I discovered this interesting critisism to OLPC. After reading them, I still think both approaches are useful, but recycling should definitly not been forgotten over this "new toy" :-) TMTOWTDI!

Simon Richter: git repack

Pierre, it should also be said that repacking is not a good idea on a public repo that is exported over HTTP. As soon as I need an object that is in a packfile, I need to retrieve the entire packfile, so if I repack daily, everyone needs to get the entire repository for each update (provided something changed, of course). It is usually better to let a few objects accumulate (say, about 1000), and then repack without the -a and -d options, which will create a pack with just the new objects. Of course, if you are running "git server" and use only "smart" methods to access the repo, you can repack as often as you like.

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.

Mike Hommey: Plus c est gros, mieux a passe

This french phrase is one of the favourites of our (not for much longer) president, Jacques Chirac. It could be translated as ‘The taller the tale, the more likely people will believe in it’. It fits perfectly to Microsoft’s latest F.U.D.

Ingo Juergensmann: Wireless Bridge Linksys WET54G

Ok, for some time now, I've been using my old Samsung Vm8100KXDT Laptop to connect my wired network to my Linksys WRT54GS router, which resides on another floor.

Well, if you read my old Drupal blog, you may have noticed, that I complained several times about my Netgear WG311T PCI card, being not able to be run in my PowerPCs. That's the reason why my Laptop was acting as a wired/wireless bridge (or more exactly a router between both worlds).

Today I bought a Linksys WET54G wireless bridge to replace my Laptop for that purpose. My Laptop was just too noisy and too power consuming and - even worse - the harddisk began to die. It was giving loud klackklack noises from time to time, resulting in a loss of DMA and therefore needed a power cycle afterwards.

Anyway, the WET54G is a nice small box with one antenna and one ethernet port. It is advertised as being a operating system independent device - which is clearly not true. You'll need a Windows PC to configure the device and it's quite awful to configure.

Instead of accessing the WET54G bei http, the CD-Rom contains a small program that scans the ethernet for that device. Next problem will arise when you want to configure your WLAN/WiFi settings. It is pre-configured to use channel 6 and infrastructure mode. Unfortunately, you'll need to first configure infrastructure or ad-hoc mode before you proceed to configure your ESSID, channel and b/g/mixed mode settings. Even worse because you can't change the channel or the mode when you have chosen infrastructure mode.

So in order to change your channel, you'll need to configure it in ad-hoc mode first, then change your channel and mode first, safe your settings, let the device reboot and continue with configuring infrastructure mode again.
Really badly tested piece of software, Linksys!

But beside of this huge annoyance the WET54G works quite nice once setup properly. Alas, I can't recommend it to buy for the above reasons.

Update:
After configuring it the first time, there actually is a webinterface, where you can configure the device with your favorite free OS. However, it was not accessible the first time to me, although I configured a Laptop to use the described default network in the manual. The above mentioned problems of not being able to configure the channel in infrastructure mode still exists in the webinterface.

Arnaud Fontaine: pmnew-gui announcement

These last weeks, Enrico and me have worked on a GUI frontend for pmnew. At the moment, the prototype is limited to the task of finding new packages to install. The goal of pmnew-gui is to have every little detail designed to be as smart as possible: for example, the list of packages shows at the top the packages that the system thinks you are interested in having comparing your system to thousands other systems. Screenshots http://people.debian.org/~enrico/2007-02/sshot-startup.png
http://people.debian.org/~enrico/2007-02/sshot-audio.png
http://people.debian.org/~enrico/2007-02/sshot-games.png Get it

bzr branch \
http://people.debian.org/~enrico/2007-02/pmnew-gui/

Setup The README gives some details about the setup. In short you will have to do the following steps:

apt-get install python-debian python-deb822 python-xapian \
python-apt python-glade2 python-gtk2
./update-data
./pmnew-gui

It works better if you have a network connection, and if you have popularity-contest installed and running. Feel free to send us feedbacks about the GUI. Links

Benjamin Mako Hill: Trademark Violation and Greater Evils

Biella Coleman recently mentioned counterfeit drugs in a blog post:

A pirated movie carries little consequence, except for that the movie industry may lose some cash flow. A fake Rolex purchased on the bustling streets of NYC saves you a lot of money (and robs you of a warranty). But counterfeit drugs, the consequences and stakes are at a whole other, more serious, order of things.

Biella's intentions in drawing the analogy are harmless -- people really do lose their lives because of fake drugs while rock-off movies and Rolexes are relatively harmless. However, her aside reminds me of the much less harmless, fair, and honest analogies drawn by Pat Choate in Hot Property who used examples like counterfeit drugs and dishonestly labeled aircraft parts to support a high protectionist position on IP. Because of the arguments made by people like Choate, I believe that there is a subtle danger in the type of analogy that Biella draws that I think we should try to guard against in the future. The danger lies in the fact that these comparisons tend to conflate at least two very different kinds of illegal activity. Trademark violations are illegal. So it selling drugs without approval from regulatory bodies. So is manslaughter and murder -- both terms used in the Times article Biella links to to describe the actions of drug counterfeiters. Laws in most countries already prohibit all of these things and offer increasingly harsh punishments for each action. In fact, selling unlicensed drugs and killing people is much more illegal than violating trademark and making knockoffs. And it should be. When someone commit IP violations in the process of committing much worse crimes, we should focus on highlighting, condemning, and punishing the much worse crime, not the IP violation which in comparison is almost inconsequential. The punishment for counterfeiting drugs may only be a slap on the wrist and that's probably an appropriate punishment for the counterfeiting component of the crime. The other worse crimes that the counterfeiter is also committing should be punished much more harshly. If, as the Dr. Reggi quoted in the Times article complains, "counterfeiting a medicine can be [only] a misdemeanor," we need stronger laws against selling unregulated drugs -- not stronger IP laws. If we confuse and compare bootleg movies and knock-off Rolexes with fake malaria or AIDS drugs, we're likely to come to the opposite conclusion. Our reactions to such situations should be, "People are killing people with fake drugs! We need stronger laws against killing people in these ways." They should not be "People are killing people with fake drugs! Interesting to note that they are also violating trademark laws like other counterfeiters." The former reaction will frame the discussion in a way that lets us treat the bad components of the crime more harshly and will not help IP high protectionists argue for stronger IP through a disingenuous process of guilt by association.

Martin F. Krafft: Why we have not yet released my Skycon presentation

On Sunday, I gave a talk at the 1st Skycon titled "Debian etch: does that itch scratch yet" (it's far less funny now than I thought it was when I came up with it). I think it was a well-received talk and from first feedback, it provided a doog overview of our situation with etch to those who don't follow the project very closely. I would especially like to thank Steve Langasek, Sam Hocevar, Frans Pop, Brian May, Anthony Towns, Theodore Ts'o, Thomas Viehmann. and the other folks of #debian-devel for their input during preparation. And a big shout to everyone who showed up to the talk itself, which included a bunch of the chaps who showed me a "craic" time during my five week stay in Limerick ("craic" is an Irish way to vent enthusiasm). As I've come to expect, my (not-so-)lovely IBM laptop hardlocked whenever I tried to switch on the external VGA port, be it via ACPI, /proc, or the BIOS, even after a reboot. I also could not get a Wifi association and did not have a USB key on me, so I started to get comfortable with the fact that I'd be doing the talk based off an older set of slides. Fortunately, just when I was about to start, I restored the ACPI registers to proper working order using a uswsusp suspend cycle (of all things; did you hear that, Matthew?), even though Cathal's USB stick and Dave's laptop came to my rescue. Thanks guys, even though I ended up using my own laptop, mostly because of Firefox's Autohide extension. The slides are online under the CC by-sa-nc 2.5 licence. The source is a reStructured Text document (and a bunch of images), which rst2s5 translated for use with the sweet S5 presentation system (S6? Haha). Last but not least, I would like to thank everyone at Skynet and especially Laura for organising this event. It was very fun and the selection of talks as well as the attendants ranked above the likes of such "important" events like LinuxTag. I hope there will be another Skycon next year! NP: Amorphis / Elegy Update: Thanks, h01ger for pointing out that Sun Java is not actually in main, but in non-free. Slides updated.

Adam Rosi-Kessel: MBTA and Blogger Complaints

Does it do any good to complain about mass transit in the blogosphere? According to Universal Hub, the answer seems to be “no”:

The reporter also, indirectly, gets an answer to Paul Levy’s question about what T officials do with complaints posted daily on Boston-area blogs: Not a hell of a lot (then again, that’s hardly a policy change at the T):
When asked to comment on the blog, T spokesman Joe Pesaturo responded: “While blogs come and go, people will always be able to present comments and concerns directly to the T’s Customer Support Services.”
Oh, really? Let’s rewrite that statement a bit:
“While MBTA flacks come and go, people will always be able to have their comments and concerns ignored by the T’s Customer Support Services.”

I’ve had two successive days of bad luck. Yesterday, I arrived early for the 8am train (from Needham Heights). The LED sign announced the train was about twenty minutes late. Half an hour later, still no train. Finally, what was apparently the 8:23am train arrived about ten minutes late. That train, crowded on an ordinary day, was of course at double capacity and thus resembled one of those 1980’s “Aren’t you glad you used Dial? Don’t you wish everybody did?” commercials. The train stood motionless for about five minutes at each stop with no announcements as to what was going on. Finally, I arrived at work about an hour later than I expected. Today’s train was a bit late and had no lights in any of the cars. A conductor informed me that yesterday’s delay was due to a locomotive that failed over the weekend but that the T had neglected to fix or replace it. According to the conductor, “they don’t want to pay overtime.” (He also mentioned that all of these service improvements were courtesy of the recent fare hikes.)

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