Search Results: "will"

21 February 2007

MJ Ray: Environment: Links for 2007-02-21

The Weston Mercury - Tropicana vote - where was your councillor?: Fantastic work by Archant's local newspaper, actually calling councillors and asking them to account for the way they voted on a controversial seafront development. I'm surprised so many of the Worle councillors failed to vote for various reasons. I also think it's a bit poor that the vote was so late at night.
BBC NEWS England Cornwall Row over response to overcrowding: An amazingly brutal and probably honest answer about the local rail company's approach to commuter trains.
BBC NEWS England Train company says sorry to users: Train company admits "too much capacity was removed from the timetable".
Sustainable Building Sourcebook Contents: A book about green building in Texas USA. The whole thing seems to be online (sponsored) and it has some useful explanations about things like thermal mass.
The Weston Mercury - Town centre demolition: Dolphin Square is ugly, but I think it's actually one of the better examples of 60s rectangular town centre building. It's not listed or anything and it's so near the beach, I don't doubt it will be demolished. What will happen to our supermarket there? I hope there will still be one in the town centre area.
RADBURN, NJ: A recent planning process commented that my part of the village is a 'Radburn-style' development and that's why some parts have parking problems at the moment. I didn't know what that meant, so I looked it up. It means that the main access to our houses are footpaths and cars are left in cul-de-sacs around the edge of the development. That explains some of the apparently-confusing naming/numbering decisions. This is the site of the original Radburn.
Top 10 annoying commuting issues: Martyn in top form, ranting about his trip to work. I'm so glad my commutes are mostly cycling across countryside now.
Everyday Cycling - British Cycling Confirms Major Cyclosportive: Want to ride the TdF London-Kent route on 1st July?
Bagel Belly Blog: Travel trouble: Savs's long lane to Leicester. My comment: don't ever believe the route planners. Every one I've seen so far optimises for theoretical speed or distance, when what we really need is resilience and fuel economy too. The A47 vs A11/A14 choice is an extreme example: A11/A14 has far more free-flowing junctions and dual-carriageway than the A47.

Dirk Eddelbuettel: littler 0.0.10 released

Another bug fix release -- this time triggered by Detlef's problems to build r (pronounced littler) on SUSE/OpenSUSE. Jeff also added better rng initialization fixing problems I noticed with tempfile(), added checks for the upcoming R 2.5.0, and made tests in tests/ use a path of ../r. Lastly, we added a short segment on the upcoming, err, shall I say 'cousin' Rscript that will be released with R 2.5.0. As usual, everything is in our svn archive, on my r page, and in the local directory here. A fresh package is in Debian's incoming queue, and Jeff's littler page at Vanderbilt should reflect the new release soon too.

Gunnar Wolf: Back from [VAC]?

On January 13, I sent a mail to debian-private saying I'd be on a semi-vacation until around February 10 - And yes, for over a month I've basically not touched my packaging, and for around three months my general profile in Debian has been really low. I sent this message because the Institute I work at moved, and I got the task of taking care of everything related with electrons flows carrying information (namely, voice and data networks).
It's not that I'm really-really-back now - Work is still too absorbing, users still come too often to me expecting me to solve their problems. I can often try to do so on the data network, but I'm far from even having access to the voice equipment (I've done my hardest effort not to get such access, because that'd instantly turn me into the phone operator for life). However, for the first time in many weeks, today I had some quiet time, I catched up with some mailing lists, and... Well, I expect to work on my QA page.
Boy, team-maintainership rules! pkg-perl friends, thanks for saving me from the creepy bugs sometimes too often. I expect to pick up work I haven't even looked at since I committed to doing so with the pkg-ruby-extras team as well, specifically, getting mongrel in shape and into Debian, despite our deep differences with its author. This will make Rails roll smoother and faster in Debian. And of course, there is Debconf. After last year's burnout, I think I recovered - I'm not a core organizator anymore, but I'm back to work my way to Edimburgh ;-)
As for my local activities (Mexican Free Software conferences, meetings and people): Partly because so I decided and partly because so it happened, I've been off the hook with the local community since before Debconf 6. Before, because I was too busy to think about anything besides it, and after, because I was burnt out and somewhat bitter at several facts. I've been to few regional or local conferences, also because I knew that between last October and today I'd be too tied up at work. But last week we had both CONSOL and BarCamp Mexico. Somehow I managed to be at both (well, at CONSOL I was only enough time to do my two talks, for which I miraculously managed to get prepared, and BarCamp was during the weekend). Both were very positive for me, and I'm willing again to find some time to devote to promoting and developing Free Software in our country.
Oh! One more note: Thanks to Sergio Mendoza for pushing me and for co-discussing on the subject, we are getting small but tangible results pointing to a Debian-UNAM project. Not much to see yet, besides having received the domain authority, which for now just means a nicer name for Nisamox, Mexico's main (and only long-running) full Debian mirror.

20 February 2007

Erich Schubert: Dell customer wishlist

Dell is collecting customer wishes. It's interesting to see that all the top wishes are software related: starting with Linux preinstalled, OpenOffice, no AOL software preinstalled but a plain Vista only, Firefox as default browser or no software installed at all. I'd strongly suggest Dell to consider bundling at least OpenOffice, Firefox, Inkscape, Gaim, Thunderbird, Gimp and some more of the great Opensource software available for Windows (remember: they're free - no extra cost, but some customers will be happy for having a good vector graphics program, or a free office suite...) And I'd definitely like to see Dell offering a "no windows" option; I don't want to pay the Microsoft tax. An OS-less PC is fine for me, but it should be really cheap for Dell to get e.g. Ubuntu preinstalled.

Meike Reichle: Bilingual

I've decided to split my blog into an English and a German section. This is mostly because I've now also started blogging about some local events that are probably not of much interest to readers from other countries, so I'll blog these in German, but the rest will still be in English. All English posts will still be syndicated on Planet Debian, the German ones will only be readable via my blog or the respective feed. Talking about feeds, I spent some time trying out different feed formats for this blog, since I had some trouble with Planet. The current one (rss2.0) doesn't validate because there is html in the description element but apart from that it seems to be fine, so I'll keep it for the moment.

Sven Mueller: Dual boot and full encryption - Part 2

In my previous post about “Dual boot and full encryption“, I talked about the difficulties of combining full disk encryption for Windows with the option to dual-boot into Linux. Thanks to Jari Eskelinen (who probably is the anonymous user who posted the link to his page in a comment to my original entry), there now is a solution for this problem, at least for DriveCrypt Plus Pack from SecurStar GmbH. I will try this solution soon and it’s likely that I will blog about the results.

Bastian Venthur: Rebuilding the Archive Using Cowbuilder

Did you ever want to rebuild the archive, but setting up this whole wanna-build/sbuild/buildd stuff somewhat scared you? Then this small script might be for you. All you need is cowbuilder, the rights to build inside a cowbuilder environment and this script. When you call it with a list of packages as argument it will build every package in a clean cowbuilder environment, saving the buildlog (succeeded-$package or failed-$package) and cleaning up the rest afterwards. To speed up things you can run several instances of this script concurrently — lockfiles will prevent the script from building the same package more than once. It is even safe to kill the script and restart it later. It will automatically skip all packages where a logfile (succeded failed)-$package already exists. All you have to do after you killed the script is to remove the lockfile in the LOGDIR and the $package-directory in the BUILDDIR.


#!/bin/sh
# Version: 2007-02-20
LIST=$1
LOGDIR=$(pwd)/"logs"
BUILDDIR=$(pwd)/"build"
BASEPATH="/var/cache/pbuilder/base-testing.cow"
function build  
    PACKAGE=$1
    mkdir -p $BUILDDIR/$PACKAGE
    cd $BUILDDIR/$PACKAGE
    apt-get source $PACKAGE &> /dev/null
    cd $(find . -type d ! -name .)
    pdebuild --pbuilder cowbuilder --use-pdebuild-internal --buildresult .. -- --basepath $BASEPATH &> $LOGDIR/.$PACKAGE
    if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then
        mv $LOGDIR/.$PACKAGE $LOGDIR/succeeded-$PACKAGE
    else
        mv $LOGDIR/.$PACKAGE $LOGDIR/failed-$PACKAGE
    fi
    cd $BUILDDIR
    rm -rf $PACKAGE
 
[ -d $LOGDIR ]   mkdir $LOGDIR
if [ ! -e $LIST ]; then
    echo "No Buildlist given."
    exit 1
fi
while read package; do
    # Create Lockfile (ln -s is atomic and fails if link already exists)
    ln -s $package $LOGDIR/.$package.lock 2> /dev/null   continue
    # Build the package if not already built
    if [ ! -e $LOGDIR/succeeded-$package -a ! -e $LOGDIR/failed-$package ]; then
        echo $(date +%F %T) Building $package...
        build $package
    fi
    # Remove Lockfile
    rm -f $LOGDIR/.$package.lock
done  $LIST

I know my bash scripting skills are shitty, so please send patches after you laughed

I’m currently running two instances concurrently for 3 days on my Pentium 2,4GHz HT box and have rebuilt ~70% of the testing archive so far. It would be cool to distribute the rebuilt across a few computers via ssh, so that they’re all building on the same list but using their own cowbuilders. It should be sufficient if all computers shared the same LOGDIR across the network, but I’m not sure how to do this. NFS does not the trick since it cannot guarantee the atomicity of the ln-command.

Joey Hess: google hunt

What will it be like to be able to google yourself for everything that's hit the net about you ever since you were born? I don't know, but I'm having an amusing time leaving little nuggets hidden on the net for someone to find in a dozen years.

Benjamin Mako Hill: Novartis, Stop It

Swiss pharmaceutical company Novartis is currently suing the Indian government over its patent law in an effort to further limit production of generic drugs in India. Among other drugs, the company is trying to stop India's production of generic AIDS medicines that supplies more than half of the developing world. M decins Sans Fronti res (MSF) has a great FAQ and bunch of other information on their access to essential medicines (AEM) site that you should check out if you are unfamiliar with the case. Mika has been working on a variety of AEM projects for a while with quite a few important successes. From a certain perspective, some of the core calls for access to knowledge share common ground with free software, free culture, and anti software patent advocacy that I've been involved in. Of course, it puts things in perspective to see Mika and others in the AEM community point to millions of people and say that those people will die because of an IP maximilist position. Last week, I went with Mika to a protest of Novartis near MIT. It was just below freezing, slushy, raining, sleeting, and probably the worst weather I've ever experienced in Cambridge. Despite all that, it was wonderful to join a large group of activists in Cambridge/Boston and around the world to send a strong message to Novartis. You can watch a video of the protest or see a set of photographs. Both were taken by my friend Jay.

19 February 2007

Jonathan McDowell: The UK rail network sucks

I've been ill; I had the flu (first time I've ever actually had to take a day off work). And then I spent a week working from Portstewart. Which was a bit odd, as Katherine's living in furnished rented accomodation which means the decor is completely not us (we've always lived in unfurnished places before). Anyway. I went down to London Saturday week ago, and of course there was no direct train from Norwich because Network Rail like to screw over people travelling on weekends. And then I came back from Stansted yesterday and there were no trains from Stansted. So I end up on a replacement bus service to Cambridge (where I'm supposed to pick up a train to Norwich). And the moron driver goes to Audley End (fair enough, we knew it would stop there), reaches J9 of the M11 and decides to go southbound rather than over the junction towards Cambridge. So we end up practically back at Stansted - at J8 he comes off the M11 and rejoins northbound, then drives up to J11 before coming off. I'm not a Cambridge resident, but I'm sure this isn't a sensible route, even factoring in that I don't think you can go northbound at J9. 3 hours of travelling time. I'd have been better on the bus, but I just missed it and the next one wasn't for another 2 hours. And then there's pricing. I'm going to a wedding in Glasgow next month. It was £50 cheaper to fly than take the train (and even given check in times I suspect will be significantly faster). I'm considering a meeting in Manchester at the start of April and flying is cheaper than the train (again by over £50) and in fact given the timings would mean I could actually do it in a day rather than having to sort out accomodation. Flying is even cheaper than driving it seems, and probably faster or at least equal given check in times. I know I'm supposed to be flying less, but it's hard. Give me a viable rail network that's actually competitive on pricing (I'm not even talking about walk on pricing, I'm trying to book in advance with known travel dates/times) and has a decent schedule and I'll use it!

Biella Coleman: A simple list of favorite articles and books

While I use delicious, I find it somewhat of a chaotic mess, even if you can eventually find stuff thanks to le tagging. Because of the chaos, I have decided to compile a simple list of my favorite articles and books. Most of these are good for teaching and make a worthy second read. I have had to rely on memory to get most of the articles I have on the list there so there will be others coming soon. I am also more interested in getting the articles there than the books (and actually am putting books that I would use to teach with which is why there is not much up there now).

Andrew McMillan: Unexpected interaction between kernel config options

There was an interesting read the other week on LKML where someone or other was trying to say that no kernel config options should be hidden, and any that are should be turned into options that are linked, so that you can "see what you are doing". At the time Linus posted an excellent rant straight back, saying that more options should be hidden, and that the knobs and twiddles that people see should be obvious. I thought at the time that Linus response on this was extremely appropriate, but I didn't expect to be bitten by the opposite approach quite so immediately! I have been trying to build 2.6.20 for the last few days and wondering where in hell has the "Software Suspend" option gone. Well, today I found out that if you disable "Hot Pluggable CPUs" the option will never appear. If Linus has his way this problem would not happen, because the two knobs that people might want to twiddle, which appear superficially unrelated would actually have three settings in truth:

CONFIG_USER_HOTPLUG_CPU
CONFIG_HOTPLUG_CPU
CONFIG_SOFTWARE_SUSPEND

The first setting would be a user-selectable knob, which would ensure that CONFIG_HOTPLUG_CPU was enabled, regardless of the state of software suspend. The last one would ensure that CONFIG_HOTPLUG_CPU and CONFIG_SOFTWARE_SUSPEND were enabled. The current approach is that iff I enable software suspend, then the hotplug CPU option disappears, and OTOH if I disable hotplug CPUs the software suspend option disappears. What I did was to start with a clean, unconfigured 2.6.20 kernel and go through all of the options starting at the top, which is something I tend to do with new hardware. The idea of hot plug CPUs seemed like something I didn't need, so I disabled it. With Linus' approach I would then have enabled Software Suspend a couple of minutes later, and the hidden config option would have been re-enabled behind the scenes. With the way things are at present, I built a good number of kernels and went through quite a bit of hardware blaming before I grepped .Kconfig for SUSPEND and found out what had happened, and which option I needed to enable. It is nice to know that their is such deep sanity at the heart of the kernel development process! Hopefully someone in a position to do so will notice this particular little gotcha and fix it soon, or perhaps someone wanting an "in" to start kernel hacking could go through the kernel configuration and clean up such gotchas. It certainly seems to me that Linus would accept patches for this as being rational.

Kartik Mistry: at home and 1 year!

* I was back home on Friday noon. I knew that lots of work is in TODO list in this short & sweet visit. Went to Office to fix some issues (webmail’s access and meeting people was main reason!).
* Paid two bills.
* Fixed FTBFS for LDTP. New version is also in incoming right now!
* And yes, Yesterday (18th) was my Marriage Anniversary! Thanks to K! I know that I should go to bed right now else I will miss my train today

Wouter Verhelst: FOSDEM booth: more volunteers needed

Yesterday, I sent out an email to the debian-events-eu mailinglist, to ask for more volunteers for the FOSDEM booth next weekend. The situation is a little less desperate now than it was yesterday, but I would still need about 5 extra people who would want to put in one our at the booth. Manning the booth at FOSDEM is not hard; you need to know a bit about Debian to be able to answer questions (which means that you don't even have to be a Debian Developer), and be sure to be at the booth for your designated hour. I fully expect you not to be there all alone, but you will have final responsibility for the stuff that's at the booth during your hour, and you are not to leave it, just in case everyone else does at some point, because of a rather interesting talk, or the keysigning, or some such. If there are interesting things which you definately don't want to miss, then just let me know the hours that would work for you; I'll consider them then when I put you on the schedule.

18 February 2007

David Pashley: Ogg Player Redux

After my last post on music players capable of Ogg Vorbis playback, I was recommended:

Anything by Cowan (iAudio)
iRiver t10
iRiver iHP 120
Samsung's YP-U2
Kingston K-PEX

I can discount the iHP120 straight away as it's a HD based player and will be too large for what I want. Update: I'm intentional avoiding any Apple products. iRiver t10

iRiver T10 90GBP will get me a 2GB device. Several people have claimed it works as USB mass storage, although I've seen someone say American versions wouldn't work. iRiver have a firmware updater to convert it to UMS, so I might need to find a Windows installation. It has good battery life of around 45-50 hours from a single AA battery, which is good. It's got good reviews for its sound quality and its rugged construction might make it good in the gym. Kingston K-PEX100

Kingston K-PEX100 A 2GB model will set me back around 65GBP. It's a touch larger, but thinner than the T10. Looks like a UMS device. It can be expanded with miniSD cards, which seems a nice feature. It only has a 17 hour battery time using the internal rechargable, which seems a bit low, considering my CD player will do 120 hours off two AA. Reviews have mentioned that the build quality is a little budget and a couple of firmware bugs, but hopefully these have been fixed now. Samsung's YP-U2

Samsung YP-U2 Can only find a 1GB unit for 60GBP, although there is a 2GB unit available. Battery life is only 14 hours from the internal rechargable battery. It's smaller than the iRiver T10 and is a UMS device. I've seen reviews complain about the audio quality of this device. I think the lack of battery life and audio problems will rule this one out. Cowon iAudio U3 and T2 I wasn't recommended any particular models, but the two I'm considering is the T2 and U3.

iAudio T2 The T2 is a necklace style player, which is rather unusual, but I can pick up a 2GB model for around 100GBP. Battery is around 12 hours using the internal rechargable battery. Looking at the reviews, the supplied headphones make up the actual necklace part and you have to remove that to use your own headphones, which is what I'll be doing, having just bought some Shure E2Cs. They also say the controls are a little confusing.

iAudio U3 This is the most expensive of the products I've looked at at 115GBP for the 2GB model. Battery life is around 20 hours. Reviews have been very positive. Not sure if it's worth the extra price though. Update: Apparently the 2GB model can only be charged via USB, where as the 1GB model comes with a charger too, Also, I read in a review that it has doesn't do gapless playback, which is very annoying. Why don't players do gapless playback? Summary I think my top choice is the iRiver T10, although each of the others have their plus points. The K-PEX is expandable, the T2 is small and the U3 gets good reviews. I think I've discounted the Samsung. I will try and find each of the players in a local shop to have a play before I go out and buy one. If you have any comments on any of these players, or you have another product to recommend I'd be very interested. Oh, and continuing my trend of discovering bands that have split up, I've been getting into At The Drive-In. :S

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Evan Prodromou: 29 Pluvi se CCXV

Impressive amount of snow today -- all the digging I did yesterday when we got home is pretty much moot at this point. Huge swirling snowflake clusters are coming down from the sky and have been since we got up this morning. It's awfully pretty. Amita June and I went out to Loblaw's in the old CPR Angus Shops to replenish our larder, which was pretty empty after our trip to NYC. We had a pretty easy time of it, although I thought I'd be smart and go through the self-service line with my huge cart, which took about 2-3 times longer than just having a professional or two deal with it. By the time we left, Amita was exhausted and she fell asleep in the car on the way home. tags: loblaws angus shops snow montreal amitajune

Jodi Martin at the Lobby Lounge My friend Jodi Martin is playing at the Lobby Lounge at 4538 av Papineau tonight (Sunday 18th Feb) from 7:30PM to 11PM. Jodi is a South Australian a beautiful voice; she's just an awfully decent person. I'm going to be there, after Amita goes to sleep tonight. Jodi's also got a smouldering new pub photo here. I can't tell if she's gonna kiss you or punch you. I guess that's part of the magic. tags: jodi martin music montreal lobby lounge

wikipatterns.com One of the more interesting people I met at RecentChangesCamp 2007 was Stewart Mader, wiki evangelist for Atlassian and creator of ikiw.org (great domain name). We spent a lot of time talking about using wiki in education. Stewart has just launched wikipatterns.com, a site that uses pattern language to describe wiki usage, wiki adoption, and wiki roles. Patterns and wiki have a long and illustrious history together, of course; Ward Cunningham's original wiki, the Portland Pattern Repository, was created to help software developers share design patterns. Many patterns about wiki were first identified on Ward's wiki itself, and others have been elaborated on MeatballWiki and CommunityWiki, but as far as I know no site dedicated specifically to Wiki patterns has happened before. wikipatterns.com has some that I've never seen identified before, like the Content Alert and Scaffolds. I'm interested to see how wikipatterns.com goes. I think it could be an extremely valuable resource. Currently a lot of the language is aimed towards company wikis, which is probably where a lot of Atlassian people's interest lies, but I'm more interested in creating big Open Content repositories based on the contributions of the entire Internet. It will be interesting to see how wiki patterns scale to fit both kinds of wikis. tags: wiki stewart mader wikipatterns.com patterns

Stefano Zacchiroli: dtd2vim

Vim's Feature of the Day #2: Context-Aware Completion for XML (in 5 minutes!!!) You're editing yet another Debian sub-policy. Of course the policy is written in Docbook XML and (should I even need to mention it?) of course you're using Vim. The Docbook v4.4 specification is huuuuge and you happen to know just a tiny teeny part of it. Hence you're dreaming of XML Spy or Emacs context-aware completion. Shame on you misbeliever!, Vim can do the same!! Here is how to set-up in 9 easy steps context aware completion for Docbook v4.4 with Vim7 in Debian/unstable:

# aptitude install docbook vim-scripts perlsgml
$ mkdir -p ~/.vim/autoload/xml/ ~/.vim/after/ftplugin/xml/
$ cp -r /usr/share/sgml/docbook/dtd/xml/4.4/ /tmp/docbook-dtd/
$ cd /tmp/docbook-dtd/
$ SGML_CATALOG_FILES=/etc/sgml/catalog dtd2vim docbookx.dtd docbk44
$ mv docbookx.vim ~/.vim/autoload/xml/docbk44.vim
$ rm -rf /tmp/docbook-dtd/
$ echo "runtime ftplugin/xml.vim" >> ~/.vim/after/ftplugin/docbk.vim
$ echo "XMLns docbk44" >> ~/.vim/after/ftplugin/docbk.vim

Now just start Vim on an .xml file containing some Docbook markup and let the fun begin:

in insert mode place the cursor just after a '<' character and type CTRL-x CTRL-o: Vim will present you a choice of opening tags which can be placed there respecting the content model
in insert mode place the cursor before the '>' character of an opening tag and type CTRL-x CTRL-o: Vim will present you a choice of attributed which can belong to the current opening tag

Warnings: dtd2vim is a recent addition to vim-scripts, you will need >= 7.05. If you start editing a file which Vim is not yet able to recognized as a Docbook file (e.g. an empty file) don't panic, setf docbk is your friend. Enjoy! PS an even higher fun level while editing XML with Vim can be obtained using the "xml" ftplugin shipped by vim-scripts ...

Jesus Climent: New hard disks in the server

After an increased amount of errors showing up in my logs, I decided to substitute my 2 reused hard disks with 2 new ones. The old configuration was a setup of 1x 120GB and 1x 160GB Seagate drives, with the 1st 40GB of both in RAID1 and the rest on stripped LVM configuration for cache purposes (things I already have on DVD or my ripped CDs). Now the situation is similar, but with 2x 250GB disks, so I can put my full music collection on that logical drive. Also, the old 4x 160GB SATA disks on RAID5 are still there, with all my non-backed up music and pictures, which I should consider doing at some point. Everything should be there up and running, including this blog, but something might be missing. Time will tell ;) The installation of Debian on that configuration went flawlessly, except for the fact that on the old installation the 4xRAID5 was setup as md0 and it was confused with the newly created md0 for the root partition. Renaming the RAID5 to md1 under /etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf solved the problem. Also, LVM logical drive was found by the installer, so no information was lost at all.

Christian Perrier: And today's winner are...

...portsentry and mysql-dfsg-5.0 who both broke debconf translations yesterday. For portsentry this is even more sad as the last upload was done after I nagged the maintainer for l10n updates, which he promised me to fix. He finally did the upload several days after the moment he promised me he would do it....and he just introduced a "fix" to debconf templates in the same upload. :-( As a consequence, I now have one more l10n update to handle and thus I posted a call for updates to translators and I will NMU the package on Wednesday. Same problem for mysql-dfsg-5.0. For this one, translators are used to this as the debconf templates have changed 8 times in a year. NMU planned for February 21st as well. As a consequence, the target is still moving and I really wonder whether we will reach 100% some day. It is now 31 days since I began this campaign.