It was a pretty day in Montreal today, and since I was taking care of Amita today I knew I wasn't going to get any computer stuff done. So I decided to take care of some tasks that needed doing around the house -- cleaning up our storage room, changing some light bulbs, fixing some furniture and putting plastic on the windows for winter. This is one of my least favorite jobs for preparing for winter. Probably the biggest sink of heat for an apartment is the windows and doors, so we do our best to insulate them. Doors get insulated foam around the cracks, and windows get covered in a thin film of clear plastic, which forms a pocket of air and provides an extra insulating barrier from the outside. It sounds crazy, but it's remarkably effective -- it really makes the difference between a cold house and a cozy home. It's extremely labor-intensive, though: it involves putting up lots of double-sided tape, cutting just-right rectangles of gossamer micron-thin plastic sheeting, climbing up and down ladders, hanging, measuring, moving. Probably the silliest part is that you blow on the plastic with a hot hair drier to make it contract tightly over the window so it's easier to see out. That takes like 10 minutes to do. Last year I waited until mid-January to do the job, and we were all walking around the house shivering and wheezing. This year I'm getting it done before winter's really upon us, but that doesn't mean I like it any better. I guess I'll just be happy when it's done. tags: winter montreal insulation plastic

My JavaScript workbench So, I've been working on making a Wikiwyg plugin for PmWiki. Wikiwyg is an ingenious Javascript library for doing WYSIWYG editing in the browser, but keeping all communications with the server in wiki syntax. Every wiki engine should be using it, but for some reason it's not well-implemented. I think it's mostly a community-marketing problem, but that's a separate subject. I want to eventually get it working on Wikitravel, which runs MediaWiki, but I wanted to give it a try on an little more deterministic wiki syntax. So I started an extension for PmWiki. I've learned a lot so far; I'm far from done, but if you use darcs you can see my work so far by running:

darcs get http://evan.prodromou.name/darcs/pmwikiwyg/

Since the code's mostly in Javascript, I've been getting my JS workbench back into shape. By "workbench", of course, I mean "loose collection of tools for documentation, debugging, and editing". For documentation, I've been using the excellent JavaScript and DOM docs from Mozilla Developer Center -- itself a wiki. The docs are (almost) complete, well-written, and well organized. And, of course, Free -- it's all under the CC attribution-sharealike. For debugging, I've been using the Venkman JavaScript debugger for Firefox. It's been a while since I've worked with a half-decent debugger, so it's been a pleasure to use. And for editing, I'm sticking to my favorite programmer's editor, JED. I first started using JED because it had the same name as the founder of Spock Mountain Research Labs, but eventually I've grown to like it on its own merits. I was a longtime Emacs addict, and JED has been my editorial methadone. It's got all of Emacs's advantages -- same keyset, different but valuable extensibility -- without the long load times and heavy weight on system resources. I'm at the point where JED is my only editor. One nice thing about JED is that writing language modes is pretty easy, so there are a lot of them out there. I found a half-decent one for JavaScript floating around on the Internet a few years ago, and it seems to still be the best there is. As mentioned above, I've pretty much transitioned fully to Darcs as my version control system for whatever projects I can help it. It's a great piece of software -- all the strengths of GNU arch without the idiosyncratic naming conventions. And that's my workbench. It's no Eclipse, but I'm having fun working with these tools. tags: darcs javascript workbench mdc jed venkman

Dear Lazyweb, What is the JSF 1.2 XML-Syntax equivalent for

<img src="<c:url value='/static/foo.png' />" />

(this will make the URL relative to your application root, not to your web server; so if the app is installed in /foobar, the resulting URL will be /foobar/static/foo.png) My preferred solution would have a useful src= value so an XHTML browser can still display the page. Same for CSS stylesheets, links and similar. Please send me an email at erich@debian.org, I'll update the entry. (Comments are intentially not enabled.) Thanks. [Update: at least in apache myfaces, this should work (untested):

<c:url value="/static/foo.png" var="url" />
<img src="$ url " />

However, the template file won't render approximately in a regular browser. For easy-to-edit templates it would be nice to have an actual value in the src property. I have an idea how that could work with custom tags...]

I'm reporting to you live from Stockhom, where the Northwestern European Programming Contest has started. Our teams (some even have their own website) have yet refrained from beating every other team but are trying hard. As expected, team Messed Up from Twente is taking the lead, even though their key contestant just flew in this morning from San Diego... There's a live scoreboard available for those at home, and maybe just as interesting, a live video stream. The guys here at KTH are doing a good job in organising, even though it was mostly a copy of last year, up to exactly the same lunch and same dinner. We (Jan, Jaap and I) have been participating in the organisation so we'll be prepared for some of the caveats when the contest is coming to Utrecht next year.

Recently I read an amazing review of patient advocacy and health (counter)movements by Steven Epstein from the STS program at UCSD. It is still a draft but bound to be published in the New Handbook of Science and Technology Studies and when it is, anyone who works in this area will gain so much from reading the review. It was stunningly broad yet highly specific. He is able to synthesize an enormous literature on patient advocacy, a field that has seen a blizzard of activity, especially in the last twenty years. Along with providing points of entry and departure into the field, he also examines who the burgeoning interest in the field of STS. What I found interesting is that there is very little work being done on a topic I happen to know a lot about, lyme disease and whose politics I have been following since at least 1999. I am not sure why the lacuna but it is an odd disease dripping and screaming with controversy and seems to stand apart from many illnesses, in part because of its odd dual existence. On the one hand, it is an illness that the medical establishment totally recognize as real (and thus in some respects is unlike the class of syndromes from MCS to chronic fatigue, which another STS researcher, Joe Dumit provocatively describes as illnesses you have to fight to get ). But that is only half the picture because mainstream medicine tends think that lyme is not only easy to diagnose but also to treat, so much so that if a person thinks they have lyme (even after a round of antibiotics or lacking diagnostic markers), the are either seen as suffering from something else (and usually then told they have one of those highly contested syndromes), or more often just crazy. So it exists dually: at once recognized but only narrowly, so that in another form, that of chronicty, lyme cannot exist. It is this dual quality of lyme that defines and shapes its politics and just recently, new developments have fueled the controversy. Namely it follows from the Infectious Diseases Society of America new guidelines for the diagnosis and treatment of lyme, published last month. In a nutshell, they basically re-reduce lyme to a very easily diagnosable and treatable illness, calling for even more strict guidelines for its diagnosis than now exist. They sanction a small range of blood tests and thus totally nullify the role for clinical diagnosis, which even the CDC had acknowledged as vital in times past. Unsurprisingly this has thrown the chronic lyme community in a total tizzy and they have not taken this sitting down. A petition has been launched and protests have been planned. And amid the controversy, politicians have already heard the call to arms. In the state where lyme is a famous entity for it was first discovered there, Connecticut, its Attorney General is calling for an anti-trust investigation into the Infectious Diseases Society of America, in essence for using their clout and prestige to legitimate a gold standard in diagnosis and treatment, when it seems far from obvious that this should be the standard. According to the LDA press release:

The national non-profit Lyme Disease Association (LDA), representing more Lyme disease patients than any organization in the United States, applauds Connecticut State Attorney General Richard Blumenthal for beginning an investigation into the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA) Lyme disease guidelines development process. In an unprecedented move, the Attorney General’s office filed a Civil Investigative Demand (CID) to look into possible anti-trust violations by the IDSA in connection with exclusionary conduct and monopolization in the development of the Lyme guidelines

What I find so interesting is that this latest chapter in the grungy and torrid politics of lyme encapsulates the very nature of the politics of lyme, which really is about the agency of bacteria and in the Latourian sense. If Pasteur had to put a lot of effort into making credible the bacteriological model of disease as Brunto Latour covers in The Pasteurization of France and if there was plenty of future prostelyzing needed to bring credibility to the bacteria to more general publics, as Nancy Tomes illustrates in The Gospel of Germs, well now, I think we are in an era where we think we have such intimacy with the biological ins and outs of bacteria, it is almost impossible for the scientific community to imagine bacteria as such complex organisms that they can be in fact very difficult to diagnose, eradicate and treat. It is just no longer part of the basic conceptual universe of most doctors and medical researchers to think of bacteria in this way. The LDA press release acknowledges this very fact in the following way:

The October 2006 guidelines do not acknowledge that a complex bacterium such as the Lyme disease spirochete could possibly survive in the body and the brain, evading the immune system and short-term courses of antibiotics.

For many lyme researchers and doctors, since lyme is a bacteria and we know how to treat those pesky critters, it is frivolous to even imagine or contemplate otherwise. I would call this a hubris that arises not from the arrogance of doctors and the medical establishment but following the heels of success that medicine has indeed had with conquering the bacteria with antibiotics. Even new forms of poweful and highly resistanant TB are still treatable with a potent cocktail. That is, at a cultural level, I understand the blinders. At a political level, however, because people are suffering and because it is plausible that lyme can exist chronically, it is imperative to unseat this cultural comfort borne from past success to get the ball of research rolling anew. I think bacteria (and parasites for that matter as a recent smattering of articles demonstrate) are a lot more savvy creatures that should be treated as novel, wondorous creatures, once again. I would dare say the medical establishment, by refocusing energies on that which they think they have solved, would find themselves quite surprised. updateHere is an article discussing the issues.

Eclipse just doesn't work right for me. I'm so pissed by this crap... I've been following this tutorial (whoever had the idea to use screenshots for the actual code parts... ever heard of copy'n'paste?). At one point you need to add a class. A new class. Derived from Object. So I chose the menu option in Eclipse to, well, add a new class. After pressing "Next" in the wizard, eclipse froze, using 100% CPU. After killing and restarting eclipse, it had only created an empty file. But since I have to type in the data from the Tutorial anyway, ok. Next step in the tutorial: edit the faces-config.xml file with the faces-config editor. Sounds easy. I click on the file, open with, faces-config editor. Boom. First some content type error message is displayed, but the details actually list a NullPointerException:

java.lang.NullPointerException
    at org.eclipse.wst.sse.ui.StructuredTextEditor.update(StructuredTextEditor.java:3047)
    at org.eclipse.jst.jsf.facesconfig.ui.FacesConfigEditor.addPages(FacesConfigEditor.java:396)
    at org.eclipse.ui.forms.editor.FormEditor.createPages(FormEditor.java:142)
    at org.eclipse.ui.part.MultiPageEditorPart.createPartControl(MultiPageEditorPart.java:276)
    [... 40 more lines of backtrace ...]

Error handling in Java sucks, too. Usually you just get a 50 lines+ stack trace. [Update: deinstalling XML buddy resolved the last problem, and I could add a second class without another crash]

Sun announced the GPL release of Java, but don't get too happy yet. Sun's FAQ says "We expect to release a fully buildable JDK based almost completely on open-sourced code in the first half of 2007." Almost, in 2007. Close, but no cigar yet.

For my diploma thesis, I'll be extending a tomcat-based wiki. So I decided to setup a development framework for Tomcat, JSF and all these. What a mess. The installation docs are really really bad etc. Two hours later, a dozen Eclipse restarts, I might finally have the Eclipse.org Web Tools Platform on my computer. I don't know yet, since I didn't even write a single line of code or metadata yet. I think I've picked my preferred mirror about 20 times by now. I wish I could just use apt-get. Debian is so nice for installing software... I wish eclipse were a pure opensource project, and there weren't so many companies trying to sell extensions to it. Oh, and I wish it were a native Linux/Unix project, and wouldn't care about working around Windows userunfriendliness by offering an own installer and own update tool and own everything-that-windows-lacks. [Update: how to install eclipse extensions without going crazy:

mkdir -p ~/.eclipse/eclipse/plugins
mkdir -p ~/.eclipse/eclipse/features
touch ~/.eclipse/eclipse/.eclipseextension

Now start eclipse, go to Help, Software Updates, Manage Configuration and add ~/.eclipse/eclipse as a location to search at. Note that the folder must be called eclipse and have these two folders and marker file in it.]

Ingo J rgensmann blogged about a bug in the Debian serendipity package. Thanks, the misspelled variable has been fixed. It should be noted that dbconfig-common does support remote databases, but only at debconf priority "low". He also writes that Serendipity does not support static pages. Well, it does, but with one of the countless available plugins. This plugin is not packaged for Debian. I had this same problem for SquirrelMail in the past and am not sure what the best way is to resolve it. Packaging plugins separately (one plugin one package) seems obvious but has been rejected by the FTP-masters for bringing too much archive bloat. An alternative could be to create one package that aggregates a number of plugins. With of course the question which plugins would and would not get into it. Any other suggestions for plugin packaging are welcome.

I always associated fake teeth with uninteresting pensioners, but as of today I'm in the proud posession of one artifical molar (events leading up to this). The dentist, assisted by some glue and a screw, put it in place where it should stay for the rest of my life. It has even been matched to my natural teeth colour, so I doubt anyone will notice. Big plus: it's totally immune to caries!

The controversy around voting computers has gained a lot of national attention in the past weeks, mostly thanks to the aptly named action group "We don't trust voting computers". Leading man Rop Gongrijp has made a clear (albeit late) case against these computers, up to the point where minister Nicola has ordered the ban of a specific type. Most interesting though is the decision of the action group to cancel their scheduled court case against the national government. Instead of radically continuing until their goal - a full paper trail - is reached, they decided that it would be better to not jeopardise smooth elections, less than three weeks from now. Afterall, good elections are what it's all about. A wise decision.

I've chosen Turbogears for a recent web project. Up to now, I was pretty happy with this choice, as it allowed me to made changes to the application rather easily, I happen to like KID templating, and it all was rather painless. However, I'm stuck at two place right now. One is a rather expensive database query I have not yet added - I know that it's going to be expensive, and I'd need some way of caching the results easily. I havn't found a "turbogearish" way of caching these interim results yet. Since that brought me onto the performance thing - when writing an app you don't really know yet how it will be implemented, you best postpone performance considerations a bit, so you don't optimize too early - I did some measurements. And was pretty disappointed by the results. The testing virtual machine (sorry, I don't have hardware specs for the actual machine) is rather slow. But still, static apache can serve some 450 requests per second. Turbogears will serve static files at ~22 r/s and the main page of the webapp at just 4.5 r/s (measured with siege, when it's not crashing). I tried switching from sqlite to mysql in Turbogears, but unfortunately that just makes the application crash altogether at some point (no SQL queries succeed anymore: 'Page handler: "Commands out of sync; you can't run this command now"') Notice that this was by no means a fair benchmark of Turbogears (I'm not a turbogears expert, and the little documentation I've found so far didn't help me at all in optimizing it's performance). I was just evaluating where I'm at, and now I'm about to decide where to go next. So can anyone point me to some docs on how to get turbogears up to an acceptable speed (where acceptable would probably be >20 r/s on this hardware)? Otherwise I guess I'll start a rewrite now, maybe using Java JSF and Facelets. They seem to be a good choice if you want XML-based templating. Don't even suggest PHP to me, it's crap. And I won't be trying Ruby on Rails next, either. I don't need rapid prototyping anymore, but can go for the high-performance implementation now, even if it will be harder to read, write and modify. I have now a better grasp for what I need and how the architecture of the app should be like.

or How Mozilla Corporation is FUDing on Debian. Again. This time, Christopher Beard, Mr Mozilla Marketing is talking about Firefox in Ubuntu, that it’s great, Ubuntu is a good boy, that it cooperates with Mozilla , and that by cooperating, it can use the great Firefox name and logo. To be honest, I don’t care that Ubuntu calls Firefox Firefox instead of Iceweasel or whatever. I don’t care that Ubuntu doesn’t care about freedom as much as Debian does. I could not care less. But, indeed, I do care about (yet other) false claims about Firefox in Debian. Let’s see what Christopher has to say about it:

I understand that Ubuntu is based upon Debian. Is that the same or different than the IceWeasel browser that Debian is shipping with their latest release?
It’s different. The patches that Debian applied to the Mozilla source code (which then resulted in their IceWeasel product) are more significant in scope than those in what Ubuntu is shipping (and branding as an official Mozilla Firefox release). Firefox in Ubuntu represents a somewhat more modest set of divergences from original Mozilla source code.

Let’s check out what it is about. And as I don’t want people to doubt my words, I’ll give you, readers, the ability to check for yourself what it is all about. First, please download the latest currently available patch for Firefox 2.0 beta 2 in Debian. It has been in experimental for some weeks now. It is a bit different from the patch I described earlier, so I’ll also tell you what has been changed since this 2.0b2 patch:

• security/coreconf/rules.mk is not patched for the perl dependencies thing any more because the patch (taken from bugzilla #325148) has been applied in Firefox 2.0rc1
• The patch from bugzilla #336056 has been applied because the directory in which we would build the 2.0rc1 version contained a ~ character, which would make the build fail because of this bug.
• The patch from bugzilla #294879 has been applied for obvious reasons. It has been applied later in the Firefox 2.0 release process.

(Also note that another change has been done since then, which is actually reverting a previous patch on gfx/src/gtk/mozilla-decoder.cpp, that was adding code that became dead code when we changed the way to fix the bug.) Next, please download the official and supported Firefox diff from Ubuntu. Uncompress both these diff files, and create two directories (let’s call them ubuntudiff and debdiff) which will contain the individual patches for each file. To fill these directories, please use the following commands:

$ filterdiff --strip=1 firefox_2.0+0dfsg-0ubuntu3.diff > ubuntu.diff
$ filterdiff --strip=1 firefox_1.99+2.0b2+dfsg-1.diff > deb.diff
$ cd ubuntudiff
$ splitdiff -d -a ../ubuntu.diff
$ cd ../debdiff
$ splitdiff -d -a ../deb.diff
If you don’t have the splitdiff and filterdiff utilities, you can get them from the patchutils tools (you will also need another of these tools later). Now, let’s have fun with these split patches… Files that are only patched in Debian: (excluding any file that would be in the debian subdirectory, that contains maintainer scripts for build and installation)

$ LANG=C diff -ru debdiff/ ubuntudiff/ grep "^Only in deb" grep -v debian wc -l
6
So, that’s 6 files that Debian patches that Ubuntu doesn’t. Let’s check what they are:

$ LANG=C diff -ru debdiff/ ubuntudiff/ grep "^Only in deb" grep -v debian

(reordering result for convenience)

Only in debdiff/: browser_base_content_aboutDialog.xul

Adds rows=5 to the user agent textbox so as to display the user agent string uncut by default

Only in debdiff/: content_html_content_src_nsGenericHTMLElement.cpp
Only in debdiff/: content_html_content_src_nsHTMLInputElement.cpp
Only in debdiff/: dom_src_base_nsGlobalWindow.cpp

It’s a patch I submitted in bugzilla #343953 and that got applied in Firefox 2.0. No surprise the patch is not applied on Ubuntu.

Only in debdiff/: extensions_reporter_Makefile.in

Patch I submitted in bugzilla #354413 and that got applied in Firefox 2.0.

Only in debdiff/: security_coreconf_rules.mk

Patch from bugzilla #325148 that got applied in Firefox 2.0 (see above), and a small patch to build the NSS library with debugging symbols (put -g in CFLAGS). That leaves only 2 small patches : CFLAGS = -g added to security/coreconf/rules.mk and rows=5 to browser/base/content/aboutDialog.xul Files that are only patched in Ubuntu: (same exceptions as for Debian)

$ LANG=C diff -ru debdiff/ ubuntudiff/ grep "^Only in ubuntu" grep -v debian wc -l
45
Yes, that’s right, that’s 45 files that Ubuntu patches that Debian doesn’t. Most are windows sizes and similar things that upstream can’t get right because they are values adapted to Windows, but that also includes some changes to the code and some other things. Let’s now check differences in files that are patched in both. It’s a bit of shell black magic, but you can check by hand that it does nothing wrong :

$ LANG=C diff -ru debdiff/ ubuntudiff/ filterdiff -p1 -x configure -x debian"*" lsdiff --strip=1 while read f; do diff -u debdiff/$f ubuntudiff/ awk "! /^--- ^\+\+\+ ^ ^[-+]*\@\@/ print \"$f\"; exit "; done

That gives a list of patch files that have more differences than line numbers changes, and that do not apply to the debian directory or the configure script (which is generated from configure.in), which is what we really want to compare here. You can take this list and run interdiff between these files from the ubuntudiff and debdiff directories. I’ll explain for you what these differences are:

• Makefile.in: Ubuntu adds a line in order to install the NSS include files,
• browser_app_Makefile.in: Patch from bugzilla #314927 applied by Debian
• browser_app_profile_firefox.js: (interdiff fails because the changes apply to different versions of the file) Ubuntu changes the homepage, and sets profile.allow_automigration to false,
• config_autoconf.mk.in: Ubuntu changes includedir and idldir,
• configure.in: Ubuntu changes MOZ_APP_DISPLAYNAME, and adds some echos,
• gfx_src_gtk_nsFontMetricsXft.cpp: Ubuntu sets FC_ANY_METRICS to some patterns,
• intl_lwbrk_src_nsJISx4501LineBreaker.cpp: Patch from bugzilla #161826 applied by Debian for sparc64, which is not an architecture supported by Ubuntu,
• modules_libpref_src_init_all.js: Ubuntu changes some default fonts from serif to sans-serif, while Debian changes fonts for serif, sans-serif and monospace (setting to generic names instead of Times, Helvetica and Courier) ; I think both should be applied in Debian, actually. Ubuntu also sets dom.event.contextmenu.enabled to false,
• security_nss_lib_freebl_unix_rand.c: (interdiff fails because the changes apply to different versions of the file): both patches have the exact same effect, but are different due to changes to original file between 2.0rc1 and 2.0 final.

Overall, Ubuntu applies the same set of patches as Debian, plus some more. A somewhat more modest set of divergences, huh ?!? For what it’s worth, Ubuntu, like Debian, builds its Firefox with flat chrome and pango enabled.

What’s different in the shipping Ubuntu version of Firefox than the proposed Debian version of Firefox (that didn’t ultimately ship)?
Technically, changes include fixes to the User Agent string and the feed preview, a well as addressing issues of coherent branding. More significant than any specific difference in code, however, is Ubuntu’s commitment to work together with Mozilla and our community on releases going forward to insure product quality and integrity.
Why are you working with Ubuntu when you wouldn’t work with Debian?
We did try to work with Debian and would prefer a situation in which we work together. Ultimately, Debian took a position that was consistent with their own policies, and not compatible with some of the exceptions to Mozilla trademark policies that we offered. While we understand and respect their decision not to work with us under our branding guidelines, Mozilla believes that brands like Firefox are important for consumer protection. In any event, Ubuntu developers are working closely with Mozilla developers to insure product quality and features that are what users expect when they use Mozilla Firefox, which means that they’ll ship (and will continue to ship) a fully branded version.

Reading between the lines, that means Debian is not working with Mozilla. It’s not like we’re submitting patches. No. Never. Ever. I’m also glad to hear from Asa Dotzler, in comments to Mr Beard’s article, that this great collaboration with Ubuntu will lead to patches applied to Firefox (I guess the paid Canonical employees having more time to deal with Mozilla than the volunteer Debian maintainers may have helped, especially considering they didn’t have to do all what we already prepared). Anyways, it’s not like some of the patches we sent got applied. So, while I’m at it, here is an exhaustive list of the bugs where we took or sent the patches that are applied to Iceweasel: #51429, #161826, #252033, #258429, #273524, #287150, #289394, #294879, #307168, #307418, #314927, #319012, #322806, #323114, #325148, #326245, #330628, #331781, #331785, #331818, #333289, #333308, #343953, #345077, #345079, #345080, #345413. These don’t cover the following patches (see the rationale for these in my previous article):

• security/manager/Makefile.in, security/nss/cmd/shlibsign/Makefile: Don’t build the shlib signatures, see the rationale in my previous article,
• security/nss/cmd/shlibsign/manifest.mn: Don’t build the mangle utility,
• browser/app/Makefile.in: Force linking against libxpcom.so despite -Wl,–as-needed,
• browser/app/profile/firefox.js, gfx/src/gtk/fontEncoding.properties, modules/libpref/src/init/all.js: Preferences changes,
• browser/base/content/aboutDialog.xul: That’s one of the patches that Debian applies that Ubuntu doesn’t. See above,
• config/autoconf.mk.in: Remainings of an old patch for pangocairo, which is now useless, and setting of mozappdir,
• config/rules.mk, configure.in: Patch from Thiemo Seufer to increase stability and performance on mips, useless upstream until bugzilla #258429 is fixed, but on my to_send list,
• extensions/inspector/Makefile.in: Something that should be added to #331785, but well, it’s WONTFIX, anyway,
• layout/build/Makefile.in, layout/build/nsLayoutModule.cpp: Change to the Gecko string,
• modules/libpref/src/nsPrefService.cpp: Add a preferences directory for /etc/firefox/pref,
• widget/src/gtk2/nsWindow.cpp: Extended mouse buttons support, on my to_send list,
• configure.in, xpcom/reflect/xptcall/src/md/unix/Makefile.in: Basic patch for bugzilla #343975,
• configure.in: Check for pangoxft.

It’s so great to spend a great amount of time on a package, send patches, try to understand how things work to get patches applied, and yet, see such denial and false claims about our work. So please, Christopher, Asa, and the others, just stop talking about Debian, it will be better for everyone. PS for Rob in comments out there: No, ColorZilla won’t work on Ubuntu, because of the ABI incompatibility I explained in my previous entry, that Mozilla doesn’t seem to care much about.

With the elections for the parliament upcoming I've been considering who to vote for this time. For a longer time now I'm considering voting for the PvdA (Labour Party) lead by Wouter Bos. Bos has really refreshed the party and got rid of many of the old (and stale) socialist ideals, replacing them with more modern, still social views of society. He's also from a business background which is a welcome alternative to all the career politicians. My choice had been made. Until today. I discovered wiekiesjij.nl, "whogetsyourvote.nl", a great website aiming to better inform voters about the people on the (long) lists of candidate. Over 80% of votes on a party go to the party leader, while most lists can have over 50 candidates. The website allows you to search on personal aspects of the candidates. After some fiddling I tried the combination vegetarian, < 30 y.o., atheist and reached exactly one candidate: Kirsten Verdel, number 58 for the PvdA. From her blog she seems very sensible, and an extra qualification is that she's worked at my (everyone's?) favourite ISP XS4ALL. So my vote will go to Kirsten. It will end up at the PvdA, and Wouter will get in anyway, but I also support someone whose interests are quite similar to mine. An excellent combination. Thank you, wiekiesjij.nl for providing this insight.

Gosh, I thought our own Republican gubernatorial candidate Kerry Healey had hit rock bottom with deceptive, racist, scaremongering television ads — e.g., this one (“What kind of person defends a brutal rapist?”) and this one (“Here’s a question: have you ever heard a woman compliment a rapist?”) (commentary). Hopefully it will backfire. But now, via the trademark blog, this in Tennessee. Update: and now this.

So, about a week ago I said Harper's budget looked sane. I was wrong. The cons have managed to drop two really useful programs. One is the main Energuide program and the other is the low income energuide program. Now if anyone we don't need more evironmental programs that hit every level of society, then explain the weather.

So now with obvious things to do: Bike on bike to work day and don't stop biking to work after that day.

A security advisory was released today which warns about a severe security issue in the binary-only NVIDIA drivers:

The NVIDIA Binary Graphics Driver for Linux is vulnerable to a
buffer overflow that allows an attacker to run arbitrary code as
root. This bug can be exploited both locally or remotely (via
a remote X client or an X client which visits a malicious web page).
A working proof-of-concept root exploit is included with this
advisory.

The only possible solution (as NVIDIA still hasn't fixed the issue, although they know about it since 2004):

Disable the binary blob driver and use the open-source "nv" driver that is included by default with X.

Yes, you won't have 3D acceleration any more if you do that. Yes, that sucks. Complain to NVIDIA that they don't provide documentation so that free drivers can be written. Luckily I stopped using the NVIDIA binary-blob quite a while ago, and I don't intend to ever use it again. This exploit clearly shows me that that's a good decision. For now, I'll have to live with the fact that I must use software-rendering for 3D (which is slow). When I buy my next computer it won't have an NVIDIA card, that's for sure. But maybe there's hope. Maybe, just maybe, NVIDIA releases proper documentation one day (but don't hold your breath). Alternatively, I just learned about the nouveau project: a project which aims at producing Open Source 3D drivers for nVidia cards. I don't know what the current status is and whether it's usable already, but this is definately a project which is worth trying out and worth supporting! (via Kerneltrap)

The general freeze for Debian Etch has been postponed because of too many open RC bugs. This is handy because ones packages can be even more polished, but only once the archive is frozen it will really stabilize. There's also some people who think now is a good time to do an automated search for RC bugs (instead of a year ago...?), bringing the number even further up. More effort is required here to squash those bugs, and squash them sooner rather than later. That's why Jeroen, Bas and I have decided to work on this together the upcoming Wednesday evening. A small-scale BSP, but everyone is welcome to come along and join in! In other news, my iBook is broken again, it might have been stocked with refurbished parts after its previous breakdown according to the Apple Store. Although it's October, I spent the better part of yesterday afternoon with Stefan on a sunny terrace . I booked tickets to Stockholm, and a very good looking hostel.

I went back out to the site of Ignition 2006 today. We left the event early due to pouring rain and general bad unhappiness, with a strategic retreat to a loft in Old Town Montreal to have fun, hang out, and wear costumes that weren't covered with mud. But we left some equipment on site, and I went out to get it today, and whoooooo boy was it a mess. We tarped everything up and left up protective canopies when we left, but I guess the wind really got into this cache of stuff in the last couple of weeks, because the canopies were blown all over the place, bent, bruised, and generally indignant. Most of the tarped equipment was still tarped and dry, but there was one corner of one tarp that had come up, and everything under it was wet. Fortunately it wasn't anything important -- empty bottles, a barbecue, and some folding tables. The drive out to the site was great. It's a piece of land owned by my friend Sherman Samuel, just north of wt:Mansonville in the wt:Eastern Townships. The leaves on the trees have just about turned, so there's starting to be some bare trees and the last sharp colors of the trees. It's melancholy and beautiful -- great October weather. I was able to cram everything into the Sleek Black Tux (my just-made-up name for the Hyundai Tuscon we drive), but the drive back was pretty rough. The smell of all that camping equipment put up wet and left in the forest for a couple of weeks was... well... pretty gamy. Like really, really old towels. We call that smell "meefy", and that's pretty much what the car smells like now. Meefy. When I got home, Maj and Amita convinced me not to unload the car, but to come inside and watch the Battlestar Galactica season premiere on tape, and drink red wine and have warm split-pea soup. Allllll right. tags: meef burning man ignition eastern townships snazzy tux

Lars, you well-informed and chaste commentator I agree with Lars: Eric is doing the right thing. I understand what the Mozilla Foundation is doing, and it's more than likely the right thing for them to do. I understand what Eric is doing with Gnuzilla, and it also seems like the right thing to do. Debian and Mozilla can be friends and yet not use the same name for the software. That's OKAY. tags: lars eric dorland iceweasel firefox well-informed chaste

Freedom It sounds like, at least briefly, China has unblocked Wikipedia. It's interesting to see if this will continue, and what it will mean for future policies towards China by other Web sites. Unlike Google, Yahoo, and MSN, the Wikimedia Foundation has steadfastly refused to censor its content to meet Chinese government standards. If the WMF can stand up to China and win, what does that mean for other Web sites in the future? tags: china wikipedia unblock

Ingo J rgensmann wonders - quite rightly - when SquirrelMail 1.5 (our development branch) will become stable. Our current big project is making the entire interface templatable; that is, to separate code and layout, so it gets easy to modify the appearance. As with many open source projects, SquirrelMail started out as a small hobby project in the previous millennium, and grew and grew until it is where it's now: a giant hunk of code with stuff bolted on top, on the side and in between, and where HTML output is integrated in about every function. Work on templating had a slow start but is progressing well now; when it works acceptably we'll release 1.5.2-DEVEL, followed by perhaps a version or two more and then 2.0 Release Candidate 1 planned for the first quarter of 2007. As always, any help will make it go faster... :)