So far, DBus has two types of busses: the session and the system bus. The session bus is used by most of your desktop applications. The system bus is used e.g. by Hal signalling that new hardware was added, or by NetworkManager for network connectivity changes. The system bus is protected via a security policy. Problems arise now when you need to locate your session DBus from a different session. For example, from a cron job. There is a DBus application called "notification daemon" which can display popup baloons. This is useful for signaling yourself e.g. the completion of a long-running computation or just about anything you want. But it's using the session bus, so you can't reach it from outside of your current session. A year ago, I wrote a hack for this, which will locate your current Gnome session, read the environment variable to find the session bus and then send a message to the sessions notification-daemon. This is an ugly hack, however yesterday and today people asked on #dbus precisely how to do this. It seems to be a common question. Maybe DBus should be extended by a "user" DBus, and applications such as music players or the notification daemon should actually listen on that bus (as well). Maybe it could also be made possible to (securely) locate your session DBus via the system bus, I don't know how detailed the security policies of the system DBus are.

French is going the wrong direction as I already explained, but it's interesting to see that Czech continues to progress. This means that maintainers are quietly fixing translations for their packages, which is still good. Few activity today, mostly because of an hectic schedule, being away from home. I essentially completed the translation of atokx, broken by its maintainer, and dealt with several answers from maintainers after I proposed some NMUs. It seems that I'm now reaching packages which are really maintained..:-) Yesterday also saw the beginning of a big update for apt-listchanges. Translations are coming in in a rush and I hope that Pierre will like this. Some translators even volunteered to use the (still experimental, and for a while) Debian i18n server, hosted here, in Extremadura.

Holger Levsen made an interesting suggestion to me today: instead of whining against maintainers who do not interact with translators without explaining what I expect from maintainers, I should maybe explain what we expect. This makes pretty much sense indeed...:-) So, below is the mail I usually send to these maintainers:

Hello,
I just noticed new/modified debconf templates appearing for this
package.
I would like to suggest you to consider calling for translations when
introducing new debconf templates or changing the debconf templates in a
package or, if you prefer, to send a call for translations after uploading
the first version that introduces new templates or templates changes.
How to do this?
0) Install po-debconf
---------------------
If you test-build your package on your system, you shoud already have
it. Otherwise, consider apt-get installing it.
it will bring the needed utility.
1) Call for new translations
----------------------------
Just go to your package's build tree and use:
$ podebconf-report-po --call
This will propose you a generic mail which is to be sent to
debian-i18n@lists.debian.org and call for new translations.
This utility will mention existing translations to avoid duplicate
work.
It will also attach the needed material to this mail.
Please also think about giving a deadline to translators. We like
deadlines..:-)
2) Call for translation updates
-------------------------------
If your package already includes debconf translations (ie *.po files
in debian/po), please consider calling for translation updates if you
happen to change something in the templates...or just in case when you
release a new version.
This is done with the following command:
$ podebconf-report-po
This will build private mails to translators (ie people listed in
"Last-Translator" in the PO files) for translations that are
incomplete. These mails will included the needed PO file for each
translator.
3) Check for writing style compliance
-------------------------------------
The Debian i18n contributors have developed a set of suggestions for
the writing style of debconf templates, to give them an overall
consistency all around Debian. These writing style suggestions are
explained in the Developers Reference. Lintian also warns about common
writing style concerns.
If you change your templates to fit this, please consider 2), of
course..:-)

Of course, everybody will notice that this can be applied to any gettext-based internationalised software.

I have a set of slides for an upcoming training session. They're written in Docbook-Slides, a customised version of Docbook for, well, presentation slides. That customisation is available for Debian in the docbook-slides package, which also contains a few XSL stylesheets to convert the slides into several HTML forms (with frames, without frames, with/without some Javascript helpers, etc.). Unfortunately, there isn't any proper way to turn these slides into something printable. You can get XSL-FO with other provided stylesheets, but since passivetex is no longer part of Debian, it's hard to get a PDF. Which is silly, since dblatex (as well as others, I'm sure) can turn plain Docbook into nice PDF files. So I took the time to read a fine XSLT tutorial, and came up with my very first stylesheet, which doesn't print out "Hello world" but rather turns a Docbook-Slides document into a Docbook article. Which dblatex is happy to convert to PDF for me. Let there be much rejoicing. I'm not sure it's a good idea to actually publish one's first snippet of any language, but I'll do it nevertheless, out of hope that I can avoid frustration for some people:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version="1.0">
<xsl:template match="slides">
<article>
  <xsl:apply-templates select="@*"/>
  <xsl:apply-templates/>
</article>
</xsl:template>
<xsl:template match="slidesinfo">
<articleinfo>
  <xsl:apply-templates select="@*"/>
  <xsl:apply-templates/>
</articleinfo>
</xsl:template>
<xsl:template match="foilgroup foil">
<section>
  <xsl:apply-templates select="@*"/>
  <xsl:apply-templates/>
</section>
</xsl:template>
<xsl:template match="speakernotes" />
<xsl:template match="*">
  <xsl:element name=" name() ">
    <xsl:apply-templates select="@*"/>
    <xsl:apply-templates/>
  </xsl:element>
</xsl:template>
<xsl:template match="@*">
  <xsl:attribute name=" name() ">
    <xsl:value-of select="."/>
  </xsl:attribute>
</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

Attentive readers will notice that, apart from slides and slidesinfo, only the foilgroup and foil elements are converted. In particular, the speakernotes elements are discarded, because I figure they have no place on the printed document. If you need them, beware. I think I understand what they mean by "XSLT is verbose".

We have a couple of low-cost airlines in England and Ireland, Easyjet and Ryanair. They are interesting because they optimise for low turn-around time and general cheapness. Optimisations include making the passengers walk to the aeroplane then up both sets of on-board steps to halve loading time, and putting quite a steep charge on all checked luggage. This all makes sense. However, today, I came across a measure that makes very little sense indeed. Ryanair have added a surcharge for checking in online. So rather than go through their computerised process that (I should expect) costs virtually nothing to administer, I will be pestering the check-in staff in person today. No matter. At least I’m going home today to see my family.

Some day, I feel like we, translators, are constantly hunting a moving target, which constantly moves away. So, yesterday, the very same day Neil Williams uploaded dpkg-cross with completed debconf translations for a few languages, including mine, the atokx maintainer uploaded a new version of his package. And, of course, as one would have expected, he felt the need to change the bloody debconf templates and, therefore, break AGAIN the translations. Not to mention the *awful* use of English in these templates. There are days like today where you really really need to have a virtual but very hard cluebat. Of course, I took it the diplomatic way and sent a polite notice asking for more consideration to translators next time.

This morning, we woke up to find out that /www.gwolf.org/data/phoo/2004_11_03/Vicuna.jpg>Vicu a, our most senior cat, had passed away. She was 13 years old, and appears to have went away peacefully, shortly before our wakeup time.
She chose our home - In March 1994, the first night my mother, brother and me spent at our current home, we woke up with scared, little meow sounds. We found her over our fence - it took us years to finally understand how a baby cat could have got there.
I don't want to start describing all the ways in which Vicu a brought love and light to our life. She gave us such great gifts over her life. We will surely miss her.

Jeff Waugh talks about Devil's Pie in his interview with Linux Format (issue 87).

However, there's this really cool thing called Devil's Pie, which is an extra little thing you run. It just plugs in and you can completely script the way Metacity works, using Lisp. Much in the same way you could with Sawfish, except for being a plugin and being directly focused on scripting the window manager. You can do amazing stuff. The work on that has actually been sponsored by Pixar.

Thanks Jeff! Any more of this and people will start thinking I'm paying you... NP: Flight 602, Aim

New YubNub command: ddpo I'm a big fan of YubNub. Some Debian specific commands are really cool, like dpts or debbug. Still I was missing a command to go to the DDPO page of a given argument , so I just contributed my first command. Guess the name ....: ddpo. E.g.: the query ddpo zack leads to http://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=zack I'll be happy when the first user will report that he guessed the ddpo command out of the blue!

I’m back in Dublin, trying madly to lose the Californian mannerisms. Starting sentences with ‘So …’ is the most pernicious. It’s excellent to be back; there’s a great sense of camaraderie here, and people are easier to approach. It’s also good to have easy access to daylight — even though there’s less of it, I get to look out of a window. I had been intending to go straight from the airport to where I’m living temporarily, but I forgot its address so went to work instead. I’m so grateful to B and his wife for putting me up for the time being, but of course I’m now looking for somewhere in Dublin to live — preferably close to the Google office. So if anyone out there has a room to spare in Dublin for a non-smoker with simple needs, get in touch. I seem to have found the key to avoiding jet-lag. Stay up the night before you fly, so you sleep on the plane. When you wake up, your body clock will be so disoriented that it’s easy to persuade it to re-sync to wherever you are. It’s great to see colleagues again, but of course I’m now missing friends and colleagues from California. On the whole, however, Dublin is an upgrade. I’m even enjoying the rain. It gets so tedious in California, to know that the whole week will be 22-25°C, with no rain. Of course, the great benefit of Dublin is that it’s only an hour’s flight from Durham and the family. I’m seeing them on Friday!!

Canonical and Linspire announced a technology parternship today. I think it doesn't mean much for Linspire and Freespire success since it's basically a switch from Debian to Debian. Ok, maybe less work to merge bleeding edge stuff into Linspire products but not really mind blowing.

What's really impressive on the deal is the CNR usage in Ubuntu. I believe they're gonna use the CNR regular client for the next release for commercial software, but i bet that in the second semester will push to a integration with the www.cnr.com or a cnr.ubuntu.com. It means a lot to Canonical and Linspire companies and Ubuntu, Linspire and Freespire users. Read more about my view on what could be coming from this CNR on the web thing.

After cnr.com launch, the missing piece will be Red Hat and/or (Open)SuSE come up with a similar service providing a way to upstream developers (maybe through sf.net and similar services) distribute development snapshots or releases not verified (signed if you want) by distributions. It will pave the way to turn the Linux software distribution and installation easier than ever. The shame is that Debian isn't playing a major role on this silent move.

There is something very cool about a language in which the easiest, most direct way to explain how it solves a problem is to say, "When we pass the output of [this function] into the input for the oracle we are actually sending the data backwards in time. So when [the code] queries the oracle we get a result from the future."

Sweet.

The story goes on to say, however, "Time travel is a very dangerous business. One false move and you can create a temporal paradox that will destroy the universe (which in this case means that the computation will diverge). When programming with values from the future, it is important never, never, to do anything with the values that might change the future. This is the temporal prime directive."

I’ll try to summarize the problems I usually encounter when packaging a game for Debian:

• Game data is not DFSG-Free: There are lots of games in which this problem seem to appear, including some of the most famous ones, maybe because of the influence these might have in new game developers. Many games have a free engine, and then decide to restrict game contents, mostly not allowing commercial use of these, or not granting the rights to modify them. This usually includes game maps, models, textures, sounds, fonts and so on. Sometimes those rights are granted under a Creative Commons license, which I hope will be DFSG-compliant sometime.
• Some game data might not be redistributable, even in non-free: It seems that many game developers don’t really understand copyright laws, or not care much about them, and pick images, models, textures or even fonts from random places without crediting their authors or even telling under which license they can be used. Thus, many games include data which might be not legal to redistribute. Not having a license means that no rights are granted at all.
• Game developers seem not to be very careful especially about fonts. Many of the fonts included with game data must be replaced by free ones.
• Releases seem to be quite atypical. Usually there’s a binary release including the game data and another different release just with the source code, but without any data file, you need both to make the game go. That means that repackaging is often needed. Game developers also tend to include in the same package whatever binary libraries are needed to run the game, mostly for Windoze.
• Build chain for data files often doesn’t exist. Some game developers even use their own packaging format to include all the data in a single file, and distribute only those packaged stuff with the game.
• Games tend to be very difficult to internacionalize. Many times texts are written graphically in screens. Some other times they use their own translation system, which might be relatively difficult to handle.
• Many games use relative directories to store their data, sometimes needing writing permissions too. As this doesn’t conform to Linux and Debian standards, the code must often be adjusted to use standard Linux paths and home directories to store whatever the program needs to save.
• Some games also need writing permissions in global files, for example for storing “hall of fame” lists. This is usually solved in Linux world by making a games group with permission to write on those files, but it’s quite a dirty hack in my opinion.
• There’s often not a clear documentation on which copyright and license applies to each file. Especially for non-code stuff, it’s hard to find out if it has been created by the game developers, where it comes from, or which license applies to it. I guess there’s a misunderstanding in that, when no license is explicitly said, all restrictions apply, and not the reverse as many people seem to think. No license means no rights at all.

I’m sure I’m leaving lots of points out of this list, it doesn’t mean to be exhaustive in any way. Maybe I’ll remember more things later.

I’m the happy owner of a Linksys WRT54GL. OpenWRT is nice, but … well. Debian is just nicer. And I couldn’t resist the idea of running Debian on this little MIPS system. Since there’s clearly not enough space available on the Linksys, I decided to install etch in a chroot, that I would mount using NFS. Joey tried that already, the Debian wiki provides some information, but I use another technique. First, on another system (an i386, I debootstrap’ed a mipsel etch, using –foreign. This tells debootstrap not to run the second stage:
debootstrap –arch mipsel –foreign etch /space/debian-mipsel http://ftp.fr.debian.org/debian Then, I modified /etc/exports to allow the router to mount that chroot:
/space/debian-mipsel 192.168.1.1(rw,sync,no_root_squash) I mounted it on the router:
ipkg install kmod-nfs
insmod sunrpc
insmod lockd
insmod nfs
mount -t nfs star:/space/debian-mipsel /debian -o nolock
mount -t proc /dev/null /debian/proc I set up some swap space on the NFS mount (mandatory, or debootstrap’s second stage will fail):
ipkg install losetup
ipkg install kmod-loop
ipkg install swap-utils
dd if=/dev/zero of=/debian/swapfile bs=1M count=100
losetup /dev/loop/0 /debian/swapfile
mkswap /dev/loop/0
swapon /dev/loop/0 I chrooted inside /debian, and ran debootstrap’s second stage:
chroot /debian /bin/bash
debootstrap/debootstrap –second-stage When you are done playing, you can disable the swap space and umount everything:
swapoff /dev/loop/0
losetup -d /dev/loop/0
umount /debian/proc
sleep 1 # or umount /debian will fail
umount /debian If you want to re-mount everything, all you need to do is:
insmod sunrpc
insmod lockd
insmod nfs
mount -t nfs star:/space/debian-mipsel /debian -o nolock
mount -t proc /dev/null /debian/proc
losetup /dev/loop/0 /debian/swapfile
swapon /dev/loop/0
chroot /debian /bin/bash That first stage/second stage split in debootstrap is really cool: it’s an easy way to run Debian anywhere, only requiring to be able to chroot at some point.

... is the working title of my diploma thesis. Tomorrow I'll hold the introductory presentation on my topic in the research seminar. This is to explain my project to other members of the working group, so they can give me feedback and suggestions. What I'll be doing:

• extend the existing IkeWiki semantic wiki with a simple calendaring function
• investigate use cases for calendaring in a wiki context
• eventually develop a simple query language, that allows non-tech-savy users to do common queries and rules; others will probably be given full SPARQL or some extension on top of it (for temporal calculations)

Where I am:

• I think I know where I'm heading
• I've started hacking on IkeWikis internals
• IkeWiki actually queries the database via SPARQL to retrieve relevant temporal information and displays them in a simple calendar view
• I have some months to go for finishing my thesis

Difficulties:

• Repeating events. Actually a very common thing. I havn't seen a calendaring software that could handle more than just the simplest tasks. Please name a calendaring software that can do "the last wednesday each month which is not a national holiday".
• Custom time types: working days, work time (8-18 on work days), holidays, ...
• Sub-events. Should actually be pretty easy in a semantic wiki, but defining the semantics right and making an okay UI can get tricky
• Non-gregorian calendars (I'll probably not handle this)
• Ambiguity in expressions. If you have a meeting scheduled for some day at 10:00, duration: 1 day, it probably doesn't end at 10:00 the following day, but at 18:00, end of the working day it started. If the meeting starts at 17:00, duration 1 day, it probably ends at 18:00 the next day...
• Various technical stuff, including:
• XSLT sucks for datetime handling. It can only process very few formats; XSLT 2.0 has format-dateTime, but it can't format a duration for all I know. Still IkeWiki is using XSLT a lot.
• SPARQL is a pain for negation handling; you can do "IF NOT EXISTS", but it's very ugly. But this is common in calendaring: "if there is not another event at the same time, the office hour is wednesday at 10am"
• Ajax. Ikewikis UI makes heavy use of Ajax, but that makes development and debugging much harder; often you won't see the actual error message (or have to dig in some messy logs), because it's all obscured somewhere in XMLRPC and JSON calls

Fortunately, we have a rather strong research group here in Munich. There are experts for query and transformation languages (e.g. Xcerpt, SPEX - Querying XML Streams), temporal calculations (Computational Treatment of Temporal Notions, CTTN) and time modeling Calendar and Temporal Type System CaTTS); and I'm also working closely together with the author of IkeWiki and Xcerpt. And of course they're all nice people to work with!

Don't you just hate it when you pick up some software, start using it and immediately crop into three distinct bugs? Today's frustration is brought to you by ESR. Our motto: It's not my design that's broken, it's the equipment. And if you try to add configuration options to adjust better to the equipment, I will refuse your patch.

No change..:-) Some more activity today, launching the NMU proposals for some packages

• libapache-mod-backhand
• mgetty (but the maintainer will handle it himself, which is not a surprise)
• portsentry
• anon-proxy

vim-scripts maintenance Mixed research meeting in which universities get in touch with big companies are fun, especially at the end, when the planning phase is reached and different, often conflicting, interests show up: academic fellows pulling the blanket from one side (trying to postpone deadlines, planning paper submissions, ...) and industry hard-workers pulling it to the opposite site (which results when, press releases, ...) But the mutual presentations at the beginning of those meetings are sooooo boring, especially when you (as an academic) have to listen at the company presentation: buzzwords, organizational charts, quadrillions of $ invested in R&D in the last years, bla bla bla. What's better to occupy that time slots than Debian hacking? So this morning I proudly uploaded a new version of vim-scripts (7.0.5) which is itself proud to be the version with the longest changelog entry in the package history (49 lines). Among the most notable changes you can find:

• addition of vimplate (closing madduck's wishlist bugreport), a powerful templating system embedded with Vim and based on Perl's Template Toolkit
• migration of debian/rules to CDBS and a lot of other cosmetic clean-up changes
• addition of dtd2vim (the tool needed to create Vim data files for contextual completion on XML files, on which I will probably blog in the next entry of "Vim Tip of the Day")
• addition of several patches which enable the disabling (sorry) of plugins which are system-wide enabled by addition of let definitions in your ~/.vimrc (these changes are functional to the forthcoming vim-addon-manager, currently in the NEW queue)

Enjoy vim-scripts now!

The family of Benjamin Seidenberg released this statement today: The family will not be granting interviews at this time, but does want to issue the following statement in response to numerous media requests. We are naturally saddened and extremely concerned about the serious allegations being made against Benjamin. We love it very much, and right now, our primary focus is on its health and well-being. Benjamin is a very intelligent, accomplished individual. As an honorary pamp-commando of the International Bacalao Organization (IBO) and dubbed the Lauren Jarrett of the Cornell Orthodox Union Dining Society, it has resisted the evil temptation of search engines for over 18 years with a mildly-blemished record. Benjamin attained the rank of Golancipel, and sailed as a Hackergotchi Specialist aboard the Good Ship Lollipop in August 2003. Personally, Benjamin is an extremely caring and dedicated sibling and loinfruit to its brother and parents, respectively, although we amended our life insurance policies to remove him as a beneficiary last week. Considering both its personal and academic life, these alleged events are completely out of character and have come as a tremendous shock to our family. We are anxious to allow the facts to develop so that we can better understand what happened, and why. We hope that the public will keep an open mind about what the facts will eventually show and that the legal system will be allowed to run its course. Finally, we are very grateful for the expressions of love and support that we have received from family and friends, and we ask for your continued thoughts and prayers for our family.

As already mentioned (Camsync is shaping up), I've been working on a script to automate part of the workflow of digital photography (the part where pictures go from the camera to the computer and get registered into the photo management program). This script was PTP-only so far, since my other, older, USB mass storage digital camera was broken. I eventually found the time and willpower to tackle it with the usual method:

• unscrew every screw in sight until you can reach the part you believe is at fault (rather easy when the camera tells you "Zoom error" on boot);
• poke around, trying to see what sticks;
• push the thingy;
• push the thingy harder;
• hit the thingy;
• push the thingy (gently) in the appropriate direction;
• reassemble;
• find a spring on your desk;
• disassemble again, put the spring back where it belongs, reassemble;
• yay, it works!

So I converted my Contax U4R back from an expensive SD-card reader into a working camera (even if the autofocus seems to be less accurate than it used to be). Anyway. My point is: I've updated my camsync script (and the related Synchronisation scripts for digital cameras page) so it can now handle USB mass storage cameras, as long as they can be accessed through an automounter. I haven't tried it on a memory card reader, but it may just work. As usual, feel free to use, hack, send patches, and report your experiences.