Long time no see! I ve just packaged Digi s latest dgap beta release, dgap 1.3-21, for Squeeze. The packages are available at the usual address, using this APT source: deb http://debian.technologeek.org squeeze non-free I have made some changes to the packaging as far as udev and firmware loading is concerned, but this is nothing major. Firmware files moved out of /usr, along with udev-related utilities. Should you notice any issue with the packages or the APT repository, please let me know. The previous packages, version 1.3-15, are still available for Lenny, APT source unchanged: deb http://debian.technologeek.org lenny non-free

As mentioned earlier this week, I changed the server for my hoster from server4you to Hetzner. Because the contract for my old server is still running until the 14th of April, I thought I can make some good use of it by running an Tor exit node on it. Tor, The onion router is a world-wide network of server to anonymize network connections, and used for example by freedom-loving people in repressive countries, or by Facebook users in repressively proxied university networks Naturally, such a system is also used by people with lesser motives, and after nearly one week of running the server, some complaints were reaching server4you a honeynet supposedly detected botnet activity from my IP address, another company hired by Paramount Pictures claimed that someone downloaded Iron Man 2 over BitTorrent via my server. These were forwarded to my by server4you, demanding an explanation. I explained that I am running a Tor node, that such things are unavailable, and that neither I nor server4you is going to be held responsible. Nevertheless, they insist that I should stop whatever I am doing (I am not sure if they really understood what tor is), and when I said that I won t, they decided to unilaterally and immediately end my contract by tomorrow. Thus a powerful exit node that might have made life better for Tor users is doing to disappear again. They will not reimburse the advance fee that I had paid in advance and made a non-specific threat about further claims they might have. So server4you was, at least in my case, not only an unreliable and inflexible provider, they also prefer to cut off their customer s server just because of two complaints by third parties. I conclude that this is not a hoster that you should trust important services to. And I am not a unique case: There are reports of similar server shut-downs by server4you (in German).

[ If you haven't heard of this debate yet, you probably want to read Vincent Untz's and Mark Shuttleworth's blog posts. ] Last year, I gave a talk at FOSDEM about Debian and Ubuntu (slides of a slightly updated version). One of my points was that Debian has better values, being a volunteer-driven project where decisions are taken in the open. In contrast, Ubuntu is a project managed and controlled by Canonical, and recent history has shown that Canonical had no problem imposing some decisions to the developers community: first with the inclusion of UbuntuOne, then the switch from Google to Yahoo! to Google as the default search engine, both to increase revenue streams. So one should not be surprised by the Banshee story. I find Mark s justification quite difficult to buy, and similar to Apple s model where 30% of the revenues from the App Store go to Apple, and 70% to the seller of the application. For those wondering how much work was done by Canonical directly on the Banshee package: the banshee package in Ubuntu natty is based on the package currently in Debian experimental. The package is mainly maintained in Debian by an Ubuntu developer not paid by Canonical AFAIK, Chow Loong Jin. There are some differences between the Debian package and the Ubuntu package, which are fairly limited (full diff here) and mainly about enabling UbuntuOne and disabling the other music stores. That patch itself apparently was provided by Jo Shields, who doesn t seem to be a canonical employee. (Feel free to correct me) I think that one of the conclusions to draw from this story is that we now have several proofs that Ubuntu isn t a volunteer-driven project, and that volunteer contributors should really decide whether they are OK with working for free for Canonical, or if their free time would be better spent on other projects where they actually have a chance to influence decisions. From the Debian POV, I m still convinced that we should take the feedback that we receive from Ubuntu in consideration to improve our Debian packages (by looking at patches made by Ubuntu, or at bugs reported in Launchpad). But my motivation for contributing to Ubuntu directly has just diminished a bit more (not that it was very high before).

Downloading videos from YouTube isn't a problem thanks to tools like clive. But fetching all videos of a playlist was always a little bit tricky. There is clivescan, but it requires user intervention and needs Tk. Other tools have focused on feed parsing, so in case you have a playlist feed you can then download all (listed) videos. But none of the tools offered me a simple way to download all videos in a playlist from the command line. That's when I started writing ytplaylistfetcher, a simple shell script aiming to parse a YouTube playlist, extract all unique video ids and pass the list on to clive for downloading. By now ytplaylistfetcher is pretty much complete and there aren't many changes ahead (unless YouTube changes its page layout again, e.g. back to multi-page playlists). At the moment ytplaylistfetcher can handle the three common playlist link formats. If you've encountered another format or found a playlist link that doesn't work, let me know. ytplaylistfetcher has just one limitation in my opionin (but one I can live well with): it is limited to YouTube playlists. But that isn't a severe drawback in my opinion, as I rarely receive playlist links to other video hosting platforms (at least none where a simple wget call doesn't solve the problem. This little script show-cases one reason, why I like Linux so much: there is always an easy way to extend existing functionality.

In July last year I made a brief post about a simple filesystem I'd put together which used Redis for the storage. At that time I thought it was a cute hack, and didn't spend too much time with it. But recently I found a use for it so I cleaned it up, synced up the C client for Redis which I used and generally started to care again. If it is useful you can now find it online:

• http://www.steve.org.uk/Software/redisfs/

The basic idea is the same as it was before, except I did eventually move to an INODE-like system. Each file/directory entry receives a unique identifier (integer) - and then I store the meta-data in a key based off that name. This means for a file I might have keys, and values,like this:

Key	Value
INODE:1:NAME	The name of the file (e.g. "passwd").
INODE:1:SIZE	The size of the file (e.g. "1661" )
INODE:1:GID	The group ID of the file's owner (e.g. "0")
INODE:1:UID	The user ID of the file's owner (e.g. "0")
INODE:1:MODE	The mode of the file (e.g. 0755)

To store these things I use a Redis "SET" which allows me to easily iterate over all the entries in each directory. ObQuote: "They fuck up, they get beat. We fuck up, they give us pensions. " - The Wire

Have you ever needed to create a MySQL databases replication chain like A->B->C where B is slave of A and master of C? Me neither, until yesterday.

Since it took us about an afternoon to make it works (along with our DBAs, so we're not alone ;)) let's share some knowledge.

A very brief recap of how MySQL replication works:

1. slave I/O thread connects to the master, gets the new information from the binlog files and stores them in the relay log;
2. slave SQL thread reads the relay log and applies the changes to the slave database, without changing the slave binlog files.

Following results of theme survey, I've changed default theme of phpMyAdmin to pmahomme: I'm sure this new attractive look will improve user experience of upcoming 3.4 release. You can expect beta release with new theme soon and then we will hopefully smoothly continue through one (or more) release candidates to final release. While making this theme default one, we've also offered team membership to Mike Homm and I'm quite confident this will be valuable addition to the team. Mike, welcome on board!

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I used to maintain a membership with IEEE. I no longer do. The latest nonsense to come from them is a change for the worse in their copyright assignment policy, which i thought was already problematic. Other engineering societies (IETF, USENIX, etc) continue to do socially relevant, useful work without attempting to control copyright of work contributed to them. This just makes IEEE look like a power- and money-hungry organization, rather than a force for positive advancement of technology. For shame, IEEE. I will not consider reinstating my membership unless the organization changes their copyright assignment and publication policy to better reflect the spirit of scientific inquiry and technological advancement they should stand for.Tags: freedom, ieee, policy

Ra l (another maintainer of KVIrc) asked me to add a request to our users to my previous entry about KVIrc in Debian. So here it is: please report any bugs you find! Please note, that most of the bugs you find are most likely upstream bugs. If you're sure of this, you can help us by tagging your bug accordingly. This is done by adding Tags: upstream to the pseudo-headers of your e-mail. If you really want to help us, you can also check, if upstream already knows about this bug and add a Forwarded: pseudo header to your e-mail (if you want to report a new bug upstream, you can do so at https://svn.kvirc.de/kvirc/newticket).

Google provides a handy image search, and given that the Internet is for porn, it is a good thing that they provide a filter that tries to remove pornographic images. This allows us to define the pornyness of a name (or of any word): It is the percentage of images found by Google that are removed when enabling the SafeSearch filter. For those who want to find out the pornyness of their name without having to count pictures that are NSFW, I have created the pornyness calculator. The range of values goes from 0% (for Ursel) to 97% (for Aletta, exact percentage depends on your location, it seems). This is implemented by some simple JavaScript in a static file, and using Google s API. PS: It was pointed out to me that Maschinenbau (civil engeneering) has a score of 0%, but Mathematik (mathematics) has a score of 2%. Feel free to add more interesting results to the comments.

Once again, there will be another round of the Summer School Advanced Scientific Programming in Python . This year in St. Andrews, UK. Quoting from the official announcement:

Scientists spend more and more time writing, maintaining, and debugging software. While techniques for doing this efficiently have evolved, only few scientists actually use them. As a result, instead of doing their research, they spend far too much time writing deficient code and reinventing the wheel. In this course we will present a selection of advanced programming techniques, incorporating theoretical lectures and practical exercises tailored to the needs of a programming scientist. New skills will be tested in a real programming project: we will team up to develop an entertaining scientific computer game. We use the Python programming language for the entire course. Python works as a simple programming language for beginners, but more importantly, it also works great in scientific simulations and data analysis. We show how clean language design, ease of extensibility, and the great wealth of open source libraries for scientific computing and data visualization are driving Python to become a standard tool for the programming scientist. This school is targeted at PhD students and Post-docs from all areas of science. Competence in Python or in another language such as Java, C/C++, MATLAB, or Mathematica is absolutely required. Basic knowledge of Python is assumed. Participants without any prior experience with Python should work through the proposed introductory
materials before the course.

You can apply on-line at http://python.g-node.org Applications must be submitted before May 29, 2011. Notifications of acceptance will be sent by June 19, 2011. No fee is charged but participants should take care of travel, living, and accommodation expenses. Candidates will be selected on the basis of their profile. Places are limited: acceptance rate in past editions was around 30%. Prerequisites: You are supposed to know the basics of Python to participate in the lectures. Please consult the website for a list of introductory material. If your re a scientist and interested in Python, I cannot recommend this summer school highly enough. The Summer School is always fun, the faculty members are very nice and always willing to help and answer questions. The balance between lectures and exercises is in my opinion very good, and you ll learn a lot about Python during the week. The highlight of every Python School is always the Pac Man tournament, where groups of students will implement their own Pac Man agent (in Python) and compete against the other agents in a tournament till the bitter end! The students of the previous editions were usually very happy during and after the School. Speaking of happiness, since no fee is charged for the Summer School, you ll have more money left over to invest into the excellent Scottish pubs!

As Squeeze was just released, some might be on the lookout for a replacement for LiquidWeather++, a SuperKaramba script. Others might just search for the first time for a way to have a weather forecast displayed on their desktop. With my yaWP maintainer hat on, I'd like to recommend yaWP for the job. Why yaWP? Short answer: because it's the best (SCNR). Longer answer: because yaWP is easy to use, yet highly customizable. yaWP can track the forecasts of several cities for you, you can put yaWP on your desktop or in your control bar. You can limit the amount of days displayed (in the control bar mode). It's localized for many languages (if your language isn't among the already existing ones, please consider translating yaWP). yaWP can work with multiple services, is themeable and can display a satellite image for your area. Now, some of you might still (don't ask me why) prefer a different Plasmoid for displaying the weather forecasts. But even those can benefit from yaWP and use one of its three data engines (AccuWeather, Google Weather Service and Weather Underground (Wunderground)), thanks to KDE's Weather Ions. Ok, and how does it look? Please remember, that yaWP can be themed, so the picture below just shows one option of many.
Included from screenshots.debian.org (License: GPL2 or later + OpenSSL exception)

I spend too much time writing Emacs Lisp code these days. Unfortunately, the more I do the more I find new useful tools to improve my work-flow and save time for doing more Lisp. D'oh. I did not work on any big thing these last weeks, so I'm thinking it's a good time to talk about the various code and patches I sent to multiple Emacs packages. el-get el-get, a fabulous tool that installs and handles all the external Emacs packages I use. A friendly war started on the development list about autoloads handling. The discussion was overall pointless, since we had a very hard time to communicate our ideas, and we did not understand each others several times. In the end, el-get now supports autoload correctly and do not load automatically all your packages, improving the startup time, and using the Emacs way to do things. Which is always better, obviously. git-commit-mode

I've started to use git-commit-mode some times ago. I usually use git-commit with the -v option to see what I'm committing. I though it would be useful to color the diff with diff-mode, so I wrote a patch just to do that, which was merged today by Florian. magit

Some weeks ago, I decided to give a try to magit, and loved it. I am not always using it, but for basic operations it is very useful. But I really soon found some things I did not like and therefore send patches to enhance it. First, I've added a patch to honor status.showUntrackedFiles which I use in my home directory. In the mean time, I've also added a patch to allow adding an arbitrary file. Yesterday, I sent another pull request, not closed for now, which adds the possibility to visit files in another window from a diff file, and the support for add-change-log-entry directly from the displayed diff. Useful for these old projects still using ChangeLog files but accessible through git (hi Emacs & Gnus!). Gnus

Nothing remarkable, but I write a couple of fixes and enhancements to the Sieve manage mode, to the Gravatar code and cleaned-up some very very old code. Also added the possibility to set list-identifier as a group parameter. Org-mode

I spent most of my time working on my jd/agenda-format branch, which is soon to be merged. I've also just got developer access to the Org-mode patch work and repository, so I'll be able to break things even more! ;-) ERC

I fixed the bug that annoyed me for a long time. Now erc-track does not reset the last channel status on window visibility changes not made by the user.

Another week is over and it's time to look again at state of translations for phpMyAdmin 3.4. Compared to last week, there one three translations at 100%, so we now have 12 translations at 100%:

• Catalan
• Chinese (China)
• Czech
• Dutch
• English (United Kingdom)
• French
• Greek
• Russian
• Slovenian
• Spanish
• Swedish
• Turkish

But there are still lot of translations which would need some love:

• German
• Norvegian
• Polish

You can help make translation to your language better!

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Another month and thus another issue of Flattr FOSS. Time flies but Flattr s usage seems to remain relatively strong. I was fearing that people get bored after some time but that does not seem be to the case, my Flattr income does not really drop (it doesn t take off either ). I get a bit less for dpkg than at the start but a bit more for my blog. Enough babbling, let s go straight to the 5 projects to flattr this month:

1. Linux Mint (Flattr link) is a Linux distribution based on Debian and Ubuntu that targets home desktop users. I have never tried it (I m too much of an hardcore Debianer) but I ve read several good reviews saying that it works well out of the box with good multimedia support. If you try it out, be sure to pick Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE).
2. Network Block Device (NBD) user-space support tools (Flattr link) is the set of tools to setup a block device whose content is really on a remote server. It requires support of NBD in the kernel of course. The user space tools are maintained by Debian developer Wouter Verhelst.
3. Tahoe LAFS (Flattr link) is a filesystem that implements a cloud storage. The data are distributed across multiple servers in such a way that it can continue to work even if one of the servers fails.
4. Gajim (Flattr link) is a full featured and easy to use Jabber client. If you don t need support of multiple instant messaging protocols, this Jabber client might be a good fit for you.
5. Aur lien Gateau (Flattr link) is a KDE developer who takes one day per week off his work to work on KDE. He seeks support from the community to compensate for the loss of revenue. Much like me, he has a support page with a complete history of the amount of donations received. I can only sympathize with people who try to live true to their passion good luck Aur lien!

This article is part of the Flattr FOSS project.

5 comments Liked this article? Click here. My blog is Flattr-enabled.

Wow, it's the last day of February and this is the first journal post I've made for the whole month. Needless to say, this month isn't working out quite the way that I'd intended at the start of year, although this is due to external forces that I hadn't been able to predict. The work project that I've been working on since last September or so (and in some sense since last June) hit the crunch, and I was pulled off of nearly everything else I was doing to work on that full time. I've been working 45-50 hours a week for the whole month, and probably will for a bit of March as well. The good part is that we're hitting our deadlines. We're going to push back by two weeks due to a design problem we missed until integration testing, but it looks like only two weeks. And given that we're picking up the entire complex account management system, teasing it apart from another major system that it's part of, and bringing it up in my group, along with reimplementing some bits around the edges and working on very old and fragile code, I'm very impressed. Unfortunately, that's also eaten my life. I'm trying to keep up with occasional things here and there, but projects like Debian got put almost entirely on hold. When I'm working this much during the week, I basically collapse on the weekends, rather than work on other projects like I normally do. I've been playing video games or just watching TV, and doing a bit of reading, but not working on free software or writing book reviews. I'm going to get a bit of time off at the end of this project, and hopefully will be able to rebalance my life again. This sort of huge push is quite unusual for work, which I like. I don't like working this way, and I've been occasionally rather unhappy with how little life outside of work I feel like I have (I can't imagine what working 60 hours a week regularly would be like). But there's only about a month or a month and a half left and then we'll be done and can go back to a more relaxed pace. I'm going to see if I can get a review finished tonight just because I hate going through a month without posting a book review. I've read five books (and three magazines) that I've not reviewed yet; sadly, the reviewing brain requires quite a bit more energy than the reading brain. Or perhaps not sadly, since it means I'm still reading. Expect posting to be minimal for the next month or so, and then it will hopefully pick up again.

I picked up a couple of cheap Linux devices at the weekend. First of all, a $99 Android tablet from CVS, made by Craig. It's a generic RK2818 device and of course it's lacking any kind of GPL offer in the documentation. As far as I know the only company that's released any Rockchip source so far has been Archos, and even then they haven't released the tools you need to actually build an image - they seem to be floating around the internet anyway. But it's straightforward to get it to run the Android market, and it runs Shortyz quite well, so fit for purpose from my point of view. I am, obviously, attempting to contact Craig to find out how they're going to satisfy their obligations but haven't got past their bizarre text-to-speech based support menu system that dumps you to answerphone after 5 minutes of being on hold. Next attempt will involve pressing more buttons.

The other one was a Sharper Image Literati e-reader, $49 from Macy's (on clearance, obviously). This one's interesting by virtue of not being an Android device. Instead it's got a fairly recognisable Busybox-based Linux environment that's even got udev and dbus running. It brings up a framebuffer and just dumps a QTE-based reader (from Kobo) onto it. Other than being woefully underpowered and slow, it actually seems very competent. There seem to be several versions of the hardware - the one I got has an ARM SoC from SiRF on it. SiRF make GPS chipsets, and it turns out that their Atlas 5 platform is actually intended for Linux-based GPS units. The embedded world always seems to find a way. What surprised me more is that it's probably the most polished looking Linux I've bought for under $300. No bizarre kernel spew. echo mem >/sys/power/state works. Standard backlight interface.

Oh, and no source. Obviously. But an interesting device regardless.

The phpMyAdmin survey for new theme is over and it's time to publish results. Today I will show only basic summary, I will dig deeper into the data later. The first question for default theme has quite clear winner: As the results are quite persuating, this gives no space to discuss. Next question was about inclusion of additional theme in standard download kit: While two themes still have big majority, people are not that convinced about it. The last question of the survey was which theme should be included as additional in the download kit: I think this is most interesting result - while in question about default theme Graphite theme was clearly the second one, in this question people have indicated that Original theme should stay in the download kit. I would like to thank to all 228 people who have participated (the number is low because the survey required email confirmation, but I still think it is better way than thousands of votes which are easily scriptable).

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This past weekend I've had the pleasure to join our friends from Valls, in the Camp de Tarragona, for our annual Cal otada in Picamoixon's countryside. This was the fourth time in a row I attend, and as always, it's been a blast, even if Enric and Clara weren't there, and the Valencian group was reduced to just 5 of us. Unfortunately I had my share of alcohol on Friday evening/night while partying with my workmates so when we got to Tarragona I was basically wasted. This made me not want to take a single sip of any kind of beverage not consisting of a 100% of water during the two days, but that didn't, of course, spoil a single moment of fun. Again, we've had the full traditional pack: prepare, cook and enjoy the delicious cal ots; our share of mayhem just after eating them, during the cal ot war, which this time resulted in a really filthy face and hair; our little walk around the area, including a visit to the chapel of the altar boy ; play in the metres tall mountains of gravel in the quarry and a brief visit to the ruins of an abandoned house, to discover none of its floors have colapsed yet.

A great finish for a great weekend is getting to visit Jordi and Anna, after 3 years of no luck, and finally meeting their lovely 2.5 years old daughter Martina. This weekend just rocks, and I'm already looking forward to next year's!

I've been building unofficial wine-unstable packages for some time now and the amount of people apparently using them has become noticable (not only traffic-wise). Thus the amount of questions send to me has also risen quite a bit. In this post I try to address most of the questions in the hope it'll help people understand my motives for building these packages and potential pit falls for users. First of all: I'll stop building those packages as soon as Debian has a for my purposes recent enough version in the archives. This is expected to happen soon as most/all of the blocking issues should be sorted out now/soon. See e.g. #557783 for some insight into the problems. It might happen after updated packages are in Debian, that I'll build one version or the other occasionally to test a certain patch or version. The bottom line of this is: don't rely on me to provide always the latest packages. (This, by the way, is also explanation enough to the question, whether I'm going to build the "official" (I consider only those entering Debian's archives official) Debian packages for upstream (WineHQ).) Another question, which is seen every now and then in my inbox, is, whether I could add patch xyz to the packages. The answer is no. I maintain those packages for myself and if you want to use them, you're welcome. If you need another patch applied, just download the source package and add the patch with quilt to the series. When a certain version/build doesn't work for you, you can ask me for help, but please don't expect me to handle "doesn't work" reports like I would handle bug reports for my packages. The wine-unstable packages are for myself and if they work for me, that's all I aim for. Before spreading the word about my packages, make sure, you and those who read your post/message/whatever about my packages understand, that it is generally a very bad idea to install third-party packages, even though I'm a Debian Developer. Make also sure everybody understands that only the source package is signed with my key. Please don't download all packages (binary and source), unless you really need all of them. Please pick the ones, you need and just download them. Even though this might sound like begging, which I'm not, it'd be nice, if you could consider donating (via PayPal) something, to help cover the traffic costs. The traffic for just the wine-unstable packages has risen dramatically in the last few months. Thanks! Now, I hope I've answered most questions, if not, feel free to contact me.