Today, you have very last chance to influence selection of new default theme in phpMyAdmin 3.4. You can choose from five themes (all of them are listed on our wiki). Every opinion counts, so please visit our survey and choose the one you like most: http://survey.phpmyadmin.net/index.php?sid=72977 Besides the Original and Darkblue_orange themes, there are following to choose: Toba: Graphite: pmahomme:

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Finally back on track and the photo for eight week is on time. This picture was taken from Letn in Prague.

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I've been out here for 6 months now. At the point in time I was coming out I was pointed at Andrew Pollock's On bootstrapping oneself in the US. I figure some extra data may be useful for anyone considering the same. I moved from the UK rather than Australia. Banking I sorted out my US banking long before I ever moved here; in fact I kicked the process off shortly after I accepted the move offer. Matthew had recommended the HSBC approach, so I did that. This meant when I arrived I had a credit card, debit card and check book. They also allow me to do really easy online transfers between my US and UK accounts. Mobile phone My mobile phone was something else that was dealt with before the move. I bought a Simple Mobile SIM off eBay. I thought I'd end up moving to a contract once I had a credit record here, but actually the $60/month unlimited tariff seems to be fairly reasonable. Their customer service leaves a lot to be desired, but I've sadly come to expect that from phone companies. I've got a Google Voice account which is the number I've been giving out, so it's easily for me to switch providers (or redirect things to a VOIP setup for when I'm back in the UK, but I've got a writeup to do for that at a later point in time). Finding somewhere to live One of my concerns was that it would be hard to find somewhere to live at short notice without any credit history or SSN. This turned out to be ill founded. Both of the managed apartment complexes I looked at were ok with the fact I'd just moved to the country and seemed used to such a setup. The place I went with is privately leased and was a bit more wary, but after a conversation with my US manager (who'd managed me even when I was in the UK) it was fine. Social Security Number AKA existing as an entity as far as the US is concern. I was told to wait at least 10 working days after entry before even applying for this, or I wouldn't be in the system and it could cause delays. I did so and the card turned up within about a week (I had been told up to 2 weeks). Which was good, because work were having problems figuring out how to pay me without one. You do seem to need the SSN for everything. The only times I can remember needing my National Insurance number in the UK is for new jobs and my E111 application. Driving licence I haven't ended up buying a car here; I pretty much don't need one most of the time and I've signed up to ZipCar for easy short term rentals - they're happy to take a UK licence for sign up. However I figured getting a licence here was a good idea in case I did decide to get a car, and even just for ID (I kept having to point people at the DOB on my UK licence - everywhere here seems to card). Applying for a licence ideally relies an SSN, so I did so a few days after I'd got that. I did the car + motorbike written tests and got my learner's permit. I applied for the car theory test the same day, but the first available slot was about 6 weeks later. During this period I did the CMSP basic RiderCourse, which meant that when I passed the car test I was also fully entitled to ride a motorbike here. Other useful notes As I live in the Bay Area I got myself a ClipperCard - it's like Oyster except without the clever discounts. Works on more agencies though and helps avoid having to sort out change. For broadband I went with Sonic.net - I'm in their ADSL2 coverage area so I'm getting a reasonable 17Mb/s connection. The other options were AT&T ADSL (slower) or Comcast cable (evil). I've had zero problems with Sonic; It Just Works. Also I sort of ended up with a trial run thanks to DebConf10 being in New York. Due to the way timings worked out this took place only a few weeks before my move to SF was scheduled. My banking and phone were already in place by this point, so it allowed me to check both were working ok. They were, and I didn't really expect them not to be, but it was a nice safety net to have for the move proper. Overall the main issue I had was that a lot of things were dependant on other things; get the SSN, get a learner's permit, apply for the practical test, wait for the licence to actually turn up etc. It probably took over 3 months for everything to actually happen and come through in the post. I can tell when I actually started to exist in the system because Capital One being junk mailing me about whether I want a credit card with them...

I ve finally got the new website up and running after testing for a while. It has combined the blog and static pages into a single site that hopefully actually works and means I don t have to worry about compiling a site every time I change something. The blog software has been changed from movabletype to wordpress and while the actual migration was straightforward, there was some apache mod_rewrite evilness to update the links. There is probably broken links somewhere. The site is so old now I m not sure of all the links and paths myself. I think I also succeeded in changing the blog without spamming Planet debian with all my old posts, which is a bonus.

Australia s Department of Finance has mandated that the MS-Office document format should be the standard document format for all agencies [1]. Paul Wayper notes the fact that MS doesn t plan to support it s own standards and suggests ODF, also known as ISO/IEC standard 26300:2006. [2].Psychology Today has an interesting blog post by Marnia Robinson about scientific reasons for avoiding porn addiction [3]. Her post links to a number of other posts on the topic on Psychology Today.Psychology Today has an interesting post by Noam Shpancer titled What Doesn t Kill You Makes You Weaker [4]. It seems to me that the belief to the contrary is due to people rationalising bad things that happened to them, it s not all bad as it made me stronger .Psychology Today has an interesting article by Noam Shpancer about the soldier as hero myth [5]. He argues that soldiers are really just employees, the risk to American soldiers in war zones really isn t that great and that they are just pawns to the military-industrial complex.Anders Ynnerman gave an interesting TED talk about visualising medical data which includes many startling 3D pictures of humans and animals that are being scanned [6]. He describes how this is useful in forensic analysis by the police and in better understanding biological processes.Margarita Manterola gave an interesting Debconf talk titled Making Debian Rule, again , she has some interesting ideas for improving Debian [7]. She is most focussed on social problems and the questions and comments had some interesting ideas. The Center for Non-Violent Communication [8] was mentioned in the questions, apparently their success includes teaching better communication skills to violent criminals, so it seems that they can help with some big problems.Benjamin Mako Hill wrote an interesting article about the ratio of writers to readers on Wikipedia [9]. While he makes some good points I m wondering about the measure of an editor , there have been few months where I have made 5 edits, so I guess I m just a reader. I probably should take more care in logging in when I make changes though, I ve made more than a few small changes from random systems (client sites, Internet cafes, etc) without bothering to login. This would mess up the stats a bit.The Reid Report has an interesting article about Bush being limited in his international travel due to the fact that he has admitted being a war criminal [10].Understanding Prejudice is an interesting article that summarises a lot of psychological research [11]. It gives many ideas for anyone who wants to reduce prejudice.Robin Harris wrote an interesting ZD Net article about vibrations and the impact on disk performance [12]. Apparently it s very common to be able to get more performance from drive arrays if you dampen vibration, previously I believed that unless you had extreme vibration to cause catastrophic problems then nothing would go wrong. But it seems that even smaller amounts of vibration can cause a 30% performance loss or worse! There is work in progress on vibration-damping racks.In a story published in The Australian about the NSW ambulance service being shut down due to a virus, Professor Caelli cites SE Linux as an example of a technology to make computers more virus resistant [13]. Professor Caelli also states that there should be a legal requirement to have backup systems for computers that have such grave consequences if they crash.Sinclair Community College is offering a new class Fundamentals of Linux Security , it includes SE Linux [14].Slate has an interesting article about Pickpockets [15]. Apparently they are becoming extinct in the US as law enforcement has prevented the Fagins from training younger people, and it s only in Eastern Europe that the skills base remains.

• [1] http://www.itnews.com.au/News/245276,australia-mandates-microsofts-open-office-xml.aspx
• [2] http://www.mabula.net/tbfw/blosxom.cgi/2011/01/19#2011-01-19-minister-leigh-letter
• [3] http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/cupids-poisoned-arrow/201007/not-all-warnings-about-porn-are-moralistic-or-unscientific
• [4] http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/insight-therapy/201008/what-doesnt-kill-you-makes-you-weaker
• [5] http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/insight-therapy/201101/soldier-hero
• [6] http://www.ted.com/talks/anders_ynnerman_visualizing_the_medical_data_explosion.html
• [7] http://penta.debconf.org/dc10_schedule/events/627.en.html
• [8] http://www.cnvc.org/
• [9] http://mako.cc/copyrighteous/20110206-00
• [10] http://blog.reidreport.com/2011/02/bush-cancels-geneva-and-other-consequences-of-torture/
• [11] http://www.understandingprejudice.org/apa/english/
• [12] http://www.zdnet.com/blog/storage/bad-bad-bad-vibrations/896
• [13] http://www.theaustralian.com.au/australian-it/world-focus-on-ambulance-system-failure/story-e6frgakx-1226005951185
• [14] http://www.sinclairclarion.com/home/campus/2011/02/07/new-linux-class-starting-in-spring-quarter/
• [15] http://www.slate.com/id/2286010/pagenum/all/

As you probably know, Shani is our pet hedgehog. We finally managed to setup a blog just for her (sorry, it's in italian only), and also we uploaded tons of her photos.

You don't remember her? Here's a cute reminder:

I'm again almost one week late, but here comes photo from seventh week. The good news is that I've managed to process photo for eight week as well so it will follow soon. This picture was taken under Charles bridge in Prague.

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Everybody hates Xperia When I first got Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 it was running on Android Donut (1.6), my frustrations followed soon after mostly because it was greatly lagging with release of Android 2.1. Finally official 2.1 was released, but troubles didn t stop there, because everybody was waiting for multi-touch support I could go on like this for a very long time. However, to sum it up Sony has no plans of updating X10 anymore, they are releasing brand new phone (Arc) and they are hoping people will pay money to get it after X10 horrors. Even tho 2.1 isn t that old, (31.4% of overall Android users is using it on it), Sony changed its UI to make it look better, but all they actually did is make it look pretty bad + made it abnormally slow. Xperia ROMs From hardware aspect, it s a pretty awesome phone, but from software aspect it waste of nerves. It s obvious that Sony needs to hire more Linux people, because as it seems they have no idea what they are doing. There are of course, 2.2 Froyo and 2.3 Gingerbread straight from Google ROMs, but to be honest phone is only half usable with those. The feeling I get when using these is plain awkward. All these ROMs are stuck on 2.6.29, since as it seems Sony did a very good job protecting its bootloader, what I suggest is to use these for strictly development purposes, and have them dual boot with your working 2.1 2.2.1 Froyo (beta)
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=917956 Gingerbread 2.3.1 (alpha)
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=931934 So what is the best ROM? Out of all the ones I tried (and I tried many) it s definitely: kX10 Custom 2.1 SE ROM R2B001
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=913610 My main argument on what this is the best ROM is because, everything is working, and it s working fast. Author stripped it to the minimum, and what I definitely suggest is that you go with the R2B001 Lite because the Full version comes with too much apps. with it, kinda making this great ROM feel bit bloated. I made a video for you to experience its speed: <iframe allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" frameborder="0" height="390" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/8xe0hUx2k28?rel=0" title="YouTube video player" width="480"></iframe> Modifications: Surprisingly I m getting much lower score Quadrant score, but also getting a much higher Linpack score: benchmark results of hacked Stock SE 2.1 ROM (2.0.2.A.0.24 root + JIT) Even though, the phone s much much faster. A couple of screenshots, including Linpack/Quadrant benchmark results. Nexus S This is how I m planning to live my remaining days on this phone, if it wasn t for this ROM, I would ve crashed my X10 long time ago. In meantime I m eagerly waiting to put my hands on Nexus S, whose official release we re still waiting for in Europe Google, please hurry up

Hello Now that Squeeze is out, a lot of cleanup is going in Debian packages. One of them is getting rid of unnecessary dependencies with minimal versions in packages. I.e. getting rid if unnecessary versions like perl (>= 5.8.1).
Because Lenny was shipped with Perl 5.10, requiring Perl with version greater than 5.8 is not necessary and needlessly loads dependencies resolvers. In other words, you re not only doing this cleanup to make your source package lighter, you re doing it also for your users so that package upgrade go faster. Anyway, checking these versioned in a real PITA. So I ve enhanced Dpkg control model in Config::Model to take care of this check. To check your package, install libconfig-model-perl (from Sid), go in your package directory and run this command: config-edit -application dpkg -ui none This command will check your control file, your copyright file and may issue warnings or errors. Some warnings like the versioned dependencies can be fixed automatically with this command: config-edit -application dpkg -ui none -apply-fixes -save Be sure to archive your files before running this command to check what s been done by -apply-fixes options. For more information on using config-edit, please read Using config-model wiki page. All the best

As one of the Co-Maintainers of KVIrc, I'd like to give you a short outlook on what is planned for KVIrc in Debian in the near future or at least in the Wheezy release cycle.

• Upload of a 4.0.3 bug fix release to stable-proposed-updates as soon as upstream releases it.
• Packaging a new 4.1.1 snapshot every ten days (that is always after the previous one migrated to Testing) and make ready for 4.1.1 (maybe even 4.2?) in Wheezy.
• Rework the CMake build script of KVIrc to ensure minimal linking. At the moment KVIrc has CMake gather all B-Ds in the global CMakeLists.txt and adds those to all compiler/linker invocations. By pushing the include_directories() calls down to the respective modules and adding just the required variables to the target_link_libraries() invocations, we can improve the situation significantly.
• KVIrc uses a lot of reinvented-the-wheel code, some of this is due to its age (I think KVIrc is around since Qt2 and a lot of stuff wasn't available as an easy-to-use library then). But to be maintainable, KVIrc must move to leaner code base, which can be achieved by replacing such fragments of code with library calls. This is a big task and might not be completed in time for Wheezy, but the effort should be taken nonetheless.

Apart from what is listed above, we, the Debian Maintainers of KVIrc, strive to improve its packaging constantly.

I was going to make this a comment against Ritesh Raj Sarraf's post about patents and pharmaceuticals but the comment got way too long.

The basic problem is that patents on pharmaceuticals cannot be directly compared to patents on software and the explanation gets a bit involved. It's worse than apples and oranges, it's more like comparing an algorithm to a piece of DNA.

Patented pharmaceuticals must declare the precise chemical formula of the molecule (and a whole lot else besides) before the molecule can be brought to market but the company holding the patent is legally prevented from protecting themselves against slightly different molecules which are blatantly based on the protected molecule. All modification results in a new patentable product, legally separated from the original.

Therefore, the first company to patent a molecule from a new class is instantly joined in the field by other companies who are (obviously) watching the research news channels very carefully. (In their shoes, you would do the same or you go bust.) These companies simply add a flourine ion or change a hydrogen to a hydroxl group or any other number of minor, apparently inconsequential, changes. Changes which, in software, would be deemed a derivative work and would be roughly equivalent to changing a single local variable from a 16bit integer to a 32bit integer in a single function in a single file in the entire codebase. i.e. a trivial bug fix or even a typo.

A molecule with a couple of hundred atoms can have a change affecting one atom and be a completely new patentable item without any risk of the other company being sued for patent infringement, plagiarism, copyright violation (there is no copyright) or any other barrier. It's common to find that molecule foo is joined on the market by a desoxyfoo and a flourofoo etc. with a chlorofoo just around the corner, within months of the class-leader being launched. It can't be compared to software - effectively, every new release gets a new patent which covers the entirety of everything contained in that release, even if 99.999999999% of it is precisely the same as is covered under other several other patents held by extremely litigious competitors.

Modification is simply not prohibited - copying without making any changes whatsoever to the active molecule is prohibited. Changes to the inactive ingredients will be prosecuted - changes to the active ingredient will not. Comparing this with software is likely to drive you insane.

For example, the mere process of packaging an upstream release for a distribution would be patent infringement in pharmaceutical terms - UNLESS you deliberately patch the original source to make an utterly trivial and apparently pointless change. At that point, the upstream completely disown your entire release and you would have to fix every bug yourself - without the original upstream even telling you whether they fixed the same bug themselves, because they aren't ABLE to modify the upstream code without starting a whole new project and they won't tell you why or how they changed things. There is no such thing as an alpha-release of a molecule. Every release is final and no subsequent modification is possible - unless it only affects the inactive ingredients, e.g. by adding a slow release coating. These changes can affect the way that the molecule acts on the test subject / patient but must not change the active ingredient itself in any identifiable way. So the upstream can make a new wrapper (new packaging) but nobody else is allowed to do so until the patent expires. Once the patent expires, every one and their dog is allowed to make identical copies of the active ingredient in their own inactive packaging and these are called generics. Generics still need testing to ensure that the active ingredient truly is the same and that the generic behaves in the same way as the original but this process is cheaper than making a change to the active molecule.

A changed active molecule is an entirely new substance, it gets a new patent and it needs to go through largely the same amount of testing as the patented original but the new company still gets a head start on what the molecule is likely to do and what side-effects (by now noticeable with the class-leader product which is in large scale trials or even on the market) would be harmful to the future usefulness of their new, derivative, molecule. The new company simply jumps onto the bandwagon shouting "I want a piece of that action!" and there is absolutely nothing the original company can do about it, except try to show that their original molecule is better than the new competitors and to try and build a substantial market share before everyone switches to the new derivative. (Prescribers are human and tend therefore to be lazy, so unless there's a reason to change, the class leader will still have substantial share even after several derivatives exist.)

It's an arms race - each company tries to create as many of these potential "me-too" variants as possible in-house, put as many as can be (financially) supported through trials, keep pursuing those which don't have prohibitive side-effects / problems in tests and hope that, at the end, one of their versions will actually turn out to have better effectiveness or fewer side-effects. If not, they just have to market one as "as-effective-and-no-more-harmful-but-CHEAPER-than" the class leader. The majority of "me-too" molecules come under this category - even if the company concerned would try to point to infinitesimal differences in trial data to pretend otherwise. All this with the knowledge that the very hour that the patent expires, a dozen generic manufacturers will flood the market with copies which do not need to recover the massive costs of the original research and are therefore massively cheaper.

How much cheaper? patented molecules may cost 30 for 28 doses on Monday and one generic may cost 3p for 500, another may cost 40p for 10,000 on Tuesday, the day after the patent expiry. Generic houses only need to cover the actual costs of manufacture, not the costs of the original patent etc. and by the time the patent expires, the efforts of the patent holder to generate market share mean that economies of scale become evident. The absolute cheapest isn't necessarily the one who gets the contract either, these things all have expiry dates and all 10,000 have to be sold / supplied from a single location within that date to actually deliver the full savings. So then you get satellite generics who buy in quantities of a few million and pack down into 56 or less so that the total purchased quantity can sit on many shelves instead of just one. It's the same tablet in the end, with the same markings too. All that differs is the marking on the foil and the colour of the cardboard. (Oh and the same foil and colour cardboard can contain tablets with different markings from different manufacturers from one batch to the next, all within the branding of the same repackaging company.)

The original patent-holding company also has an interest in generating their own "me-too" derivatives, sometimes marketed under the name of a company which turns out to be solely owned by the parent of the original company. It can get horribly recursive.
Sometimes, the derivative from the sibling company hits the market before the "true" competitor from a different company - simply because all companies try to have many molecules in development at any one time (because most changed molecules fail in testing) and sometimes they get lucky and come up with two v.similar molecules and have to do something to justify the cost of developing both. That can turn out to be a poisoned chalice rather than two golden geese.

Sometimes, the company fails to get enough variants through testing and the company then gets bought out by a rival - who then gains their research and continues experimenting with other derivative molecules based on the ones already tested and dismissed. The limiting factor is the money.

At this point, I must now declare my cards. I used to be a pharmacist and although I am still entitled to call myself the holder of a Batchelor of Sciences degree in Pharmaceutical Sciences I am most definitely no longer a pharmacist. I therefore defer to my still-registered colleagues in case I've messed up any of the detail here. The above cannot be declared as the opinion of a pharmacist. I am an ex-pharmacist who voluntarily chose to resign his registration to take up full time work as a software developer rather than pay the exorbitant costs of maintaining such registration and all the "proof-of-competency" requirements which such registration requires.

Finally, before you ask, I am very happy to be an ex-pharmacist - my erstwhile colleagues have my ongoing sympathy but no matter how much some of them may beg, they all know that I will not be rejoining them on that side of the dispensary bench if I've got any choice in the matter.

Software is just better. It's all just recycled electrons.

I have been using xfig for ages to draw figures, and I appreciate it, especially combined with a small script I wrote based on an original idea by Seb Desreux at H&K, fig2ps, that allows painless integration of LaTeX code inside xfig figures. But recently, it seems that I've hit limitations in xfig. Mainly, if it is great when you want to produce sober figures, whenever you want to do something fancier, including shadings and the like, frustration comes in quickly (since it is purely impossible). I've spent a while looking for a decent alternative, until I had a look again at pgf, which since turned into TikZ. That was amazing. It integrates painlessly within LaTeX and is simply great to work with. Drawing complex diagrams with noes and complex relations between them is trivial. It handles moving the nodes very gracefully, and styling can be done in a CSS-like fashion (though it definitely isn't CSS), which means you can first concentrate on structure and then turn your graph into something nice, while for all the other programs I know, you have to handle both structural and stylistic aspects at the same time. Sure enough, you need to like the command-driven approach, as mice won't come in too useful here... As a side note, I wanted to express my admiration of Till Tantau's (TikZ's author) mastery of (La)TeX: TikZ can be seen as an interpreter of a simple graphical language written in pure TeX, which is, according to my humble experience with dirty trick in TeX, is simply amazing. Many thanks, Till !

Given that Chromium/Chrome is used more and more (as became apparent with the discussion of including it in Debian's squeeze), I decided to give it some tries, mainly Giuseppe Iuculano's version. I occasionally install Chromium from Fabien Tassin's daily builds. And, to be honest, I have also contributed a good amount (about 400) of translated strings to the Brazilian Portuguese part of Chromium. As a matter of fact, I have even done some "activism" and incentivated other people to create their accounts on Launchpad and help with the projects. But I always come back to Iceweasel/Firefox, especially with Mike Hommey's frequently updated repository. What are my reasons for staying with Iceweasel, and not with Chromium?

• I can disable full zoom in Iceweasel (i.e., I only want to zoom the text, not the images). According to Chromium's project BTS, it seems that this will be a WONTFIX bug, despite many people asking for it (and it having a lot of duplicates).
• I can, in Iceweasel, set my preferred fonts without resorting to hacks on the system level, like say, having to lie with fontconfig or other stuff. And I really want Deja Vu Sans, not a serifed font.
• In Iceweasel, a middle mouse click on "an inactive portion" of the page makes me go to the URL that is the system clipboard, just like pasting stuff in X, in general, works. I guess that there may be some way to enable this in Chromium, but, so far, I have not found it.
• In Iceweasel, I have a way (without resorting to many extensions or hackish solutions) to use the equivalent of Firefox's "View > Page Style > No Style" (i.e., to ignore any CSS sheet that the document author may have specified on the page).
• In Iceweasel, my personal data is encrypted before being synced.
• In Iceweasel, I can press Ctrl+Q and make the damn browser quit, instead of me having to use the mouse/trackpad/pointing device. This is probably a lack of my understanding on how to associate key bindings to Chromium, but the problem still stands.
• Similarly, when there is only one tab open, pressing Ctrl+W in Chromium does not close the tab (say, presenting me a blank tab or the list of most visited sites), nor it closes the application.

I would be satisfied if any of the above were fixed or better documented, but it seems that some of those are, at best, going to wait a long time.

Mosf of us would be well versed with the Patent system in general. We have patents in every sector - Technology, Agriculture, Pharmacy etc. Most readers in our profession must already be well versed of the Pros/Cons of the Patent system in Software/Technology. Patents in software are more like ammunition. The more you have, the stronger you are. We don't seem much cat fight in Software/Technology because not one organization own all the patents for a product. An IBM ThinkPad might be using a cool track pad feature which might be a patent of Dell. Since the finished product comprises of many patents from different owners in the same industry, it is better to play good with each other. You scratch my back, I scratch yours. But what about the Pharmaceutical Industry? There, one single patent could comprise the product. I was reading this document from Bruce Lehman which touches upon Patents and Pharmaceutical Industries, but couldn't find an answer to my question. read more

February has been again a busy month for me. Here s a quick summary of what I did: Multi-Arch work I have spent many days implementing and refining dpkg s Multi-Arch support with Guillem Jover (dpkg co-maintainer) and Steve Langasek (beta-tester of my code ). Early testers can try what s in my latest pu/multiarch/snapshot/* branch in my personal git repository. A Debian DVD shop I m always exploring new options to fund my Debian work (besides direct donations) and this month with the Debian Squeeze release I saw an opportunity in selling Debian DVD. Nobody provides DVD with included firmwares and quite a few people would like to avoid the SpaceFun theme. So I built unofficial Debian DVDs that integrate firmware and that install a system with the old theme (MoreBlue Orbit). Click here to learn more about my unofficial DVDs. On my blog In my People behind Debian series, I interviewed Mike Hommey (Iceweasel maintainer) and Maximiliam Attems (member of the kernel team). I started a Debian Cleanup Tip series and already published 4 installments:

• Debian Cleanup Tip #1: Get rid of useless configuration files
• Debian Cleanup Tip #2: Get rid of obsolete packages
• Debian Cleanup Tip #3: Get rid of third-party packages
• Debian Cleanup Tip #4: Find broken packages and reinstall them

For contributors, I wrote two articles: the first gives a set of (suggested) best practices for sponsoring Debian packages and adapted my article as a patch for the Developers Reference. In the second article, I shared some personal advice for people who are considering participating on Debian mailing list: 7 mistakes to avoid when participating to Debian mailing lists.

Click here to subscribe to my free newsletter and get my monthly analysis on what s going on in Debian and Ubuntu. Or just follow along via the RSS feed, Identi.ca, Twitter or Facebook.

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I've been slowly moving towards full IPv6 usage on my main machines for the past few months. My main servers all have IPv6 setup and appropriate DNS records in place. This weekend I configured my mailserver, which is based upon QPSMTPD & exim4, to be available on IPv6 too. Previously it would send mail via IPv6 where appropriate, but only receive mail via IPv4. QPSMTPD I've written about a lot in the past, and indeed I did commercial things with it for a year or two, but in short it is more of an SMTP framework than an actual mailserver. These days I use a small collection of plugins which test incoming mail in various ways, and either:

• Reject the mail at SMTP time, causing a bounce, and store a copy of the rejected mail in a quarantine.
• Accept the mail, and pass it on to exim4 for (local) delivery.

My plugins are pretty simple, but I've made a few changes for the brave new IPv6 world:

• Breakdown reverse-DNS checks into IPv4 & IPv6 flavours.
• Avoid using DNSBL for IPv6 addresses.

I reject (+ archive) about 8,000 SPAM messages a day. So far I've seen precisely zero SPAM mails be received via IPv6; though I'm sure that won't last for long! My reject archive looks like this:

steve@steve:~$ tree -d -L 2 /spam/
/spam/
 -- 23
     -- debian-administration.org
     -- mail-scanning.com
     -- steve.org.uk
 -- 24
     -- debian-administration.org
     -- steve.org.uk
 -- 25
     -- debian-administration.org
     -- mail-scanning.com
     -- steve.org.uk
...
 -- 55
     -- debian-administration.org
     -- mail-scanning.com
     -- steve.org.uk
     -- stolen-souls.com
 -- 56
     -- debian-administration.org
     -- steve.org.uk
     -- stolen-souls.com
 -- today -> /spam/56
 -- yesterday -> /spam/55

(Here "N" is the day of the year - Think of this as "date +%j". I rotate such that I keep 32 days of past SPAM mail, for reference/amusement/mistake-catching.) ObQuote: "I am already grown up, I just get older. " - Leon

... or don't shoot yourself in the foot. This is not a big secret, Debian Squeeze has been released. Right after this event, the OCaml Debian Task force was back in action -- with Stephane in the leading role. He has planned the transition to OCaml 3.12.0. We will proceed in two steps: a small transition of a reduced set of packages that can be transitioned before 3.12 and then the big transition. The reason for the small transition, is to avoid having to dep-wait (waiting for dependencies) of package upload by human. In -- a not so far -- past, the OCaml Debian Task force members were uploading packages by hand and waited for a full rebuild to go to the next step. This was long and cumbersome. We use now binNMU: it is binary only uploads -- with no source changes -- processed automatically by the release team and its infrastructure. This is far more effective and helps us to reduce the delay of the transition... The small transition is happening now!!! Don't update/upgrade your critical Debian installations with OCaml packages, you'll get a lot of removal if you do so. N.B. these removal are part of the famous Enforcing type-safe linking using package dependencies paper. As a side note, I am happy to announce that a full round of new OCaml packages has landed in Debian unstable:

• caml2html
• camlmix
• camltemplate
• cppo
• easy-format
• mikmatch
• atd
• ocaml-data-notation
• deriving
• ocaml-expect
• ocaml-extunix
• ocaml-inifiles
• ocaml-sqlexpr
• ocamlify
• tophide
• xstrp4
• yojson
• atdgen
• biniou

People aware of my current work, should notice that all the dependencies of OASIS are now in Debian unstable: ocaml-data-notation, ocamlify, ocaml-expect. This is a hint about the next OCaml Debian package, I will upload. You can also have a look at OASIS enabled packages (all the OASIS dependencies, ocaml-sqlexpr and ocaml-extunix). These packages have been generated using oasis2debian a tool to convert _oasis into debian/ packaging files. After these transition we will continue proceeding with standard upgrade work (e.g. camomile to 0.8.1). Sylvain Le Gall is an OCaml consultant working for OCamlCore SARL

I'm surprised to be on the porch hearing rushing water. I tend to think of up here as high and mostly dry, but not this time of year. Yesterday was such a soaking rain, very annoying at the time as I did chores and drove out from town. Now there are two little creeks here. That's a sound I've missed.. Pity that all the water is going to waste. I discovered the reason the large cistern is not filling up is simply because the pipe into it is not connected to the feeder pipe in the spring. It seems like a complete shambles really, with layer upon layer of pipes, all broken. I will have to wait until the water is down to dig and find out what's going on, and fix it. In the last of the evening light today I got the house's two battery banks finally combined into one bank. I had planned this out long ago, and bought one long cable I'd need, so was surprised to find I needed two long cables. Had to slide batteries around like a big sokoban puzzle, and swap several cables to make it work. While I was away I'd charged up the bank that had gone unused most of the winter. So they were near equalized and the combination seems to have gone ok. I got through the lean part of the year with only half the batteries; there never seemed to be a good time to combine them. It remains to be seen if the solar panels can keep my increased capacity filled. I hope this was only an early taste of spring. Would be nice to have some more icy weather so I can put off dealing with refrigeration a little while longer. I have my eye on a 12v/propane fridge.

I ve been playing with snapshot.d.o, which is a fantastic resource to look at how Debian has been changing over the years.
Below are some preliminary results about various aspects of source packages: format, packaging helpers, and patch systems.
For clarification:

• modif-files indicates packages that do not use a patch system, but modify files outside debian/.
• no-modif-files indicates packages that do not use a patch system, but do not modify files outside debian/.
• other is everything else . Like packages using dpatch, but still modifying some files outside Debian. Or using both dpatch and quilt. (yes, some packages do that).

Random comments:

• People have been moving away from simple-patchsys and dpatch to quilt since 01/2009 (their usage has been decreasing since then). It seems that discussing the introduction of the new package formats was enough to make people move away from dpatch, even if the 3.0 (quilt) was not usable yet. We now have less than 1000 packages still using dpatch or simple-patchsys. Can we get rid of them all for wheezy? It would be nice to standardize on quilt.
• The growth of the 3.0 (quilt) format is impressive. Its adoption is much faster than the adoption of dh7. That surprises me a lot, since I had the impression that more people were unhappy about 3.0 (quilt) than about dh7.
• The number of packages with no packaging helper, but no modified files outside debian/ is dropping. Either than means that we are patching upstream more and more (unlikely), or that means that people are switching to 3.0 (quilt) even if they have no patches, probably due to the other benefits! Could this mean that we could standardize on 3.0 (quilt) and 3.0 (native) for wheezy or wheezy+1?
• The number of packages that modify files outside debian/ without using a patch system has been constantly dropping since 2005.
• dh7 is not a cdbs killer. While it seems to be the cause for a huge drop in classic debhelper packaging, the number of packages using cdbs is still progressing.

If you have other ideas of things to investigate using snapshot.d.o, don t hesitate to ask in comments.

Continuing my series about a desktop in a shell, today I will present you my mutt setup. I use mutt because it has no bugs and is a really good MUA for people loving consoles ;)First of all you have to know, that all my mail is forwarded to my server and sorted into Maildirs via maildrop, so I do not care about sorting on my desktop , which just fetches the mail via IMAP from the server ;)I m running mutt-patched from Debian Squeeze, so not all options may be available for you if you do not have the same patchset as I do.First, tell mutt to fetch mail from imap.die-welt.net via IMAP:

set imap_user=username
set imap_pass=password
set folder="imaps://imap.die-welt.net/INBOX"
set spoolfile="imaps://imap.die-welt.net/INBOX"

Now, enable IMAP-IDLE, list subscribed folders, reconnect to the server if needed and mark mail as read when you open it:

set imap_idle
set imap_check_subscribed
unset imap_passive
unset imap_peek

Let mutt save sent mail to the Sent directory on the IMAP server, and postponed mail to Drafts:

set record=+Sent
set postponed=+Drafts

Read mail should stay where it is:

set mbox="!"

We use IMAP-IDLE, thus check for new mail manually only every 90 seconds:

set mail_check=90

Instead timeout after 15 seconds if no user input is given:

set timeout=15

Set default mail from address to my default mail address:

set from=evgeni@golov.de

And send mail via mstmp (see below for mstmp configuration):

set sendmail="/usr/bin/msmtp"

Tell mutt which addresses I recieve mail to (danger, ugly regex!):

alternates (evgeni@(debian.org golov.(de eu)) sargentd@(die-welt sargentd).net evgeni.golov@uni-duesseldorf.de)

As mutt knows where I receive mail, let it set From accordingly:

set reverse_name

Let mutt cache some stuff and find its certificates:

set header_cache="~/.mutt/cache/headers"
set message_cachedir="~/.mutt/cache/bodies"
set certificate_file=~/.mutt/certificates
set ssl_ca_certificates_file=/etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt

Show only interesting headers in an useful order:

ignore headers *
unignore headers from to subject date cc
hdr_order from to cc subject date

Fix stupid MUAs behaviour (e.g. filenames like =?iso-8859-1?Q?file=5F=E4=5F991116=2Ezip?=):

set rfc2047_parameters

Beep on new mail, will generate a ! in the window name in screen:

set beep_new

mutt-patched has the great sidebar patch, assign ctrl-n, ctrl-p to select next, prev folder, ctrl-o to open selected folder:

bind index \Cp sidebar-prev
bind index \Cn sidebar-next
bind index \Co sidebar-open

And toggle sidebar visibility with ctrl-b:

macro index \Cb '<enter-command>toggle sidebar_visible<enter><refresh>'
macro pager \Cb '<enter-command>toggle sidebar_visible<enter><redraw-screen>'

Since 1.5.20-2, mutt patched contains my sidebar-dotted and sidebar-sorted patches.
Let mutt shorten the displayed path (e.g. debian-devel instead of INBOX.ml.debian-devel) and sort the folders (the are returned in random order when using imap_check_subscribed):

set sidebar_shortpath
set sidebar_sort

Now let s set some colors (that match the rest of my desktop ):

color sidebar_new yellow default
color normal white default
color hdrdefault brightcyan default
color signature green default
color attachment brightyellow default
color quoted green default
color quoted1 white default
color tilde blue default

And add some useful macros for marking new and old messages as read:

macro index .n "<tag-pattern>~N<enter><tag-prefix><clear-flag>N<clear-flag>*" "Catchup all new messages"
macro index .o "<tag-pattern>~O<enter><tag-prefix><clear-flag>O<clear-flag>*" "Catchup all old messages"

When forwarding mail, I like it to be forwarded as an attachment (YMMV):

set mime_forward=yes

I m using goobook in mutt to fetch my addressbook from Google. As there is no Debian package for goobook (yet), you have to install it yourself (via easy_install):

apt-get install python-argparse python-gdata python-simplejson python-keyring python-nose
easy_install goobook

Configuration is easy via ~/.goobookrc:

[DEFAULT]
# If not given here, email and password is taken from .netrc using
# machine google.com
email: me@gmail.com
password: password

And then add the following to your .muttrc:

set query_command="goobook query '%s'"
bind editor  complete-query
macro index,pager a "<pipe-message>goobook add<return>" "add the sender address to Google contacts"

That s all for mutt, but We are running mutt in a screen, so let s add the following to .screenrc to fix transparency and cut&paste (see http://wiki.mutt.org/?MuttFaq/Appearance):

 defbce on
 term screen-bce

And as mutt uses mstmp (yes, I know, mutt can handle SMTP itself ), this is my .msmtprc:

defaults
domain dorei.kerker.die-welt.net
tls on
account die-welt.net
host smtp.die-welt.net
from sargentd@die-welt.net
auth on
user username
password password
tls_starttls on
tls_certcheck off
# Set a default account
account default : die-welt.net

C est tout! That is my personal mutt configuration, you can download it as one file here: my .muttrc. And as everyone loves screenshots, here is one:Oh, the next chapter will be about irssi, but not before next Sunday (March 6th) as I ll be offline for a week, skiing in Austria :)