There's a stupid system in England for utilities billing. In theory, you have the freedom to choose who supplies your electricity and gas. There are supply networks, maintained here by Wales and West Utilities and Western Power Distribution which are the same for all suppliers, but your supplier has to put the amount that you use into their network. More info at Energy Watch In practice, when you move home, you have no freedom to choose. You can't even keep your existing supplier. The supplier of the previous occupier writes to you and tells you that you are on a "deemed contract" which is a funny sort of contract which they reckon is valid even though you have no choice in the matter. Even if you tell the suppliers of your choice on the day you move (as if you didn't have enough to do), you're screwed. There are long notice periods, even for deemed contracts. With gas, you're doubly screwed, as they can make daily standing charges even if you use no gas. Nasty deemed contract supplier npower refused to negotiate and then billed for nearly 50 quid, thanks to their standing charge. You might avoid paying the home's previous electricity supplier by giving them a zero reading. As long as they're not silly about it, they shouldn't send a bill. There doesn't seem to be a daily charge for electricity. Silly edf energy sent a 16p bill. 16 pence. 0.16 pounds. The printing and posting probably cost them another 16p. I paid it at a post office counter, which I'm told pays the post office 12p. It just cost edf about 28p to receive 16p. Why the devil didn't their billing system write it off? I suggest that customers of 'no-negotiation npower' or silly money-wasting edf energy should look for a new supplier. Probably not British Gas: Martyn Drake has some British Gas horror stories, but he recently reset his web site (google!). I'm sure another BG rant will be along shortly, though. One of my uncles has had trouble with them too, but I don't think he's on the web yet.

This is the first time I can remember, that the university is recommending to not hold lectures and go home early. They are expecting the ministerials to formally close the university, like they did with schools at noon. This will be the strongest storm we've had in years, apparently (well, others have been similarly strong I think, but not as big). It's now 15:18, and when I look out of the window it's still surprisingly quiet. The trees are moving, but only slightly. But it's the wind protected side of the building. The university warning email said that they expect public transport - and Munich has a huge public transport system - to stop service at 18:00 "the latest". Guess I won't be able to go dancing tonight then. It would start at 19:00, and I need about 30-40 Minutes by subway to go there. I guess they will shut down subway to make sure noone gets stuck in the tunnels if there is a power loss. Such huge storms are a threat to power supply. [Update: 21:08 you can tell now it's a storm, but it's not bad here. But all train traffic is stopped in bavaria, grounding a few hundred people who didn't make it home in time. They've been taken care of. In Munich, busses and the subway are supposedly still in service. I went to go dancing, but there was a note on the door it's closed tonight; same for the karate training of a friend. From what I heard in the radio there were only few fatalities so far and limited damage, but we havn't reached the peak of the hurricane yet. Few reports of blackouts in some small towns. Schools remain closed tomorrow.] [Update: 19. Jan, noon - trains apparently still aren't back to schedule everywhere, but the system is recovering. Not many major damages reported in the media and not many fatalities. It's still windy. IMHO it was "typically german" how we handled the hurricane, urging people to stay at home and not risk much...]

We're at 5 minutes to midnight, and it appears that Joost is the new TV - it appears to be getting some reaonable coverage at the moment, but looks far too much like another closed app using proprietary protocols - the world has gone DRM crazy - someone stop it, I want to get off. DRM is a myth, if you can play it, you can copy it (not neccessarily easily, but it's still possible). The NewScientist article is quite interesting in the claim of "piracy-proof"... if you can play the video, you can capture it, if you can listen to music you can record it, when is the media industry going to realise that DRM is a very dumb idea that shouldn't have been allowed to get this far - pirates can (and always will) find a way, how about going back to trusting your users rather than tarring them all with the "you're a pirate" brush. The Register 's article appears to have a typo in it... well, unless you really do need a 500mbps line in order to use Joost - seems unlikely, I think they meant 500kbps. Anyways - nice idea, not sure that it's better than anything else though, I'll continue buying DVDs that let me play back when I have no interweb connection. Back to being at 5 minutes to midnight, eeep! We're all going to die! Maybe it's the introduction of DRM that's led to so much terrorism, or maybe just that the media industry appears to be out to shaft everyone. Bah. Only one other article has caught my attention this morning, it's another look at the iPhone, it appears that no one is actually getting a reasonable amount of time to play and review this device, and it brings up a number of my issues with the iPhone. So, yes, that's the morning covered - maybe more this evening.

Today I have released a significant new version of my mail server benchmark Postal! The list of changes is below:

• Added new program bhm to listen on port 25 and send mail to /dev/null. This allows testing mail relay systems.
• Fixed a minor bug in reporting when compiled without SSL.
• Made postal write the date header in correct RFC2822 format.
• Removed the name-expansion feature, it confused many people and is not needed now that desktop machines typically have 1G of RAM. Now postal and rabid can have the same user-list file.
• Moved postal-list into the bin directory.
• Changed the thread stack size to 32K (used to be the default of 10M) to save virtual memory size (not that this makes much difference to anything other than the maximum number of threads on i386).
• Added a minimum message size option to Postal (now you can use fixed sizes).
• Added a Postal option to specify a list of sender addresses separately to the list of recipient addresses.
• Removed some unnecessary error messages.
• Handle EINTR to allow ^Z and "bg" from the command line. I probably don't handle all cases, but now that I agree that failure to handle ^Z is an error I expect bug reports.
• Made the test programs display output on the minute, previously they displayed once per minute (EG 11:10:35) while now it will be 11:10:00. This also means that the first minute reported will have something less than 60 seconds of data - this does not matter as a mail server takes longer than that to get up to speed.
• Added support for GNUTLS and made the Debian package build with it. Note that BHM doesn't yet work correctly with TLS.
• Made the programs exit cleanly.

Thanks to Inumbers for sponsoring the development of Postal.

I presented a paper on mail server performance at OSDC 2006 that was based on the now-released version of Postal.

I've been replying to a number of email messages in my Postal backlog, some dating back to 2001. Some of the people had changed email address during that time so I'll answer their questions in my blog instead.

/usr/include/openssl/kssl.h:72:18: krb5.h: No such file or directory
In file included from /usr/include/openssl/ssl.h:179

One problem reported by a couple of people is having the above error when compiling on an older Red Hat release (RHL or RHEL3). Running ./configure --disable-ssl should work-around that problem (at the cost
of losing SSL support). As RHEL3 is still in support I plan to fix this bug eventually.

There was a question about how to get detailed information on what Postal does. All three programs support the options -z and -Z to log details of what they do. This isn't convenient if you only want a small portion of the data but can be used to obtain any information you desire.

One user reported that options such as -p5 were not accepted. Apparently their system had a broken implementation of the getopt(3) library call used to parse command-line parameters.

I have a pretty thin voice for a male. Thus, it’s not rare that people will take me for a female when on the phone. I’ve rather gotten used to it, and it no longer bothers me that much, specially since it usually happens with people I’ll never speak to again anyways (such as telemarketers). But, today, this guy called asking for info on an apartment we’re selling. I gave him the price, he said something about calling back later, called me “Ma’am”. So far, business as usual. He then reiterated he’d call back and ended by saying something like “thanks, cutie”! He actually hit on me! And it’s just so upseting! I mean, what could posibly make him think I want total strangers to call me that? So now, I just try to think about how it must be to be a woman, and have random strangers hitting on you all the time and on top of that thinking you’ll like it, and I think I just could not bear it. Most of us males really are just pigs. Ugh.

Within 36 hours of my return to Edmonton, from the blowing Caribbean winds to the still calm of white snow, I have fallen sick with a cold, that while not a flu (at least not 24 hrs later), is still a severe cold, knocking on flu’s door. But ever since I had various horrible experiences having to work with horrible colds (like during my qualifying exams), I don’t mind colds so long as I can stay at home and let the cold run its course, which at least is my current predicament. Because I have been parked at home, I have spent a fair amount of time on the computer today playing catching up with blog entries and emails and I came across a few potentially interesting articles about the effects of money on tieguy’s blog (run law student who knows a heck of a lot about tech, law, and free software but his blog seems to be down at the moment). He linked to pair of articles on the psychological effects of money. I have not read the articles yet (and will post them, hopefully tomorrow once I get access to them via my U of A account), but I bet this will be of interest to some Debianista’s given the recent debates and controversies over the injection of money into Debian via the Dunc-Tanc project. Now a disclaimer: I don’t have a position on Dunc-Tanc, and this is so for many reasons–the primary being I have not delved deeply into the issues an all of the debate and discussion and well, I also experience the ethical issues somewhat more of an outsider, though I do want to see Debian survive well into the future. So I have keep mostly mum on the topic but later I may have more to say. I also have yet to read the articles and am usually a little suspect of psychological experiments that purport to have universal applicability (and am not sure if these fall into this class) so I am not sure how relevant these will be to this particular case. But nonetheless, here they are, and hopefully someone will find some use in them (and sorry if they have been posted here, I am very behind on planet, thanks to dial-up for a month). On a somewhat related though different note, check out Joseph Reagle’s excellent summary of how online communities work well. Now time for much needed sleep.

The snow we got a couple of days ago hasn't abated here in Montreal. We had a cold snap right after the snowfall, so temperatures have been around -20C for the last couple of days. Last night Maj had her French classes at the Montreal YMCA, and Micaela had spent the day seeing art museums and visiting bookstores downtown. (She's a poetry nut -- loves finding books by Canadian poets, francophone and anglophone, that she can't get at home in Melbourne.) So Amita and I went to meet her about halfway from our local Metro station, at the Pizzad lic on Ave Mont Royal. I covered Amita in about 10 layers of clothing, then put her on her little purple sled and dragged her up towards Mont Royal. She kept wanting to get up and walk herself ("Up!" is her newest and most insistent word), but when she was standing she wouldn't walk at all. So it was a long time getting to the restaurant. When we got there, Micaela was leaning against the front door shivering. Apparently Pizzad lic is out of business (bummer!). A graver cause for concern, however, was Amita's face: the parts showing around her scarf were tomato red from the cold. Gah! We rushed her home (crying all the way), and when I got her undressed she had a red stripe across the middle of her face like the people in those frozen pizza ads. I bathed her cheeks in cold water, and then gave her a hot bath, and by the time she was out she was calm and regular-colored. We got pizza delivered at home, which she enjoyed a lot. No permanent damage, as far as I can tell, except to my self-confidence as a competent parent. When Maj got home later that night, she reminded me that for extremely cold weather you have to put Vaseline on babies' cheeks to protect their delicate skin from the cold. Amita and I went to Loblaw's this morning to do some grocery shopping (in the car), which was a much more reasonable experience. Tonight for dinner I made pat chinois, a plate with baked mashed potatoes and ground beef known to English-speakers as shepherd's pie. (I make it with mushrooms and veggie beef.) Here in Quebec it's called "Chinese casserole", for unknown reasons. The best guess is that French Canadian lumberjacks worked at sites in the USA where it was common to have Chinese immigrant cooks. Confronted with a potato dish they didn't recognize, they assumed it was a meal from the cooks' home country. I don't know if this origin is true or not, but it sure is a good story. Anyways, it's good stick-to-your-ribs food, which you need on a night like this. When it gets down to -28C (as it will tonight), you need a lot of carbs running your internal furnace for you. tags: montreal snow cold shepherds pie pat chinois quebec babies amitajune

Piknic lectronik The good snow we're having means that one of my favourite events of the year is going to be white and cold and fluffy and fun. For the last few years, Piknic lectronik, the group that produces weekend outdoor parties on le Ste H l ne on the site of Expo 67, has done a single, crazy outdoor party in the dead of winter. This year, the party, called "Igloofest", is happening in the Vieux Port on the Quai Jacques Cartier. It's going to be two nights, January 19-20 (that's 29-30 Niv se for you aficionados of the French Revolutionary Calendar), from 5 to 11PM. We're going out on Friday night -- our pals from Ninjatune are part of the party, and our friend DJ Ghost Beard is on that evening. It should be a great time; I'm really looking forward to dancing in the snow and having vin chaud afterwards. tags: montreal piknic lectronik party dancing ninjatune winter snow

BarCampMontreal II: Camp Harder Just got the news from my blogroll: Sylvain Carle notes that the second BarCampMontreal will take place April 28th. That's going to be close for us; we'll be at the Wikitravel Get-together in Puerto Rico up until the 22nd. And we plan to fly there from Miami. But, hey: stranger things have happened. Our BarCamp last year was an absolute blast (see my follow-up on Journal/1 Brumaire CCXV); lots of fun people doing interesting things in fun ways, and then talking about it. I'd really like to be there for this next one. tags: barcamp montreal barcampmontreal wikitravel puerto rico

Louisianne I'm happy to see that in an alternative history universe called Ill Bethisad, the French Revolutionary Calendar is used in the North American francophone nation of Louisianne. On the downside, my city of Ville-Marie is in the royalist enclave of New Francy, which uses the boring old calendar. Ill Bethisad is an impressive alternative-history project, and the wiki format seems to really be conducive to its further development. Great idea, and nice to see the ol' FRC included. tags: alternative history french revolutionary calendar ill bethisad north america

Baby Lessig Congrats to Lawrence Lessig and family on the birth of a new son. tags: baby lessig

Dear Lazyweb, what is you opinion to having a CV on your homepage? There are definitely privacy issues associated with this. Even having your birthday there makes abuse easier. On the other hand, many people will write a blog posting on their brithday and thus expose it anyway. I'd never put a full CV on the homepage (a good CV is adopted to the audience anyway), just with the bare minimum such as the university graduation and such. Having some project and research information there might get you some interesting job offers; putting a mini CV there as "teaser" along with the offer of a full CV on request could prove beneficial. On the other hand, such as CV could be a dangerous source material for "social engineering [wikipedia]" attacks. The maiden name of your mother used to be a suggested backup password for many websites, and is found in some CVs; people tend to trust people more that claim to have been on the same school or university (even if they can't remember them; especially if they are made feel embarassed by not remembering...). Where is your privacy limit? How much of your privacy did you expose on the web already anyway? Do you still avoid having a one-stop download of that data? Do you think there is a way back, with all the indexing, caching and archiving of web pages? My blog does intentionally not have comments; to reply please post in your own blog or email me at erich@debian.org; I read a couple of OSS planets and I'll also notice if you link to this blog entry and ping technorati.

Dear Lazyweb, what is you opinion to having a CV on your homepage? There are definitely privacy issues associated with this. Even having your birthday there makes abuse easier. On the other hand, many people will write a blog posting on their brithday and thus expose it anyway. I'd never put a full CV on the homepage (a good CV is adopted to the audience anyway), just with the bare minimum such as the university graduation and such. Having some project and research information there might get you some interesting job offers; putting a mini CV there as "teaser" along with the offer of a full CV on request could prove beneficial. On the other hand, such as CV could be a dangerous source material for "social engineering [wikipedia]" attacks. The maiden name of your mother used to be a suggested backup password for many websites, and is found in some CVs; people tend to trust people more that claim to have been on the same school or university (even if they can't remember them; especially if they are made feel embarassed by not remembering...). Where is your privacy limit? How much of your privacy did you expose on the web already anyway? Do you still avoid having a one-stop download of that data? Do you think there is a way back, with all the indexing, caching and archiving of web pages? My blog does intentionally not have comments; to reply please post in your own blog or email me at erich@debian.org; I read a couple of OSS planets and I'll also notice if you link to this blog entry and ping technorati. [Update: first interesting replies coming in - let me quote:

If I do get a call from someone who spotted it (rare, once every 3 months), the recruiter is 99/100 an asshole he isn't going to ask you to do something you want. Really!

Yeah, I can imagine that. One of the reasons I've put up a mini CV is that every few months I'm asked some of these basics usually found on CVs because of my art - I have some poetry on my page that is very popular, and every now and then someone wants to use it in school; teachers always want people to be able to tell something about the author. In such cases, I find it actually worth to highlight that I'm a math and computer science guy, to make people see that it isn't an either-or thing, language and science.]

Steve Yegge posts an article about this that, the other thing, and statically typed functional programming languages. In it, he compares Haskell to something you can:

"build beautiful, lithe marionettes with"

Unfortunately, I haven't had the time or inclination to learn Haskell (yet), but I have used Erlang professionally, so I do have a bit of experience using a functional programming language. What comes to my mind isn't marionettes, but clockwork. That's a purposefully neutral word, in case you were wondering. An enthusiast might say "a finely crafted swiss watch", and a detractor might grumble "a windup toy". In my mind's eye, the concept is that in functional languages you get this succession of things happening one after the other that happen precisely the same way, if the program is wound up just the same each time. To paraphrase:

Do this with the result of this with what this produces when given  
this input that is derived from this function which takes the  
result of this other thing after calculating the result of 
something that is derived from the output of a function that ...

And so on and so forth...tick, tock, tick, tock. While I can appreciate that in some ways, this is likely to produce clean programming, in other ways I am less convinced of its practicality. If you'll bear with a poor comparison, sometimes programming is like a song. You do the tricky section, then you go back to an easier section and catch your breath for a bit. That seems to work out in a language like Ruby or Java fairly well, depending on how densely you like your code. You get sections with DoThisAndThisAndThatWithTheResultsOfSelectThisFromTableXYZ that you have to slow down to think through. And then:

• You assign the result to a variable.
• Which gives you a few lines to
  • slow down
  • consider where the program is
• And then

GoToTheNextTrickyBit where ManyThingsHappen. All in all, you wind up with a sort of ebb and flow that works out pretty well if you're in tune with the code being written, going from intense calculations, to a line or two where you do no more than store things in a variable, take a breather, and prepare for the next important stanza. In my limited experience, I have to say that I didn't always get that sensation from Erlang (which in some ways is apparently less "hair shirt" oriented than Haskell). You always had to be writing something with an eye to where it was coming from, and where it was going. Without a doubt, this produces code that is more compact in terms of meaning and functionality, but at times it leaves a guy like me, who grew up with Basic, C, Python, and so on with the desire to say "woah there, nelly", let's take a breather and sort things out a bit in a few variables before moving on to the next bit of fancy code gymnastics. What I'm curious about is what will catch on from academically oriented programming languages like Haskell. The people working on them are without doubt very smart, and there are some interesting concepts being bandied about (pattern matching is pretty cool, just to cite one). But academia doesn't always produce things that catch on with the average Joe programmer, either, and while the more elitist out there may attribute this to simplistic reasoning such as 'well then Joe is just stupid', I think that the more thoughtful language crafters will attempt to ascertain what works, and what doesn't, and perhaps we will see the Ruby of functional languages emerge from Haskell, the Smalltalk of functional languages. What do you think?

It appears that some people don't understand what right-wing means in terms of politics, apart from using it as a general term of abuse.

I recommend visiting the site http://www.politicalcompass.org/ to see your own political beliefs (as determined by a short questionnaire) graphed against some famous people. The unique aspect of the Political Compass is that they separate economic and authoritarian values. Stalinism is listed as extreme authoritarian-left and Thatcherism as medium authoritarian-right. Nelson Mandela and the Dalai Lama are listed as liberal-left.

I score -6.5 on the economic left/right index and -6.46 on the social libertarian/authoritarian index, this means that I am fairly strongly liberal-left. Previously the Political Compass site would graph resulta against famous people but they have since removed the combined graph feature and the scale from the separate graphs. Thus I can't determine whether their analysis of the politics of Nelson Mandela and the Dalai Lama indicate that one of those men has beliefs that more closely match mine than the other. I guess that this is because the famous politicians did not take part in the survey and an analysis of their published material was used to assess their beliefs, this would lead to less accuracy.

The Wikipedia page on Right-Wing Politics provides some useful background information. Apparently before the French revolution in the Estates General the nobility sat on the right of the president's chair. The tradition of politically conservative representatives sitting on the right of the chamber started there, I believe that such seating order is still used in France while in the rest of the world the terms left and right are used independently of seating order.

Right-wing political views need not be associated with intolerance. If other Debian developers decide to publish their political score as determined by the Political Compass quiz then I'm sure that we'll find that most political beliefs are represented, and I'm sure that most people will discover that someone who they like has political ideas that differ significantly from their own.

I am keeping a close eye on the Wordpress 2.0.7 release. I am being cautious because:

1. no pings on their post. bit odd!
2. The mentioned vulnerability does not apply to Debian’s PHP
3. The diff between 2.0.6 and 2.0.7 has some considerable changes to the Akismet plugin which is not mentioned on the changelog/post
4. I would like to improve the Debian copyright file, though I would like to hear back from upstream first
5. There seems to be another minor security bug which I don’t think 2.0.7 addresses

I am also keeping an eye on Wordpress MU edition, to see how they handle these bugs, which has been version 1.0 for sometime. Update: Ryan informs me there will be a 2.0.8 fixing the last reported security bug.

Russell: I don't think so. I do think that most Free Software people, even more in settings such as Debian, will tend to be in the lower-left quadrant of the political compass. Personally, I ranked Economic Left/Right: -8.00, Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -6.87 - No surprise for me ;-) And yes, we do have some more upper- or right- sector people, but I think our center of mass will surely fall in the lower-left quadrant. More samples needed ;-)

This morning at LCA Andrew Tanenbaum gave a talk about Minix 3 and his work on creating reliable software.

He cited examples of consumer electronics devices such as TVs that supposedly don't crash. However in the past I have power-cycled TVs after they didn't behave as desired (not sure if it was a software crash - but that seems like a reasonable possibility) and I have had a DVD player crash when dealing with damaged disks.

It seems to me that there are two reasons that TV and DVD failures aren't regarded as a serious problem. One is that there is hardly any state in such devices, and most of that is not often changed (long-term state such as frequencies used for station tuning is almost never written and therefore unlikely to be lost on a crash). The other is that the reboot time is reasonably short (generally less than two seconds). So when (not if) a TV or DVD player crashes the result is a service interruption of two seconds plus the time taken to get to the power point and no loss of important data. If this sort of thing happens less than once a month then it's likely that it won't register as a failure with someone who is used to rebooting their PC once a day!

Another example that was cited was cars. I have been wondering whether there are any crash situations for a car electronic system that could result in the engine stalling. Maybe sometimes when I try to start my car and it stalls it's really doing a warm-boot of the engine control system.

Later in his talk Andrew produced the results of killing some Minix system processes which show minimal interruption to service (killing an Ethernet device driver every two seconds decreased network performance by about 10%). He also described how some service state is stored so that it can be used if the service is restarted after a crash. Although he didn't explicitely mention it in his talk it seems that he has followed the minimal data loss plus fast recovery features that we are used to seeing in TVs and DVD players.

The design of Minix also has some good features for security. When a process issues a read request it will grant the filesystem driver access to the memory region that contains the read buffer - and nothing else. It seems likely that many types of kernel security bug that would compromise systems such as Linux would not be a serious problem on the HURD. Compromising a driver for a filesystem that is mounted nosuid and nodev would not allow any direct attacks on applications.

Every delegate of LCA was given a CD with Minix 3, I'll have to install it on one of my machines and play with it. I may put a public access Minux machine online at some time if there is interest.

Me: “The hard part of building a standard is getting the right people at the table — those who are in a position to make that standard actionable. You can sit around all day and agree that there should be a standard, you can even agree what the standard will look like, but if you don’t have buy-in and participation from the people who can actually implement it and get the standard to be widely used, then you’re wasting your time.”

I've had a couple of silent phone calls from 01158507616. It seems that Jigsaw Insurance Marketing (UK) Ltd of 3rd floor, 16, King St, Nottingham, Nottinghamshire NG1 2AS are notorious nuisance callers. I've fed them to Ofcom's web-based silent call complaints system and with any luck, the next time I hear about them will be when they are fined. (I don't hear about them when they call. It's just silent.)

Erich commented:

"Pbuilder is great (and cowbuilder even more so). First of all, it makes setting up and upgrading chroots easier (even easier than dchroot etc.), but it will also handle dependencies and do install/removals (well, technically it won't remove stuff, the chroot is just thrown away afterwards). That way, pbuilder helps getting build dependencies right, and ensures the package is currently buildable (not with some library package you still happen to have on your system, but that has been removed from Debian; not uninstallable for some reason etc.). This makes the job easier for porters, since a FTBFS is less likely to be an error in packaging by the maintainer... At some point I had like 6 pbuilder chroots... woody, sarge, unstable, woody with some backports, sarge with SELinux backports, unstable with experimental. Sure, we don't need debhelper either? After all, it just does some cp and mvs, doesn't it? There IS some benefit in having stuff automatized in a standard way; even though we could all do our chroots ourselves, I want to express my thanks to the pbuilder (and cowbuilder) authors and maintainers for making life EASIER for me. A lot easier. I could live without, but I would probably not keep that many chroots."

Ken Bloom added:

"One important feature of a pbuilder chroot is that pbuilder installs build-dependencies as you ask it to build debian packages, and removes them as soon as it finishes building the packages. In this sense, pbuilder is specifically intended to replicate the buildd environment, so you can find out whether your packages will break on a buildd (e.g. whether you've remembered to include all of the build-deps in debian/control, because things will break on the buildds if you forgot to add a build-dep because the build-dep was just lying around on your system (or in your unstable chroot)."

Sven M ller wrote:

"Well, pbuilder has several benefits, but the most important one to me is that it restarts from a clean system (only base packages + build-essentials installed) on each build. Sure this adds to the time needed for the build, but it also makes sure that I get all build-deps right and that the whole build process is as reproducible as possible."

Ben Hutchings commented:

"The major difference between pbuilder's approach and simply building in a chroot'ed installation is that pbuilder tries to build on a minimal system plus the specified build-dependencies. If you always build with pbuilder or similar it's much less likely that you will miss a build-dependency or otherwise produce a package that can't be auto-built elsewhere."

I take the clean chroot point as a clear benefit, but it still strikes me that there are easier ways to do the same thing (rsync --delete) without all the waiting around for pbuilder on my slow mipsel. I guess that's the difference with debhelper: debhelper use doesn't seem to slow me down.

I blogged 5 days ago about the annoying beeper and different methods that were supposed to turn it off.

I asked for a clean solution, but I received suggestions for some hacks. Now I decided to make a new post since there was a comment added today and I remembered about a possible hack (dpkg-divert) I was thinking about.

Now here are some of those hacks and the reason behind rejecting them.

• I thought at some point of using dpkg-divert, as opposed to deleting the module, but this is suboptimal. And I am not sure dpkg-divert would work for such a whacked "use case"
  
• Using a hardware method is also suboptimal, for several reasons:
• I will hear the beep if I don't plug in the dummy jack
• the same goes when I am using a headset - the volume is loud and seems to not be affected by the general sound volume, so it would be disruptive and annoying while listening music and typing the wrong command;
• the Intel HDA sound driver lacks headset jack detection in the current Debian kernel. This means there is no effect if I plug such a jack
  
• The default beeping should be disabled by default, still, that would partly solve my problem. I could set that in my .inputrc file or system wide, still, that would mean a beep on some occasions (like gdm log in) - not sure if this would mean it would be more scarier, since it happens rarely or not :-)

Still, the question remains, why don't the originally proposed methods work, especially blacklisting?

Update: the headphones jack works with some small changes, bug submitted (#407252)