For those who've been hiding under a rock for the last few months: dunc-tank is the (controversion) project that was founded by the current DPL, Anthony 'aj' Towns. Controversial, because a lot of people feel that this goes against the spirit of Debian; and that by paying some Debian people and not paying others, we're creating a two-class system that we'd best avoid. And probably a bunch of other arguments, too, but that's not what this blog post is about. Me, I've been staying rather quiet in the whole debate. It's not that I don't have an opinion; rather, I haven't been voicing it, mostly because my thoughts on the matter are rather convoluted, and I'm not sure I can put them in words pretty well. But since the debate seems to be going in circles, and since I think that I might be able to help it out, I'll try anyway. If that doesn't bring the debate any further, well—can't blame me for trying. Do I think that paying people to do work on Debian is necessarily a bad idea? No, not at all. Quite to the contrary; by paying people to work full-time on Debian for a while, we will increase the amount of work that's being put into Debian, which can only be a good thing; and I can only applaud aj for trying to get this done, since it should be obvious to anyone involved that by proposing this, he only had Debian's best interests (i.e., improve our distribution) in mind. The obvious question, however, is who we'll be paying. After all, while I don't think it's necessarily bad to pay people, I do think that with money, you introduce the possibility for corruption; so at the very least, it should be strictly checked what exactly happens with the money that's being spent. Accordingly, the way in which you pay people—your whole set-up and procedures—should have a number of safeguards. Which brings me to my next point. Do I think that dunc-tank, as a project, is a good idea? No, not at all. Quite to the contrary; and I have a number of reasons for that. First, I don't think that deciding by committee who can get paid and who can't is the way to go forward. A committee will always be biased, no matter how diverse its membership. Even if you could find a committee that would not be biased—an impossibility by definition—then there will still be people who will not agree with the committee's decision. Are they right not to agree? Not necessarily. Is it bad to create such controversy if it could be avoided? Sure as hell. Moreover, by creating a project which populated by Debian people and which has the sole purpose of paying Debian people, it's fairly possible to create the impression as if all other ways to get paid to do Debian work would be unsound; that if a developer accepts money for Debian work without going through the committee, he's somehow doing something morally wrong. This would be very bad indeed; I know for a fact that there are cases of people paying Debian Developers to work a few days on a certain package so that a certain bug which impedes their business is fixed, or so that a certain version of a random package which this company is using, is uploaded into the archive. I've done this myself in the past (although I can't disclose more, since the person who paid me requested to remain anonymous); I know of at least two other Debian Developers who've done so as well. So what's the alternative? Not paying people is one, but it would not necessarily be the best. One alternative, which the FreeBSD people have been doing, is just "no organization at all". People who want to get paid just put up a web page with the amount of money they would like to have, and it's up to the community to decide whether their request is valuable enough for it to actually be paid. To some extent, this is also what the Dunc-Tank committee is doing, except that as FreeBSD does it, there is no committee in between. The problem with this approach, however, is that if we all go ahead and ask for money at the same time, it'll not only make us look like a bunch of beggars; it's also very likely that nobody will actually be getting any money, because there's so many "good causes" to choose from that there might not be enough donations to fund them all. Another proposal was one made by Manoj Srivastava, before word got out that dunc-tank would be started (or about at that time). As it was made on the debian-private mailinglist, I can't say much about that; suffice to say that I feel his proposal was overly bureaucratic, and had problems that were similar in nature to the problems I feel exist with dunc-tank. So do I have any answers which might get us a way out of the current status quo? Nope, afraid not. But allow me to make this final observation: In early 2005, a bunch of people decided that Vancouver was a nice place, and travelled there. As it happened, they were all Debian people. What a coincidence. Since they were all there anyway, they decided to talk a bit about Debian, and as a result, came up with some plan for its future. This plan, too, was rather controversial. When I initially read the first few paragraphs, I suddenly fell upon this paragraph which seemed to say that "we suspect we won't be releasing with anything but i386, amd64, and powerpc for etch". Things suddenly turned kinda red from then on. And it wasn't the wine that I hadn't been drinking. I could imagine that what I felt back then is somewhat similar to what some other people felt when they first heard about the suggestion to pay people for Debian work; and this realization is the reason why I haven't been dismissing their arguments or thoughts, much like I've seen other people do. However, I cannot say that I feel the current crisis to have many parallels with the Vancouver one; this is mostly because in the current case, people on both side of the argument seem to be building up walls around themselves, to help them ignore whatever the other side was saying. In contrast, when someone suggested something which had the potential effect of throwing most of the hard work I'd been putting in for Debian during the last five years now down the drain, I went to talk with them—after the heat had cooled down, anyway. Unfortunately for me, the result is exactly the same; for all my effort, I haven't been able to prevent m68k to be kicked out of the release; and to say I'm not happy about this would be an understatement. But at least this way the port has been given a fair chance; if I hadn't been talking to the people on the other side of the argument, I would still be talking about Steve Langasek as if he were the devil himself, and m68k would probably have been kicked out of Debian—along with a bunch of other architectures. At least I got that bit fixed. I guess what I'm saying is that people, rather than farting in eachother's general direction, should be working together in finding a compromise. Sure, that means making concessions, and agreeing to something you'd rather not agree to. But at least this way, the thing you have to agree to isn't as bad as what it could be. And trust me, people will do the stuff you don't want them to do, with or without your agreement. Hell, they've already started. Whoa, long post. I'll stop preaching now.

Dear Santa Pyro,
I've been a really good maintainer this year and I hope not to get coal. Don't let my not-updated-lintian-page fool you. My packages hasn't got any RC bug in unstable or testing and they are all updated.
What I really want for Christmas is Task and Skill step finished. That will look great under Christmas tree :)
Thanks in advance.

Your eternal applicant, luciano

Given the recent articles or blog posts that may lead some people to think that dunc bank made people work against Debian, maybe some explanations are needed. Dunc-bank is a single web page that some humourless people may find unfunny, YMMV, but that is nothing else than satirical. There was no conspiracy, undermining work, or power games. People claiming the contrary are just making complete fools of themselves. Really. The people that contributed to dunc-bank, meaning that did report most of the RC bugs in the last month are for some, even disgruntled when it comes to dunc-bank (I'm thinking e.g. of Lucas Nussbaum that did a full archive rebuild and reported many bugs). No, dunc-bank is not the evil masonery club that some depict. The sole thing I think really happened, is that people are nowadays really concerned about QA, and that there is a whole lot of issues that can be tracked automatically, at home (a good ADSL line and a GHz grade CPU is largely enough to do an archive rebuild in a week nowadays). What is really a shame in fact, is that those checks are not performed by Debian for any package, and on a regular basis. The other factor is that I think many people had concerns with etch quality, as many discussions in the past month may have let think that its quality could suffer from the announced release date. Now that this bad joke is now officially a dead-line, I think this is less and less a concern. That said, Yes, I do think some people that usually did good work in debian diminished their work considerably, and that it hurt the release. We lost some developpers (our locales + X-keyboard expert and that's a huge loss), some orphaned a lot of packages, and recent events do show that you can't improvise beeing the libpng maintainer a month before the release, and so on. Yes it's true that recent events and surroundings in Debian^[1] have led people to feel they are strangers to what Debian is becoming. And blaming them for not beeing supportive is very distateful and shocking. When you do pursue actions, that will lead to big changes in the community, then blaming the community members for those changes is a shame. So no, you can't blame the people behaviours (that have been reduced to dunc-bank supporters because that's so easy) for etch beeing late, because you can't blame the direct consequences of an action for beeing the cause of its failure.

Mozilla Firefox Locales In 2004, we had for every individual localization a dedicated source package in the Debian archive, such as: mozilla-firefox-locale-ar, mozila-firefox-locale-ca, etc. This is a mess from every point of view. First, it creates much overhead on the archive infrastructure side as well as on the maintainers one, and second, since it often results in localization packages out of sync with the browser, it is a major pain in the ass for the users. Mozilla Firefox Locales All In January 2005, Cesar Martinez Izquierdo introduced the common source package mozilla-firefox-locale-all which included most of the available localizations. That was the inital step to clean up the mess. Later, David Moreno Garza and Luk Claes took the package over and accompanied it through the Mozilla Firefox to Firefox transition. Iceweasel l10n In September 2006, I jumped in as the new maintainer. Since then, the package did continue to evolve:

• rebranding for the Firefox to Iceweasel transition (currently, the foreign locales are fixed, only the en-US locale included in iceweasel is not, patch is at #400721).
• renaming to use the proper l10n naming scheme ($ program -l10n-$ language and not $ program -locale-$ language ).
• with the inclusion of the Catalan and Ukrainian localizations, iceweasel-l10n includes now really all Iceweasel locales which were previously packaged seperately in Debian (Thanks again to Jordi Mallach and Eugeniy Meshcheryakov for their permission for inclusion).

Additionally,

• with the readdition of temporarily removed locales within the Firefox 2.0 release (he for Hebrew and pa-in for Punjabi, taken from 2.0.0.1-rc3),
• with the inclusion of unofficial but complete localizations (fa-ir for Persian and fur-it for Furlan),
• and the half-official localizations (ka for Georgian and ku for Kurdish, taken from 2.0.0.1-rc3),

iceweasel-l10n as of 2.0+debian.1-1 supports 43 languages in total. That is more than any other distribution (yes, including Ubuntu :) contains. Icelizard Currently, the locale packages for iceape and icedove are not unified. This September, I was writing to the some of the maintainers but they seemed not interested to fix it for Etch. I will try it again in 2007, my aim is to have proper unified localization packages for all icelizard applications in Lenny. Update: iceweasel-l10n 2.0.0.1+debian-1 adds Valencian localization, so supporting 44 languages now.

In the finest tradition it is Christmas-time and my computer is dead. OK slight exaguration. I have two computers I regularly use:

desktop.my.flat

This is my main development machine, which I sit in front of and work at most days.

itchy.my.flat

This has several roles:

• xen
  • So that I can run Sarge for building security updates.
• caching name server
• backup server

(Both of these machines run Sid.) The backup server is the important use for this machine. Every four hours I do a full database dump + rsync of d-a.org, my personal server, and my desktop system.

The backup machine, itchy, is currently down because of a failing hard drive. I’ve ordered a replacement computer (a bit extravogent considering I could have got by with just a new disk drive). This will be my first 64-bit machine, and also my first machine with hardware support for virtualisation. The new machine should arrive on Saturday. Once it does I’ll rotate it in. The new machine will become my desktop. My desktop will become the backup, and the old machine with the failing drive will be donated to my Sister. (Who I was due to give a machine to already. I will need to get a new disk but that will be done shortly.) I think I’ll try sticking with Etch on the new machine, and possibly make the backup machine run it too. I guess I don’t need sid yet… Besides Xen makes new installations easy

Russell, 0.0.0.0 is not the same thing as 127.0.0.1. You may get the same behaviour in some cases due to some implementation details, but that does not mean that both are the same! 127.0.0.1 means "The host this software is running on". In contrast, 0.0.0.0 means "Any host"; it can be used in software as the C constant "INADDR_ANY". While it is true that connecting to 0.0.0.0 from software such as ping will yield the same result as connecting to 127.0.0.1, it is absolutely not true that listening to 0.0.0.0 (in a bind(2) kind of way) yields the same result as listening to 127.0.0.1. After all, in the latter case you will only accept connections that originate from localhost; in the former case, you will accept any connection, whether from localhost, the local network, or the big and evil Internet. I presume you will have at least some firewall in between, but still. That being said, however, 127.0.0.2 is an alias for 127.0.0.1. So is 127.0.1.0. And 127.255.0.1. And, really, anything in the 127/8 network range. Now that has no utility—there can be use in having a /24 reserved for loopback, but a /8? Who would ever need 16M ip addresses for the local host? Is there even an operating system that can keep track of that many IP addresses? Oh well. not as if I care. And, after all, IPv6 has fixed that little issue. Although it might be fair to say that they overcompensated there a little bit.

[RV Heraclitus SE Asia voyage: blog photos] The past few weeks, we changed our route to visit an uninhabited island (aka Ko Pulau Island) said to be "National Geographic, man" by some Americans we met in Kupang. On the way to Ko Pulau Island we saw a large school of pilot whales and dolphins, a humpback or other whale close to shore, a blue starfish and hot water vents nearby on the same mostly dead reef, a flock of birds feasting on a dense school of fish, a manta ray, a bonfire on the beach shared with the kids of Rote (who we swapped roast banannas and coconuts with), a clean hull and renewed sea-sickness. At Ko Pulau Island, we saw a long white beach made of small bead things instead of sand, with surf at either end and reef in between, a green lagoon with islands being eaten away at the base, a monkey-head rock, pink coral, reef fish, sea urchins, various pieces of flotsam washed up on the beach (flip-flops, a light-bulb, bottles, wood, burnie-beans, nautilus shells, a seabird egg, a dead seabird and other crap), sunset over the ocean with golden cirrus in the sky, turtle nests, tracks and hatchlings scurrying off into the water, Indonesian fishermen in need of water and turtle eggs, tidal pools with the occasional crab, ghost crabs darting towards the water, a pandanus stand, a small cave surrounded by discarded turtle eggshells, spinifex, hermit crabs, scrambling lizards, sunburn and other things. Later in our voyage, we saw a big lone flying fish, land looming mountainous on starboard, TNI, gratis reef fish, water buffalo and threatening rain clouds. The next major stop was a bay on the south side of Sumba, black cliffs to port and an eroded hillside to starboard. There, we enjoyed the excellent snorkeling against the cliffs and off the beach, birds calling from the forest, wasps - shiny blue and otherwise, meeting roaming cows in the forest, forest fungi and other sights. We met some fishermen and drove through the forested slopes toward a nearby city. On the way, we visited an Indonesian village and saw their traditional animist temple, ample baby pigs & dogs, tons of kids trying to get in photos, satellite dishes and graves in front of houses. Unfortunately, I crashed once we reached the hotel, missing eating and night life, but I did enjoy the sights from the windows of the cramped 4WD we were in. We headed for the 9.8 knot passage of Selat Sape, complete with eddies, currents, a barracuda and the steep slopes of a silent volcano. Since there, we saw an increasing number of interesting and curious Indonesian vessels, fish traps, the grey shapes of dolphins swimming in the aqua water under the bow, a floating sandal, a school of mahi-mahi jumping out of the water, a misty night, numerous schools of feeding fish, entangled luminescent trails left by dolphins swimming in the phosphorescent water beneath the bow, flashes of lightning in the distance, our first rain since Cairns, the associated storm, Jack the fisherman (a mast hallucination) and other things. Our next stop was Kalimunjava (north of Java, Indonesia), more than half way to Phuket. We spent a week there, watched lightning, collected rain, visited the local school, dived and snorkelled on the magnificant reef with some really nice university students (hi Lely, Dudu, Jaos and others) from Java who were doing a study on the corals and hiked up the steep slopes of the island. From there we ambled past Borneo, towards Bintan, near Singapore, experiencing the first non-calm seas in ages, dolphins in the storm, floating lines of debris, big barges, container ships and megatankers, a fancy, shiny yacht, fishing vessels with 50,000 lights, Rain Drop and it's egg (child of Rain the gecko), amazing cloudscapes at sunrise, throughout the day and at sunset on the way. Amazingly, we met the 8 (Infinity, the new PCRF vessel) one find day in the South China Sea on their way to Bali. Eddie saw them from 5 miles away and knew almost straight away it was them. Michelle came on board and a lone daytime cumi (squid) swam between us as we parted. Before we arrived at Pulau Bintan (near Singapore), we saw seasnakes and a palm tree floating and lots of wind and rain. We will probably arrive in Thailand by January and I'm thinking of passing thru Sydney on the way home, so let so please mail me if you want to meet up.

Thanks to Ricardo Fernandez we have a great new and consistent artwork for our ice-lizard applications. For icedove they will land with the next upload … so here some screens.

I am about 2/3 over with my haul from Edmonton to San Juan, PR (laying over in the beautiful JFK) and am too tired to blog anything much of substance but do check out Furious Season’s impassioned and excellent commentary on the recent NYTimes article (and this one )that reveal how Eli Lily knowingly downplayed the risks of Zyprexa. And if you read the second article, you will find out what Viva Zyprexa means. Here is Eli Lily’s press release, which I have included on the next page as these things tend to vanish… Statement from Eli Lilly and Company: Response to The New York Times Article from December 18, 2006 December 18, 2006 INDIANAPOLIS, Dec 18, 2006 /PRNewswire-FirstCall via COMTEX News Network/ — Eli Lilly and Company (NYSE: LLY), vigorously objects to the characterization of company practices in a New York Times article based upon selective documents illegally leaked by plaintiffs’ lawyers. “At Lilly, we do not engage in off-label promotion - as alleged in The Times article,” said Dr. Steven Paul, Lilly’s executive vice president, science and technology. “Lilly is committed to the highest ethical standards and to promoting our medications only for approved uses. We have clear guidelines and extensive training for our sales representatives to help assure that they provide appropriate promotional information that is within the scope of prescribing information approved by the FDA.” Lilly works to bring Zyprexa to physicians who are confronted with the need to diagnose and treat serious schizophrenia and bipolar disorder wherever they practice. * About half of medical care for serious mental illness takes place in a primary care physician’s office. This is due to the fact a large number of people in the United States have no access to a psychiatrist or do not seek psychiatric care. * Our experience in mental health has taught us that primary care physicians are asking for education on severe mental illnesses, since they see many of these patients in their offices. * We believe that it is absolutely appropriate to discuss Zyprexa and its indicated uses with primary care physicians in the interest of meeting a critical medical need. * It is important that the public understand that physicians can and do prescribe medications outside of their approved indications to meet the needs of their individual patients. “While it is accurate to say that mental illnesses like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder begin early in life — with a higher prevalence during early adolescence and childhood — it is simply untrue to assert that these diseases somehow end — and therefore prescribing for them ends — in young adulthood,” added Paul. “To dismiss the devastating impairment of these disorders throughout a patient’s life is wrong. “Bipolar disorder and schizophrenia are often treated in the offices of primary care physicians. In fact Lilly did research with primary care physicians and found that they were challenged in making the diagnosis of bipolar disorder. Many primary care physicians appreciate the educational outreach Lilly provides in mental illness,” he added. The Times failed to mention that these leaked documents are a tiny fraction of the more than 11 million pages of documents provided by Lilly as part of the litigation process. They do not accurately portray Lilly’s conduct. As part of Lilly’s commitment to patients and healthcare professionals, many high-level Lilly physicians and researchers — along with researchers from outside Lilly — were engaged for a number of years to study the issue of Zyprexa and diabetes. Leaked documents involving these discussions do not represent an accurate view of company strategy or conduct. Lilly deplores the illegal release of select confidential documents. This illegal and selective disclosure of incomplete information will cause unwarranted concern among patients that may cause them to stop taking their medication without consulting a physician. This is the unfortunate result we saw when plaintiffs’ lawyers aggressively advertised about Zyprexa in recent years while searching for clients. Lilly, a leading innovation-driven corporation, is developing a growing portfolio of first-in-class and best-in-class pharmaceutical products by applying the latest research from its own worldwide laboratories and from collaborations with eminent scientific organizations. Headquartered in Indianapolis, Ind., Lilly provides answers — through medicines and information — for some of the world’s most urgent medical needs. Additional information about Lilly is available at www.lilly.com. C-LLY Zyprexa (olanzapine, Lilly) (Logo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20031219/LLYLOGO ) SOURCE Eli Lilly and Company Tarra Ryker, +1-317-276-3787, mobile: +1-317-332-7502, or Marni Lemons,
+1-317-433-8990, mobile: +1-317-532-7826, both of Eli Lilly and Company http://www.prnewswire.com Copyright 2006 PR Newswire. All rights reserved News Provided by COMTEX

Jono Bacon wrote a long blog entry on Planet Ubuntu about his vision of freedom, and how it applies to the proprietary drivers. This is a good opportunity to write sthing I wanted to write for a long time. Ubuntu’s bug #1 is “Microsoft has a majority market share“. Well, I think that this should be of severity minor or wishlist, not critical. A better bug #1 would be “our priority is our users” (does it ring a bell ?). I find it far more important to improve the satisfaction of people already using a Linux distribution, than to try to convince others to use it. Most users of Windows have very good reasons for using Windows, like proprietary applications that have no equivalent in the Free Software world. I don’t think that “Linux doesn’t have a 3D desktop” is the major blocker for people not using Linux. Windows doesn’t have a 3D desktop. Many Mac OS X users don’t use the 3D features. I haven’t felt the slightest need to try a 3D desktop, and I’m using GNOME/metacity, so the jump wouldn’t so hard to make to compiz. I’m not saying that a 3D desktop is not a good idea. Of course, it would be nice to have LiveCDs that just work and start a 3D desktop, so we could show off at conferences. But I haven’t even bothered to google for such LiveCDs. Sometimes, proprietary drivers are more needed on Linux, for example for people who bought a Wifi card without checking first if it was supported. But I don’t think that 3D graphic drivers are that important. I still hope that Ubuntu will not ship proprietary software by default, and that Ubuntu will try to help the free drivers instead. Update: I forgot to close the comments when publishing this entry. They are closed now, but trackbacks are open if you want to write your own blog about this (I don’t think it’s necessary, all arguments have been reharsed many times already. Ah, and for the records, the free ati driver works perfectly fine and fast (using MergedFB) in my dual-screen setup (2560*1024), with xv on both monitors.

That would solve so many problems. LaTeX is still unbeaten in terms of print quality. It's really powerful. Since I've been using it, if started to really despise Writer and Impress. latex-beamer slides look just so much better than any PowerPoint presentation I've ever seen. However, it's far from easy to use. The syntax is a pain, and I don't think it's a feature that you can actuall program in this language. Similar things hold for BibTeX - there are so many things to do wrong there that will go a long way unnoticed. I've recently helped a friend to fix some BibTeX files. It was a pain, there was so much wrong in there... for example URLs. People noticed that they can't just always copy URLs in there, because some characters are special to LaTeX. But instead of using the \url macro, which would also have solved linewrap problem, they started doing the most obscure things (and of course they did not read the FAQ we wrote for them or asked how to do it right), for example adding whitespace to enforce line wraps, replace _ and & with whitespace etc., wrap uppercase chars in - an awful mess. The same thing with the author values. They just wrote "First author, second author" without considering that this might be interpreted according to the common "Last Name, First Name" scheme: e.g. "van Damme, Jean-Claude". (The correct syntax is "First Author and Second Author and Author, Third" - use "and" for separating even when you have more than two authors.) XML is better here. It's rules of escaping are generic and application-independant, and thus you'll have much more tools that know how to do it right, and you only have to learn it once, not for each application. The structuring also comes in handy:

  <authors>
    <author firstname="Foo" lastname="Bar" />
    <author firstname="Gnarf" lastname="Quux" />
  </authors>

is a bit more to write, but it avoids parsing errors. And with good utilies it's not particularly hard to write. Now don't point me to XML-FO. I know about formatting objects, the paper I submitted to the eXtreme Markup Languages conferences was done with FO. It's just that they don't come anywhere close to LaTeX in terms of print quality, the only OpenSource implementation I'm aware of didn't make much progress (but they seem to have released a rewrite in the meantime) and was lacking important features, and MathML has a horrible syntax mess (apart from Apache FOP not having MathML support). XSLT also has an annoying syntax. Too verbose and totally unreadable once you do things that are a bit more complex than the simplest examples. I wish we had something that gives a similar print quality to LaTeX, that uses some XML format (or something similar structured and easy to parse, like Xcerpt data terms, but thats basically equivalent to XML, just a bit more compact; Lisp S-expressions and OEM are other examples) that allows the easy creation of third party utilities and does away with all the black magic involved... Yeah, IMHO it's really time for a rewrite of LaTeX with a modern language design. And a large, unified standard library; plain LaTeX sucks, you can barely use it without extras such as url, hyperref, latex-beamer. [Update: yes, I'm aware of bibtexML, but it's just as bad, you still need hacks such as "the C language" or using "and" to separate multiple authors. I'm also aware of docbook and docbook to latex converters; that definitely is a workaround, but doesn't solve the real problems] (Comments in my blog are intentionally disabled. So if you want to voice your general dislike of anything with XML, abuse your own blog!)

Are comment-less blogs missing the spirit of blogging?

It seems to me that the most significant development about blogging is the idea that anyone can write. Prior to blogs news-papers were the only method of writing topical articles for a mass audience. To be able to write for a news-paper you had to be employed there or get a guest writing spot (not sure how you achieve this but examples are common).

Anyone can start a blog, if there is a community that you are part of which has a planet then it's not difficult to get your blog syndicated and have some reasonable readership. Even the most popular planets have less readers than most small papers, but that combined with the ease of forwarding articles gives a decent readership.

It seems to me that the major characteristic that separates a blog from an online newspaper is the low entry requirements, anyone can create one.

Every news-paper that is remotely worth reading has a letters column to publish feedback from readers. Of course it's heavily moderated and getting even 50% of your letters published is something to be proud of. But it does create a limited forum to discuss the articles that are published.

It seems to me that creating a blog and denying the readers the ability to comment on it is in some ways making the blog less open than a news-paper column. When such blogs are aggregated in a community planet feed it seems that they go against the community spirit. It also drives people to make one-line blog posts in response, which I regard as a bad thing.

The comments on my blog are generally of a high quality, I've had a few anonymous flame comments - but you have to learn to deal with a few flames if you are going to use the net, and people who are afraid to publish their real name to a flame don't deserve much attention. I've had one comment which might have been an attempt to advertise a product (so I deleted it just to be safe). But apart from that the comments are generally very good. I've learned quite a few useful things from blog comments, sometimes I mention having technical problems in blog posts and blog comments provide the solution. Other times they suggest topics for further writing.

There are facilities for moderated blog comments that some people use. If you have a really popular blog then it's probably a good idea to moderate the comments to avoid spam, but I'm not that popular yet and most people who blog will never be so popular. At this time blog moderation would be more trouble for me than it's worth.

In conclusion I believe that the web should be about interactive communication in all areas, it should provide a level playing field where the participation of all individuals is limited only by time and ability. Refusing comments on blogs is a small step away from that goal.

At OSDC Mary Gardiner gave a talk titled The Planet Feed Reader: Better Living Through Gravity. During the course of the presentation she expressed the opinion that short dialog based blog entries are a sign of a well running planet.

Certainly if blog posts respond to each other then there is a community interaction, and if that is what you desire from a planet then it can be considered a good thing. Mary seemed focussed on planets for internal use rather than for people outside the community which makes the interaction more important.

However I believe that planets are not a direct substitute for mailing lists. On a mailing list you can reply to a message agreeing with it and expect that the same people who saw the original message will see your reply. Blogs however are each syndicated separately so a blog post in response to someone else's blog should be readable on it's own. A one line post saying "John is right" provides little value to people who don't know who John is, especially if you don't provide a link to John's post that you agree with.

On Planet Debian there have been a few contentious issues discussed where multiple people posted one-line blog entries. I believe that the effective way to communicate their opinions would either be to write a short essay (maybe 2-3 paragraphs) explaining their opinion and the reasons for it, or if they have no new insight to contribute then they should summarise the discussion.

I believe that a planet such as Planet Debian or Planet Linux Australia should not only be a forum for people who are in the community but also an introduction to the community for people who are outside. AOL posts don't help in this regard.

One final thing to note is that blogs already do have a feature for allowing "me too" responses, it's the blog comment facility...

PS Above is a picture of day 59 of the beard, it was taken on the 5th of December (I've been a little slack with beard pictures).

Hi Yesterday I did a new install of my notebook because I had LUKS and for a reason my laptop began to hang totally (with all installed kernels) after several seconds. This was also my first installation with compiz, I really like it even if it’s just eyecandy - it’s cool. _BUT_, then I installed the sun-java-* packages and also the netbeans package which is waiting in the NEW-queue, I can start it, but there’s no content inside the window? So i tested some other java programs and there exactly the same. Finally I found out that when you run compiz all java applications don’t have a content inside of the javax.swing.JFrame objects. Iceweasel seems also not to work (I’m still searching why), because when invoking on the console I don’t get any line of output - just no reaction. But I can blog - thanks to “drivel” which is also a very nice program in my opinion. Yeah, enough talking bad now - in general I’m very happy and it’s a very good system (compared to other days with unstable ), I think etch will become a really good distribution when I look at my notebook, it’s very simple to use, enough eyecandy, most hardware works out of the box. Special thanks for this to the GNOME-Team who did a really god job in the last months! Wish you a nice Sunday and have fun at work tomorrow (I have holidays )

I am really upset by the way the ARM build daemons are managed. The packages are not uploaded regularly, with sometimes three days between two uploads. Well it should not be a problem, if packages that have failed to build due to some packages not uploaded fast enough (see for example python-gnome, or rkward) were requeued, but that’s actually not the case. Also last week, the build daemon named “cats” stopped to upload packages, despite it continued to build them. 11 days later, nothing has changed even after a mail to arm@buildd.debian.org. And I do not speak about build daemons building nothing. All of that resulted in ARM being the slowest architecture to build packages. It looks like the ARM build daemon maintainer does not know the excellent page made by Jeroen. As arm@buildd.debian.org is everything but responsive (well if you can assign a level of responsiveness to /dev/null), I have decided to act. I have installed QEMU on an 8-way Opteron machine, and created 8 emulated ARM machines, which 256MB of RAM and 10GB of disk for each, all running buildd + sbuild. Altogether those 8 emulated ARM machines should be faster than all the Debian ARM build daemons. I have setup a wanna-build database on my server. During the day it has built around 100 packages. Yes I agree that real machines would be better, but I don’t have a stack of fast ARM machines at home. Anyway when you see random segfaults on the build daemons, or strange failures (that happen for weeks) on the build daemon named “netwinder“, you may think to that again. Unfortunately the machine I use for that is only available for a few months, and I will have to stop the emulated machine then. I just hope that the situation with respect to the build daemons will improve, so that I can stop them even before.

I’ve spent the last few days in Badajoz for the Debian QA meeting in Extremadura. It was my first Debian event, and it was really nice to finally meet all those developers I only knew over the Internet until then. The organisation was very good in general, and C sar G mez really deserves kudos and some rest now In addition to the usual mail processing, I worked on a few things:

• I processed some logs from a rebuilt of all packages in etch and filed about 20 RC bugs about FTBFS. I also did several libpng-related rebuilds, checking that etch packages that b-dep on it still build with the proposed new version. And I investigated a few bugs.
• I also worked on a dirty script to generate the List of packages with problems wrt release (packages in etch with RC bugs, or packages in unstable but not in testing). See the list sorted by maintainer, and the list sorted by popcon score. Despite the unavoidable high number of false positives, I think that some maintainers were actually unaware of the status of their packages, so the list was probably useful.
• I gave a talk about Collaborative QA. The idea is try to move from the current non-organisation (QA one by a bored developer, on his own, because the release is approaching) to a more organized structure (team ?), allowing to share the load and share information (blacklists, false positives lists, processes, etc). I’m not sure yet if this will work, because many people consider that the current way of working on QA is OK, but I’ve created the collab-qa alioth project, and will try to use it to store information about my archive rebuilds. More to come about this later.

In general, I was pleasantly surprised by the fact that all DDs there were very friendly, welcoming, etc. Quite different from the picture of the Debian project one can easily get by looking at the mailing list. It was really nice to have so many interesting discussions with interesting people.

A few weeks ago, some spammer sent out a spam wave abusing one of my domains (fortunately one I havn't been using much). I quickly reacted by rejecting all mail to this domain. However, I'm still seeing frequent mail delivery attempts. Apparently spammers have "discovered" the email address one of them invented, and are now spamming these addresses. Great... that's like... spammer masturbation? making up your own email addresses to spam to... And worse: apparently they're now trying to bypass greylisting. Looks like we've now hit the point where greylisting will lose much of it's effectiveness we all love it for. :-( thats really bad news. Here's an excerpt from my logs (addresses removed to protect the invented):

Dec 10 14:58:54 postfix/smtpd[25738]: NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from unknown[89.129.198.153]: 550 <agricolaapocalyptic@mydomain.tld>: Recipient address rejected: Spammers invented this address, it does not exist.; from=<random@random.tld> to=<agricolaapocalyptic@mydomain.tld> proto=ESMTP helo=<mail.001sm.com>
Dec 10 15:00:25 postfix/smtpd[15969]: NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from unknown[89.129.198.153]: 550 <agricolaapocalyptic@mydomain.tld>: Recipient address rejected: Spammers invented this address, it does not exist.; from=<random2@random2.tld> to=<agricolaapocalyptic@mydomain.tld> proto=ESMTP helo=<mx1.cnm.cn>
Dec 10 15:02:35 postfix/smtpd[15139]: NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from unknown[89.129.198.153]: 550 <agricolaapocalyptic@mydomain.tld>: Recipient address rejected: Spammers invented this address, it does not exist.; from=<random3@random3.tld> to=<agricolaapocalyptic@mydomain.tld> proto=ESMTP helo=<mx2.fr.clara.net>
Dec 10 15:04:40 postfix/smtpd[10646]: NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from unknown[89.129.198.153]: 550 <agricolaapocalyptic@mydomain.tld>: Recipient address rejected: Spammers invented this address, it does not exist.; from=<random4@random4.tld> to=<agricolaapocalyptic@mydomain.tld> proto=ESMTP helo=<mail.1-shops.com>
Dec 10 15:06:46 postfix/smtpd[20414]: NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from unknown[89.129.198.153]: 550 <agricolaapocalyptic@mydomain.tld>: Recipient address rejected: Spammers invented this address, it does not exist.; from=<hisyn@0reality.com> to=<agricolaapocalyptic@mydomain.tld> proto=ESMTP helo=<aspmx2.googlemail.com>
Dec 10 15:09:48 postfix/smtpd[20608]: NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from efi235.internetdsl.tpnet.pl[83.14.242.235]: 550 <agricolaapocalyptic@mydomain.tld>: Recipient address rejected: Spammers invented this address, it does not exist.; from=<random5@random5.tld> to=<agricolaapocalyptic@mydomain.tld> proto=ESMTP helo=<efi235.internetdsl.tpnet.pl>

Yes, that is one host retrying for 8 minutes (usually enough to bypass a greylist), another one a few minutes later, and a third one 5 days later (not included in the log); hosts that didn't make it past the RBL are not included. All in all I count 148 email delivery attemts to this address. And all on a random email in my domain that never existed, and is not a dictionary address like sales@domain.tld; but this probably means I won't be able to enable a catchall for this domain ever again or face loads of spam. OTOH, my spam filter can probably learn that "agricolaapocalyptic" is a sure indicator for spam and just discard all of it. P.S. this effect makes it more plausible that spammers are grabbing the Outlook address books of Windows users to use for spam; it's plausible the spam-address was auto-collected by outlook and then in turn collected by the next spammer. Maybe we really need to create random addresses until they give up on having sane databases sometime? Or at least blacklist our domains for their email collectors...

Last months I’ve been busy with some projects at work, involving some Qt programming, dealing with Cisco JTAPI and other nuisances, which have prevented me from working in eBox. My work desktop is about a meter away from the now three full-time developer eBox team, so I’ve been closely following the development process and participating in some design meetings and at last, I’ve found some time to write nice stuff for it again. eBox lacked administration logging, that is, a log with every change made through the eBox administrative interface (quite useful to know when something was changed or who changed it), so I’ve added support for that in the eBox framework and have implemented the necessary stuff in two modules as an example. There is still a lot of work until every module reports every action to the module, but the core is already working:
As a nice side effect, now we can also show the changes that you are about to save or rollback:
FYI, a new eBox version (0.7.99, aka 0.8rc1) was released some days ago, you can give it a try. Check our downloads section. Obviously these changes won’t be included in 0.8, but in 0.9, which will also add a openvpn module, traffic shaping and other improvements.

Aaron Leventhal of IBM has more details on the relationship between iAccessible2 and the UNIX/Linux accessibility API (ATK/AT-SPI) as well as the motivations behind iAccessible2’s evolutionary approach:

[A]n evolutionary path was needed for applications which already had MSAA (IAccessible) support… [and] an API was needed that did not require separate accessibility implementations for each platform. […] The IAccessible2 interface itself collects important ATK features from other areas, as well some completely new methods and features… For the most part, features were added either to bring Windows capabilities up to the level of ATK/AT-SPI, or in order to support the features of ARIA (previously known of DHTML accessibility). […] [W]hat we’re doing is expanding MSAA while matching ATK/AT-SPI to a very helpful degree. […] [B]ecause IAccessible2 is backwards-compatible with MSAA, the current support of Windows screen readers and other assistive technologies can continue to work on applications that add IAccessible2 support. However, the newer IAccessible2 capabilities will also be exposed, and thus newer assistive technologies will be able to take advantage of them.

Peter Korn of Sun weighs in as well. (Via Andy Updegrove.)