Simon Phipps: “Yes, you can now apt-get install sun-java5-jre and have it install without fuss on Debian and Ubuntu.” Great news. We’re one step closer to a Java/Linux combo that’s more than just Java bolted onto the side of Linux (admittedly, there’s still a bit of that here, though at least it’s attached with standard componentry now rather than the old bubble gum and bailing wire). Why is tighter integration important? Because the alternative, namely Windows and .NET, offers a tightly integrated combo that “just works”. The more a developer has to do (like, say, ship a bundled runtime because that runtime isn’t guaranteed to be available on a key platform), the more attractive the alternative looks. The real question is: Will this be enough? I’ve long contended that open-source Java is a red herring—the real challenge for Java on Linux is ubiquity, not licensing, and licensing is really only an issue because it gets in the way of ubiquity. Time will tell if this step represents the boost Java needs to become to Linux what .NET is to Windows. I don’t know though. For that to happen, the major Linux distributions have to not just add Java to the menu of available software, they have to add Java to the default configuration (much as Perl and Python are default components today), and I just don’t see Red Hat, Debian, or Ubuntu doing that till Java is open source. Still, I’m optimistic we’ll get there. Question is, will we get there in time? P.S. - How about making some of the Java platform components available via APT too? If I’m developing an application that uses, say, JavaMail, I have to go to the web, download it, figure out that it depends on the JavaBeans Activation Framework (JAF), download that, set up my classpath appropriately depending on where I downloaded them, etc. It would be great if I could just apt-get install javamail and have exactly the environment I need without additional effort.

I’m not the first person with a story about the sad state of Comcast. Since I’m certain I’m never actually going to get a True Human to read my email at Comcast, I’ll just post my brief exchange regarding Comcast’s SMTP servers here. Maybe some future archaeologist of the Internet will point to this exchange as early evidence of the End of Email: I posted the following to Comcast’s website feedback form — apparently there is no publicly advertised email address for communicating with Comcast:

Please forward this email to an engineer responsible for Comcast’s SMTP service. I run an ISP. Email to @comcast.net addresses often bounces with a “556 null byte in data” rejection connecting to gateway-s.comcast. I use postfix from Debian Sarge. This is not a problem on my end. There are numerous reports of this problem in newsgroups (just google ‘556 null byte in data’ ‘comcast’). The problem is independent of mail user agent and ISP. Note that this is *not* an issue of my users attempting to connect to the Comcast SMTP server themselves—I understand there is some issue where Comcast only accepts SMTP/SSL/TLS now for its users. This is a *delivery* problem. I have seen some speculation that Comcast’s SMTP servers are rejecting email with this error because of either large attachments or attachments with long filenames. I have seen the problem occur where the attachments are very small (on the order of 10K), but I haven’t ruled out the latter explanation. Please let me know if there is anything I can do to fix this problem. My users would like to be able to email Comcast customers.

Comcast’s response:

Dear Adam KESSEL, Thank you for taking the time to write us. Comcast is aggressive about protecting its’ subscribers from unwanted and unauthorized emails. In keeping with industry standards and best practices some recent changes to our filters have been made.If you are attempting to send emails to legitimate recipients in the Comcast.net domain, and receive an error message there are 3 likely reasons: 1. Your mail server has been identified as a source of Spam. Our mail filters have been updated to reject all mail from your server until the administrator of your mail server contacts us to request the server be removed. 2. The source of your message has a dynamic email address. Anyone attempting to email into the Comcast domain directly from a Dynamic IP address will receive the following error message: Comcast does not support the direct connection to its mail servers from residential IPs. Your mail should be sent to comcast.net users through your ISP. Please contact your ISP or mail administrator for more information. 3. Your mail server has an invalid rDNS value. What this means is that our mail filters authenticate each message by checking the rDNS value to ensure its’ a legitimate domain and yours wasnot. The error or “bounce” message you receive will indicate which reason the message was rejected. Youwill either be given the address to request Blacklist removal or you will be directed to our rDNS FAQpage. If a domain administrator feels that their IP range has been blocked in error or they would like information on required steps to be removed from our black list, they can contact us at: blacklist_comcastnet@cable.comcast.com If you need assistance setting up email through your ISP?s mail servers please visit their support pages or contact their support group. If you need information on the rDNS block, please visit: http://www.comcast.net/help/faq/index.jsp?faq=Email118405 Thank you for the opportunity to assist you. If you need further assistance with any of your Comcast services please reply to this email and we will be happy to assist you. Thank you again for choosing Comcast we appreciate your business. To visit our local support page including links to contact us via Live Chat, as well as many downloadable forms,and FAQ pages, please visit: http://www.comcast.com/nesupport/ Did you know that Comcast offers its customers a variety of free benefits? These include McAfee Antivirus, Firewall and Privacy software as well the Comcast tool bar that lets you take Comcast.net with you while you surf, and the Desktop Doctor to help you restore lost settings…plus much more, please visit http://www.comcast.net/downloads/ to see all of the extras that we provide. Sincerely,
Irene Comcast Electronic Customer Care - New England You can email us anytime by replying to this email or by clicking the “Contact Comcast” link found on the bottom of all www.Comcast.net and www.Comcast.com webpages. Our Electronic Customer Support teams are available to assist you 24 hours a day 7 days a week. **************************************************
The response contained in this message is intended for the addressee only and may vary from other ponses depending on geography, promotional campaigns or other factors. If you are not the intended recipient of this response, please delete this message. Any unauthorized use or dissemination of the information contained in this message is prohibited.
**************************************************

The last bit about “unauthorized use” is a nice touch. My follow-up:

The 556 null byte SMTP error is *not* a spam or blocking related rejection. My mail server is (1) not a source of spam (2) does not have a dynamic IP address (I assume below whenyou wrote “dynamic email address” you meant “dynamic IP address”); it is not a residential IP but rather a commercial ISP that I run; and (3) the mail server has a valid reverse DNS lookup. To clarify: not every email is being rejected from the ISP’s IP address. In fact, the same sender can send from my ISP multiple times to a Comcast subscriber, and most messages will get through. There appears to be a bug in your SMTP delivery server whereby certain triggering events cause a 556 null byte error. There is at least some evidence that one such triggering event is an email with an attachment with a long filename. This is not a spam filter issue. This is a Comcast SMTP configuration issue. As you will see if you google “‘556 null byte in data’ comcast” this is awidespread problem that is entirely unrelated to Comcast’s zealous efforts to block unsolicited email. Please forward my email to an engineer or technician. Thanks,
Adam

Finally, Comcast’s witty retort:

Dear Adam Rosi-Kessel, Thank you for taking the time to write us. Commercial Email Accounts We have to apologize, but at this time you must contact our Commercial Business support team by calling one of the following toll free numbers 888-824-8105 or 888-824-8155, 1-888-737-8361 Thank you for the opportunity to assist you. If you need further assistance with any of your Comcastservices please reply to this email and we will be happy to assist you. Thank you again for choosingComcast we appreciate your business. To visit our local support page including links to contact us via Live Chat, as well as many downloadable forms,and FAQ pages, please visit: http://www.comcast.com/nesupport/ Did you know that Comcast offers its customers a variety of free benefits? These include McAfee Antivirus, Firewall and Privacy software as well the Comcast tool bar that lets you take Comcast.net with you while you surf, and the Desktop Doctor to help you restore lost settings…plus much more, please visit http://www.comcast.net/downloads/ to see all of the extras that we provide. Sincerely,
Ivonne Comcast Electronic Customer Care - New England You can email us anytime by replying to this email or by clicking the “Contact Comcast” link found onthe bottom of all www.Comcast.net and www.Comcast.com webpages. Our Electronic Customer Support teams are available to assist you 24 hours a day 7 days a week. **************************************************
The response contained in this message is intended for the addressee only and may vary from other responses depending on geography, promotional campaigns or other factors. If you are not the intended recipient of this response, please delete this message. Any unauthorized use or dissemination of the information contained in this message is prohibited.
**************************************************

If anyone has interesting ideas about how to get past Comcast’s front lines, I would like to know.

I was listening to a DJ Shadow album, “Preemptive Strike”, and recognized one of the songs. The track “High Noon” was from (or included samples of) a Therapy? album called Lonely, Cryin’, Only. I was curious whether Therapy? had originally written the song, or whether both were covers, so I dug around Therapy?’s site a bit and discovered this gem: “Here’s an example of how strange it can be. About a month ago we got a call from DJ Shadow’s management. He’s releasing a DVD and wanted to know if we would give permission for him to include a section of our cover of ‘High Noon’, a song he wrote! Apparently he uses it in his live set and needed clearance from us. How screwed is that? He’s asking us if we allow him to use a section of a cover of a song he wrote! Bizarre.” The music industry is a strange place.

April 2006 traffic discussed avidemux bugsx cube-data db3 db4.2 debian-installer dialign doc-rfc-*? kolab dpkg foobillard gallery2 gnome-themes kscope libfaad* libx264* libtom maxdb-doc mysql niftilib php-json sork-* sork-forwards-h3 tetex-extra tremulous www.debian.org

Today I released version 1.0 of rpsltool, my router configuration generator. It can generate the complete BGP configuration (neighbor statements, route-maps, prefix and as-path lists) of peering or customer-facing routers using RPSL data, a local configuration file and a configuration template based on the popular Template::Toolkit perl package. Currently I only provide an IOS configuration template, but it should be easy to write one for JUNOS (patches are welcome!). I know that it's being used in production by several ISPs in the RIPE and APNIC regions, so if you are not satisfied by IRRToolSet I think it's worth some consideration. Major changes since the last public release:

• Modularized and cleaned up the code.
• Added the routesdiff program (formerly part of my cisco-tools package), to show which routes are actually not being accepted from a peer.
• Added the testpeerfilter program, to test the effect of a filter on a peer without actually loading it on the router.
• Added the nagpeer program, to automatically generate reports of bugs in the RPSL objects published by a peer.
• Added the rpslexpand, to quickly perform RPSL expansion from the command line.
• Added the findextraobjs program, useful to identify obsolete entries in peers configuration files.
• Added documentation.

I was at my monthly Java ™ user group meeting tonight, and during the pre-meeting discussion our president Burr Sutter asked a question he usually asks: “So, anybody working on anything exciting?” This typically is taken as “does anyone have a really cool Java ™ project that they are working on right now that would be neat for us to hear about?” I usually sit there, not saying anything. But tonight, nobody had anything much, and I finally spoke up about free runtimes for Java ™. I told them that great progress is being made in the free runtimes for Java ™ arena, particularly in GNU Classpath and Kaffe. After my update, Burr asked a very good question: “Why would you work on a free, open runtime for Java ™ programming language?” My answer follows. You would work on it in order to have a free alternative to a platform governed by the SCSL. You work on a free runtime for Java ™ because a free alternative would be better than what we have now; a closely-guarded and largely ingrown platform. You work on improving a free alternative because you are free to participate without that project demanding (via a legally-binding license) that you can only work with them from here on out, and that nothing you learn while devoting your time and energy to them (without compensation) can be used elsewhere. If you do share it elsewhere, and that project finds out, their legal team will make an example out of your ass. You prefer a free alternative runtime for the same reason that you prefer the free alternatives to the non-free frameworks and platforms available for use on Java(TM). Why is Hibernate so popular? Why is Spring so popular? Why is EJB not? Because innovation by committee, while better than a ruthless, unaccountable corporate entity concerned solely with its own betterment, is still not as good as free, open cooperation and collaboration. Is this idea so new? Don’t we try to teach kids that sharing and honesty is the Right Thing ™ to do? I will probably flesh this out as an article at some point, but I wanted to get something written down tonight, while it’s still fresh in my mind.

The coldfire development kit of which I made mention in a somewhat recent -devel-announce post has arrived about a week ago. Mine was the last one to arrive; the other four have already arrived. It took a while, because mine apparently got lost in shipping, so they had to ship me a second one. That, and the fact that I said I'd ask around in my neighbourhood whether it'd been delivered at the wrong address (but then eventually forgot to tell the Freescale folks that I had done so and that, no, it wasn't) meant it took a bit over two months to arrive here. But it finally has. Whee! The box contains a number of things I do not and will not likely ever need (the CodeWarrior Development Studio, for example, or power cables for other places of the world, like the US, the UK, and Japan), but, well—that's not important. It also contains some things that are interesting, such as a serial cable—even if I already have a few of those. The box contents also smells funny. Oh well. In the mean time, however, I've come across a bit of a problem: I can't seem to boot the thing. Well—I can, except it seems to be mangling the serial output it's sending for some reason. I can see that some output is being sent to the serial console, but it's not readable. And I can also see that it doesn't find it's root file system—I'm doing NFS root currently, and there's no network activity. Not sure what the problem is, though. Update: someone suggested that it is the baud rate. Yes, obviously it's something like that; however, I did try every baud rate between 9600 and 115200, but none of them worked. Besides, I have my command line say "console=ttyS0,19200n8", and it's still not working. I suspect a driver problem at this point...

The New York Times: “Representative Peter Hoekstra, the Michigan Republican who is chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and who led the campaign to get the [48,000 boxes of Arabic-language Iraqi documents captured by American troops] released, does not believe they have received adequate scrutiny. Mr. Hoekstra said he wanted to ‘unleash the power of the Net’ to do translation and analysis that might take the government decades.” Bonus: In addition to this being “open source” in the same sense that Howard Dean’s presidential campaign was open source politics and that the term “open source” has been applied to a wide range of non-software fields, including computer hardware, genetics, journalism, publishing, and even cola, “open source” is an actual term for an intelligence gathering discipline that uses information collected from sources available to the general public. Interesting!

The coldfire development kit of which I made mention in a somewhat recent -devel-announce post has arrived about a week ago. Mine was the last one to arrive; the other four have already arrived. It took a while, because mine apparently got lost in shipping, so they had to ship me a second one. That, and the fact that I said I'd ask around in my neighbourhood whether it'd been delivered at the wrong address (but then eventually forgot to tell the Freescale folks that I had done so and that, no, it wasn't) meant it took a bit over two months to arrive here. But it finally has. Whee! The box contains a number of things I do not and will not likely ever need (the CodeWarrior Development Studio, for example, or power cables for other places of the world, like the US, the UK, and Japan), but, well—that's not important. It also contains some things that are interesting, such as a serial cable—even if I already have a few of those. The box contents also smells funny. Oh well. In the mean, however, I've come across a bit of a problem: I can't seem to boot the thing. Well—I can, except it seems to be mangling the serial output it's sending for some reason. I can see that some output is being sent to the serial console, but it's not readable. And I can also see that it doesn't find it's root file system—I'm doing NFS root currently, and there's no network activity. Not sure what the problem is, though. Update: someone suggested that it is the baud rate. Yes, obviously it's something like that; however, I did try every baud rate between 9600 and 115200, but none of them worked. Besides, I have my command line say "console=ttyS0,19200n8", and it's still not working. I suspect a driver problem at this point...

Short summary: I can’t stay away from coding Blosxom plugins. Perl rules. PHP sucks. ;-)

• New version 0.04 of the tagging plugin, supporting Technorati style tag links to many resources.
• New add-on plugin pathbasedtagging to the plugin tagging, implementing Technorati style tag links in pure Blosxom without any help from Apache’s mod_rewrite.
• New plugin dept offering Slashdot like “dept.” lines for Blosxom postings.

Supporting Technorati style tag URLs After releasing the last version of my Blosxom plugin tagging, I noticed that Technorati only seems to like URLs ending in “/tagname” but not ending in “=tagname” (as they do if you use classic query strings instead of the path info), even if the a tag has a rel="tag" attribute. And not only I noticed this but also some other users of the plugin. (Although I do wonder how Furl made it to a Technorati partner with URLs like http://www.furl.net/furled.jsp?topic=tags…) So I somehow had to change the syntax style for my tags. This wasn’t very hard for the links, but I wanted them to still link to my blog and not to Technorati, Flickr, Wikipedia or any other external resource. Implementing Technorati style tag URLs The obviously easiest solution for someone who’s using and administrating Apache web servers for nearly ten years now was to use some mod_voodoo—eh—mod_rewrite:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^/cgi-bin/blosxom.cgi/tags/(.*)$ /cgi-bin/blosxom.cgi?-tags=$1 [PT]

That way I could use Technorati style tags and had a well performing solution. But somehow this solution wasn’t that satisfying since it wasn’t pure Blosxom and therefore had some dependency including access to some Apache config file. (Even if the config file was called .htaccess. ;-) A pure Blosxom solution A few days ago I somehow noticed that in general a special behaviour on some URLs could also be implemented using Blosxom’s API. Using the entries function to modify the Blosxom internal path itself before Blosxom or e.g. the entries_index runs but not returning any hashes, allows to have some path like URLs not being treated as a path by Blosxom. Unfortunately this couldn’t be incorporated into the tagging plugin itself, since plugins doing such path interpreting voodoo needs to be ran before any plugin supplying an entries function runs. But the tagging plugin must run after such a plugin. So I created the small add-on plugin pathbasedtagging which is solely thought for use together with the tagging plugin (but may have other, yet unknown purposes). And since I got asked if they could use the tagging plugin to link to external tag URLs instead of the own blog, I included a ready to use list of more or less popular external tag URLs including Technorati, Flickr, del.icio.us, de.lirio.us and Wikipedia. from the slashdot dept. Since I’ve always liked the often sarcastic or even evil comments inside Slashdot’s subtitle alike dept. lines and since I’m also used to use them at Symlink, I wanted them in my blog, too. Time for a new plugin. The basic work of parsing out the data from the text files the posts reside in was already written for the tagging plugin. So I just had to use that code, simplify it and add some little more code to get the dept plugin whose results you can see in my blog directly beneath the title of a posting since a few days now. Update 02:52h Hey, see my Technorati profile: It worked! Technorati recognised the tags! Yeah!

After blathijs and I today talked a little bit about blosxom plugins on the #blosxom IRC channel, I installed the listplugins plugin. Since I’m a perfectionist in some things, I had to configure it to link every plugin I use to it’s web page or source. While going through my plugin list, I noticed that there were three additional plugins I wrote myself and of which I thought I should share:

• acronyms works similar to and is losely based on Fletcher Penney’s autolinks but instead of setting links it marks configurable keywords as abbreviation or acronym and show their expansion when hovering over the keyword (all using standard XHTML).
• xml_ping_generic is based on xml_ping_weblogs and can ping an arbitrary number of URLs to be pinged with the weblog.com’s XML RPC ping API. By default it pings weblogs.com and technorati.com.
• date_rfc822 is nothing else than the 822-date command (which returns a date in RFC 822 conform format and is written in Perl, too) wrapped into a blosxom plugin. Work similar to date_fullname. I use it for including <pubDate> tags in the RDF.

All plugins are published under the same open source license, they initially came with. In other news… I started using XFN, the XHTML Friends Network, at least the blogroll, and created accounts at Technorati and at yigg.de, a German Digg.com clone formerly respective yet still known as digg.de

Now playing: Battle Without Honor or Humanity — Hotei Tomayasu (from the Kill Bill Soundtrack)

Last week my new mobile phone, a Sony Ericsson K750i arrived. After using it a few days, I really like it. Especially the usb cable, which makes it possible to access the memory stick in the phone via usb-storage, and which charges the battery when connected. The quality of the integrated 2 megapixel camera could be better, here is an example.

Short summary: I can’t stay away from coding Blosxom plugins. Perl rules. PHP sucks. ;-)

• New version 0.04 of the tagging plugin, supporting Technorati style tag links to many resources.
• New add-on plugin pathbasedtagging to the plugin tagging, implementing Technorati style tag links in pure Blosxom without any help from Apache’s mod_rewrite.
• New plugin dept offering Slashdot like “dept.” lines for Blosxom postings.

Supporting Technorati style tag URLs After releasing the last version of my Blosxom plugin tagging, I noticed that Technorati only seems to like URLs ending in “/tagname” but not ending in “=tagname” (as they do if you use classic query strings instead of the path info), even if the a tag has a rel="tag" attribute. And not only I noticed this but also some other users of the plugin. (Although I do wonder how Furl made it to a Technorati partner with URLs like http://www.furl.net/furled.jsp?topic=tags…) So I somehow had to change the syntax style for my tags. This wasn’t very hard for the links, but I wanted them to still link to my blog and not to Technorati, Flickr, Wikipedia or any other external resource. Implementing Technorati style tag URLs The obviously easiest solution for someone who’s using and administrating Apache web servers for nearly ten years now was to use some mod_voodoo—eh—mod_rewrite:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^/cgi-bin/blosxom.cgi/tags/(.*)$ /cgi-bin/blosxom.cgi?-tags=$1 [PT]

That way I could use Technorati style tags and had a well performing solution. But somehow this solution wasn’t that satisfying since it wasn’t pure Blosxom and therefore had some dependency including access to some Apache config file. (Even if the config file was called .htaccess. ;-) A pure Blosxom solution A few days ago I somehow noticed that in general a special behaviour on some URLs could also be implemented using Blosxom’s API. Using the entries function to modify the Blosxom internal path itself before Blosxom or e.g. the entries_index runs but not returning any hashes, allows to have some path like URLs not being treated as a path by Blosxom. Unfortunately this couldn’t be incorporated into the tagging plugin itself, since plugins doing such path interpreting voodoo needs to be ran before any plugin supplying an entries function runs. But the tagging plugin must run after such a plugin. So I created the small add-on plugin pathbasedtagging which is solely thought for use together with the tagging plugin (but may have other, yet unknown purposes). And since I got asked if they could use the tagging plugin to link to external tag URLs instead of the own blog, I included a ready to use list of more or less popular external tag URLs including Technorati, Flickr, del.icio.us, de.lirio.us and Wikipedia. from the slashdot dept. Since I’ve always liked the often sarcastic or even evil comments inside Slashdot’s subtitle alike dept. lines and since I’m also used to use them at Symlink, I wanted them in my blog, too. Time for a new plugin. The basic work of parsing out the data from the text files the posts reside in was already written for the tagging plugin. So I just had to use that code, simplify it and add some little more code to get the dept plugin whose results you can see in my blog directly beneath the title of a posting since a few days now. Update 02:52h Hey, see my Technorati profile: It worked! Technorati recognised the tags! Yeah!

This past couple of weeks saw a lot of Debian and Ubuntu work from me in (hopefully) equal measure. For Debian, I whipped up new versions of robotour, xshisen, libmemcache, and gtklp; robotour finally installs in /usr/games as it should be; xshisen acks NMUs and finally has a sane source package (well, a little bit tipsy still, but at least it’s now fixes the NMU source b0rkage;) libmemcache’s -dev now installs its headers to the right location; and gtklp bumps to a new upstream, with touch-fu replacing AM_MAINTAINER_MODE for seamless build. Thanks a lot to my wonderful sponsors Margarita Manterola, Sylvain Le Gall, and Andreas Metzler for the uploads! On the other hand, opendchub has migrated to testing, and its initscript failed (not to mention missing a manpage) I’ve fixed the latter, but I still have to figure out how to fix the former; I’ll probably have to consult the reference and add an unprivileged opendchub system user and configure the daemon to use that, or fix the source and allow flexible redefinition of opendchub’s working/configuration directories (currently hardcoded to $HOME/.opendchub). Either way, I have to touch the source and make patches; and I would appreciate it very much if my dearest readers can help out On the lighter (or heavier, depending on your POV) side, I noticed that Steve McIntyre posted an RFH for cvs, and I’ve decided to help out a bit. Seeing the source, I was pleasantly surprised as the age (and design) of this package, and it would be a blast for me to study this (and fix bugs, prepare patches, and release new versions while at it. It would also prepare me better for NM as well. As for my Ubuntu work, I’ve upgraded my Breezy Badger desktop to Dapper Drake last Monday (just in time for Flight 4,) and I’m quite amazed at the new features of this release. Like many folks I just loved xchat-gnome’s notification feature (especially when you’re moving in between workspaces very often) and was very much pleased with the speed of Gnome 2.13.91 (so much so that I’ve departed from my normal Ion3 desktop without regretting it. But of course, since Dapper Drake is the latest development branch, there were some snags that I got to encounter. One particular bug was with masqmail, because the 0.2.21-1ubuntu1 version created a /var/run/masqmail directory, but since /var/run is mounted as a tmpfs in Dapper, masqmail will complain the next time it restarts. Another (probably cosmetic) bug(?) was with tuxpaint, since it placed a couple of launchers in the Gnome Applications menu, one on Education and the other on Graphics. I’ve yet to see if tuxpaint’s is a genuine bug or just a design decision, but I’ve fixed masqmail’s, and 0.2.21-1ubuntu2 should be on Dapper now, thanks to Daniel Holbach. So far I’m loving the new Ubuntu release, and with FeatureFreeze finally here that means I’ll have to drag my desktop box again to the local internet cafe to do yet another aptitude dist-upgrade. Gaah, I need a laptop!

I took me 3 uploads (no less) to have php-json accepted (ITP: #333805). I just can't believe I was so inattentive and clumsy. Two times was it License issues. Third time a basic packaging error (missing debian/changelog). I've reworked my packages from scratch using cdbs, and it now works well. *phew* My appologies to the ftp-masters again (that lost a big amount of time because of guys like me, so many times that Ganeff even blogged about it) /me hides

Xulrunner finally reached unstable on sunday, and it already needed some adjustments. I forgot a conflict, misnamed the libsmjs-dev package, the hppa assembler code got somehow duplicated, so xulrunner failed to build on hppa, and some preference files needed to be moved around the packages. It also fails to build on alpha, but that’s not my fault. I also changed the way we identify a Debian built xulrunner in the user agent. I replaced the "Gecko/yyyymmdd" string with "Gecko/Debian/x.y.z.t-r". That has several advantages over the previous "Gecko/yyyymmdd Debian/x.y.z.t-r" string:

• It shortens the already long user agent string so that additions such as product name are not painful,
• removes pointless information (the date in the original string indicates the date of the build, not that of the API),
• keeps the "Gecko" string (which some site might want, seing how Apple and Konqueror did put a "like Gecko" string),
• and finally avoid confusion with other Debian release informations that may be present in the product specific part (I think Galeon puts one, for instance).

That needed 2 updates, because I realized in between that while you can set the general.useragent.product and general.usergagent.productSub variables, they are not actually taken into account until you change them a first time… The HTTP protocol initialization in xulrunner forces the respective values Gecko and yyyymmdd… I just completely removed that part of the code in xulrunner. I took advantage of this needed fix to work even more on the package, enabling the typeaheadfind module, needed by galeon and epiphany, removing some old perl code that does nothing except producing useless errors during the build, and, last but not the least, enabling the “flat style” chrome, meaning that instead of being stuck in .jar files, everything is just here in a standard tree. It appears upstream provides a way to build such trees (option --enable-chrome-format=flat to configure), but it’s useless because it doesn’t install the trees when running make install. In addition to that, the configure script still requires zip, even if it doesn’t use it, except for some obscure .jar files in libnss, that are not installed either. So after disabling the build of these useless files and removing the zip strict requirement if we build flat chrome, and fixing the script responsible for installation of the chrome files, everything got much better. These changes have been applied to firefox as well, so stay tuned, it’s for next upload. Having highjacked spidermonkey, I did some bug triage there as well. It appeared they could all be closed by the fact libmozjs0d is there. I still need to make some triage in my patches to xulrunner and send upstream those that I still have not sent, if they are of any interest there. Apart from this xulrunner stuff, I also did some bug clean-up on libxml2 and libxslt, which I’ve been somehow neglecting for some time.

After blathijs and I today talked a little bit about blosxom plugins on the #blosxom IRC channel, I installed the listplugins plugin. Since I’m a perfectionist in some things, I had to configure it to link every plugin I use to it’s web page or source. While going through my plugin list, I noticed that there were three additional plugins I wrote myself and of which I thought I should share:

• acronyms works similar to and is losely based on Fletcher Penney’s autolinks but instead of setting links it marks configurable keywords as abbreviation or acronym and show their expansion when hovering over the keyword (all using standard XHTML).
• xml_ping_generic is based on xml_ping_weblogs and can ping an arbitrary number of URLs to be pinged with the weblog.com’s XML RPC ping API. By default it pings weblogs.com and technorati.com.
• date_rfc822 is nothing else than the 822-date command (which returns a date in RFC 822 conform format and is written in Perl, too) wrapped into a blosxom plugin. Work similar to date_fullname. I use it for including <pubDate> tags in the RDF.

All plugins are published under the same open source license, they initially came with. In other news… I started using XFN, the XHTML Friends Network, at least the blogroll, and created accounts at Technorati and at yigg.de, a German Digg.com clone formerly respective yet still known as digg.de

Now playing: Battle Without Honor or Humanity — Hotei Tomayasu (from the Kill Bill Soundtrack)

Okay, something bugs me, and it's somewhat irrational, and somewhat rational. I totally hate really long URLs needed to "verify" that the sign-up is valid. There are more than one type of these, sometimes they are required to continue into the site, sometime just for extra features, but they are more often that not, very long. Now, I don't like long URLs in general in emails, because there are many services which allow you to shorten them for public use. Recently I signed up for 30 boxes and they sent me this monstrosity:

http://30boxes.com/signup.php?action=finishSignup&d=aSDFJKLa43da
safjdAL5RLKj4afjrafa45J5kljtyTGJrALKJgFKLsaj5klJ4jkljakljdkalflk
fASJKjdfa4r23890fdfjskl342390fakjlei309dk390ujkal39032kd03j9djd9

Okay, so lets look at this rationally for a bit. How many unique strings can they have from that huge behemoth of an identifier. There are 145 characters. They are using the entire uppercase (26), lowercase (26) and numbers (10), so there are a total of 62 unique symbols for each spot. That gives us a total of 62¹⁴⁵ different strings. That's

78848779858160540639233408124436328679807474352650645474403652978
77812230999983634922053904324829205441837830921209410767866820350
39259149646534571887966722870103317751633817974743087029882020930
78213775489032524047364643001443429901072761743321026356976812032

different combinations. In scientific notation, thats 7.8 × 10²⁵⁹. Just for comparison, the entire number of atoms in the universe is high-balled at 6 × 10⁷⁹ (on this page). That's more than a googol of identifiers for EACH ATOM, EVERYWHERE. Isn't naming each atom once enough? Then you would only need 45 characters, which would nicely fit in one line of my email client if you just shortened your "finishSignup" to "fS" and action to "a". As a bonus, it also saves you approximately 117 bytes of bandwidth per email. UPDATE: Apparently it has ALL the information, in addition to being completely too long. I replaced it with random crap.