Today I released version 0.60 of randomplay, my command-line shuffle-recall-swiss-army-knife music player. It will never make Winamp users happy, but it’s a good substitution for complex combinations of find/grep/xargs/sort that people sometimes use to pick tracks to play. If you can’t see why you’d use it, you probably don’t need it. The latest version adds two new command-line options, —older-than and —newer-than. These can be used to limit the songs included in the shuffle on the basis of the file modification date. The syntax is fairly flexible, and resembles that used by rdiff-backup for restoration commands. For example:

  Randomly play music under the ~/music directory that were added in the past week:
      randomplay --newer-than 1W ~/music
  Play in order music that is from before this year:
      randomplay --norandom --older-than '1/1/2006'
  Give a list of filenames of music that were added in the past 6 months, but haven't been played in the last three months:
      randomplay --names-only --newer-than 6M --days 3M 
  Play, but don't record in the playing history, music added in the first three months of 2004:
      randomplay --noremember --newer-than '1/1/2004' --older-than '4/1/2004'

Unfortunately, this new feature is pretty slow, because it stats each file individually on the initial spidering of the directories to be played. In fact, the startup is always fairly slow if you are searching a large directory hierarchy, since randomplay does not preserve any file index but checks anew on each execution. If you are searching tens of thousands of tracks over NFS (as I do), this can take a minute or so. Suggestions for improving the perfomance of the file modification time detection or of the whole startup are welcome. At some point, I will probably implement an indexing feature, but I like the simplicity of it now where it works basically like the shell find command. Version 0.60 should show up in Debian unstable shortly.

[2006-10-13 18:00]
There is a popular saying in Spanish, "en viernes 13 ni te cases ni te embarques" - Roughly, On Friday the 13th, don't get married and don't board a ship. That makes perfect sense - I'm already married, so I'm not worried about the first part. About the second, you never now - So I'd better take the plane to a country without sea access. Bolivia, here I go. [2006-10-13 23:30]
I'm writing this blog entry as I fly out of Mexico towards Bolivia, via Panama, on Lloyd Aereo Boliviano's flight number 911. The captain just announced that dinner will be served shortly, and invited those of us who want to enjoy the meal to open the tables, in order to get a better service. I fear that if I don't open it, I might get soup served straight over my pants, or something like that. [2006-10-14 02:40]
At the Panama airport. Captain informs again: "Passengers, we inform you we will replenish fuel. Therefore, if you choose not to go out for 15 minutes, we will request you to sit down with your seat belt unlocked. You will not be allowed to walk along the ailes. The bathrooms will be closed. Please do not ring the bells." Damn, that brings quite a lot of quiet about the refueling process - Of course I went down for 15 minutes, along with everybody else. BTW, shame I didn't take my laptop with me, as the battery is now at 15%... The Panama airport has (contrary to most airports I've been to in recent years) plenty of power outlets. Anyway, maybe on the way back. It's now 03:00 (Mexico time), and I think I'll have a better use for the next four hours until we arrive to Bolivia than coding.

I announced it, now he did it. Denis, we will miss you, you did a damn pretty good job on many parts where you were excellent at it. I'm disgusted to see that dunc-tank pushed you out. I'm disgusted to see that people with a lot of qualities are going to do the same, and orphan a lot of packages that really need special care, and that will fall in QA for a while. That hurts, and that hurts the Project too. Edit: and now Benjamin is following his path. I feel sick. And those where not the one that get loud about it. They just don't recognize the Debian they knew. Who can blame them ?

During the Journ es du Logiciel Libre 2006 (an excellent event, thanks to the organizers), I had long chats with people from Mozilla Europe (in a more constructive way than what others did). This is mostly second-hand information, since the well-informed guys from Mozilla Europe I talked with got their info from other Mozilla developers, so it might be slightly inaccurate, but still help to understand the issue. More details welcomed in comments. The Mozilla Foundation goal is to prevent the web from becoming a proprietary web, by ensuring that Firefox, their product, has a big-enough market-share. I find it a bit disturbing to hear free software people speak about product and market-share, but well, OK. Of course, it’s quite difficult to achieve >20% market-share only with GNU/Linux users. They put a very high emphasis on the User experience. They want Firefox to look exactly the same on all platforms, even if some features (automatic plugin installation, automatic upgrades) do not fit well on a GNU/Linux system (such features don’t work with the Debian build). They want to enforce their trademark to prevent attempts to ruin their reputation to succeed. After a question asked by Dave Neary (GNOME) to Tristan Nitot (president of Mozilla Europe), Tristan gave the example of this hacker who said he found critical security bugs in Firefox before admitting it was a joke. He also gave the example of Microsoft indirectly founding SCO. Dave Neary remarked that some people could probably be trusted (like distro maintainers). But, if I remember correctly, Tristan said that it was difficult to allow some people to use the trademark without allowing everybody to do so. Also, allowing Debian to use the trademark without allowing derivatives to do so is not possible (DFSG#8). Iceweasel is considered a good thing inside Mozilla Europe (”It’s what we have asked them to do for a long time!“). However, some people are bitter about the fact that Debian seems to have chosen to use a gnu.org-hosted fork instead of just renaming the package to iceweasel. During Tristan Nitot’s conference, I asked a question about length of security support (only 18 months for the 1.0 branch). The answer was that distros were supposed to upgrade to newer Firefox releases even on their stable releases (!) or to come and help with security support for stable releases. Also, the fact that Debian chooses to package Firefox following the FHS is considered a source of problems. Somebody claimed that Debian was the only distribution to package Firefox this way (seems strange, but I did not checked this claim). I’m not sure how this fits with other Mozilla-based browsers such as epiphany. On a more technical side, they also claimed that Debian wasn’t properly collaborating with Mozilla, sending unusable 100000-lines patches for validation just before releases (haven’t checked this claim). It’s interesting to note that the same problem exists on the other side, with Mozilla releasing “security and stability” releases instead of just providing patches for the security bugs. My personal conclusion is that Iceweasel is really a good thing, and is quite unavoidable, even if it seems that the Debian/Mozilla collaboration could maybe have been better. Let’s advertise the use of Iceweasel, Epiphany, and other Web browsers! Note : comments open for people willing to fix inaccuracies or provide references, not for a stupid childish flame-war like the one in the comment of this post. Please write your own blog entry and use a trackback if you want to provide a detailed answer! Updates:

• I forgot to mention that the Mozilla people talked about Debian-specific changes that changed frozen APIs, breaking extensions, and causing bug reports on b.m.o or misleading forum posts. (again, not verified)
• Interesting blog post about the trademark issue here
• Mike Hommey addressed most of the points I reported in this blog entry.

Back to work on Debian now. Released an updated security advisory, which seemed to work out OK despite the archive changes. Some of my packages have new maintainers. The rest I will go through and upload with the maintainer set to QA tomorrow. Some coding issues to resolve in the next day or two:

mod_ifier

This apache module is utterly broken with regard to POST data. How I managed to use it in production for so long and not notice is beyond me. Short version: The module intercepts incoming HTTP requests and filters them according to a set of user-defined rules. It allows you to block incoming requests with particular CGI parameters (get vs. post). However once the module has read the POST data it is destroyed - and unavailable for use by the CGI itself. Apparently I must use the Apache API to use buckets/brigades to read only a copy of the submitted data, so that when the module is finished processing the data is still available. I can find no understandable code for doing this. But I’m trying.

xen-tools

I need to rework some of the error detection so that roll-back will work when installation fails.

I need to find time to write more articles for the debian-administration site, but I think that will be difficult for the next week or two. I feel like I need a holiday…. despite just having had one. I guess that is because of the aftermath, but still .. ugh.

The general freeze for Debian Etch has been postponed because of too many open RC bugs. This is handy because ones packages can be even more polished, but only once the archive is frozen it will really stabilize. There's also some people who think now is a good time to do an automated search for RC bugs (instead of a year ago...?), bringing the number even further up. More effort is required here to squash those bugs, and squash them sooner rather than later. That's why Jeroen, Bas and I have decided to work on this together the upcoming Wednesday evening. A small-scale BSP, but everyone is welcome to come along and join in! In other news, my iBook is broken again, it might have been stocked with refurbished parts after its previous breakdown according to the Apple Store. Although it's October, I spent the better part of yesterday afternoon with Stefan on a sunny terrace . I booked tickets to Stockholm, and a very good looking hostel.

I was curled up around Angie list night sleeping, and I guess I was crowding Sprout , since it kicked out. Funny after several weeks of Angie talking about feeling it to actually do so myself.

According to http://healthlink.mcw.edu/article/923526833.html:

On Saturday, October, 14th, you will be 21 3/7 weeks pregnant.

We'll have pictures soon!

At the Journ es du logiciel libre near Lyon, the Debian stand happened to face the Mozilla one. The Debian developers present there had prepared some Iceweasel propaganda:



However it seems Daniel Glazman didn't understand all the fun of this situation, and just found these developers to be total morons or bloody fanatic assholes. "Moron" is also reserved for anyone trying to post comments disagreeing with him on his blog, which can also be simply deleted.

It seems some people need to take things less seriously.

Of course, as the epiphany maintainer, I can only be happy of this situation which will lead to more people using this great browser.

Dear Lazyweb, do you know anything that implements seeking on gzip/zlib streams? Seeking forward is easily done by reading the data up to the requested position, which isn't nice, but works well. Seeking backwards may be implemented by something like this:

inflateEnd (&stream);
fseek (input, 0, SEEK_SET);
inflateInit (&stream);
/* read up to the requested position */

This will be terribly slow for some cases, but well.. I'm just wondering how seeking with SEEK_END could be implemented without inflating the whole stream at first.

So it's autumn again, which means that the organization of FOSDEM is going to start its work again. I haven't been doing much in the central organization; however, I have been organizing the Debian presence there since 2004. This year, organizing FOSDEM will have an extra interesting edge, since they had a rather dramatic disc failure on their webserver and no backups, meaning, they'll have to build a new website. Apparently they chose to use Drupal (a project which occasionally was started by fellow Antwerp developer Dries Buytaert) rather than reinstalling their homebrewn CMS again. Anyway. A few weeks back I sent an SMS to the guy who did the Devrooms on FOSDEM side last year, asking whether I could get one for Debian this year, seen how their site was down and that they might've lost my contact information. Yesterday, I received a reply that he wanted an email instead. Fair enough, so I did that immediately. Haven't received a reply or an acknowledgement yet, though; that may not have been unexpected. In any case, I updated the website, which should be enough for now. Let's see what happens.

After restarting my i386 buildd some days ago, H ctor Garc a lvarez asked me where he could find a howto to setup a buildd. Unfortunately, I never found any clear doc about that. Today, I have setup a new sparc buildd which is also rebuilding the whole archive, thus it will take something like... 2 or 3 months I think (UltraSparc II @ 360 MHz with 256 MB RAM). But this time I clearly took notes on what I did, and there's now a mini-howto. I'm sure it's not really complete, but that should help you to have something working. As usual, do not hesitate to send me feedbacks.

At this school, every friday morning one member of staff holds a speech full of wisdom, insight and motiviation. While usually I find these quite transparent and full of good-sounding, not-very-helpful advices, today's speach by a history teacher was different.He talked about how africa keeps blaming the European colonialisation for it's current state, and that it should rather look ahead and "forge forward" (I didn't even know you could use "forge" as a verb implying movement, and dict.leo.org doesn't know either). He listed other countries with a devastating event in their history who were successful afterwards: Japan, after the the atomic bombing, became an industrial giant , German's economic miracly after being bombed to ashes and the Jew's will to go on after the holocaust.He assumed that if the bombs had been dropped on an African country more than half a century ago, people would still be blaming their current problems on the bombs, and demanding compensation, which some Africans do now regarding the slave trade, and which the teacher thinks also displays of lack of own initiative. Again, he compared that to Germany and Japan who did not think of expecting compensation (but then, these two have started the war that caused their bombing, so this comparision is, in my opinion, not entirely valid)Also interesting was the thesis that if these days a large slave ship would land on an African harbour, and announcements would be made that 200.000 slaves would be needed to work on American farms, people would thrash forward to go on that ship. Although it was probably a citique on the mentality of some Africans, it could also be seen as a reference to the state of affairs in Africa, where to some work as a slave might be the better choice.All in all a very interesting point of view that I wanted to share with you. It definately made more impression than my talk about Free Software, but that one went ok as well, I think.

A couple of comments on the ongoing votes. The DFSG/firmware issue is a complicated one. For the votes that we’ve currently got open, I’m voting for futher discussion in favour of the DFSG#2 clarification – not because I disagree with requiring source code for all works in principle, but because I think we should be making sure we can make Debian work with full source for everything first, before issuing position statements about it; and I’m voting for “release etch even with kernel firmware issues” above further discussion and “special exception to DFSG#2 for firmware” below further discussion, because I don’t think we can handle the broader issue before etch, and I don’t think it’s a good idea to try to tie the exception to the non-existance of technical measures directly. I’m not really sure that’s a good enough reason to vote that option below further discussion, so I might change my vote on that yet. There have been quite a few other proposals on the topic, including one from me that didn’t get sufficient seconds to be voted on, another from Frans Pop that was withdrawn due to procedural issues, a couple more from Sven Luther, and a new proposal from Sven and supported by the kernel team that’s a further refinement on the “release etch even with firmware issues” resolution currently being voted on. I personally think we should spend some time after etch thinking a bit more deeply about this stuff. Personally, I think we should insist on source for everything, but that also means we need to have a clear explanation on why it’s good – even for firmware and font files and music and artwork – and it means we’re going to need to make sure we have a reasonable way of distributing it, and it means we’re going to have to make sure that we have a good way of distributing stuff that doesn’t meet our standards but that users still need or want; whether that’s drivers they need to do installation or get good graphics performance, documentation for their software, or whatever else. There’s a lot of real improvements we could make there – both in making the core of Debian more free and more useful, and making it easier for users who want to make compromises to choose what they want to compromise on and what they don’t want to compromise on. I really hope that once etch is done and dusted quite a few of those sorts of improvements will get done, both in technical improvements in Debian, and in good advocacy from Debian and other groups towards people who aren’t already making things as free as they potentially could be. One the recall issue, I would have preferred to vote “re-affirm”, then “recall”, then “further discussion”, to say “I don’t think this creates a conflict of interest that can’t be handled, but I’ve no objection if other people think it does”. But since that isn’t what the ballot(s) turned out to be, I’ve voted “re-affirm” above further discussion on that ballot, and “recall” below further discussion on the other ballot. I’ve voted the “wish success” option above “don’t endorse/support” option for two reasons – first, because the “wish success” resolution actually refers to “projects funding Debian or helping towards the release of Etch” in general, while the “don’t endorse/support” proposal specifically talks about projects I’m involved in (including non-Dunc-Tank projects) which seems kind of personal. There’s also the fact that I’d rather see more success and mutual support in the Debian community, even for projects I don’t personally like, than less. I originally voted the “don’t endorse/support” option below further discussion for those reasons, but then decided that that was silly – just as I would have been happy to vote for the recall above further discussion, it’s not really that big a deal either way, and fundamentally I think both options are essentially the same anyway: that any potential conflict of interest can be dealt with, and Debian and Dunc-Tank are fundamentally different projects. I was probably influenced in that a fair bit by the “not endorse/support” option being proposed and seconded mostly by people who actively oppose the idea, including Josselin Mouette, Samuel Hocevar, Pierre Habouzit and Aurélien Jarno. But in the end, the outcome’s fine any which way – some people will continue disagreeing with the concept, others will agree with it, and everyone can keep contributing to Debian in whatever way they think’s best whatever the outcome. And like I said when running for DPL this year, while you are a lot more visible as DPL, it’s not actually that necessary to be DPL to get things done in Debian.

In four hours I'll be on the airplane to San Francisco via Paris. * erich puts a flower into his hair and starts singing Saturday there is the "Google Summer of Code mentor summit", where Google invited mentors from the participating organizations to Mountain View to discuss about the Summer of Code program, how it can be improved and what else Google can do for opensource. We're all very thankful to Google for offering this great program. It's meant as an opportunity to get more students interested into opensource development, and there are many success stories. Of course the program isn't perfect, and thats what the summit is for, improving it. And I'd really appreciate your feedback, your perception of the GSoC, of the students and the mentors. I've asked for feedback before, but I've received next to nothing so far. But there is quite a lot to discuss tomorrow. For example, many projects would fit to multiple organizations. I had proposed a SELinux integration project, but most of it would be reuseable by other distributions as well. There was a project which actually meant to integrate one mentoring organizations' project with an other mentoring organization. These could benefit from some "shared mentoring"; at the same time these project could server the prupose of increasing cooperation between organizations. I myself, for example, know rather little about Fedora, or the state of SELinux in Fedora. Still this is a point (well, if I still had the time to work much on SELinux that is) where I should definitely try to cooperate more with Fedora. Another proposal that came up and will be discussed is the "Summer of Content". It's not all about code. There is also documentation, graphics, sound, ... Why shouldn't a GSoC student be working on artwork or sound for a summer? The opensource/copyleft community definitely could use some support here, and we have rather few links to artists so far. So please send me your feedback. I won't be responding to mails for the next like 15+ hours since I'm travelling (maybe even 24h, if I'm busy with real life meetings), but I'm really interested in your ideas!

Took some time at lunch today to look at more places. auzure_skies and I came home, and I got an email saying that I've been accepted into the M.Sci IS program. Then we called the real estate agent and asked her to come over so we could make an offer.

And yesterday the first book in the CIM course showed up.

The nice part is that much of the CIM should be finished by the time the baby's born. The move will be done and out of the way, and the Master's program doesn't come until several months after. So it only *feels* like I'm insane. Really!

I've read quite a few blog posts about someone leaving Debian and whether they should remain on Debian planet. An official policy on these matters has now been posted which stated what I expected, if you feel that you belong and meet technical criteria then you are welcome.

Not that this solves much, the next debate will be about what content is suitable for Debian-planet with the expected answer being "anything which meets technical criteria and doesn't offend many people or break any laws". I've already had some comments on my blog from people who want me to change topics. I don't know if other people get this or whether doing an average of one post per day gets me more attention from the loons.

I started blogging after leaving Red Hat. I considered asking for my blog to be added to the Fedora Planet, but wasn't sure whether I would be posting much about it. I just checked and it seems that my old Advogato blog is aggregared on the Fedora Planet and there is no mailto URL on that site to allow me to get it changed. I've just put a final blog entry on Advogato to inform everyone of the change.

I'm not sure if it's worth adding my blog to the Fedora syndication. I have just decided to change my main desktop machine from Rawhide to Debian/unstable. The reason is that Fedora is mostly a Gratis distribution and Debian is more Libre. For most computer users there is no real difference as they don't have the skills to use the liberty that Debian offers. But for people who can code (note that we are in a small minority of computer users) the difference is significant.

The final issue that forced me to this decision is this bugzilla entry about Xen. In Debian there are kernels for Xen on i686, Xen on AMD K7, and Xen on i686 with vserver (doesn't Xen make vserver redundant?). In Fedora there will be one Xen kernel which won't boot on the machine that is most important to me and which ironically is the machine that was issued to me by Red Hat (and sold to me when I left).

This issue of a lack of choice is quite understandable from the Red Hat Enterprise Linux side of things. It's OK to say to a customer who wants to pay for a RHEL-AS license that they need a machine less than 3 years old if they want to use all the features. Adding new kernels adds support costs and I think that most RHEL customers want to have a smaller set of supported options with a higher level of support. I often recommend RHEL to clients and I will recommend that clients use Xen on RHEL-5 - and that they purchase recent hardware to do so.

But for home and hobby use it's a different matter. I provide all the support I need, I can compile my own kernels without much effort - but it saves time to have someone else do it. Fedora simply lacks choice here by design. I still support a bunch of Fedora and RHEL machines and will still develop RPMs for them. I will put everything I develop under http://www.coker.com.au/rpms/ for anyone who wants it.

Given that if the Fedora Planet people want to syndicate my blog I am more than happy to have them do so. I don't dislike Fedora, in fact I still recommend that people use it. It's just that Debian suits my personal needs better than Fedora does. I expect that I'll have more Debian content than Fedora content on my blog, but there will also be a lot of Linux content that's not distribution specific.

It will be interesting to see what the Fedora Planet people do.

Today I discovered a very useful and nearly undocumented Openswan configuration parameter, which goes by the name of leftsourceip (and symmetrically rightsourceip). What it does is telling the Linux Openswan VPN gateway what address to send traffic from, which it generates itself, and is destined for the other side of the VPN connection. Apparently there are some caveats when using the KLIPS IPsec stack, but it works great when using NETKEY. Details available in the thread up to and following this message on the Openswan Users mailinglist.

The immediate advantage of using leftsourceip is that you can just reach machines on the far end of the connection, from either gateway where you've set it, without having to specify source interface or address on the internal network.

There's already a patch in the Openswan BTS; hopefully it will be integrated soon.

The plain proposal allows us to ship with most of the firmware drivers (as they just require the *license* complies with the DFSG, which is e.g. ok with BSD-style licenses). Two drivers one might still include are still doubtfull with this decision: Typhoon and tg3. The Amendment has a similar effect - it will definitly allow us to ship with tg3, typhoon is unclear. It also supports a decision by the release team - but well, we can also live without supporting that decision (as long as nobody overwrites it). Summary: Any of the proposals allows us releaseing Etch soon. There is a "better" proposal upcoming, but that is not a reason to refuse the current one.

I just reinstalled my workstation on two new SATA disks with a recent etch d-i snapshot . That worked really fine, and it was so funny to create RAID 1 + LVM partitions by clicking with a mouse in a GTK interface. Etch will rocks. 8-)

Ok, so I am going to be in Bolivia next week - or so I hope ;-)
I don't usually take care to do this, but being it Lloyd A reo Boliviano (more on this later), and having heard first-hand and even almost lived stories of ticketing errors, I decided to call the airline to confirm my flight details.
...Only that the airline does not have a web site any more - It was grabbed by an online casino. Or maybe... Am I getting a casino ticket? Holy crap, no, it's a casino evangelism blog, explaining you how fun and interesting it is to lose your money online, how fair are the online slot machines, and such crap... Unbelievable. Anyway, I found Lloyd's Mexican office phone number in some online directory, and called. My ticket was, yes, reserved - It was not paid, though. Or maybe yes - the clerk told me that sometimes tickets get paid in Bolivia and they don't know about that. That could explain why lvaro almost lost his flight. Ok, we got that point fixed in ~20 minutes (thanks to Dydier and Ramiro, in Sucre and Potos respectively). I called again Lloyd, and yes, I'm confirmed. Phew.
About Lloyd: I flied with them two years ago, when I went to the IV National Free Software conference in Sucre. The only problem I had was due to myself: I spent some days travelling around after the conference, and my plane back was set to depart from La Paz, change planes in Cochabamba, then change planes in Santa Cruz, then on to Mexico. As I was in Cochabamba already, I decided to skip the first hop - Well, that accounted for a couple of hours on the phone getting my ticket back to life once it had been cancelled as a no-show :) However, Lloyd has went through a serious financially troubled period, and its reliability seems to have gone seriously down. Even two years ago, when we both were in Bolivia (in the conference I just mentioned), lvaro had to spend over a week he didn't plan on in Bolivia, as Lloyd's transatlantic plane was being repaired (!!). I found a similar report about an Argentinian passenger stuck for a day in Mexico and three further days in Santa Cruz due to broken aircraft... I can only hope for the best ;-)
Anyway, in Bolivia I'll have quite a packed schedule. As I've told to Dydier, I don't care too much about the details on what will we do each day (my hosts are free to own 100% of my time), but I'll give at least five talks (three in CCBOL in Potos and two to diverse auditoriums in Sucre). Of course, this is prone to change somehow, but the plan is I'll have a tutorial on PostgreSQL, a set of talks regarding computer and network security, and a talk about Free Software as a model of knowledge production rather than as a technical or social movement. Of course, wherever I go I talk about Debian as well at every possible chance ;-)