As announced 3 weeks ago, the Debian project was present at Chemnitzer Linuxtage. Several talks and workshops where held by people related to the Debian project. At the booth we had talks and discussions with exhibitors and visitors, unfortunately I didn t had much time to visit more than small parts of two lectures. Unfortunately (for the visitors) we didn t had any merchandising on board, while we received several requests. On Sunday Axel surprised us with some leftovers from fosdem of debian.ch merch. At the booth we had a demo machine running Babelbox and xpenguins, which attracted visitors very well. We received also more than one Just thank you by satisfied users. :) Four different talks and one workshop were held by Debian people, but they were not specific to the Debian. The workshop was about OpenStreetMap, lectures was about commandline helpers, grep everything, quality analyzing and team management in opensource projects and Conkeror and other keyboard based webbrowsers. Many thanks to Jan Dittberner, Andreas Tille, Christian Hoffmann, Florian Baumann, Christoph Egger, Axel Beckert, Adam Schmalhofer, Markus Schnalke, Sebastian Harl and Patrick Matth i for running the booth, answering a wide range of questions or just chatting with visitors . A special thank to TMT GmbH & Co. KG for providing the complete equipment and sponsoring it s transportation. At the end we have to send a big thank to the organizing team of the Chemnitzer Linuxtage. It was fun and a pleasure to find new friends and meet old ones of the Free Software community. A small sidenote was anybody aware that OpenSuSE Package search is using screenshots.debian.net?

I've started uploading snapshots of git-buildpackage to experimental recently. Here's a short list of what changed over the version in wheezy and sid:

• git-buildpackage now has a --git-pristine-tar-commit option that commits a tarball right back to the pristine-tar branch if it's not already there. This makes tracking upstream git and dfsg-clean source handling easier.
• git-buildpackage's --git-upstream-tree now accepts a tree directly without the need to use --git-upstream-branch.
• git-buildpackage's --git-export now parses the exported changelog instead of the working copy. This way we automatically pick up the correct tarballs, branches, etc. reducing the number of options needed.
• Jan apek added a --git-postexport hook to allow to mangle the source after exporting it.
• gbp-pull and gbp-fetch now support shallow clones thanks to Markus Lehtonen.
• gbp-pull got a speed up by skipping the checkout for fast-forward. This makes updating large source trees less time consuming.
• git-import-orig and git-import-dsc can now import into bare repositories.
• Russ Allbery updated git-pbuilder to 1.27.
• gbp-pq should be easier to use thanks to the --force and --switch options. It also handles patches without descriptions more robustly.
• The test coverage of the internal test suite increased quiet a bit. We're now generating coverage information during the build in build/cover.
• We're now generating apidocs which also serves as usage examples.

This blog is flattr enabled.

After spotting an upload of mira, who in turn spotted an upload of abe (the package, not an upload by me aka abe@d.o), mira (mirabilos aka tg@d.o) noticed that there are Debian packages which have same name as some Debian Developers have as login name. Of course I noticed a long time ago that there is a Debian package with my login name abe . Another well-known Debian login and former package name is amaya. But since someone else came up with that thought, too, it was time for finding the definite answer to the question which are the DD login names which also exist as Debian package names. My first try was based on the list of trusted GnuPG keys:

$ apt-cache policy $(gpg --keyring /etc/apt/trusted.gpg --list-keys 2>/dev/null   \
                     grep @debian.org   \
        	     awk -F'[<@]' ' print $2 '   \
                     sort -u) 2>/dev/null   \
                   egrep -o '^[^ :]*'
alex
tor
ed
bam
ng

But this was not satisfying as my own name didn t show up and gpg also threw quite a lot of block reading errors (which is also the reason for redirecting STDERR). mira then had the idea of using the Ultimate Debian Database to answer this question more properly:

udd=> SELECT login, name FROM carnivore_login, carnivore_names
      WHERE carnivore_login.id=carnivore_names.id AND login IN
      (SELECT package AS login FROM packages, active_dds
       WHERE packages.package=active_dds.login UNION
       SELECT source AS name FROM sources, active_dds
       WHERE sources.source=active_dds.login)
      ORDER BY login;
 login                   name
-------+---------------------------------------
 abe     Axel Beckert
 alex    Alexander List
 alex    Alexander M. List  4402020774 9332554
 and     Andrea Veri
 ash     Albert Huang
 bam     Brian May
 ed      Ed Boraas
 ed      Ed G. Boraas [RSA Compatibility Key]
 ed      Ed G. Boraas [RSA]
 eric    Eric Dorland
 gq      Alexander GQ Gerasiov
 iml     Ian Maclaine-cross
 lunar   J r my Bobbio
 mako    Benjamin Hill
 mako    Benjamin Mako Hill
 mbr     Markus Braun
 mlt     Marcela Tiznado
 nas     Neil A. Schemenauer
 nas     Neil Schemenauer
 opal    Ola Lundkvist
 opal    Ola Lundqvist
 paco    Francisco Moya
 paul    Paul Slootman
 pino    Pino Toscano
 pyro    Brian Nelson
 stone   Fredrik Steen
(26 rows)

Interestingly tor (Tor Slettnes) is missing in this list, so it s not complete either At least I m quite sure that nobody maintains a package with his own login name as package name. :-) We also have no packages ending in -guest , so there s no chance that a package name matches an Alioth guest account either

The Reid Report has an article about the marriage pledge that Michelle Bachmann signed which implies that slavery wasn t so bad [1]. Greg Carey has written an interesting article for the Huffington Post about marriage and the bible [2], I always knew that the so-called conservatives weren t basing their stuff on the Bible, but the truth surprised me. Geoff Lemon has written an interesting blog post about the carbon tax debate in Australia [3]. He focuses on how small it is and how petty the arguments against it are. Lord Bacon wrote an interesting list of the top 100 items to disappear first in a national emergency [4]. Some of them are specific to region and climate but it is still a good source of ideas for things to stockpile. Markus Fischer gave an interesting TED talk about the SmartBird that he and his team built [5]. A flying machine that flaps it s wings isn t that exciting (my local department store sells toys that implement that concept), but having one closely match the way a bird s wings work is interesting.

• [1] http://blog.reidreport.com/2011/07/oh-sweet-jesus-bachmann-signed-a-pledge-saying-black-kids-were-better-off-as-slaves/
• [2] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/greg-carey/bible-weddings_b_887979.html
• [3] http://heathenscripture.wordpress.com/2011/07/14/you-shut-your-goddamn-carbon-taxin-mouth/
• [4] http://baconreport.blogspot.com/2007/07/top-100-items-to-disappear-first-during.html
• [5] http://www.ted.com/talks/a_robot_that_flies_like_a_bird.html

A few weeks ago, we finished a paper that surveys the current state of parallel computing with R. The paper was lead by Markus Schmidberger and written while he was visiting the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle. The co-authors are Martin Morgan, myself, Hao Yu, Luke Tierney and Ulrich Mansmann. The paper is now available as a technical report from LMU Munich via open access, and also from my papers page.

Very nice tool I recently discovered: ink, a small tool using libinklevel, used to query the ink level of your printer (USB or parallel). In my case this is an Epson Stylus DX4200 (which works very nicely and out of the box btw). Installation:

$ apt-get install ink

Usage:

$ ink -p usb
ink v0.4.1 © 2007 Markus Heinz
EPSON Stylus DX4200
Cyan:                          76%
Magenta:                       76%
Yellow:                        76%
Photoblack:                    72%

Graphical ink level display:

$ apt-get install qink

Another nice tool built upon libinklevel is called qink, which is a QT-based GUI which displays the same information graphically (see screenshot). A list of printers supported by libinklevel is available.

Hello World I have finally a new Hackergotchi, I can’t do that myself since I’m quite unable to do any graphics work. So my coworker Markus Roth helped me, thank you! I will upload it to the SVN and modify the configfile according as soon as the CVS->SVN migration for planet.debian.org is over. Thanks and Regards,

Dear Lazyweb, I am prone to downloading random documents (usually PDFs) from the interweb. Often these have helpful filenames like 30430.pdf. Renaming them helps, but I seem to collect lots of them. Is there a simple document management system I can import them into that will let me at least categorise things, and then search for titles etc (bonus points if I can actually search the text in the documents, but I can cope if I need to manually enter the info on import)? PDF is the most useful format for me, but I'm sure I'd end up using Word or whatever support too. apt-cache search dms turns up MyDMS and Owl though both look a little heavy - I only need it for local personal use.

Linuxdays in vienna were fun (as usual). Lessons learnt:

• stfl (Structured Terminal Forms Language/Library) is definitely worth a look (thanks for the great talk and the nice discussions at the grml booth, clifford!)
• thanks to the inclusion of grml-x in rocklinux now zsh will become part of rocklinux (yeah!)
• the filter language feature of the upcoming newsbeuter release 0.5 (newsbeuter is the best available console based rss reader) looks rocking - killfile!!1! (thanks to andi for implementing this cool feature)
• using zsh-mime-setup might result in unwanted behaviour
• the catalyst web framework seems to rock (thanks, koki and tom!)
• I should take a closer look at template toolkit as well (thanks again, koki)
• even though I’m not a perl monkey attending to YAPC::Europe 2007 in Vienna (Yet Another Perl Conference) would be cool (meeting people like Larry Wall, Damian Conway, Audrey Tang and Mark Jason Dominus)

I was responsible for the booth of grml (Linux live-cd for sysadmins and texttool users) as well as for the ones of Debian and Debienna (Debian in vienna) - especially in the first two days, until Markus and Kira joined. Regarding the grml booth: It was once more amazing to see how many people already know and use grml. I had the pleasure to meet people from a professional data rescue organization who use grml in their daily business. Not to forget to mention all the people who let me know how often grml managed to save their lif^Wdata. Oh, and some nice ideas were brought to my attention and are now part of the todo list for grml. Very geeky was the 13 year old boy who visited our booth and when asking him whether he knows how to work on the console (he was staring at our grml-CDs with shining eyes) he replied: "YES, of couuuuurse!" I couldn’t resist in giving him a grml-CD. Oh, and we were running out of grml-CDs earlier than expected. Thanks to my girlfriend - who can even explain the difference between grml meilenschwein and grml64 to you now - I had the chance to attend some few talks - besides my own one about grml of course. I once more didn’t manage it to take just a single picture but I just received a pointer to the linuxdays photogallery of jostusz, thanks Sven.

Roger Cicero will be going for germany to the Eurovision song contest. With his song "Frauen regier'n die Welt" ("Women rule the world"), which he sings with the impression of being able to himself rule any woman. :-) His mix is very uncommon: it's swing, but with german lyrics, about love and life, flirting and with a well-dosed amount of macho in it, but not serious but always joking and cool. YouTube has some video clips with his music. Note that I don't think "Frauen regier'n die Welt" is his best song. Scroll down at least to "Murphys Gesetz" ("Murphys Law", and congrats for not incorrectly adding an apostrophe, it's correct this way...) Last.FM has some excerpts from songs I like better. I don't know if 'we' have any chance with him (last years' winner was Lordi, some 'schocker' hard-rock-heavy-metal band dressing up like halloween monsters), but he won't come out last for sure. Demographics of the Eurovision contest aren't too favourable for germany, nor are are European relations. But being a swing dancer, this is just really cool, because it gives my hobby a wider audience. :-) P.S. If you want to learn Swing dancing in Munich: the Lindy Hop course at Boogie-Bären starts again this tuesday, and I can also recommend the classes of Swing and the city (thats Cat and Chris); there is a beginners and intermediate workshop next weekend with world champions Markus & Bärbel together with Cat and Chris. And of course every monday there is a teaser class at Cord. P.P.S. I'd really love to see Roger Cicero perform together with some good Lindy dancers as show act. Probably a different song then, though.

München (Munich!) has a great swing scene - alive and kicking. Lindy Hop [wikipedia], Balboa [wikipedia], Boogie Woogie [wikipedia] (~ East Coast Swing) and Rock'n'Roll [wikipedia] (the acrobatic version) all over the place. Since starting dancing (RnR some years ago, Lindy a year ago, all just socially until about half a year where I took on the others as well and started going to some real trainings), they've become an essential part of my life that I wouldn't want to miss. If you happen to come to Munich, here are some links for you:

• Swing and the City, the homepage of Christine von Scheidt, a world class dancer and trainer as well as judge in some contests gives Lindy Hop classes that are excellent.
• The Cord (Sonnenstraße, very central location in Munich) has a great cosmopolitan flair and a swing night every monday, often with live music (which may or may not be great for dancing). Cat and Chris of 'Swing and the City' give teaser classes there, too.
• Salon Erna at Optimolwerke (near Ostbahnhof, also quite central, at the big party areal in Munich) is the home of Swing on Sunday. There is a beginners class as 19:30 with changing trainers and topic (usually Lindy Hop). While a bar like Cord, there are mostly dancers here.
• Swing it! is organizing social dancing events with livebands about once a month. Unfortunately, the previous location closed down (not due to Swing It, which got the place really crowded), but they'll hopefully find a new home soon.
• Boogie-Bären is the dancing club I'm in. They have four Lindy Hop classes on Tuesday, two Balboa classes on thursday and Boogie Woogie classes on most days.
• Near Fürstenfeldbruck (north-west of Munich) there is the Tanzfabrik Überacker where Fabi and Gino will take good care of you; I learned a lot from them in their classes at Salon Erna. They got me addicted to Lindy Hop. :-)
• Keep on Swinging, is the home of Fabi and Chrissi. They are giving occasional workshops at the Tanzfabrik
• If you are at the university for some time, got to the University Sports Programm. It's exceptionally cheap (like 7.50 EUR for a term for a regular student), and that includes lots of sport offers, such as a Rock'n'Roll and Boogie Woogie class. Thats where I started dancing before going to Berkeley, discovering Lindy Hop there and continuing it in Munich later on.
• Claudia and Horst, who also teach at Boogie-Bären, also give classes in Freising, north of Munich.
• And of course World of Swing: Markus and Bärbel are very well known dancers and trainers. If you are into swing, you probably have seen or met them already. They are giving Balboa and Boogie Woogie-Classes and organizing large dance events such as Rock that Swing or the "Munich Balboa Weekend".
• In summer, there will hopefully be a weekly dance event in Hofgarten park again, at the Diana temple.

P.S. My personal favourites / recommendations: Go to Cord or Salon Erna to see how much fun the community is, then take classes with Swing and the City or Keep on Swinging.

Hello (first of all, there are new pictures of me)
I think it’s time for another blog, because I have at the moment many different projects. My prio 1 project is the new proxy server which I would like to install in the office (about 500 users) which should have complicated ACLs and SquidGuard for content filtering, a virus scanner would also be very nice. I plan to authenticate the users via winbind on Microsoft ActiveDirectory (I already blogged about it some months ago) and the embedded systems should have special rules which don’t require an authentication. I also had a look at dansguardian because the people from the AIO use this solution, but I don’t think that it’s possible to auth against AD with it and I have no experience with dansguardian. The next problem is with the downtime, I should not have any if possible. This means that I will copy the system of the old proxy into a VMWare-Machine in the intranet and NAT the public IP of the proxy to it when it’s ready. And in this time I can easily setup the new proxy on the physical proxy-machine. Then my next project is for the school - we have to write a management tool (including file-databases) for network devices such as switches or routers, I think this will be a quite funny task and 2 months are IMHO enough time. The cool thing is that we need something like that on my workplace so we will be able to use it. My program also will be licensed under a free license and maybe I will build a debian package if the upstream software is in a good shape. Then the next (maybe less important, but important for my health) project is finally stop smoking. I really didn’t think that this is so difficult because I’m not a “i need it every 2 hours”-smoker, I only need it in the evening when I come home to relax a bit and this is really quite difficult. Then my last (really hard ) project is planning my holidays, I didn’t use them since summer of this year and until next august I can have 5 weeks + the days from christmas until 3rd January, so my plan is the following: 15.12.2006 Last workday 26.12 - 30.12 23c3 in Berlin 31.12 - 1.12 Snowboarding in the mountains and sylvester party with friends Then in february 2007 I will go again snowboarding for a week somewhere And in june 2007 my last holidays for this year where I’d like to visit Debconf7 (depends if I get sponsoring for accomodation and food or not, you know… I’m still a student and edinburgh isn’t really cheap). I hope this will be my last article without the hackergotchi included, I’m not a graphics-guru so I asked in #debian.de some minutes ago and Markus Gloor made one for me, biggest thanks!

I've discovered dbconfig-common project, a very interesting seanius work used to help to create new database based packages. I've joined to it and 've done my first commit to cvs.
Two new packages dbconfig-common based is ready to upload to sid, mydms and bulmacont. When dbconfig-common will be on sid, I've ask aurel32 to upload mydms to unstable.

I've discovered myDMS, an interesting Document Management System, I've installed on my system and tried it. It works so fine I've begun to use on my own documents.
I've decided tu package it to Debian.
I don't know why, but php packages seems not to be a good option in Debian. But I think this package is a very good option in Debian, I've looked for another DMS in Debian and there are not another good option.
I think I could find an sponsor for this package.

I forgot to post yesterday that GtkLP 1.1.0 has been uploaded to Sid, courtesy of my good sponsor Andreas Metzler. And, in what seems to be a coincidence, Markus Vuori mailed me some time ago just after my upload to chi about GtkLP being integrated into ubuntu-desktop. Hmmm… is gtklp the missing link? But then again, gtklp supports CUPS only, and is actually just a frontend for editing ~/.lpoptions…

I was playing around with BNFC's C++ mode, and discovered that its authors have fallen prey to two of C++'s famous pitfalls:

• All polymorphic classes (i.e. classes with at least one virtual function) must have a virtual destructor. Fortunately, G++ -Wall warns about this one.
• The compiler inserts a default copy constructor and a default copy assignment operator to all classes that lack an explicit copy constructor and an explicit copy assignment operator. This will bite you if you have pointer members in the class, and your destructor performs a delete operation on one of them. You need to either forbid copying by adding an explicit private copy constructor and an explicit private copy assignment operator to the class (prototypes without definitions will do nicely), or by enforcing some sane copying policy by giving your own copy constructor and copy assignment operator (popular policies are deep copying and sharing with reference counting).

Were you aware of these issues? :) I fixed these problems in BNFC with this patch.