As greylistd does not seem to be developed anymore and I wanted to have --auto-whitelist-clients I have switched to postgrey. I am using postgrey-integration into exim4 written by Guy Antony Halse with some minor changes to minimize the differences to my greylistd setup. - I greylist on /27 instead of /24 networks and will immediately reject invalid recipients instead of greylisting them. postgrey runs with --unix=/var/run/postgrey/socket --retry-window=4 --lookup-by-host --auto-whitelist-clients=10 --exim.

  defer
    log_message = greylisted host $sender_host_address
    !senders = : postmaster@*
    domains = +local_domains : +relay_to_domains
    !hosts = /etc/exim4/no-greylist-hosts
    !authenticated = *
    verify = recipient/callout=20s,use_sender,defer_ok
    set acl_m3 = request=smtpd_access_policy\nprotocol_state=RCPT\n\
                 protocol_name=$ uc:$received_protocol \n\
                 helo_name=$sender_helo_name\n\
                 client_address=$ substr_-3:$ mask:$sender_host_address/27 \n\
                 client_name=$sender_host_name\n\
                 sender=$sender_address\n\
                 recipient=$local_part@$domain\n\n
    set acl_m3 = $ sg \
                     $ readsocket /var/run/postgrey/socket $acl_m3 \
                            5s action=DUNNO \
                      action= 
    message = $ sg $acl_m3 ^\\w+\\s* 
    condition = $ if eq $ uc:$ substr 0 5 $acl_m3 DEFER true false 
  # add "greylisted by ..seconds" header to mail which has successfully
  # passed the greylisting.
  warn
    !senders = : postmaster@*
    domains = +local_domains : +relay_to_domains
    !hosts = /etc/exim4/no-greylist-hosts
    !authenticated = *
    message = $ sg $acl_m3 ^\\w+\\s* 
    condition = $ if eq $ uc:$ substr_0_7:$acl_m3 PREPEND true false 

I agree with Destiny -- this letter from wp:Steely Dan to wp:Luke Wilson is just excellent. If only all creative property disputes were handled this way. tags: steely dan luke wilson destiny

Hot in the City tonight It's been a hot last couple of days in Montreal -- I mean, not hot like wt:California or wt:Europe but hot enough that it feels pretty bad. According to Sacr Blues -- one of my favorite books about wt:Quebec -- Montreal has the highest variation in temperature of any inhabited place on earth -- from highs of 40C in the summer to lows of -40C in the winter. We're at the high part now. Yesterday was my Primary Caregiver ("PCG") day, so I took the opportunity to take the baby for a long walk in Parc La Fontaine, under the gigantic poplars, where it's always cool and fresh. We also went for a nice dip in the baby pool. That kept things pretty nice.

Bonne F te Speaking of hotness, last night was the 30th birthday party for my friend Niko Ritoux. Maj and I took the opportunity to do our first evening out as a couple without the baby -- our great babysitter Julia came by with her boyfriend Antoine and took Amita June to a jazz concert at the Theatre de Verdure in Parc La Fontaine. How great is that? Anyways, we had a good night with Niko. We went to Le 2, the teensy but uber-cool bistro-bar our friend Daran co-owns. It's in possibly the most valuable real estate in all Montreal -- the corner of St. Laurent and Sherbrooke -- but it's unassuming and doesn't have that Lower Main clubbed-out fake tan feel. We had a great dinner of "international tapas" -- the little appetizers that remind me a lot of Toqu -style gourmet micro-meals -- and lots of liquor and good fun. I saw a lot of people I hadn't seen in a while -- P.E. and his girlfriend Ode, who were living in Taiwan for a long time; Fred; Daran and his new friend Annie; Joannie; and our own lovely Italian princess the Other Annie. After dinner (11:30PM!) we hustled up to Bily Kun on Mont Royal and then Plan B across the street. Nicely, for a Friday night, everything was open and airy -- Montreal bars can get so damn crowded, but in the summer everyone's in Cottage Country and there's plenty of room for dedicated barflies. I'm not sure when I got home, but I think Niko had a good time. tags: birthday niko jf joannie le 2 bily kun plan b

And more time Today I spent my time creating data feeds of Wikitravel content for researchers at the University of Zurich who are doing some sort of work on the reliability and development of online travel information. I can't wait to find out how their research comes out. Maj, Amita June and I went up on the Pont Jacques-Cartier tonight to watch the last event in the International des feux at La Ronde. One of the great things about being in Mtl for the summer is this months-long fireworks festival, in which national teams compete every Saturday and Wednesday night. This is the first time I've been on the bridge for the event, and it was amazing -- much louder and bigger than when we've watched from home. Amita June, of course, was dumbfounded by the fireworks -- she gawked open-mouthed through the whole thing. I thought she'd be scared by the lights and noise and the crowd, but she loved it -- reached out and pointed for each explosion, and even said ooooooooh for the big finale. She conked out on the 8-block walk home, which gave Mama and Papa a little extra rest. tags: amitajune fireworks montreal la ronde maj

GPLv3 and license compatibility According to this article on Linuxworld.com, compatibility with other licenses like the Apache 2.0 is going to be a major focus of the GPLv3 development process. I say huzzah to that. Trivial differences between licenses are a shameful waste of time and energy for hackers who have better things to do. The world needs too much good Open Source software for us to waste time with license incompatibilities. Hopefully this same philosophy will bleed over into the FDL. Creative Commons made an overture for unilateral compatibility between the Attribution and Attribution-ShareAlike licenses and the FDL, which got stony silence from the FSF. It's time to start thinking of the users and playing nice with each other. tags: gplv3 licenses open source compatibility

Put one foot in front of the other I nearly forgot to mention: Amita June took her first step today. She's been "cruising" (walking around holding onto furniture) for about 6-8 weeks now, and she loves walking around holding onto Mama or Papa's fingers. And she's been spending longer and longer periods standing on her own -- up to about 20-30 seconds. Today, she was standing up, and she wanted to walk so I held out my finger just a little out of her reach. She extended her arm for it, then took two little steps to get to me. Ta-da! Maj and I took turns getting her to stand up on her own then walk to us. She's only got about 3-4 steps in her right now before she freaks out and sits down, but it's still pretty amazing. tags: amitajune first steps maj baby

I uploaded a new maintenance release for kazehakase (0.2.7-2.sarge2) which is ment to address a top-crasher bug posted in #345905 to my p.d.o. security archive. Once there has been positive feedback, I will upload this to proposed-updates. This makes we wonder … do package maintainers actually care about sarge? I understand that running sarge is not as much fun as working on your bleeding edge unstable/experimental mix. But that does not mean that you can leave grave bugs in sarge untouched for half a year, right?

According to this article on heise.de, there is new exploit code to crash Windows boxes remotely, like the famous "ping of death" in 199something. When you allow windows file sharing, you're vulnerable... Exploit code, as linked by heise. (Untested myself.) It's not yet clear whether a worm could use this vulnerability to spead; it certainly will not be as dangerous as the SQL server vulnerability, but it currently allows malicious users in your local network to crash your computer. Anyone at a lan party? ;-) On an unrelated note, watch this video (google) of a demo of Microsofts Voice Wreckognition technology in Vista. Very funny.

According to this article on heise.de, there is new exploit code to crash Windows boxes remotely, like the famous "ping of death" in 199something. When you allow windows file sharing, you're vulnerable... Exploit code, as linked by heise. (Untested myself.) It's not yet clear whether a worm could use this vulnerability to spead; it certainly will not be as dangerous as the SQL server vulnerability, but it currently allows malicious users in your local network to crash your computer. Anyone at a lan party? ;-) On an unrelated note, watch this video (google) of a demo of Microsofts Voice Wreckognition technology in Vista. Very funny.

A freshly downloaded version of palm-db-tools (using the most recent version 0.3.6 from June 2003) will not compile with g++ 4.0.3 and its pickier interpretation of C++. A simple patch which removes trailing semicolons after class definitions, and adds virtual destructors for a few classes, is below. The mailing list archives show one other patch for a different (yet probably relevant :) problem, and its from November 2003. By the way, would be nice if someone added the package to Debian. The Makefile's make clean target isn't quite right, and make install isn't exactly correct either. Plus, I seem to be building this by hand every few years, and it's so much easier to just apt-get. And no, my plate is already too full.

diff -ru palm-db-tools-0.3.6.orig/libpalm/Block.h palm-db-tools-0.3.6/libpalm/Block.h
--- palm-db-tools-0.3.6.orig/libpalm/Block.h	2003-06-19 18:37:47.000000000 -0500
+++ palm-db-tools-0.3.6/libpalm/Block.h	2006-07-29 15:04:19.000000000 -0500
@@ -176,7 +176,7 @@
 	size_type m_size;
      ;
 
- ;
+ 
 
 bool operator == (const PalmLib::Block& lhs, const PalmLib::Block& rhs);
 
diff -ru palm-db-tools-0.3.6.orig/libpalm/File.h palm-db-tools-0.3.6/libpalm/File.h
--- palm-db-tools-0.3.6.orig/libpalm/File.h	2003-06-19 18:37:47.000000000 -0500
+++ palm-db-tools-0.3.6/libpalm/File.h	2006-07-29 15:04:42.000000000 -0500
@@ -89,6 +89,6 @@
 	uid_map_t m_uid_map;
      ;
 
- ;
+ 
 
 #endif
diff -ru palm-db-tools-0.3.6.orig/libsupport/infofile.h palm-db-tools-0.3.6/libsupport/infofile.h
--- palm-db-tools-0.3.6.orig/libsupport/infofile.h	2003-06-19 18:37:47.000000000 -0500
+++ palm-db-tools-0.3.6/libsupport/infofile.h	2006-07-29 15:07:08.000000000 -0500
@@ -33,6 +33,7 @@
          
         public:
             virtual void parse(int linenum, std::vector< std::string> array) = 0;
+	  virtual ~Parser()  ;
          ;
         class ConfigParser: public Parser
          
@@ -40,6 +41,7 @@
                 ConfigParser(DataFile::CSVConfig& state)
                     : m_Config(state)
                      
+	        virtual ~ConfigParser()  ;
                 virtual void parse(int linenum, std::vector< std::string> array);
             private:
                 DataFile::CSVConfig& m_Config;
@@ -50,6 +52,7 @@
                 DatabaseParser(PalmLib::FlatFile::Database& db)
                     : m_DB(db)
                      
+	        virtual ~DatabaseParser()  ;
                 virtual void parse(int linenum, std::vector< std::string> array);
             private:
                 PalmLib::FlatFile::Database& m_DB;
@@ -60,6 +63,7 @@
                 TypeParser(std::string& p_Type)
                     : m_Type(p_Type)
                      
+	        virtual ~TypeParser()  ;
                 virtual void parse(int linenum, std::vector< std::string> array);
             private:
                 std::string& m_Type;

Well, it's been a few weeks since my last update, but I was still out there once a week taking pictures. The changes have been less dramatic -- but then it's hard to get as dramatic as tearing off the kitchen and pulling off a chunk of a house.

So check out the week 3-5 photos. Note there are two pages of photos.

The lath and plaster is all down. So it looks really empty inside.

The foundation work starts Thursday and continues for about 2 weeks. Then the reconstruction will begin.

Here's this week's highlight:



It's an old wagon that was in the chicken house. Because of the pickup that was in there, I had never been able to get a good picture of it before.

There were about 30 people. I talked about Debia on MacBook.Finally I have some presentation material written in English.It's available here.I got a WLAN station with TLUG auction, nice. Hopefully that will improve my life at home.For my next action: MacBook needs to sleep, and note that the MacBook notion of having to press C for booting from the CD drive isn't obvious.Well, that's life.

Tonight I shall be mostly playing dress-up games and weight training. Simultaneously. My intention is to wear my larger boots (2 x 2kg total) along with a nice chainmail top (1 x 5kg). Including beer (how much does that weight?) I’ll expect to be carrying about 10Kg / 1.5 Stones of extra weight .. whilst dancing. I’m going to be sore tomorrow but it will be worth it. Now to go shave my head before I get ready to go out ..

Well, I haven't been much active blogging these days. I indeed was quite busy at work with a reorganization taking place in my department and a few more responsibilities to have for me. My biggest holidays of the year begin right now. I'll leave today and visit my mom and my sister's family in the region of St-Etienne, in France. Then back home three days later and we will leave for a 18-days trip in Mexico on Thursday. This year is my mexican year..:-) That means a 3-week break in mail and Debian activities. See you in late August with, hopefully, a new beta of the installer which will have been released by our tireless release manager Frans Pop. I will come back and the base system will already be frozen and all of us on our way to the Etch release. Great. Hugs to those of you I use to hug and kisses to others!

I am not happy with dh_pthon in the current state that it was (NMUed into) debhelper. It is preventing me from feeling good about or generally maintaining debhelper. This is a plan for fixing that.

1. Transform dh_python into a perl module or program by some other name and possibly different interface, and put this in some other package(s).
2. Modify dh_pysupport and dh_pycentral to call above so they take over dh_python's part of the work.
3. Reduce dh_python to a no-op warning script and put on deprecation track for removal.
4. Add a regression test to debhelper that fails if any debhelper script exceeds 150 lines, excluding POD docs. (Done in svn)
5. If at any point the python maintainers find an approach that does not invole multiple competing implementations and that is either simple or has the complexity encapsulated into some other program, I can add back a dh_python. Until then the current mess will be Not My Problem.
6. Be much, much, much more cautious accepting niche programs into debhelper in the future. :-(

Possible technical complications:

• dh_pthon supports params for passing additional module directories. dh_pysupport does too, but it seems that dh_pycentral does not. Need to check if this means that noone using dh_pycentral can use it with non-standard directories, so none of them pass directories to dh_python.
• dh_python has -V and -X flags that affect its behavior and the other two programs would not have access to this information.
  • I doubt that -X is used widely. Grep.
  • -V is a redundant interface, since it does something approximating what debian/pyversons does. So things should be able to switch to the other interface, except in edge cases (although IMHO it's not an appropriate interface for a debhelper program), and for the edge cases, -V could be added to the other two programs.
• It's possible that someone might set dh_python's -n flag but not also set it on their call to dh_pycentral or dh_pysupport. Can't imagine why though.
• Not all packages use the new python policy yet. For example, debconf doesn't. I'm not sure if that's a bug or not. One alternative would be reverting dh_python to the pre-NMU version (plus a small shim to make it a no-op if it detects the new policy), to avoid breaking such packages until they transition.

The results are in. Bruce was removed from the board, and Josh Berkus, Neil McGovern, and Michael Schultheiss were added. (Neither Mako nor I sought another term.)

Congratulations to the winners -- I'm sure you will go far. I'm glad to see enthusiastic people around SPI and I'm sure you'll do a great job.

I've really enjoyed reading the recent writings of Joseph Reagle on Wikipedia and online communities. Somebody sent me his Notions of Openness essay. I think it's an excellent complement to Jonathan Nolen's Open Company Test for those of us who are working in the Open Source/Open Content/Open Communities nexus. Anyways, Joseph Reagle's blog is a good read if you're interested in the WP and sociology of wiki and Open Content. I note that he quotes and references Biella Coleman's great work on Debian; I think it's pretty cool that this field of study is expanding. Joseph will be giving a talk titled Is Wikipedia Neutral?'' at Wikimania; I'm looking forward to it. tags: joseph reagle blogs debian wikipedia biella coleman open communities open company wikimania

How good is Linux as a tool for the uninitiated, really? When journalists review Linux, they usually concentrate on the initial installation experience. Given their deadlines, that's logical: they don't often have time to spend months on using it, so installation is all they have time for. I wanted to know how good Linux, or more specifically Debian with GNOME, is for the uninitiated, or more specifically, for someone who has been using Windows for a number of years, and switches to Linux. I'm specifically uninterested in the installation experience. To see what it is like, I recruited a friend of mine, and gave her my old laptop with Linux pre-installed and pre-configured. She has agreed to try switching all her computer use to Linux, and tell me about any problems she has. We'll do this for several months, to make it realistic. Anyone can suffer through a week in a new computer environment. She's now used Linux for a bit over a week. The initial session, when she tried out the new computer at my home, went pretty well, with only a couple of real problems. Here's an edited version of the notes I made:

Bringing up the network (the laptop is configured to use NetworkManager): She found the networking subfolder of the computer folder in GNOME: "Why does it say 'Windows Network'? And why is that empty?". Later: "Why does 'Network tools' not configure the network?". She doesn't know if configuring network in Windows would be as bewildering, never having done it. She can't find anything useful about network configuration in the GNOME help system. Eventually I point out the Network Manager icon in the notification area. She selects a wireless network to connect to and enters the WPA password I give her. She then gets the GNOME Keyring dialog and doesn't understand what it is, wondering why she needs to give the WPA password a second time. She then proceeds to open some windows. "Minimization works, good." She is happy that there is a task bar at the bottom of the screen, and happens to find the "Show desktop" button there as well: "Oh, you can hide all the windows here if you have many." She finds mplayer and thinks it looks OK. She comments that she doesn't really care what player she uses, she uses several under Windows, too, and all of them have quirks. XChat has too many networks to choose from at startup. She's never had to choose an IRC network before, IRCnet being the default for Mirc (or the Mirc installation she has, anyway). She wonders why XChat didn't ask for a server to connect to after selecting the right network (XChat has a lot of servers configured for each network and chose one of them). She continues to configure XChat: "Oh Lord, NO spell checking." She finds the color selector in XChat (the GNOME or GTK+ default one) to be very confusing. The "Nicks not to highlight on" setting is bewildering, does it mean that XChat highlights by default all nicknames, even for other users? She'd like "shut up completely" setting for XChat sounds. Giving ops from a popup is intuitive. XChat in general seems intuitive to her. Next, Bittorrent, using the GNOME torrent downloader. The .torrent file is saved directly to the desktop, which is good. The downloaded file goes there too, which is good, too. Seems intuitive enough, but doesn't seem to have very many settings: it would be nice to be able to prioritize different parts of a multi-file download. She also can't get it to continue a download after restarting the client (possibly related to multi-file torrents). Next, OpenOffice.org. The Windows version doesn't split up into Base, Writer, Impress, etc, but finding the interesting one (Writer) is no problem. That Abiword was installed, too, was a bit confusing. Totem: space doesn't play/pause (except in full screen mode). Sound volume control is a bit confusing, since it has to be done using multiple slidebars (master, pcm, etc) in the GNOME sound control dialog, and also in Totem. After maximizing Totem, quitting it, restarting it, the window is now as big as the whole desktop (minus top and bottom panels), so maximizing and un-maximizing doesn't seem to have much effect, which is weird.

Other problems have surfaced since. The big one was that I had configured a simple firewall for her that didn't let anyone connect to her laptop, meaning that torrenting was not working very well. I use the same firewall settings on my own laptop, but since I mostly torrent for Debian's ISO images, and those have really fast seeders, I've never noticed that I don't torrent outward. Ah well. She also doesn't like the GNOME torrent client very much. It lacks ways of monitoring and controlling the torrenting process that she cares about: seeder and peer counts especially, or (but less importantly) changing the order in which parts of a multi-file torrent are downloaded. We tried installing Azureus, but the version in Debian etch at the time seems quite broken. Firefox seems to occasionally also work very badly for her, taking tens of seconds to load pages, but this seems to be a known bug that will be fixed in the next upstream version. We'll upgrade when we can, and hope that fixes it. Firefox's default font size was too small. Same for the default window size. And sometimes, maximizing the window still doesn't make the contents become bigger (but it works under the Windows version of Firefox). I haven't seen this myself yet, but if I do and can replicate it, I'll file bugs. Another problem that was due to my bad installation: I had forgotten to install acpid, so every time she booted, she got an error message saying "Can't access ACPI events in var/run/acpid.socket". Her exact words when reporting this were: "I don't want to know. Really, I don't. But, just in case you do." That's it for now. I may write an updated report later, if there's any interest. (For the curious, I'm intentionally not naming her, to let her try the experiment in peace, rather than getting her mailbox full of well-intentioned advice on things to try or do.)

When I was young, about 1992, I played through Wolfenstein 3D. It was great fun. When DOOM came out later, however, I found it to be boring. It was a better game than the Wolfenstein one, but not so much better that I wanted to spend time on it. I never even looked at Quake, or any of the numerous newer games released since. Partly this was because I had converted completely to Linux, and most of the games didn't work on it. Partly, however, I didn't really care, since my favorite games were C and Python. I have friends who play a lot, though. I even know a game design professional, Ville. Recently I asked him to to show me a good selection of games, primarily first person shooters. I saw, and played, Quake 2, Quake 4, Far cry, and Halo. They were all quite impressive, and pretty enjoyable, with Ville giving me advice all the time. Since Quake 2 works on Linux these days, I bought the CD-ROM and installed it. Unfortunately, it doesn't work on my laptop. It doesn't make any sounds at all, and sounds are fairly important for the game play. It does work on my desktop machine, so I've played it with that, despite the mouse trouble I have: my optical mouse seems to be incompatible with fast paced game playing, or possibly it is the surface of my coffee table. Either way, occasionally (and usually during a fight) the character starts looking straigh up at the ceiling and rotating along the vertical axis several times a second. It takes a couple of seconds to fix this. Not very good for survival. I'd fix it by trying a new mouse or getting a mouse pad, but I'm not sure I enjoy a first person shooter game enough to spend any effort on that. I've now played Quake 2 for a number of hours, and died a dozen times I think, without advancing very far. As long as I can spend time lazily shooting at alien monsters, I'm happy, but running around in mazes or figuring out which magic buttons to press in which order (after running through the maze to find them), has begun to bore me already. The fact that I find the quick pace of game play during close combat more frustrating than rewarding isn't helping. I will probably occasionally return to Quake 2, because the immersion in a glorious 3D world is so enticing, but I probably won't ever become enthusiastic. There's other kinds of games, of course. Foobillard, for example, gives much of the same kind of "wow, it's like the real world" experience to me than Quake 2, but I can take my time aiming before shooting. Also, of course, billiards balls don't shoot back. Unfortunately, I had to purge foobillard from my machine because it is too much fun, and I'd start a game (or a series of games) every time I had to wait for a compilation. One minute of fixing code and starting make, fifteen minutes of playing billiards, is not a good formula for productivity.

Mark Jaroski asked if I had any recommendations for Web hosting. I thought I'd share them here. Mostly I find Web hosting really difficult to evaluate -- there are just too many options. It's a really competitive business, and the hosting companies have SEO-saturated the Web hosting keyword at Google. On top of that, there are a ton of fake "hosting comparison" sites -- really just fronts for the bottom-feeders of hosting. When you get to even a good hosting company's Web site, there'll be a lot of flashing lights and gewgaws. A lot of companies try to sell you add-on features you don't need, and they'll have abusive UI to get you to click on the wrong thing, like:

 You're eligible for a big discount on our
 blogging software! Only $3.95 a month! 

 [Continue] Cancel

... where the "Continue" button adds the add-on to your account and "Cancel" is what you need to go on with your order. I think this is borderline fraud, but as far as I know nobody's been shut down or fined for it. For contrast, there are a lot of really good community-oriented and Open Source-friendly hosting services out there, like Montreal's Koumbit. They'll usually be able to devote more time and energy to individuals' technical needs. Often, though, small companies and community groups can't get the same economy of scale and thus price level to compete with the big guys. Of course, what you usually trade away for that $0.75 a month is any customer service or friendliness or control of your own site. The big guys are organized around selling hard to inexperienced people on price, then ignoring their requests for help and treating them like idiots for asking until they go away. Getting help with real problems like server downtime or misbehaviour can be as humiliating as having someone explain what "Cut", "Copy", and "Paste" mean, and probably get you as many over-the-phone eye roll pauses. "My Web site is down!" <eye roll> "Did your AOL Chat window get in front of your browser window, sir?" I think the best option for people is to look around, find a group or company that has a price you can live with and business practices that don't turn your stomach, and give them a try. Make frequent local backups of your site, and be ready to leave if you need to. tags: web hosting community comparison customer service

Dumb Contest Julien has started a dumb bug reports contest (you be the judge of what "dumb" applies to here). What's the point? I guess if it catches on we can humiliate Debian users and keep them from filing bug reports at all. And as we all know, no bug reports means no bugs, right? Being abusive towards users has never helped a project improve the quality of its software. Our bug tracking system is one of the things that's made Debian a top-tier operating system. Making fun of Debian users for using it is a very bad idea. tags: bts debian contest

Yay Akron The Akron Beacon Journal has an article about suggested Akron-related topics to add to Wikipedia. That seems like a great idea. tags: akron ohio wikipedia

Wow Douglas Self has some cool items in his Museum of Retro Technology about old technology -- like this rocket bicycle and this gyro-stabilized monorail. Thanks to Nick Moffitt for the links, even though he probably cribbed them from somewhere lame like Slashdot or Boing Boing. tags: douglas self museum retro rocket bicycle monorail nick moffitt

Supportworthy So, I have two blog items about technical support people looking down on those who are reporting problems. And I was thinking how much I work to gain the respect of technical support people so they'll listen to my problems when I have to make a phone call. As little as I like it, I find myself working to qualify to get my questions answered and my problems fixed. So I wonder: what if there were some kind of standardized computer user certification? You could take a series of increasingly-harder tests at some training centre, and you'd give your certification level (or -- better -- your standardized identification number) when you register software or hardware or when you report a bug. People will then know that when you say, "I think postfix isn't accepting connections!", you might actually have a point. tags: certification computer user technical support

JAM on it Maj, of course, was the one who pointed me to the page for a new Wiki engine in development. Ho-hum, I know... there's already too many wiki engines. But this one is interesting in that it aims to be MediaWiki compatible and run in a Java Servlet container. That seems like a killer combination for those people who want "the wiki that Wikipedia uses" but with an "enterprise-strength" Web technology. I've only tried the software a little bit, but it definitely looks like it's already more featureful than 70% of Wiki engines. Taking MW as a model is a great idea for a new Wiki engine -- it's an extremely featureful wiki engine that "fits well in the hand" of writers and users. Already the use of images and the special support pages look good on JAMWiki. And the integration of lucene means an excellent search engine -- something MediaWiki lacks out of the box. The Roadmap looks to have some good plans in the future. Anyways, Maj likes JAMWiki since JAM is MAJ backwards. I can't tell you what to make of that, though. What I do know is that the project needs a logo real bad. tags: wiki wiki engine java jamwiki jam servlet logo

Ajax in 10 weeks So, wp:AJAX is no longer as bonerific a word as it was six months ago, but it's still pretty hot. I mean, we've all stopped nattering about how fantabulous Ajaxical UI is, and just started writing code to make it work. It seems like nobody even uses "Ajax" and "Web 2.0" as synonyms anymore (well... I guess only the people who still call it "CGI/PERL".) But I was interested to see when I was looking for the Java Servlets link above that Sun is part of the cryptic Open Ajax Alliance. They've got an Ajax project incubating called jMaki to integrate Javascript programming on the server and on the client. Neato, say I. Most interesting was an external link to a 10-Week Free AJAX Programming Online Course. Starts August 4th, seems like a nice self-training tool. tags: ajax sun java javascript

Stuck in ol' CGI again So, I've been getting some non-deterministic 500 errors from WiLiKi, and I'm starting to think they're concurrency problems with searching the database the WiLiKi pages are stored in. I also think there may be a FastCGI tie-in, so I've rolled-back to CGI for a while to see if it cuts down on the errors. Annoying, indeed. tags: wiliki wiki cgi fastcgi

This is more or less a reminder for me, most of you will probably already know how to do it...

1. Install QEMU:
   apt-get install qemu
2. Create a (resizable) image which will hold Windows XP. The installer chokes if the image is smaller than 1.2 GB or so, but that's not too much of a problem; the "qcow" image format will only take up as much space as is really needed, so the image will be very small in the beginning (not 1.2 GB big!).
   qemu-img create -f qcow /path/to/xp.cow 1300M
3. Insert the install CD, and install Windows in the QEMU image:
   qemu -hda /path/to/xp.cow -boot d -cdrom /dev/cdrom -m 384 -localtime

4. Wait.
5. After the install has finished, shut down the QEMU/Windows; from now on you can boot it (without having to insert the CD anymore) with:
   qemu -hda /path/to/xp.cow -boot c -m 384 -localtime -k de -usb

Type "qemu -h" for more options.

I've been working on linux-uvc package in Debian.Apparently, it was one of the more awaited packages,I received quite a lot of feedback.It's sometimes refreshing to get a different kind of user reaction to uploads.However, I'd really like to have some kind of mailing listto discuss this stuff. Maybe Cc'ing debian-user will do.

It's been quite a while since my last post, so this will mainly be an update on what I've been up to the last weeks or even months. Overall the past time has mainly been pretty busy. It was the end of the semester, a time that always brings a lot of work, and in this case it was the end of my last semester, which adds a little extra pressure to the whole business, since I didn't only have to take care of the usual stuff, but also had to arrange for an appropriate topic for my upcoming thesis, which is always a kind of a "balancing act". Things are however looking good now and I am quite confident that I'll be able to spend the six months I have for my thesis on a subject that actually interests me, my tutors, complies with the official guidelines, has some purpose beyond getting me a Master of Arts AND EVEN has a realistic chance of actually working out! Yay academia! Apart from university work I've been kept additionally busy by my jobs, which unfortunately also both had a kind of peak during the last weeks. The problem about this is, that actually both of them were intended to be "only-jobs" since they both provided me with enough money and consumed just as much time as I could spare during the semester. But then I got accepted for both of them and absolutely couldn't decide which one to chose (one was at the university as a teaching assistant, the other at a pretty cool IT security consultant's) so I did both and have been juggling those two, my studies and actually getting to sleep/eat every now and then during the last weeks. This has been pretty exhausting, but on the bright side, I have a little spare money now to spend while the holidays. (Luckily both bosses are on a 3-4 week trip in August :)) One thing that suffered rather greatly from my very tight schedule this semester (apart from my horribly neglected sweetie of course) was my Debian/Free Software work that got almost entirely stalled ever since I returned from DC6. So I hope to be using the more quiet summer months to spend some time on this, maybe write a nice new talk and package some things I've had my eyes on for quite a while already. Oh, and I'll sleep. A LOT! PS: Last night, to celebrate the end of the semester, we went to see the Pirates of the Caribbean double feature. Hilarious!! Go see it!