PERHAPS BONGHITS WILL FIX MY UNDERSTANDING OF STOCHASTIC CONTEXT FREE GRAMMARS

mozilla-thunderbird 1.0.2-2.sarge1.0.8a has been uploaded to the security buildds. It addresses the same issues recently fixed in DSA-1118 for mozilla and DSA-1120 for mozilla-firefox. I don’t expect hard regressions, but if you find any, please let me know. Otherwise, this package will enter stable-security soon. You can obtain this build from: http://people.debian.org/~asac/security/

Today will hit unstable the new GRUB package version. This version has a new and very interesting feature: Xen kernel detection. Until now, every Xen user needed to change the menu.lst byhand to have it suitable to boot the dom0 and that’s a very error prone way of to do that. Currently, like any other image on menu.lst, you can change the Xen dom0 kernel options and they will be use to write down the kernel entries. Very nift. Thanks by all Xen Packaging Team for their work on it.

I've taken a deep breath and finally filed a request to get the mindi-kernel package removed from etch and sid.

mindi-kernel has been obsolete and hasn't been used by mindi for some time with apparently no detrimental effects, also it has always been i386-only and thus was never available for amd64.

What got me finally over the line was the announcement that we will not ship etch with 2.4 kernels - yeah!

“The girls I encountered were so immersed in this lifestyle, in their new reality, and completely divorced from the outside world. How could I explain to them that what they are doing means nothing in the outside world, yet will affect them for the rest of their lives? They have given up who they are for now; they have put their dreams on hold; their lives for the next two years have become a wistful compromise.”

A GPLed Tux sewing pattern project that describes itself like this: "The starting point of this project was the question: "Why is it that on the one hand in the Linux world all code of software is freely available and on the other hand the code to compile a soft toy penguin is still not open source?" This project will try to publish code that will enable people to sew soft toy penguins themselves provided they meet certain hardware requirements". 














There is even a submissions blog with lots of inspiration for your own project. Click on the Penguin to see more. Click on the pattern to go to the website.

PGP keys I won't be signing... or trusting

This is the keysigning exchange service at Biglumber. The owner of key F5538629A12E35418DFBF242FA89FA5556F42D8B has signed your key (DEA27BAA479CCA5876E5DE5628DEAE7F29982E5A). Your key with this signature on it will be emailed to you once you have uploaded a signed copy of their public key to Biglumber. Log in to biglumber.com and look for the key exchange link.

Ah, the great democratization of PGP. Who needs security when we can just collect signatures like baseball cards and hawk our identities on eBay instead? Should be an easy profit, apparently I don't even have to show that I'm me to get in on the signature exchange market. This PSA brought to you by the committee for not trusting Ryan Ward. ...whoever that is.

Back in mid-February, I was invited to participate in a review of EU government policy support research on gender issues in Free Software communities at the University of Cambridge. The meeting was fascinating to me not only because of my level of interest in the content, but also because the reviewers were a wonderfully diverse group of genuinely interesting people. I also must admit that being a guest of Kings College for two nights was quite an experience in and of itself... As someone who has been a strong proponent of the idea that approaches and technologies adopted by Free Software developers are something other communities might want to borrow from or emulate, I found the results of this research both disturbing and enlightening. The disturbance centers around just how strongly male-biased our current behaviors seem to be in practice, particularly in the Debian project. My moment of enlightenment was the realization that many of the ideas we discussed about how to encourage and enable more female participation in our communities could simultaneously make our projects more appealing and rewarding to all of our contributors! I've talked to various people about this research in my travels since the meeting in February, and many have followed up asking for pointers to the findings. I was pleased to learn this morning that the integrated report of findings and recommendations from this work are finally available online. I hope at least some of you will read this report, and will then be as interested as I am in looking for ways to change the status quo. Perhaps a BOF at the upcoming Debian developer's conference to discuss these results and brainstorm specific actions we can take in the Debian project would be a good place to start? I expect to arrive late on the 15th, and must depart early on the morning of the 21st...

In the fall of 1998, work on our house caused me to take down my roof-mounted GPS antenna. I finally got around to re-installing it today. It's hooked to an HP 58503A GPS Time and Frequency Reference Receiver. This mean my NTP stratum 1 will be back online soon. More importantly, it means I now have an excellent 10 Mhz reference source to lock my test equipment and software defined radio experiments to...

I just received word that there will be a Debian developer gathering in Bangalore, India, on the afternoon of Saturday, August 20th, at the International Institute of Information Technology. The target audience is current or aspiring Debian developers, and interested and sophisticated users of Debian in Bangalore. A registration page is available, and apparently there's an event mailing list. While I won't be able to attend, I think this sort of low-key, techie-focused, regional Debian gathering is a great idea... and it would be wonderful to have more Debian developers in India!

My maternal grandmother Estill Winfree Barksdale passed away on Saturday night. She was 101 years old. I was fortunate to grow up near all of my grandparents and many other elder relatives. They each had some impact on my perception of the world, on what I think is important, and on how I try to lead my life. But it's the little things about Grandmother that flood my mind today... from lemonade made pink with juice from the bottle of maraschino cherries always in her refridgerator when I was little, to the firmness of her grip several weeks ago when I last saw her. She was extraordinary, and I will miss her.

Just home from West Virginia, where my wife's family gather at her grandmother's house to celebrate Thanksgiving. The traditional turkey feast was pleasant as always, but the real culinary high point of this trip was on the way home... The closest major airport is Pittsburgh, we had a couple of extra hours on Saturday before our flight, and Karen and I are both graduates of CMU. So we decided to detour into Pittsburgh and and drive around a bit to see how things had changed over the years and what was still familiar. The biggest visible differences to us were on the river fronts, from the new stadium that replaced Three Rivers to what looks like a technology park built along the Monongahela under the parkway, where steel mills once stood. We didn't take time to do more than drive around the CMU perimeter, but even that let us see that the campus landscape has changed dramatically since we were students. Otherwise, most of the major landmarks that matter to us remain unchanged, including the apartment on South Millvale I lived in for all but my freshman years at CMU. But best of all, 'the O' was still alive and well on Forbes avenue! I'm sure I ate there an average of at least once a week from the time Steve Fisher introduced me to the place until I moved to Colorado. I often tell people that the best part of having to travel a lot for work is that I get to sample interesting foods from around the world... and many of my strongest travel memories are of meals enjoyed with interesting people and wonderful food. However, despite all those experiences, 'O' fries continue to rank near the very top of my list of foods I'm willing to go out of my way for. Even my 5-year-old son, who can be a lot pickier about what he'll eat than I like to admit, thanked me repeatedly on the flights home the rest of the afternoon for "making me try those french fries with cheese". Sometime, I'd love to spend enough time in Pittsburgh to see how many of the other places I used to love to eat are still around... In the meantime, a regular fix of chili dogs and fries at the 'O' are one of the few things I really miss about the years I spent in Pittsburgh.

Just packaged and uploaded a new upstream version of tar, 1.13.92. I suspect some of the open tar bugs may be resolved by this upload, but I haven't worked through the list yet, and am not sure when I will get to it.

... thats what you get for not using proper XML. I've been planning for a long time to switch to a blogging tool which has proper XML handling. That will at least make sure it's not my fault when planet breaks again. ;-) - a few times I've broken planet before, however, it was actually a bug in the planet software. If I'd do a planet rewrite, I wouldn't bother to make a tolerant feed parser, but I'd just skip any blog posts that aren't valid. Then people will hopefully switch to software that actually uses XML writers and not print()... (Yes, this post was also written to make planet realize I've fixed my feed ;-)

What a couple of weeks.

So I went off to Europe. I had planned to meet up with Daniel Stone and many others in Paris, but fate decided to piss in my cornflakes and delay my flight out of Boston so that we missed the connecting flight to Paris. I spent the whole next day in Montreal's airport, and while I got a lot of reading about Norse mythology done, I didn't have nearly as much time in Paris and didn't get to meet up with anyone. Daniel and I will have to postpone drinking and bashing X in person until a latter date. The time that I did spend there, was great though, and I got to do some of the tourist things that I didn't get to do last time I was there. Nicole, my girlfriend, had never been to Europe, so she was thrilled to see things for the first time.

Then it was off to Munich, where I did get to spend some time with Michael Banck, who is even more awesome in person than on the internets. Michael was my sponsor in Debian for well over a year, as well as my advocate, and now we're both ops in #debian together, so it was a real thrill to finally meet up with him. He was too polite to let me buy him dinner or a drink as thanks, so I'm hoping he comes to visit so I can repay him. I also got to meet several others, including release manager extraordinare Andreas Barth, which was a lot of fun. We were in town when Germany was playing Sweden in the world cup, and Germany actually won, so the whole city was singing until dawn. Ever since I've been back I've been drinking lots of Hefeveisens and wishing that they were served in 1 liter form.

Surprisingly, since I've been back, I've had the opportunity to do some programming at work and push Free Software at the same time. A co-worker of mine recently did an experiment that got her a list of 900 genes, and she wanted to narrow that list by comparing them to another list or two, but had no idea how to get this done in a reasonable amount of time. So one afternoon I wrote a small ruby script to do this, and all of a sudden my boss is looking at me wondering what other sort of neat computer things I could whip up. I also had to start doing some statistics, and I found a test that I needed to do which Excel couldn't do, so I started learning and coding a bit of R, which is pretty nice so far. The co-worker of mine just invested $800 in a two day class on learning to use an add-on for R, which is cool because I've totally failed until now to get anyone to use Free Software in the lab. The whole thing is making my labmates look at me a little funny though, since this stuff is way out of their league for the most part.

The bad news is that a few days after I came back, I found that my laptop's hard drive started making some very bad noises. I moved my data to backup computer that I'd inherited but not really used, only to find that the backup machine was prone to weird random errors. That left me without a functional computer at home. I took the opportunity to order a new machine for myself, but for now I'm kind of stuck with a web browser at work. In the meanwhile, I've taken to teaching myself statistics, and in order to do that, I've been re-learning calculus. I find it a little weird that I'm going home at night and picking up a calculus text book in my free time.

As far as X work goes, not having a working computer has caused a bit of a problem. Luckily, just before my machine died, Andres Salomon had nearly finished work on backporting Xorg 7.1 to sarge. Afterwards, he decided that he wanted to join the XSF, so since then he's been spearheading getting 7.1 in to experimental. He's been continuing the work that I haven't been able to do lately, and I'm excited to work with him in the future. In addition, Jurij Smakov joined the team as sparc driver maintainer, and Drew Parsons is officially joining the team, bringing Xprint officially in to the XSF. So even though I haven't been able to do much, things are moving forward, which is wonderful to see. As soon as I can get set up, I'm going to keep working with Andres to get 7.1 ready to ship in December.

Surprisingly, I drink far more lately than when I had a working computer. I think something is wrong with me if working on Debian helps to keep me from seeking chemical modification.

About a month ago or so, I joined in a discussion on the debian-boot and pkg-exim4-devel mailinglists about the current Exim (v4) configuration schemes. To keep you from having to google for that discussion, I'll quickly summarize my opinion on the subject of the exim4 configuration scheme in Debian: I think it sucks. I've been a rather fanatic (ish) exim user since about two months after I became a Debian Developer. Initially, I removed it to replace it with sendmail. But that was a bad idea, and I quickly found out why. However, I never liked the exim 3 configuration script, since I never could get it to do what I wanted; and, according to the exim 4 maintainer (and to anyone who compares both schemes), the current exim 4 configuration system is just a rehash of the exim 3 configuration system; not much more. But it's so backwards. The initial question which exim4-config asks you may have been relevant in the time the initial exim 3 config script was written, but it is so totally outdated in a modern Internet. As a result, my current modus operandi when I install a new box is to get out of the exim4 config system as soon as I can, to gunzip /usr/share/doc/exim4-config/examples/example.conf.gz to /etc/exim4/exim4.conf, and to open the file in a text editor. At least I know that works, the way I want it. No hard feelings, Marc (but you knew that already). Personally, I had different ideas about what an efficient question would be, and I posted those to the mailinglist (you will have to google for those if you want them, though :-). I also promised to come up with some code to implement my ideas. This has proven to be... interesting. Currently, I have a config script that does a few questions and then switches to "Not Yet Implemented" mode. As in: it displays a debconf template of "Type: error" that basically says "This part still has to be implemented". For the postinst script, I wanted to base myself on the existing postinst script. That does not seem to be a very good idea, however; the existing postinst script contains a lot of upgrade cruft. And then I still have to write my update-exim4.conf. Looks like I took on a job which turns out to be larger than expected... Oh well, I guess I'll cope. It'll just take a bit longer than I wanted it to.

I had a nice talk with ender on the phone, and he introduced me to ccache. I quickly found a way to take advantage of it using pbuilder. Next step would be to hook that into distcc. Has anyone successfully done this? My bux fixing power will increase, as most of the time, while looking at packaging bugs, the code is seldom changed and rebuilds take for ever, helping me get distracted by Cute Overload or similar procrastination tools. So resistance is futile, these bugs will go away :)

Quote from Joey Hess: In 1999, Debian began moving /usr/doc to /usr/share/doc to comply with the FHS. Due to unfortunate dpkg issues at the time, we couldn t simply move the directory and be done with it, but decided to move things peicemeil by updating all packages. Due to some silly concerns about users having to look in two places during the transition, we decided to start by making /usr/doc/ -> /usr/share/doc/ symlinks. In 2001, putting any documentation in /usr/doc became a serious policy violation. The symlinks were still allowed. In 2002, we completed the first stage of the transition, released woody with complete /usr/share/doc and /usr/doc directories, and policy was changed to not require the /usr/doc symlinks. debhelper was changed to stop adding postinst and postrm fragments to manage the links, and so most packages only needed a recompile to finish the transition. As a result, More than 250 bugs were filed, blockers of #322762. Most of these bugs, rot in peace in the BTS for years, some maintainers fixed them themselves, some other maintainers NMUed and others did QA uploads to deal with this issue. But it was not enough. It looks like at a certain point I decided we would not ship Etch with a transition from 2002 still in progress, so I did approximately 114 NMUs between the 11th and the 18th of July, fixing 152 bugs, 46 of which were not related to the /usr/doc transition. I also closed the ones affecting packages not in testing or unstable, unblocked the ones for packages that would not ship with etch (as exim3, that will be replaced by exim4), and updated the MIA info for several of the maintainers. At the same time, I revamped packaging a bit if I felt inspired to do so. Sure, things went wrong at bits and places, which I later fixed the best I could, but inmense love was poured in these NMUs. Several maintainers thanked me and the most NMU-unfriendly people didn't even complain. Lars Wirzenius pointed me to other related bugs, found by upgrading from testing to unstable with piuparts, and added blocking relationships with #322762 where needed. At this stage, less than 5 open bugs remain. I suspect that more packages once created this link and don t remove it on upgrade. I would need some help to find them. All this NMU fever happened while Joey was away on holidays, and when he returned, he confirmed my fears, I had DoSed his email and bandwidth: <joeyh> amaya: did you have to fix all the /usr/doc bugs while I was on vacation?
* joeyh watches his inbox and BW groan at the seams :-)
There is still several important and minor issues that we should deal with before Etch is released, Release Goals or not, just because we are Debian, and just because we care about this sort of things:

• The "You still Build-Depend on Xlibs-dev" Transition.
• The "You left a link link in /usr/doc" Transition.
• The "Please use Invoke-rc.d in all maintainer scripts" Transition.
• The "Let's switch to Cdebconf" Transition.

Some of you will argue that these might not be transitions per se, just mass-bugfilings. I don t really care how you d rather call it. If you are looking for easy ways to help Debian, or to fill your lazy summer afternoons with, provide a patch today and CC: me. I intend to group these bugs either using user-tags or blocking bugs in the BTS. Help locating them and grouping them will also be appreciated. [Updated entry to reflect more accurate NMU and bug totals]

Collection Management I like to collect things, books, audio cds (which I buy exclusively second-hand/used then rip), and films. I’ve had a lot of fun putting my film collection online (Warning image-heavy). Although I admit the reason I did it in the first place was because I found myself buying DVDs I already owned more than once. I do the same thing with books. I can recognised covers easily, so if I see a book which is by an author I like I will look at the cover and think “Hmmm got this”, or “Hmmm thats new”. This leads me to buy duplicates too often. This leads me to wanting to organise the hundreds of books I have, so I can lookup what I have/dont have easily. My recent query the other day about scanning ISBN numbers with a barcode reader seemed to suggest that using the hardware is trivial. However the next step is hard. I can’t find a decent tool for using storing the data in. So far I’ve looked at:

alexandria

I loved this when I started it up and imported a few books by ISBN. It found the title, the publisher, a cover image, and more. However the backend seems to be a bit hit and miss. Picking books at random I soon found major gaps. e.g. Adding Terry Pratchett’s Mort gave me all the details. Adding Witches Abroad gave a blank image and just the title, all the other details were wrong/missing.

tellico

Tellico I’ve just ruled out. It allows you to create collections of things, but you must enter all the details yourself. I’ve neither the time nor the patience to do that.

So I’ll postpone this project for a while. Probably just as well since I’ve discovered that a suprisingly large number of my books do not actually contain ISBN numbers! Mostly the older paperback fiction books I have such as “H.G.Wells the valley of the spiders & other stories”, but even modern books like some of Steven Brust’s Vlad Taltos series are free of ISBN numbers.