Just a quick one, people want food: my Telepathy talk at GUADEC earlier this week was a success by most accounts, and followed up by after-hours talks today with Kai Vehmanen’s on Telepathy SIP, and Yannick Pellet on the IM/VOIP project on the 770. My slides are available for people who missed my talk, and hopefully soon Fluendo will grace us with videos feeds too. For people still around at the conference tomorrow, I’ve arranged a BOF with Martyn Russell for discussing/hacking Telepathy and Gossip stuff. It’s in the museum library room at 11am tomorrow (Friday). Hope to see you there!

I was in Russia last week to speak at Interop Moscow 2006. As an American who’s old enough to remember duck and cover, it was an experience indeed. Growing up, the Kremlin would have been the last place I’d ever thought I’d get a chance to see, that is, if I’d thought about such things back then (most kids don’t, and I was no exception, being too busy thinking about important things like baseball and computers). After the conference, I did get that chance to see the Kremlin and other Moscow sights with fellow speakers Jon “maddog” Hall, Federico Biancuzzi, and Raoul Chiesa. Speaking of being a kid and computers, I also had the opportunity to meet Steve Wozniak, cofounder of Apple Computer. I was first introduced to computers when my father replaced his typewriter at work with an Apple II in 1981 or so, thought I might find it interesting, and brought it home to show me. Needless to say, it captured my imagination, first with the games, then with the idea that I could make it do my bidding with a little study and a lot of tinkering, and I’ve been hooked ever since. So, as I had a chance to tell the Woz firsthand, I literally do what I do because of his Apple II. I took plenty of pictures, but as usual, I don’t like most of them. The ones I don’t end up throwing out will be appearing in my Flickr photostream over the next few days.

I did my taxes yesterday, two days before the final deadline. I do that every year. I wait until the very last moment, until I get so stressed that it is painful. So the next year all I remember is the painful experience and then postpone it more and more and try to avoid it until the very last day again. Rinse and repeat. It gets worse every year. I also stupidly refuse any help that is offered to me when there's still plenty of time, and then I will want it desperately when there's only one day left, but I am too embarrassed to ask for help then because, $DEITY forbid, THEY (yes, whoever "they" is, the evil "they", the ones that would be all after me if I was paranoid) erm, yes, because THEY would find out that I procastinate.

Anyway, yesterday I was on the verge of a break down, that's why I missed the Gay Pride day blog post, when Bego called me, came upstairs with her laptop (with a very helpful windows partition), which broke completely after installing the tax software, so we migrated downstairs to Carlos' office, where i could finally calculate my taxes, and using my SSL certificate, send the outcome of my calculations to the tax office, online. It all was pretty much smooth once you completely give up all hope and stick to windows and explorer.

Carlos was shocked that I was demanding a windows machine, that's when he realized the situation was pretty desperate, as the Linux client has proven not to work at all. Jose even took pics of me using windows. I hope they don't make it to Slashdot.

Special thanks to H ctor, who in the midst of a huge headache, ended up fixing Bego's fucked up Windows partition.

Happy Yesterday! (Yesterday was the Pride day).

From Wikipedia: people should be proud of what they are, [...] sexual diversity is a gift, and [...] sexual orientation and gender identity are inherent and cannot be intentionally altered. Which I happen to agree with and celebrate.



This weekend we will skate through Madrid's streets, as there will be no cars in the centre, it will be a huge street party.

Info on activities for this year's Pride in Madrid, can be found here (in english, even).

This MUST stop now! If every DD would express his opinion and anger and frustration on the thread, then it would be the mother of all flamewars and it will suck the life out of all other Debian lists and stop the development outright. Flames shall not pass! In case someone did not get the joke - it is fun. Join the fun. Display all the traditional flamewar tactics and frases in absurd and hyper overstated ways. Let off some steam in a fictional debate about nothing. Have a bit of fun. It is curiose after all.

... if only people would use SIP instead. But the new skype beta at least doesn't crash on startup anymore. The previous version needed a wrapper to work with my GNOME:

#!/bin/sh
unset SESSION_MANAGER
exec /usr/bin/skype

The current Linux version number is 1.3.0.30, so way behind the current windows version, though I have no idea which features are missing. I havn't actually made a call with it for a year. From time to time I use it for file transfers, since many Windows users don't have more comfortable applications ready... If you want to try internet telephony, I'd suggest getting a SIP software instead, for example Ekiga. (Windows users might want to try Gizmo). In fact, most DSL modems sold in germany include SIP internet telephony, and you can just hook up your regular analog or ISDN telephone to your DSL modem and use internet telephony. You could call me for free over the internet, and it will ring my regular phone. You can get a german phone number (01212/01213) for free at freephone.web.de among others, or 100 minutes for free to german landlines at iphone.freenet.de. Other providers (e.g. GMX, 1&1) offer telephony flatrates etc.

Will tell a nice story about airlines later. Just a small note, we have arrived safly.

It’s almost the end of financial year in Australia, so what better time to take stock? I’m actually a bit surprised at just how much I need to do that – I knew being DPL would involve some new challenges, but it’s barely two months in and I’m already just about in shock. Guess it serves me right for putting “increasing Debian’s tempo” in my platform…

---

The two other roles I’ve been in that I would have expected to prepare me more have been Debian release manager, and secretary of Linux Australia. They’re both similar in a way – the release manager does a lot of cat herding within Debian, and has to make some calls that will leave people aggrieved; and Linux Australia has some contact with the press, and some reasonably serious projects going on. So a few issues were completely expected: a random initial slashdotting, a press report, an interview or two, some requests for quotes in articles and press releases, or ongoing opposition and arguments from dedicated Debianites who don’t happen to agree with me on some decision. There were other things that were new and interesting though not really surprising. The leader@ mail address turned out to have just as much spam as I expected, though also some unexpected interesting stuff too, including my first ever personally addressed open letter – in this case by Keith Curtis who also wrote the 10,000 bugs away from World Domination article that got slashdotted a while back. A tidbit:

Everyone agrees that Ubuntu couldn’t exist without Debian, but I also believe that Debian is better setup to take Ubuntu where it needs to go. There are hints that the Ubuntu team feels like they brought a pork chop suit to a lions den. Ubuntu’s user base and development team is growing exponentially, but I believe they could get there much faster with more of Debian’s help.

Keith also forwarded an open letter he’d written to Mark Shuttleworth, and had some interesting comments on the whole Java thing. As well, I suddenly started receiving SPI board mail, as Debian’s advisory representative to the SPI board, and started getting a couple of requests for authorising expenditures (Debian UK reimbursing Matthew Garrett for travel costs to the Gnome Advisory Board meeting in 2005) or providing a Debian representative for a meeting or joining the Google Summer of Code. And then there were the cool things I knew absolutely nothing about, like the excellent news Christian Perrier passed on about the launch of Dzongkha Linux, featured in news reports from Bhutan, India, and Australia. Of course, I completely expected that all this would overload me a bit, and I’d end up getting distracted from what I wanted to do, and not being able to keep up with stuff other people wanted me to do. To help with this a little, I delegated Steve McIntyre as, essentially, a co-DPL, and he’s been working on a few things, including the now successful switch of irc.debian.org over to OFTC, and another fun little endeavour that I won’t spoil just yet. Things started getting a bit weird as I was preparing to travel off to debconf in Mexico – with some frustrated comments from damog and Marga and Gunnar, which was odd coming from the conference organisers themselves; and independently the reinflamation of some old tension on the debian-installer team. That got compounded at debconf itself, with the controversy over the inclusion of Sun Java in non-free extending not just to the lists, but an article in LWN (with a followup) as well as numerous other places around the net. That issue came to something of a climax when John Goerzen (with whom I’ve had some entertaining disagreements in the past) questioned whether SPI had been sufficiently involved in the decision (“I am becoming increasingly concerned at the unilateral method in which you and/or the archive maintainers have taken this decision.”), to which I responded fairly curtly to defend the way Debian makes decisions (“If SPI wish to withdraw from their relationship with Debian, then that’s entirely possible to arrange. I don’t think it’s at all proper that you try to obtain veto power of Debian’s activities as conducted by the duly authorised members of that organisation.”). Nothing’s really news there – flamewar on Debian lists between influential project members? Next thing you know the sun will rise in the East every morning, and then where will we be? What’s not so normal is those flamewars getting front page coverage on slashdot, or noted in an article on distrowatch. As far as Debian’s concerned, we had a couple more rounds, both in public and on the developer only -private list, then moved onto actually getting the legal advice John wanted. That’s actually still pending, and the debate has pretty much abated while that’s going on. And meanwhile, Wouter Verhelst, Manoj Srivastava, and others have started a much more productive look at Debian’s relationship with SPI and similar organisations, which has continued on to a draft of a constitutional amendment. But there was more stress and chaos at debconf than just the Java stuff, but what’s really impressive is the way people ended up dealing with it. Take damog for example:

Just as Tore said: This is the best DebConf ever. Isn’t it great? I started really enjoying this DebConf once I stopped worrying about bullshit, once I stopped worrying about senseless things and started to really give a shit about almost anything. Why do I need Gunnar to tell my girlfriend Ana, “you picked up the irresponsible one”? Why do I have to worry about the DPL giving a shit or not on the Latinamerican Debian community, even after being invited to meet the guys or to attend our BOF? […] I enjoy people here, thanks to all the organization cabal, thanks for your effort and your time on this. […] But after leaving all of this behind, I think Ana and me are having a great time sharing time with friends around us (the friends, los cuates, we are here for).

After seeing that post, and figuring out who damog actually was when he gave a lightning talk towards the end of the conference, we had a chance to briefly chat about what was going on – somehow I hadn’t taken in the invitation to attend the BOF, and had been told it was all in Spanish anyway, so hadn’t gone; meanwhile they’ve been thinking about holding a Debian miniconf in Latin America somewhere and wanting to know what sort of support they can get from the rest of the project – particularly moral support rather than financial, at that. Hopefully we’ll see news on that score in the coming months. But really, damog was right in the first place anyway: why care if the DPL supports you or not? Debian’s about everyone doing what they think is good and worthwhile, and that combining to produce something great – it’s not about what some guy who got six votes more than the next guy happens to think is important. But support is important, whether it comes in the form of a DPL saying “good idea!”, or something else. Gunnar’s response to the latter, eg:

Debian is love. After my scream for help a couple of days ago, and after a mountain of hard work, things are just running. No, we are not -by far- free of incidents, and it would be foolish to expect it to be so, but we are working nicely. And by the way, thank you, I have been receiving the largest amount of hugs ever, and believe me, each of them has been important. […] Thank you all, folks. I am in Cristoph Berg’s talk about reworking NM - And this comes very good to wrap up my post. Debian is much, much more than technical work. It is a social club. I love this social club. Just sitting here makes long months of work really worth it. A great hug back to you all!

And in the end we got quite a bit out of debconf6, for example more movement on the forthcoming release, improvements on i18n stuff, a new publicity project, movement on updating python, amongst other things. Who knows if the next debconf will manage to be anywhere near as much of an experience, but at least we’ll find out fairly soon where it’s going to be (though that process isn’t without hiccups of its own). Post debconf, there’s also been a notable influx of trolling going on too; with the most obvious and odious example being the insane, anonymously-posted prayers for a female developer’s death. Fortunately those have mostly been ignored as the mindless spam they are, though one might argue that Marcela Tiznado’s acceptance as a DD on her birthday, and the inclusion of women.debian.org in the official debian.org namespace are a more appropriate response to that sort of harassment than any sort of direct reply anyway. Not all our problems have conveniently been resolved right now, of course, the difficulties related to the installer team I alluded to above are ongoing, and at the moment a really good solution is still eluding us, though development continues anyway. And then, of course, there’s more to come – half the point of posting this is so I can stop worrying about all the stuff that’s been and gone, and get on with interesting things like the next point release, and the various other projects that I’ve let languish for the past few weeks.

I just tried to see if I could order a laptop with Dell without Windows. So I went to the Dell Linux page. Which totally sucked. I'm using flashblock (since flash usually sucks), and the Dell Linux page has huge flash movies on them - the regular Dell site doesn't. Why for heavens sake does Dell use Flash on their Linux page? It's not as if Linux users care about their fancy animations. On contrary, some will probably not have Flash installed, or filtered (like me). And some will be annoyed by not being able to copy and paste the product description from that pointless flash. Even more so: all one flash does is display a table. You know, that has been possible in HTML for like ever, absolutely no reason to use flash here. Oh, and their "large text" button doesn't work either. Nor will screenreaders. Nor does google see the text in the flash. The reason you choose Linux is the reason you not choose Dell. To me this is Dell displaying that they have no clue about Linux admins. I still haven't found, what I'm looking for - a lightweight notebook, with a high resolution display, and good battery life (i.e. no nvidia or ATI graphics, preferrably no built-in CD to save weight and size) - best candidates so far: Fujitsu Siemens P7120 and Samsung X11-T2300 Culesa. Sony Vaio VGN-TX2HP/B is interesting, but I still have some reservations against Sony (they try too hard to do tech lockin, e.g. memory stick; and a friend had bad service experiences, their Rootkit, GPL violations with InstantOn...) and it's a bit too tiny for me. [Update: Thinkpad X series is not an option for me, too low screen resolution and according to the specs low battery life; Apple MacBook isn't an option because of their heat and battery issues, and I don't like the hype around it and any other Apple product]

I passed my second diploma exam today, again with 1.7. Mostly theoretical computer science: logics, computer assisted proving and proof verification systems, automata theory (buechi, muller, ... so mostly on trees and infinite words, not just undergrad DFAs) and coding theory. The professor told me I could easily have done better if I had had learned the formal definitions and that better (just as the professor did in the previous exam on databases, index structures, dataminig and knowledge discovery in databases). I had expected doing much worse in this exam, since I had big trouble concentrating the last months (the heat wave in germany and the worldcup certainly did not help either). I ended up learning just one or two hours a day on average, which is really really little. Way to little. So I'm quite happy with these results (especially since I don't care about the grades too much anyway), given the amount of work I spent. What I'm really unhappy with is my lack of concentration these days. I used to be able to focus very well. I never was good at learning stuff literally, but I used to be able to sit down and tackle problems for hours at a time until I was really into the topic. I havn't been recently, which made me really wonder if I would be able to continue my studies as is... well, todays result, too, showed that even when not focussing I'm doing quite well. Two more exams coming up - one on Algebra (starting with galois theory, so the contents of this course are apparently usually taught as "abstract algebra" or "advanced algebra" in the U.S.; no matrices, linear transformations or vector spaces involved), the other on programming, modelling and data languages, so UML/OCL, XML/CSS/XSLT/other markup, logic programming techniques etc. Then all that remains to do to finish my degree is a six-month thesis, which will hopefully be on generating UIs (this may include a text UI) from schema languages such as XSD.

I just saw a reminder about the Edinburgh debconf visit. As somebody who volunteered to help be involved I’m a little blindsided by this sudden announcement. Then I realised my mistake. When I got the mail from Moray I subscribed to debconf6-localteam which appears to be a dead list. So I’m not sure what the status of anything is. So tomorrow I will join the recent lists and poke around. Since I’m local I’m happy to meetup for keysigning purposes to anybody visiting, although since I’ve not been involved in the bid at all its probably best I don’t suddenly appear and confuse things. If we “win” then I’ll do better. Now I’m going to bed. I’ve spent six hours on trains today, and that involved 90 minutes of standing, so I’m a little worn out.

So, NEW down to 104 again. It was 111 yesterday at dinstall time, but people keep uploading NEW packages (was up at 121). Damn people. :) In other news I finished the project for work I had the last months, which was a nice server migration, getting some 50 machines from woody to sarge, with heartbeat, drbd, bonding and a lot of other things for some redundancy. But as thats finished for now, lets see what Im doing next. Oh, the next 5 days I will be on a trip to Sarajevo and Edinburgh, see this mail for the reason. We should have net there, so in theory I should be able to get more out of that NEW queue in the evenings, but if not - well, go bite in a table. :)

Weeks go by way too quickly lately, and GUADEC was suddenly here. So I finally got permission from work to attend, after managing to complete our milestone the required one week in advance. So far, my first GUADEC has been fantastic. While I've tried to come here with my most "just relax" mentality and it's working pretty well, I've also tried to be around the conference for most of the day, as meeting people is, I believe, the best way to enjoy this kind of conferences. I'm staying with Josep and Jes s in one of the bungalows at the GNOME Village, which is a very nice place, althought it's a bit too far from the GUADEC site. There's a public bus service, but some days it's quite unreliable; luckily Fabrice is staying with us at the bungalow and he has a car which we can use. An unplanned attendee was mako, who after being around the great CDG airport for the Ubuntu Conference in Paris, had a few spare days before returning to Boston and came down to Vilanova i la Geltr for the warmup weekend and half of the first core day. Of course, having him around has introduced the usual randomness to those days. Just after arriving in Vilanova, toniher drove us to the lighthouse area, where there were some big Sant Joan parties going in the middle of the beach. At 4AM, and after checking our flirting techniques are not too effective, we wandered off back to Vilanova Park, seeking some good sleep. In the meantime, Danilo Segan, from the Serbian team, apparently had a hard time finding a way to open his bungalow, and ended sleeping in ours as yet another guest. Saturday morning was spent sleeping, and while we had breakfast, I put on my Komando CT training t-shirt. When mako saw it, he said "hey I have one of those!", which made me discover how kiko traded my other Komando t-shirt with mako during the Montr al conference. WTF! We headed back to Vilanova to get lunch and my talk about the Catalan GNOME localisation project. At 16:00 it's hard to get food in some places, and when we finally managed, my talk was so close we had no time at all to prepare. Jordi Mas, Toni Hermoso and I spoke about our experience to a great audience of about 12 persons. Having decided what would each talk about two minutes before starting, I found myself with little to say at some points, but I guess the talk ended up being interesting, and we got a few interested people in assisting us with further translations. After the conference we met with Bastien and several Debian UK people in one of the bars in the beach area, where we, just after getting in, could see how Argentina scored a fantastic goal against Mexico in extra time. A few beers later, it was time to sleep, but we still had to go through the transportation odyssey. I think we managed to get a taxi one and a half hours later. Sunday has been the most intense day so far. Up at a reasonable time, mako, danilo and I planned going to spend the day at Sitges, one of the most famous towns in the Catalan coast which is just one train stop away. Mako was thrilled about the idea of visiting the Gay Capital of Southern Europe, and we set off for the train station. Visiting Sitges was not meant to be too funny for me, but mostly quite emotional. My initial plan was to go alone during the week, but I figured that mako and others would really enjoy being in such a beautiful town as this one. Sitges is where my Catalan grandmother was born, and where she lived for much of her life. Some will remember that wrote about how important she was for me when she died one year ago. I hadn't been in Sitges for years already, and I feared my emotions when I went back to her house in the middle of the town. We walked from the train station down to the Santiago Rusinyol street, while I tried to show them some of the details I always enjoy about Sitges, including the No embruteu les parets tiles which are all over the place. We arrived at my grandparent's place and we entered the house. Having danilo and mako with me probably helped to not get too many memories back, and also, seeing the house so dismantled, and empty of life made it hard to feel "at home".

Don't dirty the walls. Cleanness is a great signal of civilisation When we went down to the Platja de Sant Sebasti and I spoke to my cousin Bego on the phone I was unable to stop the tears when my grandma appeared in the conversation, though. That beach was her favourite, and I remember how she would take us to spend the day there when we were little more than babies. I took danilo and mako around the town's center and enchanting corners, and after having lunch, we headed to the beach going through the gay streets . At the beach, we had our share of sunbathing and swimming, and around 18:00 I told them we should probably head back to Vilanova, as I had to be ready to play football at 19:00. We were lucky and the train arrived as soon as we got to the station, and also when Fabrice gave us a lift to the stadium with his car. The GNOME World Cup had already started, and someone had taken the last red shirt to substitute me, so I quickly neglected my ex-team and joined the Blue Team. We found ourselves in the final after a dramatic penalty kickout, to play against the mighty Black Team led by Bastien Nocera, who had *destroyed* the White Team with 16 goals or something equally insane. It was a very even final, though, and after 40 minutes of non-stop running, our team scored the decisive goal just three minutes before the end.

Champions! The day would not end up there, as I had to meet my cousin Laia and her boyfriend Marc in Barcelona, to have dinner with them. So off I went, with a hurt calf and dressed like a tramp, to fetch yet another train. I had dinner at a nice place near the Pla a de Catalunya, and after that we were all so sleepy that we went straight to bed at my cousin's place, at 2AM or so. Then, there was the fight against the mosquitos at 4AM, and an early wake up to go back to Vilanova, in time for the grand opening of the Core GUADEC.

I upgraded my CUPS to 1.2 today, and had a bit of trouble with getting the ML-2010 to work with it. Given my other issues with this printer, I thought I would expound on how I fixed yet another problem with this semi-supported printer.
The Samsung printing uses the linuxprint system, which uses a configuration file in an XML format which isn't specified. In the default install for the Samsung linux tool, it is installed in /usr/local/linuxprinter/linuxprint.cfg with a link from /etc/linuxprint.cfg to it. My file, after being setup, looks like this:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<linux root="/usr/local/linuxprinter" system="cups">
  <option name="ghostscript" value="/usr/bin/gs-esp"/>
  <option name="address" value="localhost"/>
  <option name="port" value="631"/>
  <option name="lpr" value="/usr/bin/lp"/>
  <option name="llpr-default-printer" value="lp"/>
  <printer ppd="ppd/C/ML-2010spl2.ppd" queue="lp">
    <option name="Resolution" value="600"/>
    <option name="PageSize" value="Letter"/>
    <option name="InputSlot" value="AUTO"/>
    <option name="MediaType" value="PRINTER"/>
    <option name="JCLJamrecovery" value="RWJOff"/>
    <option name="JCLEconomode" value="PRINTERDEFAULT"/>
  </printer>
</linux>
 

I discovered the hard way that if this file isn't there, the filter which is installed (ppmtospl2) doesn't work that well. In this case, the printer queue is lp. If this file is setup correctly, you can setup CUPS yourself, using the ppd file which is referenced in the linuxprint.cfg file. If you have lost your linuxprint.cfg, I suspect you can just modify the above with the correct ppd - the Samsung package has many of them for different printers. If you don't want to go that way, you can rerun the /usr/local/linuxprinter/bin/linux-config as before, but you will have to open your CUPS 1.2 server wide open while you are configuring it so that it can add the printer. Also, I had to have a printer existing in the CUPS 1.2 server in order to have the linux-config program work at all. I solved this by just adding a virtual pdf printer (using the package cups-pdf). Even when you get linux-config to add the printer, it will not add it correctly for CUPS 1.2 - the device is incorrect - so you will have to reconfigure it via the web interface and give it the ppd which is in the directory anyway.
At least I have my printer back again.

So to make a long story short, last night at GUADEC featured a great Fluendo party at one of Vilanova's great beaches. At some point, people had drunk enough to finally consider getting a good swim in the warm waters of the Mediterranean. David Reveman, from the Novell crowd, was one of them. I learned from Anna that in the US it is illegal to show your nipples (ie, go top-less) or any reproductive organs in public. WTF!? The GNOME Hispano crowd did have no problems at all, and went in completely naked, reminding me of the great nights at Helsinki during Debconf 5. I thought it was a good opportunity to POP THE TRUNK, if only a little bit, so I swam to the buoy and came back, in complete darkness, and acs watching out for me from the distance. When we were back, most people were getting dressed already, and I managed to lose my micro suimming suit, which is a PITA as I need it to train.

The phone had more sand than silicon, I guess. Anyway, I wasn't the only one leaving stuff behind. David, if you mind your valuable wallet and mobile phone, find me around the conference. :) Other GUADEC stories will need to wait for another entry...

The Greenpeace campaign against toxic e-waste is in the news today, following a survey that shows buyers are willing to pay a small extra [...] many mobile phone makers, hp and Dell have committed to phase-out. [...] Acer, Apple, IBM and Toshiba are in the hall of shame. Something to [... cont with links...]

Wordpress has a wonderful feature: instead of providing a timezone where you live, you tell it how much hours your local time differs from GMT. Which just fails when dealing with daylight saving. And I just noticed that my setting was still 1 hour, instead of 2. I remembered to change time on my wallclocks, mobile phone, but I forgot my blog… But changing that will change it only for future posts and comments. So, for people who forgot like me, here are two SQL queries to fix the database:

update wp_posts set post_date = convert_tz(post_date_gmt, 'GMT', 'Europe/Paris'), post_modified = convert_tz(post_modified_gmt, 'GMT', 'Europe/Paris');
update wp_comments set comment_date = convert_tz(comment_date_gmt, 'GMT', 'Europe/Paris');

Don’t forget to replace Europe/Paris with whatever your timezone is ;) . Note that this will require you to run, if you’ve never done it before, something like
mysql_tzinfo_to_sql /usr/share/zoneinfo mysql -p -u root mysql

In the past months, I was getting more and more comment spam. Even though the configuration was set to moderate comments containing a link. It was a good filtering measure at the beginning, but became less and less handleable. When I decided to act, I was getting more than a hundred comment spams in my “Awaiting moderation” list. Per day. Maybe even more, I can’t remember. And about the same amount were actually able to go past the moderation filtering, by not putting links in the comment itself, but in the homepage field of the comment form. While wordpress’ comment moderation interface is pretty efficient at deleting a lot of spam, the comment management interface just sucks, even in the “massive editing” mode. So, after having spent quite some time in this sucky interface, I decided I didn’t want to resort to it any more. First I had to remove all these comment spams. I had to use use the SQL delete command myself, since Wordpress is useless. I basically deleted all comments posted after the last real one I saw. Sorry if someone posted one I didn’t see. The tricky part was that the comment count for articles is kept in a field of the wp_posts table. Which means there was a difference between the actual comment count and the count displayed. For those who’d want to do the same at home, here is the magical SQL query to refresh the comment count:
update wp_posts set comment_count = (select count(*) from wp_comments where comment_post_ID = id and comment_approved = '1'); Next step was to avoid getting more spam. I didn’t want to use captchas or any turing tests, because they basically all fail to be accessible in some way. So, I took a balanced decision. While I appreciate to get comments, I can’t stand any more the spam that get in posts as old as the blog. The best thing to do then, I think, was to allow comments on recent posts only. Sorry for those who’d like to comment on old stuff, but being able to comment on the newer posts is still better than nothing. I also kept the link moderation policy, which seemed to be helpful at the beginning. For the little story, again, Wordpress was not very helpful, so I had to resort to an SQL query to close comments on all the posts. It’s been 3 weeks or so, now, since I switched to this new policy. I got only 1 spam to moderate and none directly in the comments. Let’s hope it will last.

I am offitially screwed. Last night I wanted to reinstall my laptop (which is also my only computer now), so I backuped the contents of my laptop’s hard drive to an external usb hard drive as a 13 Gb tar.gz file and happily went on with a format and reinstall. Of course, when I had completed the installation and went back to unpack files from the backup, I was greeted by a nice message from gunzip - “invalid compressed data–format violated”. Currently I am trying to follow gzip recovery guide that requires one to manually find the next undamaged compression block and make a new gzip file with standart header and then the undamaged compression blocks, but it is quite possible that data after that will also be damaged. Additionally I have no idea how tar will react to me giving it a middle of the archive, hopefully it will not get too confused. Unfortunately the damaged block is only 90 Mb into the 13 Gb file. Oh, and of course there is a huge heap of really important files that I have no backup for that are on that backup. Fun, fun, fun. Update: I have managed to recover two crucial OpenOffice.org documents from the formatted filesystem using Magic rescue and now I am proceeding with finding if I can recover anything from the .tar.gz backup file using Gzip recovery toolkit. It is buggy, but it is still better then doing it by hand. Unfortunately, I also found out about some kind of hardware problem with my external harddrive - if I transfer lots of data to it (think a direct copy of a 13 Gb file), then it just locks up and stops responding until I power cycle it. If I turn off the USB2 support, then it works reliably, but very very slowly. This slows down my recovery attempts even more.