I today received the good news from the DAM:
My account has finally been created, I am a proud Debian Developer now! It took me ages to get through the NM process. I'll be working mostly on the Linux kernel packages, so Debian will have the advantage of being the distribution with the most official Linux kernel. I will also be working closely with Ubuntu, another one of the coolest distributions around. Together we'll bring Linux to the desktops! On a related note, I've also started blogging, and I am now syndicated on Planet Debian. [Update: thanks for the hackergotchi] [Update #2: of course that does NOT mean I stop supporting other Linux distributions]

Get ready for the first Debian Soccer Cup in Oaxtapec. :P

As we all know, sports are good for geeks.... that's why I'm organizing a Debconf Football Championship/Match. I would like to invite you all (yes, girls included) to join this championship/match.

Depending of how many people we will be and the field size that will be a single match or a championship.

All DebConf6 attendees are invited!

Every time you install qmail, God won't kill a kitten. No. I WILL DO IT MYSELF !

I've been using Drupal for this blog for most of its life. However, I'm starting to be quite annoyed by several things:

• The Captcha module is seriously broken and opens up the door for various security problems


• The Spam module is there, and works mostly, but is not effective enough to keep spam down


• The badbehavior module is over-aggressive and doesn't work well anyway


• Spam becomes a serious drag on load of the server

So I'm planning to switch to something else. Something where blogging will be fun again, without all the hassle of tracking down spam. It looks like either Wordpress or Serendipity, and I'm leaning towards Serendipity for now.

Dear German part of the Debian Lazyweb, I want to study Computer Sciences beginning with the winter semester this year. But where should I do that? I live in Southern Germany, near Strasbourg. So my primary choice was Freiburg. I went there to check it out, but all they had to offer to interested pupils was a two hours lecture about programming sets in Java. Hey, every other computing faculty says that it's not that important to know specific programming languages. Additionally I would rather put an accent on functional programming languages than on traditional ones. So Freiburg is most likely not my choice. Another question which was rised when I was there was the comparision of Bachelor and Master to the old-school diploma. I guess on most universities WS 2006 is the last chance to enter this course. What's better and why? I guess that's highly subjective, but well, I guess those who currently study CS will most probably have an opinion about that. Karlsruhe still offers the diploma. Although commuting to Freiburg is even easier, it wouldn't be hard for Karlsruhe neither (at least for the first semester or so). I don't know if Strasbourg would be an option. I guess the lectures there are in French and although I knew a fair bit of it, most got lost in the last three years. So not a primary choice, neither. But why should I be restricted to the South in my choice. What about Aachen? Well, it would be hard to find a flat from here, but I wouldn't have a problem to go that far away from home. Any comments? (Of course you could reply in German.)

I just read a story on The Register entitled Oklahoma city threatens to call FBI over "renegade" Linux maker. Quite hilarious.

Apparently Jerry Taylor, city manager for Tuttle, Oklahoma, noticed that the city's webpage wasn't working right. He got the default "test page" for the Apache webserver on CentOS.

Instead of calling the hosting company, he sent a series of vicious emails to CentOS, even threatening to call the FBI. The CentOS folks really went out of their way to help this guy -- he was not even their customer. And he repaid them by saying they should have helped him sooner.

Of course, there was the obligatory comment about being computer literate: "I am computer literate! I have 22 years in computer systems engineering and operation. Now, can you tell me how to remove 'your software' that you acknowledge you provided free of charge? I consider this 'hacking.'"

The Register story is hilarious, and the original discussion even more so because it includes a full transcript of the event. Favorite quote (to the city manager):

If you will not let me help you, or at least talk to someone who knows what Linux is, then you will look like an idiot.

Your choice.

Should anyone wish to write to the city manager of Tuttle, OK, to complain about his outrageous behavior, his e-mail address is citymgr@cityoftuttle.org. Assuming they have figured out how to properly configure e-mail.

He's probably not worth his $63k salary and with a personality like this almost certainly isn't giving his employees the "feeling that we're 'working together'" (see that link).

Sigh. Why do people hire a guy like this in the first place?

I've added news feeds for moreutils, debhelper, alien, wmbattery, Words2Nums, sleepd, pdmenu and filters. New releases will be automatically posted to them using a wikiannounce program I threw together, which generates a markdown file that is fed to ikiwiki. Other news will be posted as I see fit.

I just read a story on The Register entitled Oklahoma city threatens to call FBI over "renegade" Linux maker. Quite hilarious.

Apparently Jerry Taylor, city manager for Tuttle, Oklahoma, noticed that the city's webpage wasn't working right. He got the default "test page" for the Apache webserver on CentOS.

Instead of calling the hosting company, he sent a series of vicious emails to CentOS, even threatening to call the FBI. The CentOS folks really went out of their way to help this guy -- he was not even their customer. And he repaid them by saying they should have helped him sooner.

Of course, there was the obligatory comment about being computer literate: "I am computer literate! I have 22 years in computer systems engineering and operation. Now, can you tell me how to remove 'your software' that you acknowledge you provided free of charge? I consider this 'hacking.'"

The Register story is hilarious, and the original discussion even more so because it includes a full transcript of the event. Favorite quote (to the city manager):

If you will not let me help you, or at least talk to someone who knows what Linux is, then you will look like an idiot.

Your choice.

Should anyone wish to write to the city manager of Tuttle, OK, to complain about his outrageous behavior, his e-mail address is citymgr@cityoftuttle.org. Assuming they have figured out how to properly configure e-mail.

He's probably not worth his $63k salary and with a personality like this almost certainly isn't giving his employees the "feeling that we're 'working together'" (see that link).

Sigh. Why do people hire a guy like this in the first place?

Last night, glib 2.8 and pango 1.12 entered testing, as a first step on the GNOME 2.14 quest. The bad news is that the fixed evolution & friends were not ready to go in as well, so now many etch users will be wondering why their evolution doesn't start up, or doesn't show any mail. Until we manage to get a fixed evolution in testing, and it looks like it won't be trivial to get this done in the immediate future, Erich's recipe comes handy again:

My personal hero of the day is Gustavo Franco, for this email to debian-devel. He writes how to get your Gnome/Pango/Glib applications that don't work since yesterday's upgrade like evolution (#358071) working again:

$ G_SLICE=always-malloc evolution

And you should be able to read your email again.

Just FYI, and in case you missed it. :)

I've been using Drupal for this blog for most of its life. However, I'm starting to be quite annoyed by several things:

• The Captcha module is seriously broken and opens up the door for various security problems


• The Spam module is there, and works mostly, but is not effective enough to keep spam down


• The badbehavior module is over-aggressive and doesn't work well anyway


• Spam becomes a serious drag on load of the server

So I'm planning to switch to something else. Something where blogging will be fun again, without all the hassle of tracking down spam. It looks like either Wordpress or Serendipity, and I'm leaning towards Serendipity for now.

Taken from Getting Around Germany website. It’s worth nothing that Germany is a union country, and transport strikes (Streik) can occur at any time, although it is still a fairly rare occurrence and there is usually plenty of advance notice. Still, travelers should beware that even a short “warning strike” (Warnungstreik) in one city can ripple through the entire system, causing long delays and even cancellations. On these days, be prepared to adjust your travel plans and wait longer than usual. An interesting note about these situations: since trains and punctuality are so important in the German world, the DB will hand-out official “certificates of train tardiness” (Bescheinigung ber Zugversp tung) if a train is late. You can use these as “excuse slips” for arriving late to work, school, or other appointments.

Today my boss asked me for a method to clearly umount and afterwards eject a CDROM media on the event of trying to eject the tray using the drive button. I googled around a bit and found auto-eject-cdrom, in the public domain, and originally written by Jens Axboe, from SuSe, and Peter Willis, in 2001 and 2005 respectively. The problem with this little application is that it was unable to eject both my boss drive and mine. It did umount the filesystem but did not eject the tray. So I dig into the code and found that it used plain, old cdrom events, handled by the cdrom kernel module. The event was, in fact, defined in <linux/cdrom.h> as:
#define CDROMEJECT 0×5309 /* Ejects the cdrom media */ I found out that using system (”eject”); as my quick and dirty solution after the umount was working ok, but I was losing performance because eject is used for ejecting floppy disks, tapes and several other media. In fact, eject can figure out which media is he working with so he selects the proper method of ejecting, but I was bitten by the curiosity. So I implemented both the cdrom commands and the SCSI commands for ejecting the tray, in two functions, copypasted from the eject.c, previously apt-get source‘ed and I’m putting this interesting piece of code to the public domain (most likely it should go with a GPL license, since I used GPL’ed code on it) here: auto-eject-cdrom v0.3. A relevant and important piece of code goes now:

        /* Here I use two different methods for ejecting the CDROM. This is for fun only,
           since I could use system(\"eject\"); but this is the dirty hack. Here I use the only
           two CDROM-related eject functions from the eject.c file of the eject program
           by Jeff Tranter (tranter@pobox.com) - Note by Jose Parrella  */

Installing is just a matter of compiling and copying to /usr/local/sbin and running it as auto-eject-cdrom &. I hope it’s useful for those of you who can not afford to use one of the keys of your keyboard to assign the eject command to it. Enjoy!

Call For Papers for the 4th. World Forum on Free Knowledge is now released in english (non-official translation, sorry for mine) and spanish. The WFFK is a Community-organized Forum, made possible by the sponsorship of Government Enterprises and Private Enterprises, as well as Volunteers and Donations. The first was made in Caracas, on November 2004, in the installations of the Universidad Bolivariana de Venezuela, with the sponsorship of the Venezuelan Oil Company, PDVSA. The second WFFK was made in Thiruvananthapuram, in Kerala-India, under the name Free Software, Free Society in May 2005, and the third WFFK was made in Maracaibo, Venezuela, with the support of several Institutions, including PDVSA, CONATEL and serveral others. Impressed by the success of the 3rd. WFFK, a group of people is organizing the fourth, which will take place in Puerto La Cruz, Venezuela, in October 2006. This is the first ocassion a Call For Papers is being done, because the Forum will have a Congress inside it, as well as selected articles. In the past, we only had selected articles and invited speakers on a certain basis. This time, a Call For Papers will also be done, so we can invite nice speakers to come and share with the attendance. Last time in Maracaibo we had David Moreno Garza with us, as well as several Debian Maintainers and Co-Maintainers with us, from Venezuela and Colombia: Ernesto Hern ndez-Novich, Polkan Garc a, Ernesto Crespo, V ctor P rez, Ana Delgado, Gerardo Curiel, Manuel Garc a, V ctor P rez and myself (am I missing someone?). So this was quite a MiniDebConf! Let’s make the 4th. a complete one

Those of you who will go to DebConf 6, be careful.

The coldfire development kit of which I made mention in a somewhat recent -devel-announce post has arrived about a week ago. Mine was the last one to arrive; the other four have already arrived. It took a while, because mine apparently got lost in shipping, so they had to ship me a second one. That, and the fact that I said I'd ask around in my neighbourhood whether it'd been delivered at the wrong address (but then eventually forgot to tell the Freescale folks that I had done so and that, no, it wasn't) meant it took a bit over two months to arrive here. But it finally has. Whee! The box contains a number of things I do not and will not likely ever need (the CodeWarrior Development Studio, for example, or power cables for other places of the world, like the US, the UK, and Japan), but, well—that's not important. It also contains some things that are interesting, such as a serial cable—even if I already have a few of those. The box contents also smells funny. Oh well. In the mean time, however, I've come across a bit of a problem: I can't seem to boot the thing. Well—I can, except it seems to be mangling the serial output it's sending for some reason. I can see that some output is being sent to the serial console, but it's not readable. And I can also see that it doesn't find it's root file system—I'm doing NFS root currently, and there's no network activity. Not sure what the problem is, though. Update: someone suggested that it is the baud rate. Yes, obviously it's something like that; however, I did try every baud rate between 9600 and 115200, but none of them worked. Besides, I have my command line say "console=ttyS0,19200n8", and it's still not working. I suspect a driver problem at this point...

Today i fetched some "new" hardware:
E420R Quad*UltraSPARCII 450Mhz 4GB Ram
E220R Dual*UltraSPARCII 480Mhz 2GB Ram
RS/6000 more details will follow later
and last but not least
an Compaq StorageWorks RAID Array 4100 FibreChannel wich i right now not know how to get it working (under debian)
i also have no more space or say it other i have more hardware than space for 19" Racks$ Does sombody from you have a really good working solution for:
Rebooting with command: boot
Boot device: disk0 File and args:
Trap 3e
0 ok boot
Boot device: disk0 File and args:
SILO Version 1.4.9
boot:
And then it runs i've tried this but this didnt help

... which is a free download, somewhere. No, I'm not a unix-hater. But it's fun to see unix being torn down like it is.

Sun Microsystems recently announced that it was joining with NeXT to promulgate OpenStep, a new standard for object-oriented user interfaces. To achieve this openness, Sun would will wrap C++ and DOE around Objective-C and NEXTSTEP. Can't decide which standard you want to follow? No problem: now you can follow them all.

Hope you don't have to get any work done in the meantime.

Mooha.

The coldfire development kit of which I made mention in a somewhat recent -devel-announce post has arrived about a week ago. Mine was the last one to arrive; the other four have already arrived. It took a while, because mine apparently got lost in shipping, so they had to ship me a second one. That, and the fact that I said I'd ask around in my neighbourhood whether it'd been delivered at the wrong address (but then eventually forgot to tell the Freescale folks that I had done so and that, no, it wasn't) meant it took a bit over two months to arrive here. But it finally has. Whee! The box contains a number of things I do not and will not likely ever need (the CodeWarrior Development Studio, for example, or power cables for other places of the world, like the US, the UK, and Japan), but, well—that's not important. It also contains some things that are interesting, such as a serial cable—even if I already have a few of those. The box contents also smells funny. Oh well. In the mean, however, I've come across a bit of a problem: I can't seem to boot the thing. Well—I can, except it seems to be mangling the serial output it's sending for some reason. I can see that some output is being sent to the serial console, but it's not readable. And I can also see that it doesn't find it's root file system—I'm doing NFS root currently, and there's no network activity. Not sure what the problem is, though. Update: someone suggested that it is the baud rate. Yes, obviously it's something like that; however, I did try every baud rate between 9600 and 115200, but none of them worked. Besides, I have my command line say "console=ttyS0,19200n8", and it's still not working. I suspect a driver problem at this point...