Search Results: "will"

24 March 2006

Daniel Baumann: See you in .mx

Flying from Switzerland to Mexico is very expensive, I can't afford it myself. As I didn't get a ticket while the first sponsor round, I was quite sure that I will not get a ticket to DebConf6. Yesterday, on 23:53:04 +0100, things changed. I got an e-mail telling me, that I will get a ticket payed by an extra sponsor. So I'm able to attend from 6th to 22nd may, jippie! :) Thanks a lot to all who have made this possible. I do very, very appreciate it.

Simon Richter: Meh

Today I added a new box to my desk. It is labeled "things that are so important you better not think about putting them into a special place so you will find them faster". Too bad these things don't work retroactively.

Wouter Verhelst: Hmm

I read quite some stuff through liferea: Planet Debian, Planet Grep, commit logs on the d-i SVN repository, and more. One of the things that fits in the "more" category is my ThinkGeek wishlist (hey, they provide an RSS feed, so why not? ;-). Which, obviously, does not often see any updates; I don't surf the TG website all that often. Except that today, it did. And the best part is: I didn't even ask for it! Suddenly my thinkgeek wishlist contained some shirt that I did not ask for (and never will, since it's ugly). Strange...

Martin Michlmayr: Oz, Cambridge, Vienna, Madrid

So I watched this Australian movie (Somersault) the other day and the cute accent reminded me again how much I miss the country. It has almost been 2.5 years since I left and I'd really like to visit again. Maybe I should try to make it to LCA next year. In a related note, I'm looking for Rob Weir who has mysteriously disappeared from the Internet. Does anyone know what's up with him? As much as I like Cambridge, staying at the same place for 2.5 years obviously doesn't work. ;) Next week I'll therefor go to Vienna for some "holidays" the first thing I did was to sign myself up for a talk... if anyone wants to hear me babbling about quality in free software on Monday, check out the Debienna site. Right after my return from Vienna I'll go to Spain where I'll spend three months working in the Libre Software Engineering research group around Jesus Barahona (a Debian developer) and Gregorio Robles. I'll actually work on my PhD for a change during that time and do cool quantitative work to support the qualitative studies I've done so far. Obviously, instead of packing, I spent the last few days and weeks hacking on Debian stuff, in particular making sure it works on the MIPS and ARM devices I support and which I cannot take with me to Madrid. So we finally have 2.6 kernels for MIPS in the archive now and debian-installer will move to it tomorrow. I've also compiled the whole archive on MIPS with GCC 4.1 but a more detailed report on that is forthcoming. P.S. In terms of Spanish movies, I can highly recommend The Lovers of the Arctic Circle and Talk to Her.

Uwe Hermann: Linux 2.6.16 Upgrade [Update]

I have upgraded my kernel to Linux 2.6.16 today with some consequences: Update 2006-03-24: The loop-aes v3.1c patches apply just fine. I almost forgot to mention the NVIDIA changes...

Joey Hess: wiki+blog = wow

Already done adding blog support to ikiwiki, execpt for some minor UI issues. So now it has its own news feed, as well as a quite nice automatic TODO tracker. And my codewiki has a new projects feed and will probably shortly have individual rss feeds for some of the other projects listed there. Sweet! (ETA to migrating this blog, and my entire home page to ikiwiki: Probably less than 1 week.)

23 March 2006

Sergio Talens-Oliag: Life goes on

The last couple of days have been good days at my new workplace; I've been busy and that makes me feel good, I like to be active and was not doing much before. Why did that happened now and not before? Mainly because I started in a bad moment in time, as the people I had to talk to was really busy and some of them were almost all of the time out of the office, so I was left alone without real tasks to work on. After a couple of weeks I've had a few meetings and now I have a better idea of my responsibilities and what I'm supposed to do; initially I'll be helping with project proposals (writing them myself or reviewing/updating the ones prepared by others), I will coordinate the Institute System Administration Area and will also act as the team leader on some internal and external projects (in fact today I've been assigned a small one). Besides I've joined the FLOSS (Free/Libre Open Source Software) research group, where I'm helping on the writing and reviewing of research project proposals (currently we preparing proposals for the PROFIT Program). If things go well and we get financial support for some of the projects I'll be in charge of some of them. I'm sure I did the right thing leaving the LliureX project, I feel a whole lot better now and it seems that I'll be able to have some real work done. Good.

Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho: Planet Haskell

Per Isaac Jones’s request, here it is: Planet Haskell. (The current URI is hopefully not the final one, but this one will redirect to the new one once we have one.) Haskellers: please email me your blog feed URIs (English only, please; no need to restrict to Haskell only, though). I will not add you if you don’t.

Erich Schubert: How to use ICQ...

... or more precisely: how to be left alone on ICQ. I've been receiving lots of messages by people I don't know at all on ICQ. This has become really annoying the last weeks, I had almost stopped using ICQ because of that. I think I now know why random girls have been IMing me recently: they search for people in my age from Germany that talk German or English. So the workaround (to gaim's privacy setting "only allow messages by people on my buddy list" not working correctly) is to just remove any information from that stupid ICQ profile. Hopefully I will now no longer turn up in that stupid ICQ search function, and be left alone by people I don't know. ICQ is not a friggin dating site! I mean, I spend much of my time talking to my friends, and of course I enjoy chatting with strangers. But ICQ disrupts me while working, so I really can't stand it being abused this way.

Jos Parrella: Flying MEX

Yesterday I booked a flight with TACA from Caracas to MEX, via SJO. I’m flying on May 12th. (so hopefully I can arrive for Debian Day) and returning on May 25th., in the same flight. The flight is gonna take 6 hours from Caracas. Ana (from Debian Venezuela) will be flying with me in the return flight.Nos vemos en Mexico!

Joey Hess: wiki/blog convergence

I wrote a wiki engine last week, maybe I should write a weblog engine next week? Here's my own take on converging the two, which has been done before, but which some differences in ikiwiki perhaps allow to be approached slightly differently. First, I plan for all pages in the wiki generate a rss feed for that single page, which can be subscribed to if you want to track changes to the page alone. Then, pages can have a blog embedded in them by adding a special tag to the page, which includes a list of globs for the pages on the wiki that comprise the blog. Something like "Blog/* !*/Discussion", to exclude discussion subpages from the blog. This makes the most recently created of those pages be inlined into the html version of the page (with a form at the bottom to make a new post, if you don't want to commit to svn by hand) ... and enables creation of a regular rss feed too. Some nice features that just fall out of this: ikwiki's TODO has the details (about half way down; that page needs to be implemented as a collection of pages/blog itself).

Martin F. Krafft: Data juggling

Letting yesterday pass by in memories, I wonder how I was able to function even a bit for the last two years or so -- information-wise. While I was still at the Uni Zurich, I found myself almost constantly swamped with so much work that I (a) never got around to do any real research, and (b) turned my digital data into a complete mess. Forget about (a), it's (b) that concerns me right now. The pattern was usually:
  1. My main machine was becoming unstable and dying frequently, either on disk I/O or CPU-intensive tasks.
  2. With much time pressure, I was forced to move my data to a new machine. Two or three times that was accomplished e.g. by copying oldmachine:~/ to newmachine:~/lost+found/oldmachine (I am, unfortunately, not kidding. For the past half a year, I was working out of lapse:~/wing/lost+found/cirrus/lost+found/diamond. wing, cirrus, and diamond are all deceased machines, lapse is my laptop).
  3. Repeat (1) and (2) about three times and add to the mix that I also had a machine at home and a laptop, no synchronisation strategy really, no real backups, and no version control system.
To be fair: my important data was certainly backed up, and most of my work was on F/OSS or projects in our lab's version control system anyway. I am mainly talking about scripts, ideas, correspondence, photos, ... The chaos that built up had me busy all of yesterday. I brought all of my machines together, as well as the harddrives that were still lying around, hooked it all up, and started the endeavour. I set up a RAID 5 on one machine, mad of four 250Gb disks, and with 750Gb of space, I was ready to go. Using any combination(s) of dd nc, tar, cpio, scp, rsync, and unison, it took me several hours to bring all the data onto one machine. Usually, I would try to purge unwanted crap from ~, such as .thumbnails, or .ccache (!), once again wishing for widely-used ~/.var and ~/.etc, So today I have to consolidate about 680Gb of data. Most of it can be purged (I found a linux-2.2.7 directory somewhere in there), but often, I will have to look at two or three versions of a file and decide which one to keep. Fortunately, I am fairly certain it's usually the newest one. My intention is to move mostly everything to under the control of bzr, and then to use unison to synchronise ~ between all machines. However, there are still some unresolved points:

  • unison is for pairs, to keep three or more machines in sync, it's beneficial to have a central machine. I don't really want a central machine.

  • csync2 looks like unison for three or more, but it's a service, with listening daemon and all, and I thus cannot use it to synchronise with my home directories on machines where I don't have root or cannot install csync2.

  • I don't want everything synchronised. When it comes to documents and data, I cannot imagine any exceptions, but dot-directories in the home directory are a problem. E.g.:

    • ~/.gnupg: I don't want my GPG key to be synchronised to remote machines. However, I would not mind to synchronise the configuration or the public keyring.
    • ~/.ssh: Stuff like config and known_hosts can/should be synchronised. However, authorized_keys must not be.
    • ~/.mozilla/firefox: Would be nice, but almost impossible because of Firefox's braindead approach. For instance, you cannot write a new bookmarks.html file while Firefox is running -- it will dump its in-memory copy when quitting.
    • Most of my accounts don't need to store dot-directories for X programmes.
    • My shell or windowmanager configuration may have to be different between machines to support e.g. different defaults, Xinerama, relevant shell variables, etc.
    etc. etc. The ideal approach to the challenge of ~/.etc (I symlink into there for programmes not supporting non-default config file locations) would be a version control system. Since I don't want to depend on a single machine, bzr, git, or the other decentralised systems seem appropriate: keep a base for e.g. ~/.ssh and branch for each machine. However, then I could not use unison for ~/.etc, and just synchronising all .bzr/ subdirectories unfortunately does not work (as empirically determined). And I have not found an acceptable approach to keep the branches in sync; I surely don't want to have to push changes to every other machine before quitting the day, nor do I want to pull in changes every morning from all over the place. I may have to look at git, which IIRC stores every change/commit in a separate file, so then synchronisation of .git/ should do what I want. If you have any input on this matter, I'd be delighted to hear it.
I am still looking for the right tool to do the task of consolidation. mc works okay, but it's just a little too much typing without tab completion. konqueror is just fat, and nautilus currently won't install on amd64. Again, if you have a suggestion, I'd love to hear it. Data juggling is fun, or not. For sure, there's quite some adrenaline flowing around as you issue bulk commands, knowing that it's basically you and a scalpell, and all your digital life on the table. NP: Porcupine Tree, "The Sky Moves Sideways"

Ross Burton: Furious Anger

Today's Daily Express front page: DAYLIGHT ROBBERY That nasty Brown throwing away your money on state spending, such as the NHS, schools, pensions... A week later the same paper will be moaning about the state of the NHS, another pension crisis, or how education standards are falling. Actually, that's wrong. Another paper will moan about that, the Express will just have Diana Exclusives. NP: Trouser Jazz, Mr Scruff

Guido Trotter: Graduation

At last, it’s graduation day! I hope everything will be ok! Going to defend my xen thesis in a hour and a half! :)

Kai Hendry: Consumer hardware

This M$ Vista delay analysis got me thinking about the relationship between hardware manufacturers and well, us, the “Free software” geeks. Vista will no doubt drive hardware sales due to its high hardware requirements. Hardware manufacturers just love that. But does Ubuntu or Debian drive hardware sales? Erm, probably not. “competing hardware manufacturers are violating each others patents so much that they cannot publish specifications of their hardware without showing which patents they are violating.” -Aki I’m sure M$ has no qualms about signing NDAs with hardware companies. But for us, the future isn’t easy. I don’t think consumer hardware companies are going to shoot for Ubuntu’s certification scheme. And Ubuntu is the consumer version of GNU Debian/Linux right now.

22 March 2006

Joey Hess: DebConf lightning talks

One of the talk slots at DebConf this year will be used for a series of lightning 5-minute talks on different subjects. I finally have more than enough talks to fill up the 45 minute time slot (thanks Jeroen!), but still only three speakers, so the schedule will look something like this: These choices are a bit arbitrary, Jeroen could also talk about "Working of the PTS", or "Datamining on Debian packages metadata". I could also talk about "Rembering Emeritus Developers". We have more than enough proposals, but not enough people giving them. Me and Jeroen will both be wiped out at the end of this tag-team marathon. Help! If you're not me or Jeroen, please consider submitting your own lightning talk idea, or take over one from the list, like "Debian wish list" or "Rembering Emeritus Developers". It will be much more interesting to hear from a lot of different people, and it's easy to do. The deadline for last submissions is April 15th.
This advertisement paid for by the DebConf sauna campaign.

Matthew Palmer: Packeteer Are Spamming Scum

For anyone who takes their Boulder Pledge seriously, I present the following cautionary tale: I wanted to find some network flow control gear for a client at work. I went to contact Packeteer, and all they had was some shithouse web form (red flag #1). I left a nice message in their web form, asking them to contact me about pricing for some particular bit of kit. I was (as always) quite careful to uncheck any "spam me harder" boxes that the marketroids may have snuck in there. A month later, I haven't heard anything about pricing, but I've gotten a couple of wanky, generic Packeteer spams. There's an unsubscribe e-mail address at the bottom -- which I even tried once, but I just got another spam from them. So, not only do I get unsolicited e-mail from them as a result of an innocent (and quite unrelated) sales enquiry, but I don't even get the information I originally requested. If they'd responded to my initial contact with the info I asked for, they could have gotten the same sales response as sending out many thousands of spam e-mails (based on the estimated spam conversion rate prevailing on the 'net). Packeteer are now deeply and firmly entrenched in my "bad Internet citizen" list, and can rot in there forever. You will never get any business from anyone I work for or associate with if I can at all avoid it, Packeteer.

Gustavo Franco: For those who care about gnome^w glib apps.

I'm almost sure you missed my post to -devel writing about the issue involving glib related applications, don't you? That's basically the new glib memory allocator (a.k.a gslice) triggering bugs in software linked against it. Those are usually due to 'double free()' calls or the lack of a g_object_unref() instead g_free(), yes really bugs in the applications that were ignored until now. I'm keeping track of the related bugs, using our bts' usertags.

Well, if you're too lazy to read that thread in -devel, you will notice this bug with the latest glib (in sid) if you try to start up evolution or galculator. The workaround is: $ G_SLICE=always-malloc program . I'll test my irssi workaround and will take a look into classpath, some others are being worked as we speak.

Erich Schubert blogged about the subject yesterday, but now i'm providing some update on the bug tracking status. If you hit a new one, send me a message!

Kai Hendry: Ever wondered about



 Use rfc-3339 instead: 
sam$ date --rfc-3339=seconds
2006-03-22 22:01:25+09:00
One of the problems with iso8601 was parsing the (optional) T letter (hah!): 
sam$ date --iso-8601=seconds
2006-03-22T22:01:57+0900
Evidently date sometimes got confused with the T and treated it as a military timezone hence b0rking up the backwards conversion. So iso8601 is depreciated… well at least you don’t have to pay to read the entire rfc-3339 spec. As some of you may or not know, I have an uber cool Letter generator that uses latex to produce a pleasant professional PDF letter from a Web form. Does it work with CJK characters? No. Will it? Perhaps. Sadly tetex3 seems to be missing OpenType support. Though another Mac specific latex package called xetex does.

Steve Kemp: Caesar had an eye for clothes

Is it possible to uniquely identify an audio CD-ROM? I’ve “stolen” the disc ID code from the various CDDB clients I’ve seen, but I wonder how unique those values are. I’m looking at setting up a simple CDDB/FreeDB-esque server to store audio information which can be queried in a sane manner. The results will be XML data. Using XML data I can have individual details for each track. Ideal for soundtrack albums. Plus I can require clients to ignore attributes they don’t understand to allow for future growth. I could use the ID + sha1 hashes of the song lengths I guess …. or even a SHA1 hash of the track-data (but I’m worried that read-errors could cause problems with data summing, plus reading each track will be slowish). I see comments like this a lot:
Conceptually very similar to the ISBN number used for books, the ISRC (acronym for International Standard Recording Code) is a 12-character code defined to uniquely identify a music track song). Unfortunately, over the years very few authors have adopted this standard and currently less than one percent audio CDs use the ISRC. The UPC (Universal Product Code) is a 13-digit number that uses the UPC/EAN bar coding standard to uniquely identify the whole CD. The same ISRC considerations apply to the UPC code: very few audio CDs currently use the UPC.
In related news two tickets for Radiohead + Beck are mine :)

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