Embarrasing enough, Ubuntu has shipped a Catalan translation for the very prominent About Ubuntu GNOME Panel menu entry which read Quant a Ubuntutu . It s been there for so long that irazuzta and I really considered not fixing it at all for hysterical raisins . Anyway, seb128 now has a patch to correct this at long last in Ubuntu s gnome-panel. He promised to include it in monday's 2.14.0 upload seb: DON T FORGET! In the meanwhile, Jordi Irazuzta and I just finished setting up the Ubuntu Catalan Translators team, with the mailing of some detailed instructions on how we want to get work done in the team. It's been months of planning and designing a workflow to make a Ubuntu translation team and the openness that Rosetta offers to all the members of a team fit in Softcatal s high standards for the quality of the translations made by the organisation. As soon as people start mailing back and get subscribed to the team s mailing list, they'll get tasks assigned and we'll get the team kickstarted, with lots of work to be done before the Dapper release. The key for this team s success is that we educate our volunteers to contribute their Ubuntu translations to the upstream projects or relevant Catalan teams, and that this is somehow coordinated. The experience will be quite good for me to identify some of the social problems with Rosetta, as many times people ask if their translations for Ubuntu will appear in other distributions as well. The team is led, for now, by Jordi Irazuzta, lo noi de l'Ebre, and me. If you're a Catalan Ubuntu user and want to lend a hand, you're more than welcome to join the mailing list to help, and become a Ubuntaire!

I once decided not to have a blog, because I feared, the time I will spent blogging would vanishing from my Symlink time. But due to Symlink not being a real blog but rather a news and discussion website with a journalistic attitude and limited subjects, there are topics missing I would like to write about. And due to not wanting to spam my beloved IRC channels with all those uninteresting subjects, a blog seemed to be the right place: Nobody needs to read it, but anyone can read it. And since Blosxom (which I first noticed at zobel’s and at alphascorpii’s blog) is fully the way I would design a blog (technically), I installed it today, tweaked a little bit the httpd.conf of our Apache and there it is: My never wanted but inescapably closer coming weblog named Blogging is futile. And it will probably be mixed, German and English.

I voted "1243" in the current Debian GFDL vote. If you are a Debian developer who hasn't voted yet, please do so ASAP. Democracy lives from participation, so make up your mind. Debian should reject the GFDL for the pointed out issues. From what I've heard from others, this option will likely win. Accepting documents with no invariant sections (except the copyright part) is a compromise I could live with, changing the social contract is not, so I rated it second. I am aware of the other issues with the GFDL, but I hope that these could be sorted out somehow with the FSF. They aren't unreasonable people, after all. And there is a certain amount of interpretation in any legal document. Probably only the copyright holders can sue, and why should they as long as e.g. the DRM used doesn't really prevent access to the original documents, or the transparent copy restriction is fulfilled since the original documents are still online? But I'm really close to voting "1342" instead. But since I'm really expecting people to rank 1 first, I don't think it matters much.

This is another example why I'm proud of Debian. I sometimes have the impression, that some distributions try to package stuff with as little effort as possible. Debian however has to support tons of different architectures, build daemons and pbuilder that mostly ensure you've got the build dependencies complete, tons of users of unstable and testing that will send you bug reports when you don't have the runtime dependencies right and so on. We have a really good quality assurance. On the very first day my selinux-basics package entered unstable, I already received feedback about the udev integration. So you might ask me, why I think this is really different from other distributions. There are of course distributions which have similar properties, but I think Debian has the biggest crowd. And Ubuntu is so closely tied to Debian that these things aren't that separable. Most Ubuntu packages are largely unmodified Debian packages. And changes done by Ubuntu - which for example tracks Gnome closer than Debian - will often be fed back into Debian again. For example fakeroot, or pbuilder are further examples on Debians best practises to do quality ensurance. Sane software shouldn't require real root privileges for building. The current Debian Vote on the GFDL is another example. I'm confident it will boil down to "Debian refuses the GFDL, because it contains too many restrictions for our users". Debian cares much for it's users. And the users of our users. And the users of our users of our users. ;-) As a whole, not just the majority which will probably never even consider changing a GFDL-licensed document. Of course, people are frequently annoyed by e.g. Debian not having the latest X.org betas in unstable, so they could try out Xgl, Aiglx and this other eye candy. Sorry about that, but I do think that the X task force knows how to set its priorities right, and you could probably just get these beta version from Ubuntu and run them on your Debian. Or build your own packages and offer them to others who want to try it, too. Or wait, like I do quite often (for example for ekiga, which is stuck in the NEW queue currently). It doesn't really hurt much to not have the newest, fancies toys. In fact, you are likely to be more productive when you don't care for these things.

Two hours after I blogged about having no camera I got one :-) Being hit by #350333 I had to reboot another kernel anyway, so I decided to try a newer one, namely 2.6.16-rc5, to see if that bug is fixed there. It is, but I got hit by yaird bug #352010 when I installed it. Fun :-) Especially because Jonas provided a fixed yaird quickly...

Oh Shock and horror! The videos show ugly artefacts! The grabbed files and on the cameras lcd, though they disappear on the lcd, when I unplugg the firewire cable. Strange! p2-mate suggested electrical interference as the cause and was right. Using different power-outlets for the notebook and the camera made the artefacts go away. Oh joy!

To end a long story quickly: Here they are!

For yet unknown reasons these ogg theora files play well in vlc, kaffeine, xine and totem, but not so in (my version of) mplayer.

Better quality oggs are being encoded and uploaded atm, followed by xvid files (highest quality) and mpeg2s (for producing a video DVD).

The forth talk, "The Debian GNU/kFreeBSD port" by Aurelien Jarno was recorded in HDV and will be released soon... Due to circumstances beyond our control, the video team failed in recording "Women in Free Software: Findings from FLOSSPOLS"... Luckily an audio recording was made, which hopefully can be made available once the study quoted by Halla Wallach is published.

Currently only four out of ten slides are available. Pointers welcome!

My other notices about FOSDEM still need to published :-) When (or if?) I find time...

And finally, I succeeded in producing my first video DVD, yay! The DVD contains all videos from the debian-edu/skolelinux gathering in January in Erkelenz. Since it was made with webdvd, which Ben Hutching wrote after producing the debconf5 videos, I think I can have reasonable good confidence that this DVD will also work in most standalone DVD players.

Now I'll take a break and go out to enjoy the snow landscape in mid march :-) Even though I'm real busy atm (video was only number three of my current priorities) it's important to take a break and relax once in a while.

I dislike writing CGI crap so much that it's really amusing that I'm writing a wiki. Today I did most of the CGI parts of ikiwiki -- page editing in a web browser (with commit back via svn) and RecentChanges (pulling the logs out of svn). Still have to add logins to avoid spam, and after that I think I'll be done with the CGI side for now. It is nice to have the web-based editing interface for minor fixes to a wiki, though I've also found it very nice to be able to edit pages in vim for longer writing sessions. I did come up with something interesting today when I wasn't doing all this CGI stuff. Since ikiwiki often needs to run with different privs than its invoker (to rebuild a wiki in a post-commit hook, or to check in a wiki page from CGI), I came up with an interesting way to securely run it setuid. Pass ikiwiki --wrapper along with any other parameters, and it will emit a wrapper binry that is hardcoded to only run ikiwiki with those parameters. Dynamically programmed in C and compiled on the fly of course. The wrapper is designed to be completly safe to make setuid, and can be dropped into a post-commit hook, or cgi-bin, or whatever. You can also regenerate a wrapper with ikiwiki $(./wrapper --params) --wrapper, which is useful for changing a param. So the wrappers have sort of turned into ikiwiki's equivilant of a configuration file, which it otherwise lacks. I suppose I might as well put publish ikiwiki's documentation wiki already.

It’s only seven weeks to the most important vintage computing event in Europe, the Vintage Computer Festival Europe (VCFe), which for the first time will be three days this year because of May the 1st being a Monday this year and an official holiday in Germany and some of the swiss cantons (at least Zürich). So the VCFe 7.0 will take place from April the 29th to May the 1st 2006 in Munich and it’s focus this year is:

Home Made Brains
Kit-Computers and Individual Designs I’m currently thinking about which old hardware I’ll present at this year’s VCFe. There are a few ideas flowing around in my head:

• Old x86 laptops (1989-1996). This was my exhibition last year, but ayca, my i486 Toshiba laptop is broke (probably the display controller) and the “new” Compaq LTE pony hasn’t been setup yet. Nevertheless, I’ll bring my (nearly) everyday ThinkPad bijou with me since it’s now 10 years old and therefore ontopic now. Yeah!
• The HP 9000 Apollo Series 400 I got from dwalin and dyfa, if I manage to get a NetBSD installed on that box.
• Buying a tux case but installing some old hardware in it instead of the current FOX board. On the other hand: There should be at least a Linux running on that box.

Anyway, I’ll be there, many other Symlinker (at least dino and Venty) also will be there. And I hope to see you there, too. :-) Oh, and btw: One wish to the Debian community regarding the VCFe: Perhaps someone who’s familiar with the Debian m68k Port could give a talk about how Debian plans to save this port although the old hardware isn’t fast enough to fit the requirements for inclusion in a Debian release. This would give a really interesting talk about old and new hardware. Talks can be held at least in German or Englisch IIRC. TIA. :-) Update 16:26h: I thought of this mail by Wouter Verhelst about how modern ColdFire computers could run buildds for a hybrid m68k and ColdFire port when writing this paragraph. See also this Symlink story [German] about that topic.

Nothing stunning, given my preferences. I would have expected Enterprise D, but well, I guess those two are just two similar. I never saw Babylon 5, Firefly, Farscape, Cowboy Bebop or Battlestar: Galactica, though. You scored as Nebuchadnezzar (The Matrix). You can change the world around you. You have a strong will and a high technical aptitude. Is it possible you are the one? Now if only Agent Smith would quit beating up your friends.

Enterprise D (Star Trek)		75%
Babylon 5 (Babylon 5)		75%
Nebuchadnezzar (The Matrix)		75%
Millennium Falcon (Star Wars)		75%
Deep Space Nine (Star Trek)		63%
Serenity (Firefly)		63%
FBI's X-Files Division (The X-Files)		63%
Andromeda Ascendant (Andromeda)		56%
Moya (Farscape)		56%
Bebop (Cowboy Bebop)		56%
Galactica (Battlestar: Galactica)		38%
SG-1 (Stargate)		38%

Your Ultimate Sci-Fi Profile II: which sci-fi crew would you best fit in?

Actually, I have no idea whether it sucks or not, because even though I signed up for the beta program months ago, I’ve yet to hear word one from Yahoo, not even a “thanks for your interest, we’ll get back to you”. In many ways, this is the inverse of what Joel Spolsky wrote about a few weeks ago, namely holding your cards too close to the vest. Now, I understand why Yahoo is being extraordinarily deliberate about rolling out such a radical UI change to the general population (after all, Yahoo Mail is used by millions of “ordinary” people), but I’m technically savvy, an early adopter, and willing to endure spotty service from time to time to get early access, not to mention that I want to give my feedback on how things can be improved for all those ordinary people. Why on earth doesn’t Yahoo want to take advantage of my offer of free labor?! So, while I have no idea whether Yahoo Mail Beta sucks or not, the very fact that I don’t sucks in itself. Ah well. I’m no longer interested in being a Yahoo customer anyway, since they’re apparently the phone company now. Speaking of not hearing word one, I haven’t heard a peep from Yahoo about that earlier post either, not even from Yahoo’s voice in the blogosphere (who also didn’t respond to email on the subject), and not even after getting a link from Doc, which no doubt got my sob story in front of many more eyeballs than would otherwise have seen it. So, it would appear my friend is SOL. I’m sure all those people who are emailing him at Yahoo will understand why he’s ignoring them. And I’m sure the years worth of data he’s accumulated at Yahoo can be easily recreated. Technorati Tags: softwareasaservice, web20, yahoo

Oh sorry, I meant creationism (via The Guardian):

Pupils in England will be required to discuss creationist theories as part of a new GCSE biology course being introduced in September.

Why can't we keep the scientific theories in the science classrooms, and the religious counter-arguments in the religious education classrooms? NP: He Has Left Us Alone, but Shafts of Light Sometimes Grace The Corners Of Our Rooms, A Silver Mt Zion

Daniel Griswold: “This will send a chilling signal. It is just assuming that if a company is from the Middle East it is de facto disqualified from investing in the United States, and I think that is a terrible message to send.” Technorati Tags: flatworld

As I see it, there are three positions:

• Those who think that everybody except their candidate is a teletubbie
• Those who think everyone has a chance to win except the teletubbie
• Those who don’t care about teletubbies and would rather vote for Power Rangers

Yes, someone already told it: is that time of the year again. This small and insignificant fact (the DPL election) can shock the entire Debian Community. This kind of stuff makes us the fun, social and rewarding Debian Community some people claim we should be. The people who only cares about developing will keep working disregarding all the social conflicts. So most people won’t take much care about the Election, pick up a candidate, vote and keep working
It says: Welcome - Bolivarian Revolutionary Government of the Merida State David has more than one week in Venezuela. I’m gladly offering him accomodation in my house, bandwidth and all the support he needs for the next twenty years. We spent a weekend in Merida (which is in the Venezuelan Andes) in some Free Software Workshops and the rest of the week we have been working in several migration projects in the Company I’m working with. We have setup g33k!, a small server in my room running Debian (and Cherokee and Jaws) just for fun and testing. He’s leaving to San Crist bal (the capital of a state in the border with Colombia) on Friday and I should be finishing my semester as well. The next big Free Software event in Venezuela is the Latin American Infest. See you there!

It’s 11:30pm right now, I spent the whole day coding and can’t sleep even though I’m tired. The only thing I can focus on right now is Debian and the complete mess the Project is trying not to become. So here we go. Following tbm’s last posts about DPLship, I think he’s right. It’s pretty obvious, the last few DPLs did not take any real decisions and we’ve become quite used to that. Saying that the Project is on the road to self-destruction may be a slight exaggeration right now, but that’s what we’ll end up with if we don’t react soon. The good news is, the DPL election is in the process. The bad news is, we don’t know yet if one of the candidates will be able to carry out much of the processes needed to get the Project back into shape. We’ll find out eventually. Before doing anything, we need a clear picture of the Project as it is today; nobody can claim that today, Joey’s resignation as SRM proves it: nobody knows what the fuck did or did not happen between Joey and ftpmasters, and there’s probably a metric fuckton of gory details to take into account too. So, getting a clear picture of the state of the Project. In one word: audit. Ask every individual delegate for a detailed, comprehensive status report including all the details, including sensitive ones — obviously those reports will be sent to the DPL. No report, and that’s one less delegate. Don’t ask for team reports, they’re biased; getting X copies of the same report from team members is out of the question too. While they’re at it, ask each delegate to reaffirm its commitment, or appoint somebody else. Play by the rules or get replaced (by a little shell script, wherever possible). Based on the information collected through those reports, decide a plan of action and discuss it with the delegates. Once the decision is taken, announce it, get some feedback, then implement it. Remember: always consider the Project as a whole. The only problem is, this may well take more than one DPL term to achieve. It’s so fucking simple and we’re so fucking incapable of doing it. Sit back, look at things the way they are. Pity.

My selinux-basics package just entered unstable. The package will pull in some of the essential SELinux software to easy installation, contains some tweaks for Debian (e.g. disable legacy ttys via udev, despite them still being enabled in Debian stock kernels) and most importantly contain a tool that tests for some configuration changes required for smooth SELinux operation on Debian (e.g. use pam_selinux in ssh and login, disable /dev/xconsole) It's still a work in progress; especially this testing/fixing should be made into a modular app, and offer optional auto-fixing of these things when possible. The source currently is in the SELinux backport projects subversion repository. I'd appreciate your feedback, and of course patches.

Pyroman, my firewall tool for multi-network firewalls, is now in Debian unstable. Or will be, on the next mirror push. Thank you, ftp-masters. I thought you were, like, inactive. ;-)

I did get that Blackberry the other day, and while I don’t have time to write an extensive review right now, I can say it’s all I hoped it would be and more. Somewhat surprisingly, it even reconciles properly with Gmail, surprisingly because Gmail’s POP implementation is a bit messed up in how it handles reconciliation on standard POP clients (and, as a result, there are still issues with reconciliation when I delete mail in Gmail or Thunderbird rather than the Blackberry, but I’m still experimenting and will post details in another post). Even better, Google Talk for the Blackberry was released today, so I now have an open standard IM solution (i.e., my contacts don’t have to be inside a Google silo) that integrates across my desktops and mobile. Now, if Google would only use the Blackberry client to do over-the-air synchronization of my Google address book and Blackberry contacts (oh, and over-the-air Google calendar synchronization while you’re at it would be nice too :-)). Google Local for the Blackberry is an amazing piece of technology too. P.S. - Google just acquired Writely. Yep, Google Office is coming together quite nicely.

Thanks to the one who posted this little hint some weeks ago The ControlMaster? feature recently provided by ssh is really helpful. (If you are on Darwin, you need to install openssh through DarwinPorts first.) It's quite easy to enable it. Consider the following snipplet for ~/.ssh/config:

ControlMaster? auto
ControlPath? ~/.ssh/ssh_control_%h_%p_%r

It creates a control channel for a server connection upon the first connect. It is persistent as long as the first SSH process is running. It will block after the logout though if there are still childs connected to the master process. If that annoys you, just open some SSH masters which pre-authenticate into the background by using ssh -M -fn. What do you gain from that? Well, consider you have a SSH connection open to some host and want to scp something. You won't have to go through any authentication again and the copy process starts immediately because it is multiplexed over the connection which already exists. The same counts if you want to start a second shell to that host with the same username. I use ssh-agent for authentication (gpg-agent probably soon to come...), but sometimes the negotiation just needs quite a long time, so this snipplet is a serious SSH improvement for me.