Search Results: "will"

1 March 2006

Julien Blache: For those who still care about the Debian Project

Yes, the title of this post is yet another FTWCA. The question is, do YOU still care about the Debian Project ? I refused to take part to the recent flames, aka the FTWCA threads, but given the upcoming DPL election and the recent events, I feel it’s time to write something up about the current status of the Project. I’d like my readers to ask themselves: “Do I still care about the Debian Project, about its goals, about its spirit, about what it really is ?”. You may find that the answer to this question won’t be the one you expected, either way. Before reading further, you may want to quickly google for “Teletubbies” if you don’t know what this thing is. It may help you better understand the rest of this post. This post is a long one, thanks in advance to all of you who will read it until the end. I may refer to some people in this post. This is by no mean a personal attack, so please don’t take it as such. Recent events I mentionned “recent events” earlier, here are the events I am referring to: the FTWCA threads, DDs willing to expel Andrew Suffield because of his post to d-d-a, listmaster deciding to block Andrew from posting to d-d-a again, Rapha l Hertzog promoting his “social pressure” thing again, and some other bits that happened here and there. The problem: a bunch of Teletubbies
The Debian Project is a technical community, which some DDs are now trying to turn into a social community. Obviously, this can’t work. Why ? For a start, because the NM process has not been designed to select people based on social abilities (there’s a minimum, though, but other than that, that’s absolutely not the point of the NM process). New developers are selected on purely technical criterions, which is what you would expect from a technical community like ours. Adding social tests and whatnot isn’t going to help; the NM process is enough of a pain in the ass already for the applicants. We are a thousand Free Software hackers collaborating to the Project, dedicated to producing the best operating systems ever, and we want these operating systems to be Free Software, as defined by our guidelines on that matter, that is, to say, the DFSG. We all agree with the Foundation Documents of the Debian Project, we agree with the DMUP, and that’s pretty much all we all agree with. We never agreed to be nice to each other, we never agreed to group hugs at developer’s meetings or anything else. Our beloved Teletubbies are complaining about the “frequent” flamewars that happen on the Debian lists, and to be honest, one must acknowledge the fact that those flamewars have been a bit too frequent recently. What I find quite amusing, really, is that most of these flamewars have been started by one of the Teletubbies and mention Ubuntu. Now the same people want to come up with a mailing-lists code of conduct, similar to the one Ubuntu has. Ironic, isn’t it ? The same people are willing to expel Andrew for his post on d-d-a. Is it coherent ? The whole “social pressure” thing is nothing less than intimidation, and this is not acceptable. Similarly, the reactions to Andrew’s post on d-d-a aren’t acceptable either. Why ? Because this Project used to be open-minded. It looks like a bunch of people lost this, and I really feel sorry for them. Your reactions to Andrew’s post are really over-exagerated. You need to take a break and a reality check. If you aren’t open-minded enough to grok Andrew’s post, you’re not open-minded enough for this Project, or even for Free Software. Some of you also need to come back down to Earth. We are a volunteers organization producing Free OSes. We are doing it all for fun, so stop being so fucking serious and pull that tree out of your ass. You’ll feel better afterwards. It’s also quite amusing when the same people are announcing, on side channels (IRC, …), that J. Doe made it to their kill-file. I don’t use kill-files myself, because I believe that everybody has something interesting to say, because this is an open-minded Free Software Project, because the people I would kill-file might be maintaining something someday related to the packages I maintain and I’d need to work with them. No matter what I think of my fellow DDs, I never refused to work with anyone. People please, learn to put the Project’s interests before yours. Why ? Why now ? Why ? Because I joined a technical community of Free Software hackers, not a social community of Free Software integrists to spend my holidays with. Why now ? Because the vote on GR 2006_01 is currently running. Because the DPL election is on its way too, it’s that time of the year again. Because out of 7 candidates, 5 are, to diverse degrees, Teletubbies and 1 is the worst DPL candidate EVER (if you don’t know why and are a DD, log on to master and grep for his email address in the -private archives. Not his name, because his firstname at the time was Jonathan — something you must think about when you’ll vote). That leaves one sane candidate only; Bill, I hope your platform will be good. Solutions ? Realize that the Debian Project is the Debian Project and has nothing to do with Ubuntu, remember its goals, its spirit, remember why you joined (if you joined to get the @debian.org address, GO AWAY). This means: Remember that there is only a limited number of people making a lot of noise. So if you belong to what I believe is a silent majority, please raise your voice. Help tell those people to FOAD and let’s get back to work. When you’ll vote for the DPL election, please, think twice. Be extra-careful, most of the candidates are really good politicians.

Andrew Pollock: [debian] Getting back into it

Tonight I met Eric House, who wanted to get his GPG key signed, as we was interested in becoming a Debian Developer. We had an interesting discussion about packaging and sponsorship and the general mechanics of how Debian works as a distribution. It's motivated me to get my act together and get back into things a bit more actively. I've been having a bit of a hiatus since moving to the US, generally because I've been far too busy with real life. I think I've only made a very few uploads in the last 3 months. It also made me think as I was madly brain dumping all my tips on how to package stuff, that I should write it all down, so for any future people, I can just refer them to the document, rather than again brain dumping at them, or trying to write it all down in a lengthy email. One of the biggest problems now is plain old spare time. In my old job, I had enough idle time because things went so slowly at work, that I could sneak in a bit of Debian stuff during the day. In my new job, I'm always busy on something, so I don't have the time or inclination to be doing anything that isn't work related while I'm at work. So that leaves my evenings or weekends for Debian. Evenings have seen me tinkering with Asterisk, and will probably see me tinkering with MythTV soon. Weekends have involved doing sightseeing and other touristy stuff. So I guess the sooner I can finish my other projects off, the sooner I can devote a bit more time to Debian again. I think in the meantime, to ramp up again, I'll try to get back into doing QA work and upload one orphaned package with the wrong maintainer field a night. The list has grown long again. I think I had it down to the single digits when I last stopped. It'd be cool to get it down to zero.

Adam Rosi-Kessel: RIMU Rules

In an effort to put an end to the endless time sink of hardware problems on the small cooperative ISP I run, I’ve decided to outsource the responsibility of actually taking care of hardware and move most of the operations to a virtual private server. Part of our hosting is actually already on a VPS, but the service there has been lackluster: sometimes disk space is mysteriously unavailable; we don’t always get the promised amount of memory; throughput is slower than we’d like; customer support usually gives us cryptic responses about what was wrong and how they fixed it after a few hours; etc.. (Not to give them too bad a name, but the provider here was SPRY.) We decided to find a new provider. Lots of people had good things to say about RIMU Hosting, and after just a day it’s becoming clear to me that they are an excellent provider. Tech support (even before we signed up) was incredibly responsive; the packages of virtual servers or dedicated hardware seem like an excellent value; and my first impression is that there is none of the VPS flakiness that seemed to permeate our prior provider. It looks and feels like a real machine: top provides an accurate task list that reflects the memory we really have, dmesg gives realistic kernel-like output, etc. In such a short period of time, I can’t genuinely claim that RIMU Rules, but I will say that they rule so far. They also have a Debian developer discount, as well as a discount for hosting multiple machines with them.

Erich Schubert: Microsoft GTA

So Microsoft has released a new AJAX toy, currently on preview.local.live.com. It's not particularly new, though. In one pane it's like Google Maps, overlaid with a car image, in the other pane it's like Amazons local search. I wonder if they actually licensed Amazons imagery for it. I'm impressed: it works with firefox. But it's rather slow (seems like they are not doing view image preloading, like with the map). The final version will probably be called Microsoft GTA: Reality, and if they manage to add gore after you've driven over pedestrians (who is this guy, anyway? Did he give the permission to be included in this toy? is there no privacy in the US?) when going down one-way-streets the wrong way, it can probably even become a big seller. More likely they'll give it away for free, not making any money with it.

28 February 2006

Arnaud Vandyck: FOSDEM2006

I was not a part of the devrooms team this year (like the last two years), Pascal did all the job! I was just a simple visitor and it’s a very cool position. Mark already bloged about the Classpath’s presentations, so you can find some interresting slides there. Saturday (25th February 2006) RMS Excellent talk about the patent. As always, Richard Stallman has great images to explain complex things. I still can’t understand all the GPL3 changes but I’ll try to read some more articles about it. Putting ‘Free’ into JFreeChart The presentation from David Gilbert was very cool. I did not know JFreeChart and it is really cool! This is a very big project and it makes very beautiful charts. I’d like to find some charts to do just to use it! Eclipse for GNU Classpath Development Tom Tromey did a fantastic presentation again. I already saw his presentations past years and it was still excellent. He already tried to explain me how to set up this Eclipse/GNU Classpath setup on IRC but I missed the “Don’t build automatically” hack. Everything should be on the Classpath’s wiki. Xen A presentation by Ian Pratt, leader of the Xen Source project. I heard about this project but I didn’t know that you could move an instance from a machine to another one! Amazing! Sunday (26th February 2006) I met Wouter in the bus but he lost his voice and asked me to introduce the speakers of the Debian room. I’m sorry for the three speakers I announced if it was not just as good as if Wouter did it. I wanna intend to the two conferences anyway. Women in Free Software I already wanna be at the talk of last year but I was in the Classpath devroom. Hanna M Wallach did a fantastic talk. I learned a lot of things and I know now that there really is a need of the debian-women project. I proposed her to put a phrase or a logo or something on the Debian-Java projects web pages and she seems to be pleased. Tonight, I went on #debian-women and it seems I did not understand nothing :-D . So maybe I’d better do nothing about this unless I understand what I could do to help. Debian GNU/kFreeBSD port After the talk of Hanna, I introduced the kFreeBSD talk of Aurelien Jarno. I wanna listen to this talk because I completely don’t know *BSD… I’m sorry but I don’t know more. And I still don’t know the difference with Linux and don’t know why I should, as a simple user change to some *BSD port? Debian-Java Meeting After the kFreeBSD talk, I introduced the SLIND talk in the Debian Room, told Wouter that I go to the Classpath Devroom… and listen to the end of the talk of Christian Thalinger (CacaoJVM — the site was down when I tried). Sorry Christian, I just don’t understant these thing :-D During the talk (or was this just after the talk of Robert about JamVM?), I went eating with Wolfgang Baer. We went back during the Christian’s talk. Then we had a Debian-Java talk (I should be writing down the summary of this meeting instead of blogging)… I’ll send an email about the meeting, don’t worry ;-) Future of Classpath It is the time when Mark ask everybody: What do you do? How can we help you? It’s a great social/technical time when everybody listen carrefully to everybody. It’s wonderful. Maybe it’s the part I prefer in free software. I must say that I read some mailing lists before joining some project and the ‘Classpath’ (and friends) projects were the one I prefer because of that respect. Then came the camera… A team came in the room to film us. They claim they were making a movie about Free Software. Funny ;-) I discussed a little bit with the woman that seems to be the director and she asked for my email (no, Hanna, it was not because she felt I am sexy ;-) , nobody tells me 100 times I’m sexy ;-) ). I told her I was not one of the main contributor but she just wanna talk about free software and understand how it works. Closing Talk: The Challenge of the GNU/Linux Desktop by Jeff Waugh Jeff Waugh is an excellent speaker, I really enjoyed the presentation. A lot of humour, a lot of facts, it was really an excellent presentation. But Jeff, I still do not understand the Ubuntu business plan. I’m not a native english speaker and I did not understand a lot of jokes and some responses. Back! I messed up with my GSM, lost my PIN number or someting I don’t know (I did it a thousand times!), I went to the shop today (Feb. 28) to be able to call again. I also went to the office and the alarm was on… I asked for the security guard (I did not want to take risks the day of my birthday: February 28th)… we found nobody but someone tryied to enter on Sunday. I’ll try to prepare some report about Debian-Java tomorrow. The report will be reviewed by Wolfgang and Michael and I’ll send it on the debian-java list on Saturday or on Sunday.

Aigars Mahinovs: Jonathan backslash

After last post I received a bunch of feedback both via (buggy) comment system and via email. People wondered about my support of Jonathan and pointed out some posts by him, like http://lists.debian.org/debian-women/2004/07/msg00217.html. That in my opinion is the type of post that the DPL should be acting harshly against. Personally. On a case-to-case basis. Just to be clear - my evaluation of the platforms did not take in account anything that candidates did do in their past as I somehow felt that it was not really relevant. I was just as wrong as most of USA voters in the last two presidential elections who only trusted information from their candidate. On one hand it shows the impression Jonathan's platform left on me when I approached it without prejudice, but on the other hand we clearly do not want developers to make a quick judgment only basing on candidates platform statement, do we? So, to redeem myself I decided to simply do a research on the past actions and statements of the current candidates and post that research on the blog too. I was also planning to post my opinion on the other pre-election activities the candidates will be involved in. That now becomes increasingly important so that at least I make an informed decision in the end and hopefully help some other people come to their own conclusions in the process. Note: to prevent unfair judgement based on year old data I have arranged with Jonathan for an interview/discussion where he will be able to express his opionion and I will be able to ask him some grilling questions so that we get to really understand what is his position now. The result will be posted in this very blog. If you have something you would like Jonathan to answer for, send me a message.

Clint Adams: Why NoTA is getting ranked first this year

Jeroen van Wifflepuck There are compromising pictures of this guy in carnal embrace with windmills. These could be very embarrassing if leaked to the press. We can't have a DPL that will embarrass us. We just can't.
R.E. Jacks In Pollack This guy is beholden to marmots. Lots and lots of marmots. Do you really want to empower a marmot rampage?
Uncle Steve Charging money for T-shirts? What happened to the gift economy? All clothing should be FREE! Where's the love?
Tony Bob Towns This guy can't decide whether or not his last name is Town or Town'S. Can you really trust someone who changes his name so casually? I don't think so.
Andreas Schuldei He and Ari are part of the same marmot cabal. If you can't trust one, can you trust the other?
Yonah ( ) Walth re Quite, simply, this, guy, is, employed, by, canonical.org, to, make, us, all, look, silly. Vive le Rock. P.S., I think the syphilis is worsening.
Bill Allombert Did the Debian menu in ion3 become less fun to use? I blame this guy for some reason.

Aigars Mahinovs: Migration finished

Hello again dear Debian Planet! I have a surprise for you. While you were not watching I made myself a brand new shining blog using the fine Mnemosyne software. It is a blog written in Python that uses Kid templates and a lot of wonderful pythonic magic (for uninitiated) that generates a set of XML compliant static files. I added support for comments, tag cloud and some other dynamic features using the magic of AJAX. The feed for the planet is tweaked to only display things that have not been posted to the old blog, so this is no flood - it is only the new posts (and one old one for completeness). I especially hope the DPL platform comparison will get some feedback.

Aigars Mahinovs: DPL platform runthrough

I think more people should just publish their thoughts about platforms of our DPL candidates so that we can have more visibility and insight (and a reason to actually read those platform statements). Thanks go to MJRay for the idea, however I will try to be a bit more biased so that this post conveys more of my opinions then just a plain summary of the platforms.
Jeroen van Wolffelaar
  • ftp-team for a year, looks good
  • dpl-team as a good idea, wants team decisions to take less responsibility on his own. Might be wise, but could be un-leaderish.
  • pushes for smooth communication, I am not sure how that will work out - smooth communication means sanding off the edges, but we all know that the best development is always on the edge.
  • pushes for code of conduct. While the idea might be quite popular it also states that bad behavior in our community is becoming so widespread that a special code is needed to compensate for that. I do not feel that we are at such a bad state now - more flamewars are raised about the code of conduct then about the conduct itself. I feel this is were simple and decisive action by the DPL should be done and not a birocratic procedure to spread the blame of failure.
  • "insider reports" - good idea, like an internal Debian News Station (see Howard 100 News)
  • encouraging wiki, forums and IRC as official channels of external communication. Several questions arise here: as a user with specific question - where must I go? to which media? to which list, channel or forum category? It must not be too complex. Also there is the question of spreading knowledgeable users and developers too thin across multiple channels of voluntary support.
  • infrastructure transparency - good, but how? even tiny bits of paperwork there can slow the whole project to a crawl.
  • mediator in flamewar situations - good, DPL should be doing that.
  • media coverage - does Debian need more media coverage? I do not think so. I do believe that we need more coverage in more professional circles (even if in circles of professional psychiatrists) to attract more developers and make them understand us better, but I do not feel that attracting huge crowds of general public would do much good for the project.
  • in my opinion team players make mediocre leaders
Five word summary: transparent, wide, smooth, mediative, consensus
Ari Pollak
  • whoa ... pictures, so sweet :)
  • humor, so much needed in our project
  • good point about half-DPL - it would be nice to have DPL delegate as much as they possibly can but be strict and easy with what is left
  • Debian Police - sounds like a good substitute for Project Scud and the Finnish Inquisition :D
  • good take on licences, however I would add to the Gnocchi licence the phrase "And you must remove any copies of this licence from your memory as soon as you have finished reading it." That will show them lawyers ...
Five word summary: humor, half-*, police, anti-legalese, illustrations
Steve McIntyre
  • got in cheap, but a long time ago
  • The CD dude!
  • not much new on internal communication, same old "will tell you even that I not doing anything"
  • same stuff about the code of conduct, see above.
  • social skill test within NM. Good idea, but not a good implementation - you will not get much social conditioning with mentoring inside teams. We need someone to get on the candidate and roast them good - test their asbestos suits. After he has made a package, schedule for time and either call the newbie or IRC with him. Grill him about his package. Must sure to slide into personal insults, religion bashing and political discourses. Watch the response. Evaluate. Post audio online :)
  • open cabalish developments - there is little to be done beyond talking to cabal and making sure all semi-private developments use public Debian infrastructure for communication - draft on wiki and develop in svn, so that everyone can see.
  • very good points about professionalism. we must be able to be proud about Debian and demand some level of standards from packages inside Debian. The idea of regular DD reexamination might be a very good fit here, see below.
  • Steve looks like a good organizer to me
  • however he might be a bit too soft on leadership or simply too diplomatically inclined in his platform statement
Five word summary: professionalism, standards, MIA, tests, communication
Anthony Towns
  • not wanting to win too much
  • speed up! - release early, release often. Sounds good for the everyday processes, but not for The Release. I still want to see Debian as The Most Stable thing ever.
  • recruiting - I would ask, recruit for what? People can not just get into the interesting parts of the project and recruiting for general run of the mill development does not sound too engaging to me. You'd better make a contest for new security team members or new ftp masters or any other position that one person or only a few persons hold now. Have clear requirements and tests and actually get those people into doing those critical jobs. After that we can think about ...
  • ... compulsory turnover. Now there is a good idea that I'd like other DPLs to consider, but only with in conjunction with the previous one. We might not need full rotation, but we could have a rotating ftp team leader post that would iterate among ftp team members. That would alleviate the "hit by a bus" problem a bit more.
  • DPL as a discussion and direction leader is quite a nice and needed idea in my opinion.
  • I do not agree with aj about compulsory kindness and the general idea of expulsion on social grounds. Currently it creates more problems then it could solve in a lifetime.
  • Congrats on declassification thing, historians will surely thank us for that.
  • nice legal disclaimer, I like those kind of things :)
Five word summary: continuity, tempo, newbies, direction, bling
Andreas Schuldei Not online, to be put here when it appears.
Jonathan (Ted) Walther
  • photo, nice touch.
  • speak your mind. sound essential to a DPL.
  • Ubuntu good. Good.
  • Make love (and code) and not Desktop. Let Ubuntu make Desktop if they want to.
  • We all are strange people, face it.
  • Kicking people out is more harm to the project then those people could ever do.
  • Kicking fun out of Debian.
  • Great points about improving NM process and worshiping James Troup - I fully agree.
  • The best idea here - recertification of all Debian Developers every X years (where X is proposed to be 3 currently). This will almost automatically solve many problems we have in Debian: NM frustration, MIA developers, standards of professionalism, reiteration of best practices, social reshuffling.
Five word summary: Here, goes, my, vote, period. Alternate summary: geek, love, tolerate, recertification, statue.
Bill Allombert
  • math Ph.D. and researcher.
  • wanted to vot for Lars, but as he stepped down saw no one else good enough, so put himself forward. brave words. I like Lars too, bet it's not like we do not have good candidates this year besides him.
  • summary on effect of voluntarism and respectful communication. Quite plain if you ask me. Got me a bit bored there. Not a good sign.
  • think globally
  • assist others
  • help Debian specific software
  • observers - sounds like that Debian Action News Team minus all the fun.
  • "I am very patient" - be patient when reading and enthusiastic while writing, otherwise people might not read patiently
Five word summary: filler, communicate, more filler, patience I hope this summary gave someone as much food for thought as it did for me. My favorite is very clear, but can you guess who is my second choice? Leave a comment and let me know what you think :)

Aigars Mahinovs: 60 rants

To get my blogging up to a more regular schedule and also give you something to read that everyone could relate to, I decided to start regular commenting on the latest in 60 minutes
Stem Cells http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/02/23/60minutes/main1341635.shtml I must say that I have not been following the stem cell research closely enough in last couple of years and I am very amazed that we can now actually tell a stem cell to develop into a particular type of cell. The sight of a bunch of cells grown into a slab of heart tissue was especially fascinating. First of all there are at least two problems that I see with the research as it was shown in the program: they are not using cells from the patient, they are simply injecting the cells "in the general direction of the problem". The first is probably a problem caused by politics - in a perfect world we would take a cell sample from a patient, take nuclei of those cell, put them in place of the nuclei of the stem cells and we would basically have cloned stem cells of the same patient that we plan to be treating. There would be no problem with nonacceptance of donor organs or confusion of living with another persons DNA inside your cells. Politics block those developments. The second problem is mostly the simple immaturity of the field of research and microsurgery in general - it is still very hard for us to grow a full slab of heart and surgically replace damaged tissue with it. There are pros and cons to that approach too. Injections do have lower level of post operational risks in the area of effect - there are no tissue scars to worry about. However, having heart tissue flowing in the blood stream does seem quite risky in that it could have unforeseen consequences in other parts of the body. For better or worse. However, even taking in consideration all that problems (that the scientists of the field) surely do know about very well, it is just plain ridiculously stupid how much the religious right in general and that incompetent president of theirs is grinding all the research to a halt. And do not tell me about that last weeks of him touring bio-diesel facilities, I will come to that too. In short - go California, but I would rather see Bush just getting his marbles together and banning stem cell research in USA altogether, so that all those scientists can come to us, to EU and other places with more reasonable legal systems, because otherwise it seems that they are just asking for trouble there. Trouble that will slow the research to half of its possible speed for next 10 years or so.
Port security http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/02/24/60minutes/main1344473.shtml I can only say one thing about security and USA - 90% of the USA security forces only work to ensure that people feel secured: that they see the police, that they are searched regularly enough, that they are stopped from time to time to answer some questions, that they are being "protected" on the Internet (read: being spied upon), that they are feeling harassed enough to feel safe. If the regular people are harassed enough they will never forget that the police is there and they will assume that the real criminals get harassed even more. That instills both content and fear: content for being protected and fear because there is clearly something to be protected from. After four and a half years of this treatment people are becoming very cattle-like, i.e. easy to govern. And in the same time the real experts can easily see that for real terrorists all those protection measures are completely irrelevant - real terrorists do not try to hijack planes with matches or nail clippers. Real terrorists have people inside, good supplies of profession equipment and have all the information that your government will not tell you "for security reasons". Cocaine is being smuggled into USA by tons. If put a nuke or two into that stream with enough "green" wrapping, no one will notice anything. Anyone having enough resources to buy a suitcase nuke will have enough resources to get it into USA even if you implement the strictest police state measures the likes of which have not been seen before. Even if you mandate all citizens to implant RFID chips that could be used to track their location from satellite and shoot on (satellite) sight anyone without such chip, there will still be ways to nuke any place in USA if there were any motivation. Clearly there is none. This again show that only thing that are considered "ok to be debated upon" are being raised in USA nowadays - there has been more debate about that duck hunt incident then about millions of Americans being spied on by their own government. That says much about any country. I want to bring just one quote from this segment - "It is impossible to do proper inspections of everything without basically stopping all international commerce".
Montana coal diesel http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/02/24/60minutes/main1343604.shtml The idea of making diesel from coal is new to me, but it really is just an old, forgotten technology put into action by Nazi Germany at one point. The idea is a nice plan in the local perspective (cheap gas, lots of jobs, ...) but from a global perspective that is a very dangerous idea. Anything that prolongs the inevitable transition to pure hydrogen economy is. I think that only thing that has a big future is pure electric power with storage in some kind of metallic hydride. You see, I am worried about global warming quite a lot. And burning any kind of fossil fuel bring carbon that has been laying in the ground for millions of years and throw it back into the atmosphere in the form of carbon dioxide (CO 2). That both speeds up global warming and reduces the amount of oxygen that we have left for breathing. Does look bleak in the long term perspective, doesn't it? Yes, digging up coal in your backyard is better then fighting wars halfway across the globe for oil, but not too much.
Dogs This week Andy was talking about dog shows. Not for me that kind of thing - I like cats much more. And not those lazy show cats, I like simple cats that must rely on their smart to survive (at least be calling their owner to feed them when they are hungry :)). So here we have the end of my first coverage of 60 minutes. Lets hope that it is not the last and lets also hope that you foud at least something here to be of a value to you. As always, feel free to comment on what could be done to improve all this.

Aigars Mahinovs: Migrating from Blogger to your own Mnemosyne blog

As I decided to migrate my blog from blogger.com to my own blogging software on my own domain, I did not want to leave my old posts behind. As I had more then 150 of them, I had to do some automation to do that within my lifetime. The first step is to get the data from Blogger.com database to somewhere where you can access it in full. You will need FTP or SFTP access to a computer with a real IP address. The idea is to go to blogger.com and specifiy that you want to switch storage of your blog pages from their blogspot.com service to your of FTP or SFTP server. You will have to provide server address, URL, folder, username and password. URL does not matter at this point, but other parameters define where your data will be dumped to. Save the changes and republish the blog. After a few dozens of minutes all your data will be at your server in a set of complete html files. Now we need something that will parse those html files and write out something that your blogging software can understand. As I use Mnemosyne, my format is a set of mail message files. To allow me to use HTML formatted messages in my blog (and not only reST) I added this to my config.py: 
class EntryMixin:
   def _init_content(self):
       """Read in the message's body, strip any signature, and format using
       reStructedText unless X-Format=='html'."""
       s = self.msg.get_payload(decode=True)
       if not s: return ''
       try: s = s[:s.rindex('-- \n')]
       except ValueError: pass
       body=False
       try:
               if self.msg['X-Format'] == "html":
                       body = s.replace(" ", " ")
                       body = re.sub(r'&(?!\w 1,10 ;)',r'&',body)
                       body = xml.dom.minidom.parseString("<div>"+body+"</div>").toxml()
       except KeyError:
               pass
       except xml.parsers.expat.ExpatError, e:
               print "W: Parse failed for "+self.msg['Subject']+" at "+self.msg['Date']+" from "+str(int(time.mktime(time.strptime(self.msg["Date"],"%a %b %d %H:%M:%S %Y"))))
               print xml.parsers.expat.ErrorString(e.code), e.lineno, e.offset
       if not body:
               parts = docutils.core.publish_parts(s, writer_name='html')
               body = parts['body']
       self.cache('content', body)
       return body
This will try to parse messages as pure xHTML if custom header "X-Format" is set to "html" in the blog entry. There is one problem with this approach - xHTML must be valid, otherwise XML parser in Kid templating engine will fail and there will be no end of trouble. That is why even in HTML mode we reparse the body to XML and back to string again. If we get a parsing error at that point, we fall back to reST parser. Now we need something that will analyse our Blogger.com generated HTML files and get our content from there. Here is the script that I used: 
#!/usr/bin/python
import os, os.path, time, sys, glob, re, xml.dom.minidom
id = 1
host = "old"
mdate = re.compile( r'\">(\d+) (\D+) (\d+)<' )
mbody = re.compile( r'</div>(.+)<div style=' )
mfooter = re.compile( r'<a href=\"http://example.com/(.+)\" title=\"permanent link\">(\d+):(\d+)</a></em>' )
files = glob.glob("old/*/*/*.html")
for file in files:
       year = 0
       month = 0
       day = 0
       hour = 0
       minute = 0
       subject = ""
       oldurl = ""
       body = ""
       date = ""
       title = ""
       footer = ""
       f = open( file, "r" )
       status = 0
       for l in f:
               if status == 0:
                       if l.find('class="date-header"')>0:
                               date = l
                               status = 1
               elif status == 1:
                       if l.find('class="post-title"')>0:
                               status = 2
                       if l.find('class="post-body"')>0:
                               status = 4
               elif status == 2:
                       if len(l.strip()) > 0:
                               title = l
                               status = 3
               elif status == 3:
                       if l.find('class="post-body"')>0:
                               status = 4
               elif status == 4:
                       if len(l.strip()) > 5:
                               body += l
                       if l.find('padding-bottom: 0.25em;')>0:
                               status = 5
               elif status == 5:
                       if l.find('posted by ')>0:
                               footer = l
                               break
       f.close()
       rdate = mdate.search( date )
       rbody = mbody.search( body )
       rfooter = mfooter.search( footer )
       year = rdate.groups()[2].strip()
       month = rdate.groups()[1].strip()
       day = rdate.groups()[0].strip()
       subject = title.strip()
       body = rbody.groups()[0]
       body = "<p>"+body+" </p>"
       body = re.sub(r'<img([^>]*?[^/])>',r'<img\1/>',body)
       if subject == "":
               subject = re.sub(r'<br.*?>','\n', body)
               subject = re.sub(r'</p.*?>','\n', subject)
               subject = re.sub(r'<.*?>','', subject)
               subject = subject.strip()
               line = subject.find('\n')
               if line > 45:
                       subject = subject[:40]+"..."
               else:
                       subject = subject[:line]
       oldurl = "http://oldblog.blogspot.com/"+rfooter.groups()[0].strip()
       hour = rfooter.groups()[1].strip()
       minute = rfooter.groups()[2].strip()
       mtime = time.mktime(time.strptime(day+" "+month+" "+year+"  "+hour+":"+minute, "%d %B %Y %H:%M"))
       outname = str(int(mtime))
       while os.path.exists( outname+"."+str(id)+"."+host ):
               id += 1
       outname = outname+"."+str(id)+"."+host
       out = open( "entries/new/"+outname, "w" )
       out.write("Date: "+time.ctime(mtime))
       out.write("\nSubject: "+subject)
       out.write("\nX-URL: "+oldurl)
       out.write("\nX-Tags: untagged")
       out.write("\nX-Format: html")
       out.write("\n\n")
       out.write(body)
       out.close()
Here I parse the HTML files using a simple state automata and then assemble all the data that we need to have, like timestamp in filename and Date field. In this script it is assumed that in the current directory there is "old/" directory with subdirectories like "2005", "2006", ... which have subdirectories for months in which there are xHTML files for individual posts. The output is written to "entries/new/$timestamp.$id.$host" files. After running this script and then running mnemosyne you will see a bunch of messages about failed parsing of some messages. That shows you where your xHTML is not valid. The usual problems are html entities ( like &euro; ) that the parser does not recognise and lack of closure on img or br tags: 
This will fail because of &euro;
<img src="smile.png"> will fail, it must be <img src"smile.png"/>
My import script fixes img and br tags, but for other problems there is not much choice but going trough the entries and fixing them up manually. Also later on, if you will want to paste some custom HTML into your post, you will have to mark the whole post as HTML mode post and also check if you pasted HTML is valid XML manually. There are some other fun things in this blog, but I will go into that in later posts.

Aigars Mahinovs: The hockey fever has begun

With the opening of Turin Olympic games, the sport fever is officially on. Especially it is the fact in Latvia - this year is the ultimate hockey year: our team is in the Olympics and we have the world championship in our capital Riga in a couple months.



Tomorrow we have a chance at medals in biathlon and luge. I had no idea our guys were actually in top 5 there. That will be fun to watch tomorrow.



And on Wednesday the heat will be on: hockey, Latvia vs USA. We would have beaten USA to pulp at last years world championships if the judge would not have illegally rejected two goals shot by our team and given a large number of unfair penalties to our players. Even the coach of the USA team made a point after the game of saying that the judging was inadequate. However the real point is - we will crush you this time.



PS. I just found out that the championship is planned at the same time as the Debconf 6 in Mexico. NOOOOOOO!!!! This is the worst news - I'll miss all the fun. Crap. Really. Crap. I hope there will be some kind of coverage in Mexico.

Erich Schubert: On AppArmor vs. SELinux

Some might have read recent news such as Novell SELinux killer rattles Red Hat, or Dan Walsh's critique of Novells AppArmor release, concerned with "unix like fragmentation in the security sector". While I also do think that SELinux is both more mature in the core system and more powerful than AppArmor (with a big plus being that SELinux is in the vanilla kernel) - I do think that AppArmor can quickly become a true SELinux killer, by just being better documented and easier to use. SELinux has serious deficiencies in documentation and development community. Almost all the available SELinux documentation is based around the policy as published by the NSA, which is "superseded by the reference policy project". This is the policy currently in Debian and used in the Gentoo SELinux docs - which hasn't received any updates in months now. The newer "reference policy" is updated every few days, by exporting Tresys' internal SVN into a public CVS on sourceforge. Dan Walsh claimed "multiple distributions shipping with SELinux including Fedora Core (2,3,4 and soon 5), Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, Gentoo, Debian, Ubuntu, Suse and Slackware. " Which is not entirely true. SuSE has AppArmor now, Fedora and RHEL are pretty much the same, and apparently neither Gentoo, Debian, Ubuntu or Slackware are up to date with SELinux. Or actually involved in the current development. So that basically makes 1 distribution using current SELinux and 1 distribution using AppArmor... Looks like a tie to me. Also with the development it's pretty much down. AppArmor was developed by a small company called Immunix, and is now backed by big Novell, owner of SuSE. Current SELinux is mostly developed by a small company called Tresys, and somewhat backed and used by RedHat. Both have the feeling of "closed door" commercial development, which may be the reason why it reminds some people of the old Unix wars. Both of course claim to do an open development, with for example the current SELinux Symposium. But if you look closely at the Agenda and the speakers, it's fairly obvious that this is pretty much a business meeting, with some university speakers talking about the security concepts used. Just one quote from the site:
Developer Summit
An invitation only meeting for the core developers of SELinux to discuss future plans for SELinux and upcoming technologies.
The winner of this "war" between AppArmor and SELinux will be whoever manages to incorporate community development best, and get the other distributions like Debian, Ubuntu and Slackware to support their efforts. Currently neither of them has the air of actively supporting them, which is really bad. Widespread adoption is also where grSecurity has failed before.

Daniel Baumann: Re: Debian Live Ressources

Phillip, my blog has no comments feature for similar reasons as madduck has pointed out. As you may have read, I wrote "[Debian Live will be] first [an] unofficial [project], then trying to bring it into Debian and become an official subproject". As you may have read too, Joey wrote "Debian Live [...] is an official sub-project of Debian". I just created those ressources on my own webserver for beeing quicker and more flexible in the beginning, I would be happy to move everything to debian.org. However, this would need a large amount of time for bureaucracy (especially for a poor little NM like me). Time, which I don't have and neither want to invest nor want to waste at the moment. If you volunteer for that job, feel free to be my guest (to avoid misunderstandings: alioth isn't an option, hosting several ISO images isn't possible on haydn due to lack of bandwith and space). And yes, I agree... I'm unworthy to run something officially because I'm not a DD. I'm patiently stuck in the queue since nearly a year, currently waiting on my AM who has the major PITA to check 75 packages... (my earnest and deepest sympathy to you, rene).

MJ Ray: How I read the DPL 2006 platforms

Bill Allombert
  • Lars Wirzenius had denominated himself
  • fully volunteer project implications
  • some rules for better communications
  • mediate
  • consider the distribution globally
  • "assistant" projects, Debian-specific projects
  • neutral observers
Jonathan (Ted) Walther
  • unpopular
  • GIANT ROBOTS sex JET PACKS sex CITIES ON THE MOON sex SPACE COLONIES sex FLYING CARS beer
  • Most of us are disfunctional in various ways
  • if a person tries to get another person kicked out of the Debian project, and they fail, they themselves will be kicked out. wiki
  • developers who didn't go through NM to go through it within the next year. From that point on, every developer would be required to renew their membership every three years, similar to drivers licenses [MJR: not English driving licences, it's not]
  • honor James Troup
Andreas Schuldei
  • not found on this server
Anthony Towns
  • a leadership hat
  • increasing its tempo
  • DPL and others actively and visibly recruit people on an ongoing basis
  • raise topics for discussion, and help guide them through
  • Gratuitous Song Parody
  • [seems to see the arbitrary expulsion and ban procedures as good developments?]
  • [title claims to be Ari Pollak's platform :) This is a good thing, will win votes.]
Steve McIntyre
  • [officer of the trader called "Debian-UK"]
  • regular status updates
  • agree a Debian code of conduct
  • more NM training can/should happen more within teams
  • more open discussion will happen naturally
  • Professionalism [(!) why not think of the children, too?]
  • detect [MIA] more quickly and more easily
Ari Pollak
  • half-joke candidate
  • half-DPL
  • Team Ari: Debian Police
  • who needs such complicated licenses, anyway?
Jeroen van Wolffelaar
  • DPL team
  • adoption of a code of conduct
  • insider reports
  • more use of the official wiki
  • Increase transparency of infrastructure teams
  • mediator/ombudsman ... team like the tech-ctte
  • actively approach the press
The above are in the reverse of the vote page order, in case you were wondering. I've not worked out my preference yet. Let's see what happens.

Lars Wirzenius: Random hacks: DVD ripping with .desktop files

I watch movies and other DVDs on a computer rather than by using a dedicated DVD player box. For various reasons, it is more comfortable to watch a movie by first copying it on a hard disk. For example, often vobcopy will be able to rip it even though there are scratches or other errors. Watching directly from the DVD will fail or be painful, because of frequent stops. The command to rip a DVD is vobcopy -m. I wrote a little script around that that also creates a .desktop file so that I can just double-click on it to start Totem. Double-clicking on the directory opens a new Nautilus window, which is not useful for viewing a movie.

Sergio Talens-Oliag: Life after the Public Administration

Today was my last day at LliureX (it was marked as -1 on my calendar) but it has become my first day out, as I've ended up not going to work. Yesterday was a really strange day at work, I had nothing to do and almost nobody to talk with and on the afternoon my boss told me that I could stay at home today if I wanted, as I had nothing to do there, so I'm at home now. For me the worst thing is that I finished my assigned tasks last Thursday and since then nobody asked me to do anything else, despite the fact that I could have done something useful on the three days that I had to stay there and I was willing to do whatever they wanted. Well, anyway now another life period is over and a new one begins; the only thing I know for sure is that I'll try to stay away from Public Administrations in the near future, if I'm able to. I've had enough politicians and government employees for a while.

Lars Wirzenius: Travel report: FOSDEM 2006

I went to FOSDEM in Brussels for the weekend. I had a great time. Some scattered notes:

27 February 2006

Wouter Verhelst: #debian-tech

aj, my joining did not mean that I agreed with the channel. For me to join, ij had to convince me that it was important and that m68k had to be represented. And state that he didn't have the time. As you may have noticed, I did not say much during that time, and did not ever join #debian-tech afterwards. The reason that I did join at that point was that this discussion was, indeed, important, and that it was going on at #debian-tech. I didn't want to risk not having a say again in the future of things that are important to me; the fact that I did this should not be interpreted as an acceptance of and agreement with the channel's charter. I still feel very uncomfortable about the be nice, or else... charter of #debian-tech, because it means you can not know whether something you say as a joke will be interpreted as hostility and might get you kicked. The most important part of IRC, besides being a quick and easy way to get help, is the ability to have some fun; jeopardizing that makes an IRC channel so much less interesting to me. And, as it would appear by the replies that your recent post caused, to a lot of other people on planet debian as well.

Julien Danjou: About Xen in Debian

Some people may have noticed that a thread has recently started about Xen on debian-devel. To sum up the whole story, here it is. Guido Trotter and myself asked Adam Heath, the current official maintainer of Xen, if it was possible to help him (bug #342249) to package Xen 3.
He did not answer to our messages, as he seems to be MIA, so we started with Jeremy Bouse, Ralph Passgang and Yvette Chanco to work and we created a project on Alioth in order to package the latest release. We started our development from the package Ralph made previously. We don't know really why, but Bastian Blank, from the Debian kernel team, uploaded his own package of Xen 3, ignoring our request to work on our side, arguing that this was the work of kernel team to maintain Xen. It seems that actually, the kernel team only pretend to maintain the Dom0 and DomU kernel images, probably as soon as Xen in included in the vanilla kernel, and that Bastian took the decision alone to maintain the hypervizor and userspace tools. Today, we have functionnal and splitted packages of Xen 3, available on the Subversion repository. I made Xen packages with the latest development version of our packages and the Xen testing version. They are available from: 
deb http://naquadah.org/~jd/debian/xen stable main
Official backports will be uploaded to backports.org as soon as we will have uploaded a version to sid. But for now, we have to cancel or bypass the upload Bastian made...

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