I was up until 6 am last night working on the first video game I've written since back when I used my atari. It has a AFAIK unique concept that still meshes perfectly with a number of classic games. And it uses ascii art. More on that later, if I get it to a playable state. I spent a lot of time today looking at how d-i handles letting the user specify parameters to pass to kernel modules. This was partially broken for 2.6 kernels, and completly broken for udev. I've now cleaned it up in d-i svn to the point where I think parameters can be passed to modules in all possible cases. Oh and liw is not running for DPL after all which totally sucks. And I have a trip this weekend that will swamp all of this..

I recently bought a Samsung ML-2010, which is a nice laser printer for home use, and tried to set it up on Debian, only to discover that Samsung wasn't hip to my architecture, namely amd64/x86_64. It's no matter, their printer drivers still work, but you have to hack around a bunch of their checks. I'm documenting them here because I'd rather not forget when I reinstall, and it's probably useful for others to know about it. Step 1 - Install the necessary packages - In my case all I needed to install was ia32-libs, because I already had all of the other packages needed installed. The samsung tool uses cupsys, so you may need to install the cupsys package and it's dependencies. Step 2 - Unpack the driver - Get the driver from Samsung and untar it, producing a directory called "image" Step 3 - Hack around the glibc detection - The setup program is "smart" and tries to detect if there is a GLIBC with a high enough version. The bad news is that it uses the wrong version, because it is not familiar with the ia32-libs positioning of it. Luckily, it uses a script to do it's dirty work, so I just changed scripts/test-libc.sh to this:

#!/bin/sh
#
# Test the Libc version and make sure it is > 2.0
#
exit 0

Mostly because I know that we meet the requirement of glibc > 2.0. Step 4 - Run the setup program directly - The setup script (script.sh) doesn't like to run on x86_64 architectures, because of it's architecture checking. This is annoying, so looking into script.sh, find the program that it runs and run it directly, that is, run ./setup.data/bin/Linux/x86/glibc-2.1/setup.gtk as root (it will be putting things in /usr/local). Step 5 - Add your printer to the setup utility - run /usr/local/linuxprinter/bin/linux-config and add the printer. It's pretty straightforward, and actually follows the docs which Samsung gives out from here on.

I've just uploaded into Debian (and my local repository) a first-stab at packaging Contacts, the ulta-cool lightweight address book that uses Evolution Data Server. Hopefully Chris will get around to making a 0.2 release soon, I've packaged 0.1 as it's known to work, but the repository contains some kick-arse improvements.

I woke up to a breakfast of pancakes, cooked by the wonderful riseorbleed. I don't know about you but waking up to a hot breakfast is heavenly. After some morning ablutions, we hailed a cab and along the way we chatted with the cabbie as I looked out the window. Luxor cabbies are really nice, every time I travelled with them, they had some interesting story to tell and big, broad smiles. Smiling is the way to fatter tips! The weather in San Francisco is supposed to be rather variable. You know how that is, rain one minute and then sun the next. Well, the entire time I was there, it was bright and sunny and gorgeous. San Francisco really put on her best to charm me and she really succeeded. I didn't think that postcard-perfect pictures were possible, but I saw them everywhere. I was happy to walk around without needing a winter coat. And everyone else smirked at how happy I was. Daniel seemed to have recovered from the previous night's revelry. His talk on delta was excellent because he's a very good public speaker. Which is good, because he gave two presentations at CodeCon. When I talked to him on Thursday night, he seemed a little embarassed at how successful delta had become since it such a simple piece of software. But people like GCC use it to fare down their bug reports to the lines of code that reproduce its bugs. Rob and Tristan sidled up to my bar and asked me if I could get them some juice. For their laptops. They were working on their presentation all the way until the last minute, which involved a drunken Tristan stumbling around on stage. Except that Tristan doesn't drink, so his imitation was quite poor. They were presenting Djinni, which is their implementation of a fast simulated-annealing algorithm that takes also pressure into account. Sadly, they didn't explain their algorithm but their talk was entertaining nevertheless. At lunch, Spider snuck me out of the building and she showed me around San Francisco. She pointed out the Eagle Tavern with a glimmer in her eye. I think she's trying to corrupt me. Or she's trying to pimp me out. Then we went to Stompers where she tried on some boots. We were stymied, however, by the fact that a very annoying woman and her husband were trying on every single pair of boots in the entire store. iGlance is a real-world video-conferencing and screen-sharing application that has some fairly good usability built into it. It also has a fairly sensible privacy model and does some NAT punching to boot. Although it's only got a Win32 port for now, it's free software so someone will fix it up. Sometime in the afternoon, the beautiful and fair wealhtheow came behind the bar and surprised me with a hug and a sandwich! I was happy with the random hug from a new friend, but the sandwich was wonderful. I had not eaten lunch on Friday so I was very grateful. She put a huge smile on my face. I munched on the sandwich while listening to the OASIS talk. This technology is a locality-aware server-selection resolver, which is pretty good for distributing servers around the world and finding the fastest one. They implement this as a DNS redirector so that lookups are transparent to normal Internet software. This made me feel a little bad for holdenk, whose SelfDirectedProject happens to be on a very similar topic. It does, however, validate his approach. maradydd's presentation about Query by Example was up next. She did a very good introduction to data-mining, which segued into her hack on PostgreSQL where you can specify examples of things you want to search for. That is not how SQL normally works, where you specify constraints. With QBE, you just specify things similiar to what you want, and things similar to what you don't want. I was chatting with Rob Pascual when I noticed Len lining up in the Q&A; queue. Suddenly, my ears perked up as I sensed something important was going to happen. So I pulled out my camera, stepped on some toes, and got into position. When it was his turn at the microphone, he started saying random stuff that wasn't question at all! Something cheesy like how Meredith had changed his life and how he wanted to be with her. Then he got up on stage and asked The Question. It was beautiful. The audience broke out into cheers and applause, except for the heartless bastards beside me. But who cares about them? This was such an awesome occurance that an interview was taped. After teardown, some people were going to head to a franchise Mexican restaurant. Spider insisted that I get real food, so we walked down to the Mission. We made a detour to Good Vibrations which is a San Francisco landmark if ever there was one. I swear that she's trying to corrupt me. Anyway, as we were walking out, I must have mentioned that I was from Canada. Because Cohen, a Torontonian, came out of nowhere and introduced himself to us. Well, what was I to do but to invite my fellow countryman to dinner? So we set off to find a Taqueria that served nopales. This failed since Californians don't seem to like eating cactus. Instead, we went to Pancho Villa where I ate enchiladas and salsa verde and guacamole and churros and I was so very happy! We bid farewell to Cohen after exchanging contact information and tried to find everyone else. Unfortunately, we couldn't reach anyone by cellphone, so we sat around dejected for a while. Then we realised that we could go to Annie's Social Club where an event was happening. This turned out to be a good and a bad idea. It was a good idea because we found everyone at CodeCon. It was a bad idea because Annie's Social Club double-booked us with bad karaoke! And then were quite rude when we complained. And then kicked out John Gilmore. So I just want to say that Annie's Social Club hates geeks and freedom. So Len hailed a black stretch limousine, we all climbed into it, invited some reporters along and moved the entire party to the XYZ bar. The XYZ staff were very awesome, accommodating an extra hundred patrons and getting an extra bartender. And they were very nice about it. Unfortunately, the bar was full, so I had to lead a bunch of introverts in the fine art of taking over an establishment. We walked in, started talking, I encouraged people to sit down in empty spots on the couches. They did a very admirable job of taking over the back. I got the stunningly adorable akashayi a seat and a drink, before I taked to the people sitting with us. They were a couple who had moved from Florida to San Francisco, and a man from New York who was quite the boor. The man in the couple knew the New Yorker and seemed quite embarassed about him. After twenty minutes of conversation, they excused themselves and bid us good night. This gave us plenty of seating space to talk about geeky things until the manager kindly kicked us out. I made sure Akasha got safely to her hostel and then took a taxi back to the guest room. It was quite the challenge to direct the cab driver, since I had lost the directions back, but I managed!

Last night I uploaded the last major pieces of Xorg 7.0 to experimental, including the server itself. Today I came home and found that Joerg Jaspert had already approved them to go in. Big thanks for him for processing these things in record time. The packages currently only have a few of our Debian-specific fixes applied, and the next major step before uploading to unstable will be to get those ported from 6.9 to 7.0, and also to pull in patches like benh's radeon patch that fixes a lot of crashes in 6.9. As things stand now though, you can pull the packages from experimental for i386 and be running Xorg 7.0 in all its modularized glory. Hopefully a few of you version junkies will try them out and report bugs so we can hammer them in to shape for release!

I wanted to give another note of thanks to Eugene Konev. Eugene helped out quite a bit in the past, getting 6.8 and 6.9 in good shape for Debian. For 7.0, I had done a pretty poor job on the xfonts and he put in a ton of effort to polish them up. In addition, he packaged xdm and even ported all the patches for monolith over to that. He really helped me get this last bit over the hill, and he deserves a lot of credit for it.

I'm feeling pretty good about this because it represents the end of about a year's worth of work. I won't feel like it's the end until a set of packages I'm happy with ends up in testing, but until recently I wasn't sure I'd be able to get this far in time for etch. Yet somehow, here I am, looking like we'll definitely be shipping modular Xorg with etch. There's still this last 10% to go through though (and you know what they say about that) but I'm confident that the end of this task is in sight and I can start to move Debian's X work from playing catch up to helping define the cutting edge. Hopefully with everything going on people will be getting excited about X again, get involved, and we can keep making cool things happen.

In order to get in into the only-english-planets world, I'm starting a new blog tag: "Sorry for my English". Yes, all the English staff will be here, waiting for your corrections. Who knows... may be, some day, I will learn the difference between each English verb conjugation.

Or, may be not, but will be funny :).

Today is the last day of my stay here in Edinburgh. I have already packed most of my things and am saying goodbye at work and at home today. I have almost finalised my internship report which I hopefully will finish this afternoon. With that finished, my work here is done. Tomorrow at 7:00 I will take the bus to the airport, check-in and depart at 9:25 (EasyJet flight 6921) and arrive at 12:00 on Schiphol Airport. I want to thank everyone for the great time I had here. Fairouz Kamareddine and Rob Nederpelt for arranging this internship, their supervision and guidance. My colleagues Manuel and Krzysztof for the productive and fun times we had. My “lunch friends”: Gonzalo, Manuel, Simone, Laurent, and more for the many laughs and discussions during lunch. My parents and friends for visiting me here and being interested in all my stories. I am ready to go home and would like to. But I also would like to stay here as well. Maybe, in the future I will be back… MathLang is not finished just yet :-).

During the last two months, the Debian Catalan localisation team has seen two of their major milestones completed, after some tough work. The group managed to release Sarge with a completely translated installer, but failed to provide a translation of the Install Manual, which was a regression for us, as it had been available in Woody. We didn't give up, and thanks to the stubborness of Miguel Gea and braindmg we slowly started translating the Sarge manual months after the release, so it could at least appear in the website. But progress was too slow, so we planned an online meeting for the beginnings of the year to try to complete the translation doing a whole lot of translations during a weekend. Soon after we learned that joeyh, fjp and the d-i team wanted to terminate Sarge d-i manual support in svn RSN, as they would start to make changes to the docs to reflect etch changes, but fortunately Frans agreed to give us a slightly extended deadline, if we agreed to finish the job by January 14th:

20:37 < CIA-7> debian-installer: fjp d-i * r33721
               /sarge/installer/doc/manual/ca/: Add Catalan translation as
               translators would like to finish it for Sarge and have promised
               to do so 14 Januari 2006 at the latest

I really didn't think we would be able to make 100% in just 10 days, but the team, assisted by a large number of minionsnew contributors that volunteered on #debian-catalan, managed to do it I believe a few days before the deadline. Guillem announced it on our list. Releasing etch with an up to date Catalan manual will be a lot easier, if we try to maintain it up to date as etch development carries on. The second milestone was yesterday's completion of the Catalan translation for all five levels of the etch debian-installer, after a year of no translation activity on that front, and months of braindmg bugging me to do my chunk of work. Although it's now showing a shiny 100%, there's a lot of review work to do, and polishing it should be our focus for the next release. I seem to have recovered some of my interest in translations. That's good, because GNOME 2.14 is around the corner, and it wouldn't be fair for Josep if he ends up doing all the job. :) Also, I've been quietly working with a group of people at Softcatal in a project that will probably have lots of press in our community. It's not public yet though, but I hope that it'll be announced in the next few weeks.

About a week ago, we spent some time calling, e-mailing, and visiting family and friends. Here are some of the things we heard from various people:

"Really? Good." "Oh! Congratulations!" "Happy Congratulations!" *uncertain nervous silence* "I'm happy for both of you." "HOLY COW!" "Wow!" (Then some excited laughter) "I wondered. How are you feeling?" "That's sweet. Thank you [for calling]. You'll be great parents." "That's very exciting." ... "We'll have to get out the grandparent mugs!" "Oh, I'm just so thrilled! My first great grandchild!" "WOW! IS LIFE EVER EXCITING! Blessings to all three of you!" "Did I hear you right? Everyone -- TERAH'S PREGNANT!"

Yes, you did hear right! Terah is pregnant! She's due in October. This will be our first child. We're pretty excited! And also a little nervous. And trying to figure out how to arrange our house -- its floorplan isn't the most convenient for young children. 2006 is certainly going to be an exciting year!

In tonight's dinstall run, new versions of epiphany and yelp will enter unstable, built against xulrunner. This means that finally, gnome will be installable without a mozilla-browser dependency. Packages using XUL are now linked to correctly versioned libraries, that also use the system versions of libraries wherever possible. This is hopefully the end of a long-standing history of various problems with mozilla.

Thanks a lot to glandium for his huge work on xulrunner.

There have been a couple of Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 reviews. They all have one thing in common - they are pretty much dismissive. A couple of insightful postings:

• I(E7) coulda been a contender ... (Kurt Cagle)
• Stop Stop Stop Hurting The Internet (Jonathan 'Wolf' Rentzsch)
• More people underwhelmed by RSS Support in IE7 (Dare Obasanjo)

Some memorable quotes:

Is it just me, or does this look like a GUI widget test demo? 3 different styles of buttons, in various colors, in seemingly random arrangement. Tabs squished in between other semi-related buttons. - Leslie Michael Orchard

my god, they've made XP's Fisher Price look good

Apparently, IE7 still has only limited support for the current web standards such as RSS (yes, it can display the headlines, but it's totally useless as RSS aggregator), XHTML (you know, this six year old HTML standard which plays nicely with XML) or the SVG vector graphics format you can use with Firefox or an Adobe Plugin to IE6 (which was recently required to see the graphs at Google Webstats, and will likely be used in new versions of Google Maps to further improve speed and display quality - on browsers that support it only, of course). The UI seems to be a test run for the next office generation - they've remove the menu... Oh, and it seems rather unlikely that IE will see such a big community with tons of extensions (you name it, someone already did it) like Firefox and Thunderbird do. Still it likely is an improvement of the current IE versions, which fail to adhere to pretty much any standard. But it won't be the big selling point for users to switch to Vista.

Currently four Japanese will attend Debconf6; Junichi Uekawa (you know him well), Nobuhiro Iwamatsu (SuperH guy), Yukiharu Yabuki (was working at OpenSource SIer company) and me. Today I reserved an air ticket of Nobuhiro and me. After Debconf, we'd like to visit Vancouver also.

5/12 17:15 NRT-16:40 YTO (staying at YTO[Toronto])
5/13 09:00 YTO-12:45 MEX
5/22 14:10 MEX-19:45 YTO (staying at YTO)
5/23 08:00 YTO-09:57 YVR (staying at YVR[Vancouver])
5/24 13:10 YVR-5/25 15:25 NRT

It seems Apple is having more and more severe problems lately, MacOS viruses and worms start popping up and spreading on a larger scale... Michael Lehn has now discovered that Apple Safari can be tricked into automatically downloading and executing arbitrary shell scripts. No need to mention what harm this can cause, especially if you are stupid enough to browse the web as root (or whatever Apple calls their superuser). The behaviour to automatically open downloaded "trusted" files in a respective application is the default in Safari, which is obviously not the brightest idea Apple ever had. This is not an Apple-only problem, though. I really wonder why so many people, be it developers or users, are willing to sacrifice security for some crappy "feature"... (via Digg)

I believe in a better world, he said.
I don't gamble, she replied.
I wouldn't bet on it either, he replied, but it can't get any worse, can it?
We have to chose between bad and bedeviled, she replied.

I'd better go to bed. Tomorrow will be better, the author thought, and off he went into his bedding.

Beep, the alarm clock said.

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

I’ve prepared amaroK 1.4-beta1 packages and uploaded them to experimental (a copy is available here). I recommend you to have a look at the changelog ; that way you’re more likely to discover the stuff that’s interesting to you. As an example: “Optionally update playcount for items played on iPod and submit them to last.fm and synchronize ratings between amaroK and iPod”. Note that you’ll need ruby installed to download lyrics now (feel free to reimplement the script in Python if you wish!), and that this version will rebuild your collection. If you can report bugs directly to upstream’s bugzilla, that’d be great (the packages are unstripped, btw). NP: Bergman, Enigmas in your hand