Martin F. Krafft writes about Firefox's un-UNIX-like behavior. I mostly agree with him. Aside from the X forwarding bug in the remote implementation (which has been reported numerous times already), the main problem is the inconsistency in the interface. If I run firefox from the command line everything works fine and it behaves like a normal UNIX application (ie taking over the terminal unless I background it). If I go to another terminal and run firefox file:///tmp/foo.html, this will open a new window or tab in Firefox and immediately exits. This is very un-UNIX-like, there's no way to know if the program is actually exiting or if it's just launching a new window. These leads to fun bugs with programs that call firefox as an external viewer (see #278990 and #284174). If running firefox causes it to connect to an already running instance, it should wait(2) on that process, since that would make a lot more sense from the UNIX perspective (and perhaps a -remote flag to have the "fire-and-forget" functionality we have now, because that does make sense in some situations too).

As far as I'm concerned the whole profile mechanism is a waste of code and a hold over from the old Netscape days, for people without multiuser systems. It should be dropped completely. Although we'd probably need to be able to run multiple Firefox processes on the same profile before it could be stripped out.

There is definitely a strong Windows mentality that pervades Firefox. I still remember when the extension mechanism was first introduced back in 0.9 and you needed to run as root (or the Administrator under Windows) for it to work properly. Madness. Although UNIX does seem to be more suited to an environment where processes are lightweight and short-lived. Big, monolithic applications are a more recent phenomenon.

That's nice. Apparently SUSE/Novell are planning to no longer include any proprietary (kernel) drivers in their Linux distributions. (Most of) the kernel developers dislike binary drivers in the kernel and SUSE/Novell are clearly supporting the developers with their move. Although they plan a system for including binary drivers from userspace somehow, I still think this is a good sign. I hope it will help to convince some hardware manufacturers to release the source code of some of their (now) proprietary drivers... This whole debate was started by Arjan van de Ven's original post to the LKML in December 2005, AFAIK. (via Heise)

Yesterday, one user of whitelister reported me a bug. That made my day : this meant that there was actually users in the world that used whitelister, and thought it worth the effort to report a bug ! It motivated me to fix a couple of problems that I knew where there, and I released (and uploaded) a new version yesterday. I have to mention that whitelister will also soon be in production of a quite big mail system (even if not a FAI, we talk about MX that do more than 300k mails per week, which is not nothing). I have to mention that I also changed the license to BSD, I'm quite afraid of the direction the GPL is taking, and BSD is definitely better, spam is a too big problem, and if people want to do money with my idea, let them do it, if that can stop spam GPL has no sense at all when you don't plan to exploit the software yourself. When I'll release 1.0 (there is a couple of things I'd like to fix in how the configuration file is handled before) I'll try to give some public visibility to the project, because I really think it's based on a really good idea.

I already got some feedback about the "device driver check CD"-thing. People got confused about it, so I will tell you a bit more about my intentions (although I wanted to start doing this not until next week, duuh). What is wrong with current live systems? There are already several Debian-based live systems and they are doing a great job. But, from the Debian perspective, most of them have one or more of the following disadvantages:

• They are unofficial projects, developed outside of Debian.
• They mix different distributions, e.g. testing and unstable.
• They support i386 only.
• They change package's behavior and/or appearance by stripping them down to save space.
• They including unofficial packages.
• They ship custom kernels with additional patches not part of Debian.
• They are large and slow due to their sheer size and thus not suitable for rescue issues.
• They are not available in different flavours, e.g. CDs, DVDs, USB-stick and netboot images

Why create our own live system? Debian is the Universal Operating System: IMHO we should have an official live system for showing arround and to officially represent the true, one and only Debian system with the following main advantages:

• It's an official Debian subproject.
• It reflects the (current) state of one distribution.
• It runs on as much architectures as possible.
• It consists of unchanged Debian packages only.
• It does not contain any unofficial package.
• It uses an unaltered Debian kernel-image with no additional patches (except from live system specific ones which maybe required).

Creating the Debian Live framework Such a life system framework would allow to create different images for different scenarios:

• A small "base-system" for rescue purposes.
• A normal "desktop-system" for demonstration purposes.
• A special "diagnose-system" for device functionallity and detection purposes.

The last one is this "confusing" thing I mentioned before. Wouldn't it be nice to have a live system to easy detect hardware? Imagine, you could take such an image, burn it on a CD or copy it on a USB-stick, go to your hardware shop and boot it. Since this system would use only official Debian packages, you can easily verify if your favourite piece of hardware is supported by Debian. Doubts like "it runs with Knoppix, so hopefully it runs with Debian too" are history by that. Maybe someone could implement then some sort of application which checks the hardware against Kenshis Debian GNU/Linux hardware compatibility list and displays some sort of report about the compatibility level of the tested hardware. I will definitely work on that goal. But first, I have to do a bit of research about the best techniques and create the framework arround it... Thanks to Myon for setting up the record live.debian.net.

Let me point you to a couple of British TV series that I have discovered this year and loved.

* The old: After watching the two seasons of Faulty Towers, a British Comedy from the 70s with John Cleese (Monty Python), I will never be able to thank Lars enough for discovering it to me.

* The new: I am now completely hooked to The IT Crowd. I specially liked the first Episode. Geek humor on TV (and done right)? Yes! Absolutely drolling

Roland, you are stealing my thunder! *grr* Approximately three weeks ago, I decided to start the "Debian Live" initiative in my semester break - first unofficial, then trying to bring it into Debian and become an official subproject. One of the most important reason for me is having excately such a "device driver check CD"... However, today is the first day of my break and I will start working on it with the beginning of the next week.

Today's Avahi Love posting covers publishing SFTP servers. My NAS box runs SSH, so I can use the ssh: method in gnome-vfs to browse the filesystem (it uses SFTP). The magic service file is:

<?xml version="1.0" standalone='no'?>
<service-group>
  <name replace-wildcards="yes">Remote Files on %h</name>
  <service>
    <type>_sftp-ssh._tcp</type>
    <port>22</port>
  </service>
</service-group>

Restart Avahi and then with a suitable Avahi-enabled gnome-vfs, there will be entries in Places → Network Servers for each machine that file is installed on. Kick arse!

My Top Five Reasons as to why I don't update the information for Sound Juicer in GnomeFiles often:

1. No programmatic way of uploading new versions. Freshmeat has a XML-RPC interface and sample implementation, freshmeat-submit. This means I could integrate posting new versions into my make release script, which also uploads source tarballs to ftp.gnome.org and puts the latest DOAP file on burtonini.com. Ideally GnomeFiles will let me specify a DOAP URL and the server will fetch it regularly, updating the information when it changes.
2. When adding a new version I need to fill in the download location field from scratch. For every Sound Juicer release this is going to look like http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gnome/source/sound-juicer/2.[something]/sound-juicer-2.[something].tar.gz. It's a good assumption that if one version was at some URL, the next version will be at a very similar URL, so why not pre-fill that field with the previous version's URL? Freshmeat does this, and it turns typing in a long URL into changing a single number.
3. I need to fill in the file size of the file at the URL. Why can't the server do that? If the download is over HTTP it could do a HEAD request and extract the Content-Length header.
4. No support for branches. There are two branches of Sound Juicer development at any moment: stable and development. I have to pick one of these to publish, so am either publishing only the stable release, or the development releases. People who want to know about the other releases can't find this information out.
5. This one is petty, but it bugged me. Description of the file to download eg. "Binary" or "gnomefiles.org Server". One of those is a description of the file, the other is a description of the site.

NP: Black Diamond, Angie Stone

My father wanted to try out b2evolution. Oh my god... He was not able to login. With the help of ethereal we found out that b2evolution uses the following line of code to determine your cookie domain:

$cookie_domain = ($basehost == 'localhost') ? '' : '.'. $basehost;

which will not work when you have a local net with hostnames such as "linux1" because this tries to restrict the cookie to .linux1. Changing it to

$cookie_domain = '';

worked like a charm. Why is there not a single PHP program that just works? Is it the language that invites you to write crappy code, or is it the users of PHP that have no clue?

Returned from Cambridge tonight, back at work now. The weekend was really great, a more detailed report (and maybe a few pictures, depends on how they turned out) will follow once I slept, cleared my backlog and did the things I'd actually planned to do on the plane/train/coach. (Gaaah, I want my laptop back!)
For now I'd just like to let you know that I made it there and back without any problems, the workshop was great and I would like to thank everyone involved. Cheers! :)

PS: I arrived quite late or rather early this morning, I am dead tired, watching Amaya's video of her cats comfortably lolling around on a cosy blanket on a heater does *not* help! *whimper*

zsh: can't write history file /root/.zsh/history You'll get this error message on logout when your ssh login is to a userid which may not write your home directory (such as staff_t, when logging into root whose files usually are sysadm_home_r). Here's a simple workaround for you zsh users:

if id   grep -q sysadm_r; then
        export SAVEHIST=1500
        export HISTFILE=~/.zsh/history
        export HISTSIZE=1500
fi

This will only enable history when you are sysadm_r. Bash users probably can use

if ! id   grep -q sysadm_r; then
       shopt -u cmdhist
fi

I went to the cinema yesterday evening, and not having a clear idea of which film we wanted to watch, we decided for Manuale D'Amore, an Italian movie. It was great, funny almost all the time but with very emotive moments, all them mixed very well. The history is very simple. The movie introduces different couples that are in four different moments of their love: falling in love, the crisis, the traition and being abandoned. Every chapter is very well driven, and the actors play fairly well their roles. This movie, and the last one I watched, Los 2 lados de la cama, are good examples of European cinema very well made. In my opinion, if European cinema had followed this path more often, and with a bit more advertising, it will get more success than now, in which there are a lot of movies made trying to be different. P.S: I HATE people eating nachos in theaters.

To all of you who have root on LVM: Do not assume it is a good idea to make a snapshot of your current root volume and then to reboot with that as root. Unless you have dm-snapshot compiled in your kernel or on your initrd, it will not work. In an unrelated message, I'm writing a bootable CD for my desktop right now, because it won't boot currently. Hmm, maybe they are related after all. Next time, I'll just boot with /bin/bash as my shell, and pivot_root into the snapshot device (which I will then create on the fly). That should work.

Sometimes i ask me about the sense of too much work, too many pending tasks and getting involved in more things i can do. Perhaps i am the type of people that can not say "no" when somebody ask me to do something.

I think there are two type of people from the point of view of creativity and contribution of contents , providers and consumers, servers and clients ;-). Some of my friends are only consumers, they do not want to provide anything of this type of things (documents, images, events, aplications, theathre, etc.), they even think that near people that is creating and contributing are going to be in trouble and are going to have a lot of work that will prevent to have time to dedicate it to they themselves. And perhaps they are right.

But somebody will have it to do.

Since i can remember, i have been in the side of the "servers". In the theater of the school, in the choir of the church, developing aplications, coordinating free network projects, etc.

And i know i have lost a lot of experiences in the side of the "clients". I am surprised of the amount of things that I am losing myself not being an Internet "consumer" or a theater "consumer" or a computer "consumer".

But somebody will have it to do.

Have a good day.

Since SuSE closes the security support two years after release and the recent KDE JavaShit remote code execution hole wasn’t patched as fast as I would have expected it (the patch came out after the upgrade I’m writing about here) in the SuSE 9.0 which was installed on my 2.66 GHz AMD desktop at work (it started as in 2002 as a SuSE 7.3 on a 400 MHz box and has been upgraded since then to 8.0, 8.2 and 9.0 IIRC), I decided, it’s now really time to upgrade to SuSE 10.0. (Although 10.1 will be out soon, I just don’t want to wait for it.) And since my boss only wants SuSE boxes and neither Debian (which I would prefer) nor Gentoo (which a colleague prefers), I couldn’t simply install Sarge on this box although I would have chosen that option if it would have been available. Since my former SuSE experiences told me that this would mean a lot of trouble, I took notes from the beginning, once for the blog and once for my boss to show him, that most trouble doesn’t come from me being a power user used to being allowed to touch any config file (like I am on Debian). Preparations So I begin with the preparations: Starting the 400 MHz Debian Woody box on my desktop (whose operating system is more than a year older than SuSE 9.0 and still has security support, yeah!) I usually need to build custom Debian packages for customers. There I could chat in IRC and took notes while trying to upgrade and get the whole thing working again. When everything was ready, I put the SuSE DVD in — just to notice, that it’s just a CD-ROM. So I put the SuSE 10.0 CD1 in the CD-ROM drive and typed “sudo shutdown -r now” in the shell. The box starts shutting down and tells me:

Please stand by while rebooting the system…

But it didn’t reboot. I waited for several minutes, nothing happend. Well, seems as if the SuSE upgrade already starts as I expect it to end: Horrible. Read more…

Yesterday I noticed that Epiphany in Ubuntu (and probably Debian too) is now build with Zeroconf support, which means it will detect any web sites exported over Zeroconf and add them to the bookmarks. This totally rocks, as instead of having a number of bookmarks for various administration pages on my machines, the machines can export them over Zeroconf and when I am at home and those machines are on, they'll appear magically. The first step to having Zeroconf enlightenment is to ensure avahi-daemon is installed on all machines. It doesn't matter if there are some machines that it cannot be installed on (i.e. router running embedded software), as other machines can publish their name and services on their behalf. The first service I published is the web-based admin pages for my printer. The printer is connected to a small server called Melchett (a Buffalo LinkStation) which is running CUPS. By creating /etc/avahi/services/cups.service on Melchett with the following contents, the web site is published:

<?xml version="1.0" standalone='no'?>
<!DOCTYPE service-group SYSTEM "avahi-service.dtd">
<service-group>
  <name>Epson Stylus Photo R220 Admin</name>
  <service>
    <type>_http._tcp</type>
    <port>631</port>
    <txt-record>path=/printers/epson-stylus-photo-r220</txt-record>
  </service>
</service-group>

Each .service file in /etc/avahi/services defines a group of services. A group has a name, and a set of services. Each service has a number of properties:

Type

Specifies what the type of the service is (_http._tcp is HTTP over TCP). There is a canonical list of types available. This is a required element.

Port

What port the service is listening on. This is a required element, there is no default port 80 for _http._tcp services.

Text Record

This sets arbitary key-value pairs, which are interpreted on a per-service manner. For _http._tcp services the valid keys are u (username), p (password) and path.

There are also domain-name and host-name properties, but these are not used in this service description as the service is on the local machine. In summary, you can see that I have specified that there is a web page accessible via HTTP on this machine, available on port 631 at the path /printers/epson-stylus-photo-r220. When other machines search the network for web pages they'll find this service entry (with the hostname properties filled in by Avahi), and generate the URL http://melchett.local:631/printers/epson-stylus-photo-r220 A quick pop into Epiphany shows that this is indeed the case, there is now a Local Sites category in the bookmarks containing Epson Stylus Photo R220 Admin. There is one other thing I need to explain: how to publish services on behalf of other machines. Until this afternoon this required something to run avahi-publish-address to give the machine a Zeroconf name, but this afternnon Trent committed static name mapping to Avahi. When this is in a released version, I'll continue this article.

Our Chair of Software Engineering at the ETH Zurich is addicted to the Eiffel programming language. Thus, a PhD student is working on an Eiffel Multimedia Framework, named EiffelMedia, and I'm doing the Debian packaging. After working the second year with Eiffel stuff now, I can say that packaging Eiffel programs (not the language itself) is a major PITA, with respect to the following two aspects: Eiffel is different

• Build tool is an Ant clone written in Eiffel, called geant (part of Gobo Eiffel).
  
  
• Paths are not hardcoded into the binaries, they are set by environment variables. You guessed it right - it's not a bug, it's a feature.
  
  
• There is no Eiffel compiler, just Eiffel-to-C wrappers which then issue the compilation to objectcode by a C compiler. Generating executables from Eiffel sources takes longer than from any other language.

Eiffel is non-free

There are not one... not two... but three incompatible Eiffel compilers arround. Oh yeah...

• EiffelStudio, developed by Betrand Meyers company Eiffel Software (formerly known as Interactive Software Engineering) reflects the reference implementation of the Eiffel language. Last summer, Eiffel was accepted as ECMA standard 367. Version 5.6 of EiffelStudio released back in fall 2005 does implement this standard.
  
  EiffelStudio is proprietary software (speaking of EiffelStudio means actually EiffelStudio Free Edition). Last year, I bitched Eiffel Softwares employees for about 3 month continuously to change the EULA for allowing non-modified redistribution. Thanks to be not ignored by Larry Miller from Eiffel Software, in the beginning of 2005 the EULA was changed and I could provide packages publicly. Theoretically, I could have moved them over to Debian non-free, but it's quite a large piece of software (190MB, source and binary packages) and the important parts (compiler and IDE) are still provided binary-only (so the archive would have to carry three arch specific version, makes 570MB in total per revision), thus no upload was considered. Additionally, EiffelStudio is available on Linux only for the i386, powerpc and amd64 architectures. All other platforms where Linux runs on are not supported.
  
  Another annoying problem with EiffelStudio is its nasty disclaimer flooding allover the buildlogs. It's built into every binary and displayed as the first 19 lines of every output of those:
  

  This program has been produced with a demo or non-commercial version
  of ISE EiffelStudio, the full lifecycle object-oriented development
  environment from Eiffel Software.
  This version is reserved for non-production use of Eiffel. Any other
  use requires purchase of a license.
  Eiffel Software offers commercial and academic licenses and
  support/maintenance contracts covering diverse needs.
  For more information please contact
  Eiffel Software at the address below or consult the Eiffel products page
  at http://www.eiffel.com/products/.
          Eiffel Software
          356 Storke Road
          Goleta CA 93117 USA 
          Telephone 805-685-1006, Fax 805-685-6869
          E-mail sales@eiffel.com
          http://www.eiffel.com
  

  This could have been "designed" a bit more discreet. However, as I do have to use wrapper scripts anyways for all binaries in the packages of any Eiffel program, I stripped that out by the occasion.
  
  
• Visual Eiffel developed by Object Tools was a proprietary Eiffel IDE and compiler suite. In November 2004, the compiler and the standard library were made free and are licensed under GPL.
  
  Unfortunately it was never fully compatible to EiffelStudio, actually years behind. It's not suprising that the project seemed never to be alive. Because it's still stuck with an old Eiffel language specification, it's even less useful today than it ever was.
  
  
• SmartEiffel (formerly know as SmallEiffel), developed by the LORIA Laboratory is a GPL licensed Eiffel compiler.
  
  But SmartEiffel does not and will not implement the recently published Eiffel ECMA standardization (roumors has it that they fork the Eiffel language in some essential parts caused by some technical and/or personal missunderstandings between Bertrand Meyer and the leader of the development team of SmartEiffel, they know each other from earlier).

Except from some fundamental programs like Gobo Eiffel or the Eiffel Wrapper Generator (they support both all three compilers), nearly all programs are written according to the current Eiffel specifcation. So there is no real alternative to the proprietary EiffelStudio. Beeing binary-only is a major drawback too: EiffelStudio on Linux/powerpc is dynamically compiled against glibc-2.3.5, but Sarge has glibc-2.3.4. So one needs a backport of glibc, which taints the system in an unneccessary and stupid way. Please: Eiffel Software, if you are reading this, open the sources of EiffelStudio now and turn it into free software, for the greater good of us all. Make additional ports to other architectures possible and allow us, the packagers and upstreams of Eiffel programs, to drop the cumbersome support for other ancient Eiffel compilers. Let's focus us to one, single implementation and improve it.

So, we've all had the e-mails promising us millions... and we all know they're a scam... it appears that now we have ICQ people trying to solicit money...

10:47 <@root> Message from unknown ICQ handle 204857947:
10:47 <@root> Hello, i have a problem, i have a rent debt for apartment where i 
              live, and i cant fix it. Im trying to find somebody who will 
              understand my situation and will agree to help me with money what i 
              need. Maybe you can help ?

(yes, I use bitlbee, yes this is a message from someone that I don't know, yes it just seemed weird to me...)