Don t you love it when it looks simple and then it is actually simple, but you are not up to the task?

I am loving the xlibs-dev transition, really, I mean it! Two of my packages, fkiss and xdigger got bit by this issue, and I immediately fixed the bugs with a little help from a script provided by Moritz Muehlenhoff. really cool.

So I follow instructions in The Debian Wiki, run the script, check with pbuilder, upload and profit! Fun! End of world hunger! Err, almost. So I get all excited and decide to look at the bugs. And I find a nice one: #346347. Not bad, gpsim FTBFS, Luk also took a look at it and didn t really like what he saw, it neede no xlibs-dev or substitute for them and sitll FTBFS.

But wait! Just by looking at gpsim s bugs page, I find out that there s a New Upstream Version(tm) (#248931) available since 1 year and 241 day ago. Also, NMUs that have not been acknowledged for as long as almost two years... Not nice. And there s even a patch (#345215) for building it on, GNU/kFreeBSD... how sexy!

So I get all obsessive about it. But newer upstream needs a newer libgtkextra-dev version (#347397), which of course was not packaged (don't we all love Murphy?) and that s where I am stuck at. I loathe libraries. But still I gave it a try. And failed. Several times.

Fun? Yes! Profit? Nope! Do you want to take a look at it? Easy. It s all here.

Amaya also FTBFS. And I want to NMU amaya. Badly. Since I first heard about amaya, and realized that I am named after a web browser (sucky as it might be) and after getting many IRC highlights (every time that amaya FTBFS is mentioned on IRC), I have been wanting to use/adopt/NMU it. Amaya NMUs amaya, how recursive can it get?

I will go to bed now, and try not to keep thinking about it, not because I want to become an early riser, Gunnar, no need to worry! But reading about it I thought it would be healthier for me to wake up everyday at the same hour, so that s all I am aiming for. If you know me, you might be rolling on the floor laughing as you read this. So am I! But, if you know me, keep in mind that I have been drinking coffee with no sugar since August... Hey! You are not laughing anymore?

Vi and Emacs are doing fine. Emacs was not pregnant after all, or so the vet told me. It was hard to see her slowly become herself after surgery. Vi was perfectly OK all along, but she looked terrible. Anyway, she felt better by 6am the next day and came to bed, perfectly groomed, and purring like nothing had happened. A week has passed and she has started doing the gory part today... she s biting away the scar tissue, and it bleeds a bit. Oh my Spaghetti Monster!

I just came back from the vet. I left Vi and Emacs there and will pick them up after work, as today they will be spayed and neutered (450 EUR total). I am all shaky inside.
My little cats! (Well, not so little, as Emacs started acting like if she was in heat only a few hours before I had to take a plane for my Holidays, so I guess she is not so little anymore, nor is Vi, who seemed completely fascinated by her new behavior. Anyway, my vet knew this would happen one month in advance, when we were arranging an appointment for the surgery that will be performed today).

Good luck, my babies!

I will survive Xmas!

(Not safe for work)

Sorry, but I just couldn’t resist to at least once use FTWCA. (I guess it will become some kind of meme on Planet Debian and the Debian lists the one or the other way round… (And isn’t “meme” just another name for running gag? ;-) Via dyfa I found a page with very impressive optical illusions in interior design just resulting from the right perspective. Unfortunately my flat is way to small for such a cool decoration. (These orange holes would fit perfectly regarding the colour. :-)

Today I was running out the door chasing the dog. The dog saw a person walking on the street and ran up to see her. I managed to get a hold on the dog and bring her home, but on the way back, theres this mini slope. Of course I'm bringing dog back inside and didn't think of this and get my sneakers covered in mud as there is a big ditch at the bottom. :(

So here's my instructions on washing shoes:

- First toss them in the washing machine on a low water level setting. Add in a bit of laundry detergent to help get the stink and mud out.
- Next take them out and stuff them with newspaper. Don't let the chunks of newspaper be too thick or it will not absorb as well. Leave newspaper in both shoes for 30-45 minutes.
- Now its time to let them air dry. The best approach is to put a fan in front of them. The more power the faster they dry. Right where I live right now, its the middle of a heat wave. So I realized the big air conditioning fan and motor outside is going around 24/7 and with huge amounts of hot air. If you take the latter approach, the shoes are usually dry with 1.5-2 hours, especially since it runs at least 10000 rpm. Otherwise the in house approach may take 4-6 hours. Also note that the air blown out from under your refrigerator is also good.

So in under 3 hours you can have your shoes squeaky clean with a nice smell, and be dry.

Friday my coach (very computer illiterate, maybe illiterate too) asked me to print out an access database of names. He hands it to me on a cd, and says Monday I want to see it printed out.

First I attack it with mdbtools and find there are 30 tables, which am I to choose? I look through all of them and find Names which seems to have what he wanted. I dumped it in CSV to a file and then did my magic with awk to get names addresses and zip codes. Of course with handy cups-pdf installed I run it through pdfprint. It turns out theres 192 pages. I say fuck that and leave it as is in a pdf and email it to him.

Of course that couldn't be the end. I get a response back from the mailserver tailing me his email account is full. Spectacular, he must have a quota of 5mb for these crap school accounts. So I then upload it to my webserver, send him another email saying its there and thats what happened. All will be found out tomorrow. M$ Access suuuuuuuuucks.

Interesting commentary by Chinese documentary filmmaker Hao Wu on Marketplace. Wu explains that it is not possible to obtain most films in China except as pirated versions, and when there are official legal releases they are edited and censored by the government. If the United States is successful in getting China to devote substantial police resources to enforcement of international copyright law, a perhaps unintentional side effect is that access to information and openness will be squelched. This raises the question of whether it is really in Hollywood’s long term interest to crack down on piracy in otherwise repressive regimes. It’s at least an interesting perspective to bring to the issue that I hadn’t really considered.

Today, a Demonstration against copyright law changes is happening. Never demonstrated before, I think this will turn into a interesting experience.

Debcamp has been slightly rough, but apparently not rough enough. Of all the things that have not gone perfectly, I heard most complaints when our web cam was down:



Other random notices:

* Foreigners like sauna but not Salmiakki (a kind of Licorice)
* Nobody has complained about missing lamps during nighttime
* April 1st was a while ago, right?

And as last point, I would like to remind debcampers, that from saturday morning breakfast will be available 08.00 -> 09.00 At TF, instead of all day at dorms. Also, for the weekend, the lunch time is limited from 11.00 -> 14.00. For more details, refer to the Food page at debconf site.

Automatic language identification: http://grid.let.rug.nl/~vannoord/TextCat/Demo/textcat.html -Insanely cool.

I remember I saw that site a long time ago last time. Finding it again turned out to be very hard. Googling for "automatic language identification demo" and variants turned out all kinds of interesting papers, but not this site. If I would have tried with "language guesser", I would have found it without needing to resort to search for the papers cited on the page... Google is still not magic.

About the mandatory comment issue, I agree VERY much with Joey. I think the SCC name is unfortunate, probably something like "ports" would better. I'd also like believe that many of the ports will become more lively when they get administrated on scc site by the actual porters instead of the overworked d-i and debian infrastructure team. This of course up to how many people (and vendors!) care about their specific arch, to actually work for it.

And about all the "universal OS" and "what about users" screams... I'm almost speechless. What about the _current_ X86 and powerpc users with their recent hardware that isn't supported by woody? We have a lot more X86 users currently without stable security support than there are woody users of the archs proposed to be moved to SCC.

Roland Fails at homework, and Wouter gets detention for copying Rolands homework. Any given spam detection method is workaroundable, but uribl happens to be one the hardest ones so far.

What Roland is missing, is that spamassassin 3.0:s uribl module checks against the domain names too. So if cheap-placebo-meds.biz points to zombie servers at unblacklisted ip addressess, It will still get a score if cheap-placebo-meds.biz is already blacklisted as a domain.

They could still drop the domain from the url entirely, and just add an zombie IP, but that would be terribly unreliable. The zombie-hosted sites I have seen usually had 10-15 round-robin addressess, of which 2-3 actually responded.

Another escalation spammers could do is to buy (more) throwaway domains. But there is already work to detect fresh/throway domains and list them, since typically spammer domains are less than one month old.

But if zombie hosted spammer sites come a big problem, the uribl module can check against dial-up blacklists as well, of course at the great annoyance of everyone who has web site on their dial-up and advertisize it to their friends via email...

What spammers will probably start doing, is setting up (more) gateway/redirection sites on various free webspace sites like geocities, or start obfuscating their addressess (isn't that poetic justice: "please go to cheap dash meds 123 dot biz". In any case, their links will look more suspicous than before, which hopefully will damage their sales.

In other news, excuse me, it's nice that GNU has locales and standard ways of doing things, but does /bin/true really need all this??

--lifeish--
Moving, short summer holiday, back to work, being left stranded in Finland while my girlfriend will be studying in Japan for almost an year - Waaaaahhhh :-( On the bright side nobody is here to complain if I sit half-dressed an entire rainy saturday in front of my laptop.
--nerdish--


So Linux must suck because I don't have A Linux desktop system at home?
Well, the only reason there is no desktop system here is that I hate big and noisy traditional desktops. The other possibility is that my thinkpad is slowly taking control of me. Still Happily running Linux on my laptop, wlan AP, dsl router and mythTV PVR box. I'm beginning to doubt if I need a PVR anyway, there simply isn't any worthy content on TV.

Now, suppose you get a new laptop and a desktop, more time will be wasted installing Linux on the laptop? Wrong. The Ibm Thinkpad x40 installed pretty much without a glitch. Of course, to avoid the problems mjg59 had I chose a x40 with builtin wlan, so I saved my from some grief I could have hit.

The desktop (Dell optiplex gx270) installed fine all the way to X - ok, so the frigging xfree86 config still doesn't work I thought. Again, wrong. After half a day of fighting, I got it in 640x480 resolution at 256 colors. But nothing better. A posting on the dell forums revealed the cause - Dell has been shipping machines with broken bios for half an year! Am I the only one this gives the creepy "we support only windows" feeling? Unsuprisingly, the suggested BIOS downgrade refused. So I was stuck for some days with 640x480. Finally. finding out Christian Zietz had written a hack around it, I actually have an usable desktop!

Personally, using d-i has been a more pleasant experience than bootfloppies ever was. Thanks for everyone involved!

On the embedded hardware front I have not been as frustrated as liw. Trimming a minimal debian which still has all the needed hardware support and fits into the memory limits _is_ on the other hand frustrating - netbase drags an inetd and bluez drags in gconf,orbit and almost half of gnome(!).

For some odd reason, nobody seems to believe me, when I tell them that I signed today papers for a job that would be basicly developing Debian. Grah. Anyways I am more than happy to leave coding propierty code based on Oracle databases.

So far, I know Scratchbox is the central point (This Article for a short introduction). I'm thinking of wetting my feet by experimenting an scratchbox based crosscompiling buildd. Now I need to find something really close to doorstep to get impressive speed increase numbers ;)

On the other hand, I'ts kinda scary that A hobby will become a job. Does this mean I need to invent a new hobby? I guess sports wouldn't be bad.

I noticed that I have become quite passionate in autoconfiguring vs force everyone to configure by hand discussions. It makes my heart bleed when I see someone suggesting that populating /etc/modules shouldn't be a problem for a newbie. Writing mails under strong emotions leads to harsher than necessary words, so I guess need to chill down. It's just software, like Liws Advocating Linux essay reminds.

After talking with some LinuxTag guys about which kind of talks are still missing for the upcoming LinuxTag, I submitted another proposal for a still only roughly sketched talk: KISS – Keep it simple and stupid, also on the web.

KISS – “Keep it simple and stupid” is an old and successful principle in the Unix world: Small and simple programs, doing only one thing, but they’re doing perfect, fast and reliable. This principle can also work on the web and make webservers or surf terminals out of already discharged computers.

I planned to show “simple” (or at least “simple to use”) tools like Blosxom or the Website Meta Language, a more slim webserver than Apache (e.g. fefe’s fnord or one of the ACME webservers thttpd, mini_httpd or micro_httpd), slim web-browsers (e.g. like Dillo, Opera, glinks, ViewML or Minimo) and one or more Linux distributions optimized for low end PCs. While thinking about low end PCs, usually the following distributions come to my mind: DeLi Linux, fli4l and Debian Woody. But none of them seems to fit for my talk as perfectly as I would like:

• DeLi Linux is no bad distribution, since it’s designed especially for 386 to Pentium I, but I have some strong disagreements with the maintainer of DeLi Linux, since he sees a very small package list as necessary requirement for a distribution for old PCs. He states that distributions for old PCs “don’t have that many harddisk space” (beyond other, more realistic arguments — but it seemed to be his main argument) while I see a rich package diversity as an quality criteria. (One of the reasons, why I like Debian and dislike Ubuntu.) So I’m not sure if I should present a very raped DeLi Linux to the audience, just to make it fit my needs, although I’m quite curious about his upcoming 0.7 release with the low end, KHTML based ViewML webbrowser. (Apart from me seeing PHP5 and KDE as a big nono on old PCs…)
• Although I still like Debian Woody very much (you know that old story… ;-), it is just too old for making a talk about how to turn old PCs into being usable again. Sarge would be fine, but it was suggested to showcase an easy and fast way to get something ready to run, and I can’t give the auditors a list of all the Debian packages with low resource consumption and therefore usable on low end PCs.
• I haven’t used it yet, but fli4l seems to be very good distribution to turn an old PC into a ISDN or DSL router, even without harddisk. The last time I had a look at fli4l, it used an Apache as (optional) webserver, which wouldn’t fit into my scheme, since I would like to show an alternative to Apache. But as I found out today the recently released version 3.0 of fli4l uses the already mentioned ACME mini_httpd. Cool! They’re on the right way! ;-) Unfortunately it only seems to be used for serving information pages about the fli4l status and not as common webserver. (Please correct me, if this is wrong! I would appreciate it, if I’m wrong at this point. :-)

Since I first read about viewml on the DeLi Linux page, I looked for Debian packages of viewml today. apt-cache search hasn’t found anything on Woody or Sarge and packages.debian.org is still down, so I used Google. I found out, that there at least was a viewml package in Debian since at least 2001, so I expect, it just didn’t make it to stable. But I also found this interesting page on a webserver called www.ubuntulite.org. Ubuntu Lite? That sounds very interesting, since I see Ubuntu not as the baddest idea (expect for it’s horribly resource hunger and only offering one package per application by default ;-), but having an Ubuntu derivative prepackaged for low end PCs and with several webbrowsers instead of only Epiphany (and probably Firefox, don’t they?) would be perfect for my purpose. So I’m currently downloading an Ubuntu Lite ISO and will give it a try on one of my Pentium MMX boxes. Unfortunately it doesn’t seem to support Pentium I or AMD K5 since Ubuntu itself only supports i686 and upwards. :-/ But this also means, that it’s no occasion for my Pentium I Compaq LTE 5100 (which I probably will name pony), but currently, after Bartosz’ recent post on Planet Debian, it looks like Debian GNU/kFreeBSD could also be an interesting OS, since it fits all requirements perfectly: Free, Modern, Exotic and all conveniences of Debian. ;-)

Now Playing: Jefferson Starship — We Built This City

Not owning a washing machine of your own does funny things to you. When I moved here, I knew that being without one I would have to cycle to the laundromat every time, carrying a huge backpack, wash my stuff, cycle back home with the wet cloths and hang them in the drying room in the basement. Compared to the hassle that it would be to get a washing machine, and considering I am only going to live here for half a year this seemed sensible. There are however a few things I did not know/consider:

• The afore mentioned half year is from September to March. Most of the time it's f***ing cold!
• A trecking backpack full of cloths is not too heavy, but a trecking backpack full of wet cloths is another matter.
• Wet cloths get awfully cold when being transported in winter and they are able to preserve that low temperature for a surprisingly long time (usually until the last sock is hung up).
• Hanging up two loads of super-freezy laundry does painful things to the tips of my fingers.
• The ability of my fingers to preserve cold temperature is in no way inferior to that of my laundry.
• The laundromat is not heated very well (maybe not at all).
• It is a very good idea, to sort your laundry before going to the laundromat. (Use backpack's separable compartments for that!) I am not overly bashfull, but there's nothing like a big funny looking guy interestedly watching you sorting through your underware
• In order to put off the afore mentioned inconveniences as long as possible I am totally willing to disregard any sense of style, fashion or non-idiocy I may have left (cloths-wise that is).

My day at the office has been pretty grand. I got to talk with a whole bunch of people about their problems and promised to look into some of them. Then I talked to someone about sales and marketting. Then I talked to Chris and we struggled with PHP. And finally, a chat with Tim about release management. It was like a day at the Montr al office, but with people who are less bouncy. I tried to smile at people and make them feel happier, at which I think I was mildly successful. Perhaps my motivational poster will help? I had some tasty ph for lunch at Ph Vi t which is a Vietnamese restaurant run by Cantonese people. It is also within walking distance of the office. Their soup was rather filling for a small portion and they had delicious spring rolls. Alas, they are not UltimateSpringRolls, but one can't expect to find those everywhere. A special bonus was that I got to talk with Deidra, in between happy bites of noodles and soup. It is now late and I guess I should be heading out. I was hoping to hang out with people after work, but they seem to have gone home. Oh well. So to pass the time, I released WvDial 1.55. Hurray!

As mentioned in my last entry, Livejournal have changed their url scheme to get around a problem in mozilla. The trouble is down to the -moz-binding CSS property. I'll repost a copy of the short lived posting to the lj_dev community earlier.

Discussing the URL Change As we recently announced in [info]news, we have changed the canonical URL of most journal, community, and syndicated content. While we did offer subdomains to Paid users in the past, this is now the canonical URL that we will link and redirect to for all journals. However, all communities are located at http://community.livejournal.com/username and syndicated accounts at http://syndicated.livejournal.com/username. Due to the way certain proxy servers are configured, and the fact that the HTTP RFC prohibits it, the canonical URL for journals with a username starting with an underscore will be http://users.livejournal.com/username. We are however offering a free rename if you fall into this group. So now the technical side of all of this and why it was a required change; bear with me as its 3am my time and I'm sitting in John F. Kennedy Airport after a five hour flight. Late last week we become aware that it was possible to use the "-moz-binding" CSS attribute within Mozilla and Mozilla Firefox to execute arbitrary offsite JavaScript. As this attribute is designed to allow attaching an XBL transform and JavaScript to any node within the DOM, it is quite easy to use in a malicious fashion. We immediately altered our cleaner to strip this attribute from entries and comments, though also realized that wasn't even half the battle. As we allow custom CSS in many of our styles, as well as the ability to link to an external stylesheet in a variety of fashions, it was quite possible to take advantage of this exploit and hijack the session cookie of any user who views your journal. As we, along with many other sites, used one cookie to authenticate a user, this cookie was quite powerful if stolen. If the user had not chosen to bind their cookie to their IP address, a malicious user could steal it, login as that user, deface the account and SPAM with it, as well as modify that user's style to include the exploit thus causing this problem to spread much like a virus. Borrowing the idea from another development team within Six Apart, we decided we needed to break our cookies into three categories. One cookie would be our application management cookie, this cookie would only be accessible on www.livejournal.com where we will not display untrusted content. A second cookie will be accessible on all subdomains of livejournal.com, though it only will say if you are logged in or not; it is solely for optimization. We then will issue one cookie for each journal you visit. This cookie will be only accessible on username.livejournal.com or community.livejournal.com/username as it is limited to a single journal. This cookie will only grant you the permission to read protected entries and post in the particular journal. This means that if the journal owner steals your cookie, they will be able to do nothing more than view their journal and comment upon it as if they are you. In the end you will have n+2 cookies, with n being the number of journals you visit. Due to the fact that we cannot clean every external CSS stylesheet linked to every time we generate a journal page, this change is required. While it does not fully protect us from some new cross site scripting vulnerability that can be exploited via entries or comments, they are much easier to block, patch, and recover from quickly. With Mozilla deciding to allow the execution of arbitrary JavaScript via CSS, there is no other viable solution than the one we have undertaken. We developed a plan to phase all of this in over the next week, URL change first and then followed by the cookie change, though this morning we were made aware that this was being actively exploited. As such we took our week time line and shortened it to about twelve hours. While URLs have been changed at this time, our cookie handling change has not yet happened. This should however be expected to take place within the next day or two as well as various other cleanups and fixing bugs we've already encountered. Please feel free to let us know if you have any questions and open a support request if you find a bug or encounter a problem. Sorry all of this came with just about zero warning, but in the end we could not wait longer to fix this problem.

Thanks to Daniel Silverstone for providing me with a cache copy of the text.

It would appear that this week has been entirely grey, I can not remember seeing the sun in the last week... I want sunshine dammit. I did see reflection of sunshine on the sea earlier this week, not entirely sure how that works when there's no sun, but that was pretty. I think I'm going to actually start going to bed at reasonable hours and getting up early, not sure yet... will have to sleep on it :)