I've completed an initial port of Sound Juicer to GStreamer 0.10, and have made a tarball which can be downloaded here. There is one small problem with it... playback doesn't work. There is probably a simple mistake in the code somewhere, but I'm tired and thought I'd open this up to the Many Eyes of the Internet. The first person to fix CD playback will get a huge thank you. The first person who fixes seeking and time display (which I hear will be broken) will get a really large thank you. Download my pretties, and find my bugs!

Although my work on the project here has been progressing quickly and I’m still enthusiastic about it, it is time for a break. I will have a small holiday of roughly two weeks starting tomorrow in which first my parents and then my friends will visit me. I’m looking forward to seeing them and showing them all the nice/strange/great/beautiful things I’ve seen here in the short period that they are here. Fire Alarm I finally had an experience with the infamous fire alarm of the Halls. My colleagues already found it a bit strange that it hadn’t happened to me yet. Last Friday at 0:30 I was about to get some sleep when it happened. I got dressed and left the Hall and stood with dozens of other inhabitants in the rain on the grass until the fire department came to check. After 30 minutes they told us what had happened: some guy had been smoking in the lounge (thanks a lot). I mean, everyone knows that fire detectors on the halls and in the lounges are more sensitive than the ones in the rooms! Bike Troubles I’m finally getting used to biking in the area: how cars react to you, how pedestrians react to you, the cycling on the left. I am no longer dependant on the bus service. I did my shopping by bike last Saturday and also went to the city centre. I went by the Bike Station to get my steer up, but it was impossible. Then I cycled up to the castle, but my chain snapped. I went back and they fixed it. Then I cycled up again, witnessed the yet again beautiful sunset and was about to cycle home but my front derriere was broken. So I went back again, and they helped me again. It is a great crew! So… I will not be at the computer for some time and thus not write here. (Debian-wise I am waiting for some Debian/Ruby packages to get through the New queue anyway, so it’s not stalling me.) I will write again somewhere in February.

For a while now I’ve been thinking that I’d like to get my private pilot’s license, so I’ve decided that once daylight saving time begins, I’ll start taking lessons. Does anyone have a recommendation for a good instructor? I’d prefer one based out of Reid-Hillview, since I live just off Capitol. Also, how long should it take, and how much should it cost? (I know those answers are dependent on how much flight time I need before I feel comfortable taking the exams, but I’m just looking for an average.) Lisa’s dad has his license so he was able to give me a bit of an idea, but he got his out of Hollister so I’m not sure if there’s a difference. Also, I’d like to get my IFR and probably also multi-engine; but I’ve heard some people say that it’s a good idea to wait a while after getting VFR before getting IFR. Is there any merit to that? Lisa and I are also getting serious about buying a new home, and this time we’ve even got a realtor helping us find houses that we might be interested in. It’s sort of off to a slow start, since the market is kind of slow right now anyway, but I’m hoping it will pick up soon. Also I don’t think we’ve adequately explained to the realtor quite what we’re looking for, and how little work we’re actually willing to do to the house. We’re hoping to move sometime this year, but I’m not sure whether that’s realistic. Fortunately we don’t have any urgent need, so we don’t have to settle for something; but I’d still like to get it over with as quickly as possible.

I learned just last week that my law school professor John Flym was counsel in the Vanguard Case. He testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Friday. It appears that John is also retiring. This will be a great loss for Northeastern Law School. He was one of my favorite professors at Northeastern. Some students didn’t understand his clinical approach, which among other things demanded that we take nothing for granted and rejected easy or prefabicated answers to questions, but I found his teaching to be some of the best preparation for practicing law in the real world. Right wing critics have predictably attempted to dig up “dirt” to discredit John—e.g., Baseball Crank: LAW: Who Is John Flym?. I don’t mind linking to that entry and increasing its PageRank, however, since I don’t find anything objectionable in the “dirt” the writer has dug up. In fact, it only increases my respect for the man. (He opposes nuclear weapons and torture? How shocking!)

Alvaro Lopez Ortega comments on my explanation of why I don't want the OpenSolaris panel talk at Debconf6. He misses the point: I am not objecting to OpenSolaris itself, but to having a talk about it at Debconf6. From my entry: "I [...] questioned the fact that Debconf6 will have a talk on OpenSolaris, when there are good Debian related talks rejected." I think that for a Debian development conference, having a talk about Debian is much, much more important than discussing OpenSolaris, or even co-operation between Debian and OpenSolaris. That is the core of my objection: OpenSolaris is not about Debian, and the talk is crowding out a talk about Debian. As a smaller issue, I do also happen to dislike the OpenSolaris license (the CDDL), and this makes me dislike having the OpenSolaris talk (instead of a Debian one) even more. I have sufficient grounds for disliking it in the fact that it is Yet Another License. More importantly, it seems to be incompatible with the GPL, which causes all sorts of unpleasant complications if Debian wanted to use OpenSolaris code. Further, it seems unclear that the CDDL fills the requirements of the Debian Free Software Guidelines. The result: there is little room for co-operation between Debian and OpenSolaris. This doesn't mean OpenSolaris is evil or that it needs to be shunned. I'm perfectly happy with non-free software, but not in the Debian context. The license issue can, however, be disregarded completely, when arguing about having this talk at Debconf6, as far as I care. I want to see a Debian conference concentrate on making Debian better, and not on making OpenSolaris better. If there were free slots in the conference programme, I wouldn't mind, but there aren't. All slots are full, and Debian specific talks have been rejected in favor of the OpenSolaris talk. That is what irks me. Note also that I'm not criticizing the people who want to give this talk (or hold the panel, or whatever), only the Debconf6 talks committee. And I did that in private, I didn't drag it into public.

Today I had my first encounter with authenticated proxies (creepy). The client has a working LDAP directory and Samba servers for logins in their network, and until now they have plain old packet forwarding for WWW access. They didn’t even had Squid caching as a transparent proxy, and they suddenly wanted to authenticate users against the directory, and give particular access to users of certain groups. Luis was working on this using winbind and ntlm_auth in Squid (all from their corresponding packages in Sarge) and he was using the –require-membership-of stanza on auth_param. So his configuration was basically:

• An authentication required ACL: acl whocares auth_proxy REQUIRED
• Two authenticators (auth_param) using winbind (one for basic and one for digest) with the ntlm_auth utility, and specifying the SID of the group.
• Repeat the last step for every group wanted to have access to the proxy
• http_access rules involving the ACL made in step 1

This approach didn’t work as it meant to be used, since only the first authenticator worked. Seems like Squid parses the list of authenticators and only work with the first one. So only one group can be allowed to use the proxy this way, as far as I understand. I googled a bit through some Russian forums and started solving some problems with winbind and Samba themselves: no domain separators, no stanzas for winbind in the smb.conf (winbind use default domain = yes), bad mappings for uids and gids, etc. Then I found out about wbinfo_group.pl, a Squid helper written in PerlOfCourse which can find out the group of a certain user trying to authenticate with the proxy. So I thought that maybe this way I could made specific acl’s for each group and even control other stuff in Squid using the group. I made this in this way:

• An external ACL (the helper) defined as: external_acl_type nt_group ttl=0 concurrency=5 %LOGIN /usr/lib/squid/wbinfo_group.pl
• An ACL that tries to match the helper with a group name: acl allowed external nt_group “Allowed Navigation”
• Rulelists involving the above ACL
• Repeat steps 2 and 3 for each group with special needs.

This is magically working, and I think there’s more flexibility with this than the other way, but I’m not an expert and I have questions that will be answered in this week, hopefully:

• Do I need the proxy_auth REQUIRED ACL?
• Is there another way to allow access for several groups using winbind and NTLM?
• Why use winbind? Wouldn’t LDAP, SMB or other authenticators named in the Squid FAQ work?

This over-the-counter medicament may help us in the future. When someone’s behavior suggests they may be in need of it, feel free to suggest it to them (this includes me). This is the European box. By clicking on the image, you will see the Engrish version…

Today I finally posted off my Zaurus SL-C3000, having sold it on eBay. I still think it's a lovely little device, but after taking it with me when I went back to my parents and not ending up using it at all (I had my laptop with me too) I decided I couldn't justify keeping it. Here's hoping the new owner gets more use out of it than I did. However I seem to be compensating by adding to my pile of consumer level routers. This week I got a Netgear WGT634U, with the intent of using it to replace my Asus WL-500g, which will end up providing my parents with wireless. I've put OpenWGT on it for the moment, because it doesn't require me to hook up the serial console, but the longer term plan is OpenWRT. I've still been fiddling with my Netgear DG834G but unfortunately latest OpenWRT AR7 builds have been less than reliable at booting for me. I've dropped back to an older build based on the 2.4.30 kernel, which seems to be fairly stable, so might end up trying it in production at some point. Wireless still isn't supported, which is a bit of a disadvantage. I understand 2.6 is being worked on for it, so maybe that'll lead to some wireless joy. In addition to the above I also have a Linksys WAG54Gv1 and a Linksys WRT54Gv1 sitting around. Neither are mine and I should really give them back as I'm not using them. I have to keep stopping myself from trying to find more cheap toys on eBay.

Tolimar, liw: Just to give an extra bit of ease, I know Alvaro Lopez, one of the talk's proponents. I am to some extent an instigator for this talk - Alvaro is definitively a Free Software guy. I know him for several years already. He has been as careful as possible, and told me about his frustration when the whole Nexenta mess erupted. As far as I can say, the cooperation intentions are as serious as you can expect from such a beast as Sun is - I cannot judge more, and I won't say more in this regard. I just assure you that this talk will not be a presentation on why Solaris is better than Hurd or anything like that. I trust Alvaro (and, transitively, I should also trust Simon). I do hope we get something interesting out of this talk.
[update] Alvaro has answered. I'm linking it here as he is not syndicated in Planet Debian.

Edd Dumbill writes from time to time about hinting or using the right fonts so they look nicer - At the first glance, I found three such articles in ~six weeks.
I don't know if I'm too atypical in this area as well... But for most of my work, I prefer fonts not to be beautified by antialiasing. Strangely, it seems to depend on which program (or, maybe, activity) I am working - I have no grudge against antialiasing in a web browser, but I swear to God that if you antialias my emacs or my xterms, I will hate you. It just gets more tiring.
I have no rational explanation for this - I just noticed the fact after using it for a while. I get more tired if the borders of the letters are not crisp - and I don't really care about the little details in smaller sized fonts.
Maybe that's part of the reason antialiasing is nicer in the browser - After all, it is common to find text too small to read there. At 1280x1024 (or 1400x1050 on the laptop) with the usual font size, I get a nice 170x66 rxvt. That's quite OK for most of the work that requires attention - and for following large amounts of text, decreasing the font size to a somewhat tiring size gives me a nice 200x92 window - almost always enough room. Crisp fonts. Easy to read.
Does anybody else feel the same, or am I just too looney?

After being hassled about updating Wordpress packages to 2.0 I did. Though I sort of regret it now as I wanted to wait for a bug fix release. “Point oh” software keeps me the creeps. Now a 2.0.1 release is in the works that will fix at least one (long standing) minor security issue. Personally I am reluctant to update Wordpress to 2.0 on my blog natalian.

• I don’t like the look of the new edit form.
• I’m afraid the plugins I use are going to break.
• I don’t need any more features except perhaps the plugins I use being part of the main trunk and perhaps a Captcha

You might have already noticed (if not, you will, very very soon) that the FSF has released the first draft of the forthcoming GNU General Public License 3. You can leave comments on the license or help to populate the wiki, if you're inclined. I think the Rationale Document will be very interesting to read (for me, at least). I'll leave it to more competent people to comment on the pros and cons of the changes of this new version... I hope that in the end (after a few more months of reviews etc.) we will have a fine new version of the GPL which will suit the majority of the Free Software world very well. Update 2006-01-18: Here's a nice diff between GPLv2 and GPLv3-draft1 (thanks Nico Golde).

On the whole I'm an organic, fresh, free-range, no-MSG, tree-hugging leftie kind of guy. I prefer Marks and Spencer's Red Leicester and Spring Onion crisps as they contain potato, oil, cheese and onion. When I buy chicken it's free-range. Eggs are always free-range, and the fact that the supermarkets still sell "value" eggs upsets me. This weekend in a "top 10" conversation, I discovered that I have several weaknesses:

• Nik-Naks (Rib 'n' Saucy)
• Super Noodles (Mild Curry)
• Jelly Babies

More MSG, artificial flavourings and additives than you can shake a stick at. Please say I'm not alone... or am I just weak-willed? In other news, Henry is three months old today. He is all jabbed up now so can finally leave the house, walks are fun (for certain definitions of fun that is) as he continually pulls on the lead and is obsessed with cars driving past. So far we're averaging two random people talking to us about Henry on every walk...

The videos from debconf.es 2 are now online (actually they will be at 18 UTC). Which is good and makes me happy...

But there are still some problems, so you should not mirror them (yet):

1. The low quality mpegs are a too big for my taste.

2. The good quality oggs have too low quality.

3. The kde talk is only available encoded with xvid, and nothing else. Expect high quality xvids of all talks and a mpg/ogg version of the kde talk soon.

4. I have no idea what this is - any hints welcome.

5. ATM the slides are "only" available on www.debian.org.es not yet on meetings-archive.debian.net

I very much appreciate feedback, esp. on the following topics:

1. During some talks there is quite a lot of zooming, is that good or bad?

2. Due to the camera position, some people in the audience could only be captured from the back (while they are talking). Is that good or bad ?

3. A better licence for this kind of stuff

4. The filenames: Should they contain a chronological number of the talk ? Spanish filenames might also be better/nicer, feel free to send me a translated list ;-)

5. For all talks - except the kde talk - ffmpeg and ffmpeg2theora were used for encoding. (BTW, anybody knows another theora encoder? ffmpeg2theora is slllllllow.) For some strange reasons this didn't work for the kde talk, so I've used mencoder for it. Maybe I should upload the 12GB raw-dv file of the kde talk as well, so people can debug this ?

The exact command lines I've used are documented on my video page - this page is pretty much work in progress and will be updated as I find better solutions for the above mentioned problems.

Debconf-es 2 happened a month ago. When asked back then, I gave today as the ultimate release day. Then my life has become much busier than expected, and as a result the videos are in this unfinished state. Do you appreciate them being released like this today or do you think I should have released them when they are ready ? (Which might be in two weeks or more as I'm still very busy. IMO it's good to have them (even in bad quality only (at first)) ASAP.

it's done ... You know what ? it's awkward to type with a ring ... I will get used to it I suppose ... anyway, that was a very nice wedding celebration. update : a photo of the wedding (me and my wife^[1])

Here is the mail I just sent to the debian-kde list : the QT-KDE team just uploaded to experimental packages for the 3.4.1 kde following modules :

• arts
• kdelibs
• kdeadmin
• kdegraphics
• kdetoys
• kdebase
• kdeutils
• kdeartwork
• kdemultimedia
• kdeaccessibility

the other kde modules are either maintained outside from the team, or depends upon packages that are maintained outside from the team (here is a nice picture showing the build deps and the maintainers of the official kde modules). A mirror has been set up on alioth : deb http://pkg-kde.alioth.debian.org/kde-3.4.1/ ./
deb-src http://pkg-kde.alioth.debian.org/kde-3.4.1/ ./ In order to install the package, you will need the dbus-1-qt package from current experimental. this package has not been mirrored on alioth yet. kde 3.4.1 has to wait for dbus to migrate into unstable, and for obvious reasons, this move will wait for sarge to be released (which *should* happen next week). Nota:

• There is currently no ETA for the missing kde modules, and *PLEASE* don't ask for one.
• Moreover, this upload to experimental should trigger a lot of NEW processing, and the package may not show up immediately.

For the first time in more that 10 days, I slept like a baby last night. It might hurt the xlibs-dev transition, but I hope it actually helps in the long run, I will make less mistakes, bug vorlon and dato a bit less, be more aware and awake. Now I just need to keep a balanced sleeping schedule again. I think have good allies.

I have started a small experiment that is against all rules but might spread some package love. So far, I have been successfully working with Victor Seva, Justin Pryzby, Thomas Viehmann and Nico Golde. Join us if you care about this transition!

On the other hand, I find recent threads in debian-devel, debian-private and several posts in debian-devel-announce very distracting. Although I am strongly opinionated on the subjects being discussed, I'd rather remain semi-silent and work in my "NMU love".

I just feel like quoting some passage from the Debian Developer's Reference:

A big part of your job as Debian maintainer will be to stay in contact with the upstream developers. Debian users will sometimes report bugs that are not specific to Debian to our bug tracking system. You have to forward these bug reports to the upstream developers so that they can be fixed in a future upstream release.

While it's not your job to fix non-Debian specific bugs, you may freely do so if you're able. When you make such fixes, be sure to pass them on to the upstream maintainers as well. Debian users and developers will sometimes submit patches to fix upstream bugs -- you should evaluate and forward these patches upstream.

(that's from 3.5 in case anyone wants to look up it there)

Update: Corrected Tarja Halonen’s total vote percentage. The preliminary count in the Finnish presidential elections is finished with the following results:

Candidate	Total votes		Votes short of next*		Pre-poll
					pos	%
Tarja Halonen	1,396,161	46,3 %	not applicable		1st	52
Sauli Niinist	725,213	24,1 %	670,948	48 %	2nd	20
Matti Vanhanen	561,556	18.6 %	163,657	23 %	3rd	18
Heidi Hautala	105,086	3.5 %	456,470	81 %	4th	4
Timo Soini	103,368	3.4 %	1,718	2 %	4th	4
Bjarne Kallis	61,458	2.0 %	41,910	41 %	6th	1
Henrik Lax	48,639	1.6 %	12,819	21 %	6th	1
Arto Lahti	13,041	0.4 %	35,598	73 %	6th	1

^* The difference between the current candidate and the next (upward) candidate on the list, in votes and as a percentage of the next (upward) candidate’s votes.
The result of the last opinion poll published before the election, commissioned by YLE and conducted by phone between 10th and 11th of January. The margin for error is 2,5 %-points for Halonen and decreases when the percentage decreases. Since the incumbent failed to reach majority, a runoff election will be held on the 29th of January between the two best placed candidates (starred). A remarkable fact is the low number of votes that the independent candidate Arto Lahti received, for he had to get at least 20,000 people to sign their name in favour of his candidacy, while he received only 65 % of that number in votes. It is very likely that both runoff candidates retain the votes they received today. What decides the runoff election is how the rest of the voters behave. As a quick and dirty Stetson Harrison estimate, most of Vanhanen, Kallis and Lax’s spporters are likely to vote for Niinist , while most of Hautala’s supporters are likely to vote for Halonen. Assuming that the “most”s cancel each other (an assumption that probably favours Niinist ), this yields an additional 22.2 %-points for Niinist (total 46.3 %) and 3.5 %-points for Halonen (total 49.8 %). Hence it would seem that Halonen has the upper hand in runoff. A few words on each of the eight candidates, in reverse order of popularity, follows. Arto Lahti (b. 1949) is a professor of entrepeneurship and has experience in various positions in the private sector. He has no prior political experience and is not affiliated with a political party. Henrik Lax (b.1946) is a Member of the European Parliament since 2004, representing the liberal Swedish People’s Party. He was a Member of the national Parliament 1987 2004. Prior to his political career, he had been a lawyer. Bjarne Kallis (b.1945) is a Member of Parliament since 1991, representing the party currently called Christian Democrats. He has chaired his party since 1995. For most of his non-political professional life he has been a teacher and later principal in a business school. Timo Soini (b. 1962) is a Member of Parliament since 2003, representing the right-wing populist True Finns party. He has chaired his party since 1997, which he cofounded in 1995; prior to that, he was an active member of the since-dissolved Finnish Agrarian Party. Heidi Hautala (b. 1955) is a Member of Parliament since 2003 and before that 1991 1995. She was a Member of the European Parliament 1995 2003. She represents the evironmental-liberal Green League, a party she cofounded and later chaired 1987 1991. Matti Vanhanen (b. 1955) is Prime Minister since 2003, representing the liberal Centre Party. He previously served as Minister of Defense in 2003. He has been a Member of Parliament since 1991. He has chaired his party since 2003. Sauli Niinist (b. 1948) is currently a Director at the European Investment Bank. He served as Minister of Justice 1995 1996 and Minister of Finance 1996 2003. He was a Member of Parliament 1987 2003. He represents the liberal-conservative National Coalition party, which he chaired 1994 2001. Prior to his political career, he worked as a lawyer. Tarja Halonen (b. 1943) is the incumbent, Her Excellency the President of the Republic of Finland since 2000. Prior to her presidency, she was a member of the Social Democrat Party and had served as Minister of Social Affairs and Health 1987 1990, Minister of Nordic Cooperation 1989 1991, Minister of Justice 1990 1991 and Minister of Foreign Affairs 1995 2000. She was a Member of Parliament 1979 2000. Prior to her political career, she worked as a lawyer in a labor union.