Allerdings sehr lansam...Die Vorbereitungen f r Mundus Mercaturae (kurz Mumer), vor bald zwei Monaten angek ndigt, komme langsam voran. Ein Logo wird gerade von Jenny entworfen, w hrend ich mich um einiges auf der Serverseite gek mmert habe. Auf der Basis von Catalyst, einem Perl-Framework, entsteht die Webanwendung zum Abholen und Verarbeiten von Resourcen, und POVray soll einmal dynamisch die Residenzen der Bewohner zeichen, so dass diese sich ihr trautes Heim ganz pers nlich gestalten k nnen. Noch gibt es nicht viel Wahlm glichkeiten, aber immerhin schon zwei Zaunarten, im Beispielbild beide angebracht. Es gibt auch weitere Blickwinkel. Der gesamte Perl- und POVray Code ist per wsvn einsichtig, Kommentare und Patches willkommen. Vor allem was POVray angeht kann man sich leicht n tlich machen, wer Lust hat: einfach mal melden.

So it looks like we’re finally getting a vote to issue the long-awaited GFDL Position Statement, and explain why Debian does not consider this license suitable for its main section (gr proposal, latest version). After asking around in -private, I proposed an amendment to allow GFDL-licensed documents with no invariant sections to remain in main; as of now, this amendment has received exactly zero seconds. (In case this needs mentioning, an amendment needs at least 5 seconds to appear in the ballot. And if someone wants to point me the legal flaws of my amendment, please read this first.) I’ve surprisingly found myself getting quite upset and enraged (quite political?) about the whole GFDL story. I have very clear feelings about the whole situation, and they’re best explained in this post. But well, I’m finally starting to digest that most likely Anthony’s text will pass, and managing to not get tragic about it. I guess it’ll go away, and that I’ll then continue with my Debian tasks as usual. Heck, if I one manages to be friends with people that vote conservative (and, heh, they manage to be friends with me), I guess this is about the same. NP: The Cranberries, Dreams

"Through its Science and Technology Directorate, the [US] Homeland Security Department has given $1.24 million in funding to Stanford University, Coverity and Symantec to hunt for security bugs in open-source software and to improve Coverity's commercial tool for source code analysis."

Link

"The United States Patent and Trademark Office plans to announce today that it will cooperate with open-source software developers on three initiatives that it says will improve the quality of software patents."

Link

Two optimistic things in US Gov't.... (It's not April 1 yet, right?)

How to keep a blonde busy. That's a really good one.

We have a new django release, 0.91... I'll package it RSN... but here's some forewarning for those of you out there using the python-django packages... there's some backwards incompatible changes from 0.90 to 0.91, it's probably worth reading http://code.djangoproject.com/wiki/BackwardsIncompatibleChanges if you are using django. The next real little boy^W^Wrelease will have the magic-removal branch merged in, so that'll be another set of backwards incompatible changes (if you want to stay ahead of the game though, as I said in my previous blog entry, there are some packages for that branch too ;) Fun fun fun fun fun!

My recent thought and challenging is how I can improve CUPS configuration by using debconf. The primary CUPS configuration file - cupsd.conf has some important directives which should be configured by debconf.

• Port/Listen: Default is "Port 631". This means cupsd listens port 631 of all interface, all incoming. Listen is host-based value, such as "Listen 127.0.0.1:631", "Listen kmuto.jp:413". Port and Listen can coexist, and multiple Port or Listen can do also. Handling these values are needed by many users.
• Browsing: Default is "on". This means cupsd broadcasts its information and checks new printer from network periodically. This feature is useful for LAN, but is unwelcome for some users. Handling this value by debconf may be easy.
• BrowseAddress/BrowseAllow/BrowseDeny: These values are related with Browsing. And they accept various values. It's hard to parse and evaluate values of debconf...
• Location: Location defines mainly each authentications. Root directory, jobs directory, and admin directory are defined by default. It's better to be able to handle these values by debconf, but to parse and to evaluate aren't so easy.
• FileDevice: Default is "off". If FileDevice is set "on", cupd allows file:// URI (printout job to local file for debug or something. Of course this feature invites a risk). This question should be low priority, but perhaps this is useful.
• ServerName/ServerAdmin: Like Apache. Although these values aren't meaningful for CUPS :).
• Include: cupsd.conf allows this directive like Apache. So I'm thinking to create /etc/cups/conf.d/ directory and set files to compose main cupsd.conf at there.

Another headache is that next coming CUPS 1.2 will change its configuration formats and default values. I should count it.

As JoeyH mentioned, I set up secure-testing buildd on my ARM and is already startting to build/upload some packages. Yeah, I feel good my machine is useful for someone. The reason of I bought this ARM is to just contribute Debian (I'm not embedded programmer or user). Building secure-testing has some unclear points. Most sensitive point is when we should update our chroot. For example new glibc will enter in near future.

Can we just stop this nonsense about Judges enforcing the law but not “making” it? And that there is such a thing as a non-ideological Supreme Court justice? Many people have articulated the problem better than I possibly could. But it boils down to this: “the law” is not deterministic. It is, as a practical matter, impossible to enact statutory language that is sufficiently specific to cover every situation that will appear before a court. The reason cases end up in litigation is, quite often, because the law is not clear on what the result should be. Law is not like source code that can be compiled into an object file and then fed arbitrary input to generate a certain predictable result. The real world is complex. Conditions arise over time that the legislators enacting the statute (or the framers drafting the constitution) could not have foreseen. Even if you believe Judges should exercise “restraint,” in many cases it is impossible to determine, objectively, what outcome represents the more “restrained” position. (I think Alito admitted an analogous issue today when he said that conservatives can be as much “activists” as liberals). People should agree or disagree with Judge Alito’s judicial approach, but it’s absurd to suggest that he doesn’t have an ideology, or that he could sit on the Supreme Court and just apply the law “as it is written” without having to make interpretive leaps. Those leaps will almost always involve issues on which reasonable people can differ — otherwise the case would never have reached the Supreme Court. That is, in fact, the whole point of the Supreme Court.

Interesting juxtaposition of recent news articles:

• Chinese ban on Wikipedia prevents research, users say
• The Great Chinese Experiment “China is betting its economic health on becoming a world leader in the sciences. But will it succeed?”

So after feeling motivated again, I’ve updated my old Galician translation of Mozilla Firefox 0.8 for Firefox 1.0.7, I have some people testing the translation and will soon update it for Firefox 1.5. As I’m keeping my translation strictly unofficial (I want nothing to do with upstream Mozilla), it’s possible that I’ll receive some messages about how I’m infringing on the Mozilla Foundation’s holy trade marks, and how I’m not keeping the standards of extremely high quality that the Mozilla Foundation guarantees, yadda yadda yadda., so I’m already prepared for that eventuality: I don’t know the English idiom for “tocar las narices”, but if they do it to me, I’ll adopt this name and logo for my translation. And then, if I translate Thunderbird, I’ll call this one “Thunderchicken” :-)

Matthew, I saw a poster for this today and thought of you. JD will probably welcome you when you get there.

Everybody who has used an Ubuntu live cd over the last nine months or so has used casper. It started out as a special udeb, called by the debian-installer code to bootstrap a live environment. While d-i is fairly flexible, this was stretching the limits and not really a great solution. Amongst the problems were user interactivity halfway through the boot and a very slow boot. In the middle of December, mdz asked me if I could take a look at implementing the SimplifiedLiveCD specification. As I had played a bit with casper already, I did. Casper is nothing like what it used to be, it now uses initramfs, so no user interactivity after the bootloader. It uses unionfs where available, which speeds it up a fair bit (compare to devmapper + cloop), and if the cd image has squashfs, it uses that too, which makes it even faster. Boot time improvements from around 368 to about 231 seconds is fairly good, but I hope to get it even lower. What I really, really like about casper however is how hackable it is. I added cd integrity check in less than a day (modulo some bugs in usplash I had to fix). Today, I integrated it with the new usplash in initramfs, so we actually have progress in the initramfs as well. (Instead of "mounting root file system" taking about 40 seconds.) Another neat feature is the persistence support. It will now look for filesystems with the label casper-cow (that will be changed to ubuntu-live-rw, I think) if persistent is seen on the kernel command line. This makes it easy to drag your setup around with just an USB key and any Ubuntu live cd. Next out is getting keyboard selection better and more speedups.

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’m flying Song airlines for the first time, en route to Orlando on business. The individual interactive multimedia consoles are pretty cool. You can check out your altitude, flight path, etc., in real time, which I think helps mitigate the lack of control and attendant anxiety most people feel while flying. There is also a decent selection of “MP3s” (I wonder if they are actually stored as MP3s?) that you can queue up for a personal playlist. I’ve found more than enough selections to last the rest of the flight. (Strangely, I seem to have to hit ‘pause’ at the end of each track to advance to the next). There are also a bunch of satellite TV stations, pay-per-view movies and games, although I haven’t checked those out. I’m curious about how the music licensing works. The airline would like to provide the attractive feature of a broad variety of music for its customers; at the same time, it probably serves as effective marketing for the labels, just like radio play. You might, for example, check out an album you were thinking of buying on the flight, and purchase it later if you liked it. The chance that inflight music will be copied by customers is very low and presumably they don’t need to worry about DRM. So which way does money flow—from the airlines to the labels or vice-versa? Or are the tracks “free?” Now playing: The Beatles, Revolver, “Got to Get You Into My Life.” P.S. After we landed, the interactive multimedia consoles rebooted. It turns out they are running Red Hat Linux, circa 2002. Smart.

Joeyh: as amazing as this may appear to a casual observer, it's not the fault of udev if your kernel is broken. Poking at a uevent file in sysfs has the effect of generating an hotplug event, which when received by udevd will make it load with modprobe the driver module specified by the kernel itself. The moral of this is that if loading a kernel driver breaks your system, then your kernel is buggy. Since plugging in the driver later works then probably the bug is more complex that "this driver kills my system" and may involve interactions between different kernel subsystems with specific timings.

This: ...is my newly born son Jean-Baptiste.... ...back in 1988. So, yes my son turns out 18 today, getting the right to vote, to say me "merde" as he wants and officially becoming a grown up adult...which he already his by several aspects. So, yes, I'm a proud dad. This, far more than my contribution to free software, makes me feel that I will at least leave one good thing on earth (actually, I will leave et least *three* good things on earth).