Just before Christmas, I finished reading the second volume of Tad Williams’ “Otherland” quadrilogy, “The river of blue fire”. Most of what I said about the first part still holds, especially what I said about the similarty to “games” like Second World, and how Williams forsees where stuff like Telepresence leads us.

By now, some of the story lines have crossed or merged, others are still independant and a few new ones have begun. The largest part of this volume consists of helplessly stumbling through virtual worlds. By doing so, Williams has all freedoms to create strange and interesting settings. At quite a few spots I thought: Wow, that would make a great movie szene. I hope some visually gifted will someday make a (or better: a few) Otherland movies.A few of these worlds are perverted versions of famous literature, notably H.G. Well’s “War of the Worlds” and “The wizard of Oz”. Oddly, I have only heard of these stories before, but just about the time I read about them in Otherland, they somehow re-appeared somewhere around me: The recent “War of the Worlds” movie (which I actually haven’t seen) and the old “Wizard of Oz” movie being shown at a small local theater in Karlsruhe.I’m looking forward to reading the next volume, but I have to wait for my brother to finish it, so I’ll probably squeeze another book in between.

My mother uses LyX (and thus, LaTeX) to layout her books. She doesn't need much help, but does almost everything herself. Except she was lacking an editor which could replace the quotation marks appropriately, because they are handled somewhat special in LyX (you need an editor which can replace by multiline text, such as VIM). So every now and then, mostly when she's started layouting a new book, she'll ask me to fix the quotation marks in a lyx file for her. I decided to write a small python script for it, since she has python installed on her box anyway (also on Windows, although she also has Linux on it). Maybe someone else has the same problems, so here you go:

#!/usr/bin/python
import re, sys
 
# Use full regexp power to detect as many " properly as possible...
# Note that this is a lot more sophisticated than just \b" and "\b
# and will be able to handle all the 'something ...", said foo' cases, too!
# But yeah, you can do even more, and maybe separate it into more regexps...
qrp1 = re.compile(r'(^\s* \b[:]?\s+[.:,;?!\-\(]*)"(\b)', re.M)
qrp2 = re.compile(r'(\b[.:,;?!\-\)]* \b \.\.\.)"([.:,;?!\-\)]*(\s+\b \s*$))', re.M)
 
# These are for >>-style quotes, german bracketing. If you want other
# quotes, adjust to your style yourself (hint: look at your .lyx file)
q1 = r"""
\\begin_inset Quotes ald
\\end_inset
"""
q2 = r"""
\\begin_inset Quotes ard
\\end_inset
"""
 
# Iterate over all input files...
for name in sys.argv[1:]:
        # Load input file
        fi = file(name, "r")
        data = fi.read()
        fi.close()
        # Replace quotes
        data = qrp1.sub("\\1"+q1+"\\2", data)
        data = qrp2.sub("\\1"+q2+"\\2", data)
        # Write output file with new name
        newname = name + ".quotes.lyx"
        fi2 = file(newname, "w")
        fi2.write(data)
        fi2.close()

It's day 2 of the 22C3 congress — time to post some stuff. I've been travelling to Berlin by train with Daniel Reutter, taking a bunch of photos with my new PowerShot A610 (see photo on the right, for an example). You can browse the 22c3 flickr group for more photos. We've listened to quite a lot of lectures already, and many more will follow. Especially the keynote by Joi Ito was really great, the network here works most of the time (wired net, as well as WLAN), so everything's fine for now... As far as hacking is concerned, we played around with iPodLinux a bit. We managed to port aalib to the iPod an then (more interesting) we also ported bb, the portable text-mode demo. There are some issues on both the 4g iPod and the 5g iPod we tried this on, but we're working on it... We have documented the ports in the form of HOWTOs (currently Debian-specific) in the iPodLinux wiki (aalib, bb).

Up next: porting Ruby to the iPod.

Today I read and wrote about Semapedia, a service respective toolset to encode Wikipedia URLs (and also others) as dot-matrix barcode, print them out on leaflets together with mentioning Wikipedia and the URL. Then any visitor with a modern camera cell phone can take an image of the barcode, decode it with the right software on your phone, which passes the decoded URL directly to the phones webbrowser. This is the first useful application of camera phones I ever heard about. But I see it as so useful that I may consider buying me a camera cell phone with the next contract renewal, although until now, I focused all my search for a worthy successor to my Nokia 6310i on non-camera phones. (Update: And I’m not alone with the wish for a useful mobile phone.) The 6310i had nearly everything I needed: A big memory, long standby times (1.5 to 2 weeks), WAP incl. WAP browser for reading Symlink on the road, GPRS, GSM 900/1800, T9, Infrared, gnokii support, the same battery bay than my former mobile phones (Nokia 6210 and 6130) and the Nokia typical, very intuïtive and blindly usable user interface. (Siemens mobiles suck!). It also had some things, I didn’t need yet, but sounded useful: Voice dialing and voice recording, Java for playing with own programs, Bluetooth for a cableless headset or so and GSM-1900 because perhaps also other countries than the US use that frequency band. (I refuse to travel to the US, so I won’t need the GSM-1900 there.) It had nothing I didn’t want to have in a mobile phone: Camera, radio, MP3 player, standby time munching color display, e-mail client, MMS, MP3 ring tones or flip covers. The only thing I missed, was a more modern Java VM and even more memory when Opera Mini came out and maybe polyphone ring tones, so I could have the Monkey Island theme as ring tone. ;-) So what now? Being able to use Opera Mini and Semapedia means to have a mobile phone with camera and — and that’s the drawback — a color display. Anyone knows a Nokia camera phone on which Opera Mini runs but without color display? And with the battery bay from the 6x10 series? No? Or maybe I should just stay with the 6310i and get me a second one in better condition (no broken case) from eBay or so? There were also (yet unconfirmed) rumours that my GSM provider E-Plus will have the Linux based internet tablet Nokia 770 for a contract renewal plus 80€ to 90€… Difficult decision…

Over the past months we've been working on a big change in the debian installer, removing base-config from the installation process. Doing this has required a great many changes, some of them user-visible. The installer now configures the timezone, users and passwords, and apt all in the first stage instead of after rebooting. Some preseed values have been removed or changed, including base-config/early_command and base-config/late_command. The biggest change of all, the the hardest to get working, has been moving of the selection of tasks and the installation of all packages into the first stage of the installer. Now tasksel pops up a debconf question that looks like any other question d-i asks, and the installation of packages is hidden behind a nice clean progress bar, and if any packages use debconf to ask questions, d-i will display those questions using its frontend too. I'd include a screenshot, but really, it's just another progress bar, how boring is that? By the way, if you maintain a debian package and it prompts without using debconf (when debconf is available), then your package will obviously break this, and it's well past time to fix it. I think that all the packages d-i installs do use debconf except for possibly a few like libc during upgrades. Upgrades are theoretically possible at this step for any packages debootstrap installs, so those will need to be fixed too. This has been a long, long time coming. Some milestones include:

• 1998: Wichert Akkerman and others do the design of debconf, and first draft of its specification. Without debconf, none of this would be possible.
• 1999: At linuxworld, I see Stormix's Debian-based install. I remember discussing with them about how debconf could be used to clean up the install process. I don't remember what kind of hack they used to avoid the long dpkg log interspersed with the occsional question that a Debian install involved back then.
• 1999: I begin writing the debconf program. And promoting its use.
• 2000: Randolph Chung begins writing cdebconf; d-i begins.
• 2000: Randolph writes the passthrough frontend for debconf. At the time this was expected to be used by tools like aptitude (deity?) to integrate debconf into their GUIs, but it mostly just rotted for a long time unused. Looking back this was a contribution of unexpected significance.
• 2001: I visit Progeny, they show me their implementation of a progress bar running over a Debian installation. It's a special-purpose hack, but it works.
• 2001: debconf enters Debian policy
• 2003: debconf becomes the policy-accepted standard way to do installation prompting
• 2003: Adam Heath adds --status-fd to dpkg.
• 2005 (Jan): Matt Zimmerman dusts of the passthrough frontend and makes it usable to pass debconf questions from debconf running in a chroot up to cdebconf running in d-i.
• 2005 (Jan): Michael Vogt makes apt support status fds too.
• 2005 (Fall): Ubuntu pulls most of the above peices together and fixes some bugs, gets a progress bar running over apt with debconf passthrough.
• 2005 (Dec): Colin Watson and I develop debconf-apt-progress, rest of the pieces fall into place for using this stuff in Debian.

So yeah, this has been in er, progress for 8 years, and at least three Debian derived distributions have come up with thier own approaches in between with only the last one being quite similar to the end result, and the other two being rather dead. I don't know whether this is a study in how Debian is slow, or a study in how we do eventually come up with infrastructure that is done right and ends up being used by everyone. Or both.

Today I've been fighting Planet, the well-known blog aggregator tool. After a while I had found out how/why it was scrambling Atom feeds horribly. I'm not sure if actually is a planet bug - maybe it is fine with older python versions. The SGML parser of python2.4 however fails on tags such as <br />, a very common case in blogs and thus in atom feeds. Strage additional > brackets appeared in the output. The reason is, that the SGML parser as of Python2.4 is looking for <tag/foo/ as an equivalent to <tag>foo</tag>, and thus treats <br/><br/> the same as <br>><br<br>> with the inner chars somehow magically escaped... The fix is quite simple: add

sgmllib.shorttag = re.compile('<([a-zA-Z][-.a-zA-Z0-9]*)/(/*)>')

to your feedparser.py file in the obvious place (next to sgmllib.tagfind). This will break support for these true SGML short tags, but I've never heard of a blog feed using them anyway. I told you that I'm not really sure whether this is a planet bug: It might be a bug of pythons sgmllib, too. But maybe Planet should just use a XML parser for XML files, and fallback to an SGML parser (or maybe a robust XML parser) for other files (unfortunately, many blogs - including mine - do not ensure correct XML). And Planet could use some proper XML handling, too, anyway... Right now, the code is so string-array-based, it makes me sick. You might also want some extra magic to re-fold <br/> tags to not confuse older browsers.

Sorry I've been late getting Xorg 6.9 in to unstable. The holidays combined with unexpected last minute fun with Xrender are responsible for the delays. I'm in the final stages of checking that everything will build properly, then it's on to some cleanup (translations, last minute bug fixes, etc) and getting final permission to start the transition from the release team. Hopefully in the next few days.

I'm dying to get this done so I can get 7.0 in good shape and in to experimental.

Miredo is an implementation of the Teredo - IPv6 over IPv4 tunnelling protocol which I have been playing with lately. I have filed an ITP bug to get Miredo into Debian, however this has been delayed while I try and get a handle on some of the patent issues surrounding the Teredo protocol. While Miredo itself is licensed under the GPLv2 the state of the Toredo protocol is less clear. Teredo was created by Christian Huitema, an architect with Microsoft. It is currently a Proposed Internet Standard waiting for the IETF editor to review it and assign an RFC number for it, IANA will then assign a permanent prefix for use by Teredo clients, servers and relays. According to the IETF IPR disclosure page, Microsoft has filed a statement of claim against the technologies described in the Proposed Standard. Microsoft states that they will provide a Royalty-Free, Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory License to All Implementers in their statement. Specifically the license that they offer the Teredo protocol under is called the Microsoft Royalty Free Protocol License Agreement. This is a catch-all license that Microsoft uses for all client-server protocols used by Windows. The license itself doesn’t make any claims about Microsoft’s IP rights, it simply gives you a license to use any rights Microsoft may have in the specific protocol you are using. For example at the end of the license agreement you select which protocols you wish to have covered under the agreement. Alongside Teredo you can also choose protocols such as IPv4, DNS, 6to4 and lots of other common protocols. The actual patent application for Teredo is incredibly difficult to find, the IETF IPR disclosoure doesn’t link to it, none of the proposed standards link to it and googling for “Teredo Patent Application” isn’t particularly successful either. In the end it turns out that the title is quirkily named “Allowing IPv4 clients to communicate over an IPv6 network when behind a network address translator with reduced server workload” and was published as Patent Application 20040190549 on the 30th September 2004.

• USPTO Patent Application 20040190549
• PDF Download of full original application (with diagrams) from the EU patent office - Click the ‘orginal document’ tab, cancel the download window that pops up (unless you only want the 1st page), then select ’save full document’ from the title bar above the tabs and go through the captcha form.

Incidentally if anyone knows of a nicer way to link to a US Patent Application than the ugly URL above, I would love to know. Half the reason that the Patent Application was hard to find is that it doesn’t actually mention Microsoft anywhere at all, unlike the ~5000 odd other Patent Applications currently filed by Microsoft. From what I can tell it appears that Christian Huitema has filed the application through is own personal attorneys independently of Microsoft. So where does this leave us in terms of getting Miredo into Debian? The short answer is I’m not entirely sure. I can’t seem to find a definitive statement regarding Debian’s position on patents anywhere, the best I’ve been able to come up with is a debian-legal post from Andrew Suffield from Jan 2005 which offhandedly describes the informal Debian patent policy as:

“ignore patents until somebody starts to wave them around, then drop the offending thing like a hot rock”

So maybe I’ve already shot Miredo in the foot, by investigating its Patent Status… My take on the situation seems to be that Debian is perfectly happy (and perhaps has no other option but) to ignore patents applicable to software in Debian until it becomes apparent that a particular patent is being enforced or has the potential to be enforced. So the question now becomes whether the Microsoft Royalty Free Patent License is acceptable enough to Debian to allow Miredo to be included in main or non-free, or whether it simply can’t be redistributed at all. The main problem I see with the license is that it does not permit you to sublicense other parties to make use of the Toredo technology used by Miredo. If this were a copyright license then that would most certainly fail to pass the Debian Free Software Guidelines, does Debian treat patents in the same manner? I think it’s time for me to post to debian-legal to seek some “official” guidance on the situation, but hopefully this post has ordered my thoughts enough that I can now write a coherent mail seeking help. If you have any comments or pointers to Debian statements on this sort of situation that I have missed they would be most welcome.

PERHAPS BONG HITS WILL FIX MY KEYBOARD EXTENSION

Ingo, I fear that you are overstating the situation m68k is now in. Non release critical bugs do tend to get fixed - if they didn’t there would scarcely be any point in having them in the BTS at all. My guess would be that any difference will be felt mainly when it comes to bodging round problems. I know I fix bugs for ports that aren’t even in the archive (and I don’t just mean AMD64 here) about as quickly as any other bug and I don’t feel that I’m alone on that. Where things don’t get looked at I would expect to see a package that could generally use some more attention. As far as I have noticed m68k doesn’t tend to have many porting issues that require fixes in individual packages beyond the toolchain and kernel - if that is the case it’s a bit of a moot issue.

A recent post by Ingo Juergensmann lamenting m68k not making the cut in this round of architecture qualifications. While it is a shame I think, I don't think it's necessarily the end of the world and his complaint that developers will now stop fixing bugs is crazy. Just because they're suddenly not release critical doesn't mean (good) maintainers will be unwilling to fix them. Most architecture bugs are toolchain bugs (ie not the package maintainer's fault), general types of architecture bugs (eg endianess, int size) that affect more than one architecture and tend to get fixed quickly and easily and really freaking hard problems that most package maintainers don't have the skill to fix on their own (eg #343687, help!). But if someone submits a bug that's trivial to fix, or gives me a patch, that bug will get fixed. I don't like bugs in my packages and probably most other developers don't either.

I recently came into posession of a collection of (smallish) WMV files containing photo slideshows. Unfortunately, they don't play on my DVD player, and SWMBO's laptop has No Hope of playing anything remotely like a video. So, technology to the rescue. Initially, I was just going to convert the movies into something that the DVD player would actually play, but by the time I had those, I was 95% of the way to doing the job properly, and it would (of course) look far nicer with menus and other Shinyness (instead of just a boring file menu), so I went all the way and made a complete DVD movie disc. The whole process was non-trivial to discover, but ultimately straightforward in practice (once you know the set of command line options to use), so I'm archiving this for posterity. I use Ubuntu Breezy. A lot of the packages I've used are under really heavy development, so slightly older versions may not work. If you're running another distro, finding compatible versions may be tricky (or not). Try the process with whatever you've got; if it works, great; if it doesn't work, try upgrading versions or something. Step 1: Convert Video Files To Something Less Bong Packages used: transcode 1.0.2-0ubuntu2 (trivial backport from Dapper; mail me if you want it, but the one in Breezy will probably work OK), mplayer 1.0-pre7cvs20050716-0.1ubuntu9, mjpegtools 1.6.3+rc2-0.0ubuntu2 As far as DVD players are concerned, WMV is non-existent (clever things). DVD players like some form of MPEG-2 video with AC3 or MP2/3 audio. So, we use transcode to convert the video. For WMV files in particular, only mplayer does the decoding right (the af6 plugin seemed to work, but the resizing didn't turn out too well). So, our command is:

 transcode -x mplayer -i $FILE.wmv -g 640x480 -e 44100,16,2 -o $FILE.tc --export_prof dvd-pal

Items of note:

• -g 640x480 is necessary because transcode currently can't ask mplayer for the size of the video. This will apparently be fixed in the near future, but until then, work out what size your input video is (run mplayer manually and look at it's output) and substitute for 640x480 in the above.
• -e 44100,16,2 exists for a similar reason to the above -- it's the sample rate, bits/sample, and channels of the incoming audio stream. Again, retrieve by running mplayer manually until transcode knows how to ask nicely.
• I've used -o $FILE.tc because what actually comes out of this transcode step is a separated audio/video stream, which needs to be multiplexed into a single stream (see next step). You actually get $FILE.tc.m2v and $FILE.tc.mpa files (the extensions get automatically appended).
• --export_prof dvd-pal sets a bunch of options behind the scenes so that everything gets output as PAL-compliant DVD video. Much easier than the alternatives. dvd-ntsc works nicely too, if you're stuck somewhere without decent chroma control.

As I mentioned, the output from the transcode run is two separate streams -- an audio and a video stream. We want to combine them. This is quite easy:

 mplex -f 9 -o $FILE.vob $FILE.tc.m2v $FILE.tc.mpa

This is a simple "glue them together" command -- the only interesting bit is -f 9, which simply specifies a particular MPEG-2 multiplexing method (full DVD-compatibility, or some such). If things aren't working out for you, try -f 8, which I believe also works. Since you'll probably have a bunch of video files to convert at once, you'll want to automate all of this with a shell script or shell 'for' loop. Step 2: Make a DVD Layout Packages used: qdvdauthor 0.0.10-0.1 This is the bit that I thought would be hard, but is actually amazingly easy (the previous step took me two days to get completely right, this bit took me about an hour). Fire up qdvdauthor, answer any stupid questions it might come up with. When the main screen comes up, click on the 'Add Movie' button on the left hand side, then select the first video you want to add. Repeat as required to add all of the videos you want. (Remember to add the VOB files you created earlier, and not the WMVs you might still have laying around. D'oh!) Clicking on the 'Video' tab on the left hand side should list all of your videos. Check they're all there, and are the correct size. Next, create or find a suitable background picture or video to make your main menu background. I've only tried with an image, but it seems to accept videos if you give them to it. Click on the 'Add Background' button on the main qdvdauthor screen. Pick your image. The image will probably need resizing; just go with the flow and pick the correct image size. Now you need to add those funky little menu items for selecting on. This is the really cool bit. Right-click on the background image you've got, and select 'Add Text'. Drag on the background to create a text box. You'll get a dialog come up, type some text in the bottom box, then click 'OK'. This'll create the text on the background. Drag it around if you need to. Finally, right-click the text and select 'Define as Button'. Another dialog box will appear. Rename the button if you like, then pick which video you want to play from the select box marked 'vmgm'. Click 'OK'. Repeat as necessary. That's all the hard stuff done. You can add a sound clip to play over and over again if you like, but I haven't done that yet, so you're on your own there. Step 3: Make the DVD For this step, I needed to compile toolame from source. Get it from http://toolame.sf.net/. This is super-simple. Basically, just click on the giant icon labelled 'DVD' in the top toolbar. Follow the prompts. Click 'OK' as necessary. When the process is done, check the 'Keep Open' checkbox quickly, and go over the output to ensure nothing completely crapped out. Assuming all is well, you can make your DVD image by running:

 mkisofs -dvd-video -udf -o /tmp/dvdimage.iso $DVD_DIR

Naturally, replacing /tmp/dvdimage.iso and $DVD_DIR with appropriate values. Lastly, cook the ISO to appropriate media with something like:

 cdrecord -dao -eject -v speed=2 dev=1,0,0 /tmp/dvdimage.iso

Assuming all went according to plan, you should have a physical DVD you can stick in your DVD player and watch to your heart's content. Congratulations! You just did all of this in about a 50th of the time it took me.

My father got me a nice IBM ThinkPad from 1996 earlier this year, so the next old laptop he digged up was planned to become a christmas present for my brother. But my father didn’t manage to find out, how old nor how fast that laptop was. And when I found out that it was a Pentium I with 90 MHz, it was clear, that my brother wouldn’t have any use for it, so he got “only” the used 850 MHz AMD Duron midi tower and my parents declared that old Compaq LTE 5100 laptop as a christmas present for me. :-) As my IBM ThinkPad bijou, this Compaq LTE 5100 is from 1996 and has a Pentium I processor. Both also have a 800×600 resolution, a double PCMCIA slot and a floppy drive, which can be replaced by a CD-ROM drive (if I had one). But that are all similarities. Technically the Compaq has 90 MHz instead of the ThinkPad’s 133 MHz, but therefore has 72 MB RAM in comparison to the 48 Megs the ThinkPad has. Also regarding disk space the Compaq outperforms the ThinkPad: 1.6 Gigs of disk space in comparison to the ThinkPad 1.0 GB hard disk. Another difference is the battery: While the ThinkPad can work over 2.5 hours without external power, the Compaq even didn’t manage to completely boot its currently installed Windows 98 (the ThinkPad had a Windows NT installed when I got it) when running on battery. (Will do that test again when I can confirm, that the battery was full before testing. :-) Yet another difference is the keyboard layout: The ThinkPad has an US layout while the Compaq has a Swiss-German layout. But the most obvious difference is the look: The black ThinkPad still looks like having a modern design while the Compaq looks very very outdated in its perfect computer beige and with its quite small display. So retroperspectively, it was a good a idea to name the ThinkPad “bijou” (French for jewel, jewellery, gem, etc.; named after a very neat british two-door limousine built in the UK by Slough on a 2CV base during the ’50s). Because now I have the choice between a lot of not so nice looking (not to say ugly ;-) 2CV derivatives to name the Compaq after. My favourites currently are the Iranian “Baby Brousse”, the Greek “Namco Pony” and the German “Fiberfab Sherpa”, all canvas and flatbed style 2CV based buggies, similar to the original Citroën Méhari but with steel body instead of the Méhari’s controversial plastic body. And one of the not used names, I can use for further ugly Compaq laptops¹. Another question yet to answer is the question of what operating system to install on it. Since the ThinkPad runs fine with Debian 3.0 Woody and I have a lot of other Debian boxes at home (running Woody, Sarge or Sid), I currently think about installing the very fresh NetBSD 3.0 (released on Christmas’ Eve 2005), FreeBSD 6.0 (released early November 2005), DragonFly BSD 1.4 (to be released in December :-) or DeLi Linux 0.7 pre (which was also released in early December 2005 and already uses X11R7). Another idea was to install grml 0.5, but since grml is a live CD distribution, it probably would be hard to install it over network. Same counts for ReactOS (version 0.2.9 was released shortly before Christmas 2005), which doesn’t seem to have a floppy disk plus network install. Since I always planed to upgrade my currently defective Toshiba T6400 i486 laptop ayca (maybe after getting an organ donor on eBay or so) to DeLi Linux 0.7 (and perhaps write a review about it for Linux Magazine or so) and I may get an Sun Ultra Enterprise 2 soon (on which NetBSD 3.0 would be the perfect OS since Linux’ performance still seems to suck on Sparc :-), I currently prefer the FreeBSD or DragonFly idea. If the Ultra doesn’t come, it probably will get NetBSD, since I haven’t a NetBSD box yet. (Haven’t a DragonFly box either, but a FreeBSD 4.x running somewhere. :-) Well, I guess, I’ll take even more old laptops than last year to the Vintage Computer Festival Europe (VCFe) next May. And since the two 1996 laptops are now 10 years old, they’re even ontopic! Yeah! ;-)

¹: I have two other not yet working Compaq laptops, both from an elder generation than Pentium I. One I got on a Swiss flea market for a few euros and the other was the first laptop of my boss, which he else would have thrown away. Unfortunately both are without power adapter and neither the usual allround laptop power adapters from Conrad, etc. nor the one from the LTE 5100 fits. But since there is eBay, I expect to get such a power adapter once. :-)

My current long-term learning project is Ruby on Rails, the ultra-hyped web application framework from David Heinemeier Hansson and friends. I like it (primarily because I can see a lot of my own abortive ideas from a web app framework for PHP I used to develop), but there is one big thing about it (or, rather, it's surrounding hype) that irritates me. Throughout the Rails literature (webpages, magazine and webzine articles, and the book Agile Web Development With Rails), there is a consistent message -- that, because everything is written in Ruby, you don't have to learn any new programming languages to write Rails applications. This is a wonderful theory -- no large XML config files to define my database schemas, and no castrated and irritating HTML template system to learn. From defining table relationships to printing a select tag, It's All Ruby, All The Time. Sweet, right? Sort of. The problem is that you won't find the language primitive to declare a one-to-many relationship in the Pickaxe (the definitive Ruby language reference book -- like "the Camel" for Perl, "the Bat" for Sendmail, or "the Turkey" for PHP). Defining a separate namespace in Rails for all of these operations is, of course, necessary, since the language didn't already define these operations. But, once you've defined a whole new set of methods to do all of these operations, you can look back on your hard work and see -- what? A new language -- one specifically designed to describe webapps. Don't get me wrong -- domain-specific languages are teh r0x0r. If everyone had to do all of their HTML manipulation by hand, programmers would be even more insane than they are. But, when you're writing your application in Rails, you're not speaking "pure Ruby". Your syntax and basic structure is Ruby, but your methods and attributes are new, different, and All Rails. It may not be a separate programming language in the usual sense, but by the time you've added a whole new pile of classes, methods, and attributes (not to mention whole new ways of structuring your application), how much importance is the use of the @ symbol to signify an instance variable, compared to the whole new set of methods to learn? Natural languages, of course, have similar issues. Most western european languages share a lot of common characteristics -- similar character sets, punctuation sets, and they read left-to-right. So I can look at a page of German or French, and identify most-to-all of the salient features (hey look, an 'a'!), and even grok the meaning of a few of the words (familiar to me, probably, because English misappropriated them from wherever they came from) but I still have no hope whatsoever of understanding the meaning of the passage as a whole. The language syntax looks familiar, but those nouns and verbs don't have any meaning to me. You can't plonk a Rails app in front of even a seasoned Ruby developer and expect them to immediately jump in and start hacking on it like they've been writing it all their life. The language syntax looks familiar, but those methods and attributes don't have any meaning to them. This is nothing peculiar to Rails, of course. If you want someone to hack on your Hibernate or Spring app, you'll get better results if you advertise for a Hibernate or Spring programmer than a Java programmer. But Rails advocates regularly say "it's all just Ruby, so there's nothing new to learn!", and that's Just Wrong, in my opinion. As an aside, if you're looking around for something a bit different, do seriously consider Rails (or just Ruby, if you don't need a webapp framework). It's different from the "usual" suspects (C, C++, and "the Ps" -- PHP, Perl, and Python), and pleasantly so. If you judge your programming languages by the old adage "a programming language that doesn't change the way you think about programming isn't worth learning", Ruby will score well. I know it's helped me think about my programming differently already, especially my Python programming (and thanks to Anthony Baxter for answering all of my esoteric python questions at OSDC a couple of weeks ago).

After many hours capturing some videos from DebConf-es II, i realize that the inaguration act is not recorded. The tape is as virgin as originally. Aggggh!!! The hardware will be hot this cold night recoding audio and video.

In my new computer, a HP nx8220, i have failed for the third time trying to load the wifi card firmware. I though this wouldn't be a problem, in my old acer i had it running almost without problems. Alvaro, my companion, has obtained it in the same portatil some hours ago. I have lost ;-)

After debdonf-es II i will try to get my blog again up. A lot of work in the last weeks preparing the event but many satisfied people talking around.

My blog is just a wiki page, so i have done a little script in perl to extract contents and generate a RSS 2.0 for planet.debian.org. If you want it, ask me, this wiki is a very old phpwiki embedded on a postnuke cms, so almost nobody in the world can use it directly. The main part of the script is a sql loop that calls XML::RSS to generate the feed.

In this new era of my blog, i will write in english, so, prepare you to read a lot of stupid errors :-(

Have a good day.

... and why Galeon is still my favourite browser: In galeon I can just paste an URL onto the new-tab button (which is missing by default, isn't it?) and it will open a new tab with that URL. In firefox, nothing happens. This annoys me each time I run firefox.

I do a lot of the christmas shopping on the 24th every year. The salespeople have grown tired of the christmas music, and it is wonderfully quiet in most shops. Most shoppers are men with a hit-and-run strategy in mind (shopping is, after all, a stressful hunting situation), which makes the queues rather short and leaves you the possibility to ask questions. Everyone is happy that the madness will be over in a few hours. You just have to make sure you're out on the street by five minutes to shop closing time to avoid the last-minute rush. All in all, this has been a very relaxed tour and now I

I did some investigation (which was very little, dak’s source is very helpful) upon the possibility to do source-only uploads to Debian’s ftp-master. In short: It’s not possible. Jennifer rejects uploads which do not contain a single binary Debian package:

if not has_binaries and Cnf.FindB(“Dinstall::Reject::NoSourceOnly”):
    reject(“source only uploads are not supported.”);

But well, there’s a way to trick it: If the package contains an arch:all binary independent package and if you upload it together with the source (the binary-indep target of debian/rules will help), Jennifer thinks that the upload contains indeed a binary package and ignores the fact that there are no real architecture dependent binary packages. The autobuilders will do the work for you.