So, I finally got myself a new digital camera — the Canon PowerShot A610. Judging from some, good reviews I read, it looks like the best option for my purposes and for the price I'm willing to pay. It's a 5 megapixel camera, it has a 4x optical zoom, it's pretty fast, can do videos (640x480 at 30 fps) etc. etc. Of course, it only comes with a 16 MB SD-card which is a joke, so I'll need to get something like a 1 GB card soonish. It seems to be pretty well-suited for macro photography (1cm minimum distance), see the samples on the right.
Linux usage: Using this camera with Linux is not as simple as mounting it as an USB mass storage device. Instead, the camera uses the Picture Transfer Protocol (PTP) for file transfers. Fortunately, the wonderful gphoto2 (apt-get install gphoto2) supports that, so I can easily get all images and videos off the camera with a simple

gphoto2 --get-all-files

(actually, the camera is only "supported" in the current gphoto2 CVS version, the latest stable release, 2.1.6, doesn't really recognize it — but it still works ;-) As I now have a pretty solid digital camera (compared to my last one), and I've also been gifted a good book on digital photography, I hope to be able to improve the quality of the photos in my photoblog quite a lot in the nearer future. In any case, I'll sure have some fun with this new toy...

Idea: Upstream publishes md5sums of releases which Debian can check with. Pros

• This makes it easier for maintainers
• Better security for users
• Piece of mind for upstream

Cons

• Upstream will probably need some tool to generate the RSS
• Non-trivial to parse RSS
• Version number mismatch

Well, following my resign at my current workplace for end of this year (only about 2 days of work left) I had some not so nice weeks in the past, but now its so near to the end that I’m happy that I did it. Ok, I will be without a job from January on, as the stuff I tried all didn’t work out (or maybe will, but much later than expected, but for now I just dont count on it), but the last few weeks at work did make it clear that I would have resigned even without hoping for them. The only unfortunate thing is that I dont get any money from the “job center”, but I never had any good experience with them, so well - nothing much lost. I just dont have money. :) Hrm, maybe I should start a “market”? But looking at AJs there isnt much money out there. :)

I've just uploaded sponsored package libpam-encfs. With it it's possible to have encrypted home directory, which will be mounted during login.

I'm working on new fuse (filesystem in userspace) packages and I really wonder if I should simplify their postinstallation procedure as it was mentioned in #337572. That would make my life much easier, cause there's quite many bugreports against undefined behaviour of post-debconf tasks, which are pretty hard to track for me. In fact I suppose that most users simply accept default answers so asking them about anything seems to be overhead.
Let's assume I will remove these superflous questions... now the problem is that if someone answered for them in some previous installation then I could leave unneded group and some config files on their systems. On the other head removing this group could even lead to nonworking system because of one of these bugs: #307624, 307627, 306281.
I'm quite confused what to do now. Both solutions have some advantages and disadvantages. First one at least could lead to less bugs in the future. Hints welcome.

As Christian said in a very nice summary of the issue, this is the day the DADVSI law (which is a transposition of the EUCD, the European DMCA) will be examined by French parliament. I would really like to share Christian's optimism. So far, the EUCD.INFO initiative succeeded in bringing the issue to the public (120k signatures, mostly from French residents) and to several MP. Good news are that a lot of amendments has been submitted to mitigate effects of the DADVSI law. Bad news is that we also had terrible press cover: we had articles in most national newspapers and TV, but a lot of them are completely missing the point and are comparing us to champions of piracy against copyright. Even worse, Christian Vanneste (conservative MP responsible of the law) keeps spreading lies. Today, members of the EUCD.INFO initiative went to the parliament to talk to MP and to show their concerns. Some friends and I went too even if we were just there to watch the debate. I'm quite disappointed to see that left wing was totally absent (like less than 10 MP out of 160!). Right wing was more represented but MP supporting our amendments are a minority group. Debate starts again at 21 local time. We will be there and I hope I'm wrong, but I really fear we loose more than we gain.

I'm still alive, thanks for asking. Though it doesn't feel too much like it. The stress at work is rather improving than lowering. But I sort of managed to reach an important step last thursday finally with the bind-to-pdns transition we are doing, so I thought I could present me with some gifts. Interestingly I just were at the bank in the morning to withdraw my christmas money... So I thought I could go to the cinema again. The people with which I was in the cinema before didn't ask me lately to join them anymore, so I have to kick my ass myself anyway. So I drove to the cinema complex, and being not too late was able to go a bit shopping, too. I presented me with three (or four, because one was a double) CDs: Mike Oldfield "Ommadawn", Garbage "Bleed Like Me" and Kylie Minogue "UltimateKylie". Besides I usually prefer albums to Best Of Albums I thought the Kylie double CD was a good deal nevertheless. "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire" was the movie I watched, finally. Of course people who read the book will miss the Veela, the Leprechaun, Dobbie!! and various other things. But appart from the usual cutting you get with longer books the movie itself wasn't too bad. I really enjoyed it, especially because I met two friends right before going in and got the promise to go with them to Narnia today. Yeah! Friday was very special, too. I was invited to some christmas party, at viennAventura. I really enjoyed the evening, I fully support their concept. Take a look at the nice christmas flash Diana did for the website as long as you have the chance to!
After some glogg, helping to write a christmas picture story including the photo shooting and decorating their christmas tree with handdrawn glitter balls I went happily home. I took my dog out for a walk, and when we were around the corner I heard my cat cry for me! After a week being outside and almost already thinking of never seeing him again I heard him crying for me like hell! It was sooo great to hear him, I went over to him, picked him up and took him home with me again. Of course I wasn't able to do any work that weekend but only cuddle with him all the time. Fortunately for him he was in a very cuddly mood himself, too. ;) Guess he missed me too.

So the final implementation detail in the embargoing scheme is providing a tool to move stuff from the embargoed and unembargoed queues into the archive. The existing tool the security team use is called “amber” (after the inimitable Amber Benson). amber’s pretty simple: it takes a DSA number, and the .changes files you’re looking at; then asks for confirmation, accepts the packages into the archive, regenerates Packages and Release files, fills out a template advisory with details from the deb and mails that off, and uploads the files to ftp-master for inclusion in the next stable release. There are a few problems with that. One is it doesn’t allow for rejections. Another is it doesn’t provide the security team with the opportunity to edit advisories while the packages are being prepared. Another issue is that the entire program has to run under sudo with full archive priveleges. Enter “dak dsa” aka “newamber”. The new tool aims to do more or less the same thing, but with a little more style. First, it provides a small interactive interface, so that processing an advisory now looks like:

$ newamber DTSA-25-1 smb4k_*.changes
Create new advisory DTSA-25-1? y
Advisory: DTSA-25-1
Changes:
 smb4k_0.6.4-0.0etch1_alpha.changes
 smb4k_0.6.4-0.0etch1_hppa.changes
 smb4k_0.6.4-0.0etch1_i386.changes
 smb4k_0.6.4-0.0etch1_m68k.changes
 smb4k_0.6.4-0.0etch1_mips.changes
 smb4k_0.6.4-0.0etch1_mipsel.changes
 smb4k_0.6.4-0.0etch1_s390.changes
 smb4k_0.6.4-0.0etch1_sparc.changes
Packages:
 smb4k 0.6.4-0.0etch1 (alpha, hppa, i386, m68k, mips, mipsel, s390, source, sparc)
Approve, [E]dit advisory, Show advisory, Reject, Quit? 

Choosing edit will grab a copy of the template and run vi – the template will only be filled out when you approve the upload though, since the values might change before then. Accept will do more or less what old amber did; though instead of mailing the filled in advisory draft it’ll just leave it in the filesystem instead. Of course, running vi (well, $EDITOR) generally means you can get a shell too, so running the command with full archive priveleges is a bit much – at least if you’re trying to have any sort of granularity to your security regime, which was, after all, the whole point of this exercise. So instead of running the entire command as the katie user, “dak dsa” instead has to escalate its own priveleges, in this case using sudo and specific options, such as sudo dak dsa -A -- foo.changes to approve foo.changes. Fortunately sudo and the apt argument parser are cooperative enough to allow “dak dsa” users to invoke “dak dsa -A – *” as katie, and thus have only the very limited access we’re trying for. Obviously the above is taken from the testing-security team – it’s the same source and i386 packages, recompiled on other architectures by the security.debian.org testing autobuilders. It’s shown up a few flaws in the autobuilding for etch: (a) the amd64 autobuilder isn’t active; (b) the arm buildd can’t seem to find its chroot in between running apt-get install and apt-get remove; (c) the s390 buildd only works if the source is on ftp-master; (d) of the five m68k buildds that will take packages for security.debian.org updates to testing, only two will succeed (a400t and poseidon). There’s also the notable problem that the chroots for the functional buildds have gotten out of date and that builds break somewhat obscurely as a consequenece. One of the test updates is also failing on hppa due to space restrictions. And of course, the above list is after a chunk of other problems have already been fixed. It’s worth noting that even if the above isn’t fixed for testing now; we’ll still need etch chroots for security.debian.org when we release, so those problems have to be dealt with at some point. And that the brokenness is the result of six months’ divergence from sarge; after a year and a half when etch releases – or the three years between woody and sarge’s release – it’s probably fair to expect worse breakage. Anyway, that’s just about it from me on this topic. Micah Anderson from the testing-security group is currently checking out the unembargoed facility, and has redone a couple of DTSAs on security.d.o. So presumably those guys will start working out whether security.d.o is something they want to make use of, and if so, working out what changes/tweaks are necessary for that. Though, unsurprisingly, I also still have to do some committing to CVS…

It’s more than a year since the first development release of Backup Manager, this easy-to-use tool for archiving your data under Linux. Version 0.6 which has just been released, provides a set of features for letting you implement your own backup strategy.
Backup Manager is able to use any existing infrastructure for achieving this goal: FTP or SSH accounts, CD/DVD burning devices…
A couple of different backup methods are available: tarballs (incremental or not), dumps (MySQL, SVN) and a generic method which uses content sent on stdout by an arbitrary command. An effort has been given regarding localisation, the program is now translated in 5 languages: French, German, Spanish, Italian and Vietnamese. The user guide has been writen and is available in different formats. Hopefully, the debian package will come very soon…

Today is the day where the very controversial DADVSI bill will be examined by the French Parliament. DADVSI stands for "Droit d'Auteur et les Droits Voisins dans la Soci t de l'Information" which can be roughly translated to "Author Rights and Related Rights in the Information Society". This very controversial bill includes some very ambiguous parts about software "that could be used to illegally exchange data over the Internet". The text is so vague that it can even interpreted as possibly allowing to forbig software authors to publish their sources....which explains why the French Free Software community reacted so strongly. This text is promoted by the major entertainment companies (Vivendi Universal and the like...). Some even said to representatives of the Free Software communities: "we will foirbid you to publish your sources". I'm feeling they're failing, though. The very active lobbying promoted by the EUCD.INFO initiative has already reached one goal: the bill will not be examined confidentially. For instance, I'm currently watching the LCI TV channel, one of the major news channels among satellite/cable/Internet channels in France and this problem is now in their major headlines. You're screwed, pals. Bottom line note: in France, laws are proposed by the government and must be examined, then voted, by the Parliament. The Parliament may "amend" a law (ie propose changes) which sometimes means completely changing it. We now have a great hope that this will happen as many of our representatives ("d put s"), including some from the current majority (right wing) and most of the left wing representatives, have expressed very strong reserves. Additionnal side note: at this moment, there are no less than 200 amendments proposed to this bill...:-)

Well, I've done it. The XSF svn repo now contains a full set of packages for the Xorg modular tree that enable it to run an X server in a chroot from a clean install. Note that the packages are still very sloppy because I've been mainly beating them in to shape enough to simply run the server. But that part's now done, and I can happily get that grey hatched background to show up from inside my chroot. The next step will be to finish packaging everything, so that we have a full set of packages to install, run, test, and clean up to the standards of quality we expect from Debian. Note that I don't recommend anyone but developers even take a look at these things yet, since I've been very lax in getting them in to good shape. I had a good base to work from (more on that in a moment) but I took some liberties and cut some corners in order to get to this point. Once we have a full set of packages, I'll throw them in to experimental for people to play with, but right now they're not going to be much fun for anyone.

I couldn't have gotten this far this fast without the help of Daniel Stone, so a big thanks goes out to him. Not only has he been great about showing me just which packages to steal from and where, but every time I ran in to some obscure bug he had already been there and quickly pointed me to the way out, often with a package update ready to go. The packages he made are wonderfully simple and easy to understand, which let me get moving on them right away, and they'll form a wonderful basis for the future of Debian's X distribution.

On a further note, I've asked the release team to let us upload 6.9 to unstable when it's released, which should be next week. So far there's been no objection, and a bunch of people have chipped in so far to help out with the xlibs-dev transition. Thanks to everyone who's been helping out so far with getting 6.9 in. 6.9 will set the stage for the modular packages, by giving everyone the most up to date drivers for the next few months and taking the pressure off of me to deliver the modular packages right away :-) My goal is to ship the modular packages with etch, and I'm going to keep working to do that, but 6.9 should keep people happy until those are ready for unstable.

grep-dctrl has proven, at least for me, an utterly useful tool; I suspect this will probably be the case for many others as well. (As I side comment, I believe it’d be nice for AMs to make sure their applicants do at least know about the existance of grep-dctrl, and ideally have basic knowledge about how to use it.) Many times, though, using its grep-available form is not fine-grained enough, and one needs full control over the distribution to make the search in. A valid workaround for this is to run grep-dctrl over /var/lib/apt/lists/whatever; I’ve been using this for some time now, with shell aliases like grep-sid or grep-s-etch (for sources), but sometimes I wanted a grep over two dists, or several components (e.g., main and contrib), or a set of arches. For this, I decided to write a grep-dctrl wrapper that, relying on the structure of a normal mirror, allows to run a search over any combination of dist/component/arch. At home, where I do not have a local mirror, I have populated /org/ftp.root/debian/dists with a pool of symlinks towards /var/lib/apt/lists, and whenever I need more than i386/source, I can run it on any debian.org machine with a local mirror, e.g. merkel. For example, to know which packages in sid but also present in testing are still kdelibs4c2a-untransitioned, but ignoring hppa and m68k, I’d run on merkel the following:

  % grepd sid:main,contrib:alpha,arm,i386,ia64,mips,mipsel,powerpc,s390,sparc \
          -Fdepends -e 'kdelibs4(c2)?(  , $)' -ns source,package  
    unique-sources   xargs madison -s testing   awk ' print $1 '

In case somebody finds it of interest, the script is available here, together with the dirty hack that is unique-sources, needed since not all binary packages have a Source header (sigh). NP: Jacques Brel, Au suivant

I am fully aware that the current state of the mISDN packages sucks. The big problem with updating them is that the kernel ABI has changed, and the userspace has not completely followed yet, so updating the package to the current state will break other stuff like asterisk-chan-misdn.
If you have a good idea how to fix the situation, I'd be glad to hear it.

Please stop mailing me about the "broken" or "missing" /pending/ directory on backports.org. It's gone, and will never come back. That was a temporary solution, all packages from there were moved into the regular archive a few days ago.

This time tomorrow I'll be on a plane heading to Israel in a circuitous route for a much needed vacation in Israel. It appears that the weather in Israel had turned from sunny and hot into a real winter so that we won't feel too bad comparing the weather of Israel and Ireland. The Haaretz forecast says there will actually be rain, of which I had enough here. We will escape the empty Maynooth of Christmas for the split personality (Rehovot/Carmiel) of Hanukka with the families, for some much needed stuffing with home-made Sufganiyot and other not-necessarily-related-to-Hanukka foods. A union with a newly purchased Canon 350D is also much expected :-)
This will replace a Canon Elan7 film camera of which pictures that the local development shop manages to screw the image scanning and creates washed-out colours.

I can definitely see that, when Wesnoth 1.1 is out, it will cause a new decrease in productivity in Debian. PS: Not really. Fhew! PPS: Other suggestions were: Frozen Wesnoth, Frozen Budoku, or worse: Wesnoth Budoku.

A long time, the common way of working around MSIE CSS bugs was to exploit parser bugs and missing features in it's CSS parser. Recently I read about a cleaner approach; I tested it recently and it seems to work quite well. Judging from the W3C validator, it's compatible with XHTML, too. It's nor perfect, but it probably is the best we can do currently. (And definitely cleaner than the parser-bug-exploits listed before.) The approach is simple: given the string <!--[if IE]> Foobar <![endif]--> in an HTML file, almost any parser will treat this as an comment. Except for Internet Exploiter, which will treat "Foobar" as if it was part of the regular text. Instead of "Foobar", you can load an override stylesheet to work around Internet Explorer bugs. Note that as a side effect, MSIE is not a standards compliant parser for XHTML. ;-) Now for the drawbacks:

• The part hidden from every parser except IE is not validated by tools
• The converse construct (remove --), to hide stuff from IE only, is not valid XHTML
• The conditional needs to be in every HTML file, it's not in the CSS and not cached with the CSS, so sligthly less performant than other solutions.
• It doesn't nest, you can't use comments in this construct
• They are, after all, a hack

For comparison, a few of the older tricks in CSS:

body        background-color: red;  
html>body   background-color: green;  

This is 100% valid CSS, and works because Internet Exploder doesn't support CSS 2 child selectors. But you cannot always use this, since you need to know the parent elements name. Note that this can give you trouble with the upcoming Internet Explorer which will likely have support for this selector, but will probably be "compatible" to some of the known MSIE 5/6 bugs.

body  
  voice-family: "\" \""; /* some browsers have a parsing bug */
                         /* and will ignore the following rules */
  voice-family: inherit;
  background-color: green;
 

This abuses an attribute to confuse the CSS parser of some browsers. A real hack, strongly discouraged.

So, the last show went past yesterday, and we have left Bayreuth. In retrospect, it was fun but I wouldn't want that kind of stress more often than, say, once in a year. A lot of things didn't work out as planned (I'm writing this from the train I've had to take in order to get home on time for work tomorrow), and I'm pretty tired now, after staying at the venue for three nights fixing things that broke. Insisting on a sane light control panel was the best thing I did, as it allowed me to program all the scenes together with the director, so I would only have to react to the cues. Tomorrow will see me sorting the stuff back into the storage and bringing back what I borrowed, and taking care that everything is in order with the people I've dealt with.

Hello World. As you can see, my blog is now on planet.d.o as well. /me waves :)

I'm writing this during the final minutes of debconf-es-2, which I enjoyed quite a lot. Thanks to everyone who made this another fun Debian event! Quite unsurprinsingly, I couldn't get as much done as I thought previously. What I did manage to do, is to add more stuff to my todo list: I will be taking home a bunch of DV tapes with the recordings of the talks given. I'll send a note, when they're available online.

I've still been extremely busy. Unlike my last fairly incoherent brain dump, this time I've been keeping notes on the things I wanted to write about, so hopefully I won't forget things. Here we go...

Squirrels

Squirrels are absolutely everywhere. They're very fast and very cute. They're kind of like possums, except diurnal. They run up trees with ease, and leap from tree to tree. It's quite cool to watch them. The damn things don't stand still long enough to be photographed (properly), and they don't let you get too close without scampering up a tree or running off. I'm told they're the number one carrier of rabies, so I shouldn't be trying to get too close anyway.

Sales tax

Definitely one of the more annoying aspects of consumer life is the fact that prices quoted are not inclusive of sales tax. This means you always need to part with more cash than you expect. Furthermore, there are some places (some fast-food outlets) that do quote the prices inclusive of tax, so it's really hard to know what you're in for.

Speed limits

I find speed limit signs to be either infrequent or harder to notice, or a combination of both. They're just a black text on white background sign. I'm used to them having the red circle. That said, no one seems to drive at the speed limit anyway.

Ethnicity

Canberra's a very white town compared to say Sydney, but I reckon at least the San Jose area of California blows the socks off what I've seen of Sydney for multiculturalism. You really notice it over here. I've been at the mall in Milpitas, and you can play "spot the white European" (a variation of "spot the Caucasian").

Different responses to thankyou

I think the fairly standard response to saying thanks that I'm used to is "You're welcome". Over here, you get "mm hmm" a lot, which is just strange.

Fractions vs decimal

They love their fractions. Petrol gets quoted at 221⁹/₁₀, which took me a while to realise was 221.9 cents per gallon

Alcoholic beverage labelling

Australia has the concept of a "standard drink". I remember as a kid the advertising campaign "rethink your third drink" (or for women, "rethink your second drink"). The idea being that men could drink two standard drinks in the first hour, and then one standard drink every hour after that, and be at 0.05% blood alcohol, which is the legal limit for Australia. And every bottled alcoholic drink is labelled with how many standard drinks it is. An average beer is about 1.2 standard drinks for example. No such labelling over here. You get the percentage of alcohol per volume, and that is it, which makes self-regulating very difficult. The limit is apparently 0.08%, but I don't think I want to be driving around on the wrong side of the road at that level (or any level really).

Christmas vs "Holidays"

Everyone and every piece of advertising goes on about the "Holidays". Retail people are always wishing us "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas". I think this is because there's a large chunk of people who don't necessarily celebrate Christmas.

Tipping

I haven't really come across tipping in everyday life as much as I'd expected, but when I think about it a bit, I'm at work most of the time, so that's probably why. The general rule seems to be to tip "double the tax", so for a bill at a restaurant, or where you get personal service, such as a haircut, you tip. But you don't tip at McDonald's, nor Subway (where I would have expected you would).

That's about all my current observations on living over here. Tomorrow we get our townhouse in Central Park. Our air-freight was finally delivered today. (What was supposed to take about 8 days took 4 weeks). Not sure when we can expect our sea freight at this stage. We bought a couple of mountain bikes last weekend, and if the weather is okay tomorrow, we'll pick them up and ride them home. We've found a really nice off road (as in not shared with cars) bike path, which runs close to home all the way to work. I'm really keen to roller blade to work if it's feasible, and also to cycle in. I'm a bit disappointed to discover after we've been accepted for the place that we're right on top of a toxic waste dump (or something like that). If I grow a second head, you'll know why. The other piece of exciting news is that the bank sent me a debit card, when they'd previously told me they wouldn't until I had a Social Security number (still no sign if that yet). This thing (the debit card) is freaking weird. It's Mastercard branded, and in some places you use it like you'd use a debit card for EFTPOS back home. You swipe, enter your PIN and that's it. In other cases, you swipe and sign a bit of paper like a credit card transaction. In either case, money is sucked out of our checking account. The scary thing is that no one seems to check signatures in this country, and a lot of places will accept credit card payments electronically (like petrol stations where you just swipe the card at the bowser and enter the ZIP code of your billing address and that's it). Oh, and I can use this thing like a credit card for Internet purchases. What bothers me is that the level of authentication is so low, but it's sucking actual money out of our checking account, so with all the credit card fraud around, it's relatively trivial to draw actual money out of a bank account, as opposed to using someone's credit. That said, I just got the card today, and since then, it's made shopping so much easier. It's amazing how many places won't accept a foreign credit card, and I was a big user of EFTPOS back home, and this ability to use a debit card like a credit card means I can essentially continue in that habit. I wasn't looking forward to carrying lots of cash or having to use cheques.