Search Results: "ag"

21 December 2009

Debian News: FAI Project celebrates its 10th anniversary

Ten years ago, on December 21st, 1999, Thomas Lange announced the release of version 1.0 of FAI (Fully Automatic Installation).

FAI is a non-interactive system to install, customize and manage Linux systems and software configurations on computers as well as virtual machines and chroot environments, from small networks to large infrastructures and clusters.

It is a tool for mass unattended Linux installation. You can take one or more virgin systems, turn on the power, and after a few minutes, the systems are installed, and completely configured to your exact needs, without any interaction necessary.

The tool was developed at the University of Cologne, because the author was too lazy to install Debian on 16 hosts manually.FAI now also supports the installation of Ubuntu and RPM-based Linux distributions. It is used worldwide in very different environments; even installations on two zSeries z10 mainframes are reported.

A detailed report in German about the 10 years of the FAI project can be found at http://www.informatik.uni-koeln.de/fai/otherdocs/10jahre.html.

Contributed by: Thomas Lange

Martin-Éric Racine: Wanted: a coherent, sane Finnish political party

In more than 11 years in Finland, I've been politically involved in a couple of political parties on the Right side of the spectrum - mainly because those parties tend to favor a free market economy and a work-oriented immigration. In one case, I was invited by fellow immigrants to attend the meetings of their favorite party's English section, because of my expertise on Immigration legislation and common practices. In an other case, a member of the Finnish parliament invited me to participate in his party's immigrant workgroup, which resulted in my getting involved in a number of proactive initiatives and eventually joining that party as a card-carrying member. Simultaneously, I was approached by no less than 4 Finnish political parties to become a candidate in the municipal elections (in Finland, foreigners who have lived at least 2 years on an A-status residence permit can vote and stand as a candidate in municipal elections). Despite this, I've come to the conclusion that none of these Finnish political parties is genuine: On one hand, there's politicians who claim to know everything about the Immigration question and yet their speeches tell an entirely different story than what immigrants experience. On the other hand, there's politicians who complain about the immigrants' lack of participation in political life, but who quickly add that their personal group of supporters is all they're interested in hearing from. Correlating these facts, it's been found by many politically-involved immigrants that Finnish political parties don't genuinely want to involve immigrants; all they are interested in is acquiring a few extra votes from the immigrant population and in transferring those votes to their party's star Finnish candidate, who often is someone favored by the party's old-timers but disavowed by the majority of grassroot members. In a few more extreme cases, party brasses will sheepishly admit that all they want is a couple of niggers in the candidate list to show a vague sense of adhesion to the multicultural agenda - despite the assurances they have given to often naive immigrant candidates that they "genuinely" hope that they'll be elected. As it turns out, many immigrants are actively involved at the grassroot level and receiving the praises of their Finnish colleagues for their innovative and proactive initiatives. As a result, genuinely interested Finns have joined forces with active immigrants to launch various initiatives for improving Finland's competitive position in the global economy through a thriving cosmopolitanism and a stronger culture of entrepreneurship. For instance, I am personally involved at several public and private sector initiatives. Nonetheless, grassroot initiatives can only ever accomplish so much; without the unflinching support of Finland's significant political players, several key elements of these innovative solutions cannot be implemented. However, given the grassroot's frustrating experiences of the political scene, one cannot help but wonder: Is there any Finnish political party whose actions are coherent with its stated political agenda and in sync with the grassroot initiatives being put forward by the immigrants and their Finnish associates?

Daniel Kahn Gillmor: dd, netcat, and disk throughput

I was trying to dump a large Logical Volume (LV) over ethernet from one machine to another. I found some behavior which surprised me.fun constraints(how do i get myself into these messes?)This entry has been truncated read the full entry.Tags: lvm, netcat

20 December 2009

Dirk Eddelbuettel: Rcpp and inline example

Following up on yesterday's Rcpp 0.7.0 release, here is a quick example of why the new feastures can be so useful. The following R code defines a character variable gslrng. This variable contains a short C++ code segment, which is then transformed by the function cfunction into a function of two arguments assigned to funx: <body style="background-color:#ffffff"> 
    ## now use Rcpp to pass down a parameter for the seed, and a vector size
    gslrng <- '
       int seed = RcppSexp(s).asInt();
       int len = RcppSexp(n).asInt();
       gsl_rng *r;
       gsl_rng_env_setup();
       std::vector<double> v(len);
       r = gsl_rng_alloc (gsl_rng_default);
       gsl_rng_set (r, (unsigned long) seed);
       for (int i=0; i<len; i++)  
           v[i] = gsl_rng_get (r);
        
       gsl_rng_free(r);
       return RcppSexp(v).asSexp();
    '
    ## turn into a function that R can call
    ## compileargs redundant on Debian/Ubuntu as gsl headers are found anyway
    funx <- cfunction(signature(s="numeric", n="numeric"),
                      gslrng,
                      includes="#include <gsl/gsl_rng.h>",
                      Rcpp=TRUE,
                      cppargs="-I/usr/include",
                      libargs="-lgsl -lgslcblas")
    print(funx(0, 5))
</body> The signature argument to cfunction defines two variables s and n -- which the C++ function then reads in from R and converts to two integers seed and len. seed is used to initialize the random-number generator, and len draws are then taken and stored in the STL vector v which returned at the end. As the R level, we now have a function of two arguments returning a vector of RNG draws of the given lenth and using the given seed. Also note how we tell cfunction to add the GSL include line, specify that we want to compile and link against Rcpp and provide -I and -L arguments to compile and link with the GSL. (The include statement is not needed as the compiler would have found them in /usr/include anyway, but it shows how to set this if needed.) Finally, we simply call our freshly compiled, linked and loaded C++ function with arguments zero for the seed and five for the length, and print the results vector returned to R from C++.

Torsten Landschoff: Restoring a package selection on new system

I am moving from my old Debian development system to a new one, changing architectures from i386 to amd64. So I need to do a fresh install, but basically I want to keep my package selection. Conventional wisdom is to use dpkg --get-selections and dpkg --set-selections to preserve the package selection. However, this does not keep the information about automatically installed packages. Instead, I used 
aptitude search '?installed?not(?automatic)' -F %p > packages.txt
to dump the packages I installed manually. Installing these was a matter of running: 
aptitude install  cat packages.txt
In fact this was taking so long that I loaded the packages in batches using 
cat packages.txt xargs -n 100 aptitude install --schedule-only; aptitude
While I was at it, it ran 
aptitude remove '?obsolete'
on the original system, killing of a few hundred packages that accumulated since 2003.

Jose Luis Rivas Contreras: awesome s awful.spawn grr!

Yesterday I was trying to get some of my old keybindings (from awesome 2.x) to work on awesome 3.4 and it was awful the process. With 2.x I worked with awful.spawn and got any bash command I wanted running. Now it changed to awful.util.spawn but if I wanted anything ran on a shell I had to use awful.util.spawn_with_shell but, at least for me, didn t worked. So I got commands like: 
scrot ~/tmp/screenshots/$(date +%Y%m%d-%k%M%S).png
That one didn t ran directly. Nor my commands for volume management. So I got a workaround, used only awful.util.spawn calling scripts on my ~/bin path. So if any of you has got issues with this just put your line on a bash script file, make it executable and use a line like: 
awful.key( , "Print", function () awful.util.spawn("scriptpath") end),
BTW, don t use ~ nor any thing needs a shell, use full paths to avoid confusion and bad functioning. I used ~/bin/d/anything and didn t worked nor with awful.util.spawn_with_shell. I hope this help anyone with my same issues.

Gregor Herrmann: RC bugs 2009/51

after attending the Munich BSP 3 weeks ago (thanks for inviting me, & thanks especially to Stefan for hosting me) I've tasted blood & started to look at our RC bugs more often. I'm still far from zack's RCBW frequency; but I thought I'd give a short overview anyway; maybe it motivates others to chime in? So here's a list of RC bugs I've touched in the last weeks (not counting some merges in the BTS): remarks:

Stefano Zacchiroli: RC bugs of the week - week 15

RCBW - week #15 Here are last weektoday squashes, by yours truly: Some highlights:

Wouter Verhelst: Good, not evil

There is a bit of a fluff online currently about the following clause in the "jsmin" code (whatever that is):
The software shall be used for good, not evil
This seems to have started when Google rejected a project based on that code due to its license being not free or open source according to their standards, and therefore not welcome anymore. The arguments then quickly degenerated into things like 'when did google stop being against evil'. But those are all besides the point. One of the most important properties of free and open source software is that anyone can use it for any purpose; there are no restrictions to using them. The DFSG (and hence, the OSD which was derived from the DFSG) encode this as follows:
No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor
The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.
You may think "how is 'evil' a field of endeavor", but that is the wrong question. To "use software for evil" can mean any of a number of things, including "nuclear research", "weapons development", "abortion", or, heck "the cash register in a butchery shop", depending on the ethical and moral framework through which the person writing the license sees the world. The ability to give someone a CD or DVD with a bunch of software on there, being able to tell them that they can just use this in any which way they see fit, is a very strong and important feature of the free and open source community. Every time someone comes up with a clause like the above, however, this ability is diluted somewhat; and if it is readily accepted within the greater free and open source movement, then eventually everyone interested in using a piece of software must first check whether they're not trying to use software that forbids someone's pet evil, and we lose one of the greatest strenghts that does exist for free software, but not for proprietary software. The sad thing is, the jsmin author seems to agree. From a video/transcript on which he talks about his absurd license clause is the following quote:
Also about once a year, I get a letter from a lawyer, every year a different lawyer, at a company I don't want to embarrass the company by saying their name, so I'll just say their initials IBM
[laughter]
saying that they want to use something I wrote. Because I put this on everything I write, now. They want to use something that I wrote in something that they wrote, and they were pretty sure they weren't going to use it for evil, but they couldn't say for sure about their customers. So could I give them a special license for that? Of course. So I wrote back this happened literally two weeks ago "I give permission for IBM, its customers, partners, and minions, to use JSLint for evil."
Or, in other words, all you have to do if you want to use this software for evil is set up a second company, tell Douglas that this second company wants to sell software that uses his software to people who might use it for "evil", even though the first company won't, and you're in business. Because Douglas doesn't really oppose evildoers. So the question is, why is that clause in there in the first place? There are only two possibilities; either Douglas didn't really think about those issues, in which case I hope he will one day see the light and remove the clause; or he did, and decided to go ahead and put that clause there anyway. And that would be evil.

Wouter Verhelst: QNAP NAS device

A customer called me a while back. They have a pretty high-end NAS (2U server with external disk enclosure) that they use for most of their needs: both document and other storage for management types, as well as storage for their EDA cluster. People familiar with EDA tools will know that they are pretty disk intensive. They tend to require shitloads of diskspace, preferably at high performance. The problem was that extending the storage space of this high-end NAS device is rather expensive. Supported disks only come at 300G units with prices that are higher than the cheap TB disks available today for the desktop market; and while the price and performance of those disks is worth it for the EDA requirements, the number of people storing documents and similar on the same device is not so high that performance would be an issue. Thus, what they wanted was a cheap solution to augment, rather than replace, their current storage solution, with the focus being on low cost at the possible expense of performance and, since bacula runs well there, reliability. They were quite surprised when I offered them a solution based around a QNAP device; they had expected a price, without hard disks, of about three to four times the price of the QNAP, and therefore were very happy with this suggestion. Unfortunately, the devices produced by this manufacturer that are supported by Lenny, the current Debian stable release, were EOL'd just before we placed the order; however, their replacements will be supported by Squeeze, the next release, and with a bit of help from Martin Michlmayr, we were able to install Lenny with a somewhat more recent kernel. This drove the price up somewhat, both because the newer devices are a few tens of euros more expensive, and because we agreed to pay Martin to prioritize work on the specific device that we'd need, so that we wouldn't have to wait for him to get around to it. As of this Thursday, the device, which had finally arrived after some initial delays, has been installed. Unfortunately, one of the disks that they'd bought was DOA; but they had the foresight to buy five, rather than four, disks, so that was not a major problem. In fact, the only real issues that I ran into were this one arm-specific bug, and the fact that the high-end NAS device is still running etch, which means that rsync --acl won't work. That means I'll have to go back there soon to do an upgrade of the high-end device (which had been planned for a while already); for the arm-specific bug, a workaround is already in place. All in all, a pretty good experience.

Robert Collins: Various releases


Recently I ve been working on the Python unittest API in my spare time, with a long term goal of making it possible to safely and sensibly glue many different plugins together into the core. Two important components of that goal are being able to extend the data included in a test result, and being able to change how a test is run (such as adding new exceptions that should be treated as specific outcomes python unittest uses exceptions to signal outcomes). In testtools 0.9.2 we have an answer to both those issues. I m really happy with the data included in outcomes API, TestCase.addDetail . The API for extending outcomes works, but only addresses part of that issue for now. Subunit 0.0.4, which is available for older Ubuntu releases in the Subunit releases PPA now, and mostly built on Debian (so it will propogate through to Lucid in due course) has support for the addDetail API. Subunit now depends on testtools, reducing the non-protocol related code and generally making things simpler. Using those two together, bzr s parallelised test suite has been improved as well, allowing it to include the log file for tests run in separate processes (previously it was silently discarded). The branch to do this will be merged soon, its just waiting on some sysadmin love to get these new versions into its merge-test environment. This change also provides complete capturing of the log when users want to supply a subunit log containing failed tests. The python code to do this is pretty simple: 
def setUp(self):
    super(TestCase, self).setUp()
    self.addDetail("log", content.Content(content.ContentType("text", "plain",
         "charset": "utf8" ), lambda:[self._get_log(keep_log_file=True)]))
I ve made a couple of point releases to python-junitxml recently, fixing some minor bugs. I need to figure out how to add the extra data that addDetails permits to the xml output. I suspect its a strict superset and so I ll have to filter stuff down. If anyone knows about similar extensions done to junit s XML format before, please leave a comment :)

Russell Coker: I Bought the Bose QC-15

I bought the Bose QC15 noise canceling headphones for my trip back from the US. See my previous posts about Noise Canceling Headphones [1] and Testing Noise Canceling Headphones [2] for the details of my search. I first tried my new headphones in my hotel room and they worked really well at blocking the noise from the nearby road (El Camino Real in Menlo Park) as well as the noise from the heater in my room. At the airport they entirely blocked the sound of the airport air conditioning system (which was surprisingly loud I didn t realise how loud until I tried the headphones). On the flight the headphones worked really well. I used them for hours when they weren t plugged in to any source, just stopping the noise was a huge benefit. I was also able to listen to music (both MP3s on my laptop and the plane sound system) at a relatively low volume with an apparent high quality. The Bose store I visited in Stanford mall has a sound system set up to emulate the noise you experience inside a jet to demonstrate what the headset can do. It really lives up to this demonstration! I recommend them to anyone who wants over-ear noise canceling headphones and can afford $US300 + tax. But one thing to note is that not everyone likes such things my wife didn t like the sound that they generate (the least bad way to describe it is as a soft hiss). This is definitely not something you would want to buy based on reviews alone, it must be tested in-store. The main technical suggestion I can make for improvement to the QC-15 is for it to have slightly softer and thicker padding where it contacts the sides of the wearer s head. I find that my glasses prevent it from making as good contact as I would like, and that when wearing it while eating the contact is significantly broken with every jaw movement which is really annoying. A minor suggestion is that every pair of headphones should have the left and right ear pieces clearly marked, I really shouldn t have to read an instruction manual to discover which way to wear it. One thing that surprised me was the inclusion of business cards for the headset! Here is a picture:

The picture links to a larger picture that also shows the French version of the same text on the other side. I was astonished by this, encouraging happy customers to help sell your products is a reasonable and effective form of product promotion (really this is what I m doing for Bose with this blog post). But giving customers business cards is going too far anyone who wants me to hand out their business cards can offer to pay me to do so (and I probably won t accept). But if such things are considered to be a good idea then here are a few suggestions for other things that they could do:
  1. Create a Bose dating site where one can meet people who like music and traveling (this does sound appealing). In about 10 years the children of people who meet that way would start buying audio gear
  2. Start a Bose fan club.
  3. Create a template that be used by a tattoo parlor to make a Bose tattoo.
  4. Sell Bose fan t-shirts to people who aren t dedicated enough to get a tattoo.
  5. Register Bose as a religion, that gets tax free status among other benefits.
It s a pity that Bose doesn t make any water-proof noise canceling headphones. It would be something for their marketing people to wear while jumping over a shark on water skis [3]. But seriously the best thing that Bose could do to have their products promoted would be to start by printing the web site for each product on the item, my headset has two patent numbers listed which seem unlikely to provide any benefit for anyone, in that space they could have printed the global.bose.com/qc URL that is on the business card. Of course providing the URL really doesn t do any good when the URL actually is useless. It starts by giving me a page asking which country I am in the correct thing to do is to use geoip to determine the country and then give the user the option of selecting another country if that one is not ideal. Then after I select a country it doesn t take me to a specific page for the product! I could have typed in www.bose.com and got the same result (in terms of US shopping at least) while typing six fewer characters! Next like most corporate web sites the Bose site doesn t appear to be configured for longevity of URLs URLs which are clearly designed for the computer rather than humans are expected to change without warning. This discourages linking to any page that one might discover through web searches or navigating the site, and causes them to lose a lot of potential links. Having specific URLs for all the products (including the obsolete ones) that are designed firstly for humans to read and write would be a good idea. It would be really useful to be able to compare the features of new products with the ones that are going cheap on eBay. For someone who is considering buying a new product now the purchase decision would be easier if they knew that the company would provide resources to help them get a better price on eBay in a few years if they want to upgrade to a newer model. One thing to keep in mind is the fact that the reputation of a company (which makes a dramatic impact on the prices customers are prepared to pay) depends largely on a long history of making quality products. Telling customers about those historic products is one of the most sensible things that most corporations fail to do on the Internet.

Romain Francoise: Defining evil

How exactly are these packages DFSG-free? (via, via)

Christian Perrier: Font packages moved to source v3

Today, Hideki Yamane completed his work on the last four packages maintained by the Font packaging Team to make them switch to source v3. Along with these changes, we also moved all our packages to debhelper v7 and minimal rules files. We also dropped the dependency on the obsoleted defoma. The team maintains 77 source packages for fonts and has now built a quite solid experience in this. In the upcoming weeks, I'll try to get in touch with other people who maintain fonts, inviting them to join the team and maintain their packages in our SVN (we don't do very fancy things so SVN is very well suited for such work). The maingoals will be to continue dropping support for defoma (dropping defoma hints files: you can see good examples on how to do this properly in packages maintained by the team, such as ttf-dejavu). We also intend to drop useless Recommends or Suggests that appear in some font packages (often on "x-ttcidfontconf fontconfig" which is now completely useless) as well as harmonizing package naming schemes (with a "(ttf otf)-<foundry>-<fontname>" scheme). Feel free to join and share your advice and thoughts about The Right Way To Maintain Font Packages on our mailing list.

Julien Danjou: Teething troubles

It's not that often that I start something from scratch. It's an amazing feeling to start a new project, to start writing something new. I like that. It's creation, it's an artistic part of our computing stuff. I feel like a code artist. And what I like even more is that little feeling that you are going in an unknown land. Some area in this tech world where nobody ever came before you, or only a few pioneers. That the sensation I got starting to using Cython, Python 3 and various other tools. I just spent half of my time trying to fix problems, rather than working on *my* code. Problems in autoconf macro not knowing Python 2.6 or Python 3.1. Problems and limitations in Cython. And problem in Python. That last one was a hard one. I'm still a beginner in the Python world: I barely know anything. And I was trying to use something nobody never did: building an embedded Python with a set of built-in modules. I spent hours trying to find why one type of module importing was badly failing. I finally found the answer thanks to a guy. who has the same problem A guy ? No. A pioneer. What do I say? A hero. He's been my week-hero! Thank you Miguel Lobo because you found the bug I chased for hours and because you even reported it as issue 1644818, including a patch! How not damn wonderful is that? I will not bore you with the technical details of that bug, since nobody cares. Nobody cares, even the Python guys, since that bug has been opened for 3 years, and nobody even reviewed in that time. I found an old thread about that bug where some guys were wanking about how they should do the review, because Miguel pushed for several weeks to have a review, back in 2007. But that bug was in my way. I had to do something. So I prepared my mail reader, mounted my web browser and here I was for a uniq quest: getting a Python bug fixed. At that point, if you did not stop reading earlier, you might get very excited. Don't be, spoiler, it's still not fixed. You'll have to wait the end of the season and see all the episodes I'll have to write to get the end of the story! Let's continue. I had to create an account on the Python bug tracking system. That was a trivial task for a man like me (you bet). Then, I launched a verbal attack, something you rarely see in a bug tracking system. Something I knew would awake any developer caring about their software.
Julien Danjou: Is there any chance to see this *bug* fixed someday?
I had the deep feeling that my quest was starting here. How many days would I have to wait until I get an answer? Time was passing. Minutes were ticking while I was waiting, sat in a comfortable sofa in a softly lighted room. It seemed like all my life was shorter than the delay I had to wait to get an answer. After waiting for hours, suddenly, and only 15 minutes later, I got an answer:
Martin v. L wis: Please ask on python-dev. I may be willing to revive my five-for-one offer.
Martin? Don't know that guy. Who is he? Who is he like? Will he fix that bug? What is this offer? So many question without an answer. But he asked to ask on python-dev, and I said: challenged accepted! I will write a mail to python-dev to get that bug fixed. Which I did. I sent a short (but well written you know, I made efforts) "WTF?" to pyhon-dev. And then the guy asked me to review 5 bugs so he will review and fix this one. And this is how I said that he was pissing me off for blackmailing me to fix a bug that was its "duty". Therefore, this is the end of the story so far. Will that bug be fixed some day? There's a hope, because another guy jumped in and took the bug assignment. To be continued. My conclusion about all that story: that is a little rude to start something new, with new tools, and get quickly into teething troubles. It's even more harsh to enter a community because you just found bugs, and be not very well received when you ask to apply a 10 lines long fix somebody wrote 3 years ago to fix it. I'll probably still use Python :-), but I get a darker image of its community now.

Joerg Jaspert: Dinstall status

If you are one of the majority of people that have no access to Debians ftp-master host, but still do want to know in which state our main archive update, the dinstall run, is: http://ftp-master.debian.org/dinstall.status to the rescue. This file is now updated during dinstall. It is not telling exactly which function is currently running, that would be too much detail (we have over 50), but it is giving a good overview of the area dinstall is in. There are currently 6 states it reports: The format of the file is pretty simple, it consists of 3 lines, at the time of writing this blog post it looks like 
Dinstall start: Sun Dec 20 07:52:01 UTC 2009 (1261295521)
Current action: scripts
Action start: Sun Dec 20 09:12:08 UTC 2009 (1261300328)
It tells when dinstall started, what the current action is and when that one started. In case you want to do some math on the dates it is also provided as an epoch. Have fun.

Debian News: Updates on LXDE

Several LXDE components have been updated recently in sid. They bring some new features and improve flexibility of customization. Below you have a summary of the most important changes:

Contributed by: Andrew Lee

Francois Marier: Debugging logcheck rule files

logcheck is a neat little log file monitoring tool I use on all of my machines.

I recently noticed however that I hadn't received any logcheck messages in a while from one of my servers. Either that was a sign that things were going really well or, more likely, that logcheck wasn't producing any output anymore.

Manually logging an error to syslogHere's what I did to force a message to be printed to the logs:
logger -p kern.error This is a test
Which I would expect to produce this logcheck notice:
Dec 20 15:34:08 hostname username: This is a test
Unfortunately, that didn't happen on the next scheduled run.

Forcing a logcheck runTo rule out the following:
I ran logcheck manually:
sudo -u logcheck /usr/sbin/logcheck -o -d >& logcheck.out
Looking at the output file however, my test message still wasn't there. Either logcheck was broken or one of my rule files was swallowing everything.

Finding the broken rule fileTo find the broken rule, I started by ignoring rules defined in /etc/logcheck/ignore.d.server/ and /etc/logcheck/ignore.d.workstation/ by running logcheck in paranoid mode:
logger -p kern.error This is a test
sudo -u logcheck /usr/sbin/logcheck -o -d -p >& logcheck.out
This worked, so I then ran logcheck in server mode:
logger -p kern.error This is a test
sudo -u logcheck /usr/sbin/logcheck -o -d -s >& logcheck.out
Given that this also worked, it meant that the offending rule file was in /etc/logcheck/ignore.d.workstation/. So I moved all of my custom local-* rule files out of the way and ran logcheck in workstation mode:
logger -p kern.error This is a test
sudo -u logcheck /usr/sbin/logcheck -o -d -w >& logcheck.out
Once I verified that this worked, I started to put my local files back one by one until it broke again. Then slowly removed lines from the offending file until it worked.

Solution to my problemIt turns out that one of my rule files had a line like this:
path != NULL   column != NULL
Escaping the pipe symbols with backslashes solved the problem:
path != NULL \ \  column != NULL

Maybe I should periodically print a message to syslog to make sure that logcheck is still working...

19 December 2009

Stephan Peijnik: Rest in peace Flo: 13.11.1986 16.12.2009

Today is a sad day. Everything feels like I am having a bad nightmare. That's because today I learnt from the too early death of my friend Florian Hufksy.

I am sitting here and do not really know what to write. I keep on thinking about the great times we spent together. The time we started programming when we were twelve. The time we spent learning BASIC. All the times you knew more than me and could teach me a thing or two. I remember our geek talks. How we would discuss latest games. How we lost contact and how we met again. I am thinking about how sorry I am for not having met you often enough. I keep on trying to understand what drove you that far. How you could just end it all. More and more memories come to my mind, like the moment when you showed me one of your projects, Super Mario War. The moments we had playing video games together. All those moments, all that time, I miss you my friend. You were a genius, always a step ahead, not only of me, but seemingly the whole world. I can't stop thinking about your brilliant ideas and how you always finished your projects. You were a real hacker, a real genius, a person trying to make the world a better place, a person who will be missed, not only by me.

You were a genius and I always respected you, not only as a hacker, but as a beloved friend. Why did we not spend more time together? Why did you have to go? Why do I have to write this now, sitting here in my chair with tears in my eyes? And all those memories come up again and again. There is so much more that comes to my mind, but I can't keep on writing, it just hurts too much.

The world is a sad place today. I am sad. I am mourning the too early death of my beloved friend, Florian. You will always have a special place in my heart.

Frans Pop: debmirror IV

The Debian FTP-masters recently changed the way gzipped meta files are compressed in order to make them more efficient to update using the rsync option. This was done by adding the --rsyncable option when calling gzip. Consequence was however that when debmirror compressed Packages, Sources and Contents files after updating them by applying diffs, the md5sum of the gzipped file created by debmirror no longer matched the md5sum listed in the Release file (because debmirror did not use --rsyncable). Result was that debmirror would also download the full gzipped Packages, Sources and Contents files from the parent mirror, something the diffs are meant to avoid. Not nice. Anyway, this has been fixed in debmirror 2.4 which now by default also uses --rsyncable when gzipping the updated meta files. I've also uploaded a fixed version for Lenny (20070123lenny1), which should soon be available from proposed-updates and will be included in the next stable point release. For archives that also provide diffs (most archives don't have them) but do not have rsyncable gzipped files, the default options used when calling gzip can be overruled using the new option --gzip-options (only in version 2.4). Tip: if you are using the rsync method to download files, using --diff=none may well be more efficient now that the archive has rsyncable gzipped meta files. Version 2.4 also has a few other improvements and fixes. If you're currently using version 2.3.x an update to the new version is probably a good idea.

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