I recently bought an external USB harddrive, made by Toshiba. It s the HDDR500E03X model with 500GB space, internal shock sensor and ramp loading technology. Now yesterday I learned, that I can also cover its health status using the smartmontools. The usb* device types did not fit, but the sat type worked. It is as easy as running:

smartctl -d sat -c /dev/sdb
smartctl -d sat -t long /dev/sdb

I've got a new, fast, server and I've migrated my homepage to Drupal6. This has given me a chance to experiment with i18n updates.

I've got a section for translations and I can write blog entries for this section using drivel. The new i18n blog is a separate feed, not syndicated on planet, intended for anyone who wants to know about the translation status of any of my packages - whether upstream or Debian. POT files will be uploaded for each package and each message (should have) links to the VCS where the current PO files can be found.

I could post continual messages to the debian-i18n mailing list but this way I can put specific content (like messages about which parts of the project I'm changing) as well as updates on which translations are lagging etc. I hope it'll be easier for translators to find the relevant data instead of having to search through the debian-i18n mailing list archive.

I'm not sure about comment handling within the i18n section at this stage. I think I'd prefer to get input via normal email and bug reports.

This, more general, i18n blog category will remain on my main blog and syndicated with planet. I'll use this for posts that aren't specific to one particular project.

The twiki package has been removed from Debian. The package was not really maintained, and twiki s maintenance still required some attention, as there were quite a lot security issues. So the removal is logical. I had tried and help maintain it in good shape, but couldn t do much recently, as we ve moved a little bit away from its inegration in PicoForge, having other matters to care for in Helios and Coclico these days. Maybe foswiki (the more open fork of twiki) will enter Debian some day. The ITP is there, and there are unofficial packages to be tested, for those that would need to transition from the previous installations of twiki on Debian. More details in the fowsiki ITP. Anyway, thanks for all the good work to all those who spent time working on TWiki s packages in Debian. As for me, maybe some day, I ll be interested in contributing some time to Foswiki, should we deploy it alongside FusionForge some day.

I really liked doing stuff like Zack s RCBW in the past, but nowadays I m busy with some buildds, reporting RC bugs because some maintainers don t test their uploads, as well as posting patches to fix FTBFS on GNU/kFreeBSD. But from time to time, it s also fun to close RC bugs. Here s a new concept (that I probably won t reproduce as regularly as Zack and his minions, though): RCBN for Release-Critical Bugs of the Night. Those are now closed:

• #552862: postman: FTBFS: cgi-lib.c:238: error: conflicting types for 'getline'
• #545621: regina-normal: FTBFS: problem linking with boost
• #540427: jconv: Build-Depends on libc6-dev (>= 2.7)
• #540669: kflickr: FTBFS: '.libs/libkflickrpart.so': No such file or directory
• #554638: jconv_0.8.1-1(ia64/unstable): FTBFS: build-depnds libc6-dev
• #527732: orpie: FTBFS: (.data+0x2c0): undefined reference to 'ml_gsl_vector_float_minmaxindex'
• #520862: libkarma - FTBFS: /usr/bin/csc: Command not found

Many thanks to Peter Green, to Ruben Molina, and to Ilya Barygin for their patches. Special thanks to Richard Darst for orpie s patches: he even managed to get rid of embedded code copies while addressing the FTBFS. Nice! Unfortunately, in the same time, I had to open some FTBFS/RC bugs:

• #559766: java3d: FTBFS on non-Linux ports
• #559767: java3d: FTBFS on armel: install: cannot stat 'j3d-core/build/default/ '
• #559768: java3d: FTBFS on hppa: java compilation issues
• #559771: evolution-dev: Might be missing a Depends on libgtkhtml*-dev
• #559781: ktoon: FTBFS with current ffmpeg
• #559794: libfvm-dev: *LOTS* of undefined references

So, what s next? Get back to work!

• Due to some problems in the testing migration scripts, the testing suite is currently broken. This means some packages are currently not installable (such as KDE) or others are gone (such as MySQL). This is reported as the bug #559346. The issue is being worked on but it will take some time. If you see you problems when installing packages from testing, please be patient, or fetch the package from unstable.
• Some X.Org drivers (packages xserver-xorg-input-* and xserver-xorg-video-*) that were meant to be uploaded to experimental landed in unstable instead (see sbuild s bug #559659). If you see packages with a Depends: on xorg stuff from experimental, do not update and wait until xorg-server 1.7 moves to unstable.
• Backports of KDE 4.1 made for Lenny were available at http://kde4.debian.net. That repository was planned to go out of service in the end of this year, due to technical problems they are already gone.
• Volunteers for a Debian booth at the 26c3 (Chaos Communication Congress) in Berlin wanted. If you want to help, there is more info at http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEventsDe/2009/26C3
• There will be a BSP in M nchengladbach (Germany) the weekend 22-24 January, 2010. More info in this wikipage.

I'd like to make pyroman IPv6 capable. That is actually the one big thing before calling it a version "1.0".I must admit that I havn't been very active on Pyroman (or Debian in general) the last years. This goes even so far as that "pyroman" was considered "abandoned" by Fedora or so. It is not; I use it on all my servers. It's still in use at the network I developed it for (after all there is not that much benefit for a workstation setup, where a 10 line iptables script will do the job just perfectly.).Anyway, I'd like to get IPv6 support into pyroman, but there is one big issue here: I don't have any machine using IPv6, so I havn't used ip6tables myself yet, so I don't know about all the magic involved ...So if you use IPv6, it would be very cool if someone would jump in to get full IPv6 support into pyroman. Madduck had already done some preliminary stuff, but I didn't get around to have a look at the integration or completeness yet.The '--no-act' and '--print' modes of pyroman should even allow development without any IPv6 support or root permissions in the system.Other things remaining on my pyroman wishlist:

• Fully automatic iptables firewall visualization
• Keeping traffic counters over firewall reloads
• Configuration UI
• A fancy 'arsonist' icon and a web page design

digest version 0.4.2 is now on CRAN. This new version features a fix by Henrik Bengtsson who also joined the R-Forge-hosted digest project.

Some uploads this week:

• There s a 2.49.2~dfsg-1 package for Blender sitting in unstable. Despite its version string, it s actually 2.49b (release logs). Looks like there s a good reason for ~dfsg vs. +dfsg.
• There s a pending package for Blender 2.5 alpha 0, but some things still need ironing out. As stated in #558083, it ll probably go to experimental first, given its dependency on Python 3.1.
• Speaking of which, some dozens of X.Org drivers (xserver-xorg-input-* and xserver-xorg-video-*) were meant to be uploaded to experimental last night, but due to sbuild s #559659 and lintian s #542747, they ended up in unstable instead. If you see packages with a Depends: on X.Org stuff from experimental, that s normal, wait until xorg-server 1.7 moves to unstable, go and fix some bugs instead of reaching for reportbug.

I accompanied Penny to Prague, from where she embarked into the mountains today for a week-long Moodle developer meeting. We froliced in the city a bit, tried to avoid the hordes of anonymous tourists that flooded the city, steered clear of the Christmas kitsch that was all over, sampled Czech food wherever we could, and enjoyed the local beer. On Friday, Petr Baudis took us out to The Pub, an ingenious concept by the Czech brewery Pilsner Urquell: every table has taps from where one can draw beers without waiting or having to get up, guests accumulate a tab measured in litres, and a huge screen shows which The Pub instance has the best beer throughput. Add to that an automated ordering system for salty snacks, and the brewery ensures a ready beer flow with need for no more than two staff members. Penny and I had already decided that Pilsner Urquell was our favourite Czech beer, mostly due to its bitterness. We also sampled the local Staropramen, and the well-known Budvar, and found our preference reinstated. At street prices of 50 CZK per half-litre of Pilsner, it was thus a punch in the face when the bartender at the airport bar asked for 145 CZK for the carelessly tapped beer, offering crap music and uncomfortable seating for the price. I refused the beer, because I prefered to keep only the good memories of the brew. NP: OSI: Blood

Recently I've been spidering the internet, merrily downloading content for the past few days. The intention behind the spidering is to record, in a database, the following pieces of information for each image it stumbles across:

• The page that contained the link to this image. (i.e. the image parent)
• The image URL.
• The MD5sum of the image itself.
• The dimensions of the image.

I was motivated by seeing an image upon a website and thinking "Hang on I've seen that before - but where?". Thus far I've got details of about 30,000 images and I can now find duplicates or answer the question "Does this image appear on the internet and if so where?". Obviously this is going to be foiled trivially via rotations, cropping, or even resizing. But I'm going to let the spider run for the next few days at least to see what interesting things the data can be used for. In other news I'm a little behind schedule but I'm going to be moving from Xen to KVM over the next week or ten days. My current plan is to setup the new host on Monday, move myself there that same day. Once that's been demonstrated to work I can move the other users over one by one, probably one a day. That will allow a little bit of freedom for people to choose their downtime window, and will ensure that its not an all-or-nothing thing. The new management system is pretty good, but I have the advantage here in that I've worked upon about four systems for driving KVM hosting. The system allows people to enable/disable VNC access, use the serial console, and either use one of a number of pre-cooked kernels or upload their own. (Hmmm security you say?) ObFilm: Chasing Amy

On a recent trip up the Oregon coast, a friendly doorman at our hotel in Portland was inquiring about our trip. When we mentioned we passed through Bandon, OR, he quipped that Bandon was the place furthest from a city of one million people in the USA. I guess a normal person would just think "oh, that's interesting" and move on, but it has been plaguing me ever since. Firstly, I had to find what cities in the USA had more than 1 million people. Luckily Wolfram Alpha gives the answer:

• Chicago,Illinois
• Dallas,Texas
• Houston,Texas
• Los Angeles,California
• New York, New York
• Philadelphia,Pennsylvania
• Phoenix,Arizona
• San Antonio,Texas
• San Diego,California

(I certainly wouldn't have guessed that list!) From there my plan was to find the bounding box of the continental USA; luckily Wikipedia has the raw data for that. Combined with the latitude and longitude of the cities above, I had the raw data. I couldn't figure out any way better than a simple brute-force of testing every degree and minute of latitude and longitude within the bounding box and calculating the distance to the closest large city; the theory being that from one particular point you would have to travel further than any other to reach a city of 1 million people. Luckily, that is short work for a modern processor, and hopefully the result would be a point somewhere around Bandon. I'd already become acquainted with the great circle and measuring distances when I did Tinymap, so a quick python program evolved. However, it turns out that the program picks the far south-east corner of the bounding box. Thanks to the shape of the USA, that is way out over the ocean somewhere. I can't figure out a way to get an outline of the USA to test if a given point is inside the border or not, but all is not lost. I modified the program to output the the distance to the closest large city along with the location to a log file, and then imported it into gnuplot to make a heat-map. The hardest part was finding an equirectangular outline of the USA to place the heat-map over, rather than a much more common Mercator projection; Wikimedia to the rescue! I actually surprised myself at how well the two lined up when, after a little work with Gimp, I overlayed them (big) From this, I can see that Bandon, about a third of the way up the Oregon coast, is a pretty good candidate. However, probably not the best; I get the feeling the real point that is the furthest from any city of 1 million people is actually somewhere in the central-middle of Montana. However, we can also fiddle the program slightly to disprove the point about Bandon. The numbers show the closest large city to Bandon is LA, at ~1141km. Taking another point we suspect to be more remote; the closest large city to Portland (where we met the doorman) is also LA at ~1329km. So to reach the closest large city you have to travel further from Portland than Bandon, so Bandon is not the furthest place in the USA from a city of one million people. Myth busted!

To count means that you/it/whatever counts matters. If one counts the number of females in many tech/media conference, the number of women is dreadfully low, giving off the meaning and feeling they don t always count, even if they are very well received. There is a new project spearheaded by the efforts of Annina R st that will help us count women at conferences. The project is cleverly called Be Counted and it allows you to input information about gender representation in conferences. Here is a little more about the project and I urge you to check it out and contribute:

The project aims to collect a stream of user-contributed data on gender diversity in technology environments in the form of Gender Ratio Reports (GRRs). The longterm aim of the project is to not just collect but also provide tools for retrieving and visualizing the data in order to encourage others to collectively analyze the patterns behind the numbers.

To count means that you/it/whatever counts matters. If one counts the number of females in many tech/media conference, the number of women is dreadfully low, giving off the meaning and feeling they don t always count, even if they are very well received. There is a new project spearheaded by the efforts of Annina R st that will help us count women at conferences. The project is cleverly called Be Counted and it allows you to input information about gender representation in conferences. Here is a little more about the project and I urge you to check it out and contribute:

The project aims to collect a stream of user-contributed data on gender diversity in technology environments in the form of Gender Ratio Reports (GRRs). The longterm aim of the project is to not just collect but also provide tools for retrieving and visualizing the data in order to encourage others to collectively analyze the patterns behind the numbers.

The compensation U.S. veterans now receive for herbicide-related illnesses was gained only after a long, hard-fought battle in which the lines between science and politics were often blurred. Stunningly written and depressing piece of investigate journalism about Agent Orange s continued presence, wreaking havoc in the lives of many.

The compensation U.S. veterans now receive for herbicide-related illnesses was gained only after a long, hard-fought battle in which the lines between science and politics were often blurred. Stunningly written and depressing piece of investigate journalism about Agent Orange s continued presence, wreaking havoc in the lives of many.

Yesterday I went to the local support service center for Acer at El Salvador, I realize that I bought my Acer One on Dic 21 2008, so the warranty is still valid , my first concern was my HDD, since at the time the netbook fails I did have a copy of my GPG Key on a non encrypted file system, also all my data was on the HDD and I did not want to leave my computer with my data on the hands of a $RANDOM tech support. It took me like 15 minutes to convince the representative to remove my HDD before I leave the netbook, but they agree, and they even agree on let me see when they remove the HDD before give it to me, for me this looks like a nice tech support, I actually thought that they will refuse to follow this extrange request, and I even thought that they will be refuse to admit the computer, since the original OS was no longer installed. The netbook should be up and running this Thursday yay!

This is a new version of my script to automate some of the work of backporting Debian packages. This version sets the urgency of the changelog of the backport to the highest urgency of the changelogs included in the *.changes file and allows adding an additional entry to the changelog of the backport. It also handles a distribution of etch-backports properly. I unfortunately had to revert the change in the previous version to use -nc, since unaccountably using -nc to suppress running make clean before building the source package forces a binary package build that doesn't include the source package in the *.changes file. I filed a bug against dpkg about this. In the meantime, you'll continue to need to satisfy the requirements for debian/rules clean outside of any build chroot. This version also adds some automated backporting logic that I needed for the Shibboleth packages. You can get the latest version from my miscellaneous scripts page.

[Notice] Personal content follows. If you got to this post expecting any of the recurring topics I talk about in my blog, feel free to skip it. This is one of the topics I don't like to share as impersonally as a blog post goes But I know I will not be able to meet most of the people I care about that this will reach in person And even if I did, it is not something easy to say. I have failed several times to communicate this to my closest friends. And if you are among the group of people I am thinking of, this will most probably not surprise you, given there is precedent. But in the end, it didn't work out. Nadezhda and I have lived together for practically 14 years. We had a for month long timeout in 2008. And, a couple of weeks ago, decided that we should make the separation definitive while we are in good terms and have hopes to continue having a good relationship. Anyway Life continues. It will take a bit for things to fall in their place. I know that many of you (again, the group of people I am writing this for) know and care for Nadezhda as well as me. We will Try to do things right as much as possible, and keep the many good things that are still there after all. And while life comes back to track, please excuse me for the many oversights I have done and will probably continue doing during the following weeks. (yes, comments closed. As I said ~18 months ago, Want to say something? Just think it hard enough, it will get to its destination)

gnome-doc-utils has a fairly idiosyncratic layout - help/package.pot, help/lang/lang.po - which doesn't suit things like podebconf-report-po that I want to use to call for translations and updates.

This little snippet creates the relevant directory from a gnome-doc-utils Makefile.am:

report-po: Makefile
if [ ! -d po ]; then \
mkdir po/ ; \
fi
cp $(PACKAGE)-help.pot po
cd po ; \
for l in $(DOC_LINGUAS); do \
if [ ! -L $$l.po ]; then \
ln -s ../$$l/$$l.po . ; \
fi; \
echo -n $$l: ; \
msgfmt -c --statistics $$l.po; \
rm -f messages.mo; \
done


Also, I thought gnome-doc-utils updated the PO files automatically but I couldn't get it to do it, so I've got this snippet too:


check: update-po

update-po: Makefile
for l in $(DOC_LINGUAS); do \
xml2po -u $(top_srcdir)/help/$$l/$$l.po $(top_srcdir)/help/C/$(PACKAGE).xml; \
done