Search Results: "jan"

7 June 2006

Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho: My new studio apartment

I got fed up with living with flatmates, and with the certainty of having to move out after I finish the PhD degree. So I went out and found a cheap and small studio apartment about 100 meters away from my old place. [image] That’s the building, though when I took the picture, I did not know on which side the apartment would be, and it turned out this is not the side. Would have been nice, though: a view to a small patch of forest, beyond which I could have seen (barely) the old building. Instead, my view from the windows is toward the yard-cum-parking-lot, though it is possible to vary this a lot by choosing the angle (one angle gives a view toward another forest patch). [image] [image] [image] The first picture is from the kitchenette, the others are from the single room, which I call the living room. I also have a kitchenette — [image] — and an alcove (which I call the bedroom). [image] The bathroom hopefully doesn’t have a mold problem, but probably does. It’s of the older design that frequently didn’t take moisture and water protection seriously enough. Well, at least there are no outward signs of such a problem, and the air circulation system definitely works. I apologise for the poor quality of this picture: [image] I got the keys on the first of this month, and promptly moved in a spring mattress. The next day I walked nearly the recommended 10,000 steps in handling all kinds of issues, including buying a very nice lamp and a barstool to the kitchenette. [image] [image] I got cable service on Monday and am now writing this on my laptop in the kitchenette sitting on the barstool, over a wireless network that is connected to the cable modem.

6 June 2006

Aigars Mahinovs: The curse of Montesuma - a British Internet manjana

A couple of days before going off to Debconf6 the wireless access to the Internet stopped working for me in the network of my university. I went to the network guys and they told me that I was using too much of it, so they blocked my IP address and now need to check my laptop for anything that could be of a copyright violation. When they found out that the laptop in question only has Linux installed and that the "high traffic" was mostly bunch of podcast downloads and some CD's of Linux distros (including some Dapper beta CDs), they decided to not look at my laptop (they would not know how anyway) and assured me that my laptop would be connected back the next day. I still could access the net by tethering myself to an Ethernet socked, so I was not worried. The next day the wireless was still non-functional and so it was the day after that. I was working on with Ethernet and then left for Debconf. Almost three weeks later I come back to the university only to find out that my wireless is still blocked. I go to computer guys again and they again assure me that it will be enabled the next day ... or at least on Monday. During the weekend I do all I can to get my Debconf6 photos out to somewhere you could see them and do it in proper format and quality. In the end I get them uploaded to http://koyanet.lv/~aigarius/ as zip files (no compression). "aday" is the day of my arrival, "cday*" are the DebCamp days and "day*" are the main conference days with "day0" being the Debian Day. I go home satisfied only to come back next morning and find that now _both_ wireless and Ethernet access is blocked for my laptop. Apparently my interactions with the photos and catching up on some audio and video podcasts have generated around 14 Gb of traffic (both ways summed together) and that looks to be a big NO-NO in this university. After long and heated negotiations between my boss and the IT department the best we could agree on was that my laptop will be reconnected tomorrow, but if I use more then 2 Gb of traffic (both ways) in one month again, the laptop will be removed from the network permanently. Wonderful studying conditions, right? The only solution anyone could offer me is to get a ADSL connection in the place I am renting. That will cost me 12 pounds per month for "line rental" and 25 pounds per month for 8 Mbit down / 512 Kbit down ADSL connection with 40 Gb monthly traffic cap. And that is the best deal that I could find, because if I do exceed that cap for two months in a row they will not charge me per Gb as other will, but will only downgrade priority of my traffic until the end of the month. And the traffic cap in this service only applies to peak time and I can use it all I want during the night. But still the prices are just crazy and there still is a traffic limit. Encouraging the use and discovery of new Internet technologies, right? (.... sarcasm-o-meter overload ....)

4 June 2006

Michael Janssen: Pet Peeve #2: Microsoft Excel and Unicode

Recently I was working on an application for ICRA2006 and I needed to output some data to be read by Excel. This would seem like an easy problem, just output in CSV and Excel can open the text just fine. Unfortunately Excel has one of the most backwards implementations of international character support that I have ever worked with. Being nieve to this, I simply tried UTF-8. I was greeted with multiple strange characters in the place of my normal umlauted and tilde-d letters. A quick search turned up that when Excel reads a CSV, it assumes that it is in ASCII or . However, you can import the CSV as a text file and select it as unicode. This is where my real pet peeve is: You can't select the character set of a CSV in Excel. You have to rename the file as a .TXT file and go through a wizard, basically spelling out that yes, it is comma separated and yes, this is the data I want to import. There's one drop down box which specifies the character set. Of course Unicode is supported there.

In the search for a solution to this problem which didn't involve a 10-step process for the customer, I discovered the Unicode marker which is supported by Wordpad, but amazingly, does nothing but add a bit of garbage in Excel. The sad part is that I can be almost certain that the next version of Office will continue to have this problem. My only hope is that somehow the XML format will be open enough to just create a native Excel file.

2 June 2006

Michael Janssen: Been a long time coming.

Life has taken a turn for the busy lately, which means of course that this space loses a lot of content. Things have slowed down a bit now. Things which were taking up my time before were being basically one of the only technical staff for ICRA2006 (with one other who helped enormously), a new job at Honeywell Labs, and actually getting some research done on my thesis.

ICRA2006 was basically amazing and horrible at the same time. The amazing parts: meeitng people who are famous (a.k.a. "respected in their field"), eating a ton of fancy food on the dime of the conference, being at the first conference of my academic career. The horrible: working 18 hour days, being the go-to guy for practically everything, painful feet from walking most of those 18 hours. All in all, the amazing outways the horrible by a long shot. I also couldn't make it to DebConf6 because of it, and it was in a country that I might have actually made it to this time. Next year I guess.

The new job at Honeywell is going decently. We have a target in July which is probably going to have me pulling long hours. The best thing about the new job is of course pay-related though - I am going to be consumer-debt free by the end of this year. I hope that I can finish the nameless financial web application before my finances improve enough that I don't need it anymore.

I have narrowed in on my thesis more, which is an improvement at least. Now I need to actually write papers and do research while avoiding too many duties in other areas. I've got a couple of blog postings in the queue which should show up soon, and hopefully I will re-enable myself on Planet Debian.

I also bought a present for our apartment, and she hasn't guessed exactly what it is yet. This is me taunting Di a little. :-)

Uwe Hermann: OS Install Experiences - Part 3: PC-BSD [Update]


Note: This article is part of my OS Install Experiences series.
I'll continue with the recently released operating system PC-BSD 1.1, which is based on FreeBSD 6.1. This is actually the first time I installed a BSD-like OS, so I thought it would be a bit of a hassle. But I was surprised to find that the install was really pretty easy (which is a major goal of PC-BSD, as I understand it). I didn't even read a manual or installation instructions or anything... Install
  1. First, I downloaded a PC-BSD 1.1 CD #1 image, burned it on a CD, and booted from that.
  2. The first installer screen is text-based (later it's graphical), and allows you to choose between a normal install ("boot FreeBSD"), install "with ACPI", "safe mode", "single user mode", and "with verbose logging". You can also "escape to loader prompt", or "reboot".
  3. While the installer runs, it merely shows a nice desktop background, pressing any key shows you the boot messages.
  4. After a while you can select a screen resolution for the graphical installer, run fdisk, escape into an "emergency shell", chroot into the root partition, or reboot. Default is to start the installation at a pre-selected screen resolution.
  5. You can choose the language and keyboard layout. Although you can click "back" to return to previous steps in the installer, you can not go back to the language/keyboard selection later!
  6. Partitioning. First, you can choose on which disk to install, then choose the partition to use. The list only shows the primary partitions and an "extended DOS" partition. Device names for disks are a bit different in BSD world. /dev/ad0 (counting starts at 0) is the first disk, /dev/ad0s1 (counting starts at 1) the first "partition" (called "slice" in BSD). It doesn't seem to be possible to install PC-BSD on an extended partition (please correct me if I'm wrong), so I installed it on /dev/hda2 (/dev/ad0s2 in BSD-speak), which is a primary partition. To make things more complex and confusing, a BSD slice can contain multiple "partitions" (not the same as Linux partitions!). I now have /dev/ad0s2a, which is the boot partition, and /dev/ad0s2b, the swap partition. Confused? Me too.
  7. Note that changes made to the partition table seem to be effective immediately, there's no way to go back without losing data! Debian's installer is better at this. The default PC-BSD file system is UFS, btw.
  8. The hardware will be automatically detected (worked quite well for me).
  9. You can now choose to either install the BSD bootloader in the MBR, or install no bootloader at all. Not sure what the best thing for me is here, but I decided to install the BSD bootloader (overwriting GRUB). I might have to re-install GRUB (and tell it about PC-BSD) if the BSD bootloader cannot boot the other (Linux) OSes.
  10. Now I must enter the root password, and I can also create another user. I noticed that passwords can only contain alpha-numeric characters (no %$ ,.#+!? and so on). WTF? They can't be serious... Also, you must enter a real name for the normal user, it won't let you continue until you type something... Pretty annoying. There's a checkbox called "Auto-Login User?" which is enabled by default, but I didn't find out what exactly that does...
  11. The network is successfully auto-configured via DHCP. I was not asked for a hostname, but typed hostname after the install and I got PCBSD.localhost.
  12. Reboot. The CD is not ejected automatically, you have to remove it manually before booting up.
  13. I'm asked to insert CD 2 (language packs), which I don't have (or want), as I only burned CD 1. Clicking "abort" does the trick, and I can continue with English as the default language.
  14. Finally, I'm dropped into a KDE session, and that's it.
Security That's it. Comments, suggestions, flames? Update 2006-06-02: Added IPv6 netstat/sockstat output.

31 May 2006

Aigars Mahinovs: Debconf6 last days: Hugs and goodbyes

May 21st & 22nd. The last days of Debconf went under the banner of a "hug day" - everyone was encouraged to hug everyone else for whatever reason or for no reason at all. Gunnar was group hugged several times. Number of people declined rapidly during the Sunday and very little people were left there by Monday, but everyone continued hacking until the network connection was dismantled. In the evening there was chatting, Mao, relaxing and generic photography. It is kind of sad that the Debconf is over. It has been as wonderful as ever and more exciting then ever. Now we can only return to our everyday lives and wait for the next year. Manjana*(365+x)!

30 May 2006

Andreas Metzler: Charlotte Bront ...

... you rock.

26 May 2006

Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho: Agora BASIC

To everybody’s amazement, I’ve today released a BASIC compiler. Agora BASIC is a compiler for Standard Full BASIC. It doesn’t have any aspirations to become a trendy or “modern” BASIC: it’s goal in life is to implement the Full BASIC standard to the best of its ability. Some modest extensions making it possible to write useful programs are certainly in the cards, but no object system until the standard acquires one. The initial release implements enough of the language to write simple programs; a lot remains to be done. Join us now and share the software! Err… Check out the home page.

25 May 2006

David Pashley: Pathological Date Parser in Java

I've recently had cause to parse some date values in Java. As a result I've produced a class which can manage to parse an awful lot of date formats. I thought I'd better document it in case someone found it useful. Certainly there doesn't appear to be anything elsewhere which shows you how to parse lots of formats. I have found the order of date_formats to be very brittle, so I don't recommend you change it without an awful lot of test cases. Anyway, without further to do, I present to you, the Pathological Date Parser for Java 
// Copyright 2006 David Pashley <david@davidpashley.com>
// Licensed under the GPL version 2
import java.text.SimpleDateFormat;
import java.util.Calendar;
import java.util.TimeZone;
public class Date  
    private Calendar date;
    static String[] date_formats =  
            "yyyy-MM-dd'T'kk:mm:ss'Z'",        // ISO
            "yyyy-MM-dd'T'kk:mm:ssz",          // ISO
            "yyyy-MM-dd'T'kk:mm:ss",           // ISO
            "EEE, d MMM yy kk:mm:ss z",        // RFC822
            "EEE, d MMM yyyy kk:mm:ss z",      // RFC2882
            "EEE MMM  d kk:mm:ss zzz yyyy",    // ASC
            "EEE, dd MMMM yyyy kk:mm:ss",   //Disney Mon, 26 January 2004 16:31:00 ET
            "-yy-MM",
            "-yyMM",
            "yy-MM-dd",
            "yyyy-MM-dd",
            "yyyy-MM",
            "yyyy-D",
            "-yyMM",
            "yyyyMMdd",
            "yyMMdd",
            "yyyy", 
            "yyD"
    
     ;
    public Date(String d)  
        SimpleDateFormat formatter = new SimpleDateFormat();
        d = d.replaceAll("([-+]\\d\\d:\\d\\d)", "GMT$1"); // Correct W3C times
        d = d.replaceAll(" ([ACEMP])T$", " $1ST"); // Correct Disney timezones
        for (int i = 0; i < date_formats.length; i++)  
           try  
              formatter.applyPattern(date_formats[i]);
              formatter.parse(d);
              date = formatter.getCalendar();
              break;
             catch(Exception e)  
              // Oh well. We tried
The only date formats I can't get it to parse are <4-digit year>-<day of year> and <2digit year><day of year> (e.g. 2003-335 and 03335 for 2003-12-01). If you can add support for those and other date formats I'll gladly take patches.

Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho: Diagnosis

It looks like my mother’s condition is subacute thyroiditis. It is painful but fairly harmless and easily treatable. They’re still doing some tests to verify the correctness of this diagnosis, but she should be out of the hospital on Friday.

Clint Adams: Jane and Bradt?

Call her an ignorant slut, she suggested. That's my new favorite thing to say. Only if it has merit, he replied. Especially if her name is Jane, she countered.

23 May 2006

Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho: Mother in hospital

My mother was admitted to hospital yesterday due to weeks-long fever and other symptoms. They say it’ll take a week or two to figure out what’s wrong. I hope it’s just a simple reversible infection.

19 May 2006

Simon Huggins: Everything old is NEW again

So it's been 16 days and counting since I posted about our uploads for the new beta of xfce4. During that time I've had four users file bugs asking why it's uninstallable and why apt is keeping packages back. I've had many users pop by #debian-xfce or #xfce and ask what the status is. I have to just tell them to be patient but it's a bit dull now. NEW processing has been so good for such a long time that to be honest I'd forgotten what waiting was like. Last time the xfce team did a soname change for a library it took 2 days (March 2005), the last times we uploaded an entirely new source it took 1 day (October 2005), 1 week (November 2005), 1 day (December 2005), 1 week (end of December 2005), 2 days (January 2006), even just 2 days to split the -mixer package. For entirely new packages I don't really care how long it takes them to enter the archive. But for just a simple soname change it seems a shame that it takes so long. I spoke briefly to Joerg on IRC and offered my help. After all, obviously I have the best taste in the world and it can't be too hard to spot the soname changes and just accept them, spot the people with claimed licenses that don't match the headers in the source and reject them and defer anything hard to Joerg can it? But he didn't comment on that bit just said he was at debconf (and debcamp before). Everyone in Debian is a volunteer and everyone deserves a holiday but it's frustrating when there are bottlenecks down to there only being one person doing one job. I'd suggest that the queue be split into entirely new never seen before sources and the rest but I guess that would mean changing dak. Given the list isn't processed in order I don't see why adding more people with good taste would be a bad idea. I looked at prodding helena (from dak) to give me more information but will look more this weekend - setting up the test environment is going to be the hardest part of patching it I think. Oh yeah, apologies to ER for the title of this post but I bought the box set and am going back through season 1-3 (i.e. when it was still good ;)). Also hello Planet Debian. I've been vaguely blogging elsewhere but hopefully if I got the feed right you'll just see the bits tagged for you.

Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho: New address

I’m moving to a new studio apartment in June, about 200 metres to the west from where I currently live. This naturally causes a snail mail address change. While very few people need my snail mail address, it’s listed in some of my free software as an alternative contact point, so I’d better get the word out on the change. (I will, of course, update the addresses in my software as I release new versions.) My current address is 
Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho
Helokantie 1 A 16
40640 JYV SKYL 
FINLAND
My new address, which becomes valid in the beginning of June, is 
Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho
Sienitie 2 B 27
40640 JYV SKYL 
FINLAND
(Some post offices may require a country prefix in front of the postal code; use “FI-40640″ in such a case.)

10 May 2006

Brett Parker: Well...

I got the MoinMoin parser running in django, and now have a mostly working wiki implementation using the MoinMoin parser (yay!), I ended up using the text_xml rather than text_html formatter for MoinMoin, this turned out to be a good idea, and meant that I didn't have to worry about them thar themes that get called otherwise. It still needs a few mins more work to actually make it a usable wiki, but the proof of concept worked. Next on the list: writting a nice blog engine and moving my blog over to it rather than using pyblosxom... actually, I can do this one very trivially for a straight port of the current blog :)

Aigars Mahinovs: Debconf6 day -6: Netless pooling

The Internet is not up yet, so the productivity of people here is very different now - some have no way to do what they want, but on the other hand some are benefiting from the lack of interruptions and disturbances and having a very productive hack session in the offline. Hacklab Other part of hacklab Wider view of hacklab In addition some people (including me) had to move from one hotel to another hotel, where all the other Debconf people were staying. That required finding places, packing things, moving things, giving away keycards, getting new keycards, moving things again, unpacking things, ... It basically took all morning and a good part of the afternoon for those involved. (Note: we really want/need a key/keycard for every person in the room) The dinner was a three dish set. Learning from yesterdays experience meals were preselected in two sets: normal and vegetarian. Those not liking fish (which also includes me) had to settle for the vegetarian main dish which was a tomato with sweet corn and some salad - not too filling. The food in general is quite simple and very tasty. Praying for the Internet Wild photography He is on the normal menu Gunnar's table Vegetarian table One must remember to drink a lot of water, but not tap water. The most important device in the hacklab In the afternoon some DD's (including me again) went to check out the pool system which seems to be the center of this place. There is a lot of people in and around the pool at all the time it is open (8:00 to 18:00). Swimming is quite tiring, but you can rest by holding to the wall or by climbing out and sunbathing a bit. Trampolines look scary. Strange discussions ensue among people clamping for the wall of the pool. POOOOOL! No consumo humano Dinner was just as nice as lunch, but one more bit of knowledge emerged there - if there is something on the table and you do not know what exactly it is, be sure that it will be be hot. Very hot. Especially if it is green. There was an organizational meeting right after the dinner. It seems that a lot of things can go late when setting up a network coverage for a holiday resort on a hill some way out of a town: uplink is plagued by line of sight problems, lots of wires to be put on roofs, hotspots, ... It should be fixed tomorrow - "manyana" is the key word here. It was even said that the key phrase of the conference should have been "Debconf 6: manjana" instead of "Debconf 6: hot and spicy". The "wild Debconfers vs. the security guards" issue got some coverage too. The conclusion is not to swim in the pool in the night. Especially not naked. I should go look at the local sauna tomorrow. Hyperactive network guy The place looks just wonderful - here are some more picture of the surroundings: Sunny pool area Diving tower and the pool Parliament tower Hills near the hotel Looking down the ridge A small chappel on a cliff The funiculeur Look, there is a penguin too! Walkways at night Night panorama from the tower

7 May 2006

Brett Parker: Finally...

After much messing about - I've worked out how to use the MoinMoin parser in other python programs... this means that later (after I've slept) I can write a django template tag to unwiki things nicely, using MoinMoin's parser and so not invent another wiki parsing engine (hoorah!). All that I need to do now is reimplement the text_html formatter from MoinMoin in to something slightly more useable in other apps, then we'll be there. Yay! And indeed, hoopla! I could, of course, use the text_xml formatter instead and then just do an xslt transformation on it in python... actually, that might not be such a bad idea... hmmm. I'll have to think about it :)

6 May 2006

Brett Parker: python-django-svn-trunk packages

I've just created the post-magic-removal python-django-svn-trunk packages they're available from my repository for i386 and amd64 at the following deb URL: deb http://www.sommitrealweird.co.uk/debian/ sarge,sid django The documentation etc is now also copied in to /usr/share/doc/python-django-svn-trunk as it should be. I'll try to keep these upto date, but it's been rather busy recently, so they might lag a little bit. I've not yet tested these, so if you have luck with them, it'd be nice to know, they *should* just work.

5 May 2006

Erich Schubert: More on your Google SoC applications

I'd just like to point out that using Debian is not sufficient for sending us your application. Apparently some projects were submitted with minimal wording changes to Debian, Python, Postgres, Gentoo and Apache. If you send us your project, it should have some extra relationship to our project... it should be something our users or our community needs and that is somehow related to Debian. There is nothing wrong with being useable by other projects as well, but the relationship to Debian needs to be a bit more than just "Debian is my favourite distro." For example the SELinux policy module dependency handling is obviously something all distributions would like to have to ease installation. But when integrated with some nice magic of autoselecting policy modules based on the Debian packages installed: go for it. I've been asked about details on the Debtags SoC ideas. Here are some mails for you to read:

29 April 2006

Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho: HELP!!!! I VE BEEN JALDHARED!!!

I will wear this proudly like a badge of honor. Thank you, Master Vyas!

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