Hello (first of all, there are new pictures of me)
I think it’s time for another blog, because I have at the moment many different projects. My prio 1 project is the new proxy server which I would like to install in the office (about 500 users) which should have complicated ACLs and SquidGuard for content filtering, a virus scanner would also be very nice. I plan to authenticate the users via winbind on Microsoft ActiveDirectory (I already blogged about it some months ago) and the embedded systems should have special rules which don’t require an authentication. I also had a look at dansguardian because the people from the AIO use this solution, but I don’t think that it’s possible to auth against AD with it and I have no experience with dansguardian. The next problem is with the downtime, I should not have any if possible. This means that I will copy the system of the old proxy into a VMWare-Machine in the intranet and NAT the public IP of the proxy to it when it’s ready. And in this time I can easily setup the new proxy on the physical proxy-machine. Then my next project is for the school - we have to write a management tool (including file-databases) for network devices such as switches or routers, I think this will be a quite funny task and 2 months are IMHO enough time. The cool thing is that we need something like that on my workplace so we will be able to use it. My program also will be licensed under a free license and maybe I will build a debian package if the upstream software is in a good shape. Then the next (maybe less important, but important for my health) project is finally stop smoking. I really didn’t think that this is so difficult because I’m not a “i need it every 2 hours”-smoker, I only need it in the evening when I come home to relax a bit and this is really quite difficult. Then my last (really hard ) project is planning my holidays, I didn’t use them since summer of this year and until next august I can have 5 weeks + the days from christmas until 3rd January, so my plan is the following: 15.12.2006 Last workday 26.12 - 30.12 23c3 in Berlin 31.12 - 1.12 Snowboarding in the mountains and sylvester party with friends Then in february 2007 I will go again snowboarding for a week somewhere And in june 2007 my last holidays for this year where I’d like to visit Debconf7 (depends if I get sponsoring for accomodation and food or not, you know… I’m still a student and edinburgh isn’t really cheap). I hope this will be my last article without the hackergotchi included, I’m not a graphics-guru so I asked in #debian.de some minutes ago and Markus Gloor made one for me, biggest thanks!

I was kind of thinking of starting blogging again (after having blogged only two entries here). I also wanted my own blogging software; not this livejournal thing. I want to be able to edit my blog entries with emacs, the easy way, and keep it all in a git or darcs repo. I want to be able to choose my own editing language; whether it be markdown, textile, rd or whatever.

Of course I thought of Joey's nice ikiwiki. The only problem is that I don't like its commenting system. I want people to be able to comment easily. I like comments. It is probably possible to extend ikiwiki to make it easier to do comments, but it's not something I want to do right now.

I took a look at this weird thing called hobix. I liked the design and the fact that it is written in ruby, but the author seems to be on LSD. And all this blahhrhrg whsyyythe thing, though marginally amusing, is not the kind of solid documentation I'm looking for.

Yes, I know, there are tons of blogging engines out there. I just don't _like_ them. I hate PHP, and I hate SQL databases (with a possible exception for SQLite). I just want something simple, dammit.

But I'm tired now, and my neck hurts. I will look more another day.

Update: I forgot to mention that I've tried pyblosxom, and it really looks most similar to what I need. I just thought it was a bit complicated to set up with the features I wanted. But maybe it was just me being lazy.

Until a few days ago my website was driven by PodCMS, which allowed me to manage all of the content as directories and files containing Pod (Plain Old Documentation). Unfortunately that wasn't quite flexible enough and didn't allow some features, like comments, tags and trackbacks, to be implemented easily. Also Pod sucks for some sort of content, as there's no satisfying Pod2Html module on CPAN as it seems. Therefor I decided to create something new. The new system has all features the old one had, but now allows to create content in lots of formats such as:

• Pod
• Markdown
• Sbc
• Textile
• HTML

Other markup formats are possible as well, as the API for the formatting plugins is quite easy and usually just a thin wrapper around a CPAN module which does the actual translation to HTML. Beside allowing new formats to write the content in, it also adds the following features:

• Comments
• Tags
• RSS feeds for comments and tags
• Trackbacks
• Pingbacks
• MoveableType API
• Manage static pages in an easy, tree-like fashion
• An easy web interface for editing everything. No need to work with files and directories anymore.
• Uses a relational database and is portable between many of them through DBIx::Class (I developed it using SQLite and deployed it on PostgreSQL)

In conclusion I'm pretty happy with the new software. I'm just very disappointed by quality of the generated HTML that the various Pod2HTML modules on CPAN produce, so I'll probably end up in writing something myself, based on Pod::Parser. PS: The URL to rss feed changed. Please use http://perldition.org/blog.rss.

Hello (ikiwiki), World!\n ikiwiki succeeded where other competitors failed: convincing myself to set up a blog. This is the unavoidable "Hello, world!\n" post. Thanks Joey for this valuable piece of software, I love the subverted wiki concept and I('m starting to) like also the markdown syntax. Still, the experience in setting up the blog has not been painless, here are some rough edges I haven't yet addressed with ikiwiki (IOW dear lazyweb section from now on):

• working offline and then commit is fine, but I would have loved the usual draft->publish release cycle of many blogs. More generally I'm missing a way to hide pages in ikiwiki. Ok, hiding stuff it's not in the wiki spirit, but it is definitely in the spirit of VCS to commit as often as possible to avoid losing work!
• markdown syntax is not supported per default in the current vim in unstable. I found a vim syntax extension for markdown, ... /me is going to add it to the vim package in unstable (or at least to vim-scripts, not sure yet).
• when writing post offline the "preview" feature is desirable as much as it is when writing online. Thus my first setup involved running ikiwiki on my laptop and then sync the result on the machine serving the page. Unfortunately, ikiwiki seems to be meant to be run on the final machine (for example: the ikiwiki.cgi is a arch specific code generated for the machine executing /usr/bin/ikiwiki). My current solution is then to run ikiwiki both on the machine I use to write posts and on the machine serving this blog ... better ideas?
• a couple of minor nuisances (the dates at the bottom of posts shown in Italian format, and all links in the RecentChanges page broken if I dare rebuilding with --rebuild). But hey, I know, it's free software, I'll eventually try to come up with a patch for these!

Again and nonetheless, kudos to Joey for ikiwiki, it rocks!

One of the interesting topics that came up during this last summer at various conferences -- dare I call it the Summer of Wiki? -- was the idea that experienced wiki community members need to share our cultural values and community-building experience with new wiki sites and developers. Christoph Sauer coined a term for this effort: Wiki Ohana, based on the Hawaiian concept of wp:ohana, or extended family. I was glad to see that the tireless Mark Dilley has started a new wiki at http://wikiohana.net/ to organize the Ohana effort. I plan on taking some time to work on this site; I think it's going to be crucial for riding the publicity wave that wiki is on right now. tags: wiki ohana mark dilley

Wikitorial triumphant Last summer, the Los Angeles Times tried an extremely interesting experiment in creating a wikitorial, or wiki-based editorial. The experiment was a notorious disaster: due to excessive abuse and fighting, the Times cancelled the experiment before publishing the results. The entire experience stained wiki's reputation for an entire year. Fast forward to 2006: oh, how times have changed. Ryan Singel of W I R E D magazine put up a 1000-word article about wikis on a wiki at SocialText. He invited the general public to edit the article. The result, which is a reasonably cohesive article on wikis, was published in wired under the title Veni, Vidi, Wiki. It's not the best article in the entire world on wiki, but it's not half bad. Some people have been down on the project -- mostly wiki businesses who felt they didn't get prominent enough coverage -- but I think that the bar was set so low by the LA Times that it's hard not to call getting to publication a success. Looking back, what were the possible factors that made the WIRED article work when the LA Times one didn't?

• Point of view. The LA Times article was an editorial, while the WIRED article was ostensibly a news story. Editorials are intrinsically opinion-oriented. Wiki can work for expressing personal opinions, but it's not easy, and the result usually isn't a very good read. It's much better as a means for expressing agreed-upon consensus information.
• Topic. The LA Times decided to use the extremely divisive issue of the war in Iraq as the subject of its editorial. How they expected to have a collaborative editing success with this topic is hard to understand. By concentrating on the wiki method itself, on the other hand, the WIRED article covered a much cooler topic that lent itself better to dispassionate discussion and consensus.
• Shared goals. The Times tried to reach out to a mass-market audience that was extremely passionate and divided on the topic at hand. The discussion of the Iraq war had already largely degenerated to name-calling and demonization at that point; the people who were participating had more to gain from keeping the other side from getting a say than from getting their own opinion across. For the WIRED article, the audience was experienced wiki community members -- people who know and understand the technology and culture. They had a shared goal with WIRED and with each other -- to spread the word about wiki in a way that's easy to understand. Although Angela Beesley's point and Mike Cannon-Brookes's article correctly note that the increasing commercial interest in wikis did bring some baggage along, I think there was some common ground that participants could reach.
• Organizational commitment. This, I think, was the key success factor. The LA Times posted their wikitorial as an experiment -- they dipped their toe in the water and pulled back as soon as the going got tough. As far as I know, they had no community management or leadership, and no seasoned wiki community members participating. On the other hand, Ryan Singel's article was hosted on SocialText, and SocialText has made a good business out of teaching companies and organizations the Wiki Way. They've got some of the best wiki minds around on their payroll, and it shows in their ability to manage a wiki project.

Although I think that these experiments are interesting, I don't think they make a very good measurement of whether wiki can work. Obviously, we have thousands of examples that wiki works (see WikiIndex if you need more convincing). I think that people's engagement with a wiki is proportional to their belief in the importance of their own work. If wikis are relegated to a tiny part of a Web site or publication, participants pick up on this de-emphasis and don't put much effort into the project; it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. I think that to be healthy, a wiki needs to be a major part of its parent project, if not the whole thing. That's why, I guess, WikiNews is going to continue to be more relevant and important than one-off wiki article stunts. tags: wiki wikitorial W I R E D latimes ryan singel socialtext

Hyperscope I'm psyched to see that Hyperscope has achieved its 1.0 milestone. Hyperscope is the extension of wp:Doug Engelbart's ideas about hypertext and human intelligence augmentation into the technologies of today's World Wide Web. Eugene Eric Kim has been working hard on the project and gave a great demo of the tool at Wikisym in August. Congratulations to EEK and the entire Hyperscope team! tags: hyperscope hypertext doug engelbart eek

After some time thinking about it I've moved my blog from PyBloxsom to ikiwiki; I'm still playing with it and the site needs some work, but it seems to work ok and the default look and feel is good enough for me. This post is written using Markdown to give it a try, but I wrote a simple plugin to add (partial) support for rst to be able to keep all my old entries without additional editing. I've sent the file to joeyh and I hope it gets into the upstream code (improved, if possible), as that will remove the need to keep my local changes in sync with the debian package. I have not enabled the ikiwiki.cgi because the machine I'm running it is quite slow and anyway I only need it for comments, and I usually don't have many of them. Instead of enabling comments I've added a footer asking people to send comments to echo -n klgoaca@@@eapafwl.fwl tr -s @a-z@ @i-za-h@ instead. To avoid flooding planet I've used the ikiwiki flood prevention mechanism, previous posts can be reached through the categories and/or using the full Blog index. Update I've been told that there is a Perl library to parse rst. I knew someone was working on it, but have not seen code until now; the package is called Text-Restructured and it is available from the URL http://search.cpan.org/dist/Text-Restructured/. Probably my hack could be replaced by code that uses this module instead of calling python to parse the files... any volunteers?

I finally took some time to migrate my blog from a (very old) Wordpress to a fairly new Ikiwiki. As I write these lines, the version of Ikiwiki I'm using isn't even released, and it includes two patches made by yours truly (and submitted upstream, of course, as bugs #380680 and #380743), allowing the creation of monthly archives and the possibility of making these archives RSS-less (it doesn't make much sense to have an RSS feed for something that's supposed to be static). The whole blog is now static, since I haven't investigated the comments system. I will probably enable the comments eventually, and I will of course migrate the existing ones (much like I migrated the existing articles, with a combination of a Perl script and some hand-tuning). In the meantime, I'll enjoy a spamless blog. The other regression is the lack of a search facility, but from what I can see it was hardly ever used anyway. Note to readers: old URLs should still work (thanks to Apache's magic mod_rewrite), but please update your bookmarks and feed readers and agregators and so on to use the new ones, since I'll probably disable URLs at some point. Update: I also hacked a new plugin, linkbar.pm, which appends a static Markdown string to all *.mdwn pages before they are rendered. So you should now see the lovely navigation menu on all pages, including the article pages.

I talked with Raymond King and Mark Dilley at RecentChangesCamp in February (uh... I mean Pluvi se) about their plans to develop Mark's excellent SwitchWiki wiki directory into something... more. I'm glad to see that WikiIndex is really picking up steam. It's becoming my first-stop for getting information on what's wiki, what's not, and who's doing what. The site uses MediaWiki, but the principles and community are very much rooted in the traditions of Ward's Wiki, MeatballWiki and CommunityWiki. I really hope this site keeps up it's momentum and growth. tags: wiki wikiindex mark dilley raymond king recentchangescamp

CC Salon in Montreal Tonight is the first Creative Commons Salon in Montreal. The get-together is at Caf l tranger, 680 Sainte-Catherine Ouest (at Alymer) at 19h30. More details on the Creative Commons Canada blog: http://creativecommons.ca/blog/?p=185 . Maj and I are trying to get a sitter for the event -- Amita June is starting to get grumpier and grumpier about going to sleep after 8PM. But I'll be there regardless. tags: cc cc salon montreal

Great camping Website So, maybe I just haven't been camping a lot in other places outside Quebec in a while, but I'm extremely impressed with the quality of the S paq Web site. You can search the entire network for available campsites based on various criteria (size of tent vs. RV, for example), and then use a map-based interface to browse possible sites. The maps go down to the individual site level, and have popup descriptions of each and every site -- how much sun, how close to water, how private, etc. It's really nice. I have my quibbles -- we tend to do road-trip camping, where we'll stay in a different campground each night for a few days. It'd be nice to do all those reservations at once, but the site doesn't support that. And there are some search criteria I'd like to be able to specify (number of neighbors, access by car) that aren't possible. But as far as it goes, this is a real good site. tags: quebec camping sepaq s paq reservations

Wikispam lockdown I've been having a real problem with Wikispam on my site lately -- several of my pages have nothing-to-sniff-at wp:PageRank values of 6 or 7, and I think that attracts a certain spammity crowd. I think that dealing with Wikispam is something most wiki sites do very well-- an active community is the best counter-measure against spam. And there are lots of good tools, like regexp filters, per-page locking, email and IM notification, and ip blocking that make it easier to maintain a site. But I don't have an active community working on this site -- it's pretty much just me. And WiLiKi, as beautiful and Scheme-y as it is, doesn't have many of the anti-spam tools that users of other wiki engines take for granted. I plan on building more anti-spam tools into the site, but for now I've just been locking the site up when I'm not writing something. It's not as wiki-ish, but it does keep my writing up more often. I'd feel pretty bad about it, but it looks like Alex locks up CommunityWiki for days at a time. tags: wiki spam wikispam wiliki pagerank

Amazon man at the door Just got an order from Amazon in... full of CDs and books. When I used to live in my car (long story, there), I had my 100 favorite CDs in a box in the back. It was safe there in tons of cities -- wt:Chicago, wt:Saint Louis, wt:New York City, even wt:Monterrey and wt:Guanajuato. But I parked it about a block from It's Tops in San Francisco one night while visiting home, and one of my windows was smashed and the discs were taken. Devastating. Slowly but surely I've been re-stocking my music collection, but it's painful to buy the same album twice (and, yes, I know... I shoulda made backups! I do that now). Today's shipment contained a lot of stuff I re-bought: ''wp:The Last Waltz'', a bunch of wp:Neil Young (including the DVD of wp:Greendale), and one of my favorite albums ever, the eponymous first album from Lamb. Also in the box were a bunch of Lost paperbacks ("inspired by the hit series") and the hardback copy of Bad Twin, the mystery novel supposedly written by one of the people who died in the crash of Flight 815. Yeah, I know -- but I like the show, dangit. tags: lost lamb cd amazon san francisco theft music bad twin

Best thing ever Vaguely reminiscent of the very fine Good or Bad? feature from Brunching Shuttlecocks, bestthing.info, by the enigmatic but talented xkcd, is a good way to waste a few minutes. tags: xkcd bestthing brunching shuttlecocks

Normally, l am quite happy with my T41p, as long as it's working. But for the third time time now, I had to send it in because tapping on the case caused the display to fail. The hotline was understanding and promised fast handling within 4 workdays. That was last week. Today, I called again, and they told me they are waiting for a new system board (for one of their most sucessful series), and I won't get it before next week... Is there another brand that has something like a TrackPoint? (blogged with my Nokia 770)

So I need to write a report. I can’t write it in HTML because it will print badly from a browser. And editing HTML can be a pain. There is princexml but that costs a couple of hundred dollars. I don’t want to edit in ODF because then I would have to use a hunk-of-crap WYSIWYG editor like Openoffice. Hell no. Also I have no experience of how ODF maps to the Web. Pretty badly I’ll assume. There is stuff like textile, markdown and reStructuredText, but what’s the point? They only seem to generate good HTML. So we are still left with the printing beautifully to A4 problem. Ok there is good old “tex”. But really I don’t want to go back there! Do I really have to use latex? It’s just so heavy and you can’t publish to HTML easily. Argh! Docbook. Hell no. It’s a dark art to control how the formats finally look. Trust me, I have experience. I had this thought that there must be some good mediawiki/wikipedia article printer tool. Maybe I can write this in mediawiki with the help of mozex and vim. Oh no. The Debian package is still b0rked on 1.4. Argh… I just wish there was a better mapping between the web and office formats like odf.

I've added news feeds for moreutils, debhelper, alien, wmbattery, Words2Nums, sleepd, pdmenu and filters. New releases will be automatically posted to them using a wikiannounce program I threw together, which generates a markdown file that is fed to ikiwiki. Other news will be posted as I see fit.

Thanks to everyone who contacted me with wiki suggestions. After looking at a lot of wikis, and finding none that really met my requirements (svnwiki and zwiki probably came closest), I decided to write my own. Currently it's some 300 lines of code that implements everything I need in a wiki for my project right now. A few minor features are lacking (online page editing, search, RecentChanges, themeability). Actually, I've turned the traditional wiki concept inside out, and instead of a big engine that stores pages, history, converts a custom markup to html, etc, etc, my wiki just runs on a set of files, formats them to html using a standard formatter like markdown, handles WikiLinks, and writes out static html for the web server. It's a wiki compiler. To let other people edit the wiki, just set up a subversion (etc) repository, let people commit to it, and run the compiler in a post-commit hook. Of course, it takes care to only rebuild pages when something has changed that makes rebuilding necessary, so a typical commit will take less than a second to compile and go live. I'll probably add all the missing features as I need them, and might eventually release it. BTW, I'm calling it "ikiwiki".

For a new project, I'm looking for wiki software with the following characteristics:

• Supports SubPages and relative linking from a page to its subpages and between subpages of a page works like regular wiki linking with no special syntax. MoinMoin supports subpages but to link to them without giving the whole path is ugly: "['/SubPage']" I want to just be able to link to SubPage from page FooBar and get /FooBar/SubPage if it exists, and /SubPage otherwise.
• Doesn't require special markup to make words that are not WikiWords, but that exist as pages, show up as links in other pages. Probably limiting this to capitalised words, and supporting turning off the feature for a blacklist of words in case of trouble.
• Can subscribe to changes for sets of pages or the whole wiki by rss.
• Can subscribe to be informed of new pages by rss.
• Uses some standard plain text markup language, like markdown or restructured text, and not some obscure thing specific to that wiki. Adding special syntax for wiki links is ok, and removing features like markdown's support for arbitrary inline html is ok.
• Keeps full history of changes to the wiki using a standard version control system like subversion. Ideally it would be possible to browse past states of the wiki at any point in time and even edit them to create branches, but UI for that is not a requirement.
• Allows direct commits to the wiki without using a stupid web form, using a standard version control system, like subversion.
• Supports images.
• Supports WikiName based logins and can limit edits to logged in users (although anonymous svn commits would be ok at least until wiki spammers learn how to spam via svn).
• Addendum: Cannot be written in PHP, thanks anyway.

At one point I had a half written wiki that supported a cvs backend (this was before svn) and supported browsing historical versions, but it got bogged down in trying to use html as the standard markup language, which diverted too much energy to writing code to sanitise html, and stalled out before it was usable. Writing one again doesn't seem wise, there are already too many. So I'm looking for pointers to anything that meets at least some of these requirements. Update: Subwiki uses subversion but is developing slowly and may be non-DFSG free. There's discussion about making TWiki support a svn backend, but it appears not to yet; it would probably meet all my other needs then some. GW uses subversion, but seems to be a java based academic research project. trac uses subversion, though it's not just a wiki and it might not use it for the wiki. Rather than tight subversion bindings, I'd be happy enough with a wiki that used flat text files and was flexibe enough so I could store them in svn. I'd even be happy to use viewsvn as the history browser for the wiki. Small and minimal, building blocks, like blosxom blogs, is good.

Christopher Aillon mentioned that people like NetworkManager a lot. While I agree that NetworkManager is something nice, and especially people really expect "Desktop Linux" to have it, there are a lot of other issues. I've tried netapplet, which is I think a predecessor. It looks just as fancy, but it doesn't really solve my needs. And in fact, I don't think NetworkManager can do that either (yet?). As usual, it's a bit more than just picking the right essid and maybe displaying the network strength (which doesn't work in netapplet for me, the hostap driver lists a quality of 0 for all networks, but the signal level value is fine), but also a lot about setting up VPN, encryption, handling network switches gracefully - and last but not least: saving power by disabling wireless when not needed. Also it didn't give me a proper list of networks. It just picked a random one (interestingly not the strongest, actually one I don't see right now...) and never showed the other 5 access points. That doesn't mean of course that NetworkDaemon wouldn't, it's just not in Debian yet, so I didn't try it yet. Guessnet is a nice tool for detecting your network setup. Using mii-tool it can detect whether my network cable is plugged in, and by doing "ifup eth0 ifup wlan0" I can bring up whatever is available. Well, almost except that guessnet also fails to detect my wireless networks (it probably would just need to wait a second for the scan to run). I agree that this is mostly an issue of the wireless driver. But just about every driver has it's own issues, unfortunately. For example, the vanilla orinoco driver doesn't do scanning. The hostap driver doesn't properly power down (right now I'm using some iwpriv hack to disable radio tx to save some power), the ralink driver has been locking up the laptop every now and then... some drivers don't do WEP, others don't to WPA. The wireless keyboard shortcut obviously didn't work either... So maybe, we right now (once more) need more people working on the drivers. Oh, and there are more issues with drivers - for example Scorched3D still doesn't work properly on radeon. The OSS nvidia drivers still don't have 3D. Some bluetooth headsets don't work yet... and the closed source drivers are even worse (a pain to install since they aren't properly integrated in the distributions etc.). So Linux still needs more support by hardware vendors (especially WRT to specs!) as well as more people actually doing the dirty job in C and not just having fun with PHP, Python and Mono.

It's good to see that Bruce Schneier has got a sense of self-irony :-) Update: I really dislike pymarkdown's syntax for URLs :-)