Eheh, I'm getting older... 22 today! I just wanted to put down some of the important things happened to me this year...

• sentimental life: epic fail... not really in the mood of talking about it;
• University life: I finally passed two exams which blocked me for all the previous year: yay! Now I'm being stuck with other things -- not too much enthusiasm in some courses...
• Debian life: I finally had my GPG key signed by TWO Debian Developers: I became DM, and had upload rights on non-NEW packages. Great! We had Lenny released. Uber-Great!
• misc life: I just tried getting more people-friendly, more active (meaning being less lazy), less nerd (I probably failed in this particular aspect), better, in a word.

Wishes for the 22-23 development cycle :

• finally becoming a DD! (I'm NM since Dec-2007..)
• trying to pass many exams as possible at University
• seriously fall in love (I think I've already started this with the girl I'm with now...)
• misc improvements (sorry, you can't send patches... or yes?)

Happy birthday to me!

So, Kodak announced the availability of Linux drivers for some of its scanners, together with a frontend application. While the effort is laudable, they re not quite there yet. Let s have a look. First of all, and contrary to what a few people believe after reading the press release, the drivers themselves aren t OpenSource, let alone Free Software. They re all proprietary; read better, the press release clearly mentions that only the frontend application is GPLv2. Now let s look at what Kodak offers in its drivers packages. I ve downloaded LinuxSoftware_i1200_v3.5.tar.gz from the Kodak website, these are the drivers for the Kodak i1200 series. The archive contains a set of RPM packages, one Debian package corresponding to one of the RPM packages, and a setup script. One of the packages contains the OpenUSB library, which is released under the LGPL; sources aren t there, I haven t asked for the sources, don t plan on doing so, and am not implying anything regarding license compliance whatsoever. I ll note that I haven t seen any written offer for the sources, though, be it in the archive (there s not even a README in there) or on the website. So, although Ubuntu is listed as supported, we can say that no Debian packages are provided. The setup script actually relies on alien to convert them if it thinks it s running on a Debian-based system, which is determined by the availability of dpkg in the PATH. Using alien is far from ideal. The packages ship libraries and components under /usr/lib, /usr/local/lib and even /opt, pretty randomly it seems. Let s repeat here that /usr/local and /opt are strictly reserved for the local administrator and packages must not install anything here. There are other oddities in the paths used by the software stack, like /var/kodak. It looks like the SANE backend is only a bridge to Kodak s TWAIN data source, so you d actually need the whole stack to use it. All in all, Kodak does no better, I d even venture to say it does worse, than Epson (Avasys). At least part of Epson s backend is Free Software, even if it relies on proprietary libraries for some scanners, though unfortunately most if not all of the recent ones. I also have to mention that Epson is offering both RPM and Debian packages, and by that I mean proper Debian packages. Kodak are far from that, even the RPM aren t that great (I think the RPM packages even lack dependency information, based on what I ve read in the setup script, though I haven t checked). What Kodak offers here is a GPL frontend for TWAIN that not many people will be using, while keeping the drivers proprietary. Unfortunately their SANE backend isn t a backend so to speak, and even if it was OpenSource it d still rely on the rest of the TWAIN software stack. So, in a nutshell, while I m very happy to see yet another vendor go down the road of Linux support for its products, I am immensely disappointed by the proprietary nature of the drivers and the low quality of the packages. I was, of course, investigating the drivers to possibly package them for Debian; as you ve probably understood, it s not possible, both technically and legally. And I kept a little gem from the setup script for the end:

# We need to create a link for the libdbus-1 requirement for openusb,
# but only on Fedora.
if [ -f /etc/fedora-release ]; then
    ln -s /lib/libdbus-1.so.3 /lib/libdbus-1.so.2 2>> /dev/null
fi

As we all know, sonames and soversions are useless and they just keep getting in the way. Duh.

With any luck, someone has seen this problem before and can fix it easily. I don t seem to be able to find the fix by searching, but the search terms feel like they re either too general or too specific. I was trying to install some perl software on a debian lenny system that was upgraded from etch (and previously from sarge). After installing the dependencies, I started getting errors like this:-

$ perl -MYAML::Syck -e print
Can't locate YAML/Syck.pm in @INC (@INC contains:
/usr/local/lib/perl5/5.10.0/i686-linux /usr/local/lib/perl5/5.10.0
/usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.10.0/i686-linux
/usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.10.0 .).
BEGIN failed--compilation aborted.

Update: Well done to Raphael who spotted the local that I d overlooked. D oh! Now to see if I can discover where that came from. Update 2: Also thanks to Florian who emailed in at about the same time (I don t read my email as much as my website dashboard, usually).

Then I discovered that the debian mirror being used (which is in the same city, and in a nearby network) is marked as bad on the health check. I switched mirrors to a known-good one that I ve used for other systems recently, but no joy. I think a key symptom is this bit near the end of the output of perl -V:

Compiled at Aug 4 2008 09:48:59
@INC:
/usr/local/lib/perl5/5.10.0/i686-linux
/usr/local/lib/perl5/5.10.0
/usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.10.0/i686-linux
/usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.10.0

Our good systems show a December compiled at date and a much longer @INC list. I ve tried reinstalling pretty much every package I think might be connected, including libc6, libperl5.10, perl, perl-base and perl-modules (those last four are all version 5.10.0-19). I really don t want to reinstall the whole system because it s behind an irritating firewall that will make it a 10-hour round-trip site visit. I m currently hunting and removing obsolete packages to try to make sure they re not causing problems, because I m running out of straws to clutch at. How would you recover a debian system from this?

Nearly a month has elapsed since Debian released Lenny. The interesting thing for me about this release was that I failed to get to the point where running etch was causing me pain. This became even more evident when Katherine commented on my Lenny T-Shirt - I'd forgotten to mention our release to her! Previously there have been a bunch of features coming that I really wanted, sometimes to the point of using backports. It's probably something to do with the way I run Debian; I use stable for remote machines and while in the past this would have meant quite a few work boxes these days it's just a box at my parents' and my colo. Where I felt the pain during this release cycle was on the boxes where I run unstable (my home desktop) or testing (my work box and my laptops). Development on new shininess slows down significantly while we're preparing for release (not unsurprisingly). And there are things coming up I quite like the look of, largely aimed at the desktop arena. I've been running Network Manager 0.7 from experimental on my EEE, for example - I need the HSO 3G support to avoid unnecessary faff on a daily basis. I've got ATI cards in my work and home desktops, so I'm watching the Mesa developments with interest - roll on OpenGL 2.0 support hopefully. The Intel KMS support that doesn't seem to be quite there yet but RSN, no, really, will be nice for my laptops. Experimental VDRs are looking interesting and perhaps worth upgrading my PVR to.

For a long time I haven't really understood the point of view that Debian shouldn't release. Or rather, I haven't understood why people would think that was a serious option. The first Debian box I installed went into a colo facility shortly afterwards. This is the first release I've not been running Debian on a commercial colo box and while I treat my personal colo in a similar fashion it's not quite the same in terms of priorities. However I still think regular releases are hugely important to the project. Some pain for those of us more interested in new shiny is a small price to pay for producing a flexible, reliable distribution, be they server administrators (though I see a worrying number of people decide to install testing on their production servers and then rarely/never update it), derivers or appliance vendors.

Mind you, now we've released I'm going to have to do all those things I've been putting off. I should probably start with moving my Perl bits into pkg-perl. And maybe I should switch over some sources.list files to point at squeeze instead of lenny...

position:fixed in Android Webkit Good news for mobile web developers! In the latest development build of Android ("cupcake"), WebKit supports iPhone touch events and CSS3 animations/transforms. This means that Richard Herrera's iPhone fixed positioning hack will soon work Android too. The WebKit CSS Animation demos also work, but lack of hardware acceleration in Android makes them painfully slow compared to the iPhone.

The recent problem of the Portuguese translation of GCompris shows how important a good translation is, especially as far as free software are concerned.
I have not been able to find any news in English relating this story, and think it is essential to spread it so that people better appreciate the role translators play in the free software development process. The Portuguese Magalh es Project lead to provide 300,000 netbooks to Portuguese children aged of 6 to 10, for a fee varying from 0 to 50 , depending on the earnings of the family. These netbooks have a dual boot, with Windows and Linux (a distribution based on Mandriva called Caixa M gica - Magic Box in English).

The problem has begun when some opponents to this project pointed out that the Portuguese translation of GCompris, a free educational software for children from 2 to 10, contained some grammar, syntax and spelling faults, and did not reach the level of quality expected to be distributed to Portuguese children. This story was even published by some major Portuguese newspaper, which is a very bad publicity not only for GCompris, but also for free software in general. Caixa M gica Software have also published a press release explaining the situation. The Portuguese Government have even published a document explaining how to uninstall GCompris, whereas work for correcting the translation was running, and automatic updates being set up on all Magalh es netbooks. The GNOME Portuguese translation team have made some hard work during the week-end to review and correct the existing translation, following to a call for help raised by GCompris lead developer. The new version released yesterday already include an updated Portuguese translation. I have noticed that this problem was already reported on launchpad 2 years ago, but people got lost as the translation was not made through Rosetta (a closed source platform for open source application translation). This should have been reported upstream or at least to the main translator! I take the occasion to thank all translators, l10n and i18n coordinators of the various free software projects I enjoy using in French!

A cautionary tale: Verizon's DSL salespeople are completely incompetent. Several weeks ago, I ordered residential service. I was unable to get the prequalification app on their web site to work for my address, so I called in. I was told (1) I could get a modem for free, and (2) that I didn't need to do anything for the install except plug it in -- they'd just be turning something on at the CO, perhaps even before the date my service was scheduled to begin. These were both, of course, pure fiction. On the install date, while at work, I got a call from a tech who had shown up at my house to rewire something. Luckily, I was able to rendezvous with him later in the day. The service worked briefly and then went down. Over the next few days, I called in, was told to wait at home for 8 hours, no one showed up, I called in again, was told "oh, sorry, it's going to be tomorrow", waited all day the next day, no one showed up again... a week and two actual visits later, I finally had connectivity. I can't really blame them for whatever the line problem was, but to repeatedly treat my time as worthless by making me wait at home for an entire day just in case a tech can get there, even though it's highly unlikely they will, is just offensive. Then, I received my first bill and... was charged for the modem. Calling in again, I was told that the deal I was offered was for online orders only, and even if I specifically confirmed with the sales person that he could get me the same deal since the web site wouldn't let me complete an order (and I already had an old, power-sucking modem anyway), there was no way I could get a refund. So I got an RMA and planned to go shopping for a replacement (people are selling the same model on Craigslist for $10). The RMA came in an email which also told me that if I did not return the equipment within X days I would be charged $100. This is all utter bullshit. Do not use Verizon. If your only other option is Comcast, as it is here, just steal your neighbor's wireless or tether your 3G. They could have left me reasonably happy with the whole botched situation if they had provided a honest estimate of how long it would really take to get someone out (even if it was "days"), or given me access to the same information without having to go through a call center of people only trained to read a script about how to power-cycle your router or whatever. And if they actually apologized for a saleperson convincing me to sign up by lying about what I would be charged. But why would they? What are you going to do, switch to an ISP that treats you like a human being and doesn't fuck with your traffic? Ha. Ha ha ha. Good luck with that.

I'm eternally confused about the state of powermanagement in Debian (or in Linux generally? Not using any other distribution seriously, I have no idea.) There are just too many scripts who interact or merely run in parallel (see my short note in my first posting about my shiny toy. While I don't actively invest time to educate myself about the situation, I've just tried to uninstall a round of unneeded packages and got rid of apmd and hibernate, which both were installed by default (or by dependencies of other stuff I've got rid of earlier?) but seem not to be necessary. At least the laptop still suspends when I close the lid. This is without rebooting or even just logging out, though, so if it doesn't work out, I'll have to update this entry. Update: Thanks to Michael's comment, pointing to #451380. Scope for a Google Summer of Code project, perhaps? This would be 90% talk to people and get a consensus and only 10% coding, though, but I think it would be worth it so that squeeze would have a powermanagement /acpi framework where different components don't stand on other components' toes all the time.

Django Lint is a static analysis tool that checks (or lints) web applications that are built around the Django web development framework. It aims to encourage the development of high-quality reusable Django applications. It currently reports on:

• Nullable CharField or TextField model fields
• Missing recommended configuration variables in settings.py
• Mismatch of null=True and blank=False for model fields
• Use of BooleanField with default=True or use of NullBooleanField
• Where myapp.models is actually a directory-based package instead of a single models.py
• Excessive number of models in a single application
• Models within an application having a common prefix
• Use of unique_for_date, unique_for_month or unique_for_year modifiers
• Naive tree structure implementations using ForeignKey('self')
• Missing __unicode__ methods or use of __str__
• Incorrect ordering of standard model methods relative to Django style guidelines
• Misordered middleware in settings.py
• Models with too many fields (or zero) fields
• Extremely large CharField fields
• Use of the PositiveSmallIntegerField or SmallIntegerField fields
• Use of auto_now or auto_now_add modifiers on date fields
• Instances of URLField without an explicit verify_exists value
• (and more)

Admittedly, some of the checks are based on the implementation details of MySQL, PostgreSQL and SQLite backends, but this fits with the goal of promoting re-usable applications anyway. GPLv3 source, tarballs, etc. Patches welcome.

One of the recent poor trends in mailing list discussions is to reply to a message with a comment such as FAIL or EPIC FAIL . The FAIL meme has been around for a while and actually does some in some situations, slate has a good article about it [1]. The first example cited in that article is that when Ben Bernanke and Henry Paulson testified before the Senate banking committee last month about Paulson s proposed bailout bill, a demonstrator in the audience held up an 8.5-by-11 piece of paper with one word scrawled on it in block letters: FAIL. . This is an effective form of political demonstration, short words generally work well on placards (if only because the letters can be larger and therefore read from a greater distance) and anyone can understand the meaning of FAIL in that context. There are some blogs dedicated to publicising supposed failures, failblog.org and ShipmentOfFail.com are two examples. I cite these as supposed failures because some of the pictures that they contain are obviously staged. It s basically an Internet equivalent of the Funniest Home Videos shows that I never watched because they were not particularly funny. So using the word FAIL on it s own can be an effective form of political protest and can be used for mildly amusing web sites. But where it falls down is when it s applied to a discussion that involves people who are from different cultures or have different levels of background knowledge - which covers most mailing list discussions. Something that might be obviously wrong to some people is often not obvious at all to others. For example being forced to reboot a computer for any reason other than a kernel upgrade seems obviously wrong to me (and to most people who use Linux or other Unix systems) but Windows users seem happy to reboot machines after applying patches or upgrades. So writing a message with FAIL as the only word in a discussion with Windows users would not be productive. It could however be reasonable to forward a link to a page on a Microsoft web site to Linux people for their amusement with FAIL as the only comment - anyone who would find the link in question amusing would require no more explanation. Sometimes when in a debate someone will write a message that only says FAIL , this is a very unconvincing argument that will not convince the opposition or any onlookers. Generally it seems that using FAIL in a discussion with other like-minded people when talking about someone outside your group for the purpose of amusement can be effective. But any other use is going to be a FAIL . As a more general rule single-word messages seem to have little value apart from certain limited situations. I have identified the following seven scenarios where a single word message is useful. Can anyone think of any others?

1. Code review - someone posts code (or design for code) and people who like it will write ACK or something similar.


2. Arranging a meeting - the question who wants to meet for lunch tomorrow has me as a valid answer.


3. Voting - yes and no are valid answers for a poll, but a mailing list or forum probably isn t the best place for it.


4. Citing an example to refute a claim - often a single word won t be a great response but may be adequate to prove a point.


5. Answering a request for a recommendation - if asked to recommend a laptop I might say Thinkpad or if asked to recommend a server I might say HP . Both those answers are poor (I recommend EeePC for netbooks and Dell for small/cheap servers), so while such an answer would be useful it would be below my usual quality standards for email (I prefer to write at least two paragraphs explaining why I recommend something).


6. Informing people that something has been done by replying to a request with the word Done .


7. Agreeing to a contract or proposal with OK or Yes .

Update: I added another two reasonable uses of single word messages,

• [1] http://www.slate.com/id/2202262/pagenum/all/

The listeners of yesterday s episode of Venty s Hackerfunk radio show on Radio LoRa already know and heard it: We made identi.ca talk. And we did it with help of other microbloggers. (The podcast version of this Hackerfunk episode will be online in a few days, too. Will link it here and either Venty or me will post it on identi.ca, too, as soon as it s published.) A few weeks ago we thought about how we could show microblogging on the radio. With identi.ca s Jabber (XMPP) interface we have real time access, and so the idea was born to pipe all incoming dents into a speech synthesis system. Then we tried to figure out which tools would be appropriate. Quite fast, people on identi.ca as well as on the LUGS IRC (e.g. bones0) pointed us to festival and espeak. We found no support for German in festival, so we went for espeak although festival would have had the advantage of the existence of a festival plugin for the popular multiprotocol messenger Pidgin. Next step was more difficult than expected: How to make a tail -f of XMPP incoming messages? Something like rsstail, just for XMPP. Although using the IM to IRC gateway Bitlbee (as I use it myself) and using tail -f (or better inotail -f ) on the IRC client s log file (ii comes to my mind for such purposes) would have been an option, nobody had the idea at that time. And since @deepspawn conjured xmpptail in less than two hours we happily took it. xmpptail (tar.gz) is written in Python and uses Twisted Words (Debian package python-twisted-words) as XMPP libraries. I had to patch xmpptail slightly for unbuffered I/O, Unicode support and for removing things we don t want to hear on the radio as follows, but it worked more or less out of the box.

--- xmmptail.py 2009-02-25 20:47:48.000000000 +0100
+++ xmpptail.py 2009-03-07 18:48:57.000000000 +0100
@@ -1,4 +1,4 @@
-#!/usr/bin/python
+#!/usr/bin/python -u
 # -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
 # author: Carlos A. Perilla 
 # This file is part of Jance bot.
@@ -65,7 +65,8 @@
          body = unicode(e.__str__())
          break
 
-    print("%s: %s" % (from_id,body))
+#    print("%s: %s" % (from_id,body))
+    print("%s" % (body.encode('utf-8')))
 
 
 def authfailedEvent(xmlstream):
@@ -80,9 +81,9 @@
   dprint('Got something: %s -> %s' % (el.name, str(el.attributes)))
 
 if __name__ == '__main__':
-    print "Starting"
+    #print "Starting"
     execfile('tailconf')
-    print USER_HANDLE
+    #print USER_HANDLE
     me = USER_HANDLE + "/xmpptail"
     myJid = jid.JID(me)
     server = USER_HANDLE[USER_HANDLE.find('@')+1:]

So after configuring xmpptail to use the hackerfunk Jabber account, we successfully ran the following script during the radio show:

./xmpptail.py   while read LINE; do
        if [ "$LINE" = "empty" ]; then
                continue;
        fi;
        echo $LINE
        echo $LINE   tee -a xmpp-espeak.log   espeak --stdin -v de;
done

At the end of the show, @rebugger found this howto which describes very detailed how to get festival working together with the non-free ( non-free as in DFSG) MBROLA project which offers also the appropriate files for German. But because of how much work this would be to get it running, I currently prefer to stay with espeak for German speech synthesis . Next step would be to use mnoGosearch s mguesser to detect the language of a dent and run espeak (or whatever text-to-speech system is appropriate for the guessed language) with the appropiate options for that language, because otherwise many dents sound really funny. ;-) Update, 15:02: Venty gave the whole system the name Identibla .

It s been quite the week. Stomach Flu Last Friday, my stomach was just starting to feel a little odd. I didn t think much off it a little food that didn t go over well or stress, I thought. Saturday I got out of bed and almost immediately felt like throwing up. Ugh. I probably caught some sort of stomach flu. I was nauseous all day and had some terrible diarrhea to boot. I spent parts of Saturday, Saturday night, Sunday, and Sunday night supervising some emergency downloads as the BOFH would say. By Sunday afternoon, I thought I was doing good enough to attend a practice of the Kansas Mennonite Men s Choir. I made it through but it wasn t quite as up to it as I thought. Monday morning I woke up and thought the worst was behind me, so I went to work. By evening, the worst clearly was not behind me. I was extremely cold, and then got very hot a few hours later. Tuesday I left work a little early because of not feeling well. Servers Wednesday a colleague called me at home before I left to say that the ERP database had a major hiccup. That s never good. The database is this creaky old dinosaur thing that has a habit of inventing novel ways to fail (favorite pastime: exceeding some arbitrary limit to the size of files that no OS has cared about for 5 years, then hanging without telling anybody why). My coworkers had been working on it since 5. I went into the office and did what I could to help out, though they had mostly taken care of it. Then we went to reboot the server. It didn t come back. I/O error on sda just after init started, and it hung. Puzzled, as it just used that disk to boot from. Try rebooting again. This time, I/O error as the fibre channel controller driver loads. Again, puzzled as it just used that controller to load grub. Power cycle this time. And now the server doesn t see the fibre channel link at all. Eep. Check our fiber optic cables, and power cycle again. And THIS time, the server doesn t power back up. Fans whir for about a second, then an ominous red light I never knew was there shows up. Eeep! So I call HP. They want me to remove one CPU. Yes, remove one CPU. I tried, and long story short, they dispatch a local guy with a replacement motherboard. Can you send along a FC controller, in case it s dead too? Nope, not until we diagnose a problem with it. Local guy comes out. He s a sharp guy and I really like him. But the motherboard wasn t in stock at the local HP warehouse, so he had to have it driven in from Oklahoma City. He gets here with it by about 4:30. At this point the single most important server to the company s business has been down almost 12 hours. He replaces the motherboard. The server now powers up yay! And it POSTs, and it . doesn t see the disks. !#$!#$ He orders the FC controller, which is so very much not in stock that they can t get it to us until 8:30AM the next morning (keep in mind this thing is on a 4-hour 24/7 contract). Next morning rolls around. Outage now more than 24 hours. He pops the FC controller in, we tweak the SAN settings appropriately, we power up the machine, and . still doesn t see any disks, and the SAN switch still doesn t see any link. EEP! Even the BIOS firmware tool built into the controller doesn t see a link, so we KNOW it s not a software issue. We try plugging and unplugging cables, trying different ports, everything. Nothing makes a difference. At this point, while he ponders what else he can replace while we start migrating the server to a different blade. We get ERP back up on its temporary home an hour later, and he basically orders us every part he can think of while we ve bought him some room. Several additional trips later, he s replaced just about everything at least once, some things 2 or 3 times, and still no FC link. Meanwhile, I ve asked my colleague to submit a new ticket to HP s SAN team so we can try checking of the switch has an issue. They take their sweet time answering until he informs them this morning that it s been *48 HOURS* since we first reported the outage. All of a sudden half a dozen people at HP take a keen interest in our case. As if they could smell this blog post coming So they advise us to upgrade the firmware in the SAN switch, but they also say we really should send this to the blade group; the problem can t be with the SAN and of course the blade people are saying the problem s GOT to be with the SAN . We try to plan the firmware upgrade. In theory, we can lose a switch and nobody ever notices due to multipathing redundancy. In practice, we haven t tested that in 2 years. None of this equipment had even been rebooted in 390 days. While investigating this, we discovered that one of the blade servers could only see one path to its disks, not two. Strange. Fortunately, THAT blade wasn t mission-critical on a Friday, so I power cycled it. And it powered back up. And it promptly lost connection to its disks entirely, causing the SAN switches to display the same mysterious error they did with the first blade the one that nobody at HP had heard of, could find in their documentation, or even on Google. Yes, that s right. Apparently power cycling a server means it loses access to its disks. Faced with the prospect of our network coming to a halt if anything else rebooted (or worse, if the problem started happening without a reboot), we decided we d power cycle one switch now and see what would happen. If it worked out, our problems would be fixed. If not, at least things would go down in our and HP s presence. And that worked? What? Yes. Power cycling the switch fixed every problem over the course of about 2 minutes, without us having to do anything. Meanwhile, HP calls back to say, Uhm, that firmware upgrade we told you to do? DON T DO IT! We power cycle the other switch, and have a normal SAN life again. I let out a WOOHOO! My colleague, however, had the opposite reaction. Now we ll never be able to reproduce this problem to get it fixed! Fair point, I suppose. Then began the fairly quick job of migrating ERP back to its rightful home it s all on Xen already, designed to be nimble for just these circumstances. Full speed restored 4:55PM today. So, to cap it all off, within the space of four hours, we had fail:

• One ERP database
• ERP server s motherboard
• Two fiber optic switches but only regarding their ability to talk to machines recently rebooted
• And possibly one FC controller

Murphy, I hate you. The one fun moment out of this was this conversation: Me to HP guy: So yeah, that machine you ve got open wasn t rebooted in 392 days until today. HP guy: WOW! That s INCRED oh wait, are you running Linux on it? Me: Yep. HP: Figures. No WAY you d get that kind of uptime from Windows. And here he was going to be all impressed.

Yesterday I asked for help because I was missing exif information in my Gallery2 installation. Today I found the reason for this, when I was trying get a random image block displayed in my blog, which fails as well.
There seems a bug in /usr/share/php/adodb/drivers/adodb-postgres7.inc.php:

Warning: pg_query_params() [function.pg-query-params]: Query failed: ERROR: column "g_userid" is of type integer but expression is of type text HINT: You will need to rewrite or cast the expression. in /usr/share/php/adodb/drivers/adodb-postgres7.inc.php on line 113
-1: ERROR: column "g_userid" is of type integer but expression is of type text HINT: You will need to rewrite or cast the expression.



ADOConnection._Execute(
INSERT INTO
g2_ImageBlockCacheMap
SELECT DISTINCT
?, ?, g2_Entity.g_creationTimestamp, g2_Entity.g_id, FLOOR(RANDOM()
..., Array[45]) % line 1007, file: adodb.inc.php


ADOConnection.Execute(
INSERT INTO
g2_ImageBlockCacheMap
SELECT DISTINCT
?, ?, g2_Entity.g_creationTimestamp, g2_Entity.g_id, FLOOR(RANDOM()
..., Array[45]) % line 952, file: GalleryStorageExtras.class


GalleryStorageExtras.execute(
INSERT INTO
[ImageBlockCacheMap]
SELECT DISTINCT
?, ?, [GalleryEntity::creationTimestamp], [GalleryEntity::id],
FLOOR(R..., Array[45]) % line 507,
file: GalleryStorage.class


GalleryStorage.execute(
INSERT INTO
[ImageBlockCacheMap]
SELECT DISTINCT
?, ?, [GalleryEntity::creationTimestamp], [GalleryEntity::id],
FLOOR(R..., Array[45]) % line 742,
file: ImageBlockHelper.class


ImageBlockHelper.cacheViewableTree(17) % line 520, file: ImageBlockHelper.class

Error performing imageblock.LoadImageBlock callback realpath(/usr/share/gallery2/modules/core/classes/../../../) realpath(/var/www/net/gallery.windfluechter.net/) Error (ERROR_STORAGE_FAILURE)

in modules/core/classes/GalleryStorage/GalleryStorageExtras.class at line 959 (GalleryCoreApi::error)
in modules/core/classes/GalleryStorage.class at line 507 (GalleryStorageExtras::execute)
in modules/imageblock/classes/ImageBlockHelper.class at line 742 (GalleryStorage::execute)
in modules/imageblock/classes/ImageBlockHelper.class at line 520 (ImageBlockHelper::cacheViewableTree)
in modules/imageblock/classes/ImageBlockHelper.class at line 283 (ImageBlockHelper::fetchViewableData)
in modules/imageblock/classes/ImageBlockHelper.class at line 93 (ImageBlockHelper::_getBlockData)
in modules/imageblock/Callbacks.inc at line 83 (ImageBlockHelper::loadImageBlocks)
in modules/core/classes/GalleryTemplateAdapter.class at line 1052 (ImageBlockCallbacks::callback)
in g2data/smarty/templates_c/%%626616196/matrix/%%A3^A3EA3E218EA%%ImageBlock.tpl.php at line 5 (GalleryTemplateAdapter::callback)
in /usr/share/php/smarty/libs/Smarty.class.php at line 1868
in modules/core/classes/GalleryTemplateAdapter.class at line 983 (Smarty::_smarty_include)
in g2data/smarty/templates_c/%%626616196/matrix/%%B4^B49B49848CB%%sidebar.tpl.php at line 7 (GalleryTemplateAdapter::block)
in /usr/share/php/smarty/libs/Smarty.class.php at line 1868
in modules/core/classes/GalleryTemplateAdapter.class at line 909 (Smarty::_smarty_include)
in g2data/smarty/templates_c/%%626616196/matrix/%%AD^AD7AD74CEE9%%photo.tpl.php at line 12 (GalleryTemplateAdapter::theme)
in /usr/share/php/smarty/libs/Smarty.class.php at line 1868
in modules/core/classes/GalleryTemplateAdapter.class at line 909 (Smarty::_smarty_include)
in g2data/smarty/templates_c/%%626616196/matrix/%%3A^3A83A818B59%%theme.tpl.php at line 55 (GalleryTemplateAdapter::theme)
in /usr/share/php/smarty/libs/Smarty.class.php at line 1262
in modules/core/classes/GallerySmarty.class at line 61 (Smarty::fetch)
in modules/core/classes/GalleryTemplate.class at line 219 (GallerySmarty::fetch)
in main.php at line 521 (GalleryTemplate::fetch)
in main.php at line 104
in main.php at line 88
* in main.php at line 3

file_exists(/var/www/net/gallery.windfluechter.net/g2data/cache/module/_all/0/0/GalleryPluginHelper_fetchPluginStatus.inc) getParameter smarty.compile_check for core plugin file_exists(/var/www/net/gallery.windfluechter.net/g2data/cache/module/core/0/0/0.inc) file_exists(/var/www/net/gallery.windfluechter.net/g2data/smarty/templates_c/%%626616196/matrix/%%C7^C79C79EEB7F%%ItemInfo.tpl.php) strftime(%x, 1231148074) file_exists(/var/www/net/gallery.windfluechter.net/g2data/smarty/templates_c/%%626616196/matrix/%%F3^F3EF3EB483E%%PhotoSizes.tpl.php) file_exists(/var/www/net/gallery.windfluechter.net/g2data/cache/entity/2/1/21143.inc) file_exists(/var/www/net/gallery.windfluechter.net/g2data/cache/entity/2/1/21080.inc) file_exists(/var/www/net/gallery.windfluechter.net/g2data/cache/entity/1/9/19996.inc) file_exists(/var/www/net/gallery.windfluechter.net/g2data/cache/entity/4/4/4457.inc) file_exists(/var/www/net/gallery.windfluechter.net/g2data/cache/entity/0/0/7.inc) file_exists(/var/www/net/gallery.windfluechter.net/g2data/smarty/templates_c/%%626616196/matrix/%%5A^5A35A33504B%%Navigator.tpl.php) file_exists(/var/www/net/gallery.windfluechter.net/g2data/cache/entity/2/1/21148.inc) file_exists(/var/www/net/gallery.windfluechter.net/g2data/cache/entity/2/1/21588.inc) file_exists(/var/www/net/gallery.windfluechter.net/g2data/cache/entity/2/1/21127.inc) file_exists(/var/www/net/gallery.windfluechter.net/g2data/cache/entity/2/1/21138.inc) file_exists(/var/www/net/gallery.windfluechter.net/g2data/cache/entity/2/5/25248.inc) file_exists(/var/www/net/gallery.windfluechter.net/g2data/smarty/templates_c/%%626616196/matrix/%%F6^F68F68636C4%%ExifInfo.tpl.php) postgres7 error: [-1: ERROR: current transaction is aborted, commands ignored until end of transaction block] in EXECUTE(" SELECT g2_Group.g_id, g2_Group.g_groupName FROM g2_UserGroupMap, g2_Group WHERE g2_Group.g_id = g2_UserGroupMap.g_groupId AND g2_UserGroupMap.g_userId = ? ORDER BY g2_Group.g_groupName ")

So, when there's the image block activated in theme setting, some queries like the above are failing and neither the image block nor the exif data block is displayed. The temporary solution is therefor to remove the image block from your theme or deactivate/uninstall the plugin at all. The long term solution will be to wait for an updated gallery2 after I've reported this bug to the BTS... ;)

UPDATE: #518572

Debian- and Ubuntu-packages of bluefish-unstable - the development series of bluefish - for the amd64 architecture are now available.

At some point in the past, when I was still thinking that Glest can be packaged in a sane way, I had a conversation with upstream developer martinho on the Glest forum (they call it board) about them integrating a patch in order to support big endian machines.

After some messages on their board, it was clear that they don't want to integrate any patches and started to throw out random fake arguments against the integration of my patch and other patches.

When he figured out that I replied and debunked all of his fake arguments, he went on and actually removed my posts from the forum. It was so weird since I have never seen that kind of behaviour before and some of his posts and other people's posts were replies to my posts and things didn't made any sense after the deletion.

At that moment I have managed to save one small bit of the conversation via Google's cache, but now I have finally decided to make it public.


Note: Back then, I kept this post private in the hope that I was maybe too involved in the conversation at that moment to make a rational decision about it, and hoped things would get better in time. They didn't. Meanwhile they migrated to another forum software and they said they lost most/all(?) of the previous content from the old forum.



Here is the conversation bit I managed to save.
Original text is in italic font. Regular font is for my current comments for clearing up the context of the discussion. The text retains the BB syntax and [quote]-d text is martinho's own words.



[quote="martinho"]thebohemian, eddyd,

I think you guys are missing the point, this is not the place for any [/quote]

Congrats, you are avoiding to answer the points I have raised.

[quote]
- The Glest project is made by a bunch of friends for fun, we ask for nothing, we answer to no one. So I beg you not co complain, because it is out of order.
[/quote]

In that case I don't see the point of the "development" forum. care to explain?
And, from my PoV, these are your users you're arrogantly dismissing.


The following was a reply to my request to add big endian support through a patch I provided at that time. The patch wasn't complete to actually make glest work on BE machines, but it didn't broke little endian support at all. He was trying to argue that there were no valid big endian machines on which the game would run. Integrating the patch would have made my life a lot easier in continuing the work on the patch.

[quote]
- Our target plarforms are PCs running Windows (I'm responsible for this) or Linux (matze is the boss here). We don't care if Glest doesn't run in a big endian dishwasher with Solaris.
[/quote]

Linux on PowerPC is a viable platform. So is Mac OS X on PowerPC.



I made the mistake of saying that some parts of the code where not that clean and could be improved. More on that below.

[quote]
- One of the keys of Glest success is how extremely clean our code is. Bringing random people in would break this, and we are not going to do it. [/quote]

So you are the only keepers of true knowledge of clean code? Hahahaha!

There were at least 3 patches that provided this through word/double-word swapping. I don't see how embedding the patch can affect the unity of the code.

BTW, you are aware you can "carve" people into coding in your style before accepting in, aren't you?



I suggested using int8, uint8, int16, uint16 in order to make sure that the parameters are of the expected fixed size since plain char, int, long, long long have different sizes depending on the architecture. The usage of int and int16 was inconsistent and I also suggested using always the numbered variants.

I said the approach that was then taken in code was not portable and that was the reason for the proposed change.

[quote]
- Glest has been coded with portability in mind, some of your comments about portability are really naive (compilers don't care if you declare function parameters with fixed byte length, they just use whatever is the fastest int in the platform). Fixed length data types are used when needed,
[/quote]

What? When did I say anything about that? I said the code uses inconsistently "int" and "int16" and should use the later always because the code assumes the sizes on i386, which are not always applicable - see long on amd64.


If you mean that I can't enforce the width of the parameter, then you should know better, those types are defined in a platform dependent way to be platform independent. Yes, there are cases where [b]on the stack[/b] the size of the passed data is bigger (they might be padded), but that is transparent to the functions and, in spite of that, the functions will see the proper values for the parameters.

Also, the packing behaviour is compiler and architecture dependent, and some compilers produce the weirdest packing (if you are allowed access to such docs, look for Green Hills compilers' for V850 and you'll be stunned).


Please, don't make a fool of yourself by trying to discredit me, just not to loose face.

Later he just removed my posts not to loose face.




As a sane programmer, I made my patch to do the swapping only on big endian platforms, and the code was enabled in through the precompiler, so there was no performance hit on the little endian arches.

Of course, any more-than-newbie programmer would agree that having two data sets for a single game is stupid and is better to do the swapping in the application itself to avoid space wastage and maintaing an alternate big endian data set.

[quote]
no more, no less. About endianness, we don't care. If we wanted to fix the problem anyway, the right way is to do the byte swap in the data, this is how it is done in commercial games, since it is more efficient.
[/quote]

You just proved how much bullshit you can deliver in one phrase just for the sake of winning an argument. All portable games and all applications that have data files prefer to do swapping on the spot just because swapping the data on the disk (or providing BE and LE data) is plain stupid and inefficient from a disk and bandwidth PoV.

For Glest, swapping the data after reading from disk is not even affecting performance in a manner that could be significant or noticed, not even for a processor running at 500MHz, since that would be done only on load, once, and just for the bits of data which are relevant; these are mostly headers, since the actual data, in most cases, is just a long byte vector. This translates in not more than 3 or 4 instructions in assembler (an init, an exchange, an increment and/or a loop instruction), and that would happen before starting a game, which is dead time anyway and wouldn't be noticed unless the data would be huge (order of hundreds of MB or GB) and the whole data set would need swapping.

Even if the data itself (not headers) represents data which needs to be swapped, that is still irrelevant in terms of speed.


BTW, the reason that in commercial games it might be done like that is because there the games are distributed in a package per platform anyway and having two data sets is not an issue since they are using the same amount of CDs/DVDs, but doing the same for a game like Glest would mean doubling the storage used and it would increase the complexity for a release, not to count the confusion of the users.

I still doubt commercial games do this, but I might be wrong.

The Glest FAQFuckYou says (emphasis is mine):

[..] as a rule of thumb we don t integrate any patches in our mainline, since that would require us to check them first and then maintain them, however feel free to post them at the board.

Glest development sucks. I really hope Glest Advanced Engine effort takes speed and replaces Glest.

This is the main reason I don't feel any incentive to maintain this package in Debian.

After quite successful debut in Google Summer of Code last yaer (even not directly, but though MySQL project), where both projects ended quite successfully and brought great addition to our code base, it's time to try to get again on the track. Hopefully we will manage to be direct participants this year. If you have some great ideas which are missing in phpMyAdmin, feel free to fill them either in feature tracker or directly into our ideas page.

In case you ve been living under a rock these past years, I shouldn t have to tell you what this is about :). Well, just in case.
The Google Summer of Code (GSoC) is an international program that offers student developers stipends to write code for various open source software projects. Debian has participated since 2006, mentoring dozens of students on Debian projects. The important part of the 2009 edition of the Google Summer of Code is going to start next week with the Organizations application period (March 9th). By that time, we should have listed a reasonable number of ideas on the dedicated wiki page. We will try this year to improve on the performance of the previous years, starting first with more and more dedicated manpower. If you have some time to spare to help manage our Summer of Code bid this year, we can make it a much better experience for the students and for Debian. Help is immediately needed in many areas. Some examples:

• Map out which areas in Debian could benefit from a Summer of Code project and connect the right people with the right projects ideas
• Ideas, Ideas, Ideas for Summer of Code projects

By mid-March, we will need:

• Dedicated documentation to present Debian to the prospective student
• Publicity material to promote the Summer of Code at Debian
• Ideas, Ideas, Ideas for Summer of Code projects

Further in the spring:

• Mentors, people to review proposals, do interviews
• Ideas, Ideas, Ideas for Summer of Code projects

In the summer:

• Mentoring students
• Testing and feedback for projects
• Internal communication with the community

As you can see, there is much work ahead. It s time to pitch out your favorite pet project
Remember! The Summer of Code has become a prominent outreach forum for open source organizations. It puts a spotlight on each of them to provide a well-rounded and deep experience of open source development. Right now, you can help with the Wiki, join us on IRC on #debian-soc on OFTC or join the mailing-list at soc-coordination on alioth. The short flyers-friendly URL for the Summer of Code at Debian is : <http://wiki.debian.org/gsoc>. Publicize it! See you this summer!

Titan, by Stephen Baxter describes a near-future manned mission to Titan, Saturn's moon, by Space Shuttle, no less. This is the first book i've read by Stephen Baxter, and will probably not be the last. It's well written, the most science-based outer planets mission story i've read in since Arthur C. Clarke, though with a pessimistic edge. The story turns on a waning NASA using its remaining hardware on one big mission, to Titan, where life may have been discovered. Most of the book concentrates naturally enough on getting to Titan, rather than what they found when they get there, but Baxters ammonia-based chemistry is intriguing. The physics of what it would be like to walk on the moon are a little underdone, though. Its an understatement to say that Titan is cold: serious work on insulation would be needed to stop your base melting the "permafrost" and sinking. While we don't know what life might be present, it would be good to imagine the real tasks involved in being there. But it's his idea that NASA and others really don't want space that is most interesting. That the military want space as their baliwick, and would rather frustrate the development of technologies so that no other nations or groups interfere is well worth thinking about. To a degree, I would agree: frustrate, but not he puts it, stop. Sooner or later the technology has other uses on Earth to the point where even amateurs would launch their own satellites. The vast bulk of technology development for future space use will be done not only on Earth but for Earth use: the minaturization that NASA and the military did for the space race in the 1960's now happens for consumer electronics. 3 D fabricators are being built for prototyping, and the prospect of getting a self-contained space mission together (not reliant on Earth) draws closer. I fully expect private groups, rather than national efforts, will be the first to colonise outer space, assembling pre-existing technologies. Tags review, sci-fi, titan

natura.oskuro.net, the home server which still serves this blog, has been suffering hardware problems for some weeks. Apparently the hard drive is failing intermittently, so every now the kernel starts spewing out noisy errors about its main disk dying. If I notice this quickly, it can be rebooted and that normally fixes it for a few more days. But if I don't, it'll end up giving nasty bus errors which will make remote logins a challenge. Most processes still work, but the filesystem appears to be gone. It's easy to know what's going on if you visit the blog's url and get some 404, and in that case I can only phone my father and tell him to press the reset button (I've tried sysrqd, but I need to open the port in the router and haven't had chance to do that yet). So it was time to do something about it, and the other day I installed a dirty 40GB drive on the second IDE controller, in case I could find the time to do somethng about it. Being with an endless pharyngitis that doesn't seem to get cured entirely, I've had some time today to look at it. This evening, I was about to transfer all the system to the new disk (it's half the size as the broken one, and probably slower, but it hopefully has no bad sectors), but I decided to upgrade the system first. natura was first installed in late 1997 or at the beginning of 1998, using the Debian bo install media on a Pentium 150MHz, and has gone through seven dist-upgrades which, as far as I can remember, have always worked out without major problems. The upgrade to lenny hasn't been an exception. The server has gradually lost many of the services it once hosted, so there aren't too many services to take care of anymore. All the mail services I setup for my father ended up being deprecated as they started to get used to Hotmail, GMail and so on, and the frequent hardware crashes made me switch them to the Linksys based DHCP server. In the end, the problems I saw after the upgrade were very similar to what I faced when I upgraded to etch:

• apache2 restored the 000-default symlink in the sites-enabled dir, which resulted in my website showing the classic It works message for a while.
• Apache's suexec support had moved to its own package, and was very well documented in the NEWS file, but I somehow failed to notice for some time and kept wondering what was going on.
• The Python upgrade again affected my Pyblosxom install. Fortunately it was a minor problem; I just had to add a coding=utf-8 line to the beginning of my config.py to get it working.
• dhcp3-server apparently restored its init scripts and got started again. This time, it got removed.

Such an ancient install will clearly have old, obsolete packages. I installed apt-show-versions to find out what didn't match my package sources. I found I had every single version of cpp, gcc and g++ from 2.95 to 4.3, and a myriad of obsolete libs. But there were also real gems:

defrag 0.73pjm1-7 installed: No available version in archive
figlet 2.2.1-3 installed: No available version in archive
ipmasqadm 0.4.2-2 installed: No available version in archive
isapnptools 1.26-5 installed: No available version in archive
ms-sys 2.1.0-1 installed: No available version in archive
queso 0.980922b-3 installed: No available version in archive
update 2.11-4 installed: No available version in archive

Spaniards will remember queso because it was written by Jordi Murg and became a classic tool to find out what OS was running on a remote host. update was apparently needed to flush your filesystems prior to Linux 2.2.8, and defrag is obvious, although leaves me wondering why it was needed at the time. With the upgrade done successfully, next step is trying to get the system transfered to the spare hard drive. For this, I first partitioned it creating a primary partition using up more or less half of the available space, and setup a LVM volume, leaving some free PE's in the volume group just in case I want to do snapshots in the future, and formatted it using ext3. I then transfered the system to the new disk and now face the boot challenge. I haven't created a boot partition and that should be a double problem: the BIOS is buggy and will only boot from the first 1024 cylinders, and my root is on LVM and GRUB legacy might not like it (but I'm not sure). However, I've become a big fan of GRUB2, and know I will be able to boot no matter what my BIOS thinks of my disks and regardless the complex root partition setup I throw at it. The plan is to install GRUB onto the new drive's MBR, and set it up using the ata module, which should allow to ignore what the BIOS says, and read beyond cylinder 1024 or even boot from CD-ROM. However, this isn't a setup I haven't tried before, and a single failure will result in me taking a train to fix it on-site. So, GRUB experts out there, any suggestions? Of course, for now I guess I can install GRUB in the current drive's MBR and make it boot the old kernel using the new system as root, but that's dirty and would just postpone the problem.