To make a long story short I obliterated the working directory of my current project with a bad invocation of rsync, but I have been able to recover most data with a few hours of work using the unrm and lazarus programs from The Coroner's Toolkit maintained by Wietse Venema and Dan Farmer. If you use ext3 and do not have an undelete command then this is the next best thing. (This current project is the major reason for why I have not been very active with my Debian packages in the last month.)

I am working hard on the new generation of the Mono packages, the 1.1.x branch is a lot different than 1.0.x (that's what we got currently in debian). With Mono 1.1 we drop also the "Mono Conventions" and stick to upstream's directory layout (layout of 1.0.x was not FHS-conform). I will publish preview packages via pkg-mono.alioth.deban.org as soon as I believe they are ready for testing. Noticable is, that upstream tried for cooperation (finally), in fact Miguel de Icaza did. So I hope everything becomes better now between the Debian Mono Group and upstream. More about the status and the actual plan how we bring the new suite into Debian you can read at MonoDebianPlan

It has taken longer than expected, but I have finally had the time to package the not-so-new-anymore 8.1.1 version of SELFHTML (a German HTML/CSS reference). The updated package should be in unstable by now. While I was at it, I also switched the package to cdbs...

I've got episode 2 of my new podcast Sound of History online. It's been really interesting to find these old recordings. For this episode, I found Kennedy's famous 1963 speech in West Berlin. I keep being struck with what an amazing orator Kennedy was. It is quite the captivating and amazing speech. Reagan's speech to West Berlin in 1987 is also in this episode. It's three times longer than Kennedy's, and probably less inspirational, but still an interesting listen. Next week I'm going to have one of the forgotten opposition speeches, trying to argue against Reagan. Also some good material out there from that perspective. In other news, ourmedia.org is being terribly annoying. It's much easier to upload to archive.org directly. I don't know why I ever bothered with ourmedia.org (or why anyone does, really).

A new release of Quantian is now available! Release 0.7.9.2, available as a iso file of 2.7 gb, contains almost 7.6 gb of quantitative, numerical or scientific software. This release is the second one based on Knoppix 4.0.2 and features:

• Kernel 2.6.12, KDE 3.5 / 3.4, OpenOffice 2.0, ... and more from Knoppix 4.0.2
• a backport of the openMosix-enabled 2.4.27 kernel and openMosix tools from the last clusterKnoppix release,
• very comprehensive support for GNU R with over 870 packages from CRAN and BioConductor, plus ESS, Ggobi, Rpad, RKward, RSPerl, JGR, ...
• addition of the Java 1.5.0 SDK enabling us to add ImageJ, Weka, JGR, Mondrian;
• plus a number of other new packages (inkscape, orsa, praat, wxmaxima, some more Debian documentation...)
• and still loads more of math, bio, engineering, LaTeX, ... software

Downloads are available via the Quantian site at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle and at from Greg Warnes' machine at Yale. European mirrors should be in sync within a day or two, Bittorrent support via the Linux Mirror Project should also be available soon. Note that http transfers seem to be problematic due to the file size of over 2gb; rsync and bittorrent are probably a better approach. More information is as always available at the Quantian pages.

Todays PhD comic is very funny. Another spam fun I like a lot is Make p*nis fast - combining the usual enlargement stuff with pyramid schemes. On a completely unrelated note, a german bird flu joke:

Treffen sich ein B r, ein L we und ein Huhn.
Sagt der B r: "Wenn ich br lle, zittert der ganze Wald." Meint der L we: "Das ist garnichts, wenn ich br lle, zittert die ganze Savanne!"
Daraufhin das Huhn: "Wenn ich huste, zittert die ganze Welt."

Translation:

A bear, a lion and a chicken meet.
The bear says: "When I bellow, the whole forest is afraid.". The lion tops: "When I roar, the whole savannah goes into cover."
The chicken: "When I cough, the whole world panics."

The slides for my next two shell efficiency talks are now online. I’ll hold one 1.5h talk on Thursday, 2nd of March, 19:30h at the New Thinking Store in Berlin Mitte. Thanks to Sven Guckes for the idea and for bringing me in contact (again) with New Thinking. The second will be a 3h workshop on Saturday, 4th of March at the Chemnitzer Linux-Tage. I’ll also hold a short 30min talk for beginners about the “Command line helper” on Sunday, the 5th of March, 10:00h at the Chemnitzer Linux-Tage. The slides for this talk will follow during this week. All talks will be held in German. Update, 12:57h: I’ll travel from Berlin to Chemnitz with the famous LinuxBus and there are still some seats free. So if you plan to come from Berlin to Chemnitz and want us to join, please quickly contact Frank Hofmann <linuxbus@efho.de> for reservation.

This past couple of weeks saw a lot of Debian and Ubuntu work from me in (hopefully) equal measure. For Debian, I whipped up new versions of robotour, xshisen, libmemcache, and gtklp; robotour finally installs in /usr/games as it should be; xshisen acks NMUs and finally has a sane source package (well, a little bit tipsy still, but at least it’s now fixes the NMU source b0rkage;) libmemcache’s -dev now installs its headers to the right location; and gtklp bumps to a new upstream, with touch-fu replacing AM_MAINTAINER_MODE for seamless build. Thanks a lot to my wonderful sponsors Margarita Manterola, Sylvain Le Gall, and Andreas Metzler for the uploads! On the other hand, opendchub has migrated to testing, and its initscript failed (not to mention missing a manpage) I’ve fixed the latter, but I still have to figure out how to fix the former; I’ll probably have to consult the reference and add an unprivileged opendchub system user and configure the daemon to use that, or fix the source and allow flexible redefinition of opendchub’s working/configuration directories (currently hardcoded to $HOME/.opendchub). Either way, I have to touch the source and make patches; and I would appreciate it very much if my dearest readers can help out On the lighter (or heavier, depending on your POV) side, I noticed that Steve McIntyre posted an RFH for cvs, and I’ve decided to help out a bit. Seeing the source, I was pleasantly surprised as the age (and design) of this package, and it would be a blast for me to study this (and fix bugs, prepare patches, and release new versions while at it. It would also prepare me better for NM as well. As for my Ubuntu work, I’ve upgraded my Breezy Badger desktop to Dapper Drake last Monday (just in time for Flight 4,) and I’m quite amazed at the new features of this release. Like many folks I just loved xchat-gnome’s notification feature (especially when you’re moving in between workspaces very often) and was very much pleased with the speed of Gnome 2.13.91 (so much so that I’ve departed from my normal Ion3 desktop without regretting it. But of course, since Dapper Drake is the latest development branch, there were some snags that I got to encounter. One particular bug was with masqmail, because the 0.2.21-1ubuntu1 version created a /var/run/masqmail directory, but since /var/run is mounted as a tmpfs in Dapper, masqmail will complain the next time it restarts. Another (probably cosmetic) bug(?) was with tuxpaint, since it placed a couple of launchers in the Gnome Applications menu, one on Education and the other on Graphics. I’ve yet to see if tuxpaint’s is a genuine bug or just a design decision, but I’ve fixed masqmail’s, and 0.2.21-1ubuntu2 should be on Dapper now, thanks to Daniel Holbach. So far I’m loving the new Ubuntu release, and with FeatureFreeze finally here that means I’ll have to drag my desktop box again to the local internet cafe to do yet another aptitude dist-upgrade. Gaah, I need a laptop!

A little caveat. Find doesn’t seem to like symlinks. Since /media/cdrom is a symlink to /media/cdrom0, using /media/cdrom0 with find will work. I spent far too much time figuring this out.

frodo$ cd /media/cdrom
frodo$ find  pwd  -iname '*.jpg'
# hmmm, there are images here.
frodo$ find . -iname '*.jpg' # this works ...
./common/0.jpg
./common/clip_art/e_mail/75/ec1.jpg
./common/clip_art/e_mail/75/ec2.jpg
...

Another reason to sigh about this FHS /media schema.

Well, it's finally time to announce my new podcast, Sound of History! The Sound of History is a weekly podcast featuring full-length, unedited, and uncut historic audio. You'll hear speeches, broadcasts, and events from around the world. Sometimes you'll hear famous people, sometimes not. Episode 1 is up now. On this episode, you'll find John F. Kennedy cracking jokes about Marx in front of a bunch of newspaper publishers, Ronald Reagan talking about the Challenger, some blues from 1922, and an Edison recording from 1902. Thanks to Cliff for mentioning that Reagan speech in a comment. That prompted me to go find it. I'm finding material for this podcast from around the Internet. Some of that music comes from archive.org, and there are various sources for presidential speeches. I'd like to find some British prime minister's speeches as well, but I'm having difficulty with that. If any of you Brits reading this know of a good site for uncut audio, accessible to Americans, please do let me know.

Martin, you should enable comments in your blog instead of forcing me to resort to email or spamming Planet Debian :) Seriously though, while I know that the FHS recommends /media as a mount point for removable media (and it sure makes sense for Debian as a whole to use that), one of the first things I do on my own boxes upon a fresh install is "rmdir /media /cdrom /floppy /initrd". I don't want to have yet another directory cluttering my root, and I find /mnt is perfectly fine for any mount points, especially since I don't really care whether I mount removable media or not. For example, I have /mnt/cdrom, /mnt/usbstick, /mnt/win, /mnt/hda1, /mnt/hda2, ..., /mnt/ipod etc. etc.

After implementing BGP-triggered blackholing in my network I wrote a tutorial documenting how I did it.

(People who do not understand what I am writing about can safely skip this post.) The major difference is that the first post was a good faith attempt to provide information which some developers believe to be important and relevant and some others do not, while the second one was a deliberate posting of obviously off topic information deliberately constructed to be offensive. People who fail to see this difference urgently need a reality check. If it was a way to make a point (instead of just a way to be an asshole, which is what a repeating pattern showed by the author would suggest) then it's quite a lame point since every developer should know that we all can post to d-d-a, and it hardly justifies an abuse of the list.

Debian: posted 10 ITPs for various packages I had been using or packaging for a while. I'll probably retract one of them (dgen) since I was pointed out that it wasn't as free as I though it was. Gnome: lines of Gnome fr.po files corrected: 27,334 -- lines of Gnome fr.po files still to check: 166,148. Ouch. School: my BOFH anti-doubleclick campaign seems to work pretty well. No complaints yet, and almost 30,000 daily hits on the empty-banner generator. Leisure: played powermanga during all the night. A really nice oldschool vertical shoot'em'up. And it's free, madam !

Everybody who has used an Ubuntu live cd over the last nine months or so has used casper. It started out as a special udeb, called by the debian-installer code to bootstrap a live environment. While d-i is fairly flexible, this was stretching the limits and not really a great solution. Amongst the problems were user interactivity halfway through the boot and a very slow boot. In the middle of December, mdz asked me if I could take a look at implementing the SimplifiedLiveCD specification. As I had played a bit with casper already, I did. Casper is nothing like what it used to be, it now uses initramfs, so no user interactivity after the bootloader. It uses unionfs where available, which speeds it up a fair bit (compare to devmapper + cloop), and if the cd image has squashfs, it uses that too, which makes it even faster. Boot time improvements from around 368 to about 231 seconds is fairly good, but I hope to get it even lower. What I really, really like about casper however is how hackable it is. I added cd integrity check in less than a day (modulo some bugs in usplash I had to fix). Today, I integrated it with the new usplash in initramfs, so we actually have progress in the initramfs as well. (Instead of "mounting root file system" taking about 40 seconds.) Another neat feature is the persistence support. It will now look for filesystems with the label casper-cow (that will be changed to ubuntu-live-rw, I think) if persistent is seen on the kernel command line. This makes it easy to drag your setup around with just an USB key and any Ubuntu live cd. Next out is getting keyboard selection better and more speedups.

MD, the only problem with the "not udev's fault" theory is that the kernel in question is not very modular: usb-storge is built in, and udev manage doesn't load any modules at startup.. I don't know yet if it's an udev issue or a kernel bug triggered by udev. That's why my original entry said "I don't know whether it would be udev's or the kernel's bug". Doesn't sound like a scapegoat to me.

Joeyh: as amazing as this may appear to a casual observer, it's not the fault of udev if your kernel is broken. Poking at a uevent file in sysfs has the effect of generating an hotplug event, which when received by udevd will make it load with modprobe the driver module specified by the kernel itself. The moral of this is that if loading a kernel driver breaks your system, then your kernel is buggy. Since plugging in the driver later works then probably the bug is more complex that "this driver kills my system" and may involve interactions between different kernel subsystems with specific timings.

Today, after many wasted hours, my tetrinet score is 1503 points.

The latest release of gnome-control-center contains an updated version of gnome-keyboard-properties which is even more hostile to a customised keyboard configuration. The fundamental problem has not changed: I need to customise the standard keyboard layout configured in x.org (so far I have been using xmodmap), but GNOME will override any change done in ~/.xsession. With the precedent version I was able to remove all configured layouts from the dialog (at the price of an annoying warning dialog at every login: #245460), but the new one helpfully forces me to have at least one valid layout. So, what can I do to make my keyboard configuration GNOME-compatible? Bonus points if you know how to do this without root privileges (editing the xkb database is not a valid answer).