[This is the first post in the new “Cornell” Category]
Well, my room looks quite empty and the van is quite full. We weren’t sure if all the stuff we were planning on taking was going to fit, but it did. Now, the question is will it fit in the 10×10 dorm room that is typical of the building I’m in. We’ll soon find out. We are driving up to Ithaca Thursday, and I move in Friday. Now that it’s getting close, I am starting to get more and more excited.
If anyone recently out of college, or still in it (Ari, joshk, and others) wants to offer any advice for a rising freshman, feel free to leave a comment. In other news (those of you who were helping me in #d-d already know), my server was out of commision for a few days. Grub and lilo both refused to boot off the 200 hard drive that I had moved my data to using a live system, and sarge D-I saw it as the wrong size, and did not see the partitions (perhaps why grub and lilo both failed). This was apparently a kernel issue, and so I installed using the etch beta3 netinst. G-I was working fine, but after partitioning got in a loop where it would drop to console and complain about some fatal error then go back to graphics again (somewhere around setting time zone) so I eventually used the old text system, which worked flawlessly. The only thing that I found I forgot to backup was my wordpress theme directory, so not only do I have to find my theme again (whose name I forget), I have to modify it, since I had customized the CSS. Pity.
The last bit of this post is a thank you to Joerg for approving my NM application. Now all that’s left is for elmo to proccess his backlog.

Today marks the 1 year anniversary of my application to become a Debian Developer. Here is an approximate break down of my time in the NM Queue: Waiting for advocate: 2.5 weeks (This should have been shorter, I had my advocate lined up, but then there was a question about me signing the key of the guy who signed mine, but I hadn’t checked his ID). Waiting for AM: 6 months Going through the checks: 2.5 months. (This would have been shorter had it not been right around the end of school, with the mad rush to cram everything in before exams)
Waiting for FD: 1.5 Months Waiting for DAM: almost 7 weeks so far… Total: 1 year and counting…

One of my former teachers told a reporter from the local paper that I had just gotten back from Israel and he called me to set up an interview to get my views on the recent conflict. I met with him monday, and the story is now in print. I haven’t seen where in the physical paper it is, but it’s position on the webpage suggests it’s a front-page story. It’s available online here: The Pilot: War Zone: Local Residents Flee Mideast.

So I’m planning a new box for college, and have come up with a tentative parts list. I am soliciting any advice and comments that people would be willing to offer. CPU: AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ Manchester 2000MHz HT 2 x 512KB L2 Cache Socket 939 Dual Core Processor - Retail
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16819103562
$169 (This was $289 2 days ago when I was pricing it - sweet) Motherboard: ASUS A8N5X Socket 939 NVIDIA nForce4 ATX AMD Motherboard - Retail
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16813131569
$84.99 RAM: CORSAIR XMS 2GB (2 x 1GB) 184-Pin DDR SDRAM Unbuffered DDR 400 (PC 3200) Dual Channel Kit System Memory - Retail
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16820145587
$207.00 Video: eVGA 256-P2-N553-AX Geforce 7600GT CO 256MB 128-bit GDDR3 PCI Express x16 Video Card - Retail
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16814130283
$169.99 (Before $30 mail-in rebate) Hard Drives: I was originally planning on doing 3 Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD2500KS 250GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - OEM (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822144701, $82.99) in a RAID-5 (software) configuration but there is currently a sale on the Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 ST3320620AS (Perpendicular Recording Technology) 320GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - OEM (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822148140) for $99.99 and I might just order three today. Enclosure/Power: Antec LifeStyle SONATA II Piano Black Steel ATX Mid Tower Computer Case 450Watt SmartPower 2.0 ATX 12V V2.0 for AMD & Intel systems Power Supply - Retail
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16811129155
$104.99 (But that’s a one-day sale price, I think it’s like $109.99 normally, though this is the 2nd day in a row it’s had a one-day sale. Both before $15 mail-in rebate). Optical Drive: Reusing my Sony DVD Burner from my current box. Not including shipping or rebates, the total price comes out as: $1035.94 Advice, comments, etc. are most definitely welcome as I don’t follow the hardware market.

Welcome to this 1st issue of DeDuBu contest, the monthly championship of the dumbest bug reported to the Debian BTS. The challengers

• Florent Bayle with #355455 (trying to overwrite /usr/lib/libpano12.la', which is also in package libpano12)
• Samuel Hocevar with #207349 (fortune-mod: internal error) and #177244 (chromium: Infringing on Bruce Springsteen's Copyright)
• Benjamin Drieu with #177128 (fetchmail initialisation fails on AIX 5.2 on JFS2 filesystem)
• James Westby with #374599 (cupsys: bug reporter is hallucinating) and #371032 (cupsys: Upgrade to 1.2 broke printing on local parallel GDI printer)
• Ken Bloom with #340111 (jython doesn't perform static initialization of classes called by other java classes)

How the vote has been done Five Debian related people voted for these bugs: Pierre Habouzit, Pierre Machard, Julien Louis, Mohammed Adn ne Trojette and Julien Cristau. Full ranking Bugs

• #177244 (chromium: Infringing on Bruce Springsteen's Copyright) (28 points)
• #207349 (fortune-mod: internal error) (26 points)
• #374599 (cupsys: bug reporter is hallucinating) (16 points)
• #177128 (fetchmail initialisation fails on AIX 5.2 on JFS2 filesystem) (15 points)
• #355455 (trying to overwrite /usr/lib/libpano12.la', which is also in package libpano12) (10 points)
• #371032 (cupsys: Upgrade to 1.2 broke printing on local parallel GDI printer) (9 points)
• #340111 (jython doesn't perform static initialization of classes called by other java classes) (8 points)

Challengers

• Samuel Hocevar (54 points)
• James Westby (25 points)
• Benjamin Drieu (15 points)
• Florent Bayle (10 points)
• Ken Bloom (8 points)

The winners

• Bug: #177244 (chromium: Infringing on Bruce Springsteen's Copyright)
• Challenger: Samuel Hocevar
• Bug reporter: Kingsley G. Morse Jr.
• Voter: Pierre Habouzit with the nearest ordered tierc : [1] #177244, [2] #207349 and [3] #355455.

About DeDuBu

So I realized that I haven’t made a post since I get home from Israel. I want to reassure my faithful readers (all one of you) that I am back safe and sound in the country, and had a wonderful time. Pictures from my trip are available at http://www.dlgeek.net/israel/ . Be warned that they are quite high-res and load slowly. Please do not kill my DSL. Thank you.

French parliament just approved today DADVSI, the worst copyright law in Europe. For those who don't know about DADVSI, this law is the French version of DMCA, supposedly created to fight against "piracy" and P2P, ended up in enforcing copyright in the worst way, making illegal previously licit uses of copyright material, like private copy or making de-facto illegal things like reading a DVD with free software. Parts of the DADVSI, like the so-called Vivendi Universal amendment explicitly makes programs than are "obviously" made to share illegally copyrighted material (sic, lawyers will have fun determining if a webserver is "obviously" a copyrighted material sharing program). Making available such programs will be of course illegal and debians mirrors will risk three years of jail ... will Debian continue shipping amule on its French mirrors? As a conclusion for this months long fight that proved majority does not care neither about democratic procedures nor the 170.000 citizens that signed the EUCD.INFO petition, we still has a chance constitutional council declares DADVSI as anti-constitutional. Scary, heh?

It’s 3:51 in the morning and I am already awake and showered. In about 30 minutes or so, I leave for the airport, for a flight to NY, where I will meet my tour group and fly to Israel. Back in 3 weeks. Email me if you need me, I’ll respond if I have a chance. I will hopefully put pictures up at http://www.dlgeek.net/israel during the trip, but no promises.

(This is a followup to Done!) My graduation pictures are available here.

I’m done! Today was the commencement ceremony at Pinecrest. I am now a high school graduate, ready to take the world by the horns but responsibly, or something like that (our principal isn’t the best with words). The ceremony was all right - short with no keynote speaker. I think I missed Salutatorian by a few hundreths of a point, but that’s ok, Kala’s speech was excellent. It was really annoying when students’ parents would start yelling out when their name was called. The recessional worked MUCH better this year than last though. Afterwards, I went back to homeroom to get my diploma (pretty nice, will post picture later) and final report card (not so pretty). No transcripts because the state’s student managment system screwed up GPAs and ranks, I’ll get it later. All in all, not a bad end for 13 years. I’m glad to get the hell out of Moore County Schools and Pinecrest, hopefully Cornell will be much saner.

Benjamin Seidenberg's Blog: New Anti-Spam Measures uses a simple maths test, which should work, but it produced a rambling SQL error for me. I emailed it as requested and got an error back saying Command died with status 1: "/usr/share/doc/spamassassin/examples/filter.sh" That may block all spam, but also blocks other mail, snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. [links in permalink version]

(Sorry Robert, this is a meta-blog-post. Perhaps I should create a catagory for them?) Since being syndicated on Planet Debian, the amount of comment spam I’ve gotten has risen sharply. No spam has made it onto th site itself, since I moderate the first comment someone makes, but the emails have gotten annoying. Therefore, I put a turing test into place. Blind users will be happy to hear it’s not a CAPTCHA, instead it’s one more field to fill out that asks a very basic math question to prevent spambots from commenting. Users who registered back when I required it won’t even get the field, isn’t that nice?
To the readers of Planet Debian who are probably asking “Why Do I Care?”: If you don’t mind, try out the system to make sure it works. I figure the readership of that site will have a fairly diverse set of browsers and maybe even a few using accessibility ehancements that can confirm that the system has no problems. If you encounter any problems, email me at astronut@dlgeek.net or ping me on IRC (astronut on both freenode and oftc).

At the Senior Awards Ceremony, I found out that I was awarded the 1st place ($1000) scholarship by the PTSA. Then later, I found out my parents had known for 3 weeks. It’s the first time my dad has kept a secret that long. In related news, I’m still ticked about the honors thing. The local paper’s article about the issue sucks, but a paper from a neighboring county has a great article here. In short, to make everyone more equal, the school is prohibiting the wearing of honor cords and medals and such that signify participation/success in various activities and programs. I intend to wear both my AP Scholar of Distinction and IB Diploma Canidate medals when I walk across.

So, for English, I had to do a 30 hour project to learn a new skill. So, not realizing it was as easy as learning to play golf or sewing a dress or something similar, I set out to rewrite Shakespeare. Specifically, I rewrote Macbeth in a modern setting. The (comical? good? you decide) result is available here.

I have been selected as a Chubb Foundation Scholar with a $6,000/year four year scholarship. Score! For the interested, Chubb was the company my grandfather worked for, and the scholarship is open to employee families only.

I wanted to make sure the hackergotchi (small picture of my head that floats on the entry in planet debian) looks ok. Thanks to Wouter for his guide and others in #debian-devel for helping me make it. Edit: Looks like a typo in the config was making it 404. Will get someone to fix it. Edit2: Thanks gravity!

So, thanks to Wouter Verhelst, I am now syndicated on Planet Debian, a site that aggregates the blogs of various people involved in Debian. To those who don’t know me yet, I am an 18 year old high school student (for a couple more weeks anyway) in the United States. I go by ‘astronut’ on IRC, and have completed my part of NM and am now patiently waiting for FD/DAM approval. I maintain easyh10 (manages the databases on the iRiver H10 music player), dav-text (simple ncurses based text editor), graphmonkey (a somewhat pointless graphing calculator that somehow has at least a few users according to popcon) and recently adopted pork (console AIM client). I also am an active member on the Debian Cyrus Packaging team (Cyrus is a pop/imap/nntp server). Comments are currently enabled, but moderated on the blog. I may have to go to some kind of turing test based system if planet opens me up to a flood of spam. So… Hello, to the word of Debian!

Share your search 2.0, create and manage your social news to upload photos online! As pointed out by Benjamin Hill, dropping this list of web2.0 companies into a word frequency counting tool such as this gives the following interesting statistics:

226	SHARE
166	YOUR
97	SEARCH
71	2.0
50	CREATE
50	MANAGE
50	SOCIAL
49	NEWS
46	MASH-UP
44	TO
44	UPLOAD
42	PHOTOS
41	ON
41	ONLINE
40	FIND
36	BOOKMARKING
36	FOR
30	PUBLISH
29	STORE

That is what the web 2.0 is made out of, only one keyword missing here: hype.

I've added two DebTags projects so far to the Debian Summer of Code page. Maybe we'll add some more, I'm waiting for feedback. The projects so far are:

DebTags database rewrite

the current central debtags database (the first "packagebrowser") has come of age, and is in desperate need of a rewrite and the addition of new features. It's still hosed on a woody system that should have been shut down years ago.

DebTags AI tagger

this will likely be a very popular project topic. I've already had two people expressing interest in doing this. The goal is to apply AI mechanisms (e.g. bayesian filters) to collected package information (description, readme, DOAP data, freshmeat info, sf/alioth/savannah/... info, documentation files maybe?) to guess which tags are appropriate

Maybe the second project will be split into two parts; one doing the main AI tagger work, the second working on a UI for editors to very the AI tags. Bringing that back to the central database, which will also need a review functionality. The AI tagger project is very interesting, I wished I had had time for that myself. Benjamin already worked on it a bit last year. But there is so much you could do with that codebase... Grab the top tags from DMoz or Del.icio.us and use them to train your AI. Then start classifying webpages with that. I guess with some crawling work, you can extend the ~5 Mio links on DMoz to a reasonable directory with 20 Mio Entries. Now imagine a user interface like Debtags enhanced search by Enrico. I really need to complete my studies and found a web2.0-company to sell to some search engine company for tons of money. ;-)