Recently my installation of Qt SDK I use for development of applications for Nokia N950 (N9) got broken. It happened by update some postinst script failed what caused almost no part of Harmattan SDK to be installed. I hoped this to be temporary error which will get fixed by later updates, but it turned out to persist even for 1.1.4 which has been released week ago. Yesterday I finally got time to look into it and after some debugging I found out that it was trying to install x86_64 version, which was not downloaded because I was using 32bit installer. I quickly realized this was caused by using 64-bit kernel, while running 32-bit userspace, for which the installer somehow was not prepared. Fortunately there is easy workaround for that:

linux32 ./Qt_SDK_Lin32_online_v1_1_4_en.run

What will run the binary in 32-bit personality and make kernel pretend it is compiled for 32-bit.

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Last Friday (11 November 2011), I was at the Cooperatives-SW annual conference at the Cube Cinema in Bristol, titled Growing Your Co-operative and sponsored by the Co-operative Membership South and West. It was another sold-out event, featuring headline talks from Co-op Party member and Labour MP Kerry McCarthy, Eli Sarre of Essential Trading worker co-op (pictured), Carole Theyer of Sparks Inc and Jim Pettipher from Co-operative Futures. There were also some great workshops I went to a finance workshop led by Ian Rothwell from Co-operative and Community Finance and a regulations one with Paul Martin of Kabin (details may appear on their event page) and a brilliant lunch from Runcible Spoon (and those of you who know me will know I have been livid with some co-op event lunches!) with some time to chat and network, although I also went to a fringe meeting about the RISE problems. The event concluded with the formal AGM of Co-operatives SW (electing a new chairperson and approving transfer to a new co-op corporation) as well as a bit more chat afterwards. I felt it was a great event and well worth my time being there. I m glad that some people from outside the co-op movement, from community businesses like the Strawberry Line Cafe and a few people considering joining or forming co-ops, were there and I hope it was good for them too.

Back in the dark ages of the web, before the introduction of CSS 3, browsers could only display fonts available on the client system. Thanks to the introduction of @font-face and its now widespread support, this is over. Now, Web designers have access to a large selection of fonts and most users will be able to appreciate them. Typekit provides a subscription-based library of hosted, high-quality fonts to use on websites. I expose here my own, mostly uneducated¹ on the typographic side, look on this service.

Fonts embedding 101 There are several ways to embed fonts for the Web. Let s have a look at the most common ones.

Self-hosting and @font-face A first possibility is to host fonts yourself and provide a CSS file with the appropriate @font-face declarations. There are five important things to know:

1. There is no common format. You will need to host different versions of the same font to support most browsers.
2. Of course, Internet Explorer comes with its own quirks that you need to work around.
3. Most browsers enforce a same origin policy. You need to serve your fonts from the same domain as the requesting page. You can circumvent such a limitation by enabling cross-origin resource sharing: add an Access-Control-Allow-Origin header when serving fonts.
4. Fonts are unlikely to change. To leverage caching, configure an explicit expiration date far in the future. Something like 30 days.
5. There is no MIME types registered for fonts. Don t bother setting one, even if Google Chrome likes to complain about them in the console.

One great resource is Font Squirrel which provides kits with fonts and the appropriate CSS declarations. You choose your font family (or upload one of your own), the formats that you want to use (check them all) and you will get a ZIP archive with all fonts and a CSS file. You may want to tweak it a bit to enable automatic use of the bold variant when needed and to use a local copy if available. For example, if you choose Crimson, an oldstyle typeface, you may want to declare the bold version with font-weight: bold and add local names:

@font-face  
    font-family: 'Crimson';
    src: url('Crimson-Bold-webfont.eot');
    src: local('Crimson Bold'), local('Crimson Text Bold'),
         url('Crimson-Bold-webfont.eot?#iefix') format('embedded-opentype'),
         url('Crimson-Bold-webfont.woff') format('woff'),
         url('Crimson-Bold-webfont.ttf') format('truetype'),
         url('Crimson-Bold-webfont.svg#CrimsonBold') format('svg');
    font-weight: bold;
    font-style: normal;
 

Google Web Fonts For open-source fonts, you can also use Google Web Fonts instead of hosting the files yourself. Build a collection of fonts and choose the variants that you want to use for each of them. You will then be provided with a code snippet to paste in the <head> element of your page. For example, for Crimson:

<link href='http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Crimson+Text:400,700,400italic'
      rel='stylesheet' type='text/css'>

Why choose this solution over self-hosting?

1. You don t use your own bandwith to serve fonts. This may be important if you pay for it.
2. Google uses its own CDN to serve fonts. If you don t use a CDN yourself, this can be a major performance improvement.
3. Caching is more efficient since many sites will use the same font.
4. It s easier to do it right.

Unless you are concerned about Google tracking your users², I think this is a better solution than self-hosting. Quick delivery of fonts is pretty important since content rendering can be delayed by them.

Paid services If you would like to use commercial fonts, like Adobe Minion Pro or Paratype Futura PT, a convenient option is to rent them. Typekit is service providing such an option. Pricing depends on volume and the number of fonts you want to have access to. There is a free plan and the first paid plan is US$24.99 per year. Other similar services exist. Feel free to compare. Once registered, the workflow is similar to Google Web Fonts. You choose your fonts, assemble them in a kit and publish it. Instead of directly providing a CSS file, Typekit provides some Javascript which will in turn download a CSS file containing all fonts in the appropriate format for the browser (on most browsers, fonts are inlined).

<script type="text/javascript"
        src="//use.typekit.com/tyt0atd.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
  try Typekit.load(); catch(e) 
</script>

Typekit: the good parts So, why choose Typekit? First, there is the very large choice of fonts. The first paid plan comes with more than 500 fonts from about 80 foundries. There are about a hundred serif fonts and a couple hundred sans serif ones. Typekit provides a convenient interface to browse fonts. You can either search fonts by name or by characteristics. In the last case, you can filter on properties like the classification (serif, sans serif, decorative, etc.), weight, width, contrast, x-height, recommended use or language support. Once a font is selected and added to your kit, you can easily choose what variants you want. The kit total size is displayed. If you happen to meet any problem or have some questions, Typekit support is very responsive. I got clear and crisp answers in less than a few hours in the week-end.

and the bad ones Unfortunately, Typekit has also some shortcomings. One of the most commonly cited is that Javascript is mandatory. No Javascript, no fonts. If you want to display the appropriate fonts for users without Javascript, you should just not use Typekit.

Not free, nor free While Typekit offers some open-source fonts, most of them are not. Moreover, only a few of them are available in the free plan. While I would prefer to use open-source fonts, I don t consider this a strong requirement: if you are dissatisfied for some reason, switching back to open-source fonts (or another service) is fast and easy. I like serif fonts a lot and they get less attention from the FLOSS world: it is difficult to find one whose readability on screen is excellent. Droid Serif is a nice font but is a bit too black for me. Maybe Cardo would be a good match. You may disagree and in this case, Google Web Fonts or self-hosting seem the perfect match.

Difficulty to choose and test fonts While browsing fonts is easy and smooth, choosing and testing them is another matter. For example, Typekit is missing some interface to compare font rendering for whole paragraphs at a given size. It also misses a way to check how two fonts render together, one for headings and one for paragraphs. Here, Google Web Fonts is more versatile. Things become really difficult when you want to test your selected fonts for real. Except if you have invested into one of the expensive plans, you can only include a limited number of fonts in your kit. Each time you want to try another set of fonts, you need to modify your kit and wait for it to be distributed across Typekit network. You may have to wait five or ten minutes between each change! Another inconvenient thing is that once you publish your site, any change to the kit will affect the published version. Therefore, you need to use a second kit for development and play back and forth with those two kits. What would be convenient here is a special kit with all fonts from the library with restricted access to some IP to avoid abuse. This is something done by Fontdeck, a competitor.

Poor subset support Because you want to keep the font size small (about 30 kB for each variant), Typekit usually proposes two subsets: the default one contains only latin characters and the complete one with all glyphs. If some glyph is absent from the default subset, you need to use the complete one which is roughly two to four times the size of the default one. This is a bit huge for only one character. What would be nice is to have subsets for each language. In my case, I would take a French subset because I need the glyph which appears in French in words like c ur (heart or core) or il (eye). I don t want to select the complete subset just for this character. When a glyph is absent, the next font in the CSS stack is used. For example, if the selected font is FF Tisa Web Pro and the next font in the stack is Droid Serif, here is how the word c ur may be rendered. On the first line, FF Tisa Web Pro contains the appropriate glyph. On the second line, the glyph is absent and taken from Droid Serif. Since x-height and contrast are a bit different, the replaced glyph seems out of tone. At small sizes, the difference accounts for more than 10%. I have also added a third line where the ligature is built from o and e and the following style is applied to e :

.lf-ligature  
    margin-left: -0.172em;
    zoom: 1; /* Here to trigger hasLayout on IE7 */
 

As you can see, the result seems good. I have a piece of Javascript turning a ligature into the appropriate markup. It can be extended to handle more ligatures and could be adapted to handle other composed characters (like the ones in Anton n Dvo k ).

Defective caching Because a document can only be rendered after the fonts have been loaded³, it is pretty important to deliver fonts as fast as possible. Typekit uses Edgecast as a CDN and DynECT for DNS hosting. Two files are downloaded. Both of them are hosted on use.typekit.com. The first one is a script that will act as a loader. Based on the characteristics of your browser, it will choose how to download the requested fonts for best rendering. The second file is generally a big CSS file containing the fonts. Here are the headers returned for the first file:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Cache-Control: max-age=300
Content-Encoding: gzip
Content-Type: text/javascript
Date: Tue, 08 Nov 2011 18:34:16 GMT
ETag: "388467610+gzip"
Expires: Tue, 08 Nov 2011 18:39:16 GMT
Last-Modified: Sat, 05 Nov 2011 09:31:57 GMT
Server: ECS (cdg/D624)
Vary: Accept-Encoding
X-Cache: HIT
Content-Length: 7440

First, notice that the content is served compressed. Good point. The next headers to look at are Cache-Control, Date, ETag and Expires: the server requests the content to be cached for 5 minutes. When the browser notices that its copy is out-of-date, it will issue a new request including a If-None-Match: 388467610+gzip header. Unless the kit has been modified, the server will answer with 304 Not Modified and no content. The copy of the browser will be valid for another 5 minutes. This means that after 5 minutes, at least 3 round-trips are needed to check if our fonts are up-to-date. Worse, sometimes, Typekit servers may be just slow. They can wait one second before answering, just to send a 304. Since the first file is a script embedded in <head>, the whole page is blocked until you get the answer. Here is an illustrative example with Chromium 14 where a page using Typekit is loaded while all static assets are in the navigator cache and things have gone wrong (which is pretty rare): Since fonts are needed, the rendering has been paused for 3.5 seconds until Typekit was fully loaded. If we look more closely, we may also notice we got a status 200 from the server instead of 304. Here is an excerpt of the browser request:

GET /tyt0atd.js HTTP/1.1
Host: use.typekit.com
Connection: keep-alive
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate,sdch
If-None-Match: "2200251225+gzip"
If-Modified-Since: Thu, 10 Nov 2011 11:38:11 GMT

And here is an excerpt of the answer headers:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Cache-Control: max-age=300
Content-Type: text/javascript
Date: Fri, 11 Nov 2011 17:10:03 GMT
ETag: "2200251225"
Expires: Fri, 11 Nov 2011 17:15:03 GMT
Last-Modified: Thu, 10 Nov 2011 11:38:11 GMT
Server: EOS (lax001/54E5)
Content-Length: 25755

What happened? For some unknown reason, the server denied the access to the compressed version of the resource: there is no Content-Encoding: gzip while the browser did send Accept-Encoding: gzip. The tag provided by the browser (2200251225+gzip) came obviously from the compressed resource and therefore does not match. RFC 2616 requests If-Modified-Since header to be ignored if the tag does not match. Consequently, the server answers with 200 OK and resend the whole file. The same problem happened with the CSS file. Let me stress again how important the problem is: we had to download again the two files but we also downloaded the non-compressed version. Now, let s suppose that we did not run into this problem and the server answered with 304 Not Modified. The result is still not satisfactory: we would have waited 1.3 seconds to get both answers from the server. Keep in mind that most of the time, Typekit is pretty fast. Here is how I think this should have been done: each time you modify your font kit, you get a new URL to use (containing the version of the font kit for example). This resource and the associated fonts (whose URL is also versioned) are requested to be cached for several days. As a sidenote, this also enables to modify a kit for your development environment without modifying the kit for your production site. I suspect that Typekit did not go this way to track kit usage more accurately and enforce the appropriate pricing. Having multiple versions of the same kit would also allow us to use more fonts that we are paying for. UPDATED: Typekit support knows the problem and is working on it:

You ve identified a small bug in our CDN provider that we re working with them to fix. Hopefully I can give an explanation of what s happening. The CDN edge servers have a cache of recently served kits on them. Any request that is served from that cache will be correctly Gzipped and handle ETags. Unfortunately, if the content isn t already in cache and needs to be fetched from the master origin server then the request won t be gzipped correctly which has the side effect of breaking ETags. [ ] We are working to on getting this bug fixed, but any change to a globally distributed CDN will take some time. We re also working on having our content cached longer than 5 minutes whilst still allowing people to quickly update their site.

Conclusion I have mixed feelings about Typekit. While the difficulty to test fonts and the lack of language-related subsets are annoying, I have been able to work around them. However, the caching problem is more annoying. I am still considering going back to Google Web Fonts just because of this.

---

1. While I have a high interest in typography, have my own copy of The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst and have throughly read The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web , I am still fairly novice on this matter.
2. Google serves fonts from a cookie-less domain. Technically, they could still do some kind of tracking but I believe they don t.
3. In fact, browsers have different strategies on how to render before fonts availability. Paul Irish wrote a comprehensive article on FOUT. One common strategy is to render a blank space until downloaded fonts are available. If this takes too much time, fallback fonts may be used.

Hi all! My name is Alberto Garcia and this is my first (well, second) post in Planet Debian. So I ll introduce myself. I m a free software developer and enthusiast from Galicia, Spain. I studied computer science at the Corunha University, where I first heard about GNU/Linux and Debian. After leaving university I co-founded Igalia with a group of friends. We ve been working on lots of different things during all these years, but some projects we ve been particularly involved in include GNOME, Maemo/MeeGo and WebKit. Although I ve been using Debian for more than a decade now (my first -and still running!- installation was in 1997) and I m quite familiar with the distribution, it wasn t until a few years ago that I started maintaining packages officially. Apart from software, my other main hobby is music. When I m not using my computer you ll find me at some concert (preferably small bands: I hate long queues, crowded places and being far from the stage). It s no coincidence that my first Debian package was a Last.fm player ;) I don t have much more to add. I d like to thank Ana for adding me to the planet, and I m proud to be part of the Debian community!

During the OpenRheinRuhr I noticed that a friend of mine didn t know about zgrep and friends. So I told him what other grep variations I know and he told me about some grep variations I didn t know about. So here s our collection of grep wrappers, derivatives and variations. First I ll list programs which search for text in different file formats:

grep through what	Fixed Strings	Wildcards / Basic RegExps	Extended RegExps	Debian package
uncompressed text files	fgrep	grep	egrep	grep
gzip-compressed text files	zfgrep	zgrep	zegrep	zutils, gzip
bzip2-compressed text files	bzfgrep	bzgrep	bzegrep	bzip2
xz-compressed text files	xzfgrep	xzgrep	xzegrep	xz-utils
uncompressed text files in installed Debian packages	dfgrep	dgrep	degrep	debian-goodies
gzip-compressed text files in installed Debian packages	-	dzgrep	-	debian-goodies
PDF documents	-	-	pdfgrep	pdfgrep
POD texts	podgrep	-	-	pmtools
E-Mail folder (mbox, MH, Maildir)	-	mboxgrep -G	mboxgrep -E	mboxgrep
Patches	-	grepdiff	grepdiff -E	patchutils
Process list	-	-	pgrep	procps
Gnumeric spreadsheets	ssgrep -F	ssgrep	?	gnumeric
Files in ZIP archives	-	-	zipgrep	unzip
ID3 tags in MP3s	-	-	taggrepper	taggrepper
Network packets	-	-	ngrep	ngrep
Tar archives	-	-	targrep / ptargrep	perl (Experimental only for now)

And then there are also greps for special patterns on more or less normal files:

grep for what	uncompressed files	compressed files	Debian package
PCRE (Perl Compatible Regular Expression)	pcregrep (see also the grep -P option)	zpcregrep	pcregrep
IP Address in a given CIDR range	grepcidr	-	grepcidr
XPath expression	xml_grep	-	xml-twig-tools

One question is though still unanswered for us: Is there some kind of meta-grep which chooses per file the right grep from above by looking at the MIME type of the according files, similar to xdg-open. Other tools which have grep in their name, but are too special to properly fit into the above lists:

• ext3grep: Tool to help recover deleted files on ext3 filesystems
• xautomation: Includes a tool named visgrep to grep for subimages inside other images.

Includes contributions by Frank Hofmann and Faidon Liambotis.

Two days ago, I finally brought my system up-to-date with regard to the GNOME packages that I use. I was very reluctant because I am using a heavily customized gnome-panel and I waited until all the applets that I use have been ported to gtk3 and the libgnome-applet library. I am the Debian maintainer of one of these applets, link-notification-daemon, and I have made the changes and tested them in a chroot before, but now that I am actually using it, I found and fixed more visual glitches. I think by now it is as usable as it was before on GNOME 2. I am still looking for someone to step up as the new upstream maintainer for it! I had some trouble with gnome-session and notification-daemon, thought I found the cause and reported it, but a day later I could not reproduce it anymore. Weird. Other problems, such as the busy cursor not disappearing after the session start, or evolution going into a freeze also have stopped occurring by themselves.
Other problems I found and fixed, for example the battery status applet was not visible until a major state change, or panel applets were not loaded due to a race condition, or tooltips not working (which called for a fix in gtk+ itself). I also added to the xmonad package the files required to allow the user to select GNOME with Xmonad in GDM, and found out how to have Galeon appear in the list of possible default browsers.
I don t really have to say much about GNOME3 itself. I disliked the default font, Cantarell, mostly because of the extra spacing that reduced the number of folders and mail I can see in evolution. (Also see what nekohayo has to say about that.) I also was under the impression that the font is much lighter, and I started to adjust the position of my laptop monitor to increase the contrast. So I switch back to DejaVu Sans.
I also disabled the sleep-on-lid-close feature I often run backups, or download stuff, or compile stuff, or calculate stuff, so I want better control over this. So, I guess, now that everything is almost as it was in GNOME2, I can say I like it...

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After over five years, I've decided to retire from the Debian Games Team. The games team has been a fun group to work within Debian: packaging doom-related programs was my route into Debian and I've really enjoyed it. Spare time is very tight at the moment, and I'm not dedicating much at all to Debian work. Within that, I'd quite like to try and focus on some other areas. Good luck to the team going forward!

I've been unable to solve this problem for a few weeks now, so i'll try posting it to my blog maybe someone out there knows the answer. Would very much appreciate a clue on this one. I've got a VM on a citrix xenserver 5.0.0 machine that won't start. it was running fine until it was rebooted on a Fri afternoon, a few weeks ago. Starting it from the (windows-only) xencenter GUI results in:

   "This VM cannot be started, as its network interfaces could not be
   connected. One of the NICs is in use elsewhere."

Starting it from the command line results in:

# xe vm-start uuid=88915b63-d794-e021-4f78-b03f46e352b0
Cannot plug VIF
VIF: 5dfd3886-8b48-20e5-4231-30284d7b185d

anyone seen this before? know how to fix? I've tried deleting and re-creating the network interface for the VM. I've also tried booting the VM without any network interface at all. I've tried "xe vif-unplug force uuid=5dfd3886-8b48-20e5-4231-30284d7b185d" (doesn't work, expects the VM to be running, not halted). In fact, I've lost track of all the things i've tried doing that haven't worked. I haven't rebooted the xen server and *really* don't want to have to do that. I'd rather create a new VM and copy the OS (debian, fortunately so relatively easy to do) than reboot the server (NOTE: Tried that, didn't work). Since the initial problem, I now have a total of three VMs that won't restart (with the same error message), and I can't even create a new VM. So it looks like a problem with the host rather than the guest. I think i'm going to have to migrate all the VMs off this machine to another box, then rebuild this server. maybe with a newer Xen (on debian, rather than proprietary citrix junk), or maybe as a KVM box. The (absence of) this kind of crap is one of the main reasons why i prefer KVM to Xen .and if i have to rebuild the server anyway, I may as well rebuild it as a KVM server Xen VMs won t start: Cannot plug VIF is a post from: Errata

I recently started getting mails from no-reply@joindiaspora.com. Usually, a mail from no-reply@whatever is enough to make me believe that the admins of said whatever are clueless regarding what e-mail means and how should it work. And in this case, it really amazes me If I get an invite to Diaspora*, right, I should not pester a hypothetical sysadmin@joindiaspora.com to get me off his list, but I should be able to reply to the person mailing me Maybe requesting extra details on what he is inviting me to, or allowing me to tell him why I'm not interested. But yes, Diaspora* has fallen to the ease of requiring me to join their network to be able to communicate back with the "friend" who invited me. Some of the (three?) readers of this site might not be familiar with the Diaspora* project. It is a free reimplementation (as far as I know) of something similar to Facebook Free not only in the sense that it runs free software, but also because it is federated Your data will not belong to a specific company (that is, you are not the value object they sell and make money with), but you can choose and switch (or become) the provider for your information. A very interesting proposal, socially and technically. I find that a gross violation of netiquette. I should be able to reply to the mail - Even if in this case it were to (and sorry As you are spreading my name/mail, you will excuse me if I spread your name ;-) ) fernando.estrada.invite1501335@joindiaspora.com. Such an (fictional FWIW) address would allow for mail to reach back the submitter by the same medium it was sent, without allowing open spamming into the network. Now, what prompted me to write this mail (just before adding no-reply@joindiaspora.com to my blacklist) is the message I got (in an ugly HTML-only mail which erroneously promised to be text/plain, sigh...) is that Fernando sent me as the inviting message, So, at least are you going to give Diaspora a chance? The answer is: No.. But not because of being a fundamentalist. Right, I am among what many people qualify as Free Software zealots, but many of my choices (as this one is) is in no way related to the software's freeness. I use non-free Web services, as much as many of you do. Yes, I tend to use them less, rather than more (as the tendency goes). But the main reason I don't use Twitter is the same reason I don't use Identi.ca, its free counterpart And the reason I'm not interested in Facebook is the same reason I will not join Diaspora* Because I lack time for yet another stream of activity, of information, of things to do and think about. Yes, even if I care about you and I want to follow what's going on in your life: The best way to do it is to sit over a cup of coffee, or have some dinner, or to meet once a year in the most amazing conference ever. Or we can be part of distributed projects together, and we will really interact lots. Or you can write a blog! I do follow the blogs of many of my friends (plus several planets), even if they have fallen out of fashion A blog post pulls me to read it as it is a unit of information, not too much depending on context (a problem when I read somebody's Twitter/Identica lines: You have to hunt a lot of conversations to understand what's going on), gives a true dump of (at least one aspect of) your state of (mind life work), and is a referenceable unit I can forward to other people, or quote if needed. So, yes, I might look old-fashioned, clinging to the tools of the last-decade for my Social Web presence. I will never be a Social Media Expert. I accept it But please, don't think it is a Stallmanesque posture from me. It is just that of a person who can lose too much time, and needs to get some work done in the meantime. (oh, of course: Blog posts also don't have to make much sense or be logically complete. But at least they allow me to post a full argument!)

You should probably ignore this post. I'm just venting. I'll be better after a nice cup of tea. Things that are causing me to fume about the fact Gnome Shell just hit Debian/Testing:

• Spacefun came back. Even on GDM3. Just fucking die already.
• I had to reboot to get bluetooth working again.
• /desktop/gnome/shell/windows/workspaces_only_on_primary set by default? SRSLY?
• It failed to carry over my previous monitor settings.
• I'm pretty sure I don't have a latent desire for a machine running OS X, whatever the GNOME devs might think.
• How many mouse clicks to get to the list of applications?
• Er, why have you changed my default apps? (Why is clicking a link in a terminal opening Epiphany rather than a new tab in Iceweasel?)

I update my testing boxes (work + home laptops) almost every day. It rarely breaks, and certainly when it does I accept that's what I get for doing rolling upgrades. I can't remember the last time I did an upgrade that actually made me angry. Also I suspect this thing is going to have a complete fit on my binary nVidia/hacked up DisplayLink configuration at work (the DisplayLink side refuses to do 3D for starters). Perhaps better not to upgrade there until I have a sufficient block of free time. Maybe it's time to go back to evilwm. I only stopped because I wanted a dock for wifi/bluetooth etc applets on my laptop that didn't get hidden when I fullscreened things. Implementing _NET_WM_STRUT might make that doable... (I'm sure some of this is just dealing with the change but it's a bit bloody difficult to deal with a complete change in user interface that hasn't even managed to carry across settings from the old one.)

So a few days ago, there was this:

21:24 < wouter> hum.
21:24 < wouter> Anyone know of a tool to manage scanned documents?
21:25 < wouter> the idea being that I can tell this tool "here's a bunch of newly-scanned documents", and it will upload them to a server
21:25 < wouter> and it should allow me to easily find a specific file later on
21:25 < wouter> and I'd also like version control there
21:26 < wouter> and I do _not_ want to download the entire repository of scanned documents on my laptop (that's why I have a server)
21:26 < wouter> and perhaps I'd also like a pony to go with that.
21:29 < wouter> oh, yes, and I do _not_ want a webbrowser as the primary interface (that might be okay to look things up, but not to store stuff)

The answer, as it turned out, was git-annex: a tool to manage files with git, without checking them into git. What, I hear you say? Yes, that sounds a little weird, doesn't it? Perhaps it's easiest to explain with a little example.

$ git annex add 2011-11-07-belgacom.pdf
$ ls -l 2011-11-07-belgacom.pdf
lrwxrwxrwx 1 wouter wouter 191 nov  7 14:46 2011-11-07-belgacom.pdf ->
../.git/annex/objects/xx/3F/SHA256-s1537334--c44e1a057e247bfe7c196ac146c8a0ca32096c0b10df6c18fd3f1c2e99ecddbf/SHA256-s1537334--c44e1a057e247bfe7c196ac146c8a0ca32096c0b10df6c18fd3f1c2e99ecddbf

The file is now known to git-annex, and I can have it do all kinds of useful things with it now:

$ git annex drop 2011-11-07-belgacom.pdf
drop 2011-11-07-belgacom.pdf (unsafe)
  Could only verify the existence of 0 out of 1 necessary copies
  No other repository is known to contain the file.
  (Use --force to override this check, or adjust annex.numcopies.)
failed
git-annex: drop: 1 failed

Oops, we hadn't copied it to anywhere else yet. We don't want to lose our data!

$ git annex move --to server 2011-11-07-belgacom.pdf
move 2011-11-07-belgacom.pdf (checking server...) (to server...)
SHA256-s1537334--c44e1a057e247bfe7c196ac146c8a0ca32096c0b10df6c18fd3f1c2e99ecddbf
     1537334 100%    9.22MB/s    0:00:00 (xfer#1, to-check=0/1)
sent 30 bytes  received 1537668 bytes  1025132.00 bytes/sec
total size is 1537334  speedup is 1.00
ok
$

What just happened? git-annex copied the file to a git remote called "server", and then dropped it from my local copy. It's no longer here! The symlink in my local directory is now a dead link; I can not open it anymore. But, no worries! If we ever need it again, it's just a single command away.

$ git annex get 2011-11-07-belgacom.pdf
get 2011-11-07-belgacom.pdf (from server...) 
SHA256-s1537334--c44e1a057e247bfe7c196ac146c8a0ca32096c0b10df6c18fd3f1c2e99ecddbf
     1537334 100%    9.58MB/s    0:00:00 (xfer#1, to-check=0/1)
sent 30 bytes  received 1537668 bytes  3075396.00 bytes/sec
total size is 1537334  speedup is 1.00
ok

This allows me to save space on my local laptop while not having to care where the files are -- they're just there. And it gets more awesome if you know that git-annex can store multiple copies of each file (so you have automatic distributed backups, as with regular git), where you can enforce the minimum number of copies. Also, git-annex supports multiple backends -- you can store your data in Amazon S3, or on an encrypted USB drive, or whatever, and have git-annex manage it transparently for you. I said this already on IRC, but: Joey, I owe you beer.

It s seeming increasingly likely that reports regarding the future of Banshee, Tomboy, and the rest of the Mono stack in the default Ubuntu desktop install are accurate. Ubuntu 12.04 will likely be the first Ubuntu release since 5.10 not to ship with any Mono apps in the default install ending a run of 12 releases over 6 years. The decision seems to have come about during the default apps session at the Ubuntu Developer Summit just ended in Orlando, Florida. Prior to heavy vandalism, the only reasons cited for the change in the UDS session log are Banshee not well maintained and porting music store to GTK3 is blocked on banshee ported to GTK3 . Other reasons mentioned but not in the session logs are complaints that it doesn t work on ARM. I m using a lot of conjecture in this first paragraph because the news about the decision appeared on the blogosphere before anywhere else. The first many Banshee or Tomboy developers read about it was reading a flurry of activity on the Tweetosphere from the anti-Mono activists declaring victory. So first, a word on the cited reasoning. Banshee works fine on ARM, since Mono works fine on ARM. Xamarin, the company behind most upstream Mono work, earns their income almost entirely from ARM versions of Mono, running on the varied ARM implementations found in smartphones. Every major Banshee release is personally tested on my Genesi EfikaMX, an ARM system with a Freescale i.mx51 processor. I ve also demonstrated Banshee running in an Ubuntu chroot on my HP Touchpad, an ARM-based tablet. What is known is that Banshee has some problems running on Texas Instruments OMAP4 processors the target ARM platform for Canonical s ARM work. None of the Banshee upstream developers, Mono upstream developers, or Mono Ubuntu team has ever been able to reproduce the cited problems, since problems specific to an exact ARM chip are impossible to reproduce without the requisite hardware and none of us owns an ARM system matching Canonical s target. That Banshee is still a GTK+2 app is true. A port to GTK+3 is almost complete, but blocking on a single technical bug deep within GTK# s guts, which could be fixed by someone with sufficient knowledge of GTK+ semantics. Nobody with the required GTK+ knowledge has stepped forward with a fix at this point in time. As for the final point, that Banshee is not well maintained, this seems like a directed personal insult against the active and responsive Banshee maintainer, Chow Loong Jin, and upstream bug triager David Nielsen, in addition to the immeasurable hours contributed free of charge for the benefit of Ubuntu users by various other members of related Mono app and library teams, including myself. I need to stress at this point that my annoyance with this decision has nothing to do with the actual app changes. Keeping Tomboy and gbrainy, at a cost of about 25 meg of unsquashed disk space, is a hard argument to make compared with those two plus Banshee for 40 meg. Dropping gbrainy and Tomboy, and switching to Rhythmbox, will save about 30 meg of unsquashed space, all told.I m unconvinced that Rhythmbox is a technically superior app to Banshee several features which were gained by the first app swap will be lost again but that s another long tedious argument to be had. No, what has me deeply angered is the shambolic way the changes were made and announced. Significant accommodations were made by Banshee upstream in order to make life easier for Canonical to integrate Banshee into their OS. For one thing, that s why the Ubuntu One Music Store support is a core Banshee feature, not part of the third-party community extensions package. If Banshee was being considered for replacement due to unresolved technical issues, then perhaps it would have been polite to, I don t know, inform upstream that it was on the cards? Or, if Canonical felt that problems specific to their own itches required scratching, then is it completely beyond the realm of possibility to imagine they might have spent developer resources on bug fixing their OS and sending those fixes upstream? Or even and call me crazy providing access for upstream to specialized hardware such as a $174 Pandaboard to empower upstream to isolate and fix unreproducible bugs specific to Canonical s target hardware? And here s where it gets more astonishing for me Canonical paid money to ship one of the community-based packagers responsible for the stack, Iain Lane, to Orlando for UDS, and didn t think it was worth bothering to perhaps inform him hey, the stuff you work on is in danger of being axed from the default install, maybe you should go to this session . So I m not cross that the stuff I work on has been removed from the default install. I intend to continue working on it as I have for the last 4 years, through my work in Debian. No, why I m cross that I heard about it from fucking Boycott Novell. Regardless of your opinions regarding Banshee or its stack, if you read the above and don t see it as an abysmal failure of community engagement by a company whose community manager wrote a book on the damn topic, then there s something seriously wrong with your understanding of how community labour should be seen as a resource. Maybe someone at Canonical should try reading Jono s book. It s not a first-time offence, and this mail from a PiTiVi developer regarding changes in 11.10 makes for useful further reading. [edit] There is some worthwhile discussion going on on the ubuntu-desktop mailing list covering the technical issues surrounding the decision, I would suggest it s a good place for ongoing technical discussion.

I recently purchased a Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex 1 TB hard drive. It is a 2.5" compact disk that you connect over USB. It draws its power from the USB controller. My previous Extern HDDs were all 2.5" laptop drives, for which I bought a USB enclosure. Those devices always worked perfect, as in:

• They were automatically detected
• Partitions/File Systems understood
• Desktop systems would prompt for actions

The typical kernel messages I got for these devices were:

[56063.268107] usb 1-1: new high speed USB device number 13 using ehci_hcd

[56063.401635] usb 1-1: New USB device found, idVendor=14cd, idProduct=6116

[56063.401645] usb 1-1: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=3, SerialNumber=2

[56063.401652] usb 1-1: Product: USB 2.0 SATA BRIDGE

[56063.401658] usb 1-1: Manufacturer: Super Top

[56063.401663] usb 1-1: SerialNumber: M6116018VF16

[56063.402857] scsi8 : usb-storage 1-1:1.0

[56064.400896] scsi 8:0:0:0: Direct-Access WDC WD50 00BEVT-24A0RT0 PQ: 0 ANSI: 0

[56064.401576] sd 8:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg2 type 0

[56064.402102] sd 8:0:0:0: [sdb] 976773168 512-byte logical blocks: (500 GB/465 GiB)

[56064.402615] sd 8:0:0:0: [sdb] Write Protect is off

[56064.402618] sd 8:0:0:0: [sdb] Mode Sense: 03 00 00 00

[56064.403101] sd 8:0:0:0: [sdb] No Caching mode page present

[56064.403105] sd 8:0:0:0: [sdb] Assuming drive cache: write through

[56064.404861] sd 8:0:0:0: [sdb] No Caching mode page present

[56064.404864] sd 8:0:0:0: [sdb] Assuming drive cache: write through

[56064.419657] sdb: sdb1

[56064.421850] sd 8:0:0:0: [sdb] No Caching mode page present

[56064.421854] sd 8:0:0:0: [sdb] Assuming drive cache: write through

[56064.421857] sd 8:0:0:0: [sdb] Attached SCSI disk

But for my Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex HDD, things were different. The kernel would detect but then it would not mount. The error reported is that the device is busy. My FreeAgent's kernel messages look similar to what the regular one has:

[ 168.520140] usb 1-1: new high speed USB device number 5 using ehci_hcd

[ 168.657424] usb 1-1: New USB device found, idVendor=0bc2, idProduct=5021

[ 168.657433] usb 1-1: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3

[ 168.657439] usb 1-1: Product: FreeAgent GoFlex

[ 168.657444] usb 1-1: Manufacturer: Seagate

[ 168.657449] usb 1-1: SerialNumber: NA0C1BML

[ 168.659079] scsi5 : usb-storage 1-1:1.0

[ 169.657136] scsi 5:0:0:0: Direct-Access Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex 0148 PQ: 0 ANSI: 4

[ 169.708786] sd 5:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg3 type 0

[ 169.709079] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdc] 1953525167 512-byte logical blocks: (1.00 TB/931 GiB)

[ 169.709954] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdc] Write Protect is off

[ 169.709963] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdc] Mode Sense: 1c 00 00 00

[ 169.710567] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdc] Write cache: enabled, read cache: enabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA

[ 169.759942] sdc: sdc1

[ 169.762050] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdc] Attached SCSI disk

As the Device Mapper Multipath Debian Maintainer, I have multipath-tools installed on my laptop. Turns out, for some reason, the device is consumer by the device mapper multipath stack.

20:12:58 rrs@champaran:~$ ls /dev/mapper/

1Seagate@ 1Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex N 1Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex Np1 control LocalDisk-ROOT@ LocalDisk-SWAP@

Also the block device ID listing is enumerated as type SCSI.

19:56:44 rrs@champaran:~$ ls /dev/disk/by-id/

ata-HITACHI_HTS723216L9SA60_091220FC1220NCJASEVG@ scsi-SATA_HITACHI_HTS7232091220FC1220NCJASEVG@

ata-HITACHI_HTS723216L9SA60_091220FC1220NCJASEVG-part1@ scsi-SATA_HITACHI_HTS7232091220FC1220NCJASEVG-part1@

ata-HITACHI_HTS723216L9SA60_091220FC1220NCJASEVG-part2@ scsi-SATA_HITACHI_HTS7232091220FC1220NCJASEVG-part2@

ata-HITACHI_HTS723216L9SA60_091220FC1220NCJASEVG-part3@ scsi-SATA_HITACHI_HTS7232091220FC1220NCJASEVG-part3@

ata-HL-DT-ST_DVDRAM_GU10N_M189CNI1127@ scsi-SSeagate_FreeAgent_GoFle_NA0C1BML@

ata-ST1000LM010-9YH146_W1000ZD8@ usb-WDC_WD12_00BEVE-11UYT0_ST_Killer-0:0@

dm-name-1Seagate@ usb-WDC_WD12_00BEVE-11UYT0_ST_Killer-0:0-part1@

dm-name-LocalDisk-ROOT@ wwn-0x5000c5003d19c8c2@

dm-name-LocalDisk-SWAP@ wwn-0x5000cca586e112bc@

dm-uuid-LVM-buywwzKkpfKG2RegankA2nPkmFBBPFe3D5DepV8w8nLrHfoAjIIQVnakOQJZEqJX@ wwn-0x5000cca586e112bc-part1@

dm-uuid-LVM-buywwzKkpfKG2RegankA2nPkmFBBPFe3k9aJfc9B7wRmVIwfoagffHUZjuN6c4cM@ wwn-0x5000cca586e112bc-part2@

dm-uuid-mpath-1Seagate@ wwn-0x5000cca586e112bc-part3@

raid-1Seagate@

But I'm not sure why the same doesn't happend for my external laptop drive. It gets properly tagged as device type USB. So Laptop or Server, if you have a FreeAgent that you want to connect to your machine, and see the device busy error when accessing the device['s] directly, do the following:First, the ID of the device.

20:17:43 rrs@champaran:~$ /lib/udev/scsi_id --whitelisted --page=0x83 --device=/dev/sdc

1Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex N

Add the ID to /etc/multipath.conf under blacklist section

blacklist

wwid "1Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex*"

wwid "1Seagate FA GoFlex Desk*"

# devnode "^(ram raw loop fd md dm- sr scd st)[0-9]*"

# devnode "^hd[a-z][[0-9]*]"

# device

# vendor DEC.*

# product MSA[15]00

#

Run mulitpath -F to flush the unused maps. Run multipath -v3 to ensure that now the device is blacklisted.

Nov 03 20:19:02 sdc: (Seagate:FreeAgent GoFlex) wwid blacklisted

The front cause for the mis-behavior is:

# Coalesce multipath devices before multipathd is running (initramfs, early

# boot)

ACTION=="add change", SUBSYSTEM=="block", RUN+="/sbin/multipath -v0 /dev/$name"

But something else, maybe the default blacklist table, needs the actual fix.

Almost forgot to post this. My mobile phones running free software in photos. From left to right:

• Neo FreeRunner (GTA02a5) running QtMoko
• Neo FreeRunner (GTA02a7) running Debian
• Nokia N900 running MeeGo CE (now Nemo Mobile)
• Nokia N950 running Meego CE (now Nemo Mobile)
• Nokia N9 running Harmattan (stock software)

All of that software running on the devices is more or less free software, with Harmattan obviously being by far the least free, especially applications, but still better than any other on-the-shelf phone software *), and the others being 99% or "Ubuntu like" free ie. possibly with firmware and a few driver exceptions. N9 needs some bootloader work still before Nemo, Debian, Ubuntu etc. can be run there. I've collected a few things about N9 from this point of view at a wiki page.
*) Not sure about every Android phone, but Android is not openly developed anyway so it's hardly a similar free software project such as freedesktop.org projects or Qt

I gave my N900 away now since obviously I cannot make full use of each one of these. I'm multi-SIMming my N9 and the GTA02a7 Neo FreeRunner for daily use, while the other FreeRunner and N950 are purely for tinkering related purposes. The development FreeRunner will get on upgrade to GTA04 once it's available, and then hopefully that can be made into a daily usable phone as well.

By the way, see you in FSCONS in Gothenburg next weekend. Even rms will be there, which is always interesting of course :)

It's about time that Rapha l is interviewed in the "People behind Debian" series he initiated on his blog. Indeed, when he interviews people, Rapha l asks about other people they could suggest for next interviews. So, during mine, I suggested him to be a next "victim". As he couldn't interview himself, I volunteered for this. As you'll see below, Rapha l (who's a friend of mine as I'm a friend of his) likes to speak and that shows in the length of his answers :-) but you always know more about Debian when reading his blog posts, books, mails, etc. I personnally think that he is among the best promoters of the project for years and it was a pleasure for me to conduct this interview. My questions are in bold, the rest is by Rapha l. Who are you? Hi, Rapha l Hertzog, I'm a 32 years old French Debian developer who is married and who has a 2-year old son. I'm running my own company (Freexian) since 2005, I started it 3 years after the end of my computer science studies. I'm also a very proud author of the Cahier de l'Admin Debian, a French book about Debian. You often wrote about your attempts to make your living partly, if not completely, out of your Debian work. Can you describe the way you're trying to do this? My first try has been with Freexian. I always advertised this company as being specialized in Debian GNU/Linux. While Freexian is successful enough to provide me a decent income, I'm not really satisfied with the result because very few of my contracts are about improving Debian. I use Debian daily for the benefit of my customers, writing new customer specific (embedded) software, deploying a service on Debian servers, etc. But except for the occasional bugfix, all this work does not improve Debian (the only exception has been the dpkg multiarch implementation work sponsored by Linaro). The positive side is that I don't need to fill my entire schedule to earn enough money to live. So I'm regularly taking some days off work to be able to contribute to Debian. This is a freedom that I enjoy... My French book has also been a bestseller and depending on the years the royalties represented between 1 and 2 months of supplementary time that I can spend on Debian (that is between 2000 and 4000 EUR of income). Now since last year, I decided to actively work towards my goal of making a living out of my Debian work. I want to build on what has been most successful for me up to now, that is my book. My strategy has been to build an audience around my blog: with a direct contact with my readers I have the opportunity to sell e-books, and without any intermediary taking the biggest part of the price, I don't need a very large audience to be successful. I have also been experiencing micro-donations with Flattr, people who are enjoying my articles on my blog can use it to give a few cents for each article they find useful. With a large enough userbase, this could fund free documentation and would avoid the need for commercial e-books but we're not there currently and I don't know if it will ever reach the critical mass. Last but not least, I'm soliciting donations for my Debian work on the sidebar of my blog, and I have the chance to a have a few (regular) donators. You're a proud father since last year. How do you manage your commitment to the project with your family life? There are few things that I put above Debian in my life, but my family certainly is. I try to handle most of my Debian duties during work hours so that I can spend time with my family on evenings and during week-ends but in truth I never really disconnect from Debian. It happens quite often that I say to my wife I'll come in a few minutes, let me finish this and then I end up responding to a Debian mail, or an IRC query and take 30 minutes instead of the 5 expected ones. I try hard to avoid this but it's difficult. Luckily for me, my wife is very supportive of my Debian involvement and knows me well... By the way my wife is using Debian on her computer, and my son has already played with DoudouLinux (a Debian derivative!). Have you already been accused of self-promotion in your writings? If that would ever happen, what would you answer to that? Yes, more than once. I am proud of what I do for Debian, I enjoy sharing the result of my work. Because of this, some people believe that I'm selfish and egocentric. And this has somewhat increased since I have been soliciting donations: for me it's important to be transparent towards donators so that they see what I really do for Debian. But some people have the feeling that I'm getting undeserved attention and that I bring everything towards my own person. On the other side, as an author, I'm a public figure who is definitely seeking some attention... I don't have any miraculous answer, we are a large and diverse community, it's next to impossible to please everybody. I listen to all the concerns that people bring forward, I take them into account as much as possible, in particular when I believe they are reasonable/well justified, or when they come from people that I highly respect. But sometimes I have to plainly ignore them too... in particular when they are trying to impose their own political view on a topic that's not directly related to the only value that we all share: the social contract. Contributing to Debian is a challenge, we all have to make efforts to put aside our differences and to concentrate on the work that brings us closer to the best free software operating system ever built. You recently launched a campaign to free out the soon-to-be-published "Debian Administrator Handbook", an English version of your well-known book about Debian in French. Can you tell us more about this project? My French book has been very successful at helping people to get started with Debian, and like I already explained, it was also effective to fund a part of my Debian work. So I wanted to make it available world-wide by publishing an English translation of it. I tried to find an English-speaking editor willing to take on the challenge but I found none interested. Not put off by a setback, Roland (my co-author) and I decided to negotiate with our French editor Eyrolles to recuperate the necessary rights to translate the book into English. Handling everything ourselves represents a lot of work, but it also means that we have the freedom required to decide of the license of the resulting book. We would love to see it under a license compatible with the Debian Free Software Guidelines. But at the same time we firmly believe that we deserve a reasonable monetary compensation for the work on the book, so we conditioned its liberation to a predefined amount of money (25 K ) in what we call the "liberation fund". And since we wanted to be sure that we would have the required means to complete the translation, we used a crowfunding platform to seek support of people interested by the book. With such a platform you're only debited if the minimal requested amount is reached. Anyone can participate, pre-order the book and/or put some money in the liberation fund. As of today, we already reached the minimal funding goal (15 K ) so the book translation will happen. But the liberation target has not yet been reached so we don't know yet if the book will be free from the start... you can follow the progress right on the fundraising page or on the website dedicated to the book. PS: If you want to contribute to this project and also make a donation to Debian at the same time, you should check out this page. You're one of the main developers of dpkg, a critical tool for Debian systems. Can you tell us more about the current development challenges it is facing? What will be the new dpkg features for wheezy? The current challenges are not really technical. dpkg is a relatively mature piece of software and it will continue to work for the foreseeable future without needing much maintenance work. The real challenge is trying to setup a healthy developement community around it so that we can keep tackling new interesting problems (there are many listed in the roadmap and in the 225 wishlist bugs). There is a real problem of leadership and communication in the current team. We used to be three, and we're only two nowadays. Guillem is the legitimate leader since he's involved in dpkg's developement since early 2006 while I joined only in late 2007. But in the last 4 years, we did not manage to recruit anyone else on the team. Some persons tried to contribute significant new features (like Sean Finney with a rework of the way we handle configuration files) but they gave up frustrated after a while because we did not manage to review their work (and discuss the design) in any reasonable timeframe. Another famous case is Ian Jackson with his trigger work. His work got merged, but so late that in the mean time he blew up while trying to hijack the maintenance of dpkg. For a long time I was concentrating my work on the Perl part of dpkg (aka dpkg-dev mainly), so I did not feel qualified to review and merge work related to the C part and I was just a worried observator of this situation. I tried to improve it by setting up some basic review infrastructure, it should have brought some lisibility to the status of each change left to be reviewed... but it has not been used and it changed nothing. Over the years, I became much more interested in the C part. My first big contribution in C has been the rewrite of update-alternatives (from Perl to C). I made other small changes in between, but at the start of this year I had this great opportunity to work on the multiarch implementation (FYI, multiarch is the possibility to mix packages from several architectures on a single system). This really forced me to jump into the C codebase and learn a lot about how dpkg is implemented. Thanks to this I have been able to tackle other small projects (like the improved triggers). This would be all great if my multiarch work was already merged, but it's not. It's a large work, I do not mind waiting a bit in particular since Guillem is a highly skilled C programmer. His sharp analysis of new designs are invaluable, when he reviews code he always finds something to improve. I learnt a lot just by reviewing the code he wrote over the years. That said I have been waiting since April without almost no updates from him. With the release team asking us to hurry up, the situation is getting somewhat strained as I really want to see multiarch in Wheezy and I do not really want to short-circuit Guillem. Hum, I may have drifted a bit from your original question... what great new features can people expect? Well multiarch is supposed to be the big new feature, apart from that there aren't many things that matter to the end users. But there are already quite a few changes that are of interest to package maintainers (like hardened build flags, source package improvements, improved triggers, ). What's the biggest problem of Debian? Manicheism and a tendency to quickly polarize the discussions. In reality, there are very few situations where everything is all good or all bad. Ever since I have read The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People I try hard to put into practice the habits of interdependence . Instead of having only my point of view in mind, I try to understand the motivations from the other party ( Seek First to Understand, Then to be Understood ) in order to be able to put forward solutions acceptable to both parties ( Think Win-Win ). I highly recommend this book to anyone. And I invite everybody to at least try to follow those simple advices. Is there someone in Debian you admire for their contributions? There are many and I can't give an exhaustive list... here are some that I would like to highlight (in no particular order):

• Niels Thykier for the work he puts into Lintian, and his recent work on a britney test-suite (the software that creates testing out of unstable);
• Joachim Breitner for his britney reimplementation using a SAT solver;
• Adam D. Barrat for his work on britney2;
• All the release team members who take care of an endless stream of transitions;
• Christoph Berg for his continuous work over the years on various QA infrastructure (DDPO, Mole, );
• Enrico Zini for the way he helped reform the New Member process without any big disruption;
• Russ Allbery for his Debian Policy work and for being a model in terms of how we should interact on Debian mailing lists;
• Stefano Zacchiroli for being the most active leader that I have ever seen, and for the way he tries to steer important discussions to a constructive conclusion.
• etc.

Most of those people are working on improving Debian's infrastructure so that we can all be more effective and do an even better work. This kind of work is not always very visible but it's crucial to Debian's future. Thank you to Rapha l for the time spent answering my questions. I hope you enjoyed reading his answers as I did. And, anyway, it was fun to just play the game "the other way".

Dear lazyweb, I was searching through the internet what was I doing wrong, I wrote to the polipo-user list but my email got stuck on moderation, and my connection is really shitty (that s why I m using polipo the way I m using it). I have relaxTransparency and mindlesslyCacheVary set to true, but I don t need so aggresive caching in my development stages that are located under *.local and another development subdomain on the net. Already tried setting uncachableFile to /etc/polipo/uncachable and to ~/.polipo-uncachable, according to the web-config thing is properly setted up, but can t get it to recognize it s content. I first thought it was I was writing bad the regex, .*\.local but it does work in the /etc/polipo/forbidden file. Besides, adding complete domains to the uncachable file doesn t works neither. Could someone confirm this or throw me a hand on this? I m using 1.0.4.1-1.1 version which is the last one on unstable repos.

I thought it would have been easier to print a NUL-terminated string in awk (mawk as it's the default in Debian), but after some trial-and-fail I was able to come up with this kinda ugly solution:


$ echo -e "123\n456" awk 'BEGIN ORS="" print $0 ; printf("%c", "") ' xargs -n1 -0 echo
123
456

That:

• set the Output Records Separator (ORS) to the empty string (default is the \n, new line)
• print the input line (do your elaboration there, if you need)
• print the null character, as explained in the mawk manpage: "mawk cannot handle ascii NUL \0 in the source or data files. You can output NUL using printf with %c, and any other 8 bit character is acceptable input."
• show that it's actually emitting NUL-terminated strings

What to get the files older than today? Run

find /path/ -type f -daystart -mtime +0

it will return only the files older than today, no matter the time the command is executed (by default, -mtime counts multiples of 24 hours from now). Kinda nice when you want to archive yesterday log files.

In August 2010, Sarah and I had a lovely (but short) week-long holiday in Rhodes, Greece. We thoroughly enjoyed it but I didn't document it here. When John Goerzen was looking for European holiday destinations earlier this year, I had no hesitation in recommending Rhodes. I am surprised and delighted that John took up my suggestion and loved it too! See John's holiday blogging for more on this beautiful place. This year we wanted to take a two-week holiday and have a similar experience again. We ended up choosing Kos, Greece. Kos was, perhaps not surprisingly, quite similar to Rhodes. We were based in "Hotel Oceanis" in Psalidi, on the north-east side, about ten minutes bus journey from Kos town. The hotel was very relaxing with plenty of space. It's based on the sea-side and has two public pools: the large main one and a smaller (but seemingly deeper) one adjacent to a snack bar. We were very lucky to find that the hotel had put is in a room with a private swimming pool! In total, we had four separate places to swim in the hotel. Kos town was similar to Rhodes town, but not quite as "historic" feeling. It was a bit larger/more spread-out. Some areas of the town are quite lively but we always managed to find pleasant and quiet places to eat and drink together. We had twice as much time and took advantage of that by hiring a car and visiting the rest of the island. In particular we loved the beach in Mastichari (middle-North), which had quite turbulent rolling waves. "Sunny beach" on the south coast was absolutely packed with holiday makers, but was none-the-less worth the look. All in all, my first two experiences of Greek islands were wonderful. One day, I'm sure we will return to (at least) Rhodes, but we may leave it for a while and see what the rest of the world has to offer in the mean time.

My son is being encouraged to lie. It's a fairly regular occurrence around here, and I'm sure you've seen it yourself. It's that checkbox on the website you're visiting where you say "Yes, I am over X years of age".