Search Results: "spa"

6 March 2011

David Watson: Project 52 - Week 9

Something a little political for this week. I've also taken the low budget studio setup to a new level by adding a black t-shirt for the background. No expense spared. Week 9 - Standing Alone

Eugene V. Lyubimkin: cupt: 2.0.0~beta1

Cupt v2 has reached a beta stage.

Main news of Cupt v2 comparing to Cupt v1 are grouped here.

Notable changes since 2.0.0~alpha3:



Full changelog is available in debian/changelog, as usual.

binary packages for i386, source package and README

5 March 2011

Amaya Rodrigo: Indignez vous (II)

Spend millions visiting space TWICE, take Amazon referal money from non profit... priceless!

Take Amazon referal money from non profit... priceless!

From skitterman.wordpress.com/2011/03/02/business-oppor<wbr></wbr><wbr></wbr>tunity-in-ubuntu/#comment-364:
Mark, with his wealth, could have set up any model of organisation. He chose a for-profit one. As such, the conflict of loyalty necessarily must become ever more pronounced as that profit is sought.
Thanks to a former friend for pointing me to these two people who could express this better than me.

4 March 2011

Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppArmadillo 0.2.14 and 0.2.15

A few days ago Conrad Sanderson released version 1.1.6 of his Armadillo templated C++ library for linear algebra. Accordingly, I made a new release 0.2.14 of RcppArmadillo, our Rcpp-based integration into R which included a few local fixes. However, while I updated SVN at the R-Forge project I didn't update the final tarball so Armadillo 1.1.6 wasn't in it. That is corrected in the 0.2.15 upload which is now on CRAN and its mirrors. The short NEWS file extract for both releases follows, also containing Conrad's entry for 1.1.6. A few minor tweaks were added but no user-visible changes:
0.2.15  2011-03-04
    o   Upgraded to Armadillo Version 1.1.6    Baby Carpet Shark 
         * fixed size matrices and vectors can use auxiliary (external) memory
         * .in_range() can use span() arguments
         * subfields can use span() arguments
0.2.14  2011-03-02
    o   Support Run-Time Type Information (RTTI) on matrices by setting the
        state variable vec_state in Row and Col instantiation, with thanks to
        Conrad Sanderson for the hint
    o   fastLm code simplified further by instantiating the Armadillo matrix
        and vector directly from the SEXP coming from R
    o   inst/doc/Makefile now respects $R_HOME environment variable
And courtesy of CRANberries, here are the diffs to.2.14
 ChangeLog                                                   14 -
 DESCRIPTION                                                  8 
 inst/NEWS                                                   10 
 inst/doc/RcppArmadillo-unitTests.pdf                     binary
 inst/doc/unitTests-results/RcppArmadillo-unitTests.html     10 
 inst/doc/unitTests-results/RcppArmadillo-unitTests.txt      39 +-
 inst/include/armadillo_bits/Col_meat.hpp                    51 +++
 inst/include/armadillo_bits/Col_proto.hpp                    3 
 inst/include/armadillo_bits/Cube_meat.hpp                   52 +++
 inst/include/armadillo_bits/Cube_proto.hpp                   7 
 inst/include/armadillo_bits/Mat_meat.hpp                    51 +++
 inst/include/armadillo_bits/Mat_proto.hpp                   12 
 inst/include/armadillo_bits/Row_meat.hpp                    51 +++
 inst/include/armadillo_bits/Row_proto.hpp                    3 
 inst/include/armadillo_bits/arma_version.hpp                 6 
 inst/include/armadillo_bits/config.hpp                       9 
 inst/include/armadillo_bits/field_meat.hpp                 220 ++++++++++++++--
 inst/include/armadillo_bits/field_proto.hpp                 20 +
 inst/unitTests/runit.RcppArmadillo.R                        16 +
 19 files changed, 521 insertions(+), 61 deletions(-)
and to the previous release 0.2.13, respectivel
 ChangeLog                                                   14 ++++++
 DESCRIPTION                                                  6 +-
 inst/NEWS                                                   11 +++++
 inst/doc/Makefile                                           15 +++++--
 inst/doc/RcppArmadillo-unitTests.pdf                     binary
 inst/doc/unitTests-results/RcppArmadillo-unitTests.html     18 ++++----
 inst/doc/unitTests-results/RcppArmadillo-unitTests.txt      34 ++++++++--------
 inst/include/RcppArmadillo/Col_meat.h                       24 ++++++-----
 inst/include/RcppArmadillo/Row_meat.h                       19 ++++----
 src/fastLm.cpp                                              15 ++-----
 10 files changed, 94 insertions(+), 62 deletions(-)
More information is on the RcppArmadillo page. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the R-Forge page.

David Paleino: Optional argument with \newcommand in LaTeX

In LaTeX, it seems like you can't define a command with a really optional argument, using \newcommand. You can make commands with arguments having a default value though. Now, I found myself in need of having such a functionality. I had to google a while, but finally found it, so I'm posting it here, both to share knowledge and to remember it in future :) Suppose you want to do something like \mycmd foo and \mycmd foo bla , doing different things (in my case, I needed to add the second argument enclosed by parenthesis in the TOC and other places, but only if it was present) Here's the code:
\def\mycmd#1 \def\tempa #1 \futurelet\next\mycmd@i % Save first argument
\def\mycmd@i \ifx\next\bgroup\expandafter\mycmd@ii\else\expandafter\mycmd@end\fi %Check brace
\def\mycmd@ii#1 ... %Two args
\def\mycmd@end ... %Single args
In the last two lines of the code, use \tempa for your first argument, and #1 for your second optional argument. If you need spaces there (maybe as part of some text), be sure to escape them with a backslash \. I think it's expandable for additional arguments, but I haven't tried, and I don't feel like getting my hands dirty with TeX yet ;)

Craig Small: Apache and incomplete redirection messages

As part of moving my site around, I needed a bunch of redirects so that http://enc.com.au/docs/linuxload.html now becomes http://enc.com.au/2010/07/manually_calculating_process_times/ because its now controlled by WordPress. so I used the RedirectPermanent feature of mod_alias to do it with lines like:
RedirectPermanent /docs/linuxload.html /2010/07/manually_calculating_process_times/
So you come in on /docs/linuxload.html and redirect to the blog entry, simple really! It actually works, kinda, but the log files fill with things like:
[Fri Mar 04 14:40:17 2011] [warn] [client 172.16.242.1] incomplete redirection target of '/2010/07/manually_calculating_process_times/' for URI '/docs/linuxload.html' modified to 'http://enc.com.au/2010/07/manually_calculating_process_times/
What is going on? Why won t Apache just be quiet and be happy? The reason is in the Redirect Directive documentation on the 2.0 mod_alias page:
Also, URL-path must be a fully qualified URL, not a relative path, even when used with .htaccess files or inside of <directory> sections.
But I m running Apache 2.2 and the 2.2 mod_alias page says:
The new URL should be an absolute URL beginning with a scheme and hostname, but a URL-path beginning with a slash may also be used, in which case the scheme and hostname of the current server will be added.
That s it, you two choices: Changing the above config snippet to use absolute paths fixed it.
RedirectPermanent /docs/linuxload.html http://enc.com.au/2010/07/manually_calculating_process_times/

3 March 2011

Kai Wasserb ch: Extending Chronicle

This little blog is created/compiled with Chronicle, coded by Steve Kemp, and one of the cool features is that you can specify a command run before/after your blog gets compiled from the input files. This presents us with one problem and a lot of opportunities. First to the problem: the singular "a command" (from the manual page) might not be enough. Maybe you want to run more than one command. This can be achieved by creating a directory for the commands you want to run before the compilation and one for the commands you want to run after the chronicle run. Then you create a small shell script one directory above and call that from chronicle, the script for the post-run might look like:
#!/bin/sh
set -e
WORKDIR=" dirname $ 0  /post"
find $ WORKDIR  -name "*.sh" -exec " " ";"
This script makes the assumption, that the scripts to run have a .sh suffix and are in a subdirectory named "post". But you can surely adapt this to your needs. Now to one of the oppurtunities this offers: you can now, for example, create static pages, which share the general visual appearance with your blog entries but don't show up in the tags or archive system. I'm using this to generate an imprint for this blog. The script to generate the imprint looks like:
#!/bin/sh
set -e
OUTPUT_PATH= grep output $ HOME /.chroniclerc   cut -d= -f2   tr -d [:blank:] 
sed -ne'/<\?xml version/,/blosxomFirstDayDiv/  /blosxomFirstDayDiv/b;p ' \
        $ OUTPUT_PATH /index.html > $ HOME /tmp/imprint.html
cat  dirname $ 0  /imprint.data >> $ HOME /tmp/imprint.html
echo -e "\n" >> $ HOME /tmp/imprint.html
sed -ne'/imprint_match/,$p' $ OUTPUT_PATH /index.html >> $ HOME /tmp/imprint.html
mv $ HOME /tmp/imprint.html $ OUTPUT_PATH /imprint.html
There are again some assumptions made here, which you'd need to adopt to your setup: Now you have a very powerful system to modify/extend your chronicle-generated blog. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do! A little P.S.: you might want to use version 4.5, as 4.4 had a nasty encoding bug.

Kai Wasserb ch: Extending Chronicle (Updated)

This little blog is created/compiled with Chronicle, coded by Steve Kemp, and one of the cool features is that you can specify a command run before/after your blog gets compiled from the input files. This presents us with one problem and a lot of opportunities. First to the problem: the singular "a command" (from the manual page) might not be enough. Maybe you want to run more than one command. This can be achieved by creating a directory for the commands you want to run before the compilation and one for the commands you want to run after the chronicle run. [UPDATE]Then just add run-parts /path/to/ before,post .d to your .chroniclerc for the pre,post -build configuration entries.[/UPDATE] (Thanks to Steve for pointing the obvious out to me, don't know why I didn't think of run-parts myself.) Now to one of the oppurtunities this offers: you can now, for example, create static pages, which share the general visual appearance with your blog entries but don't show up in the tags or archive system. I'm using this to generate an imprint for this blog. The script to generate the imprint looks like:
#!/bin/sh
set -e
OUTPUT_PATH= grep output $ HOME /.chroniclerc   cut -d= -f2   tr -d [:blank:] 
sed -nre'/<\?xml version/,/blosxomFirstDayDiv/  /blosxomFirstDayDiv/b;p ' \
        $ OUTPUT_PATH /index.html > $ HOME /tmp/imprint.html
cat  dirname $ 0  /imprint.data >> $ HOME /tmp/imprint.html
echo -e "\n" >> $ HOME /tmp/imprint.html
sed -ne'/imprint_match/,$p' $ OUTPUT_PATH /index.html >> $ HOME /tmp/imprint.html
mv $ HOME /tmp/imprint.html $ OUTPUT_PATH /imprint.html
There are again some assumptions made here, which you'd need to adopt to your setup: Now you have a very powerful system to modify/extend your chronicle-generated blog. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do! A little P.S.: you might want to use version 4.5, as 4.4 had a nasty encoding bug.

Rapha&#235;l Hertzog: People behind Debian: Christian Perrier, translation coordinator

Christian is a figure of Debian, not only because of the tremendous coordination work that he does within the translation project, but also because he s very involved at the social level. He s probably in the top 5 of the persons who attended most often the Debian conference. Christian is a friend (thanks for hosting me so many times when I come to Paris for Debian related events) and I m glad that he accepted to be interviewed. He likes to speak and that shows in the length of his answers :-) but you ll be traveling the world while reading him. My questions are in bold, the rest is by Christian. Who are you? I am a French citizen (which is easy to guess unless you correct my usual mistakes in what follows). I m immensely proud of being married for nearly 26 years with Elizabeth (who deserves a statue from Debian for being so patient with my passion and my dedication to the project). I m also the proud father of 3 wonderful kids , aged 19 to 23. I work as team manager in the Networks and Computers Division of Onera the French Aerospace lab , a public research institute about Aeronautics, Space and Defense. My team provides computer management services for research divisions of Onera, with a specific focus put on individual computing. I entered the world of free software as one of the very first users of Linux in France. Back in the early 1990 s, I happened (though the BBS users communities) to be a friend of several early adopters of Linux and/or BSD386/FreeBSD/NetBSD in France. More specifically, I discovered Linux thanks with my friend Ren Cougnenc (all my free software talks are dedicated to Ren , who passed away in 1996). You re not a programmer, not even a packager. How did you come to Debian? I m definitely not a programmer and I never studied computing (I graduated in Materials Science and worked in that area for a few years after my PhD). However, my daily work always involved computing (I redesigned the creep testing laboratory and its acquisition system all by myself during my thesis research work). An my hobbies often involved playing with home computers, always trying to learn about something new. So, first learning about a new operating system then trying to figure out how to become involved in its development was quite a logical choice. Debian is my distro of choice since it exists. I used Slackware on work machines for a while, but my home server, kheops, first ran Debian 1.1 when I stopped running a BBS on an MS-DOS machine to host a news server. That was back in October 1996. I then happened to be a user, and more specifically a user of genealogy software, also participating very actively in Usenet from this home computer and server, that was running this Debian thing. So, progressively, I joined mailing lists and, being a passionate person, I tried to figure out how I could bring my own little contribution to all this. This is why I became a packager (yes, I am one!) by taking over the geneweb package, which I was using to publish my genealogy research. I applied as DD in January 2001, then got my account in July 2001. My first upload to the Debian archive occurred on August 22nd 2001: that was of course geneweb, which I still maintain. Quite quickly, I became involved in the work on French localization. I have always been a strong supporter of localized software (I even translated a few BBS software back in the early 90 s) as one of the way to bring the power and richness of free software to more users. Localization work lead me to work on the early version of Debian Installer, during those 2003-2005 years where the development of D-I was an incredibly motivating and challenging task, lead by Joey Hess and his inspiring ideas. From user to contributor to leader, I suddenly discovered, around 2004, that I became the coordinator of D-I i18n (internationalization) without even noticing :-) You re the main translation coordinator in Debian. What plans and goals have you set for Debian Wheezy? As always: paint the world in red. Indeed, this is my goal for years. I would like our favorite distro to be able to be used by anyone in the world, whether she speaks English, Northern Sami, Wolof, Uyghur or Secwepemcts n. As a matter of symbol, I use the installer for this. My stance is that one should be able to even install Debian in one s own language. So, for about 7 years, I use D-I as a way to attract new localization contributors. This progress is represented on this page where the world is gradually painted in red as long as the installer supports more languages release after release. The map above tries to illustrate this by painting in red countries when the most spoken language in the country is supported in Debian Installer. However, that map does not give enough reward to many great efforts made to support very different kind of languages. Not only various national languages, but also very different ones: all regional languages of Spain, many of the most spoken languages in India, minority languages such as Uyghur for which an effort is starting, Northern Sami because it is taught in a few schools in Norway, etc., etc. Still, the map gives a good idea of what I would like to see better supported: languages from Africa, several languages in Central Asia. And, as a very very personal goal, I m eagerly waiting for support of Tibetan in Debian Installer, the same way we support its sister language, Dzongkha from Bhutan. For this to happen, we have to make contribution to localization as easy as possible. The very distributed nature of Debian development makes this a challenge, as material to translate (D-I components, debconf screens, native packages, packages descriptions, website, documentation) is very widely spread. A goal, for years, is to set a centralized place where translators could work easily without even knowing about SVN/GIT/BZR or having to report bugs to send their work. The point, however, would be to have this without making compromises on translation quality. So, with peer review, use of thesaurus and translation memory and all such techniques. Tools for this exist: we, for instance, worked with the developers of Pootle to help making it able to cope with the huge amount of material in Debian (think about packages descriptions translations). However, as of now, the glue between such tools and the raw material (that often lies in packages) didn t come. So, currently, translation work in Debian requires a great knowledge of how things are organized, where is the material, how it can be possible to make contribution reach packages, etc. And, as I m technically unable to fulfill the goal of building the infrastructure, I m fulfilling that role of spreading out the knowledge. This is how I can define my coordinator role. Ubuntu uses a web-based tool to make it easy to contribute translations directly in Launchpad. At some point you asked Canonical to make it free software. Launchpad has been freed in the mean time. Have you (re)considered using it? Why not? After all, it more or less fills in the needs I just described. I still don t really figure out how we could have all Debian material gathered in Rosetta/Launchpad .and also how Debian packagers could easily get localized material back from the framework without changing their development processes. I have always tried to stay neutral wrt Ubuntu. As many people now in Debian, I feel like we have reached a good way to achieve our mutual development. When it comes at localization work, the early days where the everything in Rosetta and translates who wants stanza did a lot of harm to several upstream localization projects is, I think, way over. Many people who currently contribute to D-I localization were indeed sent to me by Ubuntu contributors .and by localizing D-I, apt, debconf, package descriptions, etc., they re doing translation work for Ubuntu as well as for Debian. Let s say I m a Debian user and I want to help translate Debian in my language. I can spend 1 hour per week on this activity. What should I do to start? Several language teams use Debian mailing lists to coordinate their work. If you re lucky enough to be a speaker of one of these languages, try joining debian-l10n-<yourlanguage> and follow what s happening there. Don t try to immediately jump in some translation work. First, participate to peer reviews: comment on others translations. Learn about the team s processes, jargon and habits. Then, progressively, start working on a few translations: you may want to start with translations of debconf templates: they are short, often easy to do. That s perfect if you have few time. If no language team exists for your language, try joining debian-i18n and ask about existing effort for your language. I may be able to point you to individuals working on Debian translations (very often along with other free software translation efforts). If I am not, then you have just been named coordinator for your language :-) I may even ask you if you want to work on translating the Debian Installer. What s the biggest problem of Debian? We have no problems, we only have solutions :-) We are maybe facing a growth problem for a few years. Despite the increased welcoming aspects of our processes (Debian Maintainers), Debian is having hard times in growing. The overall number of active contributors is probably stagnating for quite a while. I m still amazed, however, to see how we can cope with that and still be able to release over the years. So, after all, this is maybe not a problem :-) Many people would point communication problems here. I don t. I think that communication inside the Debian project is working fairly well now. Our famous flame wars do of course still happen from time to time, but what large free software project doesn t have flame wars? In many areas, we indeed improved communication very significantly. I want to take as an example the way the release of squeeze has been managed. I think that the release team did, even more this time, a very significant and visible effort to communicate with the entire project. And the release of squeeze has been a great success in that matter. So, there s nearly nothing that frustrates me in Debian. Even when a random developer breaks my beloved 100% completeness of French translations, I m not frustrated for more than 2 minutes. You re known in the Debian community as the organizer of the Cheese & Wine Party during DebConf. Can you tell us what this is about? This is an interesting story about how things build themselves in Debian. It all started in July 2005, before DebConf 5 in Helsinki. Denis Barbier, Nicolas Fran ois and myself agreed to bring at Debconf a few pieces of French cheese as well as 1 or 2 bottles of French wine and share them with some friends. Thus, we settled an informal meeting in the French room where we invited some fellows: from memory, Benjamin Mako Hill, Hannah Wallach, Matt Zimmermann and Moray Allan. All of us fond of smelly cheese, great wine plus some extra p t home-made by Denis in Toulouse. It finally happened that, by word of mouth, a few dozens of other people slowly joined in that French room and turned the whole thing into an improvized party that more or less lasted for the entire night. The tradition was later firmly settled in 2006, first in Debconf 6 in Mexico where I challenged the French DDs to bring as many great cheese as possible, then during the Debian i18n meeting in Extremadura (Sept 2006) where we reached the highest amount of cheese per participant ever. I think that the Creofonte building in Casar de C ceres hasn t fully recovered from it and is still smelling cheese 5 years after. This party later became a real tradition for DebConf, growing over and over each year. I see it as a wonderful way to illustrate the diversity we have in Debian, as well as the mutual enrichment we always felt during DebConfs. My only regret about it is that it became so big over the years that organizing it is always a challenge and I more and more feel pressure to make it successful. However, over the years, I always found incredible help by DebConf participants (including my own son, last year a moment of sharing which we will both remember for years, i think). And, really, in 2010, standing up on a chair, shouting (because the microphone wasn t working) to thank everybody, was the most emotional moment I had at Debconf 10. Is there someone in Debian that you admire for their contributions? So many people. So, just like it happens in many awards ceremonies, I will be very verbose to thank people, sorry in advance for this. The name that comes first is Joey Hess. Joey is someone who has a unique way to perceive what improvements are good for Debian and a very precise and meticulous way to design these improvements. Think about debconf. It is designed for so long now and still reaching its very specific goal. So well designed that it is the entire basis for Joey s other achievement: designing D-I. Moreover, I not only admire Joey for his technical work, but also for his interaction with others. He is not he loudest person around, he doesn t have to .just giving his point in discussion and, guess what? Most of the time, he s right. Someone I would like to name here, also, is Colin Watson. Colin is also someone I worked with for years (the D-I effect, again ) and, here again, the very clever way he works on technical improvements as well as his very friendly way to interact with others just make it. And, how about you, Rapha l? :-) I m really admirative of the way you work on promoting technical work on Debian. Your natural ability to explain things (as good in English as it is in French) and your motivation to share your knowledge are a great benefit for the project. Not to mention the technical achievements you made with Guillem on dpkg of course! Another person I d like to name here is Steve Langasek. We both maintain samba packages for years and collaboration with him has always been a pleasure. Just like Colin, Steve is IMHO a model to follow when it comes at people who work for Canonical while continuing their involvment in Debian. And, indeed, Steve is so patient with my mistakes and stupid questions in samba packaging that he deserves a statue. We re now reaching the end of the year where Stefano Zacchiroli was the Debian Project Leader. And, no offense intended to people who were DPL before him (all of them being people I consider to be friends of mine), I think he did the best term ever. Zack is wonderful in sharing his enthusiasm about Debian and has a unique way to do it. Up to the very end of his term, he has always been working on various aspects of the project and my only hope is that he ll run again (however, I would very well understand that he wants to go back to his hacking activities!). Hat off, Zack!I again have several other people to name in this Bubulle hall of Fame : Don Armstrong, for his constant work on improving Debian BTS, Margarita Manterola as one of the best successes of Debian Women (and the most geeky honeymoon ever), Denis Barbier and Nicolas Fran ois because i18n need really skilled people, Cyril Brulebois and Julien Cristau who kept X.org packaging alive in lenny and squeeze, Otavio Salvador who never gave up on D-I even when we were so few to care about it. I would like to make a special mention for Frans Pop. His loss in 2010 has been a shock for many of us, and particularly me. Frans and I had a similar history in Debian, both mostly working on so-called non technical duties. Frans has been the best release manager for D-I (no offense intended, at all, to Joey or Otavio .I know that both of them share this feeling with me). His very high involvment in his work and the very meticulous way he was doing it lead to great achievements in the installer. The Installation Guide work was also a model and indeed a great example of non technical work that requires as many skills as more classical technical work. So, and even though he was sometimes so picky and, I have to admit, annoying, that explains why I m still feeling sad and, in some way, guilty about Frans loss. One of my goals for wheezy is indeed to complete some things Frans left unachieved. I just found one in bug #564441: I will make this work reach the archive, benefit our users and I know that Frans would have liked that.
Thank you to Christian for the time spent answering my questions. I hope you enjoyed reading his answers as I did. Subscribe to my newsletter to get my monthly summary of the Debian/Ubuntu news and to not miss further interviews. You can also follow along on Identi.ca, Twitter and Facebook.

7 comments Liked this article? Click here. My blog is Flattr-enabled.

Michal &#268;iha&#345;: Bloating dependencies

It looks like many peoples decided it is right time to bloat my system with stuff I don't use. The first think I did not like when squeeze went out was libpcsclite1 pulling pcsd and hal into my system. This is being solved on two fronts - porting pcsd to udev (in #612971) and disabling libpcslite1 support in wpasupplicant. Both of them being good ideas. What actually drove me to writing this post is today's update, where aptitude suddenly wanted to install whole latex and thus using about 760MiB of extra disk space. I know disk space is supposed to be cheap these days, but it's not that cheap with SSD in notebook. The culprit turned out to be doxygen, which up to now happily lived without single bit of latex, but now needs it (though temporarily according to changelog). I know it is tempting to enable every possible feature in your package, but in same cases it is really not something what most of people would appreciate.

Filed under: Debian English 4 comments Flattr this!

2 March 2011

Craig Small: JFFNMS 0.9.0 release candidate 1 out

The next version of jffnms is nearing completion and is now at Release Candidate 1. Version 0.9.0 has a major amount of work in cleaning up and securing the code. The majority of the work has been in the complete re-write of the engines that do the polling, autodiscovery and consolidation. The parent/child communication has changed as has the way the processes are forked. On the front-end, the requirement to register globals has finally been removed, with the code explicitly specifying and sanitising the variables it requires. This will make it easier to debug problems and make the application webservers more secure. Finally there is better support for High Capacity interface counters and some support for IPv6, meaning you can see how slow ipv6.google.com is from your place. JFFNMS 0.9.0rc1 is available from SourceForge at https://sourceforge.net/projects/jffnms/files/jffnms%20RC/

Ian Wienand: Pyblosxom Recaptcha Plugin

I think maybe the world has moved on from Pyblosxom and, as my logs can attest, spammers seem to have moved on past Recaptcha (even if it is manual). However, maybe there are some other holdouts like myself who will find this plugin useful. In reality, this will do nothing for stopping spam for that I am currently having good luck with Akismet. However, I like that in displaying the captcha it costs the spammers presumably something to crack it so they can even attempt to submit the comment.

Sandro Tosi: MySQL master/slave chain

Have you ever needed to create a MySQL databases replication chain like A->B->C where B is slave of A and master of C? Me neither, until yesterday.

Since it took us about an afternoon to make it works (along with our DBAs, so we're not alone ;)) let's share some knowledge.

A very brief recap of how MySQL replication works:

  1. slave I/O thread connects to the master, gets the new information from the binlog files and stores them in the relay log;
  2. slave SQL thread reads the relay log and applies the changes to the slave database, without changing the slave binlog files.
That said, B replicates correctly from A, but C is unable to replicate from B because B doesn't change its binlog files with updates coming from A, because there's no changes done directly on B.

In order to make the chain works, you need to add the parameter log-slave-updates on B configuration: that will reply the changes from relay log to binlog, and so C will see the changes it needs to correctly replicate.

PS: mysqldump --master-data (executed on the slave server against the master) would help you set up the correct information for replication.

1 March 2011

Michal &#268;iha&#345;: phpMyAdmin translation status

Another week is over and it's time to look again at state of translations for phpMyAdmin 3.4. Compared to last week, there one three translations at 100%, so we now have 12 translations at 100%: But there are still lot of translations which would need some love: You can help make translation to your language better!

Filed under: English Phpmyadmin 0 comments Flattr this!

Rapha&#235;l Hertzog: 5 Free Software To Support With Flattr

Flattr FOSS LogoAnother month and thus another issue of Flattr FOSS. Time flies but Flattr s usage seems to remain relatively strong. I was fearing that people get bored after some time but that does not seem be to the case, my Flattr income does not really drop (it doesn t take off either ;-) ). I get a bit less for dpkg than at the start but a bit more for my blog. Enough babbling, let s go straight to the 5 projects to flattr this month:
  1. Linux Mint (Flattr link) is a Linux distribution based on Debian and Ubuntu that targets home desktop users. I have never tried it (I m too much of an hardcore Debianer) but I ve read several good reviews saying that it works well out of the box with good multimedia support. If you try it out, be sure to pick Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE). :-)
  2. Network Block Device (NBD) user-space support tools (Flattr link) is the set of tools to setup a block device whose content is really on a remote server. It requires support of NBD in the kernel of course. The user space tools are maintained by Debian developer Wouter Verhelst.
  3. Tahoe LAFS (Flattr link) is a filesystem that implements a cloud storage. The data are distributed across multiple servers in such a way that it can continue to work even if one of the servers fails.
  4. Gajim (Flattr link) is a full featured and easy to use Jabber client. If you don t need support of multiple instant messaging protocols, this Jabber client might be a good fit for you.
  5. Aur lien Gateau (Flattr link) is a KDE developer who takes one day per week off his work to work on KDE. He seeks support from the community to compensate for the loss of revenue. Much like me, he has a support page with a complete history of the amount of donations received. I can only sympathize with people who try to live true to their passion good luck Aur lien!
This article is part of the Flattr FOSS project.

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28 February 2011

Michal &#268;iha&#345;: phpMyAdmin theme survey results

The phpMyAdmin survey for new theme is over and it's time to publish results. Today I will show only basic summary, I will dig deeper into the data later. The first question for default theme has quite clear winner: Default theme results As the results are quite persuating, this gives no space to discuss. Next question was about inclusion of additional theme in standard download kit: Number of themes results While two themes still have big majority, people are not that convinced about it. The last question of the survey was which theme should be included as additional in the download kit: Second theme results I think this is most interesting result - while in question about default theme Graphite theme was clearly the second one, in this question people have indicated that Original theme should stay in the download kit. I would like to thank to all 228 people who have participated (the number is low because the survey required email confirmation, but I still think it is better way than thousands of votes which are easily scriptable).

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Kai Wasserb ch: On the unofficial wine-unstable packages on dev.carbon-project.org

I've been building unofficial wine-unstable packages for some time now and the amount of people apparently using them has become noticable (not only traffic-wise). Thus the amount of questions send to me has also risen quite a bit. In this post I try to address most of the questions in the hope it'll help people understand my motives for building these packages and potential pit falls for users. First of all: I'll stop building those packages as soon as Debian has a for my purposes recent enough version in the archives. This is expected to happen soon as most/all of the blocking issues should be sorted out now/soon. See e.g. #557783 for some insight into the problems. It might happen after updated packages are in Debian, that I'll build one version or the other occasionally to test a certain patch or version. The bottom line of this is: don't rely on me to provide always the latest packages. (This, by the way, is also explanation enough to the question, whether I'm going to build the "official" (I consider only those entering Debian's archives official) Debian packages for upstream (WineHQ).) Another question, which is seen every now and then in my inbox, is, whether I could add patch xyz to the packages. The answer is no. I maintain those packages for myself and if you want to use them, you're welcome. If you need another patch applied, just download the source package and add the patch with quilt to the series. When a certain version/build doesn't work for you, you can ask me for help, but please don't expect me to handle "doesn't work" reports like I would handle bug reports for my packages. The wine-unstable packages are for myself and if they work for me, that's all I aim for. Before spreading the word about my packages, make sure, you and those who read your post/message/whatever about my packages understand, that it is generally a very bad idea to install third-party packages, even though I'm a Debian Developer. Make also sure everybody understands that only the source package is signed with my key. Please don't download all packages (binary and source), unless you really need all of them. Please pick the ones, you need and just download them. Even though this might sound like begging, which I'm not, it'd be nice, if you could consider donating (via PayPal) something, to help cover the traffic costs. The traffic for just the wine-unstable packages has risen dramatically in the last few months. Thanks! Now, I hope I've answered most questions, if not, feel free to contact me.

Craig Small: Updating the website

I ve finally got the new website up and running after testing for a while. It has combined the blog and static pages into a single site that hopefully actually works and means I don t have to worry about compiling a site every time I change something. The blog software has been changed from movabletype to wordpress and while the actual migration was straightforward, there was some apache mod_rewrite evilness to update the links. There is probably broken links somewhere. The site is so old now I m not sure of all the links and paths myself. I think I also succeeded in changing the blog without spamming Planet debian with all my old posts, which is a bonus.

26 February 2011

Rapha&#235;l Hertzog: February 2011 wrap up

February has been again a busy month for me. Here s a quick summary of what I did: Multi-Arch work I have spent many days implementing and refining dpkg s Multi-Arch support with Guillem Jover (dpkg co-maintainer) and Steve Langasek (beta-tester of my code ;-) ). Early testers can try what s in my latest pu/multiarch/snapshot/* branch in my personal git repository. A Debian DVD shop I m always exploring new options to fund my Debian work (besides direct donations) and this month with the Debian Squeeze release I saw an opportunity in selling Debian DVD. Nobody provides DVD with included firmwares and quite a few people would like to avoid the SpaceFun theme. So I built unofficial Debian DVDs that integrate firmware and that install a system with the old theme (MoreBlue Orbit). Click here to learn more about my unofficial DVDs. On my blog In my People behind Debian series, I interviewed Mike Hommey (Iceweasel maintainer) and Maximiliam Attems (member of the kernel team). I started a Debian Cleanup Tip series and already published 4 installments: For contributors, I wrote two articles: the first gives a set of (suggested) best practices for sponsoring Debian packages and adapted my article as a patch for the Developers Reference. In the second article, I shared some personal advice for people who are considering participating on Debian mailing list: 7 mistakes to avoid when participating to Debian mailing lists.
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Steve Kemp: IPv6 email

I've been slowly moving towards full IPv6 usage on my main machines for the past few months. My main servers all have IPv6 setup and appropriate DNS records in place. This weekend I configured my mailserver, which is based upon QPSMTPD & exim4, to be available on IPv6 too. Previously it would send mail via IPv6 where appropriate, but only receive mail via IPv4. QPSMTPD I've written about a lot in the past, and indeed I did commercial things with it for a year or two, but in short it is more of an SMTP framework than an actual mailserver. These days I use a small collection of plugins which test incoming mail in various ways, and either: My plugins are pretty simple, but I've made a few changes for the brave new IPv6 world: I reject (+ archive) about 8,000 SPAM messages a day. So far I've seen precisely zero SPAM mails be received via IPv6; though I'm sure that won't last for long! My reject archive looks like this:
steve@steve:~$ tree -d -L 2 /spam/
/spam/
 -- 23
     -- debian-administration.org
     -- mail-scanning.com
     -- steve.org.uk
 -- 24
     -- debian-administration.org
     -- steve.org.uk
 -- 25
     -- debian-administration.org
     -- mail-scanning.com
     -- steve.org.uk
...
 -- 55
     -- debian-administration.org
     -- mail-scanning.com
     -- steve.org.uk
     -- stolen-souls.com
 -- 56
     -- debian-administration.org
     -- steve.org.uk
     -- stolen-souls.com
 -- today -> /spam/56
 -- yesterday -> /spam/55
(Here "N" is the day of the year - Think of this as "date +%j". I rotate such that I keep 32 days of past SPAM mail, for reference/amusement/mistake-catching.) ObQuote: "I am already grown up, I just get older. " - Leon

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