So I was about to configure an FTP server to let a friend upload content for a website... and then I came to my senses and remembered sftp exists. It's supported by the same graphical clients, and avoids me having to figure out SSL certificates and so on. Next problem: we want to both edit the site. Okay, so I create a group, make it the default group for both users... and now I need to set the umask to 002 so that all group members can edit all files. There's no option in the client... Skimming Debian bug #496843 (closed Apr 2010, thanks Colin Watson!) we can set this in sshd_config these days - no need to mess about with wrapper scripts. Very easy:

Subsystem sftp /usr/lib/openssh/sftp-server -u 002

Now all content created through the sftp client is group-writable, and owned by the default group of each user! See 'man (8) sftp-server'.

This week, Google released an extension called BITE which lets you file bug reports from within Chrome (or Chromium). If you are testing web applications, it lets you attach screenshots and/or automated tests to reproduce the bug you've found. There's just one small catch: they haven't released a server to go with the client. Oops. Apparently the internal systems are too tightly integrated to make that possible. I have hacked up enough stubs of a BITE server in Perl to get the client to "log in" and show off some features. (Warning: it doesn't actually do anything useful yet.) So far, I have learnt:

• To get BITE to point at your dev server, you need to edit bite.options.constants.ServerChannelOption in the file src/options/constants.js (as documented on the serverhandlers wiki page) before compiling it.
• To get a bug template to apply to all URLs, you need to use the string 'all' as the URL, which is hardcoded in 'templates.js' in the client.

Note to self: when disabling Range headers in Apache to fix CVE-2011-3192, be sure to read the updated advisory and also disable Request-Range headers. (Presumably not "Range-Request" as in the summary of that link?) Or just apply the handy Debian update, of course.

Some things I have learnt this week at DebConf:

• The cost of living in the UK is much higher than in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
• I feel much better about life when I am being a fun and exciting person, compared to boring and cynical.
• My laptop is not well-suited to travelling - poor battery life, and poor wifi. However, I have mastered the art of taking only hand luggage.

I have quietly resolved to spend more time doing things that I enjoy, that maximise the use of my skills, and which help other people; and spend less time on the opposite. So far, I have tidied up various outstanding commitments that were weighing on my mind, and offered mdbtools for adoption. I started doing some RC bug NMUs again, because on a good day they hit all three of my criteria. Some ideas are already forming in my mind of other things to do, so I shall never be short of tasks.

It feels good to be at DebConf again, this time in Banja Luka. This is my fifth consecutive DebConf. Getting here was fairly painful; a flight from Split was delayed, so I had to get a later bus than planned from Zagreb. Still, I met a bunch of DebConf attendees getting the same bus, so at least there was conversation. Packaging-wise, I have been working on adding KiokuDB (and associated backends) into Debian. I wrote a patch for libossp-uuid-perl yesterday to fix a bug with its Data::UUID compatibility; this probably means I'll drop the Data::UUID ITP. Having looked at the code, I don't see how it can be easily fixed for multi-user systems. The Perl team's forthcoming move to git has come as a pleasant surprise; I've been trying out the new workflow. Earlier in the week I went running with bubulle et. al. - I must have missed the bit in the email where the very steep hill was mentioned. And the rain. So I had to slow down and turn around, and probably didn't quite do 15km in the end. :) Beer is half the price of Coca-Cola here. Awesome. So generally, I've been decompressing, and introspecting. The cafes are good for philosophical discussions; preferably when it's not raining. More later.

I have turned off comments on my blog - there was too much spam, and I'm not planning to invest the time to fix that properly. On the one hand, this is a shame - it removes an opportunity for other people to respond to what I might write. On the other hand, the idea that this was any kind of two-way conversation was always a badly-maintained illusion. I didn't have any kind of notifications set up to tell me when comments arrived; so I rarely read them, and almost never replied. I don't want to build a commercial enterprise or a "community". So for the moment, if you want to get in touch, email me. If you want to respond publically, write your own damn blog post. :)

I have recently finished watching The Prisoner (1967). All the surrealism is messing with my head. In other news, I updated GNU Enscript. Oh, and I filed an ITP for the real Data::UUID, and promptly found a symlink attack which I suspect I failed to disclose responsibly. Hmm. I could write a lot more, but the short version is: I need a holiday.

I mentioned this briefly yesterday, but now I'll try to summarize the story of a great surprise and a big moment for me. All this started when my wife Elizabeth and my son Jean-Baptiste wanted to do something special for my 50th birthday. So, it indeed all started months ago, probably early March or something (I don't yet have all the details). Jean-Baptiste described this well on the web site, so I won't go again into details, but basically, this was about getting birthday wishes from my "free software family" in, as you might guess, as many languages as possible. Elizabeth brought the original idea and JB helped her by setting up the website and collecting e-mail addresses of people I usually work with: he grabbed addresses from PO files on Debian website, plus some in his own set of GPG signatures and here we go. And then he started poking dozens of you folks in order to get your wishes for this birthday. Gradually, contributions accumulated on the website, with many challenges for them: be sure to get as many people as possible, poking and re-poking all those FLOSS people who keep forgetting things... It seems that poking people is something that's probably in the Perrier's genes! And they were doing all this without me noticing. As usually in Debian, releasing on time is a no-no. So, it quickly turned out that having everything ready by April 2nd wouldn't be possible. So, their new goal was offering this to me on Pentecost Sunday, which was yesterday. And...here comes the gift. Aha, this looks like a photo album. Could it be a "50 years of Christian" album? But, EH, why is that pic of me, with the red Debconf5 tee-shirt (that features a world map) and a "bubulle" sign, in front of the book? But, EH EH EH, what the .... are doing these word by H0lger, then Fil, then Joey doing on the following pages? And only then, OMG, I discover the real gift they prepared. 106, often bilingual, wishes from 110 people (some were couples!). 18 postcards (one made of wood). 45 languages. One postcard with wishes from nearly every distro representatives at LinuxTag 2011. Dozens of photos from my friends all around the world. All this in a wonderful album. I can't tell what I said. Anyway, JB was shooting a video, so...we'll see. OK, I didn't cry...but it wasn't that far and emotion was really really intense. Guys, ladies, gentlemen, friends....it took me a while to realize what you contributed to. It took me the entire afternoon to realize the investment put by Elizabeth and JB (and JB's sisters support) into this. Yes, as many of you wrote, I have an awesome family and they really know how to share their love. I also have an awesome virtual family all around the world. Your words are wholeheartedly appreciated and some were indeed much much much appreciated. Of course, I'll have the book in Banja Luka so that you can see the result. I know (because JB and Elizabeth told me) that many of you were really awaiting to see how it would be received (yes, that includes you, in Germany, who I visited in early May!!!). Again, thank you so much for this incredible gift. Thank you Holger Levsen, Phil Hands, Joey Hess, Lior Kaplan, Martin Michlmayr, Alberto Gonzalez Iniesta, Kenshi "best friend" Muto, Praveen Arimbrathodiyil, Felipe Augusto van de Wiel, Ana Carolina Comandulli (5 postcards!), Stefano Zacchiroli (1st contribution received by JB, of course), Gunnar Wolf, Enriiiiiico Zini, Clytie Siddall, Frans Pop (by way of Clytie), Tenzin Dendup, Otavio Salvador, Neil McGovern, Konstantinos Margaritis, Luk Claes, Jonas Smedegaard, Pema Geyleg, Meike "sp tzle queen" Reichle, Alexander Reichle-Schmehl, Torsten Werner, "nette BSD" folks, CentOS Ralph and Brian, Fedora people, SUSE's Jan, Ubuntu's Lucia Tamara, Skolelinux' Paul, Rapha l Hertzog, Lars Wirzenius, Andrew McMillan (revenge in September!), Yasa Giridhar Appaji Nag (now I know my name in Telugu), Amaya Rodrigo, St phane Glondu, Martin Krafft, Jon "maddog" Hall (and God save the queen), Eddy Petri or, Daniel Nylander, Aiet Kolkhi, Andreas "die Katze geht in die K che, wunderbar" Tille, Paul "lets bend the elbow" Wise, Jordi "half-marathon in Banja Luka" Mallach, Steve "as ever-young as I am" Langasek, Obey Arthur Liu, YAMANE Hideki, Jaldhar H. Vyas, Vikram Vincent, Margarita "Bronx cross-country queen" Manterola, Patty Langasek, Aigars Mahinovs (finding a pic *with* you on it is tricky!), Thepittak Karoonboonyanan, Javier "nobody expects the Spanish inquisition" Fern ndez-Sanguino, Varun Hiremath, Moray Allan, David Moreno Garza, Ralf "marathon-man" Treinen, Arief S Fitrianto, Penny Leach, Adam D. Barrat, Wolfgang Martin Borgert, Christine "the mentee overtakes the mentor" Spang, Arjuna Rao Chevala, Gerfried "my best contradictor" Fuchs, Stefano Canepa, Samuel Thibault, Eloy "first samba maintainer" Par s, Josip Rodin, Daniel Kahn Gillmor, Steve McIntyre, Guntupalli Karunakar, Jano Gulja , Karolina Kali , Ben Hutchings, Matej Kova i , Khoem Sokhem, Lisandro "I have the longest name in this list" Dami n Nicanor P rez-Meyer, Amanpreet Singh Alam, H ctor Or n, Hans Nordhaugn, Ivan Mas r, Dr. Tirumurti Vasudevan, John "yes, Kansas is as flat as you can imagine" Goerzen, Jean-Baptiste "Piwet" Perrier, Elizabeth "I love you" Perrier, Peter Eisentraut, Jesus "enemy by nature" Climent, Peter Palfrader, Vasudev Kamath, Miroslav "Chicky" Ku e, Mart n Ferrari, Ollivier Robert, Jure uhalev, Yunqiang Su, Jonathan McDowell, Sampada Nakhare, Nayan Nakhare, Dirk "rendez-vous for Chicago marathon" Eddelbuettel, Elian Myftiu, Tim Retout, Giuseppe Sacco, Changwoo Ryu, Pedro Ribeoro, Miguel "oh no, not him again" Figueiredo, Ana Guerrero, Aur lien Jarno, Kumar Appaiah, Arangel Angov, Faidon Liambotis, Mehdi Dogguy, Andrew Lee, Russ Allbery, Bj rn Steensrud, Mathieu Parent, Davide Viti, Steinar H. Gunderson, Kurt Gramlich, Vanja Cvelbar, Adam Conrad, Armi Be irovi , Nattie Mayer-Hutchings, Joerg "dis shuld be REJECTed" Jaspert and Luca Capello. Let's say it gain:

• Danke
• Thank you
• (RTL or not?) / toda
• Gracias
• / arigat
• / n ndi
• Obrigado
• Grazie
• C m n
• Kadin chey la
• / Efharisto
• Dank je wel
• Tak
• D ngge
• Merci
• Kiitos
• Tika hoki
• / dhanyavaadhamulu
• Thank you and God save the Queen
• Mul umesc
• Tack
• / didi madloba
• Gr cies
• Dakujem
• / Aabhar
• / Dhanyavadagalu
• Paldies
• / kop khun krap
• Terima kasih
• Hvala (hr)
• / Dhanyavad
• / Hvala (sr)
• Hvala (sl)
• / Akun
• / Sukriya
• Takk
• / Nandri
• Maki biyen jianbakik
• D kuji
• / Xiexie
• / Aabhari aahe
• Faleminderit
• / Kam sah ham ni da
• / Blagodaram
• / Xiexie
• Hvala (bs)

The UK government publishes lots of spending data now. Let's do cool stuff! ScraperWiki is one of these new-fangled cloud services, hosting code that scrapes websites. You can throw some python (or ruby, or php) together to download all the CSV files for a department. Google Refine is like a spreadsheet on crack, with features ideal for cleaning up messy data sets. I saw it for the first time at OpenTech 2011 a few weeks ago in London. You can take the government data, clean up the worst typos, and integrate it into the scraperwiki scraper. For bonus marks, throw in a bit of jQuery and Google Charts, and create a dynamically generated pie chart, or maybe a word cloud. There must be more imaginative ways to visualize this... email me if you have any ideas! They interviewed me last week - I must say, that's the first time that's happened, but I'm very flattered. None of the above would exist without the work done by @DataMinerUK et. al., so thank you, everyone.

I mentioned this briefly yesterday, but now I'll try to summarize the story of a great surprise and a big moment for me. All this started when my wife Elizabeth and my son Jean-Baptiste wanted to do something special for my 50th birthday. So, it indeed all started months ago, probably early March or something (I don't yet have all the details). Jean-Baptiste described this well on the web site, so I won't go again into details, but basically, this was about getting birthday wishes from my "free software family" in, as you might guess, as many languages as possible. Elizabeth brought the original idea and JB helped her by setting up the website and collecting e-mail addresses of people I usually work with: he grabbed addresses from PO files on Debian website, plus some in his own set of GPG signatures and here we go. And then he started poking dozens of you folks in order to get your wishes for this birthday. Gradually, contributions accumulated on the website, with many challenges for them: be sure to get as many people as possible, poking and re-poking all those FLOSS people who keep forgetting things... It seems that poking people is something that's probably in the Perrier's genes! And they were doing all this without me noticing. As usually in Debian, releasing on time is a no-no. So, it quickly turned out that having everything ready by April 2nd wouldn't be possible. So, their new goal was offering this to me on Pentecost Sunday, which was yesterday. And...here comes the gift. Aha, this looks like a photo album. Could it be a "50 years of Christian" album? But, EH, why is that pic of me, with the red Debconf5 tee-shirt (that features a world map) and a "bubulle" sign, in front of the book? But, EH EH EH, what the .... are doing these word by H0lger, then Fil, then Joey doing on the following pages? And only then, OMG, I discover the real gift they prepared. 106, often bilingual, wishes from 110 people (some were couples!). 18 postcards (one made of wood). 45 languages. One postcard with wishes from nearly every distro representatives at LinuxTag 2011. Dozens of photos from my friends all around the world. All this in a wonderful album. I can't tell what I said. Anyway, JB was shooting a video, so...we'll see. OK, I didn't cry...but it wasn't that far and emotion was really really intense. Guys, ladies, gentlemen, friends....it took me a while to realize what you contributed to. It took me the entire afternoon to realize the investment put by Elizabeth and JB (and JB's sisters support) into this. Yes, as many of you wrote, I have an awesome family and they really know how to share their love. I also have an awesome virtual family all around the world. Your words are wholeheartedly appreciated and some were indeed much much much appreciated. Of course, I'll have the book in Banja Luka so that you can see the result. I know (because JB and Elizabeth told me) that many of you were really awaiting to see how it would be received (yes, that includes you, in Germany, who I visited in early May!!!). Again, thank you so much for this incredible gift. Thank you Holger Levsen, Phil Hands, Joey Hess, Lior Kaplan, Martin Michlmayr, Alberto Gonzalez Iniesta, Kenshi "best friend" Muto, Praveen Arimbrathodiyil, Felipe Augusto van de Wiel, Ana Carolina Comandulli (5 postcards!), Stefano Zacchiroli (1st contribution received by JB, of course), Gunnar Wolf, Enriiiiiico Zini, Clytie Siddall, Frans Pop (by way of Clytie), Tenzin Dendup, Otavio Salvador, Neil McGovern, Konstantinos Margaritis, Luk Claes, Jonas Smedegaard, Pema Geyleg, Meike "sp tzle queen" Reichle, Alexander Reichle-Schmehl, Torsten Werner, "nette BSD" folks, CentOS Ralph and Brian, Fedora people, SUSE's Jan, Ubuntu's Lucia Tamara, Skolelinux' Paul, Rapha l Hertzog, Lars Wirzenius, Andrew McMillan (revenge in September!), Yasa Giridhar Appaji Nag (now I know my name in Telugu), Amaya Rodrigo, St phane Glondu, Martin Krafft, Jon "maddog" Hall (and God save the queen), Eddy Petri or, Daniel Nylander, Aiet Kolkhi, Andreas "die Katze geht in die K che, wunderbar" Tille, Paul "lets bend the elbow" Wise, Jordi "half-marathon in Banja Luka" Mallach, Steve "as ever-young as I am" Langasek, Obey Arthur Liu, YAMANE Hideki, Jaldhar H. Vyas, Vikram Vincent, Margarita "Bronx cross-country queen" Manterola, Patty Langasek, Aigars Mahinovs (finding a pic *with* you on it is tricky!), Thepittak Karoonboonyanan, Javier "nobody expects the Spanish inquisition" Fern ndez-Sanguino, Varun Hiremath, Moray Allan, David Moreno Garza, Ralf "marathon-man" Treinen, Arief S Fitrianto, Penny Leach, Adam D. Barrat, Wolfgang Martin Borgert, Christine "the mentee overtakes the mentor" Spang, Arjuna Rao Chevala, Gerfried "my best contradictor" Fuchs, Stefano Canepa, Samuel Thibault, Eloy "first samba maintainer" Par s, Josip Rodin, Daniel Kahn Gillmor, Steve McIntyre, Guntupalli Karunakar, Jano Gulja , Karolina Kali , Ben Hutchings, Matej Kova i , Khoem Sokhem, Lisandro "I have the longest name in this list" Dami n Nicanor P rez-Meyer, Amanpreet Singh Alam, H ctor Or n, Hans Nordhaugn, Ivan Mas r, Dr. Tirumurti Vasudevan, John "yes, Kansas is as flat as you can imagine" Goerzen, Jean-Baptiste "Piwet" Perrier, Elizabeth "I love you" Perrier, Peter Eisentraut, Jesus "enemy by nature" Climent, Peter Palfrader, Vasudev Kamath, Miroslav "Chicky" Ku e, Mart n Ferrari, Ollivier Robert, Jure uhalev, Yunqiang Su, Jonathan McDowell, Sampada Nakhare, Nayan Nakhare, Dirk "rendez-vous for Chicago marathon" Eddelbuettel, Elian Myftiu, Tim Retout, Giuseppe Sacco, Changwoo Ryu, Pedro Ribeoro, Miguel "oh no, not him again" Figueiredo, Ana Guerrero, Aur lien Jarno, Kumar Appaiah, Arangel Angov, Faidon Liambotis, Mehdi Dogguy, Andrew Lee, Russ Allbery, Bj rn Steensrud, Mathieu Parent, Davide Viti, Steinar H. Gunderson, Kurt Gramlich, Vanja Cvelbar, Adam Conrad, Armi Be irovi , Nattie Mayer-Hutchings, Joerg "dis shuld be REJECTed" Jaspert and Luca Capello. Let's say it gain:

• Danke
• Thank you
• (RTL or not?) / toda
• Gracias
• / arigat
• / n ndi
• Obrigado
• Grazie
• C m n
• Kadin chey la
• / Efharisto
• Dank je wel
• Tak
• D ngge
• Merci
• Kiitos
• Tika hoki
• / dhanyavaadhamulu
• Thank you and God save the Queen
• Mul umesc
• Tack
• / didi madloba
• Gr cies
• Dakujem
• / Aabhar li> / Dhanyavadagalu
• Paldies
• / kop khun krap
• Terima kasih
• Hvala (hr)
• / Dhanyavad
• / Hvala (sr)
• Hvala (sl)
• / Akun
• / Sukriya
• Takk
• / Nandri
• Maki biyen jianbakik
• D kuji
• / Xiexie
• / Aabhari aahe
• Faleminderit
• / Kam sah ham ni da
• / Blagodaram
• / Xiexie
• Hvala (bs)

I've been promoted - my job title will now be 'Software Architect'. This seems to mean I'll be writing documents rather than code - any higher-level, and I'd need Mark Shuttleworth's spacesuit. Is this a good thing? Anyway, I celebrated by opening my last bottle of Debian wine. <spam>Unfortunately, I can't take up my new role until we have hired a replacement. UK-based developers who know Perl and ideally PostgreSQL might want to look at the job description, although I'd recommend sending your CV and covering letter to me directly. I don't get a referral bonus, it's just that I don't like what that agency does with your carefully-crafted application.</spam> I'd like to thank everyone who maintains LaTeX for their assistance in this matter. In other news, I'm studying a couple of Open University courses part-time - one on software development (i.e. UML), and one on interaction design. They're going well so far - I've had a couple of tutorials, and the first part of an assignment came back with good marks. I've been reading the Lean Software Development books by Mary and Tom Poppendieck. They seem to put Agile development into a 'respectable' historical context of similar improvements in manufacturing, which might be useful for persuading project managers.

A new release of Gnash, version 0.8.9, is due in the near future. Plenty of bugs have been fixed, but some users are still going to have problems playing YouTube videos. Here's a short explanation. At some point last year, YouTube started setting HTTP cookies in your web browser, to keep track of which of their video servers is nearest to your machine. This lets them provide a better experience for you (I guess). Here's a diagram of what goes on in your browser: As of Gnash 0.8.8, a workaround was added, calling an NPAPI function NPN_GetValueForURL to ask the web browser for the relevant cookies. New diagram: The downside is that this function was only added in NPAPI version 1.9. This means:

• Only the NPAPI plugin has this workaround, not any of the other gnash plugins (e.g. the native kparts one for Konqueror).
• While most browsers do implement NPAPI, not all of them have been updated to include this newer function yet. So the versions of Epiphany and Chromium shipped in Debian at the time of writing do not work with gnash/YouTube as far as I am aware (but Webkit has fixed this upstream).

What does Adobe's plugin do? I imagine it's something like the following: So, the good news is, this problem should almost certainly get fixed over the coming Debian release cycle, if only because all the browsers will get updated. In the meantime, disabling cookies (and removing stale ones from YouTube) is a workaround.

My employer moved offices to Park Gate about a year ago - there's a coffee/sandwich place just down the road, which I generally walk past to get my lunch. And it's got a sign outside: I can't believe I didn't notice that swirl sooner. It will join my picture of the FreeBSD naughty toys machine from DebConf7. In other news, Debian squeeze is being released as I write this. It's been a fun two years. :) Also currently happening is FOSDEM - this is the second year I've missed it, so I reckon I'll make an effort for next year. Instead, today I was at a choral workshop with the Soton Phil, which was really good fun - especially when we danced (yes) through the Osanna from Mozart's Mass in C Minor.

My paternal grandmother died a month ago today - I may have been quieter than usual since December. The most vivid memory I have of her is helping to collect runner beans from her garden - apparently this had been going on since the World War II "dig for victory" campaign. Her funeral was in Hastings on 10th January, and she was buried in Fairlight, in the Roman Catholic area of St. Andrew's - it was a very peaceful setting.

If anyone mentions Dropbox to me one more time, I will scream. I'm sure it's a wonderful solution, but I have deep misgivings about handing my data over to someone I don't trust. Besides, my synchronisation needs are not that complicated. Here are my high-level requirements:

1. Two way synchronisation between multiple clients and a central server.
2. Automatic syncs - no requirement for manual triggering.
3. Graceful handling of network outages, suspends, etc.
4. If using ssh, running from within my X session (so that it can access my ssh-agent)
5. Some assurance that my data will not be passed to other people (e.g. by running everything on servers I control, or encrypting all the data with keys only I hold)
6. Regular backups of the central data.

I've been playing about with several ideas - I know some people try to do this sort of thing with git, but I don't have a need for version control right at the moment, and merging conflicts could be far too complicated. I did hack together a script involving lsyncd and NetworkManager's dbus signals, but then realised that synchronising in the other direction would need something quite different, and it was getting a bit out of hand by that point. So my current favourite is actually GNOME's Conduit project. It ticks almost all of the boxes (apart from the backups, which should be simple to put together). There are some rough edges - the author has tried to delegate the minor detail that it's accessing an SFTP share entirely to GIO. But GVFS shares are not mounted automatically by Conduit - so I would have to browse to the remote folder in Nautilus before any synching would happen in each session. Bad. But looking at how Conduit is used, I don't agree with hiding the nature of the remote folder from the user. By all means use GIO to perform the mechanics of SSH and so on, but the user surely thinks of the remote server as something different to a local folder? So from a UI perspective, this should be made explicit. After all, the user has to deal with it at some level by switching to Nautilus to set up the connection. And since I cannot find an SFTP plugin for Conduit anywhere, this still leaves me in the unfortunate position of having to write code if I want a nice solution. Bah, humbug.

For those who are not aware, The Archers is a soap opera about rural life, broadcast on BBC Radio 4. Its website has recently been revamped. Unfortunately, I appear to be served the mobile version when I visit the front page (in all of Chromium, Iceweasel and Epiphany on Debian - admittedly not the most mainstream of browsers). BBC Mobile is doing some over-zealous useragent sniffing, it seems. Also amusing: there's a "Who's Who" database of Archers characters, and several of them share the birthday "1st Jan 1970". There was I thinking that Harry Mason and Fallon Rogers had a 15 year age gap... but no. This will be as a result of the underlying database storing values in Unix time, and having a default value of "0". An explanation of Unix time popped up in an episode of The Infinite Monkey Cage the other week, which was nice to hear.

Mwahahahaa, just a few moments ago, my local copy of gnash actually got past the RTMP handshake, and got a response from iPlayer. I need to be at work in around 8 hours, though, so no time to push this until tomorrow... and it needs some cleanup. Obviously, no audio has yet been played. Don't be silly.

Having studied librtmp over the weekend, it doesn't drop into gnash as neatly as I'd hoped. Gnash already has classes to implement NetConnection and NetStream, which it makes sense to use - but librtmp is designed to replace the need for such classes to exist. So it implements certain higher-level responses to various calls from the server, that are necessary when downloading a stream. Gnash probably needs to hook in instead, and let the flash application decide what to do in these cases. So more work required, and possibly changes to librtmp in future - but I've started fixing up Gnash's RTMP code instead, for now, and have sent a couple of initial patches to Savannah. I don't think YouTube exercises these code paths, so they're a little rusty - I hope to make more progress through the week.

Of course, now everyone wants to hate Flattr, and ban its buttons from Planet Debian. You can't coerce effectively over a network connection - unless you wave the DMUP at them. It's an interesting exercise to square this approach with the promise at the heart of free software - freedom. We let people sell our software for a profit; we're a billion-dollar industry now. (Red Hat alone is worth $1bn.) That's before we start counting the money made by the businesses whose servers rely on us. But a developer advertising for 25 per month in donations? They must be banned! We need those buttons - how else should I deduct reputation points from those who want us to pay a tithe to a third party? :)

So I studied the SWF 8 iPlayer a little - there are some simple rendering issues with Gnash that I'd like to come back to, but the biggest problem is obviously the media not playing. Looking at the network requests, wireshark says something about malformed packets - Gnash is getting as far as making RTMP requests, but the connection dies pretty quickly. My working theory is that there is a bug in the Gnash RTMP client code. This code was forked from rtmpdump, and has since been converted from C to C++, and a whole bunch of other stuff. It's quite possible that there is some change deep in the code which hasn't been copied back into Gnash - therefore, it makes sense to get Gnash building against librtmp properly, which is now a separate library. This, of course, means actually writing code. Eurgh. I try to avoid that when I can, but sometimes it is inevitable. :) When writing larger changes, I find it takes me longer to get acquainted with the existing code base - in this case, two code bases, since I have to understand librtmp at some level, as well. I'm not expecting to produce anything before the weekend, which is frustrating. It is also risky to write about stuff before you have completed it, because it can be a very public failure if you don't manage it!