I am now back home after 2 days spent at the first mini DebConf Paris. It was really nice to meet a lot of people, and to be able to discuss various aspects of Debian and Free Software in general. People came from all over Europe (at least from the UK, Spain, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Greece, and obviously a majority of French people). All the talks I have been able to attend were really interesting, and some of the slides have already been made available by their author:

• Debian and Ubuntu by Lucas Nussbaum
• Debian Quality Assurance by Lucas Nussbaum
• Latest features of dpkg-dev by Rapha l Hertzog
• Smart cards in Debian by Ludovic Rousseau

I have also taken part to the keysigning party, which will now allows me to use my newly generated 4096R key. The group picture is also online, as well as a more comprehensive gallery. Thanks a lot to the organisation team, you guys have made an awesome work! See you all next year!

Story I bought Xperia X10i this summer during DebConf10 in NYC, I loved this phone from very beginning however what bothered me was that it was still stuck on outdated Android 1.6. To get your own custom Android on it, wasn t quite possible because no one managed to hack bootloader even though some of the guys at XDA where getting pretty close. Long story made short, Sony Ericsson has finally release their Android 2.1 update, but made it available only for Nordic region, they explained it all on their blog where they also sent a message for paranoid users as they called them. I thought, if I gave it all this time I can wait a little bit longer, but then one of my friends (@sahinovic) gave me a good pointer to go in right direction with using custom ROM, Nordic for example? So this is where I got my idea. I want 2.1 update now! Please note steps below will get you Android 2.1 update, but AFAIK you ll also lose your warranty 1. Root your phone If you don t have your phone rooted, this can now be done in single click. Get X10 Root and follow instructions on screen. 2. Edit system/default.prop Get Root Explorer, mount r/w (upper right corner), edit system/default.prop Lines you re concentrating on are 1 and 3 Let s say they are:

ro.semc.version.cust=1237-0333
ro.product.name=X10_1237-0333

Edit them to look like:

ro.semc.version.cust=1234-8465
ro.product.name=X10_1234-8465

Save the file and it s gonna create automatic backup of original file. 3. Get the updates using SEUS Turn off your phone, launch SEUS, plugin in the USB cable while holding back button, SEUS is going to tell you have updates for your phone Follow on screen instructions. Enjoy the update Conclusion X10 is a pretty sweet phone, but with it being so closed, it also closes a lot of doors to hacking it and playing with it, great example would be this update itself, since right now Android 2.1 update is an outdated one. However 2.1 update brings new life into it, just as it s a brand new phone, it s more responsive and much much faster. And do take a backup before this update, because I lost everything from my contacts to internet settings, but all files on my sd card remained intact. If you want to discuss anything regarding this topic please do so in comment area below or find me on Twitter.

I'm just back home after Paris mini-DebConf. I'm happy, excited, and exhausted almost as if it had been a full fledged DebConf. That's enough in my book to consider the event a complete success. As far as I know, it has been the first mini-DebConf held in Paris and about 150 people have come to attend the event from all over Europe. Off the top of my head I've met friends from at least: Spain, UK, France (obviously!), Italy, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Greece. I'm still very much impressed by such a diverse attendance. Initially, I had planned the first "DPL strike" ever (i.e. not doing anything DPL-related) for the duration of the conference, in order to take part into the BSP. That agenda has been pretty much subverted by a last minute emergency, by chatting with loads of people, and by actually finalizing the Debian Sprint Program, which had been at the top of my Debian TODO list for quite a while now. Nonetheless, I've managed to advance a bit on a couple of RC bugs, which belong to the "annoying/pointless/but-still-valid" category. They are not solved yet, but I hope to have good news to share soon. Bottom line: I loved the event. and I've even managed to avoid getting killed by my (local) family for taking part in a Debian-weekend after an almost full week of Debian traveling, which is another success on its own right Closing advice: beside some last minute legwork, I did essentially nothing to organize this mini-DebConf, your kudos should be better directed to Carl Chenet and Mehdi Dogguy for the organization. Other gifts such as bug fixes can be directed to the speakers, sponsors, and loads of other helpers from Debian France and not in particular Xavier Oswald, Valessio Brito, Tanguy Ortolo, Nattie Mayer-Hutchings, Luca Capello, Stephane Glondu, and others which surely I'm forgetting to mention here (sorry about that). Kudos folks ... let's do it again next year! (SCNR)

I m experiencing since some time (out of the blue) spontaneous reboots of some of my dom0s on lenny/i386 (others don t have this effect). As result of this, I started rolling out linux-image-2.6.32-bpo.5-xen-686 from bpo and backported xen and xen-common from testing:

# dpkg -l grep xen grep bpo
ii libxenstore3.0 4.0.1-1~bpo50+1 Xenstore communications library for Xen
ii linux-image-2.6.32-bpo.5-xen-686 2.6.32-26~bpo50+1 Linux 2.6.32 for modern PCs, Xen dom0 suppor
ii xen-hypervisor-4.0-i386 4.0.1-1~bpo50+1 The Xen Hypervisor on i386
ii xen-linux-system-2.6.32-bpo.5-xen-686 2.6.32-26~bpo50+1 Xen system with Linux 2.6.32 on modern PCs (
ii xen-tools 4.1-1~bpo50+1 Tools to manage Debian XEN virtual servers
ii xen-utils-4.0 4.0.1-1~bpo50+1 XEN administrative tools
ii xen-utils-common 4.0.0-1~bpo50+1 XEN administrative tools common files
ii xenstore-utils 4.0.1-1~bpo50+1 Xenstore utilities for Xen This fixed the problem of spontaneous reboots for all of the systems I have migrated . until now! Last week I tried this solution on my private system and it failed in some way.

A full dump of the syslog is also available. It looks like /etc/rcS.d/S03udev is hanging in some way .. the syslog for this looks like:

Oct 29 20:51:07 mordor kernel: [ 17.728120] Code: 04 00 00 00 00 83 3c 24 10 74 32 77 0c 83 3c 24 08 0f 85 9f 00 00 00 eb 12 83 3c 24 20 74 30 83 3c 24 40 0f 85 8d 00 00 00 eb 35 <0f> b6 01 8b 54 24 20 89 02 c7 42 04 00 00 00 00 eb 79 0f b7 01
Oct 29 20:51:07 mordor kernel: [ 17.731554] EIP: [<c1184d4c>] acpi_ex_system_memory_space_handler+0 189/0 221 SS:ESP 0069:ec135d74
Oct 29 20:51:07 mordor kernel: [ 17.731791] CR2: 00000000eda86000
Oct 29 20:51:07 mordor kernel: [ 17.731881] [ end trace 7b8af581772a1c55 ]
Oct 29 20:51:07 mordor kernel: [ 18.116622] input: PC Speaker as /devices/platform/pcspkr/input/input6
Oct 29 20:51:07 mordor kernel: [ 18.427607] Error: Driver pcspkr is already registered, aborting
Oct 29 20:51:07 mordor kernel: [ 232.381814] Adding 10000452k swap on /dev/sda2. Priority:-1 extents:1 across:10000452k The dom0 is there hanging in some way I don t have an exact way to get the system proceed from there usually I need to wait some seconds and pressing ^C after a while will get the box up.
Anyways I remember there are some problems with udev >= 150 and older kernels, which is also documented in the squeeze release notes. Maybe there is also a problem with older udev and newer kernels? But why is this combination working on other systems? Booting linux-image-2.6.32-bpo.5-686 works without any issue anyways, so it seems xen related. Any idea is appreciated!
UPDATE: I ve also reported this via #602109.

It turns out that pdfedit is pretty good at extracting text from pdf files. Here is a script I wrote to do that in batch mode.

#!/bin/sh
# Print the text from a pdf document on stdout
# Copyright: (c) 2006-2010 PDFedit team  <http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfedit>
# Copyright: (c) 2010, David Bremner <david@tethera.net>
# Licensed under version 2 or later of the GNU GPL
set -e
if [ $# -lt 1 ]; then
    echo usage: $0 file [pageSep]
    exit 1
fi
#!/bin/sh
# Print the text from a pdf document on stdout
# Copyright:   2006-2010 PDFedit team  <http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfedit>
# Copyright:   2010, David Bremner <david@tethera.net>
# Licensed under version 2 or later of the GNU GPL
set -e
if [ $# -lt 1 ]; then
    echo usage: $0 file [pageSep]
    exit 1
fi
/usr/bin/pdfedit -console -eval '
function onConsoleStart()  
    var inName = takeParameter();
    var pageSep = takeParameter();
    var doc = loadPdf(inName,false);

    pages=doc.getPageCount();
    for (i=1;i<=pages;i++)  
        pg=doc.getPage(i);
        text=pg.getText();
        print(text);
        print("\n");
        print(pageSep);
     
 
' $1 $2

Yeah, I wish #!/usr/bin/pdfedit worked too. Thanks to Aaron M Ucko for pointing out that -eval could replace the use of a temporary file. Oh, and pdfedit will be even better when the authors release a new version that fixes truncating wide text

Today I forgetfully left my USB drive at home when I took off for a night at the yurt. This has happened before and generally involves staring at an scp for rather too long, probably getting low on battery power in the process, and is followed by not quite having files in the places I expect and forgetting to delete them from my small laptop SSD later. With git-annex those annoyances can go away. So I wanted a couple of gigabytes of files that were left at home behind a slightly slow link. Rather than scp them to my laptop for several hours, I just did a quick ssh into a server, and browsed through my stuff there, running git annex get $foo & on files and directories I wanted. Then went to eat dinner and play board games while the content was scped across the slow link from home. Now I can quickly download it all to my laptop from that fast server (named "finch"), like this:

git pull
git annex move . --from finch

That removes the data from the server too, freeing its space back up for next time. And the files are in their regular places on my laptop, automatically. And I can simply git annex drop . when I need that space back without worrying about losing any data. (Hmm, this feels a little bit like it did to switch from doing everything by hand with dpkg to using apt-get..)

I disabled my Facebook account about a month ago. See the blog post when I started my Facebook hiatus for the reasons. Now, almost one month into my hiatus, I must say that it has been surprisingly easy. While I do think I probably missed some interesting things my friends are doing (or maybe even did not get invited to some parties; a lot of things are Facebook-only nowadays, unfortunately) I do have the impression that I have much more spare time and that I'm more productive. To my most important friends (in particular my girlfriend of course) I've been keeping my contact out of Facebook anyway, so I didn't lose anything there. So essentially I'm continuing my Facebook hiatus for an indefinite amount of time. I just wonder how to inform my Facebook friends that are expecting my back anytime soon ... and I do hope they'll at some point realize that some of their friends are not on Facebook by choice, but still deserve to be invited to parties and such.

Another month ending and you still have some clicks left on flattr.com? How about these then?

• newsbeuter the mutt of RSS feedreaders
  Newsbeuter is an open-source RSS/Atom feed reader for text terminals. It runs on Linux, FreeBSD, Mac OS X and other Unix-like operating systems. Newsbeuter s great configurability and vast number of features make it a perfect choice for people that need a slick and fast feed reader that can be completely controlled via keyboard.
  I m using newsbeuter as my main rss reader on the PC (but I have to admit, I read more feeds on my Android while traveling and not working at the PC).
• SparkleShare Sharing work made easy
  SparkleShare shines by its absence. Unlike other syncing tools it s designed to get out of your way, to make sharing documents and collaboration easier, and to make peers aware of what you are doing.
  Haven t used it myself yet, but it looks like a superb replacement for Dropbox in the future.
• Gajim
  Gajim is a full featured and easy to use Jabber client. It is available under Linux and Window. Some features it supports: chat, groupchat, bookmarks, file transfer, link-local connection, metacontacts, secure connection, audio / video chat,
  Yes, I use screen+irssi+BitlBee much, but Gajim still deserves love as it is open the whole day too (don t ask me why).
• Mixxx 1.8.1
  Mixxx is free, open source software for performing live DJ mixes. Developed by a diverse community of DJs, Mixxx is a complete replacement for a conventional turntables and mixer DJ setup, and is available for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. Mixxx 1.8.0 includes a year s worth of contributions from over 30 developers and artists, and is our most exciting release to date. This release includes much anticipated features such as looping, hot cues, support for multiple MIDI devices, and a brand new database-powered library. Check out the full list of changes on our blog: http://mixxxblog.blogspot.com/2010/10/mixxx-180-released.html Money collected through this Flattr account goes to directly support Mixxx development. Show some love!
  Awesome DJing software for the OpenDJs out there (I m still learning).
• mentors.debian.net Helps you get your packages into Debian
  Only approved members of the Debian project so-called Debian Developers are granted the permission to upload software packages into the Debian distribution. Still a large number of packages is maintained by non-official developers. mentors.debian.net helps them to find a sponsor to get their packages into Debian.
  Yeah, I am DD, but many others are not and mentors.d.n helps them to get their stuff checked and uploaded. Thanks for the time before my key got almighty ;)

Again, all non-italics text is stolen directly from flattr, and please forgive me if I recommend some thing that hasn t been officialy announced yet :)

So the four days are up. What do I have to show for it? Well I am declaring victory because S.Y.T.Y.C.D...OMG? is playable. There is a long way to go before one would actually want to play it though. I had to take out doors, AI, the level boss and levels for that matter. FOV is kind of erratic. But you can fight, take, and quaff things and the dungeon is nicely laid out (except for doors.) So that's good for something right? I will add all the other good stuff as time passes.

Three thousand lines of code is not a huge program, but it is enough to get a pretty good feel for a language. Now that I've completed my first real Haskell program I feel that I've gotten over several of the humps in the learning curve and am starting to get a good feel for it. Actually, I've written closer to five thousand lines, since there were several big refactorings. One was when I stopped manually threading my program state around and added a StateT monad. I did know from the beginning I would need one, but it seemed easier and a better learning exercise to let the program start out with a vesigial tail and gills before growing up into a modern Haskell program. (I suppose it's still written in baby-Haskell, really..) Another refactoring came when I realized I needed to use a custom data type, not String, to represent keys. That was a great experience in type-based refactoring. Being able to keep typing ':make' and landing on the next bit of code that needed fixing was great, and simply adding that one type exposed several non-obvious bugs. I found myself writing code that is much more solid and reusable than normally comes easily. And yet it's also very malleable. Actually, pulling out better data types and abstractions can get a bit addictive. When I realized that I had a similar three-stage control flow being used for each of git-annex's subcommands, and factored that control flow out into a function that used the 3 data types below, I felt I'd gone down that rabbit hole perhaps far enough for now.

type SubCmdStart = String -> Annex (Maybe SubCmdPerform)
type SubCmdPerform = Annex (Maybe SubCmdCleanup)
type SubCmdCleanup = Annex Bool

(That will allow for some nice parallelism later though, and removed dozens of lines of code, so was worth it.) Since git-annex is a very Real World Haskell type program, there is a lot of impure code in it. I could probably do better at factoring out more pure code. I count 117 impure functions, and only 37 pure. Anyhow, from my perspective of a long-time perl programmer, some other random impressions..

• ghc --make is handy, but every time it spits out a new 13 mb executable I can feel my laptop's SSD groan!
• It was surpisingly easy to get into nasty situations with recursive dependencies between the 19 haskell modules I wrote. Sometimes solving them was really messy. I lost hours to this. More time than I've lost to the problem in all other languages combined over 15 years. It's not clear to me if it was due to the overall design of my program, or if Haskell's types tend to encourage this problem. Or if there's some simple "please let me have recursive dependencies" switch to ghc that I missed..
• I'm used to being able to use man to get at mutiple books worth of detailed documentation for perl, and work easily offline or with limited bandwidth. With Haskell, I spend much more time searching online for documentation than I an comfortable with (although Hoogle is pretty neat). And the haddock-produced documentation is often pretty sketchy. The saving grace is that the source to any library function is a click away, and tends to be very readable.
• I'm used to being able to use pretty much any Unix syscall by name from perl: mkdir, chmod, rename, etc. In Haskell, there is a Windows smell to the names, like createDirectoryIfMissing and setPermissions. And there are pointless distinctions like renameFile vs renameDirectory. These long names are not memorable and I have to look them up every time. Most of POSIX is available, but it's scattered amoung many disparate libraries, and I can't find an interface for sysconf(3) at all. There is a certian temptation, that I am so far resisting, to make a library for C/perl refugees that exports the sane Unix names for everything.
• Anything involving the IO monad, or probably most monads, has a certian level of syntactic clumsiness about it. Compare:

  if ($flag foo  && length $l = <>)  
  

  vs

  foo <- getFlag "foo"
  l <- getLine
  if (foo && not $ null l)
      then do
  

  When writing lots of impure code, that got old, and while I could use ifM, or make up some other similar thing, its syntax would also be somewhat clumsy.
• The fixity levels for a lot of stuff seems a bit off. I too often found myself writing error $ "foo: " ++ (show bar) or return $ Just $ ... (Still a lot better than Scheme thanks to $!)
• I've leveled up a couple times now, but this particular video game seems to have more levels going up and up, forever. Can't even see the top from here!

First there was mr, then etckeeper. Now git-annex completes my triptych of software tools that use git in ways that were never intended. Git's original tagline was "the stupid content tracker". Git-annex inverts that, by managing files with git, without checking their contents into git. While that may seem paradoxical, it is useful when dealing with files larger than git can currently easily handle, whether due to limitations in memory, checksumming time, or disk space. I've been working on git-annex for two weeks, and have been trusting my data to it for a week. Not a little data, but terabytes spread amoung multiple archival drives, file servers, laptops, and portable USB drives. In situations too complex for unison or rsync to be of much use. Applying git to this problem in an unconventional way has simplified things enormously. At this point it should be very usable, and solid. A package will be uploaded to Debian shortly; or git clone it.

First there was mr, then etckeeper. Now git-annex completes my triptych of software tools that use git in ways that were never intended. Git's original tagline was "the stupid content tracker". Git-annex inverts that, by managing files with git, without checking their contents into git. While that may seem paradoxical, it is useful when dealing with files larger than git can currently easily handle, whether due to limitations in memory, checksumming time, or disk space. I've been working on git-annex for two weeks, and have been trusting my data to it for a week. Not a little data, but terabytes spread amoung multiple archival drives, file servers, laptops, and portable USB drives. In situations too complex for unison or rsync to be of much use. Applying git to this problem in an unconventional way has simplified things enormously. At this point it should be very usable, and solid. A package will be uploaded to Debian shortly; or git clone it.

The following program, compiled with clang 1.1, runs 500 times faster than the gcc4.5-compiled code (in both cases with -O2):

#include <stdio.h>
#define len 1000000000L
unsigned long f(unsigned long a, unsigned long b) __attribute__((noinline));
int main()
 
    printf("%lu\n", f(0, 2*len));
    return 0;
 
unsigned long f(unsigned long a, unsigned long b)
 
    unsigned long sum = 0;
    for (; a < b; a++)
        sum += a;
    return sum;
 

Now, I would be interested to see what s happening here. I took a look at the assembler code both compilers create, but the only thing I found out so far is that gcc s assembly is easier to understand 50 lines (gcc) vs 134 lines (clang). If someone knows the answer, please tell me. Also see http://lwn.net/Articles/411776/ for a C++ version that calls f() via boost::thread. Update: I also reported a bug at http://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=46186.
Filed under: General

As requested by our beloved leader, here s my report on this year s Google Summer of Code 2010 Mentor Summit. The summit took place in Google s HQ in Mountain View, California and was what they call an unconference . In the beginning of the unconference the attendees had 10 minutes to write down proposals for a session and put them on a huge white board. After that, every attendee voted for the sessions in which he was interested by putting a small sticker on the proposal. This way we could evaluate the interest on a specific topic and schedule the sessions to the differently sized rooms according to their interest. Neat trick! The the rest of the summit was basically like a conference: we had 11 tracks filled with 5-6 sessions per day, which ran from 10:00 to 17:30. Google provided shuttle buses from our wonderful hotel to the googleplex in the morning and back to the hotel in the evening. The hotel was very nice, it was equipped a swimming pool and a hot tub (both outside), which was extensively used in the morning and of course during the night. Speaking of the night, Google sponsored Thai food in the first night and ye olde Pizza and Beer in the second. Some of the attendees brought their keyboard, guitar, bass and electric clarinet, and where playing some sweet ass Jazz and Pop (on special request ). The sessions itself where not quite what I expected. I expected some proper talks about specific topics, but it was more like and open discussion round where everyone was invited to participate. For some topics it worked pretty well, for others not. It was still totally worth coming, since you meet a lot of like minded people and there is plenty stuff to talk about. Of course I was very exited to see the googleplex. And the rumors are true: the googleplex seems to be a very nice place to work. They provide free breakfast, lunch and dinner for their employees. They have micro kitchens everywhere where you can grab free snacks and beverages. There are lot s of toys lying around, they have bicycles everywhere on the campus which you can just grab to move from one building to another. There is a dinosaur on the yard, a spaceship over the stairwell and lots of other things (testing on the toilet, anyone?), and we have probably only seen a small fraction, since we were not allowed to leave the restricted areas for the unconference. Despite the horrible yet lag (leaving Germany on Friday morning and leaving San Francisco on Sunday night), I m glad I was able to attend to the summit and can only recommend aspiring mentors and students to participate to the next summer of code!

I didn t quite believe what I was seeing until I searched and found several other people noticing the same behaviour. For background, Facebook recently introduced the concept of groups not in the sense we ve been used to, but more like lists. Groups are supposed to be to lists what databases are to bits of paper. You can add friends to groups to organise them, send them group emails, run a collective mailing list, and so on. Except that in practice, this is another really good way of exploiting lazy users. See, there are some things to know about groups:

• you don t have to opt in to one; friends can add you and that s it no confirmation necessary
• it seems that even if the group is closed, members can add other members without any controls
• if you re added and you switched off email notifications in general, you don t even know it
• the group gets an email address, which sprays inbound mail to every member until they get fed up and switch it off

The second point may be wrong it s very unclear exactly what permission is afforded to a group member and when or where information about the group membership is published. Since my day job is in private education, this immediately makes me think of two terrifying scenarios:

1. A student inadvertently gets added to a large group and nobody notices because there is so much other traffic. Whatever my other privacy settings, anything I or anyone else posted to the group is now visible to him this is the same as the previous group arrangement. The difference is that he can now go on and add anyone else Mark Zuckerberg himself even without any kind of checks by the group administrator. A membership system like this quickly spirals out of control.
2. Somebody with a grudge maybe I took too long fixing their PC adds me to a group with, shall we say, inappropriate or unsavoury content while I m away on holiday and tips off the child protection officer. Better yet, he first sends an email to all staff expressing horror and asking them to verify this in case it s his computer lying. Now there are multiple witnesses to the fact that I was a member of this group, and I return from the sea side to find a P45 on the door mat.

Unlike free software, I can t fix this. Fortunately, I have: enabled every email notification under the sun; few and trustworthy friends; according to my profile, no interests or contact details whatsoever; and no care for groups. I m happy with my lists, thanks all the same.

Email. We get a lot of it. We filter out the SPAM. Then if we're well-organized we file it away into folders as it arrives. (To be fair some people use priority settings such that all mail stays in their INBOX until they're "done" with it. I've never had the patience for that kind of behaviour.) One problem which I often encounter is wanting to have email be delivered, archived, and stored, but I don't want to read it. Yet when I see a folder in my mail client which has unread mail in it I cannot unsee. In my case I deliver mail to folders as it arrives via either Exim's filter language, or procmail. Procmail blows goats on the whole, but it is common and available everywhere - I just don't trust my own DSL enough to rely upon it (which is a dangerous sign). So, how do you deliver a new mail to a Maildir folder, and mark it read at the same time? Well you can be na ve and do what I did which is to invoke formail to add "Status: ro" to the header. Unfortunately that's insufficient to mark a mail as read when viewed in mutt. When an email is stored in a Maildir folder its status is encoded in part of its filename - which is why you'll have files like:

new/1288039894.28406_3.steve.org.uk
cur/1283711971.11157_3.skx.xen-hosting.net:2,S

The latter file has been Seen. So to mark a message as not-new you need to do two things:

• Save it to ./cur/ not ./new/.
• Append the appropriate flags to the filename (generally :2,S).

I've seen some horrific shell + procmail code to do the job, but the simpler version is:

:0
*^(To: From:).*root@
*^X-added-header:.*debian-administration.org
  ~/bin/read-to-maildir .machines.debian-administration.org/

Similarly you can use Exim's filter language to do the same job:

# Exim filter
if $h_to: contains "hostmaster@" then
    pipe "/home/skx/bin/read-to-maildir /home/steve/Maildir/.hostmaster/"
finish

Cute. Obvious too? Maybe not to me. ObSubject: Why did you murder someone, Raymond? - In Bruges

I don't believe in bottled water. The reason for that should be obvious to anyone who thinks about it for more than just a second, but in case you can't figure it out:bottled water sucks. Since I moved out on my own, now over two years ago, I haven't bought the slightest amount of water other than through the tap. This wasn't a conscious decision, originally; it's just that I'm not a fan of non-sparkling water, and that buying 1.5L bottles of sparkling water would quickly reduce to non-sparkling ones by the rate I drink it, and I just didn't think it worth buying for that reason. As I came to realize that tap water is a fine beverage, and that for all practical purposes it is free or mostly so, compared to bottled water I stopped even considering the idea to buy bottled water. But I do still like sparkling water every once in a while; and this weekend, I remembered that about a decade ago, an acquaintance who worked for Philips had shown me a prototype apparatus to generate sparkling water out of plain water in approximately 1L quantities. It was a prototype then, so I could imagine it being a product today. Googling around for a while found no Philips product of that type; but then I did find another company that specializes in such devices. Their devices are fairly cheap (or, at the very least, affordable). And the best part: it doesn't even require electricity (contrary to that prototype device I saw so many years ago). One is on its way now. Wonder what it'll be like.

Kanzepharaz of the one thousand and eight spires. Kanzepharaz capital of the Empire of K'thorv and since the succesful end to the war that led to the annihilation of the Pleiadic Oligarchy in K'threl, the richest and most splendid city in the Middle World. Kanzepheraz whose real estate prices have soared e'en beyond the calculation of the rainbow abacus of Thobis Himself. Anathomelis, a princeling of the Imperial Clan needs a location for his new and expanded orgy dome. Yet the only available and affordable on a seventh rank civil allowance place left in the city of one thousand and eight spires is the tomb of Pharaz the First and Subsequent, lich-emperor of the Jerelite dynasty and his eldritch retainers. Before the construction-serfs can move in, the tomb must be cleared of its unshriven and non-rent-paying denizens. As His Principalities' chief swordbearer it has fallen to you to make the tomb of Pharaz safe for gentrification. Treasures and honors await you if you succeed. Aeons of torment in the Planes of Unlife await you if you fail. WILL YOU RISE TO THE CHALLENGE? rec.games.roguelike.development is having another challenge, this time to complete a roguelike game in four days. My previous attempt to write one in seven days was a failure but as I can build upon my previous work, I think I can make it this time. This time I did not waste lots of time thinking of a name. S.Y.T.Y.C.D...OMG? and The Real Housewives of Mordor were the only ones under serious consideration. With that crucial task out of the way, I spent the morning ripping code out of A.L.F. wherever possible. In the afternoon, I looked into dungeon generation. My previous experiments with this sort of thing were pretty convoluted but now I think I have a simpler algorithm which still provides a random yet plausible-looking map. It basically goes like this:

1. Divide the map into a grid of sectors.As the S.Y.T.Y.C.D...OMG? map is 60 80, my sectors are 20 16 giving 3 5 grid.
2. Mark each space on the map as impassable.
3. In each sector, pick a random square as its "center" not too near the edge of the sector.
4. Join each pair of centers first W -> E and then N -> S. with passable spaces. These will be the corridors and doing it this way ensures all sectors will be connected. Last time, my mistake was making rooms first and then corridors which is much more complicated to get right.
5. For each sector, there is a 2/3 chance it contains a room. If there is, randomly a number of spaces to each side of the center square. These will be the dimensions of the room. Make all the spaces in the resulting rectangle passable.
6. Randomly take a quarter chunk out of some rooms making them "L" shaped for a bit of variety. (at some point I can add round, polygonal or other shapes.)
7. Create "walls" by making all the outer boundary spaces of the room impassable again. This also ensures rooms do not touch or overlap.
8. If a wall meets a corridor, turn it into a "door." Doors don't do anything yet but eventually will be locked, trapped etc.
9. Finally, place monsters, treasure, and items in the room.

My humble RC bug squashing efforts for this week. I've saved them all up, because I don't want to spam Planet Debian too much... or alternatively, because I've been feeling ill Thursday/Friday and didn't do anything at all.

• #598619 in x11vnc NMU'd, after one false start, but at least I learnt something.
• #586849 and #586838 in mgltools- utpackages,geomutils confirmed fixed.
• Patch written for #592417 in mgltools-utpackages.
• Verified and NMU'd patch for #410130 in cryptonit.
• #590383 in rabbitmq-server confirmed fixed.
• Investigated why #589194 in openclipart hadn't been closed, although it was Anibal who eventually sponsored the patch.
• #599988 in lwjgl fixed and uploaded.
• Confirmed #599959 in sawfish closed from last week, after it got binNMUs.
• Patch finally written for #593856 in gnucash.

Note that quite a few of these were "cheating" by just closing bugs that someone else had written a patch/comment for, and the mgltools-* ones are in non-free software, so they won't have the same impact on the RC bug stats. Also, I've mentioned the gnucash and sawfish ones before, but they'll definitely be counted in the stats now..

Dear Gnome people. Is there a reliable way to right-attach panel applets? May laptop screen and my external monitor have different resolutions, and I havn't found a reliable way (except making two panels) of getting some of my applets to stick to the right. I usually keep my launchers on the left, while vairous system status icons on the right part. But when switching to a higher resolution, at most one will move to the right end of the panel at the new resolition, while the others just stay in place (i.e. left-attached at a given pixel position). There are so many smart layout managers, GTK pretty much always uses flexible layout managers, why is the Gnome panel relying pixel offsets? It has been suggested to me a couple of times that I could achieve this via gconf. However, since the gconf changes are not reflected at runtime but frequently overwritten I did not get this to work reliably even just for two applets. Thank you. If you have any comments, please email me via erich () debian org. On a side note, this is also the first true post to my new blog. :-)