Paul van Tilburg: Jaiku, Twitter, Luonica, Ping.fm
More than a year ago I tried out Jaiku and it worked quite well despite some of its glitches. Although the number of journal posts plummeted, I ve been able to keep up the microblogging. I ve noticed in the past year that others preferred Twitter and/or identi.ca, but I didn t want to join all these networks and duplicate my microblogs and all the hassle that came with it. This week I ve registered myself on ping.fm, so I can post to more services (my Twitter, my Jaiku) simultaneously.
Meanwhile Christian had set up a local (test) Laconica service, which available as of yesterday as Luonica on http://ica.luon.net/ (for all Luon users). Obviously, I have also added Luonica to my publish list.
Thanks to 
In the spirit of Thomas Limoncelli's Time Management for System Administrators, this is my checklist for setting up a new Debian system. I have added a few notes to the original list to justify their existence and to provide some background information.
Whilst you should avoid performing repetitive interactive configuration and defer to the multitude of tools designed for this task, constructing and sharing a checklist can still be an instructive step. It can also be useful in situations where a machine has already been partly configured for you.
This is just a quick note for everyone who is interested: Yesterday we had a small meeting discussing the plan to bring Debconf 11 to Berlin, Germany. There will be an official meeting regarding this topic at this year s LinuxTag. The meeting will probably take place on Friday the 26th of June at a conference room. Everyone is invited to join the discussion.
PS: I also have a shiny new key, the fingerprint is 
This weekend I implemented an idea I had some weeks ago: sending regular mails with the translation status and the contents status of 
According to The Registry, 
This is a rant. A rant which goes to the grub maintainers, and one that could go nearly identically to many people in
the KDE environment or many other open source projects.
I really like grub. I really like grub 0.97 despite that it s been unmaintained for years and not booting on two
of my important machines. I should like grub 2 because its configuration looks more straightforward and for its better
features - direct booting of .iso images, from LVM and RAID. But actually, I have learned to hate grub 2 since it is not
finished and badly documented, and that its existence is already being used as an excuse for grub 0 s development
having stopped years ago (and it being renamed to grub-legacy to clearly show that it s the unloved
child) - and things looks like this is not going to change any time soon.
grub 0.97 is the de facto standard in booting Linux, its most prevalent advantages probably being its capability of
reading filesystems and its command shell, which allows booting kernels and other software that one wasn t
planning to boot when the system was shut down. There is a small fraction of people who still use lilo despite its
disadvantages, for example on achitectures that are not supported by grub, if one wants to have the boot FS on LVM, if
one just prefers lilo for non-technical reasons or on systems that grub doesn t work on.
The last three systems, by the way, that I still run lilo on are Pyramid pizzaboxes with supermicro-made mainboards
from 2002, which just refuse to boot if grub is used and the vendor just says that grub 0.97 is still beta and that they
do not support grub on their systems: Use Lilo.
Grub s last upstream release, 0.97, dates back to 2005, and upstream has stopped developing this grub release
years ago. grub 2, the new way to go, had its first release in 2003, and the last stable release that
people are supposed to use dates back to februar 2008. grub 2 is clearly a step in the right direction, but there are
still bugs, and the most prevalent show stopper against grub 2 is the almost complete absence of any documentation. I
have, for example, not yet found good documentation about the new config file format, which is a completely different
deal from what we are used to with grub 0. The commands manual pages do little more than list the (obvious!)
command line options without giving much more information about what the actually do, let alone usage examples. The
documentation (which used to be really excellent for grub 0), has been moved to a wiki, which has some
useful content but cannot keep up with the excellent documentation that grub 0 used to have.
Additionally, grub2 does not seem to have a grub shell which can be called from within the host system, which makes
installing grub 2 in exotic situations much harder than it used to be with grub 0.
I am also quite disappointed that despite the grub upstream web pages claiming that grub 2 is under active development,
the last release is more than fifteen months in the past while there are still so many shortcomings. The Debian
maintainers of grub 2 are regularly packaging grub 2 subversion snapshots, which is a good idea in face of
upstream s release policy which is quite different from what s being told in the wiki. I am, however,
reluctant to rely on a development snapshot of a software to boot productive systems.
Guys, you cannot declare a widely used, well-documented software legacy when the replacement is still in a nearly
unuseable shape and the docs are hidden in the helpful files named .c and .h. This is simply
unacceptable. It s a drama that the docs are still in such a pitiful shape fifteen months after your last
release.
But, grub is not the only free software project that so blatantly scores developer fun over the needs of the end user.
I know that it is a boring task to fix bugs and to work around design shortcomings in the existing version of software,
and that it is much more fun to hack away on new designs and new code, but dropping old versions before the new version
is up to par with the old one is annoying the users and driving people away to other software packages. This applies to
grub, a quite low-level program, but also to larger and more complex projects like KDE who has recently pulled the same
stunt by dropping development and support for KDE 3.5 while KDE 4 is still missing many many features and KDE
3.5 s stablity, thus driving people (back) to GNOME or alternative desktop environments. This we give a
damn about people who actually use our software, our compilers run without users as well attitude is a show of
disrespect for the user base and makes me very sad as this does indeed show that free software is in no way superior to
its commercial counterparts.
Sadly, I do not have a solution for this issue since I know that free software developers are usually volunteers who do
not have to report to anybody, and that they do not need to care for their user base. But I hope that people begin to
reconsider their attitude and think about what kind of horrible damage is being done to the user base and to free
software s reputation.
It has been more than a month since I last wrote about my work on update-manager during this year s Google Summer Of Code and I am somewhat ashamed I wasn t able to provide you with updates more regularly.
So first of all, yes, I did do some work and yes, there has been quite some progress. Basically both private and university stuff have kept me from writing and that s why I d like to start with this series of weekly updates today.
Yesterday I finally found some time to analyze all filesystem message dumps
for Nokia phones. I always hated way Gammu used to decode these messages,
because in most cases decoding was almost same function just with added some
random offsets.
After some time looking into the dumps, I finally came out with
I m on vacation the 1rst two weeks of June in 
So, I'm considering a backup system that has as its goal to let you
backup 
Take the following URL:
Ever since I bought 