Of course, one would expect me to react to this post. Apparently, from my cumulated experience, joking about funny translations is a very widespread game among german-speaking developers (of course, as everybody knows, us French do translate everissing and no single Frainche DiDi will make such fun abaouttel10n wouhorke, aha). I'd say: more generally widespread among people .who jargonize about computing so often in their daily work that they often forget that not everybody, even in a country where people are as clever about English as German/Austrian/Swiss folks are (we all know that 100% population in these places speak a very perfect English) do understand what "downgrade" means. Seriously, "funny" translations are our (translators) daily nightmare. We hate them because we know people hate us (or make jokes about our work) when they face them. The example taken by Patrick is a nice case as "downgrade" is tricky for all of us. For instance, French translators have chosen "revenir la version pr c dente" as "bring back to former version". This is about the only "right" way to say what's being done ("d grader" is another option but that has a negative connotation). Of course, I often *hear* people (incl. me) say "downgrader" which is an horrible neologism....and of course doesn't say anything to people who are clueless in English. English is, unfortunately, often a very compact language. This is our daily pain. So, as German translation of "to downgrade", what do *you* propose, Patrick? "Downgradieren"? Tricky, eh? Taken from APT for "downgrade":

• German: deaktualizieren
• French: revenir la version pr c dente
• Spanish: desactualizar
• Italian: retrocedere
• Danish: nedgraderingen (hope this is the inifitive, just guessing)
• Dutch: degraderen
• etc.

Hint: you can see this with "apt-get source aptitude" and look in po/ for you favorite language. That sounds funny to you? Fine. But as usual in free software, please report.....and patches welcome...

As a german I'm used to strange translations in computer context.
I saw it back when I was using Microsoft products and I regulary stumble upon it on Debian systems. But whats actually kind of funny:Debian is outstanding in that regard.
An example:
Debian has that "wonderful" package manpages-de which provides a german manpage for ps.
It contains a formulation that is so inaccurate and not really funny:

"--cumulative Daten von toten Kindern einbeziehen (als Summe zusammen mit den Eltern)"

For the English only speakers: That can be roughly translated to "Collect data from dead children
(summed with their parents)". For me this somehow sounds like we are a butcher OS and so I reported #495441 but nobody cared about it yet.

Today I had another WTF on german translations because when I wanted to upgrade my system I read the following sentence:

"Sind Sie sich sicher, dass Sie die oben genannten Pakete installieren bzw. aufr sten wollen?"

Cold war, anyone?

Well its a classical case of using a word-by-word translation instead of a meaning-orientied translation. Its a fact that 'upgrade' can be translated to 'aufr sten' (as done above) but in that case its just not appropriate. As a matter of fact most german people I'm aware of would actually confuse the meaning with a meaning such as in a military context (therefore the "Cold war, anyone?" text above). And just btw. if we would rely on computing power to translate it back into English we would get:

Are you sure itself that you want to install and/or rig the packages specified above?

So it seems that Babelfish has a similar pereception.

In a couple of weeks at FOSDEM, I ll be giving a talk in the GNOME developer room on the semantic desktop and showing the new world of interaction that RDF, SPARQL and Tracker make possible. I ll be joined by Philip Van Hoof and Roberto Guido. We ll be digging behind the buzzwords, explaining what it s all about and most importantly showing off cool real-world apps using this stuff. We ll also announce a competition for the coolest app using Tracker and RDF, for which Codethink will sponsor a prize. See you all there!

Only few days ago a long-standing bug in coreboot, the Free Software x86 BIOS/fimware project, has been fixed: Adding support for a laptop/notebook. The code was developed by coresystems GmbH (thanks a lot!). Quoting from the announcement:

coreboot is running on a multitude of different computers, ranging from tiny embedded systems as small as the palm of your hand over desktop and server systems to super computers with thousands of nodes. However, one might say that in the area of mobile computers coreboot has to catch up, compared to its support of other devices. Thus, I am especially glad to announce that coresystems GmbH is releasing coreboot for the Roda RK886EX a.k.a Rocky III+ notebook today. It's a rugged notebook, protected against shock, vibration, dust and humidity:
http://www.roda-computer.com/en/products/notebooks/rocky-iii-rk886ex.html We have been testing various Linux distributions as well as Windows XP and Windows 7 booting on this nice notebook. I want to sincerely thank those who made this project possible with their funding:

• secunet Security Networks AG
• Bundesamt f r Sicherheit in der Informationstechnologie (Federal Office for Information Security, BSI)

A big thank you also goes to everyone who worked with coresystems on this project.

The committed patch series includes improved support for the Intel i945 / ICH7 chipset (which was also written by coresystems), the SMSC LPC47N227 Super I/O, the Texas Instruments Cardbus+Firewire bridge TI PCI7420, and finally the Renesas M3885x Embedded Controller (EC). Btw, the latter, the so-called embedded controller (sometimes integrated in the Super I/O, sometimes it's an extra chip) is one of the major problems for coreboot support on laptops. They are almost always undocumented (i.e., no public datasheets are available), but they have low-level control over power/battery management, early power-up sequence, and often include keyboard controller functionality and other important stuff. Luckily, for this notebook an EC datasheet is available. Checkout the coreboot EC support code for the Renesas M3885x for an impression of what this stuff is all about. Anyway, there is hope that this laptop will only be the first in a row of multiple supported ones in the future. Interested developers and contributors are of course always welcome on the coreboot mailing list :-)

Recently, Eclipse started ignoring clicks on dialog buttons for me. This seems to be due to some changes in gtk 2.18. It does not use native windows for all widgets anymore, and SWT seems to rely on it. Thanks to this blog post, I have this fix in my bashrc: The Debian bug tracker also knows about this problem, which is partly fixed for the eclipse packages. Bad luck that I am using a download from eclipse.org.

I m running Debian/Unstable on an EeePC 701, I ve got an SD card for /home etc but the root filesystem is on the internal 4G flash storage which doesn t have much spare space (I ve got a full software development environment, GCC, debuggers, etc as well as running KDE4). On some of my systems I ve started the practice of having two root filesystem installs, modern disks are big enough that usually it s difficult to use all the space, and even if you do use most of the space the use of a second root filesystem only takes a fraction of a percent of the available space. Today I discovered a problem with my EeePC, I had upgraded to the latest Unstable packages a few days ago and now when I run X programs the screen flickers really badly every time it s updated. Pressing a key in a terminal window makes the screen shake, watching a video with mplayer makes it shake constantly to such a degree that it s not usable. If that problem occurred on a system with a second root filesystem I could upgrade the other a few packages at a time to try and discover the root cause. But without the space for a second root filesystem this isn t an option. I hope that Btrfs [1] becomes ready for serious use soon, it seems that the btrfs snapshot facility might make it possible for me to preserve the old version in a bootable form before upgrading my EeePC (although even then disk space would be tight). So I guess I now need to test different versions of the X related packages in a chroot environment to track this bug down. Sigh.

• [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Btrfs

Coming to New Zealand for an extended period of time, I figured it would make sense to purchase a prepay mobile plan to make it easier to mix with locals. Not knowing better, I went with Vodafone, which I whole-heartedly regret: their website is a massive pain in the ass, their price plans completely over the top, and their customer service representative incompetent and unfriendly. My latest experience eclipsed all previous encounters, and makes me want to tell you about it: Between all the obscure add-ons Vodafone threw at me when I bought this SIM card, two weeks ago I couldn t figure out how my balance had decreased from $30 to $0 when I rarely ever made calls. I wrote an e-mail to their customer service hotline, and it took them a week to get back to me, with the following text:

Due to being a Prepay Customer, unfortunately usage details are not available as per terms and conditions. I have although checked your usage and can confirm that all charges are correct.

Obviously, I wasn t going to accept this claim of omniscience, so when last weekend, $20 disappeared over the course of a day, that was the catalyst for me to reopen the ticket and reply along the lines of:

Only I know when I used my phone and thus only I can determine whether the charges are correct. Please show the full records to me, or else

This seemed to convince the representative, and 8 messages and 11 days after my initial request, I was told I could request the records at $5/30 records. Yes, you read that right: they wanted to charge me to view the records. I thus replied:

I am NOT willing to pay for that. If you are unable to comply with my desire for transparency, then I shall terminate the contract and make sure to inform the media as well as the consumer institute of this conduct. As stated previously, I shall also consult with a lawyer. Charging consumers to view data that is obviously available is a strong indication that you do not want me to see it. I can t imaging why this would be the case other than the data being inconsistent with reality.

That worked, and I finally got an Excel sheet with my usage data, which allowed me to track down the depletion of my account: to lure customers in, they promise free calls to other Vodafone numbers for the first four weekends. There are three problems with that though:

1. Having purchased my card on Saturday afternoon, I was annoyed to find out that the remaining 34 hours of that weekend would be counted as a whole weekend.
2. They don t provide a way by which to find out whether a given number actually belongs to Vodafone or not. The 021 prefix is not enough of an indication.
3. They don t actually tell you anywhere but the aforementioned horrific website that the addon has expired.

So thanks, Vodafone. You ve lost a customer, who should have gone with 2degrees in the first place, who have much lower rates, even though their data coverage doesn t seem as good. I don t need data anyway. I ll still insist on Vodafone providing the data in a Free format. You can find more information about NZ mobile phone providers on the LCA2010 wiki page. NP: Age Pryor: Shank s Pony

Moving today went as about as well as you could possibly ask for. The movers arrived at a few minutes to 9, had most of the place packed up within 30 minutes, and I think we headed to the new place in a little over an hour. Mad props to Handle With Care Moving. The guys were really great. The rain also held off for the duration, thankfully. There's just dregs left at the old place, oh and the entire kitchen. I think we're both subconsciously dreading (and therefore avoiding) moving the kitchen stuff, because we really don't want to unpack at the new place, because the kitchen is going to get totally destroyed in hopefully a couple of weeks time. I'm finding wall space to be a bit of a premium at the new place. We're trying to keep the second bedroom as usable as a bedroom as possible, while primarily using it as a study, so that when we have house guests, we can throw some sort of bed down in that room and not have it all become ridiculously cluttered. When you've got desks all against one wall, a built-in wardrobe against another wall, and a full length sliding door on the other wall, that doesn't leave too many options for a bookshelf and retaining space for a bed. I think we might have to avail ourselves of some more elfa shelving and ditch the Ikea bookshelf we currently have. On the other hand, our bedroom is looking pretty good. For the first time in ages, it's just going to be a bedroom. No desks, no filing, no storage. The wardrobe has less space than our old place, so we're having to be pretty ruthless with clothing. Oh, and the bathroom storage: way less. Not sure how we're going to sort that one out at the moment. The phone and cable TV should get hooked up tomorrow, and then I'll get the DSL moved over, so hopefully by Wednesday, we'll have Internet connectivity. We brought the cats over this afternoon. They're still confined to our bedroom at the moment until they calm down a bit. We have until next Sunday to officially be out of the old place.

I received a surprising 13 responses to my previous post, which was certainly more than I expected and is one reason it's taken me a few days to follow up on it. (How do you pick someone from a group of 13 people based on just a paragraph or two? Clearly I'd like for someone to help all of these people get involved in Debian, but to do so solely by myself would be making a commitment that I just don't have time to come through on. So, it ends up being quite arbitrary. I pick who I think I'd most like working with and could make the most out of the opportunity, and even that is an arbitrary judgement based on very little.) One question asked by one of the people who emailed me was, "Why did you ask for someone who isn't involved in Debian already and who doesn't necessarily have the technical skills needed?" The answer to this question has several facets. For one, people already involved in a free software project tend to be busy people. The workload in projects tends to be concentrated in few hands, and many of those people who are already involved in a project don't need or want any more work. So, asking for someone not already involved in Debian increases the pool of people who might respond to such a request and actually be able to follow up on it. While this a valid reason, it still doesn't explain why I didn't just say, "it's okay if you're not already involved in Debian or don't know python" and not state a preference as to the skill level of the person who would respond to such a request. I did, however, have a specific reason for stating my preference. I asked specifically for someone who wasn't already involved in Debian and who didn't necessarily know python or consider themselves a competent programmer because I wanted to encourage people who don't consider themselves to already know enough to be a useful comaintainer to contact me. I've picked up a lot from following Geek Feminism on what sort of language turns minority groups like women away, and I wanted to ask in such a way that it didn't turn away people who aren't good at self-promotion or who are less sure of their skills, or who don't yet have the skills, men and women alike. Even I still sometimes internally question my own competence as a programmer, and my self-confidence has increased over the past few years. (For the curious, the responses I received were, at my guess, 85% male, 15% female. Whether that's a success or not depends on the demographics of those who read the post, but it is better than the ~98% male involvement in the FLOSS world altogether.) And I do think it's more of a contribution to the project to help someone new get involved than to try to convince someone who's already overcome the barrier to entry to take on some more work. We'll see how it turns out in the end. I have high hopes. (No pressure, soon-to-be-selected mentee.)

For a long time we had a bug against the archive asking us to export a file similar to the Maintainers index, just for the Uploaders (aka Co-Maintainers). Back then it wasn t that easy, but this changed. A while ago I also got a patch from Emilio Pozuelo Monfort against the first bug asking for it (#120262 !, and so went to integrate it. Of course this told us about a deficit in daks code parsing the Uploaders field. No, it is not good to solely split on a comma, when we have at least one Maintainer with a comma in their name field. We now split on the end of a mail address, followed by a comma. This simple idea is from Alexander Reichle-Schmehl, I was always thinking of a more complicated parser for it But heck, why? Yes, this can easily go wrong, if people, for whatever reason, add a space in there. But it only harms them, not us, so I don t think it is a big problem. Let us help you shot in your own foot. :) The new file will be exported as Uploaders.gz right besides the Maintainers.gz we already have on every mirror in the indices/ directory, starting with the next dinstall run (that will start in 2 hours and some 42 minutes, at time of writing this entry). Until then you can find a version at my space, to poke around and find bugs. A good example is right at the top - a52dec. Bug already filed, they missed a comma between two Uploaders. Feel free to hunt for your own bugs. :) And while I am writing already: Are you working with data generated out of the Debian archive, but have to generate the data yourself? (Like people had with the Uploaders index in the past, for example). Feel free to ask for it to be generated during dinstall. If the data is available (or can be made) and makes sense to have for more than just a personal pet project, we are happy to merge patches, help with it, provide it. (And really, asking cost nothing, we can t do more than deny it).

Roland blogs about his GPG-encrypted password store. When I read the title of his blog post, I thought he would be writing about the gnupg.vim Vim plugin. But he didn t, so I ll take care of that: The gnupg.vim plugin provides transparent editing of GPG-encrypted files. It s as simple as vim foo.gpg, enter your GPG key if you are creating the file, and you are done.

Good people steal ideas, right? On that basis I setup a static domain to host the javascript and icons I use upon a few different sites & projects. This was preempted by the release of a new version of the excellent jQuery library. I also managed to put together a tremendous hack to solve a pretty annoying problem running multiple distributions from a single external kernel under KVM. Ubuntu users, in particular, will be well aware of dmesg SPAM coming from the use of CONFIG_SYSFS_DEPRECATED. In short the way that the kernel presents information beneath the /sys tree has changed over the life of the kernel - and this has a knock-on effect to the userspace supplied by different distributions and releases of GNU/Linux.

Some distributions need an "old" kernel and an "old" udev with "old" udev rules in order to create the appropriate device nodes such that the kernel will boot & mount its filesystems. (i.e. These need CONFIG_SYSFS_DEPRECATED to be set.) Conversely some distributions mandate a "new" minimum kernel version, and supply a "new" version of udev with "new" udev rules and they absolutely will not function when presented with an "old" kernel. (i.e. They must have kernels without CONFIG_SYSFS_DEPRECATED set.)

I've solved this problem via a kernel patch which is both evil and genius. The details are a little me-specific, but in short:

• devtmpfs is used to setup and mount an initial /dev tree before /sbin/init is launched..
• udev launches later and mounts a tmpfs over /dev such that it can start creating its own nodes.
• At this point evil begins: I've patched the kernel such that any attempt to mount a tmpfs filesystem at /dev is silently changed to mount a devtmpfss filesystem instead.
  • The alternative is that udev creates many nodes, but manages to fail to create the root & swap nodes such that the KVM guests fail to boot.

Ultimately udev doesn't get an empty /dev tree to play with, instead it finds one already pre-populated, such that any devices it cannot create are there regardless - because the devtmpfs implementation has already created them. Genius. And evil. So very evil. Meh. Steal that idea. I dare you .. (I'm impressed at how well devtmpfs works, and how easy I was able to make my "patch of evil"^tm. Just a few lines in fs/namespace.c.) ObSubject: The Last House On The Left

RCBW - #18 ... and RCBW is back! Here is this week squashes:

• bug #544879 - clutter - resurrect -doc package, fix gtk-doc related FTBFS
• bug #504980, bug #560513 - cryptonit - add missing #include for gcc 4.4 (bonus point: misc QA fixes)
• bug #504901 - dibbler - no longer valid gcc FTBFS
• bug #504869 - scim-bridge - closed (w maintainer) as unreproducible an already fixed gcc 4.4 bug
• bug #505390 - traverso - add missing #include for gcc 4.4
• bug #562846 - flim - drop Recommends on metamail (now gone)
• bug #526207 - jaula - closed as unreproducible a gcc 4.4 bug (recent flex adds cstdio by itself)

Most of the actually fixed missing include bugs above have benefited from patches by Martin Michlmayr, thanks! Also, this week squashing has benefited from a huge list of bugs which Luk has given me, some of the not-yet-fixed bugs there are a bit trickier than usual (e.g. missing #include bugs which got intertwined over time with const char * conversions bugs, which in turn require some far reaching code changes due to the propagation of function prototypes in unexpected code parts). Since I'll be leaving tomorrow morning for the BSP in M nchengladbach, I'll have a bit of time there to dive a bit more into the issues. Actually, what I fear most now is buying train tickets from Cologne to Moenchengladbach and back, since I'm totally unable to pronounce the name of the latter city (my German sucks, actually there is no such "my German" at all). Luckily, I've been told they've wonderful ticket-selling machines in Cologne See you there, and happy RC squashing!

1. This afternoon I tried to unlock my old Three mobile phones for the purpose of getting cheap net access as described in my previous post [1]. I wanted to use Dodo 3G Internet (via the Optus network) for my parents which would cost them $139 per year and I wanted to use my old Three phone tethered to their PC as the 3G modem (cheaper than buying a new 3G modem). I took in 3 Three phones to the Three store to get unlocked, I actually have 4 old Three phones (my wife and I are each on our third Three phone) but I seem to have misplaced one. It turned out that the two newer phones (LG U890) can t be unlocked as they are permanently locked to the Three network. The older LG U8110 can be unlocked, doing this took 30 minutes of the Three employee speaking to other Three employees on the phone and I will now have to wait 4 days to receive an SMS with the unlock code. So the Three anti-competitive behavior of making it unreasonably difficult to get a phone unlocked and of selling phones that (supposedly) can never be unlocked wasted them 30 minutes of store employee time when other potential customers were queuing up as well as 30 minutes of employee time in their call center. If the call-center employee was based in Australia then as the minimum wage is $14.31 per hour [2] that would have cost them at least $14.31 for 2*30min of work, as a rule of thumb it s generally regarded that the costs of employing people are twice the salary (including costs of maintaining office/shop space, paying managers, doing paperwork, etc). So it probably cost Three about $29 to unlock one of my phones and tell me that the others can t be unlocked, when I find phone 4 it will cost them another $29. As $29 is my typical monthly bill this has got to make an impact on the profitability of Three. If they were smart they would have sent me an SMS when I got a new phone telling me whether the old phone can be unlocked and if so giving me the code to do so. For phones that can be unlocked I doubt that would make anyone unlock their phone who wouldn t do so anyway, and for phones that can t be unlocked they could encourage the owner to give the phone to someone who wants a phone for pre-paid use (thus locking in a new customer). It probably won t be worth the effort of cracking an LG U890 phone to save my parents $10 per annum. As I couldn t get the LG U8110 to talk to my laptop I guess that forces my parents to eventually use Three for 3G net access. But they could have just matched the Dodo price and got the same result without having me spend half an hour in their store. Update: I just enquired about ending my Three contract for 3G net access ($15 per month for 1G of data) in favor of the yearly prepaid option of $149 per annum for 12G. The prepaid option would save me $31 per annum and allow me to use more than 1G in the busy months. But it seems that I subscribed to a two year contract for that one and I have 6 months to go. Over those 6 months they will make about $15 extra in revenue from me while annoying me in the process, this probably isn t a good deal. As my 3G modem is locked to the Three network even if I didn t have a contract I would still be unable to use a different provider.


2. My mother phoned Optus about her Internet connection and discovered that she had supposedly renewed her Optus cable Internet contract in September last year. Presumably someone from Optus phoned my parents and asked what seemed like a routine do you want to keep using the Internet? question but was really a do you agree to a 2 year contract with a $250 penalty clause for exiting early? . This isn t the first time that Oprus has scammed my parents (previously they charged them rental for a phone that they never supplied), I guess that they have a practice of pulling such stunts on pensioners. I guess I ll have to call the TIO, which will end up costing them more than the $250 penalty clause. The irony here is that as Dodo uses the Optus network I would have used Optus by choice for my parents, but now that they are being scum I will willingly pay the extra $10 per annum to use Three (which while annoying aren t actually hostile).


3. Finally while Google is admirably living up to their don t be evil motto in regards to China [3] their conduct regarding Google Talk leaves a lot to be desired. Two employees of a company I work for use Google Talk for their instant messaging, this has a Windows client but also allows general access via the Jabber protocol. So these two guys wanted to talk to me via Jabber but Google would just send me email saying X has invited you to sign up for Google Talk so you can talk to each other for free over your computers , I received 5 such messages from a colleague who was particularly persistent. It seems impossible for the Google Talk server to send a chat request to my personal Jabber server (which works well with a variety of other Jabber servers). So I have now started using my Gmail address to talk via the Jabber protocol to other Gmail users. This means that I have a TCP connection to the Google servers open most of the time and Google can boast of having one more active Gmail user. But it doesn t seem to really provide them a benefit. I am going to keep using my main email address as my primary Jabber ID and only use my Gmail address for talking to Google Talk users and only when paid to do so. But as a result of this I recommend that everyone avoid Google Talk as much as possible. Use open Jabber servers such as the ones run by Jabber.org.

It seems to me that none of these companies are really gaining anything from trying to lock customers in. They would be better off spending their efforts on being friendly to people and making them want to be repeat users/customers.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2010/01/15/cheap-net-access-australia/
• [2] http://www.fairpay.gov.au/
• http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/new-approach-to-china.html

I've recently found out a bit more about separating debug info, and thought a consolidated reference might be handy. The Idea Most every distribution now provides separate debug packages which contain only the debug info, saving much space for the 99% of people who never want to start gdb. This is achieved with objcopy and --only-keep-debug/--add-gnu-debuglink and is well explained in the man page. What does this do? This adds a .gnu_debuglink section to the binary with the name of debug file to look for. The first part is the name of the file, the second part is a check-sum of debug-info file for later reference. Build ID Did you know that binaries also get stamped with a unique id when they are built? The ld --build-id flag stamps in a hash near the end of the link. Incase you're wondering what the format of that is... Although the actual file may change (due to prelink or similar) the hash will not be updated and remain constant. Finding the debug info files The last piece of the puzzle is how gdb attempts to find the debug-info files when it is run. The main variable influencing this is debug-file-directory. The first thing gdb does, which you can verify via an strace, is search for a file called [debug-file-directory]/.build-id/xx/yyyyyy.debug; where xx is the first two hexadecimal digits of the hash, and yyy the rest of it: Next it moves onto the debug-link info filename. First it looks for the filename in same directory as the object being debugged. After that it looks for the file in a sub-directory called .debug/ in the same directory. Finally, it prepends the debug-file-directory to the path of the object being inspected and looks for the debug info there. This is why the /usr/lib/debug directory looks like the root of a file-system; if you're looking for the debug-info of /usr/lib/libfoo.so it will be looked for in /usr/lib/debug/usr/lib/libfoo.so. Interestingly, the sysroot and solib-search-path don't appear to have anything to do with these lookups. So if you change the sysroot, you also need to change the debug-file-directory to match. However, most distributions make all this "just work", so hopefully you'll never have to worry about anyway!

With Guantanamo Bay about to be shut down, and President Obamas' first year in office complete, what do the American public think of him?

	% of Americans who approved of Pres. Bush after one year in office
	% of Americans who favor waterboarding the Christmas bomber
	% of Americans who approve of Pres. Obama after one year in office

How did this happen? Well, once upon a time, the USA was really racist. Then a light skinned African American with no negro dialect entered the presidential contest and the country entered a new post-racial era. Unfortunately not everyone had the audacity to hope. Things got so bad, people wanted to cut obamas nuts off but the change we sought within us prevailed and became president. Unfortunately some parts of the US are still filled with overweight Jesus and gun loving Walmart shoppers who insist on voting Republican even though that party doesn't exist anymore. Why? Racism. It's the only possible explanation

Working on another laptop, I was missing my quiltrc settings. I think, I got them from a this email by Marco d Itri. Perhaps it is of help to somebody (for example, when I go searching for it again). BTW, I changed it locally to check only for debian folder in parent directories and create debian/patches automatically if needed: I d rather end up with a patches dir inside the debian folder instead of having it at a random place in the package sources when adding the first quilt patch. I wonder if we should ship this with the quilt package!?

Our co-op registers domain names for others. Like most registrars, we now cannot register Chinese (.cn) domains. There s a bit of background discussion on WebmasterWorld. While it s always disappointing to offer fewer services, I don t think we ve ever registered a .cn domain and especially not for anyone in China. Most of the .cn domains we see are in spam. If this tighter control makes any dent in the amount of spam and scam sites, that s probably a good thing. I ve not felt any significant reduction in spam since this change, though. I suspect the scammers have just moved to another top-level domain with a long-time idle government, while a few legitimate users of cn domains will also be punished along with the scammers. Will we ever shut out the spammers? Even if we kick them out of all domains, they ll find some way of using IP addresses or something. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.