Melissa was complaining that I was being nice for the wrong reasons. Several responses came to mind but I instead focused my attention on the man insisting that I had not paid for use of the sushi buffet. Technically, he was correct, but as I had just now learned of the sushi buffet's existence from him, I did not consider this to be a problem by any stretch. Condescendingly, he attempted to give me an out. Perhaps I took a piece of sushi without realizing it and would like to suddenly remember right at that moment. He seemed unconvinced by my denials. I asked him why exactly he thought I had taken sushi from his precious buffet. Melissa became increasingly more fretful. I was losing patience with both of them, and I was tempted to ask her where her husband was just to cause an explosion, but I knew that that probably was not the right way to escape this situation. Fahd passed by, and was no help at all.

Yesterday, we managed to inspect the property that was for sale that we'd discovered. I think you could best describe it as a renovator's delight that's had a bit of work done on it. The kitchen is pretty new. The bathrooms are pretty good. There's some cracking around the place, and the floating floor looks like it's a bit of a dodgy job. That said, it definitely had potential, and for the asking price, assuming it wasn't structurally unsound, was something we could see ourselves doing up and flipping when we finally move back to Australia. So our agent told us we needed to get pre-approved for finance as the next step, and hooked us up with a mortgage broker, who was able to see us today. She said that pre-approval would be no problem, and we got what seemed to be a ridiculously good rate for a 5 year adjustable rate mortgage. Our agent called us back tonight and told us that there was another offer on the table for less than the asking price, and that the property had been red-tagged. It would appear that none of the modifications had permits. He's going to check with the city tomorrow to find out exactly what the nature of the red-tagging is all about, and what would be involved to get the property un-red-tagged, but I've got that feeling that it's going to be better to just walk away from it at this stage. So that's how we've spent our weekend. Speculating on real estate.

<object height="344" width="425"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/0Bmhjf0rKe8&amp;hl=en_US&amp;fs=1&amp;"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" height="344" src="http://www.youtube.com/v/0Bmhjf0rKe8&amp;hl=en_US&amp;fs=1&amp;" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="425"></embed></object> I am normally not so keen on GMO but if you managed to Clone/GMO/Tweak-Feline-DNA to make one of these for me, a one that stays so youthfully cute, I might be open to such modification.

<object height="344" width="425"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/0Bmhjf0rKe8&amp;hl=en_US&amp;fs=1&amp;"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" height="344" src="http://www.youtube.com/v/0Bmhjf0rKe8&amp;hl=en_US&amp;fs=1&amp;" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="425"></embed></object> I am normally not so keen on GMO but if you managed to Clone/GMO/Tweak-Feline-DNA to make one of these for me, a one that stays so youthfully cute, I might be open to such modification.

The RFC editor has finally released

• K. Murchison, Ed., C. Lindsey, D. Kohn: Netnews Article Format. RFC 5536, November 2009.
• R. Allbery, Ed., C. Lindsey: Netnews Architecture and Protocols. RFC 5537, November 2009.

They obsolete the venerable RFC 1036 (Standard for Interchange of USENET Messages) from December 1987. The new RFCs are the work of the IETF working group USEFOR, chartered November 1997 and concluded March 2009. I ve heard it was not quite the longest lived IETF working group ever. (I personally missed the group by a couple of months, since I started following Netnews and NNTP standardization in April, due to Alue.) Both RFCs are on the Standards Track, currenlty as Proposed Standards. In my opinion, they are a huge improvement over both RFC 1036 and son-of-1036 (which will probably be published as a Historic RFC real soon now).

I do not really understand why they don't support this themselves, but Google Analytics will not track keywords for Google image search. Instead it just shows up as "referrer". A site I'm webmaster for, Swing and the City, gets a lot of image search exposure (funnily for an image that is gone since August, Google also needs to work on their index, too), so it was a bit odd to have images.google.com show up as top referrer but not "organic search".Here's the code I use to fix this:

var r=document.referrer;
if(r.search(/images.google/)!=-1 && r.search(/prev/)!=-1) 
 var e=new RegExp("images.google.([^\/]+).*&prev=([^&]+)");
 var m=e.exec(r);
 pt._addOrganic("images.google","q",true);
 pt._setReferrerOverride("http://images.google."+m[1]+unescape(m[2]));
 ;
pt._addOrganic("maps.google","q",true);
pt._addOrganic("forestle.org","q",true);
pt._trackPageview();

Note that image search is more complicated than the maps and forestle search engines I also add for keyword tracking. The original query is encoded in the "prev" parameter, and the easiest (or only?) way to get working tracking is to use the ReferrerOverride function of analytics.Note: this is not a straight copy & paste, since I use this code in a compressed and encoded (for injection into the page via DOM ops) form. So no guarantee of syntax completeness. You'll need to adjust it to your variable naming anyway (I use "pt" instead of "pageTracker"). This is just to show you the use of unescape on the "prev" parameter for this purpose.

Eclectic paper: dh-ocaml In my day job as a researcher, I mostly publish papers along the lines of my main research interests (theorem proving, web technologies, formal methods applied to software engineering, ...). Some time though, I just come up to some eclectic idea, not strictly related to my job, that I feel like cooking up as a paper to be reviewed by some scientific venue. It happened some weeks ago with dh-ocaml, the package implementing the new dependency scheme for OCaml-related packages in Debian. It took us (as in Debian OCaml maintainers) several years to get it right and satisfactory for maintainers, users, release team, etc. The problem which dh-ocaml addresses is that, differently than C and other system-level languages, OCaml breaks ABI compatibility very often, due to the need of ensuring type safety across different libraries at link time. Other similar strongly typed languages, such as Haskell, behave similarly. This is at odds with the implicit assumption of forward-compatibility (unless otherwise "stated", e.g. with soname changes) that is relied upon by versioned dependencies in distributions like Debian. This discussion, the analysis of possible solutions, and the description of the solution we have actually implemented in dh-ocaml (called ABI approximation) turned out to be interesting for the French functional programming academic community: the paper on dh-ocaml has been accepted at forthcoming JFLA 2010. It is no rocket science , but people maintaining programs and libraries written in languages with concerns similar to OCaml's (e.g. Haskell, hello nomeata) might want to have a look.

Earlier this summer, I wrote a blog post on taking a principled position on software freedom where I argued that advocates of free/libre and open source software (FLOSS) should take a principled position because the pragmatic benefits associated with open source --- "better quality, higher reliability, more flexibility [and] lower cost" in OSI's words --- are simply not always present. More often than not, FLOSS projects fail. When they survive, they are often not as good as their proprietary competitors. Over the last year, I've been back at MIT taking classes, reading extensively, and otherwise learning how to act like a social scientist. My research goals, which I'm now beginning to focus on, are to help build a stronger understanding of the social dynamics in free software and free culture communities. With a slightly skeptical view toward my involvement with groups like the FSF and my work in the FLOSS community, at least one academic tried to suggest that taking a principled position in favor of software freedom might compromise the positivist social science research program in which I am engaged. "An advocate is too biased," they said. After many months of thinking seriously about this warning, I believe that this criticism can be addressed. After all, a principled position in favor of software freedom is a statement of how things should be, not a description of how they are. OSI will argue that open source leads to inherently better software. This statement, of course, is one that can be empirically tested and, in fact, there seems to be plenty of evidence that it is often wrong. On the other hand, the FSF's position that software should be free is ethical in nature. One can disagree with it, just like one can disagree with any other ethical position, but it can not be proved either right or wrong --- only convincing or unconvincing, logical or illogical in the context a certain set of other values that others might or might not share. Research has shown that the vast majority of FLOSS projects fizzle. A advocate who argues that FLOSS is inherently better is left trying to explain this fact and make excuses. As a result, OSI-style beliefs can certainly be a source of problematic bias in a social scientist. However, a person who believes that software should be free is welcome to recognize that it both fails and succeeds and to ask why. A principled idealist can argue in favor of behaviors that may be disruptive, difficult, or inefficient. Indeed, Stallman has never suggested that free software will be easier or better. Indeed, he routinely asks people to sacrifice their convenience for freedom. My goal, as a social scientist, is to understand why some FLOSS and free culture projects succeed and why many fail. I never take FLOSS's success for granted and, in fact, believe that proprietary software may often leads to better software in OSI's terms. Unlike an advocate who tows the OSI line, embracing evidence of the effectiveness of proprietary software is no way in conflict with my belief that software should be free. In fact, my desire to see software freedom grow becomes the driving force between trying to understand FLOSS's shortcomings! I am no more biased --- which is not to say completely unbiased --- than the person who both thinks that crime is wrong and who wants to study criminal behavior. In an analogous sense, starting out with the belief that all people are naturally law-abiding may be a problem in a way that beginning with the belief that people should be law-abiding is not. Starting from the fomer assumption, one has to explain away evidence to the contrary. Starting from the latter assumption, one can build an understanding of what drives people to obey or violate laws which, in turn, can help build a stronger society. To me, the question is not why FLOSS will succeed. Indeed, I believe its success is an empirical matter that remains very much up in the air. For me, the question is how it might. Embracing a principled position lets us face the facts and puts advocates and practitioners in a position to devise laws, social structures, and technologies to insure that it does.

Cory Doctorow wrote an interesting little column for Make magazine about Wikipedia and the way that it contains facts about facts [1]. One of the issues with this is that you can t (or at least shouldn t) make corrections based on your own knowledge of a subject, you need to cite references. Cory gives a hypothetical example where a world renowned expert couldn t simply fix an error in Wikipedia, but they could give an interview with the New York Times decrying the quality of Wikipedia and citing the correct data then once the NYT article was published it could be referenced as an authoritative source and the page updated. Mako wrote about the Wikireader (an offline reader for Wikipedia) and advocated a facility for writing changes while offline and uploading them [2]. From the perspective of improving the state of the art in computer science and making new features available for more users this sounds like a great idea. But in terms of fitting in with the way Wikipedia works it doesn t seem viable to me. Any time that you need to use an offline Wikipedia reader it seems that it will either be impossible or unreasonably difficult to gain the net access necessary to find the reference that Wikipedia requires. Sure you could fix spelling errors, reformat paragraphs, etc but not do anything serious. I wonder how many people actually put any serious effort into Wikipedia with the sole purpose of making it more readable. In terms of my own editing I have made a number of changes that improve readability, but all of them were due to reviewing pages for technical accuracy. One of the comments on Mako s post suggested that instead of having an option to directly edit pages there be an option to take notes on pages which could then be used for later editing. Maybe something like a two button combination to flag a particular paragraph as being of dubious accuracy so that the user could later do some Google searches for references. Of course another problem with this is the delay in updating a Wikireader. For most reading of Wikipedia it doesn t matter if the content is 6 months old, so we should expect that most users of the Wikireader don t have the latest data. The Wikireader company offers an update service of posting a new memory card twice a year [3]. Given postage delays etc we should expect that the average age of the content is about 4 months for people who subscribe to the update service, and probably a lot greater for people who download the updates. The popular pages of Wikipedia change fast, in the space of 4 months a page can change significantly. In terms of general Wikipedia operation I wonder if it would be beneficial to have a button to flag content as possibly not meeting the Wikipedia guidelines. It seems that the number of people who can recognise low quality pages is going to be significantly higher than the number of people who have the skill and time to fix them. I m sure that there are many people who would just love to be able to choose from a list of Wikipedia pages that have received many negative votes. Such votes could be stored offline and uploaded later, but again that would rely on having recent content on the reader (it would be annoying for a recently fixed page to keep getting voted down). One area where offline editing of a Wiki would work well is that of niche Wikis. For example if I downloaded a copy of the Debian Wiki (which would only take a tiny fraction of the space in a Wikireader) then I could easily update it every week and the incidence of other people editing a page in the mean time would often be low. I could write long updates that make significant changes to SE Linux related pages while offline without needing any references and in many cases without much risk of conflicts. Implementing a distributed version control system to manage such updates shouldn t be difficult in principle, although the VCS might have to run on a laptop or desktop system after taking raw data from the Wikireader (tools like GIT seem memory hungry and might not fit on a small device). Also Mako refers to the already indefensibly large gap between the number of readers and editors on Wikipedia . Like Mako I don t have a TV watching personality. I agree that it is desirable to facilitate read-write access for everyone, but that doesn t have to involve write access to Wikipedia. I am not convinced that there is a difference between the number of readers and editors of Wikipedia that indicates a problem here. As something becomes more popular the number of people who use it without being committed to it increases, and it also becomes more integrated into society. I don t think it s a problem that many people use their writing time for other tasks such as blogging rather than editing Wikipedia. Wikipedia makes a great reference for blog posts and blog posts drive readers (and thus potential editors) to Wikipedia. Finally I think we should consider the fact that different people have different skill sets. Maybe the Wikipedia reader base gained a significant portion of the people who have the skills to make good editors a long time ago and now the majority of new users just don t have the skills. If that is the case then having the ratio of readers to editors change in favor of readers while the number of readers expands would be a good thing. I don t think that I am being elitist in acknowledging that different people have different skill sets, and that some portion of the population will lack the skills necessary to make good contributions to Wikipedia (good enough to outweigh the mistakes that they make). I think that valuing the contributions of all people in society does not require that we value all contributions to Wikipedia.

• [1] http://www.make-digital.com/make/vol20/?pg=16
• [2] http://mako.cc/copyrighteous/20091123-00.comment
• [3] http://thewikireader.com/update.html

The story behind it Recently, I decided to set up a subscription with a VoIP provider, Phonzo, here in Norway. On their webpage, Phonzo advertised a VoIP service which actually gave you the SIP information and allowed the user to connect their own equipment to this service. That s really cool , I thought. I can play with Asterisk on the PSTN now! . They also advertised an offer with rent of a Linksys SPA2102 included, at a very affordable rate. Now, I suspected that the box might be locked as I d heard they were with some providers so I searched all over their webpage for any hint that it might be. None was to be found and since they included the specific model designation of the adapter rather than mentioning a generic Analogue Telephone Adapter , I basically assumed it wouldn t be crippled. But when it did arrive (impeccable delivery time, and telephony worked out of the box, btw), I found to my dismay that the box was indeed locked. So I sent a polite email to customer service, saying basically that I know this is a matter mostly interesting to enthusiasts, but they ve advertised an SPA2102 , and what I have receieved is a crippled SPA2102 . They basically replied It says rent , so it belongs to us. I replied Renting does not exempt you from marketing laws; you ve sold me something else than what I paid for . I got the reply: We can t open it, it contains sensitive information and it s not crippled, it s optimized for Phonzo service[sic] (!). Yeah, that s really what they said. A few more emails back and forth, and nothing of value came forth. When I received a letter from customer service saying Stop your nonsense, we re providing you a service and the adapter is a part of it I realized I wasn t getting anywhere there. I ve sent an email to the address in the SSL certificate (who also seems to be one of the founders) hoping I d get in touch with someone of relevance, but I don t have great hopes. (There s a copy of the correspondance in Norwegian, if you re interested.) So over to my plan B. The Linksys SPA2102 has two interfaces for an administrator: The first is the HTTP interface bog-standard, with an admin password. The second is the Interactive Voice Response menu you know the kind, Press 1 for x, 2 for y, . Now, this menu has several different options, including one to enable HTTP access on the WAN port . By default, this option is set to False, and changing it requires an administrator password. But how do you enter an alphanumeric password on a DTMF dialpad? Aha the admin passnumber is derived from the admin password! The mapping is 1=1, [2ABCabc] = 2, [3DEFdef] = 3, , (everything else) = 0. This reduces the keyspace quite dramatically! So basically, what I ve done is kludged together a shell script which tries the different combinations and sounds them out using a software DTMF tone generator, with earphones serving as acoustic couplers. (For now, I ve skipped numbers containing a 1 . The number 1 only represents itself, and thus its value is quite low.) It then tries port 80 on its WAN IP every 100 attempts to see if a passnumber has succeeded. The shellscript is accessible here: http://simula.gunkies.org/~toresbe/dtmfbruteforce.bash. The phone adapter has two lines, but the second one is locked by Phonzo however, it is not possible to disable the IVR menu on this thing, so I have full use of the box while this is happening. (It nearly goes without saying that I ve spoofed the DNS so it connects to my Asterisk box. ) I m now averaging about one passkey per second. According to my calculations of each passkey representing the number of symbols per digit raised to the power of the number of digits, I am trying 16807 passwords per second and will be trying 117649 passwords per second when I get to six digits. I have a quite technical readership so please do correct me in the comments if I ve made an error in either the calculations or anywhere else. If there are any Phonzo users out there with an SPA2102, I would very much appreciate it if you contacted me brute force works a whole lot better when it s parallelized. I am currently at #302362. I have not yet been contacted by anyone in the same situation.

This is it. We know the faces of people who will count in Europe during the 2009-2014 period. And we can count on them to make the EU weigh even less than it did until now. Jos Manuel Dur o Barroso, president of the European Commission. For 5 years, this ultra-liberal brought in his fanatic views of the free market, leading to unprecedented removals of regulations and legislations that could prevent large corporations to extort money from citizens. He holds a non-negligible responsibility on the (still unsolved) bank crisis of 2007. Yet, citizens voted en masse earlier this year for the EPP all across Europe, leading to his renewal. You get the commission you deserve. Herman Van Rompuy, president of the European Council. This is no secret that this transparent non-leader was the choice of Sarkozy after Tony Blair turned out to be an unsustainable choice. Yet, none of the 26 other members of the Council dared to raise a single finger against this choice. Sarkozy has completely lost his credit in France, but that doesn t prevent this council of cowards from trusting him, apparently. It s not as if there weren t good candidates, like Jean-Claude Juncker or Vaira V e-Freiberga. But having a competent, Europe-friendly president who actually knows his files and speaks many languages would have cast shadows on those who don t (see below). Catherine Ashton, foreign ministry of the EU. If there was any worse possible choice, I don t know which. This was the only position supposed to be affected to a socialist. And since the Labour party is still member of the PASD, despite their insane liberal economic policy and their full-scale paranoia leading to unprecedented freedom hunting in the UK, the position was given to someone from this party. And among them, they chose a person with a reputation of sloppiness and incompetence, who doesn t speak correctly a single foreign language. It is probable that, just like Van Rompuy s going to be Sarkozy s puppet, she s going to be the UK Foreign Office s servant. And we continentals all love the Foreign Office s policy, which is often in complete opposition to what the rest of Europe feels like. Jerzy Buzek, president of the European Parliament. You don t know him? Neither do I. A weak parliament goes with a weak parliament president. This way, the European Council has its hands free for behind-the-curtains arrangements, rather than letting the citizens representatives take action. Martin Schultz, president of the PASD group at the European Parliament. In order to ensure his place as president of the Parliament for the second half of the period, he betrayed his own people, and accepted any rotten compromise the EPP would propose for the key positions. Socialists have never been so weak in Brussels, and the total absence of leadership has something to do with it. Makes you proud to be European, heh? And of course you already know the real faces of Europe for the next years. Sarkozy, Merkel, Berlusconi, Brown. The main leaders from Western Europe, with their rotten governments who swore to slay any of the remaining personal freedoms in each of their countries. What a great image for EU in the world. What a great example to set. But again, you get the leaders you deserve. That s the whole point of democracy.

My work sometimes causes me to have reason to change small things in open source projects which I then have to submit for consideration upstream. Often this is as simple as providing a patch on the relevant mailing list and moving on.

Sometimes however the change is larger and I really would like to see the feature or bug fix accepted by the project. I am fortunate that my employer is enlightened enough to not only accept this but actively encourage participation in open source communities.

Most of the time the patches are accepted, with changes or updates, in a reasonable timescale. Certainly for kernel work I have got used to a submission/accept time measured in hours!

On occasion the change gets dropped on the floor or missed and you have to resubmit (even if its just to get told its uninteresting and to go away ;-). Unfortunately there are a small number of projects where getting something merged is an experience in frustration.

The particular project which has caused me the most trouble along these lines is Qemu. Daniel and I did the work to support the Samsung ARM based 2410 and 2440 System on Chip (SoC) and a couple of boards they were used on. Of course we then presented the patch to the Qemu mailing list. That was in November...No, not this year, or even last, we are talking 2006!

Unsurprisingly there were numerous issues with our first cut, we improved the patches and resubmitted them and received absolutely no feedback. Eventually we provoked the maintainer to respond, we took his feedback into account and resubmitted. After a year of so of this Daniel got bored and gave up.

Being a complete idiot and apparently sucker for punishment I decided to re-try. I completely restructured the port and started by just trying to get the absolute minimal core changed accepted. It took some time to provoke a response (oh and they altered RCS which meant I had to change my submission again, but they did change to git so that is acceptable ;-)

Earlier this year resulted in my all time favorite maintainer response. Eventually I managed to find out he actually objected to the patch because the SoC we were using actually required a slightly different processor capability set (the emulation is ARMv5 by default and the SoC in question is ARM v4te, hey I had not noticed any practical difference, and Qemu is an emulator not a simulator...but OK)

Remember this is the first time this objection has been raised in 30months of patch submission. Fine, I create a patch which adds V4te emulation and submit that. I eventually get a response, to which my reply is a little frustrated I will admit.

I have since resubmitted the patch with the corner cases fixed, it has been ignored, and I never have received a reply to my direct questions. On this three year anniversary of the original submission I am simply going to give up, something I detest doing.

I am one of those dull people that finishes what he starts, that is pretty much my role in Simtec these days, ensuring stuff we start gets finished or at least drawing the line and calling it complete. To end up with a complete failure offends my personal values.

Now please do not think I hold any ill feelings towards anyone concerned, open source maintainers perform their roles without pay and, by extension, without responsibility to anyone but themselves. I am sure people are too busy to care about the itch I wanted scratched and that overall their project has not really lost all that much by not having me as a contributor.

I know I could have forked the project, or maintained my own tree or any number of other technical solutions but at the end of 1,100 days I have finally exhausted my enthusiasm and can move on. Speaking of which, time to resubmit a kbuild change which got dropped ;-)

It looks like my post about bugs in Ubuntu has received a bit more attention than I expected for few lines of ranting :-). Most interesting reactions came to Lucas Nussbaum's blog. There were nice explanations how it is supposed to work, but the problem is that people out there can not manage that amount of bugs. It is possible, that for some core packages, they manage to do the job. However most bug reports will probably go to some leaf packages, which are not that important, but lot of people use them. I started to interest in bugs in Ubuntu when I noticed that there is some huge number of bugs linked on phpMyAdmin's PTS page. There was something like 50 too much bugs. After quick look I could see that most of them are duplicates. After little fight with ajaxy interface, I even managed to mark most of them as duplicates and fix it in Debian package. But as somebody with no knowledge of Ubuntu (and not willing to learn internals of yet another distribution, I think Debian and OpenSUSE is enough), I really have no idea what could be done to push some bug fix to existing release. So once some Ubuntu release (The Lucid Lynx in this case) got new version, I marked the bug as fixed. This is probably not that nice to users, but somebody from Ubuntu community should take care of them. Off-topic PS: If anybody is interested in Google Wave invitations, just write me an email, I currently have 15 without any use.

(Context: Michal iha complains about bugs filed in Ubuntu not being looked at nor forwarded to Debian or upstream) Michal, I think that your complaint is caused by a misunderstanding of how package maintenance happens in Ubuntu. I ll try to clarify it, based on what I understand (if you know better than me, don t hesitate to comment). The part of Canonical maintaining the distribution is organized into teams (full list here), like Kernel, Foundations, Desktop, Mobile, Server, etc. Most of those teams have mirror-teams in the community, like the Ubuntu Desktop team. Those teams take care of subsets of packages in Ubuntu, of relevance to the respective teams. (This is orthogonal to package upload rights, which are managed with the Ubuntu Core Development Team, and the Ubuntu Development Team ; there s a proposal to change that so that package upload rights are based on the first set of teams). However, there are some packages (probably more than 70% of the packages in Ubuntu, including main+universe) that are of no interest to any particular team. Those packages are maintained on a best-effort basis by all the Ubuntu developers (inside the loosely defined MOTU team), and focus is usually on not diverging from Debian, to make their work as easy as possible. It s very similar to what we do in Debian with orphaned packages: sometimes, important bugs get fixed, because someone complained loudly enough or a developer ran into the bug and did a QA upload ; but usually, we don t really do any bug triaging. Of course, there are some packages in Ubuntu that are not maintained by any core team, but still have someone that cares about them. They are more the exception than the rule. So, yes, obviously, you will run into packages with lots of untriaged bugs, sometimes even with patches. And those bugs and patches are rarely being forwarded manually to Debian, simply because nobody cares about those packages in Ubuntu. In an ideal world, with infinite resources, this would not happen, of course. But realistically, this is not going to change anytime soon. There s a link on the PTS to the bugs of your packages in Ubuntu. The idea is to allow an easy access to the bugs reported in Ubuntu, which are likely to be also relevant to the Debian package. You should probably feel welcomed to triage the bugs against your package in ubuntu, if it makes it easier for you to monitor them. There s some noise in the Ubuntu bugs, of course, but more and more often, by looking at the Ubuntu bugs, I find important bugs in my Debian packages that are not even reported in Debian yet.

My Debian QA page shows what I consider to be a huge amount of packages I am currently uploader for 207 packages. Why so many? There are many factors The main one is group maintenance (I'm directly responsible only for 19; of course, this should not mean I disregard the rest of them), the second one is regularity. By far, most of my source packages (177) match lib.*perl, followed by lib.*ruby with 20. Anyway A strong factor that allows the pkg-perl group to be successful in maintaining 1411 packages is the regularity of the task: Packaging Perl modules is usually as easy as running dh-make-perl on them (of course, not taking away the merit of packaging the few strange corner cases In Ruby-land, the landscape is quite different. The developer community is quite anchored in agile worldviews, which go beyond coding practices and all the way over to confronting the way most Free Software projects distribute their work. I have previously ranted presented informed and opinionated blog posts on this topic Ruby culture dictates the distribution via Ruby Gems, which are for many reasons not Debian friendly. Besides Gems, most projects have adopted Git for development tracking and are hosted under Github That's why I came up with Githubredir, which basically presents an uscan-friendly listing of tags for a given project. But if you develop in Git, you might want to split a project in its constituent parts for easier organization, without meaning that each subproject should be an independent project by itself, right? After all, that's what Git submodules are for. That's what happened with a great PDF generating library for Ruby, Prawn. Thing is, the three parts of the main project are required for the project to be built. Anyway, that was a great reason to move the package over to the new dpkg 3.0 (quilt) source format. And, yes, it is a straightforward move! If you have not yet done so, take a look at Raphael Hertzog' explanation+FAQ wiki page. It just works, and makes many things way easier. There are still some wrinkles in my packaging, like where I'm getting the orig tarballs from As the submodules are not presently tagged in any way, I was only able to download a snapshot of their respective current master branches. This is suboptimal, I know, but I have talked to the upstream author, and he confirms that for the next major version (which should not be long in coming) the tags will be synchronized, and things will be even cleaner. PS- I love Hpricot. To get the numbers for my QA page, I just had to get three dirty but useful arrays:

And work from the three very simple lists there i.e. tot.select pkg pkg =~ /lib.*perl/ .size gives me 177.

Sound Juicer "I Got Nobody On My Side And Surely That Ain't Right" 2.28.1 has been released. Tarballs are available on burtonini.com, or from the GNOME FTP servers. Props to Bastien for doing most of the work here.

• Many translations
• Use gnome-session instead of gnome-power-manager to avoid the machine going to sleep (Richard Hughes)
• Fix a few crashers when extracting an unknown CD (Bastien Nocera)
• Fix CD-Text metadata gathering (BN)
• Don't truncate submission URLs (BN)
• Extract UUIDs to put in ripped files' metadata (Philipp Wolfer)
• Fix some bugs in test program (Alex Larsson)

Bastien originally called this release Not the maintainer, lalala, plug ears but we all know he is, right?

Some technology evolves very quickly, for example the following things are used by probably 80% of readers of this page:

• A web browser.
• A mail client.
• A webserver.

But other technology is stuck in the past and only sees laclustre updates and innovations (not that inovation is mandatory or automatically a good thing) Right now I'm looking at my webserver logs, trying to see who is viewing my sites, where they came from, and what their favourite pie is. In the free world we have the choice of awstats, webalizer, and visitors (possibly more that I'm unaware of). In the commercial world everybody and their dog uses Google's analytics. On the face of it a web analysis package is trivial:

• Read in some access.log files.
• Process to some internal database representaqtion.
• Generate static/dynamic HTML output from your intermediate form, optionally including graphs, images, and pie-charts.

If you add javascript-fu to each of your pages you can track page titles, exit links, screen resolutions, and other data to record too. (Though I guess thats a seperate problem; trying to merge that data in with the data you have in your access log without making nasty links like "GET /trackin.gif?x_res=800;y_res=600". Anyway I guess with cookies you could correlate reasonably carefully.) In conclusion why are my web statistics so dull, boring, and less educational than I desire? I'd be tempted to experiment, but I suspect this is a problem which has subtle issues I'm overlooking and requires an artistic slant to make pretty. (ObLink: asql is my semi-solution to logfile analysis.) ObFilm: Bound

I finally managed to update my blog to new nanoblogger, which should work a bit faster and is easier to control, so I might get back to throwing random thoughts to world wide web. While doing that, I modified a little bit templates, what means that I cut out most of dependency on Google - for statistics I use own Piwik instance and the advertisement is currently served by AdBard.

Este post tambi n est escrito en espa ol aqu . Privacy at Facebook is heavy-duty. As a big fan of the Worlds Collide Theory I hate be tagged compulsively. I would like to select in which photos appear in my profile and feed. Since I couldn t find that option in the setting menu, I looked for the answer in my favorite scripting language: Python. This 60-lines-long script removes your tag from the latests photos where you has been labeled. You can download it from here. You may run it hourly (or every 15 minutes, or every 5 minutes, depends how paranoid you are) via cron or whatever. Any improvement is welcome. It probably runs on Windows too. If you managed to do it, leave a comment for the others.