Search Results: "nate"

26 May 2006

Raphaël Hertzog: Improving Debian as a whole

I have to agree with Joey, I have the feeling that we’re not doing many “transversal” improvements and that we’re busy enough simply trying to keep up with new upstream version of software. That’s not completely true but I also wouldn’t want Debian to evolve in that direction. I think that less people are interested in doing large scale changes because the coordination with 1000 maintainers and 10000 packages is simply too complicated and taking too much time. Luckily we had significant improvements recently that should ease that coordination work. I’m thinking mainly of the usertags that allow us to use the BTS as big TODO list. But usertags are obscure to many people and not well documented yet. So there’s room for improvements: that’s why I proposed a project for Google’s Summer of code called “Distribution-wide tracker tools” (see list of accepted projects here). Check the project proposal of Arnaud Fontaine to have a more precise idea of what it could give. I want this infrastructure because I think it may help Utnubu to effectively coordinate the integration of Ubuntu improvements and because it may help Debian be more on the leading edge (instead of trying to catchup with derivatives). And last but not least, I believe many more people (with different level of skills) will be able to effectively work on some projects once the work to do has been clearly identified and registered in such a system. The project is about to start, so all ideas/comments are welcome of course!

Kenshi Muto: Backed from Debconf6 and Canada

I backed home yesterday. After I arrived at home, I went to buy foods to cook, checked bills and snail mails, washed my clothes, took a bath, saw through a bunch of e-mails and gave up to reply to them, met my partner again, cooked for dinner, and slept well. Fortunately I haven't a jet lug at this time. Because I tripped China for 1 week before Debconf6, I was very tired at the beginning of Debconf. Furthermore mixing Spanish/English/Japanese caused me a mental fatigue. I felt better as time went by. Well, I would more enjoy if I wasn't so tired, but I enjoyed BOF, talks, swimming, foods, travelling and so on during Debconf6. 'Gracias, Debconf staff and attendees.' Mexico was an interesting place for me, so I'd like to visit there again in the future with my partner. After Debconf, we - Nobuhiro, Yukiharu, and me - stayed Toronto for 2 days. It was very nice time to see Niagara falls and to walk through Toronto downtown. I uploaded the photos: Debconf6 pictures, Canada picutures. I apologize I couldn't work well for Debian, especially for CUPS during the conference by a network problem. CUPS 1.2.1 is already released and I'm working for it.

25 May 2006

Wouter Verhelst: IceWM

I had been an Enlightenment user for a long time—halfway the Summer of 2000 up to the early fall of 2004—before someone finally decided to pick up the pieces where they were left somewhere around 2000 and restart its development. Unfortunately, that also meant causing #219925, which was irritating me more and more each day. Eventually, in the early fall of 2004 (almost a year after I filed that bug), I gave up and started looking for something else. The problem, of course, was that I'd grown so accustomed to using Enlightenment and its way of doing things that I felt at a loss. I wanted to be able to move windows above the upper edge of my screen again. I needed focus-follows-mouse. I was having a hard time without edge-flipping. Eventually I found that there was functionality for all of the above, but it wasn't flawless. Especially not the edge flipping—GNOME implements that in a truly horrible way1. Not to mention the fact that brightside, the application which implements edge-flipping for GNOME, segfaulted on me an annoyingly high number of times, sometimes even taking away my entire session with it. Even Enlightenment never did that; it would just misbehave instead. Apart from that, of course GNOME also had some extra annoyances that I didn't get rid of. The fact that it insists on mucking with my keyboard settings, to name just one example. Even so, I used it for about nine months. Then, slightly after DebConf5 in Helsinki, I realized what the true horror of GNOME is: not the fact that they hide away features or try to make the desktop void of superfluous options; the fact that they remove features that are critical to some of its users. I know I was horrified to find out that something I really used a lot had been removed in that new release. I kept using it for three more months before I threw in the towel and tried something totally different. Ion3. After coming from the mostly mouse-oriented interfaces that GNOME and Enlightenment were, ion3 was truly different. I liked it at first; it was a welcome change from what I'd previously been doing. Eventually, though, I found that the ion way of doing things just wasn't my way. The fact that, by default, it puts new windows right in front of the window you're working on was rather offputting. Any serious attempt at configuring the thing involves learning lua which, though supposedly not hard to do, is not something I ever found the time for. In the end, I discovered that I disliked working with ion, as I often felt that it gave me a fragmented and tunneled view on the world, and that it was working with me instead of the other way around. In short, it was getting the fun out of computing for me. Which wasn't good, at all. So that's when I started looking for something else again. When I'd made the decision to move way from ion3, I didn't want to keep using that "until I'd found something else"; instead, I quickly installed IceWM instead—which I still knew from back when I had a Yopy YP3000—and used that until I had found something better. Little did I know the beaty of IceWM. I've decided, by now, that it does all I need, and more: By default, it tries the best it can to put a window on your screen so that it overlaps with as little other windows as possible. I can have it not focus a new window by default. I does focus-follows-mouse, if enabled. It even does edge-flipping. Of course it's not perfect—the edge-flipping, though not as horrible as the GNOME implementation, can still use some improvement. As if to prove my point, I accidentally closed the window in which I was writing this very post before it had been written to disk, the cause of which could be described as an interface problem in IceWM (though it's more likely an example of PEBMAC (Problem Exists Between Mouse And Chair). But, all in all, using IceWM feels like finally coming home. Thanks, Marko and Mathias, for a truly wonderful piece of software. 1 I know that there are a lot of people who dislike edge-flipping. I am 99% sure that this is because they've never seen it implemented right. Edge-flipping is great, if done right; it's nightmare if done wrong. GNOME does it horribly wrong. IceWM does it better, though not perfect. The implementation in Enlightenment is perfect. I'll discuss the details in another post.

Martin F. Krafft: Post-Debconf

One thing that never really came to my mind during Debconf6 in Oaxtepec, Mexico, was blogging about what went on. In part, that's because I never had a minute to spare, plenty of other people were blogging about the event on the planet, and definitely also because I developed a dislike to play-by-play blogging, which I certainly do not like to read for my part. But now, sitting in Oaxaca in the Hostel Pochon (which has free wireless, imagine that), I feel like at least jotting down some of the highlights. My favourite non-Debian related happening must have been the descent to Mexico City airport. I am willing to bet that our pilots either had too much to drink or way too much fun, because we literally zig-zagged across this amazing city. It's about 2200 metres above sea level and our inflight information system noted our altitude at 3500m for at least 20 minutes, so glued to the window, I felt in a miniature world, hovering above a city that extends to all sides however far the eyes could see (I conclude that in all miniature worlds I've seen so far, such as the Eisenbahnmuseum Hamburg and Swiss Miniature, trains and cars are generally moving too fast). The population of "la Ciudad de Mexico" (which the locals just call "Mexico") is estimated to be somewhere between 20 and 24 million, which makes it the largest city in the world, and it was not hard to believe that during the descent (and afterwards). I arrived at Oaxtepec, a government-run vacational complex, some three or four hours after touchdown and didn't last very long until the jetlag took me to bed. That was Saturday night. With Sunday morning, the official Debconf conference had started and was to last for seven days. In general, that meant talks and BoF sessions throughout the day, loads of hacking and socialising in between, food, and drinks with more socialising in the evening (and throughout the night in some cases). I really enjoyed seeing many of the folks I had met at last year's conference in Helsinki, while some others' absence was equally prevalent. I spent most of the week hanging out with Biella Coleman, Micah Anderson, Sean Finney, Clint Adams, and a bunch of others, I also managed to make the real-life acquaintance of some people I had known online for a long time. In retrospect though, I should have spent less time with the regular clique (with whom I was to go to the post-Debconf trip anyway) and spent more time getting to know more of the attendants. The vacational complex was interesting, and unlike many others, I didn't get annoyed by the long distances between presentation room, my accomodation, the hacklab, and the place where we were served edible lunches and dinners. Rather, I enjoyed walking with others, engaged in discussions on some of the more prevalent topics filling my life with Debian (such as version control, low-level Debian tools, security issues, and social challenges). The only nuisance was the long walk to the nearby town and its market, from where I would get most of my food and drink throughout the week -- but even that walk I rarely had to manage alone. The massive pool (with a ten metre diving board) that lay in the middle of it all didn't really attract me that much, but then again I've never been much of a pool person. In the interest of various people worrying about my safety in Mexico, as well as some of my clients, I purchased a Mexican prepaid SIM card for my cellphone and linked up with the world (after two attempts and an accumulated 2.5 hour wait). The fun was only short though, when I found out that in Mexico, phone charges are ridiculously expensive, and receiving calls on a mobile phone costs exactly the same as making them. At USD 1/Minute to and from Europe, I ended up limiting my air time to a minimum. I spent most of the first couple days getting mdadm back into shape, bug triaging and uploading a new upstream to experimental, except for Monday, which I spent together with Joey Hess, Micah, and Biella trying to recover files from her wrecked filesystem, which we managed in the end using a simple fsck to at least recover her presentation. I'd be sitting on the terrace in front of the "hacklab" where people kept passing by, so my work certainly wasn't focused and without interruptions, but in the end I was still satisfied with the end result. And in the evenings, it was usually the same terrace, sampling the local beer, enjoying cheese from all over the world at the cheese party on Tuesday night, trying liquors from other parts of the globe, and talking and joking and meeting great people (I truly love the Debian crowd). Out of the large assortment of talks available, I attended several but found that front-up presentations aren't my thing and I would have to let the topic simmer a bit (along with some research) before delivering my questions to the speakers outside of the talk (where I finally got some interesting answers to long-standing questions). Thanks to the awesome work by our video team, which recorded every single presentation to tape, streaming it live and also intending to publish it on a post-conference DVD, I found myself often listening in on talks I wouldn't have gone to, while hacking away on said porch. Noticing, however, that many talk slots were left unfilled at the start of the conference (they did quickly fill with impromptu presentations and BoF sessions once the inertia of the event picked up), I was a little annoyed that my proposal was turned down in the first phase of selection. Wednesday was the day of the day trip. Against my recommendations of an early departure, we left the site at 11:30 with six busses (remarkably on time), heading for Xochicalco for a rather boring tour of the museum, and a vastly more interesting, two hour stroll (in the midday sun) around the actual archeological site, which was quite impressive despite mostly being artificially built or rebuilt by the government. We went on for an excellent buffet-style lunch (which was amazingly well organised), and then headed on for Cuernevaca, a small, romantic town where we had only an hour to spend before heading back home (who recommended starting the day earlier?). When we finally made it back to the conference, most of us were just tired and the evening wasn't as wild as some of the other ones during the week. Come Thursday, my mission was to attack the thinkpad packages, which make Debian on IBM laptops a lot more of a pleasure to use. Unfortunately, I didn't get anywhere (yet) with that work, simply because most of my time was spent battling the weird hacks that make up module-assistant, which actually makes it a lot harder for developers to provide kernel module packages (while really improving the end-user's experience). But of course, there was a positive twist to this issue, as I would now leave my screen in frustration much more frequently and socialise with the others. For the evening, the organisers had prepared the "formal dinner" (which isn't so formal at all). A bunch of busses took us to a nearby shed, where we found all tables arranged in a massive swirl, and when we were all seated, a Mariachi band entered, at the same time as the rain outside picked up -- I thought one of the Mariachis was playing the snare drum but as the rain grew stronger, I concluded it must instead be the drops on the metal roof causing the noise. Generally in love with rain, I made my way to the door while others lined up to fetch dinner and stood in awe for a bunch of minutes at the sight of the marble-sized drops descending from the sky. ... when suddenly I saw one of Debian's troublemakers, Jonathan/Ted Walther, running at me, chased by three developers and found myself amidst their altercation before I could do anything. People screaming, one reaching over my shoulder to push Ted, it was all too much. I told everyone to calm down, to which Jonathan/Ted reacted, vigorously shaking and foaming, with a "get out of my fucking way, you fucking Nazi" and I knew that stuff had gone wrong. I withdrew, and in an attempt to find out what had happened managed to piss off one of the three involved developers, who'd then later refuse to hear me out for an explanation. All that really left me in a depressed state mainly because I simply hadn't expected Debian developers getting physical at each other, and this time it was Erinn Clark who consoled me and turned the night around for the better. I still had no appetite and took the first bus home, sent an apologetic email to the offended developer (who never acknowledged receipt but seemed to have forgotten the incident the next day), and enjoyed beers while the others kept returning to the hacklab. Apparently, people were quite aware of my (passive) involvement during the incident, so I was bombarded with plenty questions, most of which I refused to answer for lack of knowledge of the actual facts. Still, when I saw one girl in another altercation with Jonathan/Ted later that night in response to severe offences he published on his blog, which led her to come close to tears, I decided it was time to pull him off the planet. He re-added himself shortly afterwards by "fixing a typo" (according to the CVS changelog), but by that time, I couldn't care less no more and simply resumed the discussions, which eventually turned into topics of life, intelligence, and the bottom-up vs. top-down debate. I am a strong supporter of bottom-up (as many of you know), and I somehow regret the way I approached the discussion, because in retrospect I see myself as somewhat arrogant during it; fortunately, noone seemed to hold it against me the next day. Throughout the entire week, I built up a reputation of the guy that needs no sleep: staying up until the early morning hours, yet rarely missing any of the first talks at 10 in the morning, and even joining with people for breakfast at the market before. Friday morning, however, I just couldn't get up. We talked until six in the morning, and when my eyelids finally moved after I dropped into bed, it was already noon and I dragged myself to the next talk. after which I simply returned to the hacklab and developed more of my dislike towards module-assistant, before the call for the official Debconf6 group picture rescued me (and those around me). The keysigning party followed and I made the mistake to offer to coordinate it (picking up where Anibal's great preparation left off), without really running the process through my head before. Standing up on the diving tower and screaming to the crowd of 140 participants, it was in part due to Moray Allen's comments that the party went more or less without any complications; I did get to conduct another experiment though. During the keysigning, Mark Shuttleworth invited a bunch of us to join him for dinner to discuss the Debian-Ubuntu situation (no bribes involved; we paid for ourselves). I'll have more on this in a separate post when it's ready. The discussion continued after we arrived back at the hacklab, and once again, I didn't go to bed at a civilised hour... ... but I did get up in time for Biella's talk, during which she employed very effective techniques to get me to actually pay attention (which I would have done anyway): she required my laptop for the presentation. Again, the talk didn't do much to me (which is not Biella's fault), but I am certainly interested in reading the relevant parts of her dissertation. At the same time, however, it made me realise how far from reality the academic world is: big words and complicated concepts just don't count when it comes to getting your hands dirty, and I will try my best not to go down that route when my own dissertation gets more serious. Two other memorable events happened on Saturday: the fun group photos (I was determined to get the participants to line up in a swirl in the pool, and partly succeeded), and the last-night-party on the porch of the hacklab, which was mighty fun, in part because we had speakers blasting tunes for the first time that week (thanks to the dance BoF the night before), and Ryan Murray was playing some of the truly excellent mixes of a close friend of his, which are available from mux.ca. I didn't sleep that night. And then Sunday had arrived, the sad last day of a great conference. I would like to thank all the organisers and helpers for making this event possible! I know some of you had some reservations before and during the event, but in the end it's the result that counts, and I was only one of many who were absolutely satisfied by the week. A great big THANK YOU to you! Following the last bits of socialising and copying Biella's harddrive image to Micah's drive for later rescue of some of her precious videos, we were off to Mexico city for the vacational part of the trip. Some of us went by bus, Vagrant and myself hopped onto the bus to assist one of our developers with his wheelchair at the airport. When the group reconvened in front of our hotel for the night in the centre of Mexico city, the vacation had started (blog post forthcoming sometime...)

24 May 2006

Neil McGovern: Wings and Roundabouts

Well, I've finally got back from DebConf6 and am quite nackered, especially considering I've just done a full day at work.

I could amuse you with the usual 'lists-of-memorable-dc6-events', or a 'review-of-each-day', or even a 'bits-from-the-orga-team', but there's pleanty of other posts on planet.d.o about that, so instead, I'll recount my experiences of the return trip, starting in Oaxtepec.

I'm also putting up all my photos, but it'll take a while. They'll be appearing over the next few days at my Fotopic site.

I wake up fairly early-ish (10am. It's early for me, ok? I'm not German :P) and pack my suitcase. I take the padlock keys out of the case and lock it. Except I got the wrong keys. So, the keys are now inside the locked case. Fortunately, I'd already taken everything out of the case I'd needed and put it in my rucksack.

Next, it comes to time to check out. I find out that we need out room checking to ensure that we haven't stolen a wall or ceiling or something. One of the cleaners has a look around and spots a missing lampshade. We (me + Fil Hands) try to explain in broken Spanish that it was missing when we arrived in the room, but she doesn't seem to be having any of it. Mind you, there is the vague possibility that "Si","Fruta","Cafe" and "Hola" isn't quite enough knowledge to explain the situation. Feh.
So, we manage to accost the lovely Amaya to do some translation for us. The cleaner lady calls her boss, who tells us it'll cost 860 pesos (£43). We politely decline. So, she then calls her boss. This all takes some time. Eventually, she opens a huge book, looks inside and sees that the shade was taken away by maintainance. Why this wasn't done before, I don't know.

Anyway, our bus was leaving at 2:00pm, so we had to rush to the reception. The journey was quite pleasent, and we eventually arrived at the airport at 4:20pm. There was a small altercation with the Taxi driver over the tip, as it was already included in the fair, and he said it wasn't. We then pointed out that tolls were also included in the fair, and the driver didn't take a toll road. At this point, he seemed to dissapear quite satified.

I approached the Air France desk, and was told I coudn't check in until 7:30pm (my flight dind't leave until 11:30pm). Bugger. So after waiting around quite a while, and getting something to eat, I went to check in. There was a huge queue, but it didn't really matter, as I was flying under a Flying Blue - Silver level card, so I could use the express queue. They did, however, want to check my luggage. Broken Spanish did work this time, as I wildly gestated towards my suitcase, making key symbols.

So, after another long wait, we (me and Daniel Baumann, we're on the same flight, and indeed sitting next to each other by some freak coincidence) wander off through to the gate. I manage to find some free wireless (ESSID: co_admeralty_club) and surf for a bit. Flight ends up being delayed for 30 mins, but it didn't matter too much.

Then, I hear an annoucement over the intercom, that a group of passengers should contact the gate staff, and my name is mentioned. A little worried, I approach.
"Hello, I'm Mr McGovern. My name was called on the intercom."
"Can I have your boarding pass please?"
"Sure..." *worry*
"Thank you.... ok, we'd like to invite you to fly business class with us today sir."
"Thank you very much"
I then proceed to whistle the 'Kill Bill' tune, as for some reason, it's following me everywhere I go in the airport, be it a cleaner, or another passenger. I think it's like some sort of virus, infecting one person and moving on to the next host.

We still had a little while, so we popped back to the waiting area to, well, wait. We saw some of the Brixen gang, and one of them had his laptop stolen : That's the second laptop down then. The first was run over by a car in Oaxtepec.

So, I board the plane, and am immediately offered lots of alcohol and other free thingstm. Which was nice. Unfortunately, the plane was further delayed. This means that on arriving in CDG, my connecting flight was already boarding. It was at this point that I had dounts about my luggage arriving in MAN at the same time as me.

So, I board the plane in Paris, and it's a straightforward flight. But lo and behold, at the other end, no baggage. No suprises there then.

Today, my luggage arrived at 8:00pm, just after I've got home from work. I'd also got a nice letter from the Inland Revenue, with a £215.67 tax rebate \o/

As my subject: S^HWings and Roundabouts.

Adam Rosi-Kessel: Cell Phones and Search Costs

I am one of the unfortunate hundreds of thousands of Verizon customers who eagerly ran out to buy the Motorola v710 Bluetooth phone when it first came out a couple of years ago. (For a short period of time, I could really turn heads with my wireless earpiece—now you look like an antiquarian if you don’t have a Bluetooth headset). It turns out that Verizon disabled all of the most useful Bluetooth features on the phone, and a class action lawsuit ensued, which predictably settled on terms quite beneficial to counsel, but less so to the affected class. The settlement provided several options for Verizon subscribers who had purchased the v710, only one of which had a substantial monetary value—namely, a $200 credit toward a new phone (or whatever the actual price we paid for the phone, assuming we still have receipts). The settlement period expires at the end of the month, so tonight I finally got around to cashing in on the victory. I was quickly reminded of how much I hate shopping for cell phone technology. Verizon provides more than a dozen options for cell phones, each of them mediocre in its own different way. (I should also mention that the Verizon Wireless website is, itself, mediocre in many different ways.) Cell phones have been around for long enough that it ought to be fairly mature technology; instead, you have to figure out which annoying shortcoming bothers you the least. The most expensive of the non-Pocket PC models, the Samsung SCH-a630, despite having a 2 megapixel built-in camera, has a lower image quality than the cheaper “LG the V” (better known as the LG VX9800), as well as crippled Bluetooth like the v710. I ended up settling on “LG the V,” despite its silly name and hefty form factor, because it seems to be the one model that Verizon decided not to cripple Bluetooth on. Apparently, it has complete OBEX support, and works quite well with Linux. It gets worse shopping for Bluetooth headsets. None of the top headsets recommended by cnet are even offered by Verizon. So instead you’re stuck perusing endless message board postings for threads with names like Which Bluetooth Headset is best for VX9800? trying to figure out which, in fact, is the best Bluetooth Headset for the VX9800. While some aspects of a Bluetooth headset are obviously personal preferences based on, for example, the shape of your earlobe, how often you drive in a convertible with the top down while talking on your cell, and whether you like to wear your headset to bed, I would really appreciate some objective metrics and brand uniformity. There’s no way to predict, for example, whether a particular model of Motorola, Jabra, or Logitech headset will be any good—some seem to be well received, while others have glaring design flaws. As a trademark lawyer, I’m disappointed by this state of affairs. I’d like to be able to identify a brand that I can trust and just go with it. This is especially true where it’s difficult to evaluate the quality of an item on first inspection (or over the Internet) and it’s an item you’ll keep for at least a while (two or three years for cell equipment). As things stand, there seem to be few real winners, and the search costs are inordinately high. Hopefully the invisible hand will eventually fix this situation, but I’m not going to bet on it.

23 May 2006

Biella Coleman: Mexican Bribes

Another Debconf has come and passed. This was my 3rd conference and surely to be one of the more memorable, partly because I showed up for the whole time (and am now traveling with 4 other DD’s in Mexico) and partly because of a few problems that plagued my visit. There is no doubt that I had a wonderful time but some of my attention was drawn away from enjoyment toward crisis management. For the first few days, it was due to computer problems (now sort of fixed) and then the last few days I had “Biella Hardware” problems in the form of one of the worst combo sore throats/ body aches that I have had in recent memory (now sort of fixed but not entirely). Now that I am in Oxaca, I hope to spend a little time blogging about this year’s Debconf but before I wanted to pass along what I think has been one of the more amusing experiences thus far in Mexico. So yesterday a group of us (Jeroeun, Martin K, Micah, Vagrant) rented a car to head off to the Southern city of Oxaca. I have actually never rented a car in a foreign country, and I was a little concerned about everything from price to roads to cops. Amid my nervousness, the employee at Thrify was sort of reassuing and quite nice but he gave us some unfortunate news: he warned us that as we reached this one particular circular intersection in Mexico City we would be stopped by a cop (because we are tourists) and basically bribed. This was not surprising news to be but I was surprised at how upset this made me. (maybe because I have never had such an experience and thought I would mangle it when the time came to pass off the money or offset the bribe or whatever). Anyway, after we packed 5 bodies and copious luggage into our compact Nissan, we headed off somewhat prepared to face off the cop and decided it was best I drive as I was the Spanish speaker. We made our way through the congested streets and headed toward the intersection and as we got closer, I thought to myself how are they going to spot us within all this traffic? But you see, the thing about this intersection is as soon as you make the turn left, you hit a light and need to stop for a long time. And you see, this gives the cop ample time to switch on the tourist radar and spot the noticeable white bodies. Sure enough, within 30 seconds of stopping at the intersection, a Mexican cop walks over and there is where the fun began. So he basically told me that I did not use my signal lights for turning when I made a left and that this infraction would cost me US $120. At this point I started to get a little freaked (I already dropped too much money on a rental car) but I remained calm and told him basically in Spanish With all respect, officer, I think I used my light because I am in a foreign country and am very aware that I must follow all traffic rules. After a little back and forth, I moved on to the bribe stage. While we were told that 100 pesos (10 US) was the typical bribe, we, being cheapskates, just offered 5 US. And then, magically, at that point, the officer said, ok just go ahead and be careful not to repeat the offense next time. I was shocked. I mean there was some money being offered right there and I was sure he was going to ask for a little more. But he backed off. Why? I think it was a combination of factors. Ok so perhaps he was surprised that I knew what was going on. Perhaps he was uncomfortable that I knew Spanish. But I think he the tipping point was due to cultural factors. I think he found it odd that there was this little woman driving a car with 4 grown and pretty large men. Given the gender dynamics in the country, this was just beyond his cultural comfort zone and he realized that I was badassss, and he just backed off. Ok, so I don’t really know if that is what happened but I like the explanation and am glad I got off the hook :-)

Pierre Habouzit: The whole java/non-free affair

summary of the problem I've re-read most of the calm and useful posts (yes some exist if you look hard :D) in the java-tro^H^Hhread. Yes, the pro-java-in-non-free are right if we omit to mention all the difficulties it will imply if such a removal has to happen for a stable update[1] removing java from our mirrors do terminate the license solve most of the issues. Though, two major concerns remains:
  1. clause 2.f (you agree to defend and indemnify Sun and its licensors from and against any damages ... and so forth) is IMHO unacceptable, even for non-free, because debian isn't in a position where it can risk to see that clause exercised by Sun ;
  2. section 4 (and others of the same sort) makes the existence of java in non-free depending of Sun's mood: exercising clause 4 is trivial they just have to imagine a new kernel feature our kernel should support that we can't provide to terminate the license retro-actively. Many instances of that problem exists in the license.
The first problem in itself seems obvious, and none of the arguments of the pro-java-in-non-free have put me at rest. The second problem is a real concern because it means that our java support can be discontinued without possible clean upgrade path back to java-package. If Sun could not retire our right to redistribute one given version of java, then we could repackage the last version we can distribute with some debconf dialog to warn the user his java package won't be upgraded again, and that he must fall back to make-jpkg. But here, if Sun decides it, Sun can make the package simply disappear. And given the number of users that will concern, this is not a problem to be taken lightly.

I honnestly believe that putting java into non-free, whereas we already have java-package that allow a quite satisfying integration of Sun's JDK/JRE into a debian instance, implicitely means that we are confident that java will stay in here forever (or for a significant enough time). And I see nothing that can guarantee such a fact, and I see too many things that can prevent this with a probability significantely greater than 0. Yes there I know there is a FAQ about those issues, where Sun promise they won't use their power to hurt people. But if they don't itend to, why did they put those clauses in the license ? With all the good will I can provide, that does not makes sense to me. If you put landmines in your garden, well, that's for a purpose, not for the garnishment. debian issues And then, I've a couple of questions there, for which I've seen no real answer: and I'll skip the questions I don't want to ask, or more precisely I don't want/fear to read the answer to: Disclaimer Don't get me wrong. I've been really happy when I've seen that java entered non-free (even if I don't like the language but that's another story and is off topic here), because that meant that progress had been done in the good direction, and that's a thing I just have to praise. But then I've heard people complain about the damn license, and went read it. And then, I've been really disappointed, and I felt betrayed by those three people:
yes, I'm a DD, but I'm also a Debian User, and I trust my fellow developpers to bring to debian packages that don't have license issues, and will be supported enough[3]. As a user, I feel betrayed because nothing that I expect from a package that is in debian (even in non-free) can be guaranteed for the java package.
Notes [1] since there is a 3 month delay, it means the new stable has to be ready in that delay [2] no to mention the haste and prematurity of that action [3] yes, even for non-free. the sole non-free package I install is the nvidia driver, that qualifies to the durability and support in debian criterium.

22 May 2006

Uwe Hermann: Podsploiting

The RedTeam, a penetration testing group, has released two security advisories which explain security holes in two podcast clients (podcatchers). Both exploits are possible because the input of the programs is not properly (or at all) sanitized. Basically, they call system($wget_cmd) where $wget_cmd is shell (/bin/sh) code which shall download a file via wget. As the $wget_cmd string contains contents from an untrusted source (HTML/XML on some random server), this results in an "arbitrary code execution" vulnerability, the worst-case scenario you could imagine. If someone is naive enough to even run such a podcatcher as root, this means a remote root exploit! Anyways, the RedTeam is definately correct in saying that more and more people start listening to podcasts, and more and more podcatchers are written. But few of them are written with security in mind, which leaves many listeners at risk... I wonder how popular closed-source podcatchers such as iTunes are affected here. Are there any published audits/audit-results (black-box auditing, obviously, as you don't have the source code) for iTunes? As for Free Software implementations... consider this a call for reviews and audits! If you know/use one of the many podcatchers (or an RSS feed aggregator, which are affected by similar issues), and have some knowledge on secure programming, get the source and review the application. Make the software you use, and the world at large, a little safer. I'll definately have a look at the programs I'm using soonish...

20 May 2006

Junichi Uekawa: Lightning talks.

Coordinated by Joey Hess. Will we fit in?

René van Bevern: ion3-scripts for Lua 5.1 also in experimental (and: strange language designers!)

As Norbert already pointed out, the Ion 3 suite of packages is currently hanging around in experimental, because Ion 3 now uses Lua 5.1, which breaks most of the user-contributed scripts. Fortunately, I think this state will be for long, because I have not been lazy either and changed almost all scripts to work with Lua 5.1 and uploaded an updated ion3-scripts package to experimental. This is the first time ever that I see language designers breaking basic things in their language with a minor revision. It is that the for-loops for Lua 5.1 are incompatible to the for-loops that were commonly used in Lua 5.0 programs. You can imagine what that means to most Lua programs, since a for loop is rather not a seldom-used construct. ;-) But hell, Lua also makes its parsing of floating point numbers dependant on the current locale, i.e. 5.1 is a valid number in a Lua program when parsed in LANG=C but not in LANG=de_DE. Okay, I am straying from the subject ... what I really wanted is to ask you to test the new ion3 package in conjunction with ion3-scripts from experimental and report bugs on still broken scripts. My impression is that it is working rather fine and can go to unstable soon.

Meike Reichle: DebConf6 Day Trip

As anticipated things began to run much more smoothly once the conference had actually kicked off. Which was quite good, since Wednesday/Thursday were pretty active days with the Day Trip on Wednesday and the Formal Dinner on Thursday. I had not been to sure whether I should go on the day trip or just stay home and sleep in for once, go to the pool, rest a bit and basically do all the other stuff I didn't get around to since I got here. In the end I did go though, and I am really happy about it now. At least for me the day trip was a full success! We were picked up around noon by a fleet of absolutely awesome fifties buses, all streamlined with loads of chrome, pastel colours, saints icons, playboy bunny heads and nice comfortable plush seats.
Xochicalco is a pretty interesting site and our guide gave us a really nice tour of the museum and the ruins. I didn't really mind the heat since I had put on enough sun screen and brought long loose fitting cloths and a lot of water. Such equipped I actually even enjoyed the dry heat and of course the spectacular site. As usual, I did take pictures and haven't found the time to actually upload them yet. After the tour of the ruins we went for a late lunch to some place of which I sadly don't remember the name. The food there was the best I've had through the whole DebConf and it was pretty fun. One of the kitchen ladies wanted to take a picture with me. Don't know why, but it was pretty amusing since the whole kitchen crowd seemed to have immense fun with the whole thing. So, whatever, maybe one day I'll come back and find the picture on a wall. Who knows :) After finishing our meal we went to Cuernavaca, the capital of Morelos State, which has a large handicraft market. Unfortunately I had taken much more time for the lunch than anticipated so we only had 45 minutes to have a walk and buy some souvenirs. But it was fun anyway. The only drawback of the day was that we had to skip the guided tour in Cuernavaca since we were so late and had to be back to Oaxtepec for dinner. But there is already quite a list of stuff I actually wanted to do when here, so a tour of Cuernavaca goes to the long "One day I'll be back" list. Summary: Great Day Trip! Well done. Cool buses!! Have to extend that once I am back *sigh*

19 May 2006

Erich Schubert: No fun for me - I'm not at debconf

But I'd like to be... I'd love to bring that lame old line:
My sock's got your name on it
(Well, if you failed to successfully assassinate someone, it can still be fun to remind him for the next few hours of that fact that he's going to die.) Not to be confused with:
My socket has got your name on it
Becaue we're not talking about coding, and some players have characters in their names (e.g. whitespace) that your programming language will probably not allow for variable names. ;-) Oh, if you want to play that game some time - instead of smacking people with clean socks, you can also just use something like saying "You're dead". Works just as well for virtually killing people. But is probably less fun. I've never been running around for days trying to smack someone with a sock. Do you know what the most evil thing is about this variant of the game? You don't have a chance to stop him from trying to assassinate you again and again... in other game variants, you at least have a chance of defeating him instead. Oh, and maybe Ted Walther misread the game instructions, and the reason he's been smacking people with his toy is that he's trying to assassinate them? Can someone hit him with a cluebat please and explain the rules of the game again?

Erich Schubert: Automatic Audio and USB access for local users

To enable single-sign-on with an existing windows network, I've been using winbind and kerberos to login users. Unfortunately, winbind doesn't have functionality to automatically add users to certain groups, e.g. audio, video, plugdev. But I want to allow local users to access audio and USB drives on these machines. I just found an easy way to do that:
  1. Add auth optional pam_group.so to your /etc/pam.d/gdm file
  2. Add *; :0 ;*;Al0000-2400;audio, video, plugdev to your /etc/security/group.conf file
    3. This will give the first user logged in via the GDM login screen access to both USB sticks and audio playback. Using :* this should apply to all local users; a similar line with tty* should work for local ttys. Note that this applies to any local user, not only to winbind users. Other groups you might want to add: cdrom, scanner, dip, netdev

DebConf6 Blog: Announcement from the DebConf Organisational team (Posted by DebConf Organisational team)

Hi all, Today we have made the unfortunate decision to ask an attendee of DebConf6 to leave the conference. Due to some disturbances that have occurred during the conference, accumulating in a incident at the formal dinner, we feel that it is inappropriate for the attendee to remain a participant of DebConf. This is a decision we have not taken lightly, however, we believe that it is essential to ensure a productive and pleasant atmosphere for the DebConf community. Further details are available for Debian Developers on the debian-private list, or for other conference attendees by visiting the information desk.

Josselin Mouette: A great dinner nevertheless

The night started great. Tables arranged in a swirl, happy geeks gathered around a good meal, it was going to be a great formal dinner.

Then came AJ and his megalomania. Well, it was kind of fun at the moment, although I still haven't cooled down after seeing his contribution to the Java in non-free thread. He even compromised himself by showing up hand in hand with Ted Walther.

After that, Ted tried to spoil the dinner, and almost managed to do it. Please people, correct me if I'm wrong as I was a few meters away from the incident and didn't follow everything. It seems the person Ted is calling a "local businesswoman" was a prostitute. As he doesn't want to name people, I'll do it: when learning that, Holger tried to throw Ted out of the building. Unfortunately some people stopped him from doing it. Holger, thanks a lot for having the courage to give this guy what he deserves, and already deserved before the provocation, when most people (including me) just stand still when facing such unbearable behavior.

Of course Ted tried to act as a martyr, as shows his blog entry. Ted, I do hope things won't be "resolved to your satisfaction". And anyway, you won't need to denounce the people who deserve to be awarded instead. Why have you come to Debconf for, anyway? Uploading broken versions of your packages, or writing stupid and provocative blog entries?

Then, the mariachis tried to improve the ambiance but only managed to prevent people from talking to each other. The real fun came from the rain, which fell so hard it entered the building in a magnificent cascade, leaving us eating and walking in a few centimeters of water. Another great moment was the power outage, during which we were lightened by camera flashes.

The food had so much success that I didn't have time to taste more than one dish before everything was wiped out. Still, despite Ted and despite the lack of food, this was a great evening, one of those I won't forget for sure.

I'll upload pictures later, but in the meantime you can have a look at Barry Hawkins' blog.

18 May 2006

Holger Levsen: three short stories from debconf6

Unsurprisingly lots of stuff has happened in the last 13 days since I last blogged. So much, that there were days where I wrote more emails than I read - and I haven't wrote many...

Also not unsurprisingly, debconf6 has been/is really a lot of fun - despite all the problems we have and had. Having met lots of nice people again (and some for the first time) will be the joyful memories I take home. I have hoped to be able to do (a little) more debian (not debconf) work, but well.. it is, as it is. We can and will learn for next years.

Also I really want to thank all those many people who gave their hands and/or brains and help get and keep debconf6 running. Muchas gracias!

Now my three short stories: on tuesday someone on IRC said "AAAARRRRGGG fucking stream!" and I replied "i'm happy about (bad) status reports, but 'ARRRGG fucking stream' makes me wanna say "streams are optional. STFU!" which then lead to "well, I didn't mean it that harsh. the streams are actually pretty cool. just too bad that the connectivity seesm to be to bad. I'm actually pretty impressed by video and sound quality."

I can understand that people at home get frustrated by interrupted streams, but we've allways said streams are optional, we do it for the first time and we had a hell more of problems than we thought off. And screaming on IRC (over and over) doesn't really make me wanna work harder.

This morning, some of the power plugs in the main auditorium didn't work. We then went to the fuse box and everything looked ok. Well, it took us some time to find out, that this main fuse box had not all fuses for the big room, there is another fuse box in the audio booth with has fuses for some (5%) of the power plugs in the main room in the tower. Arg. (Oh, and in case you wonder, yes, we have asked the hotel staff about this. They couldn't help.) So one switch of the fuses has moved a little and turned off. Arrrg. Now it's duct taped and should work till the end of the conference. Hopefully.

Story number three is my favorite: someone wanted to have wired access in the tower so plugged a cable into the hub which goes to the network panel which link to the network jacks under the table. The small switch we use has 8 ports and 9 jacks, one extra uplink jack. This broke one out of two APs in the tower and unfortunatly it was the 802.11g AP to which more clients can connect. Yay. So far so bad. Then I duct taped the entrance to the little server room in the audio booth (picture will be uploaded..) and put up a sign saying noone should enter without coordinated with me.

(BTW, then of course the AP needed some more power cycling to come back to life, but that's still not the whole story.)

The whole story is that after I duct taped that room completly some idiot(s) again plugged cables into the switch to get the net working for him or herself - of course without checking with the videoteam. Thank you very much! As I we didnt have enough issues already. Luckily this didn't cause new problems but I'm still shaking my head.

So, to summarize and to make it clear, I'm not frustrated, just stressed out, so much that I couldn't even stand people asking me to jump into the pool after lunch. It was just another request to me and I wanted to decide for myself what I do in my break. Finally I jumped into the water and was happy again :-)

Leaving to formal dinner now without reading this blog post before

Christian Perrier: Debconf - day 3

I was a bit lazy today and mostly attending nothing. Not saying that the talks were not interesting, but mostly I wanted to work on a few pending stuff such as this damn Xorg debconf templates rewrite and the subsequent French translation update (a huge one). Being in the hacklab most of the day lead me to good discussions with many people, out of which I'll keep a very long talk with Otavio Salvador. We could some day have a dedicated server for Grisu's work on the DDTP to be hosted while it is used y some translators as a testbed for a future infranstructure. I also attended the interesting "Debian in Latin America" BOF, even though it was in Spansih. It was good to get a picture of how building a community in Latin America is facing challenges. The discussion was animated and very nice with valuable interventions and good animations. Kudos to Anibal and Damog who animated it. Oh, I went assassinated during the day. I won't tell more, of course (except that now you are safe when meeting me, folks...I shouldn't even tell that, but anyway....). This sucks and I hate my murderer....:-)...I will find ways to revenge, believe me, pal. The day ended with the Wine and Cheese party. It was indeed added in the official schedule, so we felt in duty of organizing something nice. And, actually, I think it has been nice with something like 40 different cheese varieties around the table. It bringed a big crowd near the hacklab and triggerred a more than great moment, I think. So, it sounds like a Cheese Party is now becoming an official rendez-vous for all Deconfers, so see you in Debconf7 Cheese and Wine party, which will be huge. Mako, Hannah and Matt, we missed you on that one (Matt, where the hell were you?).

Christian Perrier: Debconf - day 4

Day trip today. So all Debconfers are dressed as tourists (except Sam) and I of course used my SpongeBob SquarePants t-shirt (it's becoming kind of a tradition). Two hours bus ride in "interesting" buses and enjoying all the "topes" of the road. I already fear the 4000km drive I plan in this country in August. Xochicalco place is really impressive and the site is well preserved with a museum and all logistics stuff preserving the site as much as possible. Kudos to the Morelos state. Our guide, Claudia, was really interesting and friendly. I think that most of us enjoyed the visit. Of course, sun burns have happened and I was very glad I bringed my tropical sun protection which was suited for the Reunion Island. I however less enjoyed the lunch, but mostly because I was indeed *not* hungry and I was stupid enough to eat anyway. This made me feel really "heavy" and I haven't been a much friendly table companion for Jesus, Andrew, Annabelle, Joey, Ana...sorry, pals. The trip back to Cuernavaca was quiet: I slept most of the time. We didn't really visit the place, but were more wandering around and playing tourists. This made me find a nice t-shirt for my son (yet another tradition I have: bringing him back a t-shirt from every place I've been) with "Emiliano Zapata" featured. Neat. The trip back to Oaxtepec was even more long and again, I slept most of the time. Back to Oaxtepec, I went to marga's pancake party (which was unfortunately too far from the hacklab to bring enough people). Had a good improvised talk with Frans and Joey about the installer (and *not* about Sven)....and I finished the day by releasing yet another shadow version. Very small participation to the hot liquor tastign BOF but I was too tired to be really stupid and get drunk.

Adam Rosi-Kessel: Webloyalty Call Center Reps

My blog has apparently become a canonical source (at least by PageRank) for the Webloyalty Scam (see also this update). It’s been about 18 months since I first posted about it—since then that page has gotten over 40,000 hits and over 1,000 comments. Perhaps the best testimony about this company comes from its own employees. At least two people purporting to be Webloyalty Call Center Representatives have posted comments to that entry; in both cases, the IP addresses resolved to a Connecticut location, so it is at least plausible that these people really work for Webloyalty. Here’s the most recent comment, posted from 69.183.205.129:
WOW!! The level of stupidity on this board is incredible. You people don’t get it, do you?? Webloyalty didn’t sign you up for anything. You signed yourselves up. The details are right there, in plain sight, in normal sized text, right in front of your faces. It details EVERYTHING, including the cost of the service and the billing cycle. The problem is that all of you idiots chose not to read it. You saw “free”, and figured “gee, something free for me? golly, I must be special”. WRONG!! YOU’RE NOT SPECIAL, YOU’RE JUST FUCKING LAZY AND STUPID!! YOU SIGNED YOURSELF UP! NOTHING HAPPENED AUTOMATICALLY!! THERE WAS NO SLIGHT OF HAND OR MISLEADING WORDING!! The bottom line is you’re all a bunch of stupid, lazy, crybabies who don’t want to take any responsability for your actions. NONE! Well, thats what you get for being stupid and lazy. LEARN TO TAKE RESPONSABILITY FOR YOUR OWN ACTIONS. DON’T POINT THE FINGER AT OTHERS AND CALL THEM “THEIVES” AND “SCAM ARTISTS” AND BLAME THEM FOR YOUR OWN STUPIDITY. YOU ALL MAKE ME SICK!! FUCKING CRYBABIES!!!!
And here’s another for a few months ago:
comment: I’m a rep in the call center at Webloyalty. I have no pity for any of you people. You’re all suckers, plain and simple. Didn’t anybody ever teach you that nothing is free? When all of you idiots made your purchases on whatever website you did business on at the end of your transaction there was an offer asking if you wanted to save $10, or get award miles, or whatever. When you clicked on that link you were not automatically signed up. What happens is that you’re brought to the Reservations Rewards website. On that website it tells you that you are on the website for Reservations Rewards. You see, you can tell that because the banner at the top of the site says “Reservations Rewards”. Unfortunately you were too stupid to notice or remember. It then gives you instructions on how to redeem your “reward”. At that point you are instructed to enter you email address in twice and click accept. Now you have to manually type in the email twice in those boxes. No cut and paste is allowed. Then it tells you to click accept. Now, if you had any fucking brains in your head you would have noticed that right above the box where you enter your email mail address its says, in regular sized type, in plain sight, right out in the open, that entering your email twice will act as an electronic signature and that by clicking accept you are accepting that the website you just made a purchase on can share the billing information with Reservation Rewards. Also in the big box next all of this it gives the exact details of what you are signing up for, again in regular sized print, in plain sight, right out in the open. If you are too stupid to take the time to notice all of that then you deserve what you got. which was a membership in a overpriced bullshit ptogram.
>



Webloyalty depends on idiots like you to not notice this stuff. To be blinded by the idea that you are getting something for “free”. To not look at you credit card statement so charges go through every month. Its unbelievable the amount of dummies out there that fall for this stuff. Even if you do catch the charges eventually, and get a refund they still made money off of you by collecting interest on your money when they had possesion of it. Stay a member or cancel its win-win for webloyalty.
>



So, anyway I hope all you dummies learned a valuable lesson and wont fall for this again. I’m sure many of you will, though. You’d be shocked at how many people are repeat members where they canceled the service a while back but fell for the scam again a few months later.
>



Perhaps the funniest thing about my Reservation Rewards entry is that I get emails every day or two from people asking me how to get them to stop taking their money. There are, in fact, over 1,000 testimonials (including my own entry) explaining exactly how to get them to stop charging. Every few months, I receive an email from someone furious at me for charging them all this money. I wonder who these people are who get as far as doing a Google search to find my entry, but can’t seem to figure out that I have nothing to do with the company.

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