I recently bought an external USB harddrive, made by Toshiba. It s the HDDR500E03X model with 500GB space, internal shock sensor and ramp loading technology. Now yesterday I learned, that I can also cover its health status using the smartmontools. The usb* device types did not fit, but the sat type worked. It is as easy as running:

smartctl -d sat -c /dev/sdb
smartctl -d sat -t long /dev/sdb

RCBW - week #13 Here are this week squashes, by yours truly:

• 30/11/2009 bug #499516 - drbd8-utils - avoid stop HA cluster during upgrades (sponsor upload by Iustin Pop)
• 01/12/2009 bug #530673 - xsmbrowser - avoid passing -N/-U together (patch by Michael Bode)
• 02/12/2009 bug #510567 - libgpgme11 - enable support for gpgconf (patch by Sven Eckelmann)
• 03/12/2009 bug #553162 - icomlib - add missing $ shlibs:Depends (bonus points: fix kfreebsd build)
• 04/12/2009 bug #553223 - ldapdns - add missing $ shlibs:Depends (malus points: fought with Yada)
• 05/12/2009 bug #553250 - posixlock - add missing $ shlibs/misc:Depends
• 06/12/2009 bug #552769 - leptonlib - remove /usr/bin/ subdir

And here are the usual highlights:

• Luk's list has worked worse than last week, since last weekend BSPs have stolen "my" bugs!
• in fact, a lot of people is stealing my bugs (i.e., bugs that I had put on my watch list): hello azeem, gregoa, frankie, ...
  That's very good, I now have the feeling that NMU enthusiasm is growing
• having to deal with Yada for ldapdns has been, errr, an experience
• Debian News mentioned RCBW, I'm flattered!
  (BTW, anyone knows why Debian News is not on -planet? I'm subscribed to it cause it is very useful, but it seems pointless not to have it on Planet, given how many other less-Debian-related-posts we have there ...)

Yesterday, the German magazine freeX published its December issue. It includes an three-page article about vbox-sync, written by me, that is even mentioned on the cover page. After my article on the Cross-Site-Authentication attack that was published in the German Linux-Magazin and the international Linux Magazine in 2005, this is my second publication.Vbox-sync is a tool to distribute VirtualBox images via apt-get that Phil Kern and I wrote as part of our work for itomig.de, a German Free Software consulting company, and the LiMux project. I also held a talk about it at the Debian Conference in Extremadura, Spain, in 2009.

When you just read the following sentence: "usage of a software, that can only be used together with the Internet Explorer". You already know the consequence that several hundreds Wienux boxes are gone.
Heavily disgusted by the waste of community money. The online local newspaper has a comment that seems quite to the point to me: "If as sysadmin you introduce Linux you'll be accounted for eventual failures, while with softies people just accept the shortcomings and won't blame you."
German source: Wiener Inkompetenz in IT Managment. P.S.: Wienux got setup by inexerienced people having no prior exposure to Open Source. The project setup included a calculated failure from the start.

Great, I spent a few hours today to set up a nice OpenVPN server. Nice in that I wanted the (Windows) clients to be able to access the company network like they were connected locally. My idea was to use the OpenVPN tap mode and let the DHCP server at work assign IPs to the VPN clients. This turned out to be a dumb idea. After I got everything going, I noticed the following message in syslog (which probably scrolled by previously in the debug drivel):

NOTE: your local LAN uses the extremely common subnet address 192.168.0.x or 192.168.1.x. Be aware that this might create routing conflicts if you connect to the VPN server from public locations such as internet cafes that use the same subnet.

Hmm, sure, I guess that will exclude every second incoming VPN connection. Summary: Think about IP space clashes before setting up a VPN.

Until vSphere 4, the only way to add space to an existing VMFS was to add an extent. This means creating a new partition, most of the time on a new LUN, and extend the VMFS there (vSphere 4 is now able to resize a partition on a grown LUN). This is somehow equivalent to adding a physical volume in a volume group under LVM. But contrary to LVM, once you added an extent to a VMFS, it is impossible to remove it. Well, until now, it was. I just pushed my lvm branch of vmfs-tools (get a git snapshot tarball), which includes a new tool named vmfs-lvm, allowing to just do that. For the moment, the tool is not cluster-safe, which means you d better run it on an offline VMFS (i.e. make sure no server is using it). Data should not be at risk because the tool checks the removed extent doesn t contain any data, but it also assumes the filesystem is in a consistent state beforehand. The command line to remove an extent looks like the following:

# vmfs-lvm extent0 extent1 ... extentn remove

This will remove the last extent. Update: There was a bug when setting some values at volume level. The git snapshot link above has been updated accordingly.

Caution: Latin American rant ahead. With my Latin American Spanish keyboard (xkb code "la") I can type in:

• English: abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
• Spanish, Galician, Basque, Quechua:
• Catalan/Valencian and Occitan: l l
• French:
• Italian:
• Dutch:
• German:
• Swedish:
• Danish and Norwegian:
• Icelandic:
• Finnish: (apparently, the untypable are only used in loan words)

But not in:

• Portuguese: I can't type or (no dead_tilde)
• Guaran : I can't type g (no dead_tilde).

It turns out that for some people it's more important to have 3 (yes THREE) asciitilde (~) in the Latin American Spanish keyboard, than to allow people to write in the language spoken by 51% of South American people, or the second official language in Paraguay (spoken by 94% of the population). The same thing happens with the Traditional Spanish keyboard (code "es"), which was initially thought only for Spain, but is now widely sold all over Latin America. It includes 2 asciitilde, but no dead_tilde. I think this is outrageous and I'm very very pissed about this. As can be seen in the posts I've made to the bugs in Debian and in FreeDesktop. However, it looks like we Latin Americans are overwhelmed by the amount of Spanish people in Free Software (particularly in Debian) who don't care that Brazil is the biggest economy in the region nor that other native american languages can't be written without a dead_tilde. For the record, there are some other European languages, that can't be written with the Latin American keyboard, such as:

• Polish: I can't type , only
• Czech: I can't type , only
• Romanian: I can't type , only

But in this case, it makes much more sense to not be able to write those than not being able to write Portuguese or Guaran , and it's not like there are 3 macrons and no dead_macrons, there are no macrons at all (same for all others).

Last year, after many years of peacefully living the whole year in GMT-3, our government decided that Argentina should use DST again. This was done in a rush, but patches were written and applied everywhere to have a correct timezone. Fixing the problem was not enough, tzdata's upstream decided to predict the future:

# From Paul Eggert (2007-12-22):
# For dates after mid-2008, the following rules are my guesses and
# are quite possibly wrong, but are more likely than no DST at all.
Rule    Arg 2007    only    -   Dec 30  0:00    1:00    S
Rule    Arg 2008    max -   Mar Sun>=15 0:00    0   -
Rule    Arg 2008    max -   Oct Sun>=1  0:00    1:00    S

Well, back in December 2007, October 2008 might have seemed like a long time in the future, and they assumed that sometime in the middle the correct date would be announced... But, predictably (knowing Argentina's current government), no DST has yet been announced. However, Paul Eggert's guesses had propagated to almost all UNIX distributions, so that at 0:00 Sunday Oct 5th, all our computers were suddenly one hour ahead of time. Affected systems: Debian, Ubuntu, Gentoo, Red Hat, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, Mac OS. Devices: ipod, maemo, Nokia N95. Websites: Clarin (a major newspaper - still broken 36 hours later), Gmail. And probably many others that I don't know of. I even read that Windows was affected, although I don't know how that might be possible, since as far as I know they don't use tzdata. Anyway, not satisfied with how they mistakenly predicted the future before, a few weeks ago (not enough time in advance to fix almost any systems, only sid had this release), they added this change:

# From Alexander Krivenyshev (2008-09-05):
# As per message from Carlos Alberto Fonseca Arauz (Nicaragua),
# Argentina will start DST on Sunday October 19, 2008.
#
# http://www.worldtimezone.com/dst_news/dst_news_argentina03.html
# http://www.impulsobaires.com.ar/nota.php?id=57832 (in spanish)
Rule    Arg 2007    only    -   Dec 30  0:00    1:00    S
Rule    Arg 2008    max -   Mar Sun>=15 0:00    0   -
Rule    Arg 2008    max -   Oct Sun>=15 0:00    1:00    S

So, they decided to take the word of a guy from Nicaragua (no bad feelings against Nicaragua, but I think that this kind of stuff should be informed by people from the affected country), and from a couple of articles that say that "According to some sources, we might have to change our clocks on the third Sunday of October". Would you change tzdata sources with such information? I definitely wouldn't. Anyway, Aurelien Jarno has already uploaded fixed packages, with no assumption regarding when the DST will happen, which is the sensible thing to do in a case like this. Thanks Aurel!

Reality needs fantasy to render it desirable, just as fantasy needs reality to make it believable. Stephen Duncombe

This fall I have been awash in a few obsessions including book piracy and spam. I recently got to talk about one of these obsessions when I was interviewed about book piracy by Nora Young for her weekly CBC radio and podcast show Spark. I mostly gave a lay of the land panorama with a nod toward some of the conditions, technological and social, that can help us grasp the contemporary explosion of book piracy and also raised some thoughts about what might change the future landscape. What I don t raise is whether a politics built around an explicit embrace of piracy is regressive, progressive, or something else but these ethical questions were posed in the comments left for the full interview. Some of the comments pointed to the pitfalls and shortcoming that can follow the terminology of piracy many of which I share. But what keeps me interested in the politics of piracy is how it can speak the language of spectacle, which can be a powerful tactic and technique for broadcasting a political message. Here I just paraphrasing and cribbing the work of Stephen Duncombe, who has argued, I think quite persuasively, that we cannot rely solely on reasoned debate for building political programs. Duncombe does not argue that we must toss out rationality and truth seeking (these are absolutely necessary) but notes how on their own or if not clothed in some other cloak, they may not be enough to convey and compel, especially in this day of total media saturation. Or to put a but more poetically by him Reality needs fantasy to render it desirable, just as fantasy needs reality to make it believable. Much (though not all) of contemporary digital piracy follows the logic of spectacle. It builds and conveys a fantastical drama of right and wrong, of new possibilities, of freedom from the noose of the law; it signals and speaks to the thrill and fun in twisting, even breaking, existing structures and constraints; and provides a window into another way of acting/behaving. In many cases what it provides is a commons (and I will be exploring it in depth in my class next semester on the commons) and many folks, I imagine, turn to piracy simply for the free stuff, and a number of them come out of the other side transformed into copy fighters willing to engage in a politics beyond sharing stuff and waving the pirate flag. For those of us who believe in greater access and different ways of imagining structures and strategies of re-compensation, piracy on its own is not certainly enough and I understand fully and even to some degree, share the skepticism many feel toward such language. But I am not quite ready to declare a politics of piracy as always politically bankrupt or necessarily backward. I guess what I embrace is a diverse political ecology. For some, the drama of spectacle and thrill of transgression are what turns their political mojo on; for others it is the cool and reasoned debate common to policy and reform; for others, they want to focus on building alternatives as we see with Free Software or radical tech collectives. For some, it is both the reasoned salt and the transgressive pepper that spices their political world. And I would rather have more spice than less, especially in an era where the blandness of political apathy is that which is our most dangerous enemy. Related Links: Here is a wonderful animation by the NZ Book Council that captures what I love about books and renders its materiality wonderfully alive. On the Media has a episode on book publishing and Cory Doctorow has penned some thoughts about the future of book selling. If you want to keep abreast on the politics of liberating books, check out Free our Books. If you are more interested in the technical side of things, check out the book liberator project.

Reality needs fantasy to render it desirable, just as fantasy needs reality to make it believable. Stephen Duncombe

This fall I have been awash in a few obsessions including book piracy and spam. I recently got to talk about one of these obsessions when I was interviewed about book piracy by Nora Young for her weekly CBC radio and podcast show Spark. I mostly gave a lay of the land panorama with a nod toward some of the conditions, technological and social, that can help us grasp the contemporary explosion of book piracy and also raised some thoughts about what might change the future landscape. What I don t raise is whether a politics built around an explicit embrace of piracy is regressive, progressive, or something else but these ethical questions were posed in the comments left for the full interview. Some of the comments pointed to the pitfalls and shortcoming that can follow the terminology of piracy many of which I share. But what keeps me interested in the politics of piracy is how it can speak the language of spectacle, which can be a powerful tactic and technique for broadcasting a political message. Here I just paraphrasing and cribbing the work of Stephen Duncombe, who has argued, I think quite persuasively, that we cannot rely solely on reasoned debate for building political programs. Duncombe does not argue that we must toss out rationality and truth seeking (these are absolutely necessary) but notes how on their own or if not clothed in some other cloak, they may not be enough to convey and compel, especially in this day of total media saturation. Or to put a but more poetically by him Reality needs fantasy to render it desirable, just as fantasy needs reality to make it believable. Much (though not all) of contemporary digital piracy follows the logic of spectacle. It builds and conveys a fantastical drama of right and wrong, of new possibilities, of freedom from the noose of the law; it signals and speaks to the thrill and fun in twisting, even breaking, existing structures and constraints; and provides a window into another way of acting/behaving. In many cases what it provides is a commons (and I will be exploring it in depth in my class next semester on the commons) and many folks, I imagine, turn to piracy simply for the free stuff, and a number of them come out of the other side transformed into copy fighters willing to engage in a politics beyond sharing stuff and waving the pirate flag. For those of us who believe in greater access and different ways of imagining structures and strategies of re-compensation, piracy on its own is not certainly enough and I understand fully and even to some degree, share the skepticism many feel toward such language. But I am not quite ready to declare a politics of piracy as always politically bankrupt or necessarily backward. I guess what I embrace is a diverse political ecology. For some, the drama of spectacle and thrill of transgression are what turns their political mojo on; for others it is the cool and reasoned debate common to policy and reform; for others, they want to focus on building alternatives as we see with Free Software or radical tech collectives. For some, it is both the reasoned salt and the transgressive pepper that spices their political world. And I would rather have more spice than less, especially in an era where the blandness of political apathy is that which is our most dangerous enemy. Related Links: Here is a wonderful animation by the NZ Book Council that captures what I love about books and renders its materiality wonderfully alive. On the Media has a episode on book publishing and Cory Doctorow has penned some thoughts about the future of book selling. If you want to keep abreast on the politics of liberating books, check out Free our Books. If you are more interested in the technical side of things, check out the book liberator project.

I've been working with Charlie DeTar and the Center for Future Civic Media on a project called Between the Bars which is a blogging platform for prisoners. The current platform is essentially a snail-mail to web gateway: prisoners send letters which semi-automatically scanned and posted to the site; comments are printed and mailed back. As we plan the launch of the project, we are trying to talk to as many stakeholders as possible -- this includes ex-prisoners, families and friends of people who are or have been in prison, non-profits working with prisoners, victims of people in prison, people who work in prisons or in corrections, probation officers, or almost anyone else with a perspective or set of experience that might help us understand the difficult space our project is trying to negotiate and who might be able to help influence the design. At the moment, we're not talking to current prisoners due to rules regulating research involving prisoners, but almost anyone else would be someone we'd love to connect with. We're interested in hearing from people about their experience with prisons or prisoners, about staying connected to families and friends while behind bars, and, ultimately, about how we might design, deploy, and support technology to help folks out. If you or someone you know are stakeholders and would be willing to talk about your experience and opinions with prisons, communication, and technology, please drop us a line at betweenthebars@mit.edu.

Email scams have changed... for good and for bad (depends on the POV and the case).

I decided to pick two samples that demonstrate two directions scams seems to be taking:

NAME
ADDRESS
TELEPHONE
SEX

As simple as that. Now the subject takes a more important role than the content: "Your email ID has been awarded one million pounds. in our Tobacco Promo". This, I must say, seems to be one of the worst scam emails I've ever seen. Compare it to the following:

Dear Raphael,

This email might come to you as a surprise and the temptation to ignore
it as not serious could come into your mind but please consider it and
accept it with a deep sense of humility.
[...]
The sum of ( 10,700, 000.00 Million Pounds), has been floating as
unclaimed since 2002 in my bank as all efforts to get across the
relatives of our customer Mr. Ruben Geissert who deposited the money
have hit the stones. Unfortunately, He died of Cardiac Arrest in the
year 2002, without a registered nest of kin.

I've highlighted the important bits of the email; the difference is clear.

I was already wondering some time ago when this kind of "improvements" to the scam (and spam in general) emails would be seen.

What's next?


P.S. if you haven't voted at the Earth Hour website please consider doing so.
If you are having problems voting because of the flash application, here's a direct link.

The following is written in German and probably only interesting for people living near D sseldorf. I decided to post this to Planet Debian as it might interest some of you :)

Als (ordentlicher) Student kommt man ab und zu in den Genuss, eine Arbeit schreiben zu d rfen, von der Andere (sprich: nicht nur ich durch die gute Note *g*) profitieren k nnen.
So auch geschehen mit meiner Bacherlor-Arbeit. Und obwohl mein Vortrag erst am n chsten Montag (07.12.2009, 10:00, wahrscheinlich in Raum 25.12.02.33) ist, gibt es morgen auf dem diesj hrigen Dies Academicus der HHU D sseldorf bereits einen kleinen Vorgeschmack.

Dem geneigten Leser wird aufgefallen sein, dass der Link nicht auf die Webseite meiner Universit t zeigt, und auch nicht auf die Webseite unserer AStA, sondern auf Wikipedia.
Nein, ich bin noch nicht so ber hmt um f r die Wikipedia relevant zu sein. Es gibt schlicht und einfach nichts dazu auf den Seiten. Nicht mal im Kalender der AStA stehts drin...
Woran das liegt? Keine Ahnung, ich vermute ja, dass die Herren und Damen (puh, safe, sonst kommt noch der Gleichstellungsbeauftragte zu mir...) lieber mit Streiken, Maulen und sonstigem Quatsch besch ftigt sind, anstatt irgendwie mal die Bildung zu f rdern. Egal, hier ist nicht der Platz um zu St nkern (Twitter/Identi.ca ich komme! [Danke Asel f r die Idee]), ich wollte euch n mlich einladen!

Keine Einladung ohne Einladungstext, *such* *kram*, ach hier hab ichs: Programm zum Dies Academicus 2009. Leider wei ich nicht wie aktuell die Version ist, liegt irgendwo in den Tiefen der Seite der Fachschaft Modernes Japan und ich bin da als

Spam-Erkennung: Intelligent Greylisting
Ort: H rsaal 3C
Zeit: 13 bis 14 Uhr

auf Seite 8 vermerkt. Aber ihr wolltet ja einen Text haben. Den hab ich eigentlich auch eingereicht. Und nun ganz exklusiv und nur f r meine lieben Leser (und weil niemand auf die Idee kam den ins Programm aufzunehmen):

Intelligent Greylisting

Gute Spamfilter sind entweder ressourcenhungrig, weil sie die ganze E-Mail analysieren m ssen, oder fehleranfaellig, weil sie Entscheidungen zu voreilig treffen und dadurch legitime E-Mails verlieren. Wir stellen euch eine neue Methode vor, wie man Spam effektiv filtern kann, ohne viele Ressourcen zu verbrauchen und ohne legitime E-Mails zu verlieren.

So! Ihr kommt morgen alle um 13 Uhr in den H rsaal 3C (Geb ude 23.irgendwas, PhilFak) und genie t meine Anwesenheit!

Es gr t das Grummeltier.

So this is in some sense a nadir for shell scripting. 2 lines that do something out of 111. Mostly cargo-culted from cowpoke by ron, but much less fancy. rsbuild foo.dsc should do the trick.

#!/bin/sh
# Start a remote sbuild process via ssh. Based on cowpoke from devscripts.
# Copyright (c) 2007-9 Ron  <ron@debian.org>
# Copyright (c) David Bremner 2009 <david@tethera.net>
#
# Distributed according to Version 2 or later of the GNU GPL.
BUILDD_HOST=sbuild-host
BUILDD_DIR=var/sbuild   #relative to home directory
BUILDD_USER=""
DEBBUILDOPTS="DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=\"parallel=3\""
BUILDD_ARCH="$(dpkg-architecture -qDEB_BUILD_ARCH 2>/dev/null)"
BUILDD_DIST="default"
usage()
 
    cat 1>&2 <<EOF
rsbuild [options] package.dsc
  Uploads a Debian source package to a remote host and builds it using sbuild.
  The following options are supported:
   --arch="arch"         Specify the Debian architecture(s) to build for.
   --dist="dist"         Specify the Debian distribution(s) to build for.
   --buildd="host"       Specify the remote host to build on.
   --buildd-user="name"  Specify the remote user to build as.
  The current default configuration is:
   BUILDD_HOST = $BUILDD_HOST
   BUILDD_USER = $BUILDD_USER
   BUILDD_ARCH = $BUILDD_ARCH
   BUILDD_DIST = $BUILDD_DIST
  The expected remote paths are:
  BUILDD_DIR  = $BUILDD_DIR
  sbuild must be configured on the build host.  You must have ssh
  access to the build host as BUILDD_USER if that is set, else as the
  user executing cowpoke or a user specified in your ssh config for
  '$BUILDD_HOST'.  That user must be able to execute sbuild.
EOF
    exit $1
 
PROGNAME="$(basename $0)"
version ()
 
    echo \
"This is $PROGNAME, version 0.0.0
This code is copyright 2007-9 by Ron <ron@debian.org>, all rights reserved.
Copyright 2009 by David Bremner <david@tethera.net>, all rights reserved.

This program comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.
You are free to redistribute this code under the terms of the
GNU General Public License, version 2 or later"
    exit 0
 
for arg; do
    case "$arg" in
        --arch=*)
            BUILDD_ARCH="$ arg#*= "
            ;;
        --dist=*)
            BUILDD_DIST="$ arg#*= "
            ;;
        --buildd=*)
            BUILDD_HOST="$ arg#*= "
            ;;
        --buildd-user=*)
            BUILDD_USER="$ arg#*= "
            ;;
        --dpkg-opts=*)
            DEBBUILDOPTS="DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=\"$ arg#*= \""
            ;;
        *.dsc)
            DSC="$arg"
            ;;
        --help)
            usage 0
            ;;
        --version)
            version
            ;;
        *)
            echo "ERROR: unrecognised option '$arg'"
            usage 1
            ;;
    esac
done
dcmd rsync --verbose --checksum $DSC $BUILDD_USER$BUILDD_HOST:$BUILDD_DIR
ssh -t  $BUILDD_HOST "cd $BUILDD_DIR && $DEBBUILDOPTS sbuild --arch=$BUILDD_ARCH --dist=$BUILDD_DIST $DSC"

Once there was a project called Debian and a Ganneff.... (unfortunately in German only....)

22:20 < cb> Das ist doch voll die Arbeit Maintainer zu werden :-). Ich geb
gew nschte Pakete immer nur weiter an einen der da sowieso schon den Kernel
betreut :-)
22:21 < Ganneff> es is nur viel arbeit wenn du keinen schimmer hast
22:22 < cb> ja ich hab nur das seepferdchen *g*
22:22 < Obilan> Knusper: ja sicher ist es das
22:22 < Knusper> kopf -> tisch
22:22 < cb> Knusper, wenn du die verwaisten pakete findest siehst du auf
der gleichen seite auch die links wie man maintainer wird
22:22 < Knusper> die hab ich gefunden
22:22 < cb> zumindest hab ich das das letzte mal dort gesehen
22:24 < Ganneff> wnpp?
22:24 < Knusper> aber man brauch dann schon leute, die einen "hoffieren"
22:26 < Ganneff> du brauchst erstmal die ahnung nen paket zu bauen.
22:26 < Ganneff> dazu siehe new maint guide
22:26 < Ganneff> dann brauchste nen sponsor. dazu gehe zur mentors liste
22:26 < Ganneff> dann machste mit dem eh weng rum (also normal so
paketuploads via dem)
22:26 < Ganneff> und hast da halt schon dein maintenance krams.
22:27 < Ganneff> irgendwann is der sponsor angekotzt von dir und dem
laufenden arbeit generieren
22:27 < Ganneff> der tritt dich dann dass du mal DM anf ngst.
22:27 < Ganneff> das machste dann, und jemand anders tritt dir deine pakete
als dmua zurecht, nachdem du in nem keyring irgendwo steckst.
22:27 < Ganneff> und dann kannste denn krampf selbst hochladen. aber nix
andres.
22:27 < Ganneff> irgendwann willste was andres. und willst das auch noch
ohne son doofen sponsor
22:28 < Ganneff> dann versuchste dich an DD
22:28 < Knusper> ahhhhhh
22:28 < Ganneff> dazu musste dir nen advocate suchen
22:28 < Ganneff> der is  blicherweise einer dem du vorher im prozess
laufend auf den wecker fielst
22:28 < Ganneff> und er deswegen den nm leutz sagt "oh gott, befreit mich
bloss von dem"
22:28 < Ganneff> die machen das dann, aber sie wollen dir mal etwas
schmerzen zur ckgeben
22:28 < Ganneff> desdewegen wirste viele fragen beantworten m ssen
22:29 < Ganneff> und wie beim t v das auto musste hier deine pakete nochmal
vorstellen und checken lassen
22:29 < Ganneff> und dann nochmal fragen beantworten
22:29 < Knusper> thx...
22:29 < Ganneff> irgendwann gehst du dann mit den antworten den nm leuten
so auf den geist dass die dem frontdesk sagen "meine kacke, den wolle mehr
nit mehr sehen, schickts den dochma zu den DAMs, die hamms verdient"
22:30 < Ganneff> und die machen das dann meist. ausser sie m gen dich nich.
dann darfste nochma fragen beantworten
22:30 < Ganneff> bei den dams darfste nur warten. die testen deine geduld
22:30 < Ganneff> irgendwann langweilen die sich aber
22:30 < Ganneff> und dann kriegste pl tzlich mail
22:30 < Ganneff> OH MEIN GOTT. EIN NEUER DD.
22:30 < Ganneff> ende
22:30 < Ganneff> kapitel 2:
22:30 < cb> sch ne beschreibung
22:30 < Ganneff> du machst ne zeit als dd rum
22:30 < Knusper> LOL
22:30 < Ganneff> votest durch die gegend
22:30 < Ganneff> l dst pakete umher
22:30 < Ganneff> machst bugs in stable
22:30 < Ganneff> gibts dem security team arbeit
22:31 < Ganneff> sprich - du gehst allen auf den sack. denn das is was ein
dd macht. muss ja schliesslich auch spass machen.
22:31 < Ganneff> aber irgendwann, also irgendwann, da wird das langweilig
22:31 < Ganneff> und dann verschwindeste mal ne zeit.
22:31 < Ganneff> weil du weisst - da gibts noch son team. das brauch auch
arbeit
22:31 < Ganneff> die suchen so leute die weggehen und sich verstecken
22:31 < Ganneff> nennt sich mia. die suchen.
22:31 < Ganneff> vielleicht finden die dich ja auch.
22:32 < Ganneff> dann kommste zur ck und machst mal wieder etwas arbeit f r
security/stable/sonstwen
22:32 < Ganneff> oder nicht, aber das is langweilig, da fliegste einfach.
22:32 < Ganneff> wennde dann gar keinen bock mehr hast und ne l ngre pause
willst
22:32 < Ganneff> dann gehste und machst eien auf emeritus
22:32 < Ganneff> das sind die rentner, die alten s cke, die sich
zur cklehnen und  ber die versuche der neuen lachen die sich grad von den
sponsoren qu len lassen
22:33 < Ganneff> ende kap. 2, ich hab keinen bock mehr. (jaja, emeritus)

Cheers to #debian.de on freenode

I love this guy. He plays in Times Square and is totally into his synthesizer. I can watch him for hours. One day I will ask whether he was a professor and if yes, of what (music? philosophy? both?). If only I could retire by performing in a subway station with a keyboard and dancing dolls. . . Thanks to the update left in the comments, you can watch him in action and find out what type of professor he was/is.

I love this guy. He plays in Times Square and is totally into his synthesizer. I can watch him for hours. One day I will ask whether he was a professor and if yes, of what (music? philosophy? both?). If only I could retire by performing in a subway station with a keyboard and dancing dolls. . . Thanks to the update left in the comments, you can watch him in action and find out what type of professor he was/is.

RCBW - week #12 Here is this week squashes, by yours truly:

• 23/11/2009 bug #553122 - libtcl-chiark-1 - add missing ldconfig invocation, for *.so in linker locations
• 24/11/2009 bug #528152 - tulip - replace ttf-bistream-vera w/ dejavusans (patch from James Westby)
• 25/11/2009 bug #533993 - solfege - remove net need for xmllint (patch from Ubuntu by Alessio Treglia)
• 26/11/2009 bug #531220 - nut - fix ntp.conf postinst processing to avoid overwriting user settings
• 27/11/2009 bug #523912 - mit-scheme - add missing build-dep + tricky build due to bootstrap
• 28/11/2009 bug #521964 - libapache2-mod-lisp - fix APR version detection, patch by Antonio Radici
• 29/11/2009 bug #553257 - pidgin-hotkeys - remove unappropriate e-Xclusion in dh_shlibdebs

The funniest part of this RCBW issue is probably that Luk has started handing over RC bugs to me: from time to time I just get a /query from him with bug numbers In fact, this is more useful than one can imagine, because a considerable amount of time in periodic RC squashing is taken by triaging the RC bug list to choose your targets. Of course there is no guarantee that I'll be willing/able to fix handed-over bugs but, as a RM, Luk has evidently well-trained feelings about how hard would be to fix a given bug. All in all, for this week it worked well: 4 of the above 7 came from SchindlerLuk's list. ... and of course, let's welcome Simon on board! He is definitely doing a better job at spotting packages that should be removed from the archive rather than resurrected (potential negative effect that a NMU can indeed have on a package, de facto "saving" it from testing/release exclusion). In fact, the dilemma of "NMU vs Request Removal" raises various tricky questions. For instance, while we currently have pretty clear guidelines on how and, more importantly, when doing NMUs, we are more stringent on "Non-Maintainer Removals". Quoting from the Package Removal Requests wiki page:

    In all cases, if there is a maintainer and it's not you, mention the
    maintainer's opinion or, if you don't know it, mention how and when you
    tried to contact him.

It is of course reasonable to be more stringent on a measure that is way more invasive than a "simple" NMU. But if we start to rely on NMU-time as an important trigger for removal requests, then we could probably use a more aggressive and more distributed process for removals.

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