Now that bug #500000 has been reported, let’s have a look at all our other bugs, using UDD. Number of archived bugs:

select count(*) from archived_bugs;
 count
--------
 402826

Number of unarchived bugs marked done:

select count(*) from bugs where status = 'done';
 count
-------
  8267

Status of unarchived bugs (”pending” doesn’t mean “tagged pending” here):

select status, count(*) from bugs group by status;
    status       count
---------------+-------
 pending         53587
 pending-fixed    1195
 forwarded        6778
 done             8267
 fixed             167

The sum isn’t even close to 500000. That’s because quite a lot of bugs disappeared:

select id from bugs union select id from archived_bugs order by id limit 10;
 id
-----
 563
 660
 710
 725
 740
 773
 775
 783
 817
 819

Now, let’s look at our open bugs.
Oldest open bugs:

select id, package, title, arrival from bugs where status != 'done' order by id limit 10;
  id       package                                         title                                            arrival
------+----------------+----------------------------------------------------------------------------+---------------------
  825   trn              trn warning messages corrupt thread selector display                         1995-04-22 18:33:01
 1555   dselect          dselect per-screen-half focus request                                        1995-10-06 15:48:04
 2297   xterm            xterm: xterm sometimes gets mouse-paste and RETURN keypress in wrong order   1996-02-07 21:33:01
 2298   trn              trn bug with shell escaping                                                  1996-02-07 21:48:01
 3175   xonix            xonix colors bad for colorblind                                              1996-05-31 23:18:04
 3180   linuxdoc-tools   linuxdoc-sgml semantics and formatting problems                              1996-06-02 05:18:03
 3251   acct             accounting file corruption                                                   1996-06-12 17:44:10
 3773   xless            xless default window too thin and won't go away when asked nicely            1996-07-14 00:03:09
 4073   make             make pattern rules delete intermediate files                                 1996-08-08 20:18:01
 4448   dselect          [PERF] dselect performance gripe (disk method doing dpkg -iGROEB)            1996-09-09 03:33:05

Breakdown by severity:

select severity, count(*) from bugs where status != 'done' group by severity;
 severity    count
-----------+-------
 normal      27680
 important    7606
 minor        6921
 wishlist    18898
 critical       29
 grave         209
 serious       384

Top 10 submitters for open bugs:

select submitter, count(*) from bugs where status != 'done' group by submitter order by count desc limit 10;
submitter                        count
----------------------------------------------------+-------
 Dan Jacobson                     1455
 martin f krafft                    667
 Raphael Geissert                    422
 Joey Hess                            392
 Marc Haber                368
 Julien Danjou                         342
 Josh Triplett                    331
 Vincent Lefevre                    296
 jidanni@jidanni.org                                    260
 Justin Pryzby      245

Top bugs reporters ever:

select submitter, count(*) from (select * from bugs union select * from archived_bugs) as all_bugs
group by submitter order by count desc limit 10;
                  submitter                     count
----------------------------------------------+-------
 Martin Michlmayr                4279
 Dan Jacobson               3652
 Daniel Schepler     3045
 Joey Hess                     2836
 Lucas Nussbaum        2701
 Andreas Jochens                   2605
 Matthias Klose            2442
 Christian Perrier           2302
 James Troup                   2198
 Matt Zimmerman                  2027

You want more data? Connect to UDD (from master.d.o or alioth.d.o, more info here), run your own queries, and post them with the results in the comments!

Since I was watching Don Armstrong’s talk about Debbugs’ SOAP interface I wanted to use devscripts' bts to get a list of boinc’s top five bug reporter. Finally, this is possible with devscripts (>= 2.10.36):

bts status file:-  bts select source:boinc archive:both  \
    egrep "^originator"   cut -f2-   sort   uniq -ci   sort -n \
    tail -n5
 2 Riccardo Stagni <unriccio@email.it>
 3 Martin Michlmayr <tbm@cyrius.com>
 6 Robert Millan <rmh@aybabtu.com>
 6 Thibaut VARENE <varenet@debian.org>
10 Sandro Tosi <matrixhasu@gmail.com>

Sweet - Thanks Debbugs and Devscripts maintainers!
And congratulations Sandro (or thank you - whatever you find appropriate)!

The strongly connected set of the GPG keys graph contains a bit more than 40000 keys now (yes, that’s a lot of geeks!). I wondered what was the biggest clique (complete subgraph) in that graph, and also of course the biggest clique I was in. It’s easy to grab the whole web of trust there. Finding the maximum clique in a graph is NP-complete, but there are algorithms that work quite well for small instances (and you don’t need to consider all 40000 keys: to be in a clique of n keys, a key must have at least n-1 signatures, so it’s easy to simplify the graph — if you find a clique with 20 keys, you can remove all keys that have less than 19 signatures). My first googling result pointed to Ashay Dharwadker’s solver implementation (which also proves P=NP ;). Googling further allowed me to find the solver provided with the DIMACS benchmarks. It’s clearly not the state of the art, but it was enough in my case (allowed to find the result almost immediately). The biggest clique contains 47 keys. However, it looks like someone had fun, and injected a lot of bogus keys in the keyring. See the clique. So I ignored those keys, and re-ran the solver. And guess what’s the size of the biggest “real” clique? Yes. 42. Here are the winners:

CF3401A9 Elmar Hoffmann
AF260AB1 Florian Zumbiehl
454C864C Moritz Lapp
E6AB2957 Tilman Koschnick
A0ED982D Christian Brueffer
5A35FD42 Christoph Ulrich Scholler
514B3E7C Florian Ernst
AB0CB8C0 Frank Mohr
797EBFAB Enrico Zini
A521F8B5 Manuel Zeise
57E19B02 Thomas Glanzmann
3096372C Michael Fladerer
E63CD6D6 Daniel Hess
A244C858 Torsten Marek
82FB4EAD Timo Weing rtner
1EEF26F4 Christoph Ulrich Scholler
AAE6022E Karlheinz Geyer
EA2D2C41 Mattia Dongili
FCC5040F Stephan Beyer
6B79D401 Giunchedi Filippo
74B11360 Frank Mohr
94C09C7F Peter Palfrader
2274C4DA Andreas Priesz
3B443922 Mathias Rachor
C54BD798 Helmut Grohne
9DE1EEB1 Marc Brockschmidt
41CF0322 Christoph Reeg
218D18D7 Robert Schiele
0DCB0431 Daniel Hess
B84EF12A Mathias Rachor
FD6A8D9D Andreas Madsack
67007C30 Bernd Paysan
9978AF86 Christoph Probst
BD8B050D Roland Rosenfeld
E3DB4EA7 Christian Barth
E263FCD4 Kurt Gramlich
0E6D09CE Mathias Rachor
2A623F72 Christoph Probst
E05C21AF Sebastian Inacker
5D64F870 Martin Zobel-Helas
248AEB73 Rene Engelhard
9C67CD96 Torsten Veller

It’s likely that this happened thanks to a very successful key signing party somewhere in germany (looking at the email addresses). [Update: It was the LinuxTag 2005 KSP.] It might be a nice challenge to beat that clique during next Debconf ;) And the biggest clique I’m in contains 23 keys. Not too bad.

To this… (and I know there are readers of the blog in Manchester and close by who just may be interested in the a one-day seminar and evening lecture on the 1858 cable and later transatlantic communications link). Full details below. ***
2008 marks the 150th anniversary of the first communications link laid beneath 1600 nautical miles of the Atlantic Ocean. That telegraph cable was the first in a series of cutting-edge technologies enabling fast and accurate communication between Britain and the United States of America, linking the old and new worlds. To mark the occasion, the IET in conjunction with the Museum of Science and Industry, Manchester, are holding a one-day seminar and evening lecture on the 1858 cable and later transatlantic communications links, including wireless and satellite, on Tuesday 28th October 2008. Both events are open to the public and admission is free of charge, but pre-booking is a must. The programme is given below. Both events will be held in the Cardwell Theatre, MOSI and there will be a small exhibition on the history of transatlantic communications to accompany the event. To register for the seminar and/or the lecture, please contact Anne Locker (details given at the end of the email). SEMINAR 1000-1030 Arrival and coffee 1030-1045 Bob Martin-Royle :Chairman s welcome, introduction and overview 1045-1115 Neil Barton: First steps to transatlantic - crossing the Irish Sea 1852-1854 1115-1130 Donard de Cogan: Background to the 1858 telegraph cable 1130-1145 Pauline Webb: John Pender and Manchester s contribution 1145-1215 Donard de Cogan: Insights into the landing of the 1858 cable 1215-1230 Pat Wilson: Lord Kelvin s contribution to submarine telegraphy 1230-1300 Questions and discussion 1300-1400 Lunch 1400-1430 Bob Martin-Royle: Marconi and the first transatlantic wireless links 1430-1515 Phil Kelly: TAT1 (includes film) - the first telephone cable 1515-1545 Tea 1545-1615 Des Prouse: Telstar - the birth of transatlantic satellite communications 1615-1630 Transatlantic communications: the present and future 1630-1700 Questions, discussion and closing remarks EVENING 1800-1830 Light refreshments 1830-1930 Nigel Linge: An interactive public lecture on The Transatlantic Telegraph Cable - the birth of global communications 1930- 2000 Questions and closing remarks Regards, Anne Locker
IET Archivist The Institution of Engineering and Technology
IET

Savoy Place
London
WC2R 0BL
United Kingdom

Today, 35 years ago was a dark day for the human age. I mourn the deaths of 4 innocent children as a result of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing.

As I crawl through the social science literature a very painful endeavour, believe me it fills me with disgust to see how much bullshit is being spread as authors randomly insert citations into their text to back up some claim they need to argue their case. Often, the claim is something in which I am interested, so I go out and seek the reference they cite only to find that the referenced authors say nothing even remotely related to the claim for which they were cited. It is happening all over the place, and even in articles that appeared in renowned journals. If we ever get to the point where all academic articles are properly interlinked so that references can be automatically checked and I don t mean just checked for correctness of the reference data, but for actual correctness of the reference then the population of academics will probably shrink to single-digit percentages, at least for the social sciences; I don t recall it being much different when I was researching artificial intelligence a few years ago though. Until then, I am compiling a list. Whether I ll publish it and point journal editors at, or just send it to the journals depends on my mood at the time. NP: Guns n Roses: Appetite for Destruction

I'm going on holidays and won't have access to the Internet. I'll try to respond to messages and requests as soon as possible when I return on September 26.

One thing that's annoying about the Debian installer on the NSLU2, as Joey Hess pointed out a few months ago when he reinstalled his NSLU2, is that you have to manually select some installer modules. The reason for this is that the NSLU2 only has 32 MB of RAM and thus Debian installer runs in lowmem mode in which less functionality is enabled by default. As a result of this, you have to select partman-auto, partman-ext3 and usb-storage-modules from a list of additional installer modules to load so the installer will recognize your USB disk, offer guided partitioning and format the disk with ext3. When Joey submitted his installation report, Frans Pop suggested that we could put a list of installer modules we want to have installed automatically in /var/cache/anna/include. I finally got around to playing around with this yesterday and while this specific solution won't work on lowmem systems we can use anna-install to automatically queue installer modules for installation. Since anna-install works, I put some functionality into the installer today to automatically load required installer modules on the Linksys NSLU2 and on Cobalt machines. This change is good for users because they don't have to select some modules during the installation. I'm a little bit worried that existing users of the installer on the NSLU2 will be confused when they don't see the modules in the list anymore, but I'll update the documentation accordingly.

Inspired by Amaya, I would like to commemorate the thousands of people who died of hunger on any given 14th of September.

Today, nine years ago, 13 September 1999 was a dark day for the human age: only a few days after more than a hundred of people were killed in bombings all over Russia, another bomb took the lives of 118 in an apartment complex in Moscow. Several other bombs were fortunately defused on the same day. NP: Pulp: This is Hardcore

Gazpacho, one of my all-time favourite bands, are (finally) coming to Switzerland!!! On 17 October 2008, they ll play a gig at the Z7 in Pratteln/Basel. Guess who ll be there!?! It makes me very happy that they have recently signed WiV Entertainment as event/tour managers, because it means I ll probably get to see them more often in the future. To help a bit, I have agreed to be their Swiss street team (together with Tibor from Basel), which means I ll be distributing flyers and posters when I return from Ireland, in exchange for free tickets for Penny and myself. You should join us! Tickets are 22 and can be ordered from the Z7 concert page (scroll down, I can t link directly, unfortunately). According to their news page (scroll down a bit), they are also playing in Oslo on 26 September, in Verviers, Belgium on 18 October, and in Den Bosch, The Netherlands on 19 October. Don t miss them! NP: Pulp: Freaks

I started testing GCC 4.4 ten days ago and the results are in. In total, I filed 28 new bugs and ran into 7 known issues. More than half of the bugs I filed have already been fixed and many of those that are still open have already received some attention (debugging, suggested patches). I sent a complete report to the GCC list, although I forgot to mention that I set optimization to -O3 to catch more problems. I know that it's quite popular to complain about GCC, but I'd say that most impressions people have about the GCC community no longer hold true. The GCC community is very active these days, bugs tend to get a lot of attention and there are major infrastructure changes underway to improve the compiler.

I see Martin is proud to have started this... altfrangg, calvados, faegnaescht, gazpacho, gin, gluggsi, lumpesammler, papillon, syydelaervli, tonic, zbasel If you can guess this, you're invited to gatecrash anytime. If you can guess this and don't live close to me (or did at some time in the past, and didn't use Google), I'd be curious to know how...

Sure, Martin, you started a meme (by the way, I roughly guessed you naming scheme which is a nice one). I wish I would have named my machines this way: patrick, bob, sandy, eugene, plankton, carlo, gary, puff, pearl, etc. (easy to guess for people who went to Debconf's day trips). Indeed, I haven't because I named the first ones too long time ago. So they're named kheops, khephren, mykerinos, snefrou, saqqarah, merenptah, amenophis, sethi, djedefre. Easy to guess. PS: 'carlo' is only for French-speaking users. For en_*, thata would be squidward.

Sixty-six years ago was a dark day for the human age: thousands of innocent died when the RMS Laconia (1921) was (allegedly erroneously) torpedoed and the desperate rescue attempts by the offenders were (allegedly erroneously) foiled by a bomber plane. NP: Gazpacho: Night

It appears as if I have started a meme. Someone please shoot me. NP: Gazpacho: Night

Init Seven, my favourite Swiss ISP, has offered to collocate one of my machines in their racks with native IPv6-connectivity. I am now searching for a name for this new host. A recent discussion has made me curious about how many people can deduce my host naming theme from the set of names of currently operational machines under the madduck.net domain:

albatross, bell, brick, cigar, cirrus, clegg, diamond, echo, embryo, eugene, fishbowl, gerald, gnome, lapse, lust, mother, pict, pig, piper, pulse, seamus, sheep, time, vera, wall.

If you know what ties this list together, please help me christen the new machine! Update: the responses have been overwhelming, 183 people have written in so far, and 149 of them knew what s going on (though some admitted to cheating with a search engine). Thanks to everyone! In addition to the common theme, which most guessed correctly, I have a few other restrictions, mainly that the words have to be singular names or nouns, and that they have to feel right . Here are the suggestions I ve received which passed my filters, in decreasing order of frequency:

emily, lucifer, fletcher, lunatic, arnold, flesh, gig, bike, moon, brain, hand, balloon, hope, alan, marmelade, wing, heart, summer, thunder, sam, tropez, sky, stethoscope, khyber, lotus, jugband, cymbaline, remergence, dawn, hell, desert, worm, eclipse, dog, sysyphus, julia, scarecrow, sun, overdrive, vizier, matilda, eiderdown, babe, pillow, funkydung, atom, fore, shout, breast, domine, swan, charade, grantchester, money.

Curiously, I forgot about worm and wing, which are in use, so those are out. Some of them are not candidates because I d mistype them all the time ( stethoscope , cymbaline , sysyphus , remergence , scarecrow , eiderdown , marmelade , grantchester ). Some just don t seem right ( tropez , shout , overdrive , flesh , breast , sky , jugband , eclipse , lucifer , money ) Some are not appropriate as hostname for computers ( brain , heart , damage , hell , lunatic , babe ). Those who suggested machine were referred to my SMTP servers greeting banner. I have to scratch fletcher and desert because of their source. I have to do the same to thunder , unfortunately. And I ought to retire pulse , although not really. Noone suggested grimble and crumble . As there are so many, and so many more, I am changing my rule to significant, enigmatic, and memorable singular nouns and names , which brings us down to:

arnold, gig, bike, moon, alan, khyber, lotus, julia, sun, vizier, matilda, atom, domine, swan, charade, grimble, crumble.

Given that list, I think I will be launching gig, khyber, lotus, charade, vizier, domine, and/or swan in the near future. Or if it s a pair, it ll be grimble and crumble. Thanks all, this was fun. PS: you may use the same naming scheme for your hosts, but you take full responsibility in case you and I ever have to fuse networks in any way. NP: Riverside: Out of Myself

Martin Kraft talking about swinegate asks:

Is the next thing we'll see tears on stage?

No we already did that. I'm sure the international press featured lots of discussion of the gender card at the time that I missed. Oh by the way did I mention we just bought a 40 inch high definition plasma tv? It's awesome. Anyway if you read Republican commentators such as here you would see that many of them think it isn't a good idea to dwell on this topic. If Obama says he didn't intend to attack Gov. Palin I for one believe him but he really didn't forsee his remarks would have this result? Really?

I wonder what would have happened if Obama had put lipstick on a pitbull would there be any less of this circus put up by the Republican monkeys? Are we back in Kindergarten? Mom! Mom! He hit me! . Is the next thing we ll see tears on stage? Or some sort of fake emotional outbreak? Anything goes in America, I say Both, Obama and McCain have used the lipstick analogy in the past (see previously linked article, and this AP writeup), so why are the Republican monkeys trying to nail him on sexism? They are (trying to) play the gender card (thanks to Erinn Clark for the link). Sexism surely is a word to grab attention, especially in the Excited States of America. By shifting attention to sexism, the Republican monkeys are not only stealing Obama s show and dragging the short-attention-span media (and populace) away from any Palin-related scandals, they are also covering up that they don t have anything else to say. Finally, sexism is an emotional topic, unlike the other political and policy crap the entertainment-hungry television crowd has to put up with, so hooray for excitement! I am disgusted by this American election circus. And I wish we d get about as much coverage of American news in these times as international news gets airtime on American TV. Even though I hope Obama wins for no other reason than that he s not in the same political camp as George W. International Terrorist and War Criminal Bush, I couldn t really care less and don t have any reason to believe that things will improve when the Democrats move back into the White House. And neither do lobbyists care who s sitting at the top. Idiots exist on every level and all over the globe. The rich will still pull the strings. The capitalist avalanche (euphemistically called the strive for democracy ) doesn t slow down. Other countries political monkeys have tasted totalitarianism and lost their senses, and no US government will get them back on track. And the media, who controls it all anyway, is just cashing in on the whole spectacle, which is why I have to continue to be subjected to it. Which brings us back to the rich I wouldn t be surprised to find the likes of Haliburton in the financial support list of the Republican monkeys. PS: I know and respect many American citizens, and I know most of them think like me. Nevertheless, I feel it necessary to point out that none of the above is an attack on those of you with a clue. I feel sympathy at the same time as I feel the rage expressed in the above, but this rage is solely with the political monkeys, the media, and merciless capitalists. None of those are US-specific, it just happens that you seem to have the most pronounced combinations. NP: Mogwai: Come On Die Young

Today I received two kittens. They rock. Somebody else who rocks? Martin F. Krafft. Martin rocks because of this gem I came across today managing ~/.ssh/known_hosts via git. The idea is that instead of having a single file known_hosts you have a known_hosts.d/ directory containing multiple entries that are concatenated together. So neat. So obvious. So nice. Rock award. ObFilm: Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back