I've just uploaded Policy 3.8.1.0 with the first batch of post-lenny changes. There isn't anything that earth-shattering in this set, but I'm hoping that we'll be able to get a lot more done during the squeeze release cycle. Policy has well over a hundred open bugs, quite a few of which we should be able to resolve. I also uploaded Lintian 2.2.8, which is synchronized against Policy 3.8.1 and also reverts some changes around install-menu due to a reverted change in debhelper 7.2.5, and fixes diagnosis of diversions. The last few versions of Lintian have all been a little bit buggy due mostly to the current pace of change. Hopefully this version will have fewer unexpected problems. Here is the summary of normative Policy changes, taken from upgrading-checklist.txt.gz in the debian-policy package.

• Care should be taken when adding functionality to essential and such additions create an obligation to support that functionality in essential forever unless significant work is done.
• Changelog files must be encoded in UTF-8.
• Tighten some format requirements for changelog files from a should to a must.
• Remove alternative changelog formats. Debian only supports one changelog format for the Debian Archive.
• New nocheck option for DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS indicating any build-time test suite provided by the package should not be run.
• All control files must be encoded in UTF-8.
• debian/control allows comment lines starting with # with no preceding whitespace.
• Init scripts ending in .sh are not handled specially. They are not sourced and are not guaranteed to be run by /bin/sh regardless of the #! line. This brings Policy in line with the long-standing behavior of the init system in Debian.
• The start action of an init script must exit successfully and not start the daemon again if it's already running.
• /var/run and /var/lock may be mounted as temporary filesystems, and init scripts must therefore create any necessary subdirectories dynamically.
• /bin/sh scripts may assume that local can take multiple variable arguments and supports assignment.
• User mailboxes may be mode 600 and owned by the user rather than mode 660, owned by user, and group mail.

Wouter and Christian have started bragging about their travel arrangements to attend DebConf, with probably insane amounts of toxic substances aimed at making DebConf9 the smelliest DebConf ever. So, it is time for me to announce my intentions as well. I have booked my ticket to travel MEX-MAD, leaving on Thursday 16/07/2009 and arriving to Spain on Friday 17. That means I will be getting to C ceres Friday evening. And I am flying back on Sunday 02/08/2009, which only means that I'll be jetlagged on Monday at work :-P Buying plane tickets when your country's currency has lost 50% of its worth against any other major currency in the world (US dollars are now at ~MX$15.50, and Euros are quickly approaching MX$20), let me tell you, is no fun. Even less if the plane tickets have increased their cost in absolute terms as well, due to the decrease in demand. But, yes, the good news do stand: See you in C ceres!

A few months back, a friend of mine posted in his blog a clip from the HBO TV series called The wire. That three minutes long clip hooked me up right away, and today I finished the last of the 60 hour-long episodes, spanning five seasons. I recommend it to anyone that enjoys a good script, well developed characters, a director who doesn't treat his audience as five year olds, and good acting. Man, if a 10% of TV was this good, I might even consider buying a TV set! Tags: Planet Debian

With Debconf9 being on the european mainland this year, a plane flight isn't necessary. Since flying in cattle class isn't my idea of 'fun', I had been planning to take the train to Caceres this year. So, with the public announcement of debconf registration being open, I thought I'd look at train options. Short version: I think I'll be going to the train station and ask them there, rather than looking something up on the NMBS website. Long version:

Trajectory	Date	Departure	Arrival	Train
Mechelen -> Brussels North	2009-07-13	07:02	07:18	IR 3128
Brussels North ->K ln Hbf	2009-07-13	07:27	09:15	ICE 11
K ln Hbf ->Mannheim Hbf	2009-07-13	09:54	11:24	ICE 515
Mannheim Hbf ->Basel SBB	2009-07-13	11:36	13:47	ICE 375
Basel SBB ->Arth-Goldau	2009-07-13	14:03	15:45	IR 2177
Arth-Goldau -> Milano Centrale	2009-07-13	15:50	18:50	CIS 21
Milano Centrale ->Barcelone Estacion de Franca	2009-07-13/14	19:40	09:43	EN 11274
Barcelona Estacion de Franca -> Barcelona Sants	2009-07-14	09:43	10:28	Transfer
Barcelona Sants -> Madrid-Puerta de Atocha	2009-07-14	12:00	15:23	AVE 3122
Madrid-Puerta de Atocha	2009-07-14	16:40	20:02	TLG 194

And that's after asking to arrive 'around' noon on the 15th. Although I'd love to combine ICE ('Intercity Express', German high-speed trains), CIS ('Cisalpino', Italian high-speed trains), EN ('EuroNight', pretty much what the name says), and AVE ('Alta Velocidad Espa a', Spanish high-speed trains) in a single trip, I think I'll pass for this particular suggestion. And that's ignoring the fact that 5 minutes for a transfer in Arth-Goldau (a place I've never heard of before, let alone been in that train station) is rather tight, and that I don't know whether I'll be able to make it in 45 minutes from one train station to another in Barcelona without actually knowing the city. More soon.

Many people answered to my previous rant stating that it is upstream's prerogative to refuse integration of external patches. I agree and I never said they must integrate patches if they open their source.

What I find unacceptable, and the only reason for the rant, is the fact that upstream deleted my posts from the forum when it was clear that none of the fake reasons that were given was the real reason, since I answered to all of them with sane, logic and reasonable arguments.


I find acceptable to refuse external patches, although undesirable.

Still, I find it unacceptable to try to erase all tracks of a conversation from which it is clear that you were wrong, and try to keep face by erasing traces.

I would have found it hard to deal with, but still acceptable, if upstream would have said simply "please don't try to make patches for glest with the purpose of integrating them later on, we don't want any patches from outsiders". That would have been a decent thing to do.

If you're using a HP Photosmart C5380 All-in-One printer to print on a CD, you might find it useful to use the following cd-circleprint configuration file when using mainly A4 paper format.


delta 20.0
begin_from_bottom 7.5
viewer /usr/bin/evince
converter convert
radius_inner 21
tickmarks 1
print_circle_boundaries 1
begin_from_left[0] 1.5
begin_from_left[1] 1.5
number_of_labels 2
debug 0
circle_radius[0][0] 50
circle_radius[0][1] 41
circle_radius[0][2] 41
circle_radius[0][3] 50
circle_radius[1][0] 50
circle_radius[1][1] 41
circle_radius[1][2] 41
circle_radius[1][3] 50
x_scale 1
y_scale 1


I am unsure if usually using A4 paper format changes anything, but the .ps file cd-circleprint creates uses A4 on my system.


Does anyone knows a decent editor for CD artwork?

Yesterday evening, I registered for Debconf9 in C ceres. I also registered my first proposed event: the now traditional cheese and wine party. Being in Spain with no regulations on food import for the traditional cheese providers in the Debconf crowd, I promise that this cheese party will be E.V.I.L. And Debconf 9 will be a great success, of course. See you in C ceres!

The recent problem of the Portuguese translation of GCompris shows how important a good translation is, especially as far as free software are concerned.
I have not been able to find any news in English relating this story, and think it is essential to spread it so that people better appreciate the role translators play in the free software development process. The Portuguese Magalh es Project lead to provide 300,000 netbooks to Portuguese children aged of 6 to 10, for a fee varying from 0 to 50 , depending on the earnings of the family. These netbooks have a dual boot, with Windows and Linux (a distribution based on Mandriva called Caixa M gica - Magic Box in English).

The problem has begun when some opponents to this project pointed out that the Portuguese translation of GCompris, a free educational software for children from 2 to 10, contained some grammar, syntax and spelling faults, and did not reach the level of quality expected to be distributed to Portuguese children. This story was even published by some major Portuguese newspaper, which is a very bad publicity not only for GCompris, but also for free software in general. Caixa M gica Software have also published a press release explaining the situation. The Portuguese Government have even published a document explaining how to uninstall GCompris, whereas work for correcting the translation was running, and automatic updates being set up on all Magalh es netbooks. The GNOME Portuguese translation team have made some hard work during the week-end to review and correct the existing translation, following to a call for help raised by GCompris lead developer. The new version released yesterday already include an updated Portuguese translation. I have noticed that this problem was already reported on launchpad 2 years ago, but people got lost as the translation was not made through Rosetta (a closed source platform for open source application translation). This should have been reported upstream or at least to the main translator! I take the occasion to thank all translators, l10n and i18n coordinators of the various free software projects I enjoy using in French!

I wasn t sure to really understand this project of law until I read a lot about it during the past days. As some of you might already know, this law, called Internet et Cr ation , but mainly referred as HADOPI law ¹, is a Three Strikes scheme to fight against illegal downloads proposed before the last summer by the French government, and then voted in the Autumn by the S nat (the first of the two French houses of Parliament). Not that I am in favor of illegal downloads of movies and music, but the way this law plans to fight against them is a real threat for French free software developers and users. I won t explain here all the details of this law, but to sum up, it plans to suspend the Internet access to people downloading illegal files from the peer-to-peer network, after 2 notices. Here are the problems I have noticed, as far as I am personally concerned, besides more general aspects this law implies (user freedom etc.):

• Some private actors, indirectly working for French leisure and cultural companies, will be in charge of controlling the French Internet. They will only base their accusations on the IP addresses, which I do not think to be a proof alone.
• An Internet user, accused to have illegally downloaded movies or music will have to prove by his own means he has not done it - ie. his Internet connection could have been hacked, but he needs to prove it! This is totally contrary to the way justice normally works in France, where you are supposed to be innocent until the contrary is proved. A large majority of French Internet users do not have the necessary technical skills to secure their wireless network and hence their Internet connection. And even with good skills, all of them do not own a wireless router supporting eg. WPA2, which creates a real discrimination towards French Internet users.
• A chapter of the project of law plans the possibility to set up a kind of firewall on the computers connected to the Internet - they will allow Internet users to prove their sincerity. This causes however a big issue for free software users: I doubt such a piece of software will be available for free operating systems (such as GNU/Linux, FreeBSD etc.). Even if it is, it won t be opensource - if it was, anybody could amend it and/or disable it, hence no real possibility for the user to prove it was running when the illegal download was noticed.
• This law doesn t take into account the fact that an increasing part of the peer-to-peer exchanges are encrypted, or run anonymously. More over, other technical ways of downloading are not considered (streaming, direct downloads especially when the websites are hosted abroad).

The law should be discussed at the Assembl e Nationale from today (the second house of Parliament), I hence contacted my local representative last week in order to propose a meeting allowing me to expose my concerns. Until now, I have received no answer, despite the fact he accepted to commit in favor of free software when running for being re-elected in june 2007 (he signed the Pacte des logiciels libres from the APRIL association). I guess I will receive an answer once the law is voted!

If you are managing a Free Software project, you may eventually be confronted with a security vulnerability. Normally bugs in the Open Source world are discussed in a transparent way on public forums. In the case of security bugs however, there are benefits to temporarily withholding these details from the public.

Some people describe this approach as responsible disclosure. It boils down to this:

if the vulnerability is not publicly known, warn the vendors first and give them some time to fix it before making the details public.

If the vulnerability is already public knowledge, then you can focus on fixing it as soon as possible and maybe let reporters know about a better way to report their findings.
Sample Security PolicyHere's the procedure we now follow in the Mahara project for security bugs we found ourselves or which have been privately disclosed to us through security@mahara.org:

1. Figure out the extent of the problem: which versions of Mahara are affected by this problem?
2. Fix the problem on all supported branches of the project in a private source control repository.
3. Share the vulnerability information with vendor-sec and request a CVE identifier.
   
4. Prepare release tarballs and packages.
5. Draft a security advisory for the Security forum.
6. Wait until the embargo date to push the release out.
   

Emails to vendor-sec should include:

• a description of the problem
• any proof of concept code demonstrating the vulnerability
  
• the list of affected versions
• any patches you have prepared
• a proposed embargo date

Benefits of properly handling security bugs
First and foremost, it protects end-users by giving them a chance to download and install fixed versions of your software before widespread exploitation of the security flaws.

Secondly, it may increase your project credibility. While you are admitting that your software has flaws, you are also demonstrating that your project is committed to dealing with the most serious ones promptly and in a responsible manner.

Finally, sharing security flaws and having your fixes reviewed by a select group of experts may reveal extra vulnerabilities you missed while preparing your patches. This gives you an opportunity to improve your fixes before they are released and to avoid having to issue yet another security advisory a few days later.

Big thanks to Steffen Joeris for his help in shaping the Mahara policy!

Hey auzure_skies, Happy 7th wedding anniversary. =)

I love you. =)

I m back from this years Cebit (well, yesterday already, just didn t write about it). Had a mostly good time that week, with our booth being small but visible to the visitors. In the first picture you see Rene (not our OpenOffice.org Rene :) ) setting up our second laptop, which we used whenever we had to show something to our visitors. The upper laptop with the presentation on it is my own. As it has a pretty big display we used it to continually have a presentation about Debian run. If there is no room for a projector this is a good alternative way. Later on we also had bb running, with customized texts for Cebit. As old as bb might be, it is still the best eye catcher you can have for a fair like Cebit. Nothing (well, maybe besides sex) works that good. We had a good week there, answering all sorts of questions. We had many people that knew nothing about Debian, Linux or even OpenSource and we had many that had heard about this other system already as well as people with very specific problems with various packages in Debian. There had been many people asking about the difference between Debian and Ubuntu and what we think about it, many told us they switched to Ubuntu for their Desktop but keep Debian on the Server because Ubuntu doesn t know what stability means, lots of others told us they switched back from Ubuntu because Debian is better. We also had those people that can not understand how Debian can exists if it doesn t sell anything and sometimes it turned out to be pretty hard to explain why we do what we do in a way they understand it. So all in all it was Cebit as usual. :) As one can read in the news, Cebit was much smaller than last year. 25% less exhibitors and 20% less visitors is very visible. Yet, besides a pretty tedious Sunday with the lowest visitor rate, the Debian booth wasn t much affected by it. We did have about all the usual people that visit us every year and for the rest, well, we are generic enough to attract attention from most visitors. This years booth was setup in a different way than the past years. As you can see on the pictures, it was a huge booth which had 15 different OpenSource projects on it, all arranged in isles of 3 tables each. We had BSD and Mozilla with us and the fsfe was our direct neighbor. Past years had an own booth per Project. Both ways have their advantages and disadvantages, and I think (and hope) next year will see a mixture of it. Large projects, which are known to attract lots of attention, like Debian, KDE or Mozilla, should have their own, seperated, booth. Something like 6 square meters each, placed as far away from each other as possible. Between those one or two larger areas having such tables arranged for smaller projects, like scribus or gosa will also give them a nice demonstration point and good access for visitors. Well, lets see how it will look like next year, it depends on many factors, the biggest being the money available to the OpenSource area.

I finally took some days off. Those are most needed, since I spent carnival on call at the hospital (argh!)... So Brenda and I decided to spend those days at Maceio, capital of Alagoas state, and a very anticipated vacation. They have a lot of sun and beautiful beaches, enough to fill our week (and get some tan also). This picture was taken at Praia do Gunga (Gunga s Beach), a charming place with a calm shore, almost like a pool, protected by natural reefs. As you can see, I am having a bad time right now :-) Food is excellent, so are the people. But there are some inconveniences (as always). Beaches around downtown are not proper for bathing They re fighting a long fight against pollution (and loosing, if you ask me)... Also, Alagoas is a poor state Our guide said alphabetization covers less than 70% of the people Also, network connection is expensive in hotels. Ours charges BRL 1,00 every 5 minutes! And the speed is not the best. They have one of those systems requiring a web authentication before you go. I ve seem people complaining about this kind of system in Planet Debian before (reference please!) and suggesting Tunneling over DNS as a fix . I ve noticed it would work in our hotel, but I decided to try another approach I ve already written about: just a quick tunnel over an ssh connection. I know I told you I needed an authentication before, but that is for the first connection! Yes, once the connection is established, I could just log out (thus stop the charging). No new connections could be made, but the tunnel was already up, so just put everything through the tunnel and I should be fine right? Wrong. I got bitten by a drawback of the technique already pointed in a comment when I first wrote about it: in an error-prone network, TCP-in-TCP slowly dies of attempting to correct itself over and over and I was using a poorly connected wi-fi (loosing almost 30% of the packets!). So, I was left with the set-up of a not foreseen tunnel using DNS as the only option This would take time (and money)... So I decided for a simpler approach: SOCKS proxy. Yes, everything I would do could be done through a SOCKS! So a simple:

bash$ ssh -D 8888 my.remote.location

was all that I needed. That and setting my Firefox to use a SOCKS proxy on localhost:8888 and all went fine. I paid to set-up the tunnel then, once established, I logged out and kept using my tunnel all this time. Simple and effective, and I got some time left to blog about it. :-)

Once your new Free Software project has had some traction and is gaining users, you will probably want to supplement its initial homepage with a few extra services. However, the most important aspects of managing a Free Software community have more to do with relating to human beings.
Social Interactions in Small ProjectsIn the early days of your project, support requests usually only come in through personal emails to the lead developer. In order to build your community, make sure new users feel welcome:

• Be friendly and informal in your responses. Feel free to use the person's first name at the beginning of your emails.


• Be responsive to feedback and request for help. Most Free Software developers are quite busy so this is about letting user know that you'll get back to them or thanking them for their suggestions/feedback. Very few people take the time to contact authors to let them know about the problems they run into. It's important to be supportive of the ones who do.
  


• Be calm when responding to negative feedback. It helps to take a full day to cool off before sending a reply. Thank users for writing to you, but remind them that you are not getting paid to work on this project and that you are doing this for fun in your spare time. Some users seem to forget this.

But of course, remember that the main job of a developer/maintainer is to make the software better. Keep this in mind when replying to support requests and allocate your (limited) time accordingly.
More Tools for Growing ProjectsAs your project grows and handling user-reported issues start becoming more of a burden, consider two things: documentation and distributed support.

The obvious place to start documentation-wise is to start collecting responses that you send to users who get in touch with you. This is the original meaning of a FAQ: answers to actual questions sent in by actual users. Fill your FAQ with irrelevant questions and users won't bother reading it and will email you instead.

In addition to providing good documentation, you should also think about creating a mailing list or a forum where users can post their questions (Google Groups provides a nice blend of the two technologies). There are two main advantages to this service:

• the support load is distributed across other users of the software
• questions and answers are archived by search engines

As your project grows even bigger, you will probably also want to look into getting a bug tracker and a wiki.

Have a look at this excellent online book for more ideas.

So I am going to do something that nobody on the Internet is doing lately: post a review of the Kindle 2 after having only used it for three days. Shocking, yes, I know. I had never even seen a Kindle of either model before getting the Kindle 2. I had, though, thought about getting an eInk device for some time. The $359 Kindle 2 price tag caused me significant pause, though in the end I went for it due to the 30-day return policy. On the surface, I thought that it would be weird to have a Kindle. After all, how often am I away from the computer? And there s a small local library a few blocks from where I work. But I had a hunch it might turn out for me like my iPod did: something that didn t sound all that useful from reading about it, but turned out to be tremendously so after having actually used it. Turtleback Delivery I ordered my Kindle 2 with standard shipping, which meant that it went by FedEx Smart Post. Here is my SmartPost rant. There are two words in Smart Post that are misleading. I once had an item take literally a week to make it from St. Louis to Kansas. That is, I kid you not, slower than the Pony Express ran in 1860. This time, my Kindle made it from Kentucky to Kansas in a mere five days. Oh, and it spent more than 24 hours just sitting in St. Louis. The Device Overall, the device is physically quite nice. It is larger and thinner than I had imagined, and the screen also is a bit smaller. It is usually easier to hold than a paperback, due to not having to prevent it from closing too far at the binding edge. The buttons are easy to press, though I could occasionally wish for them to be easier, but that s a minor nit. The Screen The most important consideration for me was the screen. The eInk display as both stunningly awesome and disappointing. This is not the kind of display you get on your computer. Or, for that matter, any other device. It isn t backlit. It reacts to light as paper does. It can be viewed from any angle. And it consumes no power to sustain an image; only to change it. Consequently, it puts up a beautiful portrait of a famous author on the screen when it is put to sleep, and consumes no power to maintain it. The screen s response time isn t anywhere near as good as you d expect from a regular LCD. It flashes to black when you turn a page, and there is no scrolling. On the other hand, this is not really a problem. I found the page turning speed to be more than adequate, and probably faster than I d turn the page on a real book. The resolution of the display has the feeling of being incredible. The whole thing provides a far different, and in my eyes superior, experience to reading on an LCD or CRT screen. My nit is the level of contrast. The background is not really a pure white, but more of a light gray. This results in a contrast level that is quite clearly poorer than that of the printed page. At first I thought this would be a serious problem, though I am growing somewhat more used to it as I read more. Reading Experience Overall, I ve got to say that it is a great device. You can easily get lost in a book reading it on the Kindle. I m reading David Copperfield for the first time, and have beat a rather rapid path through the first five chapters on the Kindle already. And that, I think, is the best thing that could be said about an ebook reader. It stays out of the way and lets you immerse yourself in your reading. The Kindle s smartly-integrated Oxford-American Dictionary was useful too. One thing about a novel written 150 years ago is that there are some words I just haven t ever heard. Nosegay, for instance. You can move a cursor to a word to see a brief pop-up definition appear, or press Enter to see the entire entry. This is nice and so easy that I m looking up words I wouldn t have bothered to if I were reading the book any other way. A nosegay, by the way, is a bouquet of showy flowers. Buying Experience The Kindle has a wireless modem tied to the Sprint network on it. The data charges for this, whatever they may be, are absorbed by Amazon in the cost of the device and/or the books you buy for it. This turned out to be a very smart piece of engineering. I discovered on Amazon s Kindle Daily Post that Random House is offering five mostly highly-rated sci-fi books for free on the Kindle for a limited time. So I went over to the page for each, and made my purchase . It was only a click or two, and I saw a note saying it was being delivered. A few minutes later, I picked up the Kindle off the kitchen counter. Sure enough, my purchases were there ready to read. Impressive. This level of ease of use smells an awful lot like Apple. Actually, I think it s surpassed them. You can delete books from the Kindle and re-download them at any time. You can initiate that operation from either the PC or the Kindle. And you can also browse Amazon s Kindle store directly from the device itself. I haven t subscribed to any magazines or newspapers, but I gather that they deliver each new issue automatically the moment it s released by the publisher, in the middle of the night. I pre-ordered the (free to Kindle) Cook s Illustrated How-to-Cook Library. It makes me way happier than it should to see This item will be auto-delivered to your Kindle on March 26 in the order status. Free Books Amazon s Kindle library has a number of completely free Kindle books as well. These are mostly out-of-copyright books, probably sourced from public etext places like Project Gutenberg, and converted to the Mobipocket format that is the Kindle s native format with a minimum of human intervention. As they are free, you can see them in Amazon s library if you sort by price. And, of course, Amazon will transfer them to the Kindle wirelessly, and maintain a copy of them in your amazon.com account. Unfortunately, as with free etexts in general on the Internet, the quality of these varies. I was very annoyed to find that many free etexts look like they were done on a typewriter, rather than professionally printed. They don t use smart quotes; only the straight ones. When reading on a device that normally shows you a faithful print experience, this is jarring. And I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to find a copy of Return of Sherlock Holmes that actually had the graphic figures in Dancing Men. Ah well. Your Own Content Amazon operates a mail server, username@kindle.com. You can email stuff to it, and it will convert it to the Kindle format and wirelessly upload it to your kindle for a fee of $0.10. Alternatively, you can use username@free.kindle.com, which does the same thing at no charge, but emails you back a link to download the converted work to install via USB yourself. I tried it with a number of PDFs. It rejected about a dozen times from only my single mail message a PDF containing graphic images only. However, it does quite well with most text-heavy PDFs notably doing an excellent job with Return of Sherlock Holmes from bookstacks.org the only source I found that was both beautifully typeset and preserved the original figures. Unfortunately, the PDF converter occasionally has troubles identifying what should be a paragraph, particularly in sections of novels dealing with brief dialog. I have also sent it some HTML files to convert, which it also does a great job with. You can also create Mobipocket files yourself and upload them directly. There is a Mobipocket creator, or you can use mobiperl if you are Windows-impaired or prefer something scriptable on Linux. The device presents itself as a USB mass storage device, so you can see it under any OS. There s a documents folder to put your files in. You can back it up with your regular backup tools, too. And it charges over USB. Web Browser I haven t tried it much. It usually works, but seems to be completely down on occasion. It would get by in a pinch, but is not suitable for any serious work. The guys over at XKCD seem to love it; in fact, their blog post was what finally convinced me to try the Kindle in the first place. Final Thoughts I ve ordered a clip-on light and a leather case for the Kindle. The light, I believe, will completely resolve my contrast complaint. The leather case to protect it, of course. I can t really see myself returning the Kindle anymore. It s way too much fun, and it s making it easier to read more again. And really, if Amazon manages to reach out to a whole generation of people and make it easy and fun for them to read again and make a profit doing it, of course they may move up a notch or two from being an evil patent troll company to a positive social force company. Wow, never thought I d say that one.

Django Lint is a static analysis tool that checks (or lints) web applications that are built around the Django web development framework. It aims to encourage the development of high-quality reusable Django applications. It currently reports on:

• Nullable CharField or TextField model fields
• Missing recommended configuration variables in settings.py
• Mismatch of null=True and blank=False for model fields
• Use of BooleanField with default=True or use of NullBooleanField
• Where myapp.models is actually a directory-based package instead of a single models.py
• Excessive number of models in a single application
• Models within an application having a common prefix
• Use of unique_for_date, unique_for_month or unique_for_year modifiers
• Naive tree structure implementations using ForeignKey('self')
• Missing __unicode__ methods or use of __str__
• Incorrect ordering of standard model methods relative to Django style guidelines
• Misordered middleware in settings.py
• Models with too many fields (or zero) fields
• Extremely large CharField fields
• Use of the PositiveSmallIntegerField or SmallIntegerField fields
• Use of auto_now or auto_now_add modifiers on date fields
• Instances of URLField without an explicit verify_exists value
• (and more)

Admittedly, some of the checks are based on the implementation details of MySQL, PostgreSQL and SQLite backends, but this fits with the goal of promoting re-usable applications anyway. GPLv3 source, tarballs, etc. Patches welcome.

/me for DPL Given that it is now widespread news, I guess it's time to blog about it: I'm running for DPL in this year elections, i.e.: zack for DPL!. Am I out of my mind?
Possibly It started as a joke at last DebConf, with my (naked or dressed ...) room mates spreading that rumor. Then the idea grows into me ... and now here I am. (IOW: I'm pretending I'm not entirely guilty of inflicting another platform to be read.) Apparently we are just two candidates: me and the "ticket" Steve-Luk. For the moment I've to spare a page where I will collect material about the election, and a couple of feelings:

• Sending the nomination mail is embarrassing: we are used to do only technical stuff in Debian, declaring our will of taking care for a while of our non-technical issues ain't easy.
• Preparing a platform is an intriguing experience. Whining about our problems is a thing. Trying to distill them in an organized list, and think about long term solutions is a totally different one. I suggest to try writing your own "platform" even if you are not candidate, and even when there are no DPL elections around (as Joey and HE did a while ago, IIRC, in the form of blog posts). It can be a rewarding exercise.

Version 1.0 of my platform has been submitted to the secretary, and is now available from my homepage. If you have questions, for me or the other candidates, just post them on -vote: campaigning has just started, I'm confident it will be fun! Update the platform is now available from the vote page

The listeners of yesterday s episode of Venty s Hackerfunk radio show on Radio LoRa already know and heard it: We made identi.ca talk. And we did it with help of other microbloggers. (The podcast version of this Hackerfunk episode will be online in a few days, too. Will link it here and either Venty or me will post it on identi.ca, too, as soon as it s published.) A few weeks ago we thought about how we could show microblogging on the radio. With identi.ca s Jabber (XMPP) interface we have real time access, and so the idea was born to pipe all incoming dents into a speech synthesis system. Then we tried to figure out which tools would be appropriate. Quite fast, people on identi.ca as well as on the LUGS IRC (e.g. bones0) pointed us to festival and espeak. We found no support for German in festival, so we went for espeak although festival would have had the advantage of the existence of a festival plugin for the popular multiprotocol messenger Pidgin. Next step was more difficult than expected: How to make a tail -f of XMPP incoming messages? Something like rsstail, just for XMPP. Although using the IM to IRC gateway Bitlbee (as I use it myself) and using tail -f (or better inotail -f ) on the IRC client s log file (ii comes to my mind for such purposes) would have been an option, nobody had the idea at that time. And since @deepspawn conjured xmpptail in less than two hours we happily took it. xmpptail (tar.gz) is written in Python and uses Twisted Words (Debian package python-twisted-words) as XMPP libraries. I had to patch xmpptail slightly for unbuffered I/O, Unicode support and for removing things we don t want to hear on the radio as follows, but it worked more or less out of the box.

--- xmmptail.py 2009-02-25 20:47:48.000000000 +0100
+++ xmpptail.py 2009-03-07 18:48:57.000000000 +0100
@@ -1,4 +1,4 @@
-#!/usr/bin/python
+#!/usr/bin/python -u
 # -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
 # author: Carlos A. Perilla 
 # This file is part of Jance bot.
@@ -65,7 +65,8 @@
          body = unicode(e.__str__())
          break
 
-    print("%s: %s" % (from_id,body))
+#    print("%s: %s" % (from_id,body))
+    print("%s" % (body.encode('utf-8')))
 
 
 def authfailedEvent(xmlstream):
@@ -80,9 +81,9 @@
   dprint('Got something: %s -> %s' % (el.name, str(el.attributes)))
 
 if __name__ == '__main__':
-    print "Starting"
+    #print "Starting"
     execfile('tailconf')
-    print USER_HANDLE
+    #print USER_HANDLE
     me = USER_HANDLE + "/xmpptail"
     myJid = jid.JID(me)
     server = USER_HANDLE[USER_HANDLE.find('@')+1:]

So after configuring xmpptail to use the hackerfunk Jabber account, we successfully ran the following script during the radio show:

./xmpptail.py   while read LINE; do
        if [ "$LINE" = "empty" ]; then
                continue;
        fi;
        echo $LINE
        echo $LINE   tee -a xmpp-espeak.log   espeak --stdin -v de;
done

At the end of the show, @rebugger found this howto which describes very detailed how to get festival working together with the non-free ( non-free as in DFSG) MBROLA project which offers also the appropriate files for German. But because of how much work this would be to get it running, I currently prefer to stay with espeak for German speech synthesis . Next step would be to use mnoGosearch s mguesser to detect the language of a dent and run espeak (or whatever text-to-speech system is appropriate for the guessed language) with the appropiate options for that language, because otherwise many dents sound really funny. ;-) Update, 15:02: Venty gave the whole system the name Identibla .

It s been quite the week. Stomach Flu Last Friday, my stomach was just starting to feel a little odd. I didn t think much off it a little food that didn t go over well or stress, I thought. Saturday I got out of bed and almost immediately felt like throwing up. Ugh. I probably caught some sort of stomach flu. I was nauseous all day and had some terrible diarrhea to boot. I spent parts of Saturday, Saturday night, Sunday, and Sunday night supervising some emergency downloads as the BOFH would say. By Sunday afternoon, I thought I was doing good enough to attend a practice of the Kansas Mennonite Men s Choir. I made it through but it wasn t quite as up to it as I thought. Monday morning I woke up and thought the worst was behind me, so I went to work. By evening, the worst clearly was not behind me. I was extremely cold, and then got very hot a few hours later. Tuesday I left work a little early because of not feeling well. Servers Wednesday a colleague called me at home before I left to say that the ERP database had a major hiccup. That s never good. The database is this creaky old dinosaur thing that has a habit of inventing novel ways to fail (favorite pastime: exceeding some arbitrary limit to the size of files that no OS has cared about for 5 years, then hanging without telling anybody why). My coworkers had been working on it since 5. I went into the office and did what I could to help out, though they had mostly taken care of it. Then we went to reboot the server. It didn t come back. I/O error on sda just after init started, and it hung. Puzzled, as it just used that disk to boot from. Try rebooting again. This time, I/O error as the fibre channel controller driver loads. Again, puzzled as it just used that controller to load grub. Power cycle this time. And now the server doesn t see the fibre channel link at all. Eep. Check our fiber optic cables, and power cycle again. And THIS time, the server doesn t power back up. Fans whir for about a second, then an ominous red light I never knew was there shows up. Eeep! So I call HP. They want me to remove one CPU. Yes, remove one CPU. I tried, and long story short, they dispatch a local guy with a replacement motherboard. Can you send along a FC controller, in case it s dead too? Nope, not until we diagnose a problem with it. Local guy comes out. He s a sharp guy and I really like him. But the motherboard wasn t in stock at the local HP warehouse, so he had to have it driven in from Oklahoma City. He gets here with it by about 4:30. At this point the single most important server to the company s business has been down almost 12 hours. He replaces the motherboard. The server now powers up yay! And it POSTs, and it . doesn t see the disks. !#$!#$ He orders the FC controller, which is so very much not in stock that they can t get it to us until 8:30AM the next morning (keep in mind this thing is on a 4-hour 24/7 contract). Next morning rolls around. Outage now more than 24 hours. He pops the FC controller in, we tweak the SAN settings appropriately, we power up the machine, and . still doesn t see any disks, and the SAN switch still doesn t see any link. EEP! Even the BIOS firmware tool built into the controller doesn t see a link, so we KNOW it s not a software issue. We try plugging and unplugging cables, trying different ports, everything. Nothing makes a difference. At this point, while he ponders what else he can replace while we start migrating the server to a different blade. We get ERP back up on its temporary home an hour later, and he basically orders us every part he can think of while we ve bought him some room. Several additional trips later, he s replaced just about everything at least once, some things 2 or 3 times, and still no FC link. Meanwhile, I ve asked my colleague to submit a new ticket to HP s SAN team so we can try checking of the switch has an issue. They take their sweet time answering until he informs them this morning that it s been *48 HOURS* since we first reported the outage. All of a sudden half a dozen people at HP take a keen interest in our case. As if they could smell this blog post coming So they advise us to upgrade the firmware in the SAN switch, but they also say we really should send this to the blade group; the problem can t be with the SAN and of course the blade people are saying the problem s GOT to be with the SAN . We try to plan the firmware upgrade. In theory, we can lose a switch and nobody ever notices due to multipathing redundancy. In practice, we haven t tested that in 2 years. None of this equipment had even been rebooted in 390 days. While investigating this, we discovered that one of the blade servers could only see one path to its disks, not two. Strange. Fortunately, THAT blade wasn t mission-critical on a Friday, so I power cycled it. And it powered back up. And it promptly lost connection to its disks entirely, causing the SAN switches to display the same mysterious error they did with the first blade the one that nobody at HP had heard of, could find in their documentation, or even on Google. Yes, that s right. Apparently power cycling a server means it loses access to its disks. Faced with the prospect of our network coming to a halt if anything else rebooted (or worse, if the problem started happening without a reboot), we decided we d power cycle one switch now and see what would happen. If it worked out, our problems would be fixed. If not, at least things would go down in our and HP s presence. And that worked? What? Yes. Power cycling the switch fixed every problem over the course of about 2 minutes, without us having to do anything. Meanwhile, HP calls back to say, Uhm, that firmware upgrade we told you to do? DON T DO IT! We power cycle the other switch, and have a normal SAN life again. I let out a WOOHOO! My colleague, however, had the opposite reaction. Now we ll never be able to reproduce this problem to get it fixed! Fair point, I suppose. Then began the fairly quick job of migrating ERP back to its rightful home it s all on Xen already, designed to be nimble for just these circumstances. Full speed restored 4:55PM today. So, to cap it all off, within the space of four hours, we had fail:

• One ERP database
• ERP server s motherboard
• Two fiber optic switches but only regarding their ability to talk to machines recently rebooted
• And possibly one FC controller

Murphy, I hate you. The one fun moment out of this was this conversation: Me to HP guy: So yeah, that machine you ve got open wasn t rebooted in 392 days until today. HP guy: WOW! That s INCRED oh wait, are you running Linux on it? Me: Yep. HP: Figures. No WAY you d get that kind of uptime from Windows. And here he was going to be all impressed.