Search Results: "ana"

16 February 2009

Erich Schubert: Congratulations, Debian

Debian Lenny Banner Congratulations to all developers (DDs or not, we have sponsored uploads, Debian contributors and such, too!) who contributed to the release of Debian GNU/Linux "lenny" 5.0. I must admit that I've been largely inactive recently, I just managed to keep the bugs on my remaining packages low. Funnily, just the day lenny was released I learned about a bug in Enigma on AMD64 that is probably worth fixing through proposed updates ...

15 February 2009

Michael Prokop: Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 codename Lenny - News for sysadmins

Alright, Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 AKA as Lenny has been released. Time for a Debian unstable unfreeze party! 8-) What does the new stable release bring for system administrators? I ll give an overview what news you might expect when upgrading from Debian GNU/Linux 4.0, codename Etch (released on 8th April 2007) to the current version Debian GNU/Linux 5.0, codename Lenny (released on 14th February 2009). I try to avoid duplicated information so make sure to read the release announcement and the official release notes for Lenny beforehand. Noteworthy Changes Virtualisation Virtualisation related new tools: Desktop oriented packages like virtualbox and qemu are available as well of course. Noteworthy Updates This is a (selective) list of some noteworthy updates: New packages Lenny ships over 7000 new packages. Lists of new/removed/replaced packages are available online. I ll name 238 sysadmin related packages that might be worth a look. (Note: I don t list addon stuff like optional server-modules, docs-only and kernel-source related packages. I plan to present some of the following packages in more detail in separate blog entries.) Further Ressources

14 February 2009

Biella Coleman: Joe Reagle on Wikipedia

In this age of bits and bytes, there are many virtual organizations and networks which produce all sorts of stuff we use on a daily basis. My two favorite institutions are Debian (not a surprise) and Wikipedia, not just because they oh-so-useful to me and many others, which they are, but because the social organizations behind these two entities are so (at times maddeningly) complex and full of nuance, they provide for endless analytical fascination. One of my friends, Joe Reagle, who has recently graduated from my home department, is presenting is work on Wikipedia and I thought some local New York geeks might be interested. Information below:
All welcome 4:30 - 6:00 PM, Tuesday February 17
206 Vanderbilt Hall, 40 Wash. Sq. So. Wikipedia: Nazis and Norms Joseph Reagle, NYU Department of Media, Culture, and Communication Abstract: In 1990 Mike Godwin coined his Law of Nazi Analogies to capture the common devolution of Usenet discourse into insulting comparisons with Nazis or Hitler. Eleven years later, Jimmy Wales wrote that it was important that the Wikipedia community preserve and extend our culture of co-operation, with all of us standing as firmly as possible against the culture of conflict embodied in Usenet. I argue Wikipedia is a realization even if flawed of a long-held vision for a universal encyclopedia: a technology inspired vision seeking to wed increased access to information with greater human accord. And I claim Wikipedia s collaborative culture is a big factor for this success: the norms of Neutral Point of View ensures that the scattered pieces of what we think we know can be joined and good faith facilitates the actual practice of fitting them together.

Biella Coleman: Joe Reagle on Wikipedia

In this age of bits and bytes, there are many virtual organizations and networks which produce all sorts of stuff we use on a daily basis. My two favorite institutions are Debian (not a surprise) and Wikipedia, not just because they oh-so-useful to me and many others, which they are, but because the social organizations behind these two entities are so (at times maddeningly) complex and full of nuance, they provide for endless analytical fascination. One of my friends, Joe Reagle, who has recently graduated from my home department, is presenting is work on Wikipedia and I thought some local New York geeks might be interested. Information below:
All welcome 4:30 - 6:00 PM, Tuesday February 17
206 Vanderbilt Hall, 40 Wash. Sq. So. Wikipedia: Nazis and Norms Joseph Reagle, NYU Department of Media, Culture, and Communication Abstract: In 1990 Mike Godwin coined his Law of Nazi Analogies to capture the common devolution of Usenet discourse into insulting comparisons with Nazis or Hitler. Eleven years later, Jimmy Wales wrote that it was important that the Wikipedia community preserve and extend our culture of co-operation, with all of us standing as firmly as possible against the culture of conflict embodied in Usenet. I argue Wikipedia is a realization even if flawed of a long-held vision for a universal encyclopedia: a technology inspired vision seeking to wed increased access to information with greater human accord. And I claim Wikipedia s collaborative culture is a big factor for this success: the norms of Neutral Point of View ensures that the scattered pieces of what we think we know can be joined and good faith facilitates the actual practice of fitting them together.

Brandon Holtsclaw: Managing Social Media Accounts

So in 2009 I've started using Social Media Accounts alot more like Facebook, Twitter,Wordpress ( self hosted ), and plan to use more as time goes on and I discover new services and new services are introduced. <rant> One of the issues I've noticed is most "tweet flows" want you to update your status across multiple services, like your IM status would be the same as your Twitter status and again the same as your Facebook status and so on. See the problem with this is not all "status" messages on Social Media sites are used for the same purpose , e.g. the Facebook status allows comments and the Tweet allows replies and RT's ( Re-Tweets ) and IM status doesn't allow any feedback at all, at least not publicly. An posting to both identi.ca and twitter causes replies and such to be checked on both. Where is our "Digital Convergence" / Digital Universe for Social Media ? How do any of you keep all the different forms of social media updated ( an relevant ) to the media its self, e.g. not posting the wrong status to the wrong service and not using 100000(.5) web interfaces constantly. </rant>

Wouter Verhelst: Debian @ FOSDEM 2009: Postmortem

Well, no, neither FOSDEM nor Debian are dead. But FOSDEM '09 is gone, over, and dealt with. It was a breeze, for the most part. I'm still not very happy with the booth; that needs to be done better next year. Help and suggestions in that area are more than welcome. One thing that more than deserves a follow-up is Lucas' post about FOSDEM:
On a more sad note, the worst talk of the week-end was without any possible doubt Frans Pop's release team bashing. Nobody is claiming that the release management of the lenny release cycle was perfect: there's always room for improvement. But given the context and the constraints, I think that they did a very good job. Frans' talk boiled down to: "The release team doesn't know what they are doing, I would have done much better because I'm so qualified."
As the person responsible for allowing Frans on the schedule in the first place, while being fully aware of the relationship between Frans and the release team (not at first, but certainly in time to kick him off if I'd have wanted to), I'd like to comment on that. First of all, I do not agree that the last statement in the above is true. Frans showed a few stories of things that went on in the release team, and gave his opinion on what he believed went wrong. He also explicitly said, at the beginning of the talk, that none of the talk was meant personally; that he wanted to offer some constructive criticism instead. I believe he did not fail in doing that, but of course YMMV. Secondly, and more importantly, I do not believe it is healthy for Debian (or any project, for that matter) to reject criticism. Indeed, nobody is claiming perfection. I do not believe any venue where talks can be had should be a good news show. People in a position of power not just the release team, but also, say, the DPL, ftp-masters, buildd maintainers and whatnot have received our trust to do what they need to do to the best of their abilities. If someone in the project would believe that I can significantly improve my work as buildd maintainer, it is not just their right, but indeed their duty to inform me of that fact. This is exactly what Frans was attempting to do, and there is nothing wrong with that. It is also not as if he's not tried reasoning with the release team first. He has made suggestions, which have gotten ignored. I feel that talking to more people about what he feels is right, to see whether they agree with him, is the next logical step to take, and that this it is exactly what Frans was attempting to do at FOSDEM. Having said that, I agree that finishing the talk late was a very bad thing. If anything, a talk on a subject like this should have more, not less, time for discussion. So while I do not agree that his intentions were wrong, I do agree that the execution could have been better. There, that was criticism too. Now, what's next? Oh yes, suggestions. If people have suggestions on how to improve the Debian presence at FOSDEM next year (especially, as above, ideas for creative use of the booth would be welcome), then please send me an email, making sure the subject contains the word 'FOSDEM', so my mailfilters know what to do with it. You'll preferably do so now, while FOSDEM is still somewhat fresh in your memory; I'll take notes and use those for doing better next year. Thanks,

Russell Coker: Do Spammers target Secondary MX Servers

Rumour has it that some types of spammer target the secondary MX servers. The concept is that some people have less control over the secondary MX server and less ability to implement anti-spam measures. Therefore if they accept all mail from the secoondary then a spammer will have more success if they attack the secondary server. True secondary servers are becoming increasingly uncommon, the lower priority servers listed in MX records tend to have the same configuration as the primary, so the benefit for the spammer in attacking the secondary server is probably minimal. But it would be good to know whether they do this. I decided to analyse the logs from a mail server that I run to see if I can find evidence of this. I chose a server that I run for a lient which has thousands of accounts and tens of thousands of messages delivered per day, my own server doesn t get enugh traffic to give good results. I analysed the logs for a week for the primary and secondary MX servers to see if the ratio of spam to ham differed. Now this does have some inherent inaccuracy, some spam will slip past the filters and occasionally a legitimate email will be rejected. But I believe that the accuracy required in a spam filter to avoid making the users scream is vastly greater than that which is required to give a noteworthy result. I produced totals of the number of messages delivered, the number rejected by SpamAssassin (which has a number of proprietary additions), the number of message delivery attempts that were prevented due to rate limiting (most of which will be due to spammers), and the number of attempts to deliver to unknown accounts (some of which will be due to spammers having bad addresses in their lists). For each of these rejection criteria I produced a ratio of the number of rejections to the number of delivered messages for each of the servers. The rate limit count didn t seem useful. While the primary server had a ratio of 0.75 messages rejected due to rate limiting to every message accepted the secondary had a ratio of 0.08. It seems that the secondary just didn t get enough traffic to trigger the limits very often. This is an indication that the more aggressive bots might not be targetting the secondary. The ratio of messages rejected by SpamAssassin to legitimate mail was 0.76:1 on the primary server and on the secondary server it was 1.24:1. The ratio of messages addressed to unknown users to successful deliveries was 3.05:1 on the primary and 7.00:1 on the secondary! This seems like strong evidence to show that some spammers are deliberately targetting the secondary server. In this case both the primary and secondary servers are in server rooms hosted by the same major ISP in the same region. The traceroute between the two mail servers is only 7 hops, and there is only one hop between the two server rooms. So it seems unlikely that there would be some connectivity issue that prevents spammers from connecting to the primary. One other factor that may be relevant is that the secondary server has been in service for some years while the primary is only a few months old. Spammers who store the server IP address with the email address (which happens - change the DNS records to send your mail to a different server and you will see some spam go to the old server) will be sending mail to what is now the secondary server. The difference in the rejected mail volume on the secondary server and the amount that would be rejected if it had the same ratio as the primary amounts to 7% of all mail rejected by SpamAssassin and 14% of all mail addressed to unknown users. I think it s unlikely that any significant fraction of that would be due to spammers caching the server IP address for months after the DNS records were changed. So therefore it seems most likely that something between 7% and 14% of spam is specifically targetted at the secondary server. While the ratio of spam to ham seems significantly worse on the secondary it is still a relatively small portion of the overall spam sent to the service. I had been considering setting up secondary mail servers with extra-strict anti-spam measures but the small portion of the overall spam that is targetted in such a way indicates to me that it is not going to be worth the effort. Another thing that has occurred to me (which I have not yet had time to investigate) is the possibility that some spammers will send the same messages to all MX servers. If that happens then the ratio of spam to ham would increase every time the number of MX servers is increased. In that case it would make sense to minimise the number of MX servers to reduce the amount of CPU power devoted to runing SpamAssassin. Note that I have intentionally not given any numbers for the amount of mail received by the service as it is a commercial secret. Update: One thing I realised after publishing this post is that the secondary MX server is also the main server for mail sent between local users. While the number of users who send mail to other users on the service is probably a small portion of the overall traffic (it s not a really big ISP) it will make a difference to the ratios. Therefore the ratio of spam to ham would be even worse on the secondary MX (assuming for the sake of discussion that local users aren t spamming each other).

Christian Perrier: [life] PG in America Latina

37 years since I first heard Peter Gabriel's voice (Genesis' Nursey Crime, one of the first LP I ever bought) and about 34 since I first saw him on stage in what turned out to be Genesis' last show in France (St-Etienne, my home city, may 1975). Since then, I tried to keep up with PG's appearances here and there and he has always been my favourite artist. So, if any of this blog's readers happen to be in Latin America and enjoy PG's music, just try to go there:

Clint Adams: When Iron Maiden met Ministry

After the Google employee went back to New Jersey with Jarjar, I somehow ended up paying $9 for a good slice of pizza and what is potentially the second-most-disgusting piece of vegan pizza I have ever encountered.

12 February 2009

Julian Andres Klode: debimg core: creating a repository


As I wrote Monday in debimg core example , I have an extended version which creates a repository. The problem on Monday was that the code was not far enough to be published. Not much has changed yet, but I considered to create a temporary branch temp/repository to be able to show you the example, and to give you an impression of what the final API will look like (it s not complete yet, trust me). Now I will present you the example. It is not much longer than the pool example I gave on monday, but it does much more - it creates a repository (and it has some commandline options). The concept of the Repository is very simple, too. We have two classes, Repository and Distribution, and a Repository object contains multiple Distribution objects, which are responsible for packages and related stuff. 
#!/usr/bin/python
# Copyright (C) 2009 Julian Andres Klode.
#
# Released under the terms of the GNU General Publice License, version 3
# or (at your option) any later version.
#
"""Example to demonstrate the power of debimg's repository management.
This example creates a directory example.debimg, with two subdirectories:
    - pool: This holds debimg's file pool (see debimg.core.files.Pool)
    - repo: This holds the created repository (debimg.core.repository)
It creates a repository of all required packages, using your local apt sources.
"""
from __future__ import with_statement
import operator
import optparse
import sys
from debimg.core.resolver import Resolver
from debimg.core.files import Pool
from debimg.core.repository import Distribution, Repository
def main():
    """Called when the script is executed."""
    parser = optparse.OptionParser()
    parser.add_option('-u', '--user', help='Same as in GPG')
    parser.add_option('-c', '--contents', action="store_true",
                     help='Create Contents-*.gz files')
    opts, args = parser.parse_args()
    # Create a pool, which manages the access to the files.
    pool = Pool('example.debimg/pool')
    # Create a resolver using your local apt configuration.
    pkgs = Resolver()
    # Create a new repository
    repo = Repository(pool, 'example.debimg/repo')
    # Create a new distribution and store it in dist.
    dist = repo.add_distribution('lenny')
    # Add all packages with priority required to the resolver
    pkgs.add_priority('required')
    # Add the packages from the resolver to the distribution
    for group in pkgs.groups():
        for package in group:
            dist.add_package(package)
    pool.compact()   # Optional step
    pool.fetch()     # Fetch all the packages from the mirror
    dist.finalize_files() # Link the files into the repository
    dist.finalize_packages() # Create Packages files (uncompressed and gzip)
    ##
    # If we want to create Contents-*.gz files, we can do this as well:
    # but we don't want to
    if opts.contents:
        dist.finalize_contents()
    # Now create our Release files, and sign them using the key provided on
    # the commandline. If no key has been provided, do not sign it.
    dist.finalize_release(Suite='testing', key=opts.user)
    for file in sorted(pool._files, key=operator.attrgetter('uri')):
        print file   # Print information about every file, sorted by URI.
if __name__ == '__main__':
    main()
To try the code, checkout the temp/repository branch at git://git.debian.org/users/jak/debimg.git and execute the script named test-repository, which is the same as printed above. If you have questions, please ask. Also read the docstring of debimg.core.repository to see which changes are not yet done (eg. common base class for Distribution and Repository, and of course adding files manually). Posted in Debian, debimg

Martin-&#201;ric Racine: Here's hoping for the best...

Life sometimes has extreme ways of waking people up and making them realize what matters for them. I'm going through such a phase right now in my romantic life. I won't discuss what happened here, but suffice it to say that I haven't felt so depressed in a long, long, long, long time. The good news is that life has proven to me once again how having good friends who truly care for me makes a whole world of difference. The big slap in the face that life gave me over these last few days was a harsh lesson, but I think that it was worth it. Of course, it helps that people like Gilles, Jaana, Henni, Pia, Linda, Arno and Sailesh beleived in me enough to support me through this rough spot in my life. Although their advices were vastly different, they all pointed in a very positive direction and gave me the strenght to carry on. I also must thank my beloved Anastassija; what she did was cruel beyond beleif and yet, if her few SMS from the last 24 hours are any indication, there's still hope after the storm. I'll be seeing her tonight again, after a few days of separation and I prepared her a truly romantic evening. It ain't much, but I hope that it truly succeeds in bringing the point accross that Love is stronger than everything and that even the unforgivable can be forgiven, over time, if everyone involved has enough faith in each other's future as a couple. Tonight, I truly could use the prayers of a million voices to support me and Anastassija in this difficult time. Life slapped me hard and I got the message... I think... and whatever happens after tonight, I need to know that I gave it my best shot and that, whatever her and I decide, Life can only take a turn for the better from now on.

Ana Beatriz Guerrero Lopez: FOSDEM 2009

Some stuff I want to reminder for next year s FOSDEM:

Eddy Petri&#537;or: autohibernate, zenity and cron

I have been trying to make a script that should put my laptop into hibernate, run automatically from cron, so it forces me to get to sleep.

I had managed to make it work from a console (tty1), but it seemed as if it refused to work from cron.

During the tests my local mailbox was getting the output of the command, and I stood and watched at this error message for more than an hour trying to figure out what was wrong. I couldn't understand what was wrong:


This option is not available. Please see --help for all possible usages.

This was from zenity and I was starting to suspect that it was failing to expad properly the text variable since it worked with a fixed text.

This was failing:

(...) /usr/bin/zenity --progress --auto-close --text "'$NOTIFICATION$XMSG'"

And this was working:

(...) /usr/bin/zenity --progress --auto-close --text "OH!MY!GOD!"


I couldn't figure it out. Until I tried this:

(...) /usr/bin/zenity --progress --auto-close --text "OH!MY!GOD! "


And it failed.


God damn! Setting LANG in the script fixed the issue right away!


So, if you ever want zenity to show up from cron dont forget to:
zenity is a pice of shit when it doesn't work. It could have printed the "option which wasn't available".

11 February 2009

Jon Dowland: firehose

I use Google Reader to manage most of the sites that I regularly read. Today it occurred to me that it would be very useful to have some functionality whereby feeds in a common folder could be read in one aggregated display, a bit like how planetplanet works. I then learned that Google Reader does exactly that already: It's fairly obvious to use in the normal reader, a little bit more subtle in the mobile version (you must click the folder once to load it up in a new page, then click it again to see the aggregated contents). That prompted me to try and tidy up my subscriptions and sort them in a way that took advantage of this feature. Deciding that the Google Reader interface was too primitive to properly organise all of my subscriptions (there are about 100 or so of them), I exported my subscriptions as OPML and imported them into liferea. I then dutifully pruned the list and sorted the remainder into a heirarchy of folders. In most cases I categorised things according to their topic: e.g., "computing", "friends", etc.; with two important exceptions: feeds that I track for debugging purposes but don't actually read (such as my own weblog) I put in a folder "don't read". Feeds that I have decided I need to read every post to (and there are very few of those) I moved into a top-level folder called "essential". I note that liferea 1.4.18 at least does not support the planet-style aggregation feature for folders that Google Reader does. On re-importing to Google Reader, I discovered another facet of it's behaviour that I'd neglected to pay attention to: it does not support heirarchical folders. (How could I use this software for so long and not really understand how it works?) In fact, folders are more like tags, with feeds existing in multiple folders. To make matters even more confusing, there is an entirely separate notion of tags, which applies to items inside subscriptions. Regarding the concept of an "essential" list. If you cut down your firehose consumption to just feeds which met the "essential" criteria, would you find yourself short on information, or just short on noise? Sometimes I read a book that for one reason or another (perhaps just one: excellent writing?) I cannot put down. I utterly devour the book and finish it much more quickly than average. Wouldn't it be nice if other information could be consumed so vociforously? When trying to read things such as academic papers or bid proposals, someone unused to them may find them very hard going. Someone with more practise might managed to "read" such a document much more quickly. Perhaps there is a point to all the firehose noise: maybe we need long immersion in the culture or context to train ourselves up so we can optimally consume the good stuff?

Enrico Zini: DDE, Debian Data Export

DDE, Debian Data Export After testing the idea and the prototype with my presentation at Fosdem, I'm proud to announce DDE, Debian Data Export. The problem In Debian, we publish all sort of information, using all sorts of data formats (often ad hoc and obscure), in obscure places. Try to think of an application, for example, that wants to access all this information together: A nightmare, uh? The solution DDE is a way to make it simple to publish and download data. The aim is to be able to access all sorts of Debian information without worrying about data formats, protocols and access control, and to make it easy to discover what data is available. DDE exports data as a big virtual tree. You can pick a node in the tree by its URL and download all the data that it contains, in a format of your choice: currently it supports JSON/JSONP, YAML, CSV and Python pickled objects. This means that you can now get Debian data using a trivial HTTP client tool or library, and read it using commonly available decoders: both should be available in almost any programming language nowadays. Since JSON and JSONP are supported, this even includes JavaScript in Ajaxy web pages. DDE is not a competitor to UDD: UDD is about creating a central location where all the data can be accessed, while DDE is about giving people a simple way to access data or subsets of data. In a way, DDE and UDD complete each other: the more data enters UDD, the more data is available for DDE. In turn, DDE gives a simple interface to the most popular and useful UDD queries. The dream Here are some hints at what can be done with this: A call for action You can add data to the DDE tree by just putting a data file in yaml, json or pickle format under ~/.dde (I've written a specific guide to this on the Debian wiki). If you wish to create new and fancy Debian statistics or compute other sorts of data, or if you already maintain tools that generate Debian data, including but not limited to, for example: Then please have a look at http://wiki.debian.org/DDE/StaticData and try to publish your data in ~/.dde on merkel.debian.org. For more complicated cases (like accessing a remote database), it is possible to extend DDE via python plugins. You can get in touch with me if you need to go that way.

Julien Danjou: OpenOffice is better as a pager than as a text processor

Since several month, awesome users have reported a bug with OpenOffice.org. When using OOo and clicking on a menu, or using the mouse wheel to read a document, the currently selected tag (desktop) will change automagically to another one. I've digged into awesome and found that awesome received a _NET_CURRENT_DESKTOP request. As defined by EWMH, this kind of request are sent by a pager to change the active desktop. That was weird. Nobody is using a pager here. So, I just kicked my gdb out, attached it to OOo, breaking on XSendEvent call. And I got it: 
Breakpoint 1, XSendEvent (dpy=0x1a00080, w=483, propagate=0, event_mask=1572864, event=0x7fff1fd70d70)
   at ../../src/SendEvent.c:46
(gdb) bt
#0  XSendEvent (dpy=0x1a00080, w=483, propagate=0, event_mask=1572864, event=0x7fff1fd70d70)
   at ../../src/SendEvent.c:46
#1  0x00007f8c0ab4193f in vcl_sal::WMAdaptor::switchToWorkArea ()
  from /usr/lib/openoffice/basis3.0/program/libvclplug_genlx.so
#2  0x00007f8c0aafdbd8 in X11SalFrame::Show ()
  from /usr/lib/openoffice/basis3.0/program/libvclplug_genlx.so
#3  0x00007f8c1378623c in Window::Show ()
  from /usr/lib/openoffice/program/../basis-link/program/libvcllx.so
#4  0x00007f8c13785f40 in Window::Show ()
  from /usr/lib/openoffice/program/../basis-link/program/libvcllx.so
#5  0x00007f8c1372cb54 in FloatingWindow::StartPopupMode ()
  from /usr/lib/openoffice/program/../basis-link/program/libvcllx.so
#6  0x00007f8c1373c877 in ?? () from /usr/lib/openoffice/program/../basis-link/program/libvcllx.so
#7  0x00007f8c1373ccf2 in ?? () from /usr/lib/openoffice/program/../basis-link/program/libvcllx.so
#8  0x00007f8c1373ce84 in ?? () from /usr/lib/openoffice/program/../basis-link/program/libvcllx.so
#9  0x00007f8c13795e7f in ?? () from /usr/lib/openoffice/program/../basis-link/program/libvcllx.so
#10 0x00007f8c13797e74 in ?? () from /usr/lib/openoffice/program/../basis-link/program/libvcllx.so
#11 0x00007f8c13796748 in ?? () from /usr/lib/openoffice/program/../basis-link/program/libvcllx.so
#12 0x00007f8c0aafe6f8 in X11SalFrame::HandleMouseEvent ()
  from /usr/lib/openoffice/basis3.0/program/libvclplug_genlx.so
#13 0x00007f8c0ab040c2 in X11SalFrame::Dispatch ()
  from /usr/lib/openoffice/basis3.0/program/libvclplug_genlx.so
#14 0x00007f8c0ab31625 in SalX11Display::Yield ()
  from /usr/lib/openoffice/basis3.0/program/libvclplug_genlx.so
#15 0x00007f8c0ab356f3 in ?? () from /usr/lib/openoffice/basis3.0/program/libvclplug_genlx.so
#16 0x00007f8c0ab2df1f in SalXLib::Yield () from /usr/lib/openoffice/basis3.0/program/libvclplug_genlx.so
#17 0x00007f8c135b050e in Application::Yield ()
  from /usr/lib/openoffice/program/../basis-link/program/libvcllx.so
#18 0x00007f8c135b0587 in Application::Execute ()
  from /usr/lib/openoffice/program/../basis-link/program/libvcllx.so
#19 0x00007f8c17517e80 in ?? () from /usr/lib/openoffice/program/../basis-link/program/libsofficeapp.so
#20 0x00007f8c135b4b24 in ?? () from /usr/lib/openoffice/program/../basis-link/program/libvcllx.so
#21 0x00007f8c135b4bc5 in SVMain () from /usr/lib/openoffice/program/../basis-link/program/libvcllx.so
#22 0x00007f8c1754ca6c in soffice_main ()
  from /usr/lib/openoffice/program/../basis-link/program/libsofficeapp.so
#23 0x000000000040105b in main ()
I started digging more into the code, and this is what I finally found in salframe.cxx: 
       // #i45160# switch to desktop where a dialog with parent will appear 
       if( mpParent && mpParent->m_nWorkArea != m_nWorkArea ) 
           GetDisplay()->getWMAdaptor()->switchToWorkArea( mpParent->m_nWorkArea );
Beautiful! It even has a comment with a IssueZilla bug number. Let's go and see where it comes from. After 10 minutes of research to find that fucking IZ, I finally found the link to the issue #45160. The bug is IMHO not related to OOo but to a window manager doing poor job. I've found that an awesome user already reported an bug err, wait, I mean an issue as issue #96684 (remember there's no bug in OOo, only issues) and I commented about it. UPDATE: It seems OOo developers have agreed to fix that bug eventually.

10 February 2009

Gunnar Wolf: dh-make-drupal - Easily debianize Drupal modules, themes

I have spent a couple of days working into dh-make-drupal. Yes, you guessed right: An idea based on the wonderful dh-make-perl, but applied to the Drupal Content Management System.
Drupal's greatest strengths, IMHO, are: Yup, even though I am quite fond of its flexibility and power, I fell for Drupal in no small part because of its sysadmin-friendliness. Now, I hate having non-Debian-packaged files spilled over my /usr/share partition. Drupal modules want to be installed in /usr/share/drupal5/modules/module_name (or s/5/6/ for Drupal6, to which I have not yet migrated). For that reason, over the last year I have been growing my personal apt repository of Drupal stuff. Yes, it is still on, and I don't plan on taking it off. You can access it by adding deb http://www.iiec.unam.mx/apt/ etch drupal to your /etc/apt/sources. However, you can now also do the process locally. Do you fancy the wonderful Biblio module? Or the very nice Abarre theme? Great! 
  1. 0 gwolf@mosca 4 /tmp$ ~/code/dh-make-drupal/dh-make-drupal --drupal 5 biblio
  2. 0 gwolf@mosca 5 /tmp$ cd drupal5-mod-biblio-1.16/
  3. 0 gwolf@mosca 6 /tmp/drupal5-mod-biblio-1.16$ debuild -us -uc >& /dev/null 
  4. 0 gwolf@mosca 7 /tmp/drupal5-mod-biblio-1.16$ cd ..
  5. 0 gwolf@mosca 8 /tmp$ su
  6. Password: 
  7. 0 root@mosca[1]/tmp# dpkg -i drupal5-mod-biblio_1.16-1_all.deb 
  8. Selecting previously deselected package drupal5-mod-biblio.
  9. (Reading > database ... 275110 files and directories currently installed.)
  10. Unpacking drupal5-mod-biblio (from drupal5-mod-biblio_1.16-1_all.deb) ...
  11. Setting up drupal5-mod-biblio (1.16-1) ...
Yay! Yes, still many more things to come (i.e. including the debuild call and whatnot), but... Enjoy! BTW, this piece of software owes a couple of beers to Why the lucky stiff, author of Hpricot. You are insane (but we are all well aware of that). You deserve to go to the webscraping heaven. Yes, besides the programming-languages-teaching-cartoon heaven. You find out how to split the time between them. [Update]: Of course, ITP bug #514786 has been filed, and I will soon be uploading this into Debian.

Matthew Palmer: Look Ma, I'm in the paper!

From the local paper, yesterday, in a larger article about the bushfires roaming hither and yon:
While arsonists are allegedly responsible for the fatal fires in Victoria, it was "idiots" who laid the groundwork for a potential blaze in the Royal National park near Helensburgh yesterday. Rural Fire Service Illawarra manager Richard Cotterill said that despite a total fire ban being in effect for the Illawarra and most of southern NSW, weekend bushwalkers in the park lit a campfire and then left it to smoulder. Mr Cotterill said two trucks with about 10 firefighters tended to the bushfire hazard just before 1pm, after being alerted to the smoking logs by a resident. "Obviously someone has not taken the fire ban rules into account and we are just lucky that we haven't had any significant wind conditions being as hot as it is," Mr Cotterill said. "Something like that is obviously potentially very, very dangerous. You get a wind blowing embers into the bush and it is downhill from there. "It's a very stupid thing to do and obviously people don't realise just how dangerous it can be."
I like Richard. Nice bloke, works hard for the local area, speaks straight and doesn't mince words. "Idiots" indeed. Several thousand homes are threatened if the Royal National Park burns. We've got easier evacuation paths than a lot of the people down in Victoria had, but it still could have been pretty bad. Meanwhile, the weather up here has turned grey and cold, which will be a mixed blessing for the firefighters working up at Peats Ridge and Singleton, and down around Bega. It's a lot nicer to fight a fire at 24 degrees celsius rather than 40, but the misty rain we've had around home would be enough to make backburning impossible, whilst not being enough to really knock down the fire. The winds we got on Sunday night would have made life far more exciting than is comfortable, too.

John Goerzen: Review: Video Editing Software

We recently bought a Canon Vixia HG20 camcorder. The HG20 records in AVCHD format (MPEG-4 h.264) at up to 1920 1080. To get from the camcorder to a DVD (or something we can upload to the web), I need some sort of video editing software. This lets me trim out the boring bits, encode the video for DVD, etc. Background In addition to DVD creation and web uploading, I want the ability to burn high-definition video discs. 1920 1080 is significantly higher resolution than you get from a DVD. There are two main ways to go: a blu-ray format disc, or an AVCHD disc. A blu-ray disc has to be burned onto BD-R media, which costs about $5 each, using a blu-ray burner, which costs about $200. AVCHD discs use the same h.264 encoding that the camcorder does, meaning they have better compression and can be burned onto regular DVD+R media, fitting about 30 minutes onto a DVD. Moreover, it is possible to move AVCHD files directly from a camcorder to an AVCHD disc without re-encoding, resulting in higher quality and lower playing time. The nicer blu-ray players, such as the PS3, can play AVCHD discs. AVCHD seems pretty clearly the direction the industry is moving. Compared to the tape-based HDV, ACVHD has higher quality with lower bitrates, better resolution, and much greater convenience. Hard disk or SD-based AVCHD camcorders are pretty competitive in terms of price by now too, often cheaper than tape-based ones. The downside of AVCHD is that it takes more CPU power to process. Though as video tasks are often done in batch, that wouldn t have to be a huge downside. The bigger problem is that, though all the major video editing software claims to support AVCHD, nobody really supports it well yet. The Contenders Back when I got my first camcorder in about 2001 the one that I m replacing now you pretty much had to have a Mac to do any sort of reasonable consumer or prosumer-level video editing. We bought our first iMac back then to work with that, and it did work well with the MiniDV camera. Today, there s a lot more competition out there. The Mac software stack has not really maintained its lead some would even say that it s regressed and the extremely high cost of buying a Mac capable of working with AVCHD, plus Final Cut Express, makes that option completely out of the question for me. It would be roughly $2500. Nobody really supports AVCHD well yet, even on the Mac. Although most programs advertise support of smart rendering a technique that lets the software merely copy unchanged footage when outputting to the same format as the input none of them have smart rendering that actually works with AVCHD source material. Though this fact is never documented, though discussed on forums. Another annoyance, having used Final Cut Express in the past, is that with these programs you can t just go to the timeline and say delete everything between 1:35 and 3:52 ; you have to go in and split up clips, then select and delete them. They seem to be way too concerned about dealing with individual clips. I briefly used Cinelerra on Linux to do some video editing. It s a very powerful program, but geared at people that are far more immersed in video editing than I. For my needs, it didn t have enough automation and crashed too much and that was with MiniDV footage. It apparently does support AVCHD, but I haven t tried it. I ve tried three programs and considered trying a fourth. Here are my experiences: Ulead/Corel VideoStudio Pro X2 Commonly referenced as the go to program for video editing on Windows, I started with downloading the Free Trial of it from Corel. Corel claims that the free trial is full-featured all over on their website, but I could tell almost instantly that it wasn t. I wound up buying the full version, which came to about $65 after various discounts. I wanted to like this program. Its output options include AVCHD disc, Blu-ray disc, DVD+R, and the like. Its input options include MiniDV, AVCHD, ripping from DVD, ripping from Bluray, and just about every other format you can think of. And it heavily advertised proxy editing , designed to let you edit a scaled-down version of AVCHD video with a low-CPU machine, but refer back to the original high-quality footage for the output. It didn t pan out that way. The biggest problem was the constant crashing. I really do mean constant. It probably crashed on me two dozen times in an hour. If you are thinking that means that it crashes pretty much as soon as I can get it re-opened, you d be correct. Click the Play button and it hangs. Click a clip and it hangs. Do anything and it hangs. It did seem to work better with the parts of the source that had been converted to a low-res version with Smart Proxy, though it didn t eliminate the hangs, just reduced them. And every time I d have to End Task, it would forget what it had already converted via Smart Proxy even if I had recently saved the project and have to start over from scratch. I spent some time trying to figure out why it always thought my project was 720 480 even when it was 1920 1080, and why the project properties box didn t even have an option for 1920 1080. After some forum searching, it turns out that the project properties box is totally irrelevant to the program. Yay for good design, anyone? VideoStudio Pro X2 does have good output options, allowing combination of multiple source files onto a single DVD or AVCHD disc as separate titles. Unfortunately, its DVD/AVCHD rendering process also yes hangs more often than not. The documentation for VideoStudio Pro X2 is of the useless variety. It s the sort of thing that feels like it s saying The trim tool is for trimming your clips without telling you what trimming your clips means, or making it obvious how to remove material from the middle of a clip. The proxy editing feature isn t what it should be either. Instead of being something that just automatically happens and Works in the background, you have to manage its queue in the foreground and it forgets what it was doing whenever the program hangs. On the rare occasion when pressing Play did not cause a hang, the AVCHD footage played back at about 0.5fps far, far worse than PowerDirector manages on the same machine. Bits that had been rendered for proxy editing did appear to play at full framerate. I have applied for a refund for this purchase from Corel under their 30-day return policy, and have already uninstalled it from my disk. What a waste. CyberLink PowerDirector 7 Ultra This was the second program I tried, and the one I eventually bought. Its feature set is not quite as nice as Corel s, especially when it comes to versatility of output options. On the other hand, it feels done. It only crashed two or three times on me apparently that s GOOD on Windows? Things just worked. It appears to have proxy editing support, but it is completely transparent and plays back with a decent framerate even without it. It can output to AVCHD, Bluray, and DVD, though smart rendering doesn t work with AVCHD source material. Its weakness compared to the Corel package is that it doesn t have as many options for formatting these discs. You can have only one title on a disc, though you can have many chapters. You have some, but not much, control over compression parameters. The same goes for exporting files for upload to the web or saving on your disk. The documentation is polished and useful for the basics, though not extensive. Overall, this package works, supports all the basics I wanted from it, so I m using it for now. Adobe Premiere Elements 7 I downloaded the trial of this one too. I opened it up, and up popped a dialog box asking what resolution my project would be, interlacing settings, etc. I thought YES now that s the kind of program I want. As I tried out the interface, I kept thinking the same. This was a program not just for newbies, but for people that wanted a bit more control. Until it came to the question of output. Premiere Elements 7 was the only package I looked at that had no option to burn an AVCHD disc. DVD or Blu-ray only. That s a deal-breaker for me. There s no excuse for a program in this price range to not support the only affordable HD disc option out there. So I didn t investigate very much farther. Another annoying thing is that Adobe seems to treat all of their software as a commercial. I m a user, not an audience, dammit. I do not want to buy some photoshop.net subscription when I buy a video editing program. I do not want to see ads for stuff when I m reading PDFs. LEAVE ME ALONE, ADOBE. I just felt sleazy even giving them my email address, let alone installing the program on my system. I think I will feel like a better person once I reboot into Windows and wipe it off my system. Pinnacle Studio 12 Another program that comes highly rated. But I never installed it because its minimum system requirements state that it needs an Intel Core 2 Quad 2.66GHz or higher for 1920 1080 AVCHD editing. And I have only a Core 2 Duo 2.66GHz half the computing horsepower that it wants. And since they offer no free trial, I didn t bother even trying it, especially since PowerDirector got by fine with my CPU. Conclusions This seems to be a field where we can say all video editing software sucks; some just suck a little less. I m using PowerDirector for now, but all of the above programs should have new versions coming out this year, and I will be keeping a close eye to see if any of them stop being so bad.

9 February 2009

Julian Andres Klode: debimg core example


The following example demonstrates the features of debimg core, and how it can be used to fetch a some packages. As you will see when you run this example, debimg uses SHA1 filenames for the downloaded files. This may be changed in a future version. There is also an improved version of this example, which creates a repository, but the needed module (debimg.core.repository) is not public yet, because its far from being finished. I expect to complete repository code on Wednesday. 
#!/usr/bin/python
# Copyright (C) 2009 Julian Andres Klode.
#
# Released under the terms of the GNU General Publice License, version 3
# or (at your option) any later version.
#
"""Example to demonstrate the power of debimg's pool
This example creates a directory example.debimg, with two subdirectories:
- pool: This holds debimg's file pool (see debimg.core.files.Pool)
"""
from debimg.core.resolver import Resolver
from debimg.core.files import Pool
def main():
    """Called when the script is executed."""
    # Create a pool, which manages the access to the files.
    pool = Pool('example.debimg/pool')
    # Create a resolver using your local apt configuration.
    pkgs = Resolver()
    # Add all packages with priority required to the resolver
    pkgs.add_priority('required')
    # Add the packages from the resolver to the pool
    for group in pkgs.groups():
        for package in group:
            pool.add_package(package)
    pool.fetch() # Fetch all the packages from the mirror
    for file in sorted(pool._files, key=lambda k: k.uri):
        print file # Print information about every file, sorted by URI.
if __name__ == '__main__':
    main()
Posted in Debian, debimg

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