This is not another rant to praise one in spite of the other (an everybody knows I love Ruby, so it would not be impartial), but sometimes people seems to live in another world and do things for the wrong reasons. I just read this blog post by Kanwei Li in which he gives 2 or 3 reasons he ditched Ruby in favor of Python. First of all, both are great languages and, although I favor Ruby, I use Python for some projects and they are not all that different. Of course, everyone is free to choose which language one favors, but Kanwei seems to be ditching Ruby out of not knowing much about it, or out of preferring one style over the other His first reason is that in Python white spaces matter. I used to think this is just a matter of style, but every now and then mandatory alignment hurts me (just try to put together a code generator and you ll notice it). Although my code is always correctly aligned, I like that it s done so because I want it that way, and not because some language demands it. Rants and more rants have been written about Python s mandatory alignment (or other languages lack of it), and I am not going through all of it Just I don t think it s a good reason to ditch Ruby After, he makes a big deal out of Ruby s ternary if. As written by him, he prefers

#python
if len(a) > 0:
        v = a[0]
        a = a[1:]
else:
        v = None

over Ruby s ternary if

#ruby
v = a.empty? ? a.shift : nil

Hey! Come on Ruby s ternary if is not mandatory It was copied from C just as a syntax sugar. You can do without it, just as in Python:

#ruby
if ! a.empty?
    v = a.shift
else
    v = nil
end

Better yet! you can use if s return as v value:

#ruby
v = if ! a.empty?
    a.shift
else
    nil
end

How beautiful is that! Python lacked ternary if for a long time, and when it finally acquired one via PEP 308 its syntax was made different from every other language! Although I don t think that is a problem, some people might think it would be better not reinventing the wheel. Next, Kanwei goes over a famous problem of Ruby: the lack of a sum method for Array. I admit it s strange, but that is completely coherent: Ruby s Arrays are ordered collection of objects and not mathematical arrays. How do you sum objects that are not numbers? Many different people will have many different answers to that, so Ruby leaves this decision for the programmer and provides basic methods to deal with collections of anything (that can be used to apply sum to numbers, if wished). So, in Ruby you have to use Array#inject to perform a sum:

[1,2,3].inject(0)    sum, value  sum + value  

Array#inject (actually Enumerable#inject) was borrowed from Smalltalk and allows you to loop through an array, building up an accumulator value as you go. When it s done, the final value of this accumulator is returned. Very useful for combining array elements, whether by summing them, building up a pretty display string, whatever. In the example above, I am initializing the accumulator with 0. If you use Array to mathematical operations and you want your arrays to work that way, you can always add a sum method to Array class:

class Array
    def sum
        self.inject(0)  sum, value  sum + value 
    end
end

Maybe it would be better if you just use Arrays as containers (as it was intended to) and implement that sum inside your own class I completely agree with Reg Braithwaite here. Kanwei also mention Python is faster than Ruby. That is true, but was more true some time ago. First of all, Python is older and has had more time to improve its speed. Ruby, ITOH, just now acquired a good VM and improvements to it finally can run parallel to improvements in the language itself, so I am expecting this to be less true every release. Python is already not getting much faster between releases, unlike Ruby (the differences between 1.8.7 and 1.9.1 are really impressive!). IMHO this is not a good reason to choose one instead of the other: if you really need speed, go for C :-) Now this is something I find interesting Kanwei has mentioned: Python is more production ready . He argues that Google is using it, so it must be good. Well I cannot argue against that: Google is really using Python. But IBM, Oracle, EA, Cisco, Siemens, etc are using Ruby so that is just a matter of preferring one or another company. Both are production ready I agree, though, that Ruby 1.9.1 has many differences from 1.8.7, and that that may be seen as some inconsistency, but Python also has changed a lot since its 2.0 version, for that matter. And the changes to Ruby brought many benefits I think they worth it. At last, Kanwei compares Python and Ruby docstrings. Here I also have to agree with him: Ruby docstrings sucks. Actually that s why everybody uses rdoc instead (and that is much more powerful than Python s docstrings). Again, I don t think that is reason enough to ditch Ruby (actually, the existence of rdoc, rubygems & friends should bring people to Ruby instead), but that is a matter of personal taste. Surely, Kanwei s reasons were easy to argue against. There are areas were Python shines much more than Ruby (and vice-versa), but those Kanwei mentioned are not among them. I think both languages are powerful enough, and both are way better than Perl or PHP, so either one you choose would be fine. Better if you don t have to choose and use both ;). If you have to, ITOH, pay more attention on how you feel while coding in each one, and not to some cheap reasons such as above. If you are a programmer, what matters most is that you ll spend a lot of time coding with any given language let that be something pleasant then.

I really have a complicated environment for building my packages that only I understand (and maybe no one should try to understand if wants to maintain mentally stable). So I was building with git-buildpackage that points to a script gbp-builder that builds with pdebuild and which got its debbuildopts with and I was passing more args with a local variable (EXOP) with and guess what. It was -v5.05-3+nmu1 and I got that argument OK on dpkg-genchanges for my source.changes but not to my i386.changes. I had to put in my gbp-builder script debbuildopts with and everything got OK. I frankly don t understand what happened, why the args passed until that point and not to the last dpkg-genchanges but hey! it works now! I hope nobody pass trough this and waste 2 hours finding what was wrong and it only were a pair of . BTW, now I m DD! Second in Venezuela :D

After month of collecting little fixes flying around, I release Enca 1.11. If you don't know Enca, it is an Extremely Naive Charset Analyser. It detects character set and encoding of text files and can also convert them to other encodings using either a built-in converter or external libraries and tools like libiconv, librecode, or cstocs. The full changes are short:

• Dropped scanf configure test which is not used at all.
• Fixes some wrong format strings.

You can download from http://dl.cihar.com/enca/.

A python example in ipython:

In [1]: for i in range(10):
...:     print "i in loop:", i
...:
...:
i in loop: 0
i in loop: 1
i in loop: 2
i in loop: 3
i in loop: 4
i in loop: 5
i in loop: 6
i in loop: 7
i in loop: 8
i in loop: 9
In [2]: print "i out of loop:", i
i out of loop: 9

This bit me last night while writing some code for a digital communications lab assignment. I typed the wrong variable name, which was from an inner loop when I meant to use the element from the outer loop. Is there actually a sane reason for a loop variable not to go out of scope when the loop ends? Tell me there's a good reason for it. It took me completely by surprise.

I was one of the participants invited to the FSF's Women in Free Software mini-summit which happened on the same day as Software Freedom Day this year. That was this past Saturday, September 19th. I was feeling hesitant going in, given the controversy over "why would the FSF run a closed event about such an important topic" and just a general burnt out feeling about the subject on my part. Honestly, I've tended to avoid being much of a feminist in the past and simply hope that people will stop bickering and leave me to my code, especially in the aftermath following well-publicised incidents. This is despite the fact that the thing that got me involved with free software originally was Debian Women, back in late 2004/early 2005. I needed a hook, and yet I haven't felt confident enough to reach out to others now that I'm in. I see now that there are valid reasons for having an event that is purposefully small. We all fit in a nice conference room at the FSF office, the atmosphere was very intimate, we got to learn everyone's names (and even remember them). I met some great local free software people who I hadn't met before. Food was take out from My Thai, an excellent vegan restaurant in Boston's Chinatown. While it sucks to be exclusive, in my opinion the small size really had an effect on what we got done and how we felt at the end. The official minutes from the meeting are online here, and there's a picture and brief blog post from Deborah here. The picture was taken using Cheese! I'm in the middle wearing my ever-popular Best Practical "my free software runs your company" t-shirt. There are only a few things I want to highlight myself.

1. It was a great idea to invite someone who is involved in freedom movements but is not necessarily heavily involved in free software in particular. Hillary brought fresh insights and helped us draw parallels and come up with ideas that I don't think we would have thought of otherwise. It's easy to get used to parts of a community as being "normal" and I am so happy that we have allies who can show us where we've internalised or just have learned to ignore sexist parts of the community. Women in free software are already in free software and we need to learn to reach out to others who aren't in already.
2. Cooperative power. There are groups of people that just aren't attracted by FOSS marketing that challenges you to "prove yourself the best" or similar. Just because someone doesn't like coding at 3am doesn't mean he doesn't like coding. If we want to succeed at our mission, we need to stop thinking win-lose and start thinking win-win. This applies to being more inclusive in general, not just for women. It also applies to valuing contributions from those who don't code. We need them too.
3. There are times when I don't speak up and I should. There are times when I don't blog (or participate in discussions via other media) because I don't feel like dealing with potential community backlash. I am very careful about not stepping on peoples' toes, because I've seen other people get trampled on and am not particularly excited about experiencing that myself. While I'm trying to cultivate courage in myself, it was good to have a reminder that it's not just me.

The current plan is to hold a bigger event that is open to all in the spring. I am so excited about the momentum we are building! I think the biggest thing that I took out of this is that there are still things wrong with the community and that I shouldn't be afraid to speak up and be an activist. Watching people like Deborah and Hillary talk perfectly seriously about making very long-term plans and reaching parity was incredibly empowering. We can do so much better. The time to do it is now.

A while back, Intel defined a specification for binding ACPI-defined methods for controlling hardware to the OS-specific driver, ensuring that the two don't get out of synchronisation. I added support for this to the in-kernel i915 driver last year, and after a couple of awkwardnesses it works well now. One consequence of this that showed up slightly later is that it's necessary to do some of the setup from the i915 driver rather than the ACPI driver, which meant that we had to defer the ACPI driver from binding until the drm driver had done that setup.

The problem with GMA500 is that it also implements the IGD Opregion spec, and the ACPI video driver detects this and refuses to bind. But the GMA500 kernel driver doesn't implement support for the spec and so doesn't call the function that triggers the ACPI video registration. Working around this is simple - just add acpi_video_register() to the init function of the GMA500 drm. But note that this means that you're failing to implement the spec properly, and there's potential for stuff to be broken. A full implementation of the spec for GMA500 wouldn't be especially difficult, but there's no docs and I have no hardware so I'm not going to do it myself.

The reason I bring this up is that various people have been approaching this problem in a different way. It's easy to assume that the check in the acpi driver was naively assuming that all Intel hardware was driven by i915 and that this patch was broken. It's actually entirely correct and the (out of tree) GMA500 driver was broken. If Intel had made the effort to get their code properly upstream, it'd have been fixed there when the original change was made and nobody would ever have had a problem. Just say no to out of tree drivers.

Yes, this is a dear lazyweb... I'm more and more confused about IPSec on Linux. Has anybody done a more or less recent summary about IPSec and Linux? All I find is quite old and probably doesn't apply anymore... About the only thing I'm sure about is that FreeS/WAN is officially dead. But otherwise? Openswan vs. strongSWAN vs. KAME (or is that ipsec-tools?) And what about the kernel side? Are they now all using the same code or are there still patches? It would probably best if the hypothetical knowledgeable person would not comment here but insert a relevant notice at the top of http://wiki.debian.org/IPsec, to avoid having yet another obscure page (mine) show up in Google...

When I fly, I often do so with Continental Airlines because 1) I tend to like their international flights 2) they have many flights at convenient times to San Juan, PR where I head to around 4-6 times a year. Like most airlines, their food is nothing to be desired but their gluten free option is about some of the worst food I have ever tasted. The chicken is cooked to death but otherwise entirely buck naked. Like there is nothing on it, they throw some rice in the container, and sometimes (and only sometimes) a packet of Mrs. Dash. The best part of the meal, is a coconut macaroon. After about five years of this meal (usually putting it to the side but sometimes forgetting my food and suffering from hunger) I decided it was high time to take action; I could no longer confront the bleak reality of nude rubbery chicken. So I wrote them letter. I kept it brief and knew boring would not advance My Cause, so I just decided to add some rhetorical flourish and, naturally who else came to mind than the grand master of rhetorical flourish, Mr. T. After providing the basics, like describing the truly offensive nature of nude and rubbery chicken, I drove the nail deep into wood by stating : I pity the fool that has has to survive through their gluten free meal and that naked chicken sucked more than the word suck could ever really convey (though I did duly note my appreciation for the gluten free option and that I generally liked their service). After sending off the letter I forgot about it almost immediately nor did I fly with them again for many months (not because I boycotting, I just found cheaper flights). I recently flew to Puerto Rico and lo and behold have found the gluten free option has taken a drastic turn for the better. In fact, not only was the chicken no longer naked it was in fact, fully clothed, blackened chicken, spiced to no end. And the cherry on top was a gluten free blueberry muffin and some nice fruit. Go Continental. I will never know if my letter touched the soul of some Continental office employee, working in some nameless faceless, practically windowless office park, one whose life of labor is a bit like that gluten free chicken that I so despised, rubbery and naked, in other words with no flavour or spice. But I will forever think that a dash of spice, that with the aid of the badassery that is Mr. T, one can lightly kick corporate ass to take action.

When I fly, I often do so with Continental Airlines because 1) I tend to like their international flights 2) they have many flights at convenient times to San Juan, PR where I head to around 4-6 times a year. Like most airlines, their food is nothing to be desired but their gluten free option is about some of the worst food I have ever tasted. The chicken is cooked to death but otherwise entirely buck naked. Like there is nothing on it, they throw some rice in the container, and sometimes (and only sometimes) a packet of Mrs. Dash. The best part of the meal, is a coconut macaroon. After about five years of this meal (usually putting it to the side but sometimes forgetting my food and suffering from hunger) I decided it was high time to take action; I could no longer confront the bleak reality of nude rubbery chicken. So I wrote them letter. I kept it brief and knew boring would not advance My Cause, so I just decided to add some rhetorical flourish and, naturally who else came to mind than the grand master of rhetorical flourish, Mr. T. After providing the basics, like describing the truly offensive nature of nude and rubbery chicken, I drove the nail deep into wood by stating : I pity the fool that has has to survive through their gluten free meal and that naked chicken sucked more than the word suck could ever really convey (though I did duly note my appreciation for the gluten free option and that I generally liked their service). After sending off the letter I forgot about it almost immediately nor did I fly with them again for many months (not because I boycotting, I just found cheaper flights). I recently flew to Puerto Rico and lo and behold have found the gluten free option has taken a drastic turn for the better. In fact, not only was the chicken no longer naked it was in fact, fully clothed, blackened chicken, spiced to no end. And the cherry on top was a gluten free blueberry muffin and some nice fruit. Go Continental. I will never know if my letter touched the soul of some Continental office employee, working in some nameless faceless, practically windowless office park, one whose life of labor is a bit like that gluten free chicken that I so despised, rubbery and naked, in other words with no flavour or spice. But I will forever think that a dash of spice, that with the aid of the badassery that is Mr. T, one can lightly kick corporate ass to take action.

Luis, If you can still find the ThinkPad T43 around, it would seem to be a perfect fit for your needs. It's 1400x1050, has an ATI X300 SE in it (supported by Free drivers, including DRI), and the wireless is Centrino, which only has the firmware problem. The only thing wrong with it is that it's a behemoth both in size and weight compared to my dainty little X40, but I guess that's what you wanted if you were asking for T series recommendations.

While I'm here, you all get a bonus picture of the moon over the Baltic:


If you zoom in, you can see that it's roughly four picodegrees over the sea. Brilliant.

In March 2009 I contacted Adobe about the self-contradictory nature of the license for the Adobe Glyph List For New Fonts (AGLFN) data. I did so because one of the upstreams I am involved in (fonttools) embeds a copy of aglfn.txt and I noticed the license was a bit strange. An Adobe employee by the name of David Lemon replied to say that the license would become less free than it was. I then asked him to consider using a free software license for both the Adobe CMap and AGLFN data. We discussed the benefits and drawbacks of doing this for both Adobe and the free software community. David was initially skeptical about the balance between benefits and drawbacks for Adobe and I was feeling pessimistic about the situation. The conversation ended and several months passed, with me sending the occasional ping and David being busy. Then in June he told me a new license was coming in a month. So I sent another ping on September 20th to find out what the status of that was. A couple of days later I received a mail saying that the Adobe CMap data has now been released under the BSD license and that the Adobe AGLFN data will soon follow! Please note that while this means that modifications are technically allowed, they are still strongly discouraged for compatibility reasons. Adobe has assigned an emailable maintainer (currently Ken Lunde) for these files so there is no reason that modifications should not be done upstream. You can also edit the wiki to document things or post in the forum. If you happen to meet David, Ken or Dave McAllister (who manages the Open@Adobe program) somewhere, please thank them and offer beverages. So, what does this mean for free software projects? Debian CJK users will be able to read many more PDFs with CJK characters without using any non-free packages once the new CMap files reach main. I will need to package the new AGLFN data for Debian. I will need to remove the embedded AGLFN from fonttools upstream and adapt it to use the packaged one if available or suggest the user download it if not. GNU Classpath and the other software projects using AGLFN data might like to do the same. I may consider writing a library for loading the AGLFN data, mainly as an exercise in learning how to write a good library though. Oh, and perhaps I can convince (Kenshi MUTO) my minimal level of involvement in this is worth a beer if I ever meet him

zakame++;

I have much to be thankful for reaching a quarter-century, so me and my family went to Naga city to give thanks to $DEITY and our patron (which just had its 300th year feast this weekend.) This past year saw me moving on from my old job, doing odd bits here and there, and letting me rediscover my interests. And to top it off, I found a new job. :-) I'm looking forward to what the next quarter-century brings to me, and what I could bring to it. I already have a few in the works ;) Thanks, $WORLD!

Dear Lazyweb, I've been having problems with cron jobs that mail their output, because they always manage to garble non-ASCII characters into some unreadable crap. Upon closer inspection, the real culprit seems to be mailx: no single mailx implementation out there seems to have come to terms with the fact that most contemporary operating systems have their GECOS information encoded in UTF-8, rather than in ASCII. I had very high hopes for the Heirloom implementation of mailx, except that it, too, fails at encoding mail headers in UTF-8. I'm thus wondering if there's anything I might have overlooked, perhaps a mailx setting that would enforce encoding of the From, To and Subject lines to UTF-8, or otherwise another mailx implementation that in fact does acknowledge the fact that most operating systems these days have their GECOS information encoded in UTF-8?

I've been using CRM114 as spam filter for a while now, and I'm quite happy with it. Due to bug #529720 though (incompatible upstream file format changes) I decided to start my setup from scratch with a recent CRM114 version from unstable. Here's a short HOWTO, hope it's useful for others. First you need to install crm114 and set up a few files in your $HOME directory.

  $ sudo apt-get install crm114
  $ mkdir ~/.crm114
  $ cd ~/.crm114
  $ cp /usr/share/doc/crm114/examples/mailfilter.cf.gz .
  $ gunzip mailfilter.cf.gz
  $ cp /usr/share/crm114/mailtrainer.crm .
  $ touch rewrites.mfp priolist.mfp

Edit ~/.crm114/mailfilter.cf and set the following variables (some are optional, but that's what I currently use):

  :spw: /mypassword/
  :add_verbose_stats: /no/
  :add_extra_stuff: /no/
  :rewrites_enabled: /no/
  :spam_flag_subject_string: //
  :unsure_flag_subject_string: //
  :log_to_allmail.txt: /no/

The :log_to_allmail.txt: /no/ option should probably stay at "yes" for the first few days until you have tested your setup and everything works OK. The ~/.crm114/allmail.txt file will contain all your mails, in case something goes wrong. Now set up empty spam and nonspam files like this:

  $ cssutil -b -r spam.css
  $ cssutil -b -r nonspam.css

Test the setup by invoking mailreaver.crm as follows, typing some test text and then pressing CTRL+d:

  $ /usr/share/crm114/mailreaver.crm -u ~/.crm114
  test
  [CTRL-d]
  ** ACCEPT: CRM114 PASS osb unique microgroom Matcher **
  CLASSIFY fails; success probability: 0.5000  pR: 0.0000
  Best match to file #0 (nonspam.css) prob: 0.5000  pR: 0.0000
  Total features in input file: 8
  #0 (nonspam.css): features: 1, hits: 0, prob: 5.00e-01, pR:   0.00
  #1 (spam.css): features: 1, hits: 0, prob: 5.00e-01, pR:   0.00
  X-CRM114-Version: 200904023-BlameSteveJobs ( TRE 0.7.6 (BSD) ) MF-35EB8B9A [pR: 0.0000]
  X-CRM114-CacheID: sfid-20090920_151224_574131_D290E589
  X-CRM114-Status: UNSURE (0.0000) This message is 'unsure'; please train it!

The output should look similar to the above. If there are errors instead, you should check your settings in ~/.crm114/mailfilter.cf. Now you have to setup a procmail rule for crm114:

  :0fw: crm114.lock
    /usr/share/crm114/mailreaver.crm -u /home/uwe/.crm114
  :0:
  * ^X-CRM114-Status: SPAM.*
  IN.spam-crm114

In my case this rule is also followed by a spamassassin rule, so all my mail goes through two different spam filters (will look into dspam and bogofilter also I guess, the more the better). Finally, in .muttrc I have the following configs so I can press SHIFT+x to mark a mail as spam, and SHIFT+h to mark it as non-spam (ham).

macro index X '  formail -I X-CRM114-Status -I X-CRM114-Action -I X-CRM114-Version   /usr/share/crm114/mailreaver.crm -u /home/uwe/.crm114/ --spam'
macro index H '  formail -I X-CRM114-Status -I X-CRM114-Action -I X-CRM114-Version   /usr/share/crm114/mailreaver.crm -u /home/uwe/.crm114/ --good'
macro pager X '  formail -I X-CRM114-Status -I X-CRM114-Action -I X-CRM114-Version   /usr/share/crm114/mailreaver.crm -u /home/uwe/.crm114/ --spam'
macro pager H '  formail -I X-CRM114-Status -I X-CRM114-Action -I X-CRM114-Version   /usr/share/crm114/mailreaver.crm -u /home/uwe/.crm114/ --good'

Important: crm114 is most effective if you start with empty CSS files (as shown above) and only train it by marking mails as spam/ham when it gets them wrong. The process will take a few hours or maybe a day (depending on how many mails per day you get), then the misclassification rate gets very low... Update 2009-09-23: Changed --spam/--nonspam to the correct options for mailreaver/mailtrainer, --spam/--good.