A couple of important anniversaries in the last few days:

• 2008-09-16 - I became a DD! A lot of things were done in this year, but not as much as I'd like to (in particular because of this baby: it's 9 months now :) ), but I hope I'll be able to catch up really soon now;
  
• 2008-09-23 - I had the scooter accident. Even if a year has passed, my knee still gives me pain (in particular when swimming), muscles are still really ipotonic, and the whole articulation is still "strange". They told me that's the way to go, but I hoped it would have been over by now. Never a joy.
  

Since this afternoon, bts-link is able to interact with Google Code issue tracker.

So, if you're upstream code & bugs are maintainer there and what to keep them monitored, just drop us an email to the devel mailing list (see link above).

You can also write us if your tool uses another upstream issue tracking still not managed by bts-link and we will see what we can do.

Lately, it's being an active period for Reportbug, and I'm happy about that.

As you might have noticed, this is a quite busy period for me due to non-Debian stuff, so I had to freeze a lot of Debian activities. Due to this, also several projects for Reportbug enhancements have stopped.

In particular for SOAP BTS interrogation. It's a nice topic, and I'd like to guide it myself, but we'll talk about it from August/September ;)

In the meantime, Carl is flooding us with his stream of patches, and it's hard to keep up with that, and Luca is working on making Gtk+ backend more stable and usable and we're thrilled a big number of people tried it and reported bugs (damn, I keep forgetting to disable 'reportbug reportbug' !! ;) ).

So, have fun using reportbug, don't be scare to report bug on it, and if you have some time to devote to it and want to send use patches, you know you'll be welcome :)

UPDATE: I forgot to add that the total bugs count is now at the lower point since I entered reportbug team!

Some people asked me how's the book writing is going. Ah you're right, it's a loooong time I didn't say anything of the progress, and here it is.

I've just turned the half of the book: about 10 days ago I've sent the 5th chapter (out of 10) and up to now I've covered this (high-level) contents by chapter:

1. installation & setup
   
2. first contact with mpl
3. some more stuff (like graph types)
4. OO style and some advanced things
5. GTK embedding

6th (and current) chapter is about Qt, so even KDE guys will be happy :)

I found several problems when working with GUI design programs: both Glade and Qt Designer made me scream a lot; but probably it's just me that I'm not so used to GUIs :)

Other arguments will be: Wx, web, real use cases.

In particular for the last part (real cases) I'd like to hear some proposals from you. I've already got something in mind, but users opinion will help me direct my work better.

Sorry, I've got to "drop/reduce" the science chapter (it was superseded by the real use-cases one) since I don't think this is the right place for it. Of course, a couple of "science examples" might come into the mentioned chapter, but your proposals have to be at a low-medium level.

PyCon3 Italia ended yesterday. It was simply great! great talks, gorgeous speakers and so on.

Sadly, when I left these kind of confs there's always a bad taste in my month... I see so many great people that made it, that are satisfied, brilliant and accomplish great results.

Now I feel like I'm one of many, but I want to be one above many; one of Them. Ok, ok, sounds a little bit presumptuous and we all know I'll never be like them but why not trying? ;)

The same thing happened after PyCon2, and I decided I wanted to do more, to be more.

Since an year passed, I think I've done a bit of my proposal: I started using Python as much as I can, I get involved in some project python-related (to name some: reportbug, bts-link, matplotlib) and I'm about at the half of writing a book on matplotlib (that I was offered to write).

I can be a little satisfied by this, but of course, I want to do more! :)

Once the book will be done, I'll probably still be involved with matplotlib evolution, eventually with more important contributions, but I will also search for new challenges.

It might sound ambitious, but I have a strange feeling that python core "stuff" (being the interpreter, the stdlib or near) could be something I can have a look at ;) It could also come up as a too big project to work on in my spare time, but I'll rebase my plan once I've fight for it and lose, not before.

After the short outage of GMail just suffered, all my colored labels are gone. Oh what a PITA! I love all those colors in my window, and they help a lot focus on important stuff.

Ok, it's an extension in GMail Labs that enables them, but I hope they'll be restored (yeah, the same I had before) really soon! It would be very boring to redefine them all.

/me crossing fingers

UPDATE: colors are back now \o/

We all hate the spam that come thru the Debian MLs. Wouldn't it be cool to be able to report it directly from our MUAs instead of going to the mail webpage on lists.debian.org ?

Well, Cord kindly created an API (invoked using an URL) to do exactly this. What we are needing now is people that are able to write plugins to MUAs that can call this url.

I've then started a wiki page to keep track of requests/status of those plugins.

If you can write them, and you want Debian lists be a "cleaner" place, please give us your help!

The common git hook is something like:

#!/bin/sh

exec "another script"

and since "exec" replace the current script with the other one, only one command can be execute in a hook. Even more, the common hook takes input from the standard input, so the first command takes it, and the second?

The real situation was reportbug post-receive hook, that looked like:

#!/bin/sh

exec /usr/local/bin/git-commit-notice

but I wanted to add seanius' tagpending hook to it. The solution I found was:

#!/bin/sh

# to save stdin on a file to pass to both scripts
cat > post-receive_tmpfile

/usr/local/bin/git-commit-notice < post-receive_tmpfile
/git/reportbug/reportbug.git/hooks/git-post-receive-url-notifications.py < post-receive_tmpfile

rm post-receive_tmpfile

that saves the stdin to a file, passed again to both the scripts.

Of course, I'd be happy to hear more elegant solutions :)

So it's Easter (if you believe) and what do I do? Instead of fixing this I cut off a new Reportbug release... yay

Several bug fixed, and the thanks goes to:

• Luca Bruno, that keeps working on your beloved GTK ui (and on many other areas);
• Carl Chenet, that is doing a great work on bug triaging and patch submitting: I WANT MORE LIKE HIM :)

Have fun!

So, I bought this 1TB disk to backup mine (1x750GB + 1x75GB). Now what I need to find is a backup solution to use it.

What I'm looking for is not a damn complex program, with servers+clients+daemons+agents+satellites (it's just for my box), but something that allows me to:

• have full + incremental backups;
• easy recover / exploration of the backups;
• allows different policies for different filesystems (for /home I want a retention policy of 1 year, while for /media 1 month is more than enough);
• efficiently store big files (like films, big archives, etc);
• it should recognize when a file is moved from a location to another, and avoid the del+cp again;
• possibly start when the external disk is connected, or only if it's there;
• possibly a nice gui/html frontend to allow for easy administration but NOT to schedule backup (it must run as deamon).

Ok, they are a lot or requirements, almost in importance order.

What do you have to suggest to me about it?

I , by myself, am considering backuppc, amanda and bacula, while the latter seems a lot complex.

I wait for your reply :)

I've just uploaded reportbug 4.0 in Sid (wait for the usual replication delay to have it on your machine). There are several changes in it (sadly, always too few than what I wanted):

• we now have a GTK UI interface, so if you're a fan of graphical UI give it a try!
• we moved to Git: now you don't have any more excuses, you can provide a lot of patches :)
• we split out the reportbug module (using python-support ;) ) in a separate package, so that if you need to use some of the reportbug functionalities, you don't have to dig into the private module directory.
• many others not worthing a specific entry, but that collaborates to let the project evolve.
  

I hope you'll be satisfied by that; sadly not all the promises are respected, let's hope we can deal with them in the next periods.

Two days ago I resigned (effecting immediately) from my current job, since I received an interesting proposal for a position at Dada.net.

To make a long story short, I decided to accept it (starting from April 1st, hoping it's not a joke :D ) and I'll be working as QA assistant.

The colleagues are young, the env seems stimulating and challenging, and the position is cool: all the basis are there for a great outcome, we'll see in some weeks if it's true :)

Wish me good luck!

This morning I attempted LPI101 exam (I already passed LPI102 some time ago).

I did because on April 1st the objectives will be updated to newer (and more up-to-date) that they are now (they're still about ISA devices or so) and all the materials to study on would become old.

Pretty scared (due to weird question I couldn't remember) but still passed! Scored 720 points (500 was needed to pass the exam).

Now I own the full LPI-1 certification!

Just booked the early bird ticket. Only one note: Guido will be there ;)

See ya if you come too!

No that's nothing about IBM and HPC, but it's still cool:


Taken brand new this morning from the shop (with that smell of a new engine still there). Mh, the plate is now "DJ ..." while the other one was "DD ...": would it be a sign something is changing? The hell no! ;)

That means I'm recovering well, I'm now walking without any crutches or tutor, and my knee is almost bending like the other one (well, still some degrees behind, but still), but it still hurts at every step I take. In about a week I'll be able to back swimming with the team (competition will be for next year though).

That even means I'll have to come back to work :( I'm now used to get to sleep late, wake up even later, "work" all day on stuff I like (Debian, the book, or so) so it will be a shock at the beginning, even because I'll be assigned to a new client, so all different.

Enough words, now it's time to go and have a ride on the "beast" :)

I received the interesting proposal to author a book on Matplotlib, the powerful 2D plotting library for Python.

While preparing the arguments list, I'd like to hear even your opinion, because different points-of-view will lead to a better product.

Some basic question I'd like to ask are:

- what are you using matplotlib for?
- what are the things you like the most of matplotlib, that you want to give emphasis to? And why?
- what are the (basic) things that, when you were beginning to use matplotlib, you wanted to see grouped up but couldn't find?
- what would you like to see in a book about matplotlib?
- what are some those advanced feature that made you yell "WOW!!" ?
- what are the things you'd like to explore of matplotlib and never had time to do?

Your suggestions are really appreciated :) And wish me good luck!

I got this long running task that (fsck!) died almost at the end of the job, and it logs its operation in a MySQL table.

Since I want to keep those "partial" results for further inspection (even after I'll fix and let the tool run again until the end) I don't want to waste disk space (it's ~650mb), so why don't compress that table?

With MySQL (and MyISAM tables like mine), it's pretty easy: go into the directory of the db schema:

# cd /var/lib/mysql/tabs_compare/
# ls -l
total 659500
-rw-rw---- 1 mysql mysql        65 2008-09-21 00:35 db.opt
-rw-rw---- 1 mysql mysql     12840 2008-12-25 00:44 log_1230162297.frm
-rw-rw---- 1 mysql mysql 675299244 2009-01-01 20:34 log_1230162297.MYD
-rw-rw---- 1 mysql mysql      1024 2009-01-01 20:37 log_1230162297.MYI

Pretty big :) Now, check the table:

# myisamchk log_1230162297.MYI
Checking MyISAM file: log_1230162297.MYI
Data records: 4293747   Deleted blocks:       0
- check file-size
- check record delete-chain
- check key delete-chain
- check index reference
- check record links

Hopefully there is no error, so we can compress that table:

# myisampack log_1230162297.MYI
Compressing log_1230162297.MYD: (4293747 records)
- Calculating statistics
- Compressing file
43.05%

And the result it's really nice:

# ls -l
total 375572
-rw-rw---- 1 mysql mysql        65 2008-09-21 00:35 db.opt
-rw-rw---- 1 mysql mysql     12840 2008-12-25 00:44 log_1230162297.frm
-rw-rw---- 1 mysql mysql 384558282 2009-01-01 20:34 log_1230162297.MYD
-rw-rw---- 1 mysql mysql      1024 2009-01-01 20:49 log_1230162297.MYI

The compress command didn't even take a full core on my machine and almost took 20secs to complete.

Now rebuild indexes (if any) and recheck the table to be error free:

# myisamchk -r log_1230162297.MYI
...
# myisamchk log_1230162297.MYI
...

now tell MySQL to reload those table with:

mysql> flush tables <schema>;

Keep always in mind that compressed tables are read-only, so no DML commands, while DDL are allowed (so you can DROP it, for example).

After having orphaned (and QA uploaded) the last group of WM dockapps I was maintaining, time has come to remove even that old friend of mine.

How many adventures we've passed together? Will we ever meet again?

But the past is past, so let's move forward, with no regrets.