Looking at KDE4 and related technologies, a few things about data storage hit me. Not that I know anything about it, but that does usually not prevent me from trying to be clever about it. Several parts needs to either index, cache or store data. Apps

• Strigi indexes your harddisk, just a index. No real data
• Akonadi caches your data, especially email/contacts/calendar items, but also in the future probably instant messaging logs, notes and others
• Nepomuk handles and stores tags on files and other data
• Amarok indexes your music collection and stores related info, including statistics

Among these, there is probably many other, but these I just noticed. How do these apps store their things As the smart reader has guessed, all these uses different storage methods. Strigi Indexes your data and store it in a clucene on disk format. If you remove your strigi indexes, all you lose is the cpu time used to generate it.
Strigi is not a KDE thing, but the KDE libraries depends on it. Akonadi Caches your PIM data and make it available easily for applications. Akonadi does not itself keep the data. Akonadi people has evaluated SQLite, but found it insufficient. Akonadi people also evaluated MySQL/Embedded, but did also have issues with that, so they ended up using a full MySQL server.
Akonadi is not a KDE thing, but it originates from KDE and is used by the KDE Pim libraries. Nepomuk Handles and stores metadata and tags on files, emails and other data. The nepomuk data is all in RDF format. Nepomuk uses Soprano for storage and soprano has pluggable backends.
One Soprano backend, probably the most used, is a Redland backend, which too slow for effective nepomuk usage, but is a C++ thing. Redland internally can use Berkeley DB or MySQL. The usage in Soprano is Berkeley DB format.
The other Soprano backend is using Sesame2, a java rdf storage. Quite some people are against this because it is java. Internally, it seems that it is using its own ondisk format, but is much more effective than the Redland/BDB backend, and the recommended one to use. Amarok Indexes and plays your music and does statistics over it. The amarok people have evaluated SQLite and found it not good enough for the job. The amarok people are going for MySQL/Embedded for now. Overview All in all, we have a clucene index, a full MySQL server, a BerkelyDB or custom format and a MySQL/Embedded used. I wonder how much communication between these projects there have been regarding the choice of storages. Wacky ideas Now that I already in the beginning said that I didn’t know enough about what I was talking about, I also feel well suited to make suggestions for the future. What if …

• Amarok hooked into the Akonadi MySQL database process
• Amarok skipped the concept of databases and let Strigi index the music and stored the metadata and statistics in Nepomuk
• Soprano Redland backend hooked into the Akonadi MySQL database instead of a BerkeleyDB file

That’s it for now, next up, maybe, interesting places to use plasma.

A few days ago I was awarded official Debian Developer status. Many thanks to:

• Thomas Viehmann
• Ana Beatriz Guerrero L pez
• Daniel Baumann
• Christoph Berg
• Thomas Bushnell, BSG
• Stephen Gran
• Steve McIntye
• Neil McGovern
• Cyril Brulebois
• Matthew Johnson
• Sune Vuorela
• Peter Palfrader
• Jonathan McDowell
• Tim Retout

For posterity, my first experience with the Debian development process was with #400550. Never underestimate the importance of giving credit in changelog entries.

maemo sdk seems to come with a cdbs, debhelper and dpkg-dev too old to make it easy to build several debian unstable packages like kde4.
maemo seems to come with glibc2.5 and debian/armel kde4 packages depends on 2.7 or greater.
trying to build a newer dpkg in maemo environment requires several perl modules not available - and when buildling those, a circular build dependency is quickly reached. So - dear lazyweb, what does smart man do now?

I ended up skipping the akademy keysigning, although I was signed up and looking forward to it. I think the organizers should have kicked people that didn’t bring their own copy of the list instead of providing spare copies and trying to naively verify them. If anyone on akademy is up for a key signature, please locate me and bring a snippet of paper with your key fingerprint and your full name. I’m hard to overlook.

Kris blogs about akademy being in Sint-Katelijne-Waver—which, since I moved to Mechelen, is my backyard, really—and wonders why nobody in the Belgian FLOSS community talked about it. It's not that I didn't know; Sune Vuorela, one of our Debian KDE developers, mentioned it to me a few months ago. He knew about our office in Mechelen, since he slept there at some FOSDEM a few years back. Of course, my first reaction was "oh, you'll pay me a visit then, right?", though I quickly realized "hang on, won't I be in Argentina then?" Turns out that's was the case. So I didn't bother blogging; perhaps I should have. Thing is, I've always felt like the Belgian FLOSS community is somewhat disjunct. It shouldn't be; we have a bunch of healthy and working community communication things, we have timely dinner meetings and drink meetings; and we even have a big important international developers meeting in the heart of our country. Even with that, I feel that more could be done. For example, I would probably like more unorganized social gatherings (say, more "lets-have-a-beer-now" type of meetings), and other things. Is this just me? I dunno.

Another point release for Etch has been done; now it's the time for the CD team to roll out new images after the next mirror pulse. The official announcements (prepared by Alexander Reichle-Schmehl, thanks!) will follow shortly afterwards. FTP master of the day was Joerg Jaspert, who did his first point release since Woody, as he told us on IRC. We appreciate your work and you spending your time that shortly before going to Argentina. This point release includes the etchnhalf update introducing a new kernel image (based on 2.6.24) and some driver updates. Additionally the infamous openssl hole will be fixed for good, even for new installs. Again I want to present you a list of people who contributed to this release. It cannot be complete as I got the information out of the Changed-by fields of the uploads.

• akira yamada
• Alexander Sack
• Alexander Schmehl
• A Mennucc1
• Andrea De Iacovo
• Andres Salomon
• Aurelien Jarno
• Charles Plessy
• Christian Perrier
• Christian Welzel
• Colin Watson
• dann frazier (indefatigable kernel worker, most sourceful uploads)
• Darren Salt
• Devin Carraway (3rd place of sourceful uploads, due to security work)
• Emmanuel Lacour
• Eric Dorland
• Fabio Tranchitella
• Faidon Liambotis
• Fathi Boudra
• Florian Weimer
• Francesco Paolo Lovergine
• Francois Marier
• Frank Lichtenheld
• Frans Pop (thanks for your d-i work!)
• Frederic Peters
• Gregory Colpart
• Holger Levsen
• Jan Wagner
• Jay Berkenbilt
• J r my Bobbio
• Joey Hess
• Joey Schulze
• Josselin Mouette
• Julien Cristau
• Kai Hendry
• Kurt Roeckx
• LaMont Jones
• Laszlo Boszormenyi
• Martin Pitt
• maximilian attems
• Michael Biebl
• Michael Koch
• Mike Hommey
• Moritz Muehlenhoff
• Noah Meyerhans
• Ola Lundqvist
• Otavio Salvador
• Patrick Matth i
• Petter Reinholdtsen
• Philipp Kern
• Pierre Habouzit
• Raphael Hertzog
• Rene Engelhard
• Robert Millan
• Roberto Lumbreras
• Roland Mas
• Romain Beauxis
• Russ Allbery
• Sean Finney
• Stefan Fritsch
• Steffen Joeris
• Stephen Gran
• Steve Kemp
• Sune Vuorela
• Thijs Kinkhorst (2nd place of sourceful uploads, due to security work)
• Thomas Viehmann
• Toni Mueller
• Tzafrir Cohen

From the Release Team we had dann frazier (who drove the important kernel part of etchnhalf), Luk Claes, Neil McGovern, Andreas Barth, Martin Zobel-Helas and me working on it. ;-)

The following is not a joke:

• KDE4 needs java for best performance

more precise, soprano, used by nepomuk (semantic desktop thingie), has a sesame backend (java) and a redland backend (c++). According to upstream and others, the sesame backend is way faster than the redland backend. In the soprano svn dir (and in the pristine tarball), there are a few jars put in precompiled:

• openrdf-sesame-2.1.2-onejar.jar
• slf4j-api-1.5.2.jar
• slf4j-simple-1.5.2.jar

This isn’t completely beautiful, but as they all are bsd licensed, it is at least legal.
But it isn’t good enough for debian, as we ship sources and build them. (I think I have heard at least fedora mumble something similar)
The two last jar files, the slf4j ones, are available packaged in debian in the libslf4j-java package. but openrdf-sesame is not available. If some persons out there has java knowledge, debian packaging knowledge, preferably knowledge of debian java policy and some spare time, packaging openrdf-sesame would be much apprecaited. And after that, getting the soprano sesame backend built is next goal. Thanks in advance. applications welcome.

… I’m discussing colors with someone who doesn’t know what a atomic power-plant is.

• Updated the debian packaging and debian patches of KDE4 to the 4.0.84 tarballs
• Pushed kdelibs, kdepimlibs, kdebase-runtime and kdebase-workspace 4.0.84 to experimental
• Prepared the rest of the packages ready to be pushed to experimental when the auto-builders have built this
• Updated Arora packages to the 0.2 release

Ana guessed slightly wrong when trying to guess next update of kde4.1 in debian, but her howto still works. Give it a bit for the autobuliders to catch up though. But I guess I should find a rich uncle to give me newer hardware - my computer was only idle a few hours since friday evening. I do hope that plasma people soon reaches a stable ABI. And by the way:

Thanks to frisoftware.dk

Fathi blogged a reply to Peter in where he kind of “tagged” me to also reply. So I will.

• you can t configure size and appearance of the panel. This is a long-standing problem, but I thought it was fixed.

You can as Fathi writes, but it is … a bit well hidden.

• KMail doesn t interact well with encrypted IMAP accounts. I didn t try much beyond that, because I have no accounts that are not affected by that.

My encrypted IMAP accounts works without any problems on 3 seperate machines. (home workstation, laptop, work workstation). There is a slight packaging issue here though, not all shlibs were proper bumped, so make sure you have 4.0.80-something of all packages.

• Various kicker widgets don’t appear to be available for KDE 4 (yet?).

You have moon applet and fifteen puzzle in extragear-plasma. Eyes-widget seems gone though. Not a big loss. (Or which ones are you talking about?) - and yes, I do see kde4 in Lenny.

Now that kde4.1 is beginning to really take shape, I have also upgraded all my computers to kde4. Bye bye kde3. I can’t live without a few kde3 apps though, particularily amarok. But my amarok usage was mostly controlled by the kicker media applet. So I needed something that behaved similar to the kicker media applet. Plasma && dcop command line to the rescue. It still needs some polishing, especially getting the buttons closer together. But it works. It wasn’t that hard to get started, although the plasma docs still haven’t the quality of Qt documentation. Here is how it looks:
And if anyone wants it, well - it is here: http://elvira.killmulehill.net/~sune/plasmaamarokcontrol-2008-05-27.tar.gz - at least for now.

gnupg (1.4.6-3) unstable; urgency=low * Adopt package. Thanks to James Troup for his work in the far past.
Thanks to NMU'ers Bastian and Thijs. (Closes: #476418)
* Co-maintainers wanted.
* Don't build-dep on pcap on non-linux-archs. (Closes: #357267) -- Sune Vuorela Sat, 17 May 2008 15:42:55 +0200 TODO:

• Coordinate with release-team and d-i what changes can still be done before lenny
• Look at the new upstream version
• Get a alioth project and host stuff in a version control system
• Decide on version control system
• Get a team and figure out team workflow
• Look at this newfangled packaging thing called debhelper
• Make all bugs either closed or forwarded

So - anyone interested?

Please note: Until your email address is validated, your email is NOT viewed
by any human and will not be read. I’m currentlty getting a bit of backscatter - a lot of bounces - and also quite a few of these challenge/response messages. I am especially tired of those challenge/response sender verification thingies and I so often considering actually responding just to annoy the implementers of such systems. But … what do you do ?

First off, several different people blogged about ubuntu being sexy because of this phallic splash screen: Later on, as noticed on this very blog, ubuntu started working on the release, “Ubuntu Goatse”. And now finally, “Ubuntu Hardon” has been released. I wonder where they will head next. But good luck. Comments have been hard

Thursday, my new laptop arrived. A asus Eee-PC - black edition. After a quick look at the provided software it was time to replace it with something better. Like debian with kde4.
Thanks to the Debian Eee-pc people, getting debian on the machine was quite easy. And then time to install kde4. Fetching it from experimental - and here we go. My notes so far:

• Those keys are small. Takes time to get used to it
• KDE configuration widgets are often too big for a 800×480 monitor
• Those keys are still small
• djvulibre-desktop should not recommend evince when recommends are installed by default
• Everything seems to link against gtk these days
• KDE programs can hide its menu bar giving more room for the application

… and I miss the key between z and left shift.

I just felt like trying the new experimental linker gold. It seems to do c++ stuff quite fast. To build it as a debian package, I just took the cvs binutils and the latest debian packaging, removed all the weird archs from the multiarch package and added –enable-gold to configure and built it.

$ ld --version
GNU gold (GNU Binutils for Debian 2.18.50.20080403) 1.4
It seems gold is so much stricter when trying to link something lazy developers have written. Kde3 fails quite heavily with lots of undefined stuff. Like not linking qt when actually using it. kde4 seems to do a bit better - this is where I am blaming gold for the modifications required (all in FindKDE4Internal.cmake):

• gold doesn’t like –no-undefined. but gold understands -z defs. As it is the same, replace it
• gold doesn’t like –enable-new-dtags - let us try remove it
• gold doesn’t like –fatal-warnings - let us try remove it

and then kdelibs from kde4 actually builds. I haven’t done any benchmarking, but I have the impression that gold is just so much faster. I wonder when it gets considered stable. And available for all archs.

Hej! Jeg har nu ndret ops tningen i min mailserver, s dan at den p mails sendt med smtp auth skriver en mindre detaljeret Recieved:-header. Kort og godt har jeg fjernet forekomsten af: (scrooge.local) [77.75.167.214] i Recieved:. (Det er navnet p maskinen - og den ip min internetudbyder sender mig ud igennem[1]) Nu stryger al mail lige igennem fpo.mail.dk. Det er lige f r man skulle overveje om postmesteren p fpo.mail.dk havde et defekt anti-spam-setup - noget med at melde tempor r fejl hvis en ip i en Recieved-headers var fundet p en blackliste. Umiddelbart lyder det i hvert fald defekt i mine rer. Hvis du kender postmesteren p fpo.mail.dk, s prik lige venligst til ham og bed ham fikse sit setup. Til de exim-interesserede har jeg brugt f lgende konfigurationselement i main-delen:

received_header_text = "Received: \
$ if !def:sender_host_authenticated $ if def:sender_rcvhost from $sender_rcvhost\n\t \
$ if def:sender_ident from $sender_ident \
$ if def:sender_helo_name (helo=$sender_helo_name)\n\t \
by $primary_hostname \
$ if def:received_protocol with $received_protocol \
$ if def:tls_cipher ($tls_cipher)\n\t \
(Exim $version_number)\n\t\
id $message_id\
$ if def:received_for \n\tfor $received_for "
[1] Jeg bor p kollegie og deler offentlig ip med 287 andre mennesker. Det g r at den ip-adresse altid er p mindst en eller to blacklister. At v re p blacklister er ogs sj ldent en midlertidig tilstand.

I recently got a slice at slicehost (A so called virtual server) and moved my various services over there. Mail, web, this blog and so on. I have now tried to request a additional IP, as I need a couple of services running on port 443. Apparantly their silly automatic processes includes rebooting *my* virtual server and nuking my changes to files inside *my* virtual server. Any places having a virtual private server which are run by *clueful* people without stupid automated processes? I guess it is time to move before my next payment. Angry.

Over the last days I have moved my email and web and stuff from a simple web and email hotel to a virtual server managed by me. So now I got a nice setup with

• Exim mailserver, smtp auth for sending
• Dovecot imap server
• roundcube webmail
• apache2 serving my blog and stuff

But most important for me: I can write my own spam filtering rules serverside and I can easily make sure all passwords are sent encrypted. What’s left on my todo, partly because I haven’t figured out how yet is

• Have exim not show the first recieved line when sending mail. No reason to put the IP of whatever place I am located into the emails
• Have exim rewrite the Subject: header of spam emails, not add a second Subject header
• Some kind of public/shared folders in dovecot
• Have moved my local pop3 kmail filtering rules over to exim filters

And I also still haven’t moved all my domains, but it is coming soon.

Please remember to fix a release critical bug every time you reply in a thread that ends up being somehow stupid. …worked on 3 rc bugs so far since I got up this morning.