I’ve created a page about translating my blog. Currently it has the following text: If you would like to translate any posts from my blog to a language other than English then please feel free to do so. I demand that any translations correctly cite me as the author of the original English version and give a permanent link to the original post, but I don t expect that this will cause any inconvenience. I also request that anyone who translates one of my posts gives me permission to do whatever I wish with the translated text (I want to mirror all translations of my work on my own site). I am unsure of what legal rights I have to demand this and have not yet considered whether I have a moral right to demand it. But I believe that it is the nice thing for a translator to do and hope that everyone who translates one of my posts will do so. Also I may grant permission for translations of my posts to appear on sites with Google advertising or other commercial use. I won t rule out the possibility of assigning monopoly rights on commercial use of the translations of my posts to specific individuals or organisations. Does anyone have suggestions for improvements? One of my multi-lingual friends suggested that I should be concerned about the risk of bad translations. But I desire to have people read my posts and I believe that this is a risk I just have to accept - I’m sure that there are enough multi-lingual people in the blog space to find such errors and help the translator correct them. Also I have to consider the best way to mirror the translations. I could add them to the same permalink page (producing long pages with multiple translations of my best posts), I could create a new post (resulting in English-language Planet installations getting posts that most people can’t read), or I could use a separate blog installation for the translations. Please comment if you have any suggestions. I’ll write another post in future with the solutions that I select and some analysis of the issues. Update: Thanks for the nice post Victor. It was seeing my blog in the list of “Enlaces Interesantes” on Victor’s blog that inspired my post about translation.

Share This

I've been offline, but I think I've caught up now. Email if you think I missed you. Here's some of what I did before I went offline:

robmyers Seller's Remorse

Social Contract ten years on July 5 -- celebration?

Advertising Free Software Projects etbe

A Cambridge Co-operator: Great News

Michael

Cooperative? My Arse Web design and development techniques by Steve Tucker

Anti-DRM campaign, Apple Store, London.

Place Your Blog on a 'Busy Intersection'

Should Links from Your Blog Open in a New Window? Reader Opinions

Back

Co-opNet :: View topic - What Crisis

LWN: Totally "free" Ubuntu? That's the plan for Gobuntu (Linux.com)

The Problem with RSS

Property of a Lady Answers to Love Is Strange Trivia

Fairtrade Beer niq's soapbox

Co-opNet :: View topic - The Cooperative Tour de France

ITV response to Coverage Question... - Page 3 - ITV Message Boards

Why doesn't Online Main Stream Media link?

Property of a Lady Tuesday Trivia: Dance

Humor for Bond 22? Ultimate James Bond Fan Blog

lamby :: blog :: Graduation

itv and Other Tours Coverage: Vuelta, ToB

Holidays-London-and-rain

Reflowd - Recentlog

Reflowd - Source code

Aaargh! niq's soapbox

I am playing with the thought of using IMAP to send email from my mobile clients. The way this works is that mail is actually placed into a Maildir locally and synchronised with the IMAP server using a tool such as offlineimap. The Courier IMAP server supports such an outbox feature, for other servers you can use inotify or a cron job (I am planning to publish a writeup about my new mail setup sometime soon, so no scripts linked here yet). Anyway, it's trivial to get it working, and Dann Frazier has written it all up. The question is more whether I want to, or not. I am soliciting feedback. The advantages of using an IMAP-synchronised outbox are:

• The ability to review all mail to be sent while still offline. Using mutt, you can even edit them after "sending" but before they are actually sent. Undoubtedly, doing this often should be a hint to take more time before sending a message. However, at times there are good reasons why one might want to change a message which was composed e.g. on the plane (or not send it at all), and having to remove the message from the MTA queue and recreate it with the desired changes is unnecessarily time-intensive.

• Wherever you may roam, you can send mail even if port 25 is blocked (provided that the IMAP or SSH ports are open).

• All your mail is sent by a single host, so you don't have to worry about blacklisted IPs or disclosing information about your whereabouts.

• It's trivial to post-process mail, including training spamfilters with it (as ham) through a server-side pickup script, as well as e.g. checking for missing attachments locally (you need a local sendmail script for reasons documented here).

Any solution with advantages comes with disadvantages, and these are:

• Added complexity and brittleness: having mutt pipe mail to a custom sendmail-replacement script, which puts a message in place for synchronisation with offlineimap, and a server-side cron-job calling another custom script which pipes the mail(s) to be sent to the real sendmail binary all just seems a little less trustworthy than good ol' postfix delivering mail via a TLS-encrypted, client-cert or SASL-authenticated SMTP channel to a known mail relay.
• It's non-trivial to get meaningful notifications in case delivery of a message failed.
• Messages are only sent after IMAP synchronisation carried the mails to the server and the server-side pickup process sent them on. In my setup, this could introduce a delay of 30 minutes even when online, which may be rather undesirable in urgent matters. On the other hand, such delays could easily serve to reduce stress levels (I realise that's not a problem with a technical solution though).

Can you think of any other advantages or disadvantages? Do you use an IMAP-synchronised outbox and would like to share your experiences with me? Or do you have yet another solution? Write to me! NP: OSI: Free

After reading Mike Hommey's idea about buildd network for QA testing, I decided to try to implement the 10.1 policy recommendations check using rebuildd. Here is how I proceeded. Install and configure rebuildd This is done by apt-get install rebuildd. Then, init database (I use sqlite) with rebuildd init. Then I initialized build system with rebuildd-init-build-system. I had to add nostrip to DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS, so I decided to do quick and dirty and I edited /usr/bin/dpkg-build-package adding the good export info in the first lines. Configuration file and post build cmd My configuration file is simple and the one by default: I only changed email addresses and add a post_build_cmd script. Here's the code for the script:

#!/bin/sh
dist=$1
pkg=$2
version=$3
arch= dpkg --print-architecture 
RET=0
cd /var/cache/pbuilder/result   exit 1
for file in $(grep '.deb$' $ pkg _$ version _$ arch .changes  cut -d\  -f6)
do
	echo Checking $file for stripped binaries...
	echo ---------------------------------------
	mkdir /tmp/$file
	dpkg -x $file /tmp/$file
	find /tmp/$file -type f   (while read line
	do 
		L=$(file $line   egrep 'ELF.*, stripped')
		if test ! -z "$L"
		then
			echo $L
			RET=1
		fi
	done; exit $RET)
	RET=$?
	rm -rf /tmp/$file
done
echo
echo ...done
echo Removing result files...
for file in $(grep-dctrl -sFiles . $ pkg _$ version _$ arch .changes   sed '1d'   cut -d\  -f6)
do
	rm -f $file
	rm -f /var/cache/rebuildd/build/$file
done
rm -f $ pkg _$ version _$ arch .changes
echo ...done
exit $RET

Fille the db Then I fill the database with:

grep-dctrl -sPackage,Version .  /var/lib/apt/lists/ftp.fr.debian.org_debian_dists_sid_main_source_Sources   cut -d: -f2-   tr '\n' ' '   sed 's/   /\n/g'  sed 's/  / /'   xargs -L1 -ixxxxxx echo xxxxxx sid   rebuildd-job add

And finally I just have to start rebuildd and let it do the job. Argh, already 3 build logs received with stripped binaries Update: Bug list can be found here

The Sydney Morning Herald has an article about pre-fabricated houses from Ikea and suggests that they could solve the housing price problems. The article states that in the UK the pre-fab houses would be more than 25% cheaper than regular houses in the UK. Let’s assume for the sake of discussion that the introduction of Ikea pre-fabricated houses in the Australian market (which they currently don’t plan to do) will reduce house prices by 25%. This won’t solve the problem. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics in 2006 the median income for males was $600-799 and for females was $250-399. A couple who are both at the high-end of that scale would gross $1200 per week, this would possibly allow them to pay $1600 per month towards a mortgage, if they were in the middle of that scale then they would gross $1000 per week which might allow paying $1000 per month towards a mortgage. With current interest rates that would make any mortgage greater than $200K unreasonably difficult for a couple at the high end of the median income range to repay and a mortgage greater than $120K would be unreasonably difficult for a couple in the middle of the range. The ABS median house prices show that the cheapest places to buy houses in 2005 were Adelaide, Hobart, and Darwin with median prices of $208K, $209K, and $216K respectively. So a couple who are both at the high end of the median income range can only afford to buy a house in the three cheapest cities in Australia (which are also not densly populated). The two largest cities are Sydney and Melbourne which had median house prices of $363K and $300K respectively, they would not be affordable to a couple who are anywhere near the median income - not even with a 25% reduction in price! I believe that people on a median income should be able to afford a median prices house - the majority of Australian families should be able to afford the majority of houses! The above analysis only covers families wanting to purchase a house with two incomes. The “traditional” Australian idea of having the man earn the majority of all the money that is required while his wife looks after the children (which is a bad thing for other reasons) is obviously dead. A man who earns 50% more than the median income will have trouble paying for a house while supporting children if his wife doesn’t also work. It is generally accepted that anyone who doesn’t purchase a house before having children will never own a house. It seems strange that the major political parties talk about wanting to support families and to support “the Aussie battler”, but won’t do anything serious about house prices (which is the most significant issue for such people). Giving a first home owners grant of $7000 (which is less than 3% of the required money). One possible way of alleviating this problem would be to remove Negative Gearing (or at least modifying it to encourage construction rather than buying existing properties). Then the price of properties that are rented out would reflect the rent value instead of being significantly over-priced. Another possibility would be to make public transport more efficient and with a wider scope. The desirability of a location is to a large extent determined by how much time/money/effort is required to get to the centre of the nearest city for work. Making the mass public transport support larger numbers of people (by larger and more frequent trains, trams, and buses), have shorter journeys (by a more frequent service to reduce waiting and express and connecting services where possible), and more routes (by building new train or tram lines every time a new major road is built) would significantly increase the desirability of properties that are further from the centre of cities. That would decrease the market pressure on prices of properties that are a currently 30 minutes or one hour travel from the centre. It would also be a significant benefit if people who currently spend 30 minutes commuting could spend only 20. If public transport was improved and negative gearing was abolished then I expect that there would be increased demand for new houses that are further away from city centres, and that pre-fabricated houses would make a significant difference in the price. But while the majority of the value of a house is contained in the land that it rests on I can’t see that making a difference.

Share This

Today, I made my first steps using the collab-maint repository on Alioth. I accidentally noticed that one of my packages, namely calife (a sudo-like utility which I use since more than 10 years and developed by Ollivier Robert, one of my very very very old friends in the FLOSS world), got a new release at the beginning of July. That was a good occasion to move calife package's maintenance to Alioth and then learn about collab-maint. Thanks to the pretty good documentation, this has been done "en un tournemain" and, that upload had then two benefits: a new calife and my first package in collab-maint. It's now probably time to move there some of my packages, the first being my pet package, geneweb (who has its own project on Alioth, which i certainly overkill). Thanks, again, to Alioth admins for that very efficient work.

I received a private email in response to my post about getting work in another country regarding hotel prices in London. The person who sent me the message had considered London but ended up moving to Japan instead partly due to living expenses (although Japan seems unlikely to be much cheaper). The first issue concerns security of hotels. When living in hotels (for almost a year in London and about 6 months in the Netherlands there were a few occasions (IE one brief occasion every 4+ months) when I left my laptop under my bed at a hotel, but almost all the time I took it with me. At that time I aimed to have a minimal set of luggage, one large suitcase containing clothes, books, etc (things that are generally not worth stealing) and one small case containing my laptop, digital camera, passport, and other small things that are valuable or which would cause excessive inconvenience if I lost them. Also in the small case I would take fragile items. Then when leaving my hotel I would pack most of the items from the small suitcase (pretty much everything apart from the digital camera) into my laptop bag and take it with me. This limited my losses from hotel thieves to a digital camera (no incriminating pictures and I could always buy a better one) and a couple of bottles of liquor. Good hotels have a hotel safe which you can use. But for a cheap (affordable) hotel there is no such option. Hotels in London ARE expensive, but if you are prepared to lower you standard of living they aren’t too expensive. One thing to note about UK hotels is that the idea of having a toilet and shower in every room is a new concept and all the cheaper hotels lack this. It’s a standard feature for a hotel to have a wash-basin in every room, a toilet is optional, and a bath or shower is another option. There are various types of shared bathroom in UK hotels. The better ones vaguely resemble the facilities you might expect to find at a public swimming pool (large spaces, clean tiles everywhere, and a changing area in addition to the toilet and shower cubicles). The worst ones are basically what you might expect to see in a private home but with less cleaning. To get the best deals on small hotels in London you have to find an area where there are many hotels and inspect them. It is quite acceptable to ask for the key to a room so that you can inspect it and determine if you want to rent it. One area where I lived for some time in London is near Victoria Station. Victoria is one of the largest stations in London, it has both a Tube (underground/metro for trains within the city) and a British Rail (for travel to other parts of the country) station. Victoria Station also had facilities for checking in to a flight and having your checked luggage delivered to Gatwick airport via the Gatwick Express. This was really convenient, you can check your luggage and then do some last minute shopping before going to the airport! I’m not sure if they still do this though (comments appreciated). Another good thing about Victoria Station is the large shopping area which included a tourist information centre and a store that sold freshly baked bread. Often in the morning I would buy bread from the section that had the most steam coming from it (which was the most freshly baked) before catching a train. Victoria Station is quite near many of the places you want to visit in London so I could walk to the British Museum and other places that are worth visiting (this depends on how fit you are). But the real reason for staying there is that the were many cheap hotels in the area. I could just walk down a street and know that I could find a room at one of the hotels. One feature of UK hotels is that they almost always include free breakfast as part of the deal (with no option to exclude it). Of course this means that if you are capable of eating a significant breakfast and then skipping lunch then you can save some money. A down-side to cheap hotels is that they almost never have a telephone in your room (just a pay phone in the hall), and if they do have a telephone then it will be wired in. Before wireless net access became common this was a problem as you couldn’t use a modem. More expensive hotels had an extra socket for a modem. In London there is a significant number of people who stay in hotels from Sunday night to Thursday night with their company paying (so they don’t stay in the cheap hotels). This means that most of the good hotels have cheap rooms on the weekend. So while living in London I would often stay at a good hotel on the weekend to get net access (and a few days in a luxury hotel at a cheap rate is a good change from a cheap hotel). Nowadays wireless net access is common so it would be easy to find a free access point anywhere in London and there would be no need for this. But the possibility of getting cheap hotel rooms on the weekend is something to keep in mind. One benefit of this was when I had an employer paying for my hotel bills from Sunday night to Thursday night (as part of a deal to placate my colleagues who complained about working at the other side of London). I spoke to the hotel manager and suggested that having me check out every Friday and have the room empty on the weekend was not good for them and that they should offer me a significant discount to stay 7 days a week - they made me a good deal! At that time I had the lowest cost of living apart from when I lived with my parents while the hotel in which I stayed was quite comfortable (a large comfortable room with toilet and shower and a good hotel breakfast). Moving to the Netherlands was quite easy for me as I was staying in hotels. All I had to do was to pack my suitcase, check out of the hotel, and catch the flight. One significant advantage of living in hotels is that you can easily move to another region or country. This gives the possibility of taking advantage of career opportunities that would not be possible if you owned a house and would be difficult if you rented an apartment. When in the Netherlands I ended up staying in hotels of the Bastion chain (a chain or franchise of business hotels). I stayed in a couple of other hotels first and wasn’t particularly happy but with Bastion hotels I was always happy. I arranged a deal of a small discount in exchange for not getting the breakfast that was normally included (I like to sleep in and the Dutch breakfast didn’t appeal to me). One significant benefit of the Bastion hotels over London hotels was the size. The smallest room had two single beds, a large Dutch-style bathroom, two chairs at a desk that spanned about 3M of a wall (with multiple power sockets and a phone socket), and a good TV. At the time the hotel would play two movies over the TV system every night from video cassette. The videos played on the TV in the restaurant and in the rooms (if you selected the appropriate channel). Once I became known to the staff they would do nice things such as playing the movie I requested (instead of the scheduled one) and pausing the movie when I finished dinner so I didn’t miss anything while walking to my room. Also instead of giving me a free newspaper every day (in Dutch) they gave me some free drinks vouchers every week. Once you become a regular customer at a hotel the staff are always willing to change the deal to make you happy - even when it’s a chain. One of the convenient factors of living in a business hotel is that they are located near business areas. I spent several months living in a Bastion hotel that was about 400M walk from the office where I worked. That was particularly convenient when the network broke at night - I could just walk back to the office to fix it! The deal I had with the Bastion hotels made them about 50% more expensive than the (fairly luxurious) two bedroom apartment that I later moved to. So hotels are expensive and living in them is only an option if your employer pays for it or if you work in an industry where pay is reasonably good. Given that the vast majority of people who read my blog work in the computer industry (and I suspect that they are better paid than average) this should be a viable option.

Share This

A friend recently asked for advice on a “REALLY small laptop/word processor thingy that would pretty much fit into a (big) pocket, and that only needs to write/word process“. The first problem here is that most people associate “word processing” with desktop publishing and document management. Programs such as MS-Word are considered as having the features required of a word-processor (which includes spelling and grammer checking/correcting, annotations, colours, etc). Programs that have all those features take a lot of CPU power. A Pentium-4 system might be considered the minimum requirement for running a recent version of MS-Word. But a hand-held device can’t have such a powerful CPU (it’s too small to be able to dissipate the heat from such a CPU or contain batteries that can produce enough power to tun it). The next problem is the issue of screen space. A VGA resolution screen (640×480) is regarded as high resolution in the PDA market. Such a resolution does not work with a word-processor that has three toolbars at the top of it’s screen and a paperclip taking up space at the bottom right! I’m sure that everyone who was using computers in the early 1990’s can recall the minimal word-processing programs. One thing to consider is that 640×480 in a 15 inch CRT screen is much more useful than 640×480 in a hand-held device as the larger screen can have fewer pixels per character and therefore display more text on the screen. An added complication is that there are two methods of input for PDAs. One is to have a hardware keyboard (which may be a separate device or may be part of the PDA) and the other is to have a keyboard displayed on the screen. A hardware keyboard makes the device larger and a software keyboard takes up precious screen space (you just can’t win). My PDA is an iPaQ model h3900. It has 64M of RAM, 32M of flash, no hardware keyboard, and a screen resolution of 320×240. I have done some serious writing on my iPaQ (including writing an entire article for Linux Journal) and it works reasonably well. For serious writing you can produce plain text on a PDA and then easily paste it into your program of choice on a PC later (PDAs generally support connection to a PC via serial port and/or USB). The challenge is editing files that originate on a PC using a PDA. Generally I try and use HTML and TeX for my formatted documents so the text versions of those formats are easy to edit once you have learned them. Taking data from a MD-Word file, editing it on a PDA, and then taking it back to the PC would cause many problems and probably wouldn’t be worth attempting. Recently I have been using my iPaQ for writing notes about email and blog posts that I will write. If I get an idea then I immediately write some notes about it on my iPaQ and then usually type it again instead of downloading it. For example the notes for this post were “write about RAM, storage, and screen resolution”. Often getting the initial ideas to start writing is the hard part. Writing a 500 to 1000 word blog post or message is easy once I have the ideas. If I was going to buy a new PDA now I would prefer one with a hardware keyboard, the loss of screen space for a keyboard on the touch-screen is a serious impediment to writing. The maximum amount of text that can be displayed on the screen at any one time limits the complexity of what I work on (see my post about monitors for developers). Another factor is the fact that for small notes the amount of time taken to remove the stylus from it’s bay is greater than the amount of time saved by using it. So I end up writing small notes using my finger-nail on the touch-screen which is significantly slower than using a keyboard (even the crummy ones that PDAs have). Of course the keyboard would still have to be QWERTY and have raised keys so that I can touch-type. I haven’t investigated this seriously as my iPaQ is good enough to last me for another year or two at least and I’ve got an unused spare iPaQ to replace it when it fails. But if anyone has any recommendations of Linux based PDAs with keyboards then I would appreciate some comments.

Share This

Free software projects are informal (though becoming more formal) institutions that function in multiple capacities. Foremost, they are sites that facilitate the production and distribution of technology but they certainly allow for and produce all sorts of other social facts and processes. And one of the most important is that free software projects function as quasi-educational institutions that are structured quite differently from formal educational institutions. And this blog entry by Justin Podur that reviews a book by Alfie Kohn of alternative eduction, reminded me just how much F/OSS projects are informal educational spaces but deviate significantly from traditional learning. I have more thoughts on the type of “schooling” F/OSS allows but since I am moving to my new apt. in a few hours, it will have to wait until later.

* Congratulations Kapil, We have 3rd DD now!!

After a long long long process of 946 days, I m a Debian Developer :-).

Let s have a drink... today it s on me.

Salon.com recently reviewed Zonbu, a highly compact general-purpose computer with no moving parts. Zonbu's key features are its incredibly low power consumption, network-connected storage and that it works right out of the box without any installation. Under the covers, it's a Gentoo Linux installation with mainstream open source apps such as OpenOffice and Firefox.

Zonbu and its skins — high-powered dressing for a low-power device Price-wise, you can get the Zonbu for as little as $99 if you commit to two years' subscription to the network storage. Understanding the open source ethos, Zonbu also offer the box without any tether for $250. As with the Mac mini, supplying the keyboard, mouse and monitor is up to you. Preloaded with an office suite, email, IM, web browser, multimedia player, games and Skype, Zonbu is aimed at being a general computing appliance. You can't install anything else on it, but then again, that way you can't break it easily either. It sounds the sort of thing I'd be happy leaving with non-technical family and friends. Storage with Amazon S3 Low-power solid state devices are nothing new of course, there are a variety available, and things such as the NSLU2 have been in production for some years. The novel thing about the Zonbu however is in how it manages its storage. The Zonbu has 4GB of compact flash storage on board, which it uses as a cache for Amazon's S3 storage network. All your files get encrypted and sent to S3, and are retrieved when you need them. One really neat consequence of this is that you can get at your data via the web any time you want. Secondly, it gives me some sense of security for my data. I don't know if Zonbu will give me the 'keys' to my data on S3, but it wouldn't be hard for them to provide an easy way to migrate out. Either way, S3 is a place I'd trust with my data. Why Zonbu is important Windows, and to some extent, Mac OS X, are becoming the needy children of computing, always tugging on your arm and asking you something. In contrast, Zonbu looks like a great step towards "appliance computing". Its features are more like those you'd expect from your phone or cable TV provider:

• it's a black-box appliance that users don't need to care about, with little or no vulnerability to malware
• the real value of the product is in the network
• the system is upgraded as part of the subscription

Zonbu has the potential to change domestic computing. The low price point lowers the barrier to computer ownership. Low maintenance needs lower the technical barrier to entry and use. And Zonbu's a green and economical technology, yet as useful as the full power version. As a company, I feel Zonbu to be a well-intentioned player because of their strong support for open source, and the ease with which you can get at your data despite its appliance nature. I hope they continue to develop in this open data direction. Zonbu itself probably won't attain ubiquity, but it will change the marketplace and open up a new category of network-connected appliances for the home. Further reading

• Zonbu home page
• Gizmodo hands-on review of Zonbu. I love that the first comment is a question about whether it can run vi or emacs...
• Real life with the Zonbu Mini-PC. Very detailed blog of a Zonbu user.
  
• Dress up your Zonbu. Get rid of the drab default exterior with some amazing-looking covers

Dear admins of mail-archive.com, I think that “protecting” E-Mail addresses in a public archive of a technical mailing list which has the topic of E-Mail is a very bad idea. This leads to archive quotes like

We’ve been getting many many strange mailman-bounces. It seems that somewhere the mailman-bounces address is mis-configured. It should be [EMAIL PROTECTED], but mail seems to be sent as [EMAIL PROTECTED] (note missing “u”). That’s causing bounces to bounce all over the place...

which has better not been archived at all - it doesn’t help when vital information is removed from the archived mail. Yes, this example was taken from an actual archive entry. Sheesh.

Anyway, back to pure Linux stuff. A while ago, the Ubuntu Technical Board were asked to take a look at Automatix. I've finally got around to doing so, and here are my initial conclusions. I'd appreciate any factual corrections, and note that at this point this is my individual opinion rather than any sort of official statement.

Automatix is a combination system configuration/package installation
tool, aimed at making it easy for users to install features like
graphics drivers, media codecs and software not distributed as part of
the Ubuntu distribution. It is provided as a .deb file containing a
python GUI frontend that calls out to a shell backend. The frontend
parses an XML file which contains module descriptions and function
names for installing and uninstalling modules, with these functions
being part of the shell backend. An install module will typically
check whether another package manager is running, and if not either
install a set of debs or download and manually install a
tarball. Uninstall modules generally remove the same software or clean
up the manually installed files.

The following is a list of identified issues with the current version
of Automatix - it is the result of a few hours of investigation, so
may not be complete.

• Automatix is, in itself, a poor quality package which fails to
  conform to Debian or Ubuntu policy.
  
  
  • It is inappropriately flagged as belonging to base
    
  • Depends on essential packages
    
  • Has a short description of more than 80 characters and no long
    description
    
  • Provides no email address in the maintainer field
    
  • Contains no copyright information in the standard locations
    
  • Ships a TODO file as a control file
    
  • Provides no man pages
    
  • Ships files in /usr/etc
    
  • Contains many files inappropriately flagged as executable
    
  • Changelog is in /usr/etc/automatix2/ax_data ?
  
  These issues are primarily cosmetic and in themselves are unlikely to
  cause any harm to the system.
  
• In debug mode, automatix will write files to your home directory as
  root. Again, more of an irritation than anything dangerous.
  
• Provides platform-specific data in /usr/share. Potentially an issue
  if /usr/share is shared between multiple architectures, but since
  Automatix is x86/amd64 only probably not a real problem.
  

• #!/bin/bash
  #created by arnieboy 
  foo= gksudo -u root -k -m "enter your password for gedit root access" /bin/echo "Do you have root access?" 
  sudo gedit $NAUTILUS_SCRIPT_SELECTED_URIS

  appears to be an attempt to ensure that the user has sudo rights. This
  will break if timestamp_timeout is set to 0 in sudoers - gedit should
  be run directly from gksudo. This is repeated in more than one
  place. The assumption that sudo will not need to prompt appears
  prevalent throughout the code.
  
• catagory_data.xml - nitpick, but should be category
  
• "Please NOTE that downloading and installing w32codecs, libdvdcss2
  and other non-free codecs without paying a fee to the concerned
  authorities constitutes a CRIME in the United States of America"
  
  Somewhat dubious legal advice - the issue has nothing to do with fees,
  and isn't just limited to the USA.
  
• Automatix checks that other package managers aren't running at
  startup (by grepping for a static list of application names in the
  proces list), but doesn't enforce this by carrying out any locking of
  its own. This leaves Automatix open to race conditions.
  

• if ps -U root -u root u   grep "dpkg"   grep -v grep;
     then
       killall -9 dpkg

  May well leave the system in an inconsistent and unbootable state, and
  is carried out without warning. This is entirely unacceptable and will
  leave a stale lockfile in any case.
  

• function reloadnautilus  
         killall -9 nautilus
   

  Not actually used anywhere, but could potentially lose user
  information without warning.
  
• Most install functions contain a sleep statement for no obvious
  reason. They then call dpkg_check, which sleeps again. It's not at all
  clear what this is meant to be doing.
  
• Passes --assume-yes to apt-get, which will (as a result) happily
  remove packages without giving the user an opportunity to
  intervene. This is especially bad when removing Automatix modules -
  any package that depends on one of the packages being removed will
  also be uninstalled, even if the package was originally installed via
  something other than Automatix!
  
• Has no internal dependency management. Unable to keep track of why
  packages were installed, so prevents the removal of the multimedia
  module because that would remove sections of other modules without
  explicitly removing that module. Installing swiftfoxplugins will pull
  in several plugin packages, but removing swiftfoxplugins will not
  remove them even if nothing else depends on them. Also means that
  package installation and uninstallation have to be manually kept in
  sync - uninstall will not always remove all packages that were
  installed.
  
• Has no concept of file tracking, so will just remove entire
  directories. Makes no attempt to ensure that a user-installed version
  is not already installed in the same location, so effectively assumes
  that the /opt namespace belongs to it.
  
• Will remove Ubuntu repository packages in favour of tarballs with
  no warning.
  
• Setting ctrl-alt-del to open gnome system monitor will destroy any
  existing user configuration for run_command_9
  
• Installing streamtuner will create a world writable directory in
  /opt/ripped with no sticky bit, allowing users to interfere with other
  users' files.
  
• mplayerplugin moves totem plugin files to a backup, but does
  nothing to prevent package upgrades of totem replacing them.
  
• Only updates the java link after installing new java, not the rest
  of the java alternatives
  
• amsninstall installs tls libs that are never removed, copying over
  the ones in the tcltls package. This means that the md5sums in the
  tcltls package will no longer validate.
  

• sudo ln -s /usr/lib/libesd.so.0 /usr/lib/libesd.so.1

  is really not
  such a good idea.
  

• ln -s /tmp/.esd-1000 /tmp/.esd

  looks like it'll only ever work for
  the first user on the system, and there's nothing to recreate it on
  boot.
  

• sudo sed -i "s/^vboxusers\(.*\):$/vboxusers\1:$AXUSER/" /etc/group

  - assumes that the system isn't using some sort of user directory
  service.
  
• installs truecrypt suid root - not ideal, given its less than
  stellar security record
  
• Unmounts filesystems without checking to ensure that the unmount
  succeeded.
  
• Deletes lines from fstab and replaces them with device nodes
  rather than uuids.
  
• Includes acroread 7.0.9, despite the new Acrobat license appearing
  to grant no right to redistribute.

Conclusion:

Automatix exists to satisfy a genuine need, and further work should be
carried out to determine whether these user requirements can be
satisfied within the distribution as a whole. However, in its current
form Automatix is actively dangerous to systems - ranging from damage
to small items of user configuration, through removing user-installed
packages without adequate prompting or warning and up to the (small
but existing) potential to leave a system in an unbootable state.

The current design of Automatix precludes any reasonable way to fix
some of these problems. It is attempting to fulfil the role of a
high-level package manager without actually handling any sort of
dependency resolution itself.

A more reasonable method of integrating Automatix's functionality into
Ubuntu would be for the Automatix team to provide deb files to act as
installers for the software currently provided. These could then be
installed through the existing package manager interfaces. This would
solve many of the above problems while still providing the same level
of functionality.

In its current form Automatix is unsupportable, and a mechanism for
flagging bugs from machines with Automatix installed may provide a
valuable aid for determining whether issues are due to supported
distribution packages or third party software installers.

Often there are possibilities to earn more money or gain valuable experience by working in another country. I learned (and earned) a lot while working in London and Amsterdam and recommend travelling if you get the opportunity. There are two ways of getting work in another country. One way is to work for a multi-national company and get transferred, this gives benefits of having the company sort everything out for you (creating a bank account etc). But it isn’t an option that is open to many people. Getting a job directly in another country is in some ways more difficult than expected and in some ways easier. Here are some of the factors that make it easier:

• Once you arrive in your destination country it’s usually easy to get work if the economic conditions are good. When choosing a country to migrate to and a time to migrate you will generally make sure that the economic conditions are reasonably good (or at least demand is greater than supply for your industry sector).


• It’s widely believed by employers that employees from other countries have valuable experience to bring, due to working conditions being different in other countries. I am doubtful of this (but I don’t complain when it helps me get a job).


• Employers often believe that employees from a long way away are very highly motivated and work really hard. I believe that this is correct as it applies to the employees that they get (EG Australians in the EU work really hard). Not that Australians in general would work harder than Europeans, but people who are willing to travel so far for their career will be motivated and people who have recently arrived in a country where they have few friends and no relatives have less things to distract them from work.

Here are some of the problems that you will face:

• Different expectations of employers. For example in Australia a university degree is not really required while European employers demand it.


• Getting a bank account. When I arrived in the UK I had trouble getting a bank account due to money-laundering laws. A passport was not sufficient and I needed proof of address, but renting an apartment without having a bank account was difficult too… I ended up getting an accountant to recommend me to a bank. Apparently the easiest way of doing this is to get an Australian bank that is part of a multi-national banking group to get their UK equivalent to set up an account before you leave Australia. Also I know people who had problems getting a Dutch bank account (fortunately there is the PostBank which deals with everyone). The UK laws may have changed in the last 8 years, but it’s the sort of problem that can get you in any country - as you can’t get paid without a bank account it’s serious!


• Renting an apartment. I think it’s best to plan to live in hotels until you get a job that will last a while, then you can live reasonably close to your work. Also landlords will often want to know where you work before deciding whether to accept you as a tenant. I lived in hotels in the UK for almost a year and never rented an apartment because of this. It’s not a problem if the stuff you need can fit into a couple of suitcases.


• Learning how to save money. Little things like bulk purchases of train tickets can save significant amounts of money. It’s the sort of thing that locals learn by osmosis but foreigners can take months or years to learn them. This is especially a problem when you don’t speak the local language and discount vouchers have fine print.


• Catching a taxi. Taxi drivers generally only speak the local language and if you don’t speak it then you will have problems. Showing a taxi driver a laptop screen with printed directions and a map helps.

Share This

The downside of NYC is that it is pricey but the upside is that there are a lot of free events to balance out the equation. Last night, I went to one of such free events at Lincoln center to see one of my favorite Puerto Rican folk singers, Roy Brown who was opening for Arlo Guthrie During Roy Brown’s last song, he called out another folk singer who I had never heard of Tao Rodriguez-Seeger to join him and I think that was probably one of my favorite songs of the night. Tao who comes from a family of folk singer types, usually performs with The Mammals and less frequently with The Anarchist Orchestra. His voice, at least in Spanish, is resounding and overpowering yet at the same time sports a certain type of gentle softness. It is striking and beautiful. If you like folk music, in English or Spanish, I would check him out. Here is a clip of a song recorded with Tito Auger and Roy Brown and a link to their recent complilation CD.

Following many months of faff, today Katherine and I completed on a house in Castlerock. I say Katherine and I, but really I did very little. She started looking after she'd started at UU, before we knew Black Cat was going to be sold. My sole involvement was to be dragged round a few places (including this one) when I was back in April. The initial plan was that Norwich would remain our "home" and this would be somewhere that Katherine would be able to live during term time, that I could also work from now and then. Given recent events it'll no doubt become "home" and we'll leave Norwich. To that end I've been looking at the job market back in NI. I've found (and applied for) a few things in Belfast, all software development roles. I may even have an interview; had a phone call today that felt very much like a phone interview and ended with talk of getting a formal interview sorted for when I'm next over. All scary stuff. Belfast is a bit far for a commute, so I may end up living there during the week. Or I might not get anything in NI and have to look further afield. Anyone know anything going in Derry? That may be a more managable daily journey.

July 31st was my last day working for Sixbell-Nekotec Solutions (formerly known as Nekotec Tecnolog a). I lasted there three years. It seems like a life was spent there, heh: I entered after turning 20 and I’m leaving some days before I turn 23. Our future is still a bit fuzzy, but we are working on it. In the meantime, I’m getting back full-time to Mathematics next 13rd. But if our plans succeed and if everything goes right, we’ll be moving by the end of August or early September. Heh, yes, leaving school temporarily, again! Anyway, I’m unemployed right now. Listening to music most part of the day, taking Raquel to work, coding a bit here, there, doing some Debian labor, etc. Meh. An End Has A Start is one of the albums by the English band, The Editors, it makes a great title for my post now :-). I just listened to Taraf de Ha douks’ Maskarada, it’s not that great as the masterpiece as The Continuing Adventures. I’m getting addicted to the Cold War Kids.

Hey, I am back from vacation. I was back on Saturday but I didn't had the time to blog or do Debian work, so hello :-D.

After coming back from my vacation I went back to the softfloat rrdtool thingie I was working on before and I finaly managed to compile a statically linked softfloat uclibc rrdtool. Needless to say that I found that a pain and I ended up:

• avoiding the Makefile and made the linking manually because:
• for some unknown reason, the -static option didn't ended up in the final link call
• libfreetype and libart_lgpl always were added as .so files... - libtool is probably the usual susupect, but I suspect the upstream libraries themselves
• avoided (completely) using xmerge and used directly the source since:
• CFLAGS="-Wl,-static" did not do the right thing (it didn't do in raw source, either)
• I was about to make a static rrdtool, so I didn't needed gentoo's ebuilds at that point
  

If you are curious about the hideous details, just add a comment or email me and I'll send them or publish them.

So, in the end, I managed to produce a staticlly linked arm-softfloat-uclibc rrdtool which:

• did not work directly on the .rrd files generated by the debian packaged collectd since they were "generated on another achitecture"; well with debian's rrdtool, 'rrdtool dump' was not that slow, so it was acceptable to dump with debian's rrdtool and restore with the statically linked one
• generated graphs in about 1 minute (way slower than my amd64 machine, which does in 3s, but at least 100+ times faster than debian's arm rrdtool - remember, I tested the generation and it didn't finish the first graph not even after 50 minutes)

So that was fun. The total round trip for a round of graph generation was about 15 min which was more than cool and fast compared to the slow native variant, whohoo!

Now the downside, I am not through with it. If you look at the picture you'll notice that there is a "small-ish" problem: there are no scales, legends and no letters/glyphs of any kind, so the graphs are still quite useless, but better than nothing:


They should look something like this:




Notice any difference? :-/

Of course, I won't stop here!

I suspect the problems come from the cross compiled libfreetype and libart_lgpl, and I'll probably end up doing some native compiling after all, sigh!

Thanks for sending me the article and someone also sent me a link to an accessible copy here. And remember, plants work wonders to curb indoor air pollution, which can be as bad or worse than outdoor ones. Here is a list of some of the best polluting fightin’ plants . I used to have many many many plants but when you move nearly every year, you slowly have to get rid of them. last year in Canada we had one and we had to sadly part way with the plant that has been with us for 5 years. But now that I have moved somewhere that will be my home for a bit, I am going to go a little nuts with the plants again. I just love having them. Now I need to find a good greenhouse in NYC that does not charge an arm and a leg.