Unlike Martin and Daniel, please do call me by my IRC nick in real life, mostly because that’s what I’ve been called by everybody since I was 0. On writing the long version is ok.

In certain geek circles, especially those centred around IRC channels, it seems common practice to refer to each other by nicknames, even during real life meetings. This drives me crazy. I d like the world to know that I am Martin, unless you speak to me on IRC. This also means that I am Martin on mailing lists and any other form of communication, except IRC. Love,
Martin NP: Pulp: Freaks

A client of mine seeks a document management system to be run on a Linux machine, and I have no experience in this domain. I am turning to you for help, dear lazyweb, my client will make a donation to a FLOSS project of your choosing in return. I define document management system as an online file storage for OpenOffice.org/Word documents, spreadsheets, PDFs, and pictures. Thus, this is less about content management than about file storage and organisation, aimed at collaboration. The following are the sought features:

• Security
• Tag support
• Multi-user access control
• Support for bulk up- and downloads
• An ability to access the repository with WebDAV or SSH, to be able to manipulate files with command-line tools
• A web interface, ideally with AJAX for such tasks as moving and renaming files. Note that this is not a strict requirement if it s possible to organise the data properly via WebDAV, or similar.

Do you know of any tool we could deploy? I did come across BFExplorer, but that seems to lack support for tags, direct data access, bulk uploads, multiuser environment, and it s not received updates in more than a year. Suggestions welcome! NP: Pulp: Freaks

I d like to make it publicly known that I think Pulp are awesome. NP: Pulp: It

From the official press release:

April 3, 2008 - The Swiss Open Systems User Group /ch/open organizes the first international Hackontest sponsored by Google as part of informatica08, the Swiss year of computer science 2008. Hackontest is a 24-hour programming competition of three teams of different open source projects. Its goals are to enhance popular Free Software projects according to user needs and to demonstrate to the public how enthusiastically open source software is being developed. Starting in April 2008 users and developers of open source software may submit feature requests for their favorite Free Software projects and rate and comment them. On Swiss national holiday August 1st, 2008 the Hackontest jury will pick the three most promising teams. They may travel to Switzerland on September 24/25, 2008 to participate in the competition located at the OpenExpo Z rich 2008. The jury is staffed of ten highly renowned open source hackers such as Jeremy Alison (founder of Samba), Bruce Perens (founder of the Open Source Initiative), Alexander Limi (founder of Plone), Harald Welte (founder of gpl-violations.org) and Jono Bacon (Ubuntu community leader). The Hackontest platform and further information about the event is located at www.hackontest.org.

I have been asked to serve on the jury. This sounds like it ll be a fun and interesting event, and if not only I finally get to meet Alexander Limi, with whom I ve worked on Plone, and Bram Moolenaar, author of the best editor around. Now, Debian! Let s get some proposals in! NP: The Good, the Bad & the Queen: The Good, the Bad & the Queen

Dear lazyweb: I claim to know quite a bit about the IPv6 theory, but I lack experience. I have a couple of hosts out there which are already properly IPv6-addressable and work, but I don t have a network scenario. Unfortunately, I also don t have a lot of time available for this right now. I was thus wondering if anyone of you knew of a document that explained the Debian way of

• how to add IPv6 to an existing network, using addresses determined from the IPv4 address.
• how to convert this into a network with custom addressing.
• how to connect this network to one of my IPv6-addressable hosts via a tunnel and set up the routing/advertising to make the hosts on my home network globally addressable.

I know of documents like Juliusz Getting IPv6 connectivity under Linux (linked from the Debian IPv6 project page, and of course the work by Peter Bieringer (with whom I ve worked previously), but I have not found a concise explanation of how to set it all up with minimal hacks on a Debian system. If noone has such a document, I might have to bite the bullet. Ping me if you want to cooperate. Let me know! NP: The Phoenix Foundation: Pegasus Update: From Waikato, Matt Brown sent this howto on 6to4. I sent back a small number of corrections and hope he ll incorporate them soon. On a related note, I am making good progress getting my Debian systems linked up to the future. I used the excellent SixXS tunnel broker to route 2^80 addresses to my home router and set up another tunnel to one of my native IPv6 hosts in the net. I also added 6to4 to two of my servers. This should give me enough for further experimentation, and eventually for netconf testing. I ve been keeping notes and you can expect a document with simple explanations for everything that I did. But before that, I want to get behind some kernel bugs related to netfilter, such as state INVALID matching valid packets in kernel 2.6.24 and before and conntrack failing to treat ICMP replies as RELATED with kernels 2.6.18 and 2.6.22. The latter seems fixed in 2.6.24, which isn t backported yet, but which we can expect to be in Etch-And-A-Half and Debian lenny. Stay tuned

Since yesterday I am through with my NM procedure. Looking back I get to the same conclusion as probably most NMs have: not overly hard, but time-consuming and glad to have it over with. Anyway, so far so good, just waiting for DAM approval and my account now. There are still a couple of people in front of me but I hope for another processing before the elections close. (I guess it would at least be good for the turnout.) For now, many thanks to my Application Manager Andreas Barth who has been very responsive and always answered my mails quickly and thoroughly, and also to Martin Zobel-Helas for advocating me.

I am looking for a charity to receive regular donations. I would like to support the environment and wildlife, rather than people directly, and the World Wildlife Fund immediately comes to mind. While I ve been supporting the fund s work for two years now, I feel a bit uneasy about its size. It seems plausible that they can leverage synergies much more effectively, but large organisations also burn through heaps of money just to be able to do what they want to do. In addition, I feel the whole organisation is too professional and anonymous. The same applies to Greenpeace. With none of this do I intend to discredit the work of the WWF or Greenpeace! They re just not what I am looking for. I have previously donated to a charity in China, but the troubles and efforts involved with this were too much. And while China certainly needs a lot of help and support in rethinking their environmental policies, it s not like central Europe or other parts of the world couldn t put money to good use in this sector as well. So what I seek for is a small charity who operates in a niche and to whom regular donations, even if small, make a difference. EuroNatur looks promising. I d love to have more choice though. If you know of any, please let me know. NP: Barclay James Harvest: Eyes of the Universe Update: Micah Anderson pointed me to the Rainforest Action Network and Ron Lee introduced me to the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, started by Greenpeace co-founder Paul Watson, who resigned from the Greenpeace Foundation (in 1977) because of disagreements with the emerging bureaucratic structure of the organization . I have contacted both and asked for their annual reports and whether they have experience with tax-deductible donations from Central Europe. Update: Karen O Sullivan suggests the Jane Goodall Institute and the International Fund for Animal Welfare. I ve written to them as well.

For years, several important (or not so important) people have forecast the end of email. While most of what they were saying couldn t be disagreed with (important people always speak in vague, vacant terms), it wasn t until about a year ago that I noticed any effects. But over the past twelve months, I found myself frequently having to remind people of tasks, mostly outstanding emails, across the whole spectrum, and including companies who could make money from me if only they d bother replying. Statistics somewhere say that 90% or more of all mail is spam. I have very few problems with spam (and would like to describe my mail filter in a future post, but that ll take time), but I have no problem imagining how most email users out there, who are stuck with technology from the nineties (thanks mostly to Microsoft), are really drowning and thus fail at the basics of correspondence. So what s next? How should we continue to communicate, now that email has been fully embraced by the business world while it has grown to be more of a burden than a gain for the majority? Or is our society simply accumulating more and more slackers? NP: Barclay James Harvest: Time Honoured Ghosts

Zack, Wouter: Yup, Perl 6's scheme changes to reduce confusion to the programmer and to make the language better Huffman coded. Why?
As for the programmer, it comes out of observation - Changing the sigil depending on what you are expecting to get back (i.e. a hash has a '%' sigil, but if you only want one value off it, you use the '$' sigil, as it indicates a scalar variable) confuses more often than it helps - Specially newcomers. Besides, it will be easier for the interpreter itself - The sigil will become an invariant but required part of the variable name itself. Hence, Martin will be happier, as there will no longer be different namespaces under which to store your variables. Oh, BTW, Martin: Not only Perl behaves this way. Ruby also uses that concept - There, you have local variables (no sigil), instance variables ('@'), class variables (ugly '@@') and global variables ('$'). I remember in old (Quick GW)BASIC you had numeric variables (no sigil) and string variables (postfix sigil '$') as well. Any others?
Now, about the Huffman coding part, WTF?
It is one of the design goals of Perl 6 to make the most often used operators be the shortest, so you, programmer, don't wear out your keyboard and lose your valuable fractions of seconds typing i.e. '->' for a method call when you can just type a '.' - Similarly, currently you have to type too many characters for the (too common) dereferencing - If you have a reference to a hash of arrays of arrays of objects on which you want to call methods, you have to do $something-> key [0][0]->boo - Whereas with Perl 6 you will only have to do $something key [0][0].boo
Anyway, I cannot elaborate much further, as I've been -at best- just a bystander. But yes, large changes loom in Perl's future. Let see what comes on...
And when. Sigh.

I guess I am talking more about the fuss involved, and the paranoia around GPG-zealots, like there are many in Debian. GPG is not the holy grail, it s a tool which doesn t actually fit the real world (you have to be a hacker to use it, basically), it s misunderstood in many ways (see keysigning), and yet, it s a great way to waste your time with it for minimal security benefit.

- Martin F. Krafft, on the debian-private mailing list; accepted to be quoted publicly off-list.

Martin blogs about how the Camel book mentions the fact that scalars, arrays, and hashes have completely separate namespaces, as if this is a problem. Well, I disagree. As with anything in Perl: yes, obviously it's possible to confuse yourself with this feature, and yes, obviously it's true that if you do this, you will get to keep both pieces of your program. So don't do that then. However, when used properly, I find that it actually helps me improve readability of my programs. Let's say we have a subroutine which returns a reference to a filehandle to a bunch of data in a format that we know how to parse. We don't know what the filehandle points to (and we don't care, either), but we do know what the data is. So we store the filehandle in some scalar, and then proceed to parse the data into a hash. Now we could use variable names such as $fh and %hash, but I'll hope that everyone agrees with me that this is very bad practice. So, instead, we should name the variables after what they contain. Say our data file contains books:

$books = get_books_fh();
while(<$books>)  
	(... parse $author out of $_ ...)
	push @ $books $author , $_;
 

The filehandle to which $books is a reference, points to some useful data; and the %books hash table contains the exact same data, only structured in a different, more useful way. So why give them a different name? They're the same thing, call them the same way. Personally, I find this makes a whole lot of sense. And you can do the same thing with arrays vs hashes, or scalars vs arrays. Of course you can also write code that uses $somevar and @somevar, with no semantic connection between the two. That is stupid, so don't do it. The fact that you can do stupid things with Perl, however, should not mean the language sucks. You see, other than some other programming language I could think about, Perl does not assume its users are stupid, or inexperienced, or dummies, or whatever. Yes, that does mean that new users will get confused; but it also allows experienced users to Get Stuff Done in a proper way. And, well, I'm sure you can do stupid things with python, too.

I am implementing the last bits and pieces I need for ikiwiki to replace rest2web on all sites I maintain. In doing so, I need to touch Perl. I probably ran into enough crap today for a very long rant, but instead I ll limit myself to a quote from the Perl book (3rd. ed., p. 52):

Note that we can use the same name for $days, @days, and %days without Perl getting confused.

I question any language whose interpreter s capability to deal with ambiguity without confusion is worth mentioning. NP: The Flower Kings: The Sum of no Evil

• Translation From MS-Speak to English of Selected Portions of Joel Spolsky s Martian Headsets
  Haha.
• Robots are getting better...the Big Dog robot can recover itself...
  Watch the video!
• Apple iPhone bootloader attack
• APIs: "Easy to Use" vs "Hard to Misuse"

(To be fair: It is not theirs, Tolimar will be the godfather. But they do it with a perfection.) No Tags

(To be fair: It is not theirs, Tolimar will be the godfather. But they do it with a perfection.) Personal

I spent the night doing all these normal things in my dreams: washing dishes, coding, shopping, cleaning up my desk, etc.. The only thing that was common to all was that I sang Bohemian Rhapsody all along. In the morning, I was afraid I could have kept my flatmate awake, but he denied hearing anything. Regardless, I am declaring today Queen Day and I m already grooving. NP: Queen: A Night at the Opera

If you are interested in using version control for distro packaging, you

• might like http://vcs-pkg.org.
• might want to join #vcs-pkg on irc.oftc.net.
• should be signed up to our mailing list.

If you read the mailing list, you know about the upcoming Extremadura meeting 2-6 April 2008. If this is news to you, well, it isn t anymore. If you think you should be in Extremadura when this party takes place, don t hesitate and reply. The message ID is 20080311193428.GA25745@piper.oerlikon.madduck.net.

There are plenty of reasons why a company might provide a web form as the only means for customers to get in touch with their customer support department: for instance, the web form compels the customer to send along important information with the first request, therefore saving time (and money) for the customer service department. Even though I hate web forms, I sometimes do fill them in and usually get an answer back; it works. Every once in a while, however, I ll encounter a form designed by people without any form of understanding of the role of a customer for any business (it s the most important asset ). Such is the case when the form limits the message to a certain number of characters. Obviously, no customer service agent wants to read novel-length prose when fielding incoming requests, but a few hundred characters may also not be enough to get the point across. Star Alliance, for instance, expects you to get your point across in 300 characters. I find it hard to imagine that people write lengthy texts into web forms, unless they have more information to get across. I also see no technical reason for limiting the length of the text which can be submitted. The only logical explanation I have is that those companies give a flying food about customers and would much rather not have them contact the support department. NP: The Flower Kings: Back in the World of Adventures