Yes, I was away... long and sad story involving health issues. :-( I'm trying to get back, hopefully everything will be fine. Let me publicly apologize to some people that was expecting some work from me and I postponed it, not because of slackness but because I was unable to do it. I'm catching up with a lot of tasks and trying to solve long standing issues, feel free to ping me to get some update on a specific matter. I am really sorry!

Do you know about the poll to choose a slogan for the release of Debian 5.0, also known as "lenny"?

No!? Shame on you! :-)

People behind Debian Art started a discussion to get opinions! After some input they prepared a poll, maybe they should try to use a doodle. Right now, The Universal Operating System is quite popular, but a lot of people did some nice suggestions, and some of them would like to see a slogan some way related to the Toy Story (tm) character Lenny:



The discussion is distributed across three lists: Debian Desktop, Debian Publicity and Debian Curiosa, I would also point to the comments made by Gustavo Noronha da Silva (here) and Andre Felipe Machado (here).

If you didn't say anything so far, please do!

apt-get source acon

int main(int argc,char **argv)
 
        int i,tty,useunicode=0;
        char *fontf=0,*translationf=0,*keymapf=0;
        get_ids();
        set_user_id();
        /*Read configure file if no input options*/
        if(argc<2)
         
                char *env;
                FILE *fp;
                char font[300],translation[300],keymap[300];
                char tmp[300];
                font[0]=translation[0]=keymap[0]=0;
                if((env=getenv("HOME")))
                        sprintf(tmp,"%s/.acon.conf",env);
                else
                        strcpy(tmp,"/etc/acon.conf");

skx@gold:~$ ls -l /usr/bin/acon
-rwsr-xr-x 1 root root 48672 2008-06-09 10:50 /usr/bin/acon

• [1] http://blog.ted.com/2008/10/will_video_game.php


• [2] http://wirelesswatch.jp/2005/11/09/virtual-girlfriend-for-your-mobile/


• [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wii

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• If you are running stable (aka Etch), you could consider upgrading to Lenny and see, if everything works fine. Currently there are no detailed release notes documenting the procedure, so you best way to test upgrades are to:
  1. Make backups
  2. Change your /etc/apt/sources.list
  3. Run aptitude update to get information about new packages
  4. Run aptitude install dpkg aptitude apt script to install the newest package management
  5. Run script aptitude full-upgrade
  6. Exit the environment of the script command, by typing exit
  If something goes wrong / something unexpected happens, please report it. If you already know a specific package, report a bug against that package. If you don't know, please report a bug describing the problem you experienced to the upgrade-reports package. If your problem is something, which can't be fixed properly, but should be documented (e.g. hardware support regressions, packages no longer available) please report a bug against the release-notes package (Bonus points if you not only report the bug, but also supply a paragraph to be added to the release notes).
  The command script will log the entire output of the command in the file typescript. Should something go wrong during the upgrade, please send this file along with your bug report.
  Update: If you upgraded succesfully, you should report that, too. There's a template for upgrade reports, which you can use.
• Speaking of the release notes: You can take a look at the bugs reported against the release notes and see if you can help there, e.g. by writing a paragraph describing a problem.
• Install the package devscripts (you'll need the version provided by backports.org, and run the script rc-alert --include-dists TU --include-dist-op and. You'll get a list of release critical bugs open for one of the packages you have installed. Guessing that you have them installed, because you are using them and are interested in them, you should have a very high interest to get these bugs fixed :)
  You can try to help, by trying to reproduce them and reporting that to the bug report. There are even some easy bugs, where the maintainer hasn't found the time to fix it, yet. Bug 497290 for example didn't need deep technical skills. It just needed someone with some time to collect the needed data for the copyright file.
• If you speak a language other than English, you might consider joining the translation efforts. While it is to late to translate the debian-installer or the installation guide to a new language for Lenny (perhaps for the next release then?), you could start translating the release notes to a not yet supported language. If you are willing to do so (which can be quite time consuming, especially in the final phase), please contact either your localization team or the debian doc mailing list if there's no local mailing list.

• New packages won't reach Lenny anyway.
• Upload new packages to Sid makes it harder to get a fix into Lenny should a new bug be found.
• Uploading a new package makes it harder for other packages depending on your package to be migrated to Lenny.
• You are wasting the buildd's time.

• [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baseboard_management_controller


• [2] http://www.pantz.org/hardware/ipmi/ipmiconflictwithrpc.html

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1. There are some builtin commands that also have binary equivalents (like time, printf, echo). Its quiet easy to tell weither the one or the other is used, by using the which command, but thats not really a realistic workflow, so its better to know this. The difference between these commands is often causing problems, which we have to cope with. For example bashs builtin echo behaves different as /bin/echo and people who use the bash as their default shell tend to use what bash provides, which in turn causes problems if other people who use a different default shell try to work with these scripts. But this is another problem, because...
   
2. ... every program, utility and function in Debian has to provide a manpage, as said by our policy: "Each program, utility, and function should have an associated manual page included in the same package." I guess that the rationale behind that is that 'man' is a very common tool in the Un*x world, which is wide-spread and which usage is much recommended to find out how specific tools behave. It is always referred to in Documentation, weither it is Debian specific or not, e.g. in books.
   
   The time package, which is of priority Standard and which includes /usr/bin/time, does conform to that policy by providing a manpage for the time command. The various shells don't do that, because they usually don't have a man page for each and every command (usually they have a more generic manpage which includes the builtins or in some seldom cases a special manpage for such and similar things (as for zsh, which has zshmisc(1)) and because its not that easy, because the man command cannot (AFAIK) distinguish between the user joey_average calling 'man time' in a bash, while the user schoenfeld calls the command 'man time' in a zsh, or if joey_foobar calls 'man read' in a shell which does not have a builtin time command and uses /usr/bin/time instead.
   

We got an interesting experiment this weekend as Bill Maher’s anti-religious screed Religulous and David Zucker’s right-wing satire An American Carol both opened. The two films were about tied in terms of total revenue but Carol was on three times as many screens, so basically Religulous was far more successful. I think this mostly reflects something I wrote about a couple of years ago — the moviegoing audience is very demographically similar to the Democratic Party voting audience. It’s disproportionately young, disproportionately childless, and tilted toward residents of big cities and away from residents of rural communities. Conversely, the audience for television news is demographically very conservative (older, white, and a bit more prosperous than average) which is one major reason TV news coverage tilts right. The big screen audience for what looks like a witless screed against God is just a lot bigger than the big screen audience for what looks like a witless screed against Michael Moore.

• Using a password that's related to your person or someone near you, or is based on a dictionary: rather likely. There are scripts out there that will guess these passwords. Don't use them.
• Using a printout of a list of one-time passwords: somewhat less likely (they can't be guessed by script), but still not very hard (wallets get stolen by the hundreds every day, and it usually takes a while before one notices)
• Using smartcards with keys generated by someone else: somewhat unlikely (there may be a few people who know my private key, but one can't be sure of that; and, color me naive, but I tend to trust the government to abide by its own laws—for the most part—laws that prevent this kind of behavior)
• Using strong password: rather unlikely, provided you take care of them.

• [1] http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/


• [2] http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/entry.jspa?externalID=368


• [3] http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/entry.jspa?externalID=351


• [4] http://www.coker.com.au/ec2/

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