This has to be some of the harshest trolling I've seen for a long time. If it's not a troll, then someone needs anger management sessions. NP: Central Reservation, Beth Orton

While analysing the pole setters in our internal bouncers-Hitlist i found that some of them run a mail2news-Gateway.

The problem is: our Mailinglists leave Mail-Headers mostly untouched, and so headers like X-Trace or X-Complaints-To are passed through without modifications.

If a mail containing those headers is handed over to inews (as in INN) it rejects it, and the bounce comes back to us:

<XXXXX@XXX.com>: Command died with status 1: "/usr/bin/maildrop". Command
output: inews: cannot send article to server: 441 Can't set system
"X-Complaints-To" header inews: article not posted

so people: fix your systems. if you do more with listmail than dropping it somewhere make sure that the bounces your system produces go to someone who can fix it. We (as in listmasters) normally simply unsubscribe those.

btw: we talk about 18181 bounces since 08.2004 in this case.

A new version of shadow packages (login, passwd, useradd and all other low-level user management utilities) hit unstable this week-end. That release is quite a major update as this is the first release where Nicolas Fran ois introduced numerous changes meant to make the versions of shadow used in various distros reconverge. So that version now really says "hey, Debian took shadow over". He thus incorporated lots of patches from Gentoo and Fedora as well as a few Debian ones (Debian packages were apparently closer to upstream code than others). He also added support for SHA256 and SHA512 encryption methods. Careful users will read /usr/share/doc/login/NEWS.gz to get an idea of these changes. After a small hiccup with 4.1.0-1 (The "Bleu d'Auvergne" release) which was hitting our German-speaking users (login is now providing a German version of su(1) which is also provided by manpages-de, therefore making the package uninstallable), 4.1.0-2 (the "Bleu des Causses" release) is there sitting in unstable waiting for testing. Nicolas is already working on 4.1.1, now focusing on code cleaning. That version should be out pretty soon. Also note that we'll soon be short of "Appellation d'Origine Contr l e" cheeses names for the releases and we more and more have to make our imagination work. General de Gaulle was wrong: there are not 50 million cheeses in France.

Some time ago I wrote a note about VSTi on Linux. Today I tried to run FL Studio with WINE and... it works almost ;) perfectly! I'm really impressed. Now almost all VSTi plugins works seamlessly and even external plugins can be used, i.e. my favourite Superwave P8 :) I think it might be an issue with registration of full version copy but at least there are some cracks working. It's good to see the real audio software run on Linux. WINE developers, you've done an amazing job. Thank you!

What a disaster!
HP and NVidia making laptops unusable
I've been considering a new laptop for weeks - mainly to get more RAM, more space but without adding to the actual size of the machine (or weight). I know, I should have taken more time over the selection, I should have found out more about the hardware, etc.etc.
I've ended up with an HP Pavilion dv6000 (dv6615ea) for the 2Gb RAM, 15inch screen, 250Gb hard drive to replace my ageing iBook 12inch with 128Mb RAM and 30Gb hard drive - all for barely an inch extra depth and very similar weight (and it was cheaper than the original price of the iBook). I thought I'd made a good choice. Yes, it was "NVidia Graphics" according to the sticker and yes, I could have spent more time (and money) finding a pre-installed lappy but I was hasty. (Much the same way as you should never go food shopping whilst hungry). I've managed with NVidia graphics before without using the horrid proprietary rubbish and I was prepared to put up with less-than-perfect graphics (I never use 3D anyway) because the free driver is at least stable with the graphics that I actually need.
What I wasn't expecting was that the dv6615ea has a lot more NVidia stuff than just the graphics card - including the network card! This really trashes a normal install because eth0 simply does not exist. OK, I can work around that for a while but there's more - the graphics don't work with standard Debian kernels and the standard Debian 'nv' driver. Ubuntu managed some graphics with the restricted NV support but only in VESA-safe-mode. Next stop was Mepis.
Don't buy a HP Pavilion dv6000 (dv6615ea)!
Just to see if the graphics would work at all, I tried it. Aha - the non-free changes to the Mepis kernel solved both problems so at least I now have a working ethernet card and a working graphics card. That at least allows me to finish the rest of the setup to find a better way of getting the graphics to work without the non-free kernel.
I'm not happy though - I'm annoyed with myself that I got suckered into a non-free-only lappy. I'm annoyed with NVidia for being stupid about Linux support. I'm annoyed that this new lappy is just going to end up MORE unstable than my existing one because of all the proprietary crap. (I'll still need some firmware for the bcm43xx wireless card - and it is that firmware that made my previously ultra-reliable iBook into a flaky, power hungry psycho-beast.)
Currently, I'm still migrating this horrid little piece of rubbish from Mepis to Ubuntu (Hardy from Breezy) then from Hardy to Debian unstable.
GNOME doesn't yet work because of the proprietary crap but the Mepis GNOME packages are also v.old so I'm hoping that a genuine Sid installation of GNOME can actually start up but I suspect that the Mepis patches are KDE-specific and I hate KDE.
I've just wasted 500 and that's why I'm really annoyed.
I've wasted a day and a half too, making things worse.
I'm probably going to have to leave this new lappy behind and take my existing iBook to Fosdem in a few weeks and that makes me even more annoyed. Even worse, this is an amd64 machine but I'm stuck with a 32bit installation because of the proprietary crap. I doubt I'll be able to trust any packages built on this laptop - or even be able to report bugs from this machine without first replicating the bug on a genuine Debian box. There is just SO much proprietary pollution in this piece of crap. I didn't think companies were still producing crap of this pitiful standard - HP: you stink.
I'm not a happy bunny. Not even slightly.

On a lighter note - it just goes to show how I've been isolated from all this stuff until now. My other machines are fine and have no need for any non-free stuff. Nice that I don't have to deal with this every day but such a shock to the system when I'm confronted with such horrors.

Russisprung, Hundschopf, Minsch-Kante, Canadian Corner, Kernen-S, Wasserstation, Hanneggschuss, Silberhornsprung, sterreicherloch, Ziel-S. If that rings a bell, you know what I'm talking about. Today was *the* ski downhill race of the season, namely Lauberhorn in Wengen, Switzerland. The longest (2'30") and fastest (sometimes up to 160km/h) downhill races of the season. Wengen's scenery is among my favourite ones, with the Eigerwand, M nch and Jungfraujoch dominating the entire race (the image of racers in the S curve before the Hundshopf jump, with Eiger, M nch and Jungfrau at the back is usually the image of the year when it comes at ski competitions. And, this year again, the sun was brilliantly shining over Wengen so we spent a great time watching this (on TV...going there to see it live is one of my dreams). And, for this non standard downhill race, we again had a non standard winner with Mr Bode Miller, winning it for the second time in a row. Next week is the Hahnenkamm downhill in Kitzb hel, the ski Mekkah of Austria, on the Streif. Also coming, the Schladming night slalom, Chamonix downhill, Val d'Is re downhill.....January is always busy for those who enjoy competition ski. (and, as I do not only watch sports on TV, I also ran my second longest distance today, with 19.5km in just 2 hours. Yay)

Those who keep track, will know that I started writing support for NBD in debian-installer last weekend. But that's not what this post is about. I've been setting up a laptop for my brother. He talked about "something about as fast as our parents' computer", which is a 600Mhz PIII. After looking a while on ebay, I found a Dell Latitude L400, a 12" 700Mhz PIII-based laptop, for a fairly low price, which seems to fit that description, so I placed a bid. Only to figure out later that I should've read the description a slight bit more, because this was an incomplete machine: no RAM, no power adapter, no battery, no hard disk, which was being sold "for parts". Darn. Got me some fitting RAM and a power adapter on replacedirect (which is a shop I can really recommend, BTW -- new batteries for almost all conceivable laptop models, including those that have been out of production for years), put the RAM in, connected the power adapter, and crossed my fingers. Luckily the machine appears to work; it's not that they took it apart because it had broken down, or some such. I also still have a 2" hard disk to put in the machine, but apparently Dell has this conversion thing that I need to put between the disk and the rest of the machine, and that's missing; I guess I'll have to be a bit creative there. So, for the time being, I configured the machine to enable PXE booting, and set something up on the network to boot from. Since the installer support to install to the network is not (yet ;-) finished, I needed to do some stuff manually, however. After making sure I could boot the machine (long live debootstrap), I set out to install additional packages. After downloading and installing a number of packages, however, the machine suddenly died. Unfortunately rebooting didn't fix anything; the machine would die somewhat halfway through the boot. Since it was quite, eh, "early" in the morning by then, I left it at that and went to bed. Today, I easily figured out what the problem was: network-manager expects to take the network down, and then to run some scripts... which obviously breaks just about everything. I guess that if I want to make partman-nbd work, I'll have to do some work there, too...

Here is something I wrote some while ago, hope this will be useful for some World of Warcraft p(l)ayers. Has no other relation to Linux or Debian, except it works on it flawlessly. Also note that 2.3.2 patch went live last week. It is not a secret anymore that mages of all talent specs will be getting a present when patch 2.3.2 hits the live realms - the Ice Block will be available from any friendly mage trainer for a nominal fee. Currently this spell requires a whopping 21 point investment into the Frost talent tree. With patch 2.3.2 Ice Block will become trainable to all mages, Ice Barrier will take it’s place in the talent tree and a new awesome talent - Icy Veins will take the place of the Ice Barrier, so that even frost mages have a new toy to gain in this 2.3.2 mage winterly fiesta. While there is a significant proportion of mages that are frost for PVP or grinding survival purposes, a large proportion of mage population have never used Ice Block or haven’t used it for a while. For that reason, the rest of this article (after the break) will explore all the great uses of Ice Block, that all of you can look forward when patch 2.3.2 hits the live realms (or sooner, if this article convinces you to re-spec frost :)). So, what does the Ice Block do? When you cast the Ice Block, it purges you from all debuffs and releases you from all snares, you get frozen solid into a large block of ice (same look as hunter’s ice trap) and for 10 seconds you are immune to all damage, but unable to do anything - no moving, casting anything, no bandages, nothing. Getting rid of: Ice Block is a buff, so you can get out of the Ice Block by right-clicking it off at any time. Another way for keyboard-addicted mages is to press Ice Block keybinding button again (after the global cooldown is done). Enemy shamans can purge it off you and priests can mass dispel your Ice Block in PVP. Cooldown: the Ice Block is on 5 minute cooldown, which can be ended early using the Cold Snap talent from the mage frost tree. To prevent mages casting two ice blocks back to back by using the Cold Snap, Blizzard added the Hypothermia debuff (in 2.1) that prevents you from casting the Ice Block 30 seconds after the last cast. The main use of Ice Block is to survive pulling aggro in groups. While we all know that “good mages don’t draw aggro”, experienced players can easily show situations when drawing aggro is not mages fault and surviving that can be the difference between a wipe and a win. When Ice Block is used, your threat is NOT reduced, so you need to stay inside the Ice Block at least until you are under 130% of the tanks threat. After you Ice Block, the mob will run to the next person on the threat list. If your tank is dead, Ice Block will send the mob to another DPS or healer giving you a couple seconds to nuke it when it will be running back to you again. I have seen a few bosses loose their last 2-3% of health running between mages with Ice Block and hunters with Feign Death after a unfortunate death of the main tank. Ice Block is a great way to get rid of almost all debuffs that exist in the game: warlock DoTs, stuns, snares, polymorph, mind control … Even boss debuffs go away in a snap - Garrote from Moroes, Demonic Chains from Illhoof and many more deadly debuffs are no threat to a mage with an Ice Block ready. Ice Block can be used as an alternative to Slow Fall if you’re out of Light Feathers. Just do not cast it too high in the air - if the 10 seconds tick by and you haven’t hit the land yet .. you could as well kiss 10% of your durability goodbye. When solo grinding there is noone to draw aggro from you, so the mobs will continue to beat on your personal icy sculpture, however during that time your Water Elemental or other battle pets could be dishing some damage, your cooldowns will tick down and also you will also regenerate some mana inside the Ice Block. The Ice Block could thus make the difference between your death and Frost Nova+Blink+Blizzard and their death. Have you had some fun experience with Ice Block? Leave a comment so that others could repeat it too!

At 9pm Thursday my heart went into overdrive. At the emergency room I was diagnosed with acute atrial fibrillation and was scheduled for electric cardioversion but the problem went away on its own (as it sometimes does) so I was discharged in late afternoon yesterday, after a 16 hours long hospitalisation with no food or drink (cardioversion requires anesthesia). A noninvasive echocardiogram detected no faults in my heart, and no reason for the attack was identified. I am told this is a good thing and means I have a very good prognosis (it is likely that the problem will never recur). I feel fine now. The hospital visit was educational. I learned stuff about hospital procedures and some things about the equipment they use there, and met various people. I’m glad I had to make the call (if you have to go to the ER, it’s best if it’s for something nontrivial so they don’t feel you’re wasting their time but still something relatively dangerless). A bit more detailed report in Finnish is available.

Bits from the Debian i18n meeting (Extremadura 2007)

From December 12th to December 15th, Junta de Extremadura hosted another one of the Debian Meetings; five i18n guys shared ideas, food, buses and fun with the Debian KDE maintainers. We would like to thank Extremadura for hosting us during the Hispalinux Meeting 2007, the event was held at Universad de Derecho (Law University) in Caceres, Spain.

These are the minutes, results and notes from our work, it is a brief description but hopefully complete of what we have done and what is still missing/pending.

Thanks to Cesar (cek) we had the chance to work on churro (i18n.debian.net) locally; the server is still running a 2.4 kernel because of some "tick" problems with 2.6 series, the last one tried was 2.6.21 and we should try newer ones, in order to support upgrades and not get stuck with 2.4, we hope Cesar will find time to test new Debian kernels.

First, let me introduce everybody to the services, robots and resources being hosted by i18n.d.n:

• MoinMoin wiki for local and simple reference documentation, it contains all the links to the below resources. (http://i18n.debian.net/wiki/)
• Pootle experimental server
• dl10n scripts, aka dl10n robots (codename Lion), these scripts are responsible for the status of pseudo URLs used by some translation teams, by the Project Smith and by the NMU Priority List for i18n NMU Campaign
• Synchronization of the i18n material used by the Debian website to generate translation statistics about PO and PO-debconf
• Generation of Compendium PO files per-language
• Different types of statistics
• Other non user-visible services like a full source mirror for stable, testing, unstable and experimental, used by the scripts and robots.
• DDTP, Debian Descriptions Translation Project
• DDTSS, The Debian Distributed Translation Server Satellite, a web front-end for DDTP, now integrated to DDTP to use the Database back-end instead of the e-mail interface.

And, at some point, we found important to state clear the acronyms and names used in related DDTP projects/tools:

• DDTS, Debian Description Translation Server, this is the main "back-end" used in DDTP, it tends to be the interface between translator tools (present and future ones) and the database;
• ddt.cgi is a CGI interface that is able to provide info for specific packages or translations, including diffs, related packages and active/inactive descriptions.
• DDTC which is the old (and still functional) command line client for DDTP.

We took the chance to organize a few things on churro, old accounts were cleaned out and removed, we moved from /org to /srv and got more GBs of space to the "playground". Old files were also removed and some are schedule to deletion on early 2008. With the reallocation of /org we also find some more space to /home and /var, we reorganize some of the links on the web space (specially to remove services from people's accounts), and we changed the mirror script to also synchronize the Packages and Contents files.

Grisu and Martijn worked mainly on DDTP and DDTSS integration. DDTSS now provides statistics for stable, testing and unstable, we are also working with Debian Med to provide support and infrastructure to a specific audience, like packages related to Medicine. The conversion to talk directly with DDTP/DDTS database also provided:

• Fetching new translations is almost instantaneous and marks translation as requested (avoiding duplicated works via the e-mail interface).
• After sufficient reviews occurred, the upload is instant
• Committed DDTS / DDTSS / DDTP website generation into SVN
  • Added READMEs for the above directories

DDTSS now announces the user using authentication because of its integration with the Database backend used by DDTP. Quick trivia: DDTP is now a compound of 25 languages occupying 18 GBytes.

A few days before the meeting we had the offer to use "AUTOBYHAND" to upload a package with the Translation-* files. The package is now called 'ddtp-translations' and we worked during the meeting to create scripts to build the package and to test it on the archive side. This approach allow Debian i18n Team to upload new translations and remove old ones (or inactive ones) without bother FTP Master Team. Special thanks to Anthony Town, he has been working with us to prove tips, fixes and info on how to produce the package and the scripts. The code is available in the debian-l10n SVN under pkg-ddtp-translations:
http://svn.debian.org/viewsvn/debian-l10n/pkg-ddtp-translations

In our case, "BYHAND" processing consists of a simple tarball of the main,contrib,non-free /i18n/Translation-*, we decide to work on a set of scripts to make it easier to create new packages (ddtp-translations) in a consistent way and keeping debian/changelog up-to-date. We also made some suggestions to the script what will run on the archive side to check the tarball structure, base on the examples of debian-maintainers and debtags (tags-override).

One of our initial targets for the meeting with regards to Pootle and Debian was to try big PO files per language, fortunately, Nicolas and Friedel were able to increase Pootle performance enough to get a few languages from DDTP loaded in Pootle. Using the upstream Pootle-diet branch, which uses a database back-end for the generation of statistics, the time to browse the DDTP POs of a language (~20.000 files) went down to a dozen of seconds.

Speaking about Pootle, Friedel gave us a good picture of what is coming next in terms of Pootle's development. There are improvements planned in the areas of permissions and rights delegation, as well as file management (for projects and templates). Improved management of terminology projects is also planned.

Improvements in the QA capabilities of the translate toolkit and Pootle are planned to help with the "false positives" of the pofilter checks. Better reuse of existing translations will become possible by using better translation memory techniques. There is also work planned on formats and converters involving, for example, XLIFF, TMX, TRADOS and WordFast.

Another pending task for quite a while was the CVS migration to SVN, it is now done, with a new layout. Commits to the CVS were disabled and every single script or resource depending on CVS should be changed to use SVN. For now, we are publishing (via HTTP) the status files generated by the pseudo-urls robots until we can fix the scripts to re-enable the commit of the files. You can find them here: http://i18n.debian.net/debian-l10n/status/

We are pretty happy with the changes and results of the work during those days, but we still have some items pending on our TODO list:

• More advertisement and usage information about PO Compendiums
  There are two use cases are identified:
  
  • Filling new PO files.
  • QA work to find inconsistent translations.
  Maybe Eddy would love to do that? :-)
• Extend the duration of the statistics history. (Nekral)
• Debian packages of the services running on churro
  • DDTP (Grisu)
  • DDTSS (Martijn)
  • dl10n (Nekral)
• DDTP: add some scripts to handle packages with version in the description (e.g. kernel and kernel modules) (Martijn)
• DDTP: Standard generation of the translation tarballs (faw)
• DDTP: document the bracketed stats on the main page (faw)
• DDTC: should be updated to match the current features. Documentation to ease integration with procmail. (Nekral - low priority)
• Implement mail service for translation teams with their own robots (e.g. Dutch) (faw)
• Collect data from http://www.debian.org/devel/website/stats/ (Nekral)
• http://www.debian.org/intl/l10n/po/,
  http://www.debian.org/intl/l10n/po-debconf/
  are built based on the churro material. It would make more sense to build these statistics on churro (Nekral)
  • We could "fork" the page and add some fancy new features on these pages (Nekral)
  • Add information from the coordination page to indicate that a translation is ongoing. (Nekral)
• Pootle: missing review indication. Hard with PO back-end. (Friedel)

There are a couple more reports to be sent but they are more focused on i18n specific questions, tools and plans for 2008. So, probably those will be sent only to debian-i18n mail list. If you are interested, please, stay tuned. :-)

Posted on d-d-a: http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2008/01/msg00002.html
And a big thanks to Nicolas François (aka nekral), he helped me a lot making notes, preparing the text and reviewing it; and was patient enough to wait for the report while I was solving some personal problems.

Sweden	UK
Victory for topless bathers Court gives thumbs up to anal massage technique Postcard arrives 25 years late Swedish prostitution: gone or just hidden? Ninety pythons left to die in Swedish cottage	Parted-at-birth twins 'married' Pound at record low against euro Vomiting bug 'hits three million' Mr Potato Head makes octopus pal Ngugi laments Kenya violence

One of the things I noticed when I was fiddling around with daedalus the other week, was that when I had everything stopped, linux.org.au seemed to stop resolving (and therefore semi-important things like ftp.au.debian.org, which is a CNAME to mirror.linux.org.au This made me very sad, because I'm always harping on about BCP 16 when I see other sites go down because all of their name servers are on the same subnet. Now that wasn't the reason for this particular "outage", though. It seems that because one of the name servers is russell.linux.org.au, and there's no glue record for this host on any of the .org.au name servers, I don't think russell is seeing any DNS traffic at all (perhaps only from resolvers that somehow already happened to have a cached entry for it obtained through other means than an NS query for linux.org.au) So before I go doing any further disruptive maintenance on daedalus I guess I'll be needing to get a glue record for russell.linux.org.au. I'm surprised that searching Enetica's knowledge-base for "glue" didn't raise a mention of it. I would have almost thought that they could detect the need for a glue record when you're adjusting a domain's delegation, so I wonder if it's a failure of their domain management system, or a complete oversight. Maybe people just don't go sticking their name servers in the domain they're hosting any more.

New version of simple todo manager called Ukolovnik has been just released. Version 0.8 comes with following changes:

• Fixed double SQL escaping in some cases.
• New Swedish translation.

It s been a long time since I ve written about our local unconferences, but a neat one coming up is DemoCamp CUSEC 2. It s attached to the Canadian Undergraduate Software Engineering Conference, which is being held in Montr al again. Last year, I did a demonstration on how to cook an omelette, with it being a metaphor for software engineering. This year, I m going to do something more prosaic and run a round of Powerpoint karaoke, under the guise of getting people to practise their presentation skills. Or it will be a convincing argument against its use. Show up if you can! Present something you ve been working on! (There are still some slots left.) It ll be exciting. DemoCamp CUSEC 2
Thursday, 17 January 2008
19:00 21:00
Centre Mont-Royal
2200 rue Mansfield
Free admission ( Sign up Google Maps )

Last weekend was as hectic as my life has been lately: I have been trying to restore sanity into my NSLU2, I went to a lecture from Andrew S. Tanenbaum and I made a 2.5 hours drive to my parents in about 4 hours because of the fog.

First, my slug:

• refuses to recognise the USB NIC I have been using until the latest incidents (it either says 'not accepting address, error -71' or 'device descriptor read/64, error -71')
• sometimes reboots when I insert the USB NIC
• either doesn't boot at all or boots really slowly when the USB NIC is inserted
• (obviously) doesn't show the NIC in lsusb listing when is not recognised

Since the USB NIC works on my laptop, I suspect a hardware problem with the slug. Bummer!

Dear no-so-lazyweb, is there a way to install Debian on an ASUS WL-500G Premium router without loosing wireless ability? Or, is there a way to make use of my USB NIC with the ASUS router?

---

Second, Andrew S. Tanenbaum visited Romania and lectured Friday at the University Politehnica Bucharest.

He presented Minix3's architecture and the advantages it has over monolithic OSes. I attended the lecture (although I am not a student anymore) and found it quite nice and well prepared, but I had the feeling that sometimes he was trying to avoid or to bash topics that were not putting Minix into a good light or challenged its title of being the first open[0] OS based on a micro-kernel architecture[1]. In spite of that, I found him to be a really good speaker and I liked the overall presentation, although, I also expected some on the spot demos or at least some recordings.

The things that I remember:

• 2.4 millions subtle code alterations in drivers with only 80000 driver crashes (of course, no kernel crashes)
• simulation of network driver repeated crashes at different time intervals and how it affects performance - a 30% degradation at crashes that occur once every second and an insignificant degradation at crashes occurring at each 10 seconds
• every driver has a set of rights assigned to it; it was difficult for them to define this - this sounds a lot like SELinux issues
  
• messages have a fixed length
• there is no dynamic memory allocation within the kernel
• the kernel is 5000 lines of code (all drivers are in user space)
• really secure system
• there were performance comparisons with Minix2 and the hit was about 20%; still, is said that L4 has only an approximate 2-5% performance hit because of the micro-kernel architecture
  
• apparently the FreeBSD kernel has only 3 bugs /1000 lines of code
• Minix uses a BSD license
  

I also got a Minix live CD (which is more like the Gentoo Linux install CD - just console in the live system) and made an installation of Minix in a qemu machine[2]. Unfortunately, I don't think I'll have the time to dwell into the source.

I was thinking, would it worth the effort to try to make a GNU/Hurd/Minix system (i.e. replace Mach with Minix's micro-kernel)? BTW, is Debian GNU/Hurd now based on L4 or does it still uses Mach?


Note: Some of my work colleagues suggested that the presentation was the same as one he made at linux.conf.au last year, but I can't confirm/infirm that since I didn't saw the recording.

---

I won't write about the "fog drive", but I'll just say it wasn't pleasant at all, and I felt I was in driving in The Twilight Zone for the whole Friday evening.

---

[0] he gave credit to QNX
[1] For instance, I tried to ask him twice if he felt that GNU Hurd was violating the micro-kernel paradigm or if he can compare it to Minix' architecture. I had the impression that both times he avoided to answer and started the usual Hurd bashing, "they have been developing it for 20+ years, but got nothing working", meanwhile "Minix is here". After the lecture/presentation somebody told me that AST shortly said that they "were similar, but different". I didn't catch that line.
[2] thanks to qemu-launcher it is trivial to create and manage multiple qemu virtual machines

Yesterday I got my laptop back. It was in service since the 6th of December.

They replaced the battery, and although it looked like the built-in charge indicator was defect, actually the button on this battery is buried deeper than it was on the previous one and I have to press really hard on it to trigger it.

According to the tests made yesterday night, this battery holds for about 2.5-3 hours when playing music. Also it has 96% of its designed capacity. I guess is OK enough since I don't want to be spared from my laptop anymore.

Next on the agenda:

• restore data sanity (I did clean up most of the data from the HDD before handing down the laptop for the case when I was forced to hand it over; lucky for me, I managed to keep the HDD)
• install armel Debian on my new[1] NSLU2, Kinder (more news on that later ;-) )
• fix my local network chaos triggered by the problems that hit Ritter (my older NSLU2)
  
• finish the wiki theme
• work a little more on svn-buildpackage and kill more of its bugs
• walk through my (game) packages' bugs and try to fix them, answer, etc.
• try to make bluetooth transfers to work from and to my laptop

BTW, I still hold to my opinion that Dell and Emag suck, although I might buy desktops from Dell, laptops are a no-no until they fix their broken batteries and their broken "1-year warranty for batteries" policy.

[1] I bought a new NSLU2 after I left my laptop in service and it has been waiting since then to run the Debian Arm EABI (armel) port

debian/control field stats moved i.e.: crappy hardware and the virtual hosting panacea sockmel.bononia.it is a machine hosted in a galaxy far far away from me (Rome, about 400 km from Bologna). It is also a machine whose hardware is getting worst each passing day. Hence, it is an unreliable machine. That's why I've just moved the Homepage and Vcs-XXX field statistics to upsilon.cc, which at least is a virtual hosting where other people is dealing for me with crappy hardware. It's also a personal domain of mine, which will stay with me even if I will change again location. Here are the new stat URLs:

• Homepage meta-information in Debian packages
• VCS information in Debian packages and svnbuildstat

The links to them I was aware of have already been fixed, let me know if you are aware of others. Uff ...

Since September 19th I have been mostly offline and unreachable. This was due to having started a new job in a wonderful new project: soitu.es, an online newspaper with a strong focus on Citizen Journalism: citizens playing an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, analyzing and disseminating news and information, I must mention the master mind behind this all: Gumersindo Lafuente, one very well known journalist in Spain. On the other hand, working with Ra l Rivero, not the Cuban poet but the technical soul of the project, is something I would pay for, and I get actually paid to learn from him! Too bad he doesn t digg Debian :)



The site was finally launched during Xmas, and we are all less busy, so despite having what I call the weekend flu (that only affects me during the weekends, but I never feel so bad that I need to miss work during the week), I am back to normal, If you thought I was quite MIA, keep in mind I was not one of busiest ones at work! Launching such a project takes a toll on everyone, though. I set up a Flick set for my new workplace: Amayita s Soitu.es Flickr photo Set, in case you are curious. There is also an official Soitu.es Flickr Photo Pool.

Today is a holiday in Spain, due to D a de Reyes, when kids usually get their Xmas presents here. As I am fully recovered from this weekend s flu (today is Monday after all), I had some spare time and my cats got a nice present too: A DIY scratching post. There is a WTF column in the effing middle of my kitchen, so after some cardboard, a wall stapler, sisal rope and a bit of round and round the column... This pic shows the result:



I couldn t resist filming a video, available on YouTube: This scratching post is now mine! - No! Mine! - I ll get you!

The Frontal Cortex provides an astute explanation as to why he shies away from political blogging in this election season:

My hypothesis is that political judgments are like moral judgments. When you see a candidate, you experience a visceral, instinctive, inexplicable response. Your brain generates an emotion - Obama is uplifting, Hillary is commanding, McCain is honorable, etc. - and then the rest of your brain goes about explaining your emotion. The inner interpreter gathers together bits of evidence, post hoc justifications, and pithy rhetoric in order to make our automatic reaction seem reasonable. But this reasonableness is just a fa ade, an elaborate self-delusion.

Personally, I haven’t done much (any?) such blogging lately for lack of time, but I also generally agree with his conclusions. “A man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.” Technorati Tags: Politics, Elections, Neuroscience

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