As some might know, I've been working at the university for a few weeks now. I'm very happy how it all worked out, because of the people there and the subjects to work on. It's just great to think through some mind-bending index structure to improve reverse-k-nearest-neighbor queries. And the professor (who is very well known for his work on R*-Trees, the X-Tree, and the DBSCAN and OPTICS algorithms) really manages to aggregate excellent people.(rkNN is the problem of finding those points for which a Nearest Neighbor Search [Wikipedia] would return the given point. There are many use cases for example in location based services.)A lot of my work involves a framework which has been published recently on the SSDBM 2008 conference: ELKI - Environment for DeveLoping KDD-Applications Supported by Index-StructuresThe goal of ELKI is to become what WEKA is for machine learning. And it's well on it's way for that.ELKI aims at the data mining researcher, it's not designed to squeeze out the last bit of performance. Instead it allows you to compare different algorithms, try different index structures (including various spatial and metrical trees) and offers all kinds of functionality you can reuse. If you are planning to do some real world applications, it likely is still useful for prototyping.In the last weeks I've already put quite some effort in ELKI, so expect the next version to be released with significant changes and new functionality. In fact some working functionality was just left out of the release because we hadn't cleaned up the code yet.Currently, getting started with ELKI can be a bit tricky. It's not hard to use, but you just need to find out where to start. The next release will therefore include a "dummy algorithm" that mostly serves as being a template for implementing custom algorithms (it can also be used for benchmarking an index structure, though).

AVSForum user DigaDo describes a high-tech new antenna technology for digital television. This advanced device, however, is not recommended for use outdoors or in damp environments.

Today, I wanted to finish something what looked like easy task from beginning. To bing IPv6 connectivity to my home using tunnel from Sixxs. As I have an OpenWRT, I expected it should not be harder than setting up same thing on my Debian notebook. There exists several howtos on the net, we can take the one on Sixxs wiki as a good starting point. Just follow the instructions and you should get it working right? Unfortunately not. Aiccu connects, IPv6 addresses are assigned, subnet is correctly distributed over network using radvd, but IPv6 connectivity does not work. Going deeper into this issue, I found out that some packets go out, but nothing comes back. When comparing results with Aiccu set up on my Debian notebook, I noticed that packets from OpenWRT router are few bytes larger, but I didn't though it could be a reason. Unfortunately it was -- OpenWRT contains wrongly compiled Aiccu, which does not strip ethernet headers from outgoing packets and gateway then throws them out. This is a well known bug, but unfortunately nobody fixed it for White Russian. Anyway I'm not going to reinstall whole system to Kamikaze just to make the thing work, so I compiled the Aiccu package on my own and now the tunnel works fine. If you are interested, you can get the package here.

I have released second beta of Adept a few hours ago. For the unaware, Adept is an APT front-end for KDE: it lets you install, remove, upgrade software and such your Debian and Kubuntu boxes (and maybe on some other Debian derivatives, too). Changes since Alpha 6 Now, alpha 6 has been the last alpha release, therefore there are no more new features in beta 2. Most of the issues should have been resolved. I have also added a menubar, resolving a potential usability problem (and making the about box accessible, too!). There will be another beta that should fix the few remaining known issues. Please report any issues you have encountered to me (either mail, irc or bugs.kde.org). Where to get I have prepared binary packages. These should be now part of Debian Sid (unstable) and also of Kubuntu Intrepid. You should be able to get the new version from your distribution:

apt-get install adept

There is no Hardy backport, since my time is tight. If anyone is willing to do a backport (you can use the stuff that is in my PPA; however, some things need updating), please drop me a note: I will gladly publish installation instructions. Heroes of Beta 2 There has been a (silent) beta 1 a while back, which introduced a couple of regressions against alpha 6 (but fixed bugs, too!).

• Jonathan Thomas (JontheEchidna) for catching the updater regression
• Harald Sitter (apachelogger):
  • for providing new .desktop files
  • for catching the non-root mode regression

Jobs for Beta 2 Sorting through Launchpad for bugs that have been fixed is still needed, as far as I know. JontheEchidna has been working on this (and maybe some others have? Drop me a note if you worked on this and claim your fair share of fame… Sorry that I don’t keep track of that, but you know the story… too much stuff to do in too little time, all the time.) Notifier is not included. Kubuntu has an independent sort of notifier now, I believe. Maybe I’ll find time to reconcile it in 3.1 or so.

I told you I was re-reading Paul Graham s Hackers and Painters essay in order to update one of my lectures. I feel I like Ruby for I too have the same coding style as Paul s:

I found that I liked to program sitting in front of a computer, not a piece of paper. Worse still, instead of patiently writing out a complete program and assuring myself it was correct, I tended to just spew out code that was hopelessly broken, and gradually beat it into shape. Debugging, I was taught, was a kind of final pass where you caught typos and oversights. The way I worked, it seemed like programming consisted of debugging.

Ruby sort of frees me of figuring out everything beforehand. Of course, Ruby is not the only language with that in it It s just the one I like the most Anyway This is not a language-versus-language rant Rather this is about another article I just read by Carol S. Dweck The article focus on teaching kids that challenges can be taken as opportunities to improve. Failure at a challenge, in this sense, has less to do with intelligence than with effort. And I just mentioned Paul s essay because I think what Carol is really talking about is that hacking can be taught ... or rather that we should teach kids to be hackers. Here I mean hacker in the broad sense of the word, as in Paul s essay, or in the Jargon File.

7. One who enjoys the intellectual challenge of creatively overcoming or circumventing limitations.

Maybe if knowledge researchers, teachers and psychologists embrace and extend what we already understand as hacking, and begin applying it at schools, we can all improve as a society. Who knows Hacker-society might very well be our future society! ;-) What do you think about it?

For the last few days I’ve been in the city Badajoz in region Extremadura of Spain at the FAI developer meeting. Check out the Linex Euronews Video at youtube to get a short impression of Linux in the region. Lessions learnt:

• debcommit is great, it generates a commit message based on new text in debian/changelog (thanks for the pointer, Holger)
• rc-alert lists installed packages which have release-critical bugs, nice (again part of devscripts, I should take a whole day to take a closer look at all the nifty stuff in devscripts; thanks again, Holger)
• use caff (Debian package signing-party) for keysigning (thanks tokkee for the reminder, I always forget the name of it)
• collectd (statistics collection and monitoring daemon) seems to rock (thanks again, tokkee)
• chdk is a firmware add-on for Canon’s Digic II & Digic III cameras and really rocks (thanks for the pointer Thomas, allbest-a700-100b-50.zip works fine for my Canon Powershot A700)
• ganglia (cluster system monitoring daemon) looks nice as well (thanks Thomas)
• workrave (Repetitive Strain Injury prevention tool) seems to be perfect for me (thanks again, Thomas)

<insider>

</insider>

A few speakers at DebConf8 used gobby during their talks to collate ideas without breaking the flow of the session.
I've just come back from the Emdebian meeting in Extremadura (of which more later) where we also used Gobby - FAI used it too. Once the network setup was working, it was simply a case of clicking Create Session in gobby on my laptop and everyone else clicking Join Session, entering the IP of my laptop (only accessible locally) and choosing a colour.
Gobby is real-time, currently plain-text only but clearly indicates how sections have been edited and has an integrated IRC box for each session. At the end of the meeting, every gobby user has a copy of every document they opened in every session they joined. updated to the moment they quit the session.
Based on using gobby in events like this, I'd strongly recommend that someone at each worksession-type meeting starts a gobby session and maintains that session for the duration of the meeting.
Gobby even does syntax highlighting - depending on how many people join and the colours they choose, this might become difficult so it can be turned off too.
There are only a few minor issues:

1. The colour bar warning box isn't particularly intuitive - you need to click on what looks like a dimmed progress bar to select a unique colour for yourself.


2. I initially thought that Gobby had no authentication - in a local meeting, anyone who can connect to the specified IP address is able to edit the document. Since then, I've noticed it does support password authentication and there is mention of fully encrypted connections so it may be possible to use it over public networks.


3. According to Wikipedia, there is a gobby server that allows non-GNU/Linux clients to run gobby and join any gobby session - I didn't explore this and the Debian package doesn't mention anything about a server option or mixed-OS support.
   
   • Update - the server is called Sobby and is in Debian.
   
   


4. The right hand side of the window is a bit wasted - maybe some kind of sidebar would be handy, especially docking the userlist into the window so that edits can be identified more quickly.

Not being from Oakland, Meth has a relatively small impact on my life. Until I get a cold, at which point I get to curse the lack of effective drugs. What's surprising is how phenylephrine does have a noticable effect. What's even more surprising is that it has this effect about thirty seconds after I've swallowed the capsules, indicating fairly strongly that it hasn't actually hit my bloodstream in any sensible way at that point (though I've had astonishing difficulty in finding figures on how long the plastic capsules take to dissolve in the stomach). So, even though I know it's got no measurable effect beyond that of a placebo, the placebo effect still works. Damn you, psychology.

It’s silly season again in America: a Presidential election year. If you don’t know that, you must really be living under a rock. As I did four years ago, I’ll post my thoughts about how I vote online for all the elections I can participate in: national, Congressional, Indiana-wide, and local. That way, you can do more than curse the ignorant Americans for their choices; you can possibly influence at least one. Local races look to be more boring than usual this year, because neither of Indiana’s Senators is running this year. Fishers trends strongly Republican, too, which makes a lot of the other local races uncompetitive. But that’s not why I said the Republicans win. I figured I’d be able to watch the speeches from the conventions at my own convenience online, so just now I tried both sites. Here’s what the Democratic convention site told me:

We re sorry, but the Democratic Convention video web site isn t compatible with your operating system and/or browser. Please try again on a computer with the following:

Compatible operating systems:
Windows XP SP2, Windows Vista, or a Mac with Tiger (OS 10.4) or Leopard (OS 10.5).
Compatible browsers:
Internet Explorer (version 6 or later), Firefox (version 2), or, if you are on a Mac, Safari (version 3.1) also works.

That’s because the Democrats chose Microsoft as their official technology provider, and Microsoft chose to deliver all video using their Silverlight technology, which doesn’t work on Linux (yet). And what are the Republicans using? Good ol’ YouTube. Yes, I’ll probably be able to find the important Democrat speeches on YouTube. But how easy will that be? And how many of the obscure Democrat speeches will I be drawn into watching just out of curiosity? I’ve already listened to portions of Fred Thompson’s and Joe Lieberman’s speeches–because it was so easy. Advantage: Republicans.

Since some time ago I was pointed out by somebody that my feed's urls provided by planet.d.o were giving 404's.
Today I was again notified about that issue and finally decided to investigate what was going one.

---

This time it was Lisandro P rez Meyer (those who attended DC8 might remember him) who notified me, so first thing I asked was the link he was using to open my blog post, and to my surprise it was:
http://my.op era.com/atomo64/blog/2537614

Which of course throws a 404 as it is not a valid link. Next question was where he was obtaining that link from, and it was then when I found the culprint: Google Reader

A quick execution of curl and grep demonstrates how dumb Google Reader is:

$ curl -s http://my.opera.com/atomo64/xml/atom/blog/ grep 'http://my.opera.com/atomo64/blog/2537614'
<id>http://my.opera.com/atomo64/blog/2537614</id>

Anyone familiar with the Atom 1.0 specs will quickly notice how wrong Google Reader is by assuming that the id is an URL. The specs (text html) state:

The "atom:id" element conveys a permanent, universally unique identifier for an entry or feed.
...
Its content MUST be an IRI, as defined by [RFC3987]. Note that the definition of "IRI" excludes relative references. Though the IRI might use a dereferencable scheme, Atom Processors MUST NOT assume it can be dereferenced.

Note that it refers to just an identifier (an IRI, actually), not to a URL.

It leaves me one question: why does it do that?!
I mean, the specs define the atom:link element as a "a reference from an entry or feed to a Web resource", what makes Google Reader believe that an identifier is better than a reference to a Web resource? :rolleyes:

There is a very interesting email that's been getting attention, written by a resident of Wasilla, AK, Sarah Palin's hometown. It covers the good and the bad about her, and is the first thing I've seen that gives real insight into her governing style. Among other things, it mentioned that she inherited a city with no debt and left it with over $22 million of debt. The Alaska budget has been growing at 10% a year since she took over, not shrinking. Palin also fired a lot of experienced city staff when she took over, and brought in her inexperienced cronies. And she fired the librarian after the librarian refused to ban books that Palin didn't like.

And she has a real chance of becoming president.

Scary stuff.

Oh, and Snopes verified the email as authentic.

For about eight years, I was a very happy WindowMaker user. It was very lightweight, aesthetically pleasing, and I had interiorized its behaviour and keybindings so much, I didn't feel I'd ever switch away. I periodically tried (forced myself even!) to use any of the other, more en vogue environments... Experimented using Gnome for a week, KDE for a week, XFCE for a week (so I would have enough time to learn their ways)... And always came back to my good, well-known wmaker.
In 2006, when we held DebConf6 in Mexico, I saw how other people worked with ion3. I fell immediately in love with it. Not because it is prettier, snappier or has nicer widgets than other window managers - but because it is enormously more usable. Quoting Tuomo Valkonen, the ion3 author,

Ion is not perfect and certainly not for everyone, but neither is any user interface. Usability is subjective.

Using a keyboard-oriented, tiling window manager represented -for the first time in 20 years (I had my first contact with a Macintosh in 1986)- a radical user interface change. For my way of working, I just don't need a desktop, I don't need having a background space or overlapping windows. What I need is a way to functionally organize the windows I have open at any given time, quickly switch between them (and not depending on the mouse, please!), maximizing screen space and all that. ion3 was godsent.
Now, in 2007 there was (yet another) huge flamefest. Valkonen basically does not want distributors distributing any version of ion3 that's not the latest, and introducing changes not approved by him - He basically demands ion to be non-free. So, it was moved to the non-free section of Debian where only Womble decided to keep giving it support. And, of course, by September 2007 Julien Danjou announced he had written another window manager: Awesome.
My main motivation for switching away from ion3 is that... I don't want to use non-free software. But I was very comfortable with ion3. It was only after I saw many other people using Awesome at DebConf8 I decided to bite the bullet and switch. It looked at least as comfortable as ion3.
But... Well, I cannot come up with better phrasing than what Joey said when he switched to Awesome, almost exactly a month ago. When changing between the mainstream window managers, the differences are mostly cosmetic. But with these really different window managers... I cannot but reproduce Joey's words:

I wish I had a good analogy to explain to my nontechnical readers what changing to a new window manager is about.
One way to think about it is that it's like driving a car down the road, and suddenly swapping the steering wheel and brakes out for a tiller and gear shifter. And having to downshift for braking until you learn that the brakes moved to the turn indicator lever. By trial and error.
But that's really only part of it. Another way to look at it is adopting a new philosophy. Or, in some cases a cult. (In some cases, with crazy cult leaders.) Whether they use Windows or a Mac, or Linux, most computer users are members of a big established religion, with some implicit assumptions, like "thy windows shall be overlapping, like papers on the desktop, and thou shalt move them with thy mouse".
So, changing to a new window manager is a process of being dumped into a different environment, where nothing works like you've come to expect, and trying to construct a mental model that you can use to make sense of it. But it's also a process of modifying that environment to behave the way you like.
And when done whole-heartedly, this doesn't just mean trying to make it like the environment you were used to before. It means trying to absorb the underlying philosopy of the window manager, and think up new ways of doing things, inspired by that philosopy, and modify the environment to allow doing those things.
So ideally, "I switched to a new window manager" doesn't mean "my screen has some different widgets on it now". It means "I'm looking at the screen with new eyes."

So, what's so different?
Besides learning some new keybindings (expected, of course), Awesome has several suggested layouts to help you organize your workflow, usually (although not always) consisting of a main area and a side area, tiled side by side (or one above the other, or several stranger ways). This sounds rigid, but it is incredibly comfortable - and I've only been an Awesome user for three days!
But what sets Awesome apart from basically anything else is the concept of tags. Whey you see an Awesome session, you recognize something similar to the very well known workspaces concept we have had in any Unix-like environment for many years, right? Well, but they are not workspaces. They are tags. What is the difference?
When I work with workspace, each of my windows can be in a different workspace. So in one, I'll have my mail-related stuff. In another one, I might be browsing. In another one, I have my development things, and I might be following some logfiles in yet another one.
Awesome allows you to use tags for categorization in much a more flexible way.
For example: I am mostly a web-oriented developer. I usually need four things when developing a system: A browser, Emacs, the log for my development server, and a console where I can peek and poke at my objects and interactions. Of course, cramming them all into the same screen makes no sense - It would be better to follow the good ol' desktop metaphore, and just switch the focus and raise the window, right?
In Awesome, I can have them all set to the maximum screen size - _and_ use the most common combinations as well. Each of the windows can be tagged to more than one workspace (and yes, this is immensely more flexible than the always visible hint on traditional WMs).
To begin with, I'll give each major process a tag to itself, to work full-screen. Emacs is on tag 1, my browser on tag 2. The log and the console share a terminal (i.e. via screen or terminator).
This console by itself is not too useful, so I'll set it to tag 4, and we will go back to it later.
So if I'm building a view or following online documentation, I will add tag 3 to both Emacs and the browser.
I'm also setting tag 4 to the browser - That allows me to use it next to my terminal, following the results of my website-clicking.
And, of course, tag 5 will be set to Emacs and to the console, so I can quickly check any quick API-related question that does not need the documentation or look at a newly written method.
By the way, have you noticed CapsLock is the most stupid key invented, ever? Ok, I gave a good use to it: It's called Mod4. Imagine it is just an extra Ctrl, Alt or Meta key.
So, Mod4-1 gives me Emacs. Mod4-2 gives me the browser. Mod4-3 gives Emacs+browser, Mod4-4 gives browser+console, and Mod4-5 gives Emacs+console. And, of course, the handy Mod4-0 gives me all of my open windows tiled side by side.
Even this is a pattern of being a newbie, I know - I could keep 4 and 5 free, and just tag several simultaneous tags to be active. How? Switch to tag 1 exclusively (Mod4-1), and activate tag2 as well (Ctrl-Mod4-2). There, I have Emacs and browser side by side. Want to get the console instead of the browser? Simple. Ctrl-Mod4-2 (toggle off tag 2), Ctrl-Mod4-3 (toggle on tag 3).
Anyway - As you can see, I am excited at finding a very new and nice tool to help me work better. Today I was playing a bit with the Awesome widgets, but that's something to be talked about later.
In Debian, we are at a crossing point: Awesome is just reaching ion3's popularity. And I'm adding my two main machines' votes to Awesome.
This is Awesome. Quoting (yes, one last quote) the official Awesome site, This gonna be LEGEN... wait for it... DARY!.

Do you know this experience: A program, in my case subversion, has a bug and starts to eat memory. You can not interact with your system any more, only watch the memory and swap run full (if you have a display for that). Then it takes a while, while the kernel kills the (hopefully right) program. Things start to move again, until they are fully recovered from the swap and you can continue your work. Or the kernel does somehow not kill the right program, and you are screwed.During regular work, though, your swap is hardy ever needed. Only after a while, a few megabytes of never-used RAM is swapped out, to make space for using the RAM as a file cache.I d like to see the kernel not give out more memory to processes than there is physical memory, because that s plenty for normal work, and if there is more requested, then that s most likely wrong. But I still want the kernel to use the rest of the memory for caching files, and also move some unused RAM pages to the swap file.Unfortunately, there does not seem to be a settings that achieves this directly. But if you happen to have the swap about the same size as your RAM, then these settings, when written to /etc/sysctl.d/vm.conf, will do the job:

vm.overcommit_memory = 2
vm.overcommit_ratio = 0

The first one is to make sure the kernel does not hand out more memory than you tell it to, and the second is to make sure that it only hands out (swap size + 0 * RAM size) to processes.Beware that things go wrong if you happen to have no swap any more for some reason, beause then the kernel will hand out zero memory! Therefore, you need to make sure that these settings are applied after swap was enabled. On a Debian machine, rename /etc/rcS.d/S30procps to /etc/rcS.d/S37procps. This would not be possible if you could also specify the ration of swap memory to be used. Then I could set that to zero and the RAM ratio to 100.If anyone knows better ways to achieve this, I m interested to hear them.Update: For my qemu based armel package builder, this is not enough it seems. I m now running it with overcommit_ratio = 50.

I am surely not the only one to complain about the ridiculous liquids restrictions for airplane travel. Since these new regulation are in place, I ve challenged them, found holes, and compiled tips for those trying to blow up planes. I wouldn t write another story if it weren t for an idea I ve had at Zurich airport on my last trip to London: let s swamp the airports with trash so that they ll be forced to deal with Brussels and IATA to return to normal. After checking in for my flight, I stopped by the supermarket to buy two containers of yoghurt that would make someone happy. The containers each said 150g (that s weight, not volume) on them, and I put them into a clear, resealable one-litre bag, placed them into a tray to be x-ray-scanned separately, only to have them confiscated. After discovering (not much to my surprise) that the security staff didn t know the difference between weight and volume, nor understood the concept of density, I got a chance to speak to the head security officer (surrounded by five police whose attention I d gotten), and learnt that Zurich airport has one ton of trash to discard every day, Frankfurt supposedly has to deal with four. As I was walking onto my plane, I tried to think of non-recyclable containers that we could fill with liquids to bring along to increase that amount. My theory was that once the trash problem became too massive, the airports would have to deal with the authorities to resolve this liquid restriction, because it seems quite clear that normal people have no way to influence choices made that affect our safety . Unfortunately, I see two problems: First, we d be dealing with trash and hence face all the environmental concerns. The airports do not recycle the millions of PET bottles they confiscate every day, so we shouldn t make that worse. Unfortunately, I cannot think of another liquid container that wouldn t come with similar concerns. Second, the airports might have the burden, but they won t carry the cost of all the trash. In fact, thanks to the security theatre related to liquids, we already pay higher airport taxes and charges. Surely it can t be in our interest to push that further up the scale. So in the end, swamping airports with trash doesn t seem like a viable way forward, unfortunately. I wish I knew what to do. I wish that the decision makers at IATA would finally admit that they overreacted and revert to normal, with sensible security measures, which focus on fending off the real threats, not fake ones. Unfortunately, nobody likes to admit that they were wrong, especially not when the decision is heavily backed up by the lobby of vending machine companies and restaurant owners, who benefit greatly from these ridiculous liquid safety measures. NP: Pulp: We Love Life

News reports have described the use of forced child labour for cotton harvesting in Uzbekistan, which is then used in t-shirts and so on, including those sold by some major shops in England like Asda/Wal-Mart, as I mentioned on the debian-project email list last autumn. When you buy badly-produced T-shirts to support free software projects, you may be helping provide freedom for more software users in your country, but you may also be helping to enslave vulnerable workers in other countries. If you buy Debian T-shirts from the UK, you’re probably OK. This is something that the Debian UK Society seems to do right. Their buyer (and current Debian Project Leader) Steve McIntyre wrote:

“[Fruit of the Loom premium Ts, Kustom Kit Augusta/405 polo shirts ...] both FotL and KK have ethics statements that describe their standards. The KK one is linked off the front page of their website; the FotL details I have in .doc format that I’ll pass on if people would like to see them.” (original)

I also asked my local perl mongers group to do similar but there’s been no response to that yet (or any t-shirts AFAIK). I’ve been told that all of the FSF Europe gear is Fair Trade but it doesn’t say that on their web shop. How about other free software projects? Have you asked about your T-shirts? Is there a central site for this sort of information?

Wednesday I rode my bike to work.

So, logically, Wednesday saw me riding my bike home from work.

That was not the most pleasant task.

I rode directly into some really strong winds -- I figure about 40MPH -- for 2.5 miles, and for the other 8, they were crosswinds. I checked the weather about 30-60 minutes after I got home, after it had calmed down a bit, and they were saying gusts to 35. So I figure 40 or more when it was really going is about right. I was using the lowest possible gear on my 24-speed bike for a good part of that, for the first time ever.

The weather also indicated this was due to remnants from Gustav.

So now I can -- almost -- say I rode my bike through a hurricane.

I had to chuckle a bit today when I read a different bike blog -- someone who has been doing this a lot longer than me -- say he chickened out and took the bus because of 15MPH winds.

Out here in Kansas farm country, there isn't a bus. If I ride the bike to work in the morning, that's the only way I'm getting back home.

Kinda character-building, I guess.

Or crazy, depending on your view. I'm getting some strange looks lately as I've been mentioning that it's about time for me to prepare for bicycling in the winter.

Oh, and did I mention that 15MPH is a breeze out here?

Some time ago I wrote a small shell script that counted the number of dependencies of each package. It used to take lots of time to perform such a simple operation, so today I decided to rewrite it from scratch in perl and even made it able to sort the packages according to the number of pre-/dependencies.

---

So, here are 20 packages from sid, which are in the top 20 of most number of pre-/dependencies:

texlive-full:103
libjifty-perl:82
brdesktop-gnome:74
rhythmbox:72
evolution:66
xorg-dev:65
epiphany-gecko:58
gnome-control-center:55
epiphany-webkit:55
iceweasel-l10n-all:55
anjuta:53
gnucash:52
gnome-core-devel:52
brdesktop-common:52
gnome-desktop-environment:51
mplayer:51
beagle:50
dtc-common:49
totem-gstreamer:49
gnome-power-manager:49

Note that ORed dependencies are, correctly, counted once only.

Here's a usertagged list of bugs I filed when I computed the values with the shell version of the script to see what was the reaction of the maintainers. Here's the list of the 20 packages with the more dependencies on sid as of ~2008-05-02.

103 texlive-full
79 brdesktop-gnome
68 rhythmbox
65 xorg-dev
60 evolution
57 epiphany-gecko
54 gnome-control-center
53 epiphany-webkit
51 screenkast
51 iceweasel-l10n-all
51 beagle
50 vlc-nox
50 python-gnome2-extras
50 brdesktop-common
50 anjuta
49 dtc-common
48 totem-gstreamer
47 python-gnome2-desktop
47 awn-applets-c-core
46 gnome-main-menu

So, it looks like we are only going up but not down :(

Here some news from the Smuxi front. As you might already know Smuxi 0.6.2 was released. With the 0.6.2 release we have now German translation and Smuxi packages in Debian (Unstable) (as promised), Ubuntu (intrepid) and ArchLinux (AUR)! Now just OpenSUSE, Foresight Linux, Gentoo and Fedora are missing for world domination^W^Wconvering the major Linux distributions. The upcoming 0.6.3 release will contain Spanish (thanks to Juan Miguel Carrero), French (thanks to Clement BOURGEOIS) and British English (thanks to Ryan Smith-Evans) translations. Besides bugfixes this release will contain the famous tray icon support and some other goodies! The release should be ready by this weekend... stay tuned.

Daniel Baumann writes, that Debian wouldn't comply to some licenses due to embeded copies of syslinux binaries in its debian-cd package. To be exact he wrote: [..] if debian-cd is embedding a syslinux binary with a different version, it must contain the sources for it [..] (accentuation by me). And -- since both debian-cd and syslinux are licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public Licences 2 (as statet in its copyright file) -- he is wrong. To comply to the license it is completely okay to Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code, [..]. (Section 3b). To the best of my knowledge we do archive all sources of all uploads (even if not public accessible, ask an ftp-master for details about source-morgue). So we do comply to the license. Update: source-morgue doesn't guarantee all sources to be present. But all the syslinux sources mentioned by Daniel are present. PS: Of course that doesn't mean embeding a binary is okay policy wise... PS2: In future it's planed to have snapshot.debian.org for that; don't know about the state of that, yet.

The FSF is celebrating the birth of the idea that is GNU. There is a video which I have mirrored here for local users. So I plan to sing "Happy Birthday to GNU" on 27th September 2008 as well. It seems like some people are not quite so happy. One correspondent wrote that it was not the 25th birthday of the "GNU Operating System" since that would mean the GNU+HURD which he feels is still not ready. In my opinion the term "GNU Operating System" represents in loose terms "a free alternative to Unix" (free as in mukta). And that idea was born 25 years ago.² I think that the HURD was just the "concept of a notion of an idea" 25 years ago. (The first article about the HURD was on the net about 1990 or so). Moreover, in comparison with Unix of 25 years ago, the GNU+HURD combination could be considered "ready". Thus, there is indeed much to celebrate. For example,

1. There is not one --- there are many free alternatives to Unix. In fact, there are perhaps no non-free Unixes visible anymore! Does this owe a lot to the resolution made by RMS 25 years ago? Absolutely. Of course, it also owes a lot to the resolve of the hackers who followed up on this and took it well beyond what he had in mind.
2. One can run the GNU tools + HURD combination to get an environment as good or better than what was available as Unix 25 years ago. Does a general member of the public really need to do this? No. There are currently a number of far superior solutions. Does the software community need this? Yes. (See below.)

I think that there are a lot of people who disagree with RMS and FSF today on a number of issues --- and these detractors may even be right. Perhaps this makes some people begrudge FSF celebrating the 25th anniversary/birthday of GNU. I offer the following points for their consideration:

1. The vision and resolve RMS and the FSF put behind the vision --- starting 25 years ago --- have got us here.
2. The FSF's astuteness in getting a rather well-known person like Stephen Fry ¹ to celebrate GNU. If any of the distros had managed it, it would have been considered a coup!
3. While Linux may be the dominant player in Unix today, the alternatives like *BSD, Solaris and even the HURD have an important role to play in the development of free software.
4. That chocolate cake looks really delicious. :-)

So here's to (at least) another 25 years for GNU!