...to make the use of gettext for debconf messages i18n mandatory. Policy 3.7.3 states:

     * Packages following the Debian Configuration management
        specification must allow for translation of their messages by using
        a gettext-based system such as po-debconf.                [3.9.1]

Not to say this took too long. Such changes are always long processes. Anyway, I think that Denis Barbier, who built the first po-debconf packages and uploaded the first version on 9/11/2002, would appreciate this. Now, let's hunt the last remaining black sheep....:)

For various reasons, I need to secure access to some resources using two-factor authentication, and thus have been looking at smartcards. These little devices store digital keys and certificates, protected by a passphrase, and calculate digital signatures on-device. Hence the two factors: possession of the card, and knowledge of the password.This sort of scheme is widely used by government agencies and large corporations (and largely reliant on Windows, too), but I wanted to find the low cost way in for the small operator using open source.
OpenSC on Linux
The best starting point for Linux is the OpenSC project. It supports a reasonably broad array of devices, and is well supported by Linux distributions. Using command line tools you can create keys and certificates, as you would in OpenSSL for web servers and so on, and then upload them to the smartcard.Although OpenSSH source code has support for OpenSC, it is not compiled in by default in Debian and derived distributions. Unfortunately this means a bit of recompilation to get SSH supporting OpenSC. When that's done, you have an SSH implementation that can use an RSA key from your smartcard, and best of all, you can add this key to the ssh-agent like you would with regular keys. The hardwareI ordered two devices, which seemed to have the best support from OpenSC, the Axalto Cryptoflex E-Gate, and an Aladdin eToken. I got these from UsaSmartCard, who have a special section in their catalogue for Open Source compatible products. Both these cards have a USB interface built-in, I didn't want to be toting around an extra card reader in addition to the tokens themselves.
On the MacWhile both the devices worked as advertised under Linux, the experience has been a lot less fruitful under Mac OS 10.5 Leopard. There is a port of the OpenSC project for Mac OS, called SCA. The promise of the integration is great: you can use the on-device keys with apps like Safari and Mail, but there is a change in the way that the daemon responsible for talking to the smartcards (pcscd) works on Leopard, which means OpenSC won't recognise the cards.
With some fiddling, I have managed to force the Cryptoflex device to work with Mac. Unfortunately the Leopard/Darwin source for OpenSSH has diverged significantly enough from the upstream OpenSSH, that I couldn't apply the OpenSC patches. Not having ssh-agent work with the smartcard is a significant nuisance for me, as it's the easiest way to patch in the extra security to deployment processes.The Aladdin eToken just plain didn't work on Leopard. There is a report that Aladdin are working on Leopard drivers, however.I think a small number of mainly US federal smart cards will work out of the box on Leopard, though I've seen a few complaints about these on the Apple forums. It loooks unfortunately like smartcard support slipped through the net a bit. ConclusionSmartcard support is relatively straightforward on Linux. On Mac OS 10.5, it looks like some waiting is in order before things will work properly.

I finally arrived in Bangalore. Unfortunately, alone, without suitcase, which Air India apparently managed to lose. So, it will be the first time I experience the happiness of people who don't get their luggage in an airport and have to live for a few days with nothing but the clothes they had on them while travelling. Running around in local shops to get socks or pants wasn't exactly what I planned to do here and I probably won't. So, I'll take the local stance and learn about patience, and wait. The place we're hosted at is *very* nice (B&B, probably with a few other speakers I haven't seen yet). And, it has a really good Internet connection so I feel pretty safe and can give news around. I'm currently waiting for Sam whose flight was apparently delayed (I hope *he* gets his suitcase).... I hope he won't be too much in trouble: we don't want to lose our DPL in India (maybe they want to keep him here, though).

The NW-Europe Programming Contest NWERC is over (for two weeks already). The winners were from Oxford, and the best Dutch team were our Utrecht prodigies at number 7 (full standings). If I may, I think it's been a great success, but of course, there's in our eyes much to be improved. And we will, in 2008. We also got some compliments about our own jury system DOMjudge, which is nice to hear. Even more good news is that we were allowed to send three teams off to the ICPC World Finals. These finals are in Bannf, Canada and I'll probably be there aswell.

It was two weeks ago now that we hopped on an Amtrak train in the middle of Kansas at the bright and early hour of 3AM, bound for Indiana.

This has been our third trip with Jacob. He's 14 months old now. We never really enjoyed long car or airplane trips before we had a baby, and haven't really had the desire to try a long car trip since. So we try to take the train, or if time is short, fly.

Jacob enjoys the train. There's lots to see and do. The one thing he doesn't like doing is waiting for food to arrive in any situation, so when we have sit-down meals in the diner, things can get challenging.

We arrived in Indiana the same evening and spent a few days with Terah's dad out at the farm.

Jacob enjoyed grandpa and grandma:





Jacob got his first ever ice cream there. Despite the concerned "unknown food alert" look, he opened up quick for another bite.



The big hit of the visit there were chickens. I've never seen Jacob so thrilled about watching something before. He was so excited he was just moving his arms all around, almost jumping up and down. Here he is watching them:





Terah wants us to get chickens now. Just because we still have a chicken house left...

On Tuesday, we went north to spend a few days with Terah's mom. On the way up, it became overcast. Terah's mom calls it the winter "permacloud", which is the best description of it I've heard yet. I didn't believe Terah at first when she said that they don't see the sun for 3 months in winter up there, but I believe her now.

Jacob found a rocking chair just his size there, and was able to make it rock. But the big hit of this stop were refrigerator magnets, at Jacob height.



He spent a long time with them, and got pretty good at working with them, too.

He also thought he ought to check out the camera in great detail. So of course, the camera checked him out.



Terah's mom wanted to spend some time with Jacob, so on Wednesday, Terah and I headed up to Niles, MI to visit some antique shops. We found some postcards from small towns in Kansas dating back to the 1930s, an old metal fan (still works), a wooden "apothecary box" with pull-out drawers, and some furniture we might have purchased if we were closer to home.

For the first time ever, Terah was the first one to say "aren't you done shopping yet?" She was getting tired, so we started heading back. Magically her energy returned as we approached the road leading to the South Bend Chocolate Co. factory and retail store, so we headed in that direction. The next tours didn't start for almost an hour, so we bought some chocolate, looked around a bit, and then left.

Terah's mom had a good time with Jacob while we were gone.



Thursday was the O'Connor Thanksgiving. Terah's grandma and some other relatives were there. Here's Jacob with his great grandma:



Jacob enjoyed Thanksgiving dinner, and managed to keep finding things to munch on all afternoon.

That evening, we went over to Terah's Yoder grandparents and spent a few days there. Not long after we arrived, Terah's uncle showed up and brought his adopted greyhound with him. Jacob was very excited about this, though the dog wasn't so sure about Jacob.

Eventually the greyhound calmed down and Jacob got to see him up close and pet him. Jacob didn't even mind getting his whole face licked.



The next morning at breakfast, Terah's grandma had set out the high chair that she used as a girl for Jacob to eat in. I got some pictures, but Jacob was far more interested in asking to have food ready to eat.



Here's Jacob with his Yoder great grandparents:



Later Friday, it was the Yoder Thanksgiving. Jacob got plenty of attention. He also was looking VERY CAREFULLY for Waldo.



Jacob wasn't feeling the best all week, but despite having a busy week and feeling not so good, he did really well. He has been walking with help now, holding on to one adult finger with each hand. He really enjoys that, but is short enough that adults have to bend over a bit to help him. I imagine several people had sore backs after the week was over, including us.

On the train trip home, I took him to the lounge car to go walking. Usually he likes to walk as fast as he can for as long as he can, but there he would only go a little bit at a time. He'd stop at each group of chairs to look at the people, and most of them were really happy to see him, too. After he was done with the lounge car, we walked back through the coaches to our seat. As long as he kept walking, he again would stop at each row of seats to make friends with anybody that wanted to.

We tried to find a nice place to go for lunch during our layover in Chicago. But let me tell you, downtown Chicago -- at least the part near Union Station -- is dead on Sunday and the fact that it was just after Thanksgiving probably didn't help. We wound up finding a place in Union Station to eat. Jacob fussed for awhile, then went to sleep on my lap (he rarely manages to go to sleep while being held). Then on our connecting train back to Kansas.

It was a fun and busy week, but it's nice to be home too. Our train arrived in Kansas at 3:15AM Monday morning. So we went home to catch a few more hours sleep before going to work. As I went outside that morning, we had a gorgeous Kansas sunrise. As the sun was coming up, it was lighting the underside of the clouds with a vibrant deep red and orange color. The whole sky to the east was lit up like that, and felt so warm and inviting on a bitterly cold morning.

Buggy Vcs-Svn fields around My statistics flu continues (oh, BTW, don't worry, I'll be quiet again on planet RSN). This time I wanted to check how many packages are maintained using some Version Control System in Debian, but at the same time are not declaring a proper Vcs-XXX field in their debian/controls. With the help of Goneri and the svnbuildstat I've managed to cross the data used to actually build nightly packages from subversion repositories with the Vcs-XXX fields declared in Debian source packages. The outcome is yet another daily updated page which lists packages which are missing Vcs-Svn field and/or declare a wrong one (i.e. one which is not in sync with what svnbuildstat is using to build the package). You might want to have a look to the corresponding dd-list to see if some of your packages need to be fixed. Several of mine do for example ... Oh, of course the check is limited to what svnbuildstat knows. If you want to be checked it's a good idea to ask for the addition of your repository to svnbuildstat.

Yesterday we (ana, dato, holger and me) were at the CUM (University of Extremadura) to give a talk about Debian in general and QA in particular. We were talking about how things work within free software, we talked about do-ocracy and I coined the expression Mark-ocracy. It was funny Mark-ocracy: to do the things that Mark wants to do.

I’m in Merida for the QA meeting, and the Spanish speaking people here (Ana and me), plus Holger, were asked by the organization to give a talk in the University. During Q&A after the talk, one teacher mentioned that, after having received several talks about Debian by various people, she was a bit disappointed that they all resulted so DD-centric, as if all that could matter was becoming an official Developer. I promised her that in future talks I would make very explicit that even the smallest contributions are welcome in Debian, be them bug reports of a tiny patch, and that I would blog encouraging other speakers to do the same, if they’re not doing it already.

Thomas writes about a dream of his and how his dream self failed to do the right thing.

I have been able several times, while asleep, to be aware enough to realize I was dreaming and was asleep and started to drive my dream the way I wanted.

I made myself fly superman like and fly a plane, I managed to come in second place after Ayrton Senna (this was while he was alive and I respected him too much to take his victory) I managed to do a lot of things. At some point I even managed to turn right a recursive nightmare I had and got rid of it that way.

Unfortunately, I haven't been able to do this in the last 3 or 4 years, but I know I had to set a goal before going to sleep in order to achieve it.

Has anyone else experienced this?

A curiously interesting thread has sprung up on the Xorg mailing list recently regarding the lack of bandwidth the developers might have for accepting patches. Bernardo Innocenti, who hacks on OLPC stuff amongst other things, wants to get some patches reviewed for acceptance, but there aren't enough people around with the time and inclination to review and accept his work. He did a quick and dirty analysis of Xorg LoC vs Linux LoC, to give a "X codebase is roughly 1/2 Linux codebase" (which surprised me, actually, I'd always thought it was larger) and then a similarly rough analysis that suggests that Xorg has roughly 1/20th of the developer base. To some extent Bernardo's metrics are arguable, but the basic facts are that Linux gets the lions share of the developers. Is this what we should expect? Is this a healthy way for the free and open source software community to support the development of what I personally would like to see as the future desktop base? Linux does a fantastic job as an OS, right now. It's been doing it for years, really, but we still need to get behind some of the differential further up the stack. And all credit to those stalwarts of X development who are shouldering more than their fair share of the burden. So if you were looking for an open source software project where you can be appreciated, don't overlook X.

Cory Doctorow wrote an interesting article about social networking [1]. One of his points is “Imagine how creepy it would be to wander into a co-worker’s cubicle and discover the wall covered with tiny photos of everyone in the office, ranked by “friend” and “foe,” with the top eight friends elevated to a small shrine decorated with Post-It roses and hearts“, another concerns the issue of forced “friends” where colleagues and casual acquaintances demand to be added to a friends list. He speculates that the reason for social networking systems to be a fad is that once too many people you don’t really like force themselves into your friends list then you will feel compelled to join a different service. I believe that the practice of ranking friends is simply a bad idea and wonder whether anyone who has completed high-school has ever used it seriously. If you publicly rank your friends then you will alienate other friends (particularly any who might have ranked you more highly than you ranked them). Everyone who has used social networking systems has discovered the pressure to avoid alienating people that you don’t actually like. It seems obvious that alienating people who you do like is even more of a problem. In my previous post about Better Social Networking [2] I suggested having multiple lists on your social networking server that are published to different people. That would allow segregating the lists as a way of dealing with some demands to be listed. People who are associated with work (colleagues, managers, and in an example Cory used students at a school where a teacher worked) would be on a work list. The work list would point to the work profiles of other people which would match whatever the standards are for the industry in question (which would still allow quite a range, the standards for sys-admins of ISPs differ significantly from those for primary school teachers). I’m sure that someone who worked for an ISP in Amsterdam would understand that a work-based friend request made to someone who teaches primary school in a part of the world that is religiously conservative would understand why that request would be declined (but the same person might add them to a personal friends list). Another way of alleviating such problems is to not require that listing be bi-directional. Current social networking systems involve one party making a friend request to another which is listed as pending in the GUI for both parties. The options are to either leave it in that state (which is an annoyance) or reject it (which may cause offence). With a uni-directional listing one party would add the other and hope for the best. If they aren’t obsessive about such things they may not even notice that the other party didn’t reciprocate. Also it would allow for famous people receiving links from many people to their public profile without any expectation of reciprocation. Of course a distributed social networking system such as I suggest would inherently have uni-directional links as there would be no central repository to force them to be all bi-directional.

• [1] http://informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=204203573


• [2] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2007/11/18/better-social-networking/

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Debian Admin

It looks like the fine DebianAdmin.com site is at it agian:

• how to setup cisco router enable pasword
• Original source: Cisco Certifided Network Associate Study Guide : 3rd Edition

Word-for-word copyright infringement by the user "admin". See the other cisco articles for more infringements. (OK I'm still bitter their site is pimped all over the place, including wiki.debian.org, and their name is confusingly similar to my sites...)

Apache SQL

After yesterdays frustrations with SQL::YASP I moved to parsing logfiles to an temporary SQLite database. I now have a tool which you may use to load an arbitary number of Apache logfiles to, and query via SQL. It looks something like this:

asql> load /var/log/apache2/acc*
Creating tables
Loading: /var/log/apache2/access.log
Loading: /var/log/apache2/access.log.1
asql>   SELECT referer,COUNT(referer) AS number from logs GROUP BY referer ORDER BY number DESC,referer
- 4807
http://localhost/stats/ 2
http://foo.ocm/stats/ 2
asql>

Very useful :) A Debian package is available if you're interested in testing / using it, as is a mercurial repository. The package now stands at 0.4 and is essentially done. It has tab completion on filenames and does enough for me. It might be nice to allow it to auto-read certain files on startup, or persist the database but I'll not bother unless people ask for it.

These are all just 'first-builds' so problems could well lie ahead but I have now built a set of cross built packages for Emdebian (ARM) that edos-debcheck says is installable for a basic GPE installation. Only one package remains as a problem - gpe-filemanager builds fine but the current dependencies of libgnomevfs mean that gconf is required which doesn't give an option to disable ldap which is something I would rather do without. Certainly, existing GPE installations do without ldap but that could just be because these tend to use older versions of the particular libraries.
The GPE team status report covers the rest of the package set with links to the Debian and Emdebian packages.
I've got a few ITP's to close and a few more to open and close before the full GPE toolset is available (and I need to work out what has happened to the source package for gpe-terminal) but things are looking good.
All the cross building problems were in the base packages and a few of the lower level system libraries - the X libraries and GPE applications cross build very easily, thanks mainly to CDBS support in emdebian-tools.
The hard task lies ahead - configuring the packages so that Emdebian can support pre-built installation images for specific devices with their specific hardware configuration (and nothing else).
I'm expecting a 70% reduction in the amount of space required for the same package set relative to Debian.
When browsing the Emdebian package set you may think that 1,736 packages (or so) is a lot but this is mainly down to the Emdebian Tdeb implementation which splits out each translation for each package into a package of its own.
The next stage of the Tdeb process is to migrate those packages into a separate repository and finish the development of langupdate. Then, each user can choose to install only the .mo files required for their specific needs instead of getting 250Mb of translations for languages that are unsupported on their machine anyway.
The main deviation from the existing tdeb proposal is that Emdebian needs finer granularity so that gettext translations are separate from translated manpages - because Emdebian doesn't include any manpages.

When Ubuntu announced public availability of Personal Package Archives, I thought it might be good to use it to provide up to date Gammu related packages. After successful registration I uploaded Gammu package and no reaction so far, so I'll wait. However this memorised me that I wanted to use OpenSUSE Build Service for same purpose some time ago. I filled in registration and as I didn't receive any email about being accepted, I absolutely forgot about that. Now just tried to log in and it works. So you can now have access to latest Gammu, python-gammu and Wammu packages for most recent RPM distributions (Fedora 7, Fedora 8, Mandriva 2006, Mandriva 2007, openSUSE 10.2, openSUSE 10.3, openSUSE Factory, SLES 9 and SLE 10). I could not test them so any feedback is welcome :-). You can find all packages on overview page or directly in download folders. Playing with spec files after long time was quite painful, but I got to it after I managed the hardest thing - how to make build dependencies which will work on all these distros. I hope I will be able to announce similar service for Ubuntu users using PPA, but now I have to wait for some reaction on my source uploads.

We had a nice trip the rest of the way home from our Thanksgiving in New Jersey today. This morning we had breakfast in the Holiday Inn Express that we stayed in (very nice, new, clean, good pool and exercise room -- a good value for $109/night dual queens). We then spent the rest of our morning shopping at the Whole Foods Market. It's the closest Whole Foods to our house in Montreal -- hold it, no, it looks like the one in Portland (Maine) is closer. Who knew? We picked up a lot of hippy-dippy personal hygiene items that we can't seem to find in Montreal, and I also got a few bottles of wine to take across the border. I got a bottle of 2003 Andrew Will Cellars Champoux Vineyard -- an interesting Columbia Valley red blend, mostly Cabernet Sauvignon that I think will cellar nicely for a couple of years, but not too urgent. And I also picked up a 2004 Hanzell Vineyards Chardonnay, Sonoma Valley, which I also think will sit nicely for a year or so. We'll see -- I'm not really big on cellaring yet, but I'd like to give a few wines a try. We stopped in Amherst (Massachusetts) for lunch at the Amherst Brewing Company, which has good pub grub, generous portions, and really nice house brews available. We also dropped into a few bookstores. Books are a great cross-border purchase for Canadian residents, since their cover price is usually ridiculously skewed. For example: I got a Paul Auster hardback that was labeled at $22 US, $28 Canada. That's with the loonie trading at US$1.01! Our drive up to Montreal was pretty decent, although we had a ton of rain and snow that made the actual driving kind of sucky. We stopped in a cruddy gas station in Sharon, Vermont that didn't have a bathroom (doh!) and didn't stop much afterwards until Burlington. We got dinner at a great place in downtown Burlington, Burlington Hearth (AKA American Flatbread). Great oven-fired pizza, organic ingredients, nice atmosphere, more microbrew. Fabulous. We got across the border all right, although I needed some time to get my new work permit for 2008. Then a long snowy drive back home, where my friend Damien from Austin is staying with us for this week during MIGS. Should be a fun week -- we have lots to catch up on. tags: travel massachusetts wine vermont burlington amherst montreal

This Sony 22' display is fun to watch movies or tv. Installed Ubuntu on such a all in one desktop for a friend. As much as Debian improved visually thanks to newer Gnome and good upstream tango icons. I'm much less impressed by the visual appearance of Ubuntu 7.10. The compiz stuff is fun of course, but the replaced icon sets seem like a regression nowadays.
The logout buttons seem uglier and more misplaced then the usual Gnome ones, same story with the orange openoffice.org or the gnome menu icons. Restricted-manager failed in strange loops due to no initial network availability. Network-manager seemed to write settings to the correct file for static ip setup, but didn't actually set up the network. Also the "play Dvd" usecase seemed not much easier then in Debian. Only bonus is the python apt sugar "Add Remove Applications".