Search Results: "ana"

25 October 2007

Enrico Zini: axi-query-similar

apt-xapian-index: searching for similar packages I've recently posted: Today I'll show how to abuse Xapian to show a list of packages similar to a given one. This time I'll try just linking to the code in wsvn and showing in the blog only show the most important bits. So, we have a package name, and we want to show what are the packages similar to that one. To do it, we simply build a big OR query with all the terms indexed for that package: Xapian will show us the packages whose terms are most similar, and that does the trick. This works because Xapian gives us the best results first, therefore even if no package except the given one will give an exact match, we still get the nearest matches first. In order to get the list of indexed terms given a package name we need to do two things:
  1. Get the Xapian document for the package.
  2. Get the termlist of the document.
To get the Xapian document we search for a term that only that document can have. In the index, the package name is indexed with the special prefix "XP", so we can search for that: 
def docForPackage(pkgname):
    "Get the document corresponding to the package with the given name"
    # Query the term with the package name
    query = xapian.Query("XP"+pkgname)
    enquire = xapian.Enquire(db)
    enquire.set_query(query)
    # Get the top result only
    matches = enquire.get_mset(0, 1)
    if matches.size() == 0:
        return None
    else:
        m = matches[0]
        return m[xapian.MSET_DOCUMENT]
Then we build the big term list, by iterating the termlist of the document: 
# Build a term list with all the terms in the given packages
terms = []
# Get the document corresponding to the package name
doc = docForPackage(pkgname)
if not doc: continue
# Retrieve all the terms in the document
for t in doc.termlist():
    if len(t.term) < 2 or t.term[:2] != 'XP':
        terms.append(t.term)
Note that it's trivial to fetch terms from more than one document, if you want to query "all packages a bit like this one and a bit like that one", although that's less of a useful feature. Lastly, we build the final query: 
# Build the big OR query
query = xapian.Query(xapian.Query.OP_AND_NOT,
            # Terms we want
            xapian.Query(xapian.Query.OP_OR, terms),
            # AND NOT the input packages
            xapian.Query("XP"+pkgname))
I add an AND_NOT part with the input package name so that we don't get in the output the package that we asked for. This is it: 
$ ./axi-query-similar.py debtags
20309 results found.
Results 1-20:
33% debtags-edit - GUI browser and editor for Debian Package Tags
27% tagcolledit - GUI editor for tagged collections
25% libtagcoll2-dev - Functions used to manipulate tagged collections (development version)
24% tagcoll - Commandline tool to perform operations on tagged collections
19% packagesearch - GUI for searching packages and viewing package information
18% doodle - Desktop Search Engine (client)
18% doodled - Desktop Search Engine (daemon)
18% libept0 - High-level library for managing Debian package information
18% upgrade-system - system upgrader from Konflux
18% libept-dev - High-level library for managing Debian package information
17% ept-cache - Commandline tool to search the package archive
16% tracker-utils - metadata database, indexer and search tool - commandline tools
[...]
You can use the wsvn interface to get to the full source code and the module it uses. Next in the series: adaptive quality cutoff.

Matthew Garrett

Linux-hero wrote about how Ubuntu kills your hard drive. The situation is somewhat less clear than you might think from the article, but the basic takeaway message is that Ubuntu doesn't touch your hard drive power management settings by default. In almost all cases, it's more likely to be your BIOS or the firmware on your hard drive.

The script that's executed when you plug or unplug your laptop is /etc/acpi/power.sh. The relevant sections are:
function laptop_mode_enable  
...
    $HDPARM -S $SPINDOWN_TIME /dev/$drive 2>/dev/null
    $HDPARM -B 1 /dev/$drive 2>/dev/null
That is, when the laptop_mode_enable function is called, we set the drive power parameters. Now, by default laptop_mode_enable isn't called:
if [ x$ENABLE_LAPTOP_MODE = xtrue ]; then
    (sleep 5 && laptop_mode_enable)&
fi
because ENABLE_LAPTOP_MODE is false in the default install (check /etc/default/acpi-support). This means that, by default, we do not alter the hard drive power settings. In other words, the APM settings that your drive is using in Ubuntu are the ones that your BIOS programmed into it when the computer started. This is supported by the fact that people see this issue after resuming from suspend. We don't touch the hard drive settings at that point, so the only way it can occur is if your BIOS or drive default to this behaviour.

If you enable laptop mode, then we will enable aggressive power management on the drive and that may lead to some reduction in hard drive lifespan. That's a fairly inevitable consequence of laptop mode, since it only makes sense if the laptop enages in aggressive power management. But, as I said, that's not the default behaviour of Ubuntu.

There's certainly an argument that we should work around BIOSes, but in general our assumption has been that your hardware manufacturer has a better idea what your computer is capable of than we do. If a laptop manufacturer configures your drive to save power at the cost of life expectancy, then that's probably something you should ask your laptop manufacturer about.

24 October 2007

Benjamin Mako Hill: Frailty, by any other name...

A short program I wrote has searched the web and revealed many names for frailty: It eliminated a few as well:

Russell Coker: Blog Ethics

Reporters Sans Frontiers (AKA RSF AKA Reporters Without Borders) has an interesting document about blogging [1]. They are specifically focussed on blogging as a way of reporting news. Their definition of a blog states that it is “a personal website” (there are many corporate blogs run by teams) and that it contains “mostly news” (most blogs that I read contain mostly technial information about computers and any “news” is mostly about the author). They also describe a blog as being set up with an “interactive tool” - most blogs are written using web-based tools, but some are written with plain text and a compilation system. Some of their technical information is simply wrong. For example they say that RSS “alerts users whenever their favourite blogs are updated” (this can be done through RPC notification which then requires RSS to pull the data - but a user will almost always have a tool polling their favourite RSS feeds). Their section listing the various options for blogging platforms mentions LiveJournal, Blogger, and MSNSpaces but doesn’t mention Wordpress.com which seems to be a serious omission (although it does mention civiblog.org which is a useful hosting resource for grassroots political campaigning). But these are minor problems, they are reporters primarily not programmers. Their document gets interesting when it gives links to pages about blogging ethics. One page that was not directly linked (presumably because it mainly concerns non-journalistic blogging) is Rebecca Blood’s document about blogging ethics [2]. She gives a brief coverage to conflicts of interest and gives most space to the topic of maintaining a record of changes. One thing I have been considering is having a separate instance of Wordpress for documents that change [3]. This way regular blog posts (such as this one) can be relied on to preserve a list of changes (any change other than correcting a typo will be documented) so if you link to a post you can rely on the original intent being preserved. But for posts which have ongoing value as live documents they will be kept current without a significant change-log. Items that go into the main blog would include commentary on news and predictions, and the document blog would contain technical information about Linux, the science-fiction stories that I will eventually write, etc. When I wrote my previous blog post about this issue I was mainly considering technical issues, but when considering the ethical issues it becomes clear that I need a separate blog (or other CMS) for such things. The site etbe.coker.com.au needs to be a reliable record of what I wrote while another site such as docs.coker.com.au could contain live documents with no such record. The essential factor here is the ability of the user to know what type of document they are seeing. Another really interesting point that Rebecca makes is in regard to known bad sources. Sometimes a known bad source can produce worthy data and is worth referencing, but you have to note the context (which among other things means that if the worthy data gets any reasonable number of hits it may get replaced by something entirely different). If a blogger cites a reference on a known bad site and explains the reason for the reference (and the fact that the nature of the site is known) then the reader reaction will be quite different to just a reference with no explanation. As a contrast to Rebecca Blood’s document the cyberjournalist.net code of ethics [4] covers the traditional issues of journalistic integrity, “public interest” etc. One interesting issue that they raise (but apparently don’t address) is the definition of “private people“. While it is generally agreed that movie stars and similar people deserve less protection as they have chosen to be in the public eye the situation regarding bloggers is less clear. Is a blogger with a high ranking on technorati.com in a similar position to a Hollywood star when it comes to privacy? A claim is sometimes made that blogs are unreliable because they can change (based on the actions of some bloggers who change posts with no notification and turn sections of the blogsphere into a swamp). Magazines and newspapers are held as an example of unchanging content and people who publish online magazines sometimes express horror at the idea of changing a past issue. The fact is that newspapers and magazines never changed past issues because it is impossible to recall hundreds of thousands of printed documents that are distributed around a country or the world. When it’s possible to fix old issues (as it is online) then the requirement is to document the changes not keep bad versions. It probably would be a useful feature for a blogging package to have the ability to display (and link to) old versions of a page. This would allow the users to easily see the changes and anyone who references a post can reference a particular version of it. In some situations it may make sense to use a Wiki server instead of a Blog server for some data to preserve the change history. Maybe I should consider a wiki in which only I have write access for my documents repository. No-one seems to cover the issue of how to deal with fiction. Obviously for a blog such as 365tomorrows.com (a science-fiction blog) it’s assumed that all content is fictional unless stated otherwise. The problem comes when someone includes fiction amongst the non-fiction content of a blog. I recently unsubscribed from a blog feed when the author revealed that what appeared to have been a diary entry was actually a fiction story (and a poor one at that). If your blog has mostly non-fiction then any fiction must be clearly marked, probably including the word “fiction” in the title and the permalink would be required to avoid all potential of confusion. For my documents CMS/blog I am considering having a category of “fiction” and to use the category name in the permalink address of each post. Of course science-fiction is sometimes obvious as fiction, but to avoid problems with fiction that is set in current times I think it’s best to clearly mark all such posts. The old-fashioned media seems to have dealt with this, tabloid womens magazines (which almost everyone reads occasionally as they are often the only reading materiel in a waiting room) traditionally have a fiction story in every issue which is clearly marked. Another type of blogging is corporate blogging. I wonder whether that needs to be covered separately in an ethics code. One thing that the three documents about ethics have in common (as a side-note in each) is the fact that the personal reputation of the writer depends on their ethics. If you are known for writing truthfully and fairly then people will treat your posts more seriously than that of writers who lie or act unfairly. There are direct personal benefits in acting ethically. The RSF document claims that the sole purpose of ethics standards is to instill trust in the readership which directly benefits the writer - not for any abstract reasons. Whenever ethics is mentioned in terms of writing there is always someone who claims that it can’t be enforced, well many people in your audience will figure out whether you are acting ethically and decide whether they want to continue reading your materiel. I wonder whether Planet installations should have ethics codes and remove blogs that violate them. In conclusion I think that a complete code of ethics for blogging needs to have some IF clauses to cover the different types of blog. I may have to write my own. Please let me know if you have any suggestions.

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23 October 2007

MJ Ray: the Cooperative Group Half-Yearly Meeting: Q+A

the co-operative half-yearly meeting, Bristol Belatedly, as promised, here are the questions from the floor at last week's half-year meeting of the Co-operative Group Kennet and Avon area. All errors and omissions are mine, of course.
How do we defend against demutualisation and private equity attacks?
Our rules are now written so that demutualisation would require assets to be transferred to other co-operatives. Please comment on other ways to the current constitutional review consultation.
How can ordinary members get informed and involved in running the group?
Get items into network, call the regional office.
The consitutional review should give more power to meetings and make it easier for motions and binding promises.
will forward this to the review.
Why did the group secretary suddenly leave?
The job had changed post-merger, with different responsibilities.
How can we stop the payments to voluntarily-retiring directors?
The area has made its point. The chief executive of CooperativesUK will look into this and there was a congress motion to look into this issue.
There's been no mortgage advisor in one local bank branch for months. Is this indicative of the bank's attitude to mortgages?
No, it's disappointing. Please send details to the area secretary.
Please can we use geographic numbers instead of the expensive 0845 for the membership enquiries?
Will forward and ask for a geographic number.
Is the constitutional review being rushed?
It's streamlined because the merger gives a pressing need, but we want member input.
Can we or do we promote credit unions in-store?
Yes, we can and do promote them to members already. Can set aside some space in-store if needed.
Does the co-operative travel insurance discriminate against over 75s?
will forward the answer when we have it.
The top management post-merger are all from United: is this a take-over?
no, 2 executives had clear intentions to retire already and the lower levels are more mixed.
Which? gave the co-operative food a D for organic produce: why and what will we do about it?
Report from today's Guardian not yet seen. Expect to respond in next few days. The report may have compared convenience stores with larger stores.
Will ex-United travel agents become the co-operative travel stores?
Yes. There's a big big change coming, to be more of a community travel agent, restructured, with more phone and internet options.
Is the energy-saving policy to include refrigeration, lighting and IT?
This is a top goal, to improve refrigeration and lighting control. It saves the earth and saves money. Nearly all electricity is already "greener" electricity.
Do we own the freehold on the land previously occupied by a store at Shirehampton?
Yes. Only a non-food retailer will be allowed in.
Why do elected representatives have to retire at 70 if still capable?
Please submit comments on it to the constitutional review?
Why was there no transport from Weston-super-Mare?
Will check the office records for requests.
Anyone see these themes appear at other meetings? Any comments on these themes?

Isaac Clerencia: Open aLANtejo 2007

Last weekend I had the chance to attend the Open aLANtejo conference, in beautiful vora, Portugal. I went there to give a presentation about Open Source Game Development and had the chance to meet interesting people that I knew through somebody else or just from the community lore :P To be honest I had a really better time than I expected :) Some of the speakers were the Bitrock people, Jono Bacon (Ubuntu Community Manager) and Juanjo from Igalia. I’m really looking forward to meet up again. The organisation team was also really helpful and passionate about the event, so if you get invited, don’t think twice about going :)

22 October 2007

Joerg Jaspert: Clusterssh

Some people did ask me to add a “tech” category to my blog, and randomly post about useful little things that help making life easier. Well, Im not making a dedicated category for it, but one where I will put all my not-strictly-debian related “tech” content in. Up to now my blog only knew a debian category… :) Well, so the first thing i have a little to write about is clusterssh. It is similar to dsh, with the difference that clusterssh opens an xterm for every host you want to control, while dsh simply takes one commandline and executes it on the remote host(s). This way clusterssh allows you to step in and control a single host, if that one needs a little extra action, while keeping the connection to all other hosts open. After you are done with the extra action - just go back to control all hosts at once. Very helpful if you edit configuration files, and one hosts needs a little different value, while most stuff is the same. Or doing security upgrades and find out one of your colleagues was so “clever” to install an extra package which now makes aptitude want to remove half of your system. You can step in and fix the situation and then simply continue with all hosts. Usage of clusterssh is pretty simple - after you installed it type 
  cssh machine1 machine2 machine3
and clusterssh will open 3 xterms and one control window. Whatever you type into that control window is then send to all 3 machines. cssh example1 As you can see in the picture I first executed one command on both hosts, by typing it into the CSSH window, and then selected one host directly, typing a command only this host sees. Now, we are all lazy, so lets make cssh easier to use. Noone wants to type hundreds of hostnames all the time. Luckily clusterssh has a concept where you map tags to servernames. If you are the admin of your machine and want to setup such a mapping for all of your users you edit /etc/clusters, if you just want to do it for yourself edit $HOME/.csshrc. Actually - do not edit it, but run 
  cssh -u >$HOME/.csshrc
and edit the generated file. Ignore all of the config stuff for now, defaults are nice and good. Go to the bottom and add something similar to the following lines: 
 clusters = foo bar
 foo = miau wuff:2222 root@milk:98 root@elsewhere
 bar = root@miau:443 web@ftp:443
Replace with hosts you can actually login to. The above defines two set of hosts, foo and bar. Now all I need to do to login to the defined machines is to type 
 cssh foo
and clusterssh will open 4 xterms and login to the machines. At work I usually have up to 200-250 machines open with clusterssh, so it can handle large numbers of hosts at once. In such cases you might want to consider adding the -G parameter to the commandline, to not get clusterssh to resize the xterms. A last thing I like to do is - give the xterms opened by clusterssh a different layout. My window manager is setup to draw all my terminals maximized and also has some other settings that do not really help clusterssh terminals . But there is a simple way round this. Edit the following options in your .csshrc to look similar like 
terminal_allow_send_events=-xrm '*.VT100.allowSendEvents:true'
terminal_args=-class CSSH
This will put all xterms into the class CSSH. As your normal settings usually apply to class XTerm this already ignores them. If you want to setup some more things, like a blue background and red foreground in CSSH windows, just add the following into your $HOME/.Xdefaults file (or do whatever steps your window manager might like to configure such things): 
CSSH*background: Blue
CSSH*foreground: Red
Activate with xrdb -load ~/.Xdefaults, done.

Lior Kaplan: Status of the CVS bug triage

The CVS bug triage was started two and a half weeks ago. Considering the time frame, it’s going great. I started with 145 open bugs, and 3 forwarded to upstream (which doesn’t keep track of old bugs, AFAIK). And now only 53 (about 1/3) of the bugs still wait for confirmation about their status. During the triage, 38 bugs were closed and around 50 bugs were verified to still be relevant. All these numbers means that CVS has 57 bugs which are pending and verified to occur in the latest version. At least 10 of them can be solved quite easily as they have patch or an explanation good enough to be considered as a patch. The rest should probably require more work from the maintainers and upstream. During the triage, a lot of work was invested in reproducing bugs when the submitters said they can’t do that themselves anymore (not using CVS or not using Debian). Another bunch of of bugs got better tags (mostly patch tag) and up-to-date version info to ease the maintainers’ future work on the package. The bugs waiting for verification bugs were user tagged so they can be followed easily. Help with those is always welcome.

Holger Levsen: Small report from the meeting in Extremadura

The last five days I've spent at the combined Debian Edu, FAI and CDD meeting in M rida in Extremadura, together with 17 others. The Debian Edu / Skolelinux crowd was the biggest, followed by FAI, followed by CDD people, though many were part of more than one project. "As usual" it was great to meet many known faces and some unknown ones and to be able to discuss stuff in RL.

Besides various small different things, I worked on the Debian Edu etch r1 release, our lenny roadmap (see the bottom of our roadmap page which also covers etch r1) and the (technical side of the) german translation of the Debian Edu documentation. Non edu related the new setupharddisk2 for FAI took most of my brain activity. And I've signed all keys allready :-)

We stayed at a very nice hotel in the even much nicer city of Merida, which features a lot of roman ruins and history. For example, we walked over the biggest roman bridge in the world! The only thing that was bigger was the amount of good food we were forced to eat every day... Incredible. This was my second visit to Merida and this time I finally managed to visit the amphitheatre (with seats for 15000 people) and the Roman theatre. (Unfortunatly the english page about Emerita Augusta is a stub.) If you happen to come around that area make sure to spend some time sight seeing, it is really worth it! People living in Merida literally fear to rebuild their houses, because as soon as they start to dig, they find something historical and have to turn their property into a museum :-)

In case you have not seen it yet, you should watch this small movie from euro news about the free software efforts in Extremadura. Insightful and very good promotion, also to show around.

Many thanks to C sar, Jos Luis and the Junta de Extremdura for hosting such a great meeting! You rock!

On a unrelated note, spam has gone crazy yesterday while traveling back, 15000 mails were not catched by my so far well working setup. ARG. I still used to have a catchall setting, which was useful to give out addresses like $company@mydomain, but now I will explicitly list those addresses and disable catchall. And luckily for you I will not blog about every spam mail I got... :) Generally I dont consider spam (the source of) evil, it's money: as long as money rules the world, there will be spam. So since it's a social problem, it is hardly solvable by technology. (That is, as long as you want to receive mails from strangers, which I do.) IMO what's worse than spammers are autoresponders to spam. Most of those 15000 mails were auto-replies to spam. OMFSM.

Dirk Eddelbuettel: Frank Lloyd Wright Race 2007

Today was the 31th annual Frank Lloyd Wright Race in Oak Park, next door to where I live. This is a really nice small race I've run in 2006, 2004 and 2003. Conditions today were almost ideal -- we're having unseasonally warm weather, and it was sunny and in the high 60s without any noticeable winds around the start time making it feel like a nice late summer morning, rather than the middle of fall. I wasn't aiming for something really fast as I am still in training for a longer race and had done some reasonably fast one-mile laps yesterday morning leaving me not exactly well rested. But for once, I actually managed to run a steady pace, and then ended up within seconds of last year's PR for the distance at 41:15 for a pace of around 6:39, so I'm quite pleased.

20 October 2007

Jordi Mallach: You might get an email from me tonight

Sometime in August, I said I would watch the Inbox Zero talk later on that day. Well, I finally did today. And I'm ready to mass-murder my (now not so) fat inbox folder and start from scratch, and becoming a good boy. In fact, I've been on probation for a few weeks. While I wasn't watching the talk (which is pretty insightful and fun, and useful if you also have these horrid mail handling problems) I did roll up my sleeves a few times and worked on reducing the problem. After a few rounds of fighting, things were looking slightly better. I deleted TONS of spam which still was sitting in there. I deleted entire threads of list mail which for some reason wasn't being filtered properly. I archived a lot of random, misc email. I even replied to some job offers, for a change. I fixed my .procmailrc a little to get rid of lots of useless stuff that appears in my mail. It got better, but not entirely better. I went from the 6600~ which was probably the figure when I said Enough! to around 2580. It's still a lot, and I can still get rid of a lot more with easy pattern searches in mutt. The good news is that, for the first time in ages, the number of emails in the mailbox has stayed stable for more than a month. I tell you: I'm proud! So Merlin gets asked in the talk what to do when you've been a naughty boy for a long time, and you've ended up with this HUGE mailbox you can't handle anymore. His answer was what some people suggested in blog comments: put it aside, start from zero. Merlin calls it mail-DMZ, and that's probably what I'll do in a few hours, admittedly with a sentiment of guilt deep in my chest. And from that point, I'll have my mailbox be a TODO list. Delete. Defer. Delegate. Respond. Do. Simple! Other Planet Debian participants like joeyh commented that something that really helps is reducing the number of times you poll for email. For me, that means 
set daemon      1800            # Pool every 30 minutes
when it was 5 minutes before. I hope I won't find myself issuing awaken commands often... I remember when, more than five years ago, having more than 100 mails made me feel bad and go cleanup. After some vacation, it went up to 150. Then Christmas came along, 300, until I found myself nearing 7000 last summer. Before moving my junk to a demilitarised mailbox, I'm having some fun replying to some email. The first one in my mailbox is from a member of a Catalan "Mallach" family. 
From: Conchita Broquetas <familia_mallach_broquetas@yahoo.es>
Subject: Hola!
To: jordi@sindominio.net
Date: Sun, 17 Jun 2001 16:55:17 +0200 (CEST)
who discovered there was a "Jordi Mallach" other than his brother in the Internet. Apparently we had an exchange on where our families came from (Mallach is all but a common surname... anywhere, and my family has always wondered where it came from). So that's more than 6 years ago. I think I'd love to get a reply to some email sent by me years ago which has been sitting for years in a mailbox, because "I need to reply to this sometime". I think the Mallach-Broquetas are getting one tonight. If you think I'm dumping random thoughts on a vim buffer, it's probably due to me feeling sad today. Sorry, but I feel like typing, and I don't have a typewriter with me. Speaking of sad, nothing beats the next email which sat for some dramatic 6 months in my messy inbox until I found out in the worst of the possible scenarios. Let's go back to late February, 2004, when I had no job, and I didn't have a clue on what to do with my life. 
From: Mark Shuttleworth <mark@hbd.com>
Subject: New project to discuss
To: Jordi Mallach <jordi@debian.org>
Date: Sun, 29 Feb 2004 18:33:51 +0000
[...]
I'm hiring a team of debian developers to work full time on a new
distribution based on Debian. We're making internationalisation a prime
focus, together with Python and regular release management. I've discussed
it with a number of Debian leaders and they're all very positive about it.
[...]
I'm not sure if I totally missed it as it came in, or I skimmed through it and thought WTF?! Dude on crack or I just forgot I need to reply to this email , but I'd swear it was the former. Not long after, no-name-yet.com popped up, the rumours started spreading around Debian channels. Luckily, I got a job at LliureX two months later, where I worked during the following 2 years, but that's another story. I guess it was July or so when Ubuntu was made public, and Mark and his secret team organised a conference (blog entries [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]), just before the Warty release, and I was invited to it, for the same reasons I got that email. During that conference, probably because Mark sent me some email and I applied a filter to get to it, I found the lost email, and felt like digging a hole to hide for a LONG while. I couldn't believe the incredible opportunity I had missed. I went to Mark and said "hey, you're not going to believe this", and he did look quite surprised about someone being such an idiot. I wonder if I should reply to his email today...

Christian Perrier: RWC: South Africa's power (15-6)

Great final. South Africa *and* England showed that a match without tries can still be one of the best of the tournament. The first half was one of the most intense (I'd say *the* most intense) I've seen, with England playing well with their strengths (forward lanes, mauls) but felt against a tremendously defending South African team...and a perfect Percy Montgomery transforming all penalty kicks, therefore converting RSA domination. I also noticed the incredible energy of Bryan Habana who "destroyed" Sackey three times even if he weights many pounds less. I think that all rugby fans enjoyed that final even without tries (again, South Africa wins a world cup without scoring a try in final). So, that's the end of 1.5 month of rugby crazyness. Dear readers who survived until now, thank you for sharing my passion for that sport...et rendez-vous pour le tournoi des 6 nations..:-)

Jan Wagner: wordpress plugin and widget packages

Yesterday I was going through the plugins and widgets, if there are any updates or such. I realized again, that updating of plugins (and maybe searching for the relocated download source) makes me mad. Also testing and switching back is annoying much.
So I decided to package plugins and widgets I use. Since some plugins and widgets are not maintained long enought for any debian release cycle or getting obsolet with new wordpress releases, I decided to maintain the packages outside of the debian project. Anyways … some people are also scared about the security situation of wordpress. I guess this isn’t much better for wordpress extensions. Next pity, some extensions or any equivalents aren’t available for wordpress 2.3 (yet). If you run multiple blogs via the stock debian package and wan’t to make use of the new wordpress version in any of your sites, you have update all at once … which maybe not a way you want to go. I decided to repackage wordpress 2.3.0 as wordpress23, which allows you to install wordpress (<<2.3.0) and wordpress23 at same time. If you want to use debian plugin, widget or theme packages or use these from your normal wordpress installation (/usr/share/wordpress) with wordpress23, you need to symlink the dirs. For example:

# mv /usr/share/wordpress23/wp-content/plugins/ /usr/share/wordpress23/wp-content/plugins.orig
# mv /usr/share/wordpress23/wp-content/themes/ /usr/share/wordpress23/wp-content/themes.orig
# ln -s /usr/share/wordpress23/wp-content/plugins /usr/share/wordpress/wp-content/plugins
# ln -s /usr/share/wordpress23/wp-content/themes /usr/share/wordpress/wp-content/themes Remember that package updates of wordpress or wordpress23 may overwrite parts of /usr/share/wordpress/wp-content/[plugins themes] in such situation. BE CAREFULL! You can get the stuff via apt-line:

deb ftp://ftp.cyconet.org/debian wordpress main non-free contrib Or directly from: http://ftp.cyconet.org/debian/archive/wordpress/ The actual package list is: wordpress-plugin-af-extended-live-archive
wordpress-plugin-ald-spa
wordpress-plugin-all-in-one-seo-pack
wordpress-plugin-exec-php
wordpress-plugin-google-sitemap-generator
wordpress-plugin-landingsites
wordpress-plugin-lightbox-2
wordpress-plugin-now-reading
wordpress-plugin-page-links-to
wordpress-plugin-photopress
wordpress-plugin-related-posts
wordpress-plugin-rolemanager
wordpress-plugin-sideblog
wordpress-plugin-spam-karma
wordpress-plugin-stats
wordpress-plugin-ubernyms
wordpress-plugin-utw
wordpress-plugin-utwgooglesitemaps
wordpress-plugins
wordpress-widget-category-cloud
wordpress-widget-samsarin-php
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wordpress23 If you want a plugin or widget included and it makes sence to do so, drop me a mail, where to grab. Be aware that UTW isn’t supported since wordpress 2.3 anymore. A tag system was included into wordpress and you need to search replacements for all the nice UTW extension! Stay tuned! , , , , ,

Adam Rosi-Kessel: Multitasking and Classical Music

Two recent print-media articles begging to be linked: First, the Autumn of the Multitaskers in this month’s Atlantic. Despite the age-of-Internet theme, the full article is only available to subscribers. The thesis is one I’ve seen before (e.g., in GTD). Namely: although we might feel like we’re accomplishing more when multitasking, we actually end up less productive, and eventually we’ll lose our minds if we continue to overload our sense. The writer takes the idea further than I’ve seen before, incorporating several astonishing indicators from the zeitgeist, including this NSFW quote from Jennifer Connelly that I won’t reprint, and several foreign policy and domestic political examples of how multitasking is failing our culture and our country. There is a generational divide at work here. Most in previous generations (say, people over 40) didn’t come online until the Internet was nearly full-blown with spam, entertainment news, popups, advertising, streaming stock quotes, rich media services, IM, Facebook, Flash, etc.. These people generally deal poorly with information and sensory overflow because they had no incremental introduction. The younger generations (people under 25) don’t remember the world before the Internet and multipurpose portable devices, and thus think it entirely normal to watch TV, surf the web with a few open windows, talk on the phone (perhaps VoIP), and IM at the same time. At least. And they’re bored if they don’t have at least have three or four tasks going simultaneously. This isn’t to say that these gen-Yers are actually doing a good job at it — I find myself often answering computer-related questions from my younger siblings because they can’t actually read a focused page or two of dense text on the computer (e.g., a readme file) in one sitting — but rather that they don’t experience the flow as psychologically overwhelming. That leaves my (in between) generation, generally people born in the 1970’s. Those of us who grew up with early low-bandwidth wide area networks — I started on BITNET, USENET, and BBS’s in the early- to mid-1980’s — have better mechanisms for coping and prioritizing. Perhaps because our multitasking options were relatively limited, we haven’t leaped on the bandwagon to the same extent as others. I personally don’t mind two simultaneous tasks — e.g., perusing RSS headlines and listening to MP3s — but more than that doesn’t interest me. (I don’t count it as “multitasking” in the same sense where one of the tasks is just waiting, e.g., for code to compile or a large upgrade to download). Please feel free to destroy my broad generalizations here in the comments. While we’re on the subject of multitasking, I fall into the “subtle exception” category described in Getting Things Done:
The Multitasking Exception There’s a subtle exception to the one-item-at-a-time rule. Some personality types really need to shift their focus away from some task for at least a minute in order to make a decision about it. When I see this going on with someone, I let him take two or sometimes three things out at once as he’s processing. It’s then easier and faster for him to make a choice about the action required.
I find this trick particularly helpful in getting unstuck. Frequently, when drafting briefs, I’ve rewritten a sentence eight or nine times and it still doesn’t seem to get across the necessary idea efficiently and without making the reader do any hard work. Switching to another (usually simpler) task, if only for one or two minutes, is often enough to come back and do it right in one swoop. In this situation (and probably only in this situation), multitasking actually saves me time. Second, the Well Tempered Web (by Alex Ross, music critic with a blog) in this week’s New Yorker. This one is more naturally available in complete form online. Ross manages to weave together Wagner, Snakes on a Plane, the Long Tail, and Rick Rubin. Worth reading. (And while you’re at it, check out Adam Gopnik’s piece on abridgments, which unfortunately is not available online.) Lest you all think all I read is the New Yorker and the Atlantic: it’s not true. I’m just not at liberty to disclose my other sources at this time.

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Michal &#268;iha&#345;: Debugging not working USB automounting in GNOME

Some day, this thing stopped to work for me. I was not aware of doing anything what could break it, even any related package was not updated. Time went on and I still did not find time to learn how to debug this udev/hal/dbus/gnome-volume-manager machinery. Today, after some googling I found short debugging guide on Ubuntu wiki, which quickly revealed me that "volume.ignore set to true on /org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/volume_uuid_4717_5407, not mounting". Well I didn't configure anything to be ignored, so let's dig deeper in this. As I had no idea where this thing could be set, I again started to google and /etc/hal and /usr/share/hal seem to be the right place where to start grep. Nothing related in /etc, but too much entries in /usr. However most of them were selective for some special USB disks or partitions. But there was one which did this unconditionally - it was file /usr/share/hal/fdi/policy/gparted-disable-automount.fdi, what crap from gparted. Now I remember that I used this for formatting and partitioning something on USB and after doing all job, it crashed. So it left this piece of HAL hack inside /usr/share/hal and it was cause of anything not mounting. Seems to be worth of reporting as a bug... Wait a moment, it's already known and some patch for it exists. Hopefully we will see this soon in unstable.

19 October 2007

Ian Haken: Long Time, No Update

So I've clearly neglected giving frequent updates, so I'll try to summarize everything that's been going on and maybe try to post more frequently in the future (I feel like I've said that many times before).

The summer ended very well, I think. My GSoC project vlosuts concluded with a fully working version, and so hopefully some guys over at Quality Assurance can be goaded into giving it a try. Once Lars and I find some time (it seems like both our lives have been quite hectic) we'll be submitting it to the unstable branch. I intend to continue supporting and developing it; in fact last night I just checked in the first update for VirtualBox support, as recommended by Jon in my comments. It does seem to work faster than QEMU and Innotek did a quality job (in my opinion at least) of packaging it. The biggest kink is that it does not support raw disk images, and so vlosuts gets slowed down by having to convert to VMDK and back, for which I am using qemu-img (and does anyone know why VBoxManage unregisterimage doesn't seem to be working for VMDKs?). If it's possible to do a loopback mount of VMDK (without VMware's utility) it would probably make more sense to use VMDK instead of a raw image to begin with, but I'm not familiar with any way to do this. At any rate, first version of VirtualBox is there for anyone who'd like to give it a shot.

Anyone not concerned with the personal going-ons of my life should stop reading right about now. Since my semester started up again at the end of August, I've pretty much hit the ground running. I'm taking 20 units (I think the average is around 15), one of which is a mathematics graduate course. I'm also doing a research project in computer science, working a part time job (which I try to do for about 10 hours a week), and getting my graduate school applications taken care of. For anyone who is curious, the GRE is a terrible thing. Graduate school and fellowship applications have been a particular headache, but fortunately I'm just about finished up with the essays. For the curious I'll be applying to mathematics departments with an emphasis in logic and foundations at the following universities (list subject to change frequently): MIT, Berkeley, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, Urbana-Champaign, UMich.

Raphael Geissert: DeBaBaReTools: The de-what?

It's been a while since I wanted to post about a project I started.
But today when I read Russell Coker's post about his SE Linux repository I decided it was time to blog about DeBaBaReTools.

So, what is/are DeBaBaReTools?
is: a project which tries to unify different packages-building systems (pbuilder, buildd, etc) and different repository tools (debarchiver, reprepro, etc) in a single system by providing an incoming/ system.

are: Debian Bash-Based Repository Tools.

Or in other words:
DeBaBaReTools handles new packages by:


DeBaBaReTools is NOT a rewrite of a repository tool (like reprepro, debpool or debarchiver), neither yet an other building tool (like buildd or pbuilder). It is rather a glue between those two kind of tools.

So, how does DeBaBaReTools work?
As already said, they are a set of scripts which do all the work.
These are some of the scripts (more might be written later, they are under development):



Note that at the moment these are the only supported backends: gpgv, du, md5sums (all built in checkSums), pbuilder and reprepro.

Sounds interesting, doesn't it? :)

So, here's the magic:

The backends system
DeBaBaReTools doesn't try to re-invent the wheel, but it makes use of all the available tools so it works as less as possible.

This is where the backends take action. They are even more shell (even tough DeBaBaReTools clearly specifies they are Bash scripts they should work on any other POSIX-compatible shell) scripts which are loaded on demand and according to the user settings.

This opens a wide range of possible combinations of backends; making DeBaBaReTools work with almost anything.

The probe.sh script searches different directories for the specified backend (and will soon support user-hinted backends).

I think an example says more than a thousand words:
When needsBuild finds a package that needs to be built in a given architecture, the toBuild shell function is called. In order to provide the already said flexibility, needsBuild will at startup time call probeFile "buildQueue" which will then check several directories for the required backend (buildQueue in this case). Once it finds the given backend (backends/buildQueue/) it will check for any user hint (which will specify the real backend to be used) and then for a default one (default.sh which is a symlink to a real backend, plaintext.sh by default).

So, if somebody at some point wants to use a sqlite database to store all that information, that person would have to write a file called backends/buildQueue/sqlite.sh (or make it available in any of the include paths which can be extended via the EXTRA_PROBE_DIRS env variable) and either set a user hint or make default.sh point to it.
The sqlite.sh script can then call any external tools (or even more scripts) to insert the information in the database, read it and more.

I know this is a lot of blahblahblah but no single line of code is shown.
I've already requested an alioth project but it was denied because the package isn't already in the Debian archive.
If you are a DD and you think this sounds like a good project please contact the Alioth admins and convince them to create a project account for DeBaBaReTools.
Once created, many other people will be able to work on it and make it work with virtually any tool.

Any kind of feedback is very welcomed but I hope they are constructive ideas.

Why did I start this crazy project?
Because AFAIR only dak is able to do such job but I think dak is just too complex for a simple system to manage an a repository with an incoming system. And AFAIK there's no script which is able to do this job besides dak.

I hope this post makes sense because I don't want to review it again (I'm tired) :)

:bye: all

18 October 2007

Russell Coker: My SE Linux Etch Repository

deb http://www.coker.com.au etch selinux The above sources.list line has all the i386 packages needed for running SE Linux with strict policy on Etch as well as a couple of packages that are not strictly needed but which are really convenient (to solve the executable stack issue). gpg --keyserver hkp://subkeys.pgp.net --recv-key F5C75256
gpg -a --export F5C75256 apt-key add - To use it without warnings you need to download and install my GPG key, the above two commands do this. You will of course have to verify my key in some way to make sure that it has not been replaced in a MITM attack. The only thing missing is a change to /etc/init.d/udev to have a new script called /sbin/start_udev used to replace the make_extra_nodes function (so that the make_extra_nodes functionality can run in a different context). Of course a hostile init script could always exploit this to take over the more privileged domain, but I believe that running the init scripts in a confined domain does produce some minor benefits against minor bugs (as opposed to having the init scripts entirely owned). I back-ported all the SE Linux libraries from unstable because the version in Etch doesn’t support removing roles from a user definition by the “semanage user -m” command (you can grant a user extra roles but not remove any roles). Trying to determine where in the libraries this bug occurred was too difficult. Does anyone know of a good document on how to create repositories with apt-ftparchive? My current attempts are gross hacks but I’ve gone live anyway as the package data is good and the apt configuration basically works.

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James Morrison: Rain

When I was back in Canada last we got a nice rain storm while driving to see Kevin, his wife and little son Tank. Tonight in Belo Horizonte our football game was cancelled because of rain. The rain really was something, the thunder was fantastics, a few of the strikes were big enough to make me drunk.

Oh, other good thing, I have internet in the Hotel now.

Clint Adams: But can I read it over gopher

John Goerzen nearly transforms into Tom Robbins.

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