As mentioned yesterday, I went to watch the Tour of Britain for real in Taunton. It’s taken me a while to encode these (I’ll write about the technical details on another page soon), but here are the videos. They’re in the super-cool Ogg Theora format, in case that helps you update your media player with filters like these. (I probably should do some clever tricks to embed these videos in the page, but it’s taken me long enough to get this far, so please either download the files or drag-and-drop the links to your media player. If anyone can explain how to embed videos simply, please leave me a comment…) First of all, I went to Staplegrove Road, where I thought the peloton might slow slightly to get past a roundabout on their first pass through Taunton (Ogg, 514K) a bit after 11am, but they didn’t really. Then I got a brilliant position in the second row just by the finish line, which meant I didn’t see the big crash of the day until I saw the TV news in the evening, but I did see both the main sprints, for the stage win (Ogg 919K) and the yellow-jersey group (Ogg 382K). Finally, I went and watched the presentations - the yellow jersey (Ogg 1.3M) and the champagne spray (Ogg 643K) are shown here. The BBC has the broadcast rights to the tour of Britain and seem to be doing a terrible job: Live race news seems to be limited to a quick mention in the half-hourly sports bulletins on Radio Five (on satellite Astra 2D at 28 east to much of north-west Europe, or Medium Wave 909 and 693kHz). Each night, there’s a short (3 minutes?) summary report in the BBC1 TV news of that stage’s region, some time after 18:30 BST (so tonight in West Midlands, tomorrow Yorkshire and North Midlands, Friday North-west and Saturday Scotland, all Astra 2D). This is not shown on BBC News 24, as far as I’ve seen, not even in the Sportsday show. There will be one national highlights show on BBC 2 at 14:30 on Sunday (again, Astra 2D), the day after the race has finished. Official listings say this is highlights of the final stage but hopefully it will cover the other stages too. I feel they should take the rights away from the BBC and give ITV a chance. We had better coverage of this year’s Tour of Ireland (from itv4) than we have of the Tour of Britain - this is silly. For non-TV coverage details, including Twitter, see CyclingFans.com

Since a few days I'm a happy customer of Lichtblick, the biggest electric utility (Stromanbieter) in Germany which provides 100% green energy (or kostrom as it's called in Germany). Why? I was getting tired of all those hypocrites and liars (a.k.a. politicians) who keep on talking about global warming and renewable energy, but fail to produce any real results since many, many years now. So I decided to do my (small) part to help reduce CO₂ emissions, the greenhouse effect, and global warming. After measuring the energy consumption of all my power-sucking devices and replacing or turning off some of them, and after replacing all lightbulbs with highly efficient energy saving lightbulbs, changing the electric utility was the next logical step. First try (failed) As probably almost everyone in Munich, I was a customer of the Stadtwerke M nchen (SWM). According to the last electricity bill I got from them, their sources of energy are: 17% renewable energy, 83% fossil energy sources, 0% nuclear power. Well, at least they don't use nuclear power, that's a big plus IMO, but 83% polluting, fossil crap? Thanks, but no thanks. So I opted to use their kostrom M-Natur tariff, which (they claim) provides 100% renewable energy. They use the so-called Aufpreismodell (sorry, German only), i.e. you pay a few cents extra per kWh, and this extra money is invested in renewable energy sources (mostly small hydropower plants around Munich). As I found out a few hours later (d'oh!) this "Aufpreismodell" is not really ideal (you still pay a conventional electric utility instead of one with 100% renewable energy, for instance). In addition, I stubled over a petition for the city of Munich to stop investing in a new fossil fuel power plant (bituminous coal, to be more precise). Which I promptly signed (and which went to several local parties including the greens, the mayer of Munich, and others).
Now, this is what I call hypocritical behaviour — on the one side they claim/pretend to be environmentally friendly by promoting their "M-Natur" tariff, and at the same time they invest even more money in fossil fuels? WTF? Anyway, it seems the petition did have at least some impact, the aren't allowed to invest more money into that fossil fuel powerplant than they already did. For me that was more than enough reason to immediately revoke my M-Natur tariff, and what's more, I switched to a completely different company now, Lichtblick (see also the respective Wikipedia page). I'm not willing to support such energy policies/politics with my money anymore. Lichblick Lichtblick is an kostromanbieter in Germany, supposedly the biggest one.
Their "energy mix" is 100% renewable energy (which is correct, unlike with SWM, as they do not own any additional fossil fuel plants). 76% of that is hydropower, FWIW. Their prices may be a bit higher than those of conventional electric utilities, but not all that much; you might even pay less, depending on where you live and which tariff you have now. You can use their price calculator to find out. Btw, some other good choices in Germany are Greenpeace energy, Elektrizit tswerke Sch nau, and Naturstrom AG. How the switch went Easy. Grab the respective PDF, print it, fill in the required info, and send it to them. Alternatively, they also offer online registration. It'll take a few weeks until the switch is performed; they have to contact your current electric utility etc. In my case it took ca. 4 weeks. There are no additional costs for switching. There is no "downtime" whatsoever (not even a few seconds), German law requires that you always reliably get your electricity 24/7 (and it indeed worked just fine for me). So, that's that. From now on I'm happily using green energy all day (and night) long. I'm doing my part in Saving The Planet (tm) and I sleep a bit better at night... P.S. No, I'm not getting paid by Lichtblick (or anybody else) to write this.

At least in unstable that's the case, thanks to santiago who uploaded rtorrent yesterday. Unfortunately(for people using testing) the new version 0.11.8/0.7.8 for libtorrent/rtorrent is out, that's why I will wait until rtorrent got into testing so there'll be no mismatch of versions between the library and the client (actually rtorrent 0.7.4 and libtorrent 0.11.7, should be rtorrent 0.7.7) and then will start looking a sponsor for the new packages of libtorrent/rtorrent (which are going to be ready later tonight).

For the past weeks, I’ve been working on getting an SGI Origin200 system to run Debian. Getting a working kernel for the machine took some time and lead to the discovery of 2 nasty bugs, which will be fixed in 2.6.23 thanks to Ralf Baechle (who found and fixed both bugs). There’s still some work left but the machine is in a usable state, except for a dead eth1 interface. Now I’m having some fun with the bootloader, namely ARCLoad in this case. ARCLoad supports all the Linux-supported SGI MIPS machines, but couldn’t load 64bit kernels on machines equipped with a 32bit PROM; all Debian kernels for SGI MIPS machines have been 64bit for some time now, so that means ARCLoad was unusable with these machines (note that the Origin200 comes with a 64bit PROM, so this wasn’t a showstopper for this project). Thankfully another bootloader, arcboot, is used for these machines and supports 64bit kernels. Stealing a snippet of code from arcboot I’ve now uploaded arcload 0.5-5 which fully covers our needs. The joy of free software. I’ve also been working on getting the latest rEFIt version to build with GNU EFI, which means updating GNU EFI to efi110. Took some time, but everything built in the end. I haven’t tested the resulting rEFIt binary yet, waiting some feedback from GNU EFI uptream before doing so.

With all the excitement of the Vuelta and the Tour of Britain (which I’m off to watch today), I’d missed that the Tour de Pologne also started on Sunday. TVP Polonia has coverage and broadcasts free-to-air to Europe at 19, 13 and 7 east. I think it may also be visible in Australia in a GlobeCast package (can you see it? Please tell me by leaving a comment.) Scheduled shows:-

Tue 11.09.2007 to Fri 14.09.2007

15:10-16:30 CET (live) and 20:00-20:05 CET (summary)

Sat 15.09.2007

13:25-15:05 CET (live, final stage) and 20:00-20:05 CET (summary)

I can’t actually watch this at 19 east except in perfect conditions at the moment because my dish is slightly mis-aligned. I don’t want to adjust it until after the Vuelta finishes, just in case I make a mistake and lose reception completely.

Homebank has had a few problems getting through NEW due to legacy problems from the original Amiga version (and it isn't ready yet) but I've been trying it out anyway and comparing to gnucash. Bearing in mind that I have done upstream work in gnucash (i.e. I like gnucash enough to tackle the massively scary gnucash source code) and have (almost) got used to the regular dependency hell that it imposes on my sid installation, I'm finding homebank quite friendly.
(See #441110, #441103, #441129 and #441363 for recent examples of gnucash causing dependency hell - again.)
(1:0 to Homebank).
Homebank is closer to the Quicken model with categories but internal transfers between accounts are supported to give some impression of double-entry. (1:1) My main interest is in data import/export because I've long been looking for a way to create invoices from PIM data e.g. in a Palm Pilot or similar. Homebank supports a CSV data import for data that can be handled as an invoice. OK, there's no fancy invoice printing but that doesn't bother me (I never used the gnucash invoice print support) (2:1 to Homebank) - my invoices are all electronic and I have to use the client system (MSDOS!). What I need is to create my own records of the invoices within my financial accounts and Homebank may be able to do that with far greater ease than gnucash. My data exists primarily in my Palm because I take and change my bookings on-the-move. I want to be able to HotSync my Palm through a query interface (pilot-qof) and XSL (datafreedom-qsfxsl) direct into a financial application that can correlate that data with the payments made into my bank by the client and thence with data from my bank statements to prepare data suitable for my tax report.
I'm thinking that if I can get half of the ease-of-use of Homebank into the rigorous double-entry support of gnucash in a small program (gpe-cash), I'll be doing very well.
One limitation of Homebank is the "wording" - the translations appear awkward and unfamiliar but that can be easily fixed. The link between "Archives" and "automated transactions" isn't clear - I think it means "templates" and "scheduled transactions". (2:2)
Homebank can't do all the things that gnucash can do but that is a weakness in gnucash, not homebank. (3:2 to Homebank) IMNSHO, GnuCash tries to do too much and that leads to an oversized and overly complex codebase as well as a dependency list that puts OOo to shame. The graph support in homebank is a lot better than gnucash and that is not the fault of libgoffice, it is entirely down to the choices made by gnucash upstream developers. Homebank graphs are fast, simple, intuitive and informative, displaying useful info at the first attempt instead of having to wade through the Options dialogue in gnucash. (4:2 to Homebank).
If I can work out some simple scripting that combines these external tools into 'HomeOffice' support in Homebank, everyone wins.
I've never liked CSV as a data format and the homebank main files are XML (like gnucash). Unlike gnucash, the XML appears sane and usable for XSLT - raising the prospect of creating reports directly from the homebank data files.
Homebank upstream have been very supportive of the various requests to assist getting Homebank through NEW so I'm hopeful that if an XML import/export method was proposed it could be included in future - especially if the donkey work is done by external tools.
This would tie in well with datafreedom-qsfxsl and datafreedom-perl. Initially, I'll look at XML->CSV - ugly, I know but at least Homebank can import data to be used as invoices; gnucash cannot. (5:2 to Homebank).

At the end of round one:
Homebank : 5 GnuCash: 2.

Given that Hecl is very much tied to the Java ME platform, this question is pretty important to me. I was thinking about simply posting it here, on my line journal, but having recently started reading The Wisdom of Crowds, I decided to have a little fun with it, and created a "prediction market" on the Inkling Markets (a YCombinator startup) web site: http://home.inklingmarkets.com/market/show/6481 Of course, if you just want to comment on your answer, that's ok too. My thoughts on the current possibilities:

• Java ME. Widely available right now, but Sun has made a few false steps. For instance, the difficulty of writing something that runs everywhere is a high barrier for hobbyists or small companies.
• JavaFX. Apparently, this exists because Java is seen as being not quite scripty enough to compete with dynamic languages, something that I think is a legitimate concern. However, it currently is not deployed, so it's hard to say what its future will be.
• Web/Javascript. If mobile phones get better/cheaper connections, it would be easy to see them going the way of the rest of the world - rather than native applications, they'd simply be html/javascript apps. Doesn't work for games and some other things, but makes deployment very easy. The big if is the network operators and what they want to do about traffic costs. Apple, for the moment, seems to be taking this route.
• Python. Currently available for Symbian. I don't see it as a big possibility, but who knows.
• Qt. Troll tech is currently shipping a development device, the "green phone". Since it's proprietary, this one seems like a long shot too, but you never know.
• Other. GTK on Linux, Tcl/Tk... maybe even Hecl! In this field, things can be tilted upside down surprisingly quickly, although that's not quite so true for anything involving physical devices.
• None. Java ME becomes less popular, but nothing concrete supplants it, and we end up with a hodge podge of technologies, with no clear leader.

In any case, I think it's a space that's bound to be very interesting, and loaded with interesting possibilities. Update YC.news user jsjenkins points out a silly oversight on my part: Flash Lite. It slipped my mind completely, but is certainly an important player in this market. The Java folks have to be hoping that history will not repeat itself.

Eurosport coverage of Vuelta a Espa a at 19 east continues with commentary in English (analogue only) and German. Scheduled times:-

Mon 10.09.2007

16:00-17:30 CET

Tue 11.09.2007

no show (rest day, but MTB coverage at 08:45)

Wed 12.09.2007

16:00-17:30 CET

Thu 13.09.2007

01:00-01:30 (recap?) and 15:45-17:30 CET

Fri 14.09.2007 and Sat 15.09.2007

16:00-17:30 CET

Sun 16.09.2007

18:00-19:00 CET (recorded?)

TVEi are broadcasting in Spanish at 13 and 19 east. You can also see the race on TVEI America, but I don’t know the reception details. Scheduled times:-

Mon 10.09.2007

16:30-18:00 CET

Tue 11.09.2007

no show (rest day)

Wed 12.09.2007 to Sun 16.09.2007

16:40-18:00 CET

I’ll post more times next week. It was good to see a strong Caisse d’Epargne showing, as I predicted, even if it didn’t last long…

One of several things I never got around to blog about is my experience with MythTV (which, in case you don't know, turns your pc into a tivo, given a suitable tv decoder card and the mythtv software). To make up for the lack of a more detailed post, let's just recap: I had set it up a little over two years ago, on what was then a 'possibly temporary' Kubuntu box. Well the box is still there and still running Kubuntu, four releases later, and MythTV only got easier as Ubuntu now includes the decoder drivers. So far no worries. TV schedule information had always been provided via the 'free as in beer if you answer a question or two' zap2it subsidiary of the for-profit Tribune publishing company (i.e. the folks who own the Chicago Tribune, Cubs baseball team, WGN TV station around here and what have you, and are in the process of being sold to Sam Zeil). As had been noted in other places, that 'free' service is no more, and a seemingly cooperatively-run 'small fee' service has been set up by a few volunteers at schedulesdirect. So I just switched, and for the benefit of anybody sitting on the fence about this, the switch is trivial:

1. If need be, add 'feisty-proposed' to apt's sources.list file to get the new MythTV 0.20.2 release directly from Ubuntu.
2. Install MythTV 0.20.2 which takes as little as wajig update; wajig dist-upgrade
3. Follow the instructions in this email, in particular point 4) about re-creating lineup info
4. sit back and enjoy

Including the signup at schedulesdirect, the whole thing took maybe ten minutes. Not bad. Now I only have to find some spare time so that the backlog of unwatched episodes of the Daily Show does not grow much beyond six months... Oh, and last but not least, I'll have to pony up the fifteen bucks for the subscription once my trial is up next Sunday.

winpdb - a platform independent Python debugger A few minutes ago a mail arrived which told me, that my winpdb package migrated to testing, which was just another reminder to blog about it. winpdb is not just yet another Python debugger, it is actually the first really well working one I've used so far. One of my favorite features is the embedded debugging, which allows you to debug scripts which are embedded somewhere. I still have to try it with a Zope product, though - I'm really wondering if I could embed the remote debugger in there. That just brought us to another very useful feature - winpdb is a remote debugger. It connects to the real debugger (called rpdb2) using an encrypted and password protected tcp connection, which allows you to run rpdb2 under a totally different user, probably on some embedded box somewhere on the other side of the world. If you don't want to use a graphical frontend, rpdb2 is able to run the debug sessions in a 'screen' window. Although winpdb doesn't ship much documentation, it is very well documented. And in case you don't like winpdb or wx - pida ships with a debugger plugin which is in fact a gtk frontend for rpdb2. The following quote is part of a mail from Nir Aides, the author of winpdb. Although it may be biased, I think it'll probably give you some ideas in case you want to compare winpdb with some other common (commercial) debuggers. He kindly allowed me to quote it here:

I have just spent a couple of hours (instead of doing some real work…) with the commercial Python debuggers of Komodo IDE 4.1 and Wing IDE 3 beta, and (without declaring objectiveness) Winpdb seems currently better than both in several important areas:

* It is the only one of the three to support os.fork() (wingide debugger crashes)

* It handles thread debugging best in many aspects (e.g allows inspection of threads that are still running, stays with the correct thread when stepping, general usability, etc…)

* Its name-space browser is the most consistent and stable (in particular with describing class inheritance, very large objects, sets!)

* It is the only one that prevents breakpoints in invalid lines (Komodo does not care at all and Wing allows setting breakpoints inside remarks and thus possibly in other invalid lines). This is important since in Python it is sometimes surprisingly hard to tell (by looking at the source code) which lines are valid for breakpoints.

Not to forget that winpdb supports debugging of curses based applications, namespace modification and the coming version is supposed to have full unicode support. Happy debugging!

I sadly read that Warsow are having internal problems. It’s a pity, because it’s a great free game (even with its non-free game data), and they deserve the best. In any case, I just wanted to talk about this because of something that’s quite usual in the development of free games: having non-licensed data. According to tigerchas’ note: “The non-licensed state of warsow media is what has allowed this to happen - and the team is now working on rectifying this. This whole episode has been very unsatisfying and has highlighted the problems of not having a global media license for warsow”. I’m not worried about the future of the game at all, it’s not that the reason I’m writing this entry. As they also say in the same post: “Don’t let this announcement affect you too much, warsownians. warsow has hit minor stumbling blocks in the past and this is simply another. Maps can come and go. Rest assured that the current mapping team will be working on other great maps for you to enjoy”. What I wanted to point out with all this, especially to games developers and teams, is that even when licenses are boring stuff and many of you might think that you can safely ignore them and it won’t affect you, especially when you start the development, reality shows that these things happen. I wish all the best for the Warsow team anyway, and to go soon over this. Keep up the good work!

I spent much of my early childhood at the video arcade. I was fortunate enough to have a best friend who 1) Lived in the old quarters of San Juan where you could walk everywhere 2) Had three older teenage sisters who would take us when we were still quite young to the arcade, which also doubled as a fantastic ice-cream parlor. My favorite game there was galaga, and I played it incessantly (and had to use a foot stool too!!) As a result of all that childhood gaming, I am still pretty half decent at it. For example, I more often than not beat my partner (except under less than auspicious conditions, like being sleep deprived), which is pretty unbelievable as he is much more of a video game wizard than I and otherwise beats me in everything.
Back in my first year in grad school, a cohort of us would play Galaga after our large theory class, and I would also always win (and by a lot and then get crushed at foosball). So of course when I heard that there was a documentary on the very genre of arcade games that consumed so much of my early childhood, King of Kong and a movie that was rumored to leave you at the edge of your seat (which seemed like an impossibility to me), I decided to fork over the cash and check it out in the movie theatre last night. And it was well worth every penny. The movie somehow managed to capture a story and set of subjective experiences that I think are incredibly hard to portray via film: the individual and social intimacy that comes with machine interaction. The story lines revolves around two very different characters who are masters at conquering one of the hardest video games in the world, Donkey Kong and are trying to clinch the world record. The tale of rivalry between them is really good in and of itself and probably without this drama, the movie would have not worked. But what I also found amazing was how the movie conveyed the persistence of the (older) game. They live on in the lives of individuals and collectives, despite the rise of a whole, new class of games that are much more popular today. I am not sure how much longer they will live on, or if the movie was also inadvertently portraying the rise and slow decline of an era that will, in another 50 years, become part of the archive of dead history. Whatever the case, if you had a loving relationship with these games (or your friends or parents did), check out the movie. It really has some incredible footage and moments and will make you want to run to that old arcade, once again.

I get regulary annoyed by the fact that I find random -dev packages on my main system and can't figure out which package's build-depends I satisfied by installing them. Also they don't disappear if the package changes its build-depends. So I decided to solve this problem. Since I'm not really a C/C++ hacker and didn't want to learn hacking APT for this I choose to solve this problem with brute force and Perl ;-) The result is sourcedeps.debian.net, a APT archive which contains one binary package for each source package. The following mapping was done:

     source package name => binary package name, but with appended '-build-depends'
     Build-Depends       => Depends
     Build-Depends-Indep => Recommends
     Build-Conflicts     => Conflicts
     Binary              => Suggests
     Binary              => Provides (with appended '-build-depends')

If any of the Build-Depends fields contains arch limiters, arch-dependent packages will be created, otherwise one arch-independent package. This allows easy installation of build-depends by installing the corresponding meta package, tracking them, and removing them automatically in case you deinstall the meta package. It only works for known architectures though and it requires creating around 60,000 binary packages. It also doesn't allow tracking build-dependencies for more than one version of a package (e.g. unstable and experimental). You can use this by adding something like

deb http://sourcedeps.debian.net/ sid main contrib non-free

to your sources.list. The archive is signed with the following key, available from a keyserver near you and signed by me:

pub   1024D/ED505694 2007-09-08 [expires: 2008-09-07]
      Key fingerprint = 4ECF DF07 F419 0B5B 45C4  51D0 00E9 C47B ED50 5694
uid                  SourceDeps.Debian.Net Archive Key 

Comments welcome.

With the last git release, git-rebase gained a new option: --interactive. If you already had the feeling that in a patch series of yours you should have ordered patches differently, or merged some, then this command is what you dreamed of. Here is how it works Let's pretend you want to rework your last 10 patches, you'll run:

   $ git rebase -i HEAD~10

It will launch your $EDITOR and you'll see something like:

   # Rebasing 16d3800..14f3d11 onto 16d3800 
   # 
   # Commands: 
   #  pick = use commit 
   #  edit = use commit, but stop for amending 
   #  squash = use commit, but meld into previous commit 
   # 
   # If you remove a line here THAT COMMIT WILL BE LOST. 
   # 
   pick 6270640 Simplify write_tree using strbuf's. 
   pick 27c528a Further strbuf re-engineering. 
   pick fd82c9a Eradicate yet-another-buffer implementation in buitin-rerere.c 
   pick eee488f More strbuf uses in cache-tree.c. 
   pick 16878b5 Add strbuf_rtrim and strbuf_insert. 
   pick e9081af Change semantics of interpolate to work like snprintf. 
   pick 99c3ef5 Rework pretty_print_commit to use strbufs instead of custom buffers. 
   pick 203db5d Use strbuf_read in builtin-fetch-tool.c. 
   pick a20d939 Use strbufs to in read_message (imap-send.c), custom buffer--. 
   pick 14f3d11 Replace all read_fd use with strbuf_read, and get rid of it.
   ~
   ~
   ~
   ~
   ~
   ~[]

Then you can rewrite "pick" into "edit" if you want to change something in a commit, or "squash" if you want to merge it with the one from the line before. What the small help doesn't say is that you can actually reorder your commits, and it will do what you expect it to do. I used it 10 minutes ago, because I have this string buffer module I extend on a regular basis, I squashed every API extension of that module in one commit using that. Each time one change needs you to edit anything because either you asked for it, or that one of the change you asked for generated a conflict, then as usual the rebase will stop. You will be prompted to make the change, or fix the conflict, or merge comments (in case of a squash), and when all is in order, you just need to:

   $ git rebase --continue

This is just awsomely simple and intuitive

First day of the Rugby World Cup around here. Here are some of my impressions (for those of you not aware, I'm a rugby fan for ages and this event in my country will definitely affect my work on free software in the next 6 weeks). France-Argentina (12-17): being beaten by Argentina is a surprise only for people who don't know that much about Argentina in rugby. Argentina is currently ranked 6th in the world national team ranking, very close to Ireland (5th) and before England (7th), the last RWC winner. The argentinians played the best rugby they could play against a very hesitating French team. All players know each other very well as 2/3 of the Argentinian team plays...in France. The world's top player (imho), Juan Mart n Hern ndez, lead his team to victory while the french were anything but brilliant. Nothing really harmful, indeed: in rugby, completely screwing a match happens and does not necessarily mean anything for other games. Only drawback, if France qualifies, it becomes more and more likely that the 1/4 final could be France-New Zealand. Ouch... New Zealand-Italia (76-14): I haven't seen that one, therefore missing the first "haka" of that RWC. All Blacks are still the favourites of the RWC and they scored the quickest try as of now. Italy team fought quite well, from what I read, with one of my favourite players (Maurizio Bergamasco) scoring a try. Australia-Japan (91-3): in the past, Japan was closer to the top rugby world teams, particularly because of a long tradition of playing 7-players rugby and therefore being very efficient in rear lanes play. However, rugby changed last years and the power is the key. The japanese team was obviously lacking it...and then they had 14 tries scored against them by a very strict Australian team. England-USA (28-3 as I'm writing this): England is not that impressive but serious, still. The USA team plays well around the scrum and defend pretty well. On the English side, Mike Catt could be one of the stars of that RWC. And, yay, while writing this, USA scored a try against England *and* Lawrence Dallaglio got expelled for 10 minutes. Two occasions for me to be happy..(sorry in advance to my friends in England). Tomorrow, we'll attend South-Africa vs Samoa at Parc des Princes, Paris. That will definitely be a great feast and a nice rugby match. We'll of course put our heart on the Samoan side (I'm afraid I've never been enthusiast with the South African way to play rugby).

Just trying to get some data "out-there" on this issue because I'm seeing duplicate bugs being filed and I can't get any response from GnuCash Bugzilla - probably because bug-buddy is busy filing lots more duplicate bugs upstream about a problem that is entirely within Debian.
The latest upgrade of g-wrap is borked and this leads to the g-wrap binary being installed at version 1.9.9-1 when the rest of the g-wrap package is held back due to the transition from libgwrap-runtime0 to libgwrap-runtime2.
This broken transition breaks gnucash. A simple error message if only g-wrap is upgraded, a complete seg fault crash if guile-g-wrap is upgraded too.
So far, we have 3 bugs in Debian:

• 441129 gnucash: fails to start after upgrade of g-wrap 1.9.9


• 441248 gnucash: Do not start anymore after last unstable upgrade


• 441309 gnucash crashes on start

Please don't add any more. The real bug is 441103 in the g-wrap package and the fix is described in my response to 441248 as:

GnuCash is usable if you can revert to the version of g-wrap in

testing. I'm running it now with:

$ cat /etc/apt/preferences 

Package: g-wrap

Pin: version 1.9.6-3.2

Pin-Priority: 1001



Package: guile-g-wrap

Pin: version 1.9.6-3.2

Pin-Priority: 1001



i.e. there isn't anything wrong with gnucash and if g-wrap had

transitioned properly, the g-wrap binary would not have been upgraded

to 1.9.9 on your system until gnucash could use libgwrap-runtime2

instead of libgwrap-runtime0. With the correct dependencies set in

g-wrap, this whole gnucash problem would have been avoided cleanly.

There is a separate RC bug against gnucash because of this transition: gnucash: FTBFS due to g-wrap transition. which does NOT affect the currently installable and usable version of gnucash in sid.

Thanks.

After dealing with Optus phone support [1] in regard to a routine request for a password change I have been thinking about better ways of managing password changes for a large ISP. The first criteria is that the user must have a password that is difficult to brute-force attack at all times. Changing a password to a supposedly temporary value that can be easily guessed (such as “changeme“) is never acceptable. The next criteria is that the help-desk operator should be trusted as little as possible and it would be ideal if they never knew the password. One possibility that occurred to me is that each bill could have a six-digit pseudo-random number printed on it. This number could be used as an alternate password. When a customer calls up because they lost their password they almost always have their last bill (this is why they print the number for phone support on each bill). The help-desk operator could then push a button on a web based form that makes this pseudo-random number be their new password, thus the help-desk operator would not know the new password and the user would also have it printed out clearly which avoids the confusion from having a password read out in a foreign accent. Another possibility is to have the password change infrastructure integrated with the CTI [2] system, then the help-desk operator could push a button and have the computer dictate the password without the help-desk operator being able to listen in. There will always be corner cases where a help-desk operator has to change the password, but if these are rare because the automated system handles most cases then the potential for damage would be limited. Of course it would also be a really good idea to do some statistical tracking of the number of password change requests performed by each operator and investigate those who do significantly more than average. In the past AOL has experienced a variety of security problems related to trojans [3] which probably would have been discovered by such analysis. Another possible option is that customers with mobile phones could have their new password sent to them by SMS. It’s quick, easy, cheap when done in bulk, and is much harder to intercept than most methods that might be used for transferring passwords. References:

1. http://etbe.coker.com.au/2007/09/03/optus-password-changeme/


2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_telephony_integration


3. http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/news/2003/02/57753

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Ars Technica has recently posted an article about the new Opera alpha release, with some Javascript benchmark results showing it is quite faster than version 9.23. It also goes to compare with Firefox and IE7, but omits some other not so unimportant browsers. I think the main reason is because they seem to have only tested Windows browsers. Sure, Safari has been released recently on Windows, but it is still quite marginal. Anyways, I was wondering how all this was going under Linux, and also, how (good?) WebKit would perform compared to others. So, I tried the same Javascript speed tests on various browsers under Linux on my laptop, which happens to be a Pentium M 1.5GHz. And the winner is…

Test	Iceweasel 2.0.0.6	Epiphany 2.18.3/libxul 1.8.1.6	GdkWebKit	Opera 9.23	Opera 9.50 alpha 1
Try/Catch with errors	80	81	41	18	22
Layer movement	250	214	76	53	47
Random number engine	280	190	57	72	68
Math engine	343	274	82	101	91
DOM speed	205	225	18	41	54
Array functions	97	97	72	82	44
String functions	14	12	12	46	52
Ajax declaration	178	127	16	21	17
Total	1447	1220	374	434	395

So, It seems the speed gain Opera got on Windows doesn’t happen much on Linux. An interesting result, is that Iceweasel, with a bunch of extensions installed, is slower than Epiphany, despite both using the same rendering engine and Javascript library. Running Iceweasel in safe mode makes it the same speed as Epiphany, though. So having extensions does not only clutter the UI, but actually has an impact on how fast the Javascript code in web pages is going to run. And well, WebKit is the fastest for this testcase, though it stays behind Opera on some specific tests.

So, for some reason, I was using advogato and, for some reason, I was looking at jono and, for some reason, I clicked on the link to the JonoCam. What I saw was unpleasant and not what I was expecting. Someone's squatting on the JonoCam address, hiding behind eNom's privacy service. In fact, it looks like all of kdedevelopers.net is spam now, including jono.kdedevelopers.net. Not only that, but http://www.jonobacon.co.uk/ is squatted too, by futuregate aka Mindcom Internet Limited of 20 Meridian Way, Meridian Business Park, Norwich NR7 0TA. If you're reading this from near Norwich, would you post some pictures of the home of these serial domain-squatters, please? So I hopped onto the lugradio IRC and asked jono. Apparently he lost it ages ago(!) nominet says the domain was registered in 2004 and last updated April 2007, so I didn't know if that means it's been a while, or just a few months. Does the registration date change if an owner loses control? astinus told me that it does. Anyway, I wonder how many advogato users have disused person pages with spam/squatted links. Is there a nice way we could spot them all and tag them somehow? Is there some common "about me" format which advogato (and social networking sites?) could use to keep up-to-date on our movements? List three locations in case we lose our primary domain? Also, I had another email yesterday from someone apologising for losing control of their domain, asking me to change my links and I've removed a couple more from my friends bookmarks category recently. Are people still losing personal domains to squatters? If so, is there a new reason for this, or is it the same old problems of registrar-lock-in and it being cheaper to register a new domain than to go to dispute resolution? (2007-09-09: 4 comments)

I had written a little script to create a local config, so one can as user run everything (short of actually installing packages) as user. (Which is quite useful to download all packages needed to update an offline system or to install something on that. Of course one needs that system status file for that).

When updating that script to the apt now checking signatures I had to realize, that the file with the keys to look for in Release.gpg files seems to be no file. At least it&aposs location is not stored in apt&aposs Dir section, where it would be nicely adapted to changes of the other directory, but is stored as a simple value elsewhere, so it needs an additional overwriting.</rant>

Anyway. The updated script can be downloaded here, just in case it might be of interest to anyone else.