Kevin Mark commented:

"pamflip does not seem to be in the fiesty netpbm package nor does it seem to show up in packages.ubuntu.com."

Huh? Ah. Ow! Once again, I fall freely into a freedom freefall. It seems that netpbm is not the same as debian's netpbm (also used by ubuntu) and the machine providing my root window is currently using netpbm rather than debian's one. (Why? Not sure yet. It annoys the hell out of me, because every man page refers to a web page.) Apparently debian has its own netpbm because

"Upstreams and debian goals differ in some aspects too much to build the package on upstream versions"

How? In what way? No further explanation is linked. Anyone got a good intro to the history of this? Any road up, it seems that debian's netpbm doesn't (yet?) have pamflip, but it does have pnmflip. I've changed the script to match.

Last night, after what seemed an eternity; Annabelle and I finally got on a night train to Spain; and arrived in Portbou, Spain 8 hours later. Surprisingly enough; we actually managed to sleep on this train; possibly because for some reason we got lucky and had a 6 bed compartment to ourselves. We proceeded to eat breakfast at the same cafe my sister Orla and I had had breakfast at the year before; and used internet to check how best to get to Valencia. So; the final plan is to sit on this train I'm on right now (for three hours); to Barcelona, spend the day in Barcelona, and take the night train to Valencia. And meet one of pixie's friends. Should be interesting!

The Cyber Law Center has blogged about the Phonographic Performance Company of Australia Limited being permitted to charge night-club owners $1.05 per person per night for playing commercial music up from $0.07. The number of people is calculated on the maximum licensed capacity of the venue - not good if the venue isn’t full. Of course given the huge prices of drinks in clubs this probably makes no difference to the profit margins. One thing that hasn’t been mentioned in any of the articles I’ve read is whether this applies to clubs that don’t play music from artists represented by the PPCA. If a club can freely play music produced under a Creative Commons license that permits commercial use then the fee increases would be good for the production of music. Also encouraging clubs to pay musicians to perform live is a good thing, most of the best musicians started out with live performances in bars. The recording industry is the enemy of music. They under-pay artists and lock out competition giving us a succession of talent-less wage-slaves on the radio. It’s difficult to imagine any change other than Digital Restriction Management (DRM) that could make things worse.

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I've been playing some computer games this week, which I don't often do. I finally tried a modern version of this Wesnoth game that everyone in Debian was playing a while ago, and have been enjoying working through the stories in it. I played glest for a few hours, and really enjoyed the 3d graphics, especially when it rained. I'm no good at real time strategy games though, and ordering units around contantly becomes wearisome. Globulation 2 might partially manage to avoid that problem, I'll have to try it a bit more sometime. Transcend is an amazing thing. After finishing a level, I found myself avoiding going on to the next level for a long time so I could spend time messing around with the thing I constructed while playing the game -- and wished there was a way to save my creation. The graphics are reminiscent of kalidoscopes and flowers. It subverts tradition, it has the trappings of a spacewar descendent, but instead of Star Control, the game turns out to be about music growing. Like tetris, it's abstract enough that I can zone out while playing it and get into a different mental state; and I can even pick which kind by making different kinds of music as I play. Wow, wow, wow.

I just noticed that hotplug has been removed from unstable, claiming that it has been 'superseded' by udev. On the few occasions that I did try udev, it's always failed for me; as such, I'm still using hotplug on my machines. It's just way more reliable, in my experience; and I don't need automounting of CD-ROMs, or user-space scripts doing setup of kernel-space device nodes, anyway. There are also still some 2000 machines using hotplug, according to popcon.debian.org. That probably includes me, but I don't have 2000 systems. So I have a dillemma, here: either try udev again, or pick up maintenance of hotplug. Or figure out whether it's possible to use udev's hotplugging abilities without its /dev management. That would rock.

Ahaha, no sorry, no 2.0 features for rebuildd yet. I'm a bit lazy about implementing the Web interface, The problem is that everything is quite ready for it as you can see on demo server, but I can't convince myself to do HTML. I'm bad and even using mako templates and looking on different Python Web frameworks can't help me. I can't bear doing HTML pages, I don't know how to do clean things with CSS. And I don't want to learn. A friend pointed me to Paste which should do a lot of things for me, but I'm too lazy to try to read this. Actually, everything on the job-management side is quite ok. I'm just lacking of a Web interface to have a nicer overview of what's going on. Anyway, I still like to do useless coding on client eye candy: By the way, any help would be welcome.

One of the coolest features of grml IMO is grml-tips. grml-tips is a collection of tips you can request via a keyword. For example if you want to know how to use grml-x just run ‘grml-tips grml-x’:

mika@meilenschwein ~ % grml-tips grml-x
Start X window system (XFree86 / Xorg / X.org):
% grml-x $WINDOWMANAGER
Usage examples:
% grml-x fluxbox
% grml-x -mode '1024x768' wmii
% grml-x -nosync wm-ng
--
mika@meilenschwein ~ %

So as soon as you invoke ‘grml-x $keyword’ and if the grml-tips collection includes something with $keyword inside you’ll get it. I use that on daily base because all the hard-to-remember command sequences or dangerous commands like mdadm, sfdisk,… are easy to use this way. But how about keywords not being availble in grml-tips collection yet? What about keywords other users request but don’t get a match? Thanks to formorer we have a submit feature within grml-tips since version 0.4.1:

% grml-tips nfs
Sorry, could not find a tip for 'nfs'.  
Do you want to submit the keyword 'nfs' to grml's keyword database?
The grml team will write tips for the most requested and useful keywords.
To use and contribute to this feature you'll need a working networking connection.
No personal data will be transmitted to the database.
Send "nfs" to grml's keyword database? [y N]
Keyword 'nfs' has been submitted to grml's keyword database.
Thanks.
%

Now being the maintainer of grml-tips I can check what users want to get through querying the sqlite database which stores the submitted keywords. Dear paranoid users: by default the keyword is not transfered to the database of course, you have to manually press ‘y’ to submit it. It’s not the default behaviour but an option. And there’s really no personal information stored inside the database, all I can query looks like the following:

$ID nfs grml 1.0-1 Release Codename Sonnenbrand [2007-07-13] 1184261151

Oh and thanks to Nico we also have our 24/7 support slave within the #grml channel:

19:37 <     mika > grml-tips: grml-x
19:37 < grml-tips> matches: http://www.grml.org/tips/index.html#23

And if our support guy does not work as expected:

19:38 <     mika > grml-tips: does-not-match
19:38 < grml-tips> Sorry, could not find a tip for 'does-not-match'.
If you want to submit a tip please mail it to tips (at) grml.org - thank you!

… and once a week I get a cronjob-triggered mail sending me all the keywords without a match. Cool, ey? All what’s missing now is a bot that writes all the missing tips on its own. Conclusion: make it easy for your users to submit information you might be interested in - to help your users.

For a long time I've wanted to know how to embed binary blobs into executables. This would be most useful for files like Glade and and UI Manager definitions, which are required for a given program to work at all but either cannot be embedded as a string literal (Glade) or can be but is annoying (UI Manager). I finally asked the Interweb, and Daniel Jacobowitz replied with some pointers. It turns out that doing this is remarkable simple. First, a caveat. This probably requires GNU ld, which may or may not be a deal breaker for many people. First, create a data file. Let's call it foo.txt, and put some text in it.

Hello, World!

Using ld this can be read in as a plain binary blob, and then written as a standard relocatable ELF object.

ld -r -b binary -o foo.o foo.txt

Now we have a standard ELF object with the data and some useful symbols defined. objdump will show you the contents.

$ objdump -x foo.o 
foo.o:     file format elf32-i386
Sections:
Idx Name          Size      VMA       LMA       File off  Algn
  0 .data         0000000d  00000000  00000000  00000034  2**0
                  CONTENTS, ALLOC, LOAD, DATA
SYMBOL TABLE:
00000000 l    d  .data  00000000 .data
0000000d g       .data  00000000 _binary_foo_txt_end
0000000d g       *ABS*  00000000 _binary_foo_txt_size
00000000 g       .data  00000000 _binary_foo_txt_start

Here we see 13 bytes of data, and a symbol which contains the address of the data. This is all we need to access it from a C program.

#include <stdio.h>
extern char _binary_foo_txt_start[];
int main (void)  
  puts (_binary_foo_txt_start);
  return 0;
 

Now if we compile this and link it against the generated object, we'll have a binary.

$ gcc -o test test.c foo.o
$ ./test
Hello, World!

Hooray! One small problem which alert people should have noticed: the string itself is in the .data section, which is read/write. For my use, I want it to be read-only data in the .rodata section so that it isn't copied for every instance of the application. As far as I know, this isn't possible with ld but objcopy will let us rename sections on the fly.

$ objcopy --rename-section .data=.rodata,alloc,load,readonly,data,contents foo.o foo.o
$ objdump  -h foo.o
...
  0 .rodata       0000000d  00000000  00000000  00000034  2**0

Excellent, problem solved. If you want to download this sample, I have a tarball. Many thanks to Daniel Jacobowitz for pointing out how to achieve this. Update: note that any data embedded in the binary like this won't be terminated with a NULL. This is obvious in hindsight, but due to luck my example still worked. There might be a way of asking objcopy to append a 0 to the end of the data, but if not always remember to use the start and end pointers or size instead of just the start, or append a NULL yourself before converting to an ELF. NP: (), Sigur Rós

The Canonical offices are ridiculously swish, with the Dyson hand dryers providing literally seconds of entertainment (and providing something of an aircraft taking off atmosphere).

In other news, I'm now a cube. Since I'm forced to admit that I'm (at best) in my mid-to-late twenties, there will be boozing at my place tomorrow (Friday) from 9ish. It's possible that I won't get there until 10 or so, but I'm sure you'll manage to have fun anyway.

I just got a promotional email from Caf Press specifically for Canadian residents (title: Canadians feel the love). It pushed a lot of maple-leaf-covered schlock with gushy Canadia-praising. I found it annoying, and not even because of the maple leaf logos (which are relatively rare here in Quebec). I had an extremely poor experience last time I ordered a shirt from Caf Press. Because they fulfill Canadian orders from the US, they're subject to import duties. My order got caught by the feds, and I had to pay an additional sixty percent. (See Journal/14 Prairial CCXIV). I'm not gonna "feel the love" until they figure out the problem and make sure I don't get hidden charges from the Canadian Border Patrol. A Canadian fulfillment centre would probably do the trick, but I've heard that shipping Federal Express also fixes a lot of border duty problems. tags: cafepress canada borderduty taxes emailnewsletter

Gunning for the B-list So my technorati page for this blog shows me with an authority rank of 96, putting me just on the cusp of being a b-list bloglebrity (authority > 100). Technorati rates blogs by how many other unique blogs have linked to them in the last 6 months, so I just need four new links to go over the top. I have a few essays on the back burner of my Todo list, but there's a temptation to just do something negative to get those last few links. Could I come up with some more creative slurs against for Lars Wirzenius? (ref: Journal/6 Fructidor CCXIV, bottom of the page). That'd be good for 3-4 links from Planet Debian right there. tags: b-list technorati bloglebrity planetdebian larswirzenius

Running hot off the press 2.6.22-grml I took a look at the current version of VirtualBox. And I’m really amazed how responsive it is. Not only booting grml is rocking fast but also typing on the console is reaaaally fast - much more responsive than with VMware. (I took a look at VirtualBox several months ago already but the 64bit version did not work and I lost interest in it temporarly therefore.) Though I stumbled upon a small problem, that’s why I’m feeding google (several users don’t seem to manage the problem ;-)): That’s telling you that USB might not work as expected. When straceing the process you’ll notice that VirtualBox tries to access /proc/bus/usb/devices. Nowadays /proc/bus/usb is deprecated by libusb + /dev/bus/usb but of course it’s no problem to use /proc/bus/usb anyway. So until upstream of VirtualBox moves to libusb the workaround is as simple as:

# VBOX=$(grep vboxusers /etc/group   sed 's/vboxusers:x:\(.*\):.*/\1/')
# mount -t usbfs -o devgid=$VBOX,devmode=664,nodev,noexec,nosuid none /proc/bus/usb

Just because I'm a geek, I try to keep my blog standards-compliant. I've managed to keep the HTML compliant for some time now, and tonight I figured out how to embed Google Video the right way (rather than using the "HTML" that it provides) thanks to Flash Satay. So after I managed to maintain HTML compliance and have an embedded video, I thought I'd have another look at RSS feed compliance, because I've noticed that my feeble attempts at embedding video don't seem to make it into the various Planets that aggregate my blog. I cannot, for the life of me, figure out how to placate the Feed Validator with my blog's RSS feed. It seems to get bitter and twisted about embedded HTML, no matter how hard I try to escape the HTML. I've no idea if that's got anything to do with why my embedded videos won't show up on the Planets, but it's as far as I've been able to get with compliant RSS feeds...

Made some progress with gpe-cash today - fixing compiler warnings, stripping out yet more source code and fixing the debian packaging. It does build from SVN but it needs libqof1 >= 0.7.3 which is an unreleased version from QOF CVS.

gpe-cash.

It's now down to < 1Mb installed binaries with less than 500kb of additional libraries (liqof1, libsqlite) compared to a basic Gtk installation. It may creep up to 2Mb all-in by the time the rest of the Gtk code is complete but an Emdebian build should be able to cut that back towards 1.5Mb or so, installed, by dropping the docs. The SQLite backend is fully functional and the default backend. An optional libxml2 backend adds libxml2 and bumps the size requirements substantially but is worth using on the desktop as it adds support for a command-line mode that combines SQL-type queries with XML results. (Eventual plan is to rsync the sqlite from the handheld and use XSL to generate reports etc.) Still a lot smaller than any other double-entry financial package I can find and with none of the dependency problems of the original GnuCash, despite using the same objects. Managed to remove the need for GConf too which is quite handy for an embedded application.

gpe-cash will be my first GPL3 upstream - all the code I'm forking from GnuCash is GPLv2 or later, as is QOF, and GPL3 code can be linked against the LGPL2 or later libgpewidget so I'm making the new Gtk frontend GPL3 or later and I will eventualy release the whole thing under the GPL3 "or later". Thanks to Joe Smith and Anthony W. Youngman for their help with all that. I had it nearly right, just tweaked debian/copyright a bit.

Actually spent a fair bit of time migrating my upstream projects to Anjuta2 and getting used to the new interface. It is a bit twiddly at times and one or two bits are annoying (bit too much eye candy for my liking - repetition of labels and buttons) but overall it's a lot better than when v2 was first uploaded. The integral DevHelp window is handy. I'm still waiting for the svn plugin though and I've no idea what is going wrong with the anjuta manual. It is being installed and yelp can load it when passed the URL directly but I can't get it to show in the normal Gnome Help browser lists - only the man pages show.

As has been pointed out in pixie's blog entry earlier, today was insanely chaotic. Quite how we managed to get a confirmation number from a travel agent, and then get refused at checkin still baffles me; I think words need to be had with this company. Not only did they ruin our carefully planned journey to Amsterdam, they also delayed us by a day.
Oh well, in Duesseldorf for tonight; will be leaving in the early morning to go to Amsterdam. Luckily express train journeys to Holland are every two hours, and take only two hours to Amsterdam; so that should be relatively painless (touch wood).
What the hell is up with everything? I can't remember stuff ever being this chaotic or disorganised (myself included)!

Today I have released the next version of DebTorrent. It's been over a month since the last release, which means there are lots of new features in this one. This is also the first release that I consider actually useable, as it now listens for HTTP requests from APT for packages to download, and feeds the downloaded packages back to APT. It also includes a backup HTTP downloader that will use a Debian mirror to download packages from, only when no peers can be found that have them. This means your download always works, even if you're an early adopter (which I hope you are) and there aren't that many peers available. Finally, the larger packages have now been split into multiple pieces, which makes downloading them much more efficient. Here's the changelog:

• Add proxying capability to listen for HTTP requests from APT
• Add caching for all files downloaded
• Add automatic starting of torrents when Packages files are downloaded
• Modify startup to initialize all torrent downloads to download nothing
• Add automatic enabling of files to download based on requests from APT
• Add a backup HTTP download from a mirror when no peers can be found for a package
• Modify torrent creation to break large packages into multiple pieces based on the information from http://merkel.debian.org/~ajt/extrapieces/ (thanks to aj for most of this)
• Add download status information available from http://localhost:9988/
• Add lots more documentation

I've already started work on the next release, which will include almost no new features, but will be much easier (I hope) to use. It will also be distributed in a .deb binary format for the first time, and (again I hope) be available in the Debian archive. Here are the plans I've come up with for the steps to complete for the next release:

1. Make a debtorrent daemon script based on btlaunchmany
2. Make a config file with lots of explanations
3. Load configuration info from /etc
4. Save downloads and state to /var/cache
5. Log all messages to /var/log
6. Clean up the debug logging, possibly add debug levels
7. Use bittornado packaging files (debian/)
8. Add init script

I've never created/packaged a daemon before, so hopefully I haven't made any blunders in those plans.

I’ve been away from blogging. I’ve been away from doing Debian and Ubuntu work (although there has been a few package updates, as well as a new one.) I’ve been away from a lot of happenings (like how the excellent Knightlust got to convince my fellow townsfolk at Lourdes College Foundation to use FOSS,) but that’s fine, since I know there will be others who can keep up the flame burning. I’ve been away because I’ve been looking at stuff. Lots of stuff. Various stuff. Stuff like Plan 9 from Bell Labs, and Inferno, and dabbling into distributed computing, working on an implementation of Plan 9’s file protocol. Stuff like thinking about programming, meditating upon it as an art, exercising a discipline of simplicity, clarity and frugality. All that stuff. I first looked at Plan 9 last March, when I was wanting to go another round at the Google Summer of Code. While I was not selected, just getting Plan 9 to run on my machines (first as a qemu terminal, then as standalone CPU server replacing my old Ubuntu dapper install on my desktop) exposed me to that other side,’ and that got me thinking about how software ought to be good. Of course, I could have just chosen to drop it all (after all, I wasn’t selected, so…) but I knew that if I stick long enough, I might just learn something. And yes, I am learning something. Like how a lot of software isn’t really simple, just appearing to be. Or how sophisticated software development methodologies rob the clear picture gained from a well-thought, clear, and simple analysis of problems. Or when push comes to shove, I will have to make a choice, between tolerating software complexity and status quo, or facing it and attempt to simplify it. Well, there’s much to tell, but I’m lazy, and I’d rather tell stories in bits. Anyway, I think I’ll have some time to spare, especially as I have accepted a new job at an up-and-coming company that, I hope and endeavor, will rock the local and international tech scene. And, while doing that, get around to make great tools to get my job done, and other people’s jobs too. I’m getting back to the action.

One day like today, ten years ago, E.T.A. kidnapped Miguel Angel Blanco and gave the Goverment 48 hours to transfer all E.T.A. prisioners to prisions in Basque Country. On 12th July 1997, they shoot him twice at back of head, after one of the biggest demonstrations in Spain against terrorism, with millions of people out at the street asking for him to be freed. Anyway, there are still people that considers them only a separatist group, though they are considered a terrorist group by European Union, United States, and United Nations.

Miguel Angel Blanco


The first day. Newspapers talk about him.


When the given day and hour arrived, every TV channel showed this image.


He is found yet alive and taken to the Hospital. He fighted for life during 12 hours more.


Spain at the street on 14th July. 1.5 million people in Madrid.

All photos were taken from elmundo.es

So the journey of David Noble and I began. (Actually a few days ago I just couldn’t be arsed to write anything before now).
After driving to Cambridge and staying in Norwich for a whole dreadful week, we went back to Cambrige for a couple of nights, where I ended up playing Zelda on the wii for a good 11 hours. On our way to the airport, at 4am, the bus was late due to someone leaving a bag at the busstop, so they ofcourse took this as a bombthreat and closed down the entire road leaving the bus 45 minutes late.
We then arrived at Stansted, which was surprisingly non-hell-like this time as opposed to last time where I was treated as a terrorist for bringing vaseline.
An interesting planeride with paper IRC in the google notebook (Which will never be spoken of again) later, we arrived Stockholm, or, atleast what Ryanair calls Stockholm. It was two hours away from the actual Stockholm so we had to take the bus. I saw the sun for the first time in three weeks and it was the happiest day of my life, until the event that followed..
Our boat tickets for Turku were the only things we hadn’t printed out, so we ofcourse went to the wrong side of the shore in the city. They said they couldn’t find us in the system and assumed it was because our boat wasn’t arriving for another six hours. We locked our bags in the lockers and ran off into the city and had wonderful wonderful sushi and sun.
A few hours later when we returned, about an hour before our boat was to leave, they still could not find us in the system. Upon where we thought ’shit’.
Struggling to get online, we found out our actual boat terminal was on the other side of the city.
We rushed down, and actually DID make it to the boat in time. The boats had sauna ohmygod.
However, Dave had booked us a nightboat with no room or beds, so we had to spend the night on a cold floor. After not sleeping for two days already that is not very pleasent.
We eventually arrived Turku, took the train to Helsinki, and went to Teemus place and passed out on the grass in the sun. This ended in sunburns for my sunintolerant useless norwegian-english skin. Totally worth it though.
The day after we left for the festival Konemetsa with Hanna/Tulitar. The weather was nice uptil the middle of it where a huge rainstorm covered the area. It was literally bucketing down with rain, which resulted in a wild crowd, tons of mud, and us jumping and dancing around in it being very much into the music (I’ve never been so happy to have a shower my entire life once we got home). I can’t believe none of us are sick after that actually, one would think it would result in a heavy cold doing this for three days.
Tomorrow we will head for Copenhagen by plane, followed by train to Amsterdam. New adventures await us!

The Libby commutation has demonstrated the contempt that the Bush regime has for the US political process, the opinions of the voters and party members, and the reputation of the US. The Talking Points Memo has an insightful analysis. They suggest that an argument could be made for pardoning Libby by claiming that the case is politically based and bogus, such an argument would be difficult to sustain - particularly given the fact that the prosecutor and the judge were Republican appointees. But a commutation is admitting that the case was valid but that Bush wanted to protect a friend - or someone who might inform on him. In either case it’s a very bad thing. As an example here’s a YouTube video of Keith Olbermann making the case for George Bush to act as decently and honourably as Richard Nixon and resign from office. Paul blogs about why embedding media players is bad for the case of web radio. One thing I notice is that there is no convenient or easy way of extracting an embedded youtube video from a web page a quick test in my favourite browser (Konqueror) showed that the YouTube embedded section didn’t even appear. The Debian package youtube-dl allows you to download the Youtube content in a format that can be played with mplayer, but only if you see the link - which seems to not happen if the web site tries to embed it. Avoiding flash is good if you want security or if you want to use a platform other than i386 Linux or Windows and youtube-dl removes what I consider to be the only compelling reason for Flash.

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