Search Results: "spa"

11 July 2007

MJ Ray: HTML in RSS

Diary of a geek: The trials and tribulations of trying to be compliant mentions the question of embedding HTML in RSS feeds. My simple answer is to use RDF Site Summary (aka RSS-1) and the content module, then put the HTML version into a content:encoded CDATA section. RSS 0.91 doesn't really work for this and the whole Winer-inspired Really Simple Syndication is fatally flawed on XML namespaces. Anyway, if you're really a geek, please add a feedback route (pingback is my current favourite) to your blog.

Andrew Pollock: [life] Sarah made the news

Last night NBC11 was running a story and an email poll about the impending new legislation requiring that all cats and dogs over 6 months of age be spayed or neutered. Anyway, the legislation seems (surprisingly, in my opinion) divisive within the community. Since Sarah has done a lot of volunteer work at the Palo Alto Animal Services animal shelter in the past, as well as doing a bit of feral cat trap/neuter/release work, she's strongly in favour of the legislation as it'll help reduce the number of unwanted kittens and puppies that get dumped at shelters (or just dumped) every year. Unfortunately, plenty of pet owners seem to feel some need to not have their pet spayed or neutered, even if they have no intention of using the animal to breed, and these people have been kicking up a fair bit of fuss. So, as I was saying, NBC11 ran an email opinion poll, and Sarah wrote in a fairly informed piece about why she felt the way she did, and got an email back this morning for a reporter wanting to interview her, and that happened today. It's funny, Sarah was saying on the way home from work, that in hindsight one of her answers was pretty lame, and sure enough, the one sound bite they decided to use was that one... Oh well, she's had her 30 seconds of fame.

Biella Coleman: Nothing to Hide in 25 Pages or Less

I am excited to read I’ve Got Nothing to Hide” and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy by Daniel Solove and I am also excited of its “short” length, mostly because I reckon I can use this for undergraduate teaching (and will perhaps include it when I teach some version of this in the future). I place short in scare quotes because I don’t think a 25 single spaced article is really all that short though it is flagged as such in the abstract. But given this is a law journal article, which tend to trail into the 75-100 page range (and thus out of reach for most undergraduate teaching), it is indeed tiny. I am in the lookout for more law journal articles that are under 30 pages as I find them to be quite useful in the classroom…

10 July 2007

Zak B. Elep: Getting back to the Action

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.

Jose Carlos Garcia Sogo: Miguel Angel Blanco

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
Miguel Angel Blanco

newspapers
The first day. Newspapers talk about him.

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

Miguel Angel Blanco entering the hospital
He is found yet alive and taken to the Hospital. He fighted for life during 12 hours more.

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

All photos were taken from elmundo.es

9 July 2007

Biella Coleman: La Rogativa

Last night I came across an amazing photo of one of my favorite spots in Viejo San Juan, Puerto Rico, La Rogativa. It is one of the *best* spots to sit, at night, after a walk and few drinks, and watch the lights dazzle in front of you till the sun decides to rise. You will not be disappointed, especially during a winter’s night when there just may also be a slight touch of cool breeze to caress your skin. Here is the story of the statue:
A modern bronze statue of the Bishop of San Juan and three torch-bearing women stands in the Plazuela de la Rogativa. A good spot for scenic views, due to is fine location overlooking the bay. The beautiful bronze statue is the work of Lindsay Daen, created in 1971 to mark the old city’s 450th anniversary. Plazuela de la Rogativa (plaza of the procession) features a modern sculpture depicting a procession of religious women and a bishop. It commemorates an event that took place on the site in 1797. During the spring of that year, a fleet of British ships led by under Sir Ralph Ambercrombie sailed into San Juan Bay, meaning to launch an assault on the city and take control of the colony. When the attack was foiled, they undertook a naval blockade of San Juan, hoping to starve the residents into submission. As the town s people began to despair of any help from soldiers garrisoned in the inland towns, the governor ordered a rogativa, or plea, to ask the saints for assistance. The women of the town formed a procession through the streets, carrying torches and ringing bells. The British, hearing the commotion and seeing the moving lights, decided that reinforcements had arrived and quickly sailed off.

Biella Coleman

La Rogativa

Gustavo R. Montesino: Summer of Code mid-term report

I. Introduction

Today, the mid-term evaluations of the Google Summer of Code starts. It means it's a good for a comprehensive summary of what I've done so far.

For those who don't remember, My GSoC project is the Bug Triaging and Forwarding Tool, whose aim is to help triaging of Debian bug reports. On my proposal, I had included the following timeline:

During the proposals evaluations and the community bounding period, it was pointed to me that there's already a lot of good tools to handle bug reports, so I've changed this a bit and already started to work on BTS-Bugzilla interaction, which seems to be the more novel part of the
tool.

The development has been fragmented in three modules: btsutils, bzutils and bug-triage.

II. btsutils

The btstutils is a python module to interact with the Debian Bug Track System. Currently, it can query the bts by bug number, package, source package, maintainer, submitter and usertag. For each bug, it returns bug number, package, summary, status, severity, submitter and tags. Support for returning usertags is under way.

Ths btsutils can use html or soap to access the bug data, and has also a backend-agnostic module wwith tries the best method and, if that fails, tries the other.

Steffano Zacchiroli has offered me to include the btsutils on the debian-bundle, a bundle of python modules for dealing with Debian infrastrcture. I'm very excited by this idea, and believe that if all or at least some of the Debian tools which interact with BTS end using a standardized module for access, this might end up being the major contribution of my GSoC project for the Debian community.

III. bzutils

The bzutils is similar to the bzutils, but is to interact with bugzillas instead. Currently it can do queries based on GNOME's bugzilla boogle and the more generic boolean charts. The later works (at least) on GNOME, KDE and standard bugzilla (i.e., landfill). For each bug, it returns bug id,
product, component, status, resolution, reporter, assignee, summary, priority and severity.

IV. bug-triage

The bug-triage is the Bug triaging and forwarding tool. It's being developed using python, gtk and glade.

Currently, it can query the BTS using any of the btsutils' supported fields (even though the usertags aren't really accessible through the interface yet). It can also launch one of the returned bug reports in a web browser.

Integration with bugzillas is under development. It already has an interface to establish links between Debian packages and upstream bugzilla's address, product and component. The next steps will be to add an upstream button in the toolbar/menu and make it show the bugs selected through these info, allowing the user to mark the bug as forwarded to one of them.

V. The future

After that, I'll work on these features (in no particular order): filling a new upstream bug using the Debian bug data as a starting point, more advanced filtering options to filter the upstream bugs (such as filtering by words in the bug summary, and maybe through backtraces if available) and more ways to manipulate the BTS through the interface.

To be sincere, it seems this project won't be as advanced as I would like on the end of the GSoC. There are some new, unexpected (and good ^_^) things going on my life, which are taking some of the time I expected to dedicate to GSoC, which means I'll likely keep the current pace until the end of the project (I expected to increase it during July). Even so, I believe the
project is going on a good path, and I hope it'll be very useful for the Debian community.

8 July 2007

Mirco Bauer: Hello World, how small can you get?

Today I was checking how much diskspace is need when a small CLI (.NET) application like gfax is installed. The last 2 years I am optimizing the Mono packages in Debian to reduce dependency chains. Dependency chains can cause a small application to become very big (at least it looks that way) when they are installed, as modern Linux distributions automaticly install all required dependencies. So first I worked against GUI dependencies for non-GUI applications, those are annoying for servers, you don't want to install a X server or other GUI libraries when you only serve webpages using ASP.NET.
Splitting CLI 1.0/1.1 vs 2.0 also seemed to be a very good candidate to split apart, as applications usually are target at 1.0/1.1 or 2.0.
Then I split Base-Class-Libraries that have dependencies on native libraries (via P/Invoke), as those packages must depend on those native libraries, like DB drivers.
Last but not least I split debug symbols in a different package, as those are not needed for normal production usage, and embedded systems don't have much diskspace. The mono-dbg package is 28.2MB in size when installed, that's alot.
The Mono source package in Debian is now building 67 binary packages, but thanks to APT nobody has to care for that, every part is installed when needed. So today I was checking the results of it, how much will a small application download and install?
I am testing with a clean minimal Debian system, that way all dependency chains will show up very easily.
Installing GFax + required libraries today takes 43MB to download and 138MB on the harddisk. GFax is a small GNOME application, it uses libraries like: Mono, GTK#, GNOME#, Evolution#, GConf#.
So someone might say: "of course, it is based on that bloaty Mono virtual machine!", well let's check a different application.
What about a GTK# only application (no GNOME) like graphmonkey + required libraries? That will download 19.5MB and uses 56.4MB on the harddisk. That's alot less, isn't it? graphmonkey only uses Mono and GTK#.
So it's not Mono taking all no diskspace? Well after all my packaging optimizations, it's not Mono smile.png
So how big is a install of a minimal Mono runtime + all required libraries then?
Minimal as in enough to run famous the "Hello World".
It's 2.4MB to download and 7MB on the harddisk, yes you read it correctly, the super monster bloaty virtual machine just needs 7MB. Mono only has glib as dependency which will be replaced by the eglib library some day. After I had this great result, I wondered how big other runtimes are.... like.... Java and Python? The results are interesting...
A minimal Python install takes 3.9MB to download and 13.4MB on the harddisk. Yes, that's almost double the size of Mono, I was surprised too.
So and Java? Here it becomes a bit unfair as SUN's license is not allowing to ship parts of a Java runtime. So the Java package in a distribution is one package. 34.5MB to download and 95.2MB on the harddisk. Yes, that's alot, but thats the smallest install you can get when you want to run anything on it. So, if you want to run Hello World on a virtual machine: use Mono! tongue.png just kidding...
Small runtimes are important when it comes to acceptance and adaption of new technologies, as nobody wants to kill all his computer resources for it. And I often hear the replies on Linux IRC channels, when people ask which software they can use to do $task: "No I don't want o install 100MB just for $task" and they decide to try some other software with less dependencies and less resource usage.
Also for the embedded area, resources are very limited, every MB still counts there. For the completeness of my report, here the naked numbers of other available Java runtimes: sablevm 22.0MB (63.2MB), kaffe 52.2MB (118MB), jamvm 28.3MB (65.4MB), cocoa 28.8MB (66.0MB).

7 July 2007

Mike Hommey: Finding where a tarball came from with git

I got the idea reading this question on the webkit-dev list, and from my recollection of the git documentation. Well, for the webkit case, the basic script I put up would be of no help because the tarballs don’t contain all the files (plus, they use subversion, not git, so it would also require a long importing process). Anyways… Considering how SHA-1 hashes of objects are created with git, it is actually pretty easy to generate a SHA-1 hash from a random (non-git) tree, and then, the corresponding commit. First, you have git-hash-object that helps you creating a hash for a particular object (though it’s also trivial to do with sha1sum). For regular files, git-hash-object -t blob $filename is enough. For symbolic links, you have to read the link destination, and give it without a trailing character (be it the NULL character or a carriage return) to git-hash-object -t blob --stdin. For directories, you have to generate a tree “structure” by yourself and pass it to git-hash-object -t tree --stdin. I haven’t bothered looking at other file types. The tree structure can be guessed by either looking at mktree.c or at the output of git-cat-file tree $sha1 where $sha1 is the SHA-1 hash for a tree object. It contains 3 informations for each node in the tree : the file mode, with the same format as what stat() returns, except for some reason, permissions are 000 for directories and symbolic links ; the file name ; and the SHA-1 hash. These informations are written with the following format : file mode in octal ascii and no padding zero (”%o”) followed by a space character, then the filename followed by a NULL character, and the binary form of the SHA-1 hash. Nodes are sorted in a not-so-quite lexical order (take a look at base_name_compare in read-cache.c) and are not separated by any special character: the mode of a file just follows the SHA-1 hash of its predecessor. With all this new knowledge, you should be able to write some code that would return the SHA-1 from an arbitrary directory. Okay, since you must be at least as lazy as I am, you can take the script I wrote. Now, let’s take a look at a real life case : what commit is the latest nightly snapshot for the linux kernel from ? First, download the latest snapshot patch and its baseline, and extract the whole. Then, run my git-hash-tree.pl script with the directory containing the extracted kernel as an argument. It will return, after a while, the SHA-1 hash for the whole tree. During this long process, you also have plenty of time to git clone linus’s tree. Once you’re all done, you can search for the commit corresponding to the tree hash (let’s call it $hash) with the following command :

git-rev-list --all while read h; do git-cat-file commit $h grep -q "^tree $hash" && echo $h && break; done
If you just followed these steps, you should just have spent a great moment having no result at all. There are actually 2 things that prevent this method to properly work with the linux kernel nightlies : Note this is a naive method, because I haven’t dedicated much time going through git documentation and code to find better ways, if there are any. Also note it’s pretty much worthless to do this with the kernel nightly snapshots, since a file containing the SHA-1 hash of the corresponding commit can be found alongside the patch. I guess a similar method could be used with mercurial, though I could not find a documentation detailing what are the hashes calculated from (I’ve not searched a lot, I must say, but for git, it was just before my eyes).

Martin F. Krafft: Hacker tools in Germany

I am sure you've heard that "hacker tools", including nmap and other system administrastion essentials, may be considered illegal in Germany as of now. It'll depend on whether judges determine that e.g. nmap is a tool primarily used to do harm, so we all have not become criminals overnight, but there will be complications and ridiculous showdowns in courtrooms. I was only one of thousands of protestors, when this bill was first discussed by our politicians. Back in October 2006, I wrote an email to Ilse Aigner, the spokesperson for education, research and the estimation of consequences of techynology (whatever that may be) of the Christian Democratic and Christian Socialist Unions, who is a member of the German Bundestag. She's the Bundestag representative for my hometown. Surprisingly, I got a reply from her secretary, which I shall quote in full below:
im Auftrag von Frau Ilse Aigner ich habe mich bez glich Ihres Anliegens bei unserem Referenten der CDU/CSU-Arbeitsgruppe f r Recht erkundigt. Ich wurde darauf hingewiesen, dass die Bedenken Ihrer Branche hinsichtlich des Refentenentwurfs eines Strafrechts nderungsgesetzes zur Bek mpfung der Computerkriminalit t bekannt sind. Auch hat der Bundesrat eine Pr fbitte ge u ert. Zwar ist der Referent der Meinung, dass die Gefahr der Illegalisierung schon jetzt nicht best nde, trotzdem wolle man aber im laufenden Gesetzgebungsverfahren alle Bedenken beseitigen. Seien Sie versichert, dass Sie auch in Zukunft weiterhin Ihre Arbeit ganz legal aus ben k nnen.
That last sentence says: rest assured that you may continue to exercise your profession legally in the future. In the spring of 2007, it seemed as if all protests were overheard, the Bundestag pushed the new legislation 202c StGB, and the Bundesrat drew in their horns and failed to appeal the decision. I wrote another email to the secretary of Ilse Aigner asking whether I can still "rest assured", but this time, no response came back. And now the law has been passed. Politics as we know it. On the topic of whether the Debian project now has to provide a non-German archive for Germany, I find myself in the middle of the swamp of German legislation. On the one hand, publication or distribution of "hacker tools" has been made illegal, in addition to their (ab)use. On the other hand, however, the law only makes tools illegal which are (a) primarily used for cracking, and (b) are used with malevolent intentions. It's the "yes or no?" "maybe." bullshit which makes it impossible for people to do their job in Germany, if they actively want to stay on the legal side. A good example is the tax system where you have three options: do it yourself with minimal time investment and pay way more taxes than you have to, or let a tax advisor do it, or try to do it right yourself. If you do the latter, it's like walking a thin ridge in absolute darkness, except you won't be told immediately when you fall off. I think Debian should not take any action. We're not malevolently or intentionally distributing tools primarily used for cracking, so we stand good chances of getting by with it. Apart, Debian is not a legal entity in Germany anyway, so who are they to sue? NP: Overhead: Metaepitome Update: Thomas Jollans writes in that Debian can't be sued, but the German mirror operators can, with which I have to agree. Then the solution is obviously to move the German mirrors. That's a topic for this thread.

Ben Armstrong: Bumpy Typo blog upgrade: mod_fcgid 1.10 -> 2.1

For some time I have ignored my blog so I did not notice that when my co-admin upgraded our system from etch to lenny, it broke. When I found some time to look at it, it turned out to be because the blog was no longer running in production mode, so it pointed at the empty development database. This caused every URL to redirect to the login page, but since I didn’t have a valid user for that db, I couldn’t login. This, in turn, was due to the upgrade of mod_fcgid from the old 1.10 version in Etch to 2.1. Apparently, this used to work. Note the name of the module: 
<IfModule mod_fastcgi.c>
   <Directory /var/www/vir/syn.theti.ca/typo>
    FastCgiIpcDir /tmp/fcgi_ipc/
    FastCgiServer /var/www/vir/syn.theti.ca/typo/public/dispatch.fcgi -initial-env RAILS_ENV=production -processes 15 -idle-timeo
ut 60
   </Directory>
</IfModule>
It’s strange that the section is called mod_fastcgi.c, not mod_fcgid.c. Either that was done to make it a “drop in” replacement for fastcgi, and later changed in the next release, or else this config was not actually used, but somehow my blog started in production mode before the upgrade anyway. In any case, the blog is back in production node with the new fcgid with the following module section (based on this one from the mod_fcgid home page). 
<IfModule mod_fcgid.c>
   DefaultInitEnv RAILS_ENV production
   <Directory /var/www/vir/syn.theti.ca/typo>
     FCGIWrapper "/var/www/vir/syn.theti.ca/typo/public/dispatch.fcgi" .fcgi
   </Directory>
</IfModule>
Hope this is helpful to others making the upgrade.

Martin F. Krafft: The weakest link

For whatever reason, my flights always bite with my food schedule; not that I have one, but I'll get hungry part way through, it must be the excitement. Under no circumstances will I gulp down the crap they serve on short haul flights, and being a last-minute packer, I usually never find the time to eat before I leave home I am also seldom hungry when there is stuff to be done before an immutable deadline, such as the departure of a plane. Fortunately, Switzerland provides healthy and great relief in the form of Bircher M esli, a snack that can keep you nourished for hours, and which renders itself well to tuppaware transport. So I've gotten into the habit of taking some along on trips. Today, the security staff at the Zurich airport forced me to break with this habit and to throw out my treasured mush. I have since recovered from the pain, but because there is more to the story than M esli in the dump, I thought it's about time for yet another airport security story about liquids my last one is more than half a year old and I am sure you're craving by now When the attendants saw my 400ml container containing M esli (think yoghurt for now, so you'll know what consistency I am talking about), they categorised it as liquid and would not let me take it through. Obviously, there was no point in arguing nor in mentioning that I often take the stuff with me on planes and never had a problem before (which is true). I was left with the choice to dump it all, or try to eat it up before my flight left. I opted for the latter, but 400ml of M esli is quite too much for quick consumption and I had to declare forfeit about three quarters through. In a moment of genius, I did the math and postulated publicly that I should now be allowed to take the rest, because it's less than 100ml (airplanes are allergic to liquids in larger volumes). I learnt then that the size of the container matters, not the amount of stuff it contains. I handed over the container to the attendant under the pretense that I refuse to throw away food and had her do the deed instead. When I got the container back, I noticed that it still had traces of M esli, looked at the queue of my flight and decided to have a go and be difficult. The result was that I had to head for the toilets and wash off all remaining traces of explosive M esli. I made sure to leave a good bit of water in the container, sealed it, and returned to the wardens of safety. This time, they let me pass, despite the 400ml container filled with, say, 30ml of water. But clear liquids aren't dangerous, or so it seems. Or maybe this is the way to smuggle the real stuff on board? The entire situation was hilarious, I stayed calm and friendly and made sure to inject a sentence about understanding that they're just doing their job and aren't responsible for the regulations at least every minute. They assured me that this was in fact what they were doing, and that it was their orders to obey the regulations imposed by Brussels without exceptions. Just then, as I was repacking my bag behind the x-ray machine, I noticed how another passenger got through with shaving cream and other stuff in a small toiletries bag. When they didn't even bother to unpack the bag, I remarked that the regulations also demand for a single, one litre, transparent plastic bag to contain all the 100ml containers and asked whether they were aware of those. At first, the attendant denied it. When I asked her to step over and look at the informational signs all over the place, which clearly documented the plastic bag requirement, she shrugged and got seemingly annoyed: "we do our job the way we do our job, leave it up to us." Some airport staff make you take off your shoes, others don't. At some airports, you have to switch on laptops, at most you don't. Some passengers are subjected to the new liquid regulations and have to throw out M esli, others are exempt. Now what was that they say about the weakest link? NP: Dream Theater: Awake

6 July 2007

Russell Coker: Terrorism Foolishness

The Age has published a remarkably stupid article about terrorism titled “It’s hard to prevent the hard to imagine” which contains some amusing statements such as “a plan to use liquid explosives hidden in soft-drink bottles and destroy commercial jets crossing the Atlantic. The scale of this plot, combined with the innovative bomb design, threatened to kill thousands of people and cause massive disruption to global commerce“. This however has been debunked by many chemists, here is one of the many expert analysis of the claims. Here’s another inane claim from The Age “So the perpetrators in the UK looked elsewhere and compiled a crude yet potentially deadly bomb from materials available in everyday life a mix of gas cylinders, petrol and nails. Finding a way to govern access to such otherwise mundane items will be expensive, and perhaps ultimately, impossible.“. It’s surprising that The Age editorial team were unable to find someone who knows the basics of chemistry or who has ever had a need to start a fire to review the article. Everyone should know that an oxidising agent is necessary for combustion - and a huge quantity of an oxidising agent is needed for an explosion. Petrol vapour won’t ignite if it’s too concentrated (it can displace enough oxygen to prevent combustion). When a gas cylinder is damaged and set alight you get a fireball surrounding it which may be several meters wide (the one occasion that I witnessed a damaged gas cylinder on fire the fire-ball was about 4 meters wide). But no explosion. To propell nails or other solid objects you need the combustion to be rapid and only on one side of the object. Combustion on all sides (IE a 4 meter wide fire-ball) will not propell nails. Here’s what a British Army bomb-disposal operator has to say about it in The Register. If you want to talk about dangerous items that are difficult to control how about cars? A terrorist who drove a 4WD along the footpath of Oxford St could potentially kill more people than the London bombings and would take almost no preparation. The article inevitably concludes with claims about the efforts that al Qaeda operatives are supposedly making to recruit people for terrorist missions. Naturally it ignores the best recruiting method of al Qaeda - the huge civilian death toll in Iraq since the US led invasion. The best available medical research (by researchers from Johns Hopkins University and published in The Lancet - the most reputable and prestigious medical journal) estimates that there were 655,000 “excess deaths” as a result of the invasion in the period up to July 2006. Over the last year the best available reports suggest that the violence in Iraq has got worse (among other things the number of US air-strikes is twice what it was last year). For more analysis of the fear-mongering being done by much of the media (including The Age) here’s another article from The Register. It’s interesting to read The Age’s article Truth first casualty of the internet?. Maybe they should publish an article titled Intelligence first casualty of print media?.

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Eddy Petri&#537;or: RPMs, gaaaaaah!

Always when I have to deal with RPM systems I feel so handicapped and it feels so wrong from multiple PoV.

This is a rant and a dear lazyweb (not that lazy, actually) type of post.

I would like to be able to have a few things solved when dealing with RPMs:
  1. I would like a pbuilder like builder for specs
    • I know about mock, but
      • it accepts only src.rpm files (I know about rpmbuild -bs, but is broken, read further for the groovy details)
      • I have some specs that have %include directives for the maintainer scripts and when rpmbuild -bs is ran, guess what, the extra files are left outside the src.rpm;oh yes, the directives are processed correctly for the binary rpm
      • mock relies on bootstrapping a system using fedoralegacy.org, which was recently discontinued
      • I have a redhat-9 chroot tarball which I would like to use and tell mock to use that without caring about upgrades (since my packages are not at all that dependent on the build system)
      • mock fails to bootstrap even for fedora-devel-i386-core with the message "Cannot find a valid baseurl for repo: extras"
      • the older versions fail to bootstrap because, apparently, it "Could not find useradd in chroot, maybe the install failed?"
    • plague (how's that for irony?) relies on mock, which is broken
    • mach seems to be deprecated
  2. I would like a simple repo creation and maintainance tool, something in the line of mini-dinstall, which should have apt4rpm and yum support, but it seems that repos are still the "new shiny thing" which has no proper tools
  3. I would like to be able to know from which version I am upgrading from the current package, not only that I am upgrading (in case you didn't knew, the only way to know that you are upgrading in a post/pre install/remove script, is the wonderful $1 parameter which indicates the number of packages installed after the script finishes or something along that line..
So my question is, is there any way to fix any of the issues above in a sane way, without me reimplementing apt-like functionality in rpm land?

Rob Taylor: Introduction to Codethink

As those of you who’ve been a bit more observant may have noticed, I now have a new company - Codethink Ltd. It’s really just starting up, but so far we’ve been doing work on HAL, OHM and Tinymail and it’s been good fun. However I don’t want to go the normal contracting house route of taking on employees to supply demand. This inevitably leads to static power structures and static role assignments which generally seems to lead to inefficiency, conflict and boredom as a company grows. Where I want to take Codethink: In business, I believe the future lies in loosely connected individual contractors, dynamically coming together to attack a project or idea, much as was described a few years ago in the seminal article ‘The Dawn of the E-lance Economy’ by Malone and Laubacher (Though I have to admit I hate the term ‘E-lance’..). Back then a few businesses were started up to try to facilitate this, like guru.com and elance.com, but I think these fail fundamentally as they don’t represent the knowledge of the network - that requires real people who actually know each other. Of course here in open source we implicitly understand the importance of knowing each other’s strengths, the importance of introducing new people to our community and building new expertise. This can only happen in loosely-bound structures, where cost of entry is negligible - quite the opposite of the standard large-corporation model. So with Codethink I propose to act as an agent of change. I plan to provide support and help to groups and individuals who want to strike out on their own. I will use my knowledge of the management, architectural and coding expertise of these individuals to provide the service of assembling teams to attack projects for clients. There needs to be another side to the equation. For this to scale, I also need to invest in bringing new people into our open source world and training them as experts able to strike out on their own. So that means taking on employees of a kind - but with the covenant that I will be expecting each employee to be looking at becoming her own boss in time. So my cards are on the table now - for this plan to work it needs to be transparent by default. It may turn out to be a crazy idea that’ll never work in practice, but lets see. If anyone wants to chat with me about these plans, you can find me at rob.taylor@codethink.co.uk on email and XMPP and I’m always around as robtaylor on Freenode and GIMPNet.

David Nusinow: I Want More Monads

Over the past few days, I've returned to python for the first time in three or four years. My two excuses for not really liking python in the past were 1) a bad experience editing someone else's mixed tab-and-space indented code and 2) the language never really flowed out of me for some reason. I've gotten over the bad taste from the former after being assured by everyone I talked to that this sort of thing doesn't happen often, although I'm still wary of how easy it is for people to do this sort of thing.

The latter seems to have changed by a surprising avenue: learning haskell. I spent months trying to learn haskell, and I've gotten far enough along where I can sorta kinda construct useful programs with it. I'm not comfortable enough with it yet to do everything I want, but I like the language a lot because I always feel like I'm doing the right thing when I actually get a program to work. Strangely though, when I came back to python, all of a sudden how to write a lot of the code just made sense. Python lends itself well to a functional style of programming, especially given that it's started to consciously steal things like the new itertools and partial functions in version 2.5. I guess I shouldn't be too surprised that learning haskell suddenly made it a lot easier to understand other languages, but it's funny that haskell should be my gateway to python and not the other way around.

5 July 2007

Peter Makholm: Aniversaries

Principia Mathematica 320 years, Spam 70 years and Debian Social Contract 10 years. Things that changed the world?

Eddy Petri&#537;or: required file ./config.rpath' not found

If you ever encounter this error:

eddy@twix:/tmp/wormux/wormux$ ./autogen.sh
[+] Clean files generated by autoconf, aclocal, automake and configure
[+] Run aclocal
[+] Run autoheader
[+] Run automake
configure.ac:25: required file ./config.rpath' not found

Try this simple fix:

eddy@twix:/tmp/wormux/wormux$ touch config.rpath
eddy@twix:/tmp/wormux/wormux$ ./autogen.sh
[+] Clean files generated by autoconf, aclocal, automake and configure
[+] Run aclocal
[+] Run autoheader
[+] Run automake
[+] Run autoconf

Now run ./configure


Now you can go on with your work. Credits go to Daniel P. Berrange: http://www.mail-archive.com/fedora-xen@redhat.com/msg01017.html


P.S.: Apparently this is an automake 1.10 issue and can be avoided by using automake 1.9

MJ Ray: debian Pancake Society

Like Mike O'Connor's wife, people here are happier about the 10th anniversary of the Social Contract because of the pancakes more than its cultural significance. In his Everything goes into stew: Celebrating Freedom, there's a pancake recipe which may as well include stew. It's typical of the sort of bloat which users fear from a maintainer who doubled the length of his package name! Let's keep the Social Contract simple: one egg, 1/4l of milk, 200g flour, beat it all together, stand for 10 minutes, pour some into a hot oil-sprayed pan, fry while easing with a spatula and toss when firm enough. If you want to complicate things, run your pancake through the streets - don't add stuff to pancake batter.

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