If you have a (public) revision controlled ~/bin/, or bash/shell scripts I'd love to see them. Feel free to post links to your repositories as comments. I'm certain there are some great tools and utilities out there with I could be using. Right now the only external thing I'm using is Martin Krafft's pub script. I don't use it often, but it is very neat and handy when I do want it. (Something that I'd never have considered writing myself, which suggests there are many more gems I'm missing!) In other news my migration to mercurial is going extremely well. With only minimal downtime. Downtime for services really comes about because I have several websites which are powered entirely with a CVS checkout of remote repositories, so the process looks a little like this:

• Convert CVS repository to hg.
• Archive "live" CVS checkout from the server.
• Move the local CVS checkout somewhere temporary.
• Checkout from the new mercurial repository.
• Fix any broken symlinks.
• Do a recursive diff to make sure there are no unexpected changes.
• Remove the previously archived local CVS checkout
• Done!

GCC 4.3 now prints an error message when C++ code contains duplicate function parameter names in function prototypes. You'd think that's a pretty obvious problem, but we still have about 15 packages in the archive that contain such code. Anyway, for code like this:

class foo  
    foo(int w, int w);
 ;

GCC will as of 4.3 show the following error message:

t.cc:2: error: multiple parameters named 'w'

On Saturday, we sent an express letter to Ireland, using the courier service provider of the German Postal Service: DHL. The lady at the counter alerted us that the letter was unlikely to arrive on Monday, but Tuesday would be fine for our purposes, so off it went. What an amazingly crap choice. The letter has not arrived in Ireland today (Thursday) even, who knows whether it will make it tomorrow. Or next week. Or ever? When we handed over a fair bit of money to aforementioned lady for their express services, we entered a contract with the courier. A sensible assumption would be that the contract requires the courier to deliver the letter as soon as possible, which is my understanding of "express". But in this world, nothing is sensible any longer. Somewhat related to the asymmetry of e-shops I previously identified, the terms and conditions of the courier make sure that they cannot be held liable for failure to fulfill their side of the contract. The next time you walk up to the Deutsche Post/DHL counter, keep in mind that when you hand them money, you are purchasing a lower bound on delivery time: they assure you that they won't deliver the express letter before the next business day. That's it, nothing more, please move on. They don't even ensure that any such letter will arrive. Ever. But you cannot hold them liable. Maybe there is a reason why e.g. UPS charges almost three times the sum for express delivery of letters to Ireland: they actually get there in time. But then I check their conditions and see that they also interpret their delivery times as estimates of best effort, but no guarantees. Since when does "consumer" mean "get ready to be screwed?" Why are we putting up with this? I am now filing a complaint. I hope others in similar positions do the same. I am also going to try an experiement: post another express letter and ask to see their terms and conditions before forking over the money. I have a vague feeling that they'll fail to present them in an orderly fashion. Then I'll call up a lawyer friend and sum up my belligerence, time available, and plausibility. And the likely outcome is that I'll go to court against the Deutsche Post. You can count on me. NP: The Pineapple Thief: Variations on a Dream

A widely cited unofficial rule on the Internet is known as Godwin’s Law [1]. In it’s original form this rule states that “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one“. Mike Godwin noted that “overuse of Nazi and Hitler comparisons should be avoided, because it robs the valid comparisons of their impact“. The purpose of noting and publicising this is to reduce such false comparisons. It’s often used as a rule for conduct in various fora where it’s regarded that if you compare your opponent in a debate to Hitler or unjustly call them a Nazi then the debate is over and you have lost. In more recent times due to successful application of Godwin’s Rule the frequency of inappropriate comparisons has dramatically decreased. This combined with the small number of people on the net who are interested in discussing historical events that happened ~60 years ago (and the even smaller number of people who are interested in learning about them) means that the possibility of robbing valid comparisons of their impact is small. Now a large part of the use of Godwin’s rule is because it’s regarded as an ad-hominem attack that distracts everyone from serious discussion more than most such attacks. To see examples of this you merely have to do a Google search for “Bill Gates” and “Hitler” (currently 597,000 web pages have both those terms). Note that the original reason for avoiding such false comparisons is given to sustain the impact of legitimate comparisons. It is quite legitimate to use the term Nazi when describing anyone who wants to implement mass-murder and slavery on a national scale (or any of the other awful things that the Nazis did), or the propaganda and other mechanisms that the NSDAP used to gain power. It is also legitimate to make historical comparisons, comparing Stalin to Hitler is historically valid (both were awful tyrants that committed a similar range of crimes) - I’m not going to compare them in this post but I merely note that such a comparison is valid (and is the subject of much debate by people who are interested in history). I’ve just had a religious zealot named Elder Dave accuse me of breaching some new version of Godwin’s Law. I believe that my mention of the fact that his religious group (which wants to deny homosexuals the same legal rights as all other people) has some beliefs in common with the Westboro Baptist Church [2] is valid. The Westboro Baptist Church seems to be the leading organisation in the English-speaking world for demanding legislation to discriminate against homosexuals. Anyone else who demands such legislation IS trying to achieve similar aims and should expect this to be noted by everyone who has any knowledge of what is happening in the world. Religious groups are given a lot of freedom to discriminate internally (EG “Priest” is one of the few jobs that can be denied to a qualified woman without any legal recourse). Also I think that most people will agree that it’s acceptable for them to advocate self-repression (EG the book What Some of You Were [3]). But when they try and get legislation enacted to institutionalise such discrimination I believe that they are going too far. As for why the 95% of us who aren’t gay should be bothered about this issue, there’s the famous poem by Martin Niem ller which is known by the line “First they came for the Jews” [4] (actually there are a few versions of the poem some of which don’t mention Jews - check the link for details). Here’s another Wikipedia link for the same poem [5].

• [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin’s_law


• [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westboro_Baptist_Church


• [3] http://www.thegoodbook.co.uk/What-some-of-you-were-were_22/


• [4] http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Martin_Niem ller


• [5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came…

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Daniel Smolik reported problems with NFS on a Thecus N2100 a few days ago. I confirmed the bug with 2.6.18 and 2.6.22 but found that the problem didn't occur with 2.6.23. I started a git bisect and a few hours later located a fix that Francois Romieu, the maintainer of the r8169 driver, had put in. Apparently the driver had some confusion regarding hardware and IP header alignment. The good news is that the patch is very small and can easily be backported to our 2.6.18 kernel in stable. Also, packages of 2.6.23 were uploaded today and should be in the archive soon.

Sooner or later, I will conduct a series of interviews as well as a community survey among Debian package maintainers as part of my research. The motivation for my research is to improve the workflows in the Debian project. How could I make you take part in such a survey? A key challenge and necessity of a survey is to ensure a high degree of participation, or else the responses cannot be read as descriptive of the entire group. Well-formulated questions and a smart way to present them are prerequisites. For instance, I'd consider it quite counter-productive (somewhat ironic even) to ask Debian package maintainers to hit radio buttons on a web form. Instead, participation should require the use of tools with which we are familiar. Another way to get people to respond is by showing how their time will help the project. This assumes that the research hypothesis is tangible and the whole endeavour plausible. And that people care. A third means of motivation is to reward participants. Commonly, this is done by way of a draw among all participants at the end of the survey, and a price given out to the (random) winner. Obviously, the individual's chances get slimmer with every additional participant, but if the price is right, it's still worth a try. I've been pondering for a few days on what a right price would be. Previously, Nokia Internet tablets have been hip, but would you dedicate your time to a survey where you could win one of those? Or a Neo1973 (thanks Lo-lan-do)? Or would a game console, such as the PS3 or the Wii be more exciting? Or is there something (in the same price range) out there you want and would, uh, fill for fill out the survey I mean Please take a moment and let me know which price you could not resist. Don't hesitate to provide me with a list I could just as well let the winner of the draw chose her/his favourite NP: The Pineapple Thief: 8 Days Later Update: Gaudenz Steinlin suggested a Thecus N2100.

If you have a (public) revision controlled ~/bin/, or bash/shell scripts I'd love to see them. Feel free to post links to your repositories as comments. I'm certain there are some great tools and utilities out there with I could be using. Right now the only external thing I'm using is Martin Krafft's pub script. I don't use it often, but it is very neat and handy when I do want it. (Something that I'd never have considered writing myself, which suggests there are many more gems I'm missing!) In other news my migration to mercurial is going extremely well. With only minimal downtime. Downtime for services really comes about because I have several websites which are powered entirely with a CVS checkout of remote repositories, so the process looks a little like this:

• Convert CVS repository to hg.
• Archive "live" CVS checkout from the server.
• Move the local CVS checkout somewhere temporary.
• Checkout from the new mercurial repository.
• Fix any broken symlinks.
• Do a recursive diff to make sure there are no unexpected changes.
• Remove the previously archived local CVS checkout
• Done!

Work. No, not at my workplace, for Debian. I decided to modify the ftp-master webpage a little bit, just adding some css magic (and the ability to conform with that xhtml1.0 strict thing out there). (And to be honest - about 95% of the “work” needed for this was done by Mark Hymers…) But that only happened after something else, which took away most of my time today (and yesterday and the day before). Namely - a nice overview of pending removals. The main purpose of that overview is of course “ftpteam members doing removals can take it for their work”, but i think it may also be nice for users to look there, instead of wading through all the bugreports against ftp.debian.org, which include bugs about totally different topics than removals. (And then I am lazy and want a commandline to paste… :) ) The design for that page was done by Martin Ferrari AKA Tincho, you don’t want to see how my design did look like… :), the idea for it is from Jeroen van Wolffelaar who wrote the first version of it in Perl (it is now implemented in Ruby). The removals html page is regenerated every hour, using the SOAP interface to the BTS, so at least the bugs information should be recent. The other information might have errors in them, don’t trust them too far. It should be right, but then - its only informational.. :) And now: Lets do some of those removals!

David H rdeman has contributed two really valuable guides to my Debian on NSLU2 site that will be of great interest to many NSLU2 users:

• The first guide is for people running Linux on a flash device, such as a USB flash stick. Since flash only supports a limited number of writes, it is important to reduce the wear and tear on the underlying flash device. David's guide gives some practical advice of how to achieve this.
• The second guide gives a few tips and tricks that can be used to reduce the amount of RAM a system uses. This is particularly interesting to NSLU2 users since 32 MB of RAM is not a lot.

These guides mention Debian but most of the advice applies to other NSLU2 firmware flavours and to Linux in general.

My friend Martin has started a blog on usability, Yes, No, Cancel? (or in German, Ja, Nein, Abbrechen). He appears to have stalled after a good start so perhaps this mention will get him going again. He offers usability consulting through his company, Ept Computing.
Martin, an early victim of the new camera

I seem to rediscover old chill out classics like De Phazz and warm Marseillais Hip Hop in a foggy Viennese.

• Don Choa - Vies de chiens
• Fonky Family - Le plus grand des Voyous
• Aeto - B
• De-Phazz - Happiness
• Dj Brace - Mint
• N-jin - Crack Jack
• Pimbo - Roots remix
• Don Choa - Lune de miel
• Pink Martini - Sympathique
• Texta - So koennt's gehen

Of course microthol live remixes scores a lot of plays. :)
See you in Flex for Miss Kittin.

Top posters in a few Debian-related Planets:

$ planet-scores.sh 
Planet Debian-FR :
     19 Rapha l Hertzog
      4 Roland Mas
      3 Jean-Christophe Dubacq
      2 Gr gory Colpart
      2 Alexis Sukrieh

Sometimes I think this should be renamed Planet Buxy.

Planet Debian-FR (utilisateurs) :
     10 Julien Candelier
      8 Emilien Macchi
      4 Guilhem Bonnefille
      3 Shams Fantar
      1 Rapha l Hertzog
      1 Olivier Berger (perso)
      1 Jean-Christophe Dubacq
      1 Jean-Baptiste H tier (djib)
      1 Eric Veiras Galisson

Newly added contributors to that planet have all their recent articles aggregated, not only the ones they wrote since they were added.

Planet Debian :
     40 Christian Perrier
      2 Russell Coker
      2 Raphael Geissert
      1 Wouter Verhelst
      1 Steve Kemp
      1 Romain Francoise
      1 NOKUBI Takatsugu
      1 Michal  iha 
      1 John Goerzen
      1 Joey Schulze
      1 Gerfried Fuchs
      1 Fathi Boudra
      1 Enrico Zini
      1 Emanuele Rocca
      1 Dirk Eddelbuettel
      1 David Welton
      1 Christine Spang
      1 Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho
      1 Adam Rosi-Kessel

Planet "Christian loves rugby".

debian-community.org :
      4 Holger Levsen
      3 Andrew Donnellan
      2 Evgeni Golov
      1 Wolfgang Lonien
      1 Rapha l Hertzog
      1 Martin Albisetti
      1 Marcos Marado
      1 Jean-Christophe Dubacq
      1 Cord Beermann
      1 Benjamin A'Lee
      1 Andreas Putzo
$

I know I have an encoding problem on some planets, but that script is a very basic curl+shell+sed+grep+recode+sort+uniq pipeline, and I only use it for the amusement value. Maybe I'll recode it with a proper RSS parser some day if I feel utterly bored.

I recently ranted about Ubuntu not giving much credit to Debian. I have to complete this by thanking the Merge-o-Matic feature which (for a few months now) sends to package maintainers a diff file with the Debian package when a new Ubuntu package is uploaded. This sometimes make it quite easy to spot modifications done by Ubuntu and eventually adopt them. This already bringed me, as maintainer, a few interesting patches for iso-codes, console-data and geneweb. In the case of iso-codes, samba and geneweb, the Ubuntu patch was even reported manually as a Debian bug by a Ubuntu contributor/developer (no later than today, Martin Pitt took care to suggest us to adopt bzip2 compression for iso-codes and Mathias Gug proposed a patch to enable usershares in samba). So, well, even if things can still be improved, many Good collaboration also often happens.

Thanks to the outstanding work of Stephen Gran SpamAssassin 3.2.3-0.volatile1 is now available in etch-proposed/volatile. Before we accept it to etch/volatile i would like to ask some experienced SysAdmins to do some (more extended testing as we did) of the package and report back any problems you find to debian-volatile@lists.debian.org. As soon as we are convinced that SA 3.2.3 works as expected, I will move the package to etch/volatile and send an official announcement. Please consider that this upgrade might break your system, so you upgrade at your own risk. Thanks in advance for all the feedback you will send us. volatile

Solar Project are a German progressive band. I like most of their music, but they ruin it on almost every song by opening their mouths. The problem is not that they can't sing, the problem is that they sing ein English. Even zough zey doo not h ve i Dsch rm n ccent, they still can't pronunce their words, usually stressing the wrong syllables or resting too long on a vowel. For instance, they love the word "animals," but they always pronunce it aa-niiii-mals. As a result, I tend to think I am listening to some sort of "Learning English Special, First-Year Edition for German Folk Singers" CD, rather than progressive rock. What a shame. When The Beatles sing "O komm doch, komm zu mir" to the tune of "I Want to Hold Your Hand", I get the chills; when Peter Gabriel sings "Eindringling" instead of "Intruder", I turn off the stereo. But those experimented with their curiosity and translated their originals into German, which is applaudable even if horrific; well, it's "art", right? Solar Project seem to think English is so hip that they don't even bother with German. That's not uncommon either, many German bands sing English, but none have rubbed me so badly as Solar Project has. NP: Solar Project: Chromagnitude

Listmaster Thomas Viehmann wrote (IMHO) a very good summary for a policy on how to proceed with spam in the public archives of the Debian mailing lists. Some of them might need further discussions. Please help the listmasters and write your own ideas and opinions about his proposal. Also many thanks to Frans Pop, who first drafted some of them listmaster-internally quite a while ago. listmaster

Did that title get your attention? Thought so. Now you have to read on as I explain! I am working on my PhD thesis and despite a bunch of gimmicks in place to help me with discipline (ha!), such as a pretty sweet mail filter setup (in need of further improvement), I end up distracted too often. For me, it's not the Internet which draws my attention, it's rather just Debian. As a developer, whenever I encounter a suboptimality (there are no problems with Debian!), I end up fixing it, or at least filing a bug report. Or I'll play around with my system and tweak things. I'd even argue that I am not playing around, actually, for I am good enough staying away from geeky fiddling and rather put proper fixes and enhancements in place. But those still consume time. Thus the idea of putting a second system with Windows installed wandered through my head in search of something to connect with. Yes, Windows, for one simple reason: I hate using it. So the theory goes that with Windows, I might actually stick with working on the thesis, trying to avoid touching that disgusting system otherwise. There are at least two (obvious) reasons why this isn't going to happen, any time soon at least: first, I am sure that the devil in me would find ways to kill time, and if only by cheating to obtain access to a Real operating system. Whether this is true, only a trial would tell. The second, and more important reason is that I have an important deadline coming up and anticipating the lovely whooshing sound it'd make zooming by is not an option. To get Windows up and running, and to have it ready for service, with LaTeX and Git and all the other tools I use properly configured, I'd have to invest 2-3 days, at least. And those I cannot afford at this stage. But the thought is now in my head. I hope you haven't just lost all your respect. I may actually be kidding. NP: Red Snapper: Prince Blimey

I have nothing to add to this article on The Register. NP: Red Snapper: Bogeyman

…that good friends of mine, who are a couple for several years, are now engaged. Personal

Marc wrote:
It’s this time of the year again: The one where I look back at my involvement in the project and decide that I’ve been a member long enough, so I should probably get out. For Debian, there are two ways to do it: Either become MIA or become DPL. […] So, what do you think? Marc, do you care what i think? If yes, here is my opinion: You really should run for DPL. I have the hope that you will be a very good DPL. Side note: Did the campaigning period start already?
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