Search Results: "reg"

20 January 2006

Amaya Rodrigo: For fun and profit^W^W^W^WJust for fun...

Don t you love it when it looks simple and then it is actually simple, but you are not up to the task?

I am loving the xlibs-dev transition, really, I mean it! Two of my packages, fkiss and xdigger got bit by this issue, and I immediately fixed the bugs with a little help from a script provided by Moritz Muehlenhoff. really cool.

So I follow instructions in The Debian Wiki, run the script, check with pbuilder, upload and profit! Fun! End of world hunger! Err, almost. So I get all excited and decide to look at the bugs. And I find a nice one: #346347. Not bad, gpsim FTBFS, Luk also took a look at it and didn t really like what he saw, it neede no xlibs-dev or substitute for them and sitll FTBFS.

But wait! Just by looking at gpsim s bugs page, I find out that there s a New Upstream Version(tm) (#248931) available since 1 year and 241 day ago. Also, NMUs that have not been acknowledged for as long as almost two years... Not nice. And there s even a patch (#345215) for building it on, GNU/kFreeBSD... how sexy!

So I get all obsessive about it. But newer upstream needs a newer libgtkextra-dev version (#347397), which of course was not packaged (don't we all love Murphy?) and that s where I am stuck at. I loathe libraries. But still I gave it a try. And failed. Several times.

Fun? Yes! Profit? Nope! Do you want to take a look at it? Easy. It s all here.

Amaya also FTBFS. And I want to NMU amaya. Badly. Since I first heard about amaya, and realized that I am named after a web browser (sucky as it might be) and after getting many IRC highlights (every time that amaya FTBFS is mentioned on IRC), I have been wanting to use/adopt/NMU it. Amaya NMUs amaya, how recursive can it get?

I will go to bed now, and try not to keep thinking about it, not because I want to become an early riser, Gunnar, no need to worry! But reading about it I thought it would be healthier for me to wake up everyday at the same hour, so that s all I am aiming for. If you know me, you might be rolling on the floor laughing as you read this. So am I! But, if you know me, keep in mind that I have been drinking coffee with no sugar since August... Hey! You are not laughing anymore?

Vi and Emacs are doing fine. Emacs was not pregnant after all, or so the vet told me. It was hard to see her slowly become herself after surgery. Vi was perfectly OK all along, but she looked terrible. Anyway, she felt better by 6am the next day and came to bed, perfectly groomed, and purring like nothing had happened. A week has passed and she has started doing the gory part today... she s biting away the scar tissue, and it bleeds a bit. Oh my Spaghetti Monster!

Amaya Rodrigo: Hilarious: Meme Time again!

Best Meme ever!

Long time, no blog. I know. And all you get is a meme. But... I found this so hilarious. ROTFL.

* Amaya needs all the effort the developers can put into.
* Amaya needs to be close to someone, especially a guy.
* Amaya needs to expand their vegetarian variety by adding items that have gravy.
* Amaya needs a warm body!!!
* Amaya needs a friend
* Amaya needs attention
* Amaya needs someone around all the time
* Amaya needs a TCP/IP (networked computer) or SLIP (dial up) connection to access the webpages.
* Amaya needs to find remote or local copies of the XHTML DTDs.
* Amaya needs not have the woman-scorned attitude she brings forth.
* Amaya needs a comprehensive update.
* Amaya needs some female friends.
* Amaya needs to stand up for herself.
* Amaya needs further evaluation.
* Amaya needs a friend now... a WOMAN friend!
* Yes, Amaya needs X.
* Amaya needs to have a talk with him.
* Amaya needs to check that each NAME and ID attribute values
* Amaya needs wchar.h (and presumably the respective library).
* Amaya needs stabilization on some designs.
* Amaya needs lesstif too.
* Amaya needs all the back up she can get.
* Amaya needs an oxygen mask.
* Amaya needs my help.
* Amaya needs something to Help her get past all this lying.
* Amaya needs to go tonight
* Amaya needs The buzz of conversation around her and The comfort of Friends nearby.
* Amaya Needs to stop crying so damn Much
* Amaya needs a chance at winning a game.
* Amaya needs to keep in shape
* Amaya needs time to get material
* Amaya needs to be stopped and invulnerable.
* Amaya needs her kindergarten checkup

There is a paper sheet sitting on my table, with all the stuff I would want to blog about regarding these last months. To make a long story short, I turned 30, Life is good, very good, too good to blog, even. (ie: I got quoted *twice* in Michael Banck s quote file).

Axel Beckert: For those who care about memes, interior design or optical illusions

Sorry, but I just couldn’t resist to at least once use FTWCA. (I guess it will become some kind of meme on Planet Debian and the Debian lists the one or the other way round… (And isn’t “meme” just another name for running gag? ;-) Via dyfa I found a page with very impressive optical illusions in interior design just resulting from the right perspective. Unfortunately my flat is way to small for such a cool decoration. (These orange holes would fit perfectly regarding the colour. :-)

Adam Rosi-Kessel: In Defense of Piracy and Openness

Interesting commentary by Chinese documentary filmmaker Hao Wu on Marketplace. Wu explains that it is not possible to obtain most films in China except as pirated versions, and when there are official legal releases they are edited and censored by the government. If the United States is successful in getting China to devote substantial police resources to enforcement of international copyright law, a perhaps unintentional side effect is that access to information and openness will be squelched. This raises the question of whether it is really in Hollywood’s long term interest to crack down on piracy in otherwise repressive regimes. It’s at least an interesting perspective to bring to the issue that I hadn’t really considered.

19 January 2006

Riku Voipio: The shadow of DMCA creeps to Finland

Tommi Kyyr , IFPI finland:

Now, we need to understand that listening to music on your computer is an extra privilege. Normally people listen to music on their car or through their home stereos , says Kyyr and continues; If you are a Linux or Mac user, you should consider purchasing a regular CD player.

This madness began in 2001, when EU passed EUCD, the European version of DMCA. Next year, Ministry of culture introduced the first proposal for the Finnish implementation of EUCD. After fierce criticism from EFFI and various citizens, the committee studying the proposal rejected it before parliaments vote, demanding that the ministry must consult everyone effected by the change in law. When creating this proposal, practically only Music Industry pressure groups where heard.

Fast forward September 2005, and Ministry of culture and Music Industry pressure groups are pushing the second proposal a lot harder. All the parts from we hate are still there - No interoperability, chilling effects on security research and freedom of speech, and so on. Minister Karpela Claims that she is surprised by the criticism, and complained that people should have criticized properly during the law preparation phase (Not telling that EFFI _WAS_ heard during preparation, and their opinion was ignored).

The Media was alsoquick to to find out, that Jukka Liedes, the bureaucrat who actually wrote the Law Proposal, has a also a position ESEK, a Finnish Music Industry Pressure group. Such corruption is almost unheard in Finland.

On friday, the "Grand Committee" passed the law forward without modifications, for the parliament to vote on later. A requirement was appended that "Ministry of culture must ensure, that all users are able to view/listen to copyprotected content". Several The chairman of Grand Committee, already declared the appended part "Naive". Which it very much is. Entertainment industry is not going to relax copyprotection for say, Linux users in Finland...

The worst part? According to the current proposal,

Downloading music from internet without copyright holders permission is not a punishable offence, but breaking copyprotection of a CD you have bought, is.

Riku Voipio: software patents update

Easrlier this week I had a chance to listen to Gregory Aharonian. Since listening to opposing views usually brings new viewpoints to issues, I tried to listen and understand. Basicly, His point was:

- Patents are a pilar of capitalism
- Software is equal to hardware
- So Software Patents have to be good idea
- But most patents are trivial and ridiculous

The solution?

- If you are a corporation, you should be furiously filing ridiculous software patents for your defense too.

Eh? Which as ridiculous as "fucking for virginity"

- If you can't afford a legal department, well, you are SOL.

This is what irks me most about the SWpat people. "So what if small companies and individual developers lose?" "That's just the way life is in other industries as well". Patent lawyers are not prepared to bring in any compromise, or fix defects of the system. And I'm not even talking about medical/healthcare patents, where patent monopolies can literally kill people.

If the future of software development is parasitic Myhrvold's IP holding companies and programming while a lawyer is transcribing my code to patents while telling me things I can't do because we haven't licensed something...

Patents are a cold war between corporations legal departments. Nothing to do with real world, INNOVATION, or creating better products for users. I have to say, that after hearing what a software patent supporter had to say, I am more confidently against software patents than ever before.

Uwe Hermann: kitty, a Qt/KDE based RSS podcast and video aggregator, is now in unstable

kitty screenshot As mentioned earlier, I wanted to package the KDE videoblog client kitty for Debian. I finally found the time to really do it, and the package has entered Debian unstable a few days ago. The first bug has already been reported (sigh), but I'm working on it. kitty got even mentioned in Debian Weekly News (w00t!)

Meike Reichle: On laundromats

Not owning a washing machine of your own does funny things to you. When I moved here, I knew that being without one I would have to cycle to the laundromat every time, carrying a huge backpack, wash my stuff, cycle back home with the wet cloths and hang them in the drying room in the basement. Compared to the hassle that it would be to get a washing machine, and considering I am only going to live here for half a year this seemed sensible. There are however a few things I did not know/consider:

Ross Burton: Sound Juicer "Look In The Stars And Search For The Answer" 2.13.3

Sound Juicer "Look In The Stars And Search For The Answer" 2.13.3 is out. Tarballs are available on burtonini.com, or from the GNOME FTP servers. Only one change here: Thanks to Tim-Philipp Mueller and James Livingston for helping me here. This needs lots of testing, there are bound to be many regressions that need hunting and fixing. Everyone grab it now!

Michael Janssen: Warning: Habit-forming.

Recently I have started a new diet: the No S Diet. The concept is very simple: no sweets, snacks, or seconds (except on days which start with S). I started around the holidays, which actually wasn't hard at all because holidays count as S days (they're "Special"). However, I didn't really get into it that much until recently. I can't really tell if it is working yet, because it doesn't have strict weighing guidelines like the previous diet, but I feel like something has changed in my life. There is a bunch of text on the page about why it works, but the basic concept is that you should be forming habits which are healthy. It is much easier to get into a healthy habit if it's not hard to remember what the habit you're trying to reinforce actually is. It makes it much easier to feel guilty when you fail in enforcing the habit as well, because you can't make complicated excuses ("this is okay because I excercised off those calories"). The No S Diet also has the bonus of being easily combinable with basically any other diet you can think of, unless that diet specifically requires you to eat sweets. I'm thinking of combining it with the hacker's diet, which definitely appeals to my accountant side. The problem I had with the previous attempt at the hacker's diet still exists, unfortunately - I still don't have an easy way to keep track of my calories. I am considering dropping a few bucks on a calorie counter database for my new Palm, which may help in that regard. I have noticed that most of the things which are now being termed as "lifehacks" are actually just habit-forming. The No S diet is a habit for eating, Getting Things Done is a collection of habits for todo lists and projects, and Early Rising is a habit for sleeping and waking up. These are not new ideas, they are just smashed into the new fad: improving your life through good habits. The accountant in me wants to do more than just that, so I am thinking of making a drupal module or two to keep track of my progress (and subsequently broadcast it to the world).

Martin F. Krafft: GMX sells registered mail as security feature

My brother wanted to send me a sensitive document, so he followed the suggestion by his provider (GMX) to use their feature called "registered mail") ("Einschreiben"). Here's how it works:
  1. The sender composes an Email and checks the option "registered mail"
  2. GMX stores the email on their servers, generates an access code, and sends the access code with a URL to the intended recipient -- plain text, of course.
  3. The recipient surfs to the URL and accepts (or declines).
  4. GMX then acknowledges acceptance to the sender and forwards the email to the original recipient address -- plain text, of course.
I suppose the feature does what the name suggests, namely to offer the sender a way to check whether the recipient has received the email. What pisses me off is that they sell it as a way to securely send emails on the Internet. I think providers spreading fud like this should have their "licence" revoked and be condemned to practice encryption with an abacus over a 2400 baud modem line! PS: If this isn't bad, the email sent to the intended recipient doesn't properly encode special characters in the headers, which is why some content scanners (like my amavisd-new) will discard or bounce it.

Clint Adams: Not adjusted for inflation

Twice upon a time, there was a corporation called Company B. Ironically, their bugle player quit two days before the beginning of this story. Two days after the bugle player quit, something sinister was happening at Company B. To better understand it, we need to go back in time a bit. So this next part happens well before the beginning of the story. Once upon a time, Company B was run by a middle-management team known as Team Alfalfa. These guys were young and na ve and inexperienced, but idealistic and somewhat morally pure. They certainly didn't expect the bugle player to quit. They were surprised by almost every one of the things to come. When they hired a Belarussian, they were surprised when he quit shortly thereafter and moved to Hampshire County in Massachusetts. They were surprised when the owners of Company B hired Team Buckwheat. Team Buckwheat was a group of power-hungry jerks, who were hired because they had Experience and Vision. Company B needed to grow, because Progress is important, and anyway, how else would the owners be able to bilk the company of millions of dollars through fraud and mismanagement if the company didn't grow big enough to amass millions of dollars in the first place? The thirst for power was great within each member of Team Buckwheat, and they collectively vowed to take over the company. Through trickery and deceit, they sabotaged Team Alfalfa. Team Alfalfa mistakenly believed that its power hold was strong and that it could threaten to hold the company's business hostage, but it was very much mistaken. Slowly but surely, Team Buckwheat started to drive Team Alfalfa out of the company until only two members remained. In fact, their lust was so great that they began vying for power amongst themselves before they had succeeded completely in their purge of the ranks of Team Alfalfa. They employed evil and complicated manipulations and machinations, until only two of them remained as well. As only two, they were much less powerful, and as they saw the danger and became afraid, they clung to one another and allied. Losing faith in Team Buckwheat, the owners of Company B hired the Grey Knight to continue the work of rapidly growing the company in order to make enormous profits. The Grey Knight came in and exuded Calmness and Rationalness, and provided a stark contrast to the meanness and cruelty that Team Buckwheat inflicted upon its subordinates. So some unlikely bedfellows among the grunts and peons formed an alliance, and with the reluctant aid of the Grey Knight, they had the remnants of Team Buckwheat fired based on flimsy pretexts, while the remnants of Team Alfalfa watched from the sidelines. The peons and grunts were na ve and overly hopeful in the Grey Knight, who was not as noble as he seemed. After a few months of everything functioning better than it had ever done before, he brought in his friends, Team Corn. Team Corn was power-hungry as well, but more patient. Unlike Team Buckwheat, which had been cobbled together from strangers, Team Corn stuck together and moved from company to company, leaving waves of disgust and resentment in its wake. These people immediately took steps to secure their power base. Where things had been transparent and group-oriented before, they were made obscure and individualized. Each project was assigned to a single person. All communication regarding each project was required to go directly and privately to the responsible person. Discussing a project with anyone else was a breach of protocol. If the responsible person fell sick or left the country for mysterious reasons, all activity on that project would cease. Accomplishments were discouraged, and simulating the appearance of much effort and progress was encouraged. The members of Team Corn were stunted in their moral development. They believed that one was either with them or against them. Those who chose to be sycophants were given rewards and promotions, no matter how incompetent and unqualified they were. Those who did not were oppressed and punished. Objections and questions to ill-advised policies were met with hostility, and if anyone ever took a principled stand, Team Corn became fraught with confusion; they could not conceive of a reason one might act for the greater good or based on conscience rather than to do what would advance one's own interests. After a very long time, this fundamental lack of comprehension of their own evil led to their downfall, but that small bit of justice was tempered when Team Durum came in to replace them. Team Durum wasn't as bad as Team Corn, but boy did it suck.

Simon Richter: Alternative alternatives handling?

Much like Debconf, the alternatives system only handles system-wide preferences, which is kind of a drawback when the choices at hand would make more sense in a per-user context. Annoyance of the day in this regard was konsole, whose alternatives priority got bumped recently in response to a bug report that said that on systems where KDE is installed, its terminal emulator should be the system-wide default as this is what users expect. As the current flamewar has not died down yet, I figured that cloning the bug multiple times and reassigning it to all the other terminal emulators asking for their priority to be bumped would not be a great idea, so instead I filed a bug against "general" instead which should hopefully have hit -devel by now.

18 January 2006

Matthew Palmer: It Never Rains...

but it pours. So far on my trip home this afternoon (I'm a little over halfway home) I've met three people I know -- two fellow geeks and a friend from TAFE I haven't seen in several years. Statistically speaking, seeing someone you know here and there happens -- it happens to me often enough that I can accept it as normal, if not regular. But three. Thankfully, dice have no memory, otherwise some probabilistically-likely event would have to not happen, or some really bad freakishly unlikely event would have to happen to balance everything out. Shit. I get on a plane on Sunday. Now I'm worried.

Lars Wirzenius: Debian: One more about the OpenSolaris talk at Debconf6

Alvaro Lopez Ortega comments on my explanation of why I don't want the OpenSolaris panel talk at Debconf6. He misses the point: I am not objecting to OpenSolaris itself, but to having a talk about it at Debconf6. From my entry: "I [...] questioned the fact that Debconf6 will have a talk on OpenSolaris, when there are good Debian related talks rejected." I think that for a Debian development conference, having a talk about Debian is much, much more important than discussing OpenSolaris, or even co-operation between Debian and OpenSolaris. That is the core of my objection: OpenSolaris is not about Debian, and the talk is crowding out a talk about Debian. As a smaller issue, I do also happen to dislike the OpenSolaris license (the CDDL), and this makes me dislike having the OpenSolaris talk (instead of a Debian one) even more. I have sufficient grounds for disliking it in the fact that it is Yet Another License. More importantly, it seems to be incompatible with the GPL, which causes all sorts of unpleasant complications if Debian wanted to use OpenSolaris code. Further, it seems unclear that the CDDL fills the requirements of the Debian Free Software Guidelines. The result: there is little room for co-operation between Debian and OpenSolaris. This doesn't mean OpenSolaris is evil or that it needs to be shunned. I'm perfectly happy with non-free software, but not in the Debian context. The license issue can, however, be disregarded completely, when arguing about having this talk at Debconf6, as far as I care. I want to see a Debian conference concentrate on making Debian better, and not on making OpenSolaris better. If there were free slots in the conference programme, I wouldn't mind, but there aren't. All slots are full, and Debian specific talks have been rejected in favor of the OpenSolaris talk. That is what irks me. Note also that I'm not criticizing the people who want to give this talk (or hold the panel, or whatever), only the Debconf6 talks committee. And I did that in private, I didn't drag it into public.

17 January 2006

Gunnar Wolf: On the OpenSolaris round table at Debconf

Tolimar, liw: Just to give an extra bit of ease, I know Alvaro Lopez, one of the talk's proponents. I am to some extent an instigator for this talk - Alvaro is definitively a Free Software guy. I know him for several years already. He has been as careful as possible, and told me about his frustration when the whole Nexenta mess erupted. As far as I can say, the cooperation intentions are as serious as you can expect from such a beast as Sun is - I cannot judge more, and I won't say more in this regard. I just assure you that this talk will not be a presentation on why Solaris is better than Hurd or anything like that. I trust Alvaro (and, transitively, I should also trust Simon). I do hope we get something interesting out of this talk.
[update] Alvaro has answered. I'm linking it here as he is not syndicated in Planet Debian.

Aigars Mahinovs: Ok, I read the first GPLv3 draft. I found multiple...

Ok, I read the first GPLv3 draft. I found multiple problems, some good, some quite bad:

  • Section 2 - The output from running it is covered by this License only if the output, given its content, constitutes a work based on the Program.: does this mean that documents written in Abiword is covered by GPL? (Edit: I misread the sentence here, it really states just the oposite of what I thought :P)
  • Section 3 - Regardless of any other provision of this License, no permission is given to distribute covered works that illegally invade users' privacy, nor for modes of distribution that deny users that run covered works the full exercise of the legal rights granted by this License.: does this mean that one can not make a locked down system where users can not write outside the homedir, make /home a separate partition and mount it with noexec parameter thus denying all simple users the right of running modified versions of these programs (at least on this system)?
  • Section 4. - You may copy and distribute verbatim copies of the Program's source code as you receive it, in any medium, provided that you conspicuously and appropriately publish on each copy an appropriate copyright
    notice;: does that mean that I have to write "Copyright by this and that and this and that and this and that" on every CD that I record in my home to give to my friends? It sounds as bad as the original BSD advertisement clause.
  • Section 5.b - You must license the entire modified work, as a whole, under this License to anyone who comes into possession of a copy.: I suggest adding "legally" before "comes", because otherwise, for example, if a company is making an internal modification of a GPL program with some secret information embedded into the code (some very internal communication routine, passwords, codes, ...) and some industrial thief steals this modified code for a blackhat hacker, he can claim that he "came into possession of a copy" and thus he has all the legal rights use it and that no trade secret laws can apply.
  • in some places "Corresponding Source" is used instead of "Complete Corresponding Source Code" (Edit: I was pointed to a place in the middle of the licence where "CS" is defined equal to "CCSC". Still, not the best style - either declare that upfront or use one style trough the document)
  • Section 9. - it is not clearly stated that using the covered work indicates acceptance of the Licence, but it is explicitly stated for modification and propagation.
  • Section 13. - I really do not like geographic limitations. Anyone can state "this program has a progress bar, which is patented in USA, so you can not use it in USA unless you have the patent" for basically any program thus very easily discriminating against quite a few people. If it is illegal by other means, leave it be illegal by those means - do not impose additional illegality on it via copyright. Law in some countries and patent situation can change more easily then the licence for old free software projects with many contributors.


I have not yet read any comments from either FSF or any other people and I am not a lawyer, but I hope that these problems will be fixed in next drafts.

16 January 2006

Kai Hendry: Wordpress point oh

Attack by flies on some Australian beach After being hassled about updating Wordpress packages to 2.0 I did. Though I sort of regret it now as I wanted to wait for a bug fix release. “Point oh” software keeps me the creeps. Now a 2.0.1 release is in the works that will fix at least one (long standing) minor security issue. Personally I am reluctant to update Wordpress to 2.0 on my blog natalian.

John Goerzen: Haskell #1 in the Shootout

Wow. Some Haskell hackers have started paying a small bit of attention to the Great Computer Language Shootout site, and the results are impressive. Haskell now takes first place in the lines of code competition. In the CPU time competition, Haskell is also doing quite respectably: it beats out OCaml by a small margin, and defeats Java, C++, Python, Perl, Erlang, Ruby, Mono, Tcl, etc. by significant margins. These links are all using the Shootout default weightings for individual tests. The only downside to the Shootout is that the programs -- for all languages -- are not really idomatic and don't show off a language's natural beauty. Sounds like it's time to gather up some Haskell hackers to rally around the PLEAC effort as well.

15 January 2006

Edd Dumbill: A clean sweep

Firstly, if you haven't the faintest interest in the software I use to write this weblog, please feel free to go and do something more interesting right now. Now I'm in the company of dedicated readers of colophons, I will proceed. Redesign and reimplementation  This weblog, which has now been running for over two and a half years, originally ran on some custom software I'd hacked up in Zope: at that time my web development platform of choice. Today, I've relaunched with another custom content management engine, this time written using Rails. It's been a lot of fun to write, and a good excuse to sharpen my Rails skills further. The design has also been fun. It's a little basic right now, but I hope easy to read. Of course, the font is Lucida Grande, which ensures that I am fully Web 2.0 compliant.
The main new feature is that the tags I give articles are now made public. I used to tag posts for my RSS feed, but not publish them on the site. Now they are public--what few tags I currently have--and it's possible to find RSS and Atom feeds just for certain subsections of my writing. I worry sometimes about spamming the various Planet aggregator sites my blog features in, so this gives me a way to direct content specifically at them. That said, at least for Planet XML I like hearing about everything the community members have to say, not just their on-topic posts. New URLs My blog now has a new location, http://times.usefulinc.com/, and new places for  RSS and Atom feeds: Tools used

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