I've been using DreamHost to host this blog and most of my persistent online activity for the past 10 months. All in all I have been really happy with them. Others seem to have issues, but I don't have any gripes. I'm only paying a paltry fee, so I don't complain too much if my server isn't five-nines reliable. However, I am starting to have a problem with one of the services available. The email support is somewhat lax. My current situation is that I am using mutt as a reader on the server itself. This requires me to SSH into the server and read the mail on there. Because DreamHost doesn't realy expect that people will have this activity (most people check their mail by IMAP or webmail) it sometimes sees my mutt process as long-running, and decides to kill it with a HUP on the SSH connection. This is pretty annoying. Also, I get a lot of spam. No, really: on a typical day, I receive over 400 spams. Currently I am using SpamBayes for spam filtering, which works reasonably well - it catches most spam at least in the unsure folder. The same problem with mutt shows up with spambayes though: it takes up too much CPU and gets killed by DH's watchdogs.

These problems lead me to this experiment. The hassle with my mail is just too large, and I hear that GMail's spam filters are reasonably aggressive and work well after you train them slightly. I have decided that I will run an experiment. Starting with November 1st, all of my mail will forward to my GMail account. I will document the spam filtering (or lack of) abilities here on Base Zero, and I'll see how it works out. I have years of data from other methods of spam filtering so I can compare.

However, this experiment isn't only going to be about spam filtering. GMail also employs some different mail models than what I am used to. The first that I am interested in is tags. GMail uses tags instead of folders, the normal way of organizing mail. This is touted as better because you can have more than one tag assigned to a email at once, and therefore orgniaze mail which should be in two categories better. For messages which are in an Inbox you just use a Inbox tag. Spam messages get a Spam tag. So I will be orgnaizing my email with tags as much as possible. The second thing which intrigues me is the idea of emails being conversations instead of threads. GMail puts related emails together, but uses a flat structure as opposed to the tree structure that I am used to. I wonder if this will confuse me because I am on a number of lists which tend to use the tree structure a lot, with many branches. I may not like some of the things that GMail does -- in these cases I will look for hacks or build ones myself which attempt to solve these problems. I am also probably going to try and do some user interface critique.

Some people are concerned about GMail and scanning emails. This doesn't concern me that much: most ISPs can scan your emails for viruses and spam nowadays anyway, webmail particularly so. I can understand the effect that this could have on some people however. If anyone reading this message would like to be excluded from the email going to GMail, just reply to this post or email me. I will oblidge by filtering your following emails to a special folder on my server. Just realize that I will only read those emails weekly at best.

GMail will not be the only Google service which gets tested by me this month. Stay tuned for more information. Until then, hail to Google, our dear and glorious leader.

My life without CAPSLOCK Yesterday I spotted the option "Make CapsLock an additional Ctrl" in the Gnome keyboard preferences (Desktop > Preferences > Keyboard > Layout Options > Ctrl key position). I enabled it, obtaining the end of errors due to erroneous enabling of Caps Lock (as suggested to me by several people at DebConf6, but so far I've been too lazy to learn how to do it with xmodmap). In addition to feeling more relaxed when using Vim (we all know how dangerous can be Caps Lock in Vim!), using Caps Lock as CTRL is actually really handy, since key combinations involving CTRL can be formed moving the left pinky way less: probably a dream of all Emacs users out there Now it is just a matter of training my left pinky to stop going in the bottom left corner of the keyboard ...

Welcome to this 4th issue of the DeFuBu contest, the monthly championship of the funniest bug reported to the Debian BTS. The challengers

• Pierre Habouzit with #316531 (apt-listchanges: closes regex too strict), #390794 (apache2-mpm-prefork: /usr/sbin/apache2 not executable) and #393149 (uae: cannot open display)
• kolter with #390263 (uswsusp: "Linux" not capitalized in package description)
• Julien Louis with #31581 (project: Time between releases is too long) and #393083 (Hijacked website)''
• David Pashley with #393511 (irssi should notice when you are typing something in the wrong channel)

How the vote has been done Four Debian related people voted for these bugs, Philipp Kern, Florent Bayle, Cyril Brulebois and Gregory Colpart.
Mohammed Adn ne Trojette should vote quicker next time. Full ranking Bugs

• #393511 (irssi should notice when you are typing something in the wrong channel) (21 points)
• #393083 (Hijacked website)'' (19 points)
• #31581 (project: Time between releases is too long) (13 points)
• #390794 (apache2-mpm-prefork: /usr/sbin/apache2 not executable) (13 points)
• #316531 (apt-listchanges: closes regex too strict) (9 points)
• #390263 (uswsusp: "Linux" not capitalized in package description) (5 points)
• #393149 (uae: cannot open display) (4 points)

Challengers

• Julien Louis (32 points with 2 bugs)
• Pierre Habouzit (26 points with 3 bugs)
• David Pashley (21 points with 1 bug)
• kolter (5 points with 1 bug)

The winners

• Bug: #393511 (irssi should notice when you are typing something in the wrong channel) (21 points)
• Challenger: Julien Louis
• Bug reporter: Jason Spiro
• Voter: Florent Bayle with the nearest non-ordered quart : #393083, #393511, #390794, #31581

Notes To participate, simply drop me an email with a bug number. About DeFuBu

I know I repeat myself, but given current discusion, I simply feel the need to do so:

Please do not hide the arguments given to the compiler from me.

I cannot fix what I do not know if wrong. Maybe you can.

Keep the argument list tidy.

Many argument lists are longer than necessary. If there is some -I/<whatever> in the argument list on a Debian system, there is something fishy. (It&aposs not the universial collection of different stuff all going whereever it wants, after all). Common cases are:

- buggy scripts to add -I/usr/include - packages working around upstreams breaking compatibility - plainly broken upstreams - oversight

In short: if the line is too long, that is normaly a bug causing more pain than only a long line. Do something against those bugs, please. There is no need at all for a proper made library to give -I for stuff installed. It&aposs installed in the system, the default search path for /usr/include should suffice. It often does not, but that is simply bad design of that libraries interface. Do something against that, please! Also for stuff not installed, why do you need more than one -I? Are you embedding other libraries into your code? Why are they libraries if noone else uses them? If someone else uses them, why are they not made to proper library packages? If it is all intern stuff, why does it need so many include parts instead just a single include/ dir? Anf if it only needs one include dir why is it added a dozen times? What do you need -D for anything but paths? Ever heared of AM_CONFIG_HEADER?

And yes, I know many modern libraries are written by people never looked at anything but Windows when designing their headers. (Even some seem to have never looked at unixoid systems even after using them for decades). That is a problem, not something to be worked around with even more kludges. Kludges working around kludges are there to stay. So do not add them.

History
For the sarge release official kernel-images from the newly formed Debian kernel team came together with initrd-tools. initrd-tools Maintainer was jbailey. It saw some care from tbm, vorlon and me before the actual release. Remembering the flow of bugs and installation-reports it accounted for a huge number of install failures plus lacked many features the Red Hat mkinitrd had. Ubuntu got hit more directly as hoary released with a newer kernel than 2.6.8 and due to the initrd-tools devfs requirement.
initramfs-tools originated out of the need of a direct replacement. Inspired by an initramfs OLS talk jbailey had the goals of boot-time hardware detection using the nice and neat features the Linux 2.5 branch incorporated: The sysfs support of the Linux drivers allows an neat userspace daemon aka udev to coldplug them. udev is the replacement of a maze of slow shell scripts called hotplug package. The second big feature is the new initramfs format (the curious may want to read Documentation/filesystems/ramfs-rootfs-initramfs.txt of any current linux-2.6 source). For a boot loader initramfs or initrd is the same fish. The smaller and more efficient in kernel code makes the difference. The initramfs gets loaded much earlier, due to being only an cpio archive and not an fs allowing it to completely rule the rootfs search and mount. One initial assigned spec had the name "easy NFS root". The LTSP guys joined in and showed interest in incorporating their work.
Technology
initramfs-tools got default in Debian together when the first common linux-2.6 (2.6.15) package reached etch, powered all the Ubuntu releases from Breezy on and is used by the grml live-cd. Since archive inclusion almost a year ago it got much better support of all the various linux boot parameters (see man initramfs-tools or the "official" Documentation/kernel-parameters.txt), keeps an backup initrd around and has better block-based bootloader support (lilo, ..). klibc has been ported to _all_ the Debian release archs where it is in use and compiles fine on m68k and sh.
The initramfs-tools early userspace is very flexible based on it's hooks for initramfs build and boot. Thanks to alphix for the help on shaping the building blocks. There are initramfs hooks in cryptsetup, evms, dmraid, firmware-qlogic, lvm2 multipath, mdadm, usplash, .. Reviewers, uploaders and sponsors included fs, jbailey and Sesse. Most of the time it is sufficient and easy to test changes in qemu images (See slides workshop early userspace). The best wish of an early userspace is not to be remarked - aka happy booting. Nevertheless thanks a lot for the public support: Achieving Xen Disk encryption support in Etch, Popping my initramfs cherry, ..
Future
The latest initramfs-tools release seems almost ready for the upcoming etch release. The bug reports coming over from installation-reports are happily rare. Although the uuid based fstab generation solution is not yet integrated in the debian-installer. There are one or two known nitpicks left-over in the bts plus one bugger: udevsettle may exit to early, when not all the discs are ready for use. For grub there is a fail-over net, but which does not account for a to early md or lvm2 boot hook. Future initramfs-tools development will focus on an optional small klibc based Modules=dep hand walking /sys initramfs generation allowing better embedded support. grub2 will present run-time assembly challenges for the initramfs.

Before anything else: Please excuse some grammatical mistakes I've made in this post. You should understand the topic is really upsetting, and typing while searching for links, listening to news, and gathering the basic information for a five month old conflict is not exactly compatible with me spewing out proper English ;-)
Just to re-state the obvious: Mexico is, once again, on fire. This posting is mainly written with the Debian people in mind - An important number of them, after Debconf 6, went to visit Oaxaca - In late May, during the first weeks of this incredible, stupid and scary conflict we are now facing.
I've written in my blog every now and then about our political situation. Many of us had high hopes on our current government. We thought that the authoritarian regimes were a thing of the past, we hoped for real democracy, we hoped for a government that would honor human rights and solve long-standing topics for our society - Yes, we all knew president Fox came from a right-wing party, and didn't expect much advance in the social agenda -which many of us perceive as the real problem in Mexico- but still, hoped for openness and reconciliation with the past.
I won't repeat what I've extensively said over and over - The thing is, Fox's government continues to amaze us with its stupidity, with its near-sightedness, with its hypocresy. Fox's term is really close to an end - In one more month, the govt. will change hands to the first de-facto president since Carlos Salinas (going over another story we hoped to forget).
As some of you wittnessed, there was a popular protest taking place mainly in Oaxaca - Basically, the State's public elementary school teachers demanding better payment for their work. Such a protest is already a common occurrence in Mexico, as public school teachers are among the worstly paid workers (no wonder, then, our country is still undeveloped - Make public education worse, and you have the warranty of an unprepared, ignorant population). The teachers went on strike in early May, briefly returned to classes on late June to properly close the 2005-2006 lective year, but went back on strike afterwards.
Of course, the local government (Mexico is a federative republic, each state is autonomous and makes decisions independently) took a very long time to act - and acted the worst way possible: By sending policemen to forcefully throw the teachers from their camps in the downtown streets, with no negotiation, no answer, not a drop of common sense.
That led to the formation of the (pleonasmicaly named) APPO: Popular Assembly of Oaxaca's People - A group of people, partly formed by the unhappy teachers, mainly demanding the Oaxaca state governor to step down, after he proved he is inept for his office. And yes, I'm oversimplifying here, but I don't want to dig too much - There is fortunately plenty of available information in this regard.
That happened over four months ago. APPO kept control of the city. Nobody denies that this has caused Oaxaca, a city that attracts national and international tourism like few others in the country, a great deal of economic damage - Oaxacan people are, however, still sympathetic to APPO's demands. Governor Ulises Ruiz (from PRI, the party that ruled the country for over 70 years) has not been able to be seen in public in his state for some months already. The legislative power has also been unable to work properly, and the judicial power is half-dead, doing only its most basic tasks. Renowned jurists, such as Miguel ngel Granados Chapa, have repeatedly stated that this is enough for the Federal Senate to declare the governing powers in Oaxaca have disappeared - This would put an end to the conflict, leading to immediate elections, but the Senate has denied taking this course of action. Not only that, but the Federal government took the command of the local security forces, tacitly recognizing the local government is unable to coherently excersise their authority. After almost five months, last week they issued an unanymous -but mild- exhort, asking Ulises Ruiz to consider stepping down.
So far, 15 people have been killed in the different represive actions taken, first by the local police under local command, later by the local police under federal command, and starting last week, by the federal police. Today, it seems the army is getting in the conflict as well, despite promises of not doing so by the federal authorities - Of course, they have become masters in the art of breaking promises.
Why is the federal government upholding Ulises Ruiz? Simple: After the undeniable electoral fraud we had some months ago, there are too many indicatives pointing out that our (supposedly) elected president Felipe Calder n (FeCal, as he is better known as) will have a hard time becoming the president, and many people doubt he will be able to hold the authority for the six years. So far, he has shown no better aptitude as a statesman than Vicente Fox: Instead of boldly facing the claims of fraud, he just chickened out and has spent many months hiding from the public, appearing only for selected, friendly audiences. For many months already we have heard "Ulises ya cay , le sigue Calder n" (Ulises has fallen, Calder n is next). This country has not been so badly shaken in decades - Of course, Great Statesman Vicente Fox insists the country is in peace and there are no red spots. Fox even was stupid/blind enough to state that the problems in Oaxaca would be dealt with easily and successfully, just as the problems in Chiapas and Atenco were doing his term. During Fox's campaign, he promised to solve the centuries-old Chiapas problem (that resulted in the EZLN uprising in 1994) in just 15 minutes - He just has not had time to do so. Atenco? Yes, in 2002 an angry people made him step back from the most important project of his term (a new airport for Mexico City). In May 2006, Atenco sprang again to the news because of a massive repression - I'm not going into details on Atenco right now, as it would be off-topic, but you can look at my article in FeCal.org.mx or watch a very strong video by Canal Seis de Julio (both in Spanish only) for further details.
Last Friday, however, something was different. In a repressive action, a USA citizen, the Indymedia reporter and cameraman Brad Will was killed by a paramilitary group. Even more, he was killed while doing his work, and we can clearly see this evidence on his last tape. Of course, the US ambassador issued a warning, asking the US citizens not to go to Oaxaca. And, as Lorenzo Mayer says, hay de muertos and muertos - There are different categories of dead people. A highly visible US citizen is more important than the other 14 dead Mexicans, and now the Federal Preventive Police is clashing in Oaxaca.
What should be shocking, but is not so much to those of us who know this beaten country, is the attitude of the authority when taking the city. After five months of occupation, the Oaxacan people have got used to living with APPO - be it for good or for bad. Tourism has diminished, but the people's living sources have not been attacked. Of course, as soon as the Federal Police took the downtown areas, all sorts of reports of looting have been reported. The policemen are robbing even sodas and chips, and up to TVs and microwaves. As many people state, this is a very Kafkian country.
Of course, we don't know what will come next. Most of the city has been "freed", and the APPO is holding at the University. The University is autonomous, and the PFP commands have promised not to break its autonomy - but we don't believe that. There are fights very close to the University. The Rector himself spoke a couple of hours ago at Radio Universidad, the main broadcasting point for real news on this subject (I am following on the news thanks to KeHuelga, 102.9MHz FM in Southern Mexico City, or at their webpage, from where they link to many other underground or Internet radio stations joining in the broadcast), and the reports are dramatic. Dramatic, as well, is the way all of the commercial news sources are ignoring the facts.
I want to keep you updated, as one of the very few reasons things are not worse is the public opinion and, even more, the international pressure. I'm sorry I'm not giving more links right now, but I will soon. I don't want, of course, to flood people that read my blog through the different syndications with a technical profile, so updates via my blog will be quite sparse. If you can read Spanish, we have posted many articles at FeCal, and many other individual sites are also joining in. A couple of links, and I'm off for now.

• APPO main site
• Spanish Wikipedia article on APPO
• La Hora del Pueblo
• Several videos in this regard in YouTube
• Centro de Medios Libres M xico
• Sendero del Peje

First Thoughts on Ruby Following my first experiences programming with it, here is my current braindump on Ruby (pros and cons mixed):

• cool, it looks like an intersection among Python (clean way of doing OO with steroids here and there, e.g. mixins), Perl (quick and dirty syntax when dirtiness is needed, e.g. regexp), OCaml (functional stuff to improve abstraction and reuse);
• functional stuff is syntactically constrained (e.g.: why in the world a method has the concept of the code block passed to it and the nice yield syntax is meant to work on it only?, why can't we just handle code blocks as first class values?);
• some paradigm which are hard to program in other languages are amazingly easy to program in Ruby (e.g. heavy threading);
• the documentation of the language and of the library is probably the most chaotic I've ever seen: I'm still unable to find a rigorous definition of both the grammar and the semantics of the language. The standard library is well-documented/poorly-documented/read-the-code depending on which module you choose.

So, the following package exists in Debian:

Package: update-manager
Version: 0.42.2ubuntu22-5

Now, what is this abomination? What does the "ubuntu" tell us? That this package was stolen from Ubuntu? That it has Ubuntu specific patches? Branding? Or that it simply is the same package that is in Ubuntu, and the maintainers saw no good reason to use a different version string in Debian? I prefer the last explanation, and believe this to be part of a greater trend. There have been a number of REJECTs because Debian simply does not have any releases codenamed "dapper" or "edgy", and people simply uploaded the package to the wrong upload queue. I believe the Ubuntu side also had a few uploads to "unstable" that their archive maintenance software could not process. Quite a number of packages are maintained by the same people in both distributions, and in most cases, it does not make sense to have packages differ at all. Even more disturbing, Ubuntu has been built for more architectures than they released edgy for, while some people in Debian are trying to reduce the number of architectures in the hope of getting towards a shorter release cycle, which Ubuntu has just admitted to be suboptimal for server installations by preparing an "LTS" release. So Debian and Ubuntu are becoming more and more alike. Now, is this a good thing, or would we all prefer that both keep a strong "profile"? And: if they are to grow together, where should we meet? I think most of us can agree on an installer with a big "expert" switch, and a lot of eye candy as long as you can deinstall it, but we'd also have to merge the respective communities, which is what I'd consider the more difficult part. Debian's NM process is quite different from the MOTU programme, and on both sides there will be "hardliners" (I consider myself one) who will push for their respective community's standards. Still to be filled remains the spot of the end user friendly distribution. I just got a call asking me to fix a printer setup, and, frankly, this stuff is *way* too complicated. Maybe a joint project, by members of the Debian and Ubuntu communities can tackle this?

I recently bought this lovely Canon EOS 350D camera from a friend who bought the new 400D instead. It's a nice DSLR camera, which I'm convinced is able to take magnificent pictures when used appropriately (my friend's pics are a good example). So since I like things to Just Work, I updated my image downloading script. It used to just do an rsync since my previous camera was available as an USB mass storage device, which I could simply mount with autofs. But the Canon guys still don't make cameras that work that way, and one has to use the PTP protocol instead. Which means rsync isn't an option, and one has to do shell and awk magic to retrieve all the pictures. Because the camera doesn't even put all images in the same folder, but it changes folders once every 100 shots, so you have to parse the output from gphoto2 and get the pics one by one. Anyway. It works, and it even registers the pictures in the F-Spot database, with a tag on them (with a semantic of "TODO" or "unsorted"). If anyone wants the scripts, just give me a shout. Speaking of F-Spot: the new 0.2.2 version wasn't in Debian unstable yet, and the boolean logic queries were very appealing to me. So I took the liberty of preparing an unofficial package, which you'll find in my APT repository until official packages enter Sid. Oh, and since my friend's new EOS 400D isn't supported by the latest released libgphoto2 packages, I also patched them (one-line patch, to add a pair of USB ids) and uploaded them to the same place. Same thing, unofficial packages, use at your own risk, etc. He tells me there's a versioned dependency on dbus that can't be satisfied in testing, but that should be a temporary problem. That was the easy part. Now, the hard part is: learning how to do good-looking photos. I expect that'll take much longer.

A nice example of everyday sexism, I only noticed it when passing by the third or fourth time.



(Note to non-german speaking readers: -in is a female ending)

I spent a good few hours reviewing all the logrotate files included in Debian’s Sarge release the other day. Using the Debian package search it was easy to find all the packages which install a file into /etc/logrotate.d/. Once I had the list of packages I simply ran “apt-get source cat packages.txt ” and started looking over the contents. That is another area which has been audited. So far I think the systematic checking like that is quite a good way to find things. So far I can remember:

• Looking at files installed into /etc/cron.d/
• Looking at logrotate files
• Looking at all init scripts.
• Looking at all php scripts.

On the one hand spending hours looking at source code to try and detect flaws is frustrating when nothing is found, but on the other hand it is good that we have software in such good shape.

During the past weeks I’ve been drawing up a list with things to be done for the Etch release concerning my work for the Debian/Ruby Extras team. I think it is quite complete now. I hope my fellow team members can help me accomplish these goals:

• Solve all remaining issues concerning the ruby-pkg-tools.
• Make sure that all team-maintained packages are:
  • bug-less, that is, no open priority minor or higher bug reports,
  • installable,
  • up-to-date with respect to the upstream version.
• Consider all work-in-progress packages and get them in Etch if they are worthy.
• Take over the packages put up for adaption by Damog.
• Create the libextras-ruby meta-package and get it into Etch.

I think the first two items are as good as taken care of. However, the last three points need some more attention the next few weeks.

Tonight whilst Googling for random numbers that call us up and don't make it through the Asterisk menus, I discovered Who Called Us, a user-driven site to identify the people behind the numbers, for callers that provide a number but no name. Very cool. One such number seems to be drawing a reasonable amount of ire. Generally speaking, we're not bothered by telemarketers, because of the menu Asterisk presents to all callers. It's just interesting to see the cases that continually call back.

It’s snowier now than it was then.

Shun-ichi Goto, one of the elisp hackers, released an emacs major mode for Trac, trac-wiki.el. I had not tested it yet, but it would be useful for emacs users. It seems to require w3m, emacs-w3m, xml-rpc.el, and XmlRpcPlugin for Trac.

After visiting Google for the Summer of Code Summit the other week, I thought I might actually try out some of the web services they’ve come up with, rather than just sticking with search and maps, and see if they did anything for me. To my surprise – as a certified hater of webapps generally – a couple did. Writely, the web-based word processor, was kind-of interesting, but in the end didn’t work for me. The potential killer feature for me would’ve been SubEthaEdit or Gobby -like interactive collaboration, which seems like something Google ought to be able to do with their whacky AJAX techniques. Unfortunately, it seems to just be some sort of automated merge-on-commit, which does nothing for me. What I’d really like as far as online document editing goes, is actually to be able to do Gobby-like editing of (moinmoin) wikis, rather than having to deal with advisory locking. I poked a bit further at that, and I suspect it ought to be possible to hack something up by using a tool like editmoin to edit wikipages with an editor rather than a webbrowser, and using gobby to do the editing, via a sobby server hosted on the same site as the wiki. It ought to be possible to automate all that complexity using an application/gobbymoin mime type; but I didn’t get anywhere because sobby seems to require IPv6 support. Oh well, maybe some other time. I’ve played with GMail and Google Talk before, with minimal impact. GMail is kind-of nice, but I like to be able to read my mail offline, so whatever. It is useful as a backup email address if my regular one goes down though. Google Talk doesn’t seem to handle voice/video under Linux, so it’s just a Jabber server. Which is fine, since I hadn’t ever actually gotten any of these whizbang IM things setup. What’s less brilliant is that Gaim is a bit of a pain when it loses connectivity, which happens everytime I suspend my laptop, which is everytime I stop using it. But I need GMail in order to even try some of the interesting Google services these days, so whatever. Google Calendar isn’t really something I expected much of. Sure, it’s a calendar app, but I’ve never gotten much use out of appointment diaries or planners or whatever anyway. Having it be web-based actually changes that a bit though, since it makes it trivial to publish to other people, and that even makes a calendar a little bit useful for me too. Having it be able to send reminder SMSes is also neat, at least now I’ve worked out how to default that behaviour to off… Oddly, though, I’ve found I’m getting more value out of it in listing things I’ve done rather than things I’ve got coming up. I guess it’s nicer to have a list of things you’ve actually done, rather than a list of things you should have done (but often didn’t), or a list of things you’ve got to do… But the real winner is definitely Google Reader even if it’s still in Google Labs, rather than even being “beta”. While I’ve tried some aggregators in the past, none have remotely grabbed me, and I’ve been tending to just remember the URLs for the blogs and webcomics I like, and type them in when I’m feeling bored. That has the benefit that it limits the number of each I read, but the drawback that I waste time typing URLs and waiting for pages to load even when there haven’t been any updates. The keyboard interface to Reader is pretty pleasant, with the only drawback I’ve found a slight lag in loading entries at the start of the day. Having it be in my web browser is perfect, since I generally want to follow a few links from blog posts anyway. It’s also made it easy enough that I’ve added a few feeds from real newspapers (or news channels), which is probably a good thing as far as balancing my take on what’s going on in the world. There’s a couple of downsides. One is that a lot of webcomics don’t have RSS feeds, or, if they do, don’t seem to include the actual comic, just a link to it. I don’t think there’s much of a reason for that – there are a few blogs I read that include ads in their RSS, so that doesn’t seem difficult to handle, and I can’t see any other potential objections. Also annoying is that posts that get aggregated on multiple planets (such as Planet Debian and Planet Linux Australia) show up multiple times, though admittedly I pretty much expected that. Probably the major downside is that it’s so easy to read stuff that I keep adding feeds to it, though…

I’ve long wondered what the point of the “Work Offline” option in Firefox is (it’s in the “File” menu). All it really seems to do is take you to a helpful (cough) error screen when you’re working offline that tells you you can’t view the page you’re trying to view till you’re online again. If the page is in the cache, it’ll display it, but that seems to happen only rarely. I jacked my cache up to 4GB, but much to my surprise, that doesn’t appear to result in a noticeably higher cache hit rate. IE has a similar option, but it actually does something. In fact, it’s quite slick. When you add a page as a favorite, you’re given a “Make available offline” option. Once that option is selected, you can click “Customize…”, which launches a wizard that allows you to mark other pages the favorite links to as available offline as well (useful for sites like Slashdot that primarily link to other sites). You can also specify when the page(s) should be synchronized (manually or on a predefined schedule, such as every day at 5am). The Blackberry browser has a similar option too, though I haven’t used it much (most of my offline time tends to be on airplanes, and I’d much rather view the web on my laptop). The Blackberry does have a neat feature IE doesn’t have though, which is if you try to load a page that isn’t available offline, it’ll offer to queue up the request and download it once you’re online again. As with everything on the Blackberry, the page will show up in the universal inbox along with email, SMS, missed calls, etc. No more trying to remember what pages you wanted to load when you were offline or resorting to tricks only a hacker could love. Imagining a feature like this integrated with a Gmail/Google Reader combo that supports offline operation makes my mouth water. As I said in the opening paragraph, I’ve been thinking about this for a long time, but I’ve never actually gotten around to writing about it. What inspired me to do that today? Scrybe, an amazing online productivity suite that has a variety of unique and killer features, including excellent use of AJAX to preserve context as you move around within the application, a novel approach to scheduling across timezones, full integration between the calendar and to-do lists (why don’t more calendar applications do this?), and more. Watch the video for yourself. The most interesting feature from my point of view, though, is the offline support: Simply select “Work Offline”, and everything works, well, offline, no browser extension required. It even appears that changes will be synchronized when you’re online again (i.e., it’s not just a read only copy). The beta isn’t publicly available yet, but I can’t wait to see how they did this. My prediction: If this works as well as it looks, all web applications will eventually work this way. And it’s good to see that some companies are thinking about the offline problem, rather than just assuming ubiquitous Internet connectivity makes the problem go away in the very near future.

(Let's test this planet thingy... Hello everybody!) Setting up a SLES 10 server at $WORK, for a change. Compared with my usual distribution, this means: LDAP authentication is easily set up, I don't even have to know about all the packages (PAM, NSS, LDAP server, ...), and when I then create a user in yast, it does create a user in the LDAP database automatically. Debian could learn a thing or two about integration here. But it also means a hideous apache configuration schema, with lots of configuration files, some parts of the configuration in /etc/sysconfig instead of /etc/apache2, and config file snippets generated by the init.d script (coming from SuSE 4.x days, I felt right at home. At least yast hasn't overwritten anything I didn't want it to so far.) And it also means that I had to compile subversion from source because I couldn't immediately find SLES 10 binary packages. Of course, I have to admit that Subversion is a truly exotic peace of software that no sane systems administrator would ever use on his server, so I can understand that. Conclusion so far: SLES10 is a nice piece of software, but some aspects can be called rough edges although I guess many would argue it's just my bias.

Graphviz-based mindmap with Tomboy After having started using Tomboy, I've already become addicted to it. It's basically a merger between a note taking tool and a desktop wiki (with some issues with WikiWords nonetheless: #396177). I was missing a Mind map feature though. Thus I wrote the tiny teeny hack of the day which processes Tomboy's notes from ~/.tomboy/ and generates a Graphviz graph that is then rendered (to SVG) and shown on the fly. Now I can just run mindmap to obtain a Mind map of my notes. Enjoy mindmap

• tomboy2dot.xsl (XSLT stylesheet for converting a Tomboy note to a Graphviz snippet)
• mindmap.sh (Main executable which process all Tomboy notes with the above stylesheet, supposedly in ~/bin/, and do all the remaining jazz)

TODO

• add hyperlinks from the SVG output back to Tomboy notes (easy) and find an SVG viewer which follow hyperlinks on click invoking tomboy (uhm, ... anyone knows a SVG viewer able to follow links?)
• attach to this post a nice-looking screenshot. Dear Lazyweb, I currently have too few notes to provide a non-shy screenshot, any volunteer to send me one?

Kudos to Sebastian Menge who wrote the XSLT stylesheet I started from.

Today I have witnessed an incident which involved a person getting kicked from #debian-devel, when he refused to disclose his real name (I did not notice any other disruptive behavior on his part). When I objected to that, I was quite surprised to find that quite a lot of people found this an acceptable administrative measure (the channel rules wiki page was promptly created to reflect that). While I find it totally acceptable, that a person must reveal his/her real name when becoming a Debian Developer, I think that having such a requirement in place for an unrestricted public Debian channel is completely inappropriate. In my opinion, the right to remain anonymous is fundamental, and I don’t care about the person’s real name, as long as he/she has something useful to contribute. I also believe that protection of this right is a part of the core Debian philosophy, as we refuse to recognize software as free, if it impedes on the person’s right to remain anonymous (”Dissident test” in the DFSG FAQ). Therefore, the support of fellow DDs (some of them actively involved in NM process) for such measures looks like nothing but pure hypocrisy to me. I have added a note stating my disagreement on this issue to the wiki page.