It seems that my idea caught Javier's attention and he is already asking to use the scripts for Spanish.

As I have said before, those scripts will work for all languages in due time. Currently, as a test, they are running (or they should starting from tomorrow morning) only for the po material for the languages fr, de, ro and vi.

I intent to make compendiums for po-debconf material, po material[*] separately and another one made from all of them.

Stay tuned. Of course, a proper annoucement on debian-i18n@l.d.o will be done when I'll have something pretty ok.

Meanwhile, unpatient souls can take a peak at the current results

(I just enabled es, just for fun; es is broken, too?!? - or maybe the scripts are doing something wrong :-P - curious people can check, the logs are available.)


[*] which is more tricky since there is a need to merge fr_FR with fr/fr_CA with fr, de_DE with de, de_AT with de... and so on, but zh_TW does not have a zh to be merged with. Also the ll_CC strings should have higher precedence than ll strings.

Via Jamie, this hilarious This American Life parody (direct link to MP3 if the embedding doesn’t work for you). This guy obviously has listened to a lot of episodes of the show. (I expect this parody will be funny only if you have, as well.)

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Today is a sad day for me; since 1995 the Government of the Valencian Community has been in the hands of the PP (Partido Popular) and it seems that it we will have the same until 2011. With this results Valencia will host a Formula One Grand Prix and probably tons of new paper-couch buildings like the Ciutat de les Arts i les Ci ncies. The saddest part is that more than 35% of the population stayed at home; I've always have had the feeling that most of them are more on the left than the right side of the political spectrum; probably the big problem is that the current PSPV (Partit Socialista del Pa s Valenci -PSOE) candidate for the Generalitat is a joke (I would never vote for him) and CPV (Comprom s pel Pa s Valenci ) has been unable to mobilize enough people. On days like this I think about changing my living place, luckily on the two villages where I spend most of my free time, Burjassot and Godella, the left parties have won, something specially important in Godella, where the PP was going to expropriate part of the village to bury the metro station and later pay the bill selling the freed space to put buildings of 4 or 5 floors (the current houses are one or two floors high and have been there for ages). On the other side what I'm seriously considering is moving to another work again, the current job is much better than the previous one, but I've been so unlucky that I'm again working for the local government on two of the biggest projects I'm involved in and it seems that both of them will last for a long time; without a political change I'm sure that it is going to be the same old story, and life is too short to be hitting the same walls for years. Let's see what happens, probably the main problem is that I need to take a break, maybe a four years one would be a good idea... ;)

The good thing about having kept a blog these last few years, is I have a searchable record of hardware changes. Recently, I noticed a few disk errors on caesar, and I was wondering how old that disk was. I disk some searching, and found via this post that the disk in it was a hand-me-down from when I decommissioned daedalus Mk I. One of the reasons I decommissioned it when I did, was the RAID-1 was exhibiting some strange errors during resynchronisation, and I didn't want to leave the country leaving behind an ageing problematic server with my stuff on it. I'd previously been unable to fault either 120 Gb disk under some light testing with badblocks, so I just reused them, and so around October 2005, I put the larger disk in caesar. So this disk has seen a fair bit of use, originally in daedalus, and then in caesar for another 20 months. It's allowed to fail, it's served me well. Anyway, so I bought a 750 Gb drive a couple of weeks ago, because one thing that I've wanted to do with caesar was do remote backups of daedalus, and there just wasn't enough space to do that, so I went for as big as I could find, and essentially repeated the same trick as last time, to upsize:

1. Power down, attach new disk as a slave
2. Boot into single user mode
3. Unmount everything, remount root read-only
4. sfdisk -d /dev/hda sfdisk /dev/hdb to copy the partition table (I use a root, swap, LVM, three partition layout)
5. dd if=/dev/hda1 of=/dev/hdb1 bs=1M to copy the root filesystem to the new disk
6. mkswap /dev/hdb2 to put the swap signature on what will become the new swap device
7. cfdisk /dev/hdb and blow away the third partition and recreate it using all of the available space (there's probably a programmatic way of doing this, but hey, it's not exactly hard to do in cfdisk either)
8. pvcreate /dev/hdb3 to put an LVM signature on the new LVM physical volume
9. vgextend base /dev/hdb3 to tell LVM there's two disks in the volume group for the time being
10. Remount the root filesystem read-write
11. rm /boot/grub/device.map and run /usr/sbin/grub-install /dev/hdb to install GRUB in the MBR of what will become the new boot disk
12. Power down, swap the disks around so that the new disk is now primary and the old disk is now the slave
13. Boot into single user mode again, unmount everything except root
14. pvmove /dev/hdb3 /dev/hda3 to relocate all of the allocated physical extents off the old disk onto the new one
15. Twiddle thumbs for a couple of hours. Admire artwork on computer's motherboard (did you know Compaq EVO's have a picture of a car on their motherboards? A map of Texas?)
16. vgreduce base /dev/hdb3 to take the old disk out of the volume group
17. pvremove /dev/hdb3 to remove the LVM signature from the old disk
18. Power down and remove the old disk
19. Reboot into multi-user mode and profit from all the additional free physical extents

I absolutely love how I can do this with LVM, with a minimum of fuss. Last time I did this, I had a kernel panic during the pvmove, but that didn't even stop it, I just rebooted and reran the pvmove and it carried on from the last checkpoint. No such excitement this time. I'm sure Solaris' ZFS does all of this with substantially less manual steps, but hey, I like my Linux :-)

Yesterday, I read a Ben Maurer post about reCAPTCHA. It is a free CAPTCHA system but with a hidden feature: you will be used to decipher words that were not correctly recognized by OCR software in text from digitized books, that will be made accesible in an electronic form. Currently, they helping Internet Archive. The idea is to present a couple of words, distorted as usual in CAPTCHAs, once of them yet correctly recognized by OCR software and the other unrecongnized. The CAPTCHA will be resolved in the known one is entered correctly while the unknown one is guessed to be the word entered. To be sure about what has been entered, the unrecognized word will be presented to more users. A nice idea

Thanks to Apparent Brightness for this snippet:

In the northern Swedish town of vertorne , a dispute between the local council and its electricity distributor has meant that the town has had no streetlighting for many months now (TV programme in Swedish about the controversy here). Today Swedish television and other media report that since the streetlights were switched off, thefts and burglaries have halved. Maybe the thieves are afraid of the dark , says council boss Arne Honkamaa. On the other hand, maybe it s being able to see the night sky that s reducing crime.

Tags astronomy, light-pollution

I decided to move the old 1-RU Pentium III server (the thing providing all the storage for my MythTV box via ATAoE) from under the bed in the spare room to the linen cupboard. It had a brief stop in the wardrobe in the spare room, but it didn't really help with the noise. Sarah was a concerned about the heat in the linen cupboard, as this is where the patch panel is, so caesar is already in here, along with an Ethernet switch, an ADSL modem, a wireless access point, and the Vonage ATA. There's a lot of DC plug packs generating heat, so it was a reasonable concern. I figured in this day and age, someone must make some sort of USB temperature sensor, and after some searching around, I discovered the DLP-TEMP-G, which seemed to be about the right price, doing what I wanted. I'm going to say the web page was a bit ambiguous, but it was probably just late at night, because I read the bottom as having the option to buy it from Mouser, or via PayPal directly with DLP Design. So I went down the latter path, because I generally prefer to deal directly with the manufacturer. Turns out what I was actually ordering was just a "Test Application", so that email I'd received the day after I placed my order for two units was all I was going to get. I figured this out after a week or so of wondering when it was going to arrive. They were really good about it, and refunded me my $40, even though I'd received said software, and I placed a new order with Mouser for what I really wanted. Now this time, I just didn't read things thoroughly enough, although I'll still say that things were a little ambiguously worded. The page I've linked to above does say "DLP-TEMP-G and 1 DS18B20 sensor $25.00", but when reading datasheet, it goes on about three sensors, and coming with one that isn't soldered on so that you can optionally run a cable between it and the board. I somehow interpreted this as meaning there were two sensors on the board, and one loose. Not the case. The board supports having up to three DS18B20 sensors attached to it, however you please. It comes with one unattached. In hindsight, why would you want two temperature sensors directly on the board? So the moral of this story is I just can't read. Anyway, I got home from Santa Monica last night, and the goods had finally turned up, so I had a play. The DS18B20 just looks like a transistor. I initially ignored it, and just shoved the USB board in caesar, and it happily recognised it

usb 1-1: new full speed USB device using uhci_hcd and address 8
usb 1-1: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
drivers/usb/serial/usb-serial.c: USB Serial support registered for FTDI USB Serial Device
ftdi_sio 1-1:1.0: FTDI USB Serial Device converter detected
drivers/usb/serial/ftdi_sio.c: Detected FT232BM
usb 1-1: FTDI USB Serial Device converter now attached to ttyUSB0
usbcore: registered new driver ftdi_sio
drivers/usb/serial/ftdi_sio.c: v1.4.3:USB FTDI Serial Converters Driver

I then fooled around with minicom, and discovered that the little transistor thing I'd been ignoring was indeed the temperature sensor, as I got a reading of zero back (when using this program I found on the 'net). So I went to bed, and this morning did a bit of messing around with the sensor, and with a bit of creative bending, I've got it sitting in the S1 holes without requiring any soldering. It tells me the linen cupboard is about 44 degrees Celsius. Warm, but I don't think it's in any immediate danger of bursting into flames. Wouldn't surprise me if some of the gear in there isn't too keen about the temperature though. At least we won't have to worry about mold. Next step is to convince cacti to graph it, and nagios to monitor it, and we're in business. Here's a little Python program I knocked up to grab the temperature. pyserial is nice. Read on, Macduff!

Well, the people have spoken, now the airwaves are full of puzzled politicans and pundits trying to decide what they said. The outcome was a suprise, especially in Galway West (where I live), for which I'm annoyed; as I said before, a poll would have been useful. Niall O'Brolch in, said in the last poll in March to be likely to take a seat, came fairly off the mark, unfortunately. Quick summary: The Irish Parliament (the D il) has 166 seats, so the majority is 83 (I seat goes to the Chair or Ceann Comhairle). In recent years, majorities of one or two seats are normal, so we all wait for the final seats to be decided before really knowing the outcome: The Bookmakers paid out for Bertie Ahern being the next Taoiseach by 9.30 AM yesterday, though technically the numbers could still add up for the alternative, Enda Kenny. We might not know until next week.

read more »

Tags politics, galway, greens

A lot of computer problems (and some puzzles) simply involve backtracking over the solution space and checking constraints, yet these can be fairly clunky to describe in imperative languages. Compounding this, the high cost of method calls in most VM and dynamic languages make any reasonably sane-looking implementation (read: recursive) rather slow. A much better idea is to use a language that makes this really easy, like Prolog: I have a Compiler Design exam in less than a weeks time, and a common question involves being given a number of definitions of compilers in terms of their source and target languages, along with the language the compiler itself is implemented in. The task is simply to work out whether it is possible to translate from a specified language to another. This is just two stanzas in Prolog:

can_translate(Src, Tgt, [L])   :- t_diagram(Src, Tgt, _, L).
can_translate(Src, Tgt, [H T]) :- t_diagram(Src, Via, _, H),
   can_translate(Via, Tgt, T).

Compilers can be then just be defined with

t_diagram(source, target, implemented in, name).

and querying the translation pipeline is done with

?- can_translate(source, target, Result)

(Modifying it so that it works with cycles isn’t very tricky, either.)

Note: tested to work at least on Thinkpad X60, Debian unstable, recent 2.6 kernel.

# apt-get install hibernate
# hibernate-ram

Done. I thought a lot of people knew this already… PS. You might need to set IbmAcpi yes in /etc/hibernate/common.conf. Edit: thanks to Evgeni Golov for the even shorter command.

If you have never heard the name Michael J. Hardy, you should read The Mike Hardy Saga. He seems to be a famous developer who has released all sorts of software to the Internet: games, web browsers, and the like . Without writing any of them. The one he took from me is Monsterz, a small python game, not terribly well written but quite addictive. And the page he did for his own version of that game (in fact he just added all the Created By Michael J. Hardy notices he could) is absolutely fantastic. This guy has balls. I especially love the This Video Game is Dedicated to My Daughter... notice.

I've added a hot new feature to Tasks, so that you can specify a priority and group when creating a task instead of having to create and then edit it. It works like this:

Some Task

Create a task with the summary Some Task

+ Some Task

! Some Task

Create a high priority task with the summary Some Task

- Some Task

Create a low priority task with the summary Some Task

! @Work Some Task

Create a high priority task in the Work category with the summary Some Task

Now, I've tried to be i18n-aware, and use GLib's UTF-8 functions to manipulate the string, but I'd like someone to check this. Can a non-English speaker test this out with some interesting locales, specifically with UTF-8 characters which contain ASCII whitespace in their byte representation such as 0x20. Thanks! Update: thanks to Simon for pointing out that my paranoia is unfounded, UTF-8 was designed to stop this sort of problem. However, people checking this code works would still be useful! NP: Music Is Rotted One Note, Squarepusher

Outflows have been discovered from a Brown Dwarf star, 2MASS1207-3932, the lightest yet. Found by Emma Whelan and Tom Ray of DIAS and others , using the ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT), this is the first time that Jets have been seen from an astronomical object as small as this. The Brown Dwarf is 2MASS1207-3932, a 24-Jupiter mass 'near star'. Jets of material are a common feature in astrophysics, seen from Galaxies and young stars, but this is the first time they have been seen in something this small. It opens the possibility of similar outflows from smaller objects, such as giant planets. The brown dwarf 2MASS1207-3932 is full of surprises. Its companion, a 5 Jupiter-mass giant, was the first confirmed exoplanet for which astronomers could obtain an image, thereby opening a new field of research - the direct detection of alien worlds. It was then later found that the brown dwarf has a disc surrounding it, not unlike very young stars. Tags astronomy, brown-dwarfs, exoplanets

Recently spam checking stopped to be enough to prevent my mailbox to grow to incredible sizes, so I had to look for some possibility to block viruses and other malware. The obvious choice went to open source anti-virus Clamav. Setting up was pretty easy, especially when there are tons of howtos on the net (e.g. Installing and configuring Exim 4 on Debian). All I had to do was to install Clamav and configure Exim to talk to it and reject unwanted stuff. And what are results? Quite impressive - 154860 caught viruses in last 24 hours.I wonder that lots of them were also caught by SpamAssassin, because I definitely didn't receive that much malware in a day.

This is just a proof of concept. And I think those are simple po files not po-debconf files. Anyway, I'll polish the scripts a little more and then migrate it on i18n.debian.net[*]. Of course, this will be done for all languages when the scripts are more stable.

[*] thanks to Christan Perrier, I have access to that machine now

In continuation of David Watson taking notice of Spam subject lines. Update: Even better, just fresh from my spam folder: “toll-free drowning”. Not sure what to think about that.

* I tried to get “tag cloud” of my blog, it works! Kartik Mistry@localized-gujarati-geek!:/# cloud

about after again all almost also amazing another any are around article back bad before better blog book books both brother build bus but came can can’t cds com come coming cool day days debian did don’t done due during end etch even festival file finally firefox first foss found free from fun gave get gnome gnu gnunify going good got great gujarati had happy has have help here his home hope how http iiimf india install installer irc its just kde know l10n language last late like linux list live long look looking lots made make many may meet met mom mono more movie mozilla much mumbai near need net new news next nice night nirav not now office old one only openoffice org other our out package packages palanpur people place post problem python read really released right rinit sat saturday see session should since site some soon start started still stuffs sunday system take talk talked team thanks there they thing things till time today too took tried two ubuntu use user using utkarsh very waiting was way week well went were what when where which while who will work working works write www year yesterday yet

Eh!

Via Tikirobot, reCAPTCHA. Brilliant:

Over 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved every day by people around the world. reCAPTCHA channels this human effort into helping to digitize books from the Internet Archive. When you solve a reCAPTCHA, you help preserve literature by deciphering a word that was not readable by computers.

Why didn’t I think of that?

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Crappy OpenOffice.org Impress Styles The "GNOME suite" (mainly AbiWord and Gnumeric) is quite nice and I usually prefer it to the bloated OpenOffice.org counterparts. Unfortunately it is missing a good presenter. Yeah, I know, I should use beamer, and I fact I often do for academic stuff, but for quick and dirty presentations, where you care more than you should about visual aspects and WYSIWYG ... I often resort to ooimpress. It is not that bad, if you can stand its memory consumption and startup time, but for a long time I was convinced that I was wrong about a feature I was not finding in the UI. My reading of the ooimpress manual this morning seems to contradicts this belief. Here is the simple scenario. I do not play with fonts, the default styles inherited by the master page are fine. I just want from time to time to select some text and mark it as "verbatim text":

• monospace font
• remove the bullet/number corresponding to the current outline level

the use cases are those you guessed: markup a shell command, a command output, or a code snippet. Of course I can't stand doing it again and again by hand, having to keep in mind each time the font I chose and its size for ensuring uniformity. I want to use a style. That's it, nothing less, nothing more. Is it asking too much? It seems so. ooimpress supports two kind of styles. One type (sorry, forgot the name) can be applied to built-in content types, e.g.: heading1-9, titles, subtitles, .... Changing such a style will affect all slides. Fair enough, that's good. The other type can be applied only to "graphics" elements, including text boxes. Fair enough as well, this way I can change at once all the text boxes or labels I've used in my document. But wait ... how can I solve my problem now? I see only two awful ways:

1. devote a high heading level (e.g. 9) to my verbatim text
2. use a graphic style

of course, a graphic style can not be applied inside non-floating text boxes and I do not want to use tons of text boxes, especially because they are not anchored to ordinary text Dear lazyweb, please prove me wrong.

Thijs, my post was more like "Hey Mozilla, I know you are busy and all, but, it would be nice to fix some bugs and maybe add some features from time to time.... come on, 7 years to start fixing[*] a bug is waaaaaaay(maybe enough to make your users go away) to much. That's why you suck!".

BTW Thijs, have you read at least the Reply-To-List thread in their bugzilla? Or the huge pile (now 126 open issues) of "keyboard shortcut" problems they have? I am saying that there is a lot of endless discussion around the subject until someone really tackles it. As an example, the real solution for (probably) most of those 126 keyboard issues would be to allow keyboard shortcut redefinition.

So this was mostly about response time, be it bug or feature, although the title was not so well chosen.

[*] note that the patch is from a first time contributor