My DSL arrived today. A little earlier than expected (7:40 rather than 8:00 to 12:00), but it works absolutely flawlessly (as I expected). About ten minutes later, I had VoIP working too. I can still only recommend QSC, they manage to get things working, have a customer support line where they pay when the call takes longer and where the first person you speak to has access to all the data and metadata (so they can tell you why you had to wait five minutes to get VoIP, which is extraordinarily long, it seems). The email I was promised was there ten seconds after I had hung up. I guess the reason it works for them is that their focus is on businesses and technically minded people, as their list of services lists ping times (15ms, which is far from the truth; it's more like 8ms). I doubt they could maintain that level of service if they had to tell everyone how to turn on their computer.

I just purged over 1000 spam that accumulated in my home email while I was away. Those were just the ones that got through. By best estimate, I have about 10 times that which actually got filtered.

My biggest culprits seem to be stuff that comes through @gnu.org and @debian.org, since those aren't subject to the RBLs that I use.

relays.ordb.org
sbl-xbl.spamhaus.org

I think I need to teach my spamassassin/mailscanner to go through the received headers and try the RBLs. IIRC it's an option that I disabled for some reason.

I’m a specialist when it comes to delete files I didn’t intend to. 3 years ago, I did an rm -rf that cost me most of my $ HOME , and I wrote some software (which i really should work on, BTW) which helped recover most of it (it’s tricky to get files back from ext3 once they are removed from the filesystem, since ext3 clears the block pointers from the inodes then). Today, I somehow managed to remove log files. Fortunately the log files were still in use by a process, so they were still in the filesystem. Unfortunately they were still in use by a process, filling and filling and filling… and in no way i wanted to lose all this data. Let’s consider, for the needs of the demonstration, the following case:
mh@namakemono:/mnt/test$ while true; do date; sleep 1; done > log That fills a 'log' file every second with the current date.
mh@namakemono:/mnt/test$ tail -2 log
2006 7 4 20:48:02 CEST
2006 7 4 20:48:03 CEST The file keeps growing and growing. Now, let’s remove it.
mh@namakemono:/mnt/test$ rm log The file is not in the directory any more, but remains in the filesystem. It is actually readable through /proc:
mh@namakemono:/mnt/test$ ls -l /proc/10724/fd
5
lrwx------ 1 mh users 64 2006-07-04 20:52 0 -> /dev/pts/1
l-wx------ 1 mh users 64 2006-07-04 20:52 1 -> /mnt/test/log (deleted)
lrwx------ 1 mh users 64 2006-07-04 20:52 10 -> /dev/pts/1
lrwx------ 1 mh users 64 2006-07-04 20:45 2 -> /dev/pts/1
lrwx------ 1 mh users 64 2006-07-04 20:52 255 -> /dev/pts/1
mh@namakemono:/mnt/test$ tail -2 /proc/10724/fd/1
2006 7 4 20:52:45 CEST
2006 7 4 20:52:46 CEST As you can see, it kept filling while deleted. The usual technique to recover such a file is to copy it from /proc. I happen to have done so some times before, it works pretty well for static files. But that doesn’t in our case: we’ll get a new copy of the file, frozen at some point in time. Here, we’d want to ‘re-link’ the file. Basically, that can be done with debugfs. The problem is that I didn’t find a clean way to get the inode number from the /proc/10724/fd/1 file. But that can be worked around. You need root access (what a surprise), and hope your filesystem was mostly clean before removing the file. namakemono:/mnt/test# e2fsck -n /dev/namakemono/tmp
e2fsck 1.39 (29-May-2006)
Warning! /dev/namakemono/tmp is mounted.
Warning: skipping journal recovery because doing a read-only filesystem check.
/dev/namakemono/tmp contains a file system with errors, check forced.
Pass 1: Checking inodes, blocks, and sizes
Deleted inode 113570 has zero dtime. Fix? no
(…) Don’t worry, the -n option will make the filesystem opened read-only, so there’s no risk for your data.
The interesting part of the output is obvious: the number of the deleted inode. You now only need to link the inode:
namakemono:/mnt/test# debugfs -w /dev/namakemono/tmp
debugfs 1.39 (29-May-2006)
debugfs: cd test
debugfs: ln <113570> log
debugfs: q And see how it worked:
namakemono:/mnt/test# tail -2 log
2006 7 4 20:58:40 CEST
2006 7 4 20:58:41 CEST You can tail again, it will show you the file is being appended to. I guess you can do something along these lines to restore a file from ext2. I don’t know for other filesystems. If someone knows how to get the inode number without e2fsck, comments are opened :) Update: Well, it didn’t take long for me to actually find a better way:
namakemono:/mnt/test$ lsof -p 10724 -a -d 1
COMMAND PID USER FD TYPE DEVICE SIZE NODE NAME
bash 10724 mh 1w REG 254,3 13552 113570 /mnt/test/toto (deleted)
Basically, when the file can be found in /proc/$pid/fd/$fd, run lsof -p $pid -a -d $fd.

Today (one day before my birthday), I got accepted as a Debian Developer. I would like to thank the following persons (in order of appearance) which supported me in the one or other way within the NM process over the last two years. Sponsors

• Rene 'rene' Engelhard
• Gerfried 'alfie' Fuchs aka Rhonda
• Christoph 'myon' Berg
• Luk 'luk' Claes

Advocate

• Gerfried 'alfie' Fuchs aka Rhonda

Application Manager

• Rene 'rene' Engelhard

New Maintainers Front Desk

• Marc 'he' Brockschmidt aka HE
• Christoph 'myon' Berg

Debian Account Managers

• Jörg 'joerg' Jaspert aka Ganneff
• James 'elmo' Troup

For the sake of completeness: This is my old and my new QA packages overview, my NM status page, my NM application report, and my account name is 'daniel' (although my nickname is 'panthera').

Well, the temperature is soaring here again and a few people have expressed interest in this. I've also had some interesting side discussions. Simon Richter emailed me notes about the different types of disk - which I don't really understand so I've asked him to publish them himself - the gist seemed to be server disks don't like being power cycled repeatedly and yanking the power is very harmful to desktop disks. Ted Harding sent a "Medical Tip of the Day" to ALUG Main: "I assert that caffeine is a good preventative of DVT in computer users."

"A semantic wiki gives you all the issues arising in the full semantic web" IkeWiki is a semantic wiki, written in Java (so it's not an extension of MediaWiki, though MediaWiki/Wikipedia users will be able to use it right away). And opensource. It tries to use "wiki technologies" and some Ajax magic to make annotating Wiki pages with semantic information easier. It's not yet perfect, of course. It's a research project, after all. But it tries really hard to make annotating Wiki pages easy. Why do we need semantic wikis? Well, wikipedia is great, but a computer can't access that information. Human language processing is by far not yet good enough for that. Even many humans sometimes fail at it, actually... So right now, a computer application can't reliably read from Wikipedia things like a duck being a bird or that it has feathers. So if you want to be able to search in Wikipedia for "all animals that have feathers", that won't work too well. Many of the things in Wikipedia are hacks and workarounds. This includes links to foreign language versions of the page, categories, or the classification boxes in biology topics. It's all just visuals and workarounds. Semantic Wikis are much more powerful. They don't just have "links", they have typed links, so that the computer actually assign some meaning to them. (The wikipedia entry on birds has links to "plants" and "mammals", so you really need this information to not assume a bird might be a plant...) Ikewiki (which supposedly translates to "knowledge fast") trys to bring together these worlds - the easy to edit world of wikis and the semantic annotation required for the data to be useful to computers, too. The key thing is an easy to use UI, and the current approach by Ikewiki is to put some small buttons next to links (and pages, maybe later paragraphs, who knows) that allow adding and removing of types. By using some Ajax magic, this is really easy to use; and the application will actually try to use the already present information to only offer reasonable choices. (e.g. offering the "belongs to the family of" relation only for biology topics) Anyway, check it out. It's an open source project. Improve it. And - to come back to the initial quote - use it to understand the semantic web better. Unless some huge breakthrough in natural language processing occurs, we'll need semantic information for the next generation of internet applications.

Emacs has been my favorite editor for a long time, due to its incredible flexibility to meet new challenges, and extreme programmability. Things like tramp are just too cool to do without. In any case, I've been doing more Ruby on Rails lately, and as part of that, have run into a few irritations with existing emacs tools. For instance, editing .rhtml files is not quite as nice as it could be. One reason is that psgml-mode, which I use to edit HTML files wants to have access to the DTD declaration in use. Since Rails usually puts fragments in one directory (app/views/foobar/show.rhtml), and the "parent" template in another (app/views/layouts/foobar.rhtml), it means that the "child" template doesn't have access to the DTD in use, and so autocompletion of tags is not as accurate as it should be. Luckily, psgml mode provides a way to tell it that the parent is elsewhere. Utilizing this, I wrote a bit of elisp that automatically goes looking for the parent .rhtml file when you load up a fragment. It's just an initial cut, and could use some improvement, but it seems to work for me: http://www.dedasys.com/freesoftware/files/rhtml-minor-mode.el On the TODO list:

• Actually examine the layout file, to look for the top level tag that contains @content_for_layout.
• Make _partials.rhtml type files work, or at least ignore them. The problem being that it's hard to find out what tag they are contained within.

Patches, comments and suggestions are welcome!

Mark Pilgrim from Dive Into Mark lists emacs-snapshot in the 2006 edition of his essential software list. Unfortunately for him, Dapper has a very old snapshot from January.

Good news for us: Wikitravel was selected as Featured Commoner for June 2006 by Creative Commons. There's a long interview with me and Maj about the origins of Wikitravel and why we think it's so cool. It may be the best interview I've seen about the project yet; I really recommend it for curious people. tags: wikitravel cc featured commoner june 2006 interview me wiki maj

Creative Commons plugin for Microsoft Office I'll say it right now: kudos to both Creative Commons and Microsoft for the new Creative Commons Add-In for Microsoft Office. I'm not a frequent user of Microsoft Office, but I do get lots of .doc and .xls and .ppt documents over the transom, and it's good to know that Creative Commons is doing something to make it possible to Free works in these formats just a little bit. There's been a bit of controversy on the cc-community list about the move, but I think it's great. It took me a while to warm to it, but I really like Creative Commons's approach to Open Content. It reminds me of wp:harm reduction theories. I think they're not universally loved for this, but I also think it's been a big part of the success of the project. tags: cc microsoft microsoft office plugin

Sucks-Rules-Votes-o-Meter I keep forgetting to ask Don about making a microformats-oriented version of the Sucks-Rules-o-Meter. After all, the VoteLinks microformat isn't much more than a semantic-web-formalized SROM, is it? I figure a plugin for Nutch to look for vote-links would do the trick; and I bet Technorati would be cool about adding an SROM system to Pingerati. tags: votelinks srom microformats technorati don marti pingerati nutch

100M We were driving from wt:Culver City to wt:Santa Barbara yesterday, and we stopped in wt:Calabasas for a soda and some breastfeeding. I had on K-RTH 101, the soi disant "soundtrack for Southern California", when on came a commercial for HP laser printers. We were astounded to hear that there have been 100 million HP LaserJet printers shipped since 1984. Yes, one hundred million. That's one HP laser printer for every 60 human beings on Earth. Do we really need that many laser printers? Why? What the hell are we printing so much? It's pretty obvious that 100 million people haven't bought laser printers; much fewer people have bought more than one laser printer over and over. HP seems to think this is something to crow about, but I've looked into a lot of laser printers, and they're full of some pretty heavy iron. Those old ones aren't going anywhere anytime soon. Some quick math suggests that that's about one million metric tons of trash generated principally by HP. Probably the majority of HP printers have been smashed to bits, like the one in Office Space. Whose fault is it that we've gone through 100 million of these poisonous, heavy, clunky metallo-plastic whizzbangers in 20 years? Does the company have a responsibility to make machines out of reusable, recyclable materials? To not make its growth based on wp:planned obsolescence? If you're marketing the machine as a disposable device, shouldn't you have a plan for where they go at their end of life. Why aren't more machines upgradeable in small chunks, so you don't have so much material going into landfills? One hundred million laser printers, buried under piles of banana peels and diapers, or embedded in the ocean floor, or rusting in basements and warehouses. It doesn't seem like something to celebrate; it seems to me to be pretty depressing. tags: laser printer hp 100m

Honk honk honk! honk honk honk honk! I guess Portugal just won the quarterfinals against England for the wt:World Cup 2006. We have a huge Portuguese community in Montreal, and the team's victories this year at the Cup and in 2004 for the Euro cup have been a huge source of pride. I'm not a big soccer fan, but I do love the fact that Mtl's cultural communities literally fly the colors, packing the bars and cafes and driving around honking after a win (or even a big goal). Italy, Portugal, Brazil (mostly Portuguese again), France... I even saw some cars with Ukraine flags. It's a cool part of being in such a multiculti city. tags: world cup soccer portugal football fifa italy brazil ukraine

Moving Day One of the things that's crazy about being in Montreal in the summer is that there's just too much to do. On any given day, there are just a billion jillion activities and things to do. Around May, the vegetation here just explodes into frenetic growth -- trying to get a full cycle of life in in our small sub-arctic growing season. Quebec's forests are as dense and overgrown as any Amazonian jungle. I think humans' social schedule during the summer is like that, too: trying to get a full year of fun into 4-5 months. Take today, for example. It may be 13 Messidor to us citoyens, but for the people of the North today is 1 July, officially wp:Canada Day. The national holiday of Canada, it's celebrated from Coast to Coast by lots of people who love Canada and want to celebrate their Canadianness. And then there's Quebec. Sure, Montreal has some nice Canada Day events, but there's something furtive about them. Even though somewhere north of 45% of Quebec's population wants to remain in the union, it's still rare to see overt Canada Day celebrations, outside the sponsored events. But for most Quebecois, July 1 is wp:Moving Day -- the day when everyone's lease is up, by government mandate, and those people who are going to move this year go to their new homes. There are moving vans in the street and people queued up at the rental places -- typical time to rent is 2-4 hours. We moved on Moving Day last year to our new, great apartment, and it's nice to be here. This may be the first Moving Day we've been here that no one's asked for help moving. That might say something about the stage of life we're in -- people are buying their own homes and settling down -- and it may say something about our reliability as friends since we had a baby. In any event, here's one Moving Day when any moving I do is on my own. tags: canada canada day quebec moving day montreal

Jazz There was a Canada Day parade this morning on the other side of town (where the anglophones and federalists live...), but we were too tired to go. So we instead skipped down to Place des Arts to visit the free outdoor parts of the Montreal Jazz Fest. Case in point with Montreal festivals in the summer: it was big, with tons to do, and we were totally unable to deal with doing it. We had some Molson Dry, saw some music playing and Amita June clapped along (she's a great clapper!), then we had quiche and a salmon wrap and some Molson Dry, then Amita June went and played in the kids' area, then we saw some more music, then some samba, then klesmer, then off to home. Good time, but tiring. I feel obliged to enjoy Montreal summers, but sometimes it's just too much. tags: montreal jazz fest montreal jazz festival amitajune klesmer samba

France Honk honk! Honk honk honk honk honk!! So I guess France just beat Brazil to get into the semi-finals. Is it actually allowed to have a World Cup without Brazil in the semi-finals? I thought it was a rule. Niko, my French Friend, was complaining last week that the French fans were just loitering around the bars on St. Laurent rather than being boisterous like other fans did when their teams won. Not today: on our way back from Jazz Fest, we saw a huge tow truck with a gigantic tricolor draped from the back trolling up and down Mont Royal. Kind of a bummer for the Brazilians -- and the rest of us who enjoy Brazil fans' antics. But I guess that's the way it goes sometimes. tags: brazil france world cup fans

Fancruft I don't remember what I was looking up on Wikipedia, but there was some fancruft on the page and I ended up wasting half an hour reading Simpsons articles. I want my half hour back, Wikipedia! tags: wikipedia simpsons fancruft

Marilynne Robinson When I was a freshman in college, one of my favorite instructors, Michael Near, assigned "Housekeeping" by Marilynne Robinson as an English 1B assignment. I found the story haunting and beautiful and altogether excellent. I tried digging up more of her work at the UC Berkeley main library, and all I could get was "Mother Country" -- her indictment of stratified society and nuclear energy. In it, she promised never to write fiction again. So I was stunned to read a quote by Robinson in Shannon's Livejournal. Wow. Apparently wp:Marilynne Robinson has written a book of essays in 1998 and a Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel in 2005. Incredible. Why was I not informed? I've got some reading to do. tags: marilynne robinson gilead novel

Full-text feed So I've got a full-text feed now. Hopefully it works for those folks with Planet aggregators or whatever, and especially for Joey Hess, who hates the stuff below the fold. Some corrections that I made to older posts seem to have fudged up some planets, notably Planet Debian, for which I'm kind of bummed. But I think I've fixed the problem, and this should be the only time it happens. Unfortunately, since I write a lot, it means a lot of scrolling. tags: rss full text feed joey hess below the fold planet planet debian

I got up this morning with hundreds of messages in my inbox, and re-sorted them to the correct folders. My monkeyplexer program, which sorts stuff into the correct folders automatically, has been running out of control. I developed it for a version of CRM114 that's now totally obsolete, but the file formats and interfaces have all changed. I've taken a poke at bringing the program up to speed with later versions, but it's just not bad enough to deal with. Also, the horrendous interface of crm114 is just too ugly to imagine. Blech. Instead, I took the opportunity to unsubscribe from about 25 mailing lists that I no longer read and that go from my inbox to an overstuffed folder to a trashcan two weeks later. Hopefully this will take some of the pressure off of the monkeyplexer until I get time to either a) move to something easier and bayesian like ifile or b) upgrade monkeyplexer. tags: crm114 email monkeyplexer folders mailing lists sorting

My mom, the rattlesnake magnet So, my Mom got bit by a rattlesnake yesterday morning. She'd taken a baby car seat out of my Dad's car the night before to put it in her car, but it was too late and dark so she left it in the driveway to install in the morning. Apparently when she tried to install it the next day, a rattler had snuck in there to sleep and nailed her on the arm. (My folks live on a pretty big lot in wt:Los Altos Hills, and there's a lot of wildlife, of the fuzzy and also scaly nature.) She got to Stanford Hospital just fine, and she's had 4 rounds of anti-venom. She's hurting but they think it's going to be all right. The strange part of the story is that this is the second time she's been bitten by a snake. I'm not sure how she's survived the process twice, but I'm pretty amazed that it happened twice at all. Waiting for news, here in Montreal... a little nerve wracking. tags: mom rattlesnake bite los altos hills

Peer-to-peer, broadcast style I read through TechCrunch that three major studios will be distributing shows via P2P in the coming months. That's all well and good, but if it's a for-pay system (content costs $0.99 and up), why should you have to contribute any bandwidth into a peer-to-peer system? For a dollar a pop, these should be easy, high-performance HTTP downloads, not shaggy and unreliable p2p stuff. I contribute my upstream bandwidth to Free Software and Open Content, not to re-forwarding something I had to pay for. tags: p2p tv techcrunch for pay

Stimulus and response Thanks to Matt for forwarding this excellent summary of blogs. tags: blogs matt malex microbes

While on the subject Our home mail server went on the fritz while we were in California, and it was a serious pain in the keester. I had to redirect all our mail redirects from our home server (bad.dynu.ca) to Gmail. The home server's back in business now, but I hadn't changed the email stuff back yet... and today I decided not to. I've re-pointed mail for our business, Wikitravel, and personal domains to the old Wikitravel server at iWeb (the same server this site runs on). I think that's probably the best thing for us to have a "home" server that's not at home; we really need to be able to get to our stuff from the road. It's been good so far; most of the domains were pretty easy. It's been the ones I'd forgotten about that are a hassle. Like, say, bad-people-of-the-future.san-francisco.ca.us. Damn, man. The geographical .us domains used to be one of my favorite things. Now they're not so much. tags: mail server move .us iweb gmail

Second wife So, I guess I'd finished some work yesterday, and I was feeling pretty good about it, because after dinner I decided to spend a little illicit "me" time. And with me, that usually ends up being a game. I'd heard a lot about Second Life, and I was especially impressed by some of the important appearances in the world, like Larry Lessig and Mia Garlick of Creative Commons. But I also have a terribly addictive personality, which is exemplified by the large pile of coffee cups on my desk, but also by the way I go completely crazy over video games. I just don't play them that often any more, because they suck up huge parts of my life, and in the end I've just moved a few bits around. So I try to steer clear. So the fact that there doesn't seem to be much to do in SL -- no level-ups, no territory to conquer -- is kind of an advantage for it. So I gave SL a try last night. I had to use one of our laptops, since the Linux alpha of their client doesn't work on Ubuntu (as far as I can tell). I'll say this: it's awfully nice for graphics, and the world is incredibly built out. But I felt a little bit like a hobo in Vegas -- everything was about casinos and strip clubs and huge fancy houses and cars and planes that I couldn't afford. SL is pretty famous for charging for every little thing, and building an impressive dual-world economy. It seems to have worked pretty well -- there's lots of chasing after the lucre in SL. It was awfully good on the eye-candy, but I felt like Neo in the Matrix: all I could see was dollar signs behind the colors. When I told Maj this morning why I was up till 2AM last night, she gave me a serious scowl. I'm pretty sure my SL days are over... mostly. After all, there's a theory that MMORGs are the reason why we haven't met any aliens -- that any sufficiently advanced culture is going to get sucked into pretend worlds like SL and not go out and explore the universe. tags: second life mmorpg games vr cc

I did my taxes yesterday, two days before the final deadline. I do that every year. I wait until the very last moment, until I get so stressed that it is painful. So the next year all I remember is the painful experience and then postpone it more and more and try to avoid it until the very last day again. Rinse and repeat. It gets worse every year. I also stupidly refuse any help that is offered to me when there's still plenty of time, and then I will want it desperately when there's only one day left, but I am too embarrassed to ask for help then because, $DEITY forbid, THEY (yes, whoever "they" is, the evil "they", the ones that would be all after me if I was paranoid) erm, yes, because THEY would find out that I procastinate.

Anyway, yesterday I was on the verge of a break down, that's why I missed the Gay Pride day blog post, when Bego called me, came upstairs with her laptop (with a very helpful windows partition), which broke completely after installing the tax software, so we migrated downstairs to Carlos' office, where i could finally calculate my taxes, and using my SSL certificate, send the outcome of my calculations to the tax office, online. It all was pretty much smooth once you completely give up all hope and stick to windows and explorer.

Carlos was shocked that I was demanding a windows machine, that's when he realized the situation was pretty desperate, as the Linux client has proven not to work at all. Jose even took pics of me using windows. I hope they don't make it to Slashdot.

Special thanks to H ctor, who in the midst of a huge headache, ended up fixing Bego's fucked up Windows partition.

It’s almost the end of financial year in Australia, so what better time to take stock? I’m actually a bit surprised at just how much I need to do that – I knew being DPL would involve some new challenges, but it’s barely two months in and I’m already just about in shock. Guess it serves me right for putting “increasing Debian’s tempo” in my platform…

---

The two other roles I’ve been in that I would have expected to prepare me more have been Debian release manager, and secretary of Linux Australia. They’re both similar in a way – the release manager does a lot of cat herding within Debian, and has to make some calls that will leave people aggrieved; and Linux Australia has some contact with the press, and some reasonably serious projects going on. So a few issues were completely expected: a random initial slashdotting, a press report, an interview or two, some requests for quotes in articles and press releases, or ongoing opposition and arguments from dedicated Debianites who don’t happen to agree with me on some decision. There were other things that were new and interesting though not really surprising. The leader@ mail address turned out to have just as much spam as I expected, though also some unexpected interesting stuff too, including my first ever personally addressed open letter – in this case by Keith Curtis who also wrote the 10,000 bugs away from World Domination article that got slashdotted a while back. A tidbit:

Everyone agrees that Ubuntu couldn’t exist without Debian, but I also believe that Debian is better setup to take Ubuntu where it needs to go. There are hints that the Ubuntu team feels like they brought a pork chop suit to a lions den. Ubuntu’s user base and development team is growing exponentially, but I believe they could get there much faster with more of Debian’s help.

Keith also forwarded an open letter he’d written to Mark Shuttleworth, and had some interesting comments on the whole Java thing. As well, I suddenly started receiving SPI board mail, as Debian’s advisory representative to the SPI board, and started getting a couple of requests for authorising expenditures (Debian UK reimbursing Matthew Garrett for travel costs to the Gnome Advisory Board meeting in 2005) or providing a Debian representative for a meeting or joining the Google Summer of Code. And then there were the cool things I knew absolutely nothing about, like the excellent news Christian Perrier passed on about the launch of Dzongkha Linux, featured in news reports from Bhutan, India, and Australia. Of course, I completely expected that all this would overload me a bit, and I’d end up getting distracted from what I wanted to do, and not being able to keep up with stuff other people wanted me to do. To help with this a little, I delegated Steve McIntyre as, essentially, a co-DPL, and he’s been working on a few things, including the now successful switch of irc.debian.org over to OFTC, and another fun little endeavour that I won’t spoil just yet. Things started getting a bit weird as I was preparing to travel off to debconf in Mexico – with some frustrated comments from damog and Marga and Gunnar, which was odd coming from the conference organisers themselves; and independently the reinflamation of some old tension on the debian-installer team. That got compounded at debconf itself, with the controversy over the inclusion of Sun Java in non-free extending not just to the lists, but an article in LWN (with a followup) as well as numerous other places around the net. That issue came to something of a climax when John Goerzen (with whom I’ve had some entertaining disagreements in the past) questioned whether SPI had been sufficiently involved in the decision (“I am becoming increasingly concerned at the unilateral method in which you and/or the archive maintainers have taken this decision.”), to which I responded fairly curtly to defend the way Debian makes decisions (“If SPI wish to withdraw from their relationship with Debian, then that’s entirely possible to arrange. I don’t think it’s at all proper that you try to obtain veto power of Debian’s activities as conducted by the duly authorised members of that organisation.”). Nothing’s really news there – flamewar on Debian lists between influential project members? Next thing you know the sun will rise in the East every morning, and then where will we be? What’s not so normal is those flamewars getting front page coverage on slashdot, or noted in an article on distrowatch. As far as Debian’s concerned, we had a couple more rounds, both in public and on the developer only -private list, then moved onto actually getting the legal advice John wanted. That’s actually still pending, and the debate has pretty much abated while that’s going on. And meanwhile, Wouter Verhelst, Manoj Srivastava, and others have started a much more productive look at Debian’s relationship with SPI and similar organisations, which has continued on to a draft of a constitutional amendment. But there was more stress and chaos at debconf than just the Java stuff, but what’s really impressive is the way people ended up dealing with it. Take damog for example:

Just as Tore said: This is the best DebConf ever. Isn’t it great? I started really enjoying this DebConf once I stopped worrying about bullshit, once I stopped worrying about senseless things and started to really give a shit about almost anything. Why do I need Gunnar to tell my girlfriend Ana, “you picked up the irresponsible one”? Why do I have to worry about the DPL giving a shit or not on the Latinamerican Debian community, even after being invited to meet the guys or to attend our BOF? […] I enjoy people here, thanks to all the organization cabal, thanks for your effort and your time on this. […] But after leaving all of this behind, I think Ana and me are having a great time sharing time with friends around us (the friends, los cuates, we are here for).

After seeing that post, and figuring out who damog actually was when he gave a lightning talk towards the end of the conference, we had a chance to briefly chat about what was going on – somehow I hadn’t taken in the invitation to attend the BOF, and had been told it was all in Spanish anyway, so hadn’t gone; meanwhile they’ve been thinking about holding a Debian miniconf in Latin America somewhere and wanting to know what sort of support they can get from the rest of the project – particularly moral support rather than financial, at that. Hopefully we’ll see news on that score in the coming months. But really, damog was right in the first place anyway: why care if the DPL supports you or not? Debian’s about everyone doing what they think is good and worthwhile, and that combining to produce something great – it’s not about what some guy who got six votes more than the next guy happens to think is important. But support is important, whether it comes in the form of a DPL saying “good idea!”, or something else. Gunnar’s response to the latter, eg:

Debian is love. After my scream for help a couple of days ago, and after a mountain of hard work, things are just running. No, we are not -by far- free of incidents, and it would be foolish to expect it to be so, but we are working nicely. And by the way, thank you, I have been receiving the largest amount of hugs ever, and believe me, each of them has been important. […] Thank you all, folks. I am in Cristoph Berg’s talk about reworking NM - And this comes very good to wrap up my post. Debian is much, much more than technical work. It is a social club. I love this social club. Just sitting here makes long months of work really worth it. A great hug back to you all!

And in the end we got quite a bit out of debconf6, for example more movement on the forthcoming release, improvements on i18n stuff, a new publicity project, movement on updating python, amongst other things. Who knows if the next debconf will manage to be anywhere near as much of an experience, but at least we’ll find out fairly soon where it’s going to be (though that process isn’t without hiccups of its own). Post debconf, there’s also been a notable influx of trolling going on too; with the most obvious and odious example being the insane, anonymously-posted prayers for a female developer’s death. Fortunately those have mostly been ignored as the mindless spam they are, though one might argue that Marcela Tiznado’s acceptance as a DD on her birthday, and the inclusion of women.debian.org in the official debian.org namespace are a more appropriate response to that sort of harassment than any sort of direct reply anyway. Not all our problems have conveniently been resolved right now, of course, the difficulties related to the installer team I alluded to above are ongoing, and at the moment a really good solution is still eluding us, though development continues anyway. And then, of course, there’s more to come – half the point of posting this is so I can stop worrying about all the stuff that’s been and gone, and get on with interesting things like the next point release, and the various other projects that I’ve let languish for the past few weeks.

I passed my second diploma exam today, again with 1.7. Mostly theoretical computer science: logics, computer assisted proving and proof verification systems, automata theory (buechi, muller, ... so mostly on trees and infinite words, not just undergrad DFAs) and coding theory. The professor told me I could easily have done better if I had had learned the formal definitions and that better (just as the professor did in the previous exam on databases, index structures, dataminig and knowledge discovery in databases). I had expected doing much worse in this exam, since I had big trouble concentrating the last months (the heat wave in germany and the worldcup certainly did not help either). I ended up learning just one or two hours a day on average, which is really really little. Way to little. So I'm quite happy with these results (especially since I don't care about the grades too much anyway), given the amount of work I spent. What I'm really unhappy with is my lack of concentration these days. I used to be able to focus very well. I never was good at learning stuff literally, but I used to be able to sit down and tackle problems for hours at a time until I was really into the topic. I havn't been recently, which made me really wonder if I would be able to continue my studies as is... well, todays result, too, showed that even when not focussing I'm doing quite well. Two more exams coming up - one on Algebra (starting with galois theory, so the contents of this course are apparently usually taught as "abstract algebra" or "advanced algebra" in the U.S.; no matrices, linear transformations or vector spaces involved), the other on programming, modelling and data languages, so UML/OCL, XML/CSS/XSLT/other markup, logic programming techniques etc. Then all that remains to do to finish my degree is a six-month thesis, which will hopefully be on generating UIs (this may include a text UI) from schema languages such as XSD.

So to make a long story short, last night at GUADEC featured a great Fluendo party at one of Vilanova's great beaches. At some point, people had drunk enough to finally consider getting a good swim in the warm waters of the Mediterranean. David Reveman, from the Novell crowd, was one of them. I learned from Anna that in the US it is illegal to show your nipples (ie, go top-less) or any reproductive organs in public. WTF!? The GNOME Hispano crowd did have no problems at all, and went in completely naked, reminding me of the great nights at Helsinki during Debconf 5. I thought it was a good opportunity to POP THE TRUNK, if only a little bit, so I swam to the buoy and came back, in complete darkness, and acs watching out for me from the distance. When we were back, most people were getting dressed already, and I managed to lose my micro suimming suit, which is a PITA as I need it to train.

The phone had more sand than silicon, I guess. Anyway, I wasn't the only one leaving stuff behind. David, if you mind your valuable wallet and mobile phone, find me around the conference. :) Other GUADEC stories will need to wait for another entry...

While it may not be half-naked chicks and dinosaurs, the general point is so on the money. Thankfully a good portion of my research is on and about the Internet. Apparently the link gets redirected so here here is the link to the blog entry with image

…or, “Bits from a Gforge maintainer", if you’d like. After being neglected for way too long, the Gforge packages have finally started moving again. Packages for the most recent upstream release (4.5.14) are available in experimental, with quite a few improvements over the version currently in unstable:

• lots of improvements upstream, of course;
• no more sourceforge transitional package;
• source control management systems are now integrated via plugins rather than core code; existing plugins are gforge-plugin-scmcvs for CVS and -scmsvn for Subversion (both are in experimental);
• should support recent versions of PostgreSQL;
• default authentication scheme for users created through Gforge is now no longer LDAP (although it’s still available for the masochistic); nss-pgsql is now preferred, with lots of benefits (not the least being that its configuration and setup are far less brittle);
• and lots more, thanks to Christian Bayle’s work while I was busy doing something else.

From a Debian maintainer’s point of view, my Gforge-related TODO list now mainly sports three items.

• First, rewrite some PHP code into Perl: the script in charge of bringing the database schema up-to-date, db-upgrade.pl, currently delegates some of its work to PHP scripts with system() calls. That’s justifiable by the fact that these PHP scripts can use the Gforge code, classes and methods, but it makes the whole upgrading process fragile: for some reason, the system() calls sometimes fail without db-upgrade.pl noticing, and the process then just goes on with a broken DB instead of stopping right there with an error. Also, this is doomed to fail sometime: the Gforge classes used are the ones currently installed, which may or may not correspond to the database schema (remember we’re in the middle of an upgrade, so the schema is moving). Since I want this db-upgrade.pl script to be unbreakable, I need to change that.
• In addition to that (or in parallel), I’d like to migrade the gforge packages to use the dbconfig-common infrastructure. It’s supposed to be able to take on the tasks of database (and database user) creation, while still giving me a hook to plug db-upgrade.pl into.
• When the dbconfig-common migration is done, I’ll probably spam^Wcontact the various translation teams, so the Debconf templates look good and consistent.

I suppose I could also try and migrate to the webapps-common framework, but I’ll keep that for later. Of course, any help is welcome. Remember: the sooner I get the Gforge packages into a reasonable shape, the sooner they’ll go to unstable, then testing, and the sooner I’ll be backporting them to sarge, which means Alioth can be upgraded. But since I’ve heard a few complaints about Alioth being too damn slow or broken or whatever, I expect I’ll get lots of patches (in bug reports, please) from disgruntled users eager to help.

The nice thing about an NIH comment post thing is that you can change it if people start to abuse it. I was starting to get more and more comment spams. Some spammer obviously must have taken a look at my comment submission form, and written some code to post his junk there. Even though they made a little mistake that would make it very easy to identify their posts (URL-encoded the data in some field where it was not necessary, and indeed would mean that the post would not be visible had I approved it), I didn't feel like adding much code to special-case one particular spammer. So instead, I changed my comment form to rename a particular field, and would return a 403-style rather empty page with a remark of Sod off, spammer if the field is filled in. When I start to receive spam again, changing the code to do the same thing once more is pretty easy. It's been a few weeks now. And I didn't have to change anything about my comment submission policy, like some other people had to do. Isn't that nice? :-)