I was in the third talugian meeting which has the best ambient I have ever been. Is nice when you talk about linux and nobody look at you like this guy what's smoking?!, and is great that the community is growing. I'm feeling that these meetings could get us better and stronger communities and with more experience. And there's a lot coming...! Thanks kamihacker for being such a kind host in this 3 meetings, we swear in the 100th we're gonna change the place ;-) P.S. talugian is from TALUG, T chira Linux User Group, my regional LUG.

Scientific papers always have a “related works” section, where the authors describe how the work they are presenting compares with what others did. In the Free Software world, this is nearly non-existent: in a way, it seems that many of us are thinking of their projects as competing products, fighting for market share. On a project web page, I would love to read something like:

This project is particularly well suited if you want XX. But if YY is more important to you, you might want to have a look at ZZ.

Or simply links to similar projects for other environments, etc. All in all, I think that the goal is to improve the global satisfaction. Not to win a few users, who won’t be totally happy, because the project doesn’t really suit their needs. While some projects cooperate and share ideas, like I think desktop environments do inside freedesktop.org, most just ignore each other. I am both a Debian and an Ubuntu developer, and I’m sometimes amazed that Ubuntu discusses technical choices that were discussed (and solved) a few weeks earlier in Debian. And it’s even worse with the other big distros out there. Couldn’t we try to improve this ? We could just create a mailing list, where developers from various distributions could present the way they do things. This would allow to discuss future developments (”We are planning to improve this, what are you doing about that ?“) or simply to improve people’s knowledge of the various distributions. Of course, this could easily turn into flamefests, but they are technical ways to avoid that, like moderating posts from trollers… Does something like that already exist ? Do you think that it would be interesting ? Would you like to contribute to such a forum ? Some examples of things that could be discussed:

• How many packages do you have, and how do you support them ? Do you have several “classes” of packages ?
• How do you manage your releases ? Goal-based ? Time-based ? Bug-count-based ?
• Which kind of quality assurance do you do ?
• How many contributors do you have ? Are they split into different “classes” ? Who has “commit rights” ? Can you give out “commit rights” restricted to subsets of your packages ? A organized sponsorship system for people who don’t have commit rights ?
• etc, etc, etc.

Bah, MySQL keeps insisting on being a fun way to waste your time.
One of my clients hosts its systems at Dreamhost, a quite nice hosting company, which has... Well, a couple of strange details :-/
Anyway, people who work with databases know that a BLOB (or its equivalent) is the right datatype for storing images or, in general, files, right? After all, BLOB is just an acronym for Binary Large OBject. And if somebody has a BLOB field in the DB and searches on it, most RDBMS-bound programmers will at very least chuckle at a design flaw - BLOBs are just to be stored and retrieved, that's it.
Well, the system I wrote for this client uses a BLOB field - Ok, to be clear: I just declared it as a :binary in the corresponding migration. That should do the trick, and should allow me to keep my system RDBMS-independent, right? So I can still work on my development system using nice-and-trusty PostgreSQL
Anyway... My client said some documents were being corrupted. And that is Not Nice^TM... Documents were being truncated at 63Kb. The bug was consistent across the three instances of my system in Dreamhost, but could not be reproduced at my machines - It didn't take too long to find out it must be the DB (and that's partly because I don't really trust MySQL :) ).
Turns out that, in MySQL speak, there are four types of blobs: TINYBLOB, BLOB, MEDIUMBLOB, and LONGBLOB. Forgoodnessake, WHY?! The stupidiest one is the tinyblob: A Binary Large OBject limited to 8 bits (255 characters). Regular blobs are 16 bit long (65535 characters - Aha! That's your 63.99Kb limit!). Mediumblobs are 24 bits (16 million), and longblobs are 32 bits (4000 million). And, of course, the blob datatype is not large at all.
Bah.
Anyway... At least this is an open and known issue already to the Rails people, and I do expect them to change the migration equivalencies to something saner.
Bah again.

Okay, apart from finishing the move from the laptop back to the Pegasos (I compiled d2x-xl yesterday, today is reserved for the more serious stuff), this evening will be dedicated to cooking and my other pet project, xcontrol. So, it will be risotto, wireless networks and autobuilders, in no particular order. In other news, I've been running an archive rebuild to find out which packages actually implement the build-arch and build-indep targets. Out of the first 70, I've counted 11. Since so many packages would be affected, a mass filing of wishlist bugs is probably not the way to go, so I guess I'll set up a web page with the results (after making my autobuilder more robust; it still gets too easily confused) and try to shame people into updating their packages.

After one day off, we watched Argentina-Georgia yesterday evening. Interesting game because it directly affect France's chances to qualify after Argentina's win on Friday. Argentina had a big disadvantage by playing only 4 days after their historic battle against France. As a logical consequence, they appeared quite tired and very imprecise. On the other hand, Georgia fought very courageously with a strong pack of forwards, encouraged by most of the crowd in Lyon. Finally, Argentina won *and* scored the bonus point by scoring a try in the very last minute (which might become very important to qualify in this pool. Good game even if Argentina was not that impressive, but I still think this is mostly because of the 4-days delay. Today, 3 games were scheduled. We didn't watch USA-Tonga (15-25). USA was slightly favourite for that one but they also were quite tired by playing 4 days only after their battle against England on Saturday. This was the first match for Tonga and obviously the island players were less tired and played a good rugby to win that one. Japan-Fidji (31-35) seems to have been the most uncertain match as of now. I somewhat regret not watching it as these two are among the teams I like watching and 7 tries in the match probably made it very interesting. Tonight, we watched Italy-Romania (24-18). The italians compete with Scotland for the remaining qualifying spot in that pool, if one assumes that New Zealand will obviously win all its matches. So, Italy *had* to win that match. The quality of romanian rugby has decreased in the last 10 years, but they still have a good set of great players, most of them playing...in France (just like one third of the italian team, indeed). The match was quite indecise with italy keeping the ball all first half long, but only leading 8-0 on half time....and being surprised by two romanian tries at the beginning of second half (8-12). After a strong domination of Italy, Romania was logically sanctioned by one expulsion and a penalty try (for successive voluntary faults), but, until the end, Italy was still in danger. They finally made it, which was the most important for them, 4 days after they were sweeped out by the All Blacks. We're now eagerly waiting for *THE* game of this week, England-South Africa in the Stade de France on Friday. Elizabeth found out that a few tickets are still available, but for 253 euros each, we decided to watch it on TV. So, between 21:00 and 23:00UTC that day, don't even think about pinging me on IRC. I still haven't decided who I'll support the most as I'm not a huge fan of either team....but they're still among the best in the world, of course.

Since a few days I'm a happy customer of Lichtblick, the biggest electric utility (Stromanbieter) in Germany which provides 100% green energy (or kostrom as it's called in Germany). Why? I was getting tired of all those hypocrites and liars (a.k.a. politicians) who keep on talking about global warming and renewable energy, but fail to produce any real results since many, many years now. So I decided to do my (small) part to help reduce CO₂ emissions, the greenhouse effect, and global warming. After measuring the energy consumption of all my power-sucking devices and replacing or turning off some of them, and after replacing all lightbulbs with highly efficient energy saving lightbulbs, changing the electric utility was the next logical step. First try (failed) As probably almost everyone in Munich, I was a customer of the Stadtwerke M nchen (SWM). According to the last electricity bill I got from them, their sources of energy are: 17% renewable energy, 83% fossil energy sources, 0% nuclear power. Well, at least they don't use nuclear power, that's a big plus IMO, but 83% polluting, fossil crap? Thanks, but no thanks. So I opted to use their kostrom M-Natur tariff, which (they claim) provides 100% renewable energy. They use the so-called Aufpreismodell (sorry, German only), i.e. you pay a few cents extra per kWh, and this extra money is invested in renewable energy sources (mostly small hydropower plants around Munich). As I found out a few hours later (d'oh!) this "Aufpreismodell" is not really ideal (you still pay a conventional electric utility instead of one with 100% renewable energy, for instance). In addition, I stubled over a petition for the city of Munich to stop investing in a new fossil fuel power plant (bituminous coal, to be more precise). Which I promptly signed (and which went to several local parties including the greens, the mayer of Munich, and others).
Now, this is what I call hypocritical behaviour — on the one side they claim/pretend to be environmentally friendly by promoting their "M-Natur" tariff, and at the same time they invest even more money in fossil fuels? WTF? Anyway, it seems the petition did have at least some impact, the aren't allowed to invest more money into that fossil fuel powerplant than they already did. For me that was more than enough reason to immediately revoke my M-Natur tariff, and what's more, I switched to a completely different company now, Lichtblick (see also the respective Wikipedia page). I'm not willing to support such energy policies/politics with my money anymore. Lichblick Lichtblick is an kostromanbieter in Germany, supposedly the biggest one.
Their "energy mix" is 100% renewable energy (which is correct, unlike with SWM, as they do not own any additional fossil fuel plants). 76% of that is hydropower, FWIW. Their prices may be a bit higher than those of conventional electric utilities, but not all that much; you might even pay less, depending on where you live and which tariff you have now. You can use their price calculator to find out. Btw, some other good choices in Germany are Greenpeace energy, Elektrizit tswerke Sch nau, and Naturstrom AG. How the switch went Easy. Grab the respective PDF, print it, fill in the required info, and send it to them. Alternatively, they also offer online registration. It'll take a few weeks until the switch is performed; they have to contact your current electric utility etc. In my case it took ca. 4 weeks. There are no additional costs for switching. There is no "downtime" whatsoever (not even a few seconds), German law requires that you always reliably get your electricity 24/7 (and it indeed worked just fine for me). So, that's that. From now on I'm happily using green energy all day (and night) long. I'm doing my part in Saving The Planet (tm) and I sleep a bit better at night... P.S. No, I'm not getting paid by Lichtblick (or anybody else) to write this.

I've recently finished writing an article for Free Software Magazine, who, as part of sponsorship deals, are able to distribute a free book to their authors. I thought that that would be easy enough, but on second thought, I'm actually not sure... These days I'm reticent to get books on things that are documented on the web - those sorts of books tend to get stale pretty quickly. I think I'm more in the market for a 'classic', but even there, I'm not really sure. I have a lot of good ones already (scroll down on this page: http://www.welton.it/freesoftware/), and as you can see from that list, "documentation" style books quickly become dated. To tell the truth, I haven't actually bought any computer books in a while, having focused more on marketing, business, economics and the like, which aren't "documented" online as thoroughly as most programming topics are. So, I'm lookng for suggestions. One possibility is the recent Erlang book by Joe Armstrong, but even that is mostly covered by docs on the erlang.org web site. Free Software Magazine's publishing sponsors are: Apress, Addison-Wesley/Prentice Hall, O Reilly, No Starch and Packt - and I can select any book from them, to my knowledge. Suggestions? Thanks!

I did this Friday night:

cat /etc/debian_version
lenny/sid

The good:

• the upgrade was pretty painless, including the kernel upgrade (I just spent about an hour to resolve/force the upgrade path for some packages since aptitude was stubbornly refusing to upgrade since some recommends were not satisfied)
  
• the kernel doesn't seem to need any options to make the headphones work
• I can use a free driver for the wlan (bcm43xx instead of ndiswrapper)
• as a bonus, now I can suspend-to-disk while the wlan interface is turned on (with ndis+2.6.18-5 the system hanged during suspend)
  

The bad:

• the two icons I got on the desktop for the crypto partition I have mounted under /crypto are still both there (the worse thing is that I don't remember/can't find the bug number)
  
• suspend-to-ram still doesn't work - I suspect flgrx being the culprit
  
• there are now two icons for xchat in the systray. Should I be removing xchat-systray? Apparently yes, although there are a few things that xchat-systray had which are not available in the native systray thingie:

This is xchat-systray's menu:


And this is xchat's native menu:
By the way, the Hide menu entry there hides xchat itself, not the tray icon.

---

Update:
one more bad: this is still not fixed.

---

Update++:
I am a moron: apparently this is a known problem and a workaround exists. Now I can have my sincle xchat-systray icon :-) .

On a modern debian system (and other linuxes as well), the cron daemon is PAM-enabled, which is probably a good thing. One downside is that you get your /var/log/auth.log full of messages like:

Sep 11 11:15:01 otto CRON[8755]: pam_unix(cron:session): session opened for user jojo by (uid=0)
Sep 11 11:15:01 otto CRON[8755]: pam_unix(cron:session): session closed for user jojo

I think these are pretty useless and make it harder to find real authentication related entries in auth.log, especially if you get them every five minutes. Luckily, the fix is pretty simple: Just edit /etc/pam.d/cron and comment out the line @include common-session, as that only calls pam_unix.so which in turn, for session management, does nothing but logging anyways.To further separate the cron logs, you can remove these entries to syslog:

Sep 11 07:17:01 quimby /USR/SBIN/CRON[7949]: (root) CMD (   run-parts --report /etc/cron.hourly)

by configuring /etc/syslog.conf to move them to a logfile on its own:

*.*;auth,authpriv,cron.none     -/var/log/syslog
cron.*                          -/var/log/cron.log

My mother just asked me to get Google Earth (link to download page [1]) working on her machine so she can see where my sister [2] lives. So I download all 20 megs of the sucker (of course it had a horrible license agreement that precludes packaging for Debian or any other sane distribution) and ran it (under a different account of course because I don’t trust non-free software). It’s unfortunate that Google weren’t prepared to put in the extra effort of making Debian and RPM packages for it. When I examined the contents of the file there were sym-links from FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD to Linux and from amd64 and x86_64 to x86. So much for portability, just assume that everything is an i386 running Linux! The first problem I encountered is that it doesn’t support installing in text mode and demands X access, have the Google people never heard of sys-admins who do their work over low-bandwidth links and don’t use X? What happens if your sys-admin is using a braille terminal? When I enabled X by “ssh -X” I encountered the error below (Error 1). It seems that the installation program was not written with the X11 Security Restrictions in mind and only works with “ssh -Y“. The same applies to actually running the program once it’s installed. Finally it gave me a GNOME error dialogue about the Bitstream Vera Sans font not being installed. If they had made a Debian package then it could have depended on the package that provides the font in question. Now I’m left wondering which package provides it, and whether it’s even available (maybe they depend on non-free fonts). Once I got it working I found it to be incredibly slow on my Pentium-M laptop with 1.5G of RAM. I ran it on a Pentium-D desktop system in a Xen DomU (it’s only 32bit and I couldn’t figure out how to get the AMD64 version of Debian to run i386 programs without a chroot or a Xen instance). But it still wasn’t particularly fast. One problem is that the GUI is not well written, so I drag the Earth to rotate it from the initial view and the Earth moves slowly long after I have released my mouse button. Another is that my X server started using significantly more memory while it was running (and has not returned to it’s previous size). Google Earth is a really neat program that does some nice things. But I’m not going to buy a new Thinkpad to run it, and the experience of running it on a Pentium-D server is not that great either. I’ve just rm’d it from my laptop, I’ll leave it installed on the server but probably won’t run it often. I’ll try installing it on my mother’s computer (Celeron 2.4GHz with 512M of RAM) but I am not expecting it to run well. The machine is still new to her, I replaced her Pentium3 800MHz with 384M of RAM about a week ago. She never found the Pentium3 to be slow (and I don’t think that Google Earth is a good reason for an upgrade).

• [1] http://www.earth.google.com/download-earth.html


• [2] http://helen.coker.com.au/

(more…)

Share This

Homebank has had a few problems getting through NEW due to legacy problems from the original Amiga version (and it isn't ready yet) but I've been trying it out anyway and comparing to gnucash. Bearing in mind that I have done upstream work in gnucash (i.e. I like gnucash enough to tackle the massively scary gnucash source code) and have (almost) got used to the regular dependency hell that it imposes on my sid installation, I'm finding homebank quite friendly.
(See #441110, #441103, #441129 and #441363 for recent examples of gnucash causing dependency hell - again.)
(1:0 to Homebank).
Homebank is closer to the Quicken model with categories but internal transfers between accounts are supported to give some impression of double-entry. (1:1) My main interest is in data import/export because I've long been looking for a way to create invoices from PIM data e.g. in a Palm Pilot or similar. Homebank supports a CSV data import for data that can be handled as an invoice. OK, there's no fancy invoice printing but that doesn't bother me (I never used the gnucash invoice print support) (2:1 to Homebank) - my invoices are all electronic and I have to use the client system (MSDOS!). What I need is to create my own records of the invoices within my financial accounts and Homebank may be able to do that with far greater ease than gnucash. My data exists primarily in my Palm because I take and change my bookings on-the-move. I want to be able to HotSync my Palm through a query interface (pilot-qof) and XSL (datafreedom-qsfxsl) direct into a financial application that can correlate that data with the payments made into my bank by the client and thence with data from my bank statements to prepare data suitable for my tax report.
I'm thinking that if I can get half of the ease-of-use of Homebank into the rigorous double-entry support of gnucash in a small program (gpe-cash), I'll be doing very well.
One limitation of Homebank is the "wording" - the translations appear awkward and unfamiliar but that can be easily fixed. The link between "Archives" and "automated transactions" isn't clear - I think it means "templates" and "scheduled transactions". (2:2)
Homebank can't do all the things that gnucash can do but that is a weakness in gnucash, not homebank. (3:2 to Homebank) IMNSHO, GnuCash tries to do too much and that leads to an oversized and overly complex codebase as well as a dependency list that puts OOo to shame. The graph support in homebank is a lot better than gnucash and that is not the fault of libgoffice, it is entirely down to the choices made by gnucash upstream developers. Homebank graphs are fast, simple, intuitive and informative, displaying useful info at the first attempt instead of having to wade through the Options dialogue in gnucash. (4:2 to Homebank).
If I can work out some simple scripting that combines these external tools into 'HomeOffice' support in Homebank, everyone wins.
I've never liked CSV as a data format and the homebank main files are XML (like gnucash). Unlike gnucash, the XML appears sane and usable for XSLT - raising the prospect of creating reports directly from the homebank data files.
Homebank upstream have been very supportive of the various requests to assist getting Homebank through NEW so I'm hopeful that if an XML import/export method was proposed it could be included in future - especially if the donkey work is done by external tools.
This would tie in well with datafreedom-qsfxsl and datafreedom-perl. Initially, I'll look at XML->CSV - ugly, I know but at least Homebank can import data to be used as invoices; gnucash cannot. (5:2 to Homebank).

At the end of round one:
Homebank : 5 GnuCash: 2.

Joey started a stats pron meme, so lets join, with stats from packages.debian.org AKA puccini.debian.org, which I am the local-admin for. This machine has

	2007
Unique visitors	4952207
Total visits	8572139
Total pageviews	43332086
Total bandwidth (apache only)	783.28 GB
Additional traffic due to robots	53328963 pageviews adding 265.73 GB traffic

Looking at the other statistics April and May had a few percent more visitors, but other than that its pretty stable with around 600k unique visitors per month. We do not resolve IPs to hostnames due to the huge amount of useless traffic and load this would generate, so no statistics about the countries. But we do have some other stats. Like a Robot/Spider statistic. It looks like we had about 151 different spiders on our site, a few listed below.

Yahoo	is the most active spider, making some 97.54 GB of traffic
Googlebot	follows on second place, responsible for 43.92 GB
MSNBot	caused about 21.52 GB traffic
Python-urllib	is used by multiple bots and they all made up 43.29 GB traffic

Next interesting point is that of Operating systems.

Linux	is of course the most used one, 48.1% of our visitors told us they use it.
Windows	only on place 2, with 40.5%.
MacOS	all kinds of MacOS add up to 2.5%.

There are various others in the list, but none with more than 1%. Like Sun Solaris which was used for about 63k hits (compare it to Linux with 32 378 942 hits). 5423 users did want us to believe they use CPM, another 76 tried that with VMS. Of course we are interested in more details for the 48.1% Linux users, here they are:

Debian	15397537	22.8 %
Ubuntu	9050014	13.4 %
Suse	542635	0.8 %
Red Hat	107240	0.1 %
Mandriva (or Mandrake)	166545	0.2 %
Fedora	623242	0.9 %
Centos	69998	0.1 %
GNU Linux (Unknown or unspecified distribution)	6421731	9.5 %

Windows is boring, more than 33% are using the XP crap, all BSD version together, including that GNU/kFreeBSD variant have 0.1% all together. Browsers? Of course people do use lots of different browsers. The main browsers, if you ignore all the various versions, are Firefox with 44.7%, (shudder) MSIE with 17.7% and Mozilla with 14.6%. Konqueror is far behind with only about 8.5%, other browsers like Opera (3.4%) and Epiphany (1.5%) are even less used. One browser identification is interesting, namely Debian APT, which seems to be the “Fetch Changelog” function of aptitude. It generated about 200k hits (0.1%). Next point - from where do we get most people to our site? That are people not having any kind of referer information, 65%. The second place here goes to - yes, direct links from various people. Of course our search interface has most hits here, the rest is from some 80k different pages linking to us. Most of those seem to be upstream pages telling their users where to get a Debian package from (most are named something that fits “/software/download” or “is like sf/freshmeat” schema). Interestingly the links the BTS provides in their package overview going to packages.debian.org aren’t used all that much. Only about 30k hits in the whole year 2007 with the BTS as referrer. Only after all those individual links we have search engines giving us hits. That may be partly due to the fact that we did use robots.txt to block them (at least those that are good net citizens) for a long time from indexing our site. Final words: YES, I do know that the stats are likely to be wrong in any size you want them to be wrong. Yes, one cant really trust the User-Agent string, its too easy to change it. Yes, its easy to filter out referer, etc, etc, etc, but IMO its still nice to look at such things, it gives at least a little feeling for what we do burn all those CPU cycles. These stats are based on about 4.5GB of compressed apache logs from the last few months, it took some 14 hours to process the logfiles. Luckily future updates now happen once an hour and take only a minute or two… Ohh, you say Joeys meme was about mail stats? Damn. Ok, short text: 305k mails rejected in the last 7 days while we allowed 1097 mails to pass. For the yearly overview that means some 9.3million rejected and 73k accepted mails (that rate should get better, decreasing the accepted count, with the new etch setup we have now). Of course this isn’t as impressing as lists.debian.org mailstats are. :)

I’m looking for a website that can recommend appropriate movies for me to watch, both in the “you will most probably like this one based on your current taste” sense, and in the “it may be interesting for you to explore and give this one a try” one. I have a pretty strong opinion on how it should work: I feed it a long list (as complete as possible) of movies I’ve watched over the years, with timestamps if available, and the system gives me in return a subset of them for me to rate. That is, the system performs an analysis on the input, and determines what additional information it needs in order to form a picture of myself as a movie watcher. And by “rating” I don’t mean just assigning a single numeric score, but expressing opinion on various relevant aspects: how much did you enjoy it? How badly do you want to see similar films? Did you feel uneasy with the level of violence / nudity / other, or rather on the contrary? To name a few. I’m very disappointed that all movie recommendations sites I can find require for me to choose which movies to rate, and just give me a numeric scale to do so. Not only I’m finding it a daunting task deciding what to rate, but I also have the feeling it’ll result in a biased profile, and that a single numeric scale can’t be enough to reflect all the aspects in a person’s movie personality. So far, the most promising site I’ve found is MovieLens, which is developed by a research group at the University of Minnesota. From what I’ve seen it works, but I’m unconvinced that having me decide what to rate will give the best results. So, can somebody comment about the sanity of the model proposed here, and (ideally!) tell me it’s implemented somewhere?

Continuing my mission to put together a kick-ass team to develop the Ubuntu Desktop, the following position is now up on the website: Posting Date & ID: September 2007 UDD
Job Location: Your home with broadband. Some international travel will be required.
Job Summary: To adapt and develop the GNOME desktop to improve the Ubuntu user experience. Key responsibilities and accountabilities:

• Use open source development methods to create, select and adapt software to produce innovative user experiences and address the common problems of desktop computing
• Extend the desktop platform as necessary to support development
• Work with designers, artists and other developers to develop ideas and complete the project
• Involve the community of development projects, teams and Ubuntu supporters to incorporate a range of perspectives and ideas
• Take ownership of many aspects of the desktop user experience (“look and feel”) in Ubuntu
• Follow projects and trends in user interface design in the open source world, integrate the best technologies into Ubuntu and ensure their quality
• Analyse, triage and respond to bug reports

Requirements skills and experience:

• A keen and insightful eye for user interaction
• A passion for intuitive, usable and visually appealing interfaces
• A strong desire to produce distinctive ideas that stand Ubuntu out from the crowd
• Experience with the GNOME development platform and desktop environment and technologies such as GTK+
• Some experience with mainstream graphics technologies such as OpenGL and Cairo in the C programming language
• Ability to be productive in a globally distributed team through self-discipline and self-motivation, delivering according to a schedule
• Familiarity with open source development tools and methodology, especially those in common use for Ubuntu and Debian package maintenance

How to apply Please send a cover letter and CV with references to hr@canonical.com. Please indicate in your submission the role for which you are applying. We prefer to receive applications and CVs/Resumes in either PDF or plain text format.

Eurosport coverage of Vuelta a Espa a at 19 east continues with commentary in English (analogue only) and German. Scheduled times:-

Mon 10.09.2007

16:00-17:30 CET

Tue 11.09.2007

no show (rest day, but MTB coverage at 08:45)

Wed 12.09.2007

16:00-17:30 CET

Thu 13.09.2007

01:00-01:30 (recap?) and 15:45-17:30 CET

Fri 14.09.2007 and Sat 15.09.2007

16:00-17:30 CET

Sun 16.09.2007

18:00-19:00 CET (recorded?)

TVEi are broadcasting in Spanish at 13 and 19 east. You can also see the race on TVEI America, but I don’t know the reception details. Scheduled times:-

Mon 10.09.2007

16:30-18:00 CET

Tue 11.09.2007

no show (rest day)

Wed 12.09.2007 to Sun 16.09.2007

16:40-18:00 CET

I’ll post more times next week. It was good to see a strong Caisse d’Epargne showing, as I predicted, even if it didn’t last long…

winpdb - a platform independent Python debugger A few minutes ago a mail arrived which told me, that my winpdb package migrated to testing, which was just another reminder to blog about it. winpdb is not just yet another Python debugger, it is actually the first really well working one I've used so far. One of my favorite features is the embedded debugging, which allows you to debug scripts which are embedded somewhere. I still have to try it with a Zope product, though - I'm really wondering if I could embed the remote debugger in there. That just brought us to another very useful feature - winpdb is a remote debugger. It connects to the real debugger (called rpdb2) using an encrypted and password protected tcp connection, which allows you to run rpdb2 under a totally different user, probably on some embedded box somewhere on the other side of the world. If you don't want to use a graphical frontend, rpdb2 is able to run the debug sessions in a 'screen' window. Although winpdb doesn't ship much documentation, it is very well documented. And in case you don't like winpdb or wx - pida ships with a debugger plugin which is in fact a gtk frontend for rpdb2. The following quote is part of a mail from Nir Aides, the author of winpdb. Although it may be biased, I think it'll probably give you some ideas in case you want to compare winpdb with some other common (commercial) debuggers. He kindly allowed me to quote it here:

I have just spent a couple of hours (instead of doing some real work…) with the commercial Python debuggers of Komodo IDE 4.1 and Wing IDE 3 beta, and (without declaring objectiveness) Winpdb seems currently better than both in several important areas:

* It is the only one of the three to support os.fork() (wingide debugger crashes)

* It handles thread debugging best in many aspects (e.g allows inspection of threads that are still running, stays with the correct thread when stepping, general usability, etc…)

* Its name-space browser is the most consistent and stable (in particular with describing class inheritance, very large objects, sets!)

* It is the only one that prevents breakpoints in invalid lines (Komodo does not care at all and Wing allows setting breakpoints inside remarks and thus possibly in other invalid lines). This is important since in Python it is sometimes surprisingly hard to tell (by looking at the source code) which lines are valid for breakpoints.

Not to forget that winpdb supports debugging of curses based applications, namespace modification and the coming version is supposed to have full unicode support. Happy debugging!

In Santa Clara and still adjusting. The corporate housing that I'm in is nearly 4 hours by transit to the office according to the magic computers at 511.org. If I walk a mile on this side, and take a Google shuttle from the Caltrain, I should be able to get that down to an hour.

ahahahah, yeah right. I get a ride from Angie in the morning. It takes 15 minutes.

But *people*, c'mon.. This is California, right? Where are the people caring about the environment and hoping into mass-transit? Get out of your shiny Prius' and take a bus somewhere. Oh wait. You can't. Because it takes 4 hours to go 8 miles.

I'm thinking about this as I'm looking at churches and trying to decide if I feel like going to one this morning. I remember when I first joined the Beacon Unitarian Church, it was (as much as anything else) because I could walk to it. From the church, I could visit a half-dozen people who also lived walking distance from the church. How shall I build my community from inside temporary corporate housing in the middle of Santa Clara?

But we're starting to settle in a bit. We've swapped the van we used to drive across the country for a car. We've got a bank account. We've got a GrandCentral phone number which should follow us everywhere, and next we'll get an POBox so that as we move around a bit before settling in we'll at least have a permanent place to receive mail. It turns out that the State of California wants us to retake our written and road tests to move our licenses to here. That should be fun. Do you suppose it's an auto-fail if I yell "Christing fuck, people! Learn to drive!" as I merge onto the freeway? It's become a bit of a regular chant.

That's the question I'm trying to solve right now. From wide range of cameras, I reduced to this choice, but the decision is now quite hard. Both have their advantages and disadvantages and there is not easy to choose as it was to cut down previous list. I used Google a lot in last weeks to find some experiences with both cameras, but none of them really helped me. Pentax pros:

• Shake reduction in body (saves money on lens).
• Dust removal from sensor.
• Modes like TAv.
• Manual tuning of white balance looks much easier to use and provides many options.
• Dust-proof weather resistant body (although I won't have matching lenses at beginning).
• Manual flash control - it won't pop up when I don't want.
• Dedicated RAW button (I probably will take most photos in JPEG, but I want to be able to switch without going deep into menu).
• In camera RAW development (I'm not sure I will use this).
• Won lot of awards this year, so it should not be a bad camera, right?

Pentax cons:

• Underexposure in some conditions (maybe I just set something wrong on camera in shop).
• Lower lenses availability in Czechia (but I'm in Japan for next few months, where it is not that big problem).
• No option in kit lenses.

Nikon pros:

• Faster AF.
• More lenses and accessories available (but I'm not sure if I really need them).
• Scene modes (but I might anyway stick with manual settings).
• A bit cheaper here.

Nikon cons:

• Feels slightly less comfortable in my hand.

From the list it is visible that I was able to find more pros and cons on Pentax. Nikon seems to do its job pretty well, but does not provide any extra gimmicks. This is also reason why Pentax is winner for now. I'll buy the camera sometimes during next week, so things can still change.

Just trying to get some data "out-there" on this issue because I'm seeing duplicate bugs being filed and I can't get any response from GnuCash Bugzilla - probably because bug-buddy is busy filing lots more duplicate bugs upstream about a problem that is entirely within Debian.
The latest upgrade of g-wrap is borked and this leads to the g-wrap binary being installed at version 1.9.9-1 when the rest of the g-wrap package is held back due to the transition from libgwrap-runtime0 to libgwrap-runtime2.
This broken transition breaks gnucash. A simple error message if only g-wrap is upgraded, a complete seg fault crash if guile-g-wrap is upgraded too.
So far, we have 3 bugs in Debian:

• 441129 gnucash: fails to start after upgrade of g-wrap 1.9.9


• 441248 gnucash: Do not start anymore after last unstable upgrade


• 441309 gnucash crashes on start

Please don't add any more. The real bug is 441103 in the g-wrap package and the fix is described in my response to 441248 as:

GnuCash is usable if you can revert to the version of g-wrap in

testing. I'm running it now with:

$ cat /etc/apt/preferences 

Package: g-wrap

Pin: version 1.9.6-3.2

Pin-Priority: 1001



Package: guile-g-wrap

Pin: version 1.9.6-3.2

Pin-Priority: 1001



i.e. there isn't anything wrong with gnucash and if g-wrap had

transitioned properly, the g-wrap binary would not have been upgraded

to 1.9.9 on your system until gnucash could use libgwrap-runtime2

instead of libgwrap-runtime0. With the correct dependencies set in

g-wrap, this whole gnucash problem would have been avoided cleanly.

There is a separate RC bug against gnucash because of this transition: gnucash: FTBFS due to g-wrap transition. which does NOT affect the currently installable and usable version of gnucash in sid.

Thanks.

Thanks to a patch from Mathieu Geli, live-initramfs as of version 1.99.1-1 supports a boot parameter called fetch. That means, that it is enough to have a bootloader (syslinux, grub, whatever) and a kernel with the initrd image on a medium (cdrom, usb-stick, whatever) to boot a Debian Live system directly from the Internet or the local network without needing to setup a netboot environment (as in PXE). Just type:

	live fetch=http://example.com/my_squashfs.img

at the boot prompt. Whithin the boot process of the live system, the squashfs image will be once downloaded into RAM. After that point, no network access is required anymore. This is also the reason why it was invented initially, it is an alternative to the conventional netboot (PXE with tftp for boot and shared root over a network filesystem such as cifs, nfs or smb) where permanent network access is required, not a replacement. Temporary limitations

• At the moment, the amount of RAM required to run a web booted live session is equal to the size of the squashfs image. Because squashfs compression is quite good, this is not so much of a problem on reasonably modern machines (512MB for a complete Xfce Debian desktop, 758MB for a complete GNOME or KDE Debian desktop system). Nevertheless, improvements to use a local swap partition to store the image are on the way (including caching and updating).
  
  
• Due to a still pending move of the machine where live.debian.net is hosted, there are not yet autobuild squashfs images available. Later, you can just boot with something similar as: live fetch=http://live.debian.net/webboot/etch.