Debian Planet : When flaming on mailing lists isn’t enough. Calm down? Take it to email? Call each other on the phone? Please.

Despite my dramas on Monday night with Dell USA, and I think thanks to the (much better) Dell APAC, I had my change of ownership expedited, and received an email today that it had been completed. So I again grappled with the abomination that is the US Dell support line. I might add that I could not find the number I called anywhere from http://support.dell.com, and had to rely on the dialled number history in my phone to call them again. I'd like to think that half of my customer service experience improvement was because I only spoke to someone in India once. They were able to pull up my laptop's service tag now, and transferred me off somewhere else. Except that wasn't the right place, and so they transferred me again. To the wrong place. At least the second person I was transferred to was able to see that I'd already been transferred twice, and used some special phone system secret powers to transfer me to the right place at last. I didn't even have to put up too much of a fight to convince them to ship me a new drive. When I told the lady on the phone that I'd run the Hitachi Drive Fitness Test and it'd failed the disk, and that it had been making nasty clicking sounds before that, she agreed to send out a replacement. Hopefully it'll arrive on Friday.

I'm doing too many projects. I need to step back from most of them ASAP. I just don't want them to dwindle, but prosper... I really need to find more contributors for

• LaySVN, Layered Subversion, a svn mod written for storing the configuration of non-identical servers in SVN (read: servers that have some configuration parts in common, some differ) and probably of use for other cases.
  I've recently started a rewrite of LaySVN for speed reasons; you can't work on a per-file base with SVN but need to plan ahead a lot
• Pyroman, a firewall tool featuring a IMHO nice configuration language and which is very fast due to using iptables-restore, and it has rollback on errors
• SSDDiff, a diff tool for XML which can handle complex cases very well. Some say it's doing a "semantic" diff, actually. The "fast" (approximative) mode needs some love, the prototyp app IO needs to be redone (i.e. output filename parameters), XML attribute changes aren't reported yet in all output formats. I've also done some nice HTML diffs with it, that could be made a separate HTMLdiff application.
• Debtags central database needs to be rewritten to fit our newer requirements (e.g. moderation of edits or specific tags), and moved to a new server (old one still being woody)
• musicsquirrel (unreleased), a PyGTK duplicate finding tool using TRM ("musicbrainz") signatures, could need some magic like duplicate album detection (by "clustering"), and a UI to mass-select duplicates accoring to some rules (e.g. kill all duplicates found in the "unsorted" folder, if there is a properly tagged version in some other place)
• SELinux-Basics, a package to help getting SELinux working, has some basic sanity check shell scripts for a fresh SELinux system. These should be rewritten in OOP fashion with python or so, and extended with some extra checks.
• SELinux on Debian needs more adventurous people testing and using it, fixing policy to match Debian needs, writing new policy for new services, writing tons of documentation, doing some pretty install scripts and fixing some upstream bugs (module linking still not working). And making it as easy to use as AppArmor claims to be, because SELinux IS better and should be used instead.
• ISL3893, a wireless AP chip with a linux-based SDK available, is finally receiving some development. Too bad I can't devote any time to it. It would be cool to bring it up to par with famous OpenWRT.

Oh, and half of above projects need a fancy web design and an icon. Anyway, I should basically turn off my computer for the next two months and refrain from going online. :-( I know that I won't have the discipline to do so... And there are oh so many projects still only existant in my head that I'd really love to do sometime. One involving new search technologies with tags, bringing together directories like DMoz, tag based stuff like del.icio.us and "traditional" text search engines. Definitely the stuff the Web 2.0 is made out of (read: hype). But when I'm done with my diploma this new dotcom bubble is probably over, too... :-(

Given the low participation, it looks like the choice of a DPL is difficult this year. It probably means that the platform of the candidates do no suit everybody… however with DPL teams, there’s more than just the DPL and in theory each member should have their own platform. That’s not the case for me because writing a platform is a big job… which I can avoid since I’m not candidate. However I now do feel the need to tell what I would like to propose (and do) if I’m part of a team so that you know better what to expect if you vote for a team where I’m involved. I’d just like to give a warning, those items are quick notes and are in no way full- and flesched out solutions, they will need to be discussed and refined in all cases, and somes ideas may be dropped of course.

• Discuss with the core teams, ask their opinion on the problems / critics made outside. Make propositions and implement them myself when possible in order to unblock the situation when needed. Communicate the results to the DD.
• Discuss with NM, DAM and ftpmasters how to make the NM process evolve. An example of a possible solution sketched out on the basis of recent discussions could be :
  • Require from candidates entering the NM process to setup a wiki page listing their regular contributions to Debian in the last 6 months.
  • Allow NM who have been successfully sponsored on a package to upload themselves this package (and only this one, no NMU).
  • Implement changes in the LDAP database to differentiate privileges (upload, unix account, vote, email) so that people who are not requesting upload rights can have a simplified NM process
• Ensure that the scripts to help management of keyring-maint have been written.
• Suggest to the press team to work with an associated debian-press mailing list which could review the announces before being sent and which could make proposals of announces as well.
• Make irc.d.o point to OFTC to put an end to the useless split on two networks.
• Discuss with DAM to change the expulsion process: the first step should be a mediation with the DPL (or someone delegated for that task) and not a public call for “seconds”… and if the process goes further, then the message indicating that the procedure continues will be posted by the mediator which should allows for more moderated messages.
• Try to moderate the first message of a new thread on debian-devel in order to redirect misplaced messages to the appropriate list and increase the quality of the list and get back people who unsubscribed because of the noise level.
• Try to document as much as possible from the working of core teams in some wiki pages.
• Ask everyone what decisions they would like the DPL to take (maybe use polls to evaluate suggestions).

This list is neither complete nor definitive. Not all items will be achieved but each of them is a real progress IMO and I’d like to be able to work on them. For people who are concerned by those changes, I’m sorry if you discover my ideas by this post even before I had the opportunity to talk to you… I’m posting those ideas now because they may be considered by people who are currently voting, but it does not mean that I’m not interested to discuss them with you. It’s also true that some of those ideas can be implemented without being part of the DPL team and I’ll certainly try to implement some whatever the outcome of the election, but I really believe that being part of a DPL team helps greatly because you have access to some important informations, and you can effectively discuss with core teams which are otherwise difficult to approach for non-technical discussions when you’re a random DD. And last but not least, the trust of the developers is a big motivation (at least for me) to work effectively on those problems. See this post for my personal vote recommandation and see you in 3 days for the result of the election !

Oh great, the software patent debate is back. After a long and disgusting campaign where pro-software-patents lobbyists employed all kinds of semi-legal and undemocratic filthy tricks in order to introduce software patents in the EU behind our backs, the European Parliament decided by a large majority to reject the directive "on the patentability of computer implemented inventions" (a.k.a. software patents) in July 2005. Rightly so. It is beyond my imagination how a certain pro-software-patents commissioner (Charlie McCreevy) dares to restart the whole debate after such a clear defeat. Consultation and "public hearing" He has organized a "Consultation and public hearing on future patent policy in Europe" which pretends to collect your views on the software patent issue (which he's trying to introduce through the "Community Patent" backdoor). Alas, the "questionnaire" is inaccessible (it's only available in 5 languages, instead of all 25 (+2) languages of the EU member states), biased towards software patents, very obfuscated and unreadable for the general public. There's no independent working group which conducts or oversees the consultation, no independent studies and reading materials, no mentions of the negative implications of software patents, no public debate, nothing. Now, who would have expected that? The FSF Europe has published a response to the Patent Consultation Questionnaire, which highlights many of the problems. Similarly, the FFII has questioned the validity of the consultation procedure, and gives a very detailed explanation of all the serious flaws of the process. What can I do?

• First things first: the DEADLINE for answering the questionnaire and expressing your views is April 12, 2006!
• Answer the questionnaire! The FFII has prepared a short How to answer guide which you can use as a basis for your answer (per email, snail mail, or fax).
• Raise your concerns about the validity of the consultation process!
• Write your MEPs! Tell them what you think.
• Spread the word! I'm under the impression most people don't even know about this issue, yet!
• Put up banners. I know you all like pretty banners ;-)

Software patents suck (in case you didn't already know) Let me quote Donald Knuth on this:

I strongly believe that the recent trend in patenting algorithms is of benefit only to a very small number of attorneys and inventors, while it is seriously harmful to the vast majority of people who want to do useful things with computers.

(via MJ Ray)

For my hispanohablantes readers: this post is written in english since it’s gonna be syndicated into Planet Debian. Expect a post in spanish later in the day. If you can understand spoken spanish, I recommend you to hear the Free Software talk of M.Sc. Ernesto Hern ndez-Novich (Debian Maintainer) which ends noting several benefits of using Debian GNU/Linux. Available here. Update: other posts in spanish are already available in Planeta Linux Venezuela. Yesterday we (SOLVE, a Venezuelan Association of Free Software Users, Developers, Cooperatives and Entrepreneurs) had the opportunity to assist to a Free Software vs. Privative Software forum. This doesn’t sound amazing, indeed. But if you take into account that the Forum was held in the National Assembly (or House of Representatives, anyway I’ll call it AN) it gets better. Now, get this idea: the AN is having a forum to discuss a Law, and it’s listening to the parts involved. Let it sink for a minute. But what if the AN is also bringing this parts to a table to actually write the Law? This is how laws are made in our Country now (Damog always says we are terribly nationalistic. It may be true, indeed.) Anyway, we were there around 10 AM, in the Protocolar Room of the AN. The event was full-house, featuring two thirds of people supporting proprietary software (students between 17 and 20 years from the countryside and big entrepreneurs -and Microsoft, of course-) and one third of people supporting free software, including people working in the Government, students, cooperatives, developers, etc. The session was opened by Representative Luis Tasc n, which once was a great supporter of Free Software (now it seems the same for him, anyway he’s doing a great job changing the law-making roadmap) and the speakers were: Microsoft, the National Center for IT, Cavecom (the association of big software enterprises in Venezuela) in the Dark Side and Felipe P rez Mart (from SOLVE) and Ernesto Hern ndez-Novich (Sim n Bol var University) in the White Side. Kudos for IBM, in the Gray Side with Black Spots. The session of talks was incredibly amusing. The speakers started to change their opinions based on the last talk. So, this way, Berrizbeitia (Director, CNTI) tried to discuss Tascon (Representative), the Microsoft Brazilian guy tried to oppose Berrizbeitia, the guy from Cavecom fighted Microsoft (this guy was a complete moron, by the way: when he was told that a group of venezuelan people had developed translations into wayuunaiki he said that was useless since we only have 800 wayuu - native americans) the IBM-boy tried to say they were the best, Felipe Perez (SOLVE) tried to dismantle Berrizbeitia’s talk and finally Ernesto Heranndez-Novich roundkicked them all. The kids from Microsoft (wearing MSDN and VisualStudio shirts) said that Microsoft is a good company which is open-source and gives the code for free. I argued some of them that they were working free for Microsoft. They “hadn’t see it that way”. They also said the plain-ol’-good excuse that “free software was weaker since everyone can see it’s code”. They were changing their strategies and opinions sistematically as the Forum evolved. They argued no compatibility, security problems, and finally they arrived to their real reason to oppose Free Software. Several girls and boys (Daddy’s Boys, as we say to them) were arguing “no free speech” in the Country (which was amusing since this is the first time the National Assembly is writing the laws with the People) and that the Law was going to make them lose their years of University studies. Then, the most accurate of the interventions came, made by Rogmar Marin from Venezuelan Patents and Author Rights Office. He said that this event was all about the people controlling the State, not the State controlling the people. He cited two articles from the draft and the 3390 decree explicitly saying that Free Software was mandatory for Government (in the Decree it says the “National Public Administration” and in the Law it says the “National Public Power”) so he said that they were not going to lose their “bicoca” (a popular form to say “rivers of money”) since they still can program in whatever they want, just that the State has the right to decie the best for their people, and the best for their people was Free Software. This was the whole quid of the event. This is not about Free Software vs. Proprietary Software. This is not about Linux vs. Windows. This is not about IBM vs. Microsoft vs. Venezuelan Companies. This is about the best for the People (which is the maximum interest of the AN) and, in this case, the People was represented not only by the intellectual-closed-circles of Free and Proprietary Software, but by Ana Maria Morillo, from the Cambalache community in Puerto Ordaz, at the southern part of the Country. She said that their Community had absolutely no access to technology. They were poor and humble, and willing to learn. CVG Telecom, a State-based telecom company, installed a Nudetel (no, it’s not an ethic-relaxed phone operator. It stands for Telecommunications Endogen Development Kernel) in their Community, using Free Software. This was their first approach to technology and computers. They didn’t even know how to turn on a computer. Free Software helped them to approach the reality of computers. They felt prepared to use a computer, and proud of themselves. When they used privative software in other places, they needed to adapt to that technology. This demonstrates that Free Software is as easy as any Software. You need to adapt to it. The difference with Free Software is that you are free when you use it. The people from Cambalache appreciate that. Felipe Perez Marti talk was really good. He slapped Microsoft and opposed very roughly to the “technological neutrality” position of the CNTI Director, Jorge Berrizbeitia. Technological neutrality is a neo-liberal, right-wing doctrine which is the technological counterpart to laissez faire, laissez passer. The problem is that (Felipe is an economist, and a great mathematician) technological neutrality isn’t actual neutral. It happens under the conditions where the Smith’s “Invisible Hand” Theorem is valid, so, in a scenary of technological neutrality, the powerful always wins. So, Microsoft wins. He also noted the recent study funded by the United States Homeland Security and carried on by Carnegie Mellon, Coverity and Symantec, which stated that Proprietary Software had between 20 and 30 bugs per TLOC (thousand lines of code) while FOSS had only 0.434 bugs per TLOC. The Microsoft guy seemed astonished by the “discovery” and the students were offended by this. Great. What next? We brought CD’s for people, made Debian evangelization to several “disident” students, made a great cheer to every Free Software supporter, brought signs and SOLVE shirts. While the Microsoft dudes where more than twice times us, we were a coherent group which stayed until 1930 (they left at 1600, you know, it’s a Micro matter of Soft) and held great arguments, sometimes slapping the student’s moral, but definitely making our voice be heard after tenths of years being discriminated by companies, Universities and the Government. As a Debian Project volunteer, what’s your opinion about this? Is the State violating Free Speech taking this decisions? Does it have the right to take it? Is Free Software the best solution for the corporate environments of the Government, taking into account that it handles the citizen information? What are your general comments about this?

Thanks to the indefatigable and ever helpful Amaya, I'm now on Planet Debian! Thank you also for your nice introduction, Amaya! :-)

Just to drop a few words about myself and what I do:

I am an expatriate German and have lived in lovely Sydney for almost seven years now. I work as an IT professional mainly programming and maintaining SAP systems.

I have been a Debian user for about a decade now and finally decided to become a maintainer almost two years ago when I started to get involved with the mindi and mondo packages that form the quite neat, flexible and versatile disaster recovery suite Mondo Rescue.

It turns out that I got sucked into Mondo Rescue upstream development reasonably heavily mainly because it is quite a low-level tool and thus needs reasonably extensive tweaking to get it to work properly on Debian (or any other distribution for that matter). Upstream (at the time) wasn't all too fond of Debian, but I was given CVS commit access pretty early on which suited my fine as I could commit my fixes directly upstream.

Since about half a year ago, upstream has become much more active, mainly thanks to Bruno Cornec (sorry no link), the new lead developer. So, hopefully for Etch, we will have a much cleaned-up codebase and fully operational RAID and LVM2 support! In the meantime, give Mondo Rescue a go - it is quite cool as it is right now! ;-)

Hopefully, there will be some time soon to look after a few more (maybe less demanding) packages and to get more involved in Debian in general. Oh, and hopefully I'll be a real Debian developer soon - DAM approval on 27 Mar looks promising - thanks, Joerg! ;-)

[Note: this article was mostly written some weeks ago; I left it in my "to be edited" box and then promptly forgot about it. So any and all temporal references are way out of whack. Since originally writing this article, I have commenced an incremental rewrite of an in-house business management application from crazy-PHP (a common -- some may say overwhelmingly so -- dialect of the language noted for it's complete lack of any sort of good software development practices, such as the creation and use of functions (!)) into Rails. Articles on this effort will be appearing presently.] Almost immediately after I'd finished writing my previous discussion on why rewriting software is evil, I decided to make a little experiment. What I did was take a fairly well factored PHP application, and rewite (a portion of) it in Rails. My intent in this was not to produce a production-quality rewrite. I have no interest in proliferating yet more functionally equivalent clones on the world. Instead, I undertook the work simply to get a feel for (a) writing a whole, traditional, Rails app in a short space of time, (b) how quick Rails really was to produce an application, and (c) whether wholesale rewrites really are as boring and life-sucking as I imagined them to be. My methodology was this: with a small amount of knowledge of the target application (SysCP), the existing database schema and templates, and a weekend, rewrite as much of SysCP as I could in a close-as-possible reproduction of critical SysCP functionality. My summary results are: rewrites are as boring as I thought they would be, Rails is powerful but fairly complex and slightly buggy when you get down into it (especially if you're working from an existing -- possibly suboptimal -- database schema), but overall, Rails is Way Good Stuff. On the boredom aspect -- I had two days to write code. I had some domestic duties to attend to (walk the dog, visit the hardware store, help my wife with attaching a new bag rack to her bike, mow the lawn, etc) but on the whole, it was dedicated to programming. I've spent whole days (hell, 40 hour marathon stretches) cutting code before. I knew this wasn't a six-month deathmarch, but only a weekend experiment. Despite that, I feel that my motivation levels were lower than they normally are when coding. I can only imagine what it must feel like, two weeks into several months of hard core coding, knowing that you'll end up with what you had before, functionally speaking. If you are going to do the rewrite thing (and may the Flying Spaghetti Monster have mercy on your soul if you do), then pick the right project. SysCP is large masses of tangled PHP (is there any other kind?) but it has a fair amount of local and global structure once you get down to it -- for instance, it's quite well factored into business logic and display, and the code is broken down fairly logically by action handler, so you get entire source files that look like this:

  if ($action == 'edit')
   
    // 150 lines of twisty passage PHP
   
  else if ($action == 'new')
   
    // Another 150 lines
   
  // repeat for another few actions

and so on. The nice thing about this is that, if you have to look for how something works, you can almost certainly find it in one place in the source. Deciphering it might be another matter, but at least you've got something to start from. As I mentioned, the display in SysCP is pretty nicely split off from the logic -- a large number of templates, with common header/footer files, with some small parts in common templatettes. Some HTML is still generated within the actions, but due to the above action-based structure, it's usually fairly easy to identify all of the HTML that will be associated with a particular action and turn it into a coherent Rails template. I would dread doing a rewrite of the presentation layer of, say, IRM. It's idea of well-factored presentation is to separate print statements from logic by a blank line. To my great shame, I've had the reins of IRM for a year, and it's still this bad. I claim it's because I hate HTML coding with a vengeance, but I think I'm actually just scared to try and tame that particular monster. (Update: Martin Stevens has been doing some good work turning IRM's HTML into Savant templates. The only downside is that I can hear his manic laughter -- caused by IRM's insanity slowly infecting him -- all the way from England, and it's keeping me awake at night). I also had to re-learn that most hated but most important of lessons -- that, no matter how much reading you may have done, until you've cut chunks of code in a language or environment, you have no idea how it actually behaves in your brain. Specifically, I spent a fair amount of my alloted rewrite time learning a few little lessons in how Rails actually behaves, and all of it's cool little features. Of course, everyone is going to have this pain, and I've suffered it in every language that I've done any appreciable amount of programming in, but it's always a shock to the system that -- after all this time programming -- a new language still makes my brane tingle curiously for a while. Luckily, I'd read and digested all of both the Pickaxe (Programming Ruby) and AWDWR (Agile Web Development with Rails) so I knew what was possible, I just usually wasn't sure how exactly, so I spent a lot of time with my head in the books. Rails' little foibles also bit me in the bum more than once. For example, I spent over an hour (a no foolin' hour) trying to hunt down what I was doing stupid in my code to make Rails completely forget about the value of a couple of my fields. The answer turned out to be to restart Webrick (Rails' internal webserver for development testing), and the problem cleared right up. You could hear my screams of anguish from the moon (even through the vacuum of space -- it was a lot of anguish). Rails isn't the Final And Ultimate Solution To The Webapp Problem, but it's a good start. There is near-zero administrative bumf when you're writing a Rails app. Rails is fairly intelligent about working out what you want done from the world around it. Code generators (which produces sensible, minimalist templates -- not the ugly, unmaintainable behemoths produced by Visigoth Studio, which has given the whole code generation world a bad name) handle a lot of the low-level "oh bugger, I have to add a new file" feeling. It's very, very anal about project structure, but (in contrast to many other bondage-and-discipline frameworks I've looked at in the past) this structure seems almost comforting (maybe I'm just getting old and turning into a satisficer). What all this means is that you (a) don't write much code unless it moves you toward your goal, and (b) Common structure means that any Rails app will be fairly familiar to an incoming programmer. Unfortunately it also means that cunning wankers will, sooner or later, work out a whole pile of ugly tricks and contortions to get themselves out of Rails' comfortable-but-no-doubt-incompatible-with-many-people's-ways-of-thinking straitjacket, which I will (sooner or later) end up maintaining. Like many of Rails' (and Ruby's) features, though, I don't see them being any more abusable than most features of any programming language or environment -- and at least they're powerful and useful (unlike, say, register_globals, magic_quotes_gpc, magic single-character variables, mandatory indenting, or banning tabs as indent characters -- I thought I'd spread the slagging amongst lots of languages). Productivity-wise, although I was only just kicking off my Rails webapp knowledge, I felt I was doing fairly well. From experience, what I produced in my weekend was roughly on par with what I could produce in PHP in the same amount of time, had the situation been reversed. Considering that I have about 3 weeks of Ruby/Rails knowledge, and about 5 years of PHP experience, I think that's a big win. (Update: I've since produced a DNS management applet for work in about 6 hours billable time, and a virtual mail account application in about 12 hours, both using Rails. There isn't a hope in hell that I could have performed a similar feat in PHP, especially with the same amount of inherent flexibility that the Rails solutions contain). Overall, my impression of wholesale rewrites as being soul-sucking experiences stands. I suggest they be approached with the greatest of care, and only be permitted after an appropriate period of psychological counselling. There is plenty of code that needs rewriting (but why do I always have to find it?) but replacing it by doing an rm -rf on the source tree and starting again is not the answer.

... give me samba, please! I've recently been fighting windows file servers. They run on totally oversized hardware (P4-HT, 8 SATA drives in a 7-active-1-hotspare RAID-5 set) but still don't perform reasonably. (2.5 MB/s write performance is really bad, read performance is somewhat okay, though) And then it's so easy to confuse windows... seems like Windows can't handle directories ending with a dot. But you can easily create such folders over the network with SMB... name a folder "foo." and windows can't handle it any more. Or "...". Windows can't delete or rename it. And I'm talking NTFS, not plain old legacy FAT. So if you're going to hide data on a windows box, just store it using SMB in such a folder. And if you want to be really evil, write a script that autodiscovers writeable network shares around you and creates "You suck." folders there. Windows users will start running around screaming, but obviously you can't be the culprit, since you can't access Windows shares, can you? I've also been porting a python app to Windows. Python is so nice, and PyGTK works like a charm on windows. Now if Windows just wouldn't suck as much... for example, it doesn't have os.fork(). And it's I/O charset semantics are a complete mess. Once you don't use only 7-bit ASCII you're likely to go crazy. Seems like the console on Windows always uses codepage 437. The filesystem probably cp 1252. Windows internally claims to use 16-bit unicode. So if you want a python script to run on windows:

• Use string.decode(sys.getfilesystemencoding()) on any string you get from functions such as os.walk, that might depend on the filesystems character encoding
• Write your app in a fashion you can redirect your output easily to a logfile, because the console on windows is totally borked... "print" just can't print your filenames... or I havn't found the right magic yet.

I can recommend python for cross-platform coding however. The PyGTK GUIs are really nice, much nicer than all that java stuff out there. And these "issues" with windows aren't really Pythons fault, but Windows.

I just added Andree Leidenfrost to the Planet Debian feed. H ctor and I have been sponsoring his packages for mondo and mindi for a long time now, his New Maintainer proccess is currently in DAMnation and I think he will be a great maintainer one day (hopefully very soon). Andree is from Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, has a cat, and is a pleasure to work with.

Everybody say hi!

March 2006 traffic discussed audacity cdrtools cpp darcsweb doc-rfc-*? emacs21 eterm flamerobin fst gnoemoe grass ibpp imagemagick keyspan mozilla-* panda3d portaudio tetex-base subwiki ttf-dejavu wget wildmagic x264

You can run MSIE 6 on Linux quite well by now. Not that there is any reason to do so. (Okay, maybe if you are a webdesign professional you'll want to make sure your layout works fine with MIES, too.) So for me, this is more a demo on how far wine is. Here's how:

• Get a recent wine, e.g. 0.9.9 or 0.9.10
• Add a new user named "windows" to your system, because you don't want to risk running windows software like IE with your regular user account, will you? It could read your email!
• Add the freshly created windows user to the video and audio groups (adduser windows audio) if you want 3D or sound
• Use gksu -u windows xterm to open a shell as the windows user
• From Microsoft, download dcom98.exe and ie6setup.exe and save them to /tmp
• Type the following:

  cd
  wget http://www.kievinfo.com/2/ie6_overrides.reg
  wine regedit ie6_overrides.reg
  wine /tmp/dcom98.exe
  wine /tmp/ie6setup.exe
  exit
  

• You can now surprise your favourite linux-critics ("but linux won't run my $favourite_program, will it?") with a working Internet Exploder by running gksu -u windows wine C:\\Program\ Files\\Internet\ Explorer\\IEXPLORE.EXE - and it should not be able to read your email, much more secure than if you were running Windows.

Or, you could just be happy with not using Windows software. There is so much good FL/OSS software around, that I'm always seriously disappointed when I have to fight some windows software. I don't need it, do you?

Wow, some people need to learn how to ask questions. Just saw a posting to a mailing list that said (paraphrasing):

I need detailed instructions on how to do easy task foo, and then fairly involved task bar. I want the whole command process including how to do trivial thing X, unnecessary thing Y, as I tried and could not get it work properly at all. And also irrelevant question Z.

Now, I don't know about you, but a flat-out demand like that doesn't exactly give me the warm fuzzies and make me want to help -- in fact, it makes me feel like a CentOS developer. Practically speaking, I know (roughly) the answer to this person's question, but it'd take me a couple of minutes to check I had the right answer, and to write it all up. Unfortunately my motivation levels for unpaid, gratuitous assistance just dropped to zero (coincidentally, as I was reading his message). Time to give the Internet a healthy dose of the "How to ask questions the smart way" salts, methinks.

Skype (that shady VoIP application which may eventually turn your computer into a "supernode" and use it for forwarding dozens of calls, that is packed with tons of anti-debugging techiques and tries to be very very shifty) seems to be incompatible with my Gnome. With the gnome session-manager, to be precise. Because I can run skype, if I launch it using

SESSION_MANAGER= /usr/bin/skype

Anyway, if you want to use VoIP, please use a standard protocol such as SIP. German DSL providers will currently give you DSL modems for free when you sign up with them that have SIP built-in, and where you can attach your regular phone (even ISDN) and do least-cost-routing. Some even give you a flatrate to landlines with their DSL service. And Freemail providers such as Web.de, Freenet.de and SIP specialists such as SipGate offer you a true phone number for use with SIP for free. There is tons of SIP software available. Linux users might want to try kphone (for KDE), linphone (GTK) or ekiga (former GnomeMeeting, Gnome). All of which should be included in your favourite Linux distribution (okay, maybe except for ekiga which has licensing issues with the OPAL library) Windows users might want to check out (I havn't tried it myself) Gizmo. I bet there is OSX software, too. Tons.

March 2006 traffic discussed audacity cdrtools cpp darcsweb doc-rfc-*? emacs21 eterm flamerobin fst gnoemoe grass ibpp imagemagick keyspan mozilla-* panda3d portaudio tetex-base subwiki ttf-dejavu wget wildmagic x264

Well, we have enough lightning talks now to fill the space without anyone having to speak for more than ten minutes. I know I said you have until the 15th to make proposals, but I sorta forgot that I have to come up with something resembling a paper for this, which will probably be a list of the talks that will be given. And it's due on the 6th. So if you have been thinking about proposing a lightning talk, I suggest at least emailing me soon even if you're not ready to add it to the wiki page yet, so that I can pencil it into the schedule. I've marked the talks that I am currently planning on accepting as "accepted" on the wiki, but this is still tenative until the 15th.

I recently had my Debian menu in GNOME disappear for reasons I could not explain. Since this is where the launcher for many of the applications one installs are typically housed, it was quite the inconvenience. I posted to the debian-user mailing list, and asked around on IRC in #debian and #debian-devel, but the most I ever received was a suggestion to run 'update-menus' from a command line. Having done that within the first 30 minutes of the issue’s appearance to no avail, I resigned myself to making do without the menu for the time being. Uninstalling and reinstalling the menu package was of no help. Reinstalling the gnome package yielded no joy, either. I could examine the contents of /var/lib/gnome and see that the menu structure was being built, it just wasn’t making into the menu. Through some poking around and talking with some folks who emailed me off-list to admit that they, too, had experienced this and were at a loss, the mystery has been solved. Apparently during some upgrade to packages, the menu-xdg package had been removed. Reinstalling it restored the menu to its formerly visible and altogether handy state. I posted a follow-up reply to debian-user in hopes of it helping posterity. This issue must seem like such a stupid or neophyte question that some people refrain from replying to a mailing list post about it. For those who knew the answer (I assume someone did), the question must have somehow seemed unworthy of reply. However, looking at the menu package, I don’t even see a Suggests entry for menu-xdg. It would be a shame if there are other people facing this issue with no resolution, so I am openly admitting that I had this problem in the hopes that it helps someone else out. Perhaps I should file some sort of wishlist bug, but my knowledge of the menu system is still narrow; maybe I will. I find myself periodically expanding the Debian menu on my desktop just to look at it and enjoy that warm, cozy feeling I get from having it back. 8^)

I was at my monthly Java ™ user group meeting tonight, and during the pre-meeting discussion our president Burr Sutter asked a question he usually asks: “So, anybody working on anything exciting?” This typically is taken as “does anyone have a really cool Java ™ project that they are working on right now that would be neat for us to hear about?” I usually sit there, not saying anything. But tonight, nobody had anything much, and I finally spoke up about free runtimes for Java ™. I told them that great progress is being made in the free runtimes for Java ™ arena, particularly in GNU Classpath and Kaffe. After my update, Burr asked a very good question: “Why would you work on a free, open runtime for Java ™ programming language?” My answer follows. You would work on it in order to have a free alternative to a platform governed by the SCSL. You work on a free runtime for Java ™ because a free alternative would be better than what we have now; a closely-guarded and largely ingrown platform. You work on improving a free alternative because you are free to participate without that project demanding (via a legally-binding license) that you can only work with them from here on out, and that nothing you learn while devoting your time and energy to them (without compensation) can be used elsewhere. If you do share it elsewhere, and that project finds out, their legal team will make an example out of your ass. You prefer a free alternative runtime for the same reason that you prefer the free alternatives to the non-free frameworks and platforms available for use on Java(TM). Why is Hibernate so popular? Why is Spring so popular? Why is EJB not? Because innovation by committee, while better than a ruthless, unaccountable corporate entity concerned solely with its own betterment, is still not as good as free, open cooperation and collaboration. Is this idea so new? Don’t we try to teach kids that sharing and honesty is the Right Thing ™ to do? I will probably flesh this out as an article at some point, but I wanted to get something written down tonight, while it’s still fresh in my mind.