I would like to applaud Colin Watson s excellent post on bad bug triage technique.
Thank you, Colin. It needed to be said I have experienced most of those problems myself, in Debian.
My message Intent to package a Debian control file grepper to WNPP and debian-devel is today a decade old. Apparently, the message predates the invention of the acronym ITP for Intent to Package (the first instance I can find is from May 1999).
The changelog reveals that the first upload was on March 1st, 1999. There is unfortunately no record of when the package hit unstable the first time, since dinstall did not send Installed (or even the later Accepted) mails to an archived mailing list at that time. I suppose I might have it in some old private email archive, but more likely it s just gone. Similarly, the first fixed bug (#35527) predates BTS archiving and is now lost.
The grep-dctrl program came out of repeated awkward grepping of the dpkg available and status files. Eventually I decided there must be a better way, and failed to find any canned solutions (I was later pointed to sgrep, which didn t look useful enough, and even later to dpkg-awk, but I had already committed to my own solution by then). I wrote a simple C program that processed these files as a sequence of records and did simple substring searches in each record. I rapidly added support for field selection, regular expressions and output field selection. By version 1.3a of March 2000 (which was released with Debian 2.2 potato ), the program was as good as it was going to get with one exception.
Make disjunctive searches possible, said my TODO file those days. Conjunctive searches (that is, AND-searches) were possible even then by using more than one grep-dctrl command in a pipeline. Disjunctive (OR) was not possible. The problem was not so much that it would be hard to program (although the program s internal structure wasn t very good, to be honest, making extensive changes difficult), it was more a problem of coming up with a good command line syntax.
Another thing that bothered me with the old grep-dctrl was how to implement Ben Armstrong s feature request. Again, the programming part wasn t the problem, the problem was coming up with a good, clean semantics for the feature.
It was finally the appearance of ara in 2003 that got me moving again. Ara s author proudly compared eir program to grep-dctrl, claiming that my program did not do disjunctive searches while ara does. Competition being good for the soul, I took it as a challenge. In April 2003 I announced a complete rewrite of grep-dctrl, which was completed in January 2004 (the 2.0 release).
The rewrite changed the way the command line was handled even though the usual Unix switch style is still used, the command line is regarded as a language with a parser (first an operator-precedence parser, then a recursive-descent one). The command line is transformed into an interpreted stack-based language which drives the actual grepping.
The rewrite also generalised the internal data structures into an internal library which could be used to write other tools. The first such tool was sort-dctrl (introcuded in 2.7, June 2005), which was soon followed by tbl-dctrl (2.8, July 2005). The later appearance of join-dctrl (2.11, August 2007) finally allowed me to close Ben Armstrong s longstanding feature request mentioned above.
The unpronounceable part of the names, dctrl , is an abbreviation for Debian control , which I decided to call the file format used by dpkg. Some people call it a RFC-822 format, but that really is a misnomer, since the differences between dctrl and RFC-822 outweigh the mainly superficial similarities (and the historical connection). I did consider calling my program dpkg-grep, but I didn t feel like I had the right to invade the dpkg namespace. The later rename to dctrl-tools reflects the fact that there are now several tools, grep-dctrl being just the oldest.
I have several plans for the dctrl-tools suite, but my time and energy are mostly claimed by other responsibilities. The suite is currently team-maintained, but unfortunately the team is not very active. I would love it if I weren t the most active one with my busy schedule! Feel free to pop in on the dctrl-tools-devel mailing list, and to look at the Git repository and the todo list. If you decide to participate, please follow the rules.
Rules of the game: If a Debian General Resolution ballot asked me to choose between eat shit and die , I d vote for Further Discussion.
From the NaNoWriMo TOS:
The Office of Letters and Light reserves the right to change the terms and conditions hereof without prior notice at any time and any such change shall be effective immediately upon posting the changed Agreement on NaNoWriMo.org. The effective date indicated at the top of this page will be updated to indicate that changes have been made. You should, as a condition of continuing to access NaNoWriMo.org and use its features, periodically review the terms of this Agreement and such continued access and/or use shall be deemed to be conclusive evidence of your agreement to be bound by any such changed Agreement.No, I will not write the Office of Letter and Light a blank check.
Velisurmaaja was published in Elias L nnrot’s collection of traditional Finnish poems, the Kanteletar in 1840. It bears some similarity to the British ballad Edward. What follows is the original text, lifted from the tenth Gutenberg edition of Kanteletar juxtaposed with my English translation (which is more concerned with getting the message across than being good poetry). However, I am assured the translation is not beyond redemption, so here it is:
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I just wrote this in my user page in the English wikipedia:
Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho is no longer actively working on Wikipedia. While I approve, in principle, all the new and stricted editor policies, it is emotionally very demanding to be challenged under new policies for edits that were made in good faith under older policies. There just aren’t enough positive aspects to doing Wikipedia to offset that very big negative aspect.Some of the challenges toward my edits have happened in the English Wikipedia, and some in the Finnish Wikipedia. I have felt like this for about a year now – it’s probably time to make it official. I may make minor edits, or write in talk pages occasionally, but any substantial edits I won’t bother with any more.
I sometime wish I had access to an encyclopedia, written in wiki style so that it could be updated by anybody, that had an article about every SF story and novel ever written, and every fictional concept (like ansible, hyperspace etc) ever used in an SF story, and which crosslinked these in a useful manner.
Often, once I’ve had a worldbuilding idea, I want to go read some of the key stories that use the same or a similar idea, so that I could see what others have already done with the idea. Only it turns out there are no indexes that tell me “antigravity has been used in these ways in SF stories, and it is a central concept in these stories” etc.
Anybody know of something like this?
From Tuesday thingers, via Jules Jones:
Here is the Top 100 Most Popular Books on LibraryThing. Bold what you own, italicize what you’ve read. Star what you liked. Star multiple times what you loved!(more…)
Today is the second International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day. The call is for the publication of professional-quality fiction freely on the web. I’m not a pro, and I am not qualified to judge the quality of my own work, so this quite isn’t properly a IPSTD contribution, but it is offered in the day’s spirit. Enjoy.
I started a bread journal. It seemed that I was always taking pictures of my breads and showing them to people so I decided this is the best thing to do — people can look at or ignore it as they choose.
I finished reading the electronic advance reader’s copy last night. Overall, I’m glad I read it, though it was quite infuriating.
The book is set about a decade in the future. In the book’s world, anthropogenic climate change and global warming turned out to be a hoax; instead, a global cooling (caused by solar variation) was beginning. At the same time, the bird flu (H5N1) became a major pandemic. The United States was governed by the democrats and “the bitch” (a thinly disguised demonisation of a certain democrat presidential candidate), who handled everything wrong.
The book is a fictional autobiography (or a series of blog posts) by a US army officer who became famous during those turbulent times, first commanding a company finding its own way back home after being abandoned in the Middle East (the later stuff I won’t describe to avoid spoiling the book). The Last Centurions is a television propaganda show featuring his unit in action, intended to counterspin anti-military news reports.
Several chapters early in the book are pure political ranting by the narrator: how anthropogenic climate change is false, how socialized medicine is bad (and causes lots of unnecessary deaths during a pandemic), how republicans are good and democrats are evil et cetera et cetera et cetera. (Then again, it’s a Ringo book, political ranting is a given.) Given my political persuasion, it was not easy to read: I kept yelling, “where are your footnotes!” I actually tried to verify some of the claims the narrator makes, and found nothing persuasive. Still… in the end, it all turned out to be justified. It explains the character, and it explains the world. Perhaps it should be a bit trimmed during editing (remember, I read the author’s submission draft which has not been through the usual editing and copyediting cycles), but a lot of it is necessary for the story.
The premise that anthropogenic global warming is a false theory made it very hard for me to suspend disbelief. However, given that premise (and the premise of a totally incompetent government in the USA), the story is compelling and interesting. There’s a quite a bit of military action as we have become to expect from Ringo. The beginning grabbed me, – apart from the couple of chapters of exposition – held my attention tightly to the end, and left me shell-shocked.
I especially liked the wife’s edits. I’m sorry that we didn’t get to see their courtship.
I don’t know if I’ll ever want to re-read the book, but I’m still rating it at 5/5. The book is now available as an e-ARC, and will be released as a regular book in August. There is a companion site at www.thelastcenturion.com.
My Fujitsu-Siemens laptop’s power adapter became unreliable. I contacted support, described the symptoms. A week later, I had a new adapter.
Thank you, Fujitsu-Siemens. You rock.
Robert A. Heinlein: Starship Troopers (Putnam, 1959)At 9pm Thursday my heart went into overdrive. At the emergency room I was diagnosed with acute atrial fibrillation and was scheduled for electric cardioversion but the problem went away on its own (as it sometimes does) so I was discharged in late afternoon yesterday, after a 16 hours long hospitalisation with no food or drink (cardioversion requires anesthesia). A noninvasive echocardiogram detected no faults in my heart, and no reason for the attack was identified. I am told this is a good thing and means I have a very good prognosis (it is likely that the problem will never recur). I feel fine now.
The hospital visit was educational. I learned stuff about hospital procedures and some things about the equipment they use there, and met various people. I’m glad I had to make the call (if you have to go to the ER, it’s best if it’s for something nontrivial so they don’t feel you’re wasting their time but still something relatively dangerless).
A bit more detailed report in Finnish is available.
In rough chronological order, with capsule reviews. I don’t think I’ve missed any, but it is possible that I have.
If you look through the list (behind the cut), you’ll see I read mostly Baen books nowadays. There’s a simple explanation: Baen is (almost) the only publisher that does real e-books, and I tend to avoid the inconvenience of paper books where I can. Still, there’s about a hundred titles on the list.
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Tollef Fog Heen asks:
Also, why does bloglines link to the completely wrong place on dburrow’s posts? It links to http://planet.debian.org/tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-$blah rather than the real URL.I think I know why. I don’t know which Planet feed Tollef is reading, but a look at the Planet Debian RSS 2.0 feed is illuminating. Looking up Daniel’s entry, we can find the following sub-element:
<guid>tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12729767.post-4989856010680867140</guid>Looking at the RSS 2.0 specification, we can find the following note:
If the guid element has an attribute named “isPermaLink” with a value of true, the reader may assume that it is a permalink to the item, that is, a url that can be opened in a Web browser, that points to the full item described by the element. An example: <guid isPermaLink=”true”>http://inessential.com/2002/09/01.php#a2</guid> isPermaLink is optional, its default value is true. If its value is false, the guid may not be assumed to be a url, or a url to anything in particular.Thus the Planet RSS 2.0 feed claims that tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12729767.post-4989856010680867140 is a valid URL. There is no basis for this claim in Daniel’s Atom feed, as that string only occurs inside an id element, and RFC 4287 specifies that the string cannot be assumed to be dereferencable.
Top posters in a few Debian-related Planets:
Sometimes I think this should be renamed Planet Buxy.$ planet-scores.sh Planet Debian-FR : 19 Rapha l Hertzog 4 Roland Mas 3 Jean-Christophe Dubacq 2 Gr gory Colpart 2 Alexis Sukrieh
Newly added contributors to that planet have all their recent articles aggregated, not only the ones they wrote since they were added.Planet Debian-FR (utilisateurs) : 10 Julien Candelier 8 Emilien Macchi 4 Guilhem Bonnefille 3 Shams Fantar 1 Rapha l Hertzog 1 Olivier Berger (perso) 1 Jean-Christophe Dubacq 1 Jean-Baptiste H tier (djib) 1 Eric Veiras Galisson
Planet "Christian loves rugby".Planet Debian : 40 Christian Perrier 2 Russell Coker 2 Raphael Geissert 1 Wouter Verhelst 1 Steve Kemp 1 Romain Francoise 1 NOKUBI Takatsugu 1 Michal iha 1 John Goerzen 1 Joey Schulze 1 Gerfried Fuchs 1 Fathi Boudra 1 Enrico Zini 1 Emanuele Rocca 1 Dirk Eddelbuettel 1 David Welton 1 Christine Spang 1 Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho 1 Adam Rosi-Kessel
I know I have an encoding problem on some planets, but that script is a very basic curl+shell+sed+grep+recode+sort+uniq pipeline, and I only use it for the amusement value. Maybe I'll recode it with a proper RSS parser some day if I feel utterly bored.debian-community.org : 4 Holger Levsen 3 Andrew Donnellan 2 Evgeni Golov 1 Wolfgang Lonien 1 Rapha l Hertzog 1 Martin Albisetti 1 Marcos Marado 1 Jean-Christophe Dubacq 1 Cord Beermann 1 Benjamin A'Lee 1 Andreas Putzo $
I am a leader by default, only because nature does not allow a vacuum.Edit: Turns out that’s a Desmond Tutu quote. Still, it’s interesting to see it as a spam subject line.
David N. Welton writes about the word “blog”:
[…] to me it sounds more like something you have to call a plumber to deal with after having drained a couple of bottles of some caustic agent down the toilet, in an unsuccessful attempt to eliminate the “blog”
Next.