Via this article in French (which I found a very interesting read, btw) I found out that the version of Woody Guthrie s song This Land Is Your Land that was sung in Obama s celebration was the unabridged one, and that Pete Seeger himself (aged 89 now) was on stage to sing it together with Bruce Springsteen. You can see in the video he was visible moved, and that rocks. According to the post in the Le Monde Diplomatique linked above, Obama also signed a couple years ago the petition to give the Nobel Peace Prize to Seeger.

Many things could be said about Leonardo DiCaprio. Today, he just deserves an entry in this blog for pulling out, at the age of 18, the character of Arnie Grape, the mentally challenged brother of Johnny Depp in What s Eating Gilbert Grape.

Asheesh Laroia explained how to use ssh as a SOCKS proxy if you re behind a firewall that allows you to ssh to some machine not restricted by it: ssh -D. (I don t know how common such firewall setups would be, but the one at my Uni does indeed allow ssh to the outside over authenticated wireless.) With -D, ssh will listen in a local port, and behave as a SOCKS proxy. Set it up like this:

  % ssh -N -f -D localhost:4444 external-machine.example.com

And then you can point your SOCKS-capable application at localhost:4444. Chances are, however, that the application you want to use doesn t support SOCKS (like, in my case, Git). You can use tsocks then, which LD_PRELOADS a library that will divert an app s TCP traffic through the SOCKS proxy. To use it:

  % cat >~/.tsocks.conf
  server = 127.0.0.1
  server_type = 5
  server_port = 4444
  % tsocks git pull

AIUI, this is better than setting -L forwarding because you don t need a forward for each host whose port you want to access. If you re interested in starting ssh in SOCKS mode from .ssh/config, the configuration item is DynamicForward.

I ve been subscribed to the Git mailinglist for three weeks now, and I ve finally seen in action what was already imaginable by looking at their git log history: they not only review the code for the patches that go in (as in many other projects, that is), but also review the accompanying commit messages, in order to ensure they meet certain quality standards. More than once already I ve seen an otherwise-fine patch get resubmitted in order to gain a more meaningful or thorough commit message. I m sure there are more projects that do this, but alas, I haven t been in any of them (nor in that many projects in general, for that matter). It s very exciting for me to see it in action, because quality commit messages are high in my Grokking VCS list. Ideally, a commit message conveys all the necessary information the maintainer of a project needs to understand your patch and its benefits, in particular those bits that don t fit as comments in the code. If you have to accompany your patch with rationales, wouldn t it make sense to include a condensed version of them in your commit message? If you re writing messages for a project of your own, please think of future people dealing with your code, particularly if it s a public project. (It takes discipline in addition to being convinced of it, though.) Commit messages are also great because they allow you to be verbose, without cluttering the code with information that s only relevant in the context of the change, and not to the final code. There is however an (actually-not-so-fine) line between what should be in the commit message, and what should be as comments in the code, and I think we commit message enthusiasts should watch out for that. Take, for example, 39c19ce. I think a short comment saying Don t call rev-parse for each blamed line would have been a perfect companion. There must be somewhere a document explaining with more detail what makes a good commit message. If you would recommend any, please let me know (but I m not interested in documents that explain how to format your commit messages).

Romain and Zack have a couple graphs of Vcs-* fields that show that Git usage is growing, but that Subversion s is still way higher. Here s another take on the matter:

• as of today, there are 3348 packages with Vcs-Svn in unstable, and 1145 with Vcs-Git.
• if we group those packages by maintainer and we keep the top 20 for each VCS, 6 of them are teams for Git, versus 16 for Subversion.
• if we count Vcs-* fields without looking at packages maintained by teams, there are 935 packages with Vcs-Svn, and 724 with Vcs-Git.

Conclusion: s/A better CVS/Your lowest common VCS of choice/. (It ll be interesting to see what KDE and GNOME do about this.)

A while ago I dropped from a number of IRC channels, in a quest for a more productive work environment. The problem was that I look at my IRC window often, and if I see any windows with activity, I will go and read them. Recently I ve wanted to hang around in #git, because I was writing some (minor) patches and thought it d be nice to be available there. This is a fairly active channel, and whenever there was activity, I couldn t help go and look, knowing in advance it d be (mostly) uninteresting for me. So I concluded that what I really needed was to tell irssi: don t tell me there s activity in #git, unless somebody highlights me. And this is precisely what the activity_hide_targets option does. Just set it to a list of channels you want to ignore. This has also allowed me to return to a couple Debian channels that I had dropped, and maybe I ll add an extra two back.

A friend of mine send me the other day a link to The C Days of Y2K (youtube or mp3, and lyrics). I suppose it s funnier if you know the original carol, but I enjoyed it nevertheless. It also reminded me that I should attend non-Debian conferences sometime.

This unofficial GR was brought to you with the help of:

• Julio Bustamante
• Placebo
• Rebekah del Rio
• Sigur R s
• Queen
• Will Young
• Julie Andrews

Random Python 3 stuff that rocks or otherwise makes me happy (some of it in Python 2.6 already):

• initializing the default encoding from LANG or LC_CTYPE. Welcome to the 21st century.
• the new super(). Ever renamed a class that used super? Not painful anymore.
• abstract base classes. Mixin methods FTW!
• only new style classes. I ll need time to stop inheriting from object everywhere, though.
• the .setter/.deleter attributes of properties. Nice idea.
• the nonlocal statement. No more abusing of lists to break lexical scoping.
• set literals. Because set([1, 2, 3]) is just ugly.
• 1/2 returning 0.5. For those of us who can t learn to type calc instead of python.

Ah, seems the days of posting snow pictures in Planet Debian have gone, and in any case I don’t have pictures, but I’ll blog about snow nevertheless. It never snows in Alicante, my home town. It’s by the sea in the south-east of Spain, and the winters are very mild there. I had only seen or touched snow once in my life, when I was about 7 and there was an outing in school to go and see the snow in some nearby mountain. I’m told it was crappy snow anyway. Today we returned from the QA meeting in Extremadura, arriving in Madrid really early in the morning. Knowing this, I had arranged to stay with friends Sunday and Monday, spending the night at agi@’s place. The house is in some mountain, at about 1800 meters over sea level, and there was plenty of snow. There was also a slope, and a plastic sled, so we did the obvious. It was fun, it made me happy, and I should pay Alberto another visit some other time with more appropriate clothing.

There have been 470 mails during the last month in the DFSG violations threads on -vote@, but only 10 posters have contributed more than 10 mails so far:

85 Robert Millan
51 Manoj Srivastava
18 Pierre Habouzit
18 Josselin Mouette
16 Thomas Bushnell BSG
14 Stephen Gran
13 Frans Pop
13 Ean Schuessler
13 Adeodato Simo
12 Russ Allbery

Is someone working on a summary of the discussions? I would really hate it if we were asked to vote on this, with a “for details, see the -vote@ archives” footnote. (Robert Millan sounds like a perfect candidate for this task :-) )

After a summer during which I didn’t get to watch many movies, I’m back on track now. Here we go:

• A Raisin in the Sun: this is a magnificent film, almost a masterpiece. Story of a family when a large sum of money comes to disrupt their lives. You should watch it.
• Happiness: this one is definitely a masterpiece, but it’s quite likely you should not watch it: many people find it very disturbing. If you think you could take it, though, I say go for it.
• There Will Be Blood: it is a good film, and it wasn’t a waste of my time, but I do believe it’s hyped. If you ask me, I think it’s so high in the IMDB list because of its last scene.
• Ataque verbal: if you’re into Spanish cinema, and are fond of conversations, you may enjoy it quite much: a film consisting of 7 conversations. It isn’t perfect, but it’s different and cool (I’ve watched it twice, actually). The director, Miguel Albaladejo, has some other fine films as well.
• The Remains of the Day: England, 1930; Anthony Hopkins is a butler, and Emma Thompson the housekeeper of the house. Ivory at his best. I had watched this film a couple years ago; having enjoyed it quite a lot, I went and read the book recently. Reading the book was a wonderful experience, so I decided to watch the film again. It is a very good and faithful script, but I think I enjoyed it this second time better. Regarding the book, I wrote some bits about it here; from now on I hope to write something about books I read in this space. By the way, the cover of the book has some amusement in it, see if you can spot it.

This one didn’t arrive on time for the previous post, so here it is now. I’ve been meaning to find alternatives to Konsole for a bit now. I’ve always wanted the ability to click on URLs in my terminal emulator and have them open on my browser, which the Konsole in KDE3 can’t do. When I learnt that KDE4’s Konsole can, I ooh-ooh-ooh’ed and I gave it a try. But whilst KDE3’s Konsole is a very good application, amazing, even, I found KDE4’s to suck in a variety of ways, including speed. And then my quest began. I gave rxvt-unicode a try yesterday, and so far I’m very satisfied. I quickly managed to configure it to my taste; it has tabs, which I can’t do without, and you can click on URLs as well. These two features are implemented via Perl extensions because, yes, rxvt is extendable with Perl. These two extensions are not very configurable, though, so in order to have the Next tab/Previous tab movements use my preferred keys, I had to edit the Perl source and place it under $HOME.

From the “Software that recently rocked my pants” department:

• Bitlbee: talk to your Jabber/MSN/Yahoo contacs with your IRC client. I was aware of its existance, never found the time to start using it. Shame on me! I run it on my laptop rather than on a server.
• Matplotlib: plotting library for Python, and I find the results very pretty. Looks quite powerful, though I had slight problems figuring out how to do certain stuff.
• Schroot with LVM: brilliant, particularly if you make use of sessions.
• KVM with libvirt and virt-manager: seems to work well, almost as easy as VirtualBox, and (tada!) thanks to VNC you get detaching for your guests (no more Windows reboots if you restart your Xserver).

I also thank Martin F. Krafft for helpfully updating the encryption howto I followed for my previous laptop to mention that using a single encrypted device and LVM on top of it is (possibly) preferred nowadays. And to Simon McVittie for his idea of a small unencrypted Debian installation for recovery purposes in laptops without an optical drive. P.S.: I can’t believe this shit about blogging every day in November.

I’ve read in a couple posts already that these changes to membership in the project would be appropriate to manage with a DEP: I agree. I agree, not because I think the end result should be a DEP (maybe it should be a GR after all), but because of the workflow the DEP procedure proposes. The key, in my opinion, is the driver (or drivers): somebody without an agenda but trusted by the project who should take care of fostering the discussion, summarizing it regularly while keeping all differences of opinion mentioned, helping the discussion get somewhere, and talking with people in the relevant roles if they, by any chance, would not participate in the discussion directly. The result would then be a solution which everybody has had a say on, and a text that can be passed by GR with an overwhelming majority. Or, in the worst case, a GR where most of the points are common between options, but that has a couple choices for the most conflicting points, should that be needed. I would love to see this happen first thing after Lenny: this can be so exciting if done well!

Every night I can, I sit with my sister and we read half a chapter of Le petit Nicolas, in French. I read aloud, and she fixes my pronunciation. She says I’m doing well! I’m also getting to understand increasingly more and more (she helps along the way with that). I’m not sure whether it’s the magic of being written in French, or what, but I’m finding it very nice, and we laugh a lot. Maybe if I’d be reading it in a language I was fluent in it would not be the same. But, if you ever end up learning French, be sure to give it a try!

Rules:

• One song per request.
• Bonus points for for Message-Ids with “GZ” in them, eg.: <20081009102833.GZ7010@chistera.yi.org>

(ObQuote: “In every job that must be done, there is an element of fun. You find the fun and... snap, the job’s a game!”)

I’m practically 4 courses away from finishing my degree (the course I failed in June, I passed a couple weeks ago). 4 courses which I loathe, but that I’ll get done this year. After them, I still have to prepare something akin to a “final project”, but that doesn’t worry me much, since it’ll be something I enjoy. Apart from these 4 courses, I also have to take a couple non-computer science ones, whichever I want. I’ve decided to go for French lessons, since I’ve always wanted to learn French. I’m very excited for this. Today was my first day. I had some previous, incredibly rudimentary notions of French already, but that didn’t help not to find it a bit daunting at first: there’s so much to learn. (I can’t remember at all how I felt when I started studying English, but alas, I was a kid, when you’re taught stuff you know zero about.) I decided, though, to look it from a positive note, and make a pleasant experience out of it: not everyday one has the opportunity to dive into something completely new. I remained excited for the rest of the class, and I’m sure my classmates thought, “Why is this guy stupidly smiling from time to time?” (These are courses designed for freshmen, and I felt out of place. It seems 8 years it’s a lot of time.) Incidentally, my sister speaks French, and she’s lent me some books and dictionarys from her time as a student. Some of these were books from Le Petit Nicolas series; I had read all of them during my childhood, in Spanish. I glanced through the French versions, and recognizing every single picture in them as something I had already seen, albeit fifteen years ago, was a very weird feeling.

For some time now I’ve been wanting to find a window manager that allows me to improve my current “implementation” of my workflow. I currently use KWin. Since I’m a bit overwhelmed by the number of window managers available, some of them being perhaps too flexible, and since what I want is very, very specific, I thought I’d go for a lazy-web post. My workflow is simple: I don’t do tiling, and my sole wish is that a simple key combo (Mod + one letter) can activate the window designated by that combo. Ideally I can statically assign combos to each application (or, in general, window properties) from the configuration file, but I can also use a special combo to change on-the-fly the current keybindings for a particular window. At the moment I’m “faking” this with several methods combined:

• keeping the number of windows in my main virtual desktop low, so that one or two Alt-Tab always bring me to the right window.
• using a terminal emulator with tab support, so that I can switch terminal context on a separate level than Alt-Tab.
• assiging a simple key combo to “next/previous virtual desktop”, and have in that one a number of small applications I only seldomly use.
• minimizing to the system tray applications that support it, so that they are one click away (eg. Akregator).
• using, when available, a global key shortcut to show/hide a window (eg. Minirok, or previously Amarok).

In my new world, I’d be able to just type Mod+M to activate Minirok, Mod+A to activate Akregator, Mod+B for the browser, and several others keybindings for each instance of my terminal emulator (one for my -release work, one for my ongoing Uni work, another for my ongoing programming work). I really, really want that’s it’s just one Mod plus a key, because I’m convinced that’d work out very well for me (though it should offer a way to cycle among all windows as well). As for the rest, ability to display Kicker (KDE’s panel) gracefully would be a plus. Please mail me with your suggestions, but I’d appreciate if you could include pointers to the relevant parts of the documentation, or even examples, of how to accomplish what I want. I’ve tried eg. awesome 3, and I only managed to get lost in Lua-land.

I just receive The Mail (tm) from weasel, and I can't be happier that this (mh, is my life too boring?): I just become a DD!!!!!!! Please join my happiness in this achievement!!

I'd like to thank all the people helped me in my way to Debian, both for a long and fruitful collaboration or for just a mail exchange, both for kind people and rude ones (ah, we all have our own character, so never mind :) ) and in doing this I'm sure I'll forget someone (so please excuse me for this, you're in my mind tough): so thank you Tony, Bernd, Piotr, Thomas, Vincent, Adeodato, Lucas, Luk, Sune, Joerg (yeah, I'm brave :) ), Paul, and many others!

Of course, congrats go also to my other colleagues that "laureate" with me in Mid September DD Class :D