Here in Dublin I’ve been more “formally” introduced to the world of board games. Back at home, a friend had a copy of Settlers of Catan, and we used to play every now and then, but that was it. Since I arrived I’ve been attending to weekly “board game nights”, and I’ve had the opportunity to play several more, most of which I liked a lot. I’ve played Agricola, Caylus, and Power Grid, all very nice. I’ve also played Race for the Galaxy, which I didn’t like much at first, but which I’ve come to enjoy a bit more as of lately. (All four are in the top-10 of Board Game Geek.) I’m going to miss this when I get back, particularly since my friends will most certainly not be up to weekly games. I should investigate to see if some kind of board games club exists in Alicante. If you know of one, or are reading this and would be interested in organizing something, please let me know.

I’m sure this was an honest mistake, but it sure was amusing:

This week has been a little hectic, as I’ve been struggling with testing different versions of the GNU/Linux kernel.

Oh dear, more than a month without posting here. Let’s throw in some random updates:

• I’m in Dublin for the summer, doing an internship at Google. I’m not exactly thrilled by the project they’ve assigned me to, mostly because it’s C++, but oh well. We’ll see later about getting a full-time position.
• I’m not going to be at DebConf. Not only I got the “amount unable to fund yourself” box backwards (40% vs 60%), but the money I was hoping to spend in travelling was unexpectedly needed at home. I tried tricking Google into sponsoring me, but as I was told, “In Google we are generous, but not that generous”. This is the first DebConf I’ll be missing since I joined Debian.
• I didn’t fare too well in my return to University. I abandoned most courses, and got my first failure (ever) in one of the few I didn’t abandon. I’ll continue studying one more year at least, but it’ll be hard deciding what to do if I don’t manage to finish by then, because I really, really need to go forward with my life.

I normally don’t play computer games, never been a big fan. Once in a while, though, I will try one, normally when some irc channel I’m in becomes a fan of it. This afternoon Miriam introduced us to Krank. And now I’m hooked (though I’m not sure for how long, as the title hints). There are basically four kinds of objects: two you can move, and two you can’t. The objective is to move the movable ones onto the static ones, in a way that makes the static ones disappear (according to the rules here). I must say, I enjoy levels with links and anchors very, very much. Ah, and Miriam made packages available. (The code is Python and is public domain; the images are mostly free-for-non-commercial, hence the “-nonfree” suffix.)

As the title says - the Ftpmaster dak repository is now using git instead of bzr. I never did like bzr, so I recently asked what the rest of the team thinks of switching to git. Luckily I got no objections, so here we are, with a VCS thats not dead-slow. If you want to do dak development and submit patches you want to read my post to the debian-dak list and then clone the git repo. Sorry, there is no git-daemon support, you need to use the http way if you do not have access to ries. Unfortunately debian-admin thinks git-daemon isn’t good enough to run on ftp-master and that “http is enough”. Bah. (No, I won’t work around it (git-daemon uses high-port, so could be run without admin help, but NO WAY), and I don’t want to put it on alioth). The actual conversion of the repository was done by Dato, with me commenting and asking for stuff. Like the fixup of the old revisions committer names, so all the old CVS revisions now correctly tell the full name/email of the committer, not just the unix login. Or fixing all the bzr commits done by “ajt@ries”, “joerg@ries” and other broken combinations of “login@machine”. I also use his git hook to send commit mails to get commits mailed to the debian-dak lists. [Update] Nice, with the setup we use we found a bug in git. Ha. (a stupid issue with git shared repositories, and reflogs enabled at the same time that basically means you cant commit as the logs got the wrong permissions set whenever someone else did an action, like git gc.) Comments: 2

Lucas asks about how he hates reformatting paragraphs in text documents he keeps in Git, because it creates unnecessary noise in the diffs. He also hates, though, not reformatting the paragraphs, because lines can become very long then, and he wants some kind of “smart formatter”. My take on this is that you shouldn’t change your preferred workflow to adapt it to how your tools work, but to adapt your tools to work well with your preferred workflow (here, reformatting paragraphs). Or, even better, reading the manual page to discover that your tools can already adapt to it. In particular, for this problem, I recommend reading diffs for text documents with git’s --color-words. A couple screenshots to show it in action:

Watched De Gr nne slagtere (great black comedy even if it moves a bit slowly. I think if you have to chose you'd better watch Adams bler with which it shares writer/director Anders Thomas Jensen and a big part of the cast). And this just has to be said: I can't believe anybody could call eXistenZ “quite a good see”. One of the worst movies I've ever seen, on a level with “Tweed” (a late 90s Bond parody I distinctly remember having seen but can't find on imdb right now.) I agree with Adeodato's assessment of Billy Elliot, though.

It’s time for recommending five films again. I’ve also decided that I may reserve the last of the five for films I watched prior to starting these series. So here we go:

• Au revoir les enfants (Goodbye, Children): just watch it, really. (France, World War II, children in a school run by priests, but there’s a part I’m not telling you.)
• El bosque animado: a superb film that every Spanish person should watch. Magic comedy & drama set up in rural Galicia. Amazing Tito Valverde.
• eXistenZ: yet another one by David Cronenberg, involving futuristic video games this time. Quite a good see, but predictable ending?
• Billy Elliot: the kid who wants to dance ballet. Predictive and linear, but I just loved it, as I expected — maybe you will too. The scene where Billy says goodbye to Michael just completely and utterly broke my heart, probably because I identified so much with Michael.
• Now, Voyager: Bette Davis plays an ugly duckling, that obviously transforms into an awesome swan. Superb. Oh, and Bette Davis.

Managing a transition is not always easy, because many times they are bigger than you, and have parts you can’t directly take care of yourself because it’s not your area of expertise, you don’t have access, or whatever else. You end up, then, nagging people to do stuff for you, which for types like me is slightly uneasy. It is a pleasure, though, when you find supportive fellow developers on the other side, just willing to help you, even if you always have more work for them. Thomas and Michael, thank you! (And thanks, in general, to everybody who helps the release team, past and future. We just can’t do everything!) On reflection, I notice that I also find very gratifying to do stuff for others myself (particularly if I enjoy the task, of course), because it has an immediate payoff. Highly recommended.

Sometimes, when you play with undo and redo and make, inadvertently or not, some changes in the middle, you find yourself unable to get to the state from where you parted, possibly loosing some words, or more. Since version 7, Vim has a solution to this problem, named “undo branches”. The idea is simple: if you undo a change C, going back to state B, and make a new change D on top of B, instead of C becoming unreachable, it is stored in an undo branch. Undo branches are navigated with the g- and g+ commands. For documentation:

  :help usr_32.txt
  :help undo.txt

Adeodato Sim complains about the many ways to regulate sound volume on his system. I can only add that on my Dell Inspiron 9300, the “Master” is actually not usable because it is mapped only to the tiny stereo speakers while leaving the subwoofer alone, which is mapped to “Master Mono”. So I have to use the pcm mixer. At least I can map the buttons (both Fn+keyboard key and the additional buttons at the front of the laptop) to the pcm mixer. But it took quite some fiddling for something the non-technical user will expect work out of the box.

To control volume, I can adjust the “Master” mixer offered by KMix or alsamixer. Or I can adjust the “PCM” one. But then, I can also adjust volume directly in my loudspeakers. Or, even, use the hardware buttons in this Thinkpad (which, afaik, can’t be mapped into modifying ALSA values). For once, so much choice annoys me.

Now that I use Git at various places, I wanted a tool to send commit diffs. And, I couldn’t find one. There is the contrib/hooks/post-receive-email script, which does a lot of smart stuff to interpret the stdin of the post-receive hook, but which can’t send out diffs, nor produce nice subjects by default. Since, to be honest, post-receive-email scares me a bit, and I dreaded the idea of carrying a modified copy around everywhere I needed commit diffs, I went on and created a simple script to send out diffs. The initial idea was stolen from Philipp Kern (kudos!): abuse git-format-patch to produce the emails, and send those. The first hurdle was that the post-receive hook can receive packed updates, whereas you get notified that a branch changed from rev. N to rev. N+4. I really wanted to keep things simple, so I didn’t want to find out a list of all the revisions between those two, and invoke git-format-patch for each of those. And I didn’t want to generate temporary files, either (just git-format-patch —stdout). Then, while doing the dishes, inspiration came, and I saw I could easily let git-format-patch generate a stream of emails, and use formail(1) to split them. Anyway, this story is becoming larger than the script itself. You can fetch it with:

  % git clone http://chistera.yi.org/~adeodato/tmp/other/git-post-receive-diff.git

After a bit of using, and polishing it a bit more, I think I’ll submit it for contrib/ in git.

So going alone to the cinema yesterday was not a first, but going alone and being alone in the room certainly was, and an unexpected one. This was, as far as I know, the premiere in Alicante of Enloquecidas, which is certainly not that of a remarkable film, but which was entertaining enough, and provided some very good laughs. What is wrong with this city?! (Update: hm, seems I’m mistaken about the “premiere” bit. Oh well.)

Unlike Steve, I don’t particularly mind going to the cinema alone. In fact, it’s becoming a growing habit for Friday nights, when my friends go to some meetings about their faith I don’t participate in (nor their meetings, nor their faith). I really hate getting home early on Fridays, so I take chance to go to movies I know we wouldn’t be going together anyway. (Oh, and in case I haven’t said here already, the movie offerings in this “city” suck big balls. Virtually no undubbed sessions, virtually no non-mainstream movies. I don’t think I’ll still be here in a couple years, but boy would I be unhappy if the circumstances forced me to.)

Here in this library, next to a couple computers available to query the catalog, a sign reads:

Do not connect your laptop to these jacks. You may loose all data in your computer.

If I wasn’t a computer-savy person, I’m completely sure I would’ve thought: “They’re bluffing.” And then shit happens, because they’re not. (Oh, but then of course the sign is not 100% honest either.)

One of the people who most fiercely fought software patents here in Spain and Europe jokingly (?!) uses the word “fag” to insult random people he dislikes. (But so do tons of other people I don’t interact with, of course.) I used not to be annoyed by this at all, but tonight I felt differently, and it really bothered me (possibly because it was somebody from my community who did it). Life is easier when you don’t care, I guess, but I think it’s a good thing that I care now, since without such caring things can’t and won’t change.

Some people are born to be a winner, you‘re one of them. Congratulations dude! ;)

As I mentioned, this week I’ve been in Sevilla as a finalist for the 2nd edition of a Free Software contest. Each participant at this stage made a presentation of their project, and this afternoon the winners were disclosed. I’m happy to share that Minirok won the 1st prize in its category, yay! Also, Dudesconf was simply terrific — I’m so happy I could attend this year. And, as for every conference, eternal gratitude to the organizers: people from GPUL, you simply rock!!

Lets go on your nerves again with a ftpmaster post about work I’ve done in the recent past.

• The already mentioned move of britney. And it seems that this did help, so something that should have been done way earlier already… Oh well.
• Enabled a few triggers for the qa user on merkel. While I already mentioned them in my first post, there is a third one now. The qa user now gets notified at the beginning of the dinstall run, so the pages can show why packages might not be visible in the archive and in incoming right now.
• Split up the insanely huge mbox files we had as the ftpmaster mail archive. They got that big because the monthly cronjob rotating them got disabled when the ftp-master archive went away from raff, and noone bothered to reenable that job. Done now, so we are back to a manageable size. (Even if 90% of the content is spam, no matter how much greylisting and blacklists are activated :( ).
• Just committed a largish change thats nothing more than a cleanup. Someone in the past did love to not care about tab versus spaces for the indentation, so dak code ended up with a mess of tab/space mix for indentation. Which is not nice, one style is way better. Fixed that with the help of reindent.py, which one can find in Pythons examples.
• Got the code on security.debian.org to use the latest dak revision from ftpmaster. It was a few commits behind, but worse - it did have one dak tool changed in a way that it only worked on security, no longer on ftpmaster. Also some files that clearly have been copied by scp -r or rsync, but not using the VCS that should be used for it. Args. Brrrr. The “fix” was a simple check if that value the code wants to use from the config file actually exists, instead of blindly assuming it will always be there.
• Generally looked around on security.debian.org, to get more familiar with the setup there, so I can work on a request I got from some members of the security teams: Run a queue daemon that manages the upload of the packages from the security archive to the normal archive (so they end up in proposed-updates). Currently it is done with some lftp calls within the script that does the security install, and that seems to break every now and then. Which means security uploads to proposed-updates randomly go MIA. Using a queue daemon and then only locally copy files into its dir should make that way more reliable.
• Used a tool from Dato and enabled bzr commit mails for the ftpmaster dak tree, they are now going to the dak list.
• Modified the cronjobs that are expected to have output to log that into files in a new logdir. Also modified the cron.daily AKA dinstall cronjob to be more verbose about the actions done. The directory is synced to merkel too (log/cron in the ftp.debian.org tree), so every DD who wants to can look at them now.
• I also merged a small patch from Thomas, fixing/unifying some wording in reject messages.

Comments: 3