Search Results: "christine"

13 June 2011

Christian Perrier: So, what happened with Kikithon?

I mentioned this briefly yesterday, but now I'll try to summarize the story of a great surprise and a big moment for me. All this started when my wife Elizabeth and my son Jean-Baptiste wanted to do something special for my 50th birthday. So, it indeed all started months ago, probably early March or something (I don't yet have all the details). Jean-Baptiste described this well on the web site, so I won't go again into details, but basically, this was about getting birthday wishes from my "free software family" in, as you might guess, as many languages as possible. Elizabeth brought the original idea and JB helped her by setting up the website and collecting e-mail addresses of people I usually work with: he grabbed addresses from PO files on Debian website, plus some in his own set of GPG signatures and here we go. And then he started poking dozens of you folks in order to get your wishes for this birthday. Gradually, contributions accumulated on the website, with many challenges for them: be sure to get as many people as possible, poking and re-poking all those FLOSS people who keep forgetting things... It seems that poking people is something that's probably in the Perrier's genes! And they were doing all this without me noticing. As usually in Debian, releasing on time is a no-no. So, it quickly turned out that having everything ready by April 2nd wouldn't be possible. So, their new goal was offering this to me on Pentecost Sunday, which was yesterday. And...here comes the gift. Aha, this looks like a photo album. Could it be a "50 years of Christian" album? But, EH, why is that pic of me, with the red Debconf5 tee-shirt (that features a world map) and a "bubulle" sign, in front of the book? But, EH EH EH, what the .... are doing these word by H0lger, then Fil, then Joey doing on the following pages? And only then, OMG, I discover the real gift they prepared. 106, often bilingual, wishes from 110 people (some were couples!). 18 postcards (one made of wood). 45 languages. One postcard with wishes from nearly every distro representatives at LinuxTag 2011. Dozens of photos from my friends all around the world. All this in a wonderful album. I can't tell what I said. Anyway, JB was shooting a video, so...we'll see. OK, I didn't cry...but it wasn't that far and emotion was really really intense. Guys, ladies, gentlemen, friends....it took me a while to realize what you contributed to. It took me the entire afternoon to realize the investment put by Elizabeth and JB (and JB's sisters support) into this. Yes, as many of you wrote, I have an awesome family and they really know how to share their love. I also have an awesome virtual family all around the world. Your words are wholeheartedly appreciated and some were indeed much much much appreciated. Of course, I'll have the book in Banja Luka so that you can see the result. I know (because JB and Elizabeth told me) that many of you were really awaiting to see how it would be received (yes, that includes you, in Germany, who I visited in early May!!!). Again, thank you so much for this incredible gift. Thank you Holger Levsen, Phil Hands, Joey Hess, Lior Kaplan, Martin Michlmayr, Alberto Gonzalez Iniesta, Kenshi "best friend" Muto, Praveen Arimbrathodiyil, Felipe Augusto van de Wiel, Ana Carolina Comandulli (5 postcards!), Stefano Zacchiroli (1st contribution received by JB, of course), Gunnar Wolf, Enriiiiiico Zini, Clytie Siddall, Frans Pop (by way of Clytie), Tenzin Dendup, Otavio Salvador, Neil McGovern, Konstantinos Margaritis, Luk Claes, Jonas Smedegaard, Pema Geyleg, Meike "sp tzle queen" Reichle, Alexander Reichle-Schmehl, Torsten Werner, "nette BSD" folks, CentOS Ralph and Brian, Fedora people, SUSE's Jan, Ubuntu's Lucia Tamara, Skolelinux' Paul, Rapha l Hertzog, Lars Wirzenius, Andrew McMillan (revenge in September!), Yasa Giridhar Appaji Nag (now I know my name in Telugu), Amaya Rodrigo, St phane Glondu, Martin Krafft, Jon "maddog" Hall (and God save the queen), Eddy Petri or, Daniel Nylander, Aiet Kolkhi, Andreas "die Katze geht in die K che, wunderbar" Tille, Paul "lets bend the elbow" Wise, Jordi "half-marathon in Banja Luka" Mallach, Steve "as ever-young as I am" Langasek, Obey Arthur Liu, YAMANE Hideki, Jaldhar H. Vyas, Vikram Vincent, Margarita "Bronx cross-country queen" Manterola, Patty Langasek, Aigars Mahinovs (finding a pic *with* you on it is tricky!), Thepittak Karoonboonyanan, Javier "nobody expects the Spanish inquisition" Fern ndez-Sanguino, Varun Hiremath, Moray Allan, David Moreno Garza, Ralf "marathon-man" Treinen, Arief S Fitrianto, Penny Leach, Adam D. Barrat, Wolfgang Martin Borgert, Christine "the mentee overtakes the mentor" Spang, Arjuna Rao Chevala, Gerfried "my best contradictor" Fuchs, Stefano Canepa, Samuel Thibault, Eloy "first samba maintainer" Par s, Josip Rodin, Daniel Kahn Gillmor, Steve McIntyre, Guntupalli Karunakar, Jano Gulja , Karolina Kali , Ben Hutchings, Matej Kova i , Khoem Sokhem, Lisandro "I have the longest name in this list" Dami n Nicanor P rez-Meyer, Amanpreet Singh Alam, H ctor Or n, Hans Nordhaugn, Ivan Mas r, Dr. Tirumurti Vasudevan, John "yes, Kansas is as flat as you can imagine" Goerzen, Jean-Baptiste "Piwet" Perrier, Elizabeth "I love you" Perrier, Peter Eisentraut, Jesus "enemy by nature" Climent, Peter Palfrader, Vasudev Kamath, Miroslav "Chicky" Ku e, Mart n Ferrari, Ollivier Robert, Jure uhalev, Yunqiang Su, Jonathan McDowell, Sampada Nakhare, Nayan Nakhare, Dirk "rendez-vous for Chicago marathon" Eddelbuettel, Elian Myftiu, Tim Retout, Giuseppe Sacco, Changwoo Ryu, Pedro Ribeoro, Miguel "oh no, not him again" Figueiredo, Ana Guerrero, Aur lien Jarno, Kumar Appaiah, Arangel Angov, Faidon Liambotis, Mehdi Dogguy, Andrew Lee, Russ Allbery, Bj rn Steensrud, Mathieu Parent, Davide Viti, Steinar H. Gunderson, Kurt Gramlich, Vanja Cvelbar, Adam Conrad, Armi Be irovi , Nattie Mayer-Hutchings, Joerg "dis shuld be REJECTed" Jaspert and Luca Capello. Let's say it gain:

18 March 2011

Christine Spang: on transparency

I found the following quote from Stefano's DPL platform interesting:
When faced with the dilemma, I've favored ditching some DPL tasks and communicating or taking notes about the others, instead of the other way around.
It takes someone who really knows Debian to realize that sometimes communicating about what's being done is more important than doing more.

1 September 2010

Cyril Brulebois: SD: Travel with your bugs

(For Those Who Care About An Introduction: Christine Spang gave a talk during DebConf10 about Simple Defects (SD), and blogged about it later on.) Folks maintaining Debian packages are already able to partially-clone bugs.debian.org s bug database thanks to the local-debbugs tool. But what about upstream s bug tracker? Taking a (shamelessly self-centered) example: X.Org packages are hosted on FreeDesktop.org s bugzilla. Thanks to SD, it s possible to fetch bugs from there as well! Here s the obligatory picture: SD example This means that you can browse/search them locally while being offline (or well-connected, but without having to use that !$\ %$^ bugzilla web interface). Many of the replica types support both reading and writing, meaning you can also queue some changes locally, and push them later. Currently, sd help sync says that read-write support is available for RT, Hiveminder, Trac, Google Code, and GitHub. There s also read-only support for redmine. Debbugs is being worked on, see Christine s blog post about her SD talk for more info. Given there was no support for bugzilla, I had a quick look and reported my findings. The main point being: \o/ Bugzilla s XMLRPC \o/ A little while later (I m not exactly fluent in Perl ), I came up with a tentatively-mergeable branch adding preliminary read-only support for bugzilla. There s still a lot of work, but I m trying to work on it on a regular basis, adding support for more properties, and fixing bugs (tests should be written some day, too). Flattr this!

22 August 2010

Christine Spang: DebConf 10 postmortem and SD talk followup

DebConf launched with a bang the day I arrived by bike I was up until 3am meeting and greeting in the basement lounge of the Carmen Columbia dormitory, where I was staying. No idea how I managed to be so awake for that. The rest of the week alternated between hacking like crazy on code for my talk and spending a lot of time socializing with Debian folks new and old. For the day trip to Coney Island, I joined the dkg-led bike expedition which ended up running to nearly 30 miles, which was a bit more than expected. The fact that this was all in actual dense city really drove home the scale difference between Boston and New York (I'd never been to NYC before this). We took several breaks to lounge around and eat and drink, so it took quite a long time even given the distance. I hadn't planned on seeing the baseball game that was a part of the trip, but I ended up going anyway and it turns out that a bunch of geeks at a minor league game is actually quite a lot of fun! I hope someone else will put some pictures from the bike ride and game online soon, since I didn't really take any myself. This was the first DebConf where I gave a talk, which resulted in me skipping almost all of the other talks, because my talk was on the last day and I reaaally wasn't ready at the start of the conference due to the rest of life being pretty crazy this summer. I missed some things I would have liked to see because of this, but ultimately I think it was worth it. The good news is: it went well! I was nervous until I actually started talking (never given a talk at a conference before), and then it was fine. If you missed it, the talk video is on the web in low and high quality; slides are here. The audience was great there were excellent questions and people were excited and interested in the project. I couldn't have asked for a better reception. After the talk finished I spent some time aisle-chatting with some folks, and totally failed to recognize Joey despite having met him before, because he'd shaved off his hair. DebConf was, like usual, both inspiring and exhausting. I haven't managed to follow up on much that happened during the conference yet. I definitely plan to do so, though, now that real life is calming down again. I'd hate to waste the post-conference buzz about SD. My todo list includes:

12 August 2010

Olivier Berger: Report on Debbugs New developments in the ongoing struggle against bugs by Don Armstrong at Debconf

Here are some notes I took about the lecture Debbugs New developments in the ongoing struggle against bugs by Don Armstrong at Debconf 10 (that I watched from the stream). Note that the slides are at : http://rzlab.ucr.edu/debian/debbugs_presentation_debconf10.pdf, and here, I ll only mention most noteworthy elements I ve noticed. There s a linear growth of number of bugs reported for several years, from the statistics made by Don. In average, there s same number of bugs filed / archived per day : Debian s not losing ground against bugs ;) A new affect command has been added, for bugs present in a package affecting another package. The summary command which can be used to quickly spot the summary of lengthy discussions deserves more love. Included summary -1 to send a new summary by email. The new local-debbugs package : can mirror your bugs locally and allow to search, show, etc. even offline. Lots of ideas for new features still in development (but lacking manpower). Interesting idea about action required sorting which exhibits different interests for triager, maintainer, user, to maximize productivity. I guess this should be implemented in clients of the BTS also. Interesting ideas about distributed bug tracking : sharing status with other bugtrackers (see other report), sideways syncing with other distributions, and making it available to upstream also. Note this was discussed in a subsequent BoF, which I ve already blogged about. Some elements taken from the Q&A : Overall, a very interesting presentation. Well worth watching the video recording. See also my report on the presentation by Christine Spang on Distributing bugtracking for Debian with SD which also discussed some debbugs things.

Olivier Berger: My report after the BOF on distributed bugtrackers at DebConf

Here are my notes about the very insteresting BOF on distributed bugtrackers held at DebConf This is just some elements of report (some taken from the gobby edits, and written down by me after watching the video (unfortunately missing 2 mins of sound in the beginning of the video stream/recording)). This is not a full report of all the discussions, as some discussed elements weren t of interest IMHO. You ll find here many ideas of mine, links and pointers (resulting of our work in the context of the Helios project on similar topics), so this is in no way a report of what was said exactly during the BOF. Aspects of interest: Note that these topics may in principle be discussed on the Distributed bug trackers mailing list: http://kitenet.net/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dist-bugs Tools / implementation ideas : Storage of repositories / databases of remote bugs : About such storage, and the RDF store option, here s a prototype of ours that exposes UDD s bug facts through a SPARQL interface, allowing to publish bug facts as RDF (setup in the frame of the Helios project). It includes both Debian and Ubuntu bugs, and allows interlinking them in a standard way (with Semantically described links in RDF). See http://testforge.int-evry.fr/d2r-server/resource/spackage/evolution for an example. The problem is not how to distribute (distributed database systems exist), but the semantics of bug properties, and the different implementations of interfaces of different tools : which standard to implement, or how many converters are necessary if no standard ? We believe that navigation/referencing/tracking of external bugs would be much easier if bugs were LinkedData citizens, i.e. they would be exposed with (standard) formats like Semantic Web ontologies served with Semantic Web standards (like RDF). The worst case is currently to have to perform web scraping on bugtracker interfaces. How to avoiding scraping ? A solution could be to publish RDFa / microformats using common standard semantics, directly from the bugtracker pages at bugs URLs (see my wishlist for debbugs on that subject : 590931: Would be great to integrate RDFa metadata into debbugs pages). Now some pointers to historical details on the same subject and Debian (old posts by Lars Wirzenius) : Overall, the discussion was quite interesting, but didn t reach any sensitive progress regarding the state of the art. Much needs to be worked on, mainly on standardizing APIs, semantic descriptions of bugs, and implementation in tools like SD for instance. Stay tuned for more progress.

Olivier Berger: Great talk Distributed bug tracking for Debian with SD at DebConf

This is a quick report and notes about the great presentation made at DebConf on Distributed bug tracking for Debian with SD by Christine Spang (http://penta.debconf.org/dc10_schedule/events/591.en.html) Hopefully, the slides are gonna be published soon, but in the meantime, you have them in the video recording (see link above). For those who don t know SD, they may refer to a talk given by its author, Jesse Vincent, at the recent RMLL/LSM 2010 : Peer to peer issue tracking with SD and Prophet (video recording coming soon : EDIT: a premiere recording is available here). She draws 2 main use cases in her speech, which is exactly the kind of features we ve been thinking about for fetchbugs4.me : What would be even better is to be able to link all of these bugs to each-other but I m not sure this is yet possible. Christine started implementing debbugs (Debian s bugtracker) support in SD. For reference, there s a wishlist about it in 590156 : sd: Provide sync-ing with debbugs. The implementation is still in alpha state, in read-only mode only. Christine has implemented a new method getmachinereadablebuglog() for debbugs SOAP interface. It seems to send some Perl Data::Dumper output, which is probably fine for SD as SD is written in Perl, like debbugs but it may be better if it was some more generally accepted format, like JSON maybe. Among the topics discussed, was the absence of any standard API to connect to bugtrackers, meaning that SD needs to include many different client code modules for each of the trackers different APIs over different kinds of protocols. I ve raised (through my IRC comments, watching the presentation through the stream), that there s a proposal for such a standard that exists : OSLC-CM. Still, it s not widely implemented, in particular in Open Source tools (see another post of mine on the subject). I think it would be great if SD could be a client of OSLC-CM compatible trackers, hence I ve filed a wishlist. Also, I suggested that maybe it would be interesting to be able to browse the mail threads of comments on Debian bugs, much like with bts mbox show 12345 command (which opens mutt on the bugs thread, for me), when in offline mode, with SD. Maybe the bts command could just use SD as a backend for all its operations. Another very interesting feature may be to allow transfering a Debian bug to an upstream bugtracker, through SD. Dunno if that will be possible. Finally the code may be found : in github. I m looking forward to testing it.

2 August 2010

Christine Spang: lolbikeride to debconf

DebConf being in New York City this year, clearly the right way to get there was to bike, together with Molly and Daf. Being touring newbs, there were a few mishaps.

Day 1 We aimed to catch the 10:00 commuter rail train from Boston to Providence, Rhode Island, but we ran late (predictable) and had problems with the bicycle rack for my racing bike, which attaches without frame mounts (also predictable, since Mako and Mika test-rode it earlier in the week), so we didn't make it in to the station until around 10:20. We used the extra time to eat and fix up the bikes, though, so it's not clear how much of a setback that was. Here are our bikes ready to go at the Providence commuter rail station. bikes at Providence We then had some problems with Molly's brakes, and it took a long time to navigate out of the city, but eventually we found ourself on the "Washington Secondary Trail" a wonderful bike path along an old rail line. Every couple miles there'd be an old covered rail bridge over the river, and it was a well-paved straight shot for about ten miles, with no cars and no need to navigate. Molly on a train bridge Just as we were getting into things after the bike trail ended, something completely unexpected happened. This is Daf's derailleur after it sheared off in the middle as we attempted to start after a red light outside Tractor Supply Co. broken derailleur Luckily, John and his son Chris lent us a hand and hauled Daf and his bike to the nearest bicycle shop in the back of their pickup truck. They'd just come from there, where John had bought Chris a new helmet. Greenway Cycles, the only bike shop in a twenty mile radius, was three miles away. We got there an hour before it closed and Rick replaced the derailleur and straightened the hanger in a jiffy. Due to all these things, we didn't get as far as we'd planned in the first day and ended up camping in Seaport Campground in Mystic, Connecticut, rolling in at around 22:00. We did about 65 miles, including six due to the detour to the cycle shop. Carrying camping gear is heavy! Several delicious peanut butter and jelly bagels and some wheatberry and couscous salad later, we were passed out.

Day 2 Molly at the campground The second day included less bike trouble, but was no less eventful, and we were tired from the previous day's riding. The highlights included taking a tiny sidewalk path that I'm baffled how Google knows about up onto a sidewalk alongside the I-95 bridge across the Thames to New London, Connecticut. the Thames bridge The 13:00 ferry from New London to Orient Point, New York, where we got some remarkably good veggie burgers (whole edamame visible!) for lunch. Cross Sound Ferry And a vineyard on the north fork of Long Island, where we stopped for a quick tasting and ended up picking up a bottle of barrel-fermented chardonnay. The vineyard was small 23 acres, with 11 acres of grapes and the proprietors were friendly and extremely interested in our trip. They gave us a dollar off on the bottle due to our method of transport. The Old Field Vineyard It turns out there are only two trains a day on the Long Island rail, and we just barely caught the 18:52 return from Riverhead. We had mere seconds in the station and ended up without enough cash to pay for tickets onboard, but the conductor just took what we had and gave us tickets to Penn Station anyway. Outside Penn, a girl with a mohawk and a messenger bag overheard us talking about biking up Broadway and told us to bike up 8th Avenue instead. "Always bike up 8th and down Broadway because they have bike lanes in those directions." Thus, we didn't die dodging taxis in the dark. So basically, due to various people being extremely nice to us for no good reason, we made it to Columbia University around 22:30, on the correct day. Warm fuzzies for humanity all around. :)

25 July 2010

Russell Coker: Links July 2010

David Byrne gave an interesting TED talk about how changes to architecture drove changes to musical styles [1]. I think he does stretch the point a little. To a certain extent people develop the most complex instruments and the largest music halls that can be supported by the level of technology in their society people with a hunter-gatherer civilisation play drums because they can build them and can carry them. The NY Times has an interesting article about paternity leave in Sweden [2]. The Swedish government pays for a total of 13 months leave that can be split between parents for every child. Of those 13 months 2 months can only be taken by the father and that is likely to increase to a minimum of 4 months of paternity leave after the next election. Dan Meyer gave an interesting TEDX talk about how the current math curriculum in the US (as well as Australia and lots of other countries that do the same thing) is totally wrong [3]. His main point is that maths problems should be based on real-world use cases where not all needed data is immediately available and there is also useless data that must be discarded. He believes that the most important thing is developing mathematical problem solving skills basically the things that I did for fun when I was in primary school are skills that need to be taught to high-school students The Atlantic magazine has an amusing article by Daniel Byman and Christine Fair about the incompetent Islamic terrorists [4]. In Afghanistan half the suicide bombers kill only themselves and the US government has a lot of evidence of Taliban soldiers practicing bestiality and collecting porn. Islamic extremist groups are staffed by people who are bad soldiers and bad Muslims. Jon Masters wrote an interesting post titled What Would Jesus Buy about ethical purchasing decisions [5]. Jon references The Church of Stop Shopping which isn t a real religious organisation but a street theatre activist group. ZeroHedga has an insightful article comparing corporations and the US government to street gangs [6]. The conclusion is that when gangs take over a neighbourhood everyone has to join a gang for their own protection. Hillel Cooperman gave an interesting TED talk about being obsessed with Lego [7]. He compares Lego fans to Furries and makes a good case for this comparison. Marian Bantjes gave an interesting TED talk about her graphic art / graphic design work [8]. I ve never seen anything quite like this. Business Insider has an interesting article about oil cleanup, it seems that most people who worked on the Exxon Valdez disaster are now dead [9], s opposed to most people who worked in almost every other occupation at that time who are either still working or enjoying their retirement. The current gulf disaster is bigger, will require more workers for the cleanup, and can be expected to have a higher death toll. Some people claim that measures to reduce oil efficiency will impact the economy, how will millions of people who are chronically ill for the rest of their lives impact the economy? The NY Times has an interesting article on circle lenses [10], contact lenses designed to make the eyes look larger. It s illegal to sell contact lenses in the US without a prescription, but the latest trend is for women to buy them online in a variety of colors. The FDA should probably approve them, it would be better to have the quality controls you expect from a medical supply company instead of having people rely on Malaysian mail-order companies for the safety of their eyes. Don Marti has written an interesting article about the economic decline in the US, he suggests making pension funds invest in local jobs [11]. Companies are supposed to act on behalf of their stock-holders, but US companies often have the majority of their stock owned by the pension funds of workers but they act on behalf of a small number of rich people who own a minority of the stock. Don s article was inspired by Andy Grove s article in Bloomberg about the stagnation in technological development that has been caused by off-shoring the manufacturing [12]. Neil Brown has completed a test release of a new Linux software RAID feature for arrays with multiple redundancy that have bad sectors [13]. When a disk gets a bad sector the current behavior is to kick it out of the array, if you have two such errors on a 3 disk RAID-1 or a RAID-6 array then you lose all redundancy and are at risk of catastrophic failure even though in most cases both disks will still mostly work. With this patch some regions of the disk may be excluded but it can provide redundancy for other stripes. Thanks Neil for your great work here, and all your previous work over the last 10+ years! The RSPCA has a new campaign titled Close the Puppy Factories [14]. Dogs are kept in very poor conditions and forced to churn out puppies for their entire lives to supply pet stores. The RSPCA recommends that people buy puppies from registered dog breeders (not registered dog breeding companies ) and ask to see the dog s parents. They also recommend not buying from classified adverts or pet stores. Animal shelters have to euthenise huge numbers of unwanted animals, you can buy a pet dog or cat from an animal shelter for a small fee that covers the expenses related to housing and spaying it and save that animal from being euthenised! Maureen Dowd criticises the Catholic Church properly in an article for the New York Times [15]. The Catholic Church officially regards ordaining a woman and raping a child to be equally bad offenses. Frank Rich wrote an interesting column for the New York Times about Mel Gibson [16]. He describes the destruction of Mel Gibson s reputation as a symptom of changes in the culture in the US and also links it to the fall of Ted Haggard (who supported Gibson s most notorious movie The Passion of the Christ).

12 July 2010

Christine Spang: downloading a directory via HTTP with wget

From the department of things-that-I-know-are-possible-but-can-never-remember-how-to-do-so-hey-I-read-the-manpage-and-now-I'm-blogging-it, I bring you "downloading a directory of photos from a website": 
 wget --recursive http://example.com/photos/some-event/ --no-directories --directory-prefix <local-folder-name> --accept JPG,RW2
I always remember wget --recursive (or wget -r for short), but that produces an annoying tree of directories starting with the website's domain and working its way up to the directory you actually want. In the command above, --no-directories removes the tree, and --directory-prefix tells wget to put the downloaded files somewhere that's not the current working directory. The --accept option tells wget to discard files with extensions other than those mentioned, so your downloaded directory is not cluttered with webserver-generated files like index.html if you don't want it to be. Here's the short version, since the long version is nice to remember but not so nice to type: 
wget -r http://example.com/photos/some-event/ -nd -P <local-folder-name> -A JPG,RW2

4 July 2010

Gregor Herrmann: RC bugs 2010/25, 2010/26

to start with the good news: christine has joined the RCBW initiative yeah! let's see who joins next ...

as usual, a short overview about my own attempts in the RC bugs department:

Christine Spang: Christine Spang: [h]ledger rocks my world

I hate keeping track of money. Bank accounts, credit cards, investing it's such a hassle. Hell, sometimes I even hate the fact that money exists and needs to be dealt with in the first place. But I admit that it's an easier system than bartering for everything. In college I pretty much ignored most things financial. I rarely had more money than I needed, and put little financial planning into deciding what I could and could not spend money on besides, "I'm going to make X dollars this summer," and, "think twice." But now that I have a steady paycheck, it seems like a good idea to know where all my money goes, so I can make better decisions about how I'm spending (and saving) it. But I've kept procrastinating starting to do so, because GUI programs like Gnucash and HomeBank seem like such a hassle. Their first screen is dauntingly complex, and if you don't know much about accounting it's scary and difficult to be asked to set up a big set of accounts when first starting to use the program, without having any prior experience with what you personally would find useful to keep track of. Entering data through menus and dialogs is tedious and slow. hledger (or ledger, which came first) had been appearing on my radar recently, not least because Iron Blogger uses it). hledger changed my opinion of accounting software. In about 15 minutes, using only the sample transactions from the manual, I was able to enter all my assets and liabilities bank accounts, credit card, student loans, money I've borrowed from people and never paid back though I said I would, etc. And then, I could run 'hledger balance' and it would tell me what sorts of things I had spent money on in the past few days, as far back as I could bother looking up actual transactions for, rather than entering a single transaction with a balance forward. Duuude, awesome! I'm a geek. I like statistics and data about my life, as long as it's not a huge pain to collect the data in the first place. More data means more on which to base decisions, decisions which will then be freer from the bias of what I find memorable enough to remember having done. Here's what I like best about ledger: I don't think I'd be enjoying keeping track of my money nearly so much without a tool like hledger. It gets out of your way to let you focus on the hard things, like choosing categories for the things you spend money on and remembering to record the data in the first place.

27 June 2010

Christine Spang: Christine Spang: RC bug squashing

Inspired by various Planet Debian postings, I've spent some time recently looking into a few RC bugs to help with the Squeeze release. mpg123-el #581227 A previous commenter on this bug suggested a proposed fix, which I tested and uploaded. I think the bug's severity was inflated to begin with, so I downgraded the bug as well. doclifter #580246 This one had to do with the python2.6 transition. I pointed out a patch against Ubuntu's version of the package that fixes this problem, and someone else made an NMU based on that. (Seemed like a good idea to look in the PTS for Ubuntu patches since Ubuntu always transitions to newer Python before Debian proper.) gnuvd #580110 I checked upstream and a new version that's supposed to fix this bug was released today, so I updated the bug report to make note of this and give the maintainer a chance to look at it. libtommath #583820 This FTBFS bug was caused by a previous NMU that fixed a different FTBFS and also made some unrelated changes. I sent a message to the previous NMUer noting this fact and made a new upload fixing the new FTBFS. fceu #580820 Needs new upstream packaged to fix. The maintainer seems pseudo-MIA but has shown some signs of returning to activity; I sent an email inquiring as to whether he intends to fix the critical issue in this package. op-panel #582377 and #571427 These were not merged when I started out, so I merged them after noticing they were the same. I spent some poking at the bug itself and made a simple patch, only to find out that there was a pending patch in pkg-voip's subversion repo. I hopped onto #debian-voip to prod the person who'd prepared the patch in subversion about the importance of updating the BTS when working on bugs. These bugs are currently blocking on testing the patch. Most all of these bugs I've subscribed to in case of follow-up. (Geez, challenge-response subscription via email is kind of a pain.)

14 June 2010

Christine Spang: Christine Spang: the end of an era

The world around me seems to whirl these days. One week ago, I graduated from MIT. People I've known during the last four years have been dispelling to various parts of the globe one by one, day by day. California, Canada, Indonesia, Seattle. Some will be back again. Some will not, or if so only to visit. pika is a continuous bustle of activity as the summer has commenced and it has filled with creative and adventurous MIT students who've suddenly found themselves having free time. A hammock being built on the roofdeck. Thrice-weekly icecream forays. Common areas overflowing with people playing musical instruments, chatting, and messing around on laptops. Summer's warmth has arrived, bringing with it farmer's markets, strawberry picking, and swimming expeditions. While it's wonderful to get to meet so many new people living in a college environment, I can't help but feel sadness thinking about everyone who's left. There are always more friends to be made as new people arrive, but old ones moving away leave bittersweet memories, and the new relationships are always a bit different as the age discrepancy between me and others changes. Or the me-the-ephemeral-collection-of-thoughts-which-when-regarding-other-people-sometimes-involve-the-mentor/mentee-distinctions-caused-by-one-party-being-older-or-more-knowledgeable-than-the-other-at-least-in-certain-areas changes. The end of a semester always feels like this, but this year even more so as the people I started university with start down new paths. For me, that was going to involve staying on at MIT to complete a one-year master's program, the "M.Eng." in electrical engineering and computer science. That plan, too, has changed. I've deferred the degree and accepted a full-time engineering position at Ksplice, an exciting early-stage Linux startup here in Cambridge. I'd been working at Ksplice part-time since January before joining full-time immediately following graduation. Ksplice is the realization of ideas I saw being born on the whiteboard at SIPB when I was a freshman, and it's fun to see that play out in a small, ever-changing, low-bullshit company. All in all, there are many more exciting things down the road, and, working at an MIT startup, I haven't even escaped the MIT/Cambridge reality-distortion bubble yet. Still, it's tempting to resist change and let myself romanticize the good old days, hoping to catch every person I've ever enjoyed spending time with and hold them down here forever. That's not the way life works, though. Change happens.

4 June 2010

Christine Spang: Christine Spang: Django form fields with the same name as Python keywords

For work recently I've been doing some Django-related tasks that involve talking to an external API with POSTed forms. Django forms objects are declared by creating a class that inherits from django.forms.Form, with the fields of the form declared by declaring attributes of that class. Which works well and is clean and easy to remember unless the API you're working with requires a field with the same name as a Python keyword, such as return. You can't declare a field like this as an attribute; it will trigger a syntax error. I spent some time scratching my head over this, and came up with this as a workaround after source-diving to find out how Form objects actually work: 
from django import forms
class ExampleForm(forms.Form):
    def __init__(self, data=None, files=None, auto_id='id_%s', prefix=None,
            initial=None, errorclass=ErrorList, label_suffix=':', empty_permitted=False, return_url=None):
        forms.Form.__init__(self, data, files, auto_id, prefix, initial,
            errorclass, label_suffix, empty_permitted)
        if return_url is not None:
            self.fields['return'] = forms.CharField(widget=forms.HiddenInput, initial=return_url)
It turns out that the attribute declaration is just syntactic sugar for creating a dictionary of key/value pairs, which is then stored in the fields attribute. So we can monkeypatch in extra values after the translation. Which is somewhat more awkward and ugly, but works in a pinch. Note that I haven't extensively tested what interactions this may cause with other forms code, so use with some caution.

24 May 2010

Christine Spang: Christine Spang: out with the old, in with the new(er)

I just replaced my aging 2004-era PC with wait for it a 2005-era PC. A friend is moving across the country so I'm taking it off his hands. Swapping hardware between Freyja and Earlgrey The differences between the two are more than just the year of time, though: one was hand-built from parts, while the other was a commodity off-the-shelf Compaq. So the new machine, while not strictly faster by the clock, is 64-bit and is much more amenable to upgrades. While the added bulk is a bit annoying, the case has a lot more space in it up to 8 or so drive slots (I can't imagine ever needing that many), and 4 RAM slots which is a sure step up from the limitation of two drive slots and two RAM slots in my old machine. The most visibly shiny parts in the new desktop experience are 4G RAM versus 1G, and a nice ATI GPU. While I'm glad my OS allowed me to squeeze six years out of my main machine, I'll be happy to stop shaking my fist at Chromium for eating all my memory! The new machine will keep its old name: earlgrey.

3 May 2010

Christine Spang: Christine Spang: in case it wasn't already obvious

Mode of transportation has not yet been determined. Possibly bike, possibly train, possibly bus. It feels strange not needing to buy plane tickets. I should be there for all of the conference proper but not for DebCamp.

3 April 2010

Christine Spang: Christine Spang: is your keysigning offer up to date?

I occasionally get emails from people looking for GPG keysigning around the Boston area, addressed to all the local Debian Developers on the keysigning offers list. Generally, I'm the only one who replies to them, despite there being four or so other people addressed. I wonder if this problem pervades other locations as well. Keysigning is one of the hurdles every person interested in becoming a full Debian Developer must overcome. The New Maintainer process is a hurdle enough in itself! Let's try not to discourage excited newcomers who are already convinced that they want to help Debian by leaving them hanging for long periods of time trying to get their key signed. Have you moved? Are you no longer interested in filling keysigning requests? (I suspect many of those who would answer "yes" to that question are actually inactive, and so are unlikely to actually see this.) Are you interested in filling keysigning requests but didn't know about the offers list? Go to the keysigning offers list on the Debian wiki and update, add, or remove your information. There's also the list of people requesting keysigning you can subscribe to this page to see updates.

27 March 2010

Christine Spang: Christine Spang: a late Ada Lovelace Day tribute

I meant to participate in Ada Lovelace Day, a day to celebrate and acknowledge the accomplishments of women in science and technology, but I got distracted and then it was late and I fell asleep. Such is my life. Anyway, I'd like to acknowledge a woman who I've only recently met, mostly through the Free Software Foundation's women's outreach events. Marina Zhurakhinskaya works for RedHat, and is a developer for GNOME Shell. She's always enthusiastic about sharing her work with other people in person and inviting others to get involved, and is one of those people who is in there every day getting stuff done. I wish I were as confident about the things that I work on. Marina has also been working on the second incarnation of the GNOME Women's Summer Outreach Program, I believe. And she keeps giving talks all over the place, which is great! Go visibility. Now if only she would blog more. ;) I'd never met Marina before last September, despite living in the same metropolitan area! I'm glad women that I don't know about and who work on free software exist and that I get to meet them and find out that they live nearby.

25 February 2010

Christine Spang: help fund women's travel to Libre Planet

At the FSF's Libre Planet conference this year in March, there will be a track focusing on increasing the participation of women in free software. If you are able and support this cause, consider donating to fund additional women's travel to this event. Being able to meet in person with other people like you is such an energizing opportunity. Give this gift to someone who wouldn't otherwise be able to make it!

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