Our friend Jaap is besides a mathematical researcher also an aviator. Last weekend he took Erik, Judith and me on a flight from Hoogeveen (EHHO) in Drenthe to the island of Ameland (EHAL). It's a really nice experience to plan the flight on the map, fly over land, the Waddensea and the North Sea, hear the radio communications; and the check-in was a lot more relaxed compared to EHAM (Schiphol). On the other hand the on-board catering left something to be desired.

all pictures are here

Today I got a mail from weasel, that my Debian account has been created. So in the end of my NM process everything went pretty fast. Now that I finally became a Debian Developer it feels like the end of a long journey, so I'd like to reflect on my process.

I started my "career" in Debian around 2006, when I got a co-maintainer of the smstools package. From then I got more involved with adopting some more packages etc. till I finally applied to become a DD on 31th August 2007. Until then most of my uploads where sponsored by Daniel Baumann (panthera), who therefore helped me learn a lot, and so he got my advocate. From that point on the most time of my NM process I've been waiting. Waiting for an AM, waiting for my AM (well, he also needed to wait for me because we both had busy times during my active processing), waiting for front desk. After all I had luck, because the DAM problem has been solved recently. I know that a part of the time I didn't feel like pushing my application forward fast, because I did not see where this would lead, except to a situation where I'd again wait for the DAM.

Now I'm quiet happy. And that is a good moment to thank some people, who helped me to get to this point: panthera for beeing my sponsor and advocate for some time, Thijs for beeing a sponsor and quiet helpful when it was about fixing security issues in mantis, naoliv for beeing a very reliable sponsor, pabs for beeing my AM, Myon for several actings on my NM application and off course the people involved in account creation. Thanks.

When finishing series of articles about Debian packaging and writing about dbconfig-common, I just had to ask myself, why it is not used in phpMyAdmin package. I did not find any reason and as Thijs did not have any objections, I hacked it together this evening. So what you will get? All fancy features where phpMyAdmin requires it's database to manage some additional features. For example you can create PDF pages with structure of your database, add additional comments to databases, notice relations between MyISAM tables, etc. Simply see wiki for more details. Besides this, phpMyAdmin is now automatically configured to use database you choose using dbconfig-common, so you can also connect to remote MySQL server without manually configuring anything. The only thing which scares me a bit is that we now increased a lot number of debconf questions user has to reply by this...

A few weeks ago we released version 2.2.0, and now version 2.2.1 of DOMjudge, our programming contest jury system. I'm actually very satisfied with the 2.2 branch because it implements some important wishes that users of the system had, especially moving nearly all state into the one central database instead of spread over db, files and hosts. It is getting more and more complete on the functionality side. Our next target, 3.0, will focus on a different part: installing the system and getting it running is not quite trivial. The system has grown organically, and the current setup procedure tries to install everything at once, from building the judging environment, setting up the web interface to generating the documentation. We aim to pull that apart so it gets easier and the administrator keeps better oversight. But that's all for the next contest season. Meanwhile, the 2.2.x branch will be maintained for bugfixes at least until ultimo 2008.

Today I finally made something for phpMyAdmin :-). First I've updated Czech translation of 3.0, so it is not that behind as it used to be (only some PBXT strings are missing right now) and then I fixed some potential issues which Thijs has found (thanks to him for his great security work not only for Debian). Later I focused a bit on demo server. As we already have new setup script from GSoC (made by Piotr Przybylski), links to setup script have been updated and I also reorganised links to all demo versions including direct login links for cookie based authentication. I hope it is now a bit easier to navigate and choose which demo version you want to test :-).

This morning's newspaper featured a front page article reporting that elementary schools are bad at math. The third paragraph states:

"The quality of arithmetic education has a strong variation. Nearly a quarter of all schools is weak, over a quarter are strong. Exactly half scores 'average'."

Maybe I've been badly educated, but don't those statistics match what should be expected? If it's a normal (gaussian) distribution, both the lower and higher scoring chunks should be about the same size and indeed, the average part should be by far the largest. Of course I could be misunderstanding it all, probably due to me also being educated under this system.

Another point release for Etch has been done; now it's the time for the CD team to roll out new images after the next mirror pulse. The official announcements (prepared by Alexander Reichle-Schmehl, thanks!) will follow shortly afterwards. FTP master of the day was Joerg Jaspert, who did his first point release since Woody, as he told us on IRC. We appreciate your work and you spending your time that shortly before going to Argentina. This point release includes the etchnhalf update introducing a new kernel image (based on 2.6.24) and some driver updates. Additionally the infamous openssl hole will be fixed for good, even for new installs. Again I want to present you a list of people who contributed to this release. It cannot be complete as I got the information out of the Changed-by fields of the uploads.

• akira yamada
• Alexander Sack
• Alexander Schmehl
• A Mennucc1
• Andrea De Iacovo
• Andres Salomon
• Aurelien Jarno
• Charles Plessy
• Christian Perrier
• Christian Welzel
• Colin Watson
• dann frazier (indefatigable kernel worker, most sourceful uploads)
• Darren Salt
• Devin Carraway (3rd place of sourceful uploads, due to security work)
• Emmanuel Lacour
• Eric Dorland
• Fabio Tranchitella
• Faidon Liambotis
• Fathi Boudra
• Florian Weimer
• Francesco Paolo Lovergine
• Francois Marier
• Frank Lichtenheld
• Frans Pop (thanks for your d-i work!)
• Frederic Peters
• Gregory Colpart
• Holger Levsen
• Jan Wagner
• Jay Berkenbilt
• J r my Bobbio
• Joey Hess
• Joey Schulze
• Josselin Mouette
• Julien Cristau
• Kai Hendry
• Kurt Roeckx
• LaMont Jones
• Laszlo Boszormenyi
• Martin Pitt
• maximilian attems
• Michael Biebl
• Michael Koch
• Mike Hommey
• Moritz Muehlenhoff
• Noah Meyerhans
• Ola Lundqvist
• Otavio Salvador
• Patrick Matth i
• Petter Reinholdtsen
• Philipp Kern
• Pierre Habouzit
• Raphael Hertzog
• Rene Engelhard
• Robert Millan
• Roberto Lumbreras
• Roland Mas
• Romain Beauxis
• Russ Allbery
• Sean Finney
• Stefan Fritsch
• Steffen Joeris
• Stephen Gran
• Steve Kemp
• Sune Vuorela
• Thijs Kinkhorst (2nd place of sourceful uploads, due to security work)
• Thomas Viehmann
• Toni Mueller
• Tzafrir Cohen

From the Release Team we had dann frazier (who drove the important kernel part of etchnhalf), Luk Claes, Neil McGovern, Andreas Barth, Martin Zobel-Helas and me working on it. ;-)

The msttcorefonts package, downloader of the Microsoft Core Fonts for the Web, has been renamed to ttf-mscorefonts-installer to be more in line with other TrueType font packages (this is in testing since today). But better news is that it hopefully is losing relevance: a few weeks ago, the ttf-liberation package entered testing. The Liberation fonts are good replacements for Arial, Courier New and Times New Roman, created by RedHat and released under a free licence. Users requiring these three fonts can just install the ttf-liberation package from main, rather than use the (necessarily) convoluted downloader from contrib. Quite a win for Debian's compatibility with the Windows World.

Recently my Nikon D70s, when using a new Sigma lens, displayed the following error in the aperture display: fEE. As it took me some time to find out the cause and fix it, I'll explain it here perhaps for the benefit of others. What does it mean? Some lenses require that the aperture is set to smallest when they are connected to the body (the largest f-number; this is usually coloured orange). fEE is indicated when the lens is connected wrongly and the camera refuses to operate until the lens is reconnected. If like me you still get the fEE even though you've connected the lens correctly, then obviously something is broken. The camera "knows" whether the aperture ring is set to the right value due to a notch on the lens (rightmost picture) and a switch on the body ("EE Servo Coupling Post", left picture). In my case the switch on the body had broken off. You can of course send your camera in for repair, but for me it was easily repaired by sticking a hairpin in the switch. A little piece of plastic and some superglue could work as well.

Wat. een. deceptie.

This weekend will see the second Bug Squashing Party hosted in Utrecht, this time to help get Debian Lenny released. Stichting NLnet has generously provided funding for the cost of food and drink. For all details see the wiki page.

Here's a selection of pictures from a recent visit to the Efteling.

Click the icons for full versions or view full set. I'm still planning on making yet another web photo album software of my own based on a revolutionary idea. Maybe I will actually do it sometime, who knows.

After shutdown of the old L.ROOT-SERVERS.NET the IP address formerly associated with it, the IP continued to answere requests. More informations can be found at the ICANN Blog
UPDATE: Before bothering around, if you read the ICANN Blog, you realize that the issue was fixed very shortly. The whole problem is, that the file of the root DNS servers have to be keeped up to date. This issue should be fixed by operator of resolving nameservers (usually your ISP). A goody will be, to have this fixed by the next point release of debian, but it is NOT security critical.
Thanks Thijs for make me sensible that my article may misslead people who are not reading the referenced document.
UPDATE 2: A more technical description can also be found at Renesys Blog and a disussion how it is related to debian.

gnupg (1.4.6-3) unstable; urgency=low * Adopt package. Thanks to James Troup for his work in the far past.
Thanks to NMU'ers Bastian and Thijs. (Closes: #476418)
* Co-maintainers wanted.
* Don't build-dep on pcap on non-linux-archs. (Closes: #357267) -- Sune Vuorela Sat, 17 May 2008 15:42:55 +0200 TODO:

• Coordinate with release-team and d-i what changes can still be done before lenny
• Look at the new upstream version
• Get a alioth project and host stuff in a version control system
• Decide on version control system
• Get a team and figure out team workflow
• Look at this newfangled packaging thing called debhelper
• Make all bugs either closed or forwarded

So - anyone interested?

For a project I was looking for a way to use GNU Mailman for mailinglist management (especially its powerful web based moderation, bounce handling and attachment scrubbing features) but storing the mailinglist member information in a SQL database. That's useful when you want to relate mailinglist members to extra information already in a database and functionality on an interactive website, and it's possible on a per-mailinglist basis. This turned out to be not very difficult but just not that clearly documented. What I used:

• Mailman. I used the 2.1.x version packaged in Debian etch: an "open" system is just one apt-get away!
• The MySQL Member Adaptor available from rezo.net. There are several versions of MySQLMemberAdaptor around the web, but this one seems the most recent.

This explanation assumes you know how to work with Mailman in a regular setup, and things like creating databases and users under MySQL. Take the following steps:

1. Install and set up mailman as you would otherwise.
2. Put the MysqlMemberships.py file into the dir that is Mailman's base, this normally already has files like MemberAdaptor.py in it. For Debian this is /usr/lib/mailman/Mailman. You only need to add MysqlMemberships.py, the other files from rezo.net are not needed.
3. The create table query in MysqlMemberships.py does not work with MySQL 5, I had to apply this patch which I've sent to MySQLMembership's author in the meantime. This patch has been applied by Fil.
4. Create a database and a MySQL user, and add that information into your mm_cfg.py, like this:

   MYSQL_MEMBER_DB_NAME = "mailman"
   MYSQL_MEMBER_DB_USER = "mailman"
   MYSQL_MEMBER_DB_PASS = "somethingrandom"
   MYSQL_MEMBER_DB_HOST = "localhost"
   MYSQL_MEMBER_TABLE_TYPE = "wide"        # wide means one table per list, flat = one large table

5. Create a mailinglist like your normally would (e.g. via newlist). To enable the MySQL backend for just that list, create a file extend.py under /var/lib/mailman/lists/listname with the following content:

   from Mailman.MysqlMemberships import MysqlMemberships
   def extend(list):
           list._memberadaptor = MysqlMemberships(list)
   

   (whitespace is significant in Python).
6. It should work now! Upon receiving the first request for your list, the database table will be created automatically, which you can then populate. You may need to restart the mailman qrunner after you make further changes to your setup.

My previous entry features the first ever comment on this blog to arrive over IPv6. Fantastic! I guess this will be the final breakthrough that the protocol needed!!

A survey has shown that 16% of youth doesn't know why we're celebrating the 5th of May. According to quality news show Editie NL, this is a worrying fact. Well, is it? I find it rather reassuring that appearently 84% of the younger generation do know that 5 May is about the libration from German occupation (I remember now that I forgot to thank the Canadiens when I was there two weeks ago). 16% is not much: if you get a 16% discount you're usually not making a great deal. Actually, I would be very surprised of a survey that would show that less than 16% of people are completely ignorant of the world around them. These same people probably would't know the connection between the colour of the national team's shirts and the royal house, or be able to tell whether St Nicolaas is a protestant or catholic. Or the ones that claim money because -6 is larger than -5. Every country has its fair share of "challenged" people. Also in recent news is that Barack Obama is losing votes because he admitted to eating rucola (arugula) from time to time. Voter's "reasoning" boils down to "if I don't know what that is, then a president that eats it can't be trusted". It gets even more sad when you realise that these people probably do know it, but don't realise they call it rocket. Great way to lose votes.

A survey has shown that 16% of youth doesn't know why we're celebrating the 5th of May. According to quality news show Editie NL, this is a worrying fact. Well, is it? I find it rather reassuring that appearently 84% of the younger generation do know that 5 May is about the libration from German occupation (I remember now that I forgot to thank the Canadiens when I was there two weeks ago). 16% is not much: if you get a 16% discount you're usually not making a great deal. Actually, I would be very surprised of a survey that would show that less than 16% of people are completely ignorant of the world around them. These same people probably would't know the connection between the colour of the national team's shirts and the royal house, or be able to tell whether St Nicolaas is a protestant or catholic. Or the ones that claim money because -6 is larger than -5. Every country has its fair share of "challenged" people. Also in recent news is that Barack Obama is losing votes because he admitted to eating rucola (arugula) from time to time. Voter's "reasoning" boils down to "if I don't know what that is, then a president that eats it can't be trusted". It gets even more sad when you realise that these people probably do know it, but don't realise they call it rocket. Great way to lose votes.