Readers of my blog will want to update their URLs. As of right now, I've moved my blog to http://blog.fortytwo.ch/.

Reading LWN's coverage of the Linux Plumbers Converence, it occured to me that while I as somewhat experienced Linux user may know many of the components of a modern Linux desktop system, technically interested but less experienced users may have no idea what goes where. So here is a very rough high-level introduction to the “under the hood” components I could think of. As you can see there are many gaps in my knowledge, too...

I see Martin is proud to have started this... altfrangg, calvados, faegnaescht, gazpacho, gin, gluggsi, lumpesammler, papillon, syydelaervli, tonic, zbasel If you can guess this, you're invited to gatecrash anytime. If you can guess this and don't live close to me (or did at some time in the past, and didn't use Google), I'd be curious to know how...

I had to rewire a DSL concentrator (thunderstorm blew one of the ports...) today. The concentrator has two fan-out cables (input, output) with 25 RJ-11 connectors, color coded, so I had to find the colors of the remaining non-defective ports (there are 12 ports on this concentrator, the other 13 pairs are not connected. Presumably there isn't a 12 pair cable.) Google shows tons of references to the apparently standard 25 pair color code (first pair is white/blue), but unfortunately “my” cable had a light blue/light yellow first pair with most other pairs made up of cables with a base color and a colored stripe. I couldn't find the color chart on the Internet. Finally, the strange thought of RTFM entered my mind (and I even found the manual of the concentrator), and found that the importer has added a color chart leaflet to it; the cable is referred to as a “Telco50” cable. So here we go:

Pair	First Wire	Second Wire
1	red	red — white
2	yellow	yellow — black
3	green	green — white
4	blue	blue — white
5	brown	brown — white
6	black	black — white
7	purple	purple — white
8	orange	orange — white
9	light green	green — black
10	blue — black	purple — black
11	light blue — black	light blue — red
12	light green — green	light green — blue
13	light green — black	light green — red
14	light blue — blue	light blue — green
15	light yellow — red	light yellow — black
16	light yellow — green	light yellow — blue
17	gray	gray — black
18	gray — green	gray — red
19	red — black	light red
20	light red — blue	light red — green
21	light red — black	light red — red
12	white	orange — black
13	white — blue	white — green
24	white — red	white — black
25	light blue	light yellow

(Actually, on the DSL concentrator here this order is listed as “pin” numbers while the 12 ports are assigned in reverse order, starting at 25. The concentrator is a Zyxel VES-1012 and is not in production anymore.)

It is most irritating when the Laptop choses to blank its display at the exact moment when I unplug the mobile phone charger located behind it. That is all.

It's more or less four months since I proposed to resurrect our newsletter. We already released eight issues of the Debian Project News and work for the ninth issue has already started. So I guess it's time for a small "state of the DPN" speech, but since I'm not attending DebConf, you will have to read this mail instead ;) After having a rough start (and in fact missing some self-set deadlines and completely underestimating how much work is involved in such a kind of newsletter) we finally developed a - more or less - working flow of work (Which is by the way documented here). Speaking of the current state sadly means to confess, that our hopes to draw a lot of help from the community by using a system for drafting the news with a low entry barrier were not fulfilled. We actually had a good start, with good participation, but due to (I assume) the aforementioned initial difficulties participation in the creation of the DPN dropped considerably. Currently the workload of creating our bi-weekly newsletter is shared by only two people (that being Meike Reichle and myself), which is barely enough :( While we at least get a hint from time to time, what we should mention in the next issue, it rarely happens, that someone contributes by drafting a text -- which is the real work. (At this point a BIG "Thank You" to those who did! (See list bellow.) It's much appreciated!) We suffer especially, since although we are a two people team, we have in fact no redundancy, since real live issues affecting one of us will most likely affect the other one, too. Therefore we mostly concentrated our work on creating the next issues and getting them out in time, and didn't have time to answer all mails considering suggestions for changes and improvements (yet?). We are sorry, but at least we tried to read them briefly and keep them in mind when drafting the next issue. As a result of this we re-added the list of DSAs, WNPP and new and noteworthy packages due to popular demand. There are still a lot of unanswered mails not dealing with content, but with workflow issues / proposals (including changing from wiki.debian.org to a special ikiwiki instance). We are sorry, that we couldn't yet act on them and take appropriate measures, but be assured, they are not forgotten. Other issues the DPN currently have are "unwritten guidelines" regarding editorial choices of DSAs to be published and which packages to list in the "new and noteworthy package" section. Both is more or less done by our gut feeling. Speaking of problems the DPN are facing, we also need to mention translations of the DPN. The current workflow makes it difficult for translators of the DPN, since we often fail to get the final draft of the DPN ready in time to give translators a "head start" so the translated DPNs can be released together with (or at least with a as small as possible delay to) the English DPN. So here is a big call for help! We really need your help writing the DPN. (Monitoring lists and newstickers we don't monitor ourselves would be nice, too, but only add more work to us if you only give us pointers.) We will both be very busy with our real live the upcoming month, and are not sure how much time we can dedicate to the DPN. So please help us! The current draft for the next issue of the DPN is always available here . There should already be a todo list with pointers to interesting topics, which need to be written out. Some guidelines about style and content are available here. Last but not least, we would like to thank the following people who have contributed to the DPN so far:

• Adrian von Bidder
• Ana Guerrero
• Andre Felipe Machado
• Bjoern Boschman
• Graham Cobb
• Jeff Richards
• J rg Jaspert
• Jon Evans
• Julian Andres Klode
• Justin Rye
• Luca Bruno
• Martin F. Krafft
• Paul van der Vlis
• Paul Wise
• Raphael Hertzog
• Russell Coker
• Sebastian
• Stefano Zacchiroli
• Thomas Lange
• Wouter Verhelst

(Unfortunately we can't list those people, who contributed by translating the DPN, nor do we have a complete list of the native English speakers, who helped by proofreading. But we thank them nonetheless!)

Got this gem today:

This is to bring to your notice that I am delegated from the United Nations to Central bank of Nigeria to pay 100 Nigerian 419 scam victims $10 Million each, you are listed and approved for this payments as oneof the scammed victims, get back to as soon as possible for the immediate payments of your $10Million compensations funds.

Quite clever — the kind of stupidity that lets you believe this kind of email the first time will also get you a second time with this one... (Oh, yes: if you really want, you can contact mrjohnwilliamy2k1@live.com yourself.)

A while ago I decided that my desktop computer would be a test platform for a few things. So at the moment it's KDE 4.1 and OpenOffice.org 3.0 beta, both from Debian's experimental distribution. Which, on a system which originally was an installation of Debian etch, means that by now not much is left over from that etch system. Long live Debian's dependency handling, which so far has never really let me down! Conclusion: thankfully I have a laptop for actually doing stuff...

• Digikam (the KDE 4 version as packaged in experimental) is completely b0rked, which is the most annoying thing because the machine is my main photo storage. (I don't do anything beyond archiving the photos, so just blowing away the digikam database is no issue, as is just putting the files into the filesystem. OTOH once Digikam's new removable-media support is tested and works, I plan to start annotating the pictures.)
• Kmail, absolutely wants to display emails in a proportional font. And I'm not going to configure a typewriter font as the default “proportional” system font... Also, but I suspect that might be an issue with the IMAP server, it still forgets the “ignored” state of mailing list threads. making any moderatly high traffic list impossible to read.
• OpenOffice.org runs for about 30 seconds before crashing. Ok, it's beta, but so far my experience with packaged stuff, even in experimental, was better. Still, I'm not complaining, I'll just wait for the next version.
• KDE 4 can't cope with multiple screens (at least if they don't have the same size.) KDE 3 was just nice on this system. I'll start filing bugs when KDE has stabilised enough. If I still have that graphics subsystem then — I've been considering upgrading to a bigger screen for a while now, which probably would mean that I'd throw away the second display, getting more desk space instead.

I should probably add that this is not a rant. I'm running software that's explicitly labelled as experimental. So people should probably view this as a response to whoever (can't find it anymore, wasn't it on Planet?) recently stated that he'd switch to the Hurd since Debian has become boring. Or as a Thank You posting for those making Debian from a “you know it's been the stable version for the last year when it's entered Debian” type of distribution into a “get it on the day of release” distribution.

PostgreSQL upgrade from 8.2 to 8.3. This really should be automated (... but I guess I understand why it's not.) At least it does work as advertised, thanks a lot to Julien Danjou. And thanks to Martin Pitt and the PostgreSQL developers for making it so painless to run several PostgreSQL versions side by side. Now there's a serious database.

Who or what is tech-faq.com? I just found out that they listed my server, without asking, on their list of public DNS servers. There also is no obivous way to contact them. (The fact that zbasel.fortytwo.ch wasindeed a public DNS server was my own configuration mistake, of course, not theirs...)

Christian, I used to block quite aggressively (essentially blocking all IPs sending me spam for a few months) and remember seeing free.fr very, very often. Apparently this was before the block outgoing port 25 policy — I just had a grep through my log and see almost no spam coming in from free.fr. So, as I've said just recently, this is a note to all ISP: please, please, please block port 25! (ISP who don't offer unblocking will obviously lose the techie clients, but that's their own thing to decide...)

It has been mentioned very often, but xkcd captures this idea perfectly: face to face meetings help. (This is no comment on any conversation that might be going on right now, it's just the most recent cartoon.)

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.

For once, the the action of an otherwise stupid ISP, namely blocking port 25 outgoing, was probably the right thing to do. Yes, in comcasts case, it apparently was communicated badly, and of course you have to be able to get it unblocked easily, but I think if all big providers would either block 25 outgoing alltogether for their consumer offerings or would block it for hosts they see spamming (pattern: smtp connections to more than 20 hosts within one minute perhaps?) the world would be a better place. OTOH spammers are already reacting: the percentage of spam I'm receiving through regular MXen (as per reverse DNS), including Yahoo and Google, (but not gmx so far, interestingly) is increasing markedly these months.

Errors were encountered while processing:
 debian-policy
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

(I haven't looked closer yet, but I had to laugh.)