Upgrading a laptop that has not been updated for ca. 2 months. Now it requests me to restart the system after every 5 minutes of downloading and installing packages. Repeatedly: I had to restart the upgrade process about 10 times already. In addition, I'm sure I've seen it updating some of the packages at least three times. But I'm sure by the end of today I'll be there. OpenSUSE. For when Windows was not annoying enough.

Christmas is over, and unfortunately it comes with an Nvidia graphics chip, and I doubt the color calibration feature works under Linux. Nonetheless: I want one. Dual screen on a Laptop! Who wouldn't want that? And, in addition, a keyboard with a numeric keypad.

A blog entry I wanted to write quite some time now... Depicted on the right is a liter carton of organic whole milk of one of the two big retailers here in Switzerland. At the bottom is the red area again, enlarged. For those who don't read french, italian or german: it's an indication of the ingredients ( Ingredients: whole milk ), and a warning for people with allergies ( Contains milk .) No doubt information like this is an essential contribution to lowering health costs by making people chose healthier foods and being aware of what they eat.

No, I don't claim KDE is perfect. Especially the way the transition to KDE 4 is (not) being handled. (I don't mean within Debian, this is a KDE problem.) But beyond dumbing down the UI as even a very prominent Linux developer repeatedly commented on, Josselin Mouette just confirmed my decision to stay away from GNOME. Yes, there are other desktop environments and window managers, and I haven't done more than look at XFCE very briefly, but just now I'm quite happy with KDE 3.5, and am waiting for KDE 4 to become actually useable.

Yes, this is just to bookmark what Romain contributed. VPNs can be created by ssh plus tun devices; debian-administration.org has a very nice write-up including proper set up of the authorized_keys file to not allow generic ssh root access. Please, can everybody add big disclaimers on all ssh + ppp based HOWTO's that this is obsolete? Or is there a reason I'm still doing it that way other than the omnipresence of said documentation?

The best way to get me to read a blog entry you've made is to apologize about it in the next one ... So I've gone and clicked on the link to Amaya's previous entry. Getting a warning that I'm about to be presented with a page that may contain material only suitable for adults. What the hell, Amaya is an adult and so am I, so let's just confirm this. I was truly shocked to see her entry that indeed did contain the extremely dangerous word “love” in it (can't imagine what else may have triggered the filter.) Together with Youtube's apparent tightening of their filtering (I'd not have noticed except that Illiad commented on it) it seems the Intarwebs are now being converted to a happy teletubby-land. So I'm forced append this disclaimer now: Attention please, the text you've just read may have contained strong words, opinions, sentences, punctuation characters and all kinds of dangerous information only suitable for inhabitants of a small planet somewhere in the vicinity of Betelgeuse.

Today it made clear to me why Garvin Hicking is called "SuperGarv". I've had a little problem with my s9y installation and asked Garvin by mail, because I know him since good old Grafik.Ger times in FidoNet.
The problem has been described in #502954 as well: you can create directories in the Media Manager, but you can't see or use them afterwards, although they are there in the filesystem.

Usually, one could have solved this by yourself, but it seemed more apparent that the application is buggy. Garvin, instead, got the idea pretty soon:

Hast du vielleicht nur Schreib- aber keine Leserechte f r die Verzeichnisse?
Translation: "Do you have just write but no read permissions for those directories?

It's in fact somewhat unusual that you can create directories, but cannot use them afterwards. Especially when you see them on disk, you are likely to suspect a problem in the application itself, not on the disk.
But Garvin was right:

#ls -l /usr/share/serendipity/www/
...
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 28 2008-12-02 09:18 uploads -> /var/lib/serendipity/uploads
...

# ls -l /var/lib/serendipity/
total 4
drwx-wxr-x 2 root www-data 6 2006-10-18 16:10 archives
-rw-rw---- 1 root www-data 0 2008-12-02 09:19 htaccess
drwx-wxr-x 13 root www-data 4096 2008-12-02 07:48 uploads
root@vserv1:/usr/local/drupal6/modules# chmod g+r /var/lib/serendipity/uploads/

I've checked with Adrian von Bidder (#502954 submitter) on IRC and this seems to be a bug in the Debian package indeed.

So, thanks to Garvin for the hinting and Adrian for the bugreport and checking on IRC! :-)

Looking at access logs: Because of a recent entry in this blog, I have the doubtful honour to come up third (right now) in a somewhat unexpected query on Google...

"Wasted" time on the parts of both developers and users. On the other hand, isn't the whole point about computers that they waste the time they could have saved in any case? LILO boot screen with breakout game. Thanks to Florian Rehnisch for making me stumble upon this. (The description references SuSE Linux 7.2, so I'm probably the last person on earth who hasn't seen this before. Oh, welll...)

Q: is a mobile phone (nice hardware, shitty firmware, btw) waterproof? A: I now got this new toy (Sony Ericsson S500i) as aresult. And because I don't really like losing contacts again (I never managed to connect to the old phone from Linux and was too lazy to use the Windows software), I have now fired up kitchensync with the OBEX SyncML client from the OpenSync project. And was very surprised that after only very little fiddling with the configuration I could indeed copy the contacts from the phone to KDE's addressbook. There seems to be a — not so usual anymore in this decade — utf8 problem somewhere (it looks as if the encoding from the phone is converted to utf8 twice, or it is latin1 to utf8 encoded but was already utf8 on the phone), and synchronisation is only one way so far (from the phone to KDE-PIM), with changes on the KDE side being overwritten. No idea which component those bugs are in, and documentation I've found is not very verbose. So, to start with: I've gotten this nice dump with hcidump. Now, how do I extract the actual data streams from that dump? I know I have to use wbxml2xml on the data, but first I need to unwrap the network data, and I haven't found that (probably read past it in the manpage of hcidump because I'm a bit tired.) Of course, if anybody out there has solved my issues I'd be just as happy with information on how that was done instead. In the mean time, I at least have reasonable back up of my phone's contact database again.

As reported elsewhere, a small victory against the spammers had some impact. Going from 1.5 to 0.5 emails received per minute on this little server. The impact on spam that made it through all the filters is not noticeable, but I don't do statistics on that number. (I assume McColo ranges were blocked by blacklists anyway, so the drop should be mostly for the unfiltered spamtrap accounts. Anybody has opinions about Knujon?)

‘But, Archchancellor,’ said the Lecturer in Recent Runes, ‘it's still too damn far.’

(If you don't know who wrote this, you really should do some reading!) Contagioned by Kees:

• Grab the nearest book.
• Open it to page 56.
• Find the fifth sentence.
• Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
• Don t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.

On a traffic sign in Wales: the welsh text reads “I am not in the office at the moment. Please send any work to be translated.” and was received by the responsible agency in reply to their emailed request to translate the english text. (Reported widely, I've read it in the dead tree variant of my daily newspaper, the Neue Z rcher Zeitung; on the net, for example, here or on BBC.)

Since it's apparently en vogue to change one's way these days, I'm now learning Python (by looking at TurboGears and related technologies), using Emacs as my main editor (so far I was using mostly Perl and vim.) But while indenting with vim was often correct but occasionally annoying, I've found the much-touted autoindenting with Emacs disappointing. Yes, indent-region is cool, and if I hit tab on a line it indents it correctly, and using C-J instead of hitting enter also gives the right result. But why do I have to do all this? When I hit enter I want to have the new line at the correct indenting. When I start a line with “</” in a HTML file I want emacs to automatically run indent-for-tab-command on the closing “>” of this tag (or better yet immediately autocomplete the tag, since in XML there is only one tag to close, right?) (Oh, and btw: I've not found much about Python to dislike to date. So while my Emacs use might be just an episode, I might stick with Python as default scripting language for future projects for a while now. I thought about switching to git from hg as well in this “trying new things” effort but I think I'll leave this for later, since I've not had hg annoy me much so far.)

Ok, it's not that bad. But according to LWN (Subscriber-only content at this time, Debian developers can get a free account, though), there is a possibility that the OpenStreetMap data set will be relicensed (from CC-attribution-sharealike) and that the new license will be contract based, which would mean at least a click-through license. There is, thankfully, also a group of people who think that BSD or even Public Domain-style licensing would be better. Personally, I think the latter is very much preferrable; OSM has (I think, and hope that's not too optimistic) become big enough that it should be able to out-gun every vendor trying to take away OSM's work: the vendor with his few people will just not be able to keep up with the sheer number of OSM contributors.

Quote Unquote Records Since I expect they'll change it at some time, I've copied the base image of the background here. Btw, the record label might be interesting to some, at least some of their music is supposed to be licensed under a CC license. I've not looked further, though.

I occasionally send quotes that make me smile to Joey, but this time I can't resist circulating it more widely...

> 
> Marek Vasut (1):
>       i2c/tps65010: Vibrator hookup to gpiolib
Guys, I know we geeks aren't known for our sex-life, but do we have to 
make it so obvious?

(Linus Torvalds)

Reading Andrews blog entry about the movie Recount (sounds like I should watch that) got me thinking: what is all the fuss about? Living in Switzerland, I'm quite used to votes and elections, and usually the results are available within a few hours after closing time: voting/elections always is on Sundays here, but most people vote by letter beforehand. You can vote until 12:00, so we get early estimates from around 13:00 or even earlier and the end results sometimes as early as 15:00 for simple yes/no votes, with only few hours later for elections. This is all (there are a few vote by phone/Internet projects, on a very small scale) paper, without election machines. Counting done by volunteers (or, rarely, people who are “volunteered” by the state) Now, I accept difficulties in states with widespread corruption and a shaky legal system. And, of course, the U.S. presidial election has a complicated algorithm, and people are afraid of mistakes if the outcome is decided on a margin of 0.1 per cent or less (that's why you recount.) But, all in all, once the question of who is able to vote is solved, running the vote itself (including recounting it if it's a narrow outcome) is not that difficult in a modern state, is it?

While it looks slick, using the Apple Aluminium keyboard under Linux has some issues I was not aware of when I bought it. I've started to document it here.