So, got a beep this morning from our work monitoring system. One of our customers domain names is hosted with livedns.co.uk (which, as far as I can tell, is part of the Fasthosts franchise)... It appears that Fasthosts have managed to entirely break their DNS:

brettp@laptop:~$ host www.fasthosts.com
;; connection timed out; no servers could be reached
brettp@laptop:~$ whois fasthosts.com   grep -i "Name Server"
   Name Server: NS1.FASTHOSTS.NET.UK
   Name Server: NS2.FASTHOSTS.NET.UK
Name Server: NS1.FASTHOSTS.NET.UK
Name Server: NS2.FASTHOSTS.NET.UK
brettp@laptop:~$ whois fasthosts.net.uk   grep -A 2 "Name servers:"
    Name servers:
        ns1.fasthosts.net.uk      213.171.192.252
        ns2.fasthosts.net.uk      213.171.193.248
brettp@laptop:~$  host -t ns fasthosts.net.uk 213.171.192.252
;; connection timed out; no servers could be reached
brettp@laptop:~$ host -t ns fasthosts.net.uk 213.171.193.248
;; connection timed out; no servers could be reached
brettp@laptop:~$

So, that's fasthosts core nameservers not responding, good start! They also provide livedns.co.uk, so lets have a look at that:

brettp@laptop:~$ whois livedns.co.uk   grep -A 3 "Name servers:"
    Name servers:
        ns1.livedns.co.uk         213.171.192.250
        ns2.livedns.co.uk         213.171.193.250
        ns3.livedns.co.uk         213.171.192.254
brettp@laptop:~$ host -t ns ns1.livedns.co.uk 213.171.192.250
;; connection timed out; no servers could be reached
brettp@laptop:~$ host -t ns ns1.livedns.co.uk 213.171.193.250
;; connection timed out; no servers could be reached
brettp@laptop:~$ host -t ns ns1.livedns.co.uk 213.171.192.254
;; connection timed out; no servers could be reached

So, erm, apparently that's all their DNS servers "Not entirely functioning correctly"! That's quite impressive!

I use awesome as my window manager, without a gnome session around it - as gnome-power-manager now depends on having a gnome-session running, I had a choice to make - I don't need or want to run a gnome-session, so I went on the hunt for a different battery monitor for my laptop. I've ended up using fdpowermon as it does just what I need and nothing more - then I edited the default acpi scripts to do what I had gnome-power-manager doing before hand, i.e. if I've unplugged the AC and I close the lid, the laptop does a s2both. Slightly more configuration, but it now does what I expect all the time (yay!). I wanted some extra keybinding from the default config of awesome in Debian, so I also created a very small rc.lua file as follows:

dofile("/etc/xdg/awesome/rc.lua")
mylayouts =  
    layouts[2],
    layouts[10],
    layouts[2],
    layouts[2],
    layouts[2],
    layouts[2],
    layouts[1],
    layouts[1],
    layouts[1]
 
for s = 1, screen.count() do
    for t = 1, 9 do
        awful.tag.setproperty(tags[s][t], "layout", mylayouts[t])
    end
end
globalkeys = awful.util.table.join(globalkeys,
    awful.key( "Control", "Mod1"  , "l", function () awful.util.spawn("/home/brettp/bin/lock-screen.sh") end)
)
root.keys(globalkeys)

This basically overrides parts of the default config and makes it so that my "tags" are vsplit for tags 1 and 3-6, maximised for tag 2 (where my browser lives) and floating for 7-9 (where the IM client sits, and I do anything involving GIMP). It does mean that I'm at the whim of the default config mostly, but as that seems to be fairly sane most of the time, that's not a problem... it also means that I'm only maintaining a small change set rather than a full rc file, and so new "features" can come in without me having to touch anything (well, other than restarting awesome...). I do need to either unmap the minimise key combo, or create an unminimise key combo that pops up a menu with the list of minimised windows in it at some point, though - because it's all too easy to press Meta4-n when you meant Meta4-m.

The Debian Python Modules Team is discussing which DVCS to switch to from SVN. Ondrej Certik asked how to generate a list of commiters to the team s repository, so I looked at it and got this:
emilio@saturno:~/deb/python-modules$ svn log egrep "^r[0-9]+ cut -f2 -d sed s/-guest// sort uniq -c sort -n -r
865 piotr
609 morph
598 kov
532 bzed
388 pox
302 arnau
253 certik
216 shlomme
212 malex
175 hertzog
140 nslater
130 kobold
123 nijel
121 kitterma
106 bernat
99 kibi
87 varun
83 stratus
81 nobse
81 netzwurm
78 azatoth
76 mca
73 dottedmag
70 jluebbe
68 zack
68 cgalisteo
61 speijnik
61 odd_bloke
60 rganesan
55 kumanna
52 werner
50 haas
48 mejo
45 ucko
43 pabs
42 stew
42 luciano
41 mithrandi
40 wardi
36 gudjon
35 jandd
34 smcv
34 brettp
32 jenner
31 davidvilla
31 aurel32
30 rousseau
30 mtaylor
28 thomasbl
26 lool
25 gaspa
25 ffm
24 adn
22 jmalonzo
21 santiago
21 appaji
18 goedson
17 toadstool
17 sto
17 awen
16 mlizaur
16 akumar
15 nacho
14 smr
14 hanska
13 tviehmann
13 norsetto
13 mbaldessari
12 stone
12 sharky
11 rainct
11 fabrizio
10 lash
9 rodrigogc
9 pcc
9 miriam
9 madduck
9 ftlerror
8 pere
8 crschmidt
7 ncommander
7 myon
7 abuss
6 jwilk
6 bdrung
6 atehwa
5 kcoyner
5 catlee
5 andyp
4 vt
4 ross
4 osrevolution
4 lamby
4 baby
3 sez
3 joss
3 geole
2 rustybear
2 edmonds
2 astraw
2 ana
1 twerner
1 tincho
1 pochu
1 danderson
As it s likely that the Python Applications Packaging Team will switch too to the same DVCS at the same time, here are the numbers for its repo:

emilio@saturno:~/deb/python-apps$ svn log egrep "^r[0-9]+ cut -f2 -d sed s/-guest// sort uniq -c sort -n -r
401 nijel
288 piotr
235 gothicx
159 pochu
76 nslater
69 kumanna
68 rainct
66 gilir
63 certik
52 vdanjean
52 bzed
46 dottedmag
41 stani
39 varun
37 kitterma
36 morph
35 odd_bloke
29 pcc
29 gudjon
28 appaji
25 thomasbl
24 arnau
20 sc
20 andyp
18 jalet
15 gerardo
14 eike
14 ana
13 dfiloni
11 tklauser
10 ryanakca
10 nxvl
10 akumar
8 sez
8 baby
6 catlee
4 osrevolution
4 cody-somerville
2 mithrandi
2 cjsmo
1 nenolod
1 ffm
Here I m the 4th most committer And while I was on it, I thought I could do the same for the GNOME and GStreamer teams:
emilio@saturno:~/deb/pkg-gnome$ svn log egrep "^r[0-9]+ cut -f2 -d sed s/-guest// sort uniq -c sort -n -r
5357 lool
2701 joss
1633 slomo
1164 kov
825 seb128
622 jordi
621 jdassen
574 manphiz
335 sjoerd
298 mlang
296 netsnipe
291 grm
255 ross
236 ari
203 pochu
198 ondrej
190 he
180 kilian
176 alanbach
170 ftlerror
148 nobse
112 marco
87 jak
84 samm
78 rfrancoise
75 oysteigi
73 jsogo
65 svena
65 otavio
55 duck
54 jcurbo
53 zorglub
53 rtp
49 wasabi
49 giskard
42 tagoh
42 kartikm
40 gpastore
34 brad
32 robtaylor
31 xaiki
30 stratus
30 daf
26 johannes
24 sander-m
21 kk
19 bubulle
16 arnau
15 dodji
12 mbanck
11 ruoso
11 fpeters
11 dedu
11 christine
10 cpm
7 ember
7 drew
7 debotux
6 tico
6 emil
6 bradsmith
5 robster
5 carlosliu
4 rotty
4 diegoe
3 biebl
2 thibaut
2 ejad
1 naoliv
1 huats
1 gilir

emilio@saturno:~/deb/pkg-gstreamer$ svn log egrep "^r[0-9]+ cut -f2 -d sed s/-guest// sort uniq -c sort -n -r
891 lool
840 slomo
99 pnormand
69 sjoerd
27 seb128
21 manphiz
8 he
7 aquette
4 elmarco
1 fabian
Conclusions:
- Why do I have the full python-modules and pkg-gstreamer trees, if I have just one commit to DPMT, and don t even have commit access to the GStreamer team?
- If you don t want to seem like you have done less commits than you have actually done, don t change your alioth name when you become a DD (hint: pox-guest and piotr in python-modules are the same person)
- If the switch to a new VCS was based on a vote where you have one vote per commit, the top 3 commiters in pkg-gnome could win the vote if they chosed the same! For python-apps it s the 4 top commiters, and the 7 ones for python-modules. pkg-gstreamer is a bit special

I've been looking for a decent way to read rss feeds for a bit, I've finally given in to the fact that there's actually nothing about that I feel comfortable with... so, what I've started is writting a simple rss to maildir convertor (I know there's toursst, but that appears to want a galleon bookmarks file and appears to use deprecated bits of python). At the moment it is very very basic, there's still a way to go before I'll be fully happy with it, but it's much nicer being able to read rss using mutt than Yet Another Random Program, I'll be hacking up a mutt config to make it look different to e-mail later, but for now as it's still in testing phases, I'm just testing with a bog standard mutt config. I've made the code available through a git repository that should (when DNS has finished updating) be available with a git clone git://git.sommitrealweird.co.uk/rss2maildir.git/ before that it should be available from git clone http://miranda.sommitrealweird.co.uk/~brettp/rss2maildir.git/ . The HTML -> Text parser still needs some work, I'm mostly aiming for it to take HTML and generate almost OK ReST which is easier to read in a text mail client. It still needs paragraph wrapping etc, but I'll work on those over time. If anyones interested, or wants to get involved, or has some nicer ideas for how to make it work, as always I can be contacted at iDunno@sommitrealweird.co.uk :)

Hmmm, MJ Ray asks about date and locales... I *think* (though without grabbing the source I can't confirm) that the default date format of "date" is the legacy format that it's always been... if you want to get a shiny locale based date format from it use, use +"%c". Here's the output from my laptop:

brettp@pitr:~$ locale
LANG=en_GB.UTF-8
LC_CTYPE="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_TIME=en_GB.UTF-8
LC_COLLATE="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=
brettp@pitr:~$ date
Wed Jan 18 08:34:52 GMT 2006
brettp@pitr:~$ date +"%c"
Wed 18 Jan 2006 08:34:55 GMT
brettp@pitr:~$ 

I wonder why date doesn't use "%c" by default... weird.

People that don't know that they're wrong, when asking questions of a financial type of your flatmates. That is all.