Wed, 16 Feb 2005
Blogging
I'm considering switching to using blosxom on my own webserver, rather than using LiveJournal. So, for that reason:
Does anyone know whether it is possible, somehow, to download all blog posts I ever made on LiveJournal, preferably including comments?
Tue, 15 Feb 2005
Hardcoded keyboard shortcuts considered harmful
Evolution is a nice piece of software, but it has a few problems that make me still use mutt quite often. I won't go into details on all of them, but here's one to consider: the fact that evolution uses ctrl+] as a keyboard shortcut to go to the next unread message, and that (TTBOMK) that is not configurable.
Now, you might think, "what's wrong with that? It's still available as a shortcut, it's easy to remember, and it isn't hard to type, is it?" Well, not if you use a US qwerty keyboard, where [ and ] are positioned right above the enter key and don't require any shift keys. On my PowerBook G4 with Apple azerty keyboard, however, there is no immediate [ character. There is an immediate ( character, however, and that one is overloaded to get to { and [, as follows: for {, I use Meta_R+(; for [, I use Meta_R+Shift+(. This means that for ctrl+[, I need to hit four friggin' keys at a time. Feels like a space cadet keyboard. It's still possible to use that shortcut, of course, but it isn't really interesting that I have to use so many keys for something you want to do every time you read your mail.
mutt has tab to go to the next unread message. There, that was easy.
So please, pretty please, with sugar on top: make your keyboard shortcuts configurable.
weekend
Yes, I know it's tuesday already.
We (that is, mum, dad, my brothers and sister, and Roel's girlfriend) just had a nice weekend at the Belgian coast. We rented two small apartments of four beds each, and toured around a bit. Been to the sea, where the hurling winds did some nice things with the sand over there. Been to bruges (which was only 6km away), but all I did there was pay a visit to a local De Slegte 2nd hand bookstore for an hour and a half; I left with two 2nd hand DVDs.
For those interested, the DVDs were one of Paul Verhoeven's Starship Troopers (the 'special edition' DVD, whatever that means), and one of an 80s-era fantasy movie called Red Sonja. Starship Troopers is an okay movie; the plot is quite nice, but it's not really held up by the acting—one would expect that if you make a movie in which over half the main characters die, those deaths would get the director's and actor's attention they deserve, so that they would be convincing. They don't. I've never seen so many over-acted and unconvincing deaths in one movie, and they fail to bring the emotion of sorrow to the audience, instead making me smirk on occasion. Apart from that, it's quite entertaining.
The other one sucks. Nothing more to say about that. There is no plot; just a bunch of people who are on a trip and kill some others; and the current governor of California who gets on a girl with a sword. That's about it.
On sunday, the wind had intensified to a storm of the level where my brother's girlfriend got blown away if she got out the door, so we stayed in the house. I played chess and poker against Joris, which was fun to do.
Yesterday, I finished a small project for work, and in the evening, Roel and I went to the house of a friend of my father who happens to be my old Flute teacher, to rehearse the piece we're going to play on the wedding of Marian, my cousin. Did some good work there; we also had a nice chat over a glass of wine afterwards.
Wed, 09 Feb 2005
Wasted CPU cycles
To: Wouter Verhelst <wouter+buildd@grep.be> Subject: Re: Log for successful build of gtk+2.0_2.6.2-1 (dist=unstable) From: buildd@kiivi.cyber.ee In-Reply-To: <20050209195744.GB27344@grep.be> Message-Id: <20050209195828.E1576B6956@kiivi> Date: Wed, 9 Feb 2005 21:58:28 +0200 (EET) > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- > Hash: SHA1 > > Format: 1.7 > Date: Sun, 6 Feb 2005 00:16:52 +0100 > Source: gtk+2.0 > Binary: libgtk2.0-dev libgtk2.0-0-dbg gtk2-engines-pixbuf libgtk2.0-0 libgtk2.0-doc gtk2.0-examples libgtk2.0-bin libgtk2.0-common > Architecture: m68k > Version: 2.6.2-1 > Distribution: unstable > Urgency: low > Maintainer: Kiivi build daemon <buildd@kiivi.cyber.ee> > Changed-By: Sebastien Bacher <seb128@debian.org> > Description: > gtk2-engines-pixbuf - Pixbuf-based theme for GTK+ 2.x > gtk2.0-examples - Examples files for the GTK+ 2.0 > libgtk2.0-0 - The GTK+ graphical user interface library > libgtk2.0-0-dbg - The GTK+ libraries and debugging symbols > libgtk2.0-bin - The programs for the GTK+ graphical user interface library > libgtk2.0-dev - Development files for the GTK+ library > Closes: 291051 293711 > Changes: > gtk+2.0 (2.6.2-1) unstable; urgency=low > . > * New upstream release: > - fix the loop in gtkdialog (Closes: #291051). > - should fix the issue on sparc (Closes: #293711). > Files: > 67986d29a264d4df66eaa3a100d73260 2028138 libs optional libgtk2.0-0_2.6.2-1_m68k.deb > 506a027f271a6f1c8993e591f852cb84 18106 misc optional libgtk2.0-bin_2.6.2-1_m68k.deb > b19e0e39ac2f24260bbb1caf2e3afec6 7572358 libdevel optional libgtk2.0-dev_2.6.2-1_m68k.deb > 623741d88e1213a7d9dd70bf9f9103bd 17831436 libdevel extra libgtk2.0-0-dbg_2.6.2-1_m68k.deb > 76df666d13590f0eef8579787a0c2e12 252126 x11 extra gtk2.0-examples_2.6.2-1_m68k.deb > 7fb77d74d5b6c782bea53fa47bc1f172 44420 libs optional gtk2-engines-pixbuf_2.6.2-1_m68k.deb > > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- > Version: GnuPG v1.4.0 (GNU/Linux) > > iD4DBQFCCms4PfwsYq950p4RArEPAJicu9/GwlVIHxfc+9Ln3cX2S701AJ0REvsG > rfLZZxuq0ahi2x69KhlXMw== > =rBMd > -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- Your mail could not be processed: Package gtk+2.0_2.6.2-1 (unstable) is outdated. The following new versions have appeared in the meantime: unstable: gtk+2.0_2.6.2-2
Yell. Scream.
Tue, 08 Feb 2005
DoS the spammers
How does one stop spam? I don't think it's possible to entirely stop it. But it could be possible to make it less interesting, or at least less easy. DoS the spammers. Of course, preferably without DoSsing yourself.
I'm thinking about setting up something like the following:
- Make sure I use SMTP-time spam filtering.
- Write an application 'throw-junk-back' or something that will take an IP address on the command line and a bit of data on stdin, that will pick five random numbers between 1025 and 65535, and that will send the stdin data to the IP given to it on the UDP ports with the numbers we generated.
- When we're quite sure that what we received was spam (in case of spamassassin, when the score is above 15 or so), pipe the mail to 'throw-junk-back' with the IP of the connecting system.
If everyone would do this, then spammers will require four or five times their current bandwidth (not six times, because UDP has less overhead than TCP, and there'll also be false negatives), which is going to cost them a /lot/ of money, whereas it would not really hurt people that get hit by false positives (provided that only happens once or twice).
Is that a good idea, or am I crazy?
Mon, 07 Feb 2005
not atypical
Thomas Vander Stichelen talks about how he's downloaded an album, but plans on buying it anyway, and claims he's probably atypical in doing that.
Well, I'm not sure. I've downloaded a fair number of Star Trek: Voyager episodes over the last year or so, and I've become a fan – even though I almost never saw it while it was still on Kanaal 2, one of our Belgian TV stations. I like them so much that I've decided I want them all, so I've added them to my wishlist, and have bought the first season already. I will buy the others as soon as my budget permits it (they're quite expensive, but still worth it). I don't think we're so lonely as Thomas suggests. In fact, I know quite a number of people who buy the CD after they like a few of the downloaded MP3 files they have on their hard disk.
Maybe the recording industry should stop thinking of MP3 files as infringing, and start using them as the marketing instrument they really can be, for instance, by allowing people to share low-quality MP3 files but requesting they buy the CD if they want better quality or want to use it for professional purposes, or so.
...
Oh my. I just suggested a shareware-type of distribution for music. This can't be right. I must be sick.
In fact, I am. Philip, my business partner, stayed home sick today, and my nose and head aren't feeling well. I also appear to be having a fever. I would've been to bed, if not for this customer who's doing a server migration at this exact moment and requires me to do some DNS changes from time to time. Sigh...
Thu, 03 Feb 2005
Beefing up pop
pop, my parents' computer, is a Pentium I @ 133Mhz. It was running Windows 98 since ages
Since I haven't installed that system on my own machine since about four years or so, I was getting more and more problems in supporting them. I had suggested a few weeks ago they try out GNU/Linux, but they seemed afraid of that. And being stubborn and persistent is unfortunately a family trait, so I couldn't convince them, even if they are already using Thunderbird for mail and OpenOffice.org for office under Windows.
Luckily, Windows itself came to the rescue. Something's gone awry with kernel32.dll, and it doesn't boot anymore. Since the darn thing a) contains a mass of software they regularly use, and b) is frigging slow, I wasn't too happy to reinstall the box. So, I rebooted the thing to GNU/Linux, configured Gnome, and Thunderbird the way they were used from Windows, and let them use that "until I find the time to reinstall Windows". That might take longer than expected, but if they're really not happy with GNU/Linux, I will reinstall Windows. I still have to be able to live with them. For the time being.
Anyway, the kernel32.dll happened a few days ago, so today dad told me the system was running too slow to their liking. Considering the fact that Gnome 2.6 isn't exactly meant for systems running at 133Mhz, this isn't really surprising, and I should've known better than to hand them a default Gnome desktop. This needed fixing.
So, what can a guy do?
Quite a few things, apparently.
- The Gnome system administrator's guide, which is available through a certain specific website I was pointed to a few weeks ago contains a nice chapter 9, which helps to disable those settings in Gnome that eat the most resources. But that, of course, isn't enough.
- Since one of the complaints was that the system took so awfully long to boot, I tricked it into appearing faster. cd /etc/rc2.d; mv S99gdm S19gdm; mv S99rmnologin S19rmnologin can do wonders.
- While doing that, I discovered that there were a huge number of useless packages installed on pop. Which isn't surprising; I originally installed GNU/Linux on this machine when potato had just been released. That's ages ago. In the mean time, it has been upgraded, upgraded, extra software installed, some software removed, and was hardly used. Thank God for debfoster. I ran debfoster -n, and threw about 800M worth of software off the system. That included things that were useless on this hardware but do run a daemon, such as the sensord package. Helpful.
- After all this, i ran top and had a look at the result. The system ran considerably faster, but there was still room for improvement. One thing I noticed was that with no software running except for Gnome, gnome-terminal and top, it had actually more swap space in use than I had physical memory. That couldn't be a good idea. So, I thought about the things I could do about that; and this reminded me to the fact that the migration of services from folk to western I had been doing had almost been completed; and that folk,a 100Mhz Pentium, requires the same type of RAM as pop. Back before I had western, folk was everything and the kitchensink in my network – NFS- and Samba-fileserver, Windows PDC, mailserver (exim4, courier-imap, and IMP), router, firewall, LDAP; it did backups, updated the F-Prot virus data files on other systems, and did DHCP and DNS. So it required quite a bit of memory to keep all that going smoothly. Since, however, most of those services have now been taken over by western (with the exception of the router/firewall, DHCP, and backup stuff, all are migrated), it doesn't need as much RAM anymore. So, I removed two 32M SIMMs from folk—now running on 16MB of RAM—and added them to the 96M already in pop, to end up at 160M of RAM.
That should do it. I hope. I switched it on again, but didn't wait for it, as it was late enough already and I really had to go to work now.
While typing this on the train, however, mom called me on my cellphone that pop didn't boot properly. It was waiting for folk; apparently there's still an NFS mount configured, but it's not working for some reason. Meaning, it takes over five minutes to get past that stage.
Grmbl.
Wed, 02 Feb 2005
Thank God I don't live in Germany... and I'm male... and I'm not unemployed.
Jamin Philip Gray reported about a little problem in the current German employment laws:
- If you're unemployed for more than a year in Germany, and you refuse a job offer, you can apparently lose your welfare benefits. Which is reasonable; the same is true in Belgium.
- Since 2002, prostitution is no longer illegal in Germany; prostitutes and brothel owners pay taxes like everyone else. This was done in an attempt to fight trafficking in women, which is reasonable. As a result of this, brothel owners can now send out job offers for prostitutes in exactly the same way a hospital can send out a job offer for a nurse, possibly through a job centre where unemployed people would go and ask for a job.
Now combine the above two.
Tue, 01 Feb 2005
Releasing Debian
Yes, I know there's a wiki entry about that subject, but I happen to think wikis are a horrible way to discuss stuff. I don't like them. If someone thinks what I say makes sense and is interested in adding this (or a synthesis thereof) to the wiki, be my guest.
I've been thinking a while about why we can't seem to be able to release within a reasonable time. What exactly is "a reasonable time" is, of course, open for discussion; but the time it takes us right now is way more than "reasonable". My take is that to find out what we should do better, we should have a look at our history and try to find out what's going wrong. From there, we should try and find solutions to those problems. We should also not be blind to the world around us: there are other Free Software-projects comparable to our own (the BSD's and Gentoo, but in a way also KDE and Gnome, although those are different) that do seem able to release; it would be healthy to compare their release processes with our own and try to find out where we could improve ours.
I have come up with the following:
- Lazyness
- When the release has happened, we are happy. We have a party, congratulate ourselves for finally doing it, and then sit back and lazily wait what happens. It takes quite a while before someone gets up and say "it's time for us to release again; let's freeze base".
Unfortunately, this means that in the time between releases, people aren't focused on the actual release; if you ask a random Debian Developer about where we are in the release at any given point in time between the release of the then-current stable and the freeze of the next stable, it's very likely they'll tell you "I dunno". I know that was the case for me after potato's release and after woody's. - Time bombs
- Right when woody was about to be released, the security team yelled "whoa there, we can't support woody with this security infrastructure!" As a result, the release was delayed quite dramatically. Something similar has now happened to the sarge release. There's a pattern there. One could say the pattern is that we need to ensure that the security infrastructure is up to date before we release; but the real problem here is insufficient planning. When the release is near, people will find out that we're not ready, and the bomb will blow; at that time, the release will have to wait, no matter what— we can't release with the problem unfixed.
Of course, nobody can be expected to know about every possible and impossible problem before it happens; but people working on a particular task within the project will know if there are any problems that need to be adressed before the next release. They might just not know how close the release really is, and therefore do not communicate it to others... until it is almost too late. It has been the security infrastructure two times in a row now; but if we focus on not letting this happen to the security infrastructure for the next release, I fear it'll just be something else. Volatile not being integrated into Debian proper, for example. Whatever; it could be anything. - The sheer size of the project
- The Debian Project started off like many Open Source-projects do: a few enthousiasts thought it was a good idea to do a distribution, so they did one. When there was a problem, they would talk to eachother or just simply fix it; and when the release was near, everyone would know.
Today, the Project has grown way beyond that original group, with over 1000 individuals having the status of Debian Developer. We could easily fill all but the largest movie halls, opera houses, or stage theaters; if we would celebrate one Debian Developer each day, it would require us about three years to reach the last one of them. 1000 People is the size of a small village. As a result, it's nearly impossible to know each of those 1000 individuals personally. And if we can't know everyone, we certainly can't know what they're working on.
... In other words, I think it all boils down to one important thing: communication. If there are clear channels as to how something must be communicated, those channels are usually used properly. But what we lack is the big picture; someone to manage all the available information about what's needed to release, and communicate that to the Developer body at large. A way for each and every one of us to better understand our role within the scheme of the Release. Act on problems if there are any. This is the Release Managers' job, you'd say, and I agree; but I feel that for some reason that isn't working out as it should1. The fact that there have been time bombs is one prove of this.
This brings me to what I think is the heart of the problem: People in Debian are working way too much separately, and aren't talking to eachother enough. If we have a look at the Gentoo project, we'll see that they have identified some teams within their developer body, who work closely together; they all define a team leader of sorts, and the team leaders have weekly IRC meetings to discuss problems and plan ahead. There's a documentation team, a base team, a desktop team, a Portage team, etc; this ensures problems are dealt with before they're going to be a problem.
I'm not sure applying that to Debian is a good idea, though; I don't want a hierarchical structure where there are leaders and followers. Besides, I don't think our constitution would allow it. Thus, we'll need something else.
Looking at the FreeBSD project, we can see that they send periodical status updates to their announcements mailinglist. We have something similar in our Release Updates, but there are two differences: first, our Release Updates are only being sent when a Release is supposed to be near; second, the Release Update is created by the Release Managers, who will obviously only talk about the things they know about. In contrast, the FreeBSD status updates are sent regardless of whether a release is near; and they are composed after a request for status updates that is sent to their developers. In other words, every FreeBSD developer can write a section for the status update.
I'm thinking it might be a good idea to try this once Sarge is out the door; if people are working on something big, something important, they should have a way to inform the Developer body about the fact that they are doing so. Using -devel-announce could be a way to do that, but people don't usually make announcements about stuff that isn't ready yet; and if we would do so, then -devel-announce would no longer be the low-traffic list it is supposed to be. Grouping status updates into one mail would be reasonable to keep developers updated and informed on what needs to be done before we can release and how much of it has been done already, without annoying the hell out of people by sending them mail every other day.
But will this be enough? I'm not sure.
One thing that seems also quite problematic is that the Release Managers aren't always as informed about the release themselves, either. I was stunned to learn around last september that about a month had passed without a release, and that even the Release Managers didn't know what we were waiting for. I think we should all agree that the Release Managers will need to know at all time what's going on to be able to properly do their job; and that they may have reasons to ask other people that they do something in a particular way, even if that is against their procedure -- for instance, Release Managers might have a reason to request ftpmasters that NEW-processing for some package is done as soon as possible, or that the build of some other package on some architecture is prioritized over other packages; all so that the release won't be delayed. Currently, Release Managers can (and do) ask this of other developers, but if those other developers decide that they're too lazy or that they disagree with the Release Manager's decision, they will simply not do it; and there's nothing the Release Manager can do about that.
Of course I'm not pointing any fingers, nor am I advocating that the Release Managers be given some extra powers that would allow them to overrule any developer's decision without paying any attention to that developer's wishes; I do think, however, that they should have the ability to do what's necessary to make the release happen; and that might require more than just the ability to edit britney's hints, or politely ask other developers to please do something for them.
Whoa, this post ended up way beyond what I intended it to be. Let's keep it at that; in summary, I think the best course of action would be to
- Not stop doing release updates after sarge is out the door,
- Allow people beyond the Release Managers the ability to get something in the release updates, so that subprojects the Release Managers aren't familiar with can be more easily made public, too. This might include stuff that isn't necessarily important for the release,
- And finally, to give the Release Managers more powers. They don't need to become the Project Managers, but they should have the ability to say 'I want you to do foo, because the release is waiting for it' without being frowned upon
Of course, that might not make any sense, be stupid, or things might already be (partially) done that way. I dunno, I'm not a Release Manager...
1That's not to say that the Release Managers aren't doing their job right, of course; please read on
Found it!
I thought I had lost my Debian T-Shirt a while ago. Apparently, that isn't true; I found it back this morning while going through my clothes trying to find a T-Shirt to wear.
Happily wrapped inside the Debian logo right now...
Sat, 29 Jan 2005
Rehearsal
One of my cousins is getting married; and instead of playing some music from a CD or so, they asked the musicians in the family to play something. There're quite a bit of them; I play the flute, my brother plays the guitar, one of my other brothers plays the piano, one of the cousins plays the trombone, and then there are some more guitarists.
So, I looked at the Mutopia Project's website, and picked the one guitar/flute piece they have over there. It's quite nice, and a piece that's called Serenade sounds just about right for a marriage. So, today, my brother and I have been playing it. It's not too hard, but I'll still need some practice before it'll be good enough for a public performance. Not that it's a problem; the marriage is about two months from now, so we'll have plenty of time to practice.
Fri, 28 Jan 2005
Belgian weather
Belgium must be a meteorologist's wet dream
Yesterday, we had:
- Snow, when I left the house (no, not a blizzard)
- Sun, when I arrived at work (still cold, but at least it didn't look that way)
- Fog, when I left work
- Rain, when I arrived at home
Isn't that nice?
</sarcastic>
Thu, 27 Jan 2005
Airport Extreme up on ebay
My laptop came with an Airport Extreme that is non-functional in real operating systems. I've been thinking about getting myself a USB wireless thingy, some other mini-PCI wireless interface or whatnot, but haven't done so as of yet, mainly because that will all cost me extra money.
Today, I had a marvellous idea. I put my Airport Extreme up on eBay. I will only sell it to somebody who swaps me a regular Airport in return, though. The regular Airports have an ORiNOCO chipset, and should work.
Doing that will give me wireless and money. Always better that way.
Update: okay, I've been told by various people that, contrary to what I thought, the Airport and the Airport Extreme are not interchangeable, on a hardware level. Thus, I've changed the deal to say that I'll accept a USB interface as long as it's supported under LinuxPPC, and that I will answer any queries as to whether a particular model is okay.
Quickstep back up
Since quickstep's 9G SCSI hard disk broke out of heat in early summer of last year, it had been down. Christian sent me an 18G replacement hard disk back in October or so, but as that disk was SCA and quickstep requires 50pin SCSI, I needed an adapter. To keep long stories short, suffice to say that it took a while before that adapter arrived. It did last friday, so I installed it in quickstep on saturday, and started installing and configuring the thing, which has just been finished; it's now happily crunching away at packages in the experimental distribution.
I had pondered using the disk for jazz, a 33Mhz Quadra950 (which is 8Mhz faster than the 25 quickstep has); but as the Quadra only has 64Megs of RAM, and quickstep has 132Megs of them, I decided not to do that. And no, they're not compatible—jazz requires 32pin SIMMs, whereas a Centris 650 such as quickstep has 72pin SIMM slots. Using them both is not an option either, as I don't have another large enough SCSI hard disk, and I only have one RJ45 AAUI transceiver.
Too bad. I guess that will make jazz a nice demo box at FOSDEM and related events.
Wed, 26 Jan 2005
Natural Language Processing
It's incredible how many followups my previous post about "Human Language Parsers" (the official name of which apparently is $SUBJECT) prompted; it would appear that this is quite a popular subject among academics. I've received at least three pointers to allegedly good books about the subject, a number of claims on both sides of the argument whether or not it is possible, and some pointers to existing and somewhat-working implementations of the structure I outlined in my previous post.
Noteworthy is the blog link to blogs.msdn.com, which only worked once out of the five or so times I tried (the other tries all gave 404 or 503 error codes).
My conclusion from all the documentation I read: What makes NLP so hard is the fact that the information required to parse a text includes more than what is actually available in the text; one also needs background information that would require outright artificial intelligence if it is to be understood by a machine.
Or so people actually involved with this stuff claim. Having read the small amount of information, I can understand why that is.
It's also nice to find out that Dutch, which has an extensive use of compound words, is way more exceptional in that regard than I thought it was. Gheh.
Hottentottententententoonstelling. There.
Tue, 25 Jan 2005
Human Language Parser
In the 50-odd years that we have computers, human language parsers are the one thing people have tried to write, but failed.
Not hindered in any way by any degree of knowledge about the subject, I wonder why that is. Granted, human languages are quite complex to express in mathematical terms, but that doesn't have to mean it's entirely impossible. I've been thinking about this quite a bit lately, and it appears to me that an architecture composed of the following components should make a human language parser possible:
- A cataloguing dictionary
- Such a dictionary would catalogue any word in a sentence into a number of classes; example classes could be substantives, proper names, verbs or articles. Words could be classified into multiple classes (a word can be a substantive and a proper name); words that can be different things when spelled the same way (which happens a lot; in English, for example, many verbs in their infinite form can be used as a substantive if one drops the to) would have two entries in the database.
- A set of rules that would define the language's grammar
- This rulebook would contain rules such as "every sentence requires at least a verb and a subject", or "if the subject is changed from singular to plural, the verb has to be changed accordingly".
- An engine
- This would look at a given text, split it up into phrases, look each word up in the dictionary, and try to apply the grammar rules until a possible way to interpret the phrase has been found
Granted, this would require a huge amount of work; but I don't think it's impossible.
Now, one might wonder why it would be nice to be able to get a computer to understand human language. For one thing, it would vastly increase the quality of existing grammar checkers in word processors; but that's just the tip of the iceberg. Extend the dictionary to also include a numeric representation of each word where words that are synonyms have the same numeric value—or at least one that is very close—and where homonyms have multiple values, and you open the possibility to a number of interesting things. A command line interface like "good morning, please fire up mutt". An application that will take a text in English and output one in Dutch. Flawlessly.
</dreamstate>
This hasn't been done to date, and I can't believe I'm the first one to have come to this idea. So why hasn't it been done yet? I've seen many people try, but none of the grammar parsers I've seen thus far are actually functional to a degree that I'd rather trust the grammar checker than myself. What's the hard part? The huge amount of work? Or is there some barrier that I haven't thought about that makes the whole thing impossible?
Mon, 24 Jan 2005
PostScript adaptation
In October of last year, I posted a PostScript note bar snippet that I wrote about a year or so ago, on my blog. I've since received in private mail quite a number of requests to adapt it to other page sizes (letter, A5, whatnot). I've always kindly explained people that I think the numbers are self-evident and that this isn't hard, and what the numbers mean anyway, and that they should try to read some PostScript tutorial, but I'm sick of it now; I can't keep doing this. So, for everyone interested, here's the explanation. Please update your bookmarks, if you have any.
For reference, the entire code snippet again:
%!PS
50 75 moveto
1 1 13 {
1 1 5 {
500 0 rlineto
-500 5 rmoveto
} for
0 30 rmoveto
} for
stroke
showpage
Now, what do the numbers mean? Line by line:
- 50 75 moveto
- moves the PostScript cursor (or whatever it's called) to a point 50 units from the left side of the page, and 75 units from the bottom.
- 1 1 13 {
- The following is a code block with three numbers as the argument. The block ends with } for, so it's a counting loop which is started at one, incremented by one, and ended when 13 is reached. Meaning, there are 13 note bars on one page. Adjust if you have space for more note bars on a page.
- 1 1 5 {
- Another loop; this time to make sure a single note bar consists of five lines. You don't want to touch this, except if you're going to write some gregorian music or so.
- 500 0 rlineto
- Draws a line from the current point on the page to 500 postscript units to its right. Adjust if your page size is wider or smaller than A4.
- -500 5 rmoveto
- Moves the postscript cursor back to the left end of the page, but 5 postscript units above our previous location (so that the next line will be drawn slightly above the previous one). Adjust accordingly to the one above; adjust the 5 if you want more or less space between two lines of a single note bar.
- 0 30 rmoveto
- Moves the postscript cursor another 30 units up, once the complete note bar of 5 lines has been drawn. Adjust if you want more or less space between two note bars.
The rest (%!PS, stroke and showpage) are PostScript language constructs that are necessary if you want to get the correct output. Ignore them.
The smart card reader arrived today
wouter@country:/opt/belpic/bin$ ./opensc-tool -n Connecting to card in reader CCID Compatible... Using card driver: Belpic smartcards Card name: Belpic smartcards
So far, so good.
Now for a few bits of extra stuff. The belpic binaries, as shipped on the Belgian government website, are renamed to include a "belpic" prefix. It would be reasonable, for both my sanity and that of the opensc maintainer, to do the same.
When I get home tonight, I'll also compare the upstream binaries against my own. But since my laptop is powerpc, and Zetes only ships i386 binaries...
Gaim again
I received quite some feedback on my previous blog entry.
I would just like to note, for the record, that I believe some of the things that are currently available through plugins should really be default behaviour; and that two windows count as 'a gazillion' for an application that I only rarely use.
Sun, 23 Jan 2005
Gaim is bothering me
- If you can't connect at startup, be quiet. You're on a laptop. It's perfectly normal that I don't have networking from time to time. Do not throw a gazillion of windows on my desktop.
- If the connection to one of the servers drops, reconnect quietly. Don't ask me, and especially do not pop up the contacts window when I didn't ask for it.
- Speaking of which, please stop bothering me with that contacts window at startup. If I'm interested in doing a chat, I'll click your icon. Otherwise, SOD OFF, dammit.
Fri, 21 Jan 2005
doing m68k again
I was browsing my old blog entries, and stumbled upon one from about half a year ago, where I talked about the two macs p2 had brought me. At the time, I didn't have enough spare time to give them some love; and afterwards, I had completely forgotten about those.
Made up for that just now.
The good part is, they both work as far as MuckOS. The IIci even has Penguin-16 installed, and a 2.2.0 kernel (or something). The bad part is, none of them actually runs GNU/Linux at the moment (the IIci just sits there after loading the kernel, the Quadra doesn't even have one), and what's worse, the Quadra doesn't even always boot. It boots some of the time, if it feels like it.
Once I receive the long-awaited SCA-SCSI adapter, I'm thinking of configuring this Quadra as an autobuilder instead of quickstep, my Centris 650. The Quadra is a hell of a lot faster, even if it has less RAM currently; but that's an issue we can deal with, I suspect...
Dad
I forgot to mention something quite important last week.
I now officially have an old man as my dad. He's retired from his job as a hospital receptionist, and is now on what is called "brugpensioen"1 in Belgium. As a result, he'll have a lot more time to be at home—and nag me for a numer of things, apparently. Or so he thinks. Must find a way to make him stop doing that...
1literally "bridge retirement", this is a system where people, under certain special circumstances, can retire before they reach the age of 65, which is the normal age for people to retire in Belgium. Dad is "only" 58...
Done
It took a while to configure my laptop's networking properly, but it's all there, now.
I'm using a combination of whereami and vtun to get it all done. In the end, it was easy; I only had to recompile my kernel to have CONFIG_LEGACY_PTYS, which I didn't before. Would've been nice had vtund actually told me so, instead of just blattering
Jan 20 21:16:34 country vtund[7915]: Session ppp-compress[verhelst.dyndns.org] opened Jan 20 21:16:49 country vtund[7915]: Can't allocate pseudo tty. No such file or directory(2)
though, but what the hell.
wouter@country:~$ /sbin/ifconfig eth0
eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:0D:93:38:90:6C
inet addr:195.144.77.46 Bcast:195.144.77.47 Mask:255.255.255.240
inet6 addr: 2001:838:37f:0:20d:93ff:fe38:906c/64 Scope:Global
inet6 addr: fe80::20d:93ff:fe38:906c/64 Scope:Link
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:22963 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:23674 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:6105125 (5.8 MiB) TX bytes:2505543 (2.3 MiB)
Interrupt:41 Base address:0xbc00
wouter@country:~$ ping -c 1 192.168.119.2
PING 192.168.119.2 (192.168.119.2) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 192.168.119.2: icmp_seq=1 ttl=63 time=28.8 ms
--- 192.168.119.2 ping statistics ---
1 packets transmitted, 1 received, 0% packet loss, time 0ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 28.843/28.843/28.843/0.000 ms
wouter@country:~$ traceroute 192.168.119.2
traceroute to 192.168.119.2 (192.168.119.2), 30 hops max, 38 byte packets
1 192.168.119.1 (192.168.119.1) 52.299 ms 37.863 ms 74.453 ms
2 192.168.119.2 (192.168.119.2) 37.427 ms 30.221 ms 60.244 ms
wouter@country:~$
Whee. No more annoying SSH tunnels to reach my IMAP server.
Mon, 17 Jan 2005
Firefox
I've switched to using Firefox instead of Mozilla for a while now, because the latter is just way too slow at startup. However, there's a few annoyances:
- Firefox doesn't know the Site Navigation toolbar I've become used to in Mozilla. I miss it! I want my Site Navigation Toolbar!
For those that don't know what I'm talking about, the Site Navigation Toolbar is the thing that (by default) pops up with buttons like "Next", "Previous", etc, and that is populated by information in the <link> tags in the HTML page. - Every once in a while, Firefox enables the "search while you type" functionality when I'm typing in an <input> box. Now, I don't mind having the search while you type thingy – in fact, I wouldn't want to live without it – but having to click my mouse every time I enter a letter is... interesting. I'd file a bug, if only I knew what triggers it...
AOL
Yes; I, too, have been blogging for about a year now. Isn't that a coincidence?
Actually, I think it has more to do with Planet Debian being active for about a year now. It prompted many people, including me, to start one. So there.
ENOTHAPPY
I just found out that the concert trip to Slovakia the ensemble will do has conflicting dates with DebConf this year.
Garr.
Fri, 14 Jan 2005
GNOME documentation
I'm getting involved in a project to advocate GNU/Linux on the desktop here in Flanders, so I was considering writing some introductory guide to GNOME. Of course, if possible, it'd be great not to have to reinvent the wheel, so I went to the GNOME website to see whether they already have such a thing, either in Dutch so that I don't have to do anything, or in English so that all I have to do is translate.
Well, either they don't have any user documentation on their website, or it's pretty darn well hidden. I couldn't seem to find anything. Amazingly, there are links on their main page to developer documentation. One would wonder where the GNOME people's priorities lie...
Names
RedHat is rethinking how they're working with Fedora. One of the things they're going to do is FUDcon. Now, this could be just me, but I think that's a, well, pretty badly chosen name, suggesting they're about to follow Microsoft's tactics.
Oh well. As if I care :-)
Thu, 13 Jan 2005
Belgium, the Big Endian country
I was a bit confused today.
<p2-mate> so, build a BE ARM userland :)
Belgian ARM? Oh. Right. Big Endian.
* Yoe considers how he seems to be living in a Big Endian country. Hm. <p2-mate> Yoe: yeah, we live in the right endianess country :)
Does that mean I have to throw away my little endian machines now?
Unfortunately, no country seems to be having 'le' as its ISO code (unless the list of ISO codes that I consulted is outdated). And even 'el' (which would make sense in the context) doesn't exist. Pity.
Wed, 12 Jan 2005
Answering machine
Gunnar Wolf is looking for a simple, no-nonsense answering machine. I suggest he picks one of these two options:
- Try finding one second-hand. I found this is surprisedly easy on yard sales and the like, because people usually want feature-rich answering machines of the kind Gunnar explicitely does not want.
- Get yourself a modem with the capability to do voice stuff (these come even in the external modem variants; I have one like that) and install mgetty-voice to turn it into an answering machine. If you really want to, you can add mgetty-fax and pppd to more interesting stuff with it...
What is?
It's pretty silly to link to something which requires registration, when all you say is "this is really great"...
Sat, 08 Jan 2005
svn $HOME
Just read Joey Hess' description of his home directory. I've been putting my home directory in svn too, since a while; and while it provides me with quite some benefits, there are a few annoyances left that I didn't have a solution for. Reading the way someone experienced in this area handles the particularities of version-controlled home directories gave me some ideas:
- I need to start using branches
- Using .hide is a great idea.
Thanks, Joey!
Thu, 06 Jan 2005
Choco
I love choco. Probably because I'm addicted to chocolate.
There's also hazelnut "choco", which isn't really choco, but it looks similar, and in Belgium, people do still call it choco. Nutella is probably the most well-known brand of that kind of thing. I like that too.
I'm not the only one in our family for which the above is true. And since I have four brothers who all like choco, in all its types and variations, well... you can do the math.
Dad just came back from the shop. He's bought a huge nutella jar. The thing contains 3kg worth of nutella. Believe me, it's a giant.
This one should outlive us for a few weeks. I guess.
Thu, 30 Dec 2004
Test card arrived
A package arrived by mail yesterday. It featured the test eID-card I ordered.
They're a bit expensive to my taste, but I can live with that.
Now for the smart card reader that I have to get, too...
Wed, 29 Dec 2004
meme time
First time I actually participate in something like this (I think), but this time it's actually cool.
create your own visited countries map
I should note that the China part is about 'The flight to Australia stopped in Hong Kong for refuel, so we stayed on the airport for four hours'. It counts to me as 'having been there', and it looks way more interesting that way ;-)
It'd be nice to have a more detailed version of Europe for this, though. Right now, one can hardly see that I also touched Andorra and Vatican City.
Sun, 26 Dec 2004
Zetes' idea of what a patch looks like
#!/bin/sh cp belpicd/configure.in opensc/ cp --remove-destination belpicd/src/* opensc/src/ cp --remove-destination belpicd/src/libopensc/* opensc/src/libopensc/ cp --remove-destination belpicd/src/pkcs11/* opensc/src/pkcs11/ cp --remove-destination belpicd/src/tools/* opensc/src/tools/ cd opensc/src/libopensc sed 's/HAVE_OPENSSL/HAVE_NO_OPENSSL/g' ctx.c > tmp mv -f tmp ctx.c sed 's/HAVE_OPENSSL/HAVE_NO_OPENSSL/g' card-gpk.c > tmp mv -f tmp card-gpk.c sed 's/HAVE_OPENSSL/HAVE_NO_OPENSSL/g' pkcs15-wrap.c > tmp mv -f tmp pkcs15-wrap.c echo "In libopensc/ : renamed HAVE_OPENSSL so OpenSSL wont be used" [...]
Anyway. I've issued an ITP for this thing. Let's try and get a nice, good and working package out of this before sarge releases...
Thu, 23 Dec 2004
Data centers are cool
5452kB opgehaald in 3s (1527kB/s)
Yeah, sue me, so I use l10n. But you know apt, right?
Wed, 22 Dec 2004
digitally signing stuff
Alexander Schmehl blogged about how digital signatures aren't really well-organized currently; the PGP trust model is hard for a government to legally enforce, whereas the X.509 trust model isn't nice to a user (expensive, windows-only solution, or whatnot).
I agree. And for that reason, I'm very happy with the fact that the Belgian Government, trough a company called Zetes, developed a digital ID card...
...fully based on open standards, such as X.509, PKCS#15 (a standard to communicate with smart cards), and others. The ID card will optionally contain a signing key apart from the digitalized identity information, which will be signed by a CA which is to be instituted by the Government. You'll be able to read the card using standard SmartCard-reading hardware.
When people with clue design something, it's always great. This is far better than the Certipost fiasco, which is a somewhat-X.509 system that doesn't work under real browsers. One minor detail; currently Zetes is in breach of the OpenSC license by not providing source to modified LGPL binaries—but they told me they always planned to release their source, and that it will happen in the next few days. Let's see if they keep that promise.
I'd want a smart card reader for christmas.
Mon, 20 Dec 2004
What's eating Gilbert Grape?
Fine movie, that.
I didn't have much to do today, so I went to my brother's room, picked out that DVD, and played it on my laptop. This isn't a feel-good movie, but for some reason, the story made a lot of sense to me. Freaky; I usually don't have that with movies.
I just watched it a second time. Well, half of it anyway – I'm getting tired. Think I'll go to bed now.
Sat, 11 Dec 2004
Firmware blobs
There's a lot of blatter recently about firmware-requiring drivers. My arrogant opinion:
There's a difference between a bunch of opcodes packed into an array which is executed by the host system, and a bunch of bits which is sent off to a device.
You can distribute a firmware blob in an external file.
"Hey kernel, here's a file with a lot of stuff which you need to send to this device prior to doing anything else with it"
I don't see how a driver that does the above is non-free. Heck, stuff like the above could probably done in a generalized way (if devices aren't too different in how they load firmware blobs), creating a firmware-blob-dumping-framework of sorts. It's not as if that would need a proprietary license or so; so that's not how it would be non-free. The function of this framework would be to dump blobs of data to other devices, and it could perform that function well. All you'd need is the firmware blob, which you would need to download from the manufacturer's website. Or copy it from a CD-ROM or floppy disk. That does not involve Debian, so there's no problem here either.
So, what we have is this:
- A computer running Free Software.
- A device (talking USB, PCI, IEEE1399, whatnot) running non-free software. Most of these devices have a CPU and some RAM, so they could technically be considered to be a small computer themselves. They don't have permanent storage (else we wouldn't have this discussion), but that's a different matter.
- A driver in the computer running Free Software which will talk to the device–computer–running non-free software. That driver will always work correctly and as advertised; however, the computer requiring non-free software will not until it has received a blob of firmware. This is critical: people talk about some of those drivers as if they require non-free firmware blobs to function; that is not correct, the non-free system requires it, and it makes for a world of difference (see below).
- A blob of firmware (which is non-free software) required by the non-free requiring computer. It could be downloaded by the driver itself, by the user using some hypothetical other self-made special-purpose device, by the kernel through some hypothetical framework made for the specific purpose of loading firmware blobs to devices, or whatever.
Where I think the discussion goes wrong is that people see a load of non-free firmware in connection to the driver, and suddenly decide the whole driver is non-free. The firmware blob is required for the other computer to operate; I agree that Debian should not distribute it (it is still non-free software), but there's nothing wrong with providing (free) software to load the firmware blob to the device.
After all, we provide other software in the archive to copy random data from computers running Free Software to computers running non-free software already; consider netatalk, ncpfs and, of course, samba.
I submit that the part of a driver which dumps a firmware blob on a piece of hardware is similar in function to netatalk, ncpfs or samba, and that it thus can remain in main. Moving it to contrib is ridiculous, IMO.
That is all.
