viruses, part 2

, you're missing an important part of the story (and are messing up the rest). There are two types of viruses that get sent by mail: worms, and "normal" viruses in some attachments. For the latter kind, what those anti-virus thingies do actually is the right thing to do; after all, the mail is legitimate (it just happens to have a legitimate attachment with an illegitimate infection), so the recipient and/or the sender might be surprised to find out that the mail isn't arriving. In this case (because the mail was willingly sent out and isn't forged in any way), we want a notice. Those types of viruses are getting rarer, though.

The other type (mass-mailing worms) is getting more and more popular. The right thing to do for a mailserver intercepting such a mail is never to notify anyone of this fact, except perhaps his own admin; because since the mailheaders are more than likely forged, there's no way an automated system can reach the right person anyway. The right way to fight those mails, is to do what my ISP does: if an infected mail passes through their "outgoing mailserver" as ISP's like to call it, it will block any SMTP traffic coming from that IP for the next half hour, giving a clear 550 message which says your computer is infected. That reaches the right person in all cases (remember that Windows does not usually feature an MTA), and does not bother those who do not and should not care. I like this way of handling the issue, even if it occasionally bites me too (yes, there are some non-free operating systems in my LAN... some people just don't want to listen to arguments )

Bouncing it somewhere half in transit is, of course, not the right thing to do either; that will result in a bounce reaching the wrong person. If it arrives at a mailserver, not from the originating IP, a mail containing a mass-mail worm should be discarded

think... it isn't hard...

Adam, you said it yourself: "Usually, the autoreply also includes a plug for the email scanner software itself."

'Nuff said.

Train your SA's bayesian learner, and/or add a rule that adds a number of points when the word "virus" is found in a mail, and forget about them.

FAI

Been trying to figure out how FAI works. It's not as easy as it could be; I've been working on it since quite a while now. At first it didn't even work; it took me a while before I realized that the command fai-setup in the unstable version is simply broken. That explains a lot...

After fixing that (by installing the most recent version), at least least the box booted and installed. Not perfectly yet; I couldn't get it to copy the logfiles over to the logfileserver. I didn't want to install rsh or ftpd, and ssh kept asking for confirmation regarding the host key. Turned out I had disabled some bit of ssh which is needed to do that. Hmpf.

I have the feeling it's going to take a while before FAI will work as it should. Let's finish it tomorrow...

FreeBSD sucks

I now remember why I have become a Debian Developer, and not a FreeBSD one: Last week, the FreeBSD guys did an upgrade of the gettext libraries, which kinda broke everything compiled against gettext.

Obviously, the right way to fix that is to make sure both the old and the new version of the library are installed, in such a way that of the old version only the .so file remains on the hard disk while the new library puts its header files and the like on the right place, so that new software gets compiled against it. At least, that's how Debian would do this.

Apparently, the FreeBSD developers disagree with me; instead, they've now bumped the version of all packages that directly or indirectly depend on gettext (including packages that don't really use gettext, but, e.g., require GNU make, which uses gettext), so if you want to have a working system again, you have to recompile all those.

Which sucks; I've been recompiling software since 6 hours ago, and I'm still not finished. On a 2.2Ghz laptop. Yuck, source-based stuff.

assignment fun

Been hunting assignment bugs all day at work. Hunting bugs can be fun, but not if you're doing it all day with almost no success. Especially if stuff happens you didn't anticipate at first.

Matrices of autobuilders

Saw "The Matrix Revolutions" yesterday night. Have to say that I don't really like it; as an end, it's miserable. For example, when mr. Smith and Neo were fighting near the end of the movie, a scene which takes a considerable amount of time, there were a few instances where I was thinking something along the lines of "OK, they're fighting, now get on with it!". Also, the explanation of why Neo was able to stop those four sentinals in "The Matrix Reloaded" was silly. I must say that I expected a lot more of it, I'm quite disappointed.

Oh well

Ryan Murray announced on the m68k-build mailinglist that he had moved the m68k wanna-build database to newraff, a change which was pending anyway. I had assumed that James did not yet activate the two new buildd machines of which I had sent him the required information because he was busy moving all that stuff to newraff, so that he didn't want to waste his time doing this twice. Which would've been understandable.

Turns out that isn't the case; they moved the w-b database on Saturday, but the access still isn't enabled.

I'm getting tired of this... as any clueful person can see by plainly looking at the graph, m68k is lagging a bit. Less now because I'm manually feeding packages to those two buildd's, but it's very tedious and time-wasting to do so.

Australian Open

Kim Clijsters didn't win the Australian Open last night, but she came very close in an exciting finals. I'd have loved to see her win; maybe next time?

I'm sorry for the Aussies, though; after the match, the Australian president of Tennis (forgot the man's name in the mean time) announced that Heineken will remain the official beer of the Australian Open for at least the next three years! Don't they have any taste there?

Psycho

I've had to make a terribly choice just a few minutes ago: watch the end of Hitchcock's Psycho, or acknowledge the fact that I'm falling asleep, and go do bed.

It's become the latter when I suddenly realized that I was already sleeping, and that some important part of the movie had passed while I was "somewhere else". But it's a shame; I've always wanted to see Psycho, even if I know what the story is like.

Darn.

hmmm

pffff...

trains and snow

Q: What do you do when the radio says the train will be later due to the weather? A: You run for it anyway, because they're lying.

Well, almost. The train I needed to catch first, at home, was on time; but all others were too late. Oh, I love trains...

apache doing debconf abuse? Oh my.

Would you like to start apache at boot time? <Yes> <No>

Of course I want to start apache at boot time! Why else do you think I installed it? Because I like the way you look? No! Because I wanted an apache to be running on my system!

It wouldn't be so bad if the debconf configuration actually worked, which it doesn't; I'm getting error messages about some non-existant files. That's silly; one can easily check whether a file is there before doing this kind of things...

AP

I saw the light this morning; I suddenly remembered what the factory-default IP address of my AP was, set my desktop in the same subnet, and enabled DHCP. I can enable its access controls again now, so that I don't have to feel unsafe anymore. Phew.

I've also seen that my CFP's have made it into the latest DWN issue. Good; that means more people will see it, which hopefully means more people will react to it...

...OK, that last bit was unrealistic

AP fun

Note to self: Never, ever, choose the "reset to factory defaults" option of network gear, unless you have its documentation handy somewhere.

Spent the better part of last evening (and a fairly large chunk of the night, too) trying to get an ORiNOCO card to cooperate with my Access Point, so that my brother, who's bought a laptop recently, can use it. Something's wrong with the damn thing; it works flawlessly in ad-hoc mode, but refuses to recognize the AP which I've got running at home. After many hours fiddling with settings on both the card and the AP, I tried to go back to square one, and chose the "Factory Default" option in the AP's web-interface.

Bad idea.

I can't seem to find the manual, and don't know what the factory default IP address is; "arp -s" doesn't seem to work; and the default seems to be to work without using DHCP. Darn.

The funny bit was that with the factory default settings, it suddenly worked, somehow; the ORiNOCO finally found the AP. Since this is a second-hand laptop, P1-based, it doesn't have a functioning battery anymore; so I powered it off, moved it to my brother, and powered it on again, only to notice that it now again didn't work anymore.

I gave up at that point. No wireless for him...

musical notation

• It should not hog my CPU, and if it creates some Lilypond output, that had better be syntactically correct (so, not rosegarden4)
• It should not be horribly outdated (so, not rosegarden2.1)
• It should not dump core when opening anything else than its native format (so, not denemo)
• It should give me a path to its native format from the .mid file I have here (so, not noteedit)
• It should have the ability to display notes, instead of just being a sequencer (so, not brahms)
• And, last but not least: it should allow me to convert my .mid file into a conductor's score (which actually rules them all out, unless I didn't look too careful) so that I can edit it.That would be nice.

auric

network

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?

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.

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.

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:

1. Make sure I use SMTP-time spam filtering.
2. 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.
3. 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?

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...

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.

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.

GHAAAH!

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...

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.

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>

setting up a buildd

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.

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.

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?

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.

Gaim is bothering me

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.

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.

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.

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

Fedora revamped

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

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.

chroot cleanup

0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 104 to remove and 77 not upgraded.
Need to get 0B of archives.
After unpacking 150MB disk space will be freed.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n] 

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"...

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!

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.

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...

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.

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...

Data centers are cool

5452kB opgehaald in 3s (1527kB/s)

Yeah, sue me, so I use l10n. But you know apt, right?

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.

alarm clock

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.

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.

mgetty is cool

I used to think that of HylaFAX. But what I couldn't set up with HylaFAX, I just did (and easily so) with mgetty.

I now have a single box with a single modem that will receive faxes and that will allow data connections of both the PPP and getty kinds. This is really cool. I used to dial in to Scarlet when I was on the road and needed an Internet connection over my cell phone, but I have a better alternative now.

Whee

The most important phrase

What's the most important phrase in any language?

• Twee pintjes alstublieft
• Dos cervezas por favor
• Deux bières s'il vous plaît
• Two beer please
• Zwei bier bitte

Two, because you're supposed to be social. And if you're drinking alone after all, you can't get yourself drunk with only one beer (although two is likely not enough...)

My silly ISP

We have a phone line and Internet connection with Telenet, a company which provides phone and Internet services over the cable. Usually, Telenet works pretty well, but today there was an outage. Right when I was trying to work.

The line dropped twice for a few minutes in a period of only ten minutes, which I regarded as suspicious – especially since the cable modem has been acting weird for a while. Also, when the line was out, I couldn't get a dial tone on the phone either. So, I tried to call their support line to find out what was going wrong. Oh my...

The first number I called was 0800 66 800, which used to be their support line, and is a toll-free number. However, the only response I got there was "This number is no longer in use; please call us again at 015 66 66 66, where we'll gladly help you". Grmbl.

At that number, the same computer voice asked for my customer number. Which I didn't have handy; I had to find a bill first, so had to go and find mum (I don't know where they keep those), and she had to get out half the paperwork to find one. After entering that number (and chosing the right options in the menu that followed, I got someone on the phone, explained to her what was going on, and asked whether perhaps they were performing maintenance on the line.

The very first thing she asked was "Could you please give me your customer number, sir?"

...Then why did I have to enter it in the first place?

Well. She looked up a few things, and concluded that indeed our line had dropped a few times today, but that it could be the cable modem wearing out (which wouldn't be too strange, considering that the thing is about five years old now); so she wanted me to monitor it for the rest of the day; and if the problems remain, I should call back tonight or tomorrow morning.

Got back to mum to tell her that; but while explaining to dad (who had just come back from the shop) what I was talking about, he simply said 'oh, but Telenet is working on their infrastructure right down the street'...

Right. Obviously the girl on the other end of the phone line didn't know this (since I specifically asked, as it seemed the most logical explanation to me). Way to go, Telenet!

done!

FOSDEM, anyone?

Sometimes you just have to temporarily break things

Last week's thursday, I stayed up to switch the mailserver from folk to western. I had been planning to do this for quite a while, but hesitated to go ahead and do so because I was afraid lots of things would start to break. With the hard disk breakage that popped up, however, I had a reason not to wait any longer. Three hours later... everything was working fine. Minus the fact that I had forgotten to fix folk's configuration to send mail to western instead of delivering it locally, but that was easily fixed.

Perhaps I shouldn't be so afraid to break things...

He's dead, leave him!

A while ago, the Dutch schläger singer André Hazes died. I'm sure that's tough for his family and fans, but there's no reason to bother the rest of us with that fact. First, a lot of insane people bought his last record 'zij gelooft in mij', which was then played ad infinitum on the radio, driving me crazy in the process; and now, when I thought this was over and they would finally leave the poor sod alone in his grave, the VRT is planning a documentary of sorts involving the man's life, and intersect every two minutes with a trailer. Containing, of course, that song.

Please. One death is enough, no need to drive other people to ritual suicide over this.

Why disclaimers are stupid

Subject: unsubscribe
To: debian-devel@lists.debian.org
Message-ID: 
From: mjmayfield@pepco.com
Date: Fri, 3 Dec 2004 08:36:37 -0500
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That much legalese for a single "unsubscribe"? Well done.

Hm. I was supposed to delete that mail, not show it to the world. Will they sue me now?

gettext

wouter@country:~/scratch/gettext$ cat > nl.po <<EOF
> msgid "foo"
> msgstr "foe"
> EOF
wouter@country:~/scratch/gettext$ msgfmt --statistics nl.po -o nl/LC_MESSAGES/foo.mo
1 translated message.
wouter@country:~/scratch/gettext$ LANG=nl.UTF-8 TEXTDOMAIN=foo TEXTDOMAINDIR=/home/wouter/scratch/gettext gettext -s 'foo'
foo
wouter@country:~/scratch/gettext$ LANG=nl_BE.UTF-8 TEXTDOMAIN=foo TEXTDOMAINDIR=/home/wouter/scratch/gettext gettext -s 'foo'
foe
wouter@country:~/scratch/gettext$

What's going on here? nl.UTF-8 doesn't exist in /etc/locale.gen. Since nl doesn't exist in /usr/share/i18n/locales either, adding it won't help (and creating a nl locale doesn't seem to make sense, as the differences between nl_BE and nl_NL are mostly in areas such as LC_TELEPHONE and LC_MONETARY, where a difference is correct). As a result, gettext doesn't find the correct locale environment and doesn't translate anything. It took me a while of looking at the locale definition files in /usr/share/i18n/locale to find out what's going on: the 'nl' directory isn't found because it happens to have a name which is part of the locale name; it is found because it happens to be referred from the locale definition. At least, that's what I think happens.

I didn't expect that. If gettext sees a locale name of nl_BE, which it does not know (because no charset is defined), it'll just pick a random charset which is defined, and use that. Isn't it reasonable to expect that the same will happen for stuff such as nl vs nl_BE?

Maybe that's a bug...

hard disks

Nothing like waking up with the sound of a hard disk trying (and failing) to read the same block over and over again. ruptime told me folk's load average was over 6, where it's usually around 0.10...

Had to e2fsck -c a few times to get it fixed. Since that was my homedir's partition (and since my mail goes to ~/Maildir), it's not unlikely that I've lost some mail. If you're expecting a reply from me and you didn't get it, well, you know why.

I really need to finish that transition to western...

Oh well.

GNOME braindump

I was an Enlightenment user between the end of July 2001 and the 1st of October 2004. I never switched to another graphical user interface because, well, I liked Enlightenment; and after using it for three years, I obviously know it pretty well, too.

However, for various reasons, I started to use GNOME since October this year. At first, I thought I wouldn't like it at all, but it's not as bad as I thought. This probably has a lot to do with the fact that E is in fact buggy and unmaintained since a while before when I started to use it, and that the one guy who tried to remove some of its most horrible bugs, only worsened the situation with the one new version he prepared.

Luckily, GNOME does not have these problems; there are, however, a few annoyances left. Here goes.

• Enlightenment has this cool feature called 'sloppy focus'. It allows you to have a small window on top while typing in the much larger window which is below that one. As an example where this is interesting, there is the case where I'm trying to work, and some people keep sending me messages over Jabber; in those cases, I generally keep the message window on top (in case anything useful comes up), but will keep it out of focus. Getting the message window in focus requires a simple move of the mouse. Easy. Unfortunately, I can't seem to find out how to configure GNOME to behave similarly—if it even has that feature.
• Another nice feature in Enlightenment is the ability to switch virtual desktops by moving the mouse pointer to the edge of the screen. I found the ability to enable that in GNOME, too, by using the 'brightside' application. However, that one is giving me more trouble than it's worth: First, it gives me an error message every time I exit GNOME; second, the E implementation to move to another virtual is simply better in that it does not switch virtual desktops if you hold the mouse button down while touching the edge of the screen (think 'scrolling' and 'maximized windows' here), and in that it, contrary to brightside, does not reduce the time before it'll switch back to the original desktop right after you did switch.
• If there's anything I hate, it's software that tries to be smarter than me. GNOME's metacity does not allow me to move the upper edge of a window above the upper edge of my screen, and I really, really hate that.
• Of course, there's also the gconf issue that I blogged about before.

Other than the four above points, using GNOME has been a mostly positive experience to me.

Advocacy

I have an Apple laptop running GNU/Linux since about a month now, and apparently, this occasionally helps to advocate GNU/Linux.

When I'm on the train, on my way from or to work, I will usually be doing stuff on my laptop. Of course, when you're on the train, you're usually not alone; and the fact that I'm using Apple hardware isn't too common in itself. "Oh, are you a Mac user?" "No."

People don't expect that answer. Yes, this is Apple hardware, but I'm running GNU/Linux. If they're smart enough to realize that Mac isn't the same thing as PC, then they usually are smart enough to have heard about GNU/Linux, too (although they call it plain 'Linux'). In this one month, it has happened on two separate occasions now that I've given a small demo about how good, nice and useful GNU/Linux is to other people on the train. Complete strangers. Compare to the whole year I've had a GNU/Linux Pentium IV-based laptop, where literally nobody asked me a thing about GNU/Linux – not even people I know. Of course, because the train ride is pretty short, that demo can't take longer than about half an hour, but it still is enough to show them how good an alternative this GNU/Linux thing is.

Both of them apologised for taking up my time. I told them I don't care. In fact, I may be more interested in explaining this to them than they are in listening...

Star Trek

I bought season one of Star Trek: Voyager on DVD today. It wasn't cheap, but it was worth it, and I've been watching it for a while now.

The box looks totally unlike what they show over on the Star Trek website; it even includes one more disc than the website claims. Which is nice, of course, although the stuff on that disc isn't really Voyager-related (two ST:TOS episodes, and trailers for ST:DS9 and ST:TNG dvd sets). But hey, I guess that's because this is Europe, and the website is made and hosted in the US. Oh well...

Mobile networking

In these days of VPN, IPsec, dynamic routing, tunnels, IPv6, and autoconfiguration protocols, one would expect that it would be possible to configure a laptop to find all kinds of hosts automatically, both for those that are network-specific (proxy servers, NNTP-servers), and for those that are not (mail servers, version control systems, ...). And yet, every time I log in, no matter where, I manually set up two SSH connections tunnels. One to allow for a connection to the NNTP server (different ISPs require different NNTP servers, and I don't want to reconfigure leafnode every time), one to connect to my mail server. Yes, I'm using SSH keys and ssh-agent. Yes, I'm using ~/.ssh/config. But I still have to start the connection every time, which is a nuisance. And because it's more of a problem on a laptop than it's worth, I don't even bother with proxy servers anymore.

This could use some improvement. What I want is simple: I want tunnels and the like to be set up automatically when I connect my laptop to a network. If the network is 'known' (at home or at the office), then connections to local systems should not be tunneled, compressed, or encrypted, so that stuff isn't slowed down unnecessarily. However, connections to remote hosts should always be secure; whether it is an SSH tunnel or an IPsec layer that is being used somewhere shouldn't really matter. For bonus points, it'd be nice if any traffic would be compressed as well if the connection isn't fast; I sometimes connect to the 'net through my cell phone, which is slow. Speeding that up would be wonderful.

I would prefer not to have to enter a password when the network connection is set up; but if that isn't possible if I want things to be secure, so be it. It should not be possible to circumvent my security. Paranoia is good. I'll also want the ability to easily disable everything without having to remove too many keys from too many different places, should my laptop be stolen again some day. And, last but not least, it should not require me to either have a non-local IP address or to do weird stuff with the firewall, because that will simply break when I connect to a LAN where I'm not the administrator.

I think all of the above should be possible by using some IPsec (without AH) and DNAT rules on the laptop itself, carefully semi-automatically generated from a script ran from /etc/ppp/ip-up.d or some DHCP client's equivalent thereof. Not sure though; will need some experimenting.

gconf

Since a while, I've been using a version-controlled homedirectory. This is working quite well for me, except for one little detail: gconf creates conflicts all over the place. For some reason, the gnome people think it's a good idea to add an mtime attribute to every <entry>. As a result, I see many things like the following:

Index: .gconf/apps/evolution/mail/display/%gconf.xml
===================================================================
--- .gconf/apps/evolution/mail/display/%gconf.xml       (revision 112)
+++ .gconf/apps/evolution/mail/display/%gconf.xml       (working copy)
@@ -56,7 +56,7 @@
         </entry>
         <entry name="mark_seen_timeout" mtime="1099521834" type="int" value="100">
         </entry>
-        <entry name="paned_size" mtime="1100090373" type="int" value="144">
+        <entry name="paned_size" mtime="1100260105" type="int" value="144">
         </entry>
         <entry name="thread_list" mtime="1099521753" type="bool" value="true">
         </entry>

As you can see, the only thing that has changed is the mtime attribute. This happens all over the place; also, it apparently is the case that Gnome updates some timestamps at logon time. As a result, when I (1) log on at my laptop, (2) forget to log off (or forget to commit first), (3) log on at my desktop, I will always have a conflict.

This sucks. I wonder whether those mtime attributes are configurable in some way.

sick

Been sick the last few days. Again. This time it's something with my nose and lungs—I've got a bad cough, and can't breath through my nose most of the time due to there being way too much, uh, snot in there. Father went to the pharmacy today, got me something to fight the headache and to clear up my nose, and it seems to work. Hope I'll be recovered before tomorrow's concert; I have to play bass solo.

Doggies

Weird view in the Mechelen train station today. About twenty to twenty-five police officers (which is a lot in that small area), fences, and at least three dogs. Plus the two guys with their dog that passed by twice while I was on the train. Not to forget the people from the press.

When I asked someone, they told me this was "just a regular check". I couldn't help but wonder what a non-regular check would look like...

No bugs!

About an hour ago (or so), I uploaded release 1.2.7-3 of logtool, thereby closing four of my five outstanding bugs. If it wasn't for the (semi-bogus) 'new upstream' wishlist bug which is filed on nbd, I'd be bug-free now. Whee!

In other news, I received the first offer for a talk in the FOSDEM DevRoom today. Hoping more will arrive... in the mean time, I mailed some people privately, asking whether they would want to give a talk. Hopefully I get some more reaction to those than I have to the CFP I sent out earlier.

Obviously, if you are willing to give a talk in the FOSDEM DevRoom, and I didn't send you a private mail, that means nothing; just go ahead and send me a mail, explaining what you want to talk about, and if there's still place, you're on.

Wow

Hi. My name is Johanna, I'm from Sweden, and I'm going to sing an old Swedish folk song

Last week, we were a host family for people in the Up With People leadership program. The idea is that they go on a world trip with young people from all around the world, and that they try to learn something that way. They get credits from that which are valid in three US universities, too. The program lasts for three months, but they go to a different city every week.

It's been a nice week, which finished with an event in one of the aula's of the Antwerp university. Lots of things were shown there, including Johanna doing her folk song.

With nothing but a spot and a microphone. Respect. Doing that requires a lot of courage.

Some people are crazy

I'd never have thought people would be so silly to mount their server's mail queue on a RAM disk. I was wrong.

Yeah baby!

Jeremy Jaynes, and his sister Jessica DeGroot, have been convicted for spamming AOL customers. 30 year old Jeremy got nine years of prison, 28 year old Jessica a $7500 fine. A third defendant was found not guilty.

Now that is what I'm talking about. Put them all in jail, them bastards!

Oh well. If you know Dutch, read the article on Gazet Van Antwerpen's website.

Is this how it starts?

ReiserFS: hda5: warning: vs-8115: get_num_ver: not directory item
ReiserFS: hda5: warning: vs-8115: get_num_ver: not directory item
ReiserFS: hda5: warning: vs-8115: get_num_ver: not directory item
ReiserFS: hda5: warning: vs-8115: get_num_ver: not directory item
ReiserFS: hda5: warning: vs-8115: get_num_ver: not directory item
ReiserFS: hda5: warning: vs-8115: get_num_ver: not directory item

That's what the final bit of the output of dmesg on rock looks like, currently. Need to backup, mkfs, restore that one. Only I'm not sure I have enough free space elsewhere to do the first bit. Hrmpf. May need a new hard disk.

Media Players, pt. 2

I received a lot replies on my previous post about Media players. Most of them (5 out of 7) pointed me at totem, a media player for Gnome, which can run against gstreamer and libxine backends. Fair enough, I didn't see that one, even though I should've. It's not very helpful, though; the gstreamer backend utterly fails to work (it crashed at startup the first time I tried it; and all other times, it simply couldn't read the DVD which was in my PowerBook's SuperDrive), while the xine backend doesn't work either (I get sound, but no image -- all frames remain blue).

The other two talk about mplayer. No, mplayer 1.0pre5 does not compile with altivec support. If any of you out there is familiar with the mplayer code, this is what happens:

etc. The file does look clean at the location they point to; I suspect it's some preprocessor magic gone wrong, but haven't checked.

Media players

I tried to play a DVD on my powerbook yesterday. This, of course, requires a decent media player; so I tried a few of them

ogle

Works; however, it has some issues which may be related to endianness problems, as the menu isn't displayed properly. Not enough so that I couldn't enjoy a movie with it, but enough so that I wanted to check out other media players. Also, at first I didn't notice the ogle-altivec package; without this package, even the movie isn't displayed properly (which suggests that ogle will give priority to sound rather than display, which is the best thing to do, as issues with sound are far better noticeable)

vlc

Has performance issues: the sound isn't updated fast enough, which is heavily annoying. On top of that, it does some weird stuff with the sound, too -- sounds like it adjusts its internal clock if it can't keep up. That is ugly. The streaming features, however, are nice enough so that I'll keep it for less resource-requiring media files (audio only stuff, small avi or mpg files, whatever)

Xine

Idem. I think its performance is slightly better than vlc, but it's still annoying. Xine doesn't have any other killer feature that I would like to have, so off it goes.

gstreamer0.8-dvd

The package name (and its dependencies) suggest gstreamer is able to play a dvd; however, I couldn't even find out how the bloody thing works. I also couldn't find any frontend which allowed me to play a DVD

The only other media player I know of is mplayer. At first, it didn't compile; but when I found that the problem was in the altivec-specific optimization code (altivec is some multimedia extension for PowerPC, a bit like MMX and SSE on intel), I ran configure again, and compiled mplayer without the altivec bits. It still plays a DVD without performance issues; so it beats the first three of the above players with its pants down.

I didn't find any other media players (the above is what apt-cache rdepends libdvdread3 came up with), but if someone can point me at one I forgot, a pointer is of course welcome.

Personally, I think we have a problem there. All media players that I know of have issues; if not with performance or with usability, there is an issue with the license. I hate this.

Oh well. Of the media players that are in the archive, it seems ogle is the best. With the altivec support package, it works almost perfectly (I can live with the issues in the menu); and even if there are performance issues, ogle will do the right thing: other than the other two, it will give priority to sound rather than display. Which is good, because distorted sound is immediately noticeable, whereas a distorted image is not

Real men don't use caps lock

... and I'm not a real man. Or so it appears.

I'm updating some kernels. Rock is still running on 2.6.8.1, and I also wanted to try out a new m68k kernel for ska. The first obviously was no problem; to handle the second, I first needed to configure it. Thus, I start typing.

wouter@rock:/usr/src/linux-m68k/linux/$ make ARcH=m68k menuconfig

Hm, something's wrong there. Did I hit shift while entering the C? <tries again> No, I didn't. Hm. Weird.

This is on rock's console, and its 2.6.9 kernel is still building, so it could be that after installing that kernel, this particular bug will have been fixed. If not, well. Hunting bugs can be fun.

Sick

Didn't feel too well today. One could even say I felt a bit sick. So, I decided not to go to work, and stay in my bed. That seems to have been a good idea; I'm feeling quite a bit better now. Perhaps I should try and get some sleep now, so that I will be in top shape again tomorrow, but since I stayed in bed all day, that doesn't seem possible. Grmbl.

I just went downstairs, where my brother was watching TV. He had switched on CFAX, and was watching some talk show about the US presidential elections. I watched for a few minutes before I got bored and left the room again.

This has been bothering me for a while now. Do I live in Belgium, or do I live in the US? I mean, sure, I don't like the way the Bush administration is (ab)using its powers, but I've had it with those shows already. It's not as if there's anything I can do about it anyway. So, I'm trying to ignore it, but with the attitude the media over here is taking towards it, that's hardly possible.

Oh well. Something else I've been trying to ignore is Ubuntu. I'm sure there's some great stuff in there, and I'm sure the Canonical people did great work, but I'm really not interested. Debian has been serving my needs for more than three years now, and I don't have a spare system which I could use as desktop anyway; so that'd mean I'd have to wipe the hard disk of one of my systems. Not a chance. Besides, I don't think Ubuntu has an m68k release

No GPRS

I talked about how I was setting up my laptop and cellphone to dial in to the Internet last time, and that it didn't work. Well, it does now; my PPP configuration wasn't complete (missed 'usepeerdns' and 'user' configuration parameters), but is now. Next, I wanted to get it to do GPRS, but that is unfortunately not possible with BASE, my mobile phone operator — at least not unless I get myself a different account, one which is going to cost twice as much as my current one. Well, not a chance. Sorry.

I had a look at vmelilo today, too – that is, before I managed to get my VME box to hang while loading a different kernel than the one I wanted to load (silly idea, that). Apart from that, done (quite) a little research on how mono does ODBC. Have a meeting about that tomorrow... well, today, in the mean time. In an hour or so.

All of the above

Steve Kemp has an interesting poll, regarding the distributions people use. I need an "all of the above" option to correctly fill that one out.

pop, my parent's machine, runs woody. folk, the server, runs woody+backports (bind9 and exim4). western and samba, the hosts that will replace folk in the near future (western on my LAN, samba at work, in a sort-of-colo way) run testing (mainly because I'd hate having set them up, only to have to upgrade the configuration in a few months). So does my brother's new box, techno. My own working machines, rock (the i386) and country (the PowerBook) run unstable. So did sol, the sparc64 which I temporarily used at work until the new laptop arrived (hm, on second thought, could've been testing too. Not sure). And then, there's of course a number of chroots on rock; a stable one, a testing one, and even a RedHat one.

Steve, could you at least change the radio buttons to check boxes?

Stuff

// *** FIXME
//    key <LSGT> {      [ quoteleft,    asciitilde      ]       };
//    key <AE01> {      [         1,    exclam          ],
//                      [exclamdown,    slash           ]       };
//    key <AE02> {      [         2,    at              ],
//                      [ trademark,    eth             ]       };
//    key <AE03> {      [         3,    numbersign      ],
//                      [ sterling                      ]       };
//    key <AE04> {      [         4,    dollar          ],
//                      [      cent                     ]       };
//    key <AE05> {      [         5,    percent         ],
//                      [  infinity                     ]       };
//    key <AE06> {      [         6,    asciicircum     ],
//                      [ section                       ]       };
//    key <AE07> {      [         7,    ampersand       ],
//                      [ paragraph                     ]       };
//    key <AE08> {      [         8,    asterisk        ],
//                      [periodcentered                 ]       };
//    key <AE09> {      [         9,    parenleft       ],
//                      [ordfeminine                    ]       };
//    key <AE12> {      [     equal,    plus            ],
//                      [  notequal,    plusminus       ]       };
//    key <AD01> {      [         q,    Q               ],
[...]
//    key <RALT> {      [ Mode_switch,  Multi_key       ]       };
//    modifier_map Mod3   { Mode_switch };

This is silly. Especially the lower two lines.

It appears in /etc/X11/xkb/symbols/macintosh/us, and gave me a bad keyboard mapping which I had to work with for two days. Didn't file a bug yet, need to find out what the correct FIXME would be, but it'll be there. Believe me.

The mac works for the most part. Except for three slight bits, everything kinda worked out of the box.

Obviously, there's the keyboard mapping. I have a /etc/X11/xkb/symbols/macintosh/wouter which deviates a bit from standard X11 mappings (who needs KP_Enter on that key? Oh boy), and I plan to increase that deviation, but that's it.

Secondly, there's suspend. For some reason, when I close the lid and let the laptop in that state for a while, it'll plainly shut itself off. No shutdown, a power-off. Which is painful if you had stuff open. It's probably related to the pmud which doesn't want to start because it claims the laptop doesn't support suspend (which I'm sure it does), but I'll need to find that out.

Finally, there's the mobile communication. The laptop finds the mobile phone; they happily communicate; but once pppd dialed in to the free ISP I configured, the line drops out. Still need to find out what's going on there...

In other news, I started to use the blam aggregator to read Planet Debian. I find that manually skimming over the planet site in search for items I haven't read yet is an efficient waste of my time; so I'd better use specialized software to help me do this. Blam works okay, but there's a slight peculiar interesting bit about it: the default configuration comes with configured aggregation for Planet GNOME, Planet Debian, and other things. The Planet GNOME aggregation shows hackergotchis; however, the Planet Debian one does not. Why is that?

Speaking of GNOME, it appears I'm beginning to like it. I have used Enlightenment 0.16 for three years, until a few weeks ago; I started to use GNOME for various reasons, but "I think GNOME is cool" certainly wasn't one of them. Now that I am using it (and am starting to get to know it quite a bit better), I must say I like it more and more. Perhaps it's not as bad as I initially thought...

Oh, and I just love CONFIG_BLK_DEV_IDE_PMAC_BLINK. Really. Why isn't it enabled in the default configuration?

network coding

New Laptop!

It arrived yesterday at around 19:30, but I didn't get a decent operating system on the thing until late at night, so...

There are a few annoyances left, though.

• I need to convince yaboot that I think booting from disk by default (as opposed to, booting from cdrom) is generally a good thing.
• I need to convince Gnome that I do not ever want it to touch my keyboard. Ever. A keyboard configuration is the job of the X server — not of Gnome. As a result, my keyboard layout is completely fucked up; I'm not able to enter a few crucial symbols for a unix system (such as, a pipe symbol, a tilde, or an at symbol). Thank you gnome.
• There's still a bunch of important software missing, but that's not really much of a problem.

In related news, the HP we ordered along with the laptop is a plug and play printer. Give it power, give it a drum and four toners, hook up a network card, and send it PostScript level 3. There, it's happy. If anyone is looking for a cheap, not too bad quality color laser printer, go for the HP color LaserJet 2550. We have the 2550n, which is a bit more expensive (200 euros more) because it also contains a JetDirect card; but if you don't need that, it shouldn't really matter. It isn't really fast, and it isn't a high-end printer either, but if 600x600dpi is enough, and you need a printer for SOHO use, this is what you're looking for. Really.

And no, I don't work for HP

I wish people would use pbuilder a bit more

From: buildd@kiivi.cyber.ee
To: undisclosed-recipients: ;

Automatic build of evolution-data-server_1.0.2-2 on kiivi by sbuild/m68k 1.170.5
Build started at 20041019-0635
******************************************************************************
[...]
dh_install -pevolution-data-server
dh_link -pevolution-data-server
dh_scrollkeeper -pevolution-data-server
dh_gconf -pevolution-data-server
dh_desktop -pevolution-data-server
make: dh_desktop: Command not found
make: *** [binary-install/evolution-data-server] Error 127
******************************************************************************
Build finished at 20041019-1546
FAILED [dpkg-buildpackage died]
[...]
******************************************************************************
Finished at 20041019-1602
Build needed 08:40:35, 226836k disk space

You know, that's a long time. We have pbuilder to avoid this kind of stupidity. Please.

New laptop

The new laptop should've arrived today... but didn't.

The shopkeeper lives just across the street, and had told me it'd all arrive today. However, due to some external factors, the delivery of a printer which we ordered along with the new laptop was delayed... so he decided not to deliver the laptop either.

Grumble. I want a laptop!

Oh well. He told me it'd be here by tomorrow, at 20:00 hour. I trust he'll keep that promise...

hacking

Did some hacking today.

Most was work-related, but at some point I got bored and took up NBD again. It had been a while since I last looked at it, but that wasn't much of a problem.

The code does no longer use global variables anymore (whee!), and it still compiles (whee again!). It also uses getopt_long() now instead of the hand-grown stuff which used to be there (more whee!). I didn't have a setup to test it, however, so there will probably be bugs (no!). Lotsa bugs (Oh no!). I'll have to do that either tonight at home, or later this week...

$HOME

wouter@rock:~$ ls
code  data  debian  Desktop  scratch
wouter@rock:~$ ls -ad .svn/
.svn/
wouter@rock:~$

Does this mean I wasted days cleaning up my $HOME since last time I pondered doing this? No.

wouter@rock:~/scratch$ svn pg svn:ignore
*

wouter@rock:~/scratch$ ls
oldhome
wouter@rock:~/scratch$

Most of my immediate needs are in svn now. If I ever need something which isn't in svn currently, I'll fish it out of rock:~/scratch/oldhome. But I needed to get this done before I get the new laptop...

Why I hate RedHat

 10:54:15 up 8 days, 14:27,  7 users,  load average: 43.78, 80.65, 50.10

I needed to build a kernel package for an old RedHat system. Since there was no chance I'd install a RedHat on my box (let alone an old one), I set up a RedHat chroot environment, and built it in there. Suddenly the connection dropped.

It took me a while to find out what went wrong, but once I saw the load, it was easy. RedHat will parallellize the build if it's running on a multi-CPU system. In itself, that's a good idea; however, when you're running in a chroot (and are to lazy to mount /proc -- hey, it's just for a kernel) the thing that checks the number of processors will come up with nothing, which will end you up building with make -j instead of make -j1. Which hurts. Kinda.

Random thoughts: note lines

Postscript is fun.

A few months ago, I needed a piece of paper containing just some empty musical barlines -- computers are nice, but some things are better done with a piece of paper and a piano. Since the preprinted ones I had were all used, and since this was on a sunday (when shops are closed), I tried to get this out of a printer. So, I started looking for an application that could do such a thing.

That was easier said than done. Software enough to print out musical bars with notes on them, but none that would do empty pages. It took me almost an hour of looking before it occurred to me:

This is so easy in postscript. After all, it's just a bunch of lines—draw five lines above eachother, move a bit along the vertical axis, rinse, repeat.

It took me five minutes to come up with the following, which I still regularly use today:

%!PS
50 75 moveto
1 1 13 {
  1 1 5 {
    500 0 rlineto
    -500 5 rmoveto
  } for
  0 30 rmoveto
} for
stroke
showpage

That's A4 only, folks; but I guess changing the numbers to make it fit on letter or something else shouldn't be hard. And it spares me from having to buy preprinted note bar paper, which is quite expensive...

AT&T

Mom was funny this morning.

"Wouter, you should listen to Radio 1! There's something very important on there for you!"

I know these calls by my parents. It's usually about something that vaguely touches an area I'm interested in. I should've known better than to get up to listen to the radio. But hey, gimme a break—I was still sleeping.

So, like a zombie, I pulled out of bed half an hour before my alarm clock would trigger, went downstairs, and listened. "It's about switching from Windows to Linux", mom said. Indeed, a guy was talking about how AT&T is considering a move to GNU/Linux, and how this would be a bad thing for Microsoft. Cool. So I got back to my room, and crashed in my bed again.

Half an hour is a lot of time

I need a KVM switch. And a UPS.

We had a power outage about half an hour ago here, and now western isn't coming up again. This is because I've been too lazy thus far to configure SILO right so that it will boot without a prompt; and I don't remember what I need to send it to make it boot (no, just plainly enter doesn't seem to work).

The firmware is supposed to support a serial console, too; but I can't find my null modem cable in the mess that is currently my room. Besides, I don't recall how to configure the sparc's firmware to go to serial console, so even if I did find it, it wouldn't help me. Sigh

Guess I'll have to crawl under my desk, grab the monitor cable, disconnect it, throw it to the other end of the desk, crawl under the desk again, connect it to the sparc, and reboot it. I so need a KVM switch. And a UPS.

If anyone reading this has some of those to spare, they'd get, uhm, my eternal gratitude

Gheh

To: root@ska
Subject: Debconf: Configuring libraw1394-5 -- Check that /dev/raw1394 permissions are appropriate for you.
From: root 
Date: Mon, 27 Sep 2004 10:46:19 +0200

The device file /dev/raw1394 will be created for libraw1394.  This library
is used by applications to access FireWire devices.
[...]

I'm trying to build some package on request by someone else. Installing the build-dependencies pulled in libraw1394-5, which prompted the above mail. For those that don't know: ska is my MVME167, featuring a 33Mhz 68040. I doubt there's a supported firewire VME module, let alone whether the processor could handle the speed.

Not that this means we'd have to drop userland support for firewire; I never would've expected it, but a french designer created the CT60 board, which opens up the possibility to do USB on m68k. If the hardware would ever support it, the software already does—so there's no reason not to build it.

But it's still funny

Use the Source, Luke.

How do you set LDAP protocol version 3?

LDAP* ld;
int protocol;

ld=ldap_init("host", LDAP_PORT);
protocol=LDAP_VERSION3;
ldap_set_option(ld, LDAP_OPT_PROTOCOL_VERSION, &protocol);

that's how. I had to dig through the ldapsearch code to find that one out. Not that it's hard to do that, but please.

wouter@rock:~$ man ldap_set_option
No manual entry for ldap_set_option

You can do better. I know you can. Yes, you, the one who wrote the libldap2 manpages.

wouter@rock:~$ man ldap
Reformatting ldap(3), please wait...
[...]
CONTROLS
       This  library supports both LDAP Version 2 and Version 3, with the Ver-
       sion 2 protocol selected by default.  LDAP Version 3 operations can  be
       extended  through the use of controls. Controls can be sent to a server
[...]

And no further mention of protocol version 3. That's helpful. Right.

live!

end of telemarketer job & weird SPAM

Next friday will be the last day (for the time being) that I'll be working as a telemarketer. Not a day early... I never expected it, but telemarketing is an extremely tiresome job (on a mental level). Having to argue with people all day, day after day, and on top of that having to take the occasional tirade of cursing and swearing with a "Yes sir, of course sir, have a nice day"—it's not something everyone can do. Of course I only did it for the money, and I'm happy I'm off the job. On the other hand, I did learn a lot there, and it's more than just "how do I call someone who's not waiting for this call, and succeed in selling them something they don't want to have". Sales skills are important to everyone. Whether you want to sell a product, a good idea, whether you want to argue your point or want to defend yourself; sales skills help you do that.

Never would've thought I'd ever say that. Oh well.

Yesterday, by snail mail, I received something rather strange: a SPAM package advertising a collection of audio CD's. It came with the full mumbo-jumbo of bullshit: a "gold coupon" which is supposedly only given if you've "won" (in other words, everyone is a winner again), a "surprise gift" if you reply within 7 days, etc. Of course, this is in itself nothing special, since we all receive such snail mail SPAM; what is, is the extra thing that came with the package: the first CD from the collection. They actually gave out a free audio CD.

At first, I thought these guys were special. Then it occurred to me: this is a CD featuring classical music (all Mozart, to be exact). All copyrights on classical music have expired. They can make this kind of CD's at almost no charge. The fact that I received this advertisement confirmed two things to me:

1. Mail order companies will go to great lengths to pursuade you to buy.
2. Audio CD's as they are sold today are seriously overcharged

Anyway. Thanks, whoever you are, for the Mozart audio CD (as Mozart happens to be my favourite composer), but don't expect me to bite. I have better things to do with my money (even if the quality of the recordings isn't too bad).

random thoughts

The Belgian prime minister was involved in a car accident today. While driving over the R4, his car hit the safety rail, and turned upside-down. He's in hospital now, right when the federal government is involved in a major crisis. One would almost think this was done on purpose, so that he could extend the dead line (which he had already missed by that time, BTW). Oh well...

I've decided on the laptop question. Being stubborn as I am, I'll go for the apple box none the less, despite it's shortcomings (no serial port, no decent wlan, no IrDA); there are other solutions to each and everyone of those. For the serial, there's of course USB serial dongles – those should work pretty well. For wlan, I can use an atmel USB device; these are reported to work, and work well, even on big-endian PowerPC. For the IrDA, I can of course just use the Bluetooth in the powerbook. That's not always true; but I was using the IrDA only in combination with my mobile phone—a Nokia 6310i, which supports bluetooth as well. Since doing PPP over bluetooth is reportedly possible, I'll use that—and will probably like it even more, since bluetooth doesn't require line-of-sight as IrDA does.

Since I'm talking about the phone anyway, I'm looking for a Java application that I can run on the thing, and that would allow me to track expenses. For bonus points, it'd be nice if I could get the information to somewhere else using bluetooth and import it into GnuCash directly, somehow (say, OFX or so).

And then, there's also this little thing...

traceroute to gateway.nixsys.be (195.144.77.33), 30 hops max, 38 byte packets
 1  folk (192.168.119.1)  1.087 ms  0.902 ms  0.717 ms
 2  D5E02C01.kabel.telenet.be (213.224.44.1)  21.770 ms  12.463 ms  12.654 ms
 3  D5E0FA41.kabel.telenet.be (213.224.250.65)  17.860 ms  12.038 ms  10.097 ms
 4  213.224.126.234 (213.224.126.234)  7.091 ms  11.543 ms  8.087 ms
 5  kpnbelgium.bnix.net (194.53.172.75)  8.264 ms  11.840 ms  7.452 ms
 6  gig-1-0-0-mpl-be-inx-pe01.KPNbelgium.be (194.119.224.53)  13.900 ms  10.839 ms  13.134 ms
 7  * * *
 8  Fe0-0-1.brussel3.bb.xs4all.be (195.144.72.186)  19.275 ms  13.763 ms  10.031 ms
 9  Fe0-0-2.brussel1.bb.xs4all.be (195.144.72.185)  16.205 ms  13.928 ms  13.357 ms
10  Fe0-0-1.brussel3.bb.xs4all.be (195.144.72.186)  14.413 ms  11.751 ms  10.108 ms
11  Fe0-0-2.brussel1.bb.xs4all.be (195.144.72.185)  10.160 ms  10.628 ms  10.611 ms
[...]

Why?

Yesterday

Yesterday was a nice day.

Went to the JPE rehearsal. Had lunch. Did some cool stuff with western: got a full horde suite configured, updating bug 216707 in the process (note to self: if you're working on a host's mail configuration, don't attempt to run reportbug there, or you get mail addresses with superfluous host parts in bug reports). Started configuring a split-horizon mail setup; samba will now consider all grep.be to be remote, except for mailman mail, which it will handle locally. It will still do callouts to the primary MX at RCPT time, though (the problem being that the primary MX is accessible only through IPv6, so for IPv4-only hosts, samba will have to do this when it will be my primary v4 MX, which it isn't yet). Still have to configure the same thing the other way around, but I had to go when this worked. Went to the AfrekeningFuif organized by Chiro Tempo, Ekeren, which they do yearly and which is the largest of its kind in Belgium (featuring 4100 visitors last year – I don't yet know how much this time). Went drunk. Note to self: when you get drunk, drink enough water (so that the hangover isn't as bad), and don't forget to turn off the alarm clock. It helps. Kinda.

Oh well. Currently hacking up something to do centralized administration of buildd timeouts for m68k. Would be nice, it's kinda decentralized right now, and with 10 (or so) buildds running, that isn't really a good thing.

Freedom!

From Matthew Garrett's blog:

Where do we draw the line between allowing and protecting freedoms?

In my opinion, That isn't the right question. The right question is 'Where do we draw the line between allowing and forbidding freedoms', and the answer is 'between "is this a good freedom, or a bad one?"'

Way back, long before I was involved with computers (let alone Free Software), I once had a conversation about freedom with someone who held a degree in philosophy. I don't remember much from that conversation, but there's one little thing I do remember:

Give some more freedom to one person, and you'll be taking away some freedom from someone else in return.

His point was that you can't give people the right to freely do anything they like. If I am not restricted in what I do, I'll be allowed to steal your car. If I am free to do as I please, I don't have to be careful with matches, and don't have to be sorry if you owned a bookstore before I passed along. If my freedom is unlimited, I can take software, copy it, and forget about the source. Or the list of authors. Or the license. Heck, I could add my name to it without actually doing anything. Why should I? I'm free to do as I please, right?

Obviously, that isn't how things work. Freedom is good, but having the right freedoms is better. It is not a good idea to allow everyone every possible freedom; we should consider what freedoms we think are more important than others, and base our judgement on that.

I could just not care about what people choose to do with the source I write, and place my source in the public domain; however, I choose to care. Similarly, I could just not care about possible patent infringement lawsuits from people I've never met; however, I choose to care. I do happen to think that providing binaries without source is to be frowned upon; I do happen to think that applying for software patents is to be frowned upon.

To put it otherwise: I don't think the freedom to keep a program's source to myself, and get rich and famous on the back of other people is a good freedom, so I don't care about a license which forbids me to do such things. Similarly, I don't think the freedom to apply for a software patent, and get rich and hated on the back of other people is a good freedom, so I don't care about a license which forbids me to do such things.

Nor do I think Debian should. After all, we're not one of the BSD's, where the freedom to take the source and hide it is cherished. I would be amused if they'd change their license to forbid software patents, though...

zzzzz

Voice mail

I've been working as a telemarketer for a while now. The last two projects involved me calling GSM phones. As those always pick up (to the voice mail, if nothing else), I've heard quite a lot of those by now. It's kinda nice to see what people put on their voice mail sometimes...

Obviously, by far the most used is a text in the sense of "This is the voice mail of <owner>. Please leave your message after the beep, and I'll call you back as soon as possible." Sometimes, though, these aren't grammatically correct ("You're talking to the voice mail of <owner>", which obviously isn't true—at most, I could be listening to it). One noteworthy example said "mouse" instead of "beep". Think about it...

However, there are a lot of other things one could encounter when calling up to someone and getting his or her voice mail. A shortlist:

• The (beginning of the) owner's favorite song. Quite funny actually, hearing "Kids in America" or "Nothing else matters" until it's suddenly interrupted by a beep.
• Some funny text which appears to be available for download somewhere (since you hear them identically the same way on multiple people's voice mails). Notable examples include Bert and Ernie imitations, someone telling you he's in jail and "that he won't be available for a while", and others.
• Confused people who don't appear to know that they're recording their voice mail. Person A: "Oh, it's recording now". Person B: "Really?". Person A: "I think so, not sure though. Wait, let's try to..." <beep>
• Just a bit of background noise. Wonder why someone would want to do that—as a caller, you're not sure whether the callee just inadvertently pushed a button on the phone, or whether something else is going on.
• A recording of some error message as it's being generated by the phone company. "Your connection has ended due to technical reasons. Please try again later." I suspect these are an effort to avoid people like me. Not that I could blame them, of course...
• Recently, I encountered a new type: people who let other people speak up their voice mail message. "This is the secretary of mr foo", or a child's voice saying "This is the voice mail of mr bar, CEO of quux".

That's about it, I think. Well, apart from the default voice mail message with the callee's number being pronounced by a computerized voice, of course. Amazing how many people just don't bother saying something to their voice mail; by far more than half of the voice mail messages I hear are the default one. Which is incredibly boring...

Lost Debian T-Shirt

Reading up on the Debian T-Shirt stuff on planet debian recently...

I Seem to have lost my Debian T-Shirt. I used to have one of Joost's cool black ones, but it's nowhere to be found currently. Asked mom, but she thought I was talking about my OSDEM T-Shirt, but that of course wasn't the case.

Darn. What am I going to do now when I go to fix someone's PC again?

CVS $HOME

I've just read Joey Hess' description of his home directory. I of course knew for quite a while that he did this, but I never knew the specifics. Now I do. I've been meaning to try the same thing, but I have a slight problem:

wouter@rock:~$ ls|wc -l
623
wouter@rock:~$ du -sh .
7.0G    .
wouter@rock:~$ 

Right. My attempts at organizing my home directory have always failed in horrific ways for me, especially on rock, my primary workstation for the past four years. At least the disk usage has been reduced; there've been times when it was about 15G. Apparently, the most disk space is wasted in my debian/ directory (which makes sense, because it's where I do most of my work currently). Will have to clean that up before I can even begin to think about storing it in CVS, it seems; but that'll have to wait until I can get some other stuff done first (such as finishing the setup of western). And find the time to actually bring order to chaos, which will likely take ages.

arms race

Spamassassin supposedly does URL scoring now. Yes, there's a shortcoming; but that's obvious, since all spam filters can do against spammers is an arms race. You add a check, they add a workaround. You add another check, they work around that one too. This is a war, one they mustn't win.

I'd think the best way to win that war is to fight back (by wasting their resources for a change, somehow), but of course it has to stay legal. We're the good guys, remember.

Migrating home server

I recently got a Sun Ultra 10. Nice box; SPARC (of course), 333Mhz. 128MB RAM, IDE disk of (currently) 9G. I'm planning on using it to replace my server, currently a Pentium I at 133Mhz with 64MB RAM and about 3G of disk space, which is getting more and more resource-starved on all fronts (memory, hard disk space, CPU cycles).

I've installed sarge on it a few days ago. Noticed that you can't have too many ext3 partitions on sparc if you don't like too many Oopses, so it's all running on one partition now—and happily so. Right now, I'm slowly migrating services from folk (the old server) to western (the sparc). That isn't as easy as it used to be;on previous server upgrades, I just put the disk in the new box, compiled a new kernel, and let the damn thing do its job. Doing so obviously doesn't work when you're upgrading cross-architecture. Also, since the old box runs woody, I can't just copy configuration files over and be done with it; that will probably break.

Anyway. Have been migrated as of yet:

• LDAP. Which was (mostly) easy; copy some statements from one configuration file to another, create an LDIF file from the live data, import that on western. The hard part was when I noticed that Perl's NET::LDAP has issues on sparc, to the point where it didn't work for me; so my password-synchronization script broke. Rewrote the script in C, which gave me an opportunity to learn the C LDAP API (which is quite easy, actually).
• DNS. Even easier; add the zones to the new host's named.conf as slaves, add NS records for the new server, and let DNS synchronization magic do its job. There, done.
• Squid. That one was a bit harder; requires you to read a 100k+ file, and compare it to the one you already have configured. Happily not too many options changed significantly since woody was released, but reading the file takes time none the less.

Still to do are:

• Samba. There are a bunch of Windows boxen in this network, and the server runs as a domain controller for them. Need to refresh my knowledge about Samba; last time I wrote any decent smb.conf was when potato was still stable. That's ages, and I didn't touch its configuration since. Obviously, however, samba has changed a lot since, and as I'd like to plug it into LDAP and add some PAM magic to keep passwords synchronized a bit (don't have that right now), I'll have to read up on some documentation. The fact that I can't have two domain controllers on the same network (to have one for testing purposes, and a "live" one) doesn't really help either.
• Mail. Going to be a bitch, that one; my mail setup is fairly complex, so I'll need to be very careful not to lose stuff. Also, there are a few configuration changes which have been pending for a while (such as SMTP AUTH to the smarthost, and me wanting to move mailman to a host off my LAN and more onto the 'net, among some others). I'll also have to find a solution for the (non-free) f-prot I'm currently running on that box – there's no SPARC version. I assume clamav will do nicely, but it didn't exist yet when I first installed that f-prot.
• Firewalling. Should be fairly straighforward, since it's nothing more than a script I wrote myself, which calls iptables and tc directly, among some other stuff.
• moving IPv6 tunnels, radvd, and DHCP. This has problems similar to the Samba stuff; I don't want two servers to fight over who gets to give out IP addresses.
• Data migration. Can't happen before the new samba and mail are in place, and should ideally happen on the very last moment.
• Hardware. There's a ISA SCSI controller with a tape streamer in folk; and as it also functions as my gateway, it has two network interfaces, of which one is ISA, too. Need to move the PCI NIC to western, need to dig up my PCI SCSI controller (which is probably lying under a pile of junk), and put that one in western as well. With the tape streamer, of course. Ideally, I'd like to fix myself a third NIC, so that I can put the WiFi network on eth2 and firewall mostly everything away there. Will need to go by a shop for that one.

It's scary how many services have accumulated on folk over the years. Maybe I should also get myself a separate firewall, on a Mini-ITX or something similar. At least I think I can safely hope there's nothing missing in the migration plan... or is there? Hmm.

No! Tell me it isn't true!

Amaya!

Please tell me this is an old picture! Please! You didn't give up, did you?

We have a DevRoom!

Wheeee!⁽¹⁾

Okay, I just asked for it five minutes ago and didn't get an (official or otherwise) ACK yet, but I assume there'll be no problem yet, considering that last year we got our Debian FOSDEM devroom near the end of December. I had actually hoped for more reaction to my post on -events-eu, but oh well. I guess no negative reaction and the DPL acting similarly to myself equals support in Debian.

Expect a CFP within the next few days.

⁽¹⁾ yeah, I know I'm being silly right there. Thanks for telling me.

Darn

Lesson one when dealing with hardware: When it doesn't seem to work, and you suspect it's because some parts aren't seated correctly, fix that immediately, instead of being lazy and waiting a month or so.

I just discovered that the third 256MB SDRAM DIMM in this box is broken, because I didn't follow lesson one.

Darn. I hate weird kernel panics like that one.

Configuring...

I've been configuring computers lately.

Saturday, I went and got the components I ordered to install a computer for my brother. They still didn't have everything yet, but at least a working system could be created with it (that is, if he uses my monitor, mouse, and keyboard for the time being). It's a cool thingy: P4/3.2Ghz, 512MB RAM (of which only 256 has arrived yet), ATI Radeon 9200, etc. He needs it for school, to be able to use some software from AutoDesk ("Mechanical Desktop", to be precise), so I ordered a Windows XP CD with it. That hasn't arrived either.

So, to allow him to use the thing, I installed (or rather, let him install) a sarge on the box, using Gnome. His words: "That's a really cool Linux, Wouter".

Finally. It took me only a few years to convince him

Apart from that box, I got myself a Sun Ultra10 as well. Since my server, an old Pentium1 at 100Mhz, requires replacement, I thought about installing the Ultra10 as the new server, and did a Debian installation. Right now, though, I'm considering to do stuff differently: install the Ultra10 as my desktop, and use my old desktop (PIII/650) as the new server.

Let's think about that for a while.

wanna-build, and nature's whims

new laptop

Was thinking about buying one of these once I get the money from the insurance company, but there is a slight problem. Except for the 15" models, apple laptops don't have PCMCIA slots, so my ORiNOCO card can't work. Since I have a wavelan at home, I need wireless. Yes, need; I don't have a spare ethernet cable (or hub port, for that matter) anymore.

The apple laptops all have Airport Extreme; however, I was told previously that those can't work:

jul 22 23:48:34 <Overfiend>     Apple boxen are generally well supported by Linux, with 2 exceptions
jul 22 23:48:38 <Overfiend>     1) modems
jul 22 23:48:42 <Overfiend>     er, 3 exceptions
jul 22 23:48:46 <Overfiend>     2) NVidia video cards
jul 22 23:48:50 <Yoe>   don't care about modems
jul 22 23:48:51 <Overfiend>     3) Airport Extreme
jul 22 23:49:16 <Yoe>   don't care about 3D either; but what's the problem with the Airport stuff?
jul 22 23:49:27 <Overfiend>     old Airport is fine and rock-solid reliable AFAICT
jul 22 23:49:43 <Overfiend>     Airport Extreme is 802.11g, and they exclusively use a Broadcom chipset
jul 22 23:49:53 <Overfiend>     Broadcom is notoriously hostile to Linux developers
jul 22 23:50:10 <Yoe>   darn

The only alternative would be to use USB Wireless. Unfortunately, I'm afraid that won't work either; I've tried USB wireless in the past, with the current state of the linux-wlan-ng drivers (TTBOMK, the only ones that support USB prism2), using USB wireless is a perfect recipe for kernel lockups.

Better suggestions are more than welcome.

The insurance company is playing tricks on me

As was previously agreed with the insurance company, I still had to go by an instrument shop to get a new flute. I hadn't done that as of yet, both because I hadn't found the time yet and because I didn't have quite that money either. Everything else was done, though, so the insurance company was just waiting for me.

In what was probably an attempt to force the issue, they then decided to contact an instrument shop and ask for the price of a flute. The price they came back with was €250.

Which is only about €500 below what I had guesstimated my flute to be worth, and only about €1000 below what the shop I went to the other day actually told me it was worth.

The shop's (signed) offer has been sent to the insurance company, with an asked price of exactly €1236. The flute that was stolen from me wasn't just any cheap silly flute; it was a Yamaha YFL 311. Unlike most step-in models, which are made of silver-coated nickel, the YFL 311's head is made of silver only. Apart from the fact that this dramatically increases the lifetime and sound quality of the flute, it obviously also has an impact on the price.

In slightly-related news, I've decided to go with the 'classical' silver/nickel bass flute for the ensemble. The other one is quite difficult to play, and I prefer the silver one's sound as well.

Wondering when they'll send me the money. I need a new flute, but a new laptop as well...

Flutes

Today, I started playing the bass flute in the Jozef Pauly Ensemble; a bass flute sounds one octave below the classical C flute, and needs a slightly different technique, as I discovered today. But that's not all...

The ensemble has two bass flutes, but both former bass flautists decided to stop playing bass and go back to playing the regular flute. Which got me the opportunity to try it. However, the ensemble has two different bass flutes, of completely different make and model (one is a silver/nickel flute in the regular curved form a bass flute usually has; the other is a polyester/copper flute with a different form). Apart from the fact that they're not regular flutes, both bass flutes have pluses and downsides: The silver/nickel model is easier to play on, but is more tiresome (because I have to hold it up, and it's quite a bit heavier than a regular flute). The polyester/copper one will require me to practice quite a bit more, but it's made to rest on my knee, so it gives my right arm a break.

I took them both home for this week, and will have to try both of them out before next saturday. Dunno which one I'll use yet...

Living a different life

This is incredible.

Only a few months or so ago, I read Planet Debian every morning after getting out of bed, closely participated in the be.comp.os.linux newsgroup (well, not that closely anymore, since my laptop was in repair all the time; but at least I tried to follow it a bit), did quite a bit of hacking on NBD, and had some fun on projects at work as well.

Right now, my laptop is stolen, taking with it most of my interest to participate in online stuff, and I'm temporarily doing a different job—calling people who don't want to be called, trying to sell them things they don't want to have. Since this starts at 13:00 and ends at 21:00, I usually get out of bed somewhere between 10:00 and 11:30, read mail, chat a bit on IRC, get some food if I'm lucky, and hush for the bus. After getting home at night, I get some food, watch TV for an hour or three, then read my mail, handle my buildd's, perform the daily update, go on IRC for a while, and usually play some game 'till I decide it's way too late again and need to find my bed.

In other words, my daily routine is completely fucked up. Can't say I like it, even though I like not having to be out of bed at 7:00 AM.

The end of the tunnel is (hopefully) near, though. Before summer holiday started, I've contacted the school where I graduated to see whether I could be employed there as a docent. Apparently, I'm allowed to do so, albeit only for practical courses (and all IT courses are considered practical), which I didn't know until a few months ago.

They told me that mr Lambrecht, who used to tutor me when I was still a graduate student and who would be my boss now, would be there on monday, but he wasn't; and when I called today, he still wasn't there. Hopefully he'll be there tomorrow, else I'll ask for an email address.

If I'm hired, I'll quit the telesales job for a part-time tutoring job (and will spend the rest of the time in our company). If I'm not hired, I still won't stay working full-time at the telesales company, but will reduce that to a part-time job as well.

Let's see what happens tomorrow morning when I pick up my phone...

Insurance

An expert from the insurance company visited us on tuesday, regarding the theft of my laptop and flute (and some other stuff)

In short: no problem, everything is covered; I just need to send them a copy of the invoice of my laptop, and of the invoice of the new flute I'm going to buy.

Which is nice, of course.

They already have a copy of the laptop's invoice. The flute is going to have to wait a little while.

email clients

Tollef Fog Heen blogged about that, too. I don't use Gnus (lisp is too much of a mystery to me, and I don't intend on changing that just yet) or Mozilla Thunderbird (I try to avoid anything with Mozilla in the name, except for the browser which is fairly good); but I have to agree on his remarks regarding mutt.

My workaround: ditch IMAP, use Maildir over NFS instead. Works like a charm, hell of a lot faster. That only leaves the folder issue. I've been meaning to write some better-than-biff for a while, which would read out Maildir folders and show some statistics about every folder, possibly with the ability to open mutt on that folder with a single click. Just didn't happen yet...

Data cartridges

I have a second-hand tape drive which I use for my backups; I received it for free at a place where I used to work. It's still perfectly functioning, but I have one slight problem: I'm running out of tapes. So, just now, I went to look online for prices for those tapes. Man, they're expensive! €36 per 2.5GB tape is the cheapest price I could find. I don't like DDS tapes (they're not even half as reliable as the ones I use), but at least now I understand why people use them. If anyone has some spare SLR4 tapes which they don't use anymore, I'd be very happy to get them...

... and, of course, if you happen to know a cheap site where they sell those (or stuff with a higher capacity though still a lower price, that'll work too), that's also welcome.

Compulsory voting

Jeff Waugh talked about Compulsory Voting in his blog. I live in Belgium, another country where voting is compulsory; However, I disagree with Jeff. Forcing people to vote results in not just a lot of uninformed, but also a lot of protest votes. We see that a lot in Flanders, with the rise of a certain particular political party whose name I will not utter. In that background, calling a two-party political system "only one political party ahead of a fascist state" is, well, ironic.

Populism and racism in one party is a dangerous combination, especially when compulsory voting makes ill-informed people who would not normally vote cast their vote none the less.

spam

You don't know what you have until you lose it.

Apparently, there was a power failure in our house today, and my workstation's network card didn't get its driver loaded due to a configuration mishap of mine (which I fixed by now, of course). In itself, that's nothing to be stressed about, except for the fact that, in an effort to avoid my LANs mailserver to implode, I installed spamd on my workstation, and configured the server to connect to that spamd, which has considerably more CPU power (PentiumIII/650 vs PentiumI/100).

The result: I had about 50 new messages in my inbox, and only two or three of them were ham.

Perhaps I should not bother about the server's CPU power like that. Since having configured spamassassin this way, I enabled exim's load limiting features, so it shouldn't implode anymore anyway.

Hmmm...

Apples

Went to have a chat with one of my neighbours today, who owns part of a major Belgian Apple distributor. I have a laptop to replace, you know. He introduced me to what's available, and promised me he'd bring me a catalog somewhere these week. Those apple laptops are not only sexy, they're apparently also quite cheap; the only less nice bit is that they don't really have the high clock frequencies of Intel machines. Yes, I know the clock frequency isn't the only relevant metric when talking about the performance of a processor; but the difference is astonishing. Oh well.

I also got some other, m68k-powered, Apples today. P2 brought me a IIci and a Quadra950. Cool; now I'll just need to get them to work, which is a different story

Oh, and I finally got debian-installer to behave on a 2.2-based serial console. Which is nice, too, since that's something one will need when trying to install Debian on VME hardware. Not that I expect many people will still try to install Debian on VME hardware these days, but that's a different matter

Fucking filthy bastards!

Someone broke in our house last night. Not much was stolen, but they took my laptop, the bag it had (with some audio CD's in there), my flute, my mother's purse, and perhaps some more things we haven't discovered yet. I'm not sure whether I had put my gpg key on its hard disk back already, so I had to revoke it "just in case". Grumble.

I'm not sure what I hate most, the loss of my gpg key or the loss of my flute. Bastards!

UPDATE: they didn't steal the audio CD's after all, they had removed it from the bag, along with the paperwork. I hadn't seen it at first because it was under the papers.

The police has come by in the mean time, and have taken my ORiNOCO card to check for fingerprints; it was in my laptop yesterday night, so they must have touched it. That means I can't use it right now, but that was true anyway -- I don't have a laptop anymore, remember...

Too many e-mails

Yesterday, it took me about 5 hours to reach the last of my mails flagged as 'new'. Whatever happens to Debian every few months, I don't know, but it surely sucks.

Oh well.

Some people have asked my why I'm not on IRC as much as I used to be. Well, that, and the fact that I'm now temporarily working between 13:00 and 21:00. No, business is going fine; it's just that there are a few laws in Belgium which make it financially interesting to refrain from paying yourself the first few years when doing a startup. That's all fine and good, but it does mean I need to earn a bit of money in other ways every once in a while, which is what I'm doing right now.

Gtk vs VB

habits

It's incredible how fast one gets used to stuff

I've been living literally years without a watch. So long, in fact, that I don't remember what my previous watch looked like. It must've been at least 10 years; and I was perfectly allright with that. Now, my parents, brothers, and sister gave me a watch for my 26th birthday, a few months ago; and if I don't wear my watch right now, I feel naked.

Like I said, incredible.

Drunk

Two hours ago, I had €5,50 worth in drink coupons. One hour ago, I had used them all.

Right now, I'm drunk.

I probably will be embarrased about this post by tomorrow morning, but right now I don't care.

Let's find my bed now.

Long live Belgian Beer!

(and the backspace key -- you don't want to know how many times I had to use it for this post

Why does hardware break down at 2 AM?

Yesterday, right when I was about to go to bed, I suddenly noticed that rock, my workstation, wasn't acting normally anymore. Since it runs spamd for my mailserver (which I would prefer not to implode on mail), I investigated immediately. Apparently, the network card had broken down.

sigh. And I had to go to work today, which didn't happen as planned

Actually,

Why does hardware break down at all? The only replacement network card I had left was a 3Com EtherlinkII. So, ISA. Not exactly state of the art...

Mozilla

I'm starting to dislike mozilla more and more...

I could technically understand the Mozilla developers wanting to make mozilla foolproof. I just don't like them to break stuff that used to work by default. I'll have to figure out how Xprt works now, because setting print.postscript.enabled to true in prefs.js didn't do it, as had been suggested to me. As if I didn't have anything better to do. Grmbl.

Hints are welcome (except for stuff such as "Hey, Xprt is easy, go read this library of documentation, it'll only take you five hours")

Belgian federal decision

Thought this was nice to know:

Op voorstel van de heer Johan Vande Lanotte, Minister van Begroting, en de heer Peter Vanvelthoven, Staatssecretaris voor Informatisering van de Staat, keurde de Ministerraad de richtlijnen en aanbevelingen aan de federale overheidsdiensten voor het gebruik van standaarden, op maat gemaakte toepassingssoftware en vrije software goed.

If you don't know Dutch (or French -- the site is bilingual, just like Belgium itself): Belgian federal ministers have decided to mandate open standards for all federal service departments, and to make all software to which the government owns the copyright free (as in speech). This is great news, much of which has been the result of the persistent lobbying of a few people, including Herman Bruyninckx and others. If you like this news as much as I do, be sure to thank them!

gtk

I'm not feeling too happy lately. I don't know why; it could be a number of things. It used to be the case that I would go and sit behind my computer, and have fun all day, but apparently that doesn't really work any more. It's not that I'm depressed, but I've been better, and it's breaking down my motivation to do interesting things.

Maybe I need a girlfriend.

Incredible

I just noticed that the last post on Planet Debian I had read last time has now already fallen off the bottom. Incredible! It used to be the case that you could wait a week and the last one would have gone only halfway down; right now, all you need to do is wait three days, and you start missing out on posts. My, my; who would've thought. Seems Planet Debian is getting popular.

let's see...

I've got my laptop back.

Let's see how long it takes this time. This time, they didn't swap the hard disk after all; they did swap the lower part of the laptop (containing the mainboard and the lower part of the case), and the RAM, though. Let's see... after sending it in for repairs some three or four times, that leaves the floppy drive, the CD/DVD/CD-RW combo, the battery, and the upper part of the case (not the monitor; the bit where the keyboard is) original. All other bits have been replaced at some point in time.

They made a horrific error, though. The piece of paper that came with the thing and that outlined what had been fixed, said "hard disk data couldn't be backed up". When I switched it on, they had installed Windows XP.

Of course Windows couldn't back up my data, you morons. I'm running a real operating system!

Sigh... oh well. It's not as if the thing had something important on it; last time, it took a week before it died, and at that point, the hard disk had been replaced.

It's not that bad

The council is bureaucracy overruling the Parliament, thus invalidating the very principle of democracy. We have seen this in action with the new EU Patents law: the Parliament had passed several amendments to the original proposal, yet the Council ended up ignoring those democraticly voted amendments and passing an even worse legislation than the original draft. This is clearly different than what happens between a higher and lower chambers each examining new legislations before it is ratified.

Martin-Eric, it's nothing that bad. The council of ministers did indeed vote differently, but that happens routinely between a higher and a lower chamber. I remember having seen a reaction from Bart Staes, Belgian MEP for the Greens, but can't find it anymore; he explained, though, that the law will now have to go back to the parliament again, and that it won't pass unless both the council and the parliament agree.

Sounds very much like a lower and higher chamber to me.

Right...

Because of all the boring stuff, I would almost forget: I finished the first known successful installation of Debian, using debian-installer on m68k VME hardware today. Being a good debianer, I of course sent in an installation report.

Summary of that report: it (sorta) works, but there's still a long way to go.

boring...

on Friday and Saturday, I went to do some data gathering job. I didn't realize such jobs could be that boring...

I got a list of shops to go to, and some lists of products, one for each shop. With those lists, I went to the mentioned shops, and had to write down what was available in the shop (in function of the available space -- i.e., if there's not much of the product available, but they didn't provide much space either, then that's "still a lot in the shop"). Working myself down that list took all friday.

On saturday, then, I went to do the exact same thing. In, for the most part, the exact same shops (there were a few differences, because I wasn't the only one doing this, and some people had only one day to work on this job).

And that's it. There's nothing more to it than this; this is what I have been doing friday and saturday. I'm happy it was only a two-day job; I wouldn't have wanted to do this one more day. To think that there are people who do this kind of work as their day job, every week again... oh, the horror.

Silly squid

Seems squid breaks down in tiny little pieces if the hard disk partition it runs on turns out to be too small to contain everything you would need according to the cache_dir setting.

My server runs squid, which helps keeping the downloaded volume of data traffic low. I mounted a 1G partition on the /var/spool/squid directory, and said squid by way of the second parameter to the cache_dir setting that there was 950MB for his usage. Which turned out to be just not enough; with the filesystem overhead and the 5% reserved blocks, the thing ended up overflowing. Bye-bye, proxy. Restarting it just gave me something in the logs, mentioning that there isn't enough space. Oh well, so I lowered the setting, and restarted squid.

That didn't work either.

Now, I can understand that they break down (although it would've been nice if they had handled it, perhaps by dynamically adjusting the size); what I cannot understand is that they break down after restarting, and after having those values adjusted.

Anyone with a bit of squid-knowledge care to shed some light on that mystery? For reference, this is what the setting looks like right now:

cache_dir aufs /var/spool/squid 930 16 256

tasting cookies

While walking on the Meir (a major shopping street in Antwerp) today...

"Excuse me, mind if I ask you a few questions?"

Turns out she wants me to answer a few questions about cookies. "Do you ever eat cookies?" Of course I do. "What type of cookies?" All of them, basically. Goes on for a little while; then "Would you mind getting in here with me to taste some cookies?" Tasting cookies? "Sure!" Are you a journalist, or have you worked in the market research area before? Why would they want to know that? "No". Well. I don't think blogging counts.

Inside, I get a cookie, and they ask me a few things about it. "Does it look good?" sure. "Does it smell good?" That too. "What about the color? too light, too dark?" Could have been a bit darker. "Is it too compact, or could it be a bit lighter?". This goes on for a while; about 20 questions were asked. Next, she goes away, and gets me a different one. Lo and behold, this one is a bit darker. And tasts better. And it's a bit less compact. I'd put a lot of money on the idea that they chose the second cookie based on the answers I gave about the first one.

I want cookie shops to behave like that.

Go, Amaya!

This is not what your lungs look like -- not yet.

... but they will if you start smoking again. Just to give you some extra incentive

Repairs

Just called the laptop repair guys.

I had been there last week to bring my laptop in for repair (again), and they had told me it'd be ready be the end of last week. Since it's become monday in the mean time, and since I hadn't heard back of them yet, I called.

Turns out they have already done what they told me they'd do (replace hard disk and main board), but that they were now waiting for ordered RAM to arrive.

They didn't talk about RAM when I brought it. Not that I don't want them to replace the RAM if they're convinced it's broken, but this means I'll probably have to wait yet another week. This had better be the last time; if not, I'll probably have a chat with one of my neighbours who sells apples. No, not the fruit.

NBD, Festivities, voting

Did a small upstream update to the NBD userland utilities yesterday, releasing 2.7.1. The reason it took that long to create the update was that the minor bug which I fixed (multiple-file snprintf not properly if():ed) revealed another one (the server not properly closing the socket when there is an error on opening the to be exported file). While this bug should be fixed, too, it's a bit harder to do (at least if I want to keep things maintainable) due to the current layout of the code; for that reason, I'm not sure whether I should fix this bug for 2.7, or just leave it there and make sure it's fixed in 2.8 (which, due to it using glib, should be a lot easier to do).

I didn't blog about that yesterday since I didn't have the time; right after releasing 2.7, we left for the marriage of a cousin of mine, who lives in West-Vlaanderen, some 100km from here. We stayed there overnight, and arrived back home today around 12:00. The festivities were nice.

Today, then, we went to vote for the European and the Flemish Parliaments. I voted for Bart Staes in the EP, and for the SP.A (list vote) in the flemish parliament. There are no results available for the European parliament yet, since in some European countries people can still vote until 10 PM tonight, but according to the first preliminary results, things seem to go well for the greens in the flemish parliament. Not as much for the socialists, but oh well.

Might be interesting to note that Belgium is one of the few countries worldwide where there is an obligation to vote. We're not just allowed to go vote, we have to vote—if you don't, you get fined. Not that I, personally, wouldn't have voted if there was no obligation, but I do think the obligation is silly.

Debian-installer

Tried debian-installer on my VME box the other day.

First attempt failed before anything could happen, because the 2.4 driver for the SCSI controller makes the kernel panic. Built an image using 2.2, retried.

The second attempt was more successfull; it booted up to the initial langchooser dialog; unfortunately, though, the serial console doesn't really work. Need to fix that.

Ancient unices

The MVME came with two hard disks, one of which featured Motorola SysV/68:

# uname -a                                                                      
mvme1 mvme1 R3V8 980209 M68040                                                  

config.guess doesn't recognize it; it knows about R3V3 up to R3V7, but doesn't seem to have heard about R3V8. I sent in a patch the other day that will just output the same system triplet as for R3V5, R3V6, and R3V7; apart from that, people should be happy.

It's kind of a beast, though.

# touch foo-bar-baz-bar-foo-bar-baz
# ls -l
total 0
-rw-r--r--   1 root     sys            0 Jun  8 15:19 foo-bar-baz-ba
# 

RRrrright. Let's reboot it to Linux.

# reboot                                                                        
reboot: not found
# /sbin/reboot
/sbin/reboot: not found
# man shutdown
[...]
# shutdown -i6
shutdown:  You must be in the / directory to run /etc/shutdown.
#

I think I know why I prefer free unices over commercial ones.

m68k support

I guess it's time for a rant.

One question that keeps popping up regarding m68k support is "why do you guys compile package X? No sane person is going to run that on m68k anyway!"

I've had to refute that point on IRC saturday, and in private mail just today.

Well, maybe you're right. Maybe nobody is interested in running mozilla, KDE, GNOME, OpenOffice.org, or theorem solvers on m68k. (I hadn't even heard about theorem solvers before saturday; apparently, a theorem solver is something that tries to prove a theorem by starting with some axioms and some rules, and may take days/weeks/months/years to finish on even the fastest computers.)

But the question we need to ask is not "Would I, personally, have any use for this software package on m68k"; rather, the right question is "Would any single user in our user base be interested in having this software package?" That is the only right question, because that's what puts our users in the center of the argument; and according to the Social Contract, section 4, our users are one of our two priorities.

The problem with that question, however, is that we cannot reasonably answer that question. We cannot know who our users are or will be, today and in the future. Nor can we know what our users use their system for. Some might use it as a home server, and might require server software. Some might want to use it to show their friends how cool this GNU/Linux thing is, that it even supports the most recent software on outdated hardware. Others might have other reasons to run GNU/Linux on their m68k box.

Therefore, since we cannot reasonably answer that question, we have only two options: either we compile all applications on all architectures, including m68k, where technically feasible and possible (compiling lilo on m68k is not "technically feasible", even if it's technically possible; and in the case of OpenOffice.org, it's not technically possible (OpenOffice.org requires architecture-specific assembly code. Yes, I tried :)), including those that seem silly, or we compile none of them and discontinue the m68k port entirely.

Some that read that last option might be surprised to read something like that coming from me (Hi Md :). Yes, I do agree that we will probably not be able to support the m68k port "until the end of times". But let's make one thing clear: as long as we can keep up building packages for m68k and continue to have users (even today, there are still people who install Linux/m68k for the first time), we should continue to support the m68k port.

The BMFH

Antti-Juhani's post got me thinking. I cannot agree more with him; getting a confirmation mail from someone you don't even know is like getting the neighbour's garbage dumped in your garden.

There's an easy BOFH-style solution, though. Instead of discarding those mails along with the rest of the spam, reply to it. After all, such mails are based on the idea that you'll say "oh, yes, thank you for the spam, I'll just discard it 'cause you're too lazy"; if you don't do that, it won't work no more.

So, there I have it. I never confirm those mails if I sent it in the first place anyway; but when people start mailing me such junk when I didn't contact them, I might just reply, and confirm the mail, just so the system stops working. All hail the Bastard Mailer From Hell!

Serial followup

Found out why the null modem wouldn't work last week.

I don't need a null modem; I need a "normal" modem cable. As in, a straight one, not a crossed one. Never heard of something you run an operating system on which needs a straight serial line to work. Oh well.

Now for playing with it a bit, so that I understand the system, and then I can go test debian-installer for m68k VME hardware. Cool.

Want... to... yell... at... someone...

Why don't people answer the phone when you try to call them all day?

Why do people ask me to print out their 57 page thesis? Seven times?

Why do toners run out halfway past the second part?

Why do people insist on using non-free software? Which doesn't even speak LPR, and requires me to install even more non-free software that does not know what fork() is, and insists on sending jobs to printservers one at a time (meaning, I can't use our two printers in parallel, since the bloody LPR client will not send the printjob for the second printer before it completed the one for the first)?

Why does my CD player refuse to take my Rage Against The Machine CD, so that I'm forced to play something else?

Then, after all that, when I want to cool off, I get this:

wouter@rock:~$ logjam 
logjam: error while loading shared libraries: libcurl.so.2: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
wouter@rock:~$  

GHAAAH! Murphy, I hate you!

In short, I've had a lousy day. Don't ask me anything, and don't send me any bugreports, at least not if you'd like to keep your neck for a while.

NOOO!

My laptop just crashed, while accessing the hard disk; and it refuses to boot again, now.

NOT AGAIN!

PIECE OF JUNK! WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU?

This is the second time it breaks down within less than a week after it having been repaired. Somebody must be hating me.

Typesetting

Been playing with L^AT_EX for the most part of the weekend. As an excercise, I downloaded a text in medieval Dutch from the 'net, and added markup. It's a classic, part of most Dutch classes here in Belgium. Page 23, sentence five: "Nu willen wi triumpheren ende costelijc teeren!"

While doing that, I noticed that Medieval Dutch can be nice sometimes. The text contains the following poem:

O rethorijcke, auctentijcke conste leiflijcke,
Ic claghe, met wanhaghe, dat men di haet.
Den sinnen, die u minnen, vallet seer grieflijcke,
Hem tfi, die die geen gade en slaet,
Ende denghene, die di eerst maecte, versmaet
Ick puer versmade als dongheraecte selcke doren,
Maer al eest scade van selcker daet,
Ende leet hem alleene, die dit aenhoren:
Doer donconstighe gaet die conste verleoren.

The final phrase is wonderful. "Doer donconstighe gaet die conste verleoren". Or: "Those who don't know the art will make the art go lost." This text was written somewhere between 1501 and 1515, but it's good. Really.

(Anybody recognize it?

Too many parameters

To the idiot who invented the serial protocol,

What gave you the idea one would need that many protocol options? There's a gazillion of speeds, a number of parity and bit word options, and on top of that, the option between hardware or software flow control.

Why is that? Couldn't you just have said "this is how it'll be", and be done with it? Having to fiddle with all those options and find out the hard way that you'll need to create your own null modem cable is no fun.

Moron.

Yes, I know some of the above is not fully accurate. Don't bother telling me.

shared hosting...

If you are reading my blog through my website, then you probably noticed something went wrong.

My website is on a shared hosting system, which was upgraded last wednesday. While moving over files, the guys from the hosting company apparently decided that my permissions weren't right, and made them non-worldwritable. Which kinda broke my rippy installation.

It'd have been nice if they'd have noticed me of that fact, instead of just breaking stuff. Thanks.

PC shops

I just went to the local PC shop, to buy myself a gender changer. These things cost a lot more money than I expected; almost 4 euro. I wonder why that is; it's just a small device, they don't need that much money to create such a thing.

Then again, the bloody thing is patented. That's probably it.

When I was about to pay, the shop owner received a phone call, so I had to wait; I looked around a bit in the CD-ROMs they had. Lo and behold, they had one of those InfoMagick sixpack boxes; when I did my very first GNU/Linux installation, I used one of those. My first idea was "Do they still make those?", so I went to have a closer look. I honestly didn't think I'd ever see a new InfoMagick sixpack again.

Well, I didn't. Looking at the back of the box, I saw stuff such as "Debian GNU/Linux 0.93RC2", "RedHat 3.0.3", etcetera. I had actually planned to talk to the shop owner about GNU/Linux support, but that box made me change my mind.

They made it!

Yeah.

I finally have a fully functional laptop again. It only took, uh, three months or so. Isn't that cool?

Although some parts are still missing. I sent the hard disk frame back together with the hard disk, and of course the fujitsu guys didn't send it back to me at first. After calling, they did now, but of course they forgot the screws... hey, what did you think? It's a large corporation

Oh well. I pondered calling them to request they send the screws to me, too, but didn't. Those screws aren't that crucial, and if I have to wait yet another month, I'll get crazy. The disk is in the laptop, with a few screws less, and I'll go by a computer shop somewhere this week to fetch some extra screws. Surely they'll have some.

In any case, I'm happy I got rid of knoppix. Don't get me wrong, knoppix is a fine system; but the fact that you lose your settings when you power down, and that I didn't have any more storage than just a RAM disk... well... it hurts.

Anxiously awaiting

Today, the last missing bit of my laptop is supposed to get back from repairs. I made an appointment with the courier service guys so that they'd bring it to me today; and I had expected them to have brought it already, but it's now 13:07, and they're still not here.

Do I sound too impatient?

In the mean time, I'm trying to do some work. Yeah, I'm getting places, but not as fast as I would've wanted.

ReiserFS is "fast"

wouter@rock:~$ time dd if=/dev/zero of=sparsefile count=1 bs=1k seek=1G
1+0 records in
1+0 records uit
1024 bytes transferred in 0,522148 seconds (1961 bytes/sec)

real    6m26.308s
user    0m0.011s
sys     1m13.094s
wouter@rock:~$ time rm sparsefile

real    3m14.809s
user    0m0.001s
sys     1m33.124s
wouter@rock:~$ 

Hell yeah.

Released nbd 2.7, fetched hardware

I released a new upstream version of the NBD userland utilities today, with some urgent fixes. Some stuff that was already in that release includes some portability fixes (so that it should now build flawlessly on the Hurd and FreeBSD), better documentation, and a code audit (which, luckily, did not reveal any horrors). Obviously, I also uploaded a Debian package, available from your local mirror RSN(tm) (which reads as "tomorrow", because I only just uploaded it, so that's after dinstall time. sorry.)

Earlier today, I went to the home of a kind guy who donated some m68k VME hardware. That's cool, since we now have VME stuff again; before today, the only other Debian Developer known to have ever had m68k VME stuff was Nick Holgate (who actually wrote much of the required software to load Linux on 68k VME hardware, such as vmelilo). But since he's no longer very active in Debian, we lacked a VME tester. Thanks to this donation, that's no longer the case.

The box is now standing in my room, and I'll be testing out some stuff (such as debian-installer) later this week; probably during the weekend, but it might depend on some other factors.

We'll see.

Rule number one when dealing with large corporations:

Never trust them.

After whining over phone and mail for a pretty long while, I finally received the replacement hard disk from Fujitsu-Siemens' repair guys. It had taken them long enough, and it only arrived right now because I received a mail address of some manager somewhere (and mailed the guy, too), but it's finally there, wrapped in a square box of 15cm at each side. (so that it won't sustain any damage). Which is nice; I was happy as a child.

Until I opened the box

When I sent it, I had only a standard-sized screwdriver handy. The hard disk, however, was mounted in a frame, as is usually the case; and that frame required the use of a smaller-sized screwdriver. Since I didn't have one, and since the screwdriver I did have nearby didn't fit, I sent it along, trusting they'd send it back with the replacement hard disk.

Surely you can guess what happened.

Let's hope they don't need as much time to send the frame as they needed to send the hard disk, or I'll get really angry.

Apart from that, the coffee pot is almost empty. That means I've been drinking almost a litre of coffee in just over an hour. Dunno how that's possible, I'm not doing any sysadminning...

Repetitiveness is boring...

... but I'll repeat myself none the less: ruby is cool. Yeah.

Ok, that was the last time. Promise.

But why am I saying this? Well. In an attempt to do something useful while reading up on ruby, I started writing a build log file parser. It can singlehandedly handle successful logs (easy), given-back logs (even easier), skipped logs (still easier, since those don't have to do anything) and I'm now doing the code to have it handle some of the more routine failed logs (not as easy, but still). The cool part of object orientation is that it's extremely easy to abstract away complexity, a lot easier than with procedural languages IMO; and abstracting away complexity is what I'm doing all over the place.

Love it.

sunday, busy sunday...

I've said it before: ruby is cool. Last time, all I knew about it was what you can learn in a one-hour introductory presentation; since, I have read a fair amount of the canonical reference on ruby, the pragmatic programmer's guide, and have done some things in ruby, such as, e.g., an LDIF file parser and some code to convert a file with |-separated values to SQL-commands. Pretty cool stuff, although nothing groundbreaking (yet).

Object oriented programming is very natural to me; and ruby is like the summum of object orientation, including the nice features of other OO languages (and only the nice features), and adding some of its own. I talked about it to one of my teachers from college, who was very much into object orientation too, and he seemed interested.

On the personal front, we celebrated my birthday last saturday evening in the way we always do, with mom preparing an excellent meal and me getting presents afterwards. Only one present this time, but an excellent one: a wristwatch. Not just any watch, mind you: a Festina one, from one of their registered model collections. This means that they know I own this watch, and should I ever lose it and it gets found, I'll get a call. Only bit is that it's a wee bit too large for my wrist right now, so it's a bit uncomfortable; I'll have to go by the shop to get it adjusted. It's closed on mondays, though, so that'll have to wait. After the meal and receiving my present, my brother and I went to a snooker bar a few blocks away which had its opening night (well, technically, it was its reopening night, but since it's got other owners and was basically rebuilt, that's just a technical detail which I'll readily dismiss) and played two frames. We both suck at it, but since he won the first frame and I won the second, we both had a lot of fun. Might do that again.

Well...

I can only agree.

I hate the European Council.

The European Council chose to overrule the European Parliament.

I'm outraged. Not just because they oppose my position on software patents; also, and most importantly, because they blatantly ignored the the parliamentary vote on this subject, and indeed chose to make a decision directly against its intent.

I've always been told in school that the basis of democracy is the diversion of the three powers. If the European Council, a group of just a few ministers, can directly ignore and oppose a parliamentary vote, voted upon by 787 MEPs without any problem, then why do we still need a european parliament?

Today is a black day for democracy in Europe. There's only two positive bits in this news:

1. It happened the day after my birthday; that way, I don't have to hate my own birthday
2. I don't have to be ashamed of the country I live in: together with Germany, Belgium opposed this vote

My first thought in reaction to this news was about some sort of violence. Like, going to Brussels and throwing some stones through some windows. After all, if they don't need to respect structures and institutions, why should I? But that, of course, doesn't help. Better to do what the FFII suggests, and to write to representatives. Again.

Europeans, unite against patent terror!

nbd, and partying

I wrote a road map for NBD yesterday. It requires a lot of work, and I'm not going to be able to do all of that soonishly, so I outlined what's urgent and what is not. In any case, I'll upload a package later today, just to fix the two outstanding bugs. Apart from that, any and all help is, of course, appreciated, but do leave something out for me

Oh, and then there's this little detail...

Happy birthday to me!

(and no, I won't tell you how old I am, except if you already know)

I have a silly brother

My brother and I, we have the exact same jacket. Same model, same color, same everything -- except for the size; his is XL, mine is XXL. He usually leaves for school before I leave for work.

My jacket has quite a few pockets, and I'm a pocketman. I prefer to put everything I need (and stuff I wouldn't ever need, too) in my jacket pockets, so that my jacket is usually quite heavy. Today, it contains, among other things, my cell phone, my keys, and my train card.

I couldn't find my jacket this morning, so I called my cell phone. Guess who picked up.

Luckily, my mom offered to drive me to my brother's school, so that we could exchange jackets, and hopped me off at work after that (which isn't too far from my brother's school). Let's hope he'll be more careful in the future.

Page 23, sentence 5

Instructions: Get a book, post page 23, sentence 5 of it, along with these instructions.

Book one: page 23 does not even have 5 sentences.

Book(let) two: there is no page 23.

Book three: page 23 is empty.

me: Oh, sod off then. It's silly anyway.

I love standards

Since I was tired of my old CSS stylesheet, and since I had just created a nice hackergochi head for myself, I wrote a new stylesheet for my website yesterday, based on that picture. The old CSS is still there, but is not the default. Input is welcome

Right now, I have a bug in nbd-server to fix. An ugly one.

Agreement

It's nice if prominent people such as Joey Hess seem to agree with you... except if they don't

• Regarding the Planet Debian CSS, what I actually meant to say is that I dislike the default stylesheet, as opposed to liking it more than the other two. Should've been more clear there.
• Regarding the vote: Uhm. Joey, just for the record: you don't accidentally happen to be making fun of me, do you?
  Let's assume you don't. Well, yeah; that title wasn't a great example of objectivity either. In the interest of fair-play, it wouldn't be an incredibly bad or crazy idea to do it again, properly; however, I don't think I'd push such a motion forward, since in this particular case, no real damage seems to have happened (at least I didn't see anyone cry out that they misunderstood what was changed). I would support and/or second such a motion if someone else would suggest one, though.
  What's more important, I think, is to make sure things like this don't happen again in the future, perhaps by formulating a set of guidelines that define what a vote ballot should look like, and what it should definately not look like. One suggestion is to demand that subject lines refrain from making any comment on the subject of the vote (i.e., they should just say "changes too <document>", "statement about <issue of the day>", or "overruling of decision regarding <foo> by (the DPL|delegate <bar>)". Perhaps more is necessary?
• At least we can agree on the gimp part

Since I'm talking about agreeing with people, I might as wel go on...

I've been credited with having an infamous cool, and with having subtle points of view. That does in no way mean I don't have explicit thoughts about certain people or subjects; in fact, I have been known to lose it every once in a while. It is my firm believe, however, that cooperation and being positive towards eachother is crucial in a project such as Debian, even more so than leadership and similar things. My advice:

• Above all, try to remember that we're all Debian developers, aiming for the common goal to further the availability, usefullness, and quality of Free Software. We may differ in opinion about what "free software" actually is, and about how to achieve that goal, but that's only a minor detail; what's important is that we have a common ground.
• Considering the above, try to remain positive. Try to find out the motives why someone did something, assuming they did it to further the goal of getting Free Software to the masses, and don't assume they did it because of something you said or did. If you're not sure, ask.
• Ignore flamebait. Reply with reasonable arguments to reasonable things, and snip out the offensive stuff. Replying to such things will generally make it worse; is a waste of your time (since it doesn't achieve anything constructive); will probably forgotten by everyone not directly involved; and puts you at risk of having people who are directly involved form a grudge against you.
• Finally, don't even think about reading a flamewar when you're upset about something else

Not that I expect anyone is waiting for the above, but what the heck.

buildd, and other stuff

Since I'm talking about buildd anyway: I finished setting up kiivi, a box by Meelis Roos, earlier this week, and James Troup enabled the wanna-build access for this machine just today. Meaning, backlogs should definately be history for m68k now. Life's great.

Regarding the vote and its controversy: I do think the title was deceiving, but don't think this was done on purpose. The problem was that an adjective had been used, and when you do that, you'll always lose objectivity and risk deceiving people. "There's a tree over there" is objective; "There's a nice tree over there", "There's a large tree over there", or "There's an old tree over there" all aren't, because they include the result of someone's judgement. Saying "Editorial changes to the Social Contract" rather than "Changes to the Social Contract" is more or less telling people what to think, albeit not explicitely; therefore, I think the outcome of the vote should be declared invalid, even if I agree with most of the changes being made. It is also the reason why I seconded Craig Sanders' amendment.

OBTW, Keybuk: they're all equally nice, except for the "boxless" one which you made the default.

kernels, websites, and arrakis

my head

So, apparently you're supposed to have a picture of just your head now, for planet debian, which apparently is called a "hackergotchi" head (explanations on why that name was chosen are welcome

Since I didn't have one, I looked into making one myself. It isn't very hard, actually; so, for those interested in playing with the gimp, this is what I did:

• Of course, you start from a picture of yourself. This is what I started from:

• Cut out anything that isn't called a "head". I used the "Select contiguous regions" and the "Select hand-drawn regions" tools to cut out the blue (of the background), the black (of my T-shirt) and my neck. Be sure to select the "Feather" option in the "Tool Options" dialog of both tools; if you don't do that, you'll get ugly sharp edges.
• Once you selected a region you want to lose, use Control+K to get rid of it. If you selected the "Feather" option, you'll get a nice anti-aliased edge.
• When you're happy with everything, use the Script-Fu->Shadow->Drop-Shadow option in the right mouse popup menu to add a shadow.
• Finally, use the "crop" tool to get rid of any unneeded stuff

The result:

It'd be nice if "certain people" could add this to the configuration at planet.debian.net

Today was the last time...

... that I did a concert with the choir.

After having sung in the choir "Cantilene" for almost ten years, I am now officially getting too old to remain active as a member. Since we rehearse on saturday, since you can stay until you get 26, and since my 26th birthday is may 6th, I have one rehearsal left to go, after which it will be the end for me.

I feel pretty sad about that. Of course, ever since I joined the choir, I knew this day would come; but I never realized it was almost there until about half a year ago. Over the last ten years, every saturday (well, ok, almost every saturday) between 18:30 and 20:30, I was at the rehearsal; I realized how much of an impact the choir had on my life when I heard somebody talk about a saturday night TV-show which I had never heard of (it played somewhere during the rehearsal hours). At the time, I watched a lot more TV than I do now, and it was kinda "strange" that there was actually a recurring show on TV during prime time that I hadn't at least seen 5 minutes of.

I can hardly believe it's over now. 10 year is a long time. During those ten years, a lot of things happened:

• Ayrton Senna died by crashing his Formula 1 car against a concrete wall at 300kph
• I changed schools, to pursue a high school degree in IT instead of drama
• The Taliban take rule of Afghanistan
• My parents bought our first PC (before 1995 or so, we worked with a second hand Commodore 128D)
• British Scientists clone a sheep, called "Dolly"
• I finished high school
• Lady Diana dies in a car accident in Paris, France
• I first installed GNU/Linux on my parent's PC (Red Hat 4.2 at the time)
• President Clinton allegedly had an affair with a white house trainee called Lewinsky, but denies it (later confesses he did)
• I got my first Internet connection (a 14.4kbps modem to a government-sponsored (but free) ISP, even if you could only mail out of their network; doing other stuff with their services was impossible
• Boris Jeltsin resigns as president of Russia (yes, I'm deliberately declining comment here)
• I bought my first own PC (secondhand P166, which remained my primary machine until early 2003)
• I became a Debian Developer
• Al-Qaeda attacks major US cities using then unseen terrorist methods
• I finished college
• The war in Afghanistan ends the Taliban regime
• I co-founded NixSys
• Bush indicates even more braindamage by attacking yet another country; Irak this time

Yes, the ordering is right.

It's incredible how much the world and oneself changes over a period of ten year. I can't believe it's over.

Well, OK, it ain't really over yet. Next week will be the last time for me and someone else (who happens to have his birthday a few days before me). Then -- at least if they do what's always been done (I don't see a reason why they wouldn't) -- we will get a chance to choose the final song of the rehearsal, and will get a little present. After that, we'll offer the others something to drink, and I'll probably feel like an old man

In other news, I just had the first false negative (well, the first I can remember) on my business mail address. It's been active for a year or so, now. Pretty good.

I hate my ISP

An ISP is supposed to be RFC-compliant, which they aren't

Speaking of "getting what you ask for"...

I feel compelled to comment on the Dutroux case, which is going on in Arlon at the moment (see, e.g., the BBC website for English-languaged coverage of the case). It was said on the news today that Laetitia Delhez, one of only two survivors of Dutroux' crimes and who is due to testify at the trial today, announced she will refuse to testify under oath. The reason? The text you have to say when doing your oath includes the sentence "I swear I will speak without hate and without fear", words she could not speak in front of Dutroux. While I can understand this, and in fact sympathise with it, it is not how the system works; a testimony which is not done under oath is, in theory, less valuable, so it could -again, in theory- give Dutroux better chances. Which, I assume, is the last thing Ms. Delhez would want. Then again, it's highly unlikely that Dutroux would walk out on his crimes; it's more likely that the jury will feel sympathy for Ms. Delhez, and that her action will in fact make her testimony stronger.

The other surviving victim, Sabine Dardenne, who testified yesterday, gave an interview about her ordeals and the case in general, which was broadcasted yesterday evening. Having seen it, I can only say she's a remarkably strong young woman. Although the trauma of having been abducted, manipulated, and abused over a period of 81 days is probably more than anyone not so unlucky to have experienced it can imagine, and will, in fact, take a lot of effort to overcome, she seems to have done this. What's more, she has done so without professional help. That's incredible, and I can only have respect for her personality and her intelligence to grow up like this after such an incredibly horrible experience.

Silly AP

I was having problems with my wireless connectivity lately; when I sat downstairs, in the sofa, it often happened that I lost my link to the AP upstairs, only about 5 meters away from me. That isn't a normal situation, so I finally thought about setting the AP to another channel. That shouldn't do much (an AP is supposed to switch frequencies if there's too much interference), but as it's not supposed to harm either, I thought 'what the hell'. And while at it, I checked some other settings as well...

turns out one of the AP's two antennas was just switched off. Switching it on helped. Quite. And that silly setting is the default, because I had never revisited all its configuration settings after my last argument with the thing. Makes one wonder, though: why do people build an AP with two antennas, if the default settings use only one of them?

Oh well. It was a cheap thing (in fact, the cheapest one I could find), I guess you get what you ask for...

3Dfx or no 3Dfx?

I'm pondering to bring my machine down to put the old 3Dfx board back in, so that hardware-accelerated 3D would work again. I hate opening up this box, though; it's sitting halfway behind my desk, and, with all the hardware in it, is quite heavy; so moving it out of there to be able to take parts out of it (or put other parts in) is quite painful.

Plus, I don't usually shut it down either. Has been, like, months since I powered it off. It's been rebooted in the mean time for kernel upgrades, but that's about it; and going for a shutdown, as in, power off, makes me, err, uncomfortable.

Anyhow, my network board has been showing signs of imminent death. Maybe I'd better just wait 'till the imminent death has turned into premature death, so that I need to open it anyway; I can then do both things at once, swap the network card and replace the 3Dfx thing.

Yeah. Let's do that.

The NMBS is crazy

Yesterday morning, in the Antwerp Central Station:

"Dames en heren, de trein op spoor 1 is de extra mooi-weer-trein met bestemming Blankenberge..."

Or, in English: "Ladies and gentlemen, the train on platform 1 is the extra nice weather-train destined for Blankenberge" (Blankenberge is a city at the Belgian coast)

A "nice weather train"? Who invents those things?

Not that it doesn't make sense to lay in additional trains to the sea when the sun is shining during a school holiday, but that's a really silly name. Oh well.

bugs suck

Taxes

I received my tax letter in the mail yesterday. Good news: I get a bit more than a whopping €600 back! This really is welcome; I had feared I would have to pay extra, but not so. Good.

In case you're interested: in Belgium, your employer is supposed to withold a bit of your salary and send it to the tax administration, which is used as prepayments for your yearly personal taxes. Once a year, you have to fill out a form where you tell the tax administration how much money you made the year before, and how much costs (such as mortgages, etc) that give you right on reduced taxes you had. They then calculate how much money you're due, and compare that against the amount you've payed, which takes them almost a year. If you've payed too much, you get the difference back (without interests, though); if you didn't pay enough, you get to pay extra (also without interests).

Most people pay too much, and get some money back. Which is what everyone wants, because

1. if you find out you've got to pay extra, you've got to find an amount of money (often a few hundred euros) in about a month or three, and
2. if the government gets more prepayments than the amount of money the people are due, they still get interests on that money. Which is good for them.

grumble

So, the VRT did not cover our no software-patents manifestation. They seem to be on a policy of actively ignoring all about Free Software; it's not the first time they didn't cover stuff like this.

Instead, they chose to cover an action in the national airport about some idiots who think sending people, who were denied asylum and who don't have any options of appeal left, back to their country is a bad idea (which is silly) and to give a lot of time to Bush's press conference (which nobody cares about, because he's a moron anyway).

I hate the VRT. Grumble.

manifestations are fun

Went to the manifestation against software patents in Brussels, today. Kinda fun; there was quite a number of people from all over Europe, and we did a (police-accompanied) walk of about an hour to the European Council (which is not the same thing as the European Parliament, mind you). There was free food, which is also nice (but obviously not the reason I was there).

Once there, they did a nice pantomime play in which they made fun of the whole situation.

The press was there, too, with some newspaper photographers, and camera teams from the government-payed TV stations of both the french speaking and the flemish speaking part of Belgium. We didn't make the 6 o'clock news, but that's just a 10 minute newsflash. Could be that we'll make it on one of the later editions.

Which reminds me. It's almost 7 now...

dead hardware

My laptop's hard disk has been sent to the repair firm today. Hoping they'll fix it and not just replace it; not because there's anything critically important on that disk, but because I'd hate having to reinstall this laptop from scratch.

I say "this" laptop, because even if it doesn't have a hard disk currently, I'm still working on it. I'm writing this entry on my laptop, which is booted using knoppix. Hurray for Free Software!

Related, my father's been unlucky too. He offered to take his scooter and bring the hard disk to the repair firm, which is one and a half hour away from where we live; that would be cheaper than shipping it, and would most likely be faster, too. Unfortunately for him, his scooter broke down when he was about halfway, so we had to send the hard disk anyway -- and his scooter is out, again.

LAPTOPS SHOULD NOT BREAK WITHIN LESS THAN A WEEK AFTER THEY WERE REPAIRED!

Dammit

Sorry for the shouting; I'll pay for any ear damage caused by this blog entry. But I needed to get this out of me. The repair guy wrote "test OK" on the piece of paper that explained how he fixed the laptop (right under the note mentioning he replaced both the motherboard and the LCD). I wonder what kinds of a test that was. OK, granted, this time the hard disk broke down whereas the things he replaced seem to have survived; but still.

grumble. yell. whine.

Why did I agree to do this Solaris assignment?

root@backsun:/usr/local/apache2/modules# ldd mod_ssl.so 
        libc.so.1 =>     /usr/lib/libc.so.1
        libdl.so.1 =>    /usr/lib/libdl.so.1
        /usr/platform/SUNW,Sun-Fire-280R/lib/libc_psr.so.1
root@backsun:/usr/local/apache2/modules# 

sigh...

The sense of april fool's day

So, yesterday was april fool's day. I've seen a number of jokes, some of which could have been very good...

...but they were all of them spoiled by people commenting on the joke.

For those of you who don't understand what april fool's day is all about: it's about fooling with people. That means, you try to write or do something which seems normal from a far distance, but is silly once you take a closer look, and try to make people believe it.

That isn't possible if you have a number of people, those who don't understand the essense of fooling with people, start giving comments on the joke.

``That's the best april fool's day joke I saw this year!''

It was, you idiot, until you gave it away...

Oh well. At least they didn't spoil mine (since, hey, I didn't do any)

Weeeee!

I just received my laptop back from the repair firm. It had been out since March 4th, but I probably didn't update since a bit before that, because it didn't break immediately.

Now look:

558 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 89 not upgraded.
Need to get 463MB of archives.

I knew unstable proceeded fast, but I had no idea it was that fast...

On the laptop, they changed the mainboard (which includes giving me another ethernet MAC address, meaning, I have to update my DHCP and IPv6 DNS configuration) and the LCD (meaning, I have now lost the sticker which was attached to the back of the monitor). Pitty.

Luckily, I don't have to pay for it; the laptop is less than a year old, and the repair guys from Fujitsu repaired it on warranty...

Machine naming schemes

Lars Wirzenius blogged about computer naming schemes earlier today. I agree with him that naming schemes are a good thing; when I co-founded NixSys, we considered a wide range of possible naming schemes. Things we considered included:

• Composers (Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, ...)
• Animals (Elephant, Monkey, Horse, ...)
• Opera characters (papageno, carmen, donjose, ...)
• ... and many more, but I don't remember all of them, and seem to have lost the list

Eventually, we ended up not using a common naming scheme, though. We installed our laptops before the naming scheme was decided upon, and thoughtlessly picked the naming schemes we used at home, without changing it to something else again afterwards. In my case, that meant musical styles (I have "rock", "blues", "folk", "hiphop", "trance", and "quickstep"; the laptop is "worldmusic"), whereas in his case, it was "hermes" at first (the old and well-known greek gods naming scheme) and "loge" now (although I don't really know what his new naming scheme is all about).

teaching

I will be teaching soon. Well, more or less.

In Belgium, if you want to get your driver's license, you have to pass a theoretical exam, where you have to prove you know the code. After that, you have to start practicing, and do a practical exam. To practice for you practical exam, you have three options:

1. go to a driving school, pay a lot of money for 20 hours of training, drive with a car for at least three months on your own, and go do an exam
2. go to a driving school, pay less money for much less training (though I'm not sure exactly how much less), drive a car for at least six months with someone teaching you (usually, someone of your family, but that's up to you), and go do an exam
3. do not go to a driving school, drive a car for at least nine months with someone teaching you how, and go do an exam.

I did the last thing and received my license in 1997, which makes me eligible to fill the teacher role; you have to have a driver's license for at least 5 years to be. Since one of my two youngest brothers (they're twins) just passed the theoretical exam, and my father would prefer not doing this, I'll be teaching him how to drive.

Let's see how it goes.

New .sig

My old one was old enough, so I thought it time I got myself a new sig. This'll be it:

         EARTH
     smog  |   bricks
 AIR  --  mud  -- FIRE
soda water |   tequila
         WATER

 -- with thanks to fortune

Hard disk cleanup

Did some cleanup on my hard disk. Went from 300MB free, to this:

wouter@rock:~$ df -h
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda5              55G   39G   17G  70% /

I don't need three unpacked toolchain sources (for three cross compilers), outdated Debian CD images, or 5GB worth of backups of my server from a year ago, so I wiped them off my disk. Ought to do that more often, I think.

Spring is coming

It was a beautiful day, yesterday. So nice, that we ate outside, on our terrace, for the first time this year. We had to clean the table and the chairs first, though, since they had accumulated a whole lot of filth during winter.

In the back of our garden, there's a morello tree. In case you don't know what those are: officially, morello's are some kind of sour cherries; however, they're really a combination of cherry and plum, which make them quite excuisite. What's nice about this tree, though, is that it's always the first tree in our neighbourhood to be in bloom; even though all trees, including the morello tree, still have to grow their leaves, making them look like a bunch of dead wood as they do all winter, the morello tree is filled with little, slightly pink-shaded flowers. It signals the start of spring, every year; when the morello tree is in bloom, the weather will get better, and the trees and bushes will get their leaves back.

It's a special year in that regard, too. The morello tree used to be bigger, but it was standing at a bad place, and we had to remove it. Nobody liked it, but it had to be done, since it was getting too big, and blocking a path in the back of our garden. When we cut it, though, we found out that the morello tree was actually two trees, a large one and a much smaller one, which grew at about 5cm from the trunk of the larger one. So, we cut the large tree, and left the smaller one as is, since that one didn't block anything. In doing so, we stopped it from blocking our path, while we now still have a morello tree

It's fruit is delicious too, BTW. Can't wait 'till early summer, when it's edible.

basic economy

Dear Daniel,
The bank has your money. They play the markets with it, and give out loans with it, so that they make more money out of it which they can do interesting things with, such as

• pay your interest by the end of the year
• pay their employees wages high enough to prevent them from feeling the urge to take your money in a very corrupt way
• helping people buy themselves a house, or a car, or something else which costs so much money that they need to get a loan to be able to afford it.

It's kind of important to them. After all, it's their business model. Your government should help protect you against the bank spending too much of your money as venture capital. Ask your local economy teacher for more details.

Love,
Wouter

Explosion of the VCS's

It used to be easy. There was RCS, and if it became complex, you had CVS. Officially, CVS means "Concurrent Version System", but in reality and for all practical purposes, its name is CVS. The server is called cvs, the client is called cvs (hey, they're the same program), and the traces it leaves behind in your working directory are called CVS, too. And the TCP port is cvspserver. Wow, wild; different name.

Well, almost.

Today, for some reason (no doubt all valid reasons, but that's not the point), there's a multitude of VCS's out there. There's subversion (which is really svn or WebDAV, depending on your point of view). There's arch (or is that tla?). There's darcs. And if Free Beer is good enough for you, there's BitKeeper.

Now, usually, I'd be the first one to love this; after all, more version control systems mean you have more choice, and choice is good. Unfortunately, that's not really true here. A VCS is not a MUA, a webbrowser, or an FTP client; with the latter three, I couldn't care less which one "everyone else" uses. With a VCS, though, I'll have to follow suit. If you pick darcs, and I want to cooperate, I had better picked darcs, too. If you pick arch, and I want to excel in helping you, I had better grok the tla concepts and command line.

That's not a problem if there's just one VCS. It becomes more of a problem if there's many of them. Don't get me wrong, I don't care learning; in fact, I love it. But there's a limit for everyone; mine is at the point where I say "wait a minute, I did this before, didn't I?"

Think I'll stick to CVS for the time being. I'll get back to this when "The World" has made a choice.

I'm silly

If you document something, make sure you're right. If you don't do that, you're silly.

I just updated my wanna-build documentation pages to reflect reality. Sorry for any caused confusion.

It just occurred to me that the horrific attacks in Madrid, yesterday, on March 11th, 2004, happened exactly 30 months after the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center in the US, on September 11th, 2001.

Coincidence? I don't know...

gaaah!

for i in $(seq 0 $(( $NUMBER - 1 )) )
do
  TMPFILE=$(mktemp /tmp/nbd-server.XXXXXX)
  echo foo >> $TMPFILE
  echo bar >> $TMPFILE
done
mv -b $TMPFILE /etc/nbd-server

dpkg-cross horrors

So, there's this project for work where I have to provide a full packaged toolchain, including a glibc 2.3.1 which has to be cross-buildable. All of it on stable. So, I installed unstable's toolchain-source on a stable box (seems to work, minus a few silly things which I patched away) and downloaded a glibc_2.3.1-16.dsc and companies from snapshot.debian.net

Then I notice something strange is going on: it doesn't want to cross-build, even though there is code in debian/rules to make that possible. After hours of searching, I find that it does build if I run fakeroot debian/rules clean && debian/rules build manually, but not when I use debuild. Turns out dpkg-cross (which is installed because of toolchain-source) diverts dpkg-buildpackage away, and pollutes the environment if you call it with -asomething.

wouter@rock:~/glibc-2.3.1$ sudo dpkg --purge dpkg-cross
[...]
wouter@rock:~/glibc-2.3.1$ debuild -uc -us -aarm
[builds]

WHY?!?

spam...spam...spam...

OK, so after email spamming, IRC spamming, and referral spam, we now also have LiveJournal comment spam. Someone actually created a LiveJournal account for the sole purpose of creating comments with spam content.

Luckily, the LiveJournal abuse team has been very responsive to my request of disabling this account, doing so only minutes after I sent it in (kudos!), but it makes me wonder... What the hell makes people think I would be interested in

• Generic \/|agra
• 100% free st0ries (with $$$ subscription option to actually read those stories, so that one might wonder what 100% means)
• P3nis enlargmentts
• 0nline Prescripti0n D1scounts
• ... and whatnot?

I mean, how sick do you have to be to mail this shit out, and expect people to be interested? What the hell is going on with the world?

finally...

... I found some time to blog again.

it has been a (little) while, because I've been very busy. Last week, an important project was due. It's over time now, but not because we didn't try; I hardly slept thursday night, and only went to lie down on the sofa at the office around 6AM on friday morning, getting up already at 8.

In the weekend then, I didn't do much. You might be thinking that was because I had to catch up sleep, but that isn't true; I've participated in two concerts last sunday -- one with the flute choir, and one with the singing choir (that one's dutch only, sorry) -- which took up most of the day for the final rehearsals on saturday, and the whole day on sunday. It was all quite tiring, but at least we had fun, and that's what counts most.

I've been doing some packaging work today; most was work-related, but I also prepared and uploaded some minor updates of logtool and regexplorer, fixing some outstanding bugs. And I managed to get through to the end of my mailbox, which also is, uh, nice.

laptops

I have a love/hate relationship with laptop hardware.

I love laptop hardware, because you can take a laptop literally everywhere. You don't have to stop hacking to go and eat something, because you're sitting on the train, because you "have to go", or because it's such a nice weather and you want to go out and sit in the sun. Instead, you just take your laptop with you and continue whatever you're doing.

I hate laptops because they're so small in everything. When they break, you can't just open them up as easily as you can with desktops; not only is opening a laptop a whole puzzle, they also have a whole bunch of not-so-standard connectors and eenie-meenie-miny-tiny little parts which make it hard to replace broken parts. Or to find out what part is broken, for that matter.

I want to throw it out the window, yet I want to keep it. I want to cherish it, yet I hate it with all my heart.

A portable desktop. Now that would be nice.

wesnoth

Yeah, wesnoth is a nice game. Been playing it all weekend.

I ought to look to my only outstanding bug for the moment instead of playing games, though. At least I did confirm the bug to a point where it does indeed produce garbage if certain options are specified, but didn't hunt it down yet. Let's do that now, shall we?

snow

We've had 15cm of snow today. If you're not familiar with what Belgian weather usually is like: 15cm is highly unusual, the last time this happened was in the winter of 1984-1985. I was six at the time.

Result: traffic jams all over the country. Fun part is, in countries such as Switserland, Austria, or Norway, they probably have this all the time, and deal with it. Not so in Belgium, apparently.

Oh well. Stayed at home today; I'm not fighting my way to Mechelen when every train is too late...

cool picture of me

Alexander Schmehl has made a very nice picture of me (well, and of fabbione) at FOSDEM. I love it!

(Yeah, yeah. I know. I still need to fix up a review of FOSDEM. Will happen RSN^TM, I promise!)

infamous

<infinity> (Though I did notice you came close to losing your infamous cool on -devel recently...
	I had to re-check the sig)

I didn't even know I had an "infamous cool". Cool.

When infinity first said me the above, I didn't realize what he had said; only after sleeping over it, I felt it'd actually been the first time someone had called me "infamous". Guess I'm getting noticed

In other news, my laptop has been resurrected. More or less. I had opened it up to check on the monitor, and afterwards it started to hang in all horrible kind of ways. We tightened some screws now, and it seems to work correctly again.

The monitor still isn't finished, but I'll leave it as it is this time. At least I've found a hot-spot on the cover; when it goes all white again, I just have to hit it right there; it'll come back.

I can live with that.

Ruby is cool

I've been to FOSDEM last weekend. FOSDEM is a great thing; many informal meetings take place, but there are also talks about lots of free software projects, both on and off the record. This year, I didn't have the FOSDEM feeling I had on previous occasions. That probably has a lot to do with the fact that on previous occasions, I was merely an attendant; while this time, I helped organize the Debian presence. Not that there's anything wrong with that. On the contrary; I felt more involved and thus had a lot more fun. I wouldn't mind doing this again, in fact...

OTOH, organizing stuff has a drawback. There were lots of talks, but I couldn't go to many of them; in fact, I only saw one talk on the official schedule in full, being, the Ruby talk on sunday evening, 16:00-17:00. Like I said, Ruby is cool -- at least, that's the impression I got from that talk.

Before that time, however, on Sunday Morning, there were the Debian talks. Fabbione did a talk about the apache packages, Tbm did one about the archive tools, and I did one about buildd. People seemed to find them interesting, so that's a good thing.

What was less nice is the fact that right now, my laptop is doing even worse than it was doing before, now. At first, the monitor went black; now, the system hangs after it's been running for -say- 30 minutes or so. Which sucks, basically. In fact, I'm at the office now, and am typing this on my m68k mac (which happens to be a buildd machine, and will get a fixed IP address here this afternoon), using lynx, instead of my usual friend, the fully-featured logjam. Oh well. At least I have something to work on now, which is less than I could say during the weekend; if not for the fact that I did handle my buildd logs, it probably looked as if I had vanished this weekend.

Which is true. More or less.

arrakis

Weeee!

Lapack3 has built, so I can safely shut down quickstep now. It didn't take a week, as I thought yesterday; it took just under 54 hours (note to self: check next time before giving random numbers)

excitement...

So, tomorrow the FOSDEM circus starts. Which is nice. I'll have to make sure I don't get lost in everything, though...

My mother has to go to the hospital for surgery. Nothing serious; she'll be home by the evening, but I'm not sure when yet, and I can't get the car before she's back. I need to be at the office, though, to keep Fabbione company. Or so. Not sure how I'll manage to do that, but I'm sure we can pull up something; worst case, I'll go home by train saturday early morning, and come back by car to arrive at around 8AM, so that we can still make it in time for the opening speeches. Better make sure I have an alarm clock. I'll have to make sure I can get quickstep, something to sleep in, and some other stuff to the office too.

Unfortunately, moving quickstep probably means I'll have to kill the lapack3 build which has been running on it for about a week now. Hate it when that happens, but I have no choice. I'll give it as long as I can, but if there's no other possibility...

Next, I'll sleep at the office (should be fun), and will leave for FOSDEM on saturday morning.

BTW, : make sure you'll be there too. If you don't, you'll hate yourself about it afterwards, and it's been way too long since we met

Listmasters against IPv6?

Received: from [2001:838:37f:20:2c0:dfff:fef2:8eae] (helo=rock.grep.be)
        by folk.grep.be with esmtp (Exim 3.35 1 (Debian))
        id 1At6dk-00064i-00; Tue, 17 Feb 2004 15:56:00 +0100
[...]
X-Debian-Message: suspicious IP address in Received: line - could be one of cyberpromo's tricks "[2001"
Resent-Message-ID: <iosN5C.A.s_B.g9iMAB@murphy>
Resent-From: debian-l10n-dutch@lists.debian.org
X-Mailing-List: <debian-l10n-dutch@lists.debian.org> archive/latest/1454

Hmmm?

rippy, laptops, and lots of other things

After trying out a subjectless blog entry last wednesday, I found out that Rippy did not support them. Thus, I sent a cry for help to rippy's author, and found out that it was a design issue; rippy needs a way to distinguish between different items (which makes sense), and does so by checking the subject, and the subject alone (which makes less sense, but still enough so that I understand). So, I had a go at it, and wrote a patch of just a few lines which allows one to chose the tag that will make an item unique, sent it back to him, and applied it to the rippy installation I'm running. It seems to work now, I'm happy. To add to the fun, the rippy author mailed me back that he'll include the patch in his next release. Way to go!

Last sunday, we had a rehearsal day with our flute choir. Which was kinda fun, playing the flute all day. Didn't really do anything else, then, except for reading mail (which included a request from Peter Breuer to sponsor a new ENBD upload. Doing that now)

Yesterday evening, I did a test run of the talk I'll be giving at FOSDEM next weekend, with my brother as the audience, and got some feedback from him. I'm happy to have done that; I know that when I have to do something I'm not familiar with yet, and it involves facing a lot of people, that I'll be nervous as hell, so it's good to have done this before really doing a talk.

Speaking of which, there're details available about the FOSDEM keysigning party. If you want to attend, go to the website of the keysigning party, and do what they tell you to.

In other news, I've received a comment on one of my recent blog entries, telling me that a white laptop screen does not use more power (cool) and that it's probably just a loose wire or so. I just opened up my laptop (uh, s/laptop/puzzle/), and reseated some plugs; unfortunately, it does not seem fixed. Since I'm not a laptop specialist, and since this is still a fairly recent (thus, valuable) laptop, I'll stop right there. Will probably have to bring it back for repairs, which isn't going to be cheap, if last time is any measure. Darn.

idle day

Didn't really do much today. I tried to build 68060-optimized OpenSSH and OpenSSL m68k debs, but they didn't do what I wanted them to do -- at least not yet. Since doing any m68k work generally takes up a considerable amount of time, I got distracted and ended up playing xgalaga and watching TV most of the day, 'till I had to go to the choir rehearsal. Had some good fun,there.

The rehearsal is over now (and has, in fact, been for quite some time), but I'm not really feeling like working on those 060 packages at this time of the day anymore. Instead, I just wrote a 40-line script that will parse a MIME-encoded mail, fetch out the 'From', 'To', 'Cc', 'Subject', and 'Date' headers, get any 'text/plain' parts, and output all that in a format ready for it to be put on the website of the flute choir I'm in, a website I finished a while ago. Once that script is put in the right .forward file, our conductor can update the "latest news" section in the private part of that website by sending a mail. I just love perl...

In other news, my laptop is starting to malfunction. Every once in a while, the screen goes white, emitting light at full power. If I shake it around a bit, it goes back to normal, but I don't like it, since "white" is a battery-expensive color. I tried opening it up and checking what's going on yesterday, but couldn't. I'm not a hardware specialist -especially not on laptops- so I'm sure it's me; it's probably just some loose wire somewhere, but I seem to be too clueless to find out.

musical notation, part 2

A while ago, I ranted in my blog about the fact that there are no good free musical notation programs available: eveything I looked at is either too buggy, too old to still be useful, or misses a feature I need.

So, I had a closer look at the one program that is too old, Rosegarden 2.1, to see whether I could add code to make a lilypond output option possible. That doesn't seem too hard, actually, even if it's still a considerable amount of work; but I'll add this to my TODO list. I'm still not sure why the rosegarden upstream stopped working on it, though; IMO, the rosegarden2.1 editor could have been a great replacement for Finale.

Thanks to Rippy the Aggregator, people can now also read my blog on my website. In fact, this is just a test to see how it works without a subject...

While I was at it, I cleaned the CSS stylesheet up a bit; that website was the first I ever made using CSS, and it, uh, didn't look too well. No, I didn't change the colors, I just stopped mixing positioning: absolute and other types of positioning.

yuck

I've been working on documenting the userspace NBD code a bit; document what global variables are used for, what each function does, and so on. Doxygen has been a great help in making this a bit easier. I've been marking places in the source that need fixing, and documented what every global variable does, and how I could get rid of it; before I did this, I had a general idea of what each of them did, but perhaps not in detail as I didn't write most of the code, I'm simply its maintainer.

Nbd-server is a piece of code that was written in a mostly hackish way, which has had its bugs removed and some extra features added (most of which were, again, done in a hackish way with bugs removed later on), but it doesn't appear as if it was given a lot of thought before it was coded. As a result, it's got global variables that have no business being global, functions that span 80 lines and more which could easily be split up, and simply braindead things, too.

One example of the latter is the implementation of the copy on write option. As it is currently implemented, it uses an in-memory array which maps blocks in the exported file to blocks in the "diffile". I had thought previously that it did this by doing an lseek() to the right position in the file -taking advantage of the kernel's support for sparse files- and that the global variable which keeps track of which blocks are to be found in the difffile would know whether that block had been written to or not.

That is not the case.

Instead, when you write to such an export, nbd-server appends the block to that file, and stores the offset to the block you're looking for in the array. That means that if you first write block 12, then 10, then 9, then 11, and then try to read them in order (so, 9-10-11-12), that nbd-server has to do four seeks to read it out again; and since keeping track of what-block-goes-where is done using an array, the copy on write file is useless once the server stops serving (at which point it, obviously, unlinks the file).

No wonder that copy on write thing is dog slow. Yuck.

Freaky discoveries

One of the funny parts about things such as orkut and Planet Debian is that they feature photographs of everyone participating. Well, most of them, anyway.

This leads to freaky discoveries, such as "Branden Robinson has a moustache?", "Is that what Joey Hess looks like?" and, last but not least, "Amaya Rodrigo is a woman?"

Honestly, I didn't know. Then again, I suppose some people might have been scared by my picture, too.

I've also sent out a schedule for FOSDEM to the debian-events-eu list. Have fun, all of you!

NOOO!

My sister just called; her Windows PC's mouse is worn out, so she took the mouse of her old PC, and wanted to hook it up to her system instead of her broken mouse. Since the broken mouse is a PS/2 mouse, and her old one a serial one, I told her to replace the mouse, and to reboot the box; that should make her Windows 98 detect the mouse again.

Less than five minutes later, she called again: something had gone wrong during her reboot, and she was now stuck in "Safe Mode". I told her to reboot again, and to see what would happen. Well, get this: Windows had lost every configuration it had regarding her hardware, and it suddenly started to discover "new" hardware such as her PCI bus, her floppy drive, and her motherboard. I'll have to go over to her apartment somewhere this week, and fix up everything.

Someone kill me. Please.

All things human

Orkut finally reached me, after one hickup on Saturday. Boy, that's addictive! I'm not really^W^Wreally not feeling productive today, as a result. Oh well.

This morning, Roel, my brother, left for his 4-month stay in Cuenca, Spain (at 160km from Madrid), so we had some sort of a party last night, with his girl friend, some of his friends, and a bunch of our neighbours. This morning, then, right before he left, at 6:30, one of my other brothers kicked me out of bed to come down and say goodbye. I really wish Roel would've left a little later; getting up at 6:30 AM reminds me of things I'd rather forget.

I've also been doing some FOSDEM preparation last weekend; I'm almost ready to get an official announcement regarding the Debian-talks that will be done at FOSDEM out the door.

FOSDEM

googling for yourself

Googling for myself is one of the things I do every once in a while. I guess it's a good way to find out how, uh, "popular" you are

But why does google always put your blunders near the top of the list if you do that? It's a conspiracy! Google hates me!

Hm. That's actually quite likely; when I tried to register myself on that other popularity meter, orkut (yeah, I finally got my invitation as well), it broke down on me. Horribly. Twice.

<mode type="ridiculous">Burn google!</mode>

Done!

I just moved my blog from my LiveJournal account to a local blosxom installation. I exported the data from my LiveJournal account (too bad that goes through a POST form that only works when logged in, makes it harder to automate this), hacked up a little ruby script to transform the data in the XML files from that export into the format blosxom expects (that is, plain text file with the subject on the first line, and the date in the filesystem metadata. No, it's not fit for publishing), and created my own local 'php' flavour so that the blog would blend in with the rest of my website, which uses PHP to make everything look the same way, and for some other things. Next, I put everything in a new subversion repository, and created a post-commit hook to update the pages. There, it works. No, I didn't consider using the CGI script -- postprocessing CGI output with PHP, even if possible (which I don't think it is, but one never knows how crazy some people are) doesn't sound like a particularly appealing idea to me. I could've gone for an iframe, but let's not push it.

While I was at it, I fixed up the CSS chooser I wanted to do for a while. It was there, but it didn't work because I made a stupid mistake; and its class in the stylesheets didn't work yet either. Now they do.

In case you were wondering why I moved away from LiveJournal, there's a few reasons:

• First, I like that feature blosxom has which allows you to categorize stuff. I can now blog in Dutch should I ever want to, without bothering planet readers.
• Second, I was getting fed up with the fact that LJ's "don't auto-layout" option is switched off by default, that it requires you to go to the "advanced options", and that (AFAICS) there is no way to make it the default on a per-account basis. It had bitten me once too many.
• Third, logjam allows for previewing an entry, but Debian's logjam package does not (it's compiled without that support). Which sucks.
• Finally, having to use a client or a browser to blog, instead of just a simple editor, is silly IMAO. This is way easier.

Looks like my laptop's MII is broken...

When I got home last night, I didn't get network, even though the network cable was plugged in. After fiddling around a bit, I saw that the MII gave an I/O error. Not 'no link', just EIO.

Rebooting didn't help. Nor did removing the cable. Nor did most of the other things I tried. After a few minutes, just as I was about to give up, it suddenly worked again. Did what I wanted, and afterwards, shut down the thing.

This morning, when I wanted to synchronize my mail, it didn't work again. I tried to do what I did last night again, but today nothing worked. mii-tool -R usually resulted in EIO, mii-tool never gave anything else than 'no link'. mii-tool -A <anything> was a good recipe to make it throw EIO again. mii-tool -r sometimes did not, but never worked the way it should.

I'm hoping the hub is broken, but it probably isn't. I'll find out when I get to work today...

Update: doesn't seem to be the MII; I apparently missed that one of the contacts in the RJ45 connector is a little bit bended, and it doesn't make contact any more. That's probably all.

Should I continue?

I've been providing some graphs based on the information on Takuo KITAME's maintainer ranking script for quite a while now. There's a graph for each developer email address that shows the evolution of the number of packages, bugs, and the average number of bugs per package.

Considering how gluck is continually overloaded currently, and seen that I'm not sure anyone even looks at these graphs, I'll remove them soonishly (unless people convince me that they're actually useful and that I should continue to provide them)

Update: okay, if you're going to link to something and claim you'll remove it in some short time, don't mistype the URL, so that people don't think you've already removed it. Fixed. Thanks, Pascal.

How does one replace a NIC?

As I wrote a few days ago, the RJ45 connector on my laptop is a bit broken. So, I went to my neighbour's house (the one who sold me the thing), and handed it over to him on Saturday.

Today, he mailed me telling that they need to replace the logic board. I haven't heard much more details (could be that it is broken, too), but if the only way to replace that connector is to replace the entire logic board, then something's wrong, I'm afraid...

Anyway. He's told me that I should have my laptop back by Wednesday or Thursday. I really hope this is true; I had my (previous) laptop in repair on last year's FOSDEM as well, I don't want to have to go to FOSDEM without one two years in a row...

Not going to remove the graphs.

Since I've had only positive remarks from people about those graphs, I'm not going to remove them. I have, however, removed some erroneous data from the data set (probably resulting from network or server outages), so that the graph will not have those ugly spikes anymore starting tomorrow.

Dirk, telling people I was pleased with the result is an understatement. As I told you in private mail, I find your version of those graphs astonishing. I'd start building those graphs using your script, if not for the fact that there's no R installed on gluck...

...and that gluck is still loaded. Hm.

wouter@rock:~/scratch$ du -sh tmp/charts
55M

I'm currently copying the result to my people.debian.org webspace, and am trying to figure out a way to do this on a daily basis. Comments are welcome

I should also note that there is (has always been) a graph of totals in the data set. In summary: the number of bugs is steadily rising, but the average number of bugs per binary or source package is not

Nostalgia...

This just passed by on OFTC #debian-devel, thanks to wiggy. Oh, the memories...

Spam is silly.

...and it gets worse by the day

 659  D  Feb 24 shehu abdul     (2,9K) KINDLY READ THIS PROPOSAL ! ! !

What's so 'kind' about that?

FOSDEM

Well, I'm off to Brussels now, to the Roi d'Espagne, to have a few beers (or possibly something else) with fellow Free Software People.

For those that are coming and haven't packed yet: make sure you bring enough warm clothes—it's been snowing here for almost the entirety of last week.

Still need to do something to get us a booth schedule, but that'll be for later. At least I know when the volunteers can, and cannot, be at the booth.

FOSDEM done

It's Monday, 2005-02-28, 00:25, and FOSDEM 2005 has been finished since a few hours. It went pretty well.

Even though I asked about three other people to do a writeup of the talk for the benefit of the general (European) Debian public who couldn't attend (one thing I think I have to delegate), I really can't resist doing one myself, too.

In my opinion, it went pretty well. The FOSDEM organisation is improving every year, with the FIT getting more and more experience on organizing an event of this magnitude—well, for most of them, anyway; I'll organize the key signing party myself next year. Alexandre Dulanoi is a nice guy, but this isn't something he should be doing.

Debian had a booth and a Devroom at FOSDEM. There were a few glitches, but overall it went well; we had a nice variety of subjects covered by our talks, with for every type of developer something interesting. Some of the talks were crowded (like Hanna's talk), some had less success (and usually, unfairly so). Since I was organising the DevRoom, I didn't have time to go and look at other talks, but that didn't matter—I had a nice time. Most talks were very interesting; my personal favourite was the aforementioned one by Hanna Wallach–interesting subject, well presented, receptive (and well-represented) audience–but there really wasn't any of them that got me bored. Hasn't happened in this event to me since it was still called OSDEM and I didn't have time on Saturday.

The booth was quite successful, too. We had T-Shirts (which were almost completely sold out), DVD's, Stickers, Posters, Flyers, Jazz (my Quadra950) doing a 3-hour d-i first stage installation run, and other interesting things. According to what I've heard, our booth was one of the more successful ones.

Anyway. Lessons learned:

• I need to create a checklist next time, so that I don't forget things at home.
• I need to ask a short bio from speakers, so that I don't have to improvise when introducing them.
• Using a First Come, First Serve policy for assigning speakers to time slots, rather than requesting full papers and deciding on subjects works extremely well.
• It might be preferable to bring our own multi-port switch next year. The FOSDEM network operators do their best to provide us with network gear, but they are, uh, 'slightly' undermanned. To put it mildly. When relying on the organisation, it might take a while before you have a working network.
• If we want to provide any service (such as a full Debian Mirror), talk to the aforementioned network operators before the event, so that this can be planned. It may help getting it actually available.
• When demo-ing a d-i installation on an m68k mac, be sure to mention the fact that the MacOS partition is required to boot the system to those performing the actual partitioning. It kinda helps ensuring that you don't have to do all kinds of problematic things trying to get that box to run the second day, and will most likely result in the Debian stand not having a completely pointless, powered-off, old computer being silly out there.
• Oh, and last but not least: Pray that the laptop isn't broken.

If you were involved in any part of the Debian presence at FOSDEM this year, and have anything to add to the above, please let me know (mail is preferred for that one; be sure to include the word 'FOSDEM' in the subject line). Your help is appreciated.

00:50. I'm going to bed now.

Multinational domain names.

SuSE should be a swedish-based company, RedHat an Austria-based one, and Debian should create its headquarters in the Netherlands Antilles.

Or am I really being lazy here?

Laptop back.

Pity it had to be a few days late. Oh well.

It appears something's going wrong with the hard disk, though; might have had a too hard shock in some car. Really hope it's not actually something going bad, but I don't think so; the kernel message mentions the same sector all the time. I'll have it run e2fsck -c this night.

In the mean time, western is misbehaving. Not exactly sure why, but it doesn't do networking for some reason. Have I finally got my laptop back, now the server starts misbehaving. sigh...