...

Finally, EMILE, the Early Mac Image LoadEr, is part of Debian. It had been in the works for quite a while; First Stephen Marenka filed an ITP for the thing a bit over a year ago; and then I did the same, not noticing Stephen had the ITP out for a few weeks already when I did so.

ITP bugs were merged, we set up an SVN repository, and then nothing happened for a long time, mainly because while I could get it to build, I did not succeed in actually booting a kernel off my own-built emile. In the mean time, another version was released—one with wonderful features, such as an ELF loader and gunzip implementation (so that I could ditch the script that I'd written to throw kernels through objdump), the ability to boot off of CD-ROM drives (would be great for d-i), and more.

Finally, about a month and a half ago, I got the thing to actually boot on barok, my IIci, when I compiled it myself. And there was much rejoicing.

It's spent the last month in NEW, but now Joerg and/or Jeroen are back, so it's been ACCEPTed. Whee!

If you're interested in giving emile a try on your m68k machine, then feel free (once you can, after the next mirror pulse), but beware: EMILE does not have the ability to install more than one kernel yet, and you can't boot from EMILE to MacOS yet, either, should you make a mistake. I recommend trying it out on a floppy disk first, or to use a second hard disk which you can place as the second disk in your system, should it be required.

In other, only slightly related, news, there's a new release for belpic about to come out, too. But more on that later.

On firewalls

A few recent posts on Planet Debian make me wonder why some people seem to insist on using someone else's "firewall scripts", yada yada. Personally, I just have my own #!/bin/sh in /etc/init.d which runs iptables with some appropriate options. And that's it.

Well, no, I'm lying. It also has some ip6tables lines in it. An tc. But that's really it, I swear.

So, indulge me, please. What's the great thing about these firewall ruleset generators? Apart from the fact that some of them provide a GUI to change the ruleset, which I don't care for.

Planet Grep: Unbroken

There had been issues with Planet Grep for a fair while, which I did not immediately see a fix for. Then again, the version which I was running is fairly old already.

So I've just updated it. That might mean you get some double posts for the time being, but

• No more empty posts from Philip,
• No more encoding issues and weblogs dropping off of planet as a result.

The update did invalidate the cache (at least it looks that way), but I think that's worth it.

Sexism.

I had long thought that Sexism was a thing of the past; that women would have the ability to do what they wanted, and would mostly not be discriminated against. And while I was not so naive to think that there was no discrimination at all, I was under the impression that any such discrimination would mostly be something the discriminator did not think of consciously. That things like people being rejected outright for a job because they were women, and, well, "women can't work as well as men", were stories of the past. At least if I did ever discriminate against women, it never was intentional.

Little did I realize how far away from the truth that was. As some troll's recent mails show, there are actually people out there who do thinkn that the influx of Women into Debian should be stopped, and that Debian should be a men only club. Our coward is too afraid to post under his real name, instead relying on tor and throwaway yahoo accounts to mask his identity. So let's call him 'Anonymous coward'. Occasionally, this is the main reason why I don't like tor; full anonymity should not be allowed, one should be able to have people stand up for what they say, and face the consequences. Anyway, that's a different story, for another time.

What puzzles me is how anyone would think that there could possibly be a correlation between orphaned packages and the existance of Debian-Women. Personally, I've been happy that there is a Debian-Women which strives to make our community more complete; the lack of women (or any considerable part of the world population, for that matter) is a serious disadvantage for any community that tries to do something for the "greater good".

Personally, I'm disgusted and offended by the mails this moron is sending; and even though I realize that there probably still is some (unconscious) discrimination against women, I can hope to safely say that Debian is tolerant regarding people that represent a minority amongst its community members. Even Jonathan Walther, whom we kicked out for (amongst other reasons) trolling on the debian-women mailinglist, never (to the best of my knowledge) said anything which implied that he thought Debian-Women should be disbanded (although he, err, had a "different" idea of what they should be doing).

I guess all this only means we don't live in a utopia, and that Debian is not free of the plagues that will hit any sufficiently large community. But that doesn't negate the fact that I'm still offended by this lunatic.

How not to handle customer relations.

David Woodhouse has an incredible story about how he's been harassed by an incompetent Vodaphone over bills after he'd cancelled the account. It's quite funny—and at the same time, sad.

The sorry state of musical software under Linux.

This is going to be a rant on how doing anything music related under Linux currently works very, very bad. Perhaps I shouldn't be writing this since I don't have the time or skillz to help out in improving it any (so anyone interested in posting a comment to that regard should know that I already know ;-P), and because I've done it beforebut let's just ignore that for a few seconds. Hah.

I've been a musician since I was 7 years old (well, a bit less if you don't count the first years where I was only learning how to read music and not playing an instrument (the flute) yet). I've always loved doing it, since music is a great way to express one's emotions and to relax, in my opinion. Being able to produce beaty is also extremely satisfying, and I just love music (in a John Miles sort of way).

When I started to get into computers at the age of 14, one of the early things I did, even before doing my first BASIC program, was to play with musical software. I fondly remember some old Commodore 64 program of which I have forgotten the name, which would allow me to put notes on bars and play them, which was cool at the time—even if it would not allow me to put more than three notes in one chord, since that was the maximum polyphony which the Commodore's SID chip would allow. Later, when my parents bought our first PC-based system—a 486DX4@100Mhz—I moved on to Finale¹. As a musical notation program, Finale is unsurpassed. It doesn't have a Linux-version, but there is lilypond.

Of course, writing down music isn't everything. Any serious musician would also want to play the music he's written, either by having the computer play it itself, or by sending it to a MIDI device. This is usually done through a (hardware or software) MIDI synthesizer and some bit of software called a Sequencer. Traditionally sound cards came with hardware MIDI synthesizers on them, but as computers became more powerful (i.e., after the Sound Blaster 16-era), hardware MIDI synthesizers were replaced by software MIDI synthesizers that had their wavetable on disk and (when playing MIDI) in RAM. That doesn't require huge gobs of ROM chips on the sound card, resulting in either less expensive sound hardware and better MIDI playback (because software wave tables are usually larger than hardware ones).

So what's the issue? Everything.

While lilypond is nice, and (it has to be said) produces very beautiful output, the interface is way too cumbersome. I mean, what is the clearest thing to read? This:

r4\< e,8-. r8 r4 e8-. r8\!

or this?

They represent exactly the same thing, yet someone who knows music needs a split second to decode the below but a few seconds for the above (if they understand lilypond's syntaxis). In fact, at first I thought that I had done something wrong in invoking lilypond-book to produce that snippet, because I had misparsed the code above (which, incidentally, is one bar of some actual music that I have in my ~/data/audio/lilypond directory)

The plain text interface certainly does have some advantages, but IMO the downsides by far outweigh the benefits. In general, lilypond is not well suited as a way to actually write music, as opposed to simply typesetting already existing music. I did actually follow a course on harmonics (although I never finished it due to lack of time); when writing some new piece, I find that it often far easier to do the actual writing on a piece of paper and then enter that in lilypond syntaxis, rather than getting distracted over the lilypond syntaxis while trying to concentrate on what chords I can and/or want to use. It is unnatural, and would look like a Japanese person being forced to read and write texts like 'gaka ga e o kaita' which then get postprocesssed into something like 'がか が え お かいた' (look ma, Unicode!). Or, in other words: why isn't there just an input method to write music? There are unicode characters for musical notes, you know...

When comparing lilypond to finale, it is not hard to understand that entering music in a graphical environment is just so much easier. When I last used it, Finale had four input methods: one with keyboard and mouse (use the numeric keys on the keyboard to enter the desired note length and the mouse to enter the pitch); one with keyboard only (use abcdefg etc. to choose the pitch, and the same numeric keys to enter the desired length); one with keyboard and MIDI keyboard (use the numeric keys to enter a desired note length, and just press a note on the MIDI keyboard to choose it); and finally, it can also quantisise music as you play it (which is the fastest, but least accurate, method to enter music). Lilypond only allows entering music with the keyboard directly, and then only displays notes after 'compiling' them, so that you cannot see your mistakes and typos until much later. I'm disregarding midi2ly, which converts MIDI files to lilypond input files in a reasonably good way; but Finale has MIDI import functionality as well, I do not consider that to be an 'Input Method' as such.

After having entered the music, a musician will want to do something with it. Have the computer play it, for instance, or print it out so that he or she can rehearse it and eventually play it themselves. Lilypond will do neither by itself; however, it can produce postscript, PDF, and DVI files which one can use to print, and/or MIDI files which one can have the computer play. The printouts are great, as I've said before; but playing the MIDI files is another matter entirely.

As I've explained earlier, playing MIDI used to be done through hardware. When I still had a working SB16-compatible card, I could play MIDI files on my computer perfectly fine by just using the driver for that sound card. Since I currently depend mostly on ESS1371-compatible cards, that do not havve any hardware MIDI synthesizer, however, that doesn't work. So I have to use software sequencing instead. On Windows, software sequencing is done by the sound card's driver. On Linux, there is no software sequencing being done by any driver, so it all has to be done in userland. In theory, that's just fine. Unfortunately, the implementation sucks.

The only software MIDI synthesizer available on Debian is timidity. On a 1.33Ghz processor, it requires approximately 60% of my CPU to play a reasonably easy MIDI file with a polyphony of only some 5 to 10 voices. Complex MIDI files are totally out of the question. And it gets worse; when one runs timidity -iA -Os, it will register itself as an ALSA device capable of playing MIDI, so that ALSA-using applications can play MIDI data by just throwing it to the relevant device. However, this requires far more CPU power, not even being able to play as much as two or three voices at the same time on my same system. If one knows that my last Windows-based system (a Pentium I at 166Mhz) was able to play much more complex MIDI files using the same ESS1371-based sound card just fine, it's not hard to see that timidity really (really) sucks.

As said, I probably shouldn't be ranting about this as much as I do, since I don't have the time to invest in making this any better. But if anyone feels inclined to contribute some to Open Source Software, and needs some ideas, these might be interesting things to consider.

¹ I should add that, to my shame, I used an illegal copy of both afore-mentioned programs. I didn't really know any better at the time.

Ubuntu Main and Debian Developers.

One of my packages, the Linux kernel's userland support tools for the Network Block Device was chosen by Ubuntu developers to be part of their 'main'. For those not very comfortable with Ubuntu: the "main" part is their idea of "this is what we support". Everything in main is free software and supported; things that are still free software but are not supported yet, are moved to their "universe" instead. Most Debian packages live in Ubuntu's "universe"; only the desktop environments that they support and their dependencies are part of Ubuntu's "main" section. Occasionally, I was told that the nbd source packages were moved to main because ltsp declares a Depends: relationship on them, and it was decided that the ltsp packages should be part of main.

Personally, I don't use Ubuntu (though I've installed it a few times in the past, being the curious software geek that I am). As such, I don't really follow their development very closely, being more focused on Debian unstable instead. This would normally not be a problem, except that I do care that my packages are in a good state when they are released by someone, whether that someone is Debian, Ubuntu, or anyone else.

What triggers this post is the fact that Ubuntu has shipped Dapper with nbd 1:2.8.3-1, with a context of this changelog entry:

nbd (1:2.8.3-2) unstable; urgency=low

  * Steal patch from CVS for nbd-server.c to make children exit when they
    finish serving, rather than having them loop over "Help, I can't accept()
    anymore!". Closes: #350357.
 
 -- Wouter Verhelst <wouter@debian.org>  Tue, 31 Jan 2006 11:17:25 +0100

#350357 is a bug of severity important, and rightly so. From the bug report:

Jan 28 14:42:58 caradoc last message repeated 1190456 times
Jan 28 14:43:59 caradoc last message repeated 2478818 times

An infinite loop producing an error message, a bug which triggers when a client disconnects. Have two clients connect, then disconnect, and you have a syslog being filled up with spurious error messages, filling your entire disk in a few hours or days.

It may be too late to update dapper now; however, had I been asked after #350357 was filed whether it would be a good idea to ship with this specific version of nbd, I would have said "no", and this horribly buggy version of nbd wouldn't be in a released version of Ubuntu. And since #350357 was filed a few days before the above log entry, in January, I cannot believe that it would've been too late.

Of course, if anyone from Ubuntu is reading this and can tell me that yes, it is still possible to update nbd in Dapper, then by all means, please do so. Oh, and don't forget to update edgy while you're at it

That being said, I'm hoping something can be done to avoid this kind of SNAFUs from occurring again. Ubuntu could talk to me for those packages they care about, which (according to their policy and the status of nbd in their distribution) includes nbd. As it is, Ubuntu is just a large institution that happens to redistribute parts of Debian. I'm getting more feedback from the guy doin the 'nbd-server' port in FreeBSD than I'm getting from Ubuntu—and that FreeBSD guy only once or twice sent me an email...

FOSDEM Interview

At the last FOSDEM, I gave an interview to the guys of Source21.nl. Which has been published on their website right now.

As you will be able to see if you have a look, I did not have much of a voice—mainly because I had been yelling people to please move away from the bar on friday night. But, well—it still came out pretty well, I think.

Yes, my hair looks ugly (I shaved it off a week later or so), and yes, I made some factual errors regarding the release date of Sarge. But let's not dwell on that too much, shall we?

It's life, Jim, but not as we know it.

...or so Spock said. Apparrently.

Yesterday, for some reason, I was reading something on Wikipedia. Don't ask me what I started with, I don't remember; however, my journey through Wikipedia eventually got me to the Rare Earth hypothesis, the Principle of Mediocrity, and other related things.

Both are subjects relating to whether or not there would be life on other planets. The latter claims that this is, in fact, quite likely; the Principle of Mediocrity basically says that "Earth is a relatively ordinary planet orbiting a relatively ordinary star in a relatively ordinary galaxy which is one of countless others in a giant universe, possibly within an infinite multiverse". This is supported by a number of astronomical findings.

The contrast to that, the Rare Earth hypothesis, claims that Earth is, in fact, not a very ordinary planet. That to be able to reach a point where complex multicellular can have evolved—such as on Earth—such a high number of variables have to have the exact right value, with in many cases such low margins for errors, that while possible, the likelihood that life would exist on other planets is very low.

They were both interesting reads. However, there is one thing to which I did not find an answer: Why does it have to be Earth-like life?

As I understand the theory of our origins, life began on the Planet Earth in a relatively stable body of unclean water—known as the "Oersoep" in Dutch, though I couldn't find the English term for that—on which the sun shone; that sunshine made the elements of the "oersoep" react with eachother so that it eventually formed single-cell life, which then evolved into multi-cellular life, and so on. Even today, the sun still shines on Earth, and almost all energy in use on Earth can in some way or another be attributed to something that once received sunlight; I suspect the only exception to that is nuclear energy.

As I understand the Rare Earth hypothesis and the Principle of Mediocrity, both seem to assume the basic premise that the only way in which life could evolve is the way in which it evolved on Earth; that is, you need direct sunlight so that you can have some chemical reactions. You cannot have too much ultraviolet, gamma, or x-ray radiation, because that would kill life. You cannot have too many impacts of extraplanetarian bodies, such as comets or asteroids, because these impacts and the resulting fallout would destroy life.

I did not find any argument for that assertion, however; and what I don't see is why it would be necessary. We could define the "oersoep" as some sort of a "stable chaos": a bunch of chemical elements and a varying external influence (sunlight) means that you have a brewing and reacting bunch of matter, where the composition of the matter is constantly changing; however, at the same time, when viewed over a large amount of time, not much did in fact change. The varying external influences have a regular and stable rhythm; the sun appears in the morning and disappears in the evening. The sun shines longer in summer than it does in winter. While it is not the same all the time, there is predictability. If a number of chemical elements react with eachother in a certain way on one day, then they will react the same way again the next day. If this happens for years on end, you may have a series of reactions that is more or less reproducible, where the final result of all the chemical reactions turns out to be the original starting point again. At least almost so. Such a series of chemical reactions could be called "life", especially if it occurs within a small group of chemicals that sticks together, like a cell.

While a body of unclean water with regular sunshine certainly is one way to get to a series of repetitive chemical reactions, I fail to see why it would have to be the only possible way. If there were a planet composed mainly of Helium (rather than Hydrogen and Carbon, as on Earth) but also containing a bunch of other elements (so that they can react with eachother) with a star that sends out lots of gamma radiation and an atmosphere which blocks sunlight (I don't know whether Helium can do that, but let's assume it can), then I do not see why it would not be possible for life to evolve on such a planet which would be based on Helium rather than Carbon and Water, and which would require gamma radiation to survive but would die when brought into prolonged contact with light, just like we will die when brought into prolonged contact with gamma radiation.

Another example could be a planet where every year a comet of approximately the same composition impacts on the same place on the planet's surface. Such an impact would regularly stir up the chemical elements on this planet, and could provide the needed energy to produce the chemical reactions required to sustain life. If any life were to evolve on this planet, not only would it be able to survive such constant extraplanetary impacts, it would also require these impacts to continue in order to survive.

I haven't been able to find any information on that. It would seem that either I'm missing something very basic, or that nobody has thought of this before—and I would find that highly unlikely. So, anyone who's been thinking longer than me about this subject (that is to say, just a few hours) who could enlighten me?

Of course, one answer could be to say that God created all life, and that the evolution theory is only a theory, which is not grounded in any reality. But make a comment to that effect on my blog, and I will moderate it away. After having a good-hearted laugh at it.

Apache Content negotiation

There was an issue with my blog for a long while, where Apache seemed to prefer to serve application/xml+rss files over text/html ones to Firefox. This had a lot to do with the fact that Firefox requested XML files at the same priority as HTML files, since it, well, supports them. Mostly.

In itself, that's a good thing, of course. The only problem is that I don't want to see RSS when I ask for a URL that should return HTML.

A similar problem was going on with something Joey Schulze was having doing with .ics files, and Richard Atterrerreplied to that with the following gem:

   AddType text/calendar;qs=0.9 .ics
   This is not well documented, but it works!
   (At least I know it does with Apache 2.)

Which, to my surprise, works flawlessly. So, now my webserver no longer serves files RSS files, unless you explicitely ask for them. Whee!

Whee.

I just sent in the AM report for my first ever NM, Lucas Nussbaum. If I haven't done anything wrong, that means Lucas is now well on his way to actually becoming a Debian Developer.

Welcome Lucas!

GTK+-2.0 on armeb

Sometimes, dependencies on Debian can be an insane horror.

• libgtk2.0-dev requires libgtk2.0-0, which requires libgtk2.0-bin
• libgtk2.0-bin requires libcairo2, libfontconfig1, and libpango1.0-0
• libfontconfig1 requires fontconfig-config
• fontconfig-config requires at least one of ttf-dejavu, ttf-bitstream-vera, ttf-freefont, gsfonts-x11, or msttcorefonts
• ttf-dejavu requires defoma
• defoma requires a version of perl more recent than 5.6.0-16
• perl requires a version of perl-modules more recent than 5.8.7-8
• perl-modules requires a version of perl more recent than 5.8.8-1

The current version of perl on armeb is 5.8.7-8. More recent versions aren't built because they're caught up in some dep-waits:

• perl dep-waits on libdb4.4-dev
• db4.4, which provides libdb4.4-dev, dep-waits on java-gcj-compat-dev
• java-gcj-compat, which provides java-gcj-compat-dev, dep-waits on gcj-4.0
• gcj-4.0 wasn't getting built because it had been deprioritized for some reason. This was probably my mistake.

I've now prioritized all of perl, db4.4, java-gcj-compat, and gcj-4.0. Boy, what a mess did I make.

Update: ... and gcj-4.0 requires libgtk2.0-dev. Argl.

Update 2: ... okay, I was confused. The issue is not as described above, since even the version of perl in oldstable is recent enough for defoma's needs. The problem is that the xorg source package is not showing up in the armeb archive, for some reason.

Need to prod a few people...

Update 3: ... aba fixed it; xorg should now show up in armeb, and has been prioritized. Hopefully, "everything" will build now.

I don't know what the issue was, but it is fixed. Thanks, Andreas!

(oh, and I promise I'll stop updating now

Choir concert

I had been in a choir called "Cantilene" since the age of sixteen. Since this was a youth choir, however, I was kindly asked to leave when I hit 26, now two years ago.

Unfortunately, that left me in the cold, as Cantilene was part of the c-koren family which did not really have a choir that appealed to me, with hours that would allow me to attend rehearsals.

This has changed now; since a few months, the C-koren have a new member choir called "Caljenté" (which is supposedly a spanish word meaning "warmth" or some such—I'm sure Spanish people will correct me if I'm wrong;-P ), and we will give our first small concert next week's friday, at 20:30, in the "Sint Lambertuskerk" (church of Saint Lambert) of Ekeren, my home town. Everyone who can make it is welcome to be there...

Say hi to ragtime

A few months ago, my good friend Kris gave me an OldWorld Powermac (a model 8500/150, even though the processor really runs at 120Mhz) as a donation to the Debian project. I arranged to hand it to Sven Luther, who is very much into Debian on PowerPC, at FOSDEM in Brussels. Due to some misunderstandings, however, Sven did not take the mac with him; so it had been left at the office. And since I don't go to an awful lot of meetings (FOSDEM is probably going to be the only one this year), the mac is likely going to stay at our office.

So I thought I'd put it to some good use. I saw last week that the PowerPC dailies hadn't been built for about a week or so. When I asked around, I found out this was because Colin Watson, who usually builds them, does so on his laptop. Since he was not directly available, however (due to him being on vacation or something similar), they were not getting built for about a week.

An understandable situation, but rather suboptimal. So, since I had this unused PowerPC machine anyway, I installed Debian on it, called it "ragtime" in accordance with my usual machine naming scheme, did a checkout of the d-i subversion tree, and added the daily-build script to cron.

As of yesterday, Frans Pop changed the different configuration items to point to my dailies instead of Colin's; so I guess it's now rather official. Ish.

Update: NOW. Not NOT. Aargh.

Comment spams

The nice thing about an NIH comment post thing is that you can change it if people start to abuse it.

I was starting to get more and more comment spams. Some spammer obviously must have taken a look at my comment submission form, and written some code to post his junk there. Even though they made a little mistake that would make it very easy to identify their posts (URL-encoded the data in some field where it was not necessary, and indeed would mean that the post would not be visible had I approved it), I didn't feel like adding much code to special-case one particular spammer.

So instead, I changed my comment form to rename a particular field, and would return a 403-style rather empty page with a remark of Sod off, spammer if the field is filled in. When I start to receive spam again, changing the code to do the same thing once more is pretty easy.

It's been a few weeks now. And I didn't have to change anything about my comment submission policy, like some other people had to do.

Isn't that nice?

Folds.

I hate folds, too. In fact, it's the sole reason why I just removed the blogs of Laurent Gatto an Frederik Rousseau from Planet Grep, a Planet dedicated to Belgian FLOSS people.

In my arrogant opinion, a planet should be more than just a bunch of links. If I want a bunch of links, I'll just read debian-www for a few days; there'll be plenty of online casino or so owners asking for us to link back to them in that time. And rest assured, these people have a bunch of links.

Instead, a planet such as Planet Debian, Planet Grep, or, say, Planet Gnome should be an easy read. A thing one can read top-to-bottom. Without having to follow links to be able to just read whatever people are talking about. And, the claim that folds help people ignore irrelevant stuff is just plain nonsense. If there's a post that I'm not interested in, I'm perfectly capable of using the scrollbar, thanks. It's no big deal; I do that for quite a number of blog posts already.

Especially those suckers that come with folds.