Beid updates

There've been some posts on Planet Grep about using the Belgian electronic ID card in Ubuntu, recently. As the one who's responsible for making that possible, I felt I had to comment.

First, yes, it's possible to do crypto stuff with plain OpenSC rather than the belpic-patched versions; in fact, the tools required to sign plain text files aren't shipped anymore as part of belpic since (I believe) version 2.5.9, which is currently in Debian. However, if you're going to write your own software that somehow uses the eID, I strongly recommend you use the beid-patched versions, since they have support for a feature of which I can't remember the name currently but which means that you need to send your PIN to the card on every signature operation; plain OpenSC is not aware of this possiblity, so does not have support for it, may end up in a confused state when the card refuses to sign, and you may end up locking your card if you keep going on. You have been warned.

Second, there is a README.Debian file in libbeidlibopensc2 which explains some of the idiosynchracies in the packaging, and tells you which packages you need and which ones you don't. If you're interested in using the eID, I suggest you read it.

Finally, I'm currently working on packages of 2.6.0, which was released on 2007-08-30. They're mostly ready; I have a rather large changelog currently and a two-item TODO list—one of which reads "test&upload"; if all goes well, I should be able to upload them this weekend. Occasionally, this upload includes a small patch that was communicated to me through some mandriva developer which will make one of the aforementioned idiosynchracies—the fact that you have to install the -dev packages if you want to use the mozilla plugin—obsolete.

Vim vs Emacs

John Goerzen blogs about his experience of using vim for about 8 months. Having been an emacs user a few years back, I understand both editors on a basic level, and can relate to some of the things he says. I have to disagree with one particular bit, though:

It starts faster. I'm not sure if that really was true even when I switched, but it certainly isn't true on any of my machines today. Both Vim and Emacs have had major version upgrades (v7 and v22, respectively) since I started using Vim. People seem to say that Emacs 22 feels faster, though I don't know if that's true. The startup times of the two, if they're different, are imperceptible.

Sorry, but that just isn't true. Using my very non-scientific method of measuring startup times ("click on the icon, watch the clock, and start counting until the editor is ready to use"), I can tell that gvim on my hardware takes less than a second to start, whereas emacs requires approximately 5 seconds to do the same. For reference, this is on my laptop, a 1.3Ghz PowerPC G4.

In any case, I'm not a fan of either editor. There are things that vi does well, and there are things that emacs does well. On emacs' end, I like M-x gdb, I slightly prefer its M-x compile over vim's :make, and I just love psgml. I've also occasionally used gnus for news reading (never for mail, though). On vim's end, I find regex search & replace easier (as you mention in your blog post), and I prefer its syntax highlighting (I've seen emacs get confused because the first line in the output window started in the middle of a string. Such things will never happen to vim: if it gets confused once on a given file, it will always be confused on the same file. While annoying, at least you know it's there).

All in all, I don't think it matters much. I've seen people who use an editor as an operating system, both in the vim and in the emacs camp, by having a ~/.vimrc or ~/.emacs that's larger than my collection of pictures[1]. I'm not one of them; to me, an editor that doesn't properly work in its defaults shouldn't exist.

[1] okay, that's an exaggeration. Still.

Programming languages suck?

Bruno De Wolf blogs about programming languages. His statement: "all programming languages suck". Not sure whether I agree. But's let look at his arguments. In his words, a good programming language, among others, is readable by a guy who didn't write the original program and who doesn't know all the language details or libraries.

Personally, I don't agree. Code readability, above all, depends on the programmer. Programming languages that impose structure can probably help, but it's possible to create unreadable code in any language—that doesn't need goto.

Since I went to the 'karel de grote' institute of higher education, I learned quite a number of programming languages. Hairy code is possible with all of them. Unreadable code is easy with some of them, and some of those I do consider good programming languages. I guess my criteria are different:

• Flexibility. In theory any programming language that is turing-complete will allow one to write any imaginable program. In practice, some programming languages will require you 100 lines of code to do stuff which can be done in three lines in another language. A programming language that doesn't require you to turn your brain upside down three times to figure out how to get something done is a better language in my book than one that does. A language that provides multiple ways to do any given thing is very strong for this particular requirement; it allows you to pick the best way to do anything in order to prove readability. The alternative is for you to have to write some extra hairy code because the language requires you to jump through silly hoops.
  The Turing Machine utterly fails this criterion. Any language that lacks pointers or references or something similar fails it, too, though not in such a dramatic way. Perl is very good in this particular requirement.
• Compactness. I blame COBOL for this particular requirement, but it's still rather important, in my opinion: a programming language should not require me to write an entire novella for a simple 'hello world' program. Obviously COBOL utterly fails this requirement. Large parts of Java's libraries do, too. Perl and C are rather good at this particular requirement.
• Resembling english. COBOL fails this requirement, too—COBOL is english, not a programming language. Brainfuck fails, as well. Obviously. Mostly everything else passes. Except for windev, that is, which resembles French. Hah.

That's it, I guess. In my book, a programming language is a tool to get a job done. A good tool is flexible, not too unwieldly, and somewhat intuitive. Like a hammer. If you want to build a table, you probably need a hammer, among other things. The better the hammer, the more likely it is that you'll get a nice table. But even the best hammer won't get you a wonderfully crafted table if your carpenter sucks at his craft.

And so it is with programming languages: it might help if you use a proper language, but any good programmer can write readable code in any programming language.

Public Transportation

Christian Perrier blogs about how he uses public transportation to go to work, how that works well, and how that has positively affected his Debian productivity. Personally, I couldn't agree more. I've graduated from school in 2001; and the only time when I commuted to work by car was when I worked at template, where I had a company car because I had to make customer visits.

Today, as an entrepreneur, I do everything by public transportation. It is my intention to, eventually, make sure I have a car because doing customer visits by public transportation isn't easy; but it's not impossible, either; you just need to make sure you're prepared.

If I have an appointment at a customer, what I usually do is to go to the de lijn website, of the flemish public transportation company that handles buses and trams; they have a schedule online, and a route planner that allows me to do much of what Google Maps does for cars, but then for public transportation—including trains. If I do that on time (that is, earlier than half an hour or so before the appointment), I hardly ever have problems reaching my destination in time.

Of course there are days when the system fails, and I'm stuck in a train station for longer than I'd like; but these are the exception, not the rule, especially outside rush hour. And like Christian mentions, the absense of having to pay attention to the road while commuting is a real bonus, in that it allows you to actually get some work done. Or sleep, if it's been a short night. Or look outside the window, if you have nothing better to do. Or hack.

In fact, at DebConf7 in Edinburgh, I had a little discussion with Ian Jackson about how the train provides the perfect environment for hacking: nobody around to disturb you (except, occasionally, people to check your tickets, but you can just put your ticket in plain view all the time and they'll be happy without you getting out of deep hack mode), and the view out the window is just perfect to stay concentrated: no still image to get distracted by, but nothing boring either. We theorized that it'd be nice if you could just go to the train station and state "I need a ticket. The destination isn't important, but I want to be waiting as little as possible and end up here again in about 2 hours". The only problem with that, of course, is that train rides aren't free, and that office rent is much more affordable...

Androids etc.

There's a huge amount of buzz around some "Android" API that some huge search company apparently released recently.

Not that I care about mobile phones. Not as if you can do a lot of useful stuff on those, anyway. And, heck, "android"?

Am I the only one who associates that with stuff like the above?

Whoa

Whoa. India is far, I don't speak, eh, whatever they speak over there, and I have no intention of going to foss.in (unless someone pays the airplane tickets for me). But man, these posters rock. We all know FOSS is about people, and they show it. Wonderful!

Beste Belgacom

Ik realizeer me ten volle dat het in deze dagen van Internet en Digitale TV vreselijk ouderwets is om te denken dat er nog zoiets bestaat als een telefoon. Maar soms is het stukken makkelijker om gewoon iemand te bellen.

Ik zou het dan ook geweldig leuk vinden als jullie "ergens" op je website een telefoonnummer zouden hebben—en dan nog liefst ergens waar die eenvoudig te vinden is. Tenzij je m'n geld niet moet hebben, natuurlijk.

Vriendelijk bedankt,

Wouter Verhelst

Debian work

Been a while since I did so much Debian work in a fairly short time.

Today, I finished work on belpic 2.6.0, the support software for the Belgian electronic ID card. My initial builds wouldn't work since I made some stupid (no, really, stupid) errors in properly using that ugly beast, but eventually I saw the light. Working packages are now in incoming, and will soon be on a Debian Mirror Near You(TM).

Oh, in case you wonder: the difference between 2.6.0 upstream and 2.5.9 upstream is pretty small, mostly some housekeeping bugfixes; meaning, if 2.5.9 is working for you, there's probably no need to worry about getting the update. I've also added some extra changes to the packaging bits, so that you now no longer have to install the -dev packages just so you can use the browser plugins. Isn't that nice.

I did some more work on getting emile, the Early Mac Image LoadEr, to work properly again. Unfortunately, after the initial 0.10-1 upload that I did to Debian, none of my other builds managed to actually work on my test machine. Since I don't want to break existing machines that are using emile, I didn't think to upload those non-working binaries; but now with #451415, I can't ignore that problem any longer. I think I've nailed it now, though, and once barok (my IIci) has finished building (which will take a few hours), the packages should work. Cross your fingers.

Finally, I've also prepared an upstream bugfix update of nbd, the userland support tools for the Network Block Device in the Linux kernel, and have uploaded a package from that release into Debian. As if that wasn't enough, and since I genuinely care about the state of my packages in Debian derivatives, I've poked some Ubuntu-people to get it synced there, too.

I guess I'm back in shape now.

Four DVDs

A week or two ago, I went to the local standaard boekhandel to use the gift certificate that my mother had bought me for my birthday (which was in may).

For the €50 of that certificate, I bought me the Dutch version of 1984, plus 4 DVD boxes: one with Hitchcock's Psycho, one containing Superman Returns, another one of Dances with wolves, and a final box containing David Lynch's masterpiece Mulholland Drive.

Not a bad deal, I must say; especially as the latter two boxes were on a "buy one, get one free" promotion, where those boxes each had a second DVD with a different movie. For Dances with wolves, I forgot which one it is; but for Mulholland Drive, that was The Singing Detective. Now if anyone ever tells me that €20 for a DVD with a single movie is a reasonable price, then, well, hah.

Anyway. I hadn't seen Psycho before; but in a past life where I did drama school, we had some classes about this movie. As a result, some of its secrets were spoiled, and I didn't enjoy it as much as I probably would have had I not had this knowledge beforehand. Still, it was an enjoyable experience. If you've never seen this movie, shame on you! Go to the local video store, and rent it. Preferably in its original black & white form, not the 1998 remake.

Dances with wolves is a pretty interesting movie, too. Of course, as I'd seen part of it before, I already knew that.

Superman Returns is not bad, as a no-brainer entertainment movie. It's nothing beyond that, however.

Finally, Mulholland Drive is strange. Back in 2001, when the movie first came out, I went to see it at the local movie theatre; it is one of those complex movies which, once you've finished seeing it, will still leave you puzzled until you see it a few more times. Few other movies ever manage to do that to me (I think the only other one is Pulp Fiction). At the time, I planned to watch the movie again as soon as possible, but for various reasons that didn't happen; and now, after six years, I had almost completely forgotten the plot. Which is good, really—I enjoyed it much more. And I think I got it, this time; rather than trying to find the logic in the plot, I just went with the flow, which helps a lot.

The other two I still have to see. But hey, there's still time, right?

Oh, and 1984? It's nice how you want to scream and yell when the system completely takes over Winston's mind. An interesting book.

metatale is zo'n nieuw blog ranking systeem, vooral op vlaanderen gemikt. Benieuwd hoe invloedrijk mijn blog is, ging ik eens kijken. Om dan "2" als resultaat te krijgen. Moet je weten dat het gaat over een schaal van één tot vijfentwintig, waarbij de laatste de meeste invloed zou hebben. Een beetje teleurgesteld was ik toch wel.

Nu is de vraag natuurlijk: "waarom". Is dat omdat ik vooral in het Engels blog? In dat geval kan het me niet echt veel schelen. Maar als het over iets anders gaat... hmm?

Jammer dat de meeste van die pissing contests hun algoritmes niet helemaal vrijgeven. Maar goed, dat zou de deur wagenwijd openzetten om het systeem te gaan bespelen, en dat willen we ook weer niet, natuurlijk.

FOSDEM Keysigning

I just finished setting up stuff for the FOSDEM 2008 GPG/PGP key signing party. If you have a GPG or PGP key that you want to get signed, go read the instructions.