~ubuntu-branches/ubuntu/trusty/libfeedparser-ruby/trusty : revision 8

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<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">

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<html>

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<head>

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<title>Planet Debian</title>

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</head>

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<body>

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<tr><td align="right"><b>Feed title:</b></td>

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<b>Planet Debian</b>

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</a>

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</td></tr><tr><td align="right"><b>Type:</b></td>

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<td width="100%">rss</td></tr><tr><td align="right"><b>Encoding:</b></td>

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<br/>

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Planet Debian - http://planet.debian.org/

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<b>Planet Debian</b>

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</a>

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</td></tr><tr><td align="right"><b>Item:</b></td>

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<td width="100%"><a href="http://peter.makholm.net/2007/08/21/on-handling-email/"><b>Peter Makholm: On handling email</b>

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</a>

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</td></tr></table></td></tr></table>

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<p>Watching the popular <a href="http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=973149761529535925">Inbox Zero</a> video would probally improve my email handling skills better. But this took less time and I wanted to play around with Net::XMPP;</p>

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#!/usr/bin/perl -l

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use warnings;

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use strict;

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use Config::Simple;

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use Linux::Inotify2;

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use Email::Abstract;

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use Net::XMPP; # aka Jabber and Gtalk

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use POSIX;

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my $DEBUG = 0;

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our %config;

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Config::Simple->import_from("$ENV{HOME}/.mailnotifyrc", %config);

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deamonize() unless $DEBUG;

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my $inotify = new Linux::Inotify2

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or die "Unable to create new inotify object: $!";

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# Different Maildir implementations triggers different events"

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# IN_MOVED_TO: rename("tmp/file","new/file")

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# IN_CREATE: link("tmp/file", "new/file") && unlink("tmp/file")

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#

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# At this point the file should be written and closed.

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$inotify->watch("$config{Maildir}/new", IN_MOVED_TO|IN_CREATE, sub {

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my $e = shift;

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my ($fh, $xmpp, $email, $message);

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debug('Got event for ' . $e->fullname);

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open $fh, "<", $e->fullname;

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$email = new Email::Abstract join("", <$fh>);

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close $fh;

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$message = 'Mail from ' . $email->get_header('From') .

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' concerning "' . $email->get_header('Subject') .'"';

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debug("Getting ready to send [$message]");

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my $sender = new Net::XMPP::JID ($config{Sender});

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my $receiver = new Net::XMPP::JID ($config{Receiver});

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$xmpp = new Net::XMPP::Client();

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$xmpp->Connect( hostname => $sender->GetServer,

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port => $config{port} || 5222,

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tls => $config{usetls} || 0,

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);

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$xmpp->AuthSend( username => $sender->GetUserID,

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password => $config{password},

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resource => $sender->GetResource || 'mailnotify',

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);

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$xmpp->MessageSend( to => $receiver,

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type => $config{MessageType} || 'chat',

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body => $message,

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);

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$xmpp->Process(1);

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$xmpp->Disconnect;

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debug("Event done");

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});

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1 while $inotify->poll;

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sub deamonize {

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my $pid = fork();

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if ($pid) {

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exit 0;

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}

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### close all input/output and separate

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### from the parent process group

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open STDIN, '</dev/null' or die "Can't open STDIN from /dev/null: [$!]n";

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open STDOUT, '>/dev/null' or die "Can't open STDOUT to /dev/null: [$!]n";

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open STDERR, '>&STDOUT' or die "Can't open STDERR to STDOUT: [$!]n";

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### Change to root dir to avoid locking a mounted file system

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### does this mean to be chroot ?

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chdir '/' or die "Can't chdir to \"/\": [$!]";

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### Turn process into session leader, and ensure no controlling terminal

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POSIX::setsid();

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}

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sub debug { return unless $DEBUG; print STDERR for @_; }

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__END__

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</code></pre>

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</table>

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<b>Planet Debian</b>

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</a>

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</td></tr><tr><td align="right"><b>Item:</b></td>

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<td width="100%"><a href="http://www.miriamruiz.es/weblog/?p=99"><b>Miriam Ruiz: PiX Frogger: help the frog cross the street</b>

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</a>

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<p>Does the name “<a title="Frogger in the Wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frogger">Frogger</a>” ring a bell? Introduced in <a title="1981 (MCMLXXXI) in the Wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1981">1981</a>, developed by <a title="Konami Corporation in the Wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konami">Konami</a> and distributed by <a title="Sega Corporation in the Wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega">Sega</a>/<a title="Gremlin Industries in the Wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gremlin_Industries">Gremlin</a>, it’s one of the most classic from the earliest ages of computer videogames.</p>

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<p><a title="PiX Frogger Homepage" href="http://www.pixjuegos.com/?q=node/30">PiX Frogger</a> is a clone of the classic game Frogger, in which you must help a frog cross the street to avoid becoming roadkill by cars and trucks. The frog starts at the bottom of the screen and the only control the player has is navigating the direction for the frog to hop. The game allows 4 players playing simultaneously with the keyboard.</p>

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<p>PIX Frogger is <a title="Debian NEW and BYHAND Packages" href="http://ftp-master.debian.org/new.html">on the way</a>. Implemented in <a title="Fenix Homepage" href="http://fenix.divsite.net/">Fénix</a>, an interpreted script programming language, <a title="Especially or Specially?" href="http://englishplus.com/grammar/00000287.htm">specially</a> designed to developing and running 2D games and added to <a title="Fenix in Debian" href="http://packages.debian.org/fenix">Debian repositories</a> some weeks ago, it has really cute graphics and the visual layout has been nicely taken care of. The game in itself is quite simple, so it shouldn’t be hard for smaller kids to play, especially when they can compete against each other 4 at a time.</p>

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<p>For more grown-ups, I guess it’s so cool to have a version in Debian from this historical game. I’m sure many people missed it. I hope it enters the repositories soon, but meanwhile you can get it from <a title="Some debian packages" href="http://users.alioth.debian.org/~baby-guest/fenix/">here</a>. Thake care while crossing the street, though.

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</p>

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<b>Planet Debian</b>

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</a>

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</td></tr><tr><td align="right"><b>Item:</b></td>

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<td width="100%"><a href="http://blog.madduck.net/geek/2007.08.21_if-you-procmail-read-this.xhtml"><b>Martin F. Krafft: If you procmail, read this</b>

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</a>

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</td></tr></table></td></tr></table>

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<p>I just had a hard time finding <a class="reference" href="http://pm-doc.sourceforge.net/pm-tips.html">this excellent procmail resource</a> on the web. I am thus blogging

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it for posterity, in case anyone is looking for procmail documentation, tips,

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tricks, a how-to, or anything else related to procmail.</p>

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<p>And if you procmail and have not read the document, I suggest you do. It's

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truly outstanding.</p>

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<p>NP: <a class="reference" href="http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?SQL=A%20Silver%20Mt.%20Zion&P=amg&OPT1=1">A Silver Mt. Zion</a>: <em>He Has Left us Alone, but Shafts of Light Sometimes Grace the Corner of our Rooms</em></p>

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<b>Planet Debian</b>

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</a>

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</td></tr><tr><td align="right"><b>Item:</b></td>

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<td width="100%"><a href="http://www.ouaza.com/wp/2007/08/21/deprecating-cvsdebianorg-in-favor-of-alioth/"><b>Raphaël Hertzog: Deprecating cvs.debian.org in favor of Alioth</b>

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</a>

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<p>It’s very difficult to discuss with DSA and make things evolve if none of the DSA member express an interest in something related to your goal: here comes an example of a story like another in my desperate quest to try to help the DSA team. <img src="http://www.ouaza.com/wp/wp-includes/images/smilies/icon_smile.gif" alt=":-)" class="wp-smiley" /> </p>

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<p>Last time gluck ran out of space, a few non-DSA people (me, taggart, Ganneff, and others I might have forgotten) contacted people to ask them to clean their home directories. Following that discussion we discussed a bit about the opportunity to move some services from gluck on another host. Among the services on gluck, there’s cvs.debian.org. As an Alioth administrator, it struck me that cvs.debian.org is the only VCS service that’s handled by the DSA team. It seems logical to not duplicate the administrative work and have all the VCS repositories handled by the same team.</p>

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<p>The logical conclusion is that cvs.debian.org should be deprecated in favor of Alioth. So I made the suggestion in <a href="https://rt.debian.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=146">RT ticket #146</a> (login with guest/readonly). I got exactly zero response from DSA. No support and no opposition. So I went ahead and contacted the last users of cvs.debian.org:</p>

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<ul>

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<li>webwml: the <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-www/2007/08/msg00077.html">website team</a></li>

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<li>debian-doc: the <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-doc/2007/08/msg00122.html">Debian documentation project</a></li>

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<li>debian-admin: the DSA team (this was already suggested in April this year in <a href="https://rt.debian.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=44">ticket #44</a>, no response of course… except elmo saying me that he’s in favor. On IRC I also discovered that neuro doesn’t like bzr and is thus not in favor of such a move. Furthermore he visibly wants to keep control on userdir-ldap, thus he probably has not much interest in moving to a distributed system.)</li>

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<li>buildd: the <a href="http://cvs.debian.org/srcdep/?root=dak">Packages-arch-specific</a> file is maintained in the dak cvs…</li>

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</ul>

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<p>All in all, the debian-doc and debian-www folks are rather supportive of the move, but it requires adjustment to the build infrastructure, in particular to keep track of the status of translations. I have no answer from DSA and the buildd guys however.</p>

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<p>The web team started a <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/WebsiteVCSEvaluation">wiki page</a> to evaluate the VCS that they would switch to. Volunteers would be welcome to organize the conversion of the repositories and to fix the build infrastructure accordingly. This a nice little project for new contributors that want to learn. <img src="http://www.ouaza.com/wp/wp-includes/images/smilies/icon_smile.gif" alt=":-)" class="wp-smiley" /> </p>

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<b>Planet Debian</b>

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</td></tr><tr><td align="right"><b>Item:</b></td>

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<td width="100%"><a href="http://www.infodrom.org/~joey/log/?200708211534"><b>Joey Schulze: PowerPC PReP Machines</b>

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</a>

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</td></tr></table></td></tr></table>

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<p>What to do with nice PowerPC PReP machines? The PReP sub-architecture is

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not supported by the Linux kernel anymore and thus not in Debian either.

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Therefore, such machines can not exactly be used anymore, until somebody

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speaks up and revives the port.</p>

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<p>Unfortunately, Debian's PowerPC developer machine is a nice Motorola

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Powerstack II Pro4000 machine. This means that we currently don't have a

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working sid (and lenny) development environment. Looks like maybe it's

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time to check out alternatives.</p>

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</table>

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<b>Planet Debian</b>

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</a>

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</td></tr><tr><td align="right"><b>Item:</b></td>

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<td width="100%"><a href="http://tytso.livejournal.com/30229.html"><b>Theodore Ts'o: Thoughts about the Palm Foleo</b>

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<p>I looked at the Foleo and played with one while I was at Linux World a few weeks ago, but it is so restrictive in what it can do that I was completely unimpressed.</p>

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<p>First of all, according to one of the people at the booth, it will only work with a select set of Treo's; mostly the newer ones. A colleague I was with had just gotten a Treo 650, and the person at the booth said that it wouldn't work with that model of Treo. (WTF?) Furthermore, it will only do e-mail (POP or IMAP) by linking with the Treo over bluetooth connection and letting the Treo pull down the e-mail and store it on the Treo. Given that it only has 128 megs of RAM and 256 megs of Flash, it just doesn't have enough storage apparently to run a stand-alone e-mail application, which is a little bit scary. The limited amount of memory is probably why it is using Opera as a web browser, which previous experience on the N800 has largely unimpressed me in terms of compatibility with Web 2.0 sites that aggressively use AJAX or flash.</p>

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<p>So OK, it's not supposed to be a laptop. But the problem is, for 0.2 pounds more, I can <i>get</i> a laptop. Let's review the critical statistics, shall we? The Foleo costs $499, weighs 2.5 pounds, and has a size of 10.5" by 6.7" by 0.9". As stated before it has 128 megs of RAM and 256 megs of flash, with a SD slot for expansion purposes, and it has a claimed 5-6 hours of battery life. But let's compare that with my IBM X41 which I recently purchased off of eBay for $800. It has 1.5 gigs of memory, and 60 gigs of hard disk. It has two batteries; with the 4 cell battery it weighs 2.7 pounds and delivers 2 hours of battery life, and with the 8 cell battery it weighs 3.2 pounds and delivers 4 hours of battery life. So true, even with the 8 cell battery the X41 is 1.7 pounds heavier and still has slightly less battery life. But you can do a lot more with the X41! Furthermore, the Foleo's weight advantage is somewhat nullified by the fact that you have to bring the Treo around to do certain activities, and the Treo has to be powered on since the Foleo is mostly designed around being a remote large screen for the Treo.</p>

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<p>At the end of the day it's all about tradeoffs. Perhaps if enough companies created enough killer apps that could fit in 128 meg of ram for the Foleo, it might be useful enough to justifying buying it. I hear for example, that even though the Foleo doesn't have any kind of PIM functionality, a 3rd party ISV is planning on making a product available that will provide calendar and contact functionality that can sync Palm PDA's. No word on how much it will cost or how usable it will be, but with enough applications, maybe Foleo could be useful enough to justify its size/weight. I imagine that these apps will probably be commercial ones, since open source apps like Evolution will probably have difficulty fitting in the Foleo's constrained environment. :-)</p>

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<p>And, of course, it's a lot cheaper than my used X41 laptop, never mind a brand-new Lenovo X61s, which could run 2 or 3 kilobucks fully outfitted with the 4 gigs of memory and 160 gig/7200 rpm drive. However, as a road warrior, my priorities are not just weight, but functionality. A 2.5 pound solid-state laptop with only 128 megs of memory which massively restricts what I can do is not a good use of the space in my laptop bag. What I'm waiting for is the next generation of the Thinkpad X series which has a solid state disk --- which shouldn't be that far off --- and the elimination of the spinning magnetic media would mean that we should have something with Foleo's battery life without the Foleo's limited usefulness. Sure, maybe I will need to wait another year or two for my perfect laptop (12", 1024x768 LED display, at least 60 gigs solid state disk, at least 2-4 gigs memory, Intel core 2 or follow-on processor, < 3 pounds, > 5 hours useful lifetime) to become available, but the technology to do this exists today; it's just a matter of making it affordable. But given that kind of long-term future, I'm willing to settle for now with either 2 or 4 hour battery life, and a slightly heavier laptop, than to use something today with a desperately slow ARM processor and only 128 megs of memory. The weight/size savings and the increased battery life of the Foleo isn't a fair tradeoff given its very limited capabilities.</p>

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<p>This is all really too bad, because if Palm is counting on the Foleo to allow it to succeed, I think the concept has some massive shortcomings, much like their claimed LifeDrive product, which didn't last very long. And I really like the Palm company; I <b>still</b> haven't found better PDA functionality on a decade-old Palm design compared to what is available on all of the Nokia phones I've looked at, the WinCE phones/PDA's, the N800, etc. So I want Palm as a company to stick around. But with Treo getting eclipsed by newer smart phones, and the Foleo not getting particularly good buzz by folks reviewing it --- and after I played with it, I have to agree with the majority of the reviewers that this is not the Next Big Thing --- I'm not sure how much longer Palm is going to be around.</p>

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</table>

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<b>Planet Debian</b>

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</td></tr><tr><td align="right"><b>Item:</b></td>

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<td width="100%"><a href="http://oskuro.net/blog/stuff/inbox-zero-2007-08-21-12-26"><b>Jordi Mallach: Inbox Zero</b>

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</td></tr></table></td></tr></table>

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<pre>

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jordi@nubol:~$ countmail

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SIX THOUSAND ONE HUNDRED EIGHTY-FOUR!

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SIX THOUSAND ONE HUNDRED EIGHTY-FOUR MAIL MESSAGES!

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HAHAHAHAHA!

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</pre>

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<p>I'll watch

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this evening.</p>

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</table>

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<b>Planet Debian</b>

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</td></tr><tr><td align="right"><b>Item:</b></td>

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<td width="100%"><a href="http://www.infodrom.org/~joey/log/?200708211222"><b>Joey Schulze: Interview</b>

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<p>Last week I gave an interview for <a href="http://www.antennetux.de/">Antennetux</a>, a non-commercial radio station targeting regional and

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Internet users. We spoke about the Debian project and the Debian

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GNU/Linux distribution with special attention to the current <a href="http://www.debian.org/releases/etch/">etch</a> release. The

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broadcast intends to provide listeners with some insight into Free

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Software and Debian in particular.</p>

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<p>The final broadcast will be available in September on the station's

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website. There are also plans to broadcast it via radio as well. There

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will also be an installation party in October during which the radio

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people and Münster user group will install GNU/Linux on visitors machines.</p>

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</table>

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<b>Planet Debian</b>

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</td></tr><tr><td align="right"><b>Item:</b></td>

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<td width="100%"><a href="http://www.burtonini.com/blog/computers/openmoko-2007-08-21-10-30"><b>Ross Burton: OpenMoko</b>

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</td></tr></table></td></tr></table>

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<p>

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Sean Moss-Pultz from OpenMoko <a href="http://lists.openmoko.org/pipermail/announce/2007-August/000018.html">announces

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the new interface</a>:

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</p>

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We went back to the drawing board with OpenedHand -- lead by their vast

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experience with GTK+, Matchbox, and mobile user interfaces -- and

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redesigned an incredibly promising new interface.

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</q></blockquote>

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<p>

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I finally got my hands on a GTA01 last week, which was promptly flashed

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with the latest software. The new interface is pretty damn cool, with

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smooth colours, clear icons and subtle gradients. I'm sure Thomas will

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blog with more details and screenshots at some point.

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</p>

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</table>

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<b>Planet Debian</b>

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</td></tr><tr><td align="right"><b>Item:</b></td>

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<td width="100%"><a href="http://www.burtonini.com/blog/computers/postr/postr-2007-08-21-10-10"><b>Ross Burton: Postr 0.8</b>

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</td></tr></table></td></tr></table>

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<p>

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Finally, a new Postr release. Nothing amazing here, just some internal

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refactoring and better error handling. If an error occurs when talking to

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Flickr a dialog box will popup, which will help a great deal.

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</p>

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<p>

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The <a href="http://burtonini.com/computing/postr-0.8.tar.gz">tarball is

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here</a>, and packages for Debian/Ubuntu are building now.

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</p>

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<p>

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<small>NP: <cite>Sleep</cite>, DJ Olive</small>

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</p>

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</table>

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<b>Planet Debian</b>

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</td></tr><tr><td align="right"><b>Item:</b></td>

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<td width="100%"><a href="http://etbe.coker.com.au/2007/08/21/when-to-use-se-linux/"><b>Russell Coker: When to Use SE Linux</b>

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</td></tr></table></td></tr></table>

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<p>Recently someone asked on IRC whether they should use SE Linux on a web server machine (that is being used for no other purpose) and then went on to add “<b>since the webserver is installed as root anyway</b>“.</p>

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<p>If a machine is used to run a single non-root application then the potential benefits of using SE Linux are significantly reduced, the issue will be whether the application could exploit a setuid program to gain root access if SE Linux was not there to prevent it.</p>

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<p>The interesting point in this case is that the user notes that the webserver runs as root. It was not made clear whether the entire service ran as root or whether the parent ran as root while child processes ran as a different UID (a typical Apache configuration). In the case where the child processes run as non-root it is still potentially possible for a bug in Apache to be used to exploit the parent process and assume it’s privileges. So it’s reasonable to consider that SE Linux will protect the integrity of the base OS from a web server running as root - even for the most basic configuration (without cgi-bin scripts). If a root owned process that is confined by SE Linux is compromised then as long as there is no kernel vulnerability the base OS should keep it’s integrity and the sys-admin should be able to login and discover what happened.</p>

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<p>If the web server is more complex and runs cgi-bin scripts then there is a further benefit for system integrity in that a cgi-bin script could be compromised but the main Apache process (which runs in a different domain) would run without interruption.</p>

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<p>When a daemon that runs as non-root is cracked on a non-SE system it will have the ability to execute setuid programs - some of which may have exploitable bugs. Also on a non-SE system every daemon has unrestricted network access in a typical configuration (there is a Net Filter module to control access by UID and GID, but it is very rarely used and won’t work in the case of multiple programs running with the same UID/GID). With SE Linux a non-root daemon will usually have no access to run setuid programs (and if it can run them it will be without a domain transition so they gain no extra privileges). Also SE Linux permits controls over which network ports an application may talk to. So the ability of a compromised server process to attack other programs is significantly reduced on a SE Linux system.</p>

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<p>In summary the more complex your installation is and the more privileges that are required by various server processes the more potential there is to increase the security of your system by using SE Linux. But even on a simple server running only a single daemon as non-root there is potential for SE Linux to provide real benefits to system security.</p>

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<p class="akst_link"><a href="http://etbe.coker.com.au/?p=361&akst_action=share-this" title="E-mail this, post to del.icio.us, etc." id="akst_link_361" class="akst_share_link" rel="nofollow">Share This</a>

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</p>

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<b>Planet Debian</b>

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</td></tr><tr><td align="right"><b>Item:</b></td>

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<td width="100%"><a href="http://journal.dedasys.com/articles/2007/08/21/hecl-interview"><b>David Welton: Hecl interview</b>

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</td></tr></table></td></tr></table>

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<p>Roger Binkley, leader of Sun's <a href="http://community.java.net/mobileandembedded/">Mobile and Embedded</a> community, interviewed me after my talk at OSCON. It went ok, given how tired I was:</p>

415

416

<p><a href="http://today.java.net/pub/a/today/2007/08/20/javamobility-podcast16.html">http://today.java.net/pub/a/today/2007/08/20/javamobility-podcast16.html</a></p>

417

418

419

420

</table>

421

422

423

424

425

426

427

<b>Planet Debian</b>

428

</a>

429

</td></tr><tr><td align="right"><b>Item:</b></td>

430

<td width="100%"><a href="http://www.advogato.org/person/mbrubeck/diary.html?start=102"><b>Matt Brubeck: 21 Aug 2007</b>

431

</a>

432

</td></tr></table></td></tr></table>

433

434

<b>Problems for shared desktop computers.</b>

435

436

<p> I share a home desktop computer with my wife. Our computer

437

use is probably

438

pretty typical of a home computer shared between a small

439

number of users,

440

where only one user is logged in at a time, and users have

441

some shared files

442

and some private files.

443

444

<p> I've found many things that don't work as well as they could

445

in this

446

situation. We use Gnome on Debian GNU/Linux, but most other

447

desktops have

448

similar problems. I know fixes or workarounds for most of

449

the problems below,

450

but novice users would probably have a hard time finding them.

451

452

<p> Some of the problems below are relatively easy to fix. Most

453

already have bugs

454

filed in the appropriate places, and some already have

455

patches available. A

456

few problems may require hard work or fundamental design

457

changes to solve.

458

Here is the complete list of problems:

459

460

<p> User Switching:

461

<ul>

462

<li>If I select my name from FUSA while I'm not already

463

logged in, GDM appears

464

and I have to type my username. (The username should be

465

filled in

466

automatically.)

467

<li>When GDM is started by FUSA, the X server has slightly

468

settings, causing the

469

fonts on the login screen to be a different size than my

470

normal settings.

471

<li>When I log out, I am taken either to a login screen or

472

to another user's

473

session, depending on the order in which users originally

474

logged in. This

475

is arbitrary and unpredictable.

476

<li>If I switch to another user, my screen is locked.

477

Later, if the computer is

478

displaying a login screen and I type my username and

479

password, I need to

480

type my password a second time to unlock the screen.

481

<li>When I shut down the computer, it does not warn me if

482

other users are still

483

logged in.

484

</li></li></li></li></li></ul>

485

486

<p> Filesystem:

487

<ul>

488

<li>By default, users can read all of each other's files,

489

and write to none of

490

each other's files (umask 0002). This is a reasonably

491

sensible default, but

492

most users on shared systems will want to change this to

493

some degree.

494

<li>It's very difficult for a user to change which other

495

users can read which of

496

her files. (Some strategies include making some or all

497

files world

498

writeable; adding the other users to her primary group;

499

creating a new

500

shared group and a share setgid directory owned by that

501

group; changing her

502

umask; and/or manually changing permissions of individual

503

files.)

504

<li>There is no good location by default for shared files.

505

Various programs

506

complain (correctly) about insecurity if my home directory is

507

group-writeable, so I must create a world- or

508

group-writeable (and setgid)

509

directory elsewhere.

510

<li>Copying from other locations, or using programs that do

511

not respect umask,

512

can cause users to inadvertently put non-group-writeable

513

files in shared

514

setgid directories. Other users of the shared directory

515

have no easy way to

516

fix this.

517

<li>Some programs modify permissions or groups of files when

518

overwriting them.

519

(Usually this happens if the program moves the original

520

file to a backup

521

location, then writes a new version using the default

522

settings instead of

523

the original file's settings.)

524

</li></li></li></li></li></ul>

525

526

<p> Application data:

527

<ul>

528

<li>Applications that maintain a database of files (e.g.

529

photo managers, music

530

players) must be updated for each user when one user adds

531

new files to a

532

shared directory. For example, when I rip a CD to our

533

shared music

534

directory, my wife can't see the songs in her music player

535

until she

536

adds the new files to her database.

537

<li>Applications that store their data in hard-coded

538

locations in user home

539

directories (e.g. Tomboy, Miro) can't share files between

540

users. There is

541

no setting or permission that will let my wife open Tomboy

542

and view my

543

Tomboy notes, for example.

544

</li></li></ul>

545

546

<p> Installing software:

547

<ul>

548

<li>When I install software using the system admin tools, it

549

changes the

550

application menu for all other users too.

551

</li></ul></p></p></p></p></p></p></p>

552

553

554

555

</table>

556

557

558

559

560

561

562

<b>Planet Debian</b>

563

</a>

564

</td></tr><tr><td align="right"><b>Item:</b></td>

565

<td width="100%"><a href="http://www.golden-gryphon.com/blog/manoj//blog/2007/08/21/Arch_Hook.html"><b>Manoj Srivastava: Arch Hook</b>

566

</a>

567

</td></tr></table></td></tr></table>

568

569

<p>All the version control systems I am familiar with run scripts

570

on checkout and commit to take additional site specific actions,

571

and arch is no different. Well, actually, arch is perhaps different

572

in the sense that arch runs a script on almost <em>all</em>

573

actions, namely, <code>~/.arch-params/hook</code> script. Enough

574

information is passed in to make this mechanism one of the most

575

flexible I have had the pleasure to work with.</p>

576

<p>In my <a href="http://www.golden-gryphon.com/blog/manoj///software/misc/hook.html">hook</a> script, I do

577

the following things:</p>

578

<ul>

579

<li>On a commit, or an initial import

580

<ul>

581

<li>For my publicly replicated repositories (and only for my public

582

repositories), the script creates a full source tree in the

583

repository for every 20th commit. This can speed up subsequent

584

calls to get for that and subsequent revisions, since users do not

585

have to get the base version and all patches.</li>

586

<li>For the public repositories, the script removes older cached

587

versions, keeping two cached versions in place. I assume there is

588

not much demand for versions more than 40 patches out of date; and

589

so having to download a few extra patches in that uncommon case is

590

not a big issue.</li>

591

<li>If it is an ikiwiki commit, the script makes sure that it

592

updates the checked out sources of the wiki on the webserver, and

593

rebuilds the wiki.</li>

594

<li>If this is a commit to an archive for which I have a

595

corresponding <code>-MIRROR</code> defined, the script updates the

596

mirror now, and logs an informational message to the screen.</li>

597

<li>There is special handling for my Debian packages.

598

<ul>

599

<li>If the category matches one of my packages, the script looks to

600

see if any bugs have been closed in this commit, and, if so, sends

601

the log to the bug, and tags it fixed.</li>

602

<li>If the category being checked in is one that corresponds to one

603

of my Debian packages, or to the <code>./debian</code> directory

604

that belongs to one of my packages, then the script sends a cleaned

605

up change log by mail to the <em>packages.qa.debian.org</em>.

606

People can subscribe to the mailing list setup for each package to

607

get commit logs, if they so desire.</li>

608

<li>Arch has the concept of a grab file, and people can get all the

609

components of a software package by just feeding arch either the

610

grab file (either locally, or via a http URL). The script makes

611

sure that a arch config file is created , as well as a grab file

612

(using the script <a href="http://www.golden-gryphon.com/blog/manoj///software/misc/arch_create_config.html">arch_create_config</a>),

613

and uploads the grab file to to a public location (using the script

614

<a href="http://www.golden-gryphon.com/blog/manoj///software/misc/arch_upload_grab.html">arch_upload_grab</a>)

615

mentioned in <code>./debian/control</code> for all my

616

packages.</li>

617

<li>For commits to the Debian policy package, the script also sends

618

mail to the policy list with full commit logs. This is a group

619

maintained package, so changes to this are disseminated slightly

620

more volubly.</li>

621

<li>Whenever a new category, branch, or version is added to the

622

repository corresponding to the Debian policy package, the script

623

sends mail to the policy list. Again, changes to the Policy

624

repository are fairly visible.</li>

625

</ul>

626

</li>

627

<li>The scripts send myself mail, for archival purposes, whenever a

628

new category or branch is created in any of my repositories (but

629

not for every revision).</li>

630

<li>Additional action is taken to ensure that versions are cached

631

in the local revision library. I am no longer sure if this is

632

strictly needed.</li>

633

</ul>

634

</li>

635

</ul>

636

<p>I’d be happy to hear about what other people add to their commit

637

scripts, to see if I have missed out on anything.</p>

638

639

640

641

</table>

642

643

644

645

646

647

648

<b>Planet Debian</b>

649

</a>

650

</td></tr><tr><td align="right"><b>Item:</b></td>

651

<td width="100%"><a href="http://www.technovelty.org/code/badcode/utilising.html"><b>Ian Wienand: On incorrectly utilising "utilising"</b>

652

</a>

653

</td></tr></table></td></tr></table>

654

655

<p>My supervisor pointed out a very annoying habit I had formed when

656

writing technical documents, best summed up below:</p>

657

658

659

<p>"It would be difficult to find a page of governmental,

660

military, or academic writing that doesn't have on it the word

661

utilize. It must be one of the most over-utilized words in the

662

world. It seems as though people out to impress people with the

663

significance of what they're doing use utilize when they should use

664

use.

665

</p>

666

667

<p>Utilize is not an elegant variation of the word use; it has its own

668

distinct meaning. When you utilize something, you make do with

669

something not normally used for the purpose, e.g., you utilize a dime

670

when the bloody screwdriver is nowhere to be found. If the screwdriver

671

were there, you'd use it, not utilize a stupid dime for the

672

purpose. Use use when you mean use, and utilize only when it's

673

properly used to mean--to use something not normally used. The

674

computer went off-line, so they utilized Mr. Wang's abacus, the one he

675

liked to use. Despite the temporary breakdown, the computer's use-rate

676

was up (not its utilization-rate)."</p>

677

678

<p><i>Cheney, "Getting the words right" (1983)</i></p>

679

</blockquote>

680

681

<p>You will now probably notice this subtle verbiage in most

682

everything you read!</p>

683

684

685

686

</table>

687

688

689

690

691

692

693

<b>Planet Debian</b>

694

</a>

695

</td></tr><tr><td align="right"><b>Item:</b></td>

696

<td width="100%"><a href="http://planetwatson.co.uk/blog/2007/08/20/its-about-time"><b>David Watson: It's about time</b>

697

</a>

698

</td></tr></table></td></tr></table>

699

700

<p>I decided that I really needed to start making proper backups of the data on my server this week. I did have a tape drive in the server at one point but I never remembered to change the tape, or indeed ever test the backups.</p>

701

<p>Now that I have a Linksys NSLU2 (a slug), which I bought to use as a local Debian mirror. "Why not use it for backing up my important data?" I thought, so I leapt into action. The first job was to replace the drive in the USB caddy with a 250Gb drive. 250Gb should be plenty for both the mirror and the backups, which is mostly source code, mail and photos. After that installing and setting up rsnapshot was a snap.</p>

702

<p>It sure beats the "keep some stuff on my laptop" backup method I was using, which did save me from a major brain fade moment involving my Maildir folder.</p>

703

<p>I shall now wallow in the warm glow that only a backup provides.</p>

704

705

706

707

</table>

708

709

710

711

712

713

714

<b>Planet Debian</b>

715

</a>

716

</td></tr><tr><td align="right"><b>Item:</b></td>

717

<td width="100%"><a href="http://etbe.coker.com.au/2007/08/21/suggestions-and-thanks/"><b>Russell Coker: Suggestions and Thanks</b>

718

</a>

719

</td></tr></table></td></tr></table>

720

721

<p>One problem with the blog space is that there is a lot of negativity. Many people seem to think that if they don’t like a blog post then the thing to do is to write a post complaining about it - or even worse a complaint that lacks specific details to such an extent that the subject of the complaint would be unable to change their writing in response. The absolute worst thing to do is to post a complaint in a forum that the blog author is unlikely to read - which would be a pointless whinge that benefits no-one.</p>

722

<p>Of course an alternate way for the recipient to takeg such complaints as <a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/marginal.html">suggested by Paul Graham</a> is “<b>you’re on the right track when people complain that you’re unqualified, or that you’ve done something inappropriate</b>” and “<b>if they’re driven to such empty forms of complaint, that means you’ve probably done something good</b>” (Paul was talking about writing essays not blogs, but I’m pretty sure that he intended it to apply to blogs too). If you want to actually get a blog author (or probably any author) to make a change in their material in response to your comments then trying to avoid empty complaints is a good idea. Another useful point Paul makes in the same essay is “<b>“Inappropriate” is the null criticism. It’s merely the adjective form of “I don’t like it.”</b>” - something that’s worth considering given the common criticism of particular blog content as being “inappropriate” for an aggregation feed that is syndicating it. Before criticising blog posts you should consider that badly written criticism may result in more of whatever it is that you object to.</p>

723

<p>If you find some specific objective problem in the content or presentation of a blog the first thing to do is to determine the correct way of notifying the author. I believe that it’s a good idea for the author to have an <b>about</b> page which either has a mailto URL or a web form for sending feedback, I have a mailto on my about page - <a href="http://etbe.coker.com.au/about/">(here’s the link)</a>. Another possible method of contact is a comment on a blog post, if it’s an issue for multiple posts on the blog then writing a comment on the most recent post will do (unless of course it’s a comment about the comment system being broken). For those who are new to blogging, the blog author has full control over what happens to comments. If they decide that your comment about the blog color scheme doesn’t belong on a post about C programming then they can respond to the comment in the way that they think best (making a change or not and maybe sending you an email about it) and then delete the comment if they wish.</p>

724

<p>If there is an issue that occurs on multiple blogs then a good option is to write a post about the general concept as I did in the case of <a href="http://etbe.coker.com.au/2007/07/22/column-width-in-blogs/">column width in blogs</a> where I wrote about one blog as an example of a problem that affects many blogs. I also described how I fixed my own blog in this regard (in sufficient detail to allow others to do the same). Note that most blogs have some degree of support for <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linkback">Linkback</a> so any time you link to someone else’s blog post they will usually get notified in some way.</p>

725

<p>On my blog I have a page for <a href="http://etbe.coker.com.au/future-posts/">future posts</a> where I invite comments from readers as to what I plan to write about next. Someone who prefers that I not write about topic A could write a comment requesting that I write about topic B instead. Wordpress supports pages as a separate type of item to posts. A post is a dated entry while pages are not sorted in date order and in most themes are displayed prominently on the front page (mine are displayed at the top). I suggest that other bloggers consider doing something comparable.</p>

726

<p>One thing I considered is running a wiki page for the future posts. One of the problems with a wiki page is that I would need to maintain my own private list which is separate, while a page with comments allows only me to edit the page in response to comments and then use the page as my own to-do list. I may experiment with such a wiki page at some future time. One possibility that might be worth considering is a wiki for post requests for any blog that is syndicated by a Planet. For example a wiki related to <a href="http://planet.debian.org/">Planet Debian</a> might request a post about running Debian on the latest SPARC systems, the first blogger to write a post on this topic could then remove the entry from the wish-list (maybe adding the URL to a list of satisfied requests). If the person who made the original request wanted a more detailed post covering some specific area they could then add such a request to the wish-list page. If I get positive feedback on this idea I’ll create the wiki pages and add a few requests for articles that would interest me to start it up.</p>

727

<p>Finally to encourage the production of content that you enjoy reading I suggest publicly thanking people who write posts that you consider to be particularly good. One way of thanking people is to cite their posts in articles on your own blog (taking care to include a link to at least one page to increase their <a href="http://www.technorati.com/">Technorati</a> rank) or web site. Another is to include a periodic (I suggest monthly at most) links post that contains URLs of blog posts you like along with brief descriptions of the content. If you really like a post then thank the author by not only giving a links with a description (to encourage other people to read it) but also describe why you think it’s a great post. Also if recommending a blog make sure you give a feed URL so that anyone who wants to subscribe can do it as easily as possible (particularly for the blogs with a bad HTML layout).</p>

728

<p>Here are some recent blog posts that I particularly liked:</p>

729

730

<li><a href="http://securityblog.org/brindle/2006/04/19/security-anti-pattern-path-based-access-control/">Security Anti-Pattern: Path based access control</a> from Joshua Brindle <a href="http://securityblog.org/brindle/feed/">(feed)</a>. A fairly strong criticism of path based access control (as used in AppArmor). I’d have written something about this myself but Joshua did it so well that there’s no need. His post about <a href="http://securityblog.org/brindle/2006/03/25/security-anti-pattern-status-quo-encapsulation/">Status Quo Encapsulation</a> is also a good read. It’s a pity that Joshua doesn’t write more than two posts a month.</li><br />

731

<li><a href="http://primates.ximian.com/~federico/news-2007-08.html#11">Federico’s post about concrete for housing. Some technical data and some good pictures.</a> <a href="http://primates.ximian.com/~federico/rss.xml">(feed)</a></li><br />

732

<li><a href="http://tau-iota-mu-c.livejournal.com/tag/politics">Tim Connor’s blog posts about Australian politics</a> <a href="http://tau-iota-mu-c.livejournal.com/data/rss">(feed)</a>, particularly <a href="http://tau-iota-mu-c.livejournal.com/84694.html">this post about interest rates</a> (especially his latest comment). It’s a pity that Livejournal seems to offer no good options for searching and the comment in question has broken links. I would be happy to offer advice if Tim wanted to switch to a self-hosted Wordpress installation (as would some other bloggers who are members of our local LUG).</li><br />

733

</ul></p>

734

<p>Here are some blogs that I read regularly:<br />

735

736

<li><a href="http://www.problogger.net">Problogger</a> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/ProbloggerHelpingBloggersEarnMoney">(feed)</a>, I don’t think that I’ll be a full-time blogger in the forseeable future, but his posts have lots of good ideas for anyone who wants to blog effectively. I particulaly appreciate the short posts with simple suggestions.</li><br />

737

<li><a href="http://www.megatokyo.com">Mega Tokyo</a> <a href="http://www.megatokyo.com/rss/megatokyo.xml">(feed)</a> - A manga comic on the web. The amusing portrayal of computer gaming fanatics will probably remind most people in the computer industry of some of their friends.</li><br />

738

<li><a href="http://www.d-n-i.net/">Defence and the National Interest</a> <a href="http://www.d-n-i.net/new_at_DNI.xml">(feed)</a>. The most interesting part of this (and the only reason I regularly read it) is the blog of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_S._Lind">William S. Lind</a> (titled <b>On War</b>. William writes some very insightful posts about military strategy and tactics but some things about politics will offend most people who aren’t white Christian conservatives.<br /><br />

739

It’s a pity that there is not a more traditional blog feed for the data, the individual archives contain all posts and there seems to be no possibility of viewing the posts for the last month (for people who read it regularly in a browser and don’t use an RSS feed) and no search functionality built in.</li><br />

740

<li><a href="http://worsethanfailure.com/">WorseThanFailure.com (was TheDailyWTF.com)</a> <a href="http://syndication.thedailywtf.com/TheDailyWtf">(feed)</a> subtitled Curious Perversions in Information Technology. Many amusing anecdotes that illustrate how IT projects can go wrong. This is useful for education, amusement, and as a threat (if you do THAT then we could submit to WorseThanFailure.com).</li><br />

741

<li><a href="http://www.xkcd.com/">XKCD - a stick-figure web comic</a>, often criticised for the drawing quality by people who just don’t get it, some people read comics for amusement and insightful commentry not drawings. It’s yet another example of content beating presentation when there’s a level playing field.</li><br />

742

</ul></p>

743

<p>Finally I don’t read it myself, but <a href="http://www.cuteoverload.com/">CuteOverload.com</a> is a good site to refer people to when they claim that the Internet is too nasty for children - the Internet has lots of pictures of cute animals!</p>

744

<p class="akst_link"><a href="http://etbe.coker.com.au/?p=359&akst_action=share-this" title="E-mail this, post to del.icio.us, etc." id="akst_link_359" class="akst_share_link" rel="nofollow">Share This</a>

745

</p>

746

747

748

749

</table>

750

751

752

753

754

755

756

<b>Planet Debian</b>

757

</a>

758

</td></tr><tr><td align="right"><b>Item:</b></td>

759

<td width="100%"><a href="http://kitenet.net/~joey/blog/entry/inbox_zero/"><b>Joey Hess: inbox zero</b>

760

</a>

761

</td></tr></table></td></tr></table>

762

763

<p>My inbox is empty. <a href="http://layer-acht.org/blog/debian/#1-120">Holger</a>

764

posted a link to

765

766

which makes some really simple suggestions about how to handle new mail,

767

to avoid letting it rot in the inbox.</p>

768

769

<p>It turns out that I was already doing most of them pretty well. For

770

example, offlineimap only downloads new mail every 30 minutes, so I don't

771

constantly waste time checking my inbox for new mail. And I'm pretty good

772

at deleting mail I don't want, quickly sending quick replies to easy mails,

773

and adding calendar entries for time-sensative mails. So my inbox was only

774

90 messages long..</p>

775

776

<p>The main thing I need to improve seems to be getting out of the habit of

777

leaving deferred things to sit in my inbox. I went through and about 80%

778

were mails sent from the Debian BTS. All that stuff is in the BTS, so

779

there's no need to keep it in my inbox. Another 10% should have been in a

780

BTS, but was sent directly to me -- so I put it in the BTS, and removed it

781

from my inbox. I know I'm not the only one with this problem, BTW.</p>

782

783

<p>I recommend watching the talk. Thinking about mail in the inbox as only

784

having one of 5 actions you can perform on it (delete, defer, delegate,

785

respond, do) really helps process it quickly.</p>

786

787

788

789

</table>

790

791

792

793

794

795

796

<b>Planet Debian</b>

797

</a>

798

</td></tr><tr><td align="right"><b>Item:</b></td>

799

<td width="100%"><a href="http://www.hogyros.de/?q=node/305"><b>Simon Richter: Non-standard compiler extensions</b>

800

</a>

801

</td></tr></table></td></tr></table>

802

803

<p>Normally I don't like them, because the people using them write non-portable code.</p>

804

<p>In some cases however (mostly when writing stuff other people would write in perl), I'd like things like <code>__attribute__((mode(QI)))</code> to work, and not claim that while the compiler perfectly well understood what I was trying to do, it can nonetheless not help me around writing my own support for 128 bit types. At least MSVC is no better, <code>__int128</code> has the exact same behaviour.</p>

805

806

807

808

809

</table>

810

811

812

813

814

815

816

<b>Planet Debian</b>

817

</a>

818

</td></tr><tr><td align="right"><b>Item:</b></td>

819

<td width="100%"><a href="http://blog.venthur.de/2007/08/20/deserializing-soap-replies-with-zsi/"><b>Bastian Venthur: Deserializing SOAP replies with ZSI?</b>

820

</a>

821

</td></tr></table></td></tr></table>

822

823

<p>Dear Lazyweb,</p>

824

<p>what is the most elegant way to read a SOAP reply containing a complex type into an object using <a href="http://pywebsvcs.sourceforge.net/">ZSI</a>? I’ve read the <a href="http://pywebsvcs.sourceforge.net/zsi_v2_0_0.html">documentation</a> several times and I guess there is an elegant way to solve this, but I still don’t get it.</p>

825

<p>I <em>guess</em> it should work like this:</p>

826

<ul>

827

<li>Define a class Bugreport</li>

828

<li>Define Bugreport’s <a href="http://pywebsvcs.sourceforge.net/zsi.html#SECTION007000000000000000000">typecode</a></li>

829

<li>Parse (how?) the SOAP reply containing bugreport-data into a Bugreport object</li>

830

</ul>

831

<p>What I’m currently doing with soappy in <a href="http://reportbug-ng.alioth.debian.org/">rng</a> is rather crude: I take the SOAP response which is a dictionary holding many interesting facts about a bug report, take those elements I’m interested in and copy them into a bug report object. Not very elegant, but it works.</p>

832

<p>While I’m moving away from soappy to ZSI I’d like to implement the deserializion the ZSI way. Unfortunately I don’t understand their examples. So please Lazyweb, is there any ZSI expert out there who can provide a minimalistic example?</p>

833

834

835

836

</table>

837

838

839

840

841

842

843

<b>Planet Debian</b>

844

</a>

845

</td></tr><tr><td align="right"><b>Item:</b></td>

846

<td width="100%"><a href="http://blog.orebokech.com/2007/08/cornflakes-heroes-lifeline-video.html"><b>Romain Francoise: Cornflakes Heroes: "Lifeline" video</b>

847

</a>

848

</td></tr></table></td></tr></table>

849

850

<a href="http://www.cornflakesheroes.com/">Cornflakes Heroes</a> (my sister's band) have released the video for their new single <span>Lifeline</span>, check it out:<br /><br /> <br />(click <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XENxzz_goo0">here</a> if the embedded player doesn't work)

851

852

853

854

</table>

855

856

857

858

859

860

861

<b>Planet Debian</b>

862

</a>

863

</td></tr><tr><td align="right"><b>Item:</b></td>

864

<td width="100%"><a href="http://kartikmistry.org/blog/?p=352"><b>Kartik Mistry: TODOs</b>

865

</a>

866

</td></tr></table></td></tr></table>

867

868

<p>* Debian:</p>

869

<p>- Create pkg-festival at alioth, New ‘long pending’ upstream release for Festival/Speech-tools</p>

870

<p>- <a href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/xosview/" target="_blank">Xosview</a> 1.8.3, <a href="http://ayttm.sourceforge.net/files.shtml" target="_blank">Ayttm 0.5.0-6</a> (Yeah, its <a href="http://ayttm.cvs.sourceforge.net/ayttm/ayttm/ChangeLog?revision=1.695&view=markup&pathrev=AYTTM_0_5_0" target="_blank">GTK2 Port</a> is out!!)</p>

871

872

<p>- Debian@<a href="http://foss.in/2007">Foss.in/2007</a></p>

873

874

875

<p>- Kavin@home</p>

876

<p>- As above</p>

877

<p>- As above</p>

878

879

880

881

882

</table>

883

884

885

886

887

888

889

<b>Planet Debian</b>

890

</a>

891

</td></tr><tr><td align="right"><b>Item:</b></td>

892

<td width="100%"><a href="http://blog.cihar.com/archives/2007/08/20/gammu_stable_version_1_13_0/"><b>Michal Čihař: Gammu stable version 1.13.0</b>

893

</a>

894

</td></tr></table></td></tr></table>

895

896

<p>I just released new version of <a href="http://cihar.com/gammu/">Gammu</a>. There are no big changes

897

since last testing release:</p>

898

899

<ul>

900

<li>Fixed several crashes of 6510 driver.</li>

901

</ul>

902

903

<p>For stable users there are tons of changes, most noticable is initial

904

support for Sharp and Motorola phones, notes support for OBEX driver and

905

various fixes to make compilation in Visual Studio possible.</p>

906

907

908

909

</table>

910

911

912

913

914

915

916

<b>Planet Debian</b>

917

</a>

918

</td></tr><tr><td align="right"><b>Item:</b></td>

919

<td width="100%"><a href="http://jbailey.livejournal.com/37143.html"><b>Jeff Bailey: Next stop: Buffalo</b>

920

</a>

921

</td></tr></table></td></tr></table>

922

923

<br/>

924

Hey'all! We're still in transit on our great trans-continental adventure! Sorry if you've emailed us and we've not gotten back, Internet access is spotty at best on this trip, and who wants to spend their vacation reading email anyway? =)<br /><br />We just finished a good time in the kitchens of Opus and ConCentric. Angie, Sera, Chris and I all worked well together in a cohesive team, with a minimum of drama. It was really nice to work with such a solid group of people that we could say things like "Dude, I need a nap, can you cover for me?" and there was no problem with the rest of the team trading off.<br /><br />Leif was an absolute hit at the con. We were able to participate in a couple worships where him singing along wasn't a distraction at all, and he totally loved being passed between people. It does mean that he caught his first cold, but he's doing alright.<br /><br />There are always the people that I'll miss when I'm gone from there. Alexis was in the kitchen on a regular basis saying hi, Liz was always nearby, Karina with her star maps, lizzie the brit with her piles of energy, the frying-tofu master Geoff seemed to be in the kitchen often. In the kitchen, though, we got to see pretty much everyone so it was a nice chance to connect with people.<br /><br />The staff was also a very neat set of people. I don't think there was anyone in the Opus staff that I couldn't see actively working hard to pull of great programming. There's always the curmudgeonly part of me that sits in the back corner and can nit pick things to death, but in doing so I wouldn't want to hide that by almost every measure this was a successful Opus. In particular, I was impressed that the staff faced head-on how to handle walk-ins at the staff meeting just before the con started. It was interesting to watch a consensus process work with a group of people who came in from wildly different personal perspectives and to watch people change from varying viewpoints to agree on the compromise that best suited the group.<br /><br />So what's next? We've spent the night with Andrew from <a href="http://www.koolu.com/">Koolu</a> and will be heading down to Buffalo next to get an van and start on the adventure. We don't know where we're going yet, or how we'll get there, but the idea is to head down to the <a href="http://www.creationmuseum.org/">Creation Museum</a> and then west towards Vegas and the Grand Canyon. On the way, we might see if we can visit Stephanie in Ohio, Sera in Albuquerque, and Karina in Flagstaff.<br /><br />Peace, Love, Faith and Blessings to all.

925

926

927

928

</table>

929

930

931

932

933

934

935

<b>Planet Debian</b>

936

</a>

937

</td></tr><tr><td align="right"><b>Item:</b></td>

938

<td width="100%"><a href="http://journal.dedasys.com/articles/2007/08/20/hecl-dedawiki-updates"><b>David Welton: Hecl, DedaWiki updates</b>

939

</a>

940

</td></tr></table></td></tr></table>

941

942

<p>I had a pretty good week last week in terms of doing some open source work. I had the opportunity to do some consulting regarding <a href="http://www.hecl.org">Hecl</a>, which was pretty cool. Some of the work was fed back into Hecl itself, including the beginnings of a "media" API (video streams, taking pictures with the camera), and some other fixes and updates. I've also been working on it a bit on my own time, adding a Canvas demo to the MIDP2.0 demo application (works in the emulator, haven't tried it on a phone yet), and today I'm going to look at updating some of the documentation that's been lagging the code. In the course of my work, I also happened on a cool idea to speed up the launch of Hecl applications: by creating the widgets as regular widgets in Java, right away, in the <code>startApp</code> MIDlet method, it's possible to get them on the screen quickly. At that point, you can start loading Hecl, and create some Hecl objects to hold the already created Java widgets. It goes something like this:</p>

943

944

<pre><code>Form mainform = new Form("Initial Form");

945

TextField search = new TextField("search:", "", 30, 0);

946

... load script ...

947

interp.setVar("mainform", ObjectThing.create(mainform));

948

interp.setVar("searchwidget", ObjectThing.create(search));

949

... evaluate script ...

950

</code></pre>

951

952

<p>This is a good tradeoff, because it gets something in front of the user right away, and it's not a throwaway like a splash screen.</p>

953

954

<p>On another front, I've updated some of the code in <a href="http://dedawiki.dedasys.com">DedaWiki</a>, to enable email notifications in the comment system, which has percolated into the <a href="http://www.leenooks.com">Linux Incompatibility List</a>, and, with a bit of tweaking, into <a href="http://www.squeezedbooks.com">Squeezed Books</a>. I don't think the code is quite ready for a real release, but by running the incompatibility list on it, it's a great way to give it a thorough shakedown, and I'll attempt to release it sooner or later. Of course, in the meantime, interested parties can get the code out of subversion on rubyforge.</p>

955

956

957

958

</table>

959

960

961

962

963

964

965

<b>Planet Debian</b>

966

</a>

967

</td></tr><tr><td align="right"><b>Item:</b></td>

968

<td width="100%"><a href="http://etbe.coker.com.au/2007/08/20/feedburner-item-link-clicks/"><b>Russell Coker: Feedburner Item Link Clicks</b>

969

</a>

970

</td></tr></table></td></tr></table>

971

972

<p>For a while I used the Item Link Clicks feature in <a href="http://www.feedburner.com/">Feedburner</a>. For those who aren’t aware Feedburner is a service that proxies access to an RSS feed (you need to either publish the Feedburner URL as the syndication link or use a HTTP redirect to send the requests there - I use a HTTP redirect). Then when people download the feed they get it from Feedburner which is fast and reliable (unlike my blog on a bad day) and which also tracks some statistics which can be interesting.</p>

973

<p>The Item Link Clicks feature rewrites the <b>guid</b> URLs to point to a Feedburner URL that will redirect back to the original post (and track clicks along the way). The down-side of doing this is that some people who read blogs via <a href="http://www.planetplanet.org/">Planet</a> installations and just copy the link from the Planet page when citing a blog post instead of actually visiting the blog in question. This causes a potential problem for the person citing the post in that they won’t know whether the URL is valid unless they visit it. So when (not if) people have misconfigured blogs that are widely syndicated the people who cite them without verifying the links could end up linking to invalid URLs. The problem for the person who is cited is that such Feedburner redirects don’t seem to be counted as part of the <a href="http://www.technorati.com/">Technorati</a> ranking (which is a count of the number of links to a blog in the last 6 months which give some rough approximation of how important the blog is). The Technorati rating can sometimes be used in negotiations with an advertiser and is often used when boasting about how popular a blog is.</p>

974

<p>To increase my Technorati ranking I have stopped using the Feedburner URL rewriting feature. For people who view my blog directly or through a Planet installation this will not give any difference that you would notice. The problem is for people who use a service that syndicates RSS feeds and then forwards them on by email, such people received two copies of the last 10 items as the URL (GUID) change means that the posts are seen as new (Planet solves this by deleting the posts which are seen as unavailable and then creating new posts with the new URLs and no change is visible to the user).</p>

975

<p>Based on this experience I suggest not using URL rewriting services. They will hurt your technorati ranking, give little benefit (IMHO) and annoy the small number of RSS to email readers. Particularly don’t change your mind about whether to use such a feature or not. Changing the setting regularly would be really annoying. Also this means that if you use such a service you should take care not to have you Feedburner redirection ever get disabled. A minor Apache configuration error corrected a day later could end up in sending all the posts in the current feed an extra two times.</p>

976

<p class="akst_link"><a href="http://etbe.coker.com.au/?p=358&akst_action=share-this" title="E-mail this, post to del.icio.us, etc." id="akst_link_358" class="akst_share_link" rel="nofollow">Share This</a>

977

</p>

978

979

980

981

</table>

982

983

984

985

986

987

988

<b>Planet Debian</b>

989

</a>

990

</td></tr><tr><td align="right"><b>Item:</b></td>

991

<td width="100%"><a href="http://blog.madduck.net/travel/2007.08.20_pay-three-times-as-much-and-get-zero-brain-power.xhtml"><b>Martin F. Krafft: Pay three times as much and get zero brain power</b>

992

</a>

993

</td></tr></table></td></tr></table>

994

995

<p>If you walk up to the Swiss railways customer service desk and tell them that

996

you're a group of six looking to travel from Zurich to Munich and would thus

997

like to make a reservation, they'll charge you 15 CHF (~ 9.50€) for a little

998

piece of paper which documents that the guy behind the desk put his brain to

999

use and reserved six contiguous seats to keep the group together. Well, he

1000

actually asked me whether that's what I wanted.</p>

1001

<p>If you walk up to the German railways customer service desk and tell them that

1002

you're a group of (now) eight looking to travel from Munich to Zurich and

1003

would thus like to make a reservation, they'll charge you 28€ for a little

1004

piece of paper which documents that the guy behind the desk does not have

1005

a brain or didn't bother to switch it on: instead of two adjacent groups of

1006

four seats, we got four pairs of aisle seats.</p>

1007

<p>Given that we mainly reserved to minimise the annoyance for the other

1008

travellers while we kept up a conversation for the five hours of the journey,

1009

it did piss me off quite a bit to have paid three times as much in Germany as

1010

the reservation cost in Switzerland and not be able to talk among each other

1011

without annoying the others.</p>

1012

<p>This reservation was made two days in advance. You may, of course, think that

1013

the train was already full and no space to sit eight was left; however, I did

1014

not have to go further than two wagons to find copious amounts of unreserved

1015

spaces for eight, which were then, unfortunately, already occupied (of

1016

course).</p>

1017

<p>It shames me to expose my peers (I made the travel arrangements) to the crap

1018

and blather one has to put up in German railways: the quality of the speaker

1019

system is crap, everything is repeated in English by non-English-speaking

1020

conductors, and after every stop, we're yet again alerted to the fact that we

1021

could be relaxing to high-quality cuisine in the board restaurant, or should

1022

watch out for the little trolley passing by and happy to collect our money.

1023

Oh, and of course the brainless and often unfriendly service employees.</p>

1024

<p>And all that for a price more than it would have cost the lot of us to rent

1025

a van and drive back and forth.</p>

1026

<p>Going by train is my most preferable means of transport, not only, but in

1027

large part due to environmental issues. I don't understand why the German

1028

government puts this important bit of infrastructure in the hands of imbeciles

1029

and lets them overcharge for their low-quality service and their delays.</p>

1030

<p>NP: <a class="reference" href="http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?SQL=Mono&P=amg&OPT1=1">Mono</a>: <em>Under the Pipal Tree</em></p>

1031

<p><strong>Update</strong>: A guy from Berlin wrote:</p>

1032

1033

The seats you found in the other wagons may as well have been reserved, too.

1034

The electronic reservation signs will extinguish about 15 minutes after the

1035

train departs from the station. Or, there was too little time between

1036

reservation and departure, so you could only get one of the few

1037

express-reservation seats.</blockquote>

1038

<p>I am aware of this. However, the train between Zurich and Munich is ancient

1039

(part of the way it still has to run on Diesel) and the reservation signs were

1040

paper slips. The seats of eight I found were definitely unreserved, especially

1041

because I checked immediately after departure.</p>

1042

1043

1044

1045

</table>

1046

1047

1048

1049

1050

1051

1052

<b>Planet Debian</b>

1053

</a>

1054

</td></tr><tr><td align="right"><b>Item:</b></td>

1055

<td width="100%"><a href="http://layer-acht.org/blog/debian/#1-121"><b>Holger Levsen: Red Cross sued for using the red cross</b>

1056

</a>

1057

</td></tr></table></td></tr></table>

1058

1059

<p> Various newspapers report that the health product giant Johnson & Johnson is suing the Red Cross for using the red cross as a logo. Johnson & Johnson registered the trademark in 1887, six years after the us-american Red Cross started to use it. Needless to say, that a red cross has been in use for much longer and that european Red Cross associations also exist for quite some more years.</p>

1060

1061

1062

1063

</table>

1064

1065

1066

1067

1068

1069

1070

<b>Planet Debian</b>

1071

</a>

1072

</td></tr><tr><td align="right"><b>Item:</b></td>

1073

<td width="100%"><a href="http://www.golden-gryphon.com/blog/manoj//blog/2007/08/20/Mail_Filtering_with_CRM114__58___Part_4.html"><b>Manoj Srivastava: Mail Filtering with CRM114: Part 4</b>

1074

</a>

1075

</td></tr></table></td></tr></table>

1076

1077

<h1>Training the Discriminators</h1>

1078

<p>It has been a while since I posted on this category — actually,

1079

it has been a long while since my last blog. When I <a href="http://www.golden-gryphon.com/blog/manoj//blog/2007/01/14/Mail_Filtering_with_CRM114_Part_3.html">last</a>

1080

left you, I had mail (mbox format) folders called <em>ham</em>

1081

and/or <em>junk</em>, which were ready to be used for training

1082

either <strong>CRM114</strong> or <strong>Spamassassin</strong> or

1083

both.</p>

1084

<h2>Setting up Spamassassin</h2>

1085

<p>This post lays the groundwork for the training, and details how

1086

things are set up. The first part is setting up

1087

<strong>Spamassassin</strong>. One of the things that bothered me

1088

about the default settings for <strong>Spamassassin</strong> was

1089

how swiftly Bayes information was expired; indeed, it seems really

1090

eager to dumb the Bayes information (don’t they trust their

1091

engine?). I have spent some effort building a large corpus, and

1092

keeping ti clean, but <strong>Spamassassin</strong> would discard

1093

most of the information from the DB after training over my corpus,

1094

and the decrease in accuracy was palpable. To prevent this

1095

information from leeching away, I firstly increased the size of the

1096

database, and turned off automatic expiration, by putting the

1097

following lines into <em>~/.spamassassin/user_prefs</em>:</p>

1098

<pre>

1099

<code>bayes_expiry_max_db_size 4000000

1100

bayes_auto_expire 0

1101

</code>

1102

</pre>

1103

<p>I also have regularly updated spam rules from the <a href="http://www.rulesemporium.com/">spamassassin rules emporium</a> to

1104

improve the efficiency of the rules; my current <a href="http://www.golden-gryphon.com/blog/manoj///software/misc/user_prefs.html">user_prefs</a> is available as an

1105

example.</p>

1106

<h2>Initial training</h2>

1107

<p>I keep my <em>Spam/Ham</em> corpus under the directory

1108

<code>/backup/classify/Done</code>, in the subdirectories

1109

<code>Ham</code> and <code>Spam</code>. At the time of writing, I

1110

have approximately 20,000 mails in each of these subdirectories,

1111

for a total of 41,000+ emails.</p>

1112

<p>I have created a couple of scripts to train the discriminators

1113

from scratch using the extant Spam corpus; and these scripts are

1114

also used for re-learning, for instance, when I moved from a 32-bit

1115

machine to a 64-bit one, or when I change <strong>CRM114</strong>

1116

discrimators. I generally run them from

1117

<code>~/.spamassassin/</code> and <code>~/var/lib/crm114</code>

1118

(which contains my <strong>CRM114</strong> setup) directories.</p>

1119

<p>I have found that training <strong>Spamassassin</strong> works

1120

best if you alternate Spam and Ham message chunks; and <a href="http://www.golden-gryphon.com/blog/manoj///software/misc/re-learn-sa.html">this Spamassassin learning

1121

script</a> delivers chunks of 50 messages for learning.</p>

1122

<p>With <strong>CRM114</strong>, I have discovered that it is not a

1123

good idea to stop learning based on the number of times the corpus

1124

has been gone over; since stopping before all messages i the Corpus

1125

are correctly handled is also disastrous. So I set the repeat count

1126

to a ridiculously high number, and tell <code>mailtrainer</code> to

1127

continue training until a streak larger than the sum of Spam and

1128

Ham messages has occurred. <a href="http://www.golden-gryphon.com/blog/manoj///software/misc/re-learn-crm114.html">This CRM114 trainer

1129

script</a> does the hob nicely; running it under

1130

<code>screen</code> is highly recommend.</p>

1131

<h1>Routine updates</h1>

1132

<p>Coming back to where we left off, we had mail (mbox format)

1133

folders called <em>ham</em> and/or <em>junk</em> sitting in the

1134

local mail delivery directory, which were ready to be used for

1135

training either <strong>CRM114</strong> or

1136

<strong>Spamassassin</strong> or both.</p>

1137

<p>There are two scripts that help me automate the training. The

1138

first script, called <a href="http://www.golden-gryphon.com/blog/manoj///software/misc/mail-process.html">mail-process</a>, does most of

1139

the heavy listing. This processes a bunch of mail folders, which

1140

are supposed to contain mail which is either all ham or all spam,

1141

indicated by the command line arguments. We go looking though every

1142

mail, and any mail where either the <strong>CRM114</strong> or the

1143

<strong>Spamassassin</strong> judgement was not what we expected,

1144

we strip out mail gathering headers, and then we save the mail, one

1145

to a file, and we train the approprite filter. This ensures that we

1146

only train on error, and it does not matter if we accidentally try

1147

to train on correctly classified mail, since that would be a no-op

1148

(apart from increasing the size of the corpus).</p>

1149

<p>The second script, called <a href="http://www.golden-gryphon.com/blog/manoj///software/misc/mproc.html">mproc</a> is a convenience front-end;

1150

it just calls <code>mail-process</code> with the proper command

1151

line arguments, and feeds them the <em>ham</em> and <em>junk</em>

1152

in sequence; and takes no arguments. So, after human

1153

classification, just calling <code>mproc</code> does the

1154

classification.</p>

1155

<p>This pretty much finishes the series of posts I had in mind

1156

about spam filtering, I hope it has been useful.</p>

1157

1158

1159

1160

</table>

1161

1162

1163

1164

1165

1166

1167

<b>Planet Debian</b>

1168

</a>

1169

</td></tr><tr><td align="right"><b>Item:</b></td>

1170

<td width="100%"><a href="http://base0.net/archives/322-Things-That-I-Wish-Remember-The-Milk-Had.html"><b>Michael Janssen: Things That I Wish Remember The Milk Had</b>

1171

</a>

1172

</td></tr></table></td></tr></table>

1173

1174

<br/>

1175

A little bit ago I <a href="http://base0.net/archives/319-Dont-you-dun-dun-dun-da-dun-dun-forget-about-me.html">blogged</a> about how I was using <a href="http://rmilk.com">Remember The Milk</a> in order to get some things done around the house and to remind me about stuff that I want to do. Things have been going pretty well on that account, I have been using it to great effect for basically everything that I need to do outside of things that I need to get done at Honeywell (I keep a separate todo list for there). However, when using it these past weeks, I have noticed a few things that I wish it would have or things that could be improved upon, I think in a big way.<br />

1176

<br />

1177

I think the twitter interface should have some enhancements. For example, it is impossible currently to mark off an item that repeats through twitter, because you always have more than one of them on your list. I would love to do this with daily tasks so that I can mark them off as soon as I finish them with a few button presses on my cell phone. Also it would be nice to be able to add things to lists and not just the INBOX through twitter. Possibly another command starting with '!' that takes a keyword.<br />

1178

<br />

1179

Remember the milk has as a major component the map of locations that items in a list can be placed at. There are a couple improvements that I would like in this area. The first is to have multiple locations that are all just as valid in order to complete the task. Remembering the Milk (the actual task) is a great example. There are literally hundreds of places that I could get milk, and two or three of them that I use regularly, depending on which one I am driving by at the moment. If you could place these three markets in a group of some sort, then they could all be associated with the item and you could see it on your mobile or however you're viewing the map.<br />

1180

<br />

1181

The other map improvement is fairly simple - offer to give me directions from one place to another. I don't know how to drive to a random location I've just put in because it is where I need to drop my car or pick someone up or whatever, and a small link to a google maps directions would be nice. Even just a link to google maps (where I could then click on the "directions from..." link) would be a big improvement.<br />

1182

<br />

1183

The last improvement that would be nice is to be able to click on the URL or visit the site in the URL field for tasks in some way. Currently the URL field is pretty useless as a URL, because there is no way to click it and actually visit the site. If I click on it, the editing field pops up and I have to do all the hard work myself of cutting and pasting the URL into the location field. It's also a mis-cue because the URL looks like a link before I click it, just like I could click on it as I want to. A keyboard shortcut for visiting the site would be nice as well since I do use the keyboard interface quite a bit.<br />

1184

<br />

1185

These improvements I think would make a big difference to RTM users. The map improvements alone would be a big upgrade in my opinion. As for now, I will continue to use RTM whether these are implemented or not - it's a good way to keep an online list in any case. It's kept me writing blog posts at the rate of about once every two days. Not sure if that's a good thing or not yet..

1186

1187

1188

1189

<tr><td align="right"><font color="#ababab">Author:</font>  </td><td><font color="#ababab">nospam@example.com (Jamuraa)</font></td></tr>

1190

</table>

1191

1192

1193

1194

1195

1196

1197

<b>Planet Debian</b>

1198

</a>

1199

</td></tr><tr><td align="right"><b>Item:</b></td>

1200

<td width="100%"><a href="http://www.chris-lamb.co.uk/2007/08/20/fred-ewww/"><b>Chris Lamb: “Eww”</b>

1201

</a>

1202

</td></tr></table></td></tr></table>

1203

1204

<p><a href="http://bakery.cakephp.org/articles/view/obvious-trick-to-reduce-amount-of-habtm-relationship-tables-1">This</a> is not how to do HABTM (ie. “<em>many-many</em>“) database joins.</p>

1205

1206

1207

1208

</table>

1209

1210

1211

1212

1213

1214

1215

<b>Planet Debian</b>

1216

</a>

1217

</td></tr><tr><td align="right"><b>Item:</b></td>

1218

<td width="100%"><a href="http://www.cs.sfu.ca/~camerond/personal/blog/posts/Aug-19-2007.html"><b>Cameron Dale: DebTorrent Release 0.1.4 (and apt-transport-debtorrent 0.1.0)</b>

1219

</a>

1220

</td></tr></table></td></tr></table>

1221

1222

<p>The <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/frs/?group_id=31109">next release</a> of <a href="http://debtorrent.alioth.debian.org/">DebTorrent</a> is now available. This

1223

release includes new functionality for communicating with APT using

1224

a new transport method specifically designed for debtorrent, and

1225

many bug fixes.</p>

1226

1227

<p>The major changes in this release are all in the communication

1228

between APT and DebTorrent. The HTTP server in DebTorrent that

1229

listens for APT requests has been upgraded to support HTTP/1.1

1230

persistent connections and pipelining, which allows APT to have

1231

multiple outstanding requests for files. This is useful as

1232

DebTorrent suffers from the typical bittorrent slow start, so

1233

requesting multiple files at a time helps to speed up the download

1234

considerably.</p>

1235

1236

<p>Though better, HTTP/1.1 is not ideal for DebTorrent however, as a

1237

maximum of 10 outstanding requests is maintained by APT's http

1238

method, and files must still be returned in the order they were

1239

requested (which is not ideal for bittorrent-type downloading since

1240

downloads occur randomly).</p>

1241

1242

<p>To further improve the APT communication I have modified APT's http

1243

method to create a debtorrent method. This new debtorrent transport

1244

for APT is packaged separately as apt-transport-debtorrent, and once

1245

installed APT can be told to use it by replacing "http://" with

1246

"debtorrent://" in your sources.list file. This method sends all

1247

requests it receives immediately to DebTorrent, and will receive

1248

responses from DebTorrent in any order. You can find this new method

1249

on the <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/frs/?group_id=31109">Alioth project</a>, or in my <a href="http://debian.camrdale.org/">personal repository</a>

1250

(only amd64 and i386 versions are currently available).</p>

1251

1252

<p>Unfortunately, the story doesn't end here. The APT code responsible

1253

for sending requests to the method also limits the maximum number of

1254

outstanding requests that it will send to the method to 10, which is

1255

not really necessary since all existing methods limit the requests

1256

they send out themselves. I have therefore patched the current APT

1257

code to increase this limit to 1000 (a one line change), and

1258

released this patched version as 0.7.6-0.1. You can find this

1259

patched version in my <a href="http://debian.camrdale.org/">personal repository</a> (again, only for

1260

i386 and amd64). I have tested it with the other methods available

1261

and it causes no problems, and I hope to get the change included in

1262

the regular APT code soon.</p>

1263

1264

1265

1266

<ul>

1267

<li>new DebTorrent over HTTP = fast</li>

1268

<li>new DebTorrent with new apt-transport-debtorrent = faster</li>

1269

<li>new DebTorrent with new apt-transport-debtorrent and a patched

1270

APT = fastest</li>

1271

</ul>

1272

1273

<p>The last DebTorrent version (0.1.3.1) is currently in the <a href="http://ftp-master.debian.org/new.html">NEW

1274

queue</a>, and judging by the length of it, will be there for about

1275

another week. After DebTorrent is added to the archive, I will be

1276

upgrading it to this new version. I also hope to get the new

1277

apt-transport-debtorrent package into the NEW queue soon.</p>

1278

1279

<p>This brings to an end the Google <a href="http://code.google.com/soc/2007/">Summer of Code</a> (which this

1280

project was <a href="http://code.google.com/soc/2007/debian/appinfo.html?csaid=46454031B77ABCBA">created as a part of</a>), but development of

1281

DebTorrent will of course continue (probably a little slower). The

1282

next major change will be the addition of <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebTorrent/UniquePieces">unique piece

1283

numbers</a>, which is almost complete but needs to be extensively

1284

tested. I'd like to thank Anthony Towns, Steve McIntyre, and Michael

1285

Vogt for their help over the last 4 months, and also the many others

1286

who sent me encouraging emails or engaged in interesting discussions

1287

about this project. It's the people who make a project like this a

1288

fun and memorable thing to do.</p>

1289

1290

<p>Here's the changelog for the new DebTorrent release:</p>

1291

1292

<ul>

1293

<li>APT communication supports HTTP/1.1 connections, including

1294

persistent connections and pipelining</li>

1295

<li>Add support for the new debtorrent APT transport method

1296

(see the new apt-transport-debtorrent package)</li>

1297

<li>Make the Packages decompression and torrent creation threaded</li>

1298

<li>Improve the startup initialization of files</li>

1299

<li>Add init and configuration files for the tracker</li>

1300

<li>bug fixes:

1301

<ul>

1302

<li>restarts would fail when downloaded files have been modified</li>

1303

<li>deleting old cached data would fail</li>

1304

<li>small tracker bug causing exceptions</li>

1305

<li>prevent enabling files before the initialization is complete</li>

1306

<li>only connect to unique peers from the tracker that are not

1307

already connected</li>

1308

<li>tracker would return all torrents' peers for every request</li>

1309

</ul></li>

1310

</ul>

1311

1312

1313

1314

</table>

1315

1316

1317

1318

1319

1320

1321

<b>Planet Debian</b>

1322

</a>

1323

</td></tr><tr><td align="right"><b>Item:</b></td>

1324

<td width="100%"><a href="http://etbe.coker.com.au/2007/08/20/controlling-a-stonith-and-upgrading-a-cluster/"><b>Russell Coker: Controlling a STONITH and Upgrading a Cluster</b>

1325

</a>

1326

</td></tr></table></td></tr></table>

1327

1328

<p>One situation that you will occasionally encounter when running a <a href="http://www.linux-ha.org/">Heartbeat cluster</a> is a need to prevent a STONITH of a node. As documented in <a href="http://etbe.coker.com.au/2007/07/17/testing-stonith/">my previous post about testing STONITH</a> the ability to STONITH nodes is very important in an operating cluster. However when the sys-admin is performing maintenance on the system or programmers are working on a development or test system it can be rather annoying.</p>

1329

<p>One example of where STONITH is undesired is when upgrading packages of software related to the cluster services. If during a package upgrade the data files and programs related to the <a href="http://etbe.coker.com.au/2007/06/08/heartbeat-service-scripts/">OCF script</a> are not synchronised (EG you have two programs that interact and upgrading one requires upgrading the other) at the moment that the <b>status</b> operation is run then an error may occur which may trigger a STONITH. Another possibility is that if using small systems for testing or development (EG running a cluster under Xen with minimal RAM assigned to each node) then a package upgrade may cause the system to thrash which might then cause a timeout of the status scripts (a problem I encounter when upgrading my Xen test instances that have 64M of RAM).</p>

1330

<p>If a STONITH occurs during the process of a package upgrade then you are likely to have consistency problems with the OS due to <a href="http://etbe.coker.com.au/2007/07/02/committing-data-to-disk/">RPM and DPKG not correctly calling fsync()</a>, this can cause the OCF scripts to always fail to run the <b>status</b> command which can cause an infinite loop of the cluster nodes in question being STONITHed. Incidentally the best way to test for this (given the problems of a STONITH sometimes losing log data) is to boot the node in question without Heartbeat running and then run the OCF status commands manually (<a href="http://etbe.coker.com.au/2007/08/03/starting-a-heartbeat-resource-without-heartbeat/">I previously documented three ways of doing this</a>).</p>

1331

<p>Of course the ideal (and recommended) way of solving this problem is to migrate all services from a node using the <b>crm_resource</b> program. But in a test or development situation you may forget to migrate all services or simply forget to run the migration before the package upgrade starts. In that case the best thing to do is to be able to remove the ability to call STONITH . For my testing I use Xen and have the nodes <a href="http://etbe.coker.com.au/2007/06/24/xen-and-heartbeat/">ssh to the Dom0 to call STONITH</a>, so all I have to do to remove the STONITH ability is to stop the ssh daemon on the Dom0. For a more serious test network (EG using IPMI or an equivalent technology to perform a hardware STONITH as well as ssh for OS level STONITH on a private network) a viable option might be to shut down the switch port used for such operations - shutting down switch ports is not a nice thing to do, but to allow you to continue work on a development environment without hassle it’s a reasonable hack.</p>

1332

<p>When choosing your method of STONITH it’s probably worth considering what the possibilities are for temporarily disabling it - preferably without having to walk to the server room.</p>

1333

<p class="akst_link"><a href="http://etbe.coker.com.au/?p=356&akst_action=share-this" title="E-mail this, post to del.icio.us, etc." id="akst_link_356" class="akst_share_link" rel="nofollow">Share This</a>

1334

</p>

1335

1336

1337

1338

</table>

1339

1340

1341

1342

1343

1344

1345

<b>Planet Debian</b>

1346

</a>

1347

</td></tr><tr><td align="right"><b>Item:</b></td>

1348

<td width="100%"><a href="http://web.glandium.org/blog/?p=158"><b>Mike Hommey: New WebKit snapshot (almost) in unstable</b>

1349

</a>

1350

</td></tr></table></td></tr></table>

1351

1352

<p>Along with a <a href="http://people.debian.org/~glandium/epiphany-browser_2.19.90-0.1_i386.changes">new epiphany release</a> using it as backend, I prepared a <a href="http://people.debian.org/~glandium/webkit_0~svn25144-1_i386.changes">new WebKit snapshot</a>, which is now waiting in NEW for some ftp-master attention. Unfortunately, while webkit now has the necessary symbols for back and forward buttons, it seems not to work properly. Scrollbars are also not yet displayed. I’ll have to take a look at these some day, if upstream doesn’t do it before me.</p>

1353

<p>I also set up a git repository to hold the <a href="http://git.debian.org/?p=pkg-webkit/webkit.git;a=summary">debian branch</a>, following the already existing <a href="http://git.debian.org/?p=pkg-webkit/upstream.git;a=summary">git repository tracking upstream</a>. Note the <em>filtered</em> branch, which avoids the debian branch to contain what we don’t ship, and reduce the download size from 100MB+ to roughly 16MB. I’ll write more about this filtering in a few days.</p>

1354

<p>Also, if you’re interested in webkit and/or want to give a hand, you can subscribe to the <a href="http://web.glandium.org/blog/ http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/pkg-webkit-maintainers">pkg-webkit-maintainers mailing list</a>. Everything is ready for team maintenance, so, don’t hesitate ;).</p>

1355

<p>If you want to track changes on the debian repo, there is also a <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/pkg-webkit-commits">pkg-webkit-commits mailing list</a> where the post-receive hook sends the commit messages.

1356

</p>

1357

1358

1359

1360

</table>

1361

1362

1363

1364

1365

1366

1367

<b>Planet Debian</b>

1368

</a>

1369

</td></tr><tr><td align="right"><b>Item:</b></td>

1370

<td width="100%"><a href="http://blog.orebokech.com/2007/08/bzip2-compression-in-debs.html"><b>Romain Francoise: bzip2 compression in debs</b>

1371

</a>

1372

</td></tr></table></td></tr></table>

1373

1374

<br/>

1375

During my <a href="http://blog.orebokech.com/2007/08/debian-packages-without-md5sums.html">previous adventures</a> with the Debian archive, I found that two packages in the archive use bzip2 compression inside the .deb instead of the traditional gzip compression, so I decided to try it out on emacs-snapshot (one of my larger packages). The combined size of the deb files goes from 36764KB to 33880KB, a 2884KB (7.8%) difference. It also makes both <tt>lintian</tt> and <tt>linda</tt> unhappy, the former gives me the following error:<pre>E: emacs-snapshot-nox: deb-data-member-wrongly-compressed<br />N:<br />N: The binary package contains a data member not compressed with gzip.<br />N: From dpkg-dev 1.11 on, you can configure the way the data tarball is<br />N: compressed. Though this is possible, you are not allowed to use it<br />N: before dpkg 1.11 (or later) enters stable.</pre>and <tt>linda</tt> just bombs:<pre>E: emacs-snapshot-common; Package uses a newer feature of dpkg.<br /> This package uses a data.tar, or data.tar.bz2 member of the .deb. This<br /> was introduced in dpkg 1.11, but is not allowed to be used until dpkg<br /> 1.11 or later hits stable.<br />File ...3_all.deb failed to process: Level 2 unpacking failed:<br />Could not unpack data tarball</pre>Etch was released with dpkg 1.13.25, so bzip2 compression is probably allowed now. But is a 7.8% saving worth the incompatibility price? I'm not sure.

1376

1377

1378

1379

</table>

1380

1381

1382

1383

1384

1385

1386

<b>Planet Debian</b>

1387

</a>

1388

</td></tr><tr><td align="right"><b>Item:</b></td>

1389

<td width="100%"><a href="http://adam.rosi-kessel.org/weblog/2007/08/19/solid-state-kitchen-linux-box/"><b>Adam Rosi-Kessel: Solid State Kitchen Linux Box</b>

1390

</a>

1391

</td></tr></table></td></tr></table>

1392

1393

<p>Dear LazyWeb:</p>

1394

<p>Our kitchen laptop is on its last legs. I’d like to replace it with a standalone LCD and a cheap, quiet, low-power CPU with just one or two gigabytes of storage for the operating system (music and other data are stored on a server in the basement). Can someone point me in the right direction? This is an instance where Google doesn’t provide an obvious leading/consensus solution. Most searches for solid state computers point to laptops, which isn’t what I want. The closest thing I’ve found is the <a href="http://zonbu.com/device/">Zonbox</a>, but I’m not interested in their network/subscription storage model. Ideal specs:</p>

1395

<ul>

1396

<li>Total cost less than $300 (preferably less than $200)</li>

1397

<li>High-end Pentium III or lower-end Pentium IV, or equivalent. Should be able to play ogg files and browse today’s overactive websites at the same time without user latency. No need to support graphics-intensive applications like gaming or video editing.</li>

1398

<li>Built-in wireless networking. Support for a PCMCIA wireless card would also be acceptable. Most data will be accessed via an NFS share on the WAN.</li>

1399

<li>1GB or 2GB of Flash memory for storage.</li>

1400

<li>Standard VGA out, preferably at least 1280×1024 (although 1024×768 would be okay).</li>

1401

<li>USB ports for keyboard, mouse, possibly external hard drive storage when needed.</li>

1402

<li>Painless Debian/Ubuntu installation, including out-of-the-box suspend/resume functionality.</li>

1403

</ul>

1404

<p>Suggestions?

1405

<p class="akst_link"><a href="http://adam.rosi-kessel.org/weblog/?p=564&akst_action=share-this" title="E-mail this, post to del.icio.us, etc." id="akst_link_564" class="akst_share_link" rel="nofollow">Share This</a></p></p>

1406

1407

1408

1409

</table>

1410

1411

1412

1413

1414

1415

1416

<b>Planet Debian</b>

1417

</a>

1418

</td></tr><tr><td align="right"><b>Item:</b></td>

1419

<td width="100%"><a href="http://natalian.org/archives/2007/08/19/sharing-multimedia/"><b>Kai Hendry: Sharing multimedia</b>

1420

</a>

1421

</td></tr></table></td></tr></table>

1422

1423

1424

1425

<p>Ok, I have the <a href="http://natalian.org/archives/2007/07/03/slug/">slug</a>. It’s great because it allows me to easily & reliably share my multimedia collection.</p>

1426

1427

<p>So I’ve moved my multimedia collection to a massive hard drive attached to the slug and now that hard drive is full. I could buy an even bigger <span class="caps">NAS</span>, though wait a minute…</p>

1428

1429

<p>I have GIGs of (wasted) free space across my (flat mate’s) machines.</p>

1430

1431

<p>Wtf happened to <span class="caps">P2P</span>? I need something like what Google has.</p>

1432

<ul>

1433

<li>A distributed file system.</li>

1434

<li>With search.</li>

1435

<li>It doesn’t have to work across on the Internet, though listening to some remote friend’s music would be nice.</li>

1436

<li>Any level of data redundancy would be awesome. (I despise <span class="caps">RAID</span>)</li>

1437

<li>I want direct access from the FS. No odd interfaces. (something with fuse?)</li>

1438

</ul>

1439

1440

<p>I distantly recall mounting <span class="caps">NFS</span> shares of each of my (friend’s) machines and then mounting them on the central slug and trying to re-share them. I don’t think that works.</p>

1441

1442

<p>I remember in University dorms (I’m not telling where!), students had a massive multimedia share with Windows file sharing. It actually worked quite well, including search.</p>

1443

1444

<p>Any tips lazyweb? Or are centralised services really the future?</p>

1445

1446

1447

1448

</table>

1449

1450

1451

1452

1453

1454

1455

<b>Planet Debian</b>

1456

</a>

1457

</td></tr><tr><td align="right"><b>Item:</b></td>

1458

<td width="100%"><a href="http://www.grep.be/blog/en/computer/play/ldap_addressbooks"><b>Wouter Verhelst: "empty" LDAP addressbooks</b>

1459

</a>

1460

</td></tr></table></td></tr></table>

1461

1462

<p>Bernhard R. Link <a href="http://pcpool00.mathematik.uni-freiburg.de/~brl/blog/index.html#22">blogs</a>

1463

about LDAP addressbooks in Thunderb^WIcedove, and mentions:</p>

1464

1465

Also don't be confused by no records shown in the new addressbook. I

1466

guess that is some measure against always loading a possibly large

1467

remote addressbook. To test just enter anything in the search field, and

1468

the matching records should show up nicely. (I'm not sure if all

1469

versions allow searching for substrings. If they do, try searching for

1470

the at sign, to get a full list.)

1471

</blockquote>

1472

<p>Actually, the reason is that an LDAP server is not a database, and it

1473

is not required to return the full list of matching items of a search,

1474

if that list is sufficiently large (I believe the RFC suggests a minimum

1475

of 100 items to be returned); this is to avoid people DoSsing the LDAP

1476

server by accident. It also means that the suggestion to search for the

1477

at sign to get all items in the directory may not work.</p>

1478

1479

1480

1481

</table>

1482

1483

1484

1485

1486

1487

1488

<b>Planet Debian</b>

1489

</a>

1490

</td></tr><tr><td align="right"><b>Item:</b></td>

1491

<td width="100%"><a href="http://layer-acht.org/blog/debian/#1-120"><b>Holger Levsen: again</b>

1492

</a>

1493

</td></tr></table></td></tr></table>

1494

1495

<p> Again I have 99 unread mails in my mailbox ;-) <br /><br /> More than two weeks ago I watched <a href="http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=973149761529535925">Inbox zero</a>, which I recommend you to watch if you have problems coping with your inbox, even if it mostly boils down to "getting things done". <br /><br /> /me smiles and continues to update tuxmath :-)</p>

1496

1497

1498

1499

</table>

1500

1501

1502

1503

1504

1505

1506

<b>Planet Debian</b>

1507

</a>

1508

</td></tr><tr><td align="right"><b>Item:</b></td>

1509

<td width="100%"><a href="http://healthhacker.org/satoroams/?p=814"><b>Biella Coleman: The Lingering Memories of War</b>

1510

</a>

1511

</td></tr></table></td></tr></table>

1512

1513

<p>As many readers of this blog know, I tend not to shy away from writing about my mother’s struggle with Alzheimers. But in the last 6 months and especially since I paid my last visit to my mother, I have found it much harder to sit and write about her current state of affairs. If we think of Alzheimers as a journey to a new place, she is almost at the point of reaching that place of great loneliness and inhospitality, which is not only new and different—both for her and those around her—but is a virtual prison, for it rarely allows you to leave and visit the places of your past. </p>

1514

<p>More than ever, her memory and understanding of her life as she (as I and many others), once knew it, is fading fast; Of course, this was to be expected but it is quite difficult to imagine what it will be like until the actual experience unmistakably knocks on the door of present time and unfortunately, when it knocks, you can’t do anything but open the door and let it in. </p>

1515

<p>Unsurprisingly, it is incredibly difficult to witness and interact with a person who is losing most all recollections, the stuff of which, you come to realize, is what defines a person and allows you to more or less have the opportunity to seamlessly interact with him or her. </p>

1516

<p>In the last number of months, I have perhaps been more silent than usual because there is only so much I can and want to think about when it comes to my mother’s decline. I talk to her nearly every day and I have decided for now, that is enough. </p>

1517

<p>But I am retreating out of my silence after reading a refreshingly honest, though still somewhat timid piece on Alzheimer in the NYTimes, entitled <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/14/health/14seco.html?ei=5087%0A&em=&en=d0e729d8196a22f5&ex=1187323200&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1187185170-Ko4yCS2ohzKBDSRKCdNbfQ "> Zen and the Art of Coping With Alzheimer’s<br />

1518

</a></p>

1519

<p>The piece is striking because it offers a more realistic portrayal of the disease than most mainstream media accounts and it provides some really sound advice about the importance of just letting go and going with the flow when interacting with those with Alzheimers.</p>

1520

<p>At the same time, it lacks a certain window into just how disheartening and hard it can be to witness the decline, and how hard it can be to manage those conversations and interactions. </p>

1521

<p>On the whole, I try to go with the flow. For example, I recently returned from a visit and soon after I left, my mother forgot I was even there. She started to ask me over and over again when I was coming home for a visit and when I told her I was just there, her semi-humorous reaction was “well, why didn’t anyone tell me?” (and then proceeded to castigate her caretaker for not telling her!!). </p>

1522

<p>Perhaps I did not stay long enough, or perhaps her lack of recall would happen no matter what. To hear she forgot shook me hard and deeply. The first time I realized she could not remember I had just visited, I was able to jog her memory by listing off all that we did together. Finally, when I mentioned that I bought a new refrigerator while in PR, something clicked. She is still worried about money, so buying a refrigerator was enough to remind her I had spent a lot of money.</p>

1523

<p>But after it was clear that she felt quite bad about not remembering, I knew that was the first and last time I would try to “jog” her memory. Instead, I will merge and mold my reality to her reality, as much as I can and assure her that I will soon visit.<br />

1524

1525

1526

1527

1528

</table>

1529

1530

1531

1532

1533

1534

1535

<b>Planet Debian</b>

1536

</a>

1537

</td></tr><tr><td align="right"><b>Item:</b></td>

1538

<td width="100%"><a href="http://www.sukria.net/en/archives/2007/08/19/the-road-to-libdevel-repl-perl-part-2/"><b>Alexis Sukrieh: The road to libdevel-repl-perl, part 2</b>

1539

</a>

1540

</td></tr></table></td></tr></table>

1541

1542

<p>Thanks to Florian Ragwitz, <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=438569">who packaged libpadwalker-perl 1.5-1</a>, there is no blocker anymore that prevents libdevel-repl-perl from entering sid:</p>

1543

1544

<p>By the way, the author of Devel::REPL, Matt S Trout, <a href="http://chainsawblues.vox.com/library/post/devel-repl-going-into-debian-apparently.html">looks pretty happy to see his module entering Debian</a>.</p>

1545

<p>I’ve just uploaded libdevel-repl-perl, this upload closes the exciting work session we did during all the weekend with Damyan Ivanov, in order to get the module into debian. All its dependencies are now in the Perl group’s hands. That was fun.</p>

1546

<p>Team maintenance rocks!

1547

</p>

1548

1549

1550

1551

</table>

1552

1553

1554

1555

1556

1557

1558

<b>Planet Debian</b>

1559

</a>

1560

</td></tr><tr><td align="right"><b>Item:</b></td>

1561

<td width="100%"><a href="http://www.burtonini.com/blog/computers/minipc-2007-08-19-12-00"><b>Ross Burton: Mini PC Loveliness</b>

1562

</a>

1563

</td></tr></table></td></tr></table>

1564

1565

<p>

1566

I've just discovered the <a href="http://minipc.aopen.com/Global/spec.htm">AOpen MP965-DR mini PC</a>,

1567

and blimey it's lovely. Does anyone out there run have one? If I got one

1568

it would be under the television and always on, so heat and noise are

1569

important factors to me.

1570

</p>

1571

1572

1573

1574

</table>

1575

1576

1577

1578

1579

1580

1581

<b>Planet Debian</b>

1582

</a>

1583

</td></tr><tr><td align="right"><b>Item:</b></td>

1584

<td width="100%"><a href="http://mjr.towers.org.uk/blog/2007/cycling#hhracing"><b>MJ Ray: Hamburg Classic</b>

1585

</a>

1586

</td></tr></table></td></tr></table>

1587

1588

<p>

1589

1590

are broadcasting the

1591

<a href="http://www.vattenfall-cyclassics.de/elite/">Hamburg Classic</a>

1592

in DVB (digital) and PAL (analogue) at

1593

1594

at 11-14 GMT today, while

1595

1596

at

1597

1598

overlaps at 12.30-15.00 GMT,

1599

presumably including the closing stages.

1600

Notably, this race has excluded Tour de France

1601

winner Contador, apparently as well as

1602

everyone else

1603

even

1604

<strong>mentioned</strong>

1605

in connection with the

1606

Fuentes affair.

1607

</p><p>

1608

Yesterday's last stages of the Burgos

1609

and the Deutschland-Tour seemed

1610

surprisingly unsurprising, with

1611

Juan Mauricio Soler and Jens Voigt

1612

kept their respective leads.

1613

</p>

1614

1615

1616

1617

</table>

1618

1619

1620

1621

1622

1623

1624

<b>Planet Debian</b>

1625

</a>

1626

</td></tr><tr><td align="right"><b>Item:</b></td>

1627

<td width="100%"><a href="http://blog.ganneff.de/blog/2007/08/19#umts"><b>Joerg Jaspert: UMTS?</b>

1628

</a>

1629

</td></tr></table></td></tr></table>

1630

1631

<p>

1632

Im currently looking if a UMTS data connection (flatrate) is something

1633

for me. Looking around it seems Vodafone has the best network for UMTS

1634

with that HSDPA technology (3.6MBit/s max. instead of only 384kbit/s).

1635

Especially the area I am most interested in - my way to work, is only

1636

available with HSDPA from Vodafone, all other telcos dont seem to be

1637

able to get UMTS there. Some days ago I sat besides someone in a train

1638

back home who was using UMTS connection. And didnt seem to have any

1639

problems. When I asked he told me that its fairly stable, on the whole

1640

way he only knows two points where the card seems to switch to the

1641

slower GPRS way. And looking at his screen he was using some weird

1642

webchat thingie, so nothing that likes too huge lags. (Ah, btw - how can

1643

anyone seriously chat in such a weird way? I mean - we have IRC, WTF are

1644

people dumb enough to use their webbrowser to chat? Thats so silly)

1645

</p>

1646

1647

<p>

1648

My main usage would be to be online on the way to work / back home,

1649

which is about 1.5h each, so 3hours on days where I go to work (using

1650

ICEs, so at least there are repeaters for the mobile stuff in the

1651

trains). Most of my online usage is ssh based, usually via (Open)VPNs,

1652

then some mail sync runs and various small things.

1653

</p>

1654

1655

<a href="http://www.moobicent.de/">Moobicent</a> does offer a flatrate

1656

(a real one, not such a “customers are dumb and dont see it is

1657

trafficlimited just because we named it flat”one) using the

1658

Vodafone network. The hardware I need for it costs 99EUR when I order

1659

there. Its some

1660

<a href="http://www.moobicent.de/mobiledsl-flat/hardware/pc-express-card/">PC

1661

Express Card</a> that comes with a PCMCIA Adapter.

1662

1663

1664

<p>

1665

Now, has anyone out there reading this blog experiences to share? Using

1666

google there is

1667

<a href="http://blog.zugschlus.de/archives/114-UMTS-unter-Linux-funktioniert.html">Marcs

1668

blog</a>

1669

which suggests it shouldn’t be too hard to get it all running, but maybe

1670

there is something I missed to take into account?

1671

</p>

1672

1673

<p>

1674

Comments? Suggestions? Anything? <a href="http://planet.debian.org//mailto:joerg@ganneff.de">Email

1675

me</a> or catch me on IRC, (no, my blog doesnt have comments), and I

1676

summarize the results later.

1677

</p>

1678

1679

<b>Update:</b>UMTS == 3G; 2 People already told me that the Vodafone net

1680

is the right selection in Germany, one said the same for UK.

1681

1682

1683

1684

</table>

1685

1686

1687

1688

1689

1690

1691

<b>Planet Debian</b>

1692

</a>

1693

</td></tr><tr><td align="right"><b>Item:</b></td>

1694

<td width="100%"><a href="http://pcpool00.mathematik.uni-freiburg.de/~brl/blog/index.html#22"><b>Bernhard R. Link: Using slapd as thunderbird/icedove addressbook</b>

1695

</a>

1696

</td></tr></table></td></tr></table>

1697

1698

<p> It&aposs been some time since I got this working, but I decided to now

1699

also blog about it here now, as I was just asked it.

1700

1701

The main magic to get thunderbird/icedove use your ldap server as

1702

addressbook, is to include the proper schema. Search the web for

1703

mozillaAbPersonObsolete and you should find it. You do not have to

1704

use any of it&aposs new fields, not even the object class in it is

1705

needed. Your slap only have to know about the field names, then

1706

thunderbird will be able to show the normal inetorgperson&aposs mail

1707

attribute.

1708

1709

Some caveats, though:

1710

1711

You might think you might test your settings in thunderbirds by using

1712

that button to download everything and store it locally.

1713

In my experience that never works but strangly asks for a password, while

1714

the addressbook is already nicely working and needs no password at all.

1715

1716

Also don&apost be confused by no records shown in the new addressbook.

1717

I guess that is some measure against always loading a possibly large

1718

remote addressbook. To test just enter anything in the search field,

1719

and the matching records should show up nicely. (I&aposm not sure if all

1720

versions allow searching for substrings. If they do, try searching for

1721

the at sign, to get a full list.)

1722

1723

The shown fields seem also a bit strange, and differ with the different

1724

mozilla messenger/thunderbird/icedove versions. In some versions the

1725

field the primary name is extracted from can be changed, but directive

1726

to set that seems to change even more often.

1727

1728

Finaly, some snippet for your /etc/icedove/global-config.js, which causes

1729

all newly created users to have an addressbook as default. I forgot if

1730

all are needed or why I added them, but those that are unnecessary at least

1731

do not seem to harm. (Last tested version is the one in etch, though.

1732

Newer version might again have something changed).

1733

1734

<pre>

1735

/* ldap-Server for FOOBAR */

1736

pref("ldap_2.autoComplete.useDirectory", true);

1737

pref("ldap_2.prefs_migrated", true);

1738

pref("ldap_2.servers.mathematik.attrmap.DisplayName", "displayName");

1739

pref("ldap_2.servers.default.attrmap.DisplayName", "displayName");

1740

pref("ldap_2.servers.mathematik.auth.savePassword", true);

1741

pref("ldap_2.servers.mathematik.description", "FOOBAR");

1742

pref("ldap_2.servers.mathematik.filename", "foobar.mab");

1743

pref("ldap_2.servers.mathematik.maxHits", 500);

1744

pref("ldap_2.servers.mathematik.uri", "ldap://HOSTNAME:389/ou=People,dc=FOOBAR,dc=TLD??sub?(mail=*)");

1745

</pre></p>

1746

1747

1748

1749

</table>

1750

1751

1752

1753

1754

1755

1756

<b>Planet Debian</b>

1757

</a>

1758

</td></tr><tr><td align="right"><b>Item:</b></td>

1759

<td width="100%"><a href="http://www.bebt.de/blog/debian/archives/2007/08/19/T09_03_50/index.html"><b>Andreas Metzler: those were the times</b>

1760

</a>

1761

</td></tr></table></td></tr></table>

1762

1763

<p>

1764

Found at the exhibition <i>Play with Technology</i> in

1765

<a href="http://www.tmw.at/">Technisches Museum Wien</a>:</p>

1766

<p>

1767

1768

1769

</a><br />

1770

a small working x-ray machine toy. See <a href="http://www.bebt.de/images/blog/x-ray-text.jpeg">description</a>.

1771

</p>

1772

1773

1774

1775

</table>

1776

1777

1778

1779

1780

1781

1782

<b>Planet Debian</b>

1783

</a>

1784

</td></tr><tr><td align="right"><b>Item:</b></td>

1785

<td width="100%"><a href="http://etbe.coker.com.au/2007/08/19/colorado-software-summit-2007/"><b>Russell Coker: Colorado Software Summit 2007</b>

1786

</a>

1787

</td></tr></table></td></tr></table>

1788

1789

<p>On about 5 years I attended the conference <a href="http://www.softwaresummit.com/">The Colorado Software Summit</a>. The first one was the last conference under the old name (ColoradOS/2) but then as OS/2 was rapidly losing market share and the conference delegates changed their programming interests it changed to become a Java conference.</p>

1790

<p>The Colorado Software Summit rapidly became known as THE event to really learn about Java, other conferences are larger and have a higher profile but the organisers of CSS decided to keep the numbers smaller (600 is usually the maximum number of delegates) to provide better opportunities for the delegates to meet and confer. One of the attractions of CSS is the large number of skilled and experienced people who attend, there are many delegates who can teach you lots of interesting things even though they aren’t on the speaking list. I ended up never doing any serious Java programming, but I still found that I learned enough and had enough fun to justify the expense.</p>

1791

<p>Currently there is an early registration open which saves $200 off the full price ($1,795 instead of $1,995), this lasts until the 31st of August. In addition to this the organisers have offered a further $100 discount to the first five readers of my blog who register personally (IE an individual not a corporation is paying for the ticket). To take advantage of the extra $100 discount you must include the code <b>CSS509907</b> in your registration.</p>

1792

<p>PS I have no financial interest in this matter. I like the conference organisers, but that largely stems from the fact that they run great conferences that I have enjoyed. I recommend the conference because it’s really good.</p>

1793

<p class="akst_link"><a href="http://etbe.coker.com.au/?p=357&akst_action=share-this" title="E-mail this, post to del.icio.us, etc." id="akst_link_357" class="akst_share_link" rel="nofollow">Share This</a>

1794

</p>

1795

1796

1797

1798

</table>

1799

1800

1801

1802

1803

1804

1805

<b>Planet Debian</b>

1806

</a>

1807

</td></tr><tr><td align="right"><b>Item:</b></td>

1808

<td width="100%"><a href="http://www.hogyros.de/?q=node/304"><b>Simon Richter: Hacking</b>

1809

</a>

1810

</td></tr></table></td></tr></table>

1811

1812

<p>Some more hacking and the xcontrol aware "checkbuilddeps" command is nearly done. I have no idea whether using apt to access the package database was a good idea -- those bits that deal with it are hardly readable. On the other hand, directly reading the status database is frowned upon.</p>

1813

<p>Hooray for more abstraction layers.</p>

1814

<p>In other news, there is now a <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/Xcontrol">wiki page for xcontrol</a>.</p>

1815

1816

1817

1818

</table>

1819

1820

1821

1822

1823

1824

1825

<b>Planet Debian</b>

1826

</a>

1827

</td></tr><tr><td align="right"><b>Item:</b></td>

1828

<td width="100%"><a href="http://peter.makholm.net/2007/08/18/libcbtsysinfo_0/"><b>Peter Makholm: libcbtsysinfo_0</b>

1829

</a>

1830

</td></tr></table></td></tr></table>

1831

1832

<p>While testing <a href="http://debian-live.alioth.debian.org">Debian Live</a> I suddenly discovered that something had installed a library in my home directory: <tt>~/cbt/lib/libcbtsysinfo_0.so</tt>.</p>

1833

<p>Google gives two hints: Some discussion on the danish usenet group <a href="http://groups.google.com/group/dk.edb.mac/browse_thread/thread/c8acbc3fa46116ec/9bf9dff1b6cf03bf">dk.edb.mac</a> and some discussion on <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2007/07/msg02432.html">debian-user</a>.</p>

1834

<p>It looks like it get installed when I log into my internet bank. By lookin at the symbols extracted by objdump (a couple of symbols stating with Java_com_ibm_cbt_slight_CbtSysInfo) it seems to be IBM’s <a href="http://www-03.ibm.com/security/products/cbt.shtml">Crypto-base Transaction</a> system.</p>

1835

<p>Evil to install such thing without asking. (Well, it’s a Linux/x86 library even though I’m using Linux/PPC)</p>

1836

1837

1838

1839

</table>

1840

1841

1842

1843

1844

1845

1846

<b>Planet Debian</b>

1847

</a>

1848

</td></tr><tr><td align="right"><b>Item:</b></td>

1849

<td width="100%"><a href="http://base0.net/archives/321-Got-a-camera-rolling-on-your-back.html"><b>Michael Janssen: Got a camera rolling on your back</b>

1850

</a>

1851

</td></tr></table></td></tr></table>

1852

1853

<br/>

1854

For the last few weeks, I've been trying to participate in <a href="http://photojojo.com/content/tutorials/project-365-take-a-photo-a-day/">Project 365</a>. For those that don't know about it, it is the idea of taking one picture a day in order to accomplish.. something. I'm mainly just doing it for fun, and in order to improve my picture-taking skills with my camera phone. I have it walking around everywhere basically, so when I see something interesting, I try to have my phone at the ready. Some times I just take pictures of <a href="http://flickr.com/photos/jamuraa/1161207399/in/set-72157601532004533/">random<a> <a href="http://flickr.com/photos/jamuraa/1162062936/in/set-72157601532004533/">stuff</a>, but others are <a href="http://flickr.com/photos/jamuraa/1012736321/in/set-72157601532004533/">more</a> <a href="http://flickr.com/photos/jamuraa/1088783453/in/set-72157601532004533/">interesting</a>.<br />

1855

<br />

1856

I've found that it's pretty useful for me. If you see the set, you can almost notice a perceptible increase in quality of the photos. It may just be because I'm taking 2-3 photos per day and choosing the best one, or I may be actually improving in my photo-taking abilities. Hopefully by the end of the year, the <a href="http://flickr.com/photos/jamuraa/sets/72157601532004533/">set of mine</a> will actually have more than 300 photos in it.<br />

1857

<br />

1858

The idea of taking a picture a day is quite interesting to me, if only because if you asked me what I was doing last year this time, I would probably give you a general idea because my life is basically boring - I work in an office, even when I'm at school. This way I might have some idea or get reminded. <br />

1859

<br />

1860

I do have a couple of kinks that I would like to work out when I'm doing it though - when I download my photos through Bluetooth using my phone, it sets all of the creation dates to the time that I transfer the photos instead of the time that I took the photos. This means that I need to fiddle with the "taken on" date when I finish uploading the pictures - there's no way to use the <a href="http://flickr.com/tools/">Flickr Uploadr</a> to set the date. This, and the horrible VGA camera that I have in the phone make it tempting for me to buy a new phone with a better camera and tools for transferring. Also, some days I just stay in, and don't do anything interesting, so I don't have anything interesting or different to take a picture of. I'm thinking of just taking a <a href="http://flickr.com/photos/jamuraa/1012736547/in/set-72157601532004533/">self-portrait</a> on those days, but I'm not sure that it would be interesting enough.</a></a>

1861

1862

1863

1864

<tr><td align="right"><font color="#ababab">Author:</font>  </td><td><font color="#ababab">nospam@example.com (Jamuraa)</font></td></tr>

1865

</table>

1866

1867

1868

1869

1870

1871

1872

<b>Planet Debian</b>

1873

</a>

1874

</td></tr><tr><td align="right"><b>Item:</b></td>

1875

<td width="100%"><a href="http://journal.dedasys.com/articles/2007/08/18/business-friendly"><b>David Welton: Business Friendly</b>

1876

</a>

1877

</td></tr></table></td></tr></table>

1878

1879

<p>Growing up in Eugene, Oregon, which like Berkeley or Boulder could have the label "People's Republic of" applied to it, I always thought of "business friendly", as something along the lines of helping huge corporations avoid laws against pollution, or other antisocial behavior. Only after moving to Europe did I begin to get an idea of what the very positive side of "business friendly" is in the US.</p>

1880

1881

<p>Truth be told, all countries tend to protect their 'big players' to some degree, be it the US propping up creaking airlines after September 11th, Italy finding various clever ways to get around rules about funding Fiat and Alitalia, or France finding it in their 'national interests' to discourage a potential bid for Danone (yogurt!) by PepsiCo. Some are better or worse (the UK has been pretty good about not interfering), but there is a tendency to want to intervene.</p>

1882

1883

<p>Leaving be the discussion over whether those sorts of policies are good, bad, or ugly, the biggest difference between continental Europe and the US is the ease with which new companies - 'startups' can be created and enter a market.</p>

1884

1885

<p>As a first hand example, I decided this summer to create DedaSys as a real company in order to better separate my business and personal financial dealings. Were I to do that in Italy or Austria, we would be talking about fees upwards of 3000 Euros (about 4000 dollars at market rates), which is a great deal of money for something that is not making a lot of it at this point in time.</p>

1886

1887

<p>Contrast this with what it took to create a Limited Liability Company (LLC) in Oregon, my home state. To have things done up professionally, it's certainly possible to lay down a bit of cash there too, but by trading my time for money, and with the assistance of some nolo.com books about the creation and maintenance of an LLC, I was able to register DedaSys with the state of Oregon for the grand total of 55 dollars, and was actually able to complete the process remotely from Austria prior to going home on vacation, where I did the only thing I needed to do in person: open a bank account.</p>

1888

1889

<p>So it costs 1% of what it costs in Italy or Austria to open a company that provides limited liability... a very impressive difference, especially to a small, new company that does not have the connections a Ford or a Fiat will likely have to enable it to deal with all the other paperwork, rules, and regulations to deal with.</p>

1890

1891

<p>Add to that a culture of greater risk taking (meaning also more acceptance of failure), better funding opportunities, and... one comes to the conclusion that <a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/america.html">Paul Graham is right</a>. It's a pity, because the people in Europe are top notch. In Italy alone, I know a bunch of really bright hackers. Granted, some of them aren't interested, and are probably better off not starting a company or otherwise dealing with the business side of the equation, but it's always nice to have that opportunity.</p>

1892

1893

<p>In closing, here is another example of bureaucracy in action, from my personal on line journal about life in Italy, and now Austria, which I recently revamped by moving it to the Typo platform:</p>

1894

1895

<p><a href="http://padovachronicles.welton.it/articles/2007/08/18/confronting-the-bureaucratic-beast-registering-an-italian-domain">Confronting the bureaucratic beast - registering an Italian domain</a></p>

1896

1897

<p>Two months to accomplish what can be done in ten minutes with a <code>.com</code>!</p>

1898

1899

1900

1901

</table>

1902

1903

1904

1905

1906

1907

1908

<b>Planet Debian</b>

1909

</a>

1910

</td></tr><tr><td align="right"><b>Item:</b></td>

1911

<td width="100%"><a href="http://grmontesino.blogspot.com/2007/08/final-soc-releases.html"><b>Gustavo R. Montesino: Final SoC releases</b>

1912

</a>

1913

</td></tr></table></td></tr></table>

1914

1915

<br/>

1916

I've just finished releasing new versions of all modules related to my Summer of Code project, the Bug Triage and Forward Tool. If my mentor doesn't find any serious bug, these will be the last releases under the SoC flag. Thanks again, Google, for this great program and the progress it brings to Free Software.<br /><br />The releases:<br /><br />bzutils 0.2:<br /><ul><li><a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/bug-triage-devel/2007-August/000006.html">Announcement</a></li> <li><a href="http://alioth.debian.org/frs/download.php/2112/bzutils-0.2.tar.gz">Source .tar.gz</a></li></ul>btsutils 0.3:<br /><ul><li><a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/bug-triage-devel/2007-August/000005.html">Announcement</a></li><li><a href="http://alioth.debian.org/frs/download.php/2111/btsutils-0.3.tar.gz">Source .tar.gz</a></li></ul>bug-triage 0.2.2:<br /><ul><li><a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/bug-triage-devel/2007-August/000007.html">Announcement</a></li><li><a href="http://alioth.debian.org/frs/download.php/2116/bug-triage-0.2.2.tar.gz">Source .tar.gz</a></li></ul>Debian packages should hit the archive as soon as they get evaluated and sponsored. Of course, a full status report will also be posted during the evaluation time.

1917

1918

1919

1920

</table>

1921

1922

1923

1924

1925

1926

1927

<b>Planet Debian</b>

1928

</a>

1929

</td></tr><tr><td align="right"><b>Item:</b></td>

1930

<td width="100%"><a href="http://www.fooishbar.org/blog/life/stonesCorollory-2007-08-18-17-12.html"><b>Daniel Stone: a fit of narcissism</b>

1931

</a>

1932

</td></tr></table></td></tr></table>

1933

1934

<br/>

1935

Courtesy of an article in today's Guardian, I present Stone's Corollary to

1936

<a href="http://www.burtonini.com/blog/life/burtons-low-2007-08-13-19-26">Burton's

1937

Low</a>:<br />

1938

<blockquote>As a discussion about the contribution of vehicles to climate

1939

change grows longer, the probability of stating that China is <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2007/aug/17/china.pollution">putting

1940

1,000 new cars on the road every week</a> approaches one.</blockquote>

1941

<br />

1942

When used as a defence for driving an SUV, I'd also like to invoke the sudden

1943

death variant, where the discussion is finished immediately.

1944

1945

1946

1947

</table>

1948

1949

1950

1951

1952

1953

1954

<b>Planet Debian</b>

1955

</a>

1956

</td></tr><tr><td align="right"><b>Item:</b></td>

1957

<td width="100%"><a href="http://blog.drinsama.de/erich/en/2007081701-skype.html"><b>Erich Schubert: More (ranting) on Skype</b>

1958

</a>

1959

</td></tr></table></td></tr></table>

1960

1961

<p>A couple of people have pointed me to the "Skype DoS exploit code" that has

1962

been published. I had seen that, but I'm not convinced it works as simple

1963

as that. Some of the information around it doesn't make completely sense (such

1964

as using the term 'server', when they're referring to super nodes I guess, and

1965

since supernodes are just regular user machines annexed by the Skype network,

1966

they supposedly run the same software, don't they? So why doesn't it take down

1967

the client the exploit is run on?</p><p>Also I'd bet that someone has tried feeding the Skype client long URIs before;

1968

that is one of the most popular ways of seeing if some software can break.

1969

You know, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffer_overflow">Buffer

1970

Overflow [wikipedia]</a> is probably the most common class of security issues

1971

(maybe second only to PHP programming errors or SQL injection by now, though,

1972

with so many people with too little expertise writing webapps in PHP)</p><p>Others probably are wondering why I'm writing so much "against" Skype.</p><p>There are numerous reasons:

1973

<ul>

1974

<li>The whole P2P thing isn't necessary, they could use real servers</li>

1975

<li>Skype is a pain for every network admin (and thus a users nightmare, since

1976

the admin might decide to just block any traffic that could be Skype, and

1977

enforce the use of HTTP proxies etc. and thus limiting other applications

1978

as well)</li>

1979

<li>Skype uses all kinds of shady coding techniques in their client to obfuscate

1980

what their application is actually doing</li>

1981

<li>Skype is a security risk</li>

1982

<li>Skype is a memory hog (it uses 10 times as much memory as my other IM

1983

client, who does ICQ, MSN, Yahoo, Google Talk and tons of others!)</li>

1984

<li>It's a resource hog (it wakes up 200 times as second for nothing, thus

1985

preventing my CPU from using power saving states efficiently)</li>

1986

<li>It's a closed protocol and network, while there are open industry standards

1987

such as <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Session_Initiation_Protocol">SIP

1988

[wikipedia]</a> and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.323">H.323

1989

[wikipedia]</a> that can do much more than Skype</li>

1990

<li>It's UI is crap (especially Linux version 1.4 is a serious degradation vs.

1991

version 1.3), contrary to any usability best practises</li>

1992

<li>Their API is crap. I'd call that "raping" the DBus API what they're doing

1993

(basically they're offering a DBus interface that is just a transport wrapper

1994

for a text-based 'telnet-like' API. You know, DBus interfaces are meant to

1995

have meaningful functionality (like 'make a phone call') and not meant to be

1996

just "send data to the skype application")</li>

1997

<li>They don't tell the truth. Like e.g. what has really been happening these

1998

days. Or what their software really does (see 'obfuscation' above and search

1999

for "Silver Needle In The Skype")</li>

2000

</ul></p><p>And, honest, there is nothing in Skype that other apps wouldn't offer, or had

2001

been offering before <em>except</em> being really <em>aggressive</em> at

2002

getting through firewalls without any user intervention.

2003

</p>

2004

2005

2006

2007

</table>

2008

2009

2010

2011

2012

2013

2014

<b>Planet Debian</b>

2015

</a>

2016

</td></tr><tr><td align="right"><b>Item:</b></td>

2017

<td width="100%"><a href="http://www.gag.com/cgi-bin/blosxom/2007/08/18#2007.08.18"><b>Bdale Garbee: Conservation: It's in the Bag</b>

2018

</a>

2019

</td></tr></table></td></tr></table>

2020

2021

<p>

2022

I was just reading the latest issue of

2023

<a href="http://www.homepower.com/">Home Power</a>

2024

magazine, which is celebrating 20 years of publication with this issue.

2025

One of the articles, by Kathleen Jarschke-Schultze, talks about the value of

2026

reusable cotton bags for shopping instead of accepting the usual "paper or

2027

plastic". It caught my eye because my wife Karen is an avid cotton-bag user.

2028

Kathleen ends the article with an idea that I think is worth repeating:

2029

</p>

2030

2031

<p>

2032

So how about this new etiquette: Conservation in everything except courtesy

2033

and generosity. Seems like that would be a refreshing change. We all need to

2034

just put one foot in front of the other to keep moving forward on conserving

2035

global resources. Even if it is slow or small, take that first step.

2036

</p>

2037

</blockquote>

2038

<p>

2039

I like that. Conservation, courtesy, and generosity should never go out of style...

2040

</p>

2041

2042

2043

2044

</table>

2045

2046

2047

2048

2049

2050

2051

<b>Planet Debian</b>

2052

</a>

2053

</td></tr><tr><td align="right"><b>Item:</b></td>

2054

<td width="100%"><a href="http://www.lupin.org.uk/blog/computing/blocking-firefox.html"><b>Pete Nuttall: Firefox blocking</b>

2055

</a>

2056

</td></tr></table></td></tr></table>

2057

2058

<br/>

2059

The great thing about the internet is that people can use it to make a

2060

fool of themselves in front of the whole world. Since this provides

2061

everyone with entertainment, I try and do something silly every once

2062

in a while. However, I'm easily topped by other people... Today's

2063

morons are <a href="http://whyfirefoxisblocked.com/">these guys</a>

2064

who have decided that ad blocking is evil, bad and wrong. Their

2065

argument is simple - that not looking at the ads would be stealing.

2066

They point out they can't block people who are using the Ad Blocker,

2067

so they have to block every firefox user. This is the MPAAs thinking -

2068

the user is the enemy. For me, all it means is that I can't visit these

2069

websites - I'll have to go spend money somewhere else...

2070

2071

2072

2073

</table>

2074

2075

2076

2077

2078

2079

2080

<b>Planet Debian</b>

2081

</a>

2082

</td></tr><tr><td align="right"><b>Item:</b></td>

2083

<td width="100%"><a href="http://ramblingfoo.blogspot.com/2007/08/how-did-debian-games-team-got-rid-of.html"><b>Eddy Petrișor: how did the Debian Games Team got rid of spam</b>

2084

</a>

2085

</td></tr></table></td></tr></table>

2086

2087

<br/>

2088

How to get rid of most spam on <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0">Alioth</span> mailing lists.<br /><br />Until some <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1">Debian</span> developer implements <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/UsefulImprovements#head-e0eab470284b59976fc9c112a979ecf674879d27">this idea</a> in the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2">BTS</span>, the mailing list and in <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3">PTS</span>, the quantities of spam that people get on the mail addresses they expose in the Debian world, the spam will keep on coming in huge quantities. I don't care that there will always be spam, I care that the <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_4">amount</span> of spam would be lower or probably <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_5">nonexistent</span> for one time sending (I sent just one mail to the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_6">BTS</span> from two <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_7">different</span> mail addresses and it was enough to get huge amounts of spam on them).<br /><br /><br />The Debian Games Team's ML has suffered for a while, back in 2006, from spam bombing.<br />We thought that the easiest method to get rid of spam is to requires registration in order to be able to send mails to the list.<br /><br />That was a big mistake because, as some people suspect, mails from the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_8">BTS</span> needed to be allowed in and the reporters got an automated reply saying that the mail is waiting for <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_9">approval</span>, etc, etc - plain rude, people send you bug reports and you say "You are not listed, <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_10">bla</span>, <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_11">bla</span> <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_12">bla</span>". We changed the setting not to send any automatic reply and people were more content.<br /><br />But still, we had to hand approve or white list valid mails/addresses. That worked for a while, but once the mail ended up on <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_13">spammer</span> lists, the thing blew out of proportions. We were desperate. We tweaked the settings of the lists in <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_14">different</span> ways, but in the end we ended up in having such a broken setup that we had to approve white listed addresses.<br /><br />That did for me. I had to do something. So I started working on the ML setup and basically I did <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-games/2007/04/msg00035.html">the following things</a> to get rid of spam:<br /><ul><li>anything coming from white listed mail addresses was approved</li><li>black listed mails (<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_15">bellsouth</span> is one of those) is rejected (or should be)</li><li>anything that came from the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_16">BTS</span> (there are some nice headers that the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_17">BTS</span> puts) and was evaluated as ham with a score of 0 (there is a field for that, too - some field has Spam=No, Score=...) was allowed</li><li>anything that came from the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_18">BTS</span> that was Spam=No with a score above 0 was held for moderation</li><li>anything else is held for moderation</li></ul><br />This solution allowed us to lighten the burden of manually white listing every email address that ever sent valid mails to the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_19">BTS</span> and to focus only on real spam.<br /><br />Try it your self on your lists, you'll be <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_20">pleasantly</span> surprised.

2089

2090

2091

2092

</table>

2093

2094

2095

2096

2097

2098

2099

<b>Planet Debian</b>

2100

</a>

2101

</td></tr><tr><td align="right"><b>Item:</b></td>

2102

<td width="100%"><a href="http://www.gwolf.org/index.php/blog/show/Aggressive-bug-reports-leading-to-a-good-answer-or-so-I-hope.html"><b>Gunnar Wolf: Aggressive bug reports leading to a good answer (or so I hope)</b>

2103

</a>

2104

</td></tr></table></td></tr></table>

2105

2106

<p>Joey <a href="http://kitenet.net/~joey/blog/entry/a_little_politeness__44___please/">complains about users filing aggressive or otherwise inappropriate bug reports</a>. Well, in this case I must say I bit the bullet.<br />Yesterday, somebody <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=438168">complained about the maintenance statuse</a> of <a href="http://packages.debian.org/cgi-bin/search_packages.pl?searchon=names&version=all&exact=1&keywords=libapache2-mod-perl2">libapache2-mod-perl2</a>. Usually, I would have sadly nodded and said that, yes, since the API change between mod_perl for Apache 1.x and mod_perl2 for Apache 2.x (which was a <em>long</em> time ago - with perfect timing <em>not</em> to be accepted in the last weeks of Sarge's hard-freeze period, causing many of us to have to maintain two or even three versions of our code depending on the API used - But that's a different story I won't go into details now). But this time, the bug report was sent with <tt>Severity: critical</tt>.<br />I replied to this report, intending just to lower its priority and get the attention of the maintainers by <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2007/08/msg00681.html">sending it to a couple of Debian lists</a> - But soon afterwards, it became obvious that I was probably the person most interested in this package in Debian - At least, me and some other <a href="http://alioth.debian.org/projects/pkg-perl">pkg-perl fellows</a> who -as foolishly as myself- volunteered to step forward when needed.<br />Well, in short: I am now the proud owner of one of the packages most vital for many of the systems I've written for my work. It's also more complex than most of the other packages I maintain. From an undermaintained and quite full of warnings build process and resulting package set, I managed to make it linda- and lintian- clean, and... Well, now we have to dig through its <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?pkg=libapache2-mod-perl2;dist=unstable">open bugs</a>. Its build system is far from orthodox from a Perl point of view, and that took me most of the day, but hey - TIMTOWTDI, right? :)

2107

</p>

2108

2109

2110

2111

<tr><td align="right"><font color="#ababab">Author:</font>  </td><td><font color="#ababab">gwolf@gwolf.org (Gunnar Wolf)</font></td></tr>

2112

</table>

2113

2114

2115

2116

2117

2118

2119

<b>Planet Debian</b>

2120

</a>

2121

</td></tr><tr><td align="right"><b>Item:</b></td>

2122

<td width="100%"><a href="http://blog.drinsama.de/erich/en/2007081701-skype-problems-not-solved-just-worked-around.html"><b>Erich Schubert: Skype problems aren't solved, but just worked around?</b>

2123

</a>

2124

</td></tr></table></td></tr></table>

2125

2126

<p>Skype seems slowly to recover from yesterdays blackout.</p><p>However, it doesn't look to me as if they've actually solved the problem. I

2127

assume they've just added a workaround (e.g. maybe using DNS to locate good

2128

servers?) that help recovering. At least when enough people download the new

2129

version.</p><p>If you look at the graphs at

2130

<a href="http://nyanyan.to/skype/40hr_chart.php">Njanjan.to</a> and

2131

<a href="http://www.85qm.de/archives/567-Skype-Netzwerk-hat-sich-immer-noch-nicht-erholt.html">85qm.de</a>, then they still look far from healthy.</p><p>I'm not talking about the mere numbers - Skype reports about 3 Million users

2132

connected, which would mean 1 out of 3 regular users is back. But I'm talking

2133

about the <em>shape</em> of the curve. During regular operations, the curve

2134

used to be smooth. Which is easy to explain: by some million users going online

2135

and offline <em>indepentenly</em>, it all smoothens out. The curve goes up when

2136

people start working in a densely populated area and goes down when they go to

2137

bed. But if you look at the graphs for the past few hours <b>parts of the

2138

Skype P2P network still appear to get disconnected and reconnected</b>.

2139

They cerainly didn't flip a switch and people could connect again. The service

2140

still appears to be going up and down.</p><p>To me, that indicates that they actually <b>didn't solve the problem, but

2141

just found a way to make the problems not take down the whole network</b>,

2142

while parts still drop off now and then.</p><p>Just my guesses, though. And Skype will not tell the truth either, you bet.

2143

(You might want to skim over the presentation <a href="http://www.blackhat.com/presentations/bh-europe-06/bh-eu-06-biondi/bh-eu-06-biondi-up.pdf">"Silver Needle In The Skype" [PDF]</a>, about the inner workings of Skype, their obfuscation technologies and how far they go at hiding what their software is actually doing)</p><p>P.S. I've read in a blog that Skype might right now only allow one connection

2144

per IP. That would even more support the rumors that they're actually trying

2145

to defend against an attack on their network (and using the IP limit to slow

2146

down the attacks?)</p><p>P.P.S. Another interesting note: the Skype stats on the Skype website report

2147

5.5 Million connected users - my Skype client reports 3.7 Million. Which

2148

number is correct?

2149

</p>

2150

2151

2152

2153

</table>

2154

2155

2156

2157

2158

2159

2160

<b>Planet Debian</b>

2161

</a>

2162

</td></tr><tr><td align="right"><b>Item:</b></td>

2163

<td width="100%"><a href="http://www.sukria.net/en/archives/2007/08/17/the-road-to-libdevel-repl-perl-part-1/"><b>Alexis Sukrieh: The road to libdevel-repl-perl, part 1</b>

2164

</a>

2165

</td></tr></table></td></tr></table>

2166

2167

<p>I decided to play with Devel::REPL which looks to be exactly what I need to enhance my Perl Console. That module is not packaged in Debian, then I started packaging it with the help of the Debian Perl Group (big thanks go to Damyan Ivanov for his help).</p>

2168

<p>The day was pretty productive and we’re almost done now, as you can see in this tomboy note:</p>

2169

2170

<p><em> PS MadCoder: I’m sorry dude, I’m still speaking about Perl <img src="http://www.sukria.net/en/wp-includes/images/smilies/icon_razz.gif" alt=":P" class="wp-smiley" /> </em>

2171

</p>

2172

2173

2174

2175

</table>

2176

2177

</body></html>