Planet Debian

Next time I have to explain why I (really) prefer dogs to cats, I will not provide an argument. Instead, I will point people to this video.

While the video is not an instance of joking, it is nonetheless a potent example of humor, at least in the way that the philosopher, Simon Critchley has defined it in his compact and very powerful (and very beautifully written) book, On Humour:

Jokes tear holes in our usual predictions about the empirical world. We might say that humour is produced by a disjunction between the way things are and they way they are represented in the joke, between expectation and actuality. Humour defeats our expectations by producing a novel actuality, by changing the situation in which we find ourselves…

Dear Lazy Web (this is a from a friend and I know next to nothing about video editing software):

“Is there a good free video editor, on par with GIMP, that has a decently gradual learning curve, and works well?”

I just read on Slashdot a pointer to an article about GitTorrent and it made me wonder about these “meta-distributed” systems. Although I don’t share the article’s author enthusiasm, it’s a really good idea.

Anyways, browsing that article, I ended up on another one about Debtorrent. This I’ve already read about and decided to keep an eye on for some time now… It happens that one line on that article called my attention (and I quote):

At the last major upgrade of Debian/Stable, all the routers at the major International fibreoptic backbone sites across the world redlined for a week. (emphasis added)

Well… that was a surprise. Of course I know of the size and importance of Debian, but I thought our systems were more efficient (or that our “release-generated-traffic” were not of that magnitude). I began googling for a pointer on that… Anything: a quote, an URL, a list message… anything that could make that claim verifiable: Guess what: I found none!

Meanwhile, on Slashdot, other people started following the same subject...

So, is it true? Does anyone have any pointers to that? It seems quite unlikely to me… But hey! That’s just me: maybe the Internet is not that big :-)

I've recently noticed that one of our lab laptops running "testing" and "unstable" <strong>freezes</strong> the system whenever i close
the lid.

Additionally, X does not always come up properly and rebooting is (besides typing blindly) the only way to get a
graphical login. The graphics chipset is an intel 955.

After a bit of search we found a kernel bugreport, which provides a clue
where the problem occurs.

root@orion:~# cat /proc/acpi/video/*/DOS
DOS setting: <0>

To get it working for the HP Compaq 2510p, all you need to do is to set a value of "1"

root@orion:~# echo '1' > /proc/acpi/video/*/DOS

Then cross your fingers and close the lid.

Hopefully your system did no freeze and is still up ;-)

At work, we're using a modprobe post-install-Script to work around this which sets the working ACPI _DOS value if a ''ACPIvideo_DOS'' variable is set. This will hopefully be fixed soon in a newer kernel version.

Afaik from Debconf8, Bdale also owns one of those notebooks.

PS.: *rofl*

@Aigars
I'm pleased to announce that the Linux 2.6 kernel has been ported to Apple's iPhone platform, with support for the first and second generation iPhones as well as the first generation iPod touch. This is a rough first draft of the port, and many drivers are still missing, but it's enough that a real alternative operating system is running on the iPhone.
From: http://linuxoniphone.blogspot.com/2008/11/linux-on-iphone.htm
 
At least we're getting closer to a free(d) iPhone ;-)

Some time ago, Opensync-0.38 got released, and it is now available in experimental. The evolution-data-server and the Opie plugins are now available again, as well as the new tomboy (in NEW) and a rewritten google-calendar/contacts plugin. The google plugin requires the new libgcal, which I have just uploaded to NEW.

Unfortunately, kitchensync is still not ported to latest Opensync-0.3x (and got dropped for KDE4.2), so one still needs to use the command-line msynctool program. Also not ported are the (KDE3) kdepim and the currently under development Akonadi plugin. Other important plugins missing for 0.38 are the Windows Mobile, Blackberry, Palm and IRMC plugins. I tried to suggest making 0.38.x point releases including more ported plugins, but it seems development is turning towards 0.39 already, and yet some more API changes were done, this time mostly removing unnecessary interfaces, which should be a good thing in the long term. Some other good news is that there are now weekly IRC meetings of the Opensync developers, so there should be steadier progress towards Opensync-0.40 from now on. Unfortunately, I was mostly absent during all of the three meetings so far.

Along with Opensync-0.38, libsyncml saw a new major release 0.5.0 which should fix lots of bugs and provide better support for mobiles. However, lots of problems with syncml were due to bugs in the wbxml2 library. Michael Bell has hopefully found the most critical ones and I have uploaded a new wbxml2-0.9.2 to unstable today which I hope will get into lenny soon. The main problem with wbxml2 over the last year was a unresponsive/MIA upstream; however, recently wbxml2 maintainership got tranferred to the opensync project and moved to its Trac. Michael Bell has been fixing most of the outstanding issues and is currently preparing a 0.10.0 release, so this project should be back on track now.

Python 3.0 (also known as Python 3000) has been released yesterday, so I thought I'd give it a try. It turns out that a recent release candidate is in official Ubuntu 8.10 (intrepid) repositories, so I did not even need to compile anything: apt-get install python3.0 and we're done. You may want to read the summary of changes from Python 2 beforehand.

Here's a quick demo of unicode identifiers:

This isn't quite APL yet, but we are getting closer!

I was having a look at this paper on the development of Fortran:

http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/FORTRAN/paper/p165-backus.pdf (which I found here )

And I noticed the following quote:

1.2. The Economics of Programming

Another factor which influenced the development of FORTRAN was the economics of programming in 1954. The cost of programmers associated with a computer center was usually at least as great as the cost of the computer itself. (This fact follows from the aver- age salary-plus-overhead and number of programmers at each center and from the computer rental figures.) In addition, from one-quarter to one-half of the computer's time was spent in debugging. Thus programming and debugging accounted for as much as three-quarters of the cost of operating a computer; and obviously, as computers got cheaper, this situation would get worse.

This economic factor was one of the prime motivations which led me to propose the FORTRAN project in a letter to my boss, Cuthbert Hurd, in late 1953 (the exact date is not known but other facts suggest December 1953 as a likely date). I believe that the economic need for a system like FORTRAN was one reason why IBM and my successive bosses, Hurd, Charles DeCarlo, and John McPherson, provided for our constantly expanding needs over the next five years without ever asking us to project or justify those needs in a formal budget.

As Hal Varian says, "Ignore basic economic principles at your own risk. Technology changes. Economic laws do not."

I would continue to bet on programming languages that save programmers time, or otherwise make them more productive.

I was having a look at this paper on the development of Fortran:

http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/FORTRAN/paper/p165-backus.pdf (which I found here )

And I noticed the following quote:

1.2. The Economics of Programming

Another factor which influenced the development of FORTRAN was the economics of programming in 1954. The cost of programmers associated with a computer center was usually at least as great as the cost of the computer itself. (This fact follows from the aver- age salary-plus-overhead and number of programmers at each center and from the computer rental figures.) In addition, from one-quarter to one-half of the computer's time was spent in debugging. Thus programming and debugging accounted for as much as three-quarters of the cost of operating a computer; and obviously, as computers got cheaper, this situation would get worse.

This economic factor was one of the prime motivations which led me to propose the FORTRAN project in a letter to my boss, Cuthbert Hurd, in late 1953 (the exact date is not known but other facts suggest December 1953 as a likely date). I believe that the economic need for a system like FORTRAN was one reason why IBM and my successive bosses, Hurd, Charles DeCarlo, and John McPherson, provided for our constantly expanding needs over the next five years without ever asking us to project or justify those needs in a formal budget.

As Hal Varian says, "Ignore basic economic principles at your own risk. Technology changes. Economic laws do not."

I would continue to bet on programming languages that save programmers time, or otherwise make them more productive.

I discovered a minor Rails annoyance today, and, looking around for an answer to the problem, I found this, which is a perfect description of the issue, and includes a fix:

http://dev.rubyonrails.org/ticket/5123

Unfortunately it has marked as "wont fix" with no reason specified.

Perhaps there is a reasonable answer that was perhaps discussed elsewhere, and just didn't make it into the bug report, making it invisible to people like me who find it via Google, which is pretty annoying. The other explanation is more along the lines of "don't wanna" (or fuck you, as the case may be), but at least come out and say so. "We're not going to do it, as it's not part of our English-centric vision" or what have you. Being a native English speaker, even when doing stuff for Italian or Austrian or whatever clients, I tend to code in English, because it's 1) fast, 2) easy and 3) it's pretty much universally understood by programmers. However, I can see the case for specific things to be in a particular language, and on the surface, this one line patch makes that a little bit easier, and doesn't appear to be costly, so why not?

Just closing the bugs of people who have taken the time to try and help (this is clearly not just a "dude, it's, uh, broke" bug) is the twin of the equally annoying people who don't bother to take 30 seconds to send an email or bug report about software they're using, and both are things I greatly dislike.

I discovered a minor Rails annoyance today, and, looking around for an answer to the problem, I found this, which is a perfect description of the issue, and includes a fix:

http://dev.rubyonrails.org/ticket/5123

Unfortunately it has marked as "wont fix" with no reason specified.

Perhaps there is a reasonable answer that was perhaps discussed elsewhere, and just didn't make it into the bug report, making it invisible to people like me who find it via Google, which is pretty annoying. The other explanation is more along the lines of "don't wanna" (or fuck you, as the case may be), but at least come out and say so. "We're not going to do it, as it's not part of our English-centric vision" or what have you. Being a native English speaker, even when doing stuff for Italian or Austrian or whatever clients, I tend to code in English, because it's 1) fast, 2) easy and 3) it's pretty much universally understood by programmers. However, I can see the case for specific things to be in a particular language, and on the surface, this one line patch makes that a little bit easier, and doesn't appear to be costly, so why not?

Just closing the bugs of people who have taken the time to try and help (this is clearly not just a "dude, it's, uh, broke" bug) is the twin of the equally annoying people who don't bother to take 30 seconds to send an email or bug report about software they're using, and both are things I greatly dislike.

"I've got chills
They're multiplying"

I guess technically I could have used that as a subject, but ugh.

If ever you're a bit shiverry, and a bit unwell, don't shave your head. It'll take three times as long, and you'll cut yourself.

ObQuote: Red Dwarf.

If you’ve set up an online shop, are your product photos saying more about you than you intended?

“there’s a huge amount of potentially privacy-sensitive metadata in your typical JPEG as generated by your camera (including camera type, settings, date/time, maybe even GPS coordinates of your location, etc).”

Source: jhead - List and modify EXIF fields in JPEG photos [Uwe Hermann's blog]

Even worse, if you’ve been using images from your suppliers or the manufacturers without permission, the metadata can be a dead giveaway. You really shouldn’t be using them without permission anyway, though.

If you’re using your own photos, want to remove the camera data and you’re not comfortable using the command line, most graphics editors like GIMP allow you to edit or remove that extra information too (I think it’s on Save As… OK… Advanced Options and untick “Save EXIF data” in GIMP). It’s just a bit slower to convert lots of images with a GUI. (I’d usually do that sort of thing from the command line for TTLLP customers.)

One fringe benefit is that removing the thumbnails and EXIF makes the images a bit smaller, so they’re quicker to download!

• I can use native Git commands to edit/refresh patches, which beats quilt any day;
• Changes to upstream are visible both as a git branch and as separated, commented patches in the Debian branch;
• If necessary (e.g. in case of NMU), outside contributors can just dump a -p1 patch in debian/patches and be done with it.

Are you ?

I was also entertaining the idea of giving a lightning talk in the Debian room (not as part of the general lightning talks) about aptitude-gtk. I certainly don’t feel like talking for a whole hour talk or what. I don’t have that much interesting stuff to say. Maybe we could do it with other 2008 european GSoCers. That could be useful as we didn’t do much publicity-wise (see) in a timely maneer.

Certainly I should write a mail about that to the soc-coordination list about this or ramble about it on the planet. Oh, I’ll get around it.

So any Debian GSoCers going to FOSDEM ?