Thu, 22 May 2008

pgadmin3 for experimental

One of the things why I was on the tracks for getting src:wxwidgets2.8 into the pool was to be able to get a recent pgadmin3, too. The one we currently have in testing/unstable isn't even anymore able to cope with our default postgresql-8.3 version.

Now that wxwidgets2.8 is in experimental for a while I tried to suggest a pgadmin3 upload to experimental. Unfortunately the package maintainer seems to be quite busy these days, thus I prepared an NMU for it, planing to upload it into the pool at the start of next week. All involved parties received mails about it—that also includes the bug reporters of the bugs it would fix. For your convenience, if you are interested, you can find the package in the meantime on my private server: http://rhonda.deb.at/debian/pgadmin3/—feel free to give it a test and send feedback along.

[/debian] permanent link

Fri, 18 Apr 2008

On freedom

One of the freedoms I value is the freedom to choose what you spend your time on and who you spend it with. And while I believe that people in key roles in Debian still have those freedoms (hey, 2.1(1), don't you know), reality these days even confirms that. So long, and thanks for the fish.

[/debian] permanent link

Mon, 10 Mar 2008

APT::Acquire::Translation "none";

Quite a lot people are unhappy with how the package descriptions are translated. Different teams handle it differently, but the approach the German "team" chose is quite unfriendly from a quality point of view: The webinterface for it doesn't require any authentication at all, leading technically to anonymous translations all over the place. The so-called "review" process consists of the same not-existing authentication, leading to a situation where unknown people can put in whatever they like and have other (or potentially the same) unknown people acknowledge that.

The language team has actively chosen that way because it was said that bad translations simply won't happen and that the review (three people opening the page and clicking onto a button) will not let that happen. Well, it happened. And is happening all over the place. Things like "Gedultsspiel" and "Murmelirrsinn" are pretty tough and almost hiding translations from "counting pipe" to "Zählrohr" and "villages" to "Orte" (and no, those aren't the only examples that accumulated over the last months). As this all happens anonymously one can't even get a message to the people submitting (extremely) low quality translations, helping them to improve their skills so they won't do the same mistake in future translations; meaning things are hard to improve.

I am usual an advocate of translating stuff, did put a lot of effort into that area—but the total lack of quality in not only a small and tiny bit here but a much broader area is why I suggest to everyone (at least from a German language point of view): Put APT::Acquire::Translation "none"; into your /etc/apt/apt.conf file and don't get annoyed by them. When quantity is the only thing that counts people wanting to have quality are simply ignored with their mails on the lists.

[/debian] permanent link

Sat, 09 Feb 2008

My Efforts in Debian

... are still there, even if I don't blog about every single bit all the time. Most of the packages I care about are in good state, I even did jump on board of irssi co-maintaining and got its bugcount down a fair bit (though I won't rest at this stage, there are still some to go) and did jump onboard of the pkg-games Team.

... which brings me to wesnoth. For quite a while I am tracking the stable releases (1.2.x) of wesnoth in unstable while the development releases (1.3.x) are followed in experimental. With the upcoming stable release 1.4 this though will change. The development branch is feature frozen and thus will be (propably) compatible with the next stable release, and furthermore the current stable release isn't expected to receive any further update. My plan is thus to upload the next development release directly to unstable. If you want to give it some additional testing before that happens pull the package from experimental now and give your feedback, thanks.

Furthermore I am also tracking some packages for backports.org. I usually do the packaging of it almost synchronous to its upload into unstable although it is only allowed onto backports.org when it entered testing. For the timegap in between you can usually find it on my website repository. Directories that aren't empty there have some upload to backports pending and you can feel free to test the packages and send me feedback on them. Currently this includes bacula, slony1 and postgresql-8.3.

One last note, finally it happened: apache1 isn't anymore. There were two packages left in testing until recently which got their removal requests adjusted. Thanks to everyone involved in keeping track of this and helping cleaning up the archive.

[/debian] permanent link

Fri, 20 Jul 2007

msgmerge --previous and poedit

Since quite a while gettext has support for a feature which I was waiting for since ages: --previous. It means that when a string gets marked fuzzy it adds the previous original string as a comment so one is able to see the difference which led to the fuzzy marking. This makes translation of po files much much more comfortable because one can easily find out now what has changed. Let me give you a reallife example:

#: data/core/help.cfg:331
#, fuzzy
#| msgid "race^Mechanical"
msgid "trait^Mechanical"
msgstr "Kriegsgerät"

With out the previous string (in the "#|" line) you would propably be puzzled about what has changed because the string gets stripped off the everything before the ^ for displaying it in this case.

Though, not all translation tools behave correctly. One of them is unfortunately poedit. It moves the previous string to a wrong place and thus breaks the parsing of the file. A bugreport has been filed about it—but unfortunately it also means that upstream projects that already support (like Wesnoth) it are considering disabling it again because of this. So I wrote quickly a perl script that is able to fix that for you: pofix.pl. It's quite simple, reads from stdin and writes to stdout.
Go and support --previous before your competitors do it and hijack all your translators! ;)

[/debian] permanent link

Wed, 14 Feb 2007

Localized XMMS-SID

ccr has uploaded a new beta version of his fabulous xmms-sid extension for the X MultiMedia System which now also supports localization. I have prepared a package so you can test it, start localizing it for your language, or just enjoy it. I have noticed some possible wrong implementation of the i18n infrastructure, I had to do the msgfmt for the de.po myself — if you know what goes wrong here any input is absolutely welcome.

[/debian] permanent link

Thu, 21 Sep 2006

All Praise Dunc-Tank!

Recently Dunc-Tank was created. An effort, instantiated by the current DPL, it is said to improve Debian. Personally I am quite sure it's rather the opposite, especially when the people coming up with the idea are the people in charge currently and are giving the thing a quite official feeling. And money next to never is a good motivation for quality, especially when working on parts people usually don't work on. The quality Debian has is because people work on the parts they have interest in themself to get improved — that's the way Free Software really works.

But, there's one really good thing about it: Now that people are going to get paid to work on Debian, it motivates me to take a step back and spend some more time on other things. More free time for everyone, because there are the people getting paid now! Thank you very much, Dunc, for giving us back our free time!

[/debian] permanent link

Wed, 23 Aug 2006

abook in experimental

I've uploaded a CVS snapshot of abook yesterday to experimental. Cédric Duval did commit really useful stuff there, like the possibility for user defined fields and views, renaming the custom fields, and lists which can contain a quite big amount of entries.

It would be nice if you could give it some testing and send in feedback about it so that I have more than just my own impression about it for deciding if it's ready to upload to unstable for it making it into the release of etch.
Some things I've noticed so far: You can't use a comma in lists because it is used as field separator. Yes, this needs to get changed, but it is no real regression, because the only list used before was the email addresses and you wasn't able to use it there neither. The date field type isn't yet completely supported — it is planed to have content checking in it, I could think of having flexible display ways for date fields, too. So far it has its reason why it isn't released yet upstream, it has its problem, but I think it is still a great advancement over the current stable release and would make sense to get included in etch. Give it a try and report back, either to me or to the upstream list.

[/debian] permanent link

Fri, 02 Jun 2006

Back in the worng timezone

After two weeks and a bit it finally happened: I hit austria again. But, first things first. I guess everyone noticed by now that at the start the network wasn't our best strengths. I helped as much as possible, collected network cable back from one path to lay it out at a different one just to find that the about 200 m were a bit too short (or rather, me was lying the cable with too much safety). Though, it was too long anyway to be relyable, to it was cut in the middle and a small access point was put in. Later it had to be replaced because we were running a bit short of specific power supplies.

But it wasn't too bad, waiting for some more rj45 plugs and other things even allowed Ganneff to spend some time in the pool and relax a bit. And given that there seem to have been a few (vegetarian) people less than registered for sponsored meals allowed stockholm and Vagrant to get extra dishes to get fed. People during the debcamp mostly enjoyed themself, mao was played, fights for the gay vegetarian sign, tetrinetx on homer when only local network was available, and I managed to translate the new wesnoth tutorial into german. It wasn't clear by then that the new release will be delayed due to other problems until after the debconf, but in my opinion the tutorial is one of the most important parts of any games because it explains the basics, so I wanted to be sure that there won't be another release without a fully translated one.

About enjoying oneself: I tried out the skirts I brought with me and considered them absolutely comfortable. You'll find me more with one, especially when it gets warmer. It helped me to be more "myself". Also I enjoyed the weird looks and repeated questions about my shoes — although it was often that I was walking barefooted; but that got a bit of a pain, especially after noon when you were able to boil eggs on the stones. And given that I forgot myself when I switched from blue/red shoes to red/blue ones you don't have to send in your guesses when it was done because I can't tell who would be the winner anyway. ;)

The end of the week came, the Debian Day was here. Closer to its happening more and more people arrived and it was becoming more crowded in the hacklab. The network became more and more stable, the video streaming setup got finalized, and everything looked alright. Some of the mexico city people stayed for the night and enjoyed the friendly atmosphere (and a beer or two ;)).

The debconf started for real, the talks started, people were busy all around, zack added me to the alioth pkg-vim project to continue helping with the hijacked debian specific syntax files. Haven't done much yet beside a checkout, still pondering where I can bug around most ;)

I was looking forward to bubulle's BoF about the i18n infrastructure. It was really inspiring, and I collected some ideas for what the tool-to-be-created should support. The second BoF later the week just showed that others were mostly thinking along the same lines, so I hadn't much to add. Still I am looking forward to join the effort to make it happen — I was playing with the idea about such a tool for ages now, and I guess this is what it will make it happen, finally. Christian is so much more able to get people interested and together for making it happen than me... :/

There were some more talks I could mention, like Enrico's talk about Advanced tools for wasting time (yes, I have submitted my gnu.cow file in the meantime), or Erin's and aj's Debian's Debugging Debacle: the Debrief (in which I finally got around to fix a RC bug incidentally), and the talk by bubulle and jfs about State of the art for Debian i18n/l10n of course, which features some of the conclusions of the two part BoF.

Some of the evening featured interesting things too, like a cheese BoF, the everywhere featured formal dinner with its mariachis, the waterfall and the blackout; special effects you wouldn't be able to plan as well as they happened — though Martin Ferrarri had a small accident with it when water rushed down onto his plate and spilled the sauce over his white shirt and the table. And then there was the hard liquour BoF where I quit after the eggnogg.

The week passed, I got my hair dyed and rid of my beard right in time for the group photo. Thank you nattie, a thousands time, it went better than I expected! Really like it. I didn't attend the fun photo in the pool the next day, was a bit late after the talk, didn't had my bathing slip with me, was worried about my newly dyed hairs and was nervous... because a person I was looking forward to meet again was late. But gladly only late, so I got rid of my nervousness and enjoyed the last official talk (formerly mentioned i18n talk) of the week, and explained to some attendee that even in languages like French, German and English (yes, no mistake) there are still areas we have to struggle with all of this, like when keeping things up to date and the likes.

It was the last evening in Oaxtepec for me because I refused to leave by bus at 4 in the morning, rather wanted to spend the night in Mexico City to at least be able to have seen a tiny bit of it and eat something my tummy enjoys completely. :) I guess I don't need to point at sandino's gallery about that evening anymore, thanks to Gunnar. And yes, I'm mentally disturbed, but that shouldn't be anything new to people who know me for a while, or is it? ;)

This night was too long (less than 4 hours of sleep is even for debconf not much), so I rather went to bed early after a small walk (just 2 blocks or such) in the city and a nice dinner with friends who are missing the nice time too and was wearing too big sort-of shoes. Went to the airport in the morning by taxi whose driver gladly was able to speak english. Met zack and Martin Ferrari again there, and some other people with whom I was taking the same plane with. They were hacking along on the airport, found the open wifi, using power supplies from different spots. Bubulle already wrote about the two loud guys, gladly I wasn't too close to them, and plugged myself into the music and movie channels from the plane. The showed Last Holiday (which I really liked, although in the ending I started to cry — mostly because I started to realize what I was leaving...) and two spanish movies of which I don't remember the titles. People started to hack away in the temporarily set up hacklab and we started to wonder how much power they might have, though they cheated: They used two battery packs...

In Madrid some more people parted and we were down to 5 people. I bought totally overpriced playingcards so we could play Mao, had a short nice session and spread the word. We did hack the baby room power supply and hacked along a bit more, and then Peter and me were off heading to vienna, finally.

All in all I really enjoyed it. Although there were its down times, sunburned, my butt hurting a bit because in the end I did jump from the 10m platform into the pool, it still was a really nice event and even though I guess many people tried to enjoy themselfes quite some things were acomplished. If not really codewise, then at least social-wise, which will benefit quite well in the future, I'm sure. Hope to see you all next year, wherever that might be.

[/debian] permanent link

Fri, 19 May 2006

Just like Ben said...

thanks, Ted, for spoiling what was expected to be the nicest evening of the debconf. And thanks to the organizers for the really great special effects with the light plays and the waterfall; really!

[/debian] permanent link

Tue, 09 May 2006

Arrived in Oaxtepec

... and already liking it. Though, first things first, some notes about the trip so far: The plane from vienna took off 50 minutes late due to weather reasons. It was quite nice, though, and I hope that some of the night pictures of town lightnings are usable. At least the delay reduced my waiting time at the madrid airport quite a bit.

Which brings me to that airport. It's... HUGE! I mean... erm, it has signs telling people that it will take 25 minutes to the gate that the plane to mexico will be leaving. And that is including the trip on some underground train they have that it doesn't take you much longer than that... But appart from that, I arrived on the gate area before midnight so I was able to order some drink at the starbucks. At least some shop that knows how to let people enjoy the waiting time. :)

The plane to mexico left on schedule at 1:50, so it was completely dark outside when we started. And almost the whole trip, up until about the last 20 minutes or so of the 13 hour flight, it was completely dark outside, because we were travelling ahead of the sun. So it wasn't too bad, being able to get some good sleep, at least as good as possible on a plane.

Having arrived in mexio airport with a short delay and waiting a bit for my suitcase I finally met up with Frans Pop, because I was too scared of getting lost without any sense for the spanish language yet. We took one of the prepaid official taxis to the bus that will take us the rest of the trip. The taxi drive was really... well, interesting. It was the fastest trip I've ever seen in any car in city area, but the bad thing: I can't even tell you how fast we were at times because the speedometer was b0rked and displayed only zero all of the time. I guess taxi drivers are most the same all around the world, but this one definitely mastered the art.

The bustrip wasn't anything notable, besides a bit tiresome due to the air in the bus, the partly monotonous vegetation outside and that I was sure to not be able to watch the movie to the end, besides that the sound was too silent. :)

Finally arrived at Oaxtepec, which turned out that our hotel seems to be in some sort of recreation area, maybe even a bit of themepark... At least it has some rollercoasters, at least they showed them on the video. We'll see. I at least tried out the pool already, it's not even feeling cold for me. Not have met all the people yet that are rumoured to be around already, but I guess it might happen at lunch, which is expected soonish. Due to network not working though this blog post will have to wait until afterwards.

[/debian] permanent link

Fri, 07 Apr 2006

untangle

/me wonders why people seem to prefer a webbased, flash game when we have the very same thing in our sgt-puzzles package called untangle. Wasn't Debian and sort of Planet Debian about mainly free software, back then, somehow?

[/debian] permanent link

Fri, 10 Feb 2006

PHP mail() Considered Harmful

I know for myself that picking up unparsed userdata is teh evil. But we also all know that the usual webpage and mailer script coder isn't thinking. And to my knowledge the php mail() function is the only one that perverted to parse the headers additional to an explicit given recipient list for additional recipients. Yes, you read right. Often enough people use things like mail("myown@addre.ss", "subject", $body, "From: $_POST['name'] <$_POST['email']>") without thinking about it, because, there is this extra to field anyway. Right?
Wrong! SPAMers will come and send things like email="some@jo.ke\nBcc: my@sp.am, list@is.bigg.er, than@you.rs". People that put up such webmail scripts usually don't notice it anyway, they just delete the spam right ahead, not noticing that it was an abuse of their form. And the ISP has to deal with having to get the system out of the blacklists again....

At least none of the hosts on which customers are able to put up such scripts directly affect our own mail system, it's just the shared hosts they use... Still, deadly annoying. And then people are claiming that such misfeatures aren't a problem in PHP but in the coders? If it would at least be documented in the description of the function, but if one can claim it that it is it's at most just very vague hinted...

[/debian] permanent link

Mon, 14 Nov 2005

Merry X-Mas

I know, I know. A bit early, you might say. But let's face it: The shopping industry is already fully into christmas. You already get advent calendars, christmas cookies and thing in the various stores. And I got my first christmas presents the last week....

First of all I finally tried again to switch to Linux 2.6. Going through the great amount of options in my make oldconfig from 2.4 I finally tried to boot with it. The most deep changes I did was:

• Switching from APM to ACPI: This was one of the things I was worried about. But there was nothing to worry, I now can even see the temperature of the processor!
• Software Suspend: I now can shutdown my system to disk! That rocks, and seems to be more stable than the former APM sleep mode, which occasionally had problems with waking up again...
• The powerbutton now performs a shutdown. Unfortunately it is the only button that seems to get recognized, the key bindings with the function key don't do much. But I am confident that this can be settled out, they are sending keycodes. Calling acpitool manually isn't that much of an annoyance yet.
• Switching from OSS to ALSA: Another thing I was worried about. But I found out about the OSS emulation, so that reduced my worries. In the end I'm now even running without it, programs like mp3blaster I'm running with the wrapper from alsa-oss. Switched the few packages that were OSS specific on my system (like the SDL sound package) afterwards and am happy with it.
• Framebuffer module neofb works now built in! Finally I also can play around with some nice boot logo, and in connection with software suspend this isn't even wasted time. :)

This was my own christmas present. But I got some more, from a dear friend whom I'm working with and helping from time to time. More in a funny way I sent him a christmas wishlist, but he took it serious, and so there I am. Like, with a Gameboy Advance SP Kingdom Hearts Edition, including the game. I really loved the first part on my Playstation 2, am desperately waiting for the second part which shall be released in europe in spring next year... *sighs*

The second major part was a Typhoon My Mini DJ music player. Most important thing for me with it is that it plays oggvorbis files natively. Finally I'm not the only one without a portable music player!

Last but not least I'm going to attend LWE in Frankfurt/Main, and finishing my LPI Level 1 certification there. I'm not too worried about the test, though it for sure will be a good feeling to finally have something written and not only you lot telling me that I have some knowledge about it.

[/debian] permanent link

Tue, 25 Oct 2005

grml 0.5 released, some history

Yesterday night grml 0.5 - Codename Tokolytika was released. I can just repeat my last remarks: grml is a charm when it comes to restoring systems, or in other tricky situations where you need your sysadmin tools handy. Saved my day quite often so far, and I'm sure it won't stop. Get it now! I simply don't know any better live CD.

For those who wonder what I was doing in the last time: I had been to the last Friday Night Skating of this year. The last hundred meters of the almost 2 hour lasting course I got pushed because my legs had finished early... Thank you very much, Conny!
All in all it was a great event and I'm sure to visit it more regularly next year. :)

Workload both at work and private didn't really stop for quite some weeks, it was a horror. I wasn't even able to reasonably follow any mailing lists, left aside to do any real work. Though if you noticed my 1.2.2-16 upload of beep you might know that I also have invested quite much there.

Furthermore I managed to get some people of our Debienna group interested in the g++ 4.0 transition. Greek0 wrote some scripts to bring the data of mfurr's page into one (for us) better suited to use and work from. In our wiki we write down our progress to keep us updated on who's working on getting what in.
I don't have real numbers, but from tracking mfurr's list of packages needing a recompile it went down quite a bit since we started, and we don't plan to stop soonish.

And finally: I've written an article about jigdo-lite for my company's magazine. It's the 5th issue of the magazine, and my third article for it (first has been about gnupg and second about MUDs). I like writing, and from some of the feedback I received people like reading me, too. :)

[/debian] permanent link

Mon, 26 Sep 2005

Rename security.d.o to lamp.d.o

Given the recent security advisories I request the following: Please rename security.d.o to lamp.d.o because it hosts all the packages anyway....
To install a server nowadays you need to wait for security.d.o or have a local cache.

[/debian] permanent link

Mon, 11 Jul 2005

First impressions of debconf5

You don't have to follow all the links in the text, take a look at the overview gallery of the different days so far: 2005-07-08, 2005-07-09, 2005-07-10, 2005-07-11.

After a while my luggage arrived in HEL. The days so far had been quite hot, enjoying hanging around with people I've only been in contact via email, irc, or even not at all yet.

Some of them were overexcited to meet again. Some others had problems getting something to eat. (But only for half an hour or such, and only the non-vegetarian ones. Had been nice watching them waiting for their food. ;))

On a sidenode, this could be called the debconf of invalidity. Holger managed to have serious problems with one of his legs right from the start requiring crutches. Jordi was hit by elmo while playing frisbee yesterday and also has problems to move on. And though Amaya is doing pretty well with trying to learn skating she got an incident last night where she managed to get a rather nasty bruise. Others are just disliked by the birds, though (that's madduck's notebook.) I'm really wondering to whom next something is going to happen.

Ah, one last thing: For those being in HEL currently, if you like to buy one of these shirts feel free to bug me, I have several with me, both the girlie shirt and the polo shirt:

[/debian] permanent link

Fri, 01 Jul 2005

Mako killed my legs

Had been to the LinuxTag this year again. Some crazy people paid for my train ticket so I show up there... Well, the train had its usual delay, but finally I got there. Met some old faces I've met on events before and some new ones I really was looking forward to. Even managed to visit three talks on the first day, a new event record for me. The most interesting one has been the one from Meike Reichle about Debian-Women. Got me wondered if I really should try to participate there with hearing about the male/female ratio on the list and on IRC and that some females rather shy away than try to participate when seeing so much males in there. On the other hand I'm not really pleased with the QoT (nice acronym, got it from their own list), so am somehow sitting in between the seats here....

Next day morning I noticed that my left sandal was b0rked and I was running around the whole day without ones. It would't had been much of a problem if it weren't so damned hot. Switching from the one hall to the other running across the place outside it felt like I got burned on my feets' soles. Did the first part of LPIC-1 test there, wasn't a big deal, put some comments on the additional sheet and hope they'll be able to read it and improve it in that respect. Got me new shoes as a present for passing it. ;)

In the evening there had been the social event which was quite nice — and long. Talking to all the people takes some time, and it was funny to see that people went crazy because they weren't able to hand out beer for about half an hour or such. As if people would die if they drink something else in the meantime... And I guess you've all seen the funny pictures already that were shot there, you can find a linklist to galleries collected by Joey like every year on his infodrom pages.

On saturday there had been another talk I visited ("Free Software with a female touch" by Fernanda). And the keysigning party, with over 100 participants... Lasted long, but finally done. Just have to sign all the keys now... *sighs*
After that there was little time left to speak with all the people, gathering my stuff and disassembling the booth. We went eating pizza and then back to the AKK. I really wanted to leave that evening already, but Mako forced me to stay with stating that he wouldn't send me any abusive SMS if I'd leave. Isn't that mean?! Oh well...
There had been this university party going on that night where we went to. It was really great! Lots of people, two halls for dancing and one where they had bands playing. Mako, Dogi, Azeem and me danced the night away.... And even at four in the morning, when my legs were already complaining it wasn't able to get Mako to stop. Dude, that guy has energy!! And one of the best dancing styles I've seen. If I thought he's adorable before by reading his blog and taking a look at his pictures his dancing makes me even more adore him... That guy truly rocks! .. and killed my legs. *grrrr*

Tolimar, you aren't the only one who has to fear getting to HEL wrecked. Although it got a bit better so far I made the mistake to meet Mako and Dogi again yesterday. Just met for some hanging out (*sigh* ;)) but when I had to hurry for my subway my legs started to hurt again because I had to run.... Damn you, Mako!

[/debian] permanent link

Thu, 02 Jun 2005

I'm still alive

Yes, I'm still alive. Some people know what was going on in the last weeks with me because they were involved, but some people just read my blog and might wonder what's up. Though, often I get the impression that I'm ignored anyway.

First of all I was working on getting some late packages into the upcoming sarge release. I'm confident that it will release soonish, I even promised someone that it will release within the next two months and I'm quite sure that this promise will hold.

Last week has been the Linuxwochen Wien and because I was responsible for the organization of the community booths there I was quite stressed with preperations and stuff so it works well for everyone. I guess I didn't do a too bad job though I know I could have done much better. Also I couldn't avoid to feel responsible for the Debian booth there which just raised my stress a bit. But it was fun anyway, especially the hacknight with the included Open Source Lan Party. We played the game Hack the Net in speed 100. It was really nice, I took a late and slow start but managed to win in the end, with a respectable margin.

We also had some new shirts this year, the design really was great, and formed a new term: debienna — debi(an vi)enna. Some shots of the shirts were taken, too. We have quite some left, I'll take some to HEL with me, it would be nice to tell me if you want one, so I don't take too few with me. Keep in mind that they are limited edition anyway so some reservation might not be a too bad idea (yes, helix, yours is already reserved. :))

I was informed that a really kind person bought me a deviantART subscription for my account there. It is really a charm, the additional features are simply great, I really love it. *kisses* to you!

[/debian] permanent link

Thu, 12 May 2005

t-prot rocks!

t-prot rocks like hell. It saves one from reading so much crap and calms your mood. For intance when receiving mails like the following:

Subject: RE: Debian Weekly News - 10. Mai 2005

Sorry I don't speak german, but my wife does.

-----Original Message-----
[---=| TOFU protection by t-prot: 206 lines snipped |=---]
[---=| Overlong signature removed by t-prot: 7 lines snipped |=---]

On a different note: I received my tickets to HEL!!! Yeah!!!

[/debian] permanent link

Tue, 26 Apr 2005

grieg is online

Like you most propably have read already we have a new arm machine online that is expected to go into real operation soon. We have to thank again Harald Kapper for hosting the machine (you might remember him as the person hosting a mipsel machine that Andreas Barth is using as buildd for experimental and non-free. Many kudos, Harald!!

[/debian] permanent link

Mon, 18 Apr 2005

Debian is Doomed

Today a package hit sarge that is upstream maintained by Microsoft: pptview (Copyright file).
<comment />

[/debian] permanent link

Fri, 15 Apr 2005

SPAM in Figlet

Today I received this SPAM mail:

Subject: what's the time Mr Wolf?                                               


     ______  _____         _______ _     _
    |_____/ |     | |      |______  \___/
    |    \_ |_____| |_____ |______ _/   \_

    ________________________________________

    *DAYTONA, SUBMARINER, OYSTER PERPETUAL*

    http://XXXX.XXXX.XXX/r/razor/XXXXX.XX

Now this is a really interesting way to avoid the word match filters for rolex. Never saw before the use of figlet in a SPAM message... I feel inclined to click the link just to honor the creativity of it...

[/debian] permanent link

Wed, 23 Mar 2005

Correction to rsync Entry

I have written about that rsync rocks. This obviously is still true, but I need to make a correction to it about something that might have been misunderstood: I did try it, but the idea for trying it came originally from Matthias Kopfermann. He came up with suggesting xdelta or rsync, and personally I would never have thought of testing it if it wouldn't have been for him. It was simply a result that I'd have never expected.

I want to excuse to those who have read my previous entry which was really scathing, and especially to Matthi. It was written in a bad mood and after a heated discussion about something else, so I reacted in a really bad way. I hope this will stay the only time I have to change my blog because I usually don't like these things at all, appart from typo fixes, of course.

[/debian] permanent link

Tue, 22 Mar 2005

Blosxom Test Package

I have prepared the announced test package for blosxom. Please send in any comments on it as soon as possible, I want to push it into the pool soon (as fast as I am able to get the debconf translation updates). This should address the most serious problems and avoid the same breakage again in the future.

[/debian] permanent link

Fri, 18 Mar 2005

rsync rocks my home!

With the release of grml 0.3 I wondered if it does gain much while trying to suck the image via rsync. So I did the following:

$> mv grml_0.2.iso grml_0.3.iso
$> rsync rsync://grml.gwendoline.at/grml/grml_0.3.iso grml_0.3.iso

Because grml is based on unstable really much has changed, so I wonder what the outcome might be. And it really astonished me:

sent 189798 bytes  received 377290139 bytes  444879.12 bytes/sec
total size is 727541760  speedup is 1.93

That means in fact, that only (189798+377290139)/727541760*100 == 51% of the total iso image file size got transfered. Woohhh!! People, pretty please start using rsync for such jobs more often!

[/debian] permanent link

Thu, 17 Mar 2005

breaking blosxom

blosxom is badly broken. A careful fix for this seems to be hell of a work and rather impossible. So djpig sugguested to really break it for being able to fix it. This is a path that I never thought of have to travel as a maintainer but he seems to be right: it's the only sane way to fix this pre-release. I will announce the really broken (upgrade-wise) packages in my blog for people eager to test prior my upload. Especially I'll inform the translators of the debconf files in advance so have the update in the upload, too.

[/debian] permanent link

Tue, 08 Mar 2005

E-Day, aewan

Time is passing by, live is passing by. Same shit, only different days. Unless you take a closer look. Doing sponsor uploads regularly, and then out of the short there are things like the e_day. Got invited to help there just really shortly before, and after all I can say I was glad that it was possible to get free for it. It was an event by the local economy camber and mostly company oriented. They had this booth area for the so-called "Open Source Expert Group" where Alexander Biedermann and me helped out. We have been there just until about 13 o'clock, but still quite some interesting questions popped up that we hopefully were able to answer. I even got the chance to promote debian-women there, we talked to two women for quite a while who were quite interested in both what Alexander's company and Debian could offer them. Although only wireless lan was available we tried to make the best of it.

Playing around with aewan lately. Submitted two small patches already, one to add the usual "<o>ther corner" function to the selection mode which almost all tools have in the one or other way, and fiddling around with the HTML export to make it also show the background color and some other quirks in the resulting HTML source. Right now I just came up with another patch that should be incorporated into aecat, hope it will be done as quickly as the others. I really think that this is one of the most helpful tools for ASCII/ANSI artists, especially the layer part rocks.

[/debian] permanent link

Fri, 25 Feb 2005

FreePop Test Packages

From http://alfie.ist.org/debian/freepop/README:

freepop (0.6.0-0) unstable; urgency=low

  * Would be: Initial Release (closing #296714)
    -- though this is a PREVIEW RELEASE!  _NO_ warranty, not granted upgrade
    path!!

 -- Gerfried Fuchs <alfie@debian.org>  Thu, 24 Feb 2005 23:03:16 +0100

 That means: I won't guarantee that the next package would not normally require
some Replaces or similar handling, but I won't add it because this is no
upload to the pool. Furthermore I have done only minimal testing so far, and it
really requires an DRI supporting graphics card, otherwise it is deadly slow.
By not having one and not having had the posibility on testing it on my
fastest machine I won't guarantee anything.

 Additionally to the packages herein you will need the clanlib0.7 which is
available from this location: <http://people.debian.org/~fenio/clanlib/>

 Again, you are on your own when using this package. Feedback is welcome, but
don't send me reports about the upstream version (yet), send them to upstream
at <http://freepop.sf.net/> directly. Comments about the packaging might be
helpful, though.

 So long,
Alfie

So I hope you know where you stand, the packages are available here: http://alfie.ist.org/debian/freepop/ — have fun!

[/debian] permanent link

Fri, 18 Feb 2005

Fun with gettext

I started working on the german centericq because the former maintainer doesn't seem to be interested anymore, no changes since 2001 and his mailaddress bounces. While doing my business in the file I stumbled upon the following interesting thing that gettext offered me:

#, fuzzy
msgid "Failed"
msgstr "Weiblich"

While it might be funny (even for people who claim to be non-sexistic) to see that gettext thinks female is a synonym for failed, it shows in a quite nice way how the gettext fuzzy algorithm works: it tries to get a best match which is similar. And although female and failed share some letters in the same order (namely, fale) it still works out nice quite often.

You see, working on translations can be fun too, sometimes. So I encourage everyone to pick up some po files from their favorite applications and enhance them, support your fellow native speakers! Give back for what you get.

[/debian] permanent link

Thu, 10 Feb 2005

... "unfortunately has to die"

Well, then I died on freenode, if I am adviced to. But in a network where the admins believe in Sometimes the k-line rushes in without actively noticing it is a proper way to administrate it and the opinion Well, tor isn't a good thing, and who tells me different unfortunately has to die. is represented I don't really want to stay anyway. Tribe liability is no useful method to fight problems. The next time I guess they'll k-line *@user.debian or something similar if there are some playing around, it just rushes in.... I'm just sorry for the wesnoth team that I can't log anymore for them. But you have to break an egg to make an omelet...
See you on the other side where the admins got a clue how to solve problems.

[/debian] permanent link

Tue, 28 Dec 2004

Dear Erich,

As much as I'd like to understand your frustration but I can't reproduce it. Joey does in his (nearly) one-man-show hell of a job. I'd wish that everyone would do as much for Debian like him.

But did it appear to you to look things up before you start ranting around? There is no phpbb2 in woody. The package only exists in sarge and sid, and like you said yourself those shouldn't be affected....

Please check the facts if you try to defame people with incomplete and easily refuteable informations that do their work. Rather fix some release critical bugs like the ones in your own packages.

[/debian] permanent link

Mon, 15 Nov 2004

Productivity, where are thou?

Sometimes one asks themself why nothing is getting finished. One gets the impression that they are only fooling around on IRC, playing games (e.g. kobodeluxe (level 33, btw.) and kq (finished the story so far)) and whatsnot...

On a closer inspection though there are things getting done: etpan-ng hit unstable, libetpan got a new upstream version released by myself, some more bugs detected and reported by myself (including one in kq which I just "played" like mentioned above). And when looking at the German wesnoth.po I'm currently proofreading for wesnoth which is 278k huge I guess being 18% through it isn't too bad neither. Oh, and finally got around and pushed up the current Debian Weekly News to the Linux-Community website again.

Sometimes things just look bad but in fact aren't too bad. Just need to get the server back up again on which my blog is hosted so you can read about this. I'm on my way, honey.

[/debian] permanent link

Thu, 28 Oct 2004

Thank you -- NOT!

WE ARE AN UNFRIENDLY COMPANY. SENDING FRIENDLY "THANKS" REPLIES WILL GET YOU KILLFILED. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!

Did I mention that I hate custumers who reply "thank you" into our ticket system and reopening the cases? I guess I'll do some procmail magic to filter those out and move them to the SPAM queue....

[/debian] permanent link

Big Brother Awards 2004, Free Alternatives

This year for the first time I've been to the Big Brother Awards at the Flex here in Vienna. It has been celebrated for the sixth time this year, but like said I visited the first time so I can't compare with the previous years, but: it was great!! The party afterwards especially, with meeting all the people again. *gg* Anyway, I guess I'll drop by next year again just to see who is the winner.

A friend of me introduced the Free Alternatives list to me today. This is a great project in which people can search for Free alternatives to proprietary products. You can easily add new (prorietary, free) entries (which have to be approved because some people missubmitted quite some stuff because they were free as in beer, not as in speech), link some and enhance the list through it. I plan to enhance the page itself with better translation handling (Accept-Language + gettext support).... See you there!

[/debian] permanent link

Sun, 24 Oct 2004

OS04 Report

The OS04 started quite early: with the ringing of my alarm clock at 4 in the morning. Granted, I could have gone there later, but then I'd have missed the keynote from Jon "Maddog" Hall. And that would have been a really bad idea. Jon came just in time to start his talk on time at 9:30. It was a presentation on a comparison of Free Software hackers with amateur artists. The lines he draw and the anecdotes on his first meeting with Linus Torvalds kept the audience more than just only interested.

Noone dared to interrupt him, not even while he used three times as long as he was planed to speak. And I guess noone really cared anyway... The rest of the day the tracks (three side by side) were all delayed by an hour through that.

I put up my stuff on some table, Michael Prokop told me that I can run a booth, but I didn't know that I'd be the only one. So I just put up the LinuxTag DVDs I was sent with the stickers and the flyers there and a little tray for the people to put donations in and told them to pick what they like and dip what they want. It worked quite well, and there were quite few who really asked some stuff. I also had some of the Ayo73 posters left which the people were quite interested in, of course.

There were a lot of interesting talks, and for the first time I found the guts to not care for the booth all the time (I from time to time checked for the donations to not have too much lying there) but also visit some of the very interesting talks. First has been a talk on The Gimp. I play a bit around with The Gimp myself, but the practical presentation with nice examples showed some of the more intersting features.

Dr. Klaus Schmaranz also had a really interesting talk: "Quality Criteria in Software Projects". He explained it with practical references to some projects he was involved with. The room was breaking full, and I really can just recommend to anyone with the chance to visit one of his talks. I'm really looking forward to his documents, although they'll lose without his talk next to it but still contain the interesting facts and ideas.

Later then it was time for my own talk. It was about the Debian Project and how it works, and I guess the people were interested. One person was especially interested in the Custom Debian Distributions (CDD) because he played with the thought of starting with Debian Enterprise but didn't know that it already existed. He also asked about if there are some Debian Developers which are well known (within the Debian world) like Maddog is in the general Linux community. Named a few, won't name them here or some might kick me for naming them but not the others....

I'm a bit sad that I couldn't visit the talk at the same time which covered "Extreme Programming". What one is hearing about it is that its approach is really helpful.

After this Michael Prokop had his talk about grml — Knoppix for System Administrators. We (yes, I'm part of the grml team) released version 0.1 on the event and from the feedback we got so far the interest for such a version is quite interesting. It got KDE and OpenOffice removed but added LaTeX, zsh as default shell and quite some system administrator stuff and geek tools. Quite some text based tools and lightweight window managers. grml longs especially for accessibility support because our dear Mario Lang from the Debian Accessibility CDD was fed up by the not real existent support for blind users in Knoppix. The current support in grml isn't much better because this is the first release, but we plan to enhance it quite much.

The day ended with the talk about "A.N.D.I.", a quite interesting project for architects, to cooperate and collaboration of not only architects but also with different other professions. Unfortunately due to the one hour delay it was quite late already and the audience wasn't really there anymore, we were three people watching a quick explenation of the project. And I must say: it was a really pity for those not having watched it because it was terrific what they produced already, and the potential that might be hidden in this project. Unfortunately it is written in java, but well, nothing is perfect... Maybe it works with kaffe.

A long day it was, and a really interesting one. Am looking forward for the OS05 next year, really. But the most funny thing that happened was while I am in the train writing this report on my way home: Another traveller with which I shared the train compartment said to me while I already started writing this and before he left the train: "Know what? You remind me of Schiele, because you're an artist and also tall and slim..." And I guess Maddog is after all right: Hacking is comparable to art.
(I guess he was rather refering to the poster roll I was taking with me instead of my hacking, but you know: there are no coincidences.)

[/debian] permanent link

Tue, 19 Oct 2004

Netznetz.net, tpp, OS04, Cinema?

Sven Guckes has again been to Vienna, and we visited the Netznetz.net. It was quite interesting to experience what sort of art in the internet and around the internet in Austria happens. There were of course some known faces, which you meet at various happenings, but it featured also quite some projects which were more than just interesting. Especially one project of a fellow got me, who produced goggles with LEDs which he triggered from the computer, which he let blink for each eye with different frequency to produce some sort of trance feeling, because the speed of the brain halves start to synchronize. Quite impressive...

I did recently a new Vim syntax file for tpp (Upstream). I knew at that time already, that Patricia Jung wrote one, but she has choosen a non-free license for it which I personally don't see as a benefit for the community.... Well, now there are two, a free one and a non-free.

On the upcoming friday the OS04 will be happening in Graz. I'm looking forward to it, because I haven't been to Graz for a while. Especially I am looking forward to meet Jon "Maddog" Hall again. He will give the keynode and I hope to have the chance to discuss all the world and his wive. But I guess I'll rather be all the time at the Debian booth I offered and explain to the people that sarge is ready when it's ready....
At this posibility I am also really looking forward to the release of grml — the live CD for Geeks. Really, if Michael Prokop wouldn't have started it sooner or later I had to do it myself. Propably even with the same name, because I have since 1998 an email address which is named grummel. :-)

I've been asked today if we aren't going to cinema anymore... Sure, we still do. And I'm sorry, that I haven't written anything on it for a longer period of time. This is part of the things that I meant in my recent blog entries. There are 9 film quick cutups missing, and with tonight it will be two more.... *sigh*

[/debian] permanent link

Wed, 15 Sep 2004

Large Backlog, News on Wesnoth, XBlast-TNT uploaded

Yes, I know, it's ages since I last blogged... But what can I say, so much to do, so little time. Quite some things happened. I've built some packages on that mipsel machine, and glad that I could have been of help. I got accused for maybe creating problems due to not having the scripts that the buildd admins have. But I didn't upload a b0rked gtkhtml for mipsel, which one of the buildd admins with the soo great script managed for mips. I did notice the problem in the buildd log, which was hard to miss. But well....

The wesnoth team asked me what server version of wesnoth-server wesnoth.debian.net will be running. I told them that I'll stick to the sarge version, so we prepared a testing upload for it which changed the official server name from devsrv.wesnoth.org (which is tracking the developer releases) to wesnoth.debian.net (like said tracking sarge). It is currently sitting around in testing-proposed-updates and missing alpha, arm and mips builds. Those architectures have no testing auto builder, so we are in bit of a problem there (and not only us). I've got access to an arm machine, too, and prepared an arm build. Unfortunately it was rejected because the new version in sid wasn't built yet on arm neither. AARGH! I started an arm build for the version in sid, and when it was finished a new upstream version was uploaded.... So it also was rejected because there wasn't the source there anymore for the build. DOUBLEARGH! Am currently builing the next sid version, hopefully will make it this time....

Finally I've uploaded XBlast-TNT! Yeah! *bounces* It is currently sitting in the NEW queue and I hope the next NEW queue processing is soon. Will be uploading the packages to my private webspace for those who can't wait. Have much fun...
Though the version currently in development offers many enhancements: Chat, integrated level editor (we got the xile people from sourceforge into the project team), and quite some stability enhances. Watch it out!

[/debian] permanent link

Sat, 28 Aug 2004

Building on mipsel

Finally I've got access to a mipsel machine. Thought the Needs-Build stats for mipsels aren't that bad anymore, I see big problems with the ordering: I've found yaz to be waiting since 72 days for a mipsel build making it invalid for sarge, and several other packages that are also waiting (only) for mipsel builds: dbview (15 days), gauche (43 days), libopengl-perl (45 days), sqlite (20 days), nemesis (34 days), txt2pdbdoc (29 days), and so on.... There is definitely something wrong, when other packages which are uploaded just recently have no problem being picked up by the mipsel buildds (which had problems, but still processed others in the meantime on irregular basis).

Thus I am currently hand building packages for mipsel on a host that I got sponsored by Kapper.net: Much thanks to you, Harald!! He sponsors the machine with connectivity completely to the project, and I hope to get it incorporated into either buildd.debian.org or buildd.net, whichever sounds more reasonable to me and do accept it. I will though keep on building by hand because of the missorting in the scripts for the time being (in order given by oldest.html). This will help sarge much more, IMHO. I am uploading the build logs to my own webserver because I don't want an apache on the build machine to load it even more. If you are interested in them, here they are.

[/debian] permanent link

Thu, 26 Aug 2004

etpan coming, playing kq, Planet Debian broken

I am working on packaging etpan currently. During the recent discussions about mail user agents on Planet Debian and my partly frustrating experiences with mutt I think I have to give etpan a try. It is new but already quite useable from what I've read, and because it's new it is still open to suggestions; not like mutt. It is a horror to have multiple gnupg keys with different passphrases with mutt, and there are other rather annoying things with it (like, that you can't read other mails while currently composing a message; a feature that I need sometimes to look up references). My current efforts on etpan though turn around getting a liblockfile1 patch for libetpan itself, which is ITPed already but still pending an upload. My efforts aren't that well, because I'm now encountering segfaults with etpan itself... But I guess I'l stick to making etpan setgid mail for the time being (of course I won't upload it that way, or package it such, I'm using dpkg-statoverride locally).

Currently playing kq again. It is a nice adventure and I didn't "finish" it the first time I played. We need much more such games, although someone whom I encouraged to take a look complained to me that the graphics suck. I don't think so, especially I simply don't care about the graphics as long as the longtime motivation and the gameplay is alright. I never heard anyone complaining about that tetris graphics sucked....

Yes, Planet Debian is broken. A while ago I had to restructure my blog a little bit to make it work with my AcceptLang plugin. Because of this Planet Debian displayed entries of mine as new. But it wasn't my fault: Planet Debian gives a damn about the <pubDate> noted in the feed anymore. I was told this is a sort of "precaution against broken blogs that update the pubDate on typo fixes". It is really nice that we do work around broken blogs and harm those who do it right, instead of getting the people to fix their broken software. Yeah for breaking stuff for completely sensible software!

[/debian] permanent link

• operation::mindcrime (feed)
• Planet Debian (feed)
• Debian-Sicherheitsgutachten (feed)
• planet.gnome-de.org (feed)
• Advogato (feed)