Planet Debian

I just read the news that PC Magazine is being canceled. It’s not exactly a shock, given the state of technical magazines right now. I haven’t read one of those in years, since they turned to be more of a consumer than a technical publication.

But I hope I am not the only one out there that remembers PC Magazine from the mid to late 1980s. I had two favorite parts in each issue: the programming example, and the “Abort, Retry, Fail” page at the back of the magazine.

The programming example was usually some sort of DOS (or, on occasion, OS/2) utility. It was usually written in assembly, and would be accompanied by a BASIC program you could type in to get the resulting binary, as assemblers weren’t readily available. The BASIC program was line after line of decimal numbers that would decode them and write out the resulting binary — sort of a primitive uuencode for paper. Trying to type those in gave me some serious eyestrain on more than one occasion. By now, I forget what most of those utilities did, but I remember one: BatchMan. It was a collection of tools for use in DOS batch files, and could do things like display output in color or even — yes — play monophonic music. It came with an example that displayed some lyrics about batch programming on-screen, set to what I later realized was the Batman theme. Geek nirvana, right?

But Batchman was too big to publish the source code, or the BASIC decoder, in print. It might have been one of those things that eventually led me to a CompuServe account. PC Magazine had some deal with CompuServe that you could get their utilities for free, or reduced cost — I forget. CompuServe was probably where I sent my first email, from my account which was 71510,1421 — comma and all. In later years, you could pay a small fee to send email to the Internet, and I had the amazingly attractive email address of 71510.1421@cis.compuserve.com. Take that, gmail.

PC Magazine eventually stopped running utilities that taught people about assembly or batch programming and shifted more to the genre of Windows screensavers. They stopped their articles about how hard disks work and what SCSI is all about, and instead have cover stories like “Vista made easy!” I am, sadly, not making this up. Gone are the days of investigating alternative operating systems like OS/2.

It appears that “Abort, Retry, Fail” is gone, too. It was a one-page thing at the back of each magazine that featured braindead error messages and funny stories about people that did things like FAX an image of a floppy disk to a remote office — before such stories were cliche. Sort of like DailyWTF these days. The sad truth is that the people that would FAX an image of a floppy are probably the ones that are reading PC Magazine today.

I still have a bunch of PC Magazine issues — the good ones — in my parents’ basement. I also still have my floppies with the utilities on them somewhere. One day, when I get some time — I’m estimating this will be about when Jacob goes to college — I’ll go back and take another look at them.

I’m sceptical about Global Enterpreneurship Week after last year’s problems, but today is Social Enterprise Day, so I’ve tried to get involved with the WalesCoop Ethical Entrepreneurs Online Discussion from 1-2pm and 7-8pm today. Come join us!

Yep, they are back. Starting tomorrow on Channel 4. Don’t miss it.

The Open Rights Group is 3, and now has reached over 1000 fivers a month. To celebrate ORG have issued each of the first 1000 members with web badges, I have added my ORG badges into the sidebar.

If you care about any of these:

* Automatic Vehicle Tracking
* Copyright
* Creative Commons
* Data Protection
* DRM
* e-Voting
* Freedom of Information
* Identity
* Intellectual Property
* Net Neutrality
* Open Geodata
* Open Source
* Police Records
* Privacy
* Public Domain
* Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act
* Release The Music
* RFID

visit the site and sign up to help reach them target of 1500 fivers a month by December.

Bear with me that I keep you posted with boring news of screenshots.debian.net. But after further optimisation (caching the start page, serving screenshots directly from nginx instead of via Pylons) we decided that it’s time to get us on Slashdot. Thanks a lot to zepolen for teaching me about memcached and threading! The slashdot people have approved my announcement and we are already getting hammered by people following the link to screenshots.debian.net. Currently the server load is still near 100%, we have 10 Mbps network traffic and 60 request/second. Watching the web server logs is currently pretty cool.

21:08:30 up 455 days, 15:08, 2 users, load average: 1.27, 0.94, 0.69

Honestly I hardly ever read Slashdot. But apparently many others do. And if you are especially bored you can read the comments on the posting there. So much childishness. “You should have made it a distribution-independent site.” “How should I make a screenshot of libfoo-bar?” Why can’t people just be happy with what they get for free and make proper suggestions? Well, go create something yourself. Expecting something perfect from the start is pretty naive. But not unexpected.

This is a big deal for anyone interested in IPv6: Cisco is declaring IOS feature parity for IPv4 and IPv6. That is, if a given router/switch with a given IOS image can do something on v4, it can from now on do the same thing on v6 with no extra cost. (That is, given that Cisco supports it in any image, obviously.) They're starting to roll it out on the 6500 series of layer 3 switches, and the rest is supposedly following gradually over the coming calendar year.

In particular, this means that companies do not need to pay extra to upgrade their core network to being IPv6 capable -- it's a base feature you get as part of the package. (I won't say “for free”, because equipment in this class is ridiculously expensive.) Neither will they need to shell out $XX,XXX just to experiment with IPv6 in the lab. It's removing a very important roadblock in getting IPv6 more widely deployed.

Now we need Juniper to follow suit. My guess is they're following this very closely.

I think Jari reads my blog haha. There are shiny new packages for libtorrent and rtorrent. The same place as ever:

My debian-playground: http://debian.rivco.info/

My private repo:
deb{,-src} http://reprepro.deb.rivco.info/ experimental main

And of course, git (checkout master-experimental and upstream-experimental):
http://git.debian.org/?p=collab-maint/libtorrent.git
http://git.debian.org/?p=collab-maint/rtorrent.git

* Keeping tradition of cool posters, KDE India team has come with set of awesome posters again. Pradeepto announced here and here and I loved this for obvious reason!

So between yesterday and today I packaged the new upstream version of libtorrent/rtorrent 0.12.3 and 0.8.3 as beta. I still need to do some testing on the packages and maybe change libtorrent from OpenSSL to TLS.

Anyway, in the meantime you can grab the binaries (only 386) and sources from my debian-playground:

(there may be new beta versions at the time you read this so please check as well the parent directory)

Or my repo:

Hopefully they'll be available soon from the Debian Archive, just need to check some stuff before that. Anyway, they're fully working right now.

Good news everyone, new Gammu testing version is out. This time biggest fix is Bluetooth support for Mac OS X, accompanied with fixed locking on some architectures and improved debug configuration, to allow proper integration with python-gammu.

Full list of changes:

• Reimplement locking and add tests for it.
• GSM_SetDebugFileDescriptor now accepts flag whether file descriptor can be closed (bug #749).
• Soname change due to API breakage (see above).
• Fixed compilation on Mac OS X, thanks to Juan A. Bertolin for testing.

You can download from usual place: http://cihar.com/gammu/,

Debian users will find packages in experimental soon.

The next Software in the Public Interest board meeting will take at 2000 UTC (noon PST / 15:00 EST / 20:00 GMT / 21:00 CET) on Wednesday 19 November 2008 on irc.oftc.net #spi. The agenda is online, but I’ve not seen an announcement yet.

I’m surprised there’s not much on the agenda. Missing topics include supporting FACIL. What else do you think SPI should be doing?

Let’s start with a photo:

That’s Jacob over at the pumpkin patch near us. He found something to inspect, and spent awhile doing it. As he does.

He’s taken a liking to our cat, Nash. Jacob calls him “cat Nash”. Never just “Nash”. When we get home from somewhere, if the cat is around, Jacob will say, “Hi cat Nash! Hi cat Nash!” Then he’ll bend over, touch his head to Nash’s back, and try to give him a hug. Nash, surprisingly, doesn’t mind this.

Jacob enjoys being a part of — well, everything. He will repeat back new words and phrases, trying to learn how to say them, even if he doesn’t understand what they mean yet. His favorite recent outdoor discovery is that grain silos are all over the place. He’ll point them out excitedly as we drive down the road. I had never noticed just how many there are.

One day, he pointed at a water tower and said “SILO!” I understood why he said that, but I told him it was a water tower. He remembered that, and learned to tell them apart in a day or two. Then one morning he surprised me with, “Water tower. Water inside.” How he figured that out, I don’t know.

There’s another photo of him at the pumpkin patch.

The other day, I accidentally triggered our smoke alarms while checking one for a battery. After that, Jacob loved to say “BEEP! BEEP!” Sometimes followed by “Smoke larm. Hurt ears.” We learned how to say BEEP BEEP loud and also quiet.

He’s certainly a lot of fun at this age.

• The Artist information was not always correct.
• All the music was marked as being of genre Rock.

Guess it's really been longer than a year that haskell has been on my mind, though not much lately. Things are aligning again. I'll shortly be visiting the Bay Area again -- last time I piled up haskell documentation for the plane trip. This time I'm looking forward to the Real World Haskell book waiting in the mailbox when I get back.

I read and commented on the first several draft chapters, hoping my ignorance would be useful, and I know one of the authors (though if I'm not mistaken I've never met him). So I'm looking forward to reading it, but also feeling guilty that I haven't managed to do anything serious with haskell yet. No new project that I dared, or had the patience, to attempt in it. But that's what the book's supposed to solve. Getting over the gap from a basic understanding to being able to add the language as another tool in the kit.

And hey, it's better than seriously learning javascript would be, right?

Right now I can't think about haskell without thinking about Buddhism. I won't bore you with why they're connected in my head.

Here’s a fun link. This site appears to have seeded their md5 hash list with all lower case character strings of 4 characters or fewer and many english words (probably from some large dictionaries), and they seem to be adding more as they go. This makes me want to put up an interface to the 7 character alpha-numeric-plus-many-special-chars rainbow table I’ve got. But searching the 500G table for a single hash takes… a while. I’d need to batch it up. Go-go-gadget web 2.0!

Times are exciting. Our book, Real World Haskell, is now available in a number of venues. But before I get to that, I’ve got to talk about what a thrill this project has been.

I created our internal Darcs repository in May, 2007. Since then, the three of us has made 1324 commits — and that doesn’t count work done by copyeditors and others at O’Reilly.

We made available early drafts of the book online for commenting, which served as our tech review process. By the time we finished writing the book, about 800 people had submitted over 7,500 comments. I’ve never seen anything like it, and really appreciate all those that commented about it.

As for availability, RWH is available:

• For immediate purchase with electronic delivery, from O’Reilly’s page
• For immediate viewing on Safari Books Online, at its book page
• Paper editing timing is still tentative, but we’re estimating arrival in bookstores the week of December 8.

People are talking about it on blogs, twitter, etc. We’re excited!

Today I had to work with a really old svn repository again, which was still in the old bdb format (not in the newer and recommended fsfs one). This caused quite some problems, like, um... you cannot checkout, update, or commit anything.

$ svn co file:///path/to/myrepo
svn: Unable to open an ra_local session to URL
svn: Unable to open repository 'file:///path/to/myrepo'
svn: Berkeley DB error for filesystem '/path/to/myrepo/db' while opening environment:
svn: DB_VERSION_MISMATCH: Database environment version mismatch
svn: bdb: Program version 4.6 doesn't match environment version 4.4

A quick search revealed that this is bug #342508, a solution is/was supposedly mentioned in /usr/share/doc/subversion/README.db4.3 (which does no longer exist in the Debian unstable package). Luckily this blogpost has some details.

So, the short HOWTO for upgrading an svn repository of one Berkeley DB version to another one is:

$ cd /path/to/myrepo/db
$ db4.4_checkpoint -1
$ db4.4_recover
$ db4.4_archive
$ svnlook youngest ..
$ db4.6_archive -d

In this case I upgraded from 4.4 to 4.6 (do "apt-get install db4.4-util db4.6-util" if necessary).

While I was at it, I also switched the repository to the fsfs format then:

$ svnadmin dump /path/to/myrepo > myrepo.dump
$ mv /path/to/myrepo /path/to/myrepo.bak
$ svnadmin create --fs-type fsfs /path/to/myrepo
$ svnadmin load /path/to/myrepo < myrepo.dump

Maybe this is helpful for some other people out there.

Q: is a mobile phone (nice hardware, shitty firmware, btw) waterproof? A: I now got this new toy (Sony Ericsson S500i) as aresult. And because I don't really like losing contacts again (I never managed to connect to the old phone from Linux and was too lazy to use the Windows software), I have now fired up kitchensync with the OBEX SyncML client from the OpenSync project. And was very surprised that after only very little fiddling with the configuration I could indeed copy the contacts from the phone to KDE's addressbook.

There seems to be a — not so usual anymore in this decade — utf8 problem somewhere (it looks as if the encoding from the phone is converted to utf8 twice, or it is latin1 to utf8 encoded but was already utf8 on the phone), and synchronisation is only one way so far (from the phone to KDE-PIM), with changes on the KDE side being overwritten. No idea which component those bugs are in, and documentation I've found is not very verbose. So, to start with:

I've gotten this nice dump with hcidump. Now, how do I extract the actual data streams from that dump? I know I have to use wbxml2xml on the data, but first I need to unwrap the network data, and I haven't found that (probably read past it in the manpage of hcidump because I'm a bit tired.) Of course, if anybody out there has solved my issues I'd be just as happy with information on how that was done instead. In the mean time, I at least have reasonable back up of my phone's contact database again.