Rhonda's Blog

t-prot testing

Mon, 22 Feb 2010 17:30:00 EDT

The t-prot package might need your help: There is a discussion going on with the upstream developer how to proceed with respect to a hopefully helpful change in its behavior. There are several options how to address this, one of them would involve using the Getopt::Long module instead of Getopt::Mixed. Given that the benchmarks of upstream rather speak for sticking with Getopt::Mixed we would like to ask you for help:

Please test this version of t-prot (for your safety: detached gpg signature for the version) and compare it to the packaged version 2.15 that I just upload into unstable (it is installable without anything else also into (old)stable or testing). Your feedback on this is truly appreciated, please send it until the start of next week (Monday evening/Tuesday morning) to "t-prot (AT) tolot.escape.de".

Much thanks in advance!

Your Expectations

Tue, 12 Jan 2010 08:17:00 EDT

Your Expectations
I won't fulfil them for you
they are only yours

Feeling been let down
it is understandable
but it's also wrong

There are more than me
who can do the piece of work
why just bug me then?

Effect is stop work
so that others won't expect
your problem is solved

German Version

If you are looking for some packages to take care of within Debian, take a look at this list and feel free to contact me if you are interested.

Merry Season Greetings

Wed, 23 Dec 2009 06:41:00 EDT

This poem is only in German language, but I hope you can forgive me to run it in my English language feed nevertheless. I send you the best season greetings, have a nice time, use it well, relax and think about it. :)

Weihnachtsgedicht 2009

Vor ungefähr zweitausend Jahren
glaubt man, wurde ein Mann geboren
glaubt man, dass es Gottes Sohn gewesen ist
glaubt man, der uns alle erlösen sollte

Irgendwann später
dachte man, das wäre ein Grund, daran zu denken
dachte man, es wäre ein Grund, in sich zu kehren
dachte man, es wäre eine besinnliche Zeit

Heute jedoch
stresst man, um nur ja Geschenke für alle zu finden
stresst man, weil jeder überall mit einem feiern will
stresst man, um sich besonders gütig zu zeigen

Ich wünsche mir, dass
wir helfen, uns zurück zu erinnern
wir helfen, uns zurück zu besinnen
wir helfen, wieder ruhiger zu werden

Ich wünsche euch ein erlöstes, besinnliches,
gütiges und ruhiges Weihnachtsfest!

stable RC Bug Squashing

Sun, 22 Nov 2009 15:36:00 EDT

Others are doing it, so I thought I'd join in, too. Though, from a different perspective. Often enough people claim that package maintainers don't seem to care about their packages anymore once they did hit stable because they say it isn't as easy to update packages in stable. While this is partly true it still doesn't send a too good impression to have a high and increasing release-critical bug count for stable.

UDD makes it easy. It has a field affects_stable in its bugs table, and the view bugs_rt_affects_stable is even yet better. I fiddled together two short statements that help me to find release-critical bugs for stable:

SELECT b.id FROM bugs_rt_affects_stable bas
   LEFT JOIN bugs b ON bas.id=b.id
   WHERE b.severity IN ('serious', 'critical', 'grave')
   AND b.id NOT IN (select bau.id from bugs_rt_affects_unstable bau)
   ORDER BY b.id;

The second statement is without the AND clause to see all open release-critical bugs. Going through this list isn't too complicated, and I already found a good rush of bugs to mark as not affecting stable because the reason for the bug only appeared after the lenny release. I could list their bugnumbers, but it's currently up to 39 such bugs since yesterday and I don't want to bore you with it, actually it didn't involve any touching of the package—but it will definitely make it easier to find the real release-critical bugs that do affect stable and should get addressed in an update to it.

Still lots to do, 39 bugs down isn't the world when the barrier is set to about 1500. Though, it's still more than 2% and this is something that makes me a bit happy.

Things that make me happy

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 02:33:00 EDT

when people upload to Debian with an @ubuntu.com email address
even better, if they do that when they are DDs (so with a @debian.org address)

Yeah! Actually, doing so shows several things: That the collaboration between Debian and Ubuntu actually works out. That people that feel more attached to Ubuntu also do care for Debian. And that those people started to realize that contributing things back to Debian actually does reduce their own workload with respect to not having to maintain seperate patches, with the benefit of all involved parties.

So big kudos to you people being able to look over the corner of your little universe and see the bigger picture for the benefit of all!

Signing Jokes in Contracts

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 03:06:00 EDT

It is great to see that the collaboration between Debian and Ubuntu is improving; and I don't say that just because it probably can't be much better within the Debian/Ubuntu Games Team, we have people from both distributions working inside the team and most of the packages don't carry Ubuntu specific patches (anymore) because of that.

Actually, seeing that things do go pretty well in that area made me consider signing up to become a MOTU. To do that one has to sign the Ubuntu Code of Conduct (CoC) which is a fairly good document, actually. I wish there would be something similar within Debian that is considered binding, it would be able to reduce quite some tough and rough times, actually. It is about and explains to be considerate, be respectful, be collaborative, what to do when you disagree, when you are unsure and wants you to step down considerately. If these principles would be carried out amongst all the free software communities (and I really mean carried out and not just be there and grow old) I expect it would be much more welcoming for new people. And it's not too hard to do your part for it (... says the person who just recently had to excuse for her behavior).

Anyway, there is this one part with the CoC that itches me. It's not that one has to sign it with their GnuPG key, but related to it. Making it a requirement to sign it gives the document a much more official character, actually gives it the feeling and impression of a contract and I expect it is meant to carry that feeling. Though, there is this one part in it that I consider off for such a document:

Nobody knows everything, and nobody is expected to be perfect in the Ubuntu community (except of course the SABDFL).

Given that the acronym SABDFL refers to Mark Shuttleworth it means that one has to expect him to be impeccable—which I am sorry but cannot sign. I don't expect that from anyone else but myself, even Mark is only human and can make mistakes. Even though it's obvious that this is a tongue-in-cheek kind of joke which might be meant to make it clear that the Ubuntu community isn't just sterile having this in a document that is expected to get signed by contributors is just an extremely bad idea.

Sorry, Ubuntu, as long as this joke is part of the CoC I can't sign it with clean conscience, no matter how much I would sign the rest of it a thousands' time. It really makes me wonder how many others actually did read the "contract" carefully that they are signing but on the other hand simply didn't care. There is too many site signup stuff out there that noone reads neither.

Perception of Image-Hack

Tue, 06 Oct 2009 18:55:00 EDT

In my last blog entry I used the term "image-hack". It seems like it has been considered to have a negative feeling attached to it. Even though I consider this very amusing in a community that likes to pride itself with the term "hackers" I guess I can understand why people consider it a negative term. Even though technically a mockup of a website in image form actually feels just a crude hack it wasn't meant to belittle what pixelgirl has produced. Her image-hack looks extremely well.

Unfortunately no further contact after the debconf was established and personally I'm not convinced how the tiny image would work for other pages besides the start page—and removing the DSAs and News from the start page is a no-go, we actually do receive positive feedback for that. So it is what it is, an image-hack. An extremely well done one, but still just that.

New Face, Part 2

Tue, 06 Oct 2009 14:05:00 EDT

Like written in a former blog entry I am working on preparing for getting Kalle's Debian Redesign tested and installed. Even though some unfortunate events happened which made me reconsider my efforts and a lot of things changed for me I am still up with the effort. Mostly because I didn't became part of the webmasters just to chicken away in the face of obstacles, and also not just because yet another image-hack did pop up that neither showed anything usable or overall-thoughts or actual code/concepts or even tried to get in contact with the webteam.

I only remember to have received positive feedback in which I also include minor change suggestions like that the exact hits and other hits sections in the packages site aren't as clearly distinguishable as before. I have of course forwarded these to Kalle and we are looking for a solution that would go with the style. Speaking of the packages site I finally managed to get the packages from the main pool displayed too so it shouldn't behave differently to the old one anymore in that respect (see e.g. wesnoth for some more distributed package).

The next step I finished these last days was setting up a testsite for www as you can find it on www.deb.at. Please notice that you might want to surf that site in English (either change your Accept-Language settings or click on the English links at the bottom of the pages) because some of the changes are only recognizable there; like, the main page in other languages look immensely different.

Where to go from here? Kalle also has proposal for the BugTracking System and the Planet so that targets are the obvious next steps. I can't tell yet when they will be done, depends on how complicated it is to set up an environment for it, but I will keep you updated.

Times Are Changing

Thu, 01 Oct 2009 13:13:00 EDT

Since I returned from this year's debconf quite a lot things have changed in my life. One thing I knew way before debconf already, I switched jobs. I was working for a pretty long time (and also through great times) for Silver Server, for well over 6 years. Let's see what I can do in and for my new job. I'm still only pretty short there yet and I being to understand what's going on (and what could need improvements in some workflows) but it's too early to see that more precisely.

On a small side-note, the job change also required me to switch my mobile phone number because the old one was a company's number. I now have a private one that I don't fear of losing anymore. If you subtract the number 3933309527644 from my old one you have my new one. On the other hand you can always ask me for it in case you had my old one and wonder. ;)

Besides my mobile phone number other smaller things have changed over time too. Most of you noticed that I'm neither using my @ist.org nor my @debian.org address anymore because they did carry the wrong nick. And given that everyone was switching their gnupg keys I did so too. Like before I again created separate keys for private usage and for Debian usage. I'm not really following the procedure of sending out signing requests to people who have signed my old key(s), personally I don't follow them myself so I don't expect others to do. They are though cross-signed with the old ones just to be on the save side to keep the WoT not losing connections.

Also I finally got around to set up my own ejabberd server and did create my a new jabber ID that I also plan to keep. It is the same as my private mailaddress as you can see linked above in the key for private usage. ;) One of the reasons for the server is by the way also a testbed for the packaging of ejabberd which will get moved into team maintenance with the next upload which will be the next upstream version, 2.1.

But the biggest and most important change in my life is that I will have to rethink my spare time spending quite a lot because there will be something demanding a lot of time starting in about march next year. An extremely fortunate change and almost as happy one even though it means that I won't be able to attend next year's debconf in NY, but I hope the people whom I told that I will be there aren't too disappointed by this announcement. Sorry! :)

New Face, imploding

Wed, 29 Jul 2009 10:09:00 EDT

I'm extremely uneasy. Not because of some release team announcement that if one would have tried to think along after the interview with Mark Shuttleworth got around was already clear back then. It was talking about that the Debian release will propalby get adjusted to match Ubuntu's LTS releases. It isn't a big secret that the next Ubuntu LTS release will be 10.04. And counting backward from that the freeze in december is just the obvious consequence.

What I actually am uneasy about is Agnieszka's Redesign talk. Just to make things clear I want to congratulate her on what she produced. It definitely looks nice and the reactions during the talk were quite clear on that.

But, there are several issues surrounding this that makes me actually thinking about resigning from the webteam as a whole and reduce my precious time that I invest into Debian. The reason might not be as obvious, but it contains some interesting corner data:

Agnieszka did thank Sledge for his good help. So at least part of the DPL team was aware of it. Some weeks ago Luk, the other part of the DPL team, contacted me and said that he is acting with his DPL team hat on and that there were mails coming in to them about how to create some progress for the website. I told Luk that I am already working on getting Kalle's proposal integrated. It was cool to him and he thanked me and wished me well with the progress, but neither he nor Sledge did tell me anything about Agnieszka's work.
Agnieszka also did thank stockholm about his help. stockholm is part of the "marketing" team (yeah, there was one appointed two years ago; didn't you notice all their great work by now??). Anyway, eventually stockholm have heard about me efforts and did stumble by in #debian-www on IRC. He asked about the new design and who's working on it, I showed him what was there at that time already and all he said was "Cool". Again no mentioning of Agnieszka's work neither.
Like I wrote yesterday almost all of the mockups sent in contained only of images (if there even were multiple) which are hard to really decide upon—especially when they are as tiny and not clearly visible like in this presentation. Questions that were raised in the direction of wether this would actually work out were muted with the magic CSS waving; unfortunately CSS can't do magic. And with the images it's hard to decide wether it actually would work for accessibility reasons and the other things I already mentioned yesterday.
We try very carefully to not have duplication of work in the area of packaging through the terms of ITPs. Great! We try to avoid some few hours invested in an area where we have very well over thousands of contributors. But it seems to be proper to just through away days, weeks, months of invested time, effort and energy in an area that we seriously lack contributors.

Way to go, Debian. Seriously disappointed, seriously annoyed, seriously demotivated.

New Face for the Website

Tue, 28 Jul 2009 15:12:00 EDT

Not sure if you do follow the debian-www mailinglist, but from time to time there are people mailing about that they would like to give our website a new face. Most of the time people just do some mockup in some painting tool without realizing that there is a lot more behind it, with respect to translation and sublayers and accessibility requirements. After mentioning these kind of things, most people go away.

Then there was Kalle Söderman. He took a deeper look behind it, started working for himself in 2007, did notice that there is not only www.d.o but also packages.d.o (or rather wesnoth as example), wiki.d.o, planet.d.o, bugs.d.o and others too. So he started to think about something that might work cross-service, and actually did work with the code and not a painting tool. And even though he didn't hear much from people when he presented it first he kept thinking about it.

This did manage to catch my interest and I started to think about how to move forward from here. I started to contact him and started to mail back and forth about his proposal, started to set up some small testing sites (again: testing sites. They aren't meant to be finished, likewise the proposal from Kalle isn't finished yet), and this is where we are currently: On packages.deb.at/wesnoth you can see a clone of our pkg.d.o that uses his template, feel free to exchange wesnoth with your favourite package—even though be notified that it doesn't get its data regularly updated, I don't want people to use it instead of the main site and that it somehow currently doesn't show packages from the main archive but only the external sources that are used. It's just there to get you the idea.

And we also have a working testing theme for the wiki which works directly in there (thanks to Paul Wise for installing the part that needs to sit on the server side): Follow the instructions on Kalle's page about the wiki if you like to have it enabled.

I am currently trying to get something for testing set up for bugs.d.o and www.d.o; for the later I have to send kudos to Martin Zobel-Helas for giving me a prod and a system to do it on (even though he didn't originally knew that I would want to abuse it for the theme testing ;)). For the time being you can find some more of Kalle's thoughts on his Site about his proposals together with some few pages as examples, but I will keep you lot updated about major progress on this in here.

The work that I invest here is mostly about finding out how much work it actually would be to get things changed, and also because I like what Kalle did. He invested a lot of time and I guess the outcome deserves to have some further exposure. Unlike than in other areas things aren't carved in stone yet, which even Kalle is full aware of, but things have to get started somewhere. Enjoy, send (constructive) feedback (like The distinction on the new pkg.d.o proposal between Exact hits and Other hits isn't clear enough!) and acknowledge that others are doing stuff that many people in the last years did chicken out from.

Full Moon

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 03:07:00 EDT

On monday there were extremely heavy rainfall. This made it even more surprising that I was able to see the moon so clear and beautiful while driving home by night. It did motivate me to write the following Haikus which I want to share with you:

full moon shining down
it is calming and peaceful
even when cloudy

in all its silence
not much that matters and counts
giving you comfort

just watch its bright light
it does not care for others
think about yourself

Strangest problem, ever

Fri, 19 Jun 2009 11:28:00 EDT

I think I can consider this issue the strangest problem that I ever had encountered. I am unable to enter @ or € (or any key that requires the alt-gr switch on German keyboard) in iceweasel, evolution, pidgin, gucharmap but am having no troubles in all other applications I tried (kword, OpenOffice.org, abiword, gvim, urxvt) in an current squeeze system.

If anyone has any idea or hint what might be the cause of this I would be more than grateful!

Twitter: "technically wrong"

Wed, 01 Apr 2009 08:35:00 EDT

It's quite interesting. Twitter has this snippet in its registration page: By clicking on 'Create my account' above, you confirm that you are over 13 years of age and accept the Terms of Service. At least currently when you click it leads you to a page that says: Something is technically wrong. I'm very happy to accept that, but I have this strange feeling that it's not what they intended to have there...

Understanding Debian

Wed, 07 Jan 2009 05:28:00 EDT

It's always enlightning how some people see how Debian works. Or not. It seems to get more and more common that instead of filing a bugreport people seem to consider it appropriate to rather rant in their blogs about it. That will definitely get things fixed and done and motivates everyone involved to work on the issues that they get notified about only through third-party. And of course it's absolutely alright to change an application directly, not use dpkg-divert or similar, and then complain wildly about how unfair an upgrade of the package replaced that file.

And, Andrew, there wasn't a DSA about CVE-2008-2236 because it was considered a too minor issue for that. Thanks for the fish. Did you btw. try the version from the upcoming lenny release? It's not like it's not directly installable in etch because of dependencies...

Only once I would hope that people that are that deeply involved in Debian (like, being Debian Developers or long-time contributors) would do things like random users do: File the things they are annoyed with, even if they are as minor and awkward as some of the bugreports I receive for wesnoth.

Du vastehst mi ned

Thu, 18 Dec 2008 08:13:00 EDT

I dedicate this oldie but goldie to all the people in Debian that enjoy discussing everything to a dead end and then claim to have won because noone responds anymore because there is no sense to do so: Du vastehst mi ned ("you don't understand me")

Better backports.org Support

Tue, 09 Dec 2008 11:28:00 EDT

Since last weekend backports.org has two more services supporting tracking of what's going on. I will list them in chronological order:

Tracking of Security issues in backports packages: This was one of the many topics that was discussed at the Security Team meeting in Essen at the end of last month and Florian Weimer implemented a first version of tracking security issues within backports.org. It currently compares the backported version against the one fixed for unstable, so at the moment it still has some false-positives (e.g. libspf2 because the fix was taken from lenny-security), but this is still a big step forward and helpful to track outstanding issues here, too.

Diffs between etch-backports and lenny: Something similar was available at some other places before but strangely got discontinued. In here you can see which packages in backports are older (meaning only debian revision difference), outdated (newer upstream version in lenny) newer (backported from unstable?), have a wrong version schema or are not available in lenny (propably even removed from unstable). It will hopefully help people to get their backports in sync. At least it's an indicator of how well the packages are tracked.

Hope you consider them already as useful as myself, even though there is obvious space for improvements. But they are both quite helpful already in their current state so that shouldn't hinder you from using them. :)

Free your Mind - Free your Art!

Wed, 17 Sep 2008 12:01:00 EDT

For a long time publishing source code under a freedom giving license was considered bad. What if people would take your code and reuse it? What if you don't like how they reuse it?

History has shown that this has happened in only rare cases. And even then, having your code reused is an homage towards your creation. People started to understand that and it gladly became very common practise.

But it seems like the story starts over from the very beginning again, the field though is a different one. It's now graphic artists and especially musicians who are facing the same fears this time. But I think, it shouldn't be me writing this because I'm neither (well, only very few people consider ASCII art as proper art. Probably even less than consider good code to be art..). Good thing is, I don't have to. One of the wesnoth graphic artists did it, and way better than I would ever be able to get the idea across. So here you go: Jetryl about GPL Policy in wesnoth. It might be long, but it's definitely worth the read, and I hope it will help to make some people understand better and fear less.

Batman: Dark Knight

Wed, 17 Sep 2008 10:24:00 EDT

Wow, don't even remotely remember anymore when I was last blogging about going to the cinema. Granted, I wasn't that often in recent times, but I haven't mentioned some movies... Whatever.

Yesteday I have been to cinema again, and we watched "The Dark Knight". To be honest, I regret to have gone. The movie is as dark in its setting as the title says, even darker than what was common in previous Batman movies. They turned Batman into James Bond style, turning Morgan Freeman into Q, and using cheap Eminem quotes. I feel sorry for Heath that this was his last movie to star in. Even his great performance wasn't able to save the movie, and it's sad that this should be the movie people will remember him with... You deserve better, buddy.

webwml in git

Tue, 16 Sep 2008 04:19:00 EDT

Last week I wondered how much space a complete git conversion would actually need—and I was quite surprised:

$ du -hs webwml*
325M    webwml
416M    webwml.git
819M    webwml.svn

The first line is the regular CVS checkout. The third line is the SVN checkout that's available from alioth. You can see that the size is not really something one would want, especially since the real gain is extremely little: besides offline diff you rather have disadvantages with not being able to do much offline because anything history wise requires you to be online. In CVS you at least knew that revision 1.12 of a file is three commits above revision 1.9 of the same file; while in SVN you have no chance offline to know how many commits to a file happened between revision 512 and 1024, if any at all.

The conversion to git took me quite a long time, practically almost three days of (non-constant) running git-cvsimport on my laptop. The time did not completely surprise me, at least when I noticed in the end that it were well over 83 thousand commits in well over 10 years, reaching back to July 1998. My first own commit was in July 2001, which wasn't too hard to find out with git neither, and required no online operation.

git gives you complete offline access to the history. This is actually something that the build process can be based on. There propably will be some speed drawback with not being able to do simple-math for revision difference like in CVS, but that actually will have to be checked. I'm still convinced being able to do all the stuff offline without any strange hacks or needing to be online all the time is something worthwhile.

Things left to do and which I propably won't find the time in the too near future because of ... erm, you know? Lenny? That we want to release? But anyway, to not have the list of things get lost, here is a (not complete) list of things in case you are bored and want to play around a bit:

Adapt the various scripts to not check CVS revisions but use the sha1 sums.
Adjust translation-check translation="" value for all files to use sha1 sums.
Check wether a full website build would work after that changes.
Try out how submodules work and wether they might be reasonable to use for language subdirectories to allow translators partial checkouts.
... other things I've forgotten but that could be added to the WebsiteVCSEvalutaion wiki page.

Playing around a bit? Well, you don't have to do the whole git-cvsimport on yourself: I've pushed my webwml.git repository to alioth: "git clone git://git.debian.org/git/users/alfie/webwml.git" should get you started. Please notice to play around in a seperate branch and not directly in origin to be able to pull further and update from time to time.

Two Days, Apocalyptica

Wed, 27 Aug 2008 17:13:00 EDT

For quite a while I'm already looking forward to this year's Two Days A Week festival. To be precise right from when I saw the first poster about it and me finding the name of one of my most favourite bands on it: Live. I haven't seen the guys from the US for a long time now and am absolutely eager to see them on stage again.

But today came the next shock: Some few days ago Slipknot had to cancel their attendance because of the injury of one of their band members, they have found a more than adequate replacement: Apocalyptica!!!! Wiesen, I'm coming!

scons annoys

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 06:51:00 EDT

scons claims to be a better replacement for make, or rather especially autofoo magic. Unfortunately, it isn't. To me a proper build system should definitely be able to clean up behind itself. The reasoning flying around for why scons isn't able to do so are quite hilarious, ranging from that it doesn't know what it generates (how does it generate them in the first place?) to that it's extensible and thus can't be done properly (then the extensions are broken and should add their clean informations in a hook or such, too). I haven't seen any valid reason for why it shouldn't be able to do so—yet we still seem to need to clean up cruft lying aroud like .scons* files and directories, config.log and of course the build/ directory.

People, if you really want to do some proper build system, don't forget to make it clean up after itself. It shouldn't be the requirement of application developers to fix that (which doesn't really work because a scons target trying to clean the files makes scons crash).

Blosxom 2.1

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 11:27:00 EDT

Sometimes things like these happen. Noone really did expect it, but it did: blosxom Version 2.1 got released by the new Upstream Team. It does incorporate all previous Debian patches which I'm quite happy about, and contains other long standing and needed fixes and changes.

Though, there is also a tiny drawback in that, especially for the Debian package: some of the changes might not be totally approved by all the users of the Debian package. This is unfortunate, but it had to be done to get the package finally yet in a cleaner state (maybe you remember the cleanup run when I originally took over the package). Please be sure to read the NEWS.Debian entry (apt-listchanges might help here) about the most important changes, one of them might even mean that upgrades to this package will flood planets. This is extremely unfortunate but for getting things clean unavoidable:

blosxom (2.1.0-1) unstable; urgency=low

  * This update is a major switch, all local patches have been incorporated
    into upstream version again. Furthermore, html and rss flavours are now
    included in the blosxom script directly and the old 1993 and index
    flavours are not included anymore, to get rid of some further historical
    annoyances with the packaging.

  * MOST IMPORTANTLY: This update adds a new tag into rss feeds:
    <guid isPermanentLink="true"> which helps to notice duplicates and not let
    them appear again on planets. Though, for the time of switching it might
    mean that your last entries might appear as new when planet doesn't check
    <link> (which already should be cached) when finding <guid>. This is
    unfortunate but not really avoidable. To limit impact a new plugin was
    added: 00RssLimit which turns the syndicated feed in only pick up the last
    5 entries.

  * The plugin timezone got disabled and gets only installed into a new
    /etc/blosxom/plugins-available directory which is the first step to the
    planned blosxom-plugins package. If you found it useful and made use of it
    just symlink it from the plugins directory.

 -- Gerfried Fuchs <rhonda@debian.at>  Fri, 25 Jul 2008 16:19:49 +0200

Technically it means you might want to tweak the included 00RssLimit plugin to even just 1 until you blogged some more and raise it with time if your blog runs through some planet. If you do the upgrade, did set 00RssLimit to 1 and do not reappear with your last entry on your planet sites feel free to switch it back.

Again, this is an unfortunate situation, and it's not really related to the Debian package only–the addition of the <guid> tag happened upstream and will affect all users of blosxom. It's just that I added the selfwritten 00RssLimit plugin to reduce the impact for the Debian users. Hope you don't mind. ;)

Ah yes, and if you might ask where the package is: I did put it into my website for now so people have some time to stumble upon this blog entry before they install the package from unstable without prior notice and maybe not even using apt-listchanges. I will upload the package within the next day.

Plug And Pray

Fri, 11 Jul 2008 11:26:00 EDT

Sometimes one stumbles upon interesting pictures. It happens too regularly in recent times and I don't think that it will end too soon. This new section of my blog will contain such photos from time to time.
I'll start off with a quite interesting poster we stumbled upon in my hometown. If you don't understand German, it's about church service targetted at youths—and everyone knows that young people always mix their language with english vocabulary all the time to sound hip, don't we... Don't forget to also read the small text at the bottom, or you don't know where the "Chill Out - Meet & Greet" is going to happen!

Musical Countries Meme

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 09:38:00 EDT

The instructions are pretty simple: Go to your last.fm profile and look up the countries for all 50 listed "Top Artists Overall". Here is the distribution of the bands I listen to:

de: 19
uk: 11
us: 11
se: 2
at: 1
au: 1
be: 1
fr: 1
ie: 1
it: 1
mx: 1

Found through Mosquitokillah

pgadmin3 for experimental

Thu, 22 May 2008 04:56:00 EDT

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.

Love is...

Wed, 21 May 2008 08:46:00 EDT

Love is For Sharing
Share your Fun, your Joy, your Heart
Best Moments in Life

Love is Not to Share
Don't share Birthday Dinner's Bills
Not Forgetable

Love is About Talks
Talk a Lot, 'bout Everything
Talks will Hook You Up

Love is Not to Talk
Don't Overstate when in Rage
It will Hurt you Both

Love is For Spending
Spend Much Time with Each Other
It's just Natural

Love is Not to Spend
Hobbies are Fun, but Beware:
Not on Holidays

Love is For Writing
Take the Time and Write It Down
Love Letters are Fun

Love is a Black Out
No Idea how to Praise Them
Not Able To Write

Love is For Thinking
Do Not Forget the Good Things
In Times of Troubles

Love is Not to Think
Just be Yourself Where You Go
Let It Drive Itself

Deja Vu?

Fri, 02 May 2008 05:18:00 EDT

Sometimes strange things happen. This tuesday I had been to a simply great concert again: Grossstadtgeflüster. They were wearing nice white jumpsuits with finger-color handprints on them, the playlist was mostly really great, good mix of their first and from the great new album. But what was the most interesting part is that they announced another concert on the following tuesday. I just dropped to the floor because well, yet another of those "coincidences", because well, next tuesday is my birthday. Again. Deja Vu, anyone?

On wednesday I had been to the next concert: Mono & Nikitaman. I never have seen the WUK that crowded, the hall was totally packed, people were even standing through the doors into the pre-hall. And even though they are rooted in Reggae it was in no way slow or soft. Greatly carrying along, hard to keep ones feet still.

Only drawback when having two great concerts in two subsequent nights: Your neck and back starts to hurt and requests its toll. *ouch*

Baby is Leaving

Fri, 25 Apr 2008 09:34:00 EDT

Just to not confuse readers from Planet Debian, the mentioned baby is not Miriam Ruiz. Sorry. :)

baby is leaving
flying over the big sea
heading for some place

I wish her good luck
and that she will come back soon
to my open arms

P.S.: Tiny bits changed after some nagging from baby. ;)

On freedom

Fri, 18 Apr 2008 04:32:00 EDT

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.

Pregnant Husband

Sat, 12 Apr 2008 16:37:00 EDT

It's a bit strange. Still. Writing this personal part of my blog, opening some of my most inner thoughts to the wild public. Though, so wild it doesn't seem to be. To be honest I can't remember having received any bad feedback on my personal stuff, only positive, supportive ones. (Or, there was one. Though, it wasn't related to the core of the personal section but someone thinking it would be "cool" to misinterpret some statement therein and try to hurt me with it. It only made me laugh at them, trying to "use" it as an argument.)
No bad feedback might be related to that I don't have comments enabled because I don't want to have a moderation system that would make it look like I filter out bad comments but I also don't want to open it up to SPAM. And people who propably usual leave scathing comments don't consider it convenient to address me directly, via any IM system, including emails.

Anyway, opening in that way has quite some benefits: For a start, it helps me myself to keep track of things that happened. Secondly, it hopefully helps others that are in similar situations to see that they aren't alone out there and that one can survive with not hiding it. But last but not least some people address me and provide me with interesting links on the topic.

I think they shouldn't be just hidden in my personal mailbox so I am going to offer them to a broader audience here. I won't show the names of who sent them along, I'm not sure if they would like being connected to the topic. But they can be assured of my blessing for offering them to me.

First link I like to hand out is an article from advocate.com about a pregnant husband. Yes, this was no typo and the reason why I haven't posted it right the next day because I received that link on March 31st. I can just wish all the best to Thomas, Nancy and their yet unborn girl. Looking forward to see baby photos. :)

The second article I got sent lately is When Girls Will Be Boys. It is about the transition story of Ray and acceptance problems. Pretty long but definitely worth reading.

Again, thanks to the people who offered me the links to the articles, I truly appreciate them—and I hope some of the people reading my blog will too, or at least that it might change their perception and opinion on "such people".

Die Welle

Thu, 20 Mar 2008 10:49:00 EDT

"Die Welle" is yet another modern adoption of the old experiment Ron Jones did back in 1967 to his school class about showing them that something like the Third Reich is still possible nowadays. One of the pupils sums the first impression up pretty well, "Not again, I can't hear it anymore", but the further it comes to the end of the movie the more oppressing the situation gets. Definitely worth seeing, even if you can't hear it anymore.

APT::Acquire::Translation "none";

Mon, 10 Mar 2008 10:24:00 EDT

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.

Wegen Renovierung Offen

Tue, 26 Feb 2008 08:18:00 EDT

It's rare that one does something for themself, and entertainment has happen. Yesterday I had been to a cabaret and did take my other half with me. With the thought, it doesn't always have to be Resetarits, Gunkl or Dorfer I chose "Wegen Renovierung offen" ("Opened due to renovation") from and with Gery Seidl–being the child of a master-builder and having done my A-levels at a high school for structural engineering it wouldn't had been a better fit thematic wise.

The role of the construction supervisor Roman Schweißer is catching right from the start, and that's not only for insiders but also for people who generally have no connection to this business branch; a human like everyone else: The internal conflict between what his boss tells him and what his heart tells him, different approaches to get that done, and at the same time trying to also work on his shaken relationship isn't easy—but for sure it's extremely entertaining and worth seeing. My other half didn't regret it to got convinced by me.

Dates are still a lot left, partly sold out, partly though also from other projects to which I'm looking forward to. It's rare that a still young performer is not only just able to catch up with oldsters but also to perform with them on stage.

My Efforts in Debian

Fri, 08 Feb 2008 19:00:00 EDT

... 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.

Happy Christmas

Mon, 24 Dec 2007 20:02:00 EDT

...or similar for those who enjoy the hopefully silence part of the year. May you have someone to cuddle you to sleep... and also wake up again with. ;)

Strange ...

Thu, 22 Nov 2007 09:13:00 EDT

Haven't written anything for way too long, I tried to put something down again last week, and this is what I came up with. It's not influenced by anything special, it's not as well as I usual prefer, but still, I thought I should share.

life is strange
it starts off without knowledge
in the end you die

love is strange
it starts off with bad heartaches
in the end - alone

things are strange
still we try to survive it
go on day by day

In the mirror...

Tue, 20 Nov 2007 11:11:00 EDT

One says the eyes are the mirror of the soul. I made this experience back in easter for the first time. I was over at my brother's place for easter celebration when I got up in the morning, went into the bath and looked into the mirror for morning toilet. I washed my face like always with cold water to refresh myself, and when I removed my hands... I was sure I was looking into a female face. It quite a lot bewildered me; it was the first time this happened. And I wasn't even properly shaved...
An experience like this is something special I guess, and it happened more and more often in the meantime. I guess this is one more proof that what I feel is the right thing.

... even though still some others seem to be immensly ammused by it. When I went to the ceilidh at the debconf in EDI I received some pretty nasty responses to my outfit, which I didn't expect within a project about Freedom and Openness. Though, I give the people the doubt of not knowing what they have done. It's too much in human nature to joke about things they don't understand, not knowingly insulting others. I'd like to dedicate this fine tune from Garbage to them: Bleed Like Me. If you listen closely to the lyrics you might be able to find out why...

There has also been a genderfuck night in the club next to the night venue which on the other hand was pretty nice. It was attended by quite some people from Debian, some expectedly, some to my happy surprise. Thank you again guys, for making this evening to something special. I hope you keep it in as nice remembrance as me.

My former SO drew a while ago a pretty nice picture about me. I didn't ask for it, or did hint it, which makes me even more happier about it. Thank you Babsi, really. :) I switched my hackergotchi on Planet Debian to it just in case.

Today is the Transgender Day of Remembrance. I stumbled upon it in the Venus Envy comic I got notified about earlier this year, you might want to check its contribution, but beware, it might as disturb you as it does to me. I'm thankful that Erin dis survive it, because she gives so much strength with her comic to me and possibly also others...

Bourne Ultimatum

Mon, 12 Nov 2007 17:30:00 EDT

Today I have been to the "Bourne Ultimatum". I bought myself the first and second part on DVD just recently to remind myself of what was going on, I even planed to watch it with some dear friends but all I received were meaningless promises, and before it stops screening I went on my own—just to stumble upon an old friend in the cinema who was going to watch the movie himself with his brother. Anyway, I was really looking forward to this part, given that I really enjoyed the former two parts—and I wasn't disappointed at all. It is a really worthy final part of this trilogy. Julia Stiles had a bit bigger part in this one which was an added enjoyable addition, and the scenes in Madrid were really quite thrilling. All thumbs up!

Wir Sind Helden, Grossstadtgefluester - 2nd part

Tue, 06 Nov 2007 04:30:00 EDT

Next round of catching up. Two more concerts I had been to since Texta. First of them was Wir sind Helden. They played again in the Gasometer, but the entrance wasn't as bad as I am used to at that location. The accoustic in the hall still hasn't really improved, though. But aside from the location the concert was truly worth it. The support band Polarkreis 18 was unknown to me but are worth keeping an eye on, and if you don't know them neither they pretty much reminded me of Radiohead. Wir sind Helden themself did rock the hall totally, it was true fun seing how the band themself enjoyed the concert, played with the fans, and when they sang Bist Du nicht müde nach so vielen Stunden ("Aren't you tired after so many hours") as encore my shouting of "NOOO!!" got Judith offtracks and laughing. ;)

Last week at Halloween Grossstadtgeflüster had been to the B72 again. What can I say, I just love the band. I was though pretty impressed that they remembered me—hell, Jen even remebered my name Rhonda D'Vine without me mentioning it... It helps that they aren't that famous yet and thus one can just approach them frankly without much fear of annoying them or being pushed off by some security guy. It's sad though that they sill haven't got any record label since they were last here and that their fanpage has been closed for the second time. I am thinking about helping to fight the latter problem at least, it's pretty useless to buy domains (gsgf-fans.de, gsgf-fanpage.de) and then return them after a short while, making it mostly unusable again. :/