The Random Musings of Maulkin

Election results

Sat, 03 May 2008 17:40:00 EDT

For info, as I've been asked by a couple of people, I've been elected as a city councillor for King's Hedges in Cambridge

Full results:

Candidate	Votes
Neil McGovern (Liberal Democrat)	762
Geri Bird (Labour)	560
Cyril Weinman (Conservative)	419
James Youd (Green)	129

This gave me a majority of 198, a massive improvement of last year's majority of just 18. Huge thank you to everyone who supported me and helped during the campaign period, I'm really grateful.

Be careful what you post

Wed, 16 Apr 2008 08:18:00 EDT

In follow-up to my previous post, in which the phrase "google for gerri bird cambridge" (which turned up a rather poor lack of reply to a survey) was printed on some campain leaflets, I've come across a slightly different example of how traditional PR ideas may not work online if the people who are doing it don't understand the technology.

The Cambridgeshire County Council have placed on their transport page a link inviting people to view some videos of their new mis^WGuided Busway on YouTube. They've even gone so far as to create a YouTube account for the purpose. Unfortunately, the comments on their first video aren't too favourable, with the vast majority of people hating the idea. Not content with this, a second video was also posted, with exactly the same effect. In retaliation, it seems that their PR department has tried to fake some good reviews, but have been caught out.

So, some simple lessons:

Don't trust user generated content to do your job for you
Don't trust sites you have little control over
Don't try and stuff the ballot by writing like a PR person

Be careful what you print

Sat, 29 Mar 2008 14:59:00 EDT

For those that don't know, I'm running for local government as the Liberal Democrat candidate for King's Hedges City Councillor in Cambridge.
Part of this involves seeing what the other parties do. I had a leaflet come through the door for the potential Labour candidate, Gerri Bird. It contained the usual bumpf, and a suggestion at the end; "google for gerri bird cambridge".
This could present a problem for Gerri. You're not asking someone to go to a site, where the information you have is constant and of a known quality. In this case, Gerri not replying to a survey from the local cycling organisation is the top hit on Google. As these leaflets are already out in the wild, the instructions can't be changed.

Something to be careful of.

Virus scanning the Debian archive for fun and profit

Wed, 05 Mar 2008 17:04:00 EDT

As some people may know, I'm a member of the Debian testing security team. As well as tracking all CVE IDs with which packages they affect, we also keep a list of known embedded code copies. Embedded code copies are a bad thing, as they cause no end of problems for the security teams.

One of the problems we've had to find a solution for is: How do we know what statically compiles against a library, or even worse, ships it's own copy?
So, we're looking for something that looks a particular set of bytes in arbitary executeables; a signature of the library if you will. And we do have a rather good tool that can be used to scanning for binary signatures: clamav :)

Step 1

Create a clamav signature

Clamav have a nice guide on how to create signatures on their site. The method I use is fairly simple: find a unique binary string and pass it to sigtool --hex-dump and place it in a nbd file.

Step 2

Scan the archive

for I in `find /mirror/debian/pool/ -name *all.deb`; do 
	clamscan -i -d smarty.ndb --deb --tempdir=/home/maulkin --no-summary \
	--max-space=1024m --stdout $I >> /home/maulkin/smarty.log; 
done;

Step 3

???

Step 4

PROFIT!!!

While I'm talking about testing security, we're all rather busy at the moment in the team, so we could do with some help! If you fancy helping, have a quick read of the intro and come onto #debian-security on irc.debian.org and say hi!

A quick comparison of top news stories

Fri, 11 Jan 2008 11:52:00 EDT

Sweden	UK
Victory for topless bathers Court gives thumbs up to anal massage technique Postcard arrives 25 years late Swedish prostitution: gone or just hidden? Ninety pythons left to die in Swedish cottage	Parted-at-birth twins 'married' Pound at record low against euro Vomiting bug 'hits three million' Mr Potato Head makes octopus pal Ngugi laments Kenya violence

Tor, privacy and anonymous browsing

Tue, 11 Dec 2007 07:45:00 EDT

An interesting discussion appeared on #debian on OFTC regarding TOR. One person was of the view that "many intelligence and other agencies are probably heavily involved in tor". As the discussion continued (yes, I should have pointed out it was OT for the channel...) it appeared that privicy and anonymity were getting confused.

Now, I'm not a huge TOR fan (being an oper on OFTC), but I seriously doubt that government agencies are 'heavily involved'. I was pointed at an article to back this claim up, but the article doesn't. Instead, it (and the original claim) raises a couple of interesting issues.

Firstly, there is a difference between privacy and anonymity, although closely related. Privacy allows you to keep information about yourself secret, and anonymity allows you to keep you yourself secret. In the case linked, although the people browsing were anonymous, and maintained privacy, this was broken when they revealed information about themselves. Breaking this privacy broke their anonymity. TOR doesn't even grantee complete anonymity:

Tor can't solve all anonymity problems. It focuses only on protecting the transport of data. You need to use protocol-specific support software if you don't want the sites you visit to see your identifying information. For example, you can use web proxies such as Privoxy while web browsing to block cookies and withhold information about your browser type. Also, to protect your anonymity, be smart. Don't provide your name or other revealing information in web forms.

[http://www.torproject.org/overview.html.en]

Used properly, TOR can be a very powerful tool to help, but certainly isn't a silver bullet. It needs to be used properly to prevent your identity being known (anonymity). However, without privacy, this is nothing.
Even without these safeguards, it would require significant resources (and may not be possible) to reliably retrieve useful information about one particular person. This leads to the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory, which is the main issue I have with TOR, but that's a different post.

So, the question is: do you want privacy or anonymity when using the internet? You need to know what you want before you use a tool, as nothing can beat user education on how to keep your browsing details out of the 'wrong hands'.

Too much information!

Wed, 05 Sep 2007 09:44:00 EDT

Providing a lot of information in a bug report is useful. It helps the developer work out what's wrong. However, you should be careful not to reveal too much information as one submitter did to Gnome in their bug report. Have a look (if you're not in work) at the .xsession-errors at the end of their report to see what movies they were playing.

Update: mind you, at least they were vaguely covert, compared to the brutal honesty of this report. Thanks to Florent Bayle for that link.

And the winner is...

Tue, 07 Aug 2007 09:35:00 EDT

MJ Ray posted a couple of short summaries as to how the election would have turned out if alternate voting systems had been used. A couple of people asked about others, so here's a nice long list:

Borda,
Borda Elimination,
Minmax,
Nanson,
Ranked Pairs,
Condorcet (SPI),
Condorcet (Debian):

Bdale Garbee
David Graham
Luk Claes
Joshua D. Drake
Martin Zobel-Helas
Joerg Jaspert

Bucklin:

Bdale Garbee
David Graham
Joshua D. Drake
Luk Claes
Joerg Jaspert
Ian Jackson

IRV,
Pluralty:

Bdale Garbee
David Graham
Joshua D. Drake
Martin 'Joey' Schulze
Luk Claes
MJ Ray

Most of these seem to come out in favour of the result we achieved with Condorcet. Plurality (aka: First past the post) and IRV put heavy emphisis on the voters first choice. It doesn't really make sense to compare results from a condorcet ballot with either of these methods. Bucklin is rather meaningless in a multi-winner election.

In answer to "is this type of Condorcet ever likely to elect someone who polarises views", it's possible, but unlikely. IRV and Pluralty are the ones to go for if you want the majority of people unhappy, unlike the others, which produce the majority of people happy.

It's raining

Mon, 25 Jun 2007 13:46:00 EDT

As a load of the UK seems partially under water:

Cheese + Logos

Mon, 04 Jun 2007 11:49:00 EDT

Well, my colo box lives again. Ish. It's now running under a Xen instance until the new hardware arrives that'll fix it's blown up PSU. So I can now be contacted via the usual methods again :)
In other news, it seems that the new 2012 logo has been announced. It's really quite foul. Fortunately, others have come up with alternate designs. See image 5. If it gets pulled (very likely) see my mirror.

09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0

Fri, 04 May 2007 04:42:00 EDT

For all those who are wondering what this is, wake up :)

For others, I made a little icon:

It encodes the colours as:
#09F911 #029D74 #E35BD8 #4156C5 #635688 #C009F9 #11029D #74E35B #D84156 #C56356 #88C009 #F91102 #9D74E3 #5BD841 #56C563 #5688C0
Aka: "09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0" three times.
Interestingly, that little icon which HAPPENS to contain the code in question is copyright myself. And I'm licencing it under CC BY-NC-SA 3.0

Update: Thanks to Michal Politowski to notice that the second colour was coded as #020D74, not #029D74. Updated.

Make me pwetty clothes...

Wed, 18 Apr 2007 12:19:00 EDT

As some people may know, there's a group of us getting some official Debian Tartan (thanks to Phil at hands.com) kits made up for DebConf 7.
Moray got back from the weavers today, with a nice photo of the tartan being weaved :)

Don't get free hardware, win it

Mon, 26 Mar 2007 12:37:00 EDT

A while back, I entered a competition to win one of a few prizes. The results came in, and it looks like I was a runner up, netting me a Mac Mini.

First, a rant about Mac OS X. It appears that there is no way to:

Use a non-mac keyboard without using an external keyboard definition file
Set the MTU for wireless connections
Set the 'switch windows' to something other than the awful ctrl+F4
Set the end and home keys to go to the start and end of the input line, respectively

They also asked me to " become one of our evangelists and tell your developer friends and colleagues about Zimki".
Well, I'm not so sure about evangelism, but I'll certainly blog about their platform, as it's fairly interesting.
So, what exactly is Zimki?
Well, it's basically a server side Javascript parser, based on SeaMonkey. The thought of using Javascript as a server side language is, initially, enough to make you run a thousand miles. After you get over your initial shock of this and examine it a little more closely, it does make at least a moderate amount of sense. It's entirely OO, so you should be able to pull in common functionality, perfect for the quick deployment of Webapps that Zimki is designed for.
Of course, this does rely on having the core libraries available. The only ones which seem to exist at the moment are:

trimpath.js - a JavaScript templating language
wiky.js - a Wiki markup language
feed.js - an RSS / Atom feed generator

So, I can make a wiki which uses a template, and outputs it as an RSS feed. The rest I have to code myself - or do I?
This brings me nicely on to the next issue: documentation. There is a thorough lack of it. Thus, more classes may exist, but who knows. This is my MAJOR bugbear about Zimki. Give developers docs, and a nice coding environment, and they're happy. Zimki doesn't have either. Oh wait? I haven't mentioned the coding environment?
All editing seems to be done via a text box with some AJAX magic on the save button. But the save button doesn't work in Linux. Oh, and you can't indent your code. And you can't use a local editor.

This may sound all doom-and-gloom for Zimki, but it isn't. The editor could do with some attention, but it's not a show stopper. Zimki does manage to throw together HA concepts, backups and database (ish. The database object idea which Zimki uses is something I really don't like, but that's personal preference). The cost model they use is rather... odd. A charge is made for each call to the Zimki framework. I'm not a beancounter though, so I can't tell you how cheap/expensive this system is. If you know JavaScript well, and want to develop a complete webapp in it, this is certainly a good tool.

Now hopefully they'll get some documentation together and so people can actually USE the thing. If you're bored, why not play with my app that I wrote.

UK Government reconfirms commitment to "no software patents"

Mon, 26 Feb 2007 17:13:00 EDT

A while ago I signed up to a petition against software patents on the Prime Minister's e-petitions website.

I received a email today, with the Government's reponse:

The Government remains committed to its policy that no patents should exist for inventions which make advances lying solely in the field of software. Although certain jurisdictions, such as the US, allow more liberal patenting of software-based inventions, these patents cannot be enforced in the UK. [snip]

This was certainly a welcome surprise.

It may be cold, but it's hotting up in here

Sat, 16 Dec 2006 18:11:00 EDT

aba recently announced the freeze of Debian Etch, which is great news. However, it now means that a lot of work is now important for the secure testing team. So, if you have time, please help us out and look through the list of vulnerable packages in the testing suite, and provide patches/upload fixes :) I'd like as many of these fixed as possible before we hand over to the stable security team.
I've also been actively recruiting recently. Luk has joined the team, and should also be helping to issue updates in the near future. Please come find me on IRC (Maulkin) if you want to help us produce a nice secure operating system :P

As this seems to be a post about testing security, I'll put a bit of a status update too:

Updates now go through newklecker (aka: security.debian.org)
The embargoed/unembargoed queues seem to work (mostly), whcih means that there should be a greater number of people who can do updates for stable
We're working through all the outstanding issues which don't have CVE-IDs yet, and requesting them
I'm working on various clamav signatures to find embedded code copies in other packages

Another year gone.

Thu, 30 Nov 2006 07:28:00 EDT

Well, it's my birthday, and I am x years old, where x is:

Chromium
Pasiphae
frames per second at a cinema
bits a needed to represent truecolour images
points on a backgammon board
blackbirds, baked in a pie
(2^n)n

Not really into Pokemon

Wed, 01 Nov 2006 06:05:00 EDT

Care of XKCD

How to cut load on your servers, MySpace style

Tue, 31 Oct 2006 09:14:00 EDT

Stolen gratuitously from David Ulevitch of OpenDNS:

$ host -vv myspace.com
Trying "myspace.com"
;; ->>HEADER< <- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 24145
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 5, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;myspace.com. IN A

;; ANSWER SECTION:
myspace.com. 68350 IN A 216.178.32.51
myspace.com. 68350 IN A 216.178.32.50
myspace.com. 68350 IN A 216.178.32.49
myspace.com. 68350 IN A 216.178.32.48
myspace.com. 68350 IN A 127.0.0.1

Received 109 bytes from 208.67.222.222#53 in 9 ms

I'm mad I am.

Sat, 28 Oct 2006 12:35:00 EDT

I don't normally do these meme things as I'm on various planets, but this made me laugh:

Maulkin --
[noun]:

A person of questionable sanity who starts their own cult

'How will you be defined in the dictionary?' at QuizGalaxy.com

What if Clippy came to PHP?

Wed, 18 Oct 2006 10:44:00 EDT

At the next election, you must...

Tue, 17 Oct 2006 07:11:00 EDT

Vote for Zod!

Microsoft causes software piracy

Mon, 04 Sep 2006 18:12:00 EDT

Over the past three years, my girlfriend's computer has been running slower and slower. This isn't a huge surprise, as it's running Windows XP, which seemingly becomes bloated as time passes. Thus, it came time for a reinstall, or at least some major clean up.

First, she backed up all her files, and checked there was nothing else needed. She found the original software that came with the laptop, and gave them, an d the laptop itself to me. It didn't come with a Windows XP cd, but being a Toshiba laptop, from PC World, it has a 'System Recovery' CD. So, I duly inserted that, and started the full install. After about an hour, the system rebooted into Win98. I wasn't happy.

This computer has a valid WinXP product key on the base, so I decided to find my own media and install using that. After finally getting hold of a copy, I install, and it states that the product key is invalid when I try and activate windows. I decide that something must be wrong, as it's on a sticker on the bottom of the laptop, so call Microsoft. Microsoft then nicely tell me that the product key is indeed valid, and if the installer isn't accepting it, I should contact the people I bought it from.
For the benefit of non-uk readers, PC World are the lowest of the low (IMO) when it comes to computer services. They really do not know their arse from their elbow. I will not be calling them, as they want to charge £1 per minute to talk to me about fixing their fuckup. Which they won't do, because this is out of warranty. I've been through this before.

So, despite this computer having a LEGAL licence for Windows XP, it now is happily running an ILLEGAL copy of Windows 2000 Pro.

If anyone from PC World, Microsoft or Toshiba read this: congratulations for making the installation of Windows XP so hard to illegally install that legal licences don't work.

How to set fire to your hard drive

Mon, 14 Aug 2006 12:32:00 EDT

I was off searching for stock photos today on a site called istockphoto when I found my machine grinding to a halt. Thanks to the system load plugin in XFCE, I was able to tell that about half of my 515Mb of swap was being used. This laptop has 256Meg ram in it already, so what could possibly be using up that much memory?

Well, the answer was simple. Firefox. More precisely, the flash plugin for firefox. istockphoto uses a system called sIFR, which replaces text, mostly titles, with little embedded flash objects. More details about this technique can be found at Mike Davidson's blog. Now, it seems that this particular site is titling EVERY headline with a flash object, which is causing firefox to use up about 300Mb of ram. So, I installed Flashblock to remove this memory hogging flash from my web pages. It did indeed free up the memory, and stopped the flash from displaying.

Interestingly, Firefox did not free up the memory it was using until I shut the thing down and started it again. It was suggested that this may be due to the way that firefox has a built in memory cache of pages loaded. After a quick look in about:config, I discover that there is an option, browser.cache.memory.enable that's set to 'true'. However, setting this to false causes work's web page to fail to load at all. Having a look with ethereal, the request goes out, and the text comes back. It just displays about:blank.

So, in summary, if you need to reduce memory requirements, don't use firefox. This would be the favoured option for me, if there was a good alternative that has the Web Developer Toolbar, but unfortunately, there isn't.

Editors

Fri, 04 Aug 2006 11:15:00 EDT

An old one, but still amusing:

And remember, "although emacs is an awesomely powerful OS, it lacks a good text editor". Yes, it is Friday.

Another package that should be released with etch

Tue, 25 Jul 2006 12:11:00 EDT

After the annoucement of a pending release of etch, I feel it's vital that Neil Fraser's software must included with it.

Centrifugal^H^H^H^H^Hpetal force

Tue, 11 Jul 2006 11:18:00 EDT

Taken from the wonderfully witty xkcd.com:

How ironic...

Mon, 03 Jul 2006 04:57:00 EDT

On the same day that Nominet signs up to ICANN, it's announced that the US government is doing a full consultation on the future of ICANN, possibly fundimentally changing how ICANN operates.

This is rather spiffy...

Tue, 13 Jun 2006 15:49:00 EDT

I've finally got annoyed at how much ram Gnome was using up, and decided to have a look at various other light weight systems, including:

ion3
blackbox
icewm
metacity
twm
ratpoison

I generally got the feeling I'd popped back to 1994 and was using Slackware or something. This laptop doesn't have a lot of ram, but it's got enough to be able to run something that looks nice. As this is the computer I use most of the time, it does need to look nice.

However, I finally install xfce4. I do have to say, I'm very impressed. It looks nice, has all the functionality I'm looking for, and just works^TM. There's a couple of panels that don't seem to be installable at the moment, but this seems to be being worked on at the moment. It also has the advantage of huggie being one of the maintainers, so I have someone to prod if I get stuck. Sorry in advance huggie :)

For those who care about security...

Tue, 06 Jun 2006 20:05:00 EDT

Extract from the secure testing team list of doom changelog:

maulkin@cheddar:/home/repos/secure-testing$ svn log -r4160 data/CVE/list
------------------------------------------------------------------------
r4160 | stef-guest | 2006-06-07 00:20:30 +0100 (Wed, 07 Jun 2006) | 7 lines

some bug reports have been closed, but were missed:
fftw fixed
moodle fixed
gnumach fixed
linux fixed


------------------------------------------------------------------------

Finally! Linux has been fixed!

And todays award for a good idea goes to...

Thu, 01 Jun 2006 17:19:00 EDT

Thomas Martinsen (tech) for implementing a system that polls IRC, gets and image urls pasted into channels, and dumps them on a web page.

This is, obviously, NOT SAFE FOR WORK!
Have a look at it by visiting http://irc.tnet.no

For your viewing pleasure...

Fri, 26 May 2006 16:29:00 EDT

I've popped my photos up of DebConf6 for those who want to see them :)

Wings and Roundabouts

Wed, 24 May 2006 16:18:00 EDT

Well, I've finally got back from DebConf6 and am quite nackered, especially considering I've just done a full day at work.

I could amuse you with the usual 'lists-of-memorable-dc6-events', or a 'review-of-each-day', or even a 'bits-from-the-orga-team', but there's pleanty of other posts on planet.d.o about that, so instead, I'll recount my experiences of the return trip, starting in Oaxtepec.

I'm also putting up all my photos, but it'll take a while. They'll be appearing over the next few days at my Fotopic site.

I wake up fairly early-ish (10am. It's early for me, ok? I'm not German :P) and pack my suitcase. I take the padlock keys out of the case and lock it. Except I got the wrong keys. So, the keys are now inside the locked case. Fortunately, I'd already taken everything out of the case I'd needed and put it in my rucksack.

Next, it comes to time to check out. I find out that we need out room checking to ensure that we haven't stolen a wall or ceiling or something. One of the cleaners has a look around and spots a missing lampshade. We (me + Fil Hands) try to explain in broken Spanish that it was missing when we arrived in the room, but she doesn't seem to be having any of it. Mind you, there is the vague possibility that "Si","Fruta","Cafe" and "Hola" isn't quite enough knowledge to explain the situation. Feh.
So, we manage to accost the lovely Amaya to do some translation for us. The cleaner lady calls her boss, who tells us it'll cost 860 pesos (£43). We politely decline. So, she then calls her boss. This all takes some time. Eventually, she opens a huge book, looks inside and sees that the shade was taken away by maintainance. Why this wasn't done before, I don't know.

Anyway, our bus was leaving at 2:00pm, so we had to rush to the reception. The journey was quite pleasent, and we eventually arrived at the airport at 4:20pm. There was a small altercation with the Taxi driver over the tip, as it was already included in the fair, and he said it wasn't. We then pointed out that tolls were also included in the fair, and the driver didn't take a toll road. At this point, he seemed to dissapear quite satified.

I approached the Air France desk, and was told I coudn't check in until 7:30pm (my flight dind't leave until 11:30pm). Bugger. So after waiting around quite a while, and getting something to eat, I went to check in. There was a huge queue, but it didn't really matter, as I was flying under a Flying Blue - Silver level card, so I could use the express queue. They did, however, want to check my luggage. Broken Spanish did work this time, as I wildly gestated towards my suitcase, making key symbols.

So, after another long wait, we (me and Daniel Baumann, we're on the same flight, and indeed sitting next to each other by some freak coincidence) wander off through to the gate. I manage to find some free wireless (ESSID: co_admeralty_club) and surf for a bit. Flight ends up being delayed for 30 mins, but it didn't matter too much.

Then, I hear an annoucement over the intercom, that a group of passengers should contact the gate staff, and my name is mentioned. A little worried, I approach.
"Hello, I'm Mr McGovern. My name was called on the intercom."
"Can I have your boarding pass please?"
"Sure..." *worry*
"Thank you.... ok, we'd like to invite you to fly business class with us today sir."
"Thank you very much"
I then proceed to whistle the 'Kill Bill' tune, as for some reason, it's following me everywhere I go in the airport, be it a cleaner, or another passenger. I think it's like some sort of virus, infecting one person and moving on to the next host.

We still had a little while, so we popped back to the waiting area to, well, wait. We saw some of the Brixen gang, and one of them had his laptop stolen :| That's the second laptop down then. The first was run over by a car in Oaxtepec.

So, I board the plane, and am immediately offered lots of alcohol and other free things^tm. Which was nice. Unfortunately, the plane was further delayed. This means that on arriving in CDG, my connecting flight was already boarding. It was at this point that I had dounts about my luggage arriving in MAN at the same time as me.

So, I board the plane in Paris, and it's a straightforward flight. But lo and behold, at the other end, no baggage. No suprises there then.

Today, my luggage arrived at 8:00pm, just after I've got home from work. I'd also got a nice letter from the Inland Revenue, with a £215.67 tax rebate \o/

As my subject: S^HWings and Roundabouts.

El introducir....

Mon, 01 May 2006 06:25:00 EDT

Womble2 (Ben Hutchings) as one of your newest DDs! Quite a few people know him in the UK, and some of you may have met him over at DC5.

I'm not sure if I've got the subject of this post right, but it is meant to be Spanish, as we're so near DC6 :)

I've now joined the club...

Thu, 27 Apr 2006 10:07:00 EDT

of people who have flooded Planet Debian.
I think I should be proud.

To join this highly exclusive^W^Wnot very exclusive^W^W^Wrather common club, simply fix some broken <link> tags in your RSS feed. Or, if using Blosxom, add/edit the config line $url.

Shooting yourself in the foot with MTAs

Wed, 26 Apr 2006 07:49:00 EDT

Care of SlayerXP from #uknot:

postfix

the bullet zips back and forth between pipes and processes and barely has enough momentum left to enter your foot

sendmail

There was a bang, and there's a pain in your foot, but you don't understand sendmail rulesets well enough to work out what happened

qmail

You shoot yourself in the knee, and it's your fault for not understanding mail systems as well as DJB that it happened. (and it's not a bug, oh no.)

Submissions being taken for others

Killing X

Thu, 20 Apr 2006 07:00:00 EDT

I've got a IBM Thinkpad R50e. It's a very nice laptop, with a lovely keyboard. It does, however, have one farily large issue, as I discovered last night.
The control and alt keys are a little too easy to press at the same time. Therefore, it's very easy to press ctrl+alt+backspace when you've just spent an hour creating some minutes for a SPI board meeting and haven't saved your changes yet.

So, thanks to Priyadi Iman Nurcahyo's blog, I've added this to /etc/X11/xorg.conf:

Section "Serverflags"
Option "DontZap"      "yes"
EndSection

Girlcode

Mon, 10 Apr 2006 07:15:00 EDT

Choosing a CMS system

Sat, 08 Apr 2006 09:29:00 EDT

Well, I volunteered at the last SPI board meeting to re-do the SPI website, as it was old and outdated.

So, I posted a message over to spi-private and spi-www asking for ideas.

The main one that came up was using a CMS. Now, I've had a look at various CMSs in the past, and none of them have come up trumps. Also suggested were other options such as using Embperl and svn (which I use for the Debconf site), but this isn't user friendly enough for many people, and a wiki, but I'm not convinced a wiki is the best thing for a static site.

The main issue that I saw with using a CMS for the SPI site is the requirement for it to be truly multilinugual. Unfortunately, this does sort of knock out a SPI Project, Drupal. Another less important issue is the storage engine. Ideally, this should be postgres, as it's another associated project :) Thirdly, the software should be free (as in DFSG, not beer).

So, this leaves a few options. After many hours googling and lots of suggestions from the lists, I had a short list.

SPIP
It seems to handle multilingual sites ok, but has two problems. Firstly, it's a php3 site. Although it should work in php4 and php5, it's still not going to be optimised enough. Secondly, it's written in French. This means that I can't hack it if needed
Flux
PHP5, and using nice XML/XSLT. Has multilinugal capabilities, but it's admin interface is almost impossible to understand
Brainfood
The CTO of Brainfood contacted me to suggest Brainfood as a possible solution. However, it's not yet open source. It also doesn't seem to support multilinugal sites. It's also written in Java, and may not work in open source systems

This leaves one which I've found, Plone. It has issues, but it's the best I've found. Namely, it requires Zope. This means that every time you change it's skin, the entire Zope server requires a restart. Not even a reload, but a full restart. However, it's multilinugal facilities are very good, and it has a nice management interface. It does have lots of plugins that extend it's functionality, which is nice.

One of the problems I'm having at the moment is to get news items to have a 'Effective Date' of 1998, as the management interface only seems to go back to 1999, and I need to put old items on there. I also need to work out how to run it under Apache, and possibly use postgres as a storage engine.

So, all in all, Plone wins the day, due to it's ability to host multilinugal sites, and it having a management interface that doesn't suck.

For those that want a sneak preview, see the testbed, but don't expect it to work perfectly :)

Introducing...

Sat, 08 Apr 2006 09:24:00 EDT

A new Debian Developer, eriks! I got the notification through from the DAM today that he's got his account. Welcome to the conspiricy :)

As a side note, he's also my first NM to get an account, so I'm especially proud :)

For those who care about coming to DebConf6...

Mon, 03 Apr 2006 17:51:00 EDT

You MUST reconfirm your attendance, or you won't get free lodgings and food.
The clock is ticking, you have about 2 hours left, ie: until 2006-04-03 23:59:59UTC.