Linuxland is slow //at 02:26 //by abe

Linuxland is slow. I just got a newsletter e-mail from them with subject “Debian 3.1 r1 ist da!” (engl.: “Debian 3.1 r1 is here!”) announcing the availability of 3.1.r1 in their shop. My first thought was: “Oh, I thought it would take a few days more.” Then I noticed that they talk about 3.1r1 which was released on 18th of December last year and not the upcoming and already announced 3.1r2 which should be released at the end of February or at the beginning of March.

Supporting Free Software via vendors //at 02:25 //by abe

Steve wrote in his blog:

I’ve seen this argument before “Buy distribution of GNU/Linux and support free software programmers”. The only problem I have with it is that it is incorrect. Buying GNU/Linux distributions helps the vendors who created it, certainly, and may indirectly help pay for some free software in the sense that the vendors might ship free software they wrote (e.g. SuSEs Yast{2]). However plonking down real cash-money for a boxed set of SuSE gives no money to the people who created MySQL, no money to the people who created Firefox, no money to the people who created Emacs, Vim, Bash, and Catan/Pioneers, etc.

I think, in general you’re right. And if you — as you did :-) — take SuSE, it usually works. And you’re probably also right for most people who just know the big, commercial distributions. But what if you take a free distribution like Debian or some of the BSDs, e.g. OpenBSD? How much truth is in there then?

Especially in the case of OpenBSD your view doesn’t seem work, because if you buy an (official) OpenBSD box, you pay the developers — or at least a few of them — of the operating system core and some mission-critical applications.

But what if you take community based distributions like Debian? You distinguished between distributor and authors of free software. In my eyes especially Debian, but also some other community based distributions are both at same time. So IMHO you can put them on the author side of your view.

And since many Debian vendors (at least those I saw) donate a part of the profit they make from selling Debian CDs or DVD to the Debian Project. Or they offer additional shopping cart items “Donation to Debian” if you order a Debian item. (Example: LinISO.de)

Another question in this context would be, how the FOSS world would look like if there are or were no commercial distributors. It probably would be much smaller because some marketing and some lobbying would be missing. Although that’s the only implication which comes to my mind, I’m sure, there are many more possible views on this subject.

But as I said, IMHO you’re right for most cases.

Debian QA Meeting in Darmstadt //at 02:24 //by abe

After having a nice DVD evening on Friday with a friend (X-Men 2 and Dogma) in Darmstadt, I attended the Debian QA Meeting in Darmstadt for the rest of the weekend. Although I not really that deep in QA, there were interesting talks, discussions and people. Looking though the list of the oldest Debian packages with RC bugs, I even found a package (elvis-tiny, which I have installed on some boxes) with an RC bug and some more bugs I could fix during the QA meeting.

Debian’s newest developer and AM, Myon, NMU’ed the package for me and so elvis-tiny 1.4-18.1 is the first package I build to enter Debian. The package was btw initially built on my Unstable box at home, which is an about 10 years old Pentium 1 with 133 MHz and 64 MB of RAM called m35. I was working there via ssh and screen using my ThinkPad bijou — which is also an Pentium 1 with 133 MHz and therefore in the same performance class as m35.

Later in the afternoon, djpig filed another RC bug against that package because the above mentioned list of old RC bugs hasn’t been updated yet, so this package probably won’t get into testing that fast. On the other hand: The package is really old and seems unmaintained, because the three bugs weren’t that hard to fix. So it’s probably not so bad that this bug report was filed. And as HE wrote in his blog today, it probably saved him work, because he planned to find all such packages and file the appropriate bugs against them…

While doing some keysigning with the people who were sitting beside me (Amaya and h01ger) I also learned how to use caff and directly found a bug and filed it, while Myon just had uploaded a new version shortly before. But late in the night, he seemed to upload the next version where the bug is already fixed… And thanks to Emme installed the missing dependency for using gnupg-agent on the console (pinentry-curses) on Saturday, I’ve now no more excuses for not yet having signed all the keys from the Key Signing Party at Linuxtag in Karlsruhe.

When most of the meeting was over, I drove Ganneff and HE to the train station and — although they seemed skeptical regarding the idea of being driven in a 2CV — they had obviously fun with it and asked a lot of questions while mostly being amused or surprised by my answers. (Yet another reason to drive a 2CV… ;-)

Can the spam problem be solved? //at 02:23 //by abe

Many have tried to solve spam problem, even Micrsoft (with a quite strange solution ;-), but except personal solutions like well working and well-kept spam filters, no well-working general technical solution has been found yet.

Although I really would like to see a technical solution and often think about this problem, I currently believe that this primarily is a social problem which cannot be solved solely with technic. UserFriendly’s Erwin seems to see it the same way and proposed today a quite drastical solution.

There are good ideas out there (e.g. SPF, RBL, Greylisting and Teergrubing), but all seem to have their problems, too. Especially RBL often have administrative problems, i.e. if an entry is justified or not. Greylisting simply can be bypassed by being SMTP conform and trying again, so it’s usefulness will decrease permanently. And against Lutz Donnerhacke’s teergrubing, spammers seem to have found workarounds quite quickly. Haven’t heard much about it in the last years. (I just can’t remember what the drawback of SPF was.)

For myself I’ve solved the spam problem with a learning SpamAssassin and sorting mail by spam-level into several mailboxes. The higher the spam-level of such an inbox, the more seldom I look into it. Works fine. For me. No general solution though, since the SpamAssassin needs to be fed with fresh spam regularly.

Cheap blue pills //at 02:22 //by abe

I just got an obvious spam e-mail with subject “cheap blue pills” and it took me quite a moment to realise that they don’t want me to buy pills which let me keep everyone I love and everything that I have built my life upon. What a pity. But why don’t they sell also red pills? ;-)

Blosxom plugin tagging released //at 02:22 //by abe

I like the idea of categorising blog posts and I like blosxom, but even with multcat adding a post to multiple categories is somehow limited. In other blogs I often saw the technic of tagging articles with a keyword. I wanted that feature, too, but there weren’t any appropriate plugin for blosxom. Until now, because again, I just wrote it by my own…

So here is the blosxom plugin tagging, version 0.01. License is GPL v2 or higher.

tagging expects one or more “header” lines starting with “Tags: ” and being located directly under the first line, which always is the title. Those lines you can fill with comma seperated keywords (seperation by blanks possible via config) and shows them with appropriate links in $tagging::tag_list for the story template and $tagging::global_tag_list with all used keywords for the head or foot template.

Filtering is done using the -tags parameter in the query string. It uses the same delimiter as configured for the Tag header lines inside the posts.

Multiple Move & Co. //at 02:20 //by abe

nion’s blog made me notice that many people don’t know mmv (multiple move), which approximately works like this:

mmv '*.htm' #1.html
mmv '*.foo.*' #1.#2.bla

Additionally, mmv also can copy, link or even append files when called as mcp, mln or mad respectively with the appropriate command line options.

When I told nion in IRC on #debian.de about mmv, HE pointed me to the Perl script /usr/bin/rename, which is in Debian’s perl package and therefore installed on nearly every Debian system by default. It moves files by applying perl subsitutions to file names:

rename 's/\.htm$/.html/' *.htm
rename 'y/A-Z/a-z/' *

Being curious, if the newly found tool is not only available in Debian, I looked on a SuSE 9.0 box and indeed, I also found there a /usr/bin/rename. But — surprise, surprise — it’s not a Perl script but an ELF binary. And although it does similar things than mmv and Debian’s rename, it is the simplest of the three commands:

rename .htm .html *.htm
rename foo foo00 foo?
rename foo foo0 foo??

Note to my self: Nice add-on for your command line efficiency talk.