Fri, 27 May 2005
self-help group
Perhaps it's time to found self-help group? Seems to be a common problem to flood planet.debian.org.
At least it would be nice to have special "I flooded planet" badges at upcoming DebConf 5 :)
postet at 20:47 into [/Debian] permanent link
Thu, 19 May 2005
Not so long ago in a cinema not so far away...
It's 02:26 AM local time, and I just missed the last train, that could bring me from downtown Frankfurt/Main to the suburb I used to live (if I'm not travelling around the world).
So I have roughly 3 hours, before I can get home, take a shower, take some breakfast, and get back to work. I could try to get some sleep (working for the university gains you a house key, being member of our student council a room with some couches)... or I left my books at home, so I have nothing to read again - I could increase performance of my script... but I have Internet access here, I could try to fix some RC-Bugs but I don't feel like that. I worked a bit to much, didn't slept very well the last days, and ate to much for diner...
Oh, diner! I could say, that I watched "Episode III" by accident. As said: I worked to much, and didn't had time to go to the supermarket. So went out for food, and while wondering what to do with this evening, I went by a cinema, and look! Episode III is getting into the cinemas today! And look! They still have some tickets! That wouldn't be far from the truth, but the truth is, that I planed to see the movie, but forget to buy tickets, and thought they were sold out. And by sheer coincidence I went to restaurant across the cinema, and by sheer coincidence, to get home, I needed to cross the street, passing the cinema, seeing they still sell tickets... so I went in and I mus say...
... that...
... watching...
... Star...
... Wars...
... Episode...
... III...
... Revenge...
... of...
... the...
... Sith...
... was...
... different from all the other nightly previews I have been.
Oh? Should I have placed a spoiler somewhere here? Hey, I don't plan to write any details about the story, don't worry. And by the way: You could have seen the End of the story some decades ago ;)
Well, something has changed. When Star Trek VI: The undiscovered Country came to the cinemas, the cinema was showing that movie and the previous five!
When Star Trek VIII: First Contact came to the Cinemas, the local Start Trek Fan Club showed some highlight episodes from the series, and the movie in German synchronisation AND in the English original.
When Star Wars: Return of the Jedi special edition hit the cinemas, I went at six a clock to the cinema, to watch all three episodes, while the cinema was decorated like the Mos Eisley cantina.
When The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring hit the movies, I did needed to deliver a talk about XSLT for a seminar. All my examples where inspired by the book and in my audience where guys with pointed ears, which got nearly mad, when I overrun my time slot a bit...
Well, and today? I almost forgot to buy tickets, and no one organized an Episode I to Episode VI marathon. Although I saw, that in an other cinema, they had at least some decoration and some costumed fans - but running around in a weird dress most people don't recognize? Come on, I'm a geek! Long haired, T-Shirts with nice, geekish sayings. People think all the year, that I look some kind of weird, so why dress up, to see a movie?
An other interesting point: The other preview where exactly timed. The movie started at 0:00, no minute earlier. Today, they had several presentations, starting at 7:00pm. And they call that a special, nightly preview!
Perhaps, my generation is getting old...
Oh, about the movie! I must admit, that it wasn't that bad. I think, that what rescues this movie is, that I saw Episode I and Episode II previously. Unlike when watching Episode I for the first time, I didn't expected too much from the movie. So I conclude: Hearing the first stertorous of Darth Vader and seeing him for the first time with a symmetrical helmet (a fact, that got special attention in a "making of" I read the other day) is worth to spend some money for a ticket - but only shortly.
I would prefer, if George Lucas didn't had filmed the first three Episodes. Perhaps I should get back to my garage, and continue working on my time machine...
postet at 03:16 into [/Debian] permanent link
Tue, 17 May 2005
Finally travelled home from Guetersloh...
... but unfortunately, I didn't had anything to read during the 4 hours in the train.
But the new ICEs have power sockets, so I could hack a bit:
for x in $(for i in $(seq $(python -c "print ord('a')") $(echo $(python -c "print ord('a')")+25|bc)) ;do printf \\x$(printf %x $i) ; echo " " ; done) ; do for y in $(for i in $(seq $(perl -e "print ord('a')") $(echo $(perl -e "print ord('a')")+25|bc)) ; do printf \\x$(printf %x $i) ; echo " " ; done) ; do echo -n $x$y " "; apt-cache search $x$y|wc -l ; done; done > /tmp/foobar ; for i in $(cat /tmp/foobar|sort -n +1 |head -n $(echo $(cat /tmp/foobar| sort -n +1|grep -n 2|head -n1|cut -d: -f1)-1 |bc)|grep 1|cut -d" " -f 1) ; do echo $i ; apt-cache search $i ; done ; rm /tmp/foobar
Try to guess what this does, before trying it ;)
Yes, I know it's not very elegant. Perhaps I will give it the final touch, when I again forget to take a book with me, when traveling in a train.
postet at 15:30 into [/Debian] permanent link
Mon, 16 May 2005
Important information for woody -> sarge upgrades
Might not be new to most DDs, but according to my experience at the small developer gathering here in Guetersloh and after reading some upgrade reports in different mailing lists, it is not yet well know:
Citing from the release-notes of the upcoming sarge release: The recommended method of upgrading is to use "aptitude", as described here.
The release notes are quite unknown, but are quite important!
Beside some thing like better / other dependency resolution, consideration of recommends / suggests, the most important feature is, that aptitude remembers which packages are installed by the admin, and which packages are just installed as dependency (I think, synaptic has a similar feature, but I didn't played with it yet).
So, since people will start doing this, and talking about that, please spread it: There are release notes, and you should upgrade with Sarges aptitude.
postet at 00:45 into [/Debian/events] permanent link
Sun, 15 May 2005
HOWTO unsubscribe from Debian Mailinglists:
For those of you, who don't read -user: Adam Hardy posted a nice HOWTO unsubscribe from debian lists ;)
postet at 14:49 into [/Debian] permanent link
Sat, 14 May 2005
Small improvement...
... to Lolo's small squid url rewrite hack: Download all packages with priority required, standard and important nighlty.
Netinstall base system in less than 10 minutes guaranteed...
postet at 23:50 into [/Debian/events] permanent link
Squid Redirect rules!
As I bloged before: I'm here at a small development gathering in Guetersloh.
Here are people from quite different regions, and therefore with quite different
/etc/apt/sources.list files. So, what is the easiest way, to allow
them to get their packages from one fast mirror?
Interesting problem. Of course you could just tell them to point their sources list entries to the fastest mirror in your experience - there are even tools to find the fastest mirror like netselect-apt or apt-spy, but that isn't the most elegant solution, isn't it?
Of course you can just create a local mirror (for example with debmirror or with the script linked at http://www.debian.org/mirror/ftpmirror),
but that's a bit overkill, isn't it? Especially, if you have only one dsl-line.
And everyone still needs to change the /etc/apt/sources.list.
If you run a proxy like squid, you could just think, that often requested packages, will be in the cache, so you still let it be as it is. But if two people install the same package using different mirrors, it would still be downloaded and cached twice (since it would have different URLs).
A really elegant solution is to add a rewrite script to Squid, so that URLs from one mirror are transparently rewritten to your favourite mirror. Florian Lohoff just wrote hacked a nice script: Let's take the mirror list from Debian, to know which hosts we should rewrite (since we won't touch other server). Then take our Package-File and extract all file name from all packages, and now if someone wants to access http://ftp.foo.bar/debian/pool/main/b/baz_0.0-1_baz.deb this URI is rewritten if and only if ftp.foo.bar is in our list of known hosts AND if pool/main/b/baz_0.0-1_baz.deb is in our known packages. Hosts like security.debian.org and packages like baz_0.0-1ubuntu3.deb are ignored.
So you only need to force everyone to use the proxy (one trivial rule on your router), and now everyone does not even to touch their configuration, they can use (nearly) any mirror in their sources.list, and won't even notice, that they indeed downloading their packages from e.g. ftp.de2.debian.org. Of course you should tell them, what you have done ;)
And you should do some fine tuning, e.g. you might want to increase the max size of save objects in your squid config (to catch some bigger packages, too), and give your squid quite same space to storage his objects.
If you want to know details of this nice little hack, you should contact Flo directly, he did it, he knows it a bit better than me ;)
postet at 18:35 into [/Debian/events] permanent link
Arrived in Guetersloh yesterday...
...took me 5 hours to get there. Well, it's quite nice here, the main train station is circa 10 minutes by foot from the Skolelinux Testzentrum in Germany, there is a nice pub 10m away, and if you need a small recovery time, you can take a small walk in a nearby park.
I only wished, it would take me less time to get here from my hometown near Frankfurt / Main.
This time it went quite bad: Beside the problem, that I couldn't book my train tickets in advance (I had a meeting, and didn't know, which train I would take), my train needed to be redirected (I think a suicide jumped before a previous train), and therefore I missed my connection, waiting for nearly an hour...
But hey, I finally arrived, and could join the already accumulated team, meeting old friends again, start to work on various topics, learn from them, and teach them a bit of what I know...
postet at 13:12 into [/Debian/events] permanent link
Wed, 11 May 2005
[DebConf] CfP: Debian-Day at DebConf-5
You might have already heard about it: We are organizing a day with "normal" talks right before DebConf-5. Target audience will not be the developers and experienced users visiting the DebConf, but other interested people, including press, sponsors and people who don't know much about Linux at all.
Although we have some nice talks so far (including what is free software, what is Debian, how to help Debian), we could use some more ;)
So if you would like to do an English, more general talk for a non-technical audience, please get in contact with me. Especially, if you are from Finland and could add some local stuff ;)
Some topics I could imagine for this are for example:
- Greeting by the DPL (I still wait for the answer to my mail, Branden ;)
- First steps with your Debian System
- A quick overview over custom Debian distributions and Debian derivatives
Of course that is only what I could think of. If you have other ideas (of course you can just propose topics without doing a talk yourself), please drop me a mail.
postet at 23:06 into [/Debian/events/DebConf-5] permanent link