Thu, 09 Aug 2007
No smoking area
Today is the 9th of August and we've been at a restaurant (well... a self service cafeteria). Nothing fancy so far about it, but it was the first time this month, which makes it kind of special: On the first a new law come into effect in Lower Saxony (and some other parts of Germany) prohibiting smoking in public restaurants (save in closed, separate rooms).
Being a non-smoker it was a nice experience to see how the former smoking area had vanished from the restaurant. Especially, since in that special case you couldn't avoid the smoking zone: To get to the toilette you needed to go through the smoking zone. And where do you bring your tablet back? Right, in the smoking zone.
Nice.
postet at 16:36 into [/Debian/other] permanent link
Sun, 05 Aug 2007
Second anniversary
So an other happy year has passed.
I hope for many more to come :) Love you, Schatz.
postet at 23:33 into [/Debian] permanent link
Fri, 15 Jun 2007
How do you explain Debian?
While I already have some experience in explaining this Debian thingy
to people, who are more or less familiar with Linux and free software, next
week I have a special job: Explain Debian -- and how free software projects
work -- to people, who aren't familiar with that.
It's a university course, which just learned the boring theory. Licence work, a bit of history, etc. A complete different audience than I used to speak to: So far all but one of my talks where with people who visited my talk because they were interested in the topic... some came even, just because they like my talks! I'm not yet sure, how to handle that.
Beside the difficult audience (which might be even more difficult, because
it's rather hot here), it might be further complicated by the techniques: It's
a kind of shared course, a cooperation of the University of Hildesheim and the
University of Saarland; slides are transmitted via vnc, audio and video are
transmitted in both ways via a software I haven't seen before; half of the
audience here half there... and if you ever visited one of my talks, you might
know, that I'm a walker
type of guy: I run around, gesticulate, point
things out on my slides, sometimes I even go right into the audience and talk
to people directly. And now I can't really do this, urg.
But all that's solvable, the main questions remains: How do you explain how Debian works, what Debian is, to people who just learned about the four freedoms?
I was asked to aus dem Nähkästchen plaudern
. That's a German idiom;
don't know how to translate that. In this case it means more or less that they
would like to hear stories, not see organigrams.
Well... so far my Idea is to reuse some of my old slides from an
old talk1 and add some nice examples, showing the see the
need, solve the problem
approach. Perhaps I'll use reportbug-ng and
debtags as examples.
If you have any ideas, better examples: Feel free to mail me. Would be perfect if I could get your ideas before Monday. Thanks.
1: Note to myself: I really need to sort my talks page out.
postet at 19:55 into [/Debian] permanent link
Sat, 02 Jun 2007
Report from the LinuxTag -- Part I (A bit of DebianDay and my talk)
Before I start with my report I need to fulfill my promise for those who stumble here from kushaldas.in: The URL of the web interface for the package description translation framework is for now: ddtp.debian.net (It's easy: Debian Description translation pproject). There might be some changes after DebConf, our annual conference, which will take place this month. So keep an eye on your language's team mailing list.
But more about Kushal Das later. The first part of my report will cover a bit of our DebianDay and of course especially my talk ;) More will follow later.
Friday was DebianDay and I attended
Holger's talk about
debian-community. It's a quite
interesting project, trying to solve the problem, that there's not much between
real DDs
and the rest of the world. It's more low level
than the
Debian maintainers idea floating around for a while: Look around, you'll see
much contributors to Debian, who are not maintaining any package.
The idea is basically to have kind of bonuses for contributing to Debian, as
a more direct way to say Thanks!
. Have look at the website, and think
how you could help to get things rolling.
After his talk it was my turn. I did a Debian package building for
beginners
talk... Well, actually it's a workshop stripped down by the
practical part leaving only the slides of the introduction. But who cares
;)
Again I was surprised how many people where interested in that topic. I always thought it's kind of special and not that interesting, but the room was quite stuffed. Some people where even sitting on the floor. I neither counted how many people attended my talk, nor how many seats where available. I guess I had something between 80 and 120? Perhaps Wolfgang Borgert, who moderated DebianDay, can correct me, if I'm wrong.
Since I stripped down a workshop to a talk, I needed to take special care about the timing. Well... I didn't work perfectly. I took a bit too long while answering questions, but I think all in all it was quite right. As usual I took gnujump as example; easy package, works without much tweaking of the templates created by dh_make, and if you have some time left at the end, you can show some additional stuff, like splitting of a -data package.
After the talk I got some quite interesting questions; the three most interesting ones were the following:
- Non English license texts: One guy asked me about non English
licence texts (in his case: A Japanese license text for some special
printer driver).
I asked him, to seek help by a Japanese DD, which might be okay to let the package pass ftpmaster. Sorry, but THIS IS NOT ENOUGH! I just asked Jörg Jaspert, one of the ftpmasters, and the Debian Project need's (of course) a translated version of that licence, as well as a statement of the upstream author, that the translation is okay. Otherwise the translated text has no legal binding and is therefore useless. - Installation packages: Packaging non-free stuff, which you need to download yourself, is a) sadly sometimes needed, b) useful for some people who need it and c) some kind of tricky. I could help much here; didn't did anything similar, yet. So I answered to take a look at either flashplugin-nonfree, msttcorefonts or java-package. Question to the others: Is there some kind of common infrastructure to build an installer package upon?
- The
Joomla!
problem: Again a thing I have no experience myself in; packaging web applications. According to the Joomla! guy I talked, too, there is a special problem with that (please correct me, if I understood something wrong; as said: webapps aren't my speciality).
There is demand for Joomla! packages, but so fare none exist. Major problem: While Joomla! is capable of running at multiple aliases, it is not (yet) capable of handling them to serve different content to them. So he wanted to be able to install Debian-Packages to different directories, where he would add different configurations of them. Short term solution could be to install it to /usr/share/ or so, and create a script, creating a symlink farm... long term solution should be to fix Joomla! ;)
So much for now; I'll write some more about the event in general, a goodie from an old friend from Treuchtlingen (rather short; the german entry is longer), and a small talk I had with an other Jörg later... I'm kind of tired right now.
postet at 22:43 into [/Debian/events/LinuxTag-2007] permanent link
Tue, 29 May 2007
Donating blood
Sven
Mueller wrote a nice blog about how important it is to donate blood. To
cite him: Please donate blood if you can. If you are uncomfortable with the
choice you made on your first donation, check out other options for
donations.
I agree wholeheartedly! I heard from a Lady, who can't donate blood
herself, since she doesn't feel comfortable with it -- I can understand it, I
hate needles and don't like to see my own blood neither. But she wants to help
nonetheless, so she volunteered to help during blood drives
: She sits by
the people donating blood, talks to them, helps them walk around when they
still feel dizzy, give out food and drinks, etc.
postet at 18:59 into [/Debian/other] permanent link
Sat, 26 May 2007
Doing stuff I should have done quite some time ago...
Yesterday I did something, I should have done a long time ago. I donated
blood. I donated blood several times already, especially when I was in army
service and a nearby University hospital called for help, when they where
running low. I must confess it wasn't only the feel good factor
that
motivated me back then; you could donate blood during your duty hours, got some
money, something to eat a way better than the normal food we got and
additionally you where freed from heavy duty for two days. Even after I got
out of military service, I went a couple of times to donate blood.
But for some reason -- I don't know why -- I stopped for a couple of years.
Well; the funny thing is, that the German red Cross has often these collect
blood
sessions in a nearby school, which is on my way back to university,
but even that didn't worked. I always had something else in mind or planed for
that evening.
However, the other day we found a flier of one of those collect blood
sessions
yesterday evening. And so we went there... and where surprised how
many people wanted to donate blood! I can't remember that I ever had to wait
to donate blood, but this time they said they had many first time donors,
which need special care.
Rest of the story is easy: After some interesting conversation (You know
how that works?
-- Yes, I look away, and you do the rest and tell me
nothing!
), Meike and myself had half a liter less, and enjoyed a very nice
meal.
As I already said: I don't understand, why I didn't did it for such a long time; nice atmosphere, nice things to eat, nice people taking care of you... I'm going to donate more often. Perhaps you want to try it, too?
postet at 12:35 into [/Debian/other] permanent link
Mon, 21 May 2007
Playing with the package file
For Meikes thesis, we needed a csv-File from the Debian-Package file, so I wrote a small script to do that. You can get it from my repository (or via websvn). (Not yet perfect, but worked well enough for us; patches welcome.)
If you just need the csv to copy the data in a database (like she
did), don't try to guess, how long a textfield (e.g. for depends or the
long description) should be; we tried and failed several times
(Sure... 2000 characters should be enough for a long
description.
). We finally used the following database (We used
PostgreSQL, should work similar on other database systems): CREATE TABLE packages
( package character varying (75) NOT NULL, source character varying (75),
priority character varying(10) NOT NULL, section character varying(20)
NOT NULL, installedsize integer NOT NULL, maintainer character
varying(150) NOT NULL, architecture character varying(4) NOT NULL,
version character varying(40) NOT NULL, depends character varying(5000),
conflicts character varying(5000), recommends character varying(5000),
suggests character varying(5000), enhances character varying(500),
predepends character varying(500), provides character varying(500),
replaces character varying(500), buildessential character varying(3),
essential character varying(3), filename character varying(200) NOT NULL,
md5sum character(33) NOT NULL, origin character varying(100), sha1
character(41) NOT NULL, sha256 character(65) NOT NULL, size integer NOT
NULL, tag character varying(1000), task character varying(400),
description text NOT NULL, longdescription character varying(30000),
CONSTRAINT pk PRIMARY KEY (package) );.
Now that you've created a table, you need to fill it. Easiest method
is to use the COPY
statement, as follows: copy packages
(package, source, priority, section, installedsize, maintainer, version,
depends, conflicts, recommends, suggests, enhances, predepends, replaces,
buildessential, essential, filename, md5sum, origin, sha1, sha256, size,
tag, task, description, longdescription) FROM '/path/to/your/csv-file'
DELIMETER ';' CSV;.
You should now have a nice database to play with :)
Some examples... Which are the packages with the longest longdescription?
debian_packages=> select package, length(longdescription) as length from packages order by length desc limit 5;
package | length
------------------------+--------
texlive-latex-extra | 25337
texlive-fonts-extra | 5719
emacs-goodies-el | 4502
xbase-clients | 4403
postgresql-contrib-7.4 | 4223
(5 rows)
Or... Which maintainer have the most packages?
debian_packages=> select maintainer, count(*) as anzahl from packages group by maintainer order by anzahl desc limit 5;
maintainer | anzahl
------------------------------------------------------------------+--------
Debian Qt/KDE Maintainers <debian-qt-kde@lists.debian.org> | 465
Debian QA Group <packages@qa.debian.org> | 458
Debian X Strike Force <debian-x@lists.debian.org> | 274
Debian Perl Group <pkg-perl-maintainers@lists.alioth.debian.org> | 261
Daniel Baumann <daniel@debian.org> | 255
(5 rows)
Or... Is there a package, whose sha256-sum contains Meikes birthday?
debian_packages=> select package, sha256 from packages where sha256 like '%261081%';
package | sha256
------------------------------+-------------------------------------------------------------------
libobject-realize-later-perl | 5188126108146fc0b1328473125687fb388bd8d87f460e335952dbb1b66aa3d1
(1 row)
And another goodie (We needed to alter the database several times, to make this package fit into it): Which is the package with the longest name?
debian_packages=> select package, length(package) from packages order by length(package) desc limit 1;
package | length
---------------------------------------------------------+--------
libmaypole-plugin-authentication-usersessioncookie-perl | 55
(1 row)
A lot of fun... and a lot of interesting facts to be discovered...
postet at 13:09 into [/Debian] permanent link
Sat, 05 May 2007
Bug #422411
Do you remeber that scene from Star Wars: A new Hope, where
Obi Wan Kenobi and Darth Vader finally meeth for their light saber duell? And
Vader says: I've been waiting for you, Obi-Wan. We meet again, at last. The
circle is now complete.
?
Felt a bit like that, when I today filled a rc bug against one of my old application managers packges...
*evil grin*
postet at 21:40 into [/Debian] permanent link
Thu, 03 May 2007
That's sooo childish!
Hiding a number? Why such an effort?
If you post the number 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88
C0, you can always claim you did it, because you thought it was one of
those stupid memes...
postet at 13:05 into [/Debian/memes] permanent link