Philipp Kern

Lenny got released yesterday and after having to push another update to Etch through volatile to fix an annoying warning when Lenny is in the sources.list, my work is now almost done too. (Yes, the autobuilding infrastructure is still offline, but we will get that reactivated shortly.)

Anyway: if you live in or around Karlsruhe and did not get a mail by nomeata and me and if you would enjoy meeting tomorrow (Monday) evening, please speak up by mailing us. Let us celebrate the latest and greatest release. ;-)

The plan is to meet up at the Vogelbräu at 19:30.

It is a shame that the bug count for Lenny is only rising since the beginning of Debcamp (about 2008-08-02). Fellow developers, do you really want to release? Is the Release Team expected to fix all the bugs you file?

Another point release for Etch has been done; now it's the time for the CD team to roll out new images after the next mirror pulse. The official announcements (prepared by Alexander Reichle-Schmehl, thanks!) will follow shortly afterwards. FTP master of the day was Joerg Jaspert, who did his first point release since Woody, as he told us on IRC. We appreciate your work and you spending your time that shortly before going to Argentina.

This point release includes the etchnhalf update introducing a new kernel image (based on 2.6.24) and some driver updates. Additionally the infamous openssl hole will be fixed for good, even for new installs.

Again I want to present you a list of people who contributed to this release. It cannot be complete as I got the information out of the Changed-by fields of the uploads.

• akira yamada
• Alexander Sack
• Alexander Schmehl
• A Mennucc1
• Andrea De Iacovo
• Andres Salomon
• Aurelien Jarno
• Charles Plessy
• Christian Perrier
• Christian Welzel
• Colin Watson
• dann frazier (indefatigable kernel worker, most sourceful uploads)
• Darren Salt
• Devin Carraway (3rd place of sourceful uploads, due to security work)
• Emmanuel Lacour
• Eric Dorland
• Fabio Tranchitella
• Faidon Liambotis
• Fathi Boudra
• Florian Weimer
• Francesco Paolo Lovergine
• Francois Marier
• Frank Lichtenheld
• Frans Pop (thanks for your d-i work!)
• Frederic Peters
• Gregory Colpart
• Holger Levsen
• Jan Wagner
• Jay Berkenbilt
• Jérémy Bobbio
• Joey Hess
• Joey Schulze
• Josselin Mouette
• Julien Cristau
• Kai Hendry
• Kurt Roeckx
• LaMont Jones
• Laszlo Boszormenyi
• Martin Pitt
• maximilian attems
• Michael Biebl
• Michael Koch
• Mike Hommey
• Moritz Muehlenhoff
• Noah Meyerhans
• Ola Lundqvist
• Otavio Salvador
• Patrick Matthäi
• Petter Reinholdtsen
• Philipp Kern
• Pierre Habouzit
• Raphael Hertzog
• Rene Engelhard
• Robert Millan
• Roberto Lumbreras
• Roland Mas
• Romain Beauxis
• Russ Allbery
• Sean Finney
• Stefan Fritsch
• Steffen Joeris
• Stephen Gran
• Steve Kemp
• Sune Vuorela
• Thijs Kinkhorst (2nd place of sourceful uploads, due to security work)
• Thomas Viehmann
• Toni Mueller
• Tzafrir Cohen

From the Release Team we had dann frazier (who drove the important kernel part of etchnhalf), Luk Claes, Neil McGovern, Andreas Barth, Martin Zobel-Helas and me working on it. ;-)

This will be my first DebConf ever and I'm excited. I just booked my flights together with nomeata:

2008-08-03: Frankfurt (10:20) -> Buenos Aires (19:05) [LH510]
2008-08-03/04: Buenos Aires (21:30) -> Mar del Plata (3:20) [Bus]
2008-08-17: Mar del Plata (12:00) -> Buenos Aires (18:00) [Bus]
2008-08-18: Buenos Aires (20:55) -> Frankfurt (15:00) [LH511]

Yesterday I got a note from the Debconf organizers about my place in the sponsorship queue (15 of 58). The drawback, however: there is no money to be given out, yet. At least that's what I heared on IRC. The mail sounds a tad different. Considering that I applied for 2300 USD (~1300 EUR) there is no way that I pay this alone, being a job-less full-time student spending the other time with volunteer work.

It would be nice to meet up all the other people driving Debian (apart from those I already met at FOSDEM), but considering that I wouldn't even see much of Argentina, well: no. Flights aren't getting cheaper, too. Back then when I searched (February I guess) Lufthansa return flights were offered for 1000 EUR flying non-stop from Frankfurt.

I don't might paying a few hundred dollars on this myself, but how are other non-company-sponsored individuals dealing with this notice? (Comments are enabled, but need OpenID. Comments mailed in will be converted if allowed to do so.)

We escorted Sarge to its last home. 3.1r8 is done, thanks to all the people who made it possible. A big thanks goes to James Troup, our ftpmaster of the day doing all the grunt work of getting a new point release out of the door.

To bring in a more personal feeling of who makes this all possible, here is a list of people contributing uploads to 3.1r8 (mostly people from our fabulous Security Team):

• Alberto Gonzalez Iniesta
• dann frazier
• Darren Salt
• Devin Carraway
• Florian Weimer
• Gregory Colpart
• Julien Cristau (who is glad that he finally got rid of xfree86)
• Luk Claes
• Martin Pitt
• Michael Koch
• Moritz Muehlenhoff
• Noah Meyerhans
• Patrick Schoenfeld
• Roland Mas
• Russ Allbery
• Sean Finney
• Steffen Joeris
• Thijs Kinkhorst

I would also like to thank dann frazier, Luk Claes, Martin Zobel-Helas and Neil McGovern for helping with the preparation of the point release.

I just tried Movable Type as another weblog backend to finally reenable comments, but it failed. Really.

I have IPv6 activated on my web server, of course. (It still is not natively available with Hetzner, so I use a tunnel to SixXS for it.) My lighttpd thus passes the IPv4 IPs a bit differently to CGI scripts: 0.0.0.0 gets substituted by ::ffff:0.0.0.0 and IPv6 addresses pop up, too, especially when I access the site.

Now MT saves IPs as character varying(16) in the database, even though PostgreSQL would support IP addresses natively as a data type. One would expect the script to bail out on inserting the comment into the database or to truncate the IP. Instead it tells the commenting person that the comment was accepted, but in fact it is not saved at all. I cannot find it in the database. And MT is not even a PHP application.

Now it is possible that MT indeed complains on stderr, but well, lighttpd suppresses that fd now instead of piping it into the error log, after failing to close it properly before (#446324).

If you want to use the current git tree of 2.6.25 with Debian unstable and if you use cryptoroot: remember to add chainiv to /etc/initramfs-tools/modules and to regenerate the initrd with update-initramfs -u -k 2.6.25-rcX if necessary (i.e. if the kernel package is already installed).

Otherwise cryptsetup will bail out after the passphrase is provided:

device-mapper: table: 254:0: crypt: Error allocating crypto tfm
device-mapper: ioctl: error adding target to table
device-mapper: ioctl: device doesn't appear to be in the dev hash table.
Command failed: No key available with this passphrase.

Thanks go to the corresponding thread on the pkg-cryptsetup-devel mailinglist.

Now I cannot use this new kernel anyway because fglrx fails to compile just again (maybe because I used SLUB this time, don't know).

In short both Toy Story and Toy Story 2 are worth seeing. Especially as a Debian fanboy. Isabel and I had some great fun watching it in English. To infinity and beyond...!

I expected the second part to fail, but it kept the fun up, although I still don't know what crack the Pixar people smoked when creating the screenplay.

Some memorable quotes:

Woody to Buzz: That wasn't flying! That was... falling with style!

Woody: Buzz, could you give me a hand here? [Buzz throws his broken arm at Woody]

Sid (the boy who destroys toys): I want to ride the pony.

Alien #1: A stranger. Alien #2: From the outside. All: Oooooooooooooooh.

Now of course that's all of Part One and out of context, but well, here you are.

In other "news" I like how portable some applications are. I was able to get Final Fantasy VII running on Isabel's Windows Tablet PC just like on my Linux notebook, with the same emulator (epsxe), the same memory cards and even the quick saves were working as expected. Wow.

A pity that its authors won't release the source code albeit the source of the plugins needed anyway actually is public. It's using some kind of Gtk 1.x linked in statically, so it's horrible usability wise. With source code that could have been improved.

Normally I don't have that much pain. Some headaches from time to time, and a busy nose, but that doesn't cause pain, just lots of used tissues.

But now I'm at FOSDEM and on the way there yesterday I had some severe headaches and today my right leg and foot hurt quite much. What's up. I guess the latter is related to my slipping on the stairs of the Delirium, where the beer event took place. It got me covered in beer, which wasn't a problem (luckily only two, but well, both were half empty afterwards) but it seems that the bump had some consequences. (No, I wasn't drunk, but too many already spilled too much beer on those stairs.)

Now I don't actually see much when looking at the leg, but it feels a bit burning. There's some light, though: I just enjoyed an extensive shower at the hotel and it provided me with some relief.

In other news I just tried DesktopBSD and it failed. Apart from the screen being a bit blurry (like with radeonhd without the blitting fix applied) the main blocker was the missing WiFi support, but hey it's an Intel 3945, so it can't be that hard.

Maybe I get around into implementing UPnP into Gobby soon, looking at UPnP's test code it does not seem too hard. Funny enough the router providing free WiFi at the hotel broadcasts UPnP stuff so the port mapping actions probably work (as UPnP does not offer any means of authentication).

No pictures, yet. Heh.

Dear Lazyweb,

is there a nice free and open Python IDE available? I was impressed by Eclipse's Java support when I had to code a project for my studies but I hate the language thoroughly. I also had a quick glance at NetBeans IDE which provides a Ruby IDE. It looked really nice with working code completion and refactoring support.

Now I was a Ruby fanboy some time ago and switched to Python partly for (a bit) more performance and also because of better bindings to various libraries. Until now I coded Python in vim, but well, an IDE would be nice and I wonder why a language with as much drive as Python has lacks a nice free IDE.

I also had to work with Visual Studio 2008 recently to port Gobby to Windows with proper C++ exceptions. The IntelliSense feature (their marketing speak for code completion) worked quite well with the given C++ code, but that IDE just got into my way. (Apart from the compiler having a different opinion about what real C++ is like, in contrast to gcc's opinion.)

As my pyblosxom (heh) still lacks a comment plugin please mail me suggestions (if you have some) to my debian.org address.

Uh, and a nice sticker:

So I am 21 now. This does not give me any significant additional privileges in Germany and somehow I'm feeling a bit old, having overcome my teen years now. The day is also the worst day of year to have birthday on. At least there are actually some people available this year to celebrate with me, in contrast to recent years.

(Re additional privileges: I am now allowed to drive the car with slightly more than 0.0 ‰ blood alcohol. Given that in the US my age would finally allow me to buy alcohol at all, it's a bit... uhm... funny.)

My wish to buy a digicam or to receive it as a birthday or Christmas gift is quite old actually. Exactly a year ago I already looked out for suitable models at Amazon and had trouble finding something satisfyable. Just like now. I really don't want to dig into the whole market of cams to get an overview of what's available.

My parents own an older 5 MP Canon PowerShot, which is just fine. It uses standard rechargeable batteries and has a turnable display. Now the latter is not really available anymore and the reviews of Canon cams on Amazon are not too promising, neither, i.e. they claim that the quality got worse in the last two years since we buyed that old cam.

Does anyone have some recommendations of cameras in the 100 < x < 200 Euro range which get along with standard batteries? Preferably it would use SD cards as my laptop happens to provide a reader for it. A finder is not really required, as I use the display for almost all pictures anyway, but the display should have a sensible resolution (something people also critisised when looking at Canon cams). The lens should provide a bit of wide-angle and should obviously be good.

As my blog does not provide any comments facility (yet), I appreciate emails at pkern (at) debian.org with suggestions, especially if you made some personal experiences. (Although I know that people here prefer digital mirror reflex cams, but those are just too expensive for me.)

Thanks in advance, dear Lazyweb!

First of all cheers to James for a new keyring upload. If I knew that I would have updated my subkey expiry once again before, heh. And the changes mail is not yet available anyway, maybe it was too large? Neither the PTS, nor d-d-changes lists it (yet?). It's shown in "Latest version" in the PTS, though.

Michal, I've got a simple script in /usr/local/sbin/update-debian-keyring which I run once in a while, as the keyring in the archive is outdated more often than not:

#!/bin/sh
rsync -az --progress keyring.debian.org::keyrings/keyrings/debian-keyring.gpg /usr/share/keyrings/debian-keyring.gpg

Now this won't solve the who-uploads "problem" completely as the Debian Maintainer keyring is still missing. As far as I know it is not rsync-able (as it's not managed by the keyring powers but on ftp-master) and probably not even directly wget-able. At least the imported GPG blob is not put into the pool, just the source package is. It's available as a file for DDs in merkel.debian.org:/srv/ftp.debian.org/keyrings/debian-maintainers.gpg, though.

Update: buxy told me that the keyring upload was done by noodles, not troup. Sorry about that, but I was unable to check that.

So I just booked train tickets to Zürich to attend the Debian Bug Squashing Party on January 12-13, 2008. This will be my first BSP and yay, I will meet fellow DDs (and NMs).

The only occasion where that happened by now was LinuxTag 2005, when I attended the Debian Day as a freshly accepted Developer (and got an exemption from school for it). I also attended CeBIT back then but felt strange when visiting the booth, although my AM was present, so I quickly left again.

I hope to change this the coming year: so I will go to FOSDEM in Bruxelles on February 23-24, thanks to Sven Krohlas, an Amarok fellow, for organising the trip.

Maybe I could also attend DebConf 8 if there are some travel funds available for me. We will see, I really look forward to it.

Perfect occasions to get more involved, to boost my English and to meet some people I only know from IRC and mail.