I did a pyblosxom backport today. Easy job (using dependencies from backports.org), just replace all occurrences of python2.3 by python2.2 in the debian/ subdir...

After a couple of hours toying around with pyblosxom i got it mostly working like i want to. The real blog move is delayed by two things:

First of all, all my blog guids will change. I don't want to fill up planet.debian.org again... any idea (except dropping my old entries)?

Secondly, i'd like to have a multi-user blog. That is, i need to modify pyblosxom to change the data dir (and some preferences) depending on some parameter. With blosxom (perl) i used an environment variable.

Also i'd like to provide blogging API support for other users: they don't have ssh access, and many find it difficult to ftp... Having a webui would help, too - but for both i need to enable write access for the web server. Having pyblosxom run as fastcgi or so would be cool.

Debtags need more work on my side. Tagging is coming along okay since the facets restructuring by Enrico. His tag submission tool works fine, and i wrote a script recieving these updates via mail.

Today, Enrico found the first people who adopted tags (IIRC ocaml and brasilian were adopted) - this is great, but i'll have to add my side: sending them email notifications when someone changes these tags.

Well, i hope i'll find time to clean up my maintainance scripts and check them in into our subversion repository. I don't think i'll checkin the webgui - it really needs to be rewritten.

I've been installing a new PC (for my mother) together with my father.

While the overall install process was okay, and the installer itself was really good (apart from the difficulties of partitioning for a machine that will mostly be used with windows)

Installing packages was different. A lot of packages ask dozens of questions, often even for me hard to understand. The most annoying package was xfree.

Xfree really asks too many questions. How many users do really need to set nodeadkeys, for example? Those not capable of editing the config file will probably run either KDE or Gnome, both of which allow this kind of customization in their menus. In short: xfree configuration sucks.

Similar things apply to other packages. Why the hell ask all this, if 99% of users will stick with the defaults and 99% of the rest will edit the configuration file anyway?

I'm trying to do some (admittedly complex) arp setup. It seems like recent kernels do not support what the "arp" command line tool does. :-(

The setup i have is the following:

internal network using 10.0.0.0/24 external network using 10.0.1.0/24 DMZ using the external networks ip.

A firewall box is connected to all three networks, using IPs .1

proxy-arp is enabled on the firewall box, and a box in the DMZ is reachable just fine (so apparently proxy-arp works and forwarding does so, too)

I'd like to masquerade 10.0.1.2 to 10.0.0.2 - this works fine when i do "ip add addr 10.0.0.2 dev ethEXT". I'd like to do it without.

For this i need either teach my outside router the ip of my firewall as gateway (which i cannot) - or i need to send ARP replies for the IP.

This works fine using proxy arp, as long as this IP is actually used by a box on the inner network or DMZ. Unfortunately, since i masquerade the IP, it doesn't work.

The arp manpage state:

arp [-v] [-H type] [-i if] -s hostname hw_addr [netmask nm] pub

arp [-v] [-H type] [-i if] -Ds hostname ifa [netmask nm] pub

So i should be able to do

arp -i ethEXT -Ds 10.0.1.2 ethEXT pub

Well, this doesn't work. In my kernel - probably any iproute2 enabled kernel - this creates the following entry in my arp table:

IP address       HW type     Flags       HW address            Mask     Device
10.0.0.64        0x1         0xc         00:00:00:00:00:00     *        eth0

i get the same result when i try giving my own MAC explicitely.

As far as i can tell, any iproute2 enabled kernel will NOT support arbitrary arp "publish" entries. All you can do is adding arp_proxy entries.

If you know a solution apart from running an userspace arp daemon, please tell me. Until then i will stick with adding a second IP to my external if.

I was wondering wheter we should strip sarge of applications to make it fit onto one DVD. Of course we can use popcon ratings to just select a subset that does fit onto exactly one DVD.

But maybe it would be smarter to search for big packages in an alpha state that would be "worthless" to have on the DVD after a short time.

I'm thinking of removing packages in an early state and under rapid development. For example the "crystalspace" 3D engine SDK (which currently is not in sarge anyway, but that would be > 10 MB) - would it actually be ready for release with sarge? Wouldn't API changes etc. break it in no time? Wouldn't anyone developing with the SDK want to switch to a more recent version anyway?

I think sarge, being a static version, should not contain such moving targets.

And i do think that *providing an official 1-DVD version of sarge is important* to ease distribution by third-parties (for example included with some linux magazine). We do not necessarily need to drop packages from sarge altogether, but we should make some official "drop list".

Preferrably we should even help distributors to strip the sarge dvd further down, for example to have additional space for contributed packages on it, or other information added by the distributor (for example adding openoffice-for-win32 and mozilla-firefox-for-win to the DVD)

I've been a software suspend 2 user for half a year now. It works just great. The LZF compressor reduces the amount of memory to write by 50%, decreasing the suspend-to-disk time a lot.

I also used ACPI sleep, but this causes minor graphic glitches after resume: Some random pixels appear for example in gnome-terminal and mozilla. They do not go away when i restart these apps, seems like the data corruption is somewhere in video memory. They disappear after a software suspend 2 cycle.

Of course, not everything works perfectly with software suspend 2, too. Last time i tried, my 1394 drive would not be recoginized after resume - unloading the ohci1394 driver locked up the system. Seems like this driver really doesn't like suspend. USB also is a known problem with suspend, you need to unload the modules before doing so. Maybe this will work with 1394, too. Maybe this is solved with USB by now, i don't know.

Another [http://www.base0.net/wordpress/archives/2004/09/02/what-is-wrong-with-people-these-days blog entry] i want to comment on is from Michael Janssen.

Well, i guess i have easy talking here. Munich is AFAIK one of the safest 1-Mio+ cities in the world. I live a bit outside in a suburb. The suburbs are even a wealthier area of germany (in fact, four of the five wealthiest districts of germany are munich and the adjacent districts). We also have an exceptionally low crime rate.

The question that troubles me more, and that also applies to all this "War against Terror" shit, is: *What am i willing to pay for that?*

When i see recent developments - the U.S. demanding flight passenger informations, cameras being installed on public places, calls for cameras being installed on important intersections to track number plates (similar to the city fee system in London, but without the complete coverage - so any serious car thief will know which intersections to avoid when not having the number plate replaced...), all this RFID tracking shit (i know what you bought in the supermarked yesterday...), biometric information in the passports (heck, biometric systems work worse than guessing...)...

What for? People who want to do crimes will do crimes. They won't care.

We really need to teach people to be better people. In my opinion this includes paying more value to immaterial things. Because you cannot steal being smart from someone else. But you can steal his oh-so-cool-new-thing. Of course this is not what our industry wants, because you can't sell it. And if you can't make money that easily (teaching dumb people to be smart is a tough job...), but you can make a lot of money from people being scared - well, money runs the world. Figures.

Similar things apply to many places: the recent terrorism in russia, the palestinans - defending with violence against people you have been mistreating for ages just doesn't work: They have nothing to lose. (There are reports of little boys disappearing in chechnya and their bodys being found later. The russian military there is not being paid and said to be raiding homes to make up for that. And israelis have been "settling" in areas which belonged to palestinans for some time... A woman, which was engaged in the Moscow theatre disaster, was said to have lost her boyfriend - shot by russian military...)

Well, i think the principle is simple: stop mistreating and killing people and there will be less people trying to kill you. This also applies to Mr.Bush and the U.S. Unfortunately it takes a long time for these wounds to seal, but you should at least try hard not to make new wounds.

Oh, and the "American dream" is misread a lot by now. In good old times it probably was about becoming what you want to. Now it's about having stuff others do not have. And the easiest way probably is to just take it when they are not looking...

And no, this is not about the US being bad or so. Others are not that much better. And it certainly is getting worse here, too. (Probably to all the US influence, cinema and such). It's more about the capitalism messing with the values of people.

BTW: a good read about society is [http://paulgraham.com Paul Grahams] [http://paulgraham.com/nerds.html Why Nerds are unpopular]

I do understand [http://verbum.org/blog/freesoftware/dialog-war Colin Walters] very well. I also do hate these "network error" dialogs. Especially since my DSL provider interrupts the connection every 24h hours (due to "technical reasons", probably because they don't want people to keep the same IP...)

While i do understand the need to keep people informed about problems, i think we should try not to bother them that much...

One of my most hated network-interruption messages is the one of gaim. Because it not only does steal my focus, it's not done when i click okay: now the "reconnecting" box will pop into the foreground, taking focus again...

Could we maybe try to have such things stay in the background somehow?

Since the latest version of gaim it does behave MUCH better with respect to normal IM chats: once the window is opened it doesn't steal the focus any more. The previous versions (differently from earliers) did even switch my desktop to get into focus. That was really annoying. I was typing somewhere and next i'm typing into my chat window. A wonder i never sent someone an IM reply with "ls" in there...

For example workrave manages (at least the two times i tried it) to stay mostly out of your way. A small box which does NOT steal the focus.

Maybe we could use GNotify for such things?

This actually is one application i had wanted to write for a long time: A notification app, which tries to keep out of your way. Maybe like someone sitting next to your screen and just giving you a note to read *when you have time to handle it*.

What i was imagining was something like a small yellow bar sliding into view at the right hand of the screen. Urgent things may then slide further in, other notices should just stack up there.

I'm pretty sure i'd manage to frequently look for such things - just like i manage to look for my inbox monitor.

The more toy-addicted people may then decide to have some animation there. Maybe like a phone rining in the lower right corner.

Others will prefer an On-screen-display ticker with such messages.

Oh, and we are gonna need some way to recalling messages (when reconnect has succeeded) and a way to handle static but changing messages (3 new mails... 4 new mails...).

(Had to edit this blog entry, using and ampersand in the title still breaks planet...)

(Actually some days ago) i've made myself a hackergotchi! ;-)

http://www.mucl.de/~erich/hackergotchi.png

Now i have to find out how to add it to the planet site.

(I know its not great. But this picture from snowboarding was the best i had at hand. Never use one with too bright background, hair does require a lot of fine tuning otherwise. Sometimes you can notice that on TV, too. Guess that is why they use green screens by now, it blends nicer with blonde hair. ;-) Well, my hair is way shorter again by now anyway...)