Bash-Completion 1.3 released

After almost 8 months from the previous release, the Bash Completion Team is proud to announce the release of bash-completion 1.3!

Nothing really innovative in this release. Just "boring" new completions, and bugfixes :) For some stats, this release features 184 completions, the previous (1.2) had 168. For more numbers, please read previous posts. New completions are obviously welcome!

Apart from the usual team members (Ville Skyttä, Freddy Vulto, Guillaume Rousse and me), we've had contributions from (in no particular order): Anton Khirnov, Paul Walmsley, Miklos Vajna, Andrej Gelenberg, Stephen Gildea and Andrey G. Grozin. Thank you people for helping us!

The exciting things will arrive with 2.0. So stay tuned, and enjoy the new bash-completion!

-- David

Connessione VPN a UniPA da riga di comando

Non saremo in molti, ma... chi, come me, usa un sistema operativo libero, è uno studente dell'Università degli Studi di Palermo, deve collegarsi alla VPN dell'università, e utilizza un gestore di rete non capace di gestirle, si trova nei guai :)

Ecco quindi un piccolo tutorial per poterci collegare alla VPN dell'università (o a qualunque altra VPN PPTP), da riga di comando.

Software necessario: pptpsetup, pppd, ip (o route, ma bisognerà adattare i comandi).

Prima di tutto, creiamo il nostro bel tunnel:

# pptsetup --create unipa --server vpn.unipa.it --username pippo@studenti.unipa.it --password password

L'username è ricavabile dal Portale Studenti, la password è quella utilizzata per accedere al portale stesso.

Questo creerà un file /etc/ppp/peers/unipa, con tutti i dati necessari, ed aggiungerà i dati relativi all'autenticazione ad /etc/ppp/chap-secrets.

A questo punto, per avviare il tunnel, basterebbe:

# pon unipa

Purtroppo, non è così. Infatti, bisogna aggiungere i server DNS dell'università, e sistemare la tabella di routing.

Per aggiungere i server DNS, utilizzo una piccola utility, sponge(1), che evita la creazione di un file temporaneo. Ecco la ricetta:

pon unipa
echo -e "nameserver 147.163.1.22\nnameserver 147.163.1.3" | \
    cat - /etc/resolv.conf | \
    sponge /etc/resolv.conf
ip route del default
ip route add default via 147.163.1.24 dev ppp0

Questo andrebbe preferibilmente messo in uno script, da avviare da root, quando si ha necessità della VPN.

Quel che fa, è semplice. Aggiunge i due DNS dell'università in testa a /etc/resolv.conf, elimina la route di default, e routa tutte le connessioni attraverso la VPN.

Magari c'è un modo più carino e simpatico, ma questo è quello che sono riuscito ad ottenere :)

Getting network devices with Python and udev

UPDATE I wrote a new article based on Ben Hutching's response.

Just a quick post, mainly as a reminder for when I'll try to implement this in WICD:

#!/usr/bin/python

import gudev

client = gudev.Client(['rfkill', 'net'])

for dev in client.query_by_subsystem('net'):
    if dev.get_sysfs_attr_as_int("type") != 1:
        continue

    driver = dev.get_driver()
    if not driver:
        parent = dev.get_parent()
        if parent:
            driver = parent.get_driver()

    print type, dev.get_name(), driver, dev.get_sysfs_path()

This will print all network devices with ethernet-encapsulated packets (that's what sysfs type "1" is). Here's the output on my system:

eth0 e1000e /sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:19.0/net/eth0
wlan0 b43 /sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1c.1/0000:10:00.0/ssb0:0/net/wlan0

I'm still missing how to reliably detect if a device is a "wired" or a "wireless" one. I suspect that checking the existence of /phy80211 would be enough, but I can't really tell, and seems like I'm not able to find an exhaustive sysfs reference manual.

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Optional argument with \newcommand in LaTeX

In LaTeX, it seems like you can't define a command with a really optional argument, using \newcommand. You can make commands with arguments having a default value though.

Now, I found myself in need of having such a functionality. I had to google a while, but finally found it, so I'm posting it here, both to share knowledge and to remember it in future :)

Suppose you want to do something like \mycmd{foo} and \mycmd{foo}{bla}, doing different things (in my case, I needed to add the second argument enclosed by parenthesis in the TOC and other places, but only if it was present)

Here's the code:

\def\mycmd#1{\def\tempa{#1}\futurelet\next\mycmd@i}% Save first argument
\def\mycmd@i{\ifx\next\bgroup\expandafter\mycmd@ii\else\expandafter\mycmd@end\fi}%Check brace
\def\mycmd@ii#1{...}%Two args
\def\mycmd@end{...}%Single args

In the last two lines of the code, use \tempa for your first argument, and #1 for your second optional argument. If you need spaces there (maybe as part of some text), be sure to escape them with a backslash \.

I think it's expandable for additional arguments, but I haven't tried, and I don't feel like getting my hands dirty with TeX yet ;)

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pages tagged latex

LaTeX
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Optional argument with \newcommand in LaTeX
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covers

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LaTeX

Ebbene sì, sono un appassionato di LaTeX! :)

Ho impaginato alcune opere, che verranno mano a mano elencate in questa pagina.

Copertina Titolo Autore Anno Note
morsi.jpg A trattenere a morsi la tua idea Nuccia Di Giuseppe 2009
avventi.jpg Nuovi Avventi Autori Vari 2011 per descrivendo.com
Biblioteca Fardelliana
orecchioanima.jpg L'orecchio dell'anima Stefano Cona 2011
lemadri.jpg Le madri sono fiabe all'incontrario Autori Vari 2011 per descrivendo.com

Nel caso in cui qualcuno volesse vedere i sorgenti delle suddette opere, mi contatti.

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avventi fardelliana.jpg

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other

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inlinepage.tmpl

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View a specific SVN revision on web

I just found this out, so I'm posting it, since it might be useful both as a reminder, and for others to read.

Suppose you have a "classical" Subversion web interface, like svn.openstreetmap.org. This will show you the last revision by default.

What if you want to see a particular revision? I found this by googling a bit:

http://<yoursvn>/!svn/bc/<revision>/<path>

So, say, using the above example, you want to see the sites/ directory of revision 20000: here you are (compare with current).

This obviously works with files too.

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pages tagged svn

View a specific SVN revision on web
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zoom-world-mini.png

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linea6.gpx

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panning-hand-off.png

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linee bus.html

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OpenLayers.js

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north-mini.png

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slider.png

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linea5.gpx

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blank.gif

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OpenStreetMap.js

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style.css

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bus

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gpx

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img

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theme

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default

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stops.js

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pages tagged italian

Mappa dei bus urbani di Mazara!
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Bike-sharing a Mazara
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Perché i pedaggi in Sicilia sarebbero uno scempio
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LaTeX
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Connessione VPN a UniPA da riga di comando
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Feliĉa Zamenhofa Tago!
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Addio SputniX
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Mourning for my grandpa's death
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Linux Joint Day 2009 - Quinto meeting del Free Software Siciliano
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/me in love.
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Nuova auto in arrivo! :)
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Auguri Dalila!
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Ma come.. ancora?!
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Risultato di una nottata...
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Questo blog non è un SMS!
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Io non uso emoticon al posto del testo su MSN
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Prossimo rilascio di Debian GNU/Linux
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Benvenuto!
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Turi: puro Hip-Hop Italiano
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Viaggio nella lucida follia...
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Nuove conoscenze...
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Terme Acqua Pia - Montevago
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Stop ranting, David!
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La fine di un sogno... - The end of a dream...
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Linux Day 2007 Palermo
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pages tagged debian-it

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Perché i pedaggi in Sicilia sarebbero uno scempio

È notorio che io sia di destra, e abbia sempre votato a destra. Prima del Governo nazionale però, viene la prosperità della mia terra, la Sicilia. Ecco il perché di questo post.

Con il Decreto-Legge n. 78 del 31 maggio 2010, "Misure urgenti in materia di stabilizzazione finanziaria e di competitività economica", al capitolo IV, articolo 14, Pedaggiamento rete autostradale A.N.A.S. e canoni di concessione, si apre in prospettiva un periodo nero per la Sicilia.

La manovra economico-finanziaria di cui sopra, infatti, introduce in Sicilia il pagamento del pedaggio su tutte le autostrade (sono tutte infatti gestite da A.N.A.S.). Peccato che, in Sicilia, le autostrade fossero finora praticamente gli unici assi di trasporto all'interno dell'isola. E, sebbene non siano particolarmente curate (cantieri decennali, mancanza delle corsie d'emergenza in alcuni tratti, mancanza di servizi in altri, ...), né riescano a collegare tutti i punti dell'isola (tutta la costa meridionale è "scoperta"), noi Siciliani ci siamo sempre accontentati.

I lettori del nord storceranno il naso: loro pagano il pedaggio da sempre. Certo: se avessimo anche noi vie di trasporto alternative (strade statali, linee ferrate) adeguate, penso che chiunque pagherebbe per il privilegio di avere la propria auto a disposizione nel luogo di destinazione.

Analizziamo però le vie alternative che andrebbero a sostituire alcune delle attuali autostrade (i.e. quelle che conosco e che ho percorso più spesso).

Autostrada A19 - Palermo-Catania

È il principale asse di collegamento Est-Ovest dell'isola. Lunga circa 192km, presenta 4 aree di servizio in direzione Catania, e 3 in direzione Palermo. Da anni, uno dei viadotti del tratto Palermo-Caltanissetta è ridotto ad una sola corsia (e non si vedono lavori in corso). L'alternativa su rotaia non è confortante: 3 o 4 ore, se si evitano i tragitti fantasiosi proposti da Trenitalia, tipo quello passante per Messina Centrale (5 o 6 ore). L'alternativa su gomma è anche peggio: èrappresentata dalla Strada statale 121 Catanese, lunga più di 250km, che si snoda nell'entroterra siculo aggirando le varie colline. Secondo Wikipedia, prima dell'inaugurazione dell'A19, la tratta Palermo-Catania necessitava di 7 ore, a causa della tortuosità della strada statale.

Autostrada A29 - Palermo-Mazara del Vallo

Per andare dalla mia città, Mazara del Vallo, al capoluogo di regione, Palermo, esiste l'autostrada A29, lunga circa 115km. Manca di stazioni di rifornimento e di servizio lungo tutto il tratto, ma viene usata quotidianamente da pendolari -- lavoratori e studenti, con mezzi propri o autobus di linea -- che altrimenti impiegherebbero 2 ore e 43 minuti con il treno fino a Palermo Notarbartolo (unico binario, non elettrificato, con tratte in cui la velocità tocca i 60 km/h, e in cui raramente si raggiungono i 100km/h. Come dite? FrecciaRossa?).

L'alternativa non-autostradale è costituita da

  • Strada Statale 115 Sud-Occidentale Sicula, attraversando i centri abitati di Campobello di Mazara e Castelvetrano;
  • Strada Statale 119 di Gibellina, 58km di curve tra le montagne e le campagne dell'entroterra siculo, fino ad Alcamo;
  • Strada statale 624 Palermo-Sciacca, dallo svincolo di Alcamo fino a Palermo.

Conclusioni

Sicuramente questa è un'analisi incompleta, ma spero dia l'idea dei problemi derivanti dall'applicazione del pedaggio sulle nostre autostrade, senza la presenza di valide alternative.

Già ci muoviamo poco dai nostri paeselli, rischiamo di restare fermi del tutto. Cosa possiamo fare? Dire NO ai pedaggi in Sicilia.

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pages tagged sicilia

Perché i pedaggi in Sicilia sarebbero uno scempio
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Bash-Completion 1.3-2: now with triggers!

Today I uploaded bash-completion 1:1.3-2 to the experimental branch of Debian.

This package uses dpkg triggers to achieve an overdue goal: speedup shell loading by not even looking into completions for unavailable commands.

The mechanism is simple: a trigger is activated when a package installs something in one of the usual $PATH directories, and it creates symlinks for the appropriate completions.

This upload also features a change in the layout: completions were moved out of /etc/, so you won't be annoyed anymore during upgrades (and, let's say it, they shouldn't have been there since the beginning). However /etc/bash_completion.d/ is still around for compatibility reasons. If you want to enable a completion, just symlink it there from /usr/share/bash-completion/completions/. If there are enough requests, I might do a simple compenable/compdisable script to create them.

I'd appreciate if adventurous people could test it, and report bugs (if any, hopefully). And don't be scared by the tons of messages about removed conffiles :)

Please beware that the "detection mechanism" of appropriate completions is not entirely foolproof: it might need some hacking upstream (adding meta-headers to completion files?), so I'll try to improve it in future.

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Bike-sharing a Mazara

Sottotitolo: perché non funzionerà.

Il Comune di Mazara del Vallo ha acquistato 90 biciclette e 9 ciclo-posteggi ("rastrelliere''), da affidare in gestione a 9 aziende operanti sul territorio mazarese. Fin qui, tutto bene.

Il problema nasce nel momento in cui il Comune detta le regole del servizio. Ogni azienda avrà in concessione 10 biciclette ed 1 ciclo-posteggio. Ogni bicicletta viene concessa al costo di 3,00€ al mese (il ciclo-posteggio è in comodato d'uso gratuito); e potranno essere noleggiate ad un prezzo massimo di 0,30€/ora.

Facciamo due conti.

Per ammortizzare la spesa della concessione (30€/mese), quindi senza alcun guadagno, ci vorrebbero 100 ore di noleggio mensile. Che vuol dire 3 ore circa al giorno. Con questo però ci paghi solo la concessione.

Supponiamo allora che noleggi per un'ora al giorno tutte e 10 le biciclette: sono 3€ giornalieri, 90€/mese. Ci paghi la concessione, e con i restanti 60€ ci fai ben poco; non ci puoi campare, né pagarci le bollette, né pagarci qualcuno.

Giochiamo un po' con i numeri allora, e vediamo il guadagno netto mensile per ore di noleggio giornaliere:

Ore Guadagno €
20 150
40 330
60 510

Solo con 60 ore giornaliere di noleggio (6 ore per ognuna delle 10 biciclette!) si arriva ad un guadagno ragionevole, che però basta a malapena per pagarci le bollette e l'eventuale affitto.

E se ad attuare questo servizio fosse un'azienda già costituita, e ci fosse bisogno di una persona appositamente preposta? Non la si può pagare meno di 500€/mese. Quindi i numeri di cui sopra sarebbero destinati a salire.

Chiedendomi se i miei fossero calcoli sbagliati, mi sono guardato in giro, e...

  • ATAC Roma fa pagare 0,50€ ogni mezz'ora per il servizio di bike-sharing;
  • A Milano si paga un abbonamento giornaliero di 2,50€, con i primi 30 minuti gratuiti, dopo 0,50€ ogni 30 minuti (o frazione) fino a 2 ore, superate le 2 ore, 2€ ogni ora o frazione (ci sono altri abbonamenti che alla lunga risultano più economici, settimanale e annuale, ma non c'interessano).

Questi sono prezzi credo abbordabili per il cittadino (soprattutto quelli di Roma!), e sostenibili per un'azienda interessata. Con i prezzi proposti dal Comune, invece, bisognerebbe avere un flusso altissimo e continuo di turisti, e un'alta percentuale di questi noleggiare le bici. Cosa che, purtroppo, Mazara non ha al momento.

È sicuramente un'iniziativa lodevole, che però, mi spiace dire, è stata progettata malissimo.

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pages tagged mazara

Mappa dei bus urbani di Mazara!
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Bike-sharing a Mazara
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avventi.jpg

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lemadri.jpg

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orecchioanima.jpg

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morsi.jpg

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clamtk 3.11

clamtk_3.11-1_i386.changes uploaded successfully to localhost
along with the files:
  clamtk_3.11-1.dsc
  clamtk_3.11.orig.tar.gz
  clamtk_3.11-1.diff.gz
  clamtk_3.11-1_all.deb

Greetings,

    Your Debian queue daemon

Enjoy! :)

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libnet1 adopted

I've finally adopted libnet :)

The new upload carries a complete rework of the Debian package, plus some major patches:

  • 00-fix_build-process.patch added (moving from .diff.gz to a proper patch)
  • 01-fix_libnet-functions.h.3.patch added (hyphen-used-as-minus-sign)
  • 02-fix_libnet_802_1q_hdr.3.patch added (manpage-has-bad-whatis-entry)
  • 03-fix_libnet_802_1x_hdr.3.patch added (manpage-has-bad-whatis-entry)
  • 04-fix_libnet_build_ntp.patch added (Closes: #418249)
  • 05-fix_libnet_pblock_coalesce_buffer_overrun.patch added (Closes: #418975)
  • 06-fix_libnet_pblock_coalesce_leak.patch added (Closes: #418979)
  • 07-add_libnet-cq-end-loop.patch added (Closes: #497909)
  • 08-fix_libnet_checksum.c.patch added (moving from .diff.gz to a proper patch)
  • 09-fix_hurd-i386_built.patch added (fixed build on Hurd i386) (Closes: #457506)

Enjoy the new libnet :)

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Turi: puro Hip-Hop Italiano

Ecco cos'ho trovato con un po' di navigazione su youtube.com... che dire: fantastico, un misto di rap inglese e calabro.

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Benvenuto!

Benvenuto su hanskalabs.net! Questo è il mio sito web personale. Per chi non mi conoscesse, mi chiamo David Paleino, e sono conosciuto in rete anche come "hanska". Questo sito, oltre ad essere una finestra su di me, conterrà anche cose riguardanti la mia passione principale: i computer. Si parlerà quindi di programmazione, sicurezza informatica, GNU/Linux, free software, opensource e tanto altro! Stay tuned!

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Prossimo rilascio di Debian GNU/Linux

Ieri è giunta una mail da Martin Schulze, che annunciava (su linux.debian.announce) il rilascio della prossima versione del sistema operativo Debian GNU/Linux, la 4.0. La prossima versione sarà la cosiddetta "etch", l'attuale testing, che diventerà stable, secondo le previsioni di Martin Schulze, entro Dicembre 2006. Nuove funzionalità includono:

  • kernel 2.6.17 installato di default, con possibilità di selezione di altri kernel;
  • supporto per l'architettura AMD64;
  • gcc (GNU Compiler Collection) 4.1;
  • X.Org sostituirà definitivamente XFree86;
  • introduzione di SecureAPT.

La nuova versione del sistema operativo sarà rilasciata in contemporanea per tutte le 11 architetture supportate. L'intero testo dell'articolo è disponibile sul sito Debian.

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Goodbye eDonkey

It's news of some day ago. And it's sad. RIAA has hit the file-sharing world another time. In fact, on September 13th, eDonkey surrended to RIAA, with the closing of www.edonkey.com web site, which reports a sad message, e the non-distribution of eDonkey 2000 and Overnet clients. The reported message is

The eDonkey2000 Network is no longer available.

If you steal music or movies, you are breaking the law.

Courts around the world -- including the United States Supreme Court -- have ruled that businesses and individuals can be prosecuted for illegal downloading.

You are not anonymous when you illegally download copyrighted material. Your IP address is 82.57.104.199 and has been logged. Respect the music, download legally.

Another P2P pilaster has fallen down.

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Mozilla Firefox and Debian

Someone called it "The Mozilla scandal", to let people understand the situation which involves Debian GNU/Linux and the notorious Mozilla Firefox browser. As you can read in the bug report sent by Mike Connor, there's a serious license problem as concerns the Mozilla browser. As said in the long discussion, in fact, the name "Firefox" is a Mozilla Corporation trademark, which should be used with their own artwork which are copyrighted. This is in contradiction with Debian's philosophy to use only free software (not meant as free-of-charge). Debian, in fact, has used the name "Firefox" without using Mozilla artworks. There's a condition imposed by Mozilla which states that you use both the name and the artwork, or neither.The proposal is, therefore, to rename the browser, and on some blogs some ideas were born:

  • IceWeasel;
  • FireChicken;
  • FoxFire;
  • FreeFox;
  • Fire-you-know-what;
  • Not-FireFox;
  • WaterWolf;
  • OpenFox / DebFox / PeopleFox / WorldFox;
  • PlasmaFox;
  • ... .

As you can understand, some names are highly ironic, other are more realistic for a possible renaming proposal. What will happen? Debian probably will rename the browser, or maybe they'll put it in the non-free branch, or they'll create a "Firefox Community Edition"... Let's hope they'll find a middle ground... Some links:

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What is a hacker?

Some days ago, surfing the Internet, I came across a particular website, PassiveMode, who mainly deals with hacking.

Amongst the articles I found one which interested me: What is a hacker?.

It is a topic I'd like to deal with, because I noted there are misunderstangings and disinformation about this. The article opens with a piece taken from a book by the same author, Beyond Fear by Bruce Schneier:

A hacker is someone who thinks outside the box. It's someone who discards conventional wisdom, and does something else instead. It's someone who looks at the edge and wonders what's beyond. It's someone who sees a set of rules and wonders what happens if you don't follow them. A hacker is someone who experiments with the limitations of systems for intellectual curiosity.

It's evident this is not the concept of hacker claimed by media, that is the computer criminal, all alone in his room for days, trying to steal credit card numbers. No, this is not hacking. Hacking is curiosity: it is using objects in a way they were not designed for.

Some time ago, on Usenet, precisely on the alt.hackers group, I read about a "clever spoon/pen hack". "What is he talking about?" you might be asking. This is hacking.

A restaurant owner (I assume, it's not written in the post) who, to avoid people from stealing the pen which he used to sign credit cards, banded a spoon to it. Hacking is not necessarily a term concerning the world of computers. Hackers have always been there, even though the term is rather recent. Taking back Bruce Schneier's words: Galileo was a hacker. Mme. Curie was one, too. Aristotle wasn't. (Aristotle had some theoretical proof that women had fewer teeth than men. A hacker would have simply counted his wife's teeth. A good hacker would have counted his wife's teeth without her knowing about it, while she was asleep. A good bad hacker might remove some of them, just to prove a point.)

"Computer" hackers follow these guidelines. They have the same genius as Galileo had, but they use it on computers. Computers, networks in particular, are the new exploration fields. The Internet is an immense landscape of hidden and undiscovered information. The more you know, the more you can do. One shouldn't be surprised in discovering that many hackers focus on computer security. To deal with security you need a particular mindset: thinking in a non-common way, breaking the rules, exploring systems limitations. It is a challenge: the hacker finds a wall between himself and knowledge. This wall is something to be destroyed to gain knowledge. Starting once again from the original article on PassiveMode:

Hackers cheat. And breaking security regularly involves cheating. It's figuring out a smart card's RSA key by looking at the power fluctuations, because the designers of the card never realized anyone could do that. It's self-signing a piece of code, because the signature-verification system didn't think someone might try that. It's using a piece of a protocol to break a completely different protocol, because all previous security analysis only looked at protocols individually and not in pairs.

This is security hacking, breaking a system thinking in a different way.

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Ndiswrapper on a 2.6.19(-rc4) Kernel

Has anyone ever tried to use the ndiswrapper module under a 2.6.19-rc4 kernel? This is the sad message appearing in `dmesg`:

Symbol usb_register_driver is being used by a non-GPL module,
which will not be allowed in the future Please see the file
Documentation/feature-removal-schedule.txt in the kernel
source tree for more details.
ndiswrapper: Unknown symbol destroy_workqueue
Symbol usb_deregister is being used by a non-GPL module,
which will not be allowed in the future Please see the file
Documentation/feature-removal-schedule.txt in the kernel
source tree for more details.
ndiswrapper: Unknown symbol __create_workqueue
ndiswrapper: Unknown symbol queue_work

How to solve this? You just need to edit a file, ./kernel/module.c, commenting the lines 1720-1:

if (strcmp(mod->name, "ndiswrapper") == 0) add_taint_module(mod, TAINT_PROPRIETARY_MODULE);

These lines just "block" a "proprietary" module which is using GPLed components (usb_register_driver and usb_deregister, as we can see from `dmesg`). Ndiswrapper, in fact, is not proprietary on his own, but it uses proprietary drivers developed for Microsoft Windows platforms. Same thing for the other program present at the same lines, driverloader.

This "hack" should work also for the stable version of the kernel.

Happy WiFi-ing!

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Flash and Fonts on Debian GNU/Linux

Who has had problems in seeing fonts in flash movies on Linux using Firefox?

Here is a solution, taken from lot of googleing and several suggestions:

  1. Install xfs package, that is the X Font Server;
  2. Install the msttcorefonts package, which contains the Microsoft fonts, used by most of the flash movies;
  3. Install the ttmkfdir package, which contains the ttmkfdir and mkfontdir utilities, which we will use later.

At this point, we can proceed:

  1. mkdir -p /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fs/
  2. ln -s /etc/X11/fs
  3. cd /usr/share/fonts/truetype/msttcorefonts
  4. ttmkfdir
  5. mkfontdir

With the last two commands, we'll create two files in /usr/share/fonts/truetype/msttcorefonts/: fonts.dir e fonts.scale. Now we can edit the /etc/X11/fs/config file (or /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fs/config, they're the same file, as we symlinked them), adding the path of the Microsoft fonts to the catalogue line. For example (your mileage may vary, since this line depends on which fonts you've got on your system) in the case you have:

catalogue = /usr/share/fonts/X11/misc/,
/usr/share/fonts/X11/100dpi/:unscaled,
/usr/share/fonts/X11/75dpi/:unscaled,/usr/share/fonts/X11/100dpi/,
/usr/share/fonts/X11/75dpi/

you'll need to edit the line so as it becomes:

catalogue = /usr/share/fonts/X11/misc/,
/usr/share/fonts/X11/100dpi/:unscaled,
/usr/share/fonts/X11/75dpi/:unscaled,/usr/share/fonts/X11/100dpi/,
/usr/share/fonts/X11/75dpi/,/usr/share/fonts/truetype/msttcorefonts/

(those paths should stay on a single line)

Now we can restart Firefox, and see our flash movies! ;)

This procedure works on Debian and Debian-based systems. It should nevertheless work also on other systems, paying attention to system path differences.

Posted

Io non uso emoticon al posto del testo su MSN

Questo è quello che afferma Alessio, da Catania. Un motivo c'è, ed è valido: chi non ha mai visto frasi del genere?

Frase MSN

Ecco: una frase quasi incomprensibile. Come spiega Alessio nel suo articolo, ci sono diversi motivi per cui bisognerebbe NON utilizzare semplici lettere o combinazioni di lettere, che potrebbero trovarsi dentro qualunque parola, per mostrare degli emoticon. Per ricordare alcuni punti:

  1. le immagini non vengono visualizzate subito. Per parecchi secondi, quindi, la frase risulterà incomprensibile;
  2. le immagini hanno grandezze diverse, rendendo difficile la lettura;
  3. lo spazio occupato diventa maggiore all'interno della finestra;
  4. rallenta la connessione ad internet;
  5. può causare blocchi e malfunzionamenti;
  6. si costringe il proprio interlocutore a vedere le stesse immagini ripetute decine di volte;
  7. si aumenta il carico del pc, incrementando l'usura dei suoi componenti.

Altri motivi si possono leggere sempre nell'articolo originale. Per questo, espongo qui il banner della "protesta":

No smiles

Posted

Questo blog non è un SMS!

Proprio così. Se condividi l'insofferenza verso il linguaggio degli Short Message Services, clicca sul banner sottostante:

Questo blog non è un essemmesse!

Posted

Happy 2007!

Happy New Year 2007! I hope the new year will be better then the previous!

Posted

clamtk in Debian repositories

I just got an email confirming the acceptance and the entrance in Debian repositories of clamtk, a graphical frontend to clamav, famous antivirus for GNU/Linux platforms.

To install:

apt-get install clamtk

Enjoy it!

Posted

gnome-rdp in Debian repositories!

Second email of the day: this time is gnome-rdp's, a graphical tool, written in Mono C#, for connecting via SSH, RDP or VNC.

To install:

apt-get install gnome-rdp

Enjoy it!

Posted

proda migrated to Testing!

Finally all those who are interested in the Debian-Med project, and are using a Debian Testing ("Lenny"), can use the package proda, a software for the detection and the alignment of homologous regions in proteins. Here is the official communication, and the package page. Enjoy it!

Posted

Let's give grep some colour

For those using GNU/Linux, grep is a fundamental utility. If you're looking for a word into a file with very long lines, how could you find the result of your search immediately? It's difficult. That's why we're going to give grep some fancy mood ;-)

First of all, let's open ~/.bashrc (or the corresponding file, if you use another shell than BASH), and put, in any point (better if at the end of the file), the following lines:

alias grep="grep --color=auto"

export GREP\_COLOR="1;33;40"

After this, let's go back to the shell and give the command source ~/.bashrc, so as to enable the new settings.

And now, the explanation. The first line tells Bash to substitute to "grep" the command "grep --color=auto". This lets grep consider the environment variable GREP_COLOR. In fact, in the second line, we export this variable with the colour we want. The "colour" format is:

  • attr is the "attribute" for the highlighted text, it can be 0 (normal), 1 *(bold)* **and so on;
  • foreground is the foreground colour of the text, and can be:
  • 30 - black
  • 31 - red
  • 32 - green
  • 33 - yellow
  • 34 - blue
  • 35 - magenta
  • 36 - cyan
  • 37 - white

  • background is the background colour, and can have values of:

    • 40 - black
    • 41 - red
    • 42 - green
    • 43 - yellow
    • 44 - blue
    • 45 - magenta
    • 46 - cyan
    • 47 - white

  • So the example written above sets the searched text in bold, in yellow with a black background. It shines on my black shell! ;-)

    Enjoy grep!

    Posted

    Enclosing a string with sed

    One of the most common problems might be "enclosing" a bunch of lines with some other text. Let's do an example: we want to create some <img /> tags from files in a directory, so to easily create an "image gallery" to be put online.

    $ ls

    bar.png buz.png foo.png

    $

    How could we have a list of the files, with <img />? "Easy": use some sed magic!

    $ ls > files

    $ cat files

    bar.png

    buz.png

    foo.png

    `$ sed -i 's/^(.*)$/\1<\/img>/g' files

    $ cat files

    <img src="bar.png">bar.png</img>

    <img src="buz.png">buz.png</img>

    <img src="foo.png">foo.png</img>

    Easy, uh? :)

    Posted

    New version of clamtk

    I've just packaged the latest version, 3.05, of clamtk, a GUI written in Perl and Gtk for ClamAV, for Debian. Enjoy!

    Posted

    25 years of TCP/IP

    Happy New Year! Happy 2008! It's the New Year, but we have also other things to be happy for. Today, in fact, it's 25 years from adoption by ARPANET of the TCP/IP protocol as a standard. Without TCP/IP, without ArpaNet, Internet would not exist at all, and you couldn't be reading this article. Let's see how the story goes. TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) is the protocol which controls data transmission: it checks sent and received data, lost and wrong data. It also provides retransmission of data in case of faulty receiving. TCP has been engineered over the IP protocol, which doesn't guarantee packets arrival and delays, to offer a reliable communication channel between two processes, made by a bidirectional stream of bytes. *IP *(Internet Protocol) is a packet network protocol. Currently the widest used version is IPv4, distinct from the more recent IPv6, created to better handle the growing number of devices connected to the Internet and, therefore, needing an *IP address. *An IP(v4) address is composed by four groups, divided by dots (.), of decimal numbers from 000 to 255 (i.e. from 000.000.000.000 to 255.255.255.255), with a total of 32bits and 232 available addresses (which will soon be saturated). An IP(v6) address, instead, is composed by eight groups, divided by colons (:), of hexadecimal numbers from 0000 to FFFF (i.e. from 0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000 to FFFF:FFFF:FFFF:FFFF:FFFF:FFFF:FFFF:FFFF), with a total of 128bits and 2128 available addresses.

    Posted

    Risultato di una nottata...

    Ecco cosa ha portato la notte di Capodanno:

    The Walk

    Questa era una foto di quest'estate, all'incontro dei giovani con il Papa a Loreto 2007. Qualche modifica con Gimp... ed ecco il risultato!

    Posted

    Root powers

    Here is a funny picture I've found while surfing the Net:

    Root powers

    Posted

    The right approach

    Le cœur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît point.

    Blaise Pascal

    (transl. "The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of.")

    Useless reason

    Posted

    It's just getting used to...

    Posted

    Why using -Wl,--as-needed

    Today I was preparing a new package for Debian, pinot, a Xapian (and other engines) based full-text search engine, when I noticed of the real difference in generated dependencies passing -Wl,--as-needed to the linker (via LDFLAGS) or not. Here it is a table which summarizes the result:

    LDFLAGS="" LDFLAGS="-Wl,--as-needed"
    libatk1.0-0 (>= 1.20.0)
    libc6 (>= 2.7-1) libc6 (>= 2.7-1)
    libcairo2 (>= 1.4.0)
    libcairomm-1.0-1 (>= 1.4.0)
    libcomerr2 (>= 1.33-3)
    libcurl3 (>= 7.16.2-1) libcurl3 (>= 7.16.2-1)
    libdbus-1-3 (>= 1.1.1) libdbus-1-3 (>= 1.1.1)
    libdbus-glib-1-2 (>= 0.74) libdbus-glib-1-2 (>= 0.74)
    libfontconfig1 (>= 2.4.0)
    libfreetype6 (>= 2.3.5)
    libgcc1 (>= 1:4.1.1-21) libgcc1 (>= 1:4.1.1-21)
    libglib2.0-0 (>= 2.12.0) libglib2.0-0 (>= 2.12.0)
    libglibmm-2.4-1c2a (>= 2.14.0) libglibmm-2.4-1c2a (>= 2.14.0)
    libgmime-2.0-2 libgmime-2.0-2
    libgtk2.0-0 (>= 2.12.0) libgtk2.0-0 (>= 2.12.0)
    libgtkmm-2.4-1c2a (>= 2.12.0) libgtkmm-2.4-1c2a (>= 2.12.0)
    libidn11 (>= 0.5.18)
    libkrb53 (>= 1.6.dfsg.2)
    libldap-2.4-2 (>= 2.4.7)
    libpango1.0-0 (>= 1.19.3)
    libpng12-0 (>= 1.2.13-4)
    libsigc++-2.0-0c2a (>= 2.0.2) libsigc++-2.0-0c2a (>= 2.0.2)
    libsqlite3-0 (>= 3.5.4) libsqlite3-0 (>= 3.5.4)
    libssh2-1
    libssl0.9.8 (>= 0.9.8f-5) libssl0.9.8 (>= 0.9.8f-5)
    libstdc++6 (>= 4.2.1-4) libstdc++6 (>= 4.2.1-4)
    libtag1c2a (>= 1.4) libtag1c2a (>= 1.4)
    libtextcat0 libtextcat0
    libx11-6
    libxapian15 libxapian15
    libxml++2.6-2 (>= 2.20.0) libxml++2.6-2 (>= 2.20.0)
    libxml2 (>= 2.6.27) libxml2 (>= 2.6.27)
    libxrender1
    zlib1g zlib1g
    34 20

    We removed 14 useless dependencies!

    Posted

    Alphabet Aerobics...

    Yet another youtube.com video... this Mc (Gift of Gab, from Blackalicious) pronounces whole sentences made out of words starting with the same letter, in alphabetical order.

    Posted

    gthumb 2.10.9 on its way

    Well, the title says it all... I'm working on getting gthumb 2.10.9 in shape for Debian :)

    I've got quite an usable package -- I just need to make it "lintian clean". Looking forward to complete it ;)

    Posted

    Ma come.. ancora?!

    Ancora David?! Ancora? Basta. Hai ricevuto tante di quelle delusioni ultimamente, che non riesci più a contarle. E oggi l'ultima. O no?

    Che ti ho fatto di male per non parlarmi più? Uno non può esprimere il proprio pensiero? Cos'è, "c'ho provato" troppo? Non mi pare.. non ti ho più chiesto di uscire da non so quanto tempo. E tu hai regolarmente rifiutato, quando te l'ho chiesto. Non mi pare assolutamente di aver esagerato..

    E meno male che di me ti fidavi, e che mi volevi bene.. spero ci risentiremo.

    Ciao, Mel.

    Posted

    Here I Am! My first Meme :)

    myself

    1. Take a picture of yourself right now.
    2. Don't change your clothes, don't fix your hair -- just take a picture.
    3. Post that picture with NO editing.
    4. Post these instructions with your picture.

    Posted

    The Black Mags

    This is kind of an addictive song I've been hearing lately: The Cool Kids - Black Mags.

    It really sounds like old school Hip-Hop... I definitely like it!

    Posted

    Posted
    08
    Posted
    01

    WICD 1.7.0~b3 in experimental

    I just uploaded WICD 1.7.0~b3 to experimental. This was supposed to be the last pre-release before the official one, but a ~b4 has just been released, adding one more patch I'm keeping in debian/patches/. Luckily enough, my previous big hacking to split the source code (to make it easier for packagers to have separate binary packages) has been merged upstream! So one less patch for me to maintain :)

    It would be cool if experienced people (this is not (yet) for the faint of heart!) could test this package, before 1.7.0 gets released as stable and I upload it to sid. Or maybe you could just want to help us :)

    Let's find bugs now!

    Posted

    WICD 1.7.0 in unstable!

    WICD 1.7.0-1 just landed in Unstable! This is supposed to be the last 1.* release -- upstream will actively work on 2.0, and fix bugs on 1.7 only if they're serious enough. I will obviously support 1.7 until 2.0 comes out :)

    Enjoy!

    Posted

    Posted
    03
    Posted
    09
    Posted
    06

    DebConf 8: Mar del Plata - Argentina

    Today I visited the DebConf 8 website, and was "dreaming" (yes, that's right, dreaming..) about going there. I actually made a flight plan for DebConf -- this might be useful for anyone living in Sicily/Southern Italy who wants to go there. Obviously, my starting airport would be Palermo Falcone-Borsellino (PMO), YMMV.

    Unfortunately, the travel is about 29 hours, with a total cost of more than € 1.000,00. That is, just to get there. And I didn't consider any kind of accommodation. But, well, Argentina is not that close to Italy, is it? :-P

    I hope next year's DebConf will be held somewhere nearer to me -- Europe? ;)

    Outbound flight
    From To Flight Departure Arrival Price Duration
    Palermo (PMO) Rome Fiumicino (FCO) AirOne 2831
    Aug 1, 15:35 Aug 1, 16:35 € 87,73 1h 0m
    Rome Fiumicino (FCO) Madrid (MAD) AirEuropa 1044
    Aug 1, 18:45
    Aug 1, 21:10 - 2h 25m
    Madrid (MAD)
    Buenos Aires (EZE) AirEuropa 41 Aug 2, 00:55 Aug 2, 09:20 € 924,73 13h 25m
    Buenos Aires (EZE) Buenos Aires (AEP) BUS Aug 2, xx:xx Aug 2, xx:xx
    € 14,00 1h 00m
    Buenos Aires (AEP) Mar del Plata (MDQ) Aerolinas Argentinas AR1606 Aug 2, 13:50 Aug 2, 14:45 € 90,38 0h 55m
    € 1.116,84 18h 45m
    plus waiting times at Airports

    (10h 25m)

    29h 10m

    Posted

    Debian Ports

    I'm currently experimenting with ports of the Debian system other than x86 using Qemu. This is what I currently have installed/am installing:

    More details will follow about these setups, as soon as I get some time.

    I actually plan to play more with qemu (disk space and time permitting), to install (and well, try), these other ports:

    • Debian GNU/Linux on MIPSEL
    • Debian GNU/Linux on ARM
    • Debian GNU/Linux on Sparc
    • Debian GNU/Linux on PowerPC
    • Debian GNU/Hurd on x86
    • possibly, other ports of Debian.

    Just bookmark this page... and come visit sometimes! ;)

    Posted

    Debian GNU/kFreeBSD on x86

    Here you can find some information about my x86 virtual machine running Debian GNU/kFreeBSD.

    # uname -a
    GNU/kFreeBSD kfreebsd 6.3-1-486 #0 Thu Mar  6 01:51:33 CET 2008 i686 i386 Intel(R) Celeron(R) M CPU 530  @ 1.73GHz GNU/kFreeBSD
    # cat /proc/cpuinfo 
    processor       : 0
    vendor_id       : GenuineIntel
    cpu family      : 6
    model           : 14
    model name      : Intel(R) Celeron(R) M CPU 530  @ 1.73GHz
    stepping        : 3
    flags           : fpu de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep pge cmov pat mmx fxsr xmm b26
    cpu MHz         : 1810.31
    bogomips        : 1810.31
    # ifconfig
    ed0: flags=8843 mtu 1500
            inet6 fe80::5054:ff:fe12:3456%ed0 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x1 
            inet 192.168.1.71 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 192.168.1.255
            ether 52:54:0:12:34:56
            media: Ethernet 10baseT/UTP 
    lo0: flags=8049 mtu 16384
            inet6 ::1 prefixlen 128 
            inet6 fe80::1%lo0 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x2 
            inet 127.0.0.1 netmask 0xff000000 
    # mount
    /dev/ad0s1a on / (ufs, local)
    devfs on /dev (devfs, local)
    linprocfs on /proc (linprocfs, local, noexec, nosuid)
    # df -h
    Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
    /dev/ad0s1a           4.9G  259M  4.3G   6% /
    devfs                 1.0K  1.0K     0 100% /dev
    linprocfs             4.0K  4.0K     0 100% /proc
    #
    

    I'll be mainly using this machine to help porting Debian to the kFreeBSD kernel (or, well, to port my packages, in first instance).

    A quick installation guide will (hopefully) soon be available!

    Posted

    New site engine!

    From yesterday evening, this site is now running thanks to Drupal, a Content Management System (CMS) which I believe more flexible and complete than Wordpress. All the old articles and archives aren't lost (I've made a backup before hacking :) ), but it'll take a while before I figure out how to correctly import nearly 3 years of articles into Drupal. Stay tuned!

    Posted

    gthumb 2.11.0 in experimental

    Finally, today gthumb 2.11.0 (3:2.11.0~svn2319-1) first appeared on Debian systems. It's a SVN snapshot from svn.gnome.org, so don't expect much stability, even though it is not that unstable as one may think, but upstream hasn't released it yet, so I preferred putting it into experimental. It'll start being very unstable when the port to gio begins.

    gthumb 2.11.0 has much many new features with regard to gthumb 2.10.x series. First of all, it uses libexiv2 instead of libexif, thus allowing for much more image-metadata (EXIF) manipulation than now. Please, please, please. Test the new package. To do so, and you haven't ever installed anything from experimental, here are some instructions:

    1. add the following line to your /etc/apt/sources.list: deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian experimental main
    2. update your packages list: # apt-get update
    3. install gthumb from experimental: # apt-get -t experimental install gthumb

    Posted

    New john version in Debian

    Today a new version of john (a.k.a. John The Ripper) has landed on Debian. Enjoy! ;)

    Posted

    Great day

    Today is a great day. I've officially had an AM assigned: this means that my way to becoming a Debian Developer has started!

    Posted

    Bug-triaging bash-completion

    Today I've been triaging bugs for bash-completion... what a mess! I've been tagging, closing bugs, applying patches, trying to do my best... and it seems like I've lowered the bugs count a bit. Enjoy a cleaner bash-completion! (well, when it'll be released, that is :) )

    Posted

    acpi patch to use /sys/ instead of deprecated /proc/

    Time has come for me to do something serious for Debian :-)

    I must say I'm not a C programmer -- everything I did comes from general knowledge of C, trial-and-error, some general concepts I have. Thus, the code I'm attaching here is likely to be buggy.

    I'd like that, who feels a bit adventurous, applies the patch to acpi-0.09 (the current Debian version), to see if it works for him. As already happened, for someone it did not work, so I fixed it a bit.

    I hope you know how to patch sources... don't you? ;)

    Please report any failure/missing information to Debian Bug #462305, by sending a mail to 462305@bugs.debian.org (or, well, comment this post...).

    Thanks!

    Posted

    Copyright nightmares... and NM.

    I'm adopting libnet for Debian, and the old maintainer didn't do a good job with filling debian/copyright with the right information. In fact, he only completed the information for the upstream author of the package, but didn't do anything to check whether the other pieces composing this software contained other copyright notices... and, well, there are. Lots. And, well, also different licenses. :-(

    I'm now getting kinda sad about this. I did a lot of work to get the information completed right, and was having a problem with the definition of a couple of licenses (whether they were DFSG-free or not). I've then asked to my usual sponsor, which is also my AM. And, well, he took those issues into the NM process. Well, I know this is his "job" as my AM, and he does this to guarantee I'll be (if ever) the best DD I can. But, well, I was looking for a wise suggestion from an experienced developer, and didn't want my mails to be put on trial for NM. I'm just mad at this. :-/

    I hope everything will go well for my NM, after this request for help to my sponsor.

    UPDATE Jun 10, 2008: my sponsor sent me a mail replying to a question like "I hope this won't compromise my NM", saying that he's still confident that I can become an excellent DD. Wow :-)

    *[AM]: Application Manager *[NM]: New Maintainer *[DD]: Debian Developer

    Posted

    Debian Information Policy

    Ingo, I believe that we didn't need any page like the one you're pointing at. Just a "warning banner" on the homepage would've done the trick -- oh, well, those machines are developer-oriented (be them DDs or maintainers), so I believe that a more verbose post on -devel would have been sufficient.

    But, well, this is IMHO, and IANADD.

    Posted

    Debian-Ubuntu integration: improving software!

    Lucas did a very good job: he successfully integrated part of Ubuntu package management with Debian's. As explained in his blog, he took all the data from Launchpad and made a SQLite database with the fetched data. Now we have a "Ubuntu" column in the Debian Developer Packages Overview pages, and also a nice "Ubuntu box" in the PTS pages (see example).

    This is really useful: in fact, I've just integrated two patches for john, which were filed in Ubuntu's Launchpad -- and we would probably never have had them in Debian.

    Lucas' work will surely improve the collaboration between Ubuntu and Debian maintainers, and this will give end-users improved software... enjoy FOSS advantages! :)

    Posted

    Making flash movies work with PulseAudio

    I've recently installed [PulseAudio][0] (why should I switch to it?), and suddenly all embedded flash movies (YouTube, for example), got muted (oh, well, my browsers also started crashing...). This post is about making those movies work with PulseAudio :)

    [0]: http://www.pulseaudio.org/ "PulseAudio homepage This is not original content. The original author is Mrbigshot08 on forums.debian.net, but I'm posting a more Debianist way to do what he explains.

    1. download the source package:

      $ wget http://pulseaudio.vdbonline.net/flashplugin-nonfree-pulse_0.1~000.tar.gz

    2. install the needed packages to build a proper Debian package:

      # apt-get install devscripts pbuilder

    3. extract the source and cd into it:

      $ tar zxvf flashplugin-nonfree-pulse_0.1~000.tar.gz
      $ cd flashplugin-nonfree-pulse_0.1~000/

    4. satisfy the package dependencies:

      # /usr/lib/pbuilder/pbuilder-satisfydepends

    5. start the build:

      $ debuild

    6. if everything went fine, cd into the upper directory, and install the package:

      $ cd ..
      
      

      dpkg -i flashplugin-nonfree-pulse_0.1~000_*.deb

    7. remove things we installed no more needed:

      # apt-get --purge remove devscripts pbuilder

    Note that lines starting by $ can be run as a normal user, those starting with # must be run as root (or you can use sudo, if properly configured).

    Also, time for some legalese bloat:

    I do not take any responsibility for any problem this procedure might cause to your system / computer. These instructions are provided "AS IS", and any express or implied warranties are disclaimed. In no event shall I be liable for any direct, indirect, incidental, special, exemplary or consequential damages (including, but not limited to, procurement of substitute goods or services; loss of use, data, or profits; or business interruption) however caused and on any theory of liability, whether in contract, strict liability, or tort (including negligence or otherwise) arising in any way out of the use of these instructions, even if advised of the possibility of such damage.

    Posted

    Bash-Completion 20060617 near to release

    I've finally added my dh_bash-completion script to bash-completion, and fixed the RELEASE number. Hopefully it will soon be released (tomorrow?) -- it actually fixes 23 bugs filed in the Debian BTS. Wow! :-)

    Bash-Completion would eventually need to be totally re-written: we are planning to make it modular in some way, mainly to reduce the loading time on login.

    Posted

    Geohashing

    Today I've found this on xkcd.com:

    geohashing algorithm from xkcd.com

    The funny thing is: today I should be in open sea.... wow! :-)

    Here's a map letting you see this algorithm in action. People on my graticule: let's meet someday! ;-)

    Posted

    Google Shell

    Here's what someone posted on it.comp.os.linux.iniziare (an Italian newsgroup for Linux neophites).... goosh stands for Google shell. And yes, it really behaves like a unix-shell. Try typing "login" and, if you happen to have a GMail account, you'll end up having something like:

    d.paleino@goosh.org:/web> _

    blinking at you. :-)

    He (Stefan Grothkopp, the author of goosh.org) must be a shell-lover... I love his website too now :-)

    Imagine how would that be fancy to do your searches typing "web foo"... very hackish, indeed! :-P

    Posted

    Going back to the Fox

    Sorry Joss, I'm going back to FireFox.

    I've been a happy user of Epiphany-Gecko for more than a year, I admit, but right now it has become too buggy. Yes, it's gecko's fault, I know, but it became unusable at all.

    And Epiphany-Webkit isn't that better. It has lots of bugs, and missing important functionalities (i.e. the recent "Open in New Tab doesn't work"-bug...).

    I'm going back to Firefox. Version 3 opens up very fast on my laptop. I admit I am a bit lost -- I'll miss something of Epiphany (for example, the ability of adding "custom" search fields on top -- I had one for the BTS...).

    I'll probably revert to Epiphany, sure. But that will take some time, unfortunately :-/ . I know the developers have announced they'll completely switch to webkit, but in the meanwhile, I'll stick with Firefox.

    Posted

    New DE: lxde

    Today I switched from Xfce to LXDE: the first impression is: wow.

    It's really fast, and it seems lacking no functionality from what I had on Xfce (probably some, but I just installed it like 10 minutes ago, and I still need to find out all its potentialities :-) ).

    It's based on OpenBox as window manager, which was originally derived from BlackBox. Since version 3.0, it has no code from BlackBox anymore :-)

    I'll post my impressions after some use... I really like it -- I always preferred speed over beauty. ;-)

    Posted

    Posted
    10

    Simple Python and Vala XML parsers

    As some of you might know, I'm an OpenStreetMaper. In the last month, during those bits of spare time I had, I wrote a set of python scripts which compute some statistics over an OSM dump. I do this by parsing the whole XML tree, and national dumps are pretty huge (italy.osm is ~4G nowadays, and is not as well-mapped as Germany!), so I needed a way to do this without creating a memory-hungry beast.

    With Python, I could succesfully do this:

    #!/usr/bin/python
    # -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
    
    import xml.etree.cElementTree as etree
    
    def parse(filename):
        source = open(filename)
        context = etree.iterparse(source, events=("start", "end"))
        context = iter(context)
    
        event, root = context.next()
    
        for event, elem in context:
            if event == "end":
                root.clear()
                continue
    
            print elem.tag
    
    if __name__ == '__main__':
        import sys
        parse(sys.argv[1])
    

    And here the results:

    $ /usr/bin/time ./parsexml.py ~/osmstats/dumps/italy.osm.bz2.20100912.out 1>/dev/null
    413.22user 6.15system 8:57.80elapsed 77%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 21200maxresident)k
    7739552inputs+0outputs (10major+1470minor)pagefaults 0swaps
    

    However, since some time, I wanted to learn Vala, so I tried to do this very same task with it. Here's the code:

    using Xml;
    
    class XmlParser {
        public void parse_file(string path) {
            var handler = SAXHandler();
            void* user_data = null;
    
            handler.startElement = start_element;
            handler.user_parse_file(user_data, path);
    
        }
    
        public void start_element(string name, string[] attr) {
            stdout.printf("%s\n", name);
        }
    }
    
    int main(string[] args) {
        Parser.init();
        var parser = new XmlParser();
        parser.parse_file(args[1]);
        Parser.cleanup();
        return 0;
    }
    

    You need to compile it with:

    valac --pkg libxml-2.0 xml.vala

    And here's the result:

    $ /usr/bin/time ./xml ~/osmstats/dumps/italy.osm.bz2.20100912.out 1>/dev/null
    122.01user 4.03system 3:14.61elapsed 64%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 6352maxresident)k
    7738984inputs+0outputs (0major+461minor)pagefaults 0swaps
    

    Both these codes are, however, CPU-hungry. But at least they don't swap :-)

    Needless to say that I'm planning to switch my scripts to Vala for 2.0.

    Posted

    How to: database-less local map rendering with Mapnik and OSM

    Here's a quick howto for local map rendering, using python, mapnik and data from OpenStreetMap.

    This tutorial shows how to create a stylesheet for mapnik from scratch, if you're looking for how to tweak OpenStreetMap's mapnik rendering, I plan to write a tutorial on PostGIS-driven rendering at a later time.

    This post is not for those who want to make a local slippy map, nor those who want to render different areas of big dumps (think of big national dumps).

    We'll render some features of a residential area of a city with buildings mapped. We'll get a small dump of the area for this, using the XAPI.

    First, you need to install mapnik. On Debian-like systems, it should be as easy as:

    # apt-get install python-mapnik
    

    Then, you need some python code to use the mapnik library. Let's call it render.py:

    #!/usr/bin/python
    
    import mapnik
    
    ###
    # Configuration
    ###
    style = 'style.xml'
    output = 'output.svg'
    
    width = 1280
    height = 800
    
    bbox = '12.58664,37.65759,12.5945,37.66325'
    
    ###
    # Don't touch below!
    ###
    bbox = bbox.split(',')
    ll = mapnik.Coord(float(bbox[0]), float(bbox[1]))
    tr = mapnik.Coord(float(bbox[2]), float(bbox[3]))
    
    mymap = mapnik.Map(width, height)
    mapnik.load_map(mymap, style)
    
    map_bbox = mapnik.Envelope(ll, tr)
    mymap.zoom_to_box(map_bbox)
    mapnik.render_to_file(mymap, output)
    

    For the purposes of this post, we're going to create a 1280x800 map -- adjust that to suit your needs -- and we specified a bounding box corresponding to that area. That's composed as west,south,east,north coordinates. Be sure to get them right :-).

    Now we need to write a Mapnik stylesheet, we'll call it style.xml. That's a XML document, you can find the documentation at the official website. The skeleton of a stylesheet is as follows:

    <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
    <!DOCTYPE Map>
    <Map bgcolor="lightblue" srs="+proj=latlong +datum=WGS84">
    <Style name="...">
    ...
    </Style>
    <Layer name="...">
     <Datasource>
      ...
     </Datasource>
    </Layer>
    </Map>
    

    The stylesheet has an arbitrary number of Style elements and an arbitrary number of Layer elements. The former class of elements define the appearance of the features, while the latter defines where to get data from. Each layer has a Datasource child: here's where you say where to get your data from. We're going to use the osm input plugin, which lets you parse the dump directly. This has some drawbacks:

    • not scalable for big dumps
    • for each bbox you want to render, the full dump has to be re-parsed

    But works great for small dumps.

    In this tutorial, we want to pretty render a residential area, so we first need to render the road network. This will mainly be made of highway=residential roads.

    Each style can have one or more Rule element. These define what elements that particular style should apply to. Each rule can have different rendering settings.

    The given dump has different roads: residential, unclassified, tertiary and secondary. Let's add a rule for each. Here's the first of them:

    <Rule>
     <Filter>[highway] = 'residential'</Filter>
     <LineSymbolizer>
      <CssParameter name="stroke">#ffffff</CssParameter>
      <CssParameter name="stroke-width">5</CssParameter>
      <CssParameter name="stroke-linejoin">round</CssParameter>
      <CssParameter name="stroke-linecap">round</CssParameter>
     </LineSymbolizer>
     <TextSymbolizer name="name" face_name="DejaVu Sans Book" size="8" fill="#000" halo_radius="1" spacing="300" placement="line" />
    </Rule>
    

    It is quite straightforward: you define what elements the rule should apply to, and then add some symbolizer. For a detailed description of each symbolizer, please read the documentation.

    The example dump also has a railway and some steps. To render them, we use the stroke-dasharray property:

    <Rule>
     <Filter>[highway] = 'steps'</Filter>
     <LineSymbolizer>
      <CssParameter name="stroke">#ff0000</CssParameter>
      <CssParameter name="stroke-width">5.0</CssParameter>
      <CssParameter name="stroke-dasharray">2,1</CssParameter>
     </LineSymbolizer>
    </Rule>
    <Rule>
     <Filter>[railway] = 'rail'</Filter>
     <LineSymbolizer>
      <CssParameter name="stroke">#222222</CssParameter>
      <CssParameter name="stroke-width">3</CssParameter>
      <CssParameter name="stroke-linejoin">round</CssParameter>
     </LineSymbolizer>
     <LineSymbolizer>
      <CssParameter name="stroke">white</CssParameter>
     <CssParameter name="stroke-width">1</CssParameter>
      <CssParameter name="stroke-linejoin">round</CssParameter>
      <CssParameter name="stroke-dasharray">10,20</CssParameter>
     </LineSymbolizer>
    </Rule>
    

    Also here, it is quite simple. The values given to stroke-dasharray determine the size of the dashes, and they can be alternated. So, for the steps we have 2px of #ff0000 and 1px of trasparency, while for the rail we have 10px of white and 20px of #222222.

    What if we want to add some markers to the map? Easy, just use another symbolizer, called PointSymbolizer:

    <Rule>
     <Filter>[highway] = 'stop'</Filter>
     <PointSymbolizer width='10' height='22' file='stop.png' type='png' allow_overlap='true' opacity='1.0' />
    </Rule>
    

    Here we mark stop signals with a pre-rendered stop.png (only png and tiff are currently supported, and svg support is only in the development version).

    What to do next? Well, we can make this map really nice. We'll render buildings with a pseudo-3D effect, which, however, does not reflect real heights -- but it's rather nice to see. How to achieve this? BuildingSymbolizer is the answer.

    <Rule>
     <Filter>[building] &amp;lt;&amp;gt; ''</Filter>
     <BuildingSymbolizer>
      <CssParameter name="fill">#00ff00</CssParameter>
      <CssParameter name="fill-opacity">0.4</CssParameter>
      <CssParameter name="height">0.00007</CssParameter>
     </BuildingSymbolizer>
    </Rule>
    

    Here we just draw building=*. Regarding the height, you need to play a bit -- it took a while before I found a good value of it.

    One thing missing in this stylesheet, is the rendering of coastlines. Since we don't have a coastline here, I'm skipping it, but the easy way is: use another rule. This is really just a trick; OpenStreetMap renders the coastline in a different way respect to other features, that's why I'm using this trick.

    I'm not posting the whole stylesheet, but you can download it. You can also get the script, the OSM dump and the stop.png image.

    Now, you should be able to just do:

    $ ./render.py
    

    and you will have your map in output.svg :-)

    Here's what you would get if you use the files provided above (click to see the original SVG version):

    Posted

    Posted
    03
    Posted
    02

    New team member in bash-completion

    I'm glad to announce that we accepted a new member in bash-completion's upstream team: Dan-Leonard Crestez. He's an active guy in the F/OSS world, and I'm glad he's now in our team. :)

    Welcome on board!

    Posted

    Welcome Michael Gilbert!

    I just approved his request for joining the DKMS team. Welcome on board!

    Posted

    Posted
    09

    RC bug squashing

    Following zack's suggestions, I've been looking at RC bugs in my sparetime.

    In two days (well, two evenings really), I've been able to cope with a good number of bugs:

    • #543063 - ann: FTBFS: /bin/sh: aclocal-1.10: not found (DELAYED/7 RFS!)
    • #527823 - elisa-plugins-bad: FTBFS: rm: cannot remove `/build/user-elisa-plugins-bad_0.3.5-1-amd64-0hSRfJ/elisa-plugins-ba d-0.3.5/debian/elisa-plugins-bad//usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/. pth': No such file or directory *(DELAYED/2 RFS!)
    • #536924 - gai: FTBFS: gai-private.h:66:35: error: libgnomeui/libgnomeui.h: No such file or directory (DELAYED/10)
    • #537019 - gimp-dcraw: FTBFS: Unrecognized switch --build-strip (DELAYED/2)
    • #536945 - hdate-applet: FTBFS: hdate_applet.c:21:35: error: libgnomeui/libgnomeui.h: No such file or directory (DELAYED/7)
    • #519056 - im-sdk: FTBFS with glibc 2.8 (DELAYED/2 RFS!)
    • #536964 - im-sdk: FTBFS: Package libglade-2.0 was not found (RFS! - see above)
    • #543083 - libcsoap: FTBFS: aclocal-1.10: not found (DELAYED/7)
    • #543036 - honeyd: FTBFS: configure: error: dumbnet-config not found (closed, unreproducible)
    • #543045 - farpd: FTBFS: configure: error: libdumbnet not found (closed, unreproducible)
    • #536967 - glunarclock: FTBFS: configure: error: Library requirements (libglade-2.0 >= 2.0.0 ) not met (0-day)
    • #521942 - jabsorb: FTBFS: Missing Build-Depends on servlet-api and commons-httpclient (0-day)

    I must admit that some of them (didn't count them, might also be the greatest part of them) already had patches, and I just prepared the NMU. For others, there were other FTBFS's other than the ones filed, and those were fixed too.

    It would be extra cool if some DD uploaded the remaining 3 NMUs!

    I also had time to release and package syslog-summary 1.14, but, not being DMUA (yet), I'd need a sponsor for that too (but I'll probably ask my AM, since this upload sets DMUA).

    Happy RC-bug-squashing!

    Your friendly neighborhood-hanska :)

    Posted

    Posted
    03

    ..so I turned 22.

    Eheh, I'm getting older... 22 today! :)

    I just wanted to put down some of the important things happened to me this year...

    • sentimental life: epic fail... not really in the mood of talking about it;
    • University life: I finally passed two exams which blocked me for all the previous year: yay! Now I'm being stuck with other things -- not too much enthusiasm in some courses...

    • Debian life: I finally had my GPG key signed by TWO Debian Developers: I became DM, and had upload rights on non-NEW packages. Great! We had Lenny released. Uber-Great!

    • misc life: I just tried getting more people-friendly, more active (meaning being less lazy), less nerd (I probably failed in this particular aspect), better, in a word.

    Wishes for the 22-23 development cycle :) :

    • finally becoming a DD! (I'm NM since Dec-2007..)
    • trying to pass many exams as possible at University
    • seriously fall in love (I think I've already started this with the girl I'm with now...)
    • misc improvements (sorry, you can't send patches... or yes?)

    Happy birthday to me!

    Posted

    Linux Joint Day 2009 - Quinto meeting del Free Software Siciliano

    Si chiama Linux Joint Day e si terrà Sabato 28 e Domenica 29 a Villarosa in provincia di Enna, il quinto meeting ufficiale dei pinguini siciliani in una "due giorni" caratterizzata da incontri, dibattiti e seminari sull'utilizzo delle tecnologie libere, sul free software e sull'indipendenza della Rete.

    Oltre ai Linux User Group dell'isola, aderiranno all'evento in uno spirito di condivisione e apprendimento collettivo anche altre associazioni, movimenti e controculture digitali made in sicily, l'associazione VerdeBinario di Cosenza, nonché i principali hacklab della regione.

    La partecipazione, in pieno spirito "free", rimane comunque aperta ad appassionati o curiosi non appartenenti a nessun gruppo, ma che vogliano comunque conoscere e sperimentare il sistema operativo GNU/Linux e tutte le realtà ad esso collegate.

    Durante l'incontro verranno affrontate e discusse varie tematiche, principalmente sul sistema operativo GNU/Linux.

    Per raggiungere il posto: http://www.sangiovannello.it/it/dove-siamo.html

    Per tutte le altre informazioni contattare:

    geenna@freaknet.org
    me@mancausoft.org
    scinziatu@freaknet.org

    Venite Numerosi :-)

    Posted

    Posted
    01
    Posted
    02
    Posted
    11

    Finally a DD!

    Finally, it happened! I became a Debian Developer!

    I wish to thank everybody involved in this process: from those who helped me in my initial packaging efforts, to who actually created the account.

    Many thanks to the pkg-perl team for accepting newbies and helping them: props to Damyan Ivanov, Gregor Herrmann, Gunnar Wolf!

    Thanks to Debian-Med and Debian CLI: they always believed in me, and I had a great time in these teams. A special thanks goes to Andreas Tille, who advocated my NM candidature.

    Thanks to my two AMs, Bart Martens and Bernd Zeimetz. Even if my NM was long, difficult and not so flawless, it all went good, at the end :).

    A special thanks to Enrico Zini: he was the first DD signing my GPG key, thus allowing me to have more "rights" (being a DM), and experience some more responsibility than I previously had. Thanks to his "Become a DD. NOW!" right after checking my ID in Palermo -- Enrico, it finally happened!

    Thanks to Christoph Berg, Ron Lee, and Stephen Gran, which handled the final steps of the overall process.

    --

    And now, dapal is here to break the world. Be warned! :)

    Posted

    Posted
    07
    Posted
    08
    Posted
    01
    Posted
    08

    Terme Acqua Pia - Montevago

    Oggi sono andato alle Terme Acqua Pia di Montevago (AG)... bellissima (mezza-) giornata, anche se piuttosto stancante!... l'acqua caldissima, ci sarebbe voluta anche una vasca con l'acqua fredda per non "morire rilassati"... ebbene sì, anche la piscina aveva acqua calda!!!...

    Foto (e istruzioni su come arrivare) disponibili sul mio profilo su Badoo.

    Enjoy!

    Posted

    Nuove conoscenze...

    Ieri sera ho conosciuto una ragazza su Badoo... una ragazza carina (beh, ma questo è soggettivo e, comunque, non conta molto l'aspetto fisico per me... certo, deve piacermi...), ma, soprattutto, intelligente e simpatica. E, inoltre, per i discorsi che abbiamo fatto non dimostra affatto la sua età... spero di conoscerla meglio e, magari, chissà... ;-)

    Posted

    Confusion

    I feel confused... it seems like life is going around me, round and round it goes, and I feel more and more lonely. I feel like having no chances of being happy again, at least in the short term. Useless ranting, probably, but I need to write it somewhere, somehow. Don't wait, act David, act. But that's so difficult now to me. Some doubts had arisen in me again, and I don't know whether I want she as a friend or not. Or whether I want to try and conquer her heart again. Any other girl I'm dating isn't like she was for me...

    Posted

    Viaggio nella lucida follia...

    Prendo in prestito un titolo di DJ Gruff per esprimere la mia situazione attuale... viaggio nella lucida follia... so che stare male è inutile, e che finirò con lo stare peggio... però non riesco a farne a meno... non so che fare (e non ditemi "buttati nello studio", che è peggio), mi sento una barca in alto mare... quanto vorrei trovare una ragazza che mi voglia bene, e che possa essere un punto fermo nella mia vita.

    Posted

    Posted
    07
    Posted
    11

    Book Meme

    Yet another meme...

    Here's the result, instructions follow:

    Questa malattia rappresenta il prototipo delle forme di anemia megaloblastica.

    From Malattie del sangue e degli organi ematopoietici by Gianluigi Castoldi and Vincenzo Liso.

    (for non-Italian-speakers, "This pathology represents the prototype of megaloblastic anemia", from "Blood and haematopoietic organs pathologies")

    Here are the rules:

    • Grab the nearest book.
    • Open it to page 56.
    • Find the fifth sentence.
    • Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
    • Don't dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.

    Posted

    /me in love.

    Vero :)

    Daniela, sono tuo!

    Posted

    Monodoc 2.0 transitioned!

    Finally, monodoc 2.0 is available in pkg-mono's repository.

    Here's a screenshot:

    Monodoc 2.0 with 2.2 backported patch

    This release includes a patch backported from 2.2 (not yet available in Debian), made by Jonathan Pryor:

    > This version supports the following non-Library top-level nodes:
    > 
    >   - File Formats
    >     - [ Mono File Formats - mdoc.5, mono-config.5 ]
    >   - Languages
    >     - [ C#, etc. ]
    >   - Tools
    >     - [ Mono Development Tools, etc. ]
    >   - Various
    >     - [ Anything that has an invalid //source/@path value
    > 
    > Library nodes ("Base Class Library", "Mono Libraries", etc.) are also
    > top-level nodes, and all top-level nodes are sorted by name.

    (here's the full thread)

    This will ensure easier handling of monodoc manuals for downstream packagers. No more monodoc.xml handling hacks! Yay! :-)

    Posted

    First post on Planet

    This is my first post on Planet. Great day!

    Here's a presentation of myself. I'm David Paleino, I'm 21 and studying Odontology in Palermo, Italy. Yes, I'm Italian.

    Some might know me because of my past "key-signing problems": that was a big issue, indeed. Anyway.

    I've started contributing to Debian some time ago, initially in pkg-perl team. Then I joined debian-med, and I'm still in that team. Being a dentist in future, I wanted to help the "medical" section of Debian, even though there isn't any software I could use in my future work. I'll work on that, eventually.

    I've developed, together with Andreas Tille, Debian Med's website and "scripts": those are intended to be used also for other Debian Blends (formerly CDDs).

    Now I'm also active in pkg-mono: I'm helping in the transition to Mono 2.0, and that's a big task.

    I also maintain some packages, even some more or less popular ones (gthumb, john, gnome-rdp, bash-completion).

    I'm concerned with Free Software also outside Debian-specific work: I help my LUG (SputniX) in organizing various FOSS-related events. Incidentally, tomorrow there's the LinuxMeeting, and on Sunday we have JavaDay. Everyone's welcome!

    I definitely hope I won't annoy you too much with my posts!

    Posted

    Posted
    07

    JOSM in Debian now supports OAuth authentication

    Finally we have the same exact features as the upstream precompiled one. YAY!

    Here's the story. JOSM supports the OAuth authentication method since the SVN snapshot rev. 3094. At the time (the package was uploaded on Mar 18, 2010), we didn't have some needed dependencies in Debian for that. So I had to disable it, by patching the source code.

    In the meanwhile, I started filing RFP/ITPs, to fulfill the missing dependency chain. And it turned to be a long chain. Here it is:

    JOSM missing dependencies graph

    Looking at it now, that it's all done, it doesn't seem that long. However, I had to face the infamous Maven buildsystem, which I didn't know at all and pretended to download every dependency in a "local repository". Then I found the maven-debian-helper and maven-repo-helper packages, and started understanding it. Unfortunately, it seems that maven is only being used by CDBS people, so I had to override some debian/rules targets to get the work done with dh7.

    Once the chain was fulfilled... JOSM didn't even compile. Then I discovered that JOSM had code working with oauth-signpost 1.1, but 1.2 (which I uploaded to Debian) broke the API. So I had to port it to the new API, and I could finally upload it.

    Now we're at the end of this adventure. Debian JOSM users will have the choice of OAuth re-enabled, and I learned to master a new (to me) beast.

    Enjoy :)

    Posted

    Posted
    09
    Posted
    06
    Posted
    04

    Bash-Completion 1.0 released

    The Bash Completion Development team is proud to announce the release of
    bash-completion 1.0!

    This release features many new improvements: first of all, the upstream development is now driven by a cross-distribution team. We now have people from Debian, Mandriva, Gentoo, Exherbo, RedHat/Fedora, and we're hopefully going to grow more! See the AUTHORS file for more information.

    Other than that, many new completions have been added, and plenty of bugs
    have been fixed (49!). For more info, look at our changelog file.

    Still there? Go download bash-completion-1.0!

    We also changed homepage, thanks to Debian's Alioth project for the
    hospitality.

    For any bug you might find, please contact us at our mailing list, or
    directly file it at the Alioth tracker.

    Happy installation!

    P.S.: Debian package coming soon.

    Posted

    Posted
    01
    Posted
    12

    wicd_1.6.2.2-5~exp1_i386.changes is NEW

    Why is wicd NEW? Simple, I managed to split the files into separate packages.

    As soon as it clears NEW, those who are using experimental will be able to install a cli-only wicd, i.e. no more unnecessary throwing in of GTK+ and X :-)

    I will make a call for testing as soon as this package clears the queue. Hope I didn't make too much mistakes ;-)

    Posted

    RC bug squashing

    Just had some time in the last two days, and here's the list of uploaded NMUs. So far, I had only one maintainer complaining (again, sorry!), but I must admit that on Sunday I just didn't follow the correct NMU procedure :(

    Anyhow, here's what I have:

    1. #504824 [libnids] FTBFS with GCC 4.4: #elif used instead of #else
    2. #504864 [omnievents] FTBFS with GCC 4.4: missing #include
    3. #504871 [bookmarkbridge] FTBFS with GCC 4.4: missing #include
    4. #504902 [libofa] FTBFS with GCC 4.4: missing #include
    5. #504943 [libassa] FTBFS with GCC 4.4: missing #include
    6. #504963 [libfcgi] FTBFS with GCC 4.4: missing #include
    7. #504970 [italc] FTBFS with GCC 4.4: missing #include
    8. #504973 [libspiff] FTBFS with GCC 4.4: missing #include
    9. #505021 [passepartout] FTBFS with GCC 4.4: missing #include
    10. #505078 [codeine] FTBFS with GCC 4.4: missing #include
    11. #505333 [gloox] FTBFS with GCC 4.4: missing #include
    12. #505372 [bobot++] FTBFS with GCC 4.4: missing #include
    13. #505420 [esteidutil] FTBFS with GCC 4.4: missing #include
    14. #510759 [log4cxx] FTBFS with GCC 4.4: missing #include
    15. #526151 [openmovieeditor] FTBFS with GCC 4.4: missing #include
    16. #551107 [fusecompress] FTBFS with GCC 4.4: missing #include
    17. #551718 [eboard] eboard: FTBFS with latest eglibc and gcc 4.4

    Some highlights

    Most of these bugs, if not all, already had a patch attached. Thanks to Martin Michlmayr for his work on this!

    Regarding fusecompress, after my upload to DELAYED/2, the maintainer promptly replied asking for sponsorship of a package he already had. So this does not really count :)

    If you want to participate in this great game too, and improve our loved distribution, you can have a look at this list of possibly easy bugs to fix.

    Have fun!

    Posted

    Posted
    10

    Auguri Dalila!

    Auguri Dalila! :-)

    Sono davvero contento per te! E via con la prima laurea della classe 86-87! ;-)

    Posted

    Me is DM!

    I am a Debian Maintainer now! :)

    I can upload new revisions of packages (i.e. I cannot do sourceful uploads), after a sponsor (i.e. a DD reviewing the package in question) lets me set the "DM-Upload-Allowed" flag in debian/control. A little step towards becoming DD! :-)

    Here is the proof:

    $ gpg --no-default-keyring \
    --keyring /usr/share/keyrings/debian-maintainers.gpg \
    --list-keys Paleino
    pub   1024D/1392B174 2006-02-01
    uid                  David Paleino <d.paleino@gmail.com>
    uid                  [jpeg image of size 6708]
    uid                  Hanska <aksnah@gmail.com>
    uid                  David Paleino <david.paleino@poste.it>
    sub   4096R/A71D5481 2008-02-18
    $

    Yeah! :-)

    Posted

    Nuova auto in arrivo! :)

    Oggi siamo usciti per vedere un'auto.. ecco cosa arriverà, siori e siore, prossimamente nelle migliori strade di Mazara e Palermo!...

    Renault Modus Saint-Tropez

    Posted

    Posted
    05

    GoogleCode redirector

    I recently saw a couple of bugreports all complaining about debian/watch files failing with GoogleCode. Since I'm myself maintaining some packages whose upstream authors use Google as their hoster, I felt it was a good idea to offer a service for uscan(1) and DEHS.

    You can reach the service at http://googlecode.debian.net.

    To use it in your debian/watch, just use:

    http://googlecode.debian.net/p/<project>/<regex>

    For example:

    http://googlecode.debian.net/p/pyproj/pyproj-(\d+.*).tar.gz

    The source code is available at debian-it.it (you should give this url to git clone). This service is currently in beta testing; suggestions and patches are more than welcome! Also, feel free to report any issue you might encounter!

    Posted

    Posted
    08

    gmtkbabel 0.1

    Version 0.1 of gmtkbabel has just been released! :)

    It consists of a set of shell scripts, which use zenity to give a nice GUI over mtkbabel.

    gmtkbabel 0.1

    Future improvements might include providing a Qt alternative (and the "g" in the name might just mean "GUI" instead of "GTK" then), and whatever users need. It might also become something more serious, written in a more complex language, who knows :)

    Many thank to Elena ``of Valhalla'' Grandi, who started this project to help some users on #osm-it@oftc.

    Posted

    Posted
    12

    Projects

    Links to projects:

    • pastebin-sharp, a library for CLI projects to ease access to pastebins supporting an XML-RPC interface;
    • gnome-rdp, remote Desktop Client for the GNOME Desktop.

    Posted

    Free software yes, free speech too!

    Dear Julien,

    that proposal is not about censoring mails sent in by people. Think to it as that "karma" thing many sites have.

    And yes, I'm one of those in favour of such project. I'm a free {software,speech} guy, but just hate all the flames seen lately on -devel. We must find a way to stop that, or at least to control it.

    Again, it's not censorship, as I read it, all messages would go in. Citing:

    I have also seen opinions that other "obvious" ways of addressing the issue, such as moderation of the lists or a new organizational entity, which would act as a list watchdog, is not the way to go, as it adds yet another layer of bureacracy and raises the usual questions of choosing the "right" people for the privileged position.

    It's just an alternative way of expressing opinions about a mail. Consider it as those "+1"/"-1" mails that you can often see.

    Posted

    Me at DebConf8! (virtually..)

    Today I was watching some DebConf8 videos and... well, someone cited me! :D

    That's almost incredible, uh?

    That was Andreas Tille (thanks!), talking about the framework for CDDs we initially made for Debian-Med.

    You can grab the video at the meetings-archive.debian.net website (low - high) (it's an OGG video), go to 43:20 mins... and hear my name! :)

    Again, thanks Andreas!

    Posted

    Quote of the day!

    Yes, definitely: http://www.bash.org/?464385

    Posted

    Posted
    07

    La fine di un sogno... - The end of a dream...

    (see further for English version)

    Tra ieri e oggi mi è crollato il mondo addosso... letteralmente.

    Usciamo per comprare un regalo per suo cugino e... "ho seri dubbi su noi due": e inizia la tragedia di David. Una storia fatta d'amore... finita così, su due piedi. Almeno per quanto mi riguarda, apparentemente. Perché non ho avuto segnali, non ho avuto nulla che facesse supporre la fine. Quello che sta succedendo in questi giorni è la fine di un pezzo della mia vita... un anno e quattro mesi... una storia importante... finita per cosa? Qualche incomprensione, qualche litigio... Se uno amasse veramente una persona, sposterebbe le montagne per starci insieme, farebbe di tutto per provare a riparare, risolvere quello che non va. E invece no, preferisce nascondersi... "non so se ce la potrei fare"... "e se poi riaccadesse?"... cercheremo il modo di non farlo accadere di nuovo. O, meglio, cercheremo di chiarire i punti di "discordia", per accettarci l'un l'altro per come siamo fatti. No. Non va. Si ha paura del futuro... allora non uscire di casa, che magari t'arriva un fulmine sopra e muori sul colpo. Vivi la vita. Credo che il nostro amore sia stato uno di quelli importanti, di quelli che ti capita poche volte nella vita. Ero (sono) veramente innamorato, ma -- purtroppo non si può quantificare -- sembra che non mi amasse quanto me... "no, io ti amo!... però ho paura di stare ancora male"... purtroppo la vita può essere sofferenza, a volte, ma se ami una persona, la maggior parte sono momenti belli, indimenticabili. E così è stato anche per noi. Ma, forse, i momenti "brutti" (pochi, a dir la verità), contano molto più di quelli belli... Fa' del bene, e lo scriveranno sulla sabbia, fa' del male, e lo scriveranno sulla roccia lessi da qualche parte, una volta... ora capisco il senso di quella frase, l'ho provato sulla mia pelle. Mi sono scottato, ecco... credevo fosse la ragazza per me, con cui sarei stato anche in un futuro non troppo lontano ormai... "non riesco più a vederti nella mia vita"... così, di punto in bianco?! E no, non ha nessun altro... si vedeva che soffriva. Non capisco le donne, davvero.

    Sto male, e non so quando riuscirò a riprendermi. Ha detto che ci penserà ancora, ma "non credo proprio"... bell'inizio d'estate per me.

    Scusate il piccolo rant, ma ne avevo bisogno.


    ENGLISH VERSION

    Between yesterday and today the whole world fell down on me... literally.

    We go out to buy a present for her cousin and... "I have serious doubts about us": and David's tragedy begins. A story made of love... ended all of sudden. At least for what I see, apparently. Because I had no signals, anything that would let me think to an end. What is happening in these days is the end of a piece of my life... a year and four months... an important story... ended for what? Some incomprehension, some arguing... If one really loves a person, she would move mountains to stay with him, she would try anything to try and repair, solve what is not going. But no, she prefers to hide... "I don't know if I could afford it"... "and if this happens again?"... well, we would find a way to not let it happen again. Or, better, we would clarify the points of "difference", to accept one another for how we're done. No. She doesn't go on. She's scared of the future... so, don't go out from home, a ligthning could get you and you die instantly. Live your life. I believe our love has been one of those that happens rarely in life. I was (am) really in love, but -- unfortunately this isn't quantifiable -- it seems she didn't love me as much as I did (do)... "no, I love you!... but I fear feeling bad again"... unfortunately, life can sometimes be suffering, but if you love a person, most of the times you live faboulous, unforgettable moments. And this was also for us. But, probably, the "bad" moments (very few, to say the truth), count much more than good ones... Do well, and they'll write that on sand, do bad, and they'll write on the rocks (sorry, I knew it in Italian, so I'm doing a translation from that version) I read somewhere, a time... know I fully understand the meaning of that sentence, I tried that on myself. I got burnt, that's it... I believed she was the girl for me, with whom I would've stayed in the not-so-distant future... "I can't see you in my life any longer"... how, all of suddent?! And no, she doesn't have another guy... she really suffered. I can't understand women, really.

    I feel very bad, and I don't know when I'll feel better. She said she will still think about it, but "I don't really believe so"... great summer start, for me.

    Sorry for the little rant, I just needed it.

    Posted

    Stop ranting, David!

    (see further for English)

    Mi sono deciso, basta. Basta star male, basta sentirsi solo. In una sola espressione, stop ranting, David!

    Ho forzatamente** soppresso il mio amore per lei. Basta. Spero di non scottarmi così pesantemente di nuovo, in futuro.

    Da oggi sono ufficialmente single (oh, beh, disponibile ad altre ragazze, ovviamente!).


    ENGLISH VERSION

    I made up my mind, stop. Stop suffering, stop feeling alone. In an expression, stop ranting, David!

    I've forcibly suppressed my love for her. Stop. I hope not to burn myself so heavily again, in future.

    Since today, I'm officially single (oh, well, available to girls, obviously!).

    Posted

    Forgetting

    Related to this:

    Forgetting

    I only hope an assert() would suffice to me. Oh, well, I just hope we would eventually get together again... I love her <3 .

    Posted

    Posted
    06

    Bash-Completion 1.2 released

    After more than 9 months from the previous release, the Bash Completion Team is proud to announce the release of bash-completion 1.2!

    In this release, we dropped support for bash < 3.2. We're sorry, but we cannot stop development just to support versions that old. By now, everyone should have a version fulfilling our requirement.

    As usual, lots of completions have been added: we're now at 168 files in our contrib/ directory (1.1 had 145, and 1.0 had 44 -- but most completions in 1.0 were bundled in the main file). Now bash_completion only contains helper functions, and basic filename-based completions. Everything has moved to contrib/!

    This release also saw the contribution of many external people, despite the fact that our bugtracker on Alioth doesn't seem to work too well (problem with attachments, anyone?). Anyhow, you're invited to register and start filing bugs as you find them :).

    Apart from the usual team members (Ville Skyttä, Freddy Vulto, the newcome Leonard Crestez and me), we've had contributions from (in no particular order): Ted Stern, Jeremie Lasalle Ratelle, Raphaël Droz, Adrian Friedli, Ildar Mulyukov, Neville Gao, Austin English, Igor Murzov, Mario Schwalbe and Mark van Rossum. Thank you people for helping us!

    For completion developers: we added new helper functions. Most notably, it's now possible to get the current and the previous "word" just by calling:

    _get_comp_words_by_ref cur prev

    instead of (up to 1.1):

    cur=$(_get_cword)

    prev=${COMP_WORDS[COMP_CWORD-1]}

    Also, we have a new helper to deal with completion with colons, __ltrim_colon_completions(). See the comment in bash_completion for its documentation.

    You'll find more helpers directly in bash_completion. We're still far from having a distributable API documentation, so please forgive us.

    Enjoy the new bash-completion!

    -- David

    Posted

    Addio SputniX

    Riporto qui la mail che ho appena mandato alla mailing list di SputniX.

    ---8<---

    Ciao a tutti,

    questa mail è per spiegare il perché sono praticamente scomparso. In seguito a questa mail, ho deciso di ridurre la mia attività in SputniX a zero, ed uscirne. O forse non ne ho mai fatto parte, visto che ho pagato la quota associativa solo i primi due anni, e gli altri 4-5 no (cfr. messaggio).

    Con la quasi-fusione con AICQ Sicilia poi, sembra che SputniX abbia preso una deriva "enterprise". Come Vincenzo avrà notato (o forse no) alla prima riunione (l'unica cui partecipai), io ero del tutto fuori luogo. Un mondo fatto di ingegneri, controllo di qualità, un sacco di paroloni; io un "quasi-dentista" con la passione per il FLOSS (notare il gioco di parole [1]). 'un ci trasu nenti nenti.

    Ricordo con nostalgia le nottate passate a smanacciare sul kernel per presentare qualcosa al LM di $anno, oppure andar la mattina del LD, presto, al complesso didattico per dare una mano per sistemare le aule ed accogliere i visitatori, ed impazzire con Alessandro per fermare il fiume di gente che si presentava. O assistere meravigliato alla "linux car". Mi sentivo in una verà "comunità". Forse non lo era neppure allora, ma almeno ne aveva la parvenza.

    Se penso che ora si parla di DM, DLgs, normative ISO, [..], mi veni 'u friddu. Visto che, sempre in riferimento al messaggio, non ho alcun diritto in merito alle attività dell'associazione, preferisco non litigare né "fare bile" con nessuno, ed uscirne.

    Grazie a tutti delle pizziate. Forse i chili che ho preso sono anche merito vostro :) (merito, non colpa).

    Forse un giorno troverò un LUG meno "rigido" sotto il punto di vista "chi può prendere le decisioni"; o forse ne creerò uno mio (il MazaLUG esiste come idea da qualche anno, e ho un paio di persone che spingono per crearlo, ma non mi ci sono mai messo visti gli impegni con l'uni. Forse, una volta laureato...).

    In fin dei conti, è stata una bella esperienza.

    Nel caso qualcuno voglia parlarmi, è inutile che mi cerchiate a casa. Né a Palermo né a Mazara.

    Lo trovo un grave atto di scortesia E di violazione della privacy (non ho mai dato il numero di telefono di casa a Mazara, eppure...), e c'è il rischio che mi scaldi troppo a parlare dal vivo di questa situazione (non solo per questo, anche per il periodo particolarmente stressante; purtroppo non sono fatto a camere stagne). Ripeto, non voglio inimicarmi nessuno, quindi meglio lasciar perdere, e parlarne solo online (dove una mail si può rileggere più volte, e si può tenere a bada l'istinto; tipo questa, che è scritta da un paio di giorni, ed è stata limata e modificata più e più volte).

    Sadly,

    David

    [1] sarò pure amareggiato, ma non per questo perdo il mio umorismo nerd.

    --->8---

    Non so se il messaggio in questione sia visibile da tutti, in caso contrario:

    From: Vincenzo Virgilio <[..]>

    To: Sputnix@yahoogroups.com

    Subject: Re: [Sputnix - 24 Ottobre LD09] Proposta di mediazione - Locandina - Logo

    Date: Tue, 2 Mar 2010 09:44:33 +0100

    Lo status di soci è riservato a tutti coloro che sono in regola con le quote associative, dal primo anno di iscrizione a oggi.

    Quindi prima di parlare di diritti, voti o altri argomenti, controlla di poterlo fare.

    Vincenzo

    Posted

    Posted
    02
    Posted
    06

    wicd 1.6.1 in sid

    For those of you who don't use experimental, the 1.6.x branch of wicd has been sitting there for some time. It had some bugreports, and I closely cooperated with upstream to get patches merged.

    Here we come then, wicd 1.6.1 has been uploaded to unstable. Upstream merged all the patches I provided them (yay!), and it has lots of improvements from 1.5.9.

    On the packaging side, it now provides a nice Debconf script to add/remove users to/from the netdev group (already translated into 9 languages, thanks d-i18n people!).

    Upstream side:

    • it gracefully handles daemon restarts. That was a major issue before, because every package upgrade caused the GUI not to work anymore;
    • udhcpc support has been added, this is rather useful to FSO people (thanks gismo for the initial patch!);
    • a message box shows up when DBus blocks access to the daemon (just make sure you add yourself to the netdev group, and reload DBus);
    • I added support for pre/post-down connection scripts, which upstream kindly merged;
    • other smaller things :-)

    I am expecting more bugs yet to come, since experimental doesn't have the same userbase as unstable, but, hey, that's how it works.

    Also, I'm going to requestsync it to Ubuntu Karmic Koala as soon as possible, hope to get it there before the Debian Import Freeze, planned on Jun 25.

    Enjoy it!

    Posted

    Posted
    10

    Linux Day 2007 Palermo

    Domani, 27 Ottobre 2007, si terrà a Palermo, presso il Polo Didattico dell'Università degli Studi (edificio 19), il consueto appuntamento annuale con il Linux Day :)

    Accorrete numerosi! Saranno disponibili 5 aule (1, 3, 4, 5, 6), quindi non abbiate paura di terminare i posti! ;)

    Posted

    Posted
    03

    JOSM/1.5 svn3094 in sid

    For those of you fans of OpenStreetMap, I just uploaded JOSM 3094 to Sid.

    I had to heavily patch this version, to disable OAuth support. Yes, you won't be able to use it with the Debian package. The reason is simple: supporting OAuth requires a set of packages not yet available in Debian. I've filed ITPs, and blocked bugs appropriately, but it'll take some time until the full chain is available.

    In the meanwhile, enjoy! Go in the streets and map the world!

    Posted

    Posted
    05
    Posted
    11
    Posted
    10

    Bash-completion 1.1 released

    Here we go, another release has been cooked for your enjoyment: bash-completion 1.1 is here!

    This release's development cycle has seen the release of bash4: this introduced a number of bugs, which have been hopefully fixed. Blame us if you find any other :)

    Many completions were split out of bash_completion: this prepares the road to dynamic loading of needed completions (in a future major release), resulting in a smaller and faster completion!

    Furthermore, like each release, many new completions have been added, many old ones were improved, and some bugs have been fixed (more than 20). For more info, look at the changelog file.

    Still there? Go download bash-completion-1.1!

    For any bug you might find, please contact us at our mailing list, or directly file it at the Alioth tracker.

    --

    For the Debian users out there: package coming soon!

    --

    Happy installation!

    Posted

    Posted
    02

    "Git

    I know the "git tips" meme is over, but I found this in git-fetch(1) and, as I find it extremely useful, I'm posting it.

    Just add these lines to your ~/.gitconfig:

    [url "git+ssh://git.debian.org/git/"]

    insteadOf = alioth:
    

    Then, if you need something from collab-maint, just use git clone alioth:collab-maint/repo.git , easy! :)

    P.S.: I did not include my username in the URL because I have it set up in ~/.ssh/config.

    Posted

    Wicd 1.5.9-1 uploaded to Debian: important news.

    I've just uploaded wicd 1.5.9-1 to Debian/unstable. From this version onwards, to be able to use wicd-client to connect to the wicd daemon, you need to be part of the netdev system group.

    Posted

    Posted
    04
    Posted
    11

    Low-memory madness

    When your console looks like:

    # free -m
    -bash: fork: Cannot allocate memory
    

    Something's definitely wrong.

    Posted

    Using Git tutorial for Debian-Women

    On the 25th of November I held a training session for the Debian Women project, about Using Git. A transcript of the session is available.

    The session took 2,5 hours, more than I really expected (one hour less), but I had many questions asked. There were ~160 attendants, but many of those asking questions seem to have missed that this was a "basic" session, for people who never used it.

    All in all, it was a great experience. While preparing the talk, I had the chance to re-read some forgotten manpages, which clarified some points, so it was really useful for me as well :)

    Given the kind of questions I had, it would be nice to have an "Advanced Git" session, maybe in January-February. Any volunteers? I'll sure be attending it :)

    FYI, the next session will be held by POX (Piotr Ożarowski) next Thursday (Dec, 2). It will be about Python libraries/application packaging, you'll have to read the introductory session as a pre-requisite.

    Posted

    Posted
    05

    OpenPGP key transition announcement

    Because of the recently announced attack against the SHA-1 digest algorithm, I finally decided to move away from my old 1024-bit DSA OpenPGP key, landing to a shiny new 4096-bit RSA one.

    The old key will continue to be valid for some time, but I prefer all future correspondence to come to the new one. I would also like this new key to be re-integrated into the web of trust. I'm attaching a file with the complete text of the transition, clearsigned by both keys to certify the transition.

    You can find the transition statement also on http://www.hanskalabs.net/key-transition_20090509.txt .

    You can check the validity of the file with something like:

    $ gpg --decrypt key-transition_20090509.txt | gpg --decrypt

    If you need to transition your key too, and you're one of my signees, then let's please coordinate, so that we have the new keys cross-signed, without spurious signatures fromgoing-to-be-revoked keys :)

    Thank you for your help.

    Posted

    Mourning for my grandpa's death

    Addio, nonno.

    Posted

    Posted
    12
    Posted
    04
    Posted
    2007
    2007
    Months
    Posted
    04
    Posted
    page.tmpl
    Posted
    Getting network devices with Python and udev - 2

    Thank you Ben for your kind reply :)

    In my first post, I was trying to distinguish Ethernet-like device types.

    Here's the final code:

    #!/usr/bin/python
    
    import gudev
    
    client = gudev.Client(['rfkill', 'net'])
    
    for dev in client.query_by_subsystem('net'):
        if dev.get_sysfs_attr_as_int("type") != 1:
            continue
    
        driver = dev.get_driver()
        if not driver:
            parent = dev.get_parent()
            if parent:
                driver = parent.get_driver()
    
        # available: wlan, wwan, wimax
        if dev.get_devtype() == 'wlan':
            type = 'Wireless'
        else:
            type = 'Wired'
    
        print type, dev.get_name(), driver, dev.get_sysfs_path()
    

    However, I have a few remarks.

    First, I don't understand why ethernet devices don't have a "devtype" attribute. How can I be sure that, failing to be "wlan", "wwan" or "wimax", it's a wired one? (not that any other kind of device comes to my mind, heh).

    Second, I had to look through Linux sources to find the possible values for DEVTYPE; in particular, I grepped for device_type structs inside ./drivers/net/. And the documentation you pointed me to, while being useful for other reasons (the rfkill support), didn't solve my doubts about the sysfs hierarchy.

    Rather, your comment about DEVTYPE helped quite a lot in this particular problem.

    Thank you! :)