I've made a quick release of dh-make, now up to 0.52. Besides a minor dh_make.1 manual page fix this release will put the right value in the debian/source/format file. 0.51 will make it a native source package no matter what flags you use.
If you get weird lintian errors about native source formats and version numbers wrong on your brand-new Debian package you just made, you might of been bitten by this bug.
That leaves a few bugs left, there are two I need help with:
Bug 328692 - If you have a plan ASCII name like me, then your name looks fine in the dh-make generated man pages. This bug requires converting names that aren't plain ASCII (e.g. that use UTF-8) into something groff understands. Someone suggested decomposed unicode but unicode and groff are pretty much a black art to me, let alone combining them.
Bug 533117 - This one is all about making dh-make make your python packages. You'll need to understand the new debhelper v7 rules files. Again, python is not something I use so the bug is stuck here.
After a long time of testing and just plain other non-software writing stuff, I'm happy to announce Gjay 0.3.0 is released. This is my first release of Chuck Groom's code and hopefully it will work for you too.
The Debian packages will be out shortly after some building and testing. If you have a 64-bit computer it now works with 64 bits fine (ie on my amd64).
It still needs some work, I'd like it to interact with more than audacious as the sound player. Also if you know how to in one of the sound libraries stream wav, ogg or mp3 files correctly I'd like to hear from you. Currently gjay just uses the same old fork to mpg321 method, but idealy I'd like it to use the libraries directly.
OK, ok, i got a chroot and pbuilder now. So that should, I hope stop any more FTBFS bugs about missing depdendencies.
procps got uploaded that fixes some important bugs, but mainly they were small fiddly things. About the most significant enhancement was pmap now has a real working -x flag. It looks a lot like some of the other pmap programs out there and shows the RSS and Dirty bytes per map. Let me know if its useful or not.
However there still is 48 bugs in the package, so if you're feeling game wander over to procps bug page and have a look around, but here are some more interesting ones, such as why would a process start time be earlier than the boot time? Bug 408879 has this problem
Now, a nice can of worms is in a Linux system, what is free memory? What should the "free" program report? Currently free just reports what it sees in /proc, but in Bug 565518 should the slab count be taken out? I certainly won't be making any Debian-specific changes here as you could get different numbers depending on your distribution, or even worse the age of you Debian system.
procps is also my first attempt at using git-buildpackage which I found very helpful. There was one problem with it and that is how it works with the quilt patch program. If the quilt patches are applied, git doesn't know this and says all the files have changed. I know its how these two programs are supposed to work but its a little annoying.
Some what belatedly (hey I'm travelling!) I've changed the layout of my main website http://www.enc.com.au/ so it now has black panels and a little pop-up. It's all in the name of T he Great Australian Internet Blackout which is a protest about the upcoming Australian Governments Internet Filtering.
As per usual with this sort of thing, the proposed solution will not even meet its rather vague goals, unless you count filtering a 1000 or so websites a "goal". While the numbers vary, the best estimates is its way over 100 to 200 million websites. So that 1000 is 0.0005, or 1 in 200,000.
The filter is alternatively going to filter reported refused classification material or perhaps "other stuff"; they'll get back to you on the second one. For the first it works that somone finds a website of sufficient level of classification, reports it to the government and it gets filtered. And how many times have you come across RC websites, just by wandering around? That's not R rated websites, its not porn, its not even reasonably exotic porn, but stuff that's downright nasty.
The government, as per usual, has come out with the tired old protect the children rant. The filter doesn't stop spam, it doesn't stop weirdos on facebook or MSN chatting up your teenage daughter or son, it filters websites that, unless you or your child is REAL unlucky you will never see; ever.
So why am I against it? Surely filtering RC level websites is great right? And to be honest if that is all this ever was going to be, it's still a complete waste of my (and if you are an Australian Internet user) your money, but once the filtering is in, there is going to be a line outside the relevant ministers door to filter anything else anyone wants to filter, for example:
Games that are available outside Australia, if they have not been classified here then they shouldn't be available here
Torrent trackers, because the industry would no doubt tell the government that the only thing they're good for is illegal download of movies or music
Websites about certain topics that some people would rather not be seen, there is a large mountain of stuff that fits in here depending which crank has their own barrow to push
This sort of filtering while initially seeming ok, will get worse, much much worse. There is not a real strong push from the general public about filtering RC websites, most people see and hate spam much more. If you are an Australian citizen I ask you to visit the The Great Australian Internet Firewall website and write to your local member of parliament.
Work doesn't often send to me places as great as Manilla in the Philippines, but here I am. It's a reasonably modern place and to me feels more like America than Asia in so many ways, posssibly because of its history. One thing is for sure, noone follows road rules here. Red lights are a suggestion and a zebra crossing is just some painted lines that you do need to stop at.
As for food, it's not that different, in fact this sad lot is about what was different:
McSpaghetti - Was supposedly sugar coated spaghetti but actually was very tame, my son would of loved it.
Wow Steak from KFC - Neither Wow nor Steak, like a big chicken nugget with gravy and rice
Halo Halo - A dessert drink which was sugared or preserved fruit, milk and ice.
Generally though the food has been pretty good but nothing I could get at home.
Good news about Gjay, the previous maintainer said it was ok for SourceForge to hand over the control of the program to me so I've set it up in git and started working on it. Most of the work was getting the code up-to-date to the later gtk APIs and making it work with audacious instead of xmms. It's almost ready for (re)initial release and there is even an ITP ready to go.
Git is a rather interesting and new (for me at least) version control system. I've been using cvs for more years than I'd care to think about and svn but while it is a bit different as you'd expect I haven't had it get in my way. In fact I've been so impressed with Git I have put a few other projects into it, mainly with the collab maintence Debian project for a few of my packages.
It's the late afternoon of the first day of 2010 here, though I suppose its still 2009 for someone for a little while.
After a lot of waiting, JFFNMS release candidate 1 for 0.8.5 got uploaded to sourceforge. This release is mainly about fixing some database release bugs 0.8.4 had and they're all caused by the fact that working with PHP and database to release code is plain awful.
The problem is tracking changes in your database. So version 1 has 3 tables and 60 rows, version 2 has 4 tables and 90 rows, but what changed? Everything I've seen so far is a bit of a hack or is real fiddly. JFFNMS release process is both which is why I'll go and release several versions of C code or Debian packages before trying to crack that nut again.
If you are wondering what JFFNMS is, its a Network Management System. It makes graphs and red/green icons depending on the status of your routers and servers. Written in PHP and web based and of course licensed under the GPL
Time away from work and its been either raining or hot. So I've updated and released some software. It always seems to happen there is a lot of Free Software development during the breaks.
psmisc got a bunch of updates, including a new program called prtstat which formats the stat file in the procfs for a pid in (hopefully) a nice way. No sooner had I released the latest update when a bug report came in. It seems fuser -m -k is a little too happy about killing itself. The fix is in the CVS but anoying I missed that.
Next up was the Debian gw6c package. I was asked why it didn't get moved from unstable to testing. The problem is that while Linux has iproute, kfreebsd does not so the lack of a dependency was stopping it transitioning. To make matters worse the freebsd template was missing from their package. After some deb-substvars evilness to fix the dependencies and some dh_install overrides in the debian/rules file it should all be happy when its finished.
Finally, I miss having good random playlists. I'm too lazy to make them myself so I use some random thing which often gives me rubbish. A program called Gjay used to be in the Debian archive but got removed, mainly because the upstream stopped supporting it. I can write C (the programming language its written in) and I wanted to use it, so I fixed it. My version is 64-bit clean, so it works on my amd64 and it works with audacious not the old xmms which is great. More importantly, it compiles, it runs and it even works properly. I'm just wondering if I want to release it out to the wider world or not.
One of the good things, or perhaps the worst thing (it depends on where
and when) about my job is I travel a bit. One of the more interesting
places (again in both good and bad ways) was Port Moresby,
Papua New Guinea. Lots of stuff doesn't work too well over there. It's
hard to get experience maintenance staff, its hard to get the right
parts over there and probably the hardest part is paying for it.
I
was always surprised the clocks never work right. They are either
horribly fast or slow. At first I thought the hotel had just not set
it right, so I set it to the right time. But the next morning it was
out again. What the hell was going on?
Most alarm clocks work
off the power. In both Australia and PNG this is 50Hz, so the clock
rectifies the AC power coming in to get 50 pulses a second. Count 50
pulses and you have a second, do this 60 times and tick over a minute.
We
take for granted that the frquency of power is right on 50Hz, but
talking with the students who were doing power engineering it is
actually quite hard to do. It's like having a car with the same revs no
matter if you are going up or down a hill.
Anyhow, if you need
to wake up the right time in PNG, use the alarm clock on your phone.
Otherwise you may be jumping out of bed at 5am thinking you are running
late, then wondering where the sun went.
While I originally had a blog site on Avogato, I just didnt seem to use it much. I needed some place that I could put some writing that wasn't quite up to a new whole page with the associated heavy work to format it but it had to go somewhere.
So I'll try to put those middle entries into this place.
Now all I got to work out is how to link the thing to Planet Debian and I'll be set.
Updated: psmisc, gw6c and gjay