Whatever’s on my mind

Finally, I got my notebook working again. It seems a full Gnome installation isn’t exactly what my old MacBook needed. So it lay around for weeks, or rather months now, not being used for anything remotely relevant to anything. After all I then decided to get rid of Gnome at least on the notebook and instead installed LXDE… what can I say? It’s amazing. Removing all the stuff I don’t need anyways on this system (even the pbuilder/cowbuilder stuff is gone) made it really fast again. I’m happy now and the vacation can come with my notebook at hand, since it’s running again.

Yet that’s actually not what I wanted to write about. After a three week break due to illness (and, I admit, bad weather — although it still is pretty snowy and icy outside) I’m back on the track. And it wasn’t even that bad. Of course I’m not back on the level I had before but at least it’s about 5.5 km in 35 minutes. For a beginner who just had a forced break from training, I’m quite satisfied with myself. So, I’m running again.

Yay!

It’s been quite a while since I posted something in my blog. I had to recover from not going to Debconf9 which was real sad. Right before the conference, I mean like a day before it, I got more or less sick and just couldn’t fly the next day. I managed to rebook the flight (thanks to SwissAir) for the next day but it wasn’t meant to be. I would have loved to meet the “Debian crew”, get my GnuPG key a bit more into the web of trust, discuss a few issues, envy the fast end evolved notebooks everyone else has… You can imagine it wasn’t easy to see the conference going its way via live stream when I was actually planned to be there. Again sorry to everyone who worked for me being sponsored and everything!

Anyways, time goes by and a lot happens, none of which I’d like to publish in a blog, except: I got a part time job. :) If you’ve ever asked me about my experience with Linux vServers or web hosting in general, and if you even asked me where to get such with fair prices and good support, I might have mentioned a small firm in Germany which I’m a customer of for a long time now. And about two months ago it just so happened that they called me. I admit, I know the owner of the company (haven’t seen him in a too long time, though) and I already considered us friends. But I was still surprised when he asked me to work for him. It’s not a big deal, he said, just administer the servers we’re running and take care of them. It’s a few hours a month, don’t worry, you can do it! All that with a scary smile… Now it turns out he had more in mind and I’m working on different projects at the same time, but still have the system (all Debian of course) at first priority. I have no clue if he’s satisfied with my work or if he’s just afraid to tell me (you know, us being friends and all), yet the systems are up and running and I’m learning every day. I even got the chance to write a small project in ruby which I wanted to do for a long time. Love it!

So, this is the first time that I recommend him not only because I trusted him with my system but also because I know your system would be safe. ;-) Need an IT partner in Germany or the Netherlands? o-byte.com

Uhhh, I have to ask for a raise after this hymn :)

Something else I forgot? Well, I became a DD but that’s also some time ago, so hmm… no, that’s it… for now.

Yes, it’s true. I finally booked flights (I still wait for a confirmation mail).

So, see you there, I suppose…

Sorry for the noise… but it’s always the same. When it happens I can’t really believe it. No, not my birthday is unbelievable… I do trust the calendar. It’s the fact that I’m 27 now. I mean, I’m supposed to be grown up, ain’t I? I don’t think it’s happening soon…

Oh dear, it happened… Hundreds of developers seem to have switched to git (man, I want to be as famous as Linus) and finally the packaging helper for subversion is orphaned. Yeah, I know, this is just partly related if at all but at least the low interest in its further development seems to prove my point.

Anyways, I’m not going to fully give up on it. Eddy just copied the bug message to d-devel to arrest some attention and actually I’m trying the same here. svn-buildpackage is still needed, let alone the entire texlive stuff which is maintained in subversion repositories and many packages in collab-maint. So, let’s see if we can’t get it somewhere.

0.6.24 – release soon

As Eddy mentioned in the bug report there is a version 0.6.24 prepared in trunk. Looking at my working copies I seem to have fixes for #363003, #414564, #467614, #480684, and #506876 lying around which I didn’t commit yet. They should be sent to the bug reports, though. If you consider working on a release of svn-bp please contact me (or just write to the bug reports, I’m subscribed).

0.7 – do it right ;-)

This is far away but maybe a worthy goal. Two months ago I started working on a rewrite of svn-bp in order to fix some long outstanding bugs which would need gross hacks in the current version or aren’t even fixable by design. Find my first experiments in branches/0.7. But then let me be honest, I didn’t do anything about it lately – partly because of the low interest, but majorly because of vcs-pkg. I hope to figure out during debconf9 (I hope I can attend) if it is a possible replacement of svn-bp. But that’s still up in the air.

Well, that’s my two cents about the situation.

ITP: #525841

I know there already is a poker client and server application in Debian but I do like the simplicity of this one. So, until it’s officially uploaded beta testing is appreciated. Download packages for sid at http://downloads.jhr-online.de/holdingnuts/sid/. Packages for M$ Win and Gentoo are upstream available at http://www.holdingnuts.net/download.

The best part: upstream has a running server instance which you can connect to for testing (and playing of course). It’s the default connection when you start the client the first time.

Go for it! Let’s play poker…

Just recently I convinced a friend of mine to use LaTeX for her papers. A huge step for her and a small one for me as I just had to copy my templates and show her a few hints about LaTeX. Well, that’s what I thought. It was actually even the very same day when she asked me for help: she needed an image in there. That was of course easy but when I saw it I felt like I needed to replace it (it was seriously awfull). So, drawing…

She needed three rectangles connected with arrows. Easy thing with pstricks one might think but then pstricks is a PITA when you need a pdf document. So I tried tikz (of course, Debian delivers it right away). And see how “easy” that looks like:

\begin{figure}[htbp]
    \centering
    \begin{tikzpicture}
    [<->, auto,
    block/.style = {rectangle, draw=blue, thick, fill=blue!20,
                    text width=3.5cm, text centered, rounded corners,
                    minimum height=2cm, font=\sffamily},
    line/.style  = {draw, thick}]
    \matrix [column sep=5mm, row sep=2cm]
    {
        % row 1
        & \node [block] (top) {Rectangle A}; \\
        % row 2
        \node [block] (left) {Rectangle B}; &
        & \node [block] (right) {Rectangle C}; & \\
    };
    \begin{scope}[every path/.style=line]
        \path   (left) -- node [midway,font=\sffamily\footnotesize] {Arrow desc 1} (top);
        \path   (left) -- node [midway,font=\sffamily\footnotesize] {Arrow desc 2} (right);
        \path   (top)  -- node [midway,font=\sffamily\footnotesize] {Arrow desc 3} (right);
    \end{scope}
    \end{tikzpicture}
 
    \caption{My fancy image}
    \label{fancyimage}
\end{figure}

Don’t you like it that way?

It’s done… all messages are now running through my fancy IRC client named irssi.

What messages you ask? Well, there is all IRC traffic obviously, then all jabber contacts, and all ICQ/AIM contacts and… woohoo… thanks to twirssi I now even have my identi.ca (or Twitter if you’re brave enough) feeds in an irssi window (from which I can also update my identi.ca stuff, of course).

Isn’t that great?

Today the SquirrelMail plugin avelsieve happened to be released with version 1.9.8. Thanks and kudos to Alexandros who after so long time still was in the mood to put things together.

The new features promise to be amazing: a new user interface, much code rewriting, and an entirely new SPAM handling. Unfortunately after installing it my SquirrelMail installation went badly down somehow. While everything alse is delivered properly by apache2, SquirrelMail now runs into one timeout after another. I need to figure out what’s actually going on there. The error.log is quiet so far…

Anyways, for all you people who are looking forward to see this new fancy and shiny version in sid, I have to ask for patience. I think the package is ready but before testing no uploading! Until then you can (if you’re brave) test the package by installing it from

http://downloads.jhr-online.de/avelsieve_1.9.8-1_all.deb

And all you others just have a look at the changelog that’s probably (hopefully) hitting sid in a few days:

  * New upstream release
     + A large part of the code has been rewritten.
     + A new-style SPAM rule has been implemented.
     + A new, global Whitelist rule has been implemented, for
       the SPAM rules to take advantage of.
     + New, "Custom Sieve Code" rule has been implemented; this allows users
       to enter directly Sieve code snippets as a rule. (experimental)
     + Miscellaneous code movement and restructuring.
     + UI: The "Add New Rule" buttons are now links, and are displayed
       both at the top and at the bottom of the rule table.
     + UI: Major rework in the UI of both the Rules Table and the Add New
       Rule / Edit Rule pages.
     + UI: If a vacation rule is active, then display a notice in the
       rules table page and upon logging in to Squirrelmail, that reminds
       the user.
     + UI: Vacation options have been aligned properly; text has been
       changed accordingly.
     + Sieve: Vacation Subject is now supported.
     + New functionality: "Insert New Rule Here"
     + New functionality: "Move Rule to Position" (requires Javascript)
     + Avelsieve now highly recommends the use of javascript_libs plugin
       for some visual effects / UI improvements.
     + UI: Added new icons and used different ones, to improve usability.
       Icons are provided by Mark James' famfamfam.com.
     + UI: Added new icon "theme" based also on famfamfam.com. This theme
       is the default from now on.
     + UI: Removed unnecessary text / clutter from rules table page.
     + UI: The notify action options have been aligned in a table.
     + Added an LDAP Sieve storage backend, compatible with Sun Messaging
       Server's Sieve features.
     + The DO_Sieve_* backends should have a separate retrieve() method
       for retrieving the raw Sieve script. Currently, only the Managesieve
       backend has it.

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