It's a time when things breaks suddenly: today my old headphones broke, sigh, so I had to buy a new pair. This time it's a Sennheiser HD 515... for sure a lot different from the old pair.
As I was at the shop, I also bought the cable to connect my VCR to the new amplifier, and I also took the time to look for a DVD to give my mother as Christmas gift (knowing that she likes Richard Gere I choose a "special price" Shall We Dance DVD... actually, two DVD, as one of the two is a Windows Media HD-DVD... but well we don't have anything to play it on... it was at the same price of the single DVD version so I took it anyway), and finally as I was there, I also found a special offer on About a Boy DVD... I liked that film from the first time I've seen it, and I've seen it two or three times, but I still have to see it in English, that's the main reason why I buy DVDs.

In the last days I've also spent some more time, during the evening, watching the extra DVDs for The Lord of the Rings that I always left behind me. With them, and the new DVDs, my ~/.dvdcss directory counts 64 keys.

On a Gentoo side of the things, I've completed my job today at 15, so tomorrow I'll have time to reconnect the gfbsd box, and finally start tacking down the remaining problems. Tonight I'll take a look to the rest of the bugs, and see to handle them.

Oh I started trying out kdetv as an everyday TV viewer, as it's simpler to command with kdelirc, but it does not really seem to work that well with tuning, I'll have to import tvtime's stations.

A simple and quick update, as I've just took a forced break from the data entry job (as it would have been too good as a job, I have to do it with a faulty box, the keyboard stop responding after a while, and I have to reboot... or to shut it down for a while).

First of all, a little of self-advertising ;) Linux.com published another article of mine: Using Gnulib to improve software portability. I want to thanks Chris for proofreading and fixing it up before submission to Linux.com editors :)

I'd also like to say to the advertisers of an italian newspaper, that making radio stations air that the _first_ DVD of a series is available when it was published two weeks before and it's no more available, it's just a stupid way to gain readers..
I'm referring to the DVDs of Italian actor Marco Paolini (Italian Wikipedia), in particular to his show about the Vajont disaster, one of the most touching acting I've ever seen.
But now knowing that there are DVDs available for his shows, I'll try to find them somewhere.

Now I'm going to clean up a few things, and then I'll restart working, tomorrow is the last day, and I have still about 200 records to entry in the database.

It's time for me to start learning something new, and this time is the turn of DocBook. While I'm still going on with the job that's taking up my time, I need to relax my mind with something else between the breaks.
Today, I fixed the tree to use bindnow-flags function instead of -Wl,-z,now flags, removing a couple of userland_Darwin checks, but this takes longer and while useful it's not productive for myself :)

Why I want to learn docbook? Because unieject needs some user documentation, and the mxml2man program seems not to be what I really needed, although I hacked it quite a bit, I didn't get a hold of it enough. So I'm thinking of just writing everything in docbook, and ship it with prebuilt manpages.

Anyway, now the main parties already gone, tomorrow I need to end cleaning up my room and insert at least 150 records. At 30 records/hour, I need quite a bit of hours spent on that, I'll put the Dream Teather DVD as background music, most probably.

Okay, so today I got the 625 records I have to entry in the database for work. Not exactly a light job, also if I can reach the 30 records/hour.. the main problem is that lot of data are about non-Italian people, and I find sometime difficult to read correctly the names.
As I said, the job takes my "complete attention", as I have to connect the monitor to another box to work at it (a non-networked Windows 2000 box they gave me), also if I have the iBook open for emergencies, I don't follow mails or IRC or either Jabber when I'm working on it.

I'm currently waiting to clean up my backlog, as I have a patch to GwenView that Lanius gave me the ok to commit (removes an executable stack on AMD64), and xawtv that I promised to look at (before I got the job, I joined media-tv herd to help with zvbi needed by xawdecode, and I'm thinking to move there alevt that is probably more "at home" - phosphan given it up, and it's currently media-video).

Also, as I had to send it already to two people, I put the two patches for my keyboard hack on my space, hope people can enjoy them until I can find time to find a solution to the >255 keys.

These holidays are going to be strange, from a side happy, as I'm having a strangely "lucky" real life, but a part strange because of family chaos and this work that's going to destroy my nerves, I already know. But I need the money...
I also have to clean up my room as it's _really_ a mess especially after changing amplifier yesterday.
Oh and to shut up the people bitching about holidays/christmas/hanuka/whatever... Happy Yule to all.. a bit late perhaps :P

Okay, finally yesterday I got my money for the translation work! Yai! :)
So today, I wanted to buy the only thing I promised to myself to buy with them: the new amplifier. My old Kenwoord was really falling a part, and I needed to replace it, a friend of mine suggested me to take an ONKYO, HT-R330. It's _really_ good :)
I also wanted to use the optical connection, to avoid electric noise to disturb my audio.. and it worked fine almost out of the box, I just had to low a selector in KMix to let it work fine :)

A part that, today I got a job.. a shit of a job, but always a job, I need the money and I took it also if I didn't want. I have to do some data entry for a data processing company.
It's boring, it's long, and the MS Access "program" I have to use sucks. But they pay me.

Luckily should be only a temporary job, after next week it should be already done. In the mean time, my packages won't be updated regularly. I leave them for their respective herds, but usually if I take a package for myself it's because nobody else want/can take care of it.
If this means that I'll fail to update an amaroK release the second after it's released, I want to inform the bump ricers: I bump as soon as I know _and_ I have time, when I'm working for data entry I have the monitor connected to the box I'm working with, and I don't see mails nor RSS feeds. This also means that filing bug for me to bump things is not going to work. You want things bumped the second before they're released? Well you have two methods: you start doing that by yourself, or you start paying me instead of doing the current job ;)

Seriously, tho, I might end up taking other jobs that might decrease my focus on Gentoo for a while, I really need money, and until I can find someone that's fine with paying me for working on Gentoo, the things are this way ;)

Oh well, I hope next days won't be too heavy... happy holidays all :)

I'm wondering about this. In the past I wrote about the problems between KWord and OpenOffice.org about ODT handling.
Basically, a list created with KWord does not get loaded correctly with OpenOffice 2. The issue was identified before the final release, but was postponed to 2.0.1 release.
Okay, today I found OpenOffice 2.0.1 in portage, updated and tried, almost sure it was going to work...

Well it didn't. OpenOffice.Org 2.0.1 is still unable to load KWord's ODTs correctly, although they are compliant documents and they should be loaded fine. The issue in their issuezilla was verified and closed, but the problem persists.

This makes me think of two things: a) ODT is not a true solution at the moment, because its implementations does not really conform to a single standard, lists are handled in two different ways, and OpenOffice.Org, that should be the major ODT consumer and producer, is not able to manage one of the two b) the way OpenOffice.org issues are handled is faulty, they "verify" and "close" issues before the actual release, and then they are not actually fixed, it would be simpler if people could build some experimental version and verify and close bugs by themselves after the fix has been committed, but the way OpenOffice.Org is designed, it takes too much time to build to check that for a normal user, and it has to wait for the actual release.

Not like Gentoo's way to handling bugs is perfect, sometimes I'd simply like to tell people to set verified all the bugs I resolve, so that I can close them later, but that's probably not going to work that well :|

Anyway, OpenOffice.Org still has troubles handling that particular feature, that's not exactly a "small" feature; ODT is not yet ready to be the perfect interexchange format for every office suite.
And the ironic thing is that if Microsoft would have supported ODT, maybe they could have found a way to make them incompatible with everything else like they did with HTML.. are we going to use their format in the future, as actual working interexchange format, similarly how we currently use Samba to share data between Linux, FreeBSD and other L/OSS operating systems?

Today, I started getting annoyed by the continue wall output of apcupsd while the electric saw was being used. Unfortunately, the power cabling in my house makes the voltage go up and down when something that has big power consumption is started, so all my PTYs were full of apcupsd's warnings about "power faults" and returns. The same goes for my mail inbox.

So I disabled WALL warnings and started thinking about writing a KDE client o apcupsd. It shouldn't be difficult, no? I just need to write an user interface to show the data produced by apcupsd.

The only problem is that it does not provide any kind of library to access those data, there's a TCP protocol but it's not documented, the various utilities used by apcupsd uses an internal library to communicate with the daemon, and so there's no way to actually write anything without reverse engineering the protocol.

Okay, I think I have an interesting work in front of me :)

I might make this a weekly or monthly event, as who better than Flame-eyes might comments about Flames? ;) Yeah lame pun, I'm sorry for all the ones who read it :P

Anyway, I'm (obviously) referring to Linus's ideas on GNOME... well I don't really want to add much to them by itself, as I find his opinion almost right (while a bit too heated for my likeness :P).

What I want to have everybody here commenting on that read, is this entry from Tim Janik appeared on Planet GNOME (yeah I read Planet GNOME, and I usually enjoy it).
I think Tim actually hit the centre of the problem, I really suggest to all the ones flaming about Linus's declarations to read that entry, and to understand it.

Remember I talked about a laptop to cleanup?
Well my first experiments with (k)ubuntu gone bad: the kernel used by 5.10 does not get along well with the 3com PCMCIA card I'm using; there were workarounds, but nothing worked at the end.
Mandrake installed, but got messed up with Xorg at the startup.

Then, I tried Fedora Core... at the start the CD-Rom didn't start right, it failed the test, died in anaconda install and so on.. thanks to my friend Giandomenico, I was able to get the Network installation wokring using lighttpd server on my main box and mounting in loop the ISO of the rest of the CDs. This way, Fedora installed, the PCMCIA card worked fine with 2.6.11 but it does not work with 2.6.14 after a full yum update, so I just reverted grub to start with the 2.6.11 while I work on the beast. Xorg had to be updated before it started working, but that is now solved, I was also able to get rid of the "postmark" version I was having with Mandrake. At the end Fedora Core installation was mostly fine and pretty interesting.

As the laptop is a ThinkPad using Mwave modem, I had to install tpctl to configure it, unfortunately it was a bit more tricky, the package needed was on RpmForge, and it was not installing because of a missing dep, and there were no packages to install the modules for the ThinkPad, so I had to install that by hand, too.
Also configuring mwave was not so simple: the mwavem package that is told to be the way to use it has a dead homepage, I couldn't find it on IBM's website; instead I found that the module was already present in the 2.6 kernel; unfortunately it asked a full I/O port and IRQ configuration, and that required me to reconfigure with tpctl to disable the IR port, that would be unused anyway; I just hope I was able to configure it right because I have a strange traceback on dmesg and when using Fedora's tool to configure a PPP connection I got a few "ioctl not supported" or something like that on dmesg. minicom seems to open /dev/mwave, but I can't see anything from that, not sure what the reason is, tho :| I'll give a better try to that when I'll have another phone line to hook to, mine being DSL would get killed if I connect an analog modem.

I must say, I wasn't expecting this much from Fedora.. it's quite usable at the end, also Gnome looks not so bad in that incarnation, I might reconsider those two project in the future, and maybe start suggesting them to n00bs whom I'm not going to admin ever after :)

I also have to say that working one entire day with three monitors display the most different things is not funny at all: I had the iBook updating (well it's still doing, to be honest), this system I was working at, and the laptop I was installing/configuring... I have so much of an headache right now, sigh.

Oh I'm still missing news from my publisher for the payment, last Tuesday my contact told me that all the people at the office responsible for my payment were on break because of a series of local holidays, and they would have returned Monday (today), so he would have told me the status that day... well I haven't heard of him today, and this situation is starting pissing me off :(

My hopes to get KDigest working in the next weeks seems to have vanished; one of the functions I need to complete the creation of new digests does not work on Korundum 3.5.0 (and -r1 that is needed anyway for ruby 1.8.4); thanks to Richard Dale, there's a patch to implement the missing marshaller; I'll use it locally to work on KDigest, so it won't stop me, but I have to wait for Korundum 3.5.1 to get the function available on downstream distributions.

Oh well, thanks again to Caleb and Richard for the quick answers and solutions :) I hope other projects using Korudum will appear in the future, so that if other problems are present, they can be fixed soon :)

Remember if someone wants to help with KDigest, just drop me an email, it can be found on KDE's svn inside /trunk/playground/utils/kdigest if you have KDE SVN account; it uses the usual translation and documentation modules for KDE, also.

Not my laptop this time, I found a little job to get a few euros, an old used laptop to cleanup, to make it usable by its new owner without problems and mess ups.
A part a bit of problems as the CMOS battery gone away (that's why I like having a multimeter at home, it's useful to check the status of batteries), now I'm wondering what I should install on it.

The person going to use this is not a geek, and needs something simple; I'm probably not going to have to do service for him after this time, so I don't have the need to put there something that would be simpler to _me_ to administer (that's what I do to people that I have to support later, so in that case would have been gentoo the choice), so it's a bit of an experiment.

Currently I'm thinking between Ubuntu, Mandriva and Kubuntu. The first is for sure one of the most impressive projects in the last years for newbies and people that are not interested in become techies, the second was my own starting point (with Mandrake 7.1) and use KDE that's a pro for me (as I know it way better than gnome), and Kubuntu that would join the pro of the two, hopefully.
I'm downloading the live of KUbuntu now, I should have an Ubuntu live but I think it was for PPC, so I'll re-download it, while of Mandriva I have a CD-Set from a magazine.

Oh well, it would be an interesting work to do, I just hope that the internal modem works fine or I'll have to tell the person to buy a PCMCIA card, and that might mean that it won't take the laptop at all and look for something better (I hope to be paid anyway).

Well going to torrent now, also if lately I saw rtorrent failing from time to time, seems to be related to GCC 4, I have to look for a way to debug that better.

Ok after the second part, another update on the KDigest front.

I tried opening in the past days a project on BerliOS to host KDigest to allow other people to use it, but the registration procedure does not work with Konqueror. Then I remembered that exists the playground module in KDE's SVN, so I put Kdigest there; this way it's also possible translate KDigest and add documentation to it.

I'll update my site later and then user DevCounter to look for graphics for the icons and translators.

I hope it can become something better in the future, as I find it an interesting project, and might help the people who likes to do things in GUI instead of coming down to console for some tasks.

As I already blogged, I'm rewriting my KDigest application using Ruby and Korundum bindings for KDE.
I must say, the work is simpler than what I was expecting, the calls seems also more logical, and after a couple of problems now I'm able to do quite everything the old KDigest did.
Unfortunately the creation of digests is getting difficult, as one of the methods I was using it's not available on Korundum, but I found an interesting way that might be also simpler to use from user perspective.

The icons are still the dummy ones provided by KDevelop as my graphic skills are under the definition of "low"; I'll see to open a new project at BerliOS later (not with Konqueror as a bug prevents Konqueror users to open a new project on BerliOS :( ).. if somebody wants to join, it's obviously welcome :)

Okay, tonight I wanted to take a break from Gentoo work and start something that would be pleasant and useful to learn something new, so I tried converting KDigest in Ruby. Why in Ruby? Because I like it, and it's simpler to debug, and as the standard library should already provide the functions for CRC, MD5 and SHA1 I need, it's probably simpler to implement than in C++.

The first problem is that I never worked with Korundum before, so I had to learn from example; the second is that the examples wasn't working... thanks to Caleb, I didn't waste all the night debugging that, when I asked him, he told me to try with Ruby 1.8.3, and now I'm actually using that, as 1.8.4_pre1 breaks QtRuby, sigh.

Anyway, in less than 3 hours I converted the GUI initialization functions from C++ to Ruby!
Tomorrow I'll start with the true code, I hope I'll be able to recode most of it leaving the same base architecture, then I'll import everything on an SVN locally, and see to restart the work on this application that might be of help to someone, I hope :)

Oh by the way, I _really_ like the laser printers that can print without too much noise on 2am without waking up my parents :P

Okay, I was given two second hand Canon printers, an old BJC-2100 and an almost new PIXMA iP1500, both uses USB interface, and that is good as I have only a parallel port and it's already occupied by an old Epson Stylus XL+. One of the two is broken, but I wasn't told which one, yet. The BJC has still inside the cartridge so I tried that before, configured in CUPS and it was in the gutenprint drivers with no problems, but it doesn't print, maybe that's the broken one. Now I've connected the Pixma, but... i have no idea how to configure it as it's not in gutenprint.

Googling, I found that there are drivers for Linux from Canon, but they are released as binaries for i386, using RPMs.
There are sources, yes, but they are not complete, it requires them to be linked against the binary-only i386 libraries.

What does that mean? That I might not be able to use the iP1500 from Linux, mainly. Well I could, as I'm on a multilib setup, I just need to rebuild the sources for x86 and then link them against the binary libraries (I can't use the binaries because they are built for SuSE 9.1, linking to libraries we don't carry anymore), but I'm not sure if I will. I can still use the printer from MacOS anyway, as it's supported by Canon for that OS.

It's interesting to see how the GPL seems not to be able to protect us against these kind of binary drivers:

LICENSE
    * These programs are licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public
      License.  (See the file COPYING.)

EXCEPTION
    * As a special exception, these programs are permissible to link with the
      libraries released as the binary modules.
    * If you write modifications of your own for these programs, it is your
      choice whether to permit this exception to apply to your modifications.
      If you do not wish that, delete this exception.

That sucks :(

Okay seems like new variants of Sober are really hitting the mail servers badly. The problem is that, while they don't really do anything to non-Windows users as a virus, they are a great bore for everyone. I receive daily ten or more Sober.* mails (and I just kill the Paris Hilton thing using maildrop), and some of them is able to get around SpamAssassin's detection.

Last time I had something like this was with Sober.P, and Dirk's rule did his job right that time.

Update: I was able to get it working, don't ask me what I did wrong before, the code for the rule follows


header __SOBER_P_MSGID Message-ID =~ /<[0-9a-f\.]{15,22}\@/
header __SOBER_P_CTYPE Content-Type =~ /text\/plain.*charset=\"us-ascii\"/
header __SOBER_P_PRIO X-Priority =~ /^3 /
header __SOBER_P_IMP Importance =~ /^Normal/

meta SOBER_P_SPAM (__SOBER_P_MSGID && __SOBER_P_CTYPE && __SOBER_P_PRIO && __SOBER_P_IMP )
score SOBER_P_SPAM 18.0
describe SOBER_P_SPAM Rassistische Mail Sober-P


header __SOBER_OTH_CTYPE Content-Type =~ /multipart\/mixed.*boundary="=+[0-9a-f\.]+"$/

meta SOBER_OTH_VIRUS (__SOBER_P_MSGID && __SOBER_OTH_CTYPE && __SOBER_P_PRIO && __SOBER_P_IMP )
score SOBER_OTH_VIRUS 6.0
describe SOBER_OTH_VIRUS Some W32-Sober virus


Thanks slarti for helping me on #gentoo-dev :)
Finally, no more Sobers! :D

I'm currently listening to Dream Theater's Live at Budokan DVD, that my sister gave me for the birthday... I have to say it was quite a bit of time since last time I heard something from Dream Theater, and... I love them :) This live is also good from the video side, by all means a perfect birthday present :)

Now, I'm actually starting to feel the need for a new amplifier, as mine is as old as me, and it's falling a part :(
I've already put an eye on a Kenwood's model, but it costs quite a bit and I'm still waiting for payment from my publisher for the translation of Sommerville's "Software Engineering". I also need to reorder completely my study room to put the speakers in the right place.
As I haven't passed the driving exam, I want at least to take this opportunity to hear a good DVD with a good sound :)

I never actually thought of how much is interesting to look at a Live DVD until I started watching at this... it's really impressive watching to such artists playing in front of so many people... if I could return back in time, I would probably try to go seeing them as they were in Italy this year, if I remember correctly.

Oh, and the DVD is not a Sony's, so no rootkit as far as I can see ;)

Okay today I was trying to do the less job possible for Gentoo as it was my birthday. I had anyway to employ some time in looking for mail logs as I tried to limit the quantity of spam received because of Sober.* virus.

I must say, I *love* syslog; I use metalog locally, as it allows me to avoid logrotate while not having 20MB logs, and everything that passes through it is correctly categorized. The problem is with the other logs that gets added to the /var/log directory without pass through anything.

So, pretty please, if you're going to write a daemon... please add syslog support to it at least as an option ;)

Okay, yesterday I had a sort-of-driving exam... sort of because the examiner let me wait for 40 minutes in the car, and it was *very* cold, so when she asked me to move, I was half-assed because of the cold and the upsetting of remaining there waiting. She then let me drive only for 3 minutes before rejecting me :|

Also, I took a cold waiting later in the cold rain because of a misunderstanding between me and my father who should have took me home after the exam, so I wasn't feel well at all, and yesterday I had to avoid the LinuxDay (was having fever). I'm sorry for the ones who came there looking for me, but if they still wanted to see my presence on Gentoo or even elsewhere, I wasn't having so much options ^^;

By the way, as Friday was _a lot_ upset because of the exam, so I had a bit of a fight with solar, probably because of misunderstanding there, too, and I'm sorry for that. I'm still a bit pissed off by Mark's comment, who said I just care about my arch, as I consider it an offence, given how much time I spent in the past months for Gentoo as a whole.
The problem is that if I don't get a bugreport, I can't possibly know what problems are in other arches. And after formation of x86 arch team I did not start reiterating over all the bugs to see if people asking for patches applied are now part of the x86 arch team.

Anyway, I'll be off-irc for a while, also because tomorrow is my birthday, but I'll try to cope at least with the basic bugs of vlc and xine when they come.
If people needs me, I'll be reachable by mail and Jabber.

Some time ago I talked about my problem with ruby and https.. to summarize, I was unable to get data out form bugzillas that used https with self-signed certificates because openssl library started bitching about that. Quite reasonable, eh? :)

Lately, I fixed that by spawning a wget process to get the pages, way more simpler than having to deal with ruby internals too much.
Now, in the last days I also added a few more bugzillas to the list ServoFlame accepts, and then I added a listzilla command to show the supported bugzillas :)


[00:22] <Flameeyes> listzilla
[00:22] <ServoFlame> kernel, kde, sourceware, abisource, gnome, fdo, openoffice, gcc, gentoo, novell, redhat


ServoFlame can be found on freenode on some #gentoo-* channels (for example #gentoo-dev) and accepts requests in the form Servoflame bug zilla #number. It does output something similar to GenBot's (mozbot) output.

I have yet to release the code for the bugzilla plugin.. I'll do that in the next days. I think I can try to get working an rbot snapshot from SVN as the current one seems to fail to recognize when it gets disconnected by the server, and I can't disable extra plugins such as karma and quotes (that I don't really need!).

I might also want to add support for dump/restore of the zillas list as when I change the on-file layout I usually break them... or maybe I can try to get a hold of yaml format used by rbot itself :)
This because I plan on trying supporting mantis, too.. but that requires HTML parsing, while bugzilla just require XML parsing that's way easier.

Oh well, I'll see.