I recently uploaded these photos to a gratis stock photo site - MorqueFile for other people to use and that brought back all the good and warm memories of Debconf5 back again. So, enjoy the pictures, feel the summer, remember all the people that do not appear in these photos at all:
P.S. Yes, MorqueFile people do know that their licenses are stupid, but they do not care enough to go to all the trouble of changing that.
Just a day after I announced my new blog, the server hosting it went off-line. The funny thing is - it was because of an upgrade. As it turns out after I updated Debian sid on the server, a new version of udev was installed. A version that did not work anymore with kernels << 2.6.12 and surely the kernel I had there was 2.6.11. I mean, what the hell is that? Why would you drop support for kernels that are only 4 version old???
Could you not just have a copy of the old code around and call that if the kernel is old?
Anyway it appears that it was the udev that was tasked with loading the drivers for my servers network card and as the server was rebooted (power problems) it would not bring its network back up. I only today managed to get to that server and find out what the problem was.
Oh and I also noticed that LVM packages are also just to be broken - apparently new packages will only work with kernel >> 2.6.14 . Just wonderful!
After last post I received a bunch of feedback both via (buggy) comment system and via email. People wondered about my support of Jonathan and pointed out some posts by him, like http://lists.debian.org/debian-women/2004/07/msg00217.html. That in my opinion is the type of post that the DPL should be acting harshly against. Personally. On a case-to-case basis.
Just to be clear - my evaluation of the platforms did not take in account anything that candidates did do in their past as I somehow felt that it was not really relevant. I was just as wrong as most of USA voters in the last two presidential elections who only trusted information from their candidate.
On one hand it shows the impression Jonathan's platform left on me when I approached it without prejudice, but on the other hand we clearly do not want developers to make a quick judgment only basing on candidates platform statement, do we? So, to redeem myself I decided to simply do a research on the past actions and statements of the current candidates and post that research on the blog too.
I was also planning to post my opinion on the other pre-election activities the candidates will be involved in. That now becomes increasingly important so that at least I make an informed decision in the end and hopefully help some other people come to their own conclusions in the process.
Note: to prevent unfair judgement based on year old data I have arranged with Jonathan for an interview/discussion where he will be able to express his opionion and I will be able to ask him some grilling questions so that we get to really understand what is his position now. The result will be posted in this very blog. If you have something you would like Jonathan to answer for, send me a message.
Hello again dear Debian Planet! I have a surprise for you. While you were not watching I made myself a brand new shining blog using the fine Mnemosyne software. It is a blog written in Python that uses Kid templates and a lot of wonderful pythonic magic (for uninitiated) that generates a set of XML compliant static files.
I added support for comments, tag cloud and some other dynamic features using the magic of AJAX.
The feed for the planet is tweaked to only display things that have not been posted to the old blog, so this is no flood - it is only the new posts (and one old one for completeness). I especially hope the DPL platform comparison will get some feedback.
I think more people should just publish their thoughts about platforms of our DPL candidates so that we can have more visibility and insight (and a reason to actually read those platform statements). Thanks go to MJRay for the idea, however I will try to be a bit more biased so that this post conveys more of my opinions then just a plain summary of the platforms.
Five word summary: transparent, wide, smooth, mediative, consensus
Five word summary: humor, half-*, police, anti-legalese, illustrations
Five word summary: professionalism, standards, MIA, tests, communication
Five word summary: continuity, tempo, newbies, direction, bling
Not online, to be put here when it appears.
Five word summary: Here, goes, my, vote, period. Alternate summary: geek, love, tolerate, recertification, statue.
Five word summary: filler, communicate, more filler, patience
I hope this summary gave someone as much food for thought as it did for me. My favorite is very clear, but can you guess who is my second choice? Leave a comment and let me know what you think :)
To get my blogging up to a more regular schedule and also give you something to read that everyone could relate to, I decided to start regular commenting on the latest in 60 minutes
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/02/23/60minutes/main1341635.shtml
I must say that I have not been following the stem cell research closely enough in last couple of years and I am very amazed that we can now actually tell a stem cell to develop into a particular type of cell. The sight of a bunch of cells grown into a slab of heart tissue was especially fascinating.
First of all there are at least two problems that I see with the research as it was shown in the program: they are not using cells from the patient, they are simply injecting the cells "in the general direction of the problem".
The first is probably a problem caused by politics - in a perfect world we would take a cell sample from a patient, take nuclei of those cell, put them in place of the nuclei of the stem cells and we would basically have cloned stem cells of the same patient that we plan to be treating. There would be no problem with nonacceptance of donor organs or confusion of living with another persons DNA inside your cells. Politics block those developments.
The second problem is mostly the simple immaturity of the field of research and microsurgery in general - it is still very hard for us to grow a full slab of heart and surgically replace damaged tissue with it. There are pros and cons to that approach too. Injections do have lower level of post operational risks in the area of effect - there are no tissue scars to worry about. However, having heart tissue flowing in the blood stream does seem quite risky in that it could have unforeseen consequences in other parts of the body. For better or worse.
However, even taking in consideration all that problems (that the scientists of the field) surely do know about very well, it is just plain ridiculously stupid how much the religious right in general and that incompetent president of theirs is grinding all the research to a halt. And do not tell me about that last weeks of him touring bio-diesel facilities, I will come to that too. In short - go California, but I would rather see Bush just getting his marbles together and banning stem cell research in USA altogether, so that all those scientists can come to us, to EU and other places with more reasonable legal systems, because otherwise it seems that they are just asking for trouble there. Trouble that will slow the research to half of its possible speed for next 10 years or so.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/02/24/60minutes/main1344473.shtml
I can only say one thing about security and USA - 90% of the USA security forces only work to ensure that people feel secured: that they see the police, that they are searched regularly enough, that they are stopped from time to time to answer some questions, that they are being "protected" on the Internet (read: being spied upon), that they are feeling harassed enough to feel safe. If the regular people are harassed enough they will never forget that the police is there and they will assume that the real criminals get harassed even more. That instills both content and fear: content for being protected and fear because there is clearly something to be protected from. After four and a half years of this treatment people are becoming very cattle-like, i.e. easy to govern.
And in the same time the real experts can easily see that for real terrorists all those protection measures are completely irrelevant - real terrorists do not try to hijack planes with matches or nail clippers. Real terrorists have people inside, good supplies of profession equipment and have all the information that your government will not tell you "for security reasons". Cocaine is being smuggled into USA by tons. If put a nuke or two into that stream with enough "green" wrapping, no one will notice anything. Anyone having enough resources to buy a suitcase nuke will have enough resources to get it into USA even if you implement the strictest police state measures the likes of which have not been seen before. Even if you mandate all citizens to implant RFID chips that could be used to track their location from satellite and shoot on (satellite) sight anyone without such chip, there will still be ways to nuke any place in USA if there were any motivation. Clearly there is none.
This again show that only thing that are considered "ok to be debated upon" are being raised in USA nowadays - there has been more debate about that duck hunt incident then about millions of Americans being spied on by their own government. That says much about any country.
I want to bring just one quote from this segment - "It is impossible to do proper inspections of everything without basically stopping all international commerce".
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/02/24/60minutes/main1343604.shtml
The idea of making diesel from coal is new to me, but it really is just an old, forgotten technology put into action by Nazi Germany at one point.
The idea is a nice plan in the local perspective (cheap gas, lots of jobs, ...) but from a global perspective that is a very dangerous idea. Anything that prolongs the inevitable transition to pure hydrogen economy is. I think that only thing that has a big future is pure electric power with storage in some kind of metallic hydride. You see, I am worried about global warming quite a lot. And burning any kind of fossil fuel bring carbon that has been laying in the ground for millions of years and throw it back into the atmosphere in the form of carbon dioxide (CO 2). That both speeds up global warming and reduces the amount of oxygen that we have left for breathing. Does look bleak in the long term perspective, doesn't it?
Yes, digging up coal in your backyard is better then fighting wars halfway across the globe for oil, but not too much.
This week Andy was talking about dog shows. Not for me that kind of thing - I like cats much more. And not those lazy show cats, I like simple cats that must rely on their smart to survive (at least be calling their owner to feed them when they are hungry :)).
So here we have the end of my first coverage of 60 minutes. Lets hope that it is not the last and lets also hope that you foud at least something here to be of a value to you.
As always, feel free to comment on what could be done to improve all this.
This post gives links to photos from my mothers 60th birthday. Please contact before using these photos anywhere.
Tā nu radinieki, draugi un mātes darba kolēģi - visas iznākušās manis uzņemtās fotogrāfijas no manas mātes (Rasmas Mahinovas) 60tās dzimšanas dienas svinešanas var dabūt šeit:
Abos arhīvos bildes ir pilīgi vienādas, atšķirās tikai kvalitāte, jeb izmērs. Kopā tur ir 267 fotogrāfijas (katrā arhīvā). Ja ir vajadzība dabūt bildes vēl lielākā izmērā, tad lūdzu sazinieties ar mani pa tiešo.
This particular post is being written from GMail, transfered to my blog server by email, processed by some massage scripts and then integrated into my blog without me doing much about it. Neat ne?
Pārbāūdīšu arī rāķštīšāņū Latviešu valodā.
Убедитесь в том, что вы готовы встретиться с любой проблемой, возможной в этой ситуации.
日本
This concludes language testing. :)
As I decided to migrate my blog from blogger.com to my own blogging software on my own domain, I did not want to leave my old posts behind. As I had more then 150 of them, I had to do some automation to do that within my lifetime.
The first step is to get the data from Blogger.com database to somewhere where you can access it in full. You will need FTP or SFTP access to a computer with a real IP address. The idea is to go to blogger.com and specifiy that you want to switch storage of your blog pages from their blogspot.com service to your of FTP or SFTP server. You will have to provide server address, URL, folder, username and password. URL does not matter at this point, but other parameters define where your data will be dumped to.
Save the changes and republish the blog. After a few dozens of minutes all your data will be at your server in a set of complete html files. Now we need something that will parse those html files and write out something that your blogging software can understand. As I use Mnemosyne, my format is a set of mail message files.
To allow me to use HTML formatted messages in my blog (and not only reST) I added this to my config.py:
class EntryMixin: def _init_content(self): """Read in the message's body, strip any signature, and format using reStructedText unless X-Format=='html'.""" s = self.msg.get_payload(decode=True) if not s: return '' try: s = s[:s.rindex('-- ')] except ValueError: pass body=False try: if self.msg['X-Format'] == "html": body = s.replace(" ", " ") body = re.sub(r'&(?!\w{1,10};)',r'&',body) body = xml.dom.minidom.parseString("<div>"+body+"</div>").toxml() except KeyError: pass except xml.parsers.expat.ExpatError, e: print "W: Parse failed for "+self.msg['Subject']+" at "+self.msg['Date']+" from "+str(int(time.mktime(time.strptime(self.msg["Date"],"%a %b %d %H:%M:%S %Y")))) print xml.parsers.expat.ErrorString(e.code), e.lineno, e.offset if not body: parts = docutils.core.publish_parts(s, writer_name='html') body = parts['body'] self.cache('content', body) return body This will try to parse messages as pure xHTML if custom header "X-Format" is set to "html" in the blog entry. There is one problem with this approach - xHTML must be valid, otherwise XML parser in Kid templating engine will fail and there will be no end of trouble. That is why even in HTML mode we reparse the body to XML and back to string again. If we get a parsing error at that point, we fall back to reST parser.
Now we need something that will analyse our Blogger.com generated HTML files and get our content from there. Here is the script that I used:
#!/usr/bin/python import os, os.path, time, sys, glob, re, xml.dom.minidom id = 1 host = "old" mdate = re.compile( r'\">(\d+) (\D+) (\d+)<' ) mbody = re.compile( r'</div>(.+)<div style=' ) mfooter = re.compile( r'<a href=\"http://example.com/(.+)\" title=\"permanent link\">(\d+):(\d+)</a></em>' ) files = glob.glob("old/*/*/*.html") for file in files: year = 0 month = 0 day = 0 hour = 0 minute = 0 subject = "" oldurl = "" body = "" date = "" title = "" footer = "" f = open( file, "r" ) status = 0 for l in f: if status == 0: if l.find('class="date-header"')>0: date = l status = 1 elif status == 1: if l.find('class="post-title"')>0: status = 2 if l.find('class="post-body"')>0: status = 4 elif status == 2: if len(l.strip()) > 0: title = l status = 3 elif status == 3: if l.find('class="post-body"')>0: status = 4 elif status == 4: if len(l.strip()) > 5: body += l if l.find('padding-bottom: 0.25em;')>0: status = 5 elif status == 5: if l.find('posted by ')>0: footer = l break f.close() rdate = mdate.search( date ) rbody = mbody.search( body ) rfooter = mfooter.search( footer ) year = rdate.groups()[2].strip() month = rdate.groups()[1].strip() day = rdate.groups()[0].strip() subject = title.strip() body = rbody.groups()[0] body = "<p>"+body+" </p>" body = re.sub(r'<img([^>]*?[^/])>',r'<img\1/>',body) if subject == "": subject = re.sub(r'<br.*?>',' ', body) subject = re.sub(r'</p.*?>',' ', subject) subject = re.sub(r'<.*?>','', subject) subject = subject.strip() line = subject.find(' ') if line > 45: subject = subject[:40]+"..." else: subject = subject[:line] oldurl = "http://oldblog.blogspot.com/"+rfooter.groups()[0].strip() hour = rfooter.groups()[1].strip() minute = rfooter.groups()[2].strip() mtime = time.mktime(time.strptime(day+" "+month+" "+year+" "+hour+":"+minute, "%d %B %Y %H:%M")) outname = str(int(mtime)) while os.path.exists( outname+"."+str(id)+"."+host ): id += 1 outname = outname+"."+str(id)+"."+host out = open( "entries/new/"+outname, "w" ) out.write("Date: "+time.ctime(mtime)) out.write(" Subject: "+subject) out.write(" X-URL: "+oldurl) out.write(" X-Tags: untagged") out.write(" X-Format: html") out.write(" ") out.write(body) out.close() Here I parse the HTML files using a simple state automata and then assemble all the data that we need to have, like timestamp in filename and Date field. In this script it is assumed that in the current directory there is "old/" directory with subdirectories like "2005", "2006", ... which have subdirectories for months in which there are xHTML files for individual posts. The output is written to "entries/new/$timestamp.$id.$host" files.
After running this script and then running mnemosyne you will see a bunch of messages about failed parsing of some messages. That shows you where your xHTML is not valid. The usual problems are html entities ( like € ) that the parser does not recognise and lack of closure on img or br tags:
This will fail because of € <img src="smile.png"> will fail, it must be <img src"smile.png"/>
My import script fixes img and br tags, but for other problems there is not much choice but going trough the entries and fixing them up manually. Also later on, if you will want to paste some custom HTML into your post, you will have to mark the whole post as HTML mode post and also check if you pasted HTML is valid XML manually.
There are some other fun things in this blog, but I will go into that in later posts.
With the opening of Turin Olympic games, the sport fever is officially on. Especially it is the fact in Latvia - this year is the ultimate hockey year: our team is in the Olympics and we have the world championship in our capital Riga in a couple months.
Tomorrow we have a chance at medals in biathlon and luge. I had no idea our guys were actually in top 5 there. That will be fun to watch tomorrow.
And on Wednesday the heat will be on: hockey, Latvia vs USA. We would have beaten USA to pulp at last years world championships if the judge would not have illegally rejected two goals shot by our team and given a large number of unfair penalties to our players. Even the coach of the USA team made a point after the game of saying that the judging was inadequate. However the real point is - we will crush you this time.
PS. I just found out that the championship is planned at the same time as the Debconf 6 in Mexico. NOOOOOOO!!!! This is the worst news - I'll miss all the fun. Crap. Really. Crap. I hope there will be some kind of coverage in Mexico.