I’ve been playing with some graphing tools lately, in particular Dan Vanderkam’s dygraphs JavaScript Visualization Library. So far I’ve translated the RC bug list (the “official” one, not the other one) into the appropriate format, generated some numbers for an LD50 equivalent for bugs, and on Wouter’s suggestion the buildd stats. One of the nice […]
One of the XP systems I look after had a trojan this month — looks like it came from a fake “UPS package” mail with a zipped attachment that got clicked on, then stuck its tendrils into the registry and all over the place, and started popping warnings about viruses and instructions on how to […]
On Wednesday the 25th, I was thinking about project growth. The day before I’d posed a question to the debian-vote list: Over the next twelve months, what single development/activity/project is going to improve Debian’s value the most? By how much? How will you be involved? There have only been a couple of replies so far, […]
So moving onto Monday the 23rd. Something I’ve been pondering blogging about for ages now is an analogy I came up with for the way Debian is organised. I’m not quite sure of the motivation, but it goes something like this: imagine all of the people in the organsiation arranged in a circle. That circle […]
One of the freedoms I value is the freedom to choose what you spend your time on and who you spend it with. And while I’ve spent a lot of time arguing that people in key roles in Debian still have those freedoms (hey, 2.1(1), don’t you know), reality these days seems to be otherwise. […]
Last month we had a brief discussion on debian-devel about what images would be good to have for lenny — we’re apparently up to about 30 CDs or 4 DVDs per architecture, which over 12 architectures adds to about 430GB in total. That’s a lot, given it’s only one release, and meanwhile the entire Debian […]
In a couple of days, DPL-elect Steve McIntyre takes over as DPL, after being elected by around four hundred of his peers… Because I can’t help myself, I thought I might poke at election numbers and see if anything interesting fell out. First the basics: I get the same results as the official ones when […]
One of the challenges maintaining the Debian archive kit (dak) is dealing with Debian-specific requirements: fundamentally because there are a lot of them, and they can get quite hairy — yet at the same time, you want to keep them as separate as possible both so dak can be used elsewhere, and just so you […]
Continuing from where we left off… The lower bound for me becoming a DD was 8th Feb ’98 when I applied; for comparison, the upper bound as best I can make out was 23rd Feb, when I would have received this mail through the debian-private list: Resent-Date: 23 Feb 1998 18:18:57 -0000 From: Martin Schulze […]
So, sometime over the past few weeks I clocked up ten years as a Debian developer: From: Anthony Towns <aj@humbug.org.au> Subject: Wannabe maintainer. Date: Sun, 8 Feb 1998 18:35:28 +1000 (EST) To: new-maintainer@debian.org Hello world, I’d like to become a debian maintainer. I’d like an account on master, and for it to be subscribed to […]
Oh yay, another argument about sexism. I thought we were over this. Aigars writes: Trying to restrict what words people can or can not use (by labeling them sexist, racist or obscene) is the bread and butter of modern day media censorship. It is censorship and not “just political correctness”. While I would not want […]
Okay, so any excuse to bring out the Laphroaig is fine by me, but the cute little eeePC is better than most. That it’s cute and popular is all very well, but what really makes my day is this is the first device I’ve seen that both doesn’t hide the fact it’s running Linux, and […]
For a while I’ve been trying to find some easy way to keep a few machines I admin behaving the way I want them too with minimal effort. They don’t really need much maintenance — but I would like something to help keep them all in sync. Basically, something like FAI, but much, much simpler […]
Something I’ve been meaning to play with for a while, inspired by a slashdot post the other day: Hopefully I’ll be able to speed up the calculations enough to have it work on more than just .1% of the data in reasonable time (the above took three hours of CPU time to generate, sadly), at […]
So with the GPLv3 and LGPLv3 finally out (hurray!) it’s time to actually pay attention to the practical consequences of an upgrade to the world’s premier copyleft licenses. One of the things I hadn’t noticed, though I should have, is that the LGPLv3 is not compatible with the GPLv2 — that is, GPLv2 programs that […]