Just found that I had been added to Planet Gnome, I really need to see the picture they put for me, so let's write a diary.

Cleaning-up rpmfind.net servers, I spent most of the week-end trying to fix the mirrors, clean-up the databases, ditch more rpm2html C code and replace it with easier to read/write/maintain python scripts. This is a whole interconnected mess of C/python/php scripts manipulating SQL (MySQL), exchanging XML between the servers, and generating HTML at some point. Maintainance is hairy but it works, and I basically didn't touch it for 2 years, as a result the cleanup took a lot of time, effort, and CPU time (if only ALTER TABLE DIS/ENABLE KEYS or SELECT within SELECT was implemented in the installed MySQL I would have lost far less time and CPU, oh well, I hate databases anyway).

I also noticed that my SuSE mirror rsync password does not work on the speakeasy box, and that rpmfind now get denied access for KDE rsync. Sent mail about the situation asking for new access, but didn't got any reply so far. Each database contains in average: 165,000 packages, 200 distributions/release, 1+ million Requires, 400,000 Provides and 3.5+ million path for files present in the packages.

So if rpmfind.net is acting funny, that's normal, I'm playing with it again. Doing some attempts at load balancing too, YMMV. Some statistics from the queries pages seems to indicate that 45 million searches have be run on the 3 boxes in the last 2 years. It's both huge i.e. a fairly large number, but relatively small compared to the number of Linux/RPM distro deployments. I draw the conclusion that a lot of people are actually not updating once installed, or at least not that many are updating using the network, or they don't know about rpmfind.

Oh and I replaced the xmlsoft.org and rpmfind search pages with the ones for the protest agaisnt software patents in Europe. I got 5 mails about it ranging evenly from hostile to supportive. I then discovered that far more messages pointed at it on a slashdot thread. That's fine, don't send me mail, go argue on /. that suits me perfectly :-) . Now that the vote has been posponed to Sep 22 I think I will get the pages back soon.

In other news, my brother got married, I borrowed Nabil's Olympus E10 digital camera, it's a reflex with a smartcard disk. I took 400+ picture over the 2 days, basically the battery were running out before the disk got filled. Marriage was "traditional", well organized, I had some fun, and some of the pictures are great. I loved that camera.

I also discussed on IRC with Rik the problem of rogue applications taking down the desktop (as I naively pointed out in my last diary as something to fix), of course he has looked at the problem for quite a while, the crucial point is how to detect that an application is doing something wrong consuming resources, and how to distinguish it from an acceptable processing. There is apparently no good way to do this and heuristics don't work, I think it has to be a policy, and then ways to express policy rules to the kernel is not easy either... the problem seems just too hard :-(

Looking into the possibility of changing my ADSL provider (from Nerim to Free), but since I rely on ADSL for my work, I will start by getting a second phone line and get a parallel setup then switch only when everything works. I expect some pain nonetheless !

Oh ... and it's my birthday today.