Advogato blog for Physicman

31 May 2005

Tue, 31 May 2005 20:33:42 GMT

avriettea: There is a big difference between a State and its citizens. I never was a supporter of Chirac or of de Villepin and I agree with you that re-starting the nuke testing for the 50th birthday of Hiroshima was outrageous (even though they weren't made above ground). OTOH, I will not follow you in the pointless debate of a country being or not relevant to the world (if this sentence can bear any meaning).

We are all citizens of the same planet. We only have one world.

31 May 2005

Tue, 31 May 2005 12:25:59 GMT

Reading some comments on the results of the French vote on the so-called European Constitution. I have a reaction of my own.

Why should we be ashamed of the result of a democratic vote?

Why should we approve this so-called Constitution?

Maybe some of us voted "Non" for some wrong reasons (not related to the treaty itself), but my feeling is that this "Non" is a chance for us to question the way the european construction has been done so far.

Let us take this opportunity to ask ourselves what Europe we want.

I personally think Europe should be built by and for its citizens. A democratic Europe, where the people (or their direct representatives) would have the final word to decide on the path to follow.

The treaty that was presented to us didn't go that way and was rejected.

I don't call this a shame, I call it an opportunity...

Some have started to build upon it to start a work on a real Constitution by creating a Constituent Assembly.

30 May 2005

Mon, 30 May 2005 12:21:59 GMT

I reworked most of my dccifd client for exim and I think it's working much better now.

It's quite unbelievable how crappy the code was... I think I did it a bit too much in a hurry and overlooked quite a large number of things. This isn't good enough, and I'll try to avoid doing the same mistake in the future.

I should create a webpage with more documentation and help on how to install; but in the mean time, the local_scan can be found here.

19 May 2005

Thu, 19 May 2005 16:04:01 GMT

On the Hurd front, I think we're gaining more and more momentum. There is quite a lot of activity lately.

A nice step is Michael Banck getting Gnome to work on the hurd (with even a nice screenshot :)

Mozilla is also on it's way, Michael got epiphany to work (at least locally).

All this is pretty sweet :)

19 May 2005

Thu, 19 May 2005 14:27:16 GMT

Still porting Debian packages for the Hurd. To do this more easily I've installed sbuild which does the job of tracking the dependencies and compiling the package inside a chroot.

It is a bit tricky to get the chroot working (requires using crosshurd instead of debootstrap as under GNU/Linux), but once it's done it speeds up the automatic building of non-problematic packages.

I've setup a repository of the packages I've built using it at http://packages.physicman.net/hurd/

Lately, I've had a report that my DCC local_scan for Exim doesn't work on Solaris, so I've started to rewrite parts of it. Rereading the code, I'm quite amazed that it works at all ;)

30 Mar 2005

Wed, 30 Mar 2005 09:07:20 GMT

Nice, I got FreeCiv to work on the Hurd. I even made a screenshot ;)

29 Mar 2005

Tue, 29 Mar 2005 14:04:43 GMT

Hmm it has been some time.

Not much to mention. I've been somewhat ill these last weeks. I've continued to build Debian packages for the Hurd.

I also saw someone using my DCC client for exim. I probably should do something about it... At least, make a better documentation.

I should also start building a new wireless access point at home. I need more time and motivation for this...

Let's go back to work. I'll probably start learning Ruby for we use it quite often here. Will probably be interesting...

3 Mar 2005

Thu, 3 Mar 2005 16:20:32 GMT

Work

I'm finalising the setup of our internal Jabber server. I've finally found out how to create permanent conference rooms. So now it needs some more test users before being 'official'.

I need to find a willing windows beta-tester to find out wich Jabber client we're going to recommend to our users.

And of course, we'll see if it's really going to be used... :-/

2 Mar 2005

Wed, 2 Mar 2005 10:58:25 GMT

FOSDEM

Apparently the problems we encountered this week-end with the server were related to vulnerable awstat.pl scripts. The chroot system prevented the script to do any harm (or at least none I could find); but wasted *lots* of memory with the unfortunate result of having the OOM Killer killing apache and ssh and thus render the server somewhat useless...

I'll try to find some time to investigate ways of limiting access to physical memory from the chroots to avoid these kind of problems in the future...

Post FOSDEM 2005

Pictures from the event are coming in from all places ;)

Here a number of pics from the Hurd people:

Here are those of Michael Banck, here those of Ognyan Kulev (I think) and here are those of Barry de Freese.

And here and here are a couple of the #linuxbe people.

Again, it was really nice to be able to put faces on people's (nick)names :)

WORK

I was finally able to migrate to our new newsreader server. So far it has been much smoother than I expected. Hmm... something must be wrong ;) Well, maybe this is just the consequence of fewer residential customers... All the better for those still bearing with us ;)

On another note, my collegue Laurent is now father for the second time. Congratulations pal :)

1 Mar 2005

Tue, 1 Mar 2005 13:50:44 GMT

I'm testing this application I found in the menu with is simply called "Blog entry poster". If this works well, I may be posting more often than usual ;)

Well see...