Older blog entries for jgg (starting at number 7)

dhd, there is No Cabal, The Project Named Deity does NOT exist, and you should *really* listen to those voices in your head. <<CABAL OUT>>. As an aside, I sometimes wonder if the Debian Cabal (assuming there is a cabal) is upset with all the other peole out there forming non-Debian cabals and taking the Cabal name for their own. It seems to me, that if there was a Cabal, the people doing this would just disappear into the night. On the other hand, a sneaky Cabal might set up these other Cabals just to confuse the issue and hide it's true sinistar motives!

For some reason all the interesting things lately have been about Weird Wacked Out users. Go figure. Today, there was a rather hillarious flame war about a person who keeps filing really lame bugs. Someone suggested we procmail his messages into the bit bucket. See, that is how you get attention! On the flip side, the reason Potato is delayed is because SuSE and RedHat spies are conspiring to eliminate our distribution, if you belive the paranoid..

Tip: Never violate the setup time requirements on ADC chips. Particularly if the Spec Sheet doesn't really show it, DON'T DO IT, IT IS WRONG AND EVIL.

An interesting thing a few people know about Debian is that we ship a default Apache page that comes up when you go to the document root on a newly installed web server.

Now, it seems, that people all around the globe use Debian and for some reason don't get rid of this default page correctly. Just today some irate anti-spam person emailed us and complained that a spammer (who is using Debian, go figure) is one of our users because when you go to their website it says.. Debian!

This is a daily occurance for the webmaster team, all sorts of wacked out stuff. It amazes me how many people decide to set out on these sorts of personal crusades beliving they are rightous and we are to blame.

I wonder if Microsoft ever gets mails like that.

meta I agree with dria, but I strive for irrelevent stories that only people on this site have a hope of even getting...

I would like to remind the world about BATF. Hillarious if you enjoy that sort of humor. Local too...

Today it seems the world discovered my email on the DUL, I just got 3 emails on it all at once - I wonder if it got forwarded someplace? Weird. Of course they all praise the DUL as having virtually a 0% false positive rate. I wonder though how they measure that since the mails go into the bit bucket. I think I'll ask ..

Looking for info on JTAG interfaces and software for linux, mail me if you know anything..

meta I did talk with lilo today and an interesting thought occured to me, what if the project pages could show a 'Recent Diary Entries' only for people in that project (with a certain status or something)? Then you could see at a glance what is happening to the people in that community. It might provide some interesting perspecitve to look at things like that.

I find the recent diary list wraps rather quickly and going to each persons page each day is tedious.

It seems some people want to widen the scope of the Purges, they want an inquisition to purge those who lack the faith.

I think I'll have a nap..

Nothing interesting happened today. I did just notice that once again the l-k exploder I am sitting on has lost it and begun sending mail in spurts <sigh> I wonder how much volume vger does.

About the meta thread, I like colours, I think people would rank more consistently if they didn't have a preconcieved notion of what a master/journeyer/etc is. I also wonder if the invasion of the BSD's was as large as the invasion of the Debianer's . Hmm :>

The troll that visited Advogato today prompted some concern that things might go downhill. As much as I enjoy some of the good /. trolls, I'd rather not see them here! There was talk of having a All-Debian weblog/essay site (we do like our weblogs) that would focus on our particular community. I am of the opinion that having more presonal interaction (as opposed to technical) things might run smoother with reduced friction. Alot of us use IRC for that, but that is not reasonable for everyone. I wonder what lilo thinks..

In alot of ways this would be a logical extension of the idea Raphael floated, bring BTS, News, Status, Journal and activities together into one big developer site.

Has anyone asked Raph if he keeps backups? I'd hate to loose these diary entries!

Today we finished the EE55 project report. This is one of those courses where you write lots of reports about the project, but the project itself is not too hard. We implemented a simple neural processor on a FPGA using VHDL. Kinda nifty.

The report itself was actually done completely on Linux using tools like Sketch, Dia, Lyx and Latex. I don't think nearly enough people quite grasp how remarkable these things are - One neat thing is we could take a printout from MaxPlus II, use pstoedit to make it into a sketch file, load it in sketch, add lots of markup and then import into Lyx! The only thing that could not be done is make the final PDF - ghostscript doesn't have LZW support due to the unisys patent.

Debian is leaking people again, some people think it is fear caused by Echelon. Interesting.

Seen on irc (in jest):
<woot> Why the spate of resignations?
<bod> woot: they are afraid of Culus

Oh, the pile of junk known as smartlist has broken again in odd ways - digests are out. Probably take all night before that gets working again. Hatefull Software.

The crypto summary hit the list. I think we will probably implement at least parts of it in a few months, the 'trust evaluator' thingy I envision is not something I am personally going to write, I think.

Rant: Occasionally people email us with a frantic 'Help! Your machine is port scanning me! You bastards!'. Guess what it *always* is? FTP in port mode! Lame. Normally this isn't such a big deal, but sometimes these people harrass our mirrors, their upstreams, our upstreams, etc and it can create a very big mess!

Today I heard a loud grinding noise from the new-maintainer corner, it sounds like someone is oiling the gears.

Lully has been Rescued by Ben Collins - he telephoned API and the situation has been resolved. For those that do not know, lully is the Dual EV6 that was lent to Debian by API - it is quite possibly the most powerful machine we have.

Atipa, who is sponsoring the FTP server upgrades, has them nearly completed which means Saens should be travelling to New York soon. Hopefully going to .5G of ram and 5x9G RAID5 will make all the difference in performance.

It would seem we have hit upon the best solution to implementing crypto signatures in Debian during a late night IRC pow wow. Watch d-devel for details.

Today I was pointed at Advogato by aj. I had heard about it for months but never knew what it was.. I got confused and thought it was a lilo project (Levin, Levien, its 3am!). Oh well - that makes it *less cool* but not fatally so.

Anyhow, I just joined and already I have Journeyer status (in like 10 mins). That may indicate I have too many IRC friends! I certified a bunch of other Debian Wanks that I know from IRC as well. Add to that list later.