Older blog entries for mhatta (starting at number 18)

MIAU founded

Some of you might notice that I've been somewhat inactive as a Debian developer or hacker in general for a while. There were several reasons, but at least one of my free-time-suckers these days has been MIAU (Movements for the Internet Active Users). I'm one of the founders, and recently we held the kick-off press conference and are steadily gaining supporters. Oh yeah, we know the acronym is quite awkward...we simply love that sound (in case you don't get, see our symbol mark).

Our organization is intended to be a Japanese counterpart of EFF or ORG, and possibly includes some elements of what Prof. Lessig & Co. are doing in the U.S. We would like to defend our freedom and build/preserve the nurturing environment for innovation, especially in the Net. We would also like to be a political voice for Japanese Internet users. Currently we are focusing to fight with (IMHO) ill-conceived Japanese copyright "reform"s, such as extending the copyright term to 70 years or making downloading (in a sense) questionably-uploaded materials (like BitTorrent downloads) illegal. In case you want to know what's going on in the Japanese copyright war front now, I recommend this recently-published Techdirt article: Japan Is The Latest Country To Explore Copyright Term Extension.

Unfortunately, for the time being, most of the MIAU Web contents are available only in Japanese. Yes, *I* got to translate the MIAU articles into English but need some more time...and I should admit MIAU as an organization is still tottering in many aspects. I'm not sure how we can gain greater momentum. If you have some experience to run this kind of initiative in your countries, please share your experience with us.

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Syndicated 2007-11-13 08:01:00 from A Crutch for the Crab

ghostscript 8.61.dfsg.1~svn8187-1 uploaded

So, brand-new packages are now in the NEW queue. Sorry it took soooo long time(my life has been hectic these days). I guess it might take another long time to make them entered into the archive, so I give you some apt-line:

deb http://people.debian.org/~mhatta/debian/ghostscript/ ./
deb-src http://people.debian.org/~mhatta/debian/ghostscript/ ./
Tell me if something goes wrong in the process of transition. One of the reason I was reluctant to upload them (while Ubuntu has already did almost 2 month ago) was, the CJKV support in GPL Ghostscript 8.60 is notably regressed from the level of ESP Ghostscript 8.15.1. Seems Till Kamppeter once merged some key CJKV patches into the mainline SVN repository, but later they were revoked. Until recently, I didn't realize why Till used a rather peculiar old SVN snapshot 8187 for Ubuntu (the current SVN revision is something like 8249), but now it's clear for me. I could choose to apply those revoked patches to the 8.60 source by myself, but as you might know I'm a lazy bastard, so I simply follow the Ubuntu path, with some Debian-specific tweaks. Well, let's hope this issue will be fixed before the official 8.61 is released...or I'll try, hopefully.

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Syndicated 2007-09-25 01:18:00 from A Crutch for the Crab

CAPTCHA installed

I got fed up with comment spams, so finally I made some time and installed Bill Ward's excellent Captcha plugin for Blosxom. Seems it works nicely. I'd better migrate PyBlosxom or such, maybe someday...

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Syndicated 2007-09-24 13:58:00 from A Crutch for the Crab

The SVN snapshot gs-gpl package is available

Kevin Shanahan asked me to provide gs-gpl package based on the bleeding edge Subversion snapshot. Some of you might want it for your own enjoyment, too. At least I wanted it, since the merger of gs-esp/gs-gpl is now going on in the upstream (Kudos to Till Kampetter). So here it is. Add the following to your /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://people.debian.org/~mhatta/debian/gs-gpl ./
deb-src http://people.debian.org/~mhatta/debian/gs-gpl ./

Note that this is really FOR TESTING PURPOSE ONLY, and you should use this with caution. Or, you might waste not only your precious time but also equally precious inks and papers ;-) Needless to say, do not report any bugs to the Debian BTS.

Also, I'll use this repositry to test the reorganization of Debian Ghostscript packages. Currently I plan to divide the current sumo gs-gpl package into several subpackages (like gs-gpl-x, gs-gpl-doc, libgs and so on). So, maybe I'll blow up and some dependency tangling or such will happen. You are warned.

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Syndicated 2007-05-05 13:07:00 from A Crutch for the Crab

The SVN snapshot gs-gpl package is available

Kevin Shanahan asked me to provide gs-gpl package based on the bleeding edge Subversion snapshot. Some of you might want it for your own enjoyment, too. At least I wanted it, since the merger of gs-esp/gs-gpl is now going on in the upstream (Kudos to Till Kampetter). So here it is. Add the following to your /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://people.debian.org/~mhatta/debian/gs-gpl ./ deb-src http://people.debian.org/~mhatta/debian/gs-gpl ./

Note that this is really FOR TESTING PURPOSE ONLY, and you should use this with caution. Or, you might waste not only your precious time but also equally precious inks and papers ;-) Needless to say, do not report any bugs to the Debian BTS.

Also, I'll use this repositry to test the reorganization of Debian Ghostscript packages. Currently I plan to divide the current sumo gs-gpl package into several subpackages (like gs-gpl-x, gs-gpl-doc, libgs and so on). So, maybe I'll blow up and some dependency tangling or such will happen. You are warned.

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Syndicated 2007-05-05 13:05:00 from A Crutch for the Crab

GNU a2ps 4.13c-rc5 released

ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/a2ps/a2ps-4.13c-rc5.tar.gz

Yet another RC release. I think now it builds on *BSD (including MacOS X) nicely. Enjoy.

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Syndicated 2007-04-27 04:12:00 from A Crutch for the Crab

abiword 2.4.6-2 uploaded

libgucharmap4 is gone, so I rebuilt this to link with newer libgucharmap6. It was a straight rebuild.

I guess I should investigate other bugs, but don't have enough time...

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Syndicated 2007-04-27 04:00:00 from A Crutch for the Crab

GNU a2ps 4.13c-rc4 released

GNU sysadmins gave me permission some days ago, so I uploaded my work to alpha.gnu.org for the first time. You can obtain it from:

ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/a2ps/a2ps-4.13c-rc4.tar.gz

I uploaded new Debian a2ps package to ftp-master, too. Let's see what buildds are gonna say...

BTW, it seems Gentoo people have already "released" 4.13c (for example, look here) somehow. Hmm...I might have to number the new one as 4.14.

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Syndicated 2007-04-22 13:49:00 from A Crutch for the Crab

R.I.P. Andrew Hill

Jazz pianist/composer extraordinaire Andrew Hill died yesterday. He was 75 years old.

I love his music. I even gave a lecture on his music several years ago.

I have a great regard for someone who follows his own logic, challenges the mainstream mode AND achieve artistic excellence. In many cases, so-called "avan-garde" are hard trying to do things different, but their results are not impressive aesthetically. Hill achieved both. And boy, he swang hard when he wanted. I'll miss him.

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Syndicated 2007-04-21 06:07:00 from A Crutch for the Crab

R.I.P. Andrew Hill

Jazz pianist/composer extraordinare Andrew Hill died yesterday. He was 75 years old.

I love his music. I even gave a lecture on his music several years ago.

I have a great regard for someone who follows his own logic, challenges the mainstream mode AND achieve artistic excellence. In many cases, so-called "avan-garde" are hard trying to do things different, but their results are not impressive aesthetically. Hill achieved both. And boy, he swang hard when he wanted. I'll miss him.

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Syndicated 2007-04-21 06:01:00 from A Crutch for the Crab

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