Older blog entries for tausq (starting at number 18)

hrm, been a while. Mostly have been busy with stuff at work. On a positive note it looks like lully is finally back (knock on wood). We have the RAID up (25G) and mirror sync is in progress. Seems like that'll finish in another 12-15 hours or so. Gawd debian is really huge :-) For those interested, this is syncing from sourceforge at 200-300kB/s. Not sure if lully's bandwidth qualifies it for a tier-1 Debian mirror, but it's certainly not bad.

Trying to fix the db.debian.org security problem joey reported. Stripping tags seem to be the easiest, but it doesn't solve all problems. Unfortunately, "solving all problems" in the context of supporting all browsers (i.e. no cookies, no javascript) is rather difficult. (At least when your site uses multiple scripts....) The only thing I can think of right now is do redirects on the server side -- i.e. have one script run the other script and pass query strings to it via stdin. Sounds kludgy but should be perfectly safe. Unfortunately I'll be gone for a couple of days starting tomorrow, so I guess i'll just implement the tag-stripping for now.

Oh, and Shaleh, if you are looking for ugly Makefiles, look no further than boot-floppies! :/

ok, more rant time :)

Someone was complaining on the Debian list that he was caught by surprised by the first test cycle, which starts today. I am deeply bothered that people have time to read and respond to flamewars that are several tens of messages long, and can't be bothered to read about release cycles that were posted both to mailing lists and in Joey's weekly newsletter. What does this mean, really?

Still no word from TLS yet. grrr.....

Looks like RedHat decided to redirect the www.cygnus.com site to www.redhat.com. Shame on them.... :-(

Just for fun, I decided to set up an oracle database on one of my computers. Ended up taking most of the day though, because the Oracle installer is so broken on Linux...

Case in point: I went around looking for the sqlplus binary, and all there is in the bin directory was a sqlplus directory. The installer insists that sqlplus is already installed and refuses to let me reinstall it. So I redid the install from the beginning, and when I watched it in another window, I saw it create the sqlplus executable, and then overwrite it with a sqlplus directory. What kind of junk is this?! I've done several Oracle installs on other platforms (albeit an older version) and the installers were not nearly as crappy.

welp, it looks like the root cause of the modconf bug is actually not in modconf itself.... i was wondering why things worked in my testrig (chroot jail) but not when tested in actual potato boot-floppies. I guess if I had set up my test environment more carefully I would have found this sooner.... ah well. Now the bugs are filed, and things that I could fix are fixed, this time I'm pretty confident we've licked the bug for good.

Haven't been in the best of moods likely, I seem to be ticking people off with some of my more terse emails. <sigh>

Haven't posted anything for a few days... um... let's see....

I uploaded a i386 build of boot-floppies last night/this morning. Looks like there's going to be another build tomorrow. Things are moving nicely along. According to aph, all the reported rc bugs are now fixed. There remains some other rc problems, but I trust we'll have those worked out. I am a bit concerned about m68k and arm which are supposed to release with potato. Unlike the other archs (alpha, sparc, powerpc and i386) we don't get active participation of m68k and arm developers on irc so I personally don't have a good feel for where they stand... I've heard they do have somewhat working boot-floppies though.

Looks like I'll be in California for a week in June doing a bit of travelling. Should be fun...

My curry is getting better... :)

I spent some time tonight discussing with several people how to convince companies to sponsor Debian. The fact is, because not many OEMs sell systems bundled with Debian, the project has rather low visibility outside of the technically-savvy clique. IMHO it is definitely in Debian's best interest to more aggregively publicize and promote the project. This will open many more doors both technically and socially for us to make a difference.

<sigh>now i feel like a politician

I have a bunch of other stuff i was going to say, but they are probably best left unsaid ....

As joey says, 6 espies for dhd! He apparently wrote a hello world program for GTK in assembly!

I've been looking at SOAP for a while now. Seems like a neat idea.... there is a mod_soap project in its beginning stages, and I'm working with Chris, who registered the project at SourceForge, to get things going...

One of my dogs, a 14-year old dalmation, had to be put to sleep today :-(. I have two other dogs at home that are about that age. <sob>

<rant>

One of my biggest complaints about the Debian project is that we lack good project management people. Of course, it is to be expected that with 400-odd developers and many to-be-developers, coordination and communication are key. Sadly, no one seems to put a lot of emphasis on this. Our slow release cycle is (IMHO only, of course) a direct consequence of poor communications and coordination. Sure there is tons of work involved, but it can be done much better and more coherently if we had a plan in place rather than everyone going about doing their own thing. Many of the flamewars that erupt regularly on the lists also stem from people not communicating well and arguing before thinking. I'm sure this is nothing new, and many of these assertions have been made before, again and again. Sometimes I wish some of the Debian folks would just take a more draconian approach to the issues that are brought up and deal with them quickly and decisively.

</rant>

Later, when I'm more calm....

Since I didn't feel like doing any work, I decided to go package something :P xerces (XML library from Apache) looks pretty interesting. XML seems to be in the news so much lately, I wonder if it's all hype.... been looking at SOAP a bit. The idea is good, I think, but there seems to be fairly severe performance tradeoffs. Hrm...

well, we got lully back, but without the disks :/ We're supposed to get 2 18G in there, but I wonder how long that will take.