Rambling around foo

... numpads on laptop keyboards.

Just because a very, very, very restricted segment of the population is into accounting or other jobs needing frequent numeric input, almost all laptop manufacturers feel the stupid urge to place a numpad on laptops with screens over 14''.

Reasons why a numpad on a laptop is a bad idea:

• can lead to health issues: it forces the user to assume a bad position in front of the screen; this can affect the eyes and the backbone; It's bad enough many people have a bad posture in front of the computer as it is, no need to pump up Scoliosis' position in the laundry list of modern day health risks

The numpad forces eye focus and users' hands to be way off center. The touchpad looks as if it was thrown to the side by accident Note how the designer tried to offset the misalignment forced by the numpad by "positioning" the touchpad closer to center, but not in line with the space bar (and the keyboard)

• ugly design: it simply looks ugly; why do people think Apple didn't jump into this stupid bandwagon? Because it's ugly design!

Without numpad the position is almost perfect! The symmetry of the laptop improves on the design. Notice how the touchpad is also centered.

• the numpad is useless for the vast majority of people, and those who need numpads, already use them at desktop (keyboard) or, can buy numpads
• it's more expensive to manufacture (more moving parts, more complex wiring and more expensive materials - plastic is cheaper than plastic+copper+rubber)
• less resilient: more ways to fail, higher risk to get liquids inside
• bad mechanical design: wider keyboard means less distance from the edge to the keyboard, which can mean a more fragile case
• makes the laptop heavier: the plastic or material that covers the keys would be enough to cover the insides; the extra rubber, wiring, support etc, add extra weight
• it kills the opportunity to use the real estate for other useful things (or things which improve the overall design): speakers, volume keys, finger print readers, other special function keys, LEDs or other output devices

What's worse is that most resellers do not have filters for this particular mis-feature, so you can't easily exclude laptops corrupted by this horrendous idea.

So, if you're a laptop designer, please stop putting numpads on laptops.

It will make for better looking laptops and you'll have the opportunity to be the one stating the obvious: numpads are generally useless! Even on desktop keyboards!

The XDG standard says user-specific data files should be written [in] $XDG_DATA_HOME which defaults to $HOME/.local/share.

Appdirs explicitly breaks XDG_DATA_HOME specification and returns a path based on $XDG_CONFIG_HOME, ~/.config/<appname> instead of ~/.local/share/<appname> for user_data_dir. Although the spec is as clear as day, the authors of appdirs say this is 'subject to some interpretation'.

No, it's not, read the damn spec!

http://standards.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/basedir-spec-latest.html



The irony is that initially they got it right, but decided to break the standard some two years ago.

Thank you appdirs authors for ignoring a perfectly clear standard just because you *think* 'in practice, Linux apps tend to store their data in ~/.config/<appname>'.


Dear appdirs authors, if some people break the law it doesn't mean the law is broken. And if *you*think* some apps do not conform to a standard, it does mean *at*all* that you should not, either. More than that, if some applications decide on their own they consider some things config data and you'd classify those as 'application data', that's their business, and is not your place to decide to break the standard for everybody. Standards exist for a reason.

 BTW, your software is worthless to me now and I decided NOT to use it because of this idiotic decision of yours.

Dear HP,

I bought a HP Photosmart C5380 All-inOne multifunctional unit. It is supposed to be a printer, a scanner and a copier, being able to print on paper, CDs, DVDs and photopaper.

First of all I dislike the way you force me to buy new ink cartridges even if there is still ink in the current cartride. I hope somebody reverse-engineers as soon as possible your 364/364XL cartridge chips so I can use my printer at a price lower than that necessary for a tank fill for my car!

Second, even if one of my cartridges is „missing or defective”, the previous one, the empty one which the current one replaced, is definetly OK, so fuck you and your money extrosion schemes.

Third, and the reason for this rant, is that even if ALL the cartridges are empty, I should be able TO USE THE FUCKING SCANNER FUNCTION, since it doesn't depend on the fucking supposedly missing ink! But I can't because you decided that scanning probably needs ink, otherwise I don't understand why would you block the functioning of the whole unit because of some presumed missing ink issue.

I should probably return this device and ask my money back because of this and when they deny this to make a huge scandal about it.

So, HP, FUCK YOU, you well dressed money extortionists!

Dear form creators,

Please stop trying to be smart asses and say an address such as mom+dad@some.fqdn.ok is not OK. As a matter of fact IT IS!


If you want to be shocked, find out that even *@some.other.fqdn.ok is ALSO OK!

And If you really want to be correct and validate addresses against some regexp, there are only some really LOOOOOONG ones which should make it clear that your itsy-bitsy regexp which pretends to match valid email addresses, IS WRONG!


Correct regexps/codes that validate email addresses look something like this or like this. So please stop te nonsense.

Reasonable email addresses can and do contain . and + along many other characters in the local part (i.e. the part before the @).

PLEASE GET THIS THROUGH YOUR THICK SKULLS: THE ONLY RELIABLE WAY TO VALIDATE THE VALIDITY OF AN EMAIL ADDRESS IS TO TRY TO SEND MAIL TO IT.

I have been trying to make a script that should put my laptop into hibernate, run automatically from cron, so it forces me to get to sleep.

I had managed to make it work from a console (tty1), but it seemed as if it refused to work from cron.

During the tests my local mailbox was getting the output of the command, and I stood and watched at this error message for more than an hour trying to figure out what was wrong. I couldn't understand what was wrong:


This option is not available. Please see --help for all possible usages.

This was from zenity and I was starting to suspect that it was failing to expad properly the text variable since it worked with a fixed text.

This was failing:

(...) | /usr/bin/zenity --progress --auto-close --text "'$NOTIFICATION$XMSG'"

And this was working:

(...) | /usr/bin/zenity --progress --auto-close --text "OH!MY!GOD!"


I couldn't figure it out. Until I tried this:

(...) | /usr/bin/zenity --progress --auto-close --text "OH!MY!GOD!îîăăîăî"


And it failed.


God damn! Setting LANG in the script fixed the issue right away!


So, if you ever want zenity to show up from cron dont forget to:

• set DISPLAY
• set LANG

zenity is a pice of shit when it doesn't work. It could have printed the "option which wasn't available".

As a beta tester for the new email application from Nokia, you will have to give your mail account password:



and agree that they will get your data, too [1].




Really unimpressive, Nokia.


[1] I haven't checked the "Nokia privacy policy", but is enough for me to say no, thanks, and start to wonder if they do anything behind my back with the phones they sell.

Dear Nokia,

I really like your phones and I have been using them for about 10 years, but please understand that WPA2-PSK keys can be up to 64 hexdigits long, not 63.

Please fix this issue on the Nokia E51 phone and any other phones on which this might be the same.

Also, please, don't suggest that I should persuade all the admins that use 64 digits long keys to change them and change every client that already uses such a key, just to allow a phone to use the APs they admin.

P.S.: Could somebody confirm/inform that the same issue affects the Nokia E71?

---

Update: The bug was confirmed for E51, E65, E66, E71 devices. I sent a report to the support for Nokia about this.

Update:

It seems that the lenny version (1:1.5.6.3-1) plus some small changes to allow building and running on etch does not have this problem.

The changes include:

* backported to etch
- compile against tcl8.4, instead of tcl8.5
- gtik and git-gui depend on tk8.4, instead of tk8.5
- drop the versioned dep on asciidoc and docbook-xsl

---

It s really nice that git-core is backported to etch, but is kind of hard to convince people to use it when gitk needs tk8.5, which is unavailable in etch.

This was the reason why previosely I made a local backport (1:1.5.6-1~bpo40+1~local) thinking the missing/extra[*] dep was a temporary glitch. According to bug 456423, this should be safe.


Does backports.org have a buildd network? IIRC, it uses the experimental buildd network, but that doesn't explain the desynchronisation of the packages in etch-backports.


Oddly enough, the build now fails on my etch machine during the tests in t9400-git-cvsserver-server.sh (looks like it is not related to the tk8.5 change):

* FAIL 23: cvs update (create new file)
echo testfile1 >testfile1 &&
git add testfile1 &&
git commit -q -m "Add testfile1" &&
git push gitcvs.git >/dev/null &&
cd cvswork &&
GIT_CONFIG="$git_config" cvs -Q update &&
test "$(echo $(grep testfile1 CVS/Entries|cut -d/ -f2,3,5))" = "testfile1/1.1/" &&
diff -q testfile1 ../testfile1

* expecting success: echo line 2 >>testfile1 &&
git add testfile1 &&
git commit -q -m "Append to testfile1" &&
git push gitcvs.git >/dev/null &&
cd cvswork &&
GIT_CONFIG="$git_config" cvs -Q update &&
test "$(echo $(grep testfile1 CVS/Entries|cut -d/ -f2,3,5))" = "testfile1/1.2/" &&
diff -q testfile1 ../testfile1
Counting objects: 5, done.
Compressing objects: 100% (2/2), done.
Writing objects: 100% (3/3), 282 bytes, done.
Total 3 (delta 1), reused 0 (delta 0)
Unpacking objects: 100% (3/3), done.
To gitcvs.git
0879984..e6bd37b master -> master
cvs update: Updating .
cvs update: New directory `master'
* FAIL 24: cvs update (update existing file)
echo line 2 >>testfile1 &&
git add testfile1 &&
git commit -q -m "Append to testfile1" &&
git push gitcvs.git >/dev/null &&
cd cvswork &&
GIT_CONFIG="$git_config" cvs -Q update &&
test "$(echo $(grep testfile1 CVS/Entries|cut -d/ -f2,3,5))" = "testfile1/1.2/" &&
diff -q testfile1 ../testfile1

* checking known breakage:
mkdir test &&
echo >test/empty &&
git add test &&
git commit -q -m "Single Subdirectory" &&
git push gitcvs.git >/dev/null &&
cd cvswork &&
GIT_CONFIG="$git_config" cvs -Q update &&
test ! -d test

Counting objects: 4, done.
Compressing objects: 100% (2/2), done.
Writing objects: 100% (3/3), 388 bytes, done.
Total 3 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0)
Unpacking objects: 100% (3/3), done.
To gitcvs.git
e6bd37b..4a13ee9 master -> master
cvs update: Updating .
cvs update: New directory `master'
* FIXED 25: cvs update w/o -d doesn't create subdir (TODO)

* expecting success: (for dir in A A/B A/B/C A/D E; do
mkdir $dir &&
echo "test file in $dir" >"$dir/file_in_$(echo $dir|sed -e "s#/# #g")" &&
git add $dir;
done) &&
git commit -q -m "deep sub directory structure" &&
git push gitcvs.git >/dev/null &&
cd cvswork &&
GIT_CONFIG="$git_config" cvs -Q update -d &&
(for dir in A A/B A/B/C A/D E; do
filename="file_in_$(echo $dir|sed -e "s#/# #g")" &&
if test "$(echo $(grep -v ^D $dir/CVS/Entries|cut -d/ -f2,3,5))" = "$filename/1.1/" &&
diff -q "$dir/$filename" "../$dir/$filename"; then
:
else
echo >failure
fi
done) &&
test ! -f failure
Counting objects: 13, done.
Compressing objects: 100% (4/4), done.
Writing objects: 100% (12/12), 754 bytes, done.
Total 12 (delta 1), reused 0 (delta 0)
Unpacking objects: 100% (12/12), done.
To gitcvs.git
4a13ee9..f573218 master -> master
cvs update: Updating .
cvs update: New directory `master'
grep: A/CVS/Entries: No such file or directory
grep: A/B/CVS/Entries: No such file or directory
grep: A/B/C/CVS/Entries: No such file or directory
grep: A/D/CVS/Entries: No such file or directory
grep: E/CVS/Entries: No such file or directory
* FAIL 26: cvs update (subdirectories)
(for dir in A A/B A/B/C A/D E; do
mkdir $dir &&
echo "test file in $dir" >"$dir/file_in_$(echo $dir|sed -e "s#/# #g")" &&
git add $dir;
done) &&
git commit -q -m "deep sub directory structure" &&
git push gitcvs.git >/dev/null &&
cd cvswork &&
GIT_CONFIG="$git_config" cvs -Q update -d &&
(for dir in A A/B A/B/C A/D E; do
filename="file_in_$(echo $dir|sed -e "s#/# #g")" &&
if test "$(echo $(grep -v ^D $dir/CVS/Entries|cut -d/ -f2,3,5))" = "$filename/1.1/" &&
diff -q "$dir/$filename" "../$dir/$filename"; then
:
else
echo >failure
fi
done) &&
test ! -f failure

* expecting success: git rm testfile1 &&
git commit -q -m "Remove testfile1" &&
git push gitcvs.git >/dev/null &&
cd cvswork &&
GIT_CONFIG="$git_config" cvs -Q update &&
test -z "$(grep testfile1 CVS/Entries)" &&
test ! -f testfile1
rm 'testfile1'
Counting objects: 3, done.
Compressing objects: 100% (2/2), done.
Writing objects: 100% (2/2), 233 bytes, done.
Total 2 (delta 1), reused 0 (delta 0)
Unpacking objects: 100% (2/2), done.
To gitcvs.git
f573218..2ed3834 master -> master
cvs update: Updating .
cvs update: New directory `master'
* ok 27: cvs update (delete file)

* expecting success: echo readded testfile >testfile1 &&
git add testfile1 &&
git commit -q -m "Re-Add testfile1" &&
git push gitcvs.git >/dev/null &&
cd cvswork &&
GIT_CONFIG="$git_config" cvs -Q update &&
test "$(echo $(grep testfile1 CVS/Entries|cut -d/ -f2,3,5))" = "testfile1/1.4/" &&
diff -q testfile1 ../testfile1
Counting objects: 4, done.
Compressing objects: 100% (2/2), done.
Writing objects: 100% (3/3), 300 bytes, done.
Total 3 (delta 1), reused 0 (delta 0)
Unpacking objects: 100% (3/3), done.
To gitcvs.git
2ed3834..3f3e927 master -> master
cvs update: Updating .
cvs update: New directory `master'
* FAIL 28: cvs update (re-add deleted file)
echo readded testfile >testfile1 &&
git add testfile1 &&
git commit -q -m "Re-Add testfile1" &&
git push gitcvs.git >/dev/null &&
cd cvswork &&
GIT_CONFIG="$git_config" cvs -Q update &&
test "$(echo $(grep testfile1 CVS/Entries|cut -d/ -f2,3,5))" = "testfile1/1.4/" &&
diff -q testfile1 ../testfile1

* expecting success: echo Line 0 >expected &&
for i in 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
do
echo Line $i >>merge
echo Line $i >>expected
done &&
echo Line 8 >>expected &&
git add merge &&
git commit -q -m "Merge test (pre-merge)" &&
git push gitcvs.git >/dev/null &&
cd cvswork &&
GIT_CONFIG="$git_config" cvs -Q update &&
test "$(echo $(grep merge CVS/Entries|cut -d/ -f2,3,5))" = "merge/1.1/" &&
diff -q merge ../merge &&
( echo Line 0; cat merge ) >merge.tmp &&
mv merge.tmp merge &&
cd "$WORKDIR" &&
echo Line 8 >>merge &&
git add merge &&
git commit -q -m "Merge test (merge)" &&
git push gitcvs.git >/dev/null &&
cd cvswork &&
sleep 1 && touch merge &&
GIT_CONFIG="$git_config" cvs -Q update &&
diff -q merge ../expected
Counting objects: 4, done.
Compressing objects: 100% (2/2), done.
Writing objects: 100% (3/3), 302 bytes, done.
Total 3 (delta 1), reused 0 (delta 0)
Unpacking objects: 100% (3/3), done.
To gitcvs.git
3f3e927..28c1b4a master -> master
cvs update: Updating .
cvs update: New directory `master'
* FAIL 29: cvs update (merge)
echo Line 0 >expected &&
for i in 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
do
echo Line $i >>merge
echo Line $i >>expected
done &&
echo Line 8 >>expected &&
git add merge &&
git commit -q -m "Merge test (pre-merge)" &&
git push gitcvs.git >/dev/null &&
cd cvswork &&
GIT_CONFIG="$git_config" cvs -Q update &&
test "$(echo $(grep merge CVS/Entries|cut -d/ -f2,3,5))" = "merge/1.1/" &&
diff -q merge ../merge &&
( echo Line 0; cat merge ) >merge.tmp &&
mv merge.tmp merge &&
cd "$WORKDIR" &&
echo Line 8 >>merge &&
git add merge &&
git commit -q -m "Merge test (merge)" &&
git push gitcvs.git >/dev/null &&
cd cvswork &&
sleep 1 && touch merge &&
GIT_CONFIG="$git_config" cvs -Q update &&
diff -q merge ../expected

* expecting success: ( echo LINE 0; cat merge ) >merge.tmp &&
mv merge.tmp merge &&
git add merge &&
git commit -q -m "Merge test (conflict)" &&
git push gitcvs.git >/dev/null &&
cd cvswork &&
GIT_CONFIG="$git_config" cvs -Q update &&
diff -q merge ../expected.C
Counting objects: 5, done.
Compressing objects: 100% (3/3), done.
Writing objects: 100% (3/3), 303 bytes, done.
Total 3 (delta 1), reused 0 (delta 0)
Unpacking objects: 100% (3/3), done.
To gitcvs.git
28c1b4a..1f0f9c8 master -> master
cvs update: Updating .
cvs update: New directory `master'
diff: merge: No such file or directory
* FAIL 30: cvs update (conflict merge)
( echo LINE 0; cat merge ) >merge.tmp &&
mv merge.tmp merge &&
git add merge &&
git commit -q -m "Merge test (conflict)" &&
git push gitcvs.git >/dev/null &&
cd cvswork &&
GIT_CONFIG="$git_config" cvs -Q update &&
diff -q merge ../expected.C

* expecting success: cd cvswork &&
GIT_CONFIG="$git_config" cvs -Q update -C &&
diff -q merge ../merge
cvs update: Updating .
cvs update: New directory `master'
diff: merge: No such file or directory
* FAIL 31: cvs update (-C)
cd cvswork &&
GIT_CONFIG="$git_config" cvs -Q update -C &&
diff -q merge ../merge

* expecting success: echo Line 9 >>merge &&
cp merge cvswork/merge &&
git add merge &&
git commit -q -m "Merge test (no-op)" &&
git push gitcvs.git >/dev/null &&
cd cvswork &&
sleep 1 && touch merge &&
GIT_CONFIG="$git_config" cvs -Q update &&
diff -q merge ../merge
Counting objects: 5, done.
Compressing objects: 100% (3/3), done.
Writing objects: 100% (3/3), 303 bytes, done.
Total 3 (delta 1), reused 0 (delta 0)
Unpacking objects: 100% (3/3), done.
To gitcvs.git
1f0f9c8..e6c5fc1 master -> master
cvs update: Updating .
cvs update: New directory `master'
* ok 32: cvs update (merge no-op)

* expecting success:
touch really-empty &&
echo Line 1 > no-lf &&
echo -n Line 2 >> no-lf &&
git add really-empty no-lf &&
git commit -q -m "Update -p test" &&
git push gitcvs.git >/dev/null &&
cd cvswork &&
GIT_CONFIG="$git_config" cvs update &&
rm -f failures &&
for i in merge no-lf empty really-empty; do
GIT_CONFIG="$git_config" cvs update -p "$i" >$i.out
diff $i.out ../$i >>failures 2>&1
done &&
test -z "$(cat failures)"

Counting objects: 4, done.
Compressing objects: 100% (2/2), done.
Writing objects: 100% (3/3), 305 bytes, done.
Total 3 (delta 1), reused 0 (delta 0)
Unpacking objects: 100% (3/3), done.
To gitcvs.git
e6c5fc1..4d0f85b master -> master
cvs update: Updating .
cvs update: New directory `master'
cvs update: Updating .
cvs update: New directory `master'
cvs update: Updating .
cvs update: New directory `master'
cvs update: Updating .
cvs update: New directory `master'
cvs update: Updating .
cvs update: New directory `master'
* FAIL 33: cvs update (-p)

touch really-empty &&
echo Line 1 > no-lf &&
echo -n Line 2 >> no-lf &&
git add really-empty no-lf &&
git commit -q -m "Update -p test" &&
git push gitcvs.git >/dev/null &&
cd cvswork &&
GIT_CONFIG="$git_config" cvs update &&
rm -f failures &&
for i in merge no-lf empty really-empty; do
GIT_CONFIG="$git_config" cvs update -p "$i" >$i.out
diff $i.out ../$i >>failures 2>&1
done &&
test -z "$(cat failures)"


* expecting success:
mkdir status.dir &&
echo Line > status.dir/status.file &&
echo Line > status.file &&
git add status.dir status.file &&
git commit -q -m "Status test" &&
git push gitcvs.git >/dev/null &&
cd cvswork &&
GIT_CONFIG="$git_config" cvs update &&
GIT_CONFIG="$git_config" cvs status | grep "^File: status.file" >../out &&
test $(wc -l <../out) = 2 Counting objects: 5, done. Compressing objects: 100% (2/2), done. Writing objects: 100% (4/4), 366 bytes, done. Total 4 (delta 1), reused 0 (delta 0) Unpacking objects: 100% (4/4), done. To gitcvs.git 4d0f85b..a146cf3 master -> master
cvs update: Updating .
cvs update: New directory `master'
Invalid module '' at /home/eddy/usr/src/tools/git-backports/1.5.6.3-1~bpo40+3~local/git-core-1.5.6.3/t/../git-cvsserver line 2895, line 18.
cvs [status aborted]: end of file from server (consult above messages if any)
* FAIL 34: cvs status

mkdir status.dir &&
echo Line > status.dir/status.file &&
echo Line > status.file &&
git add status.dir status.file &&
git commit -q -m "Status test" &&
git push gitcvs.git >/dev/null &&
cd cvswork &&
GIT_CONFIG="$git_config" cvs update &&
GIT_CONFIG="$git_config" cvs status | grep "^File: status.file" >../out &&
test $(wc -l <../out) = 2 * expecting success: cd cvswork && GIT_CONFIG="$git_config" cvs status -l | grep "^File: status.file" >../out &&
test $(wc -l <../out) = 1 Invalid module '' at /home/eddy/usr/src/tools/git-backports/1.5.6.3-1~bpo40+3~local/git-core-1.5.6.3/t/../git-cvsserver line 2895, line 19.
cvs [status aborted]: end of file from server (consult above messages if any)
* FAIL 35: cvs status (nonrecursive)

cd cvswork &&
GIT_CONFIG="$git_config" cvs status -l | grep "^File: status.file" >../out &&
test $(wc -l <../out) = 1 * expecting success: cd cvswork && GIT_CONFIG="$git_config" cvs status | grep ^File: >../out &&
! grep / <../out Invalid module '' at /home/eddy/usr/src/tools/git-backports/1.5.6.3-1~bpo40+3~local/git-core-1.5.6.3/t/../git-cvsserver line 2895, line 18.
cvs [status aborted]: end of file from server (consult above messages if any)
* FAIL 36: cvs status (no subdirs in header)

cd cvswork &&
GIT_CONFIG="$git_config" cvs status | grep ^File: >../out &&
! grep / <../out * fixed 1 known breakage(s) * failed 11 among 36 test(s) make[2]: *** [t9400-git-cvsserver-server.sh] Error 1 make[2]: Leaving directory `/home/eddy/usr/src/tools/git-backports/1.5.6.3-1~bpo40+3~local/git-core-1.5.6.3/t' make[1]: *** [test] Error 2 make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/eddy/usr/src/tools/git-backports/1.5.6.3-1~bpo40+3~local/git-core-1.5.6.3' make: *** [build-arch-stamp] Error 2


[*] depends on how you look at it

Some of you might have noticed that in the recent weeks I wasn't active at all online. This was because I was on a vacation in Italy. On the way back I was eager to write about my experiences, but after entering Romania, I found out that may parents had been involved in a motorcycle accident due to a careless driver.

The accident took place on the second day of the Orthodox Easter (on the 28th of April)[1] while my parents were coming back from my sister's, just 20 km away from my home town, Caracal, in a village called Zănoaga. There, a Daewoo Cielo was parked on the left side of the road[2], facing the direction towards Caracal. The driver decided that it was a good idea to turn his vehicle and, according to his declaration, instead of looking himself if there was anything comming, he asked a passenger if there were any cars comming.

Since a motorcycle is not a car, I guess the passenger thought it was OK to answer "no".

So the driver simply started his maneuver and managed to occupy the entire right lane, according to the accident schematics (I saw the official police schematics of the accident site with my own eyes). There were only 30 cm from the front most point of the car to the ditch on the right side of road, while the rear wheels were on the mark indicating the axis of the road. That left only 2 meters free on the opposite lane out of the 6.60 meters wide road, so there was no way for my father (driving the motorcycle) to avoid the collision, in spite of the fact he was travelling at about 40-50 km/h[3], within the legal speed limit (50 km/h).

My father barely had enough time to avoid the central pillar and aim for the rear right door of the car, obviously, a safer place to hit. Still, this wasn't enough to keep my mother on the motorcycle, a safer place for her than anywhere on the road.

My mother was projected over my father and over the car, and, luckily, landed on the side of the road, between the asphalt and the ditch, on an area covered with grass. She landed straight onto her head (the helmet protected her really well), and the shock of the landing propagated along the spine, resulting in the fracture of the L1 vertebra. She also got a fissure in the right clavicula, but that should already be OK now.

My father managed to remain on the motorcycle, but the impact was violent enough that he managed to bend the gas tank and has two huge bruises on the inside of his thighs (one for each leg). He also accuses pains in his shoulders and the lower end of the spine (unfortunately he "managed" not to do the medical investigations after the accident), but I hope all of these will pass soon and will have no ill effects. Also, out of sheer luck, at that time, my father was wearing a full-face helmet, contrary to his habit of earing an open-face helmet; due to this, his face was protected and suffered no harm, while the chin of the helmet broke after the impact with the motorcycle windshield. Also some deep scratches starting from the half of the helmet windshield up to the top of the helmet were the signs of a (probably second) violent impact with the motorcycle windshield.



So, the next time you are on the wheel, please look out for motorcycles, too. Motorcycles do exist on the road!

Also, I advice anyone driving a motorcycle to wear good protection equipment like a full-face helmet, jacket, pants, boots, gloves, etc. These helped a lot my parents, and will help you too, if, God forbid, you are involved in an accident.


My mother is in a cast that covers her from hips to shoulders to help with the fracture recovery and also wears a collar (just for safety reasons since she is suffering of spondyloses).
My father is able to walk (with some pain) and seems not to have any injures (I will take him for a close investigation some time soon in spite of his stubbornness).



[1] worrying for us (me and my future spouse), my parents didn't told us and waited for us to return to Romania
[2] in Romania the vehicles travel on the right side of the road, so the driver also drove on opposite lane, a fact which, according to the law, is punished with the suspension of the driving license
[3] he speed was confirmed by the measurements done by the police

I was recently forced to face once more the limitations and quirks of rpm. This is more painful, when looking at a more capable system like .deb.

When building a .deb package, the debian/rules file is pretty much the heart of all things happening, with debian/control and debian/changelog as the lungs and the liver(? maybe) .

Having different files for the maintainer scripts makes possible things like automatic (but repetitive) generation/modifications of those scripts. This can be useful in some situations when the postinst should do stuff depending on the current contents of the released upstream source (sorry, I know I am being vague, but I can't detail too much). The source package is then generated and the resulting package can be rebuilt 1000 times and the resulting postinst will not be different for a given release. But this is always done in the same way, no matter the upstream version.

Fatality one - the spec is fixed, saint, but still can be altered... still, not in due time

So the basic idea is to have postinst.in as a source for postinst, which is created during the configure stage and later removed on clean. This is possible and works on deb.

Try the same on rpm and you will fail. This is because, although the spec file supports file inclusions, the altered files are merged into the spec right at the beginning of the build process, and you end up with no or an outdated postinst. A later rebuild of the same package would do the trick, but that is wrong for more than one reason.

Fatality two - why fatality one was met

All of this is made in order to overcome yet another rpm limitation: rpm can't assist too much on upgrades; you can't simply upgrade packages properly from one version to another, because rpm doesn't have the notion of letting the scripts know which version is installed over which; it only tells that it is an upgrade or not.

This has lead some people believe rpm isn't able to upgrade at all. Glad to tell them they're wrong (still rpm sucks and is brain dead).

Fatality three - why rpm based system fail to have upgrade support today

Want another RPM limitation? RPM has this brain dead idea that on upgrade the "proper" order and way to call the maintainer script(lets) is:

• new-preinst 2
• new-postinst 2
• old-prerm 1
• old-postrm 1

The numbers 1 and 2 are literally what is passed to the scripts and mean "the number of the installed versions of the same package that will exist after the current operation finishes". No versions of any kind, no other parameters, no rollback, no nothing, just 1 or 2.

And by letting the scripts of the old version run AFTER the scripts of the new one means that you have to explicitly prepare the packages for a later upgrade support (and the best idea is to do NOTHING in the old prerm and postrm scripts on upgrades, since nobody is clairvoyant to see what would be the right course of action for upgrade in future releases).

More bad ideas from the rpm land (glad not to be there)

In somewhat related news, the fedora people are discussing now around the rejection of being able to have package names contain non-ascii characters, characters like kanji, kanas, cyrillic characters or any other characters. Even if I am pro-l10n, this wreaks of bad idea scent from a mile afar.

They aren't probably aware that even unicode is broken (if you see the same glyphs in the comparison table, that is proof unicode is broken) but that is their decision and I am glad I am not in that lost land.

When people say "lightweight branches":

• In git lingo, most likely they will think about the fact that you don't need a different directory to switch to a different branch.
• In subversion lingo, they will probably mean that the cost of making a branch in the repository does not impose an expensive operation
• In bzr lingo, it seems they mean a repository with short history (aka shallow copy, for most other people)
• it seems that mercurial refers to git's meaning as "named branches" (not sure about this); not sure if mercurial documentation refers to anything else as "lightweight branches"

Export means:

• for subversion: to create a working copy without any meta information
• for mercurial/hg: "The act of exporting a changeset generates an augmented patch file that describes the change."
• for git, it seems to be a useless 'cp -r' operation

There are several other differences in the VCS/SCM lingo paralel uses, if you want to look closely, but these are enough for now...

No wonder we have communication problems and people don't grasp the power of a new tool when it changes the meaning of previously used terms.

First I want to say shame on you for plain out laying. I had the laptop in service once, not twice. That was for the battery. The HDD is fine and I never had hardware issues with it. Now I am writing from that laptop, is that proof good enough for you?

Now I understand how rumors start.

What I don't understand what would motivate anyone to do this?

Oh, and you're welcome for the free advertising.

Today I went for the second time[1] to emag's service[2] to have my laptop's[*] battery replaced since it was powering the laptop only for 15 (yes, fifteen) minutes. This after only 11 months since I bought the laptop[**].

I didn't observed this drastic reduction until recently (last time I remember was about 1 hour and 50 minutes, back in August), because I wasn't so mobile since August.

To make the long story short, I had to: wait, wait, argue, wait, argue, talk normally to the manager, wait, wait, argue, argue, observe sheer contempt from the personal when I asked again for the manager, talked normally to the manager, left after 4-5 hours wasted (+2 yesterday).

All this just to be able to keep my data safe by holding on to my hard disk, since they insisted they wanted the whole laptop[3], and making them write on the warranty receipt they were the ones who pulled out the HDD (I might be over-cautious/paranoid, but I wouldn't trust emag with the garbage bin).


Now I am on a forced vacation away from Debian for an undefined time, although I might be able to send mails and do make small patches from work.


Hey, emag:

• teach your employees to behave properly like the manager did! (I don't remember her name, sorry, I'm really bad with names)
• you'd better redirect clients with broken hardware to the actual services instead of acting like a useless buffer when is clear you're over your heads
• simple and obvious defects like it was in my case (I could have proven it in exactly 15 minutes) should be handled with minimum impact for the client, for example, keep the faulty battery, but let me take home the laptop
  

[*] Dell Inspiron 6400 / E1505
[**] when I think the long battery time was one of the most important points, it looks ridiculous now to have such a bad degradation in such a short time

[1] first was yesterday, but due to some support person's incompetence I had to postpone - I asked two questions, they gave me two wrong answers
[2] after all this I wouldn't recommend emag to anyone
[3] You might ask why would they need the whole laptop for a clear 'battery is broken' complaint? Apparently "the service can't test the batteries without the laptop". They probably have neither any spare laptops nor dedicated equipment to measure batteries.

... and ignored a troll. I feel so good now.

Thursday evening, when I came from work I found my nslu2 not working. It is/was a router and a local mirror. I tried to understand what's going on, but I couldn't. Everything looked fine, except that it did not resolve any addresses and the ping to my provider was not giving any results.

I tried to restart dnsmasq, although it seemed it was running fine, and then, in a desperate gesture (after trying to understand what was going on) I thought of restarting networking. I got locked on the outside and was forced to restart the system.

Everything looked to come back to normal. Since it was late, I set myself to investigate the next morning what happened. But yesterday morning, the network was again down and the slug was inaccessible.

Since the only way to restore sanity in such a situation (because I don't have a serial console on the slug) was to reset and hope for the best, I did that.


The slug didn't start anymore. It seemed to cycle through boot -> reset -> reboot. I tried to see what was going on and connected the hard disk to my laptop. The filesystem was clean, although /var/log/boot.0 was a directory (and that directory had the same content as /var/lib/dpkg/info). I manually removed that, but that didn't make the slug boot.


It seems my slug is kind of dead.

Now I would like to know if is there any way to do remotely what flash-kernel does from within debian.

I am stumbling again on the problem of not being able to install libgnome-dev and libsvn-dev side by side, namely bug #429025.

For some reason, I was under the impression that the bug was fixed... but apr-util is behind :-(.

Now in dpkg I found this:

dpkg: no, cannot proceed with %s (--auto-deconfigure will help):\n
%s

Before there was something like:

dpkg: no, cannot remove %s (--auto-deconfigure will help):\n
%s


This is going backwards wrt to i18n since one of the basic rules of i18n is to have complete sentences, while keeping the verb covered behind some parameter is not a good way of doing that.

Dear lazyweb, is this a bug? Should I fill this?

$ sh -x rpm/build_latest_srpm foo 2>&1 | grep -E '\'
+ alias 'rpmbuilder=rpmbuild --define "_topdir /tmp/rpmbuildarea/foo/redhat"'
+ rpmbuild --define '_topdir /tmp/rpmbuildarea/foo/redhat' -bs foo.spec
$ sh rpm/build_latest_srpm foo 2>&1 | grep -E '\'

$ bash -x rpm/build_latest_srpm foo 2>&1 | grep -E '\'
+ alias 'rpmbuilder=rpmbuild --define "_topdir /tmp/rpmbuildarea/foo/redhat"'
+ rpmbuilder -bs foo.spec
rpm/build_latest_srpm: line 46: rpmbuilder: command not found
$ bash rpm/build_latest_srpm foo 2>&1 | grep -E '\'
rpm/build_latest_srpm: line 46: rpmbuilder: command not found

$ rpm/build_latest_srpm foo 2>&1 | grep -E '\'
rpm/build_latest_srpm: line 46: rpmbuilder: command not found

$ type sh
sh is hashed (/bin/sh)
$ type bash
bash is hashed (/bin/bash)
$ ll /bin/*sh
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 677184 2006-12-11 23:20 /bin/bash
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 21 2006-08-17 21:05 /bin/csh -> /etc/alternatives/csh
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 80200 2007-02-02 09:34 /bin/dash
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 4 2006-12-19 15:02 /bin/rbash -> bash
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 4 2006-12-19 15:02 /bin/sh -> bash
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 13 2006-08-17 20:58 /bin/tcsh -> /usr/bin/tcsh


The script has /bin/bash in the shabang.

I tried to reproduce with another simpler script, and I observed that the issue happens when the script is processed by bash. With a /bin/sh shabang, it didn't since the command processing the script was sh, also all sh commands were ok.

I also suspect that it has to do with this paragraph from the bash manual:


Aliases are not expanded when the shell is not interactive, unless the expand_aliases shell option is set using
shopt (see the description of shopt under SHELL BUILTIN COMMANDS below).


... but different and (I would say) worse behaviour than the sh invocation should not happen.

The test script follows:

#!/bin/bash

alias rpm-build="echo \"I:\""
alias dpkg-select="dpkg --get-selections \"ls\*\""

echo "alias1:" && rpm-build test
echo "alias2:" && dpkg-select

Test and enjoy. Before you ask, yes, I use bash functionality.

Update: Also using set -i just before the alias definition and keeping it during the expansion does not help.

I have a few questions:

• when you write your new piece of code, be it in bash, C, python, haskell, ruby, perl or whever langauge, do you think about possible future uses? do you care about those when designing it?
• do you take good care to make sure you can expand your data containers at a later point in ways which you didn't envisioned initially?
• are you able to implement a feature which is cool 2 year after your application is in production? how about another feature? how many until you realize you can't anymore or you need to redesign and rewrite the whole thing?
• do you care if your interface remains compatible?
• how easy is it for you to jump into somebody else's code and fix it to do what you want? ...without breaking the original functionality?

If you are programmer you will know what you should have answered...

Update: this post was tagged as "rant" and the rant was about a badly written and too rigid code; this was not about trying to tell the future and implementing now what you might need later