After months of complete silence, ICQ spam has started again. Unfortunately, it is not even possible to put these people on ignore since kopete does seem to have lost its ignore option. Or, at least, I cannot find it any more in the menus. At least, kopete doesn't show a message from a new contact before one has decided whether to add or not to add the new contact. A very good idea. Not.
I decided to query #kopete on freenode where the Ignore button has gone to. But, I didn't get any information. They said "your kopete, 0.11.1, is old. Please update to 0.12, this is the supported version."
WTF? I am using Debian unstable, with has the latest released KDE, and kopete 0.11.1 is part of current kdenetwork. And the developers refuse support for a package which has been built a mere six weeks ago? Have these people lost their grasp with reality? This sooooo ridiculous.
Is there any other useable ICQ client that integrates well with KDE?
Disclaimer: I am not comfortable with technical documents in my native language, German. I generally find German translations of technical stuff clumsy, overly complicated and badly worded. I might have a "special" feeling for the language, but some output of translators is just too bad to tolerate.
For example, I constantly keep stumbling over the german translation of the Debian security team FAQ, which I consider horrendously badly done. Especially the use of the german word "Gutachten", which basically means "opinion" in the legal sense (as the document produced by an expert called by a court of law) to translate "advisory" is a very very bad choice. My toes curl when I read the german version.
In April 2005, I suggested to the German translation team to review the translation of the security team FAQ. I might not have chosen the right wording for that request, but besides a lot of flamage and "the translation is just fine", I received the usual "send a patch". Which I did in April 2005.
No answer. In October 2005, I asked again, and received answer from the translator that my patch was just too intrusive. Well, a bad translation was rewritten, and the bad translation is still being used.
Consequences for me? I'm not going to bother any more about German translations. English is just fine, and when somebody needs a German translation, I'm going to translate the stuff myself. Pointing people to the official German translations is just too embarrassing. A pity.
After over two years without a release, and after having release candidates in experimental since October, aide 0.11 was released a few days ago, and I have just uploaded 0.11-1 to unstable. This time, I even haven't forgotten to use the -v option to svn-buildpackage to have the changelog entries for the package versions uploaded to experimental in the unstable upload notice as well.
aide is the Advanced Intrusion Detection Environment, a program which compares the real state of the file system with a database which holds various file attributes such as inode data and/or cryptographic checksums. In 2005, the Debian maintainer of aide, Mike Markley, has accepted me as a co-maintainer, and since I have done the biggest part of the work in the last months, I have adopted the package as responsible maintainer in January 2006. Mike is still listed in Uploaders and can commit to our alioth svn, though.
Well, after reconfiguring my blog on Debian Planet, a few old articles have shown up again. Most probably the Planet had forgotten about having seen these articles before I left Planet weeks ago.
It isn't so bad, since most of the articles are still current - adduser is still beingn worked on, exim4 needs GnuTLS knowhow desperately, and clamav-data packages are still being built automatically for volatile.
Since leavingplanet.debian.org, I have moved my blog to my own s9y installation on my own server, and am thus able to debug s9y and to make modifications to my installation.
I am therefore returning to Planet, and hope that my blog won't cause any dupes any more.
I have just experienced a nightmare with a watch file. The phpmyadmin upstream dumps all released files onto a single
web page, and they use version numbering a.b.c-foon, which “foo” being beta, rc, or pl, and of couse a.b.c
for a release version.
This has resulted in the following (probably incorrect) watch file
Dank der netten Unterstützung eines Kollegen konnte ich heute WPA mit einem aktuellen Linux unter Connection an einen Netgear-Wireless-LAN-Router testen. Im Gegensatz zum letzten WPA-Versuch vor einem halben Jahr (damals wollte wpasupplicant nicht mit meinem ipw2200-Interface) diesmal mit Erfolg.
Christian Kurz, an ex-colleague of mine and one of my mentors who brought me to the Debian project, has recently retired from the project. Actually, he is probably the DD who has spent the most time in educating me about the project - it was easy for me since I only needed to speak up in the office to reach him. He has been sponsoring my first uploads back in 2001.
Chris, thanks, for doing so much for Debian, and for me. You were a great help, and I'm looking forward to getting bug reports from you. It is a great honor to know you.
There is a HOWTO on the Internet which has the intention to help new users with creating their allround web-administrated exim mail server on Debian basis, using our pre-compiled packages. Unfortunately, this HOWTO starts with disabling all Debian magic in the exim4 configuration, which I personally think is WRONG to suggest to a newbie, and does not quite mention this in the documentation. The result is a big number of support requests in the Debian-specific and generic exim support mailing lists and IRC channels.
The makers of debianhowto.de do not seem to be quite interested in a peaceful co-existence.
On numerous requests, I am temporarily deconfiguring my RSS feed from planet.debian.org. Looks like there is an
incompatibility between p.d.o and serendipity which causes dupes to appear on the planet.
Some people think that the dupes are more annoying than my articles are worth reading. So, I am leaving.
I am one of the guys who builds Linux kernels locally, from vanilla sources. What I don't like in this approach is that I do not get the distribution patches and might miss one of the kernel security patches, since I am way too busy to keep track of LKML any more. otoh, I am kind of a version number junkie when it comes to the kernel, so the Debian kernel sources even in sid frequently are not current enough. So, what I want to have is a compromise between a vanilla kernel and the Debian distribution kernels, built in a way that the images integrate well with Debian.
This article contains a few questions and wishes directed towards the Debian kernel team.
