The Substantially Similar Weblog

Inexplicable oddity of the day: X was hanging after log in. It looked like it got stuck on xrdb.

Inexplicable solution: /dev/null was not readable. (Not only do I not know why /dev/null being unreadable caused the problem, I also don’t know why /dev/null lost its world-readable bit).

There’s a first time for everything, I guess, and this is the first time /dev/null has been the crucial point in fixing my system.

I’m not sure I’d ever be able to explain how to diagnose and fix problems like this to newbies.

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Apologies to any Planet Debian readers for having just monopolized the front page with several stories; I moved a bunch of old stories to a new blog topic, and apparently Planet Debian thinks they are all now new stories, even though they have their old timestamp. If anyone knows a remedy for this, please let me know. (I guess this entry is further compounding my overpresence!)

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At long last, my bug #184361 is fixed and my one line patch has been accepted! This is a happy day for me. I receive dozens of hits per day related to this bug, which prevents users from cancelling their own print jobs without authentication. I’ve also had to respond to a lot of email over the last couple of years helping people rebuild cups with this patch.

My only regret is that my useful linux page is slightly less useful now that my patch has been accepted.

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Spam gets more clever all the time. Yesterday, this· appeared on the debian-mentors list·:

 Date: Wed, 7 Apr 2004 22:36:41 -0700 (PDT) From: rasheed badmus  Subject: free game boy To: debian-mentors@lists.debian.org Hello: I’d like to request for someone to sponsor the following unofficial packages I have: snes9express (1.39-beta) - a GUI frontend for SNES9x (as far as I know this is still an orphaned package); and visualboy advance (a gameboy/gameboy color/gameboy advance emulator for Linux). The said packages can be obtained in this apt source location: anything that u want to send,send it by this below. P.O box 1103 agodi Ibadan, Oyo state, Nigeria. 

Although list members quickly figured out that this was actually spam·, someone made a good point: if spammers start using text from a typical posting to a list in the body of their message, it’s going to be very hard to use content-based filters reliably. I can’t see how, for example, a Bayesian filter would be able to drop the above message in the right bin.

Also, see this fairly technical but fascinating description of how an Internet cafe technician in Dublin caught a spammer red-handed·. The best part is where the spammer tries to eat his USB memory stick so the police won’t get it. (Sorry, this is one instance where my civil liberties instincts are overcome by my harsh justice instincts).

(this is another case where this post would ideally be filed under two categories—”Debian” and perhaps “spam”—which is not yet a category.)

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I just discovered that spoon, aka Ian Truskett, has passed away.

I never met spoon, and had only exchanged a handful of emails with him. I maintain the Debian package of a perl module he wrote, libwww-shorten-perl (or WWW::Shorten). It’s an odd connection to have with someone, and now to realize that they died. I don’t know quite what to do about it.

It also reminds me that there are many small free software projects out there maintained by lone developers (I have several myself), and as the movement ages we need to figure out how to pass on the torch without too much disruption. Maybe we should all have something like a living will, expressing some sense of who should take up our projects when we’re gone.

I’m uploading spoon’s last release of WWW::Shorten into sid now, released just a few weeks before he died. It’s not much of a tribute, I know, but it’s the only thing I can think to do.

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After eight months, I finally completed the Debian New Maintainer process a few minutes ago. I am now ajkessel@debian.org, at least for Debian purposes. I once asked an employer who took 6 months to hire me whether they did hiring by attrition. I think Debian might have a similar process, but it’s probably the only way to weed out people who won’t be sufficiently committed to the project.

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