Philipp Kern asks about mail-based tracking systems. Even though he specifically says “no” to RT, I would recommend it. The source is very hackable and making up commands for changing ticket properties is easy.

Jose Carlos Garcia Sogo writes that I’ve not put a licence on my fakecat plugin for pyblosxom. This has now been fixed. Also, please do send me patches even in the cases where I have forgotten to licence it appropriately.

As Benjamin Drieu noted, ccache is a wonderful tool. He complains about the configuration needed, which in the Debian package is really, really small. Just do PATH=/usr/lib/ccache:$PATH in your .bashrc or .zshrc and it will be used for all compilations. Very useful and less cumbersome than creating the links in ~.

Ian Murdock writes a bit about OpenSolaris and the Nexenta people who are creating a GNU+Solaris based OS. He writes a bit about the fact that the Debian community hasn’t exactly embraced their efforts, but have rather been rude to them. A small thing caught my eye though:

It seems to me the argument that linking a GPL application to a CDDL library and asserting that that somehow makes the library a derivative work of the application is, to say the least, a stretch—not to mention the fact that we’re talking about libc here, a library with a highly standard interface that’s been implemented any number of times and, heck, that’s even older than the GPL itself.

It’s not so much that you make the library a derivative work of the application as that you are making the application (that is, the binary /usr/bin/dpkg or whatever you are linking) a derivative of both the dpkg source code as well as the libc binary) and this is problematic when the libc in question is under the CDDL and dpkg is under the GPL.

which is what was shipped with it, and I think there might be a newer firmware out there which fixes some of the issues.

I just got my Nokia 770 and I must say it’s a nice device. Some initial experiences are:

• No pen calibration on bootup. Nice and cool. All other handheld devices have that, but the 770 seems to work just fine without it. Kudos.

• It’s not a PDA. No PIM thingy built-in, the device asks for its own name, but not the user’s.

• It doesn’t show that it’s running Linux. I find this quite cool, as it shows that you can produce devices which run Linux and feel like they’re targetted at non-geeks.

• The device feels sluggish and lacks feedback when doing stuff, whether it be closing an application, launching an application and so on. This makes it sometimes hard to know whether it has caught your action or not. Also, sometimes menus pop up for half a second, then goes away.

• The 770 has support for multiple applications at the same time. Works well enough, I guess.

• I want something to protect the screen, or I know it will develop scratches from the pencil over time. I guess I can get something from a shop in not too long.

• When putting the lid on, it’s quite neat that it turns off the screen the moment the lid closes. I’ll have to investigate how they do this. Hub thought it might be a magnet. Getting an X-Ray of the whole device would probably show.

• The feed reader needs work, I want to mark stuff as “read” explicitly and not just have a rolling list of news where I need to know where I was.

• Reduced-size MMC cards appear to be cheap. Around 30€ for a 512MB card which should be enough for a fair amount of music. I need to find an Ogg Vorbis player as well.

All in all, mostly happy, but there are still a bunch of rough edges which should be smoothed away in a few more revisions.

I’ll see if I can get a development environment up and running on it, as well as getting a newer firmware onto the device (if I can find it; I wonder if the developer rootfs on maemo.org is newer or not..), but all that’s for tomorrow.

Joey Hess checks out the modifications to his packages in Ubuntu compared to Debian. I’m not going to go into the “does Ubuntu push patches aggressively enough back to Debian” debate, but he asks about what Malone is and complaining that he can’t find the relevant bug in Ubuntu’s bugzilla. Well, for historical and hopefully soon-to-go-away reasons, Ubuntu has two BTS-es. Bugzilla is used for bugs and packages in main, while Malone is being used for packages in universe. Since rbscrobbler is in Universe, use Malone. So, Malone #2925 is the bug:

When you hit enter in the password entry field, it should act as if the Ok button were clicked, instead of activating the Ok button.

Update: Fix broken markup.

Stephan Hermann complains about the missing hwinfo in Ubuntu. Well, it’s not missing, it’s just a few versions behind:

Package: hwinfo
[...]
Version: 8.38-3

Also, the -c parameter to wget is useful.

(ok, this isn’t really tech related, but it’s about penguins, so.) CNN reports that

“The gentoos come up on Kidney Cove and can rest there because it is in a minefield,”

I knew it all along. Gentoos like to rest in mine fields. Insane penguins.

Which File Extension are You?

So, I’m a container format. How should that be interpreted?

Gunnar wonders what the strangely-marked ⊼ on apple keyboards is. It’s the enter key, not to be confused with the return key. (On most systems, those are used the wrong way around with (carriage) return key actually completing the dialog and enter adding a line feed in a multi-line input field.