I got my scanner working today by using the experimental genesys backend for SANE. Now I just need a good system for storing stuff I scan together with some metadata so I can find it again later.

Web-based would be good, but not PHP and not MySQL (though I could fix the latter of those if the system as such is good). I’ve skimmed through what’s on freshmeat, but didn’t find anything which seemed to work well enough, so I guess I might end up writing my own..

If anybody has any suggestions, please drop me a mail.

• 10.0.0.0/24 is something very different from 10.0.0.0/8 and it appears Linux doesn’t really like to masquerade itself, as it then sends RST to the originating host. Of course, ssh doesn’t care about getting an RST and just hangs.

• OpenWRT is quite neat, and my wlan is now separated from the wired network, which means we can run services such as cups on the wired network without having to require authentication. It would be cool to play around with VLAN tagging, but I think that’s for another day.

• I need to investigate how to get the internal DNS working properly; I kinda want to have sensible reverse-DNS for 10.x.x.x addresses.

• The whole infrastructure which goes on top of the physical and first layer of the network is still missing (Kerberos, LDAP, cups, openvpn, nocatauth or similar).

Do not ever get cooling liquid into your PCI and AGP slots.

I hate those pages which try to set a cookie just because I GET them.

Jose Carlos Garcia Sogo wonders about how to do pyblosxom meta-categories. Just using the fakecat plugin I wrote about a year ago should work fine, I would think.

So, since Anders has continued blogging about beers, I figured I might try blogging about interesting beers too.

I had a beer I bought in Finland, during a beer-shopping spree Magni and I went on. Some of the beers were ok-ish, but this is absolutely one of the good ones. It’s a stout, so it’s black. The head was very small, but it smelled good. The dark, sweet (but not overwhelming) smell of a dark beer. A bit of chocolate, but not too much of that either.

The first two or three tastes were when the beer was still a bit too cold, so it lacked a bit in the body, but once it warmed up that corrected itself. Full and nice chocolate/coffee-taste. The carbonation is medium, so neither flat nor tounge-biting.

Unlike some other stouts, this one doesn’t feel like it will fill up my stomach, so it’s much more like a porter in that regard. (Incidentially, porters and red/brown ales are my favourite kind of beer.)

All in all, a very nice beer and I hope I’ll find more of it in the future.

Slowly, DebConf5 is coming to an end. It’s been great fun, I’ve met new friends and old friends. There has been interesting discussions about more or less everything under the sun, and there has been some conflicts where people (me included) have been singing at six o’clock in the morning, where people have not done as they’ve been asked to, but all in all, I think everybody has had a great time.

It’s a bit sad and strange to see people slowly packing their stuff up, everything from not letting their things be all over the place to people actually leaving. I’m looking forward to next year and hope it will be even more fun.

I wish to extend a great thanks to the organisers, with special thanks to mooch and the people who have made the whole of DebConf5 a smooth experience. Rock on.

Debconf 5 has been a good experience so far. Mostly, at least. Talked with a lot of people. Many old friend, some new ones. Productive discussions about everything from how to handle libpam-umask and its integration with shadow and possible integration with upstream pam to more or less an reiteration of last year’s discussion on how to handle Debian contributors who are not (package) maintainers. Other stuff we’ve done is building a Debian sand castle (with multiarch support), building multiple pyramids out of empty beer glasses and random other crazyness.

Karianne had to go home to Oslo today. She didn’t feel too well, being tired and feeling unproductive here. I hope she gets enough rest until I get home and we can have some nice days before the LARP in the end of the month.

I just released pkg-config 0.18 which fixes some annoying bugs in earlier versions. One is the support for PKG_CONFIG_LIBDIR which was erronously removed. Another change is the removal of some memory leaks. Those are just small bugs which are fixed though. There are a few real changes in there as well:

• pkg.m4 now has a PKG_CHECK_EXISTS macro to just check whether dependencies are fulfilled or not.
• PKG_CHECK_MODULES no longer caches. This fixes lots of problems people stumbled into and I’m not sure why caching was added in the first place.

The last and biggest change is the handling of private libraries. Private libraries are any libraries your library or application uses, but which are not exposed in the API. They are needed for static linking, but otherwise should just be taken care of by inter-library dependencies. Examples of private dependencies are Cairo’s use of libpng and a library needing libm. An example of a public dependency is GTK+ exposing the GLib api.

LaTeX is a really nice typesetting language and it has a nice tool called listings which handles program listings for you. By default, listings doesn’t break lines. Why it doesn’t do that is beyond me, but I’m sure the author has his reasons. It does however have support for breaking lines quite easily. The trick is using something along the lines of:

\lstset{
basicstyle=\small,
showstringspaces=false,
language={},
breaklines=true,
breakatwhitespace=true,
prebreak={\mbox{\hfill$\hookleftarrow$}}}

which renders into