Apparently, since Thunderbird 2.0, the user now has an easy way to choose to send messages as HTML-only emails, instead of the sane defaults of doing “text only” or “text + HTML”. As a result, lots of Thunderbird users now send HTML-only emails, which are a PITA to read with mutt.

Does someone know if there’s an open bug about reverting that change?

Does someone know of a good strategy to convert HTML-only emails to text emails, preferably pluggable into procmail, so it happens at delivery time? It’s how course possible to read HTML emails using an external HTML viewer, but I can’t find a way to reply to a “stripped” version of the messages.

As you might have guessed (or not), I’ve been playing with the idea of improving my Debian rebuild setup by building on tmpfs: disk I/O take a signifiant amount of time, that could easily be reduced by building (mostly) in memory.

Most packages build fine on tmpfs: only 8 packages fail only on tmpfs. Apparently, most of the failures are caused by old versions of autoconf: this version used /tmp to store temporary files ; for example, when generating Makefile, it would create it on /tmp, then move it to the current directory. The problem arises when /tmp is an ext3 filesystem, while the current directory is on tmpfs: when moving the file back to the current directory, the mtime of the file is truncated.

This can lead make to think that a given target needs to be rebuilt. A nice example of that is the smuxi package, that just loops when building.

Demo:

# cat Makefile 
f2: f1
        echo "Need to rebuild f2!"

First case: f1 and f2 are stored in the current directory. Make agrees that
f2 was created after f1:

# rm f1 f2 ; touch f1 ; touch f2 ; make
make: `f2' is up to date.

Second case: f2 is created on /tmp, then moved to the current directory. Make thinks that f2 was created before f1 (and is right, according to stat).

# rm f1 f2 ; touch f1 ; touch /tmp/f2 ; mv /tmp/f2 f2 ; make
echo "Need to rebuild f2!"
Need to rebuild f2!
# stat f1 f2     
  File: `f1'
[..]
Modify: 2009-03-08 18:21:08.900237000 +0100
  File: `f2'
[..]
Modify: 2009-03-08 18:21:08.000000000 +0100

Hi,

I’m looking for a tool to create simple websites (5-10 pages), only static content (no PHP). Think of the typical small business or sports club website: text + pictures about what they did/do, nothing really complex.

Requirements:

This blog post is long overdue, but like Lenny, it was finally released. Yes, I defended my PhD thesis on December 4th. So I’m officially a Doctor from the Université Joseph Fourier Grenoble.

The general context of my thesis is distributed systems, like peer-to-peer systems and applications running on HPC (High Performance Computing) cluster and grids. More specifically, I worked on methods and tools to study such systems, trying to answer the following questions: take a given application that will run on a distributed system. What can we learn or verify about its performance or its characteristics? Will it scale well, even with 1000 or 10000 nodes? Does this app perform better than this another app? Under which conditions? (that’s probably the hardest question, because you need to be able to run both apps under the same conditions if you want a fair comparison!)

My work involved studying basic building blocks that can be used to study distributed systems, like network emulators (Dummynet, Linux’s traffic control subsystem, NISTNet). I also designed P2PLab, which allows to emulate network-centric peer-to-peer systems using a cluster, targetting experiments with thousands of emulated instances of the application. For example, it allowed to run experiments with ~15000 emulated BitTorrent nodes using 160 real machines.

So what’s next? Well, my first-priority plan is to make use of my PhD to apply to an academic position (maitre de conférences, i.e assistant professor). If you know an open position where I would be a good fit, don’t hesitate to tell me! Of course, this plan might very well fail (I will know around end of June). In that case, I’ll probably be looking for a job, likely Free-Software-related. Again, if you hear of something for me, ping me!

Scott has several posts about git (1, 2, 3), and the “I worked on this locally, now I want to push this to a remote place where others will be able to fetch it”.

I’ve been using the following snippet for that. YMMV.

REPO=reponame
ROOT=/wheremygitreposare/
SERV=remoteserver
git clone --bare . /tmp/${REPO}.git && \
rsync -avzP /tmp/${REPO}.git ${SERV}:$ROOT && \
git remote add origin ${SERV}:${ROOT}${REPO}.git && \
git config branch.master.remote origin && \
git config branch.master.merge refs/heads/master

(Please post comments if you can improve it!)
But I totally agree that this common use case is not well addressed in git.

Of course, I was in Brussels this week-end, for FOSDEM. I gave a talk about Ultimate Debian Database (slides here) in the Debian devroom. The conclusion was “UDD is ready, go play with it!” so you know what you should do now! FOSDEM in general was great and huge (see the video from Quim Gil if you still doubt that) as usual.

On a more sad note, the worst talk of the week-end was without any possible doubt Frans Pop’s release team bashing. Nobody is claiming that the release management of the lenny release cycle was perfect: there’s always room for improvement. But given the context and the constraints, I think that they did a very good job. Frans’ talk boiled down to: “The release team doesn’t know what they are doing, I would have done much better because I’m so qualified.” Giving such talks at FOSDEM, in front of an audience with many people not involved in Debian development, is really insulting. To make things worse, he finished the talk late, not leaving any time for questions/discussion, so the audience might be left with the impression that his opinions are representative of the opinions of DDs.

If you don’t know that leap years don’t always happen every 4 years, you really should read about the switch from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar. PostgreSQL’s documentation on the topic is also interesting, as well as the output of ncal -p.

On a related subject, the insertion of a leap second triggered a few interesting blog posts from Dave Jones (1, 2, 3), and also a Linux bug, reported on slashdot, and already fixed.

(Yes, that post was mostly an I-need-to-bookmark-this post.)

I’m getting increasingly annoyed by the state of some aspects of hardware support in Linux.

My laptop (old Dell Latitude D610, Intel-based with ATI graphics) used to suspend/resume correctly with Linux 2.6.24 (ie, > 95% success rate). Later changes made the success rate drop significantly, and added a problem with kacpid taking 100% CPU because of an interrupt storm. And now, with 2.6.28-rc6, it’s completely broken. (partially documented in bug 11563, but I admit I gave up on this bug, because I’m going to change my laptop soon).

My desktop used to wake-on-lan correctly with 2.6.24 (but required some hacks, because it wouldn’t wake up if the NIC was DOWNed before shutdown), but changes in the r8169 driver broke it. (documented in bug 9512).

As a result, I’m forced to run old kernel versions on the two systems I have at home. I can understand that those issues aren’t considered high priority (not everybody use WoL), but the fact that in both cases, they are regressions, worries me a bit.

How many things are routinely broken during each kernel release cycle? Hardware support is difficult, of course, but are we really doing everything we could to make it suck less? Some things I really would like to see:

• Distro packages for development kernel versions. For Debian, there’s this repository, but it doesn’t always contain the latest kernel versions. Maybe that’s something that should be moved to a kernel.org umbrella and generalized to all distributions, to provide beta-testers with easy-to-install packages. git bisect isn’t that user-friendly.
• Funding for driver developers to buy specific hardware. Many drivers cover a wide range of chips/cards, and developers often only have on a small subset of them, making it difficult to debug issues specific to one chip.
• Better/updated bugzilla on kernel.org. Many bug logs are totally confusing, and cover different issues. They could maybe benefit from new or specifically developed bugzilla features (and more bug triagers, of course).

FTWCA copyright issues, there’s interesting stuff on Universal Studios’ Automated Copyright Notice System website.