Benj's tavern

We now need a /debian-non-fr archive

bdrieu@april.org — Fri Jun 30 2006 23:00

French parliament just approved today DADVSI, the worst copyright law in Europe.

For those who don't know about DADVSI, this law is the French version of DMCA, supposedly created to fight against "piracy" and P2P, ended up in enforcing copyright in the worst way, making illegal previously licit uses of copyright material, like private copy or making de-facto illegal things like reading a DVD with free software. Parts of the DADVSI, like the so-called Vivendi Universal amendment explicitly makes programs than are "obviously" made to share illegally copyrighted material (sic, lawyers will have fun determining if a webserver is "obviously" a copyrighted material sharing program). Making available such programs will be of course illegal and debians mirrors will risk three years of jail ... will Debian continue shipping amule on its French mirrors?

As a conclusion for this months long fight that proved majority does not care neither about democratic procedures nor the 170.000 citizens that signed the EUCD.INFO petition, we still has a chance constitutional council declares DADVSI as anti-constitutional.

Scary, heh?

You are too elite to use my crap

bdrieu@april.org — Sat Feb 04 2006 16:00

Daniel, I'm afraid you are guilty of Argumentum ad populum.

I would really like to see those millions of Gnome users confused by this small white square called a GtkTextEntry that every gnome zealot invokes when asked why keyboard support disappeared from a lot of Gnome features.

What is funny is that the very Gnome Human Interface Guidelines ask not to [...] Limit Your User Base and that is exactly what the Gnome developers do. Stating that a typical Gnome user does not want keyboard is simply false. My own experience let me think a substantial part of Gnome users want both (and the Ctrl-L thingy does not count as keyboard support, it is just crap).

I would perfectly understand Gnome developers prefer it this way, after all it is their choice. But don't say it is for users sake. And be prepared to loose many users with unique needs.

How surprising!

bdrieu@april.org — Fri Jan 13 2006 15:54

I always knew I had the best of everything.

Your Inner European is French!

Smart and sophisticated.

You have the best of everything - at least, *you* think so.

Who's Your Inner European?

Heading to the parliament

bdrieu@april.org — Tue Dec 20 2005 19:20

As Christian said in a very nice summary of the issue, this is the day the DADVSI law (which is a transposition of the EUCD, the European DMCA) will be examined by French parliament.

I would really like to share Christian's optimism. So far, the EUCD.INFO initiative succeeded in bringing the issue to the public (120k signatures, mostly from French residents) and to several MP. Good news are that a lot of amendments has been submitted to mitigate effects of the DADVSI law.

Bad news is that we also had terrible press cover: we had articles in most national newspapers and TV, but a lot of them are completely missing the point and are comparing us to champions of piracy against copyright. Even worse, Christian Vanneste (conservative MP responsible of the law) keeps spreading lies.

Today, members of the EUCD.INFO initiative went to the parliament to talk to MP and to show their concerns. Some friends and I went too even if we were just there to watch the debate. I'm quite disappointed to see that left wing was totally absent (like less than 10 MP out of 160!). Right wing was more represented but MP supporting our amendments are a minority group.

Debate starts again at 21 local time. We will be there and I hope I'm wrong, but I really fear we loose more than we gain.

CVS rulez (Score:-1, Flamebait)

bdrieu@april.org — Wed Dec 14 2005 13:53

As it seems people are arguing about the revision systems hype, I just wanted to point that CVS rulez. Sure, it does not $some_obscure_witty_feature but, hey, is this feature really useful?

I've been using CVS for ten years, coded around 500k source line of code and honestly, it suits all my needs. To tell the truth, I don't even use all of its capabilities.

So, CVS can't keep history of a file when you move it. Big deal? After all, renaming a file is just like creating a brand new one. Leave a commit message stating previous name of foo is bar if you really need history and that is it. So far, I never stumbled upon a case where this "feature" limited me or made me loose more than 15 seconds.

Same for distributed RCS. Sure, on the paper they look good. Call me a moron but I never managed to use one properly. Even a large but well managed project does not need such monstruosity.

Matthew is right on one point: RCS are like languages, geeks advocate languages because of a specific subset of features. But they don't realize 90% of functionality of a language is present in all other languages and the 10 other percents can be achieved with method if you really need them.

I personally find very discouraging to learn a brand new RCS for every project I contribute to if upstream has decided this one is cool. If you want users to contribute, use a standard RCS as well as a standard mailing-list system, common language, etc.

Pick of the day, ccache

bdrieu@april.org — Thu Nov 24 2005 14:39

I recently tried and adopted ccache, which (quoting its webpage) acts as a caching pre-processor to C/C++ compilers, using the -E compiler switch and a hash to detect when a compilation can be satisfied from cache. This often results in a 5 to 10 times speedup in common compilations.

I must say I was sceptical, but ccache really works great, specially when you have to compile again and again the same code, like a Debian package which you have to clean but which source code remained the same.

The only glitch is installation. If you wish to use it by default for all your compilers, there is still some manual configuration. I'd really like it to provide an alternative to, say, cc.

I hate the Internet

bdrieu@april.org — Thu Oct 13 2005 13:03

So, as I'm a follower, I gave a try to the "you need" meme and found at the second place that benj needs to fix this. Ahah, funny, this poor benj has a bug to fix. Oh, wait, this reminds me something.

*sigh*. OMG, that old nasty bug I never fixed.

I hate when the Internet bugs you about things you have to do.

So I need my tongue to catch up...

bdrieu@april.org — Mon Oct 03 2005 15:42

J'en reste sans voix.

You Should Learn French

C'est super! You appreciate the finer things in life... wine, art, cheese, love affairs.
You are definitely a Parisian at heart. You just need your tongue to catch up...

What Language Should You Learn?

On the use and abuse of logrotate to rotate spams

bdrieu@april.org — Tue Sep 27 2005 11:16

As for everybody, spam eventually became a major nuisance from quite a long time now. As my main email address is the same since 1996 and as it is apparent on the web, my daily spam volume is hundreds of spams (if not thousands). This makes too much junk to download in the morning when I start my computer and then to process via anti-spam filters. This is why I set up a basic filtering on my mail gateway and archive almost-certainly-spam in my $HOME there for further investigation in case ham is lost.

The problem is that my spam box eventually becomes too big and fills up the hard drive, causing frustration to other users. So I decided to use logrotate to archive my spam and set up the following in a crontab:

/home/benj/evil-spam {
	daily
	missingok
	rotate 7
	compress
	notifempty
}

So I can still harvest for recent ham if I need, and disk usage is kept low. This is really what I like with Unix, the possibility to use well-conceived tools in order to achieve something the programmer did not even imagined.

OK, nothing fancy there but I thought this perversion of logrotate might worth sharing. :-)

Naming machines

bdrieu@april.org — Mon Sep 19 2005 14:15

As I stumbled on my client's server, I could notice it was named after Mercury, and that there was a Hermes, a Vulcan and other mythology gods nearby. Besides that it is the quadrillionth time I log on a server named "mercury", I kept wonder how many naming schemes I met during my various business trips. So far, after ten year of consulting, I can count:

mythology gods
sci-fi authors
cities, countries, lakes
fishes, shells, flowers, sweets
drugs (yes, I once ssh'd to tetrahydrocannabinol)
chemical elements
fiction characters, like Asterix, LOTR, X-Men (good guys being Debian servers, magneto being the Windows server)
female first names
boring names like mailgw012

I wonder what else people use, if people know other naming schemes I'd be curious to hear them.