What I've been up to codewise recently:

• Today I landed the Portfolio API in Moodle CVS. This doesn't mean that it's finished yet, just that it's stable enough to be there without breaking other things. There are two plugins so far, box.net (requires API key), and a simple download plugin. I'm working on putting little 'add to portfolio' buttons all through Moodle, after that I'll be doing the Mahara plugin. Whee!


• I had a really interesting Skype conference with Simon Grant at JISC last week about the ePortfolio standards he's working on, PIOP and LEAP 2.0 which look very interesting. I am hoping that phase 3 (!!) of the Moodle/Mahara integration (I am currently working on Phase 2) will implement one of these, as well as for Mahara's own import/export.


• buffycli has hit Debian, v 0.2.1 was uploaded today. Many thanks to Martin for uploading it, Enrico for providing perl bindings to libbuffy (and suffering endless questions about them), SammyV and debian-perl for perl stuff, and Francois for packaging stuff. Man I bugged a lot of people to get this done.


• I've also finally started having a look at finishing what I started back in Easter at the Mahara hackfest, namely the ability to use views for profile pages and a wall blocktype plugin. This is quite cool as it introduces the ability to have different view types, autocreated views at user-creation event (as well as fixing a long standing issue of the core not being able to subscribe to its own events, which was daft). I hope to get this merged next week with plenty of time for testing before 1.1

Firstly, it is impossible to get a reasonable warranty in the UK for laptops in general, and it appears, Samsung in particular. Anyway, I eventually settled for 3 years of International Collect & Return with a "target" turn around time of 72 hours. That was the absolute best I could do, and it cost an extra £70.

I didn't even let it boot to Windows, but immediately installed Debian Lenny on it, with an immediate upgrade to Sid. I used the full drive encryption with LVs method, and the installation went fine.

The first thing that happened on the first-boot-after-install was that it .. wouldn't. I now of course can't remember the actual error message, but it was at the "Loading ACPI Modules" stage and Googling revealed that I needed to place the following in /etc/modprobe.d/local-video:

install video /bin/true

After that it booted fine. I haven't found any obvious side effects of this yet. Anyway, I got through the rest of the installation. I stupidly selected Desktop Environment to install, this is a hangover from my early experiences of trying to install X on Debian Potato and never managing to be able to find the complete list of packages to install. Anyway the first thing I did was remove a large amount of stuff that pulled in (eg Notification Daemon... honestly. That was the first thing to go, followed closely by Network Manager), and then install my trusty Pirates of Gnome GDM theme.

Suspend and resume is working fine. I'm using hibernate and getting it to unload the wifi drivers (more on wifi later) before s2ram (which works perfectly with -f a3 - I sent an email to the list to confirm this as the Q45 isn't in the list of supported hardware so far). I love s2ram. That worked perfectly on my macbook too with -f -p -m. It gives me warm fuzzies when suspend works.

Wifi is not working. options iwl3945 disable_hw_scan=1 in /etc/modprobe.d got it as far as being unable to iwlist scan successfully, but I cannot associate with an AP. I've opened a bug on intel linux wireless but I guess I'm probably going to have to buy something else. Sigh. This makes me ragey.

Everything else pretty much just works out of the box. I'm happily using ion3 again, and xmms2-client-cli is like a dream come true. Why I ever used pointy clicky music playing interfaces, I honestly don't know. It even has a last.fm scrobbler plugin! ♥

I've been playing a little bit with awesome and I originally really liked what I saw, I see in the new version they even have a scratchpad, which is a feature of ion3 I use all the time. I compiled the version from git and it took me forever to get all the libraries I needed, eventually I installed gnome-core-devel which pulled everything in (and almost certainly a bunch of crap I don't need. Hello, 320GB hard drive!) Oh and also a trick is to apt-get source awesome and put the awesome.desktop file in /usr/share/xsessions, to get gdm to offer it in the window manager list. However, while I had it reasonably working on my Macbook, I cannot get it to work in any sort of reasonable way on the new laptop. Like, no keybindings. I haven't had too much time to look into this, I guess I'll give it another go later.

Bluetooth has been a *pain*. Once I have my laptop and phone paired I can use command line tools to transfer files and mount the device (according to this howto - ignoring the modem bit and focusing on the rest), but so far I haven't been able to find a nice way to get them to pair, because none of the applications I've found seem to handle passphrases consistently. I ended up randomly trying bluez-gnome and kdebluetooth multiple times, as well as restarting my phone, and the various applets, until eventually one of them (the gnome one) finally asked me for a passphrase, and magically they appeared paired. Grrrr. kdebluetooth has been purged, I'll keep the gnomey ones around for a bit until I find I can do everything I want with the cli. I haven't even started thinking about synchronising them. Everyone I've talked to uses Evolution for this. And I ... uh, don't. And am not willing to go that far.

Related-to-bluetooth note at this point: Ion3's dock doesn't support gnome applets, but stalonetray is a workaround. I run it with -w -p and it acts as a bridge between the ion dock and gnome applets. Doesn't work too nicely in the statusbar though.

xrandr is working perfectly for me, with ion3's mod-xinerama. Support for this seems to have been removed, I'm using a deb Nigel gave me ages ago that was lurking in his home directory on my work machine.

Alt-Gr is a nice side effect of the otherwise horrid UK keyboard. Previously the ability to input unicode was something I had only really experimented with in macosx, it's nice to see that (I presume) gnome is taking care of this for me.

So I've been given a lot of shit over the last few days about the fact that I run ion3 with gnome-settings-daemon in the background. Here's a few reasons why I do it:

- It makes applications much prettier. Iceweasel for example, which is one of the few graphical applications I use constantly, looks whorish without it. I'm sure I could figure out a way to make it nicer, but really, why would I if putting gnome-settings-daemon & in my .xsessionrc does it for me?

- Magic Alt-Gr unicode workiness.

- Ease of setting up shortcut keys for things like sleep and volume control. Interestingly, I haven't been able to interface like this with xmms2 at all, even using gxmms2. I ended up writing an ion3 keybinding for pause instead and switching to having an open terminal that displays xmms2 status, and learning xmms2 cli controls (which is far nicer anyway)

All in all, using Linux again as my main machine is a very welcome change. As I previously wrote, as much as I used to love mac os x on the laptop, trying to get work done is impossible on it. Now if only the stupid wifi would work. I'm going to be in trouble if I don't buy something else before I get back to London, because my flat only has wifi.

I guess the last thing .. I re-purposed one of my usb drives as an encrypted drive. That all worked fine, I set it up with luksformat and I can mount it, but so far I can only mount it if I have an entry in /etc/crypttab which is fine except that sometimes when I plug it in it turns up in /dev/sdb and sometimes in /deb/sdc and sometimes in /deb/sdd and so on, which is a pain and means I often have to edit /etc/crypttab. Dear lazyweb! Is there a better way?

After I got everything (except wifi) working, I had a ritual peeling off of stickers, and I've finally stuck on the Debian Swirl logo, that I got in Finland at Debconf 5 all that time ago. This laptop really is cute.

Today looked like:

New Samuel Flynn Scott & Bunnies on Ponies CD -> abcde -> cd drive anger -> try usb cd drive -> still cd drive anger -> remembering recent dist-upgrade -> split:

a) go to another machine to use cd drive -> fetch abcde.conf -> no cdinfo in cddb -> enter cd info -> get it wrong -> retag oggs

b) do another dist-upgrade -> hit #477194 -> flail about -> find debian bug -> use workaround -> continue dist-upgrade -> cups problems -> bang head on desk and start drinking beer

remerge -> try again to use the cd drive -> epic failure -> fury -> more beer.

For the lazyweb purposes, dmesg is full of

UDF-fs: No partition found (1)
hdd: command error: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
hdd: command error: error=0x54 { AbortedCommand LastFailedSense=0x05 }
ide: failed opcode was: unknown
ATAPI device hdd:
Error: Illegal request -- (Sense key=0x05)
Illegal mode for this track or incompatible medium -- (asc=0x64, ascq=0x00)
The failed "Read 10" packet command was:
"28 00 00 00 00 10 00 00 01 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 "
end_request: I/O error, dev hdd, sector 64
isofs_fill_super: bread failed, dev=hdd, iso_blknum=16, block=16


Multiple other people with same problem found, but none of them seem to have a solution. Sysadmins say: who cares, you're leaving, don't bother spending too much time on it.

I haven't rebooted yet, I'm too scared.

Last night I couldn't get to sleep so I opened up my laptop and started reading the last couple weeks of debian-vote, which made my eyes immediately heavy.

Unfortunately, as soon as I closed the laptop, my brain started racing again and I woke up a bit.

Next time I'll try debian-legal.

To find out what to put in <VirtualHost> lines in apache config files, I'm sure there's a better way to do this:

vhostlist=`apache2ctl -t -D DUMP_VHOSTS 2>&1 | grep 'is a NameVirtualHost' | awk '{ print $1 }' | perl -e 'while (<>) { chomp; push @a, $_ }; print join(", ", @a);'`
db_subst somepackage/virtualhost choices ${vhostlist}
db_input $PRIORITY somepackage/virtualhost || true

to eventually end up here:

<VirtualHost _VIRTUALHOST_>


but hey, it works.

After the last time I typed passwords into irssi after a weird problem with ion3 losing focus, I realised that my ~/.ion3 directory was completely out of sync with /etc/X11/ion3. But I didn't have the time or energy to try and reconfigure it.

But today I typed my password into irssi again, and as such, I decided it was time to do something about it.

So, I moved ~/.ion3 to ~/.ion3fucked and started again. But this time, I did something smart.

I created ~/.ion3clean. For every file in /etc/X11/ion3 I was copying into ~/.ion3 and modifying, I first copied it into ~/.ion3clean. This means that now I have a diff of all my changes. So next time upstream changes the config and I find that my ~/.ion3 is out of sync with what Debian ships (although after this mess I'm not sure there will be any more debian packages), all I need to do is re apply the diff! Glee!

Would one see this:

> Am I mistaken or this is a flame on how to flame ?

over here, for all you ubuntu users.

The packages installed cleanly into Debian sid but I find that:

- I don't want an ubuntu gdm login theme (Pirates of Gnome FTW!)
- I don't actually use gnome (I use ion3) so the gnome themes are not useful (and neither is the gnome splash art)


Even so, if I was running ubuntu I would definitely use this.

cogito is too much fun

Today I had to deal with:

~ a libglib transition that removed all of gnome;
~ an infinte loop in a process on a production database that inserted 50,000,000ish records before someone killed it;
~ trying to find the goddamn bug that caused the infinite loop, it's some sort of dst thing. I hate dst;
~ there not being a powerpc version of enigmail in unstable (why?!);
~ nowhere near enough sleep.

There is good stuff to counter that though.

I think this is an ace idea

I find this ITP hilarious.

Chocolate o' DOOOOOOM

I have successfully weaned myself off filters in my mail client and switched completely to procmail for one of my email addresses. The work one. The easy one.
The other two are harder. Because, well, because they just are. I'm still struggling with whether I need filtering on the other two, I have redirected all mailing lists to gmail, so I'm not sure I have to set up procmail for them. I guess it's conceivable that there will be a time I want some filtering on those addresses.
Next: wean myself off thunderbird, perhaps switch to mutt.

I am still completely and utterly devoid of a good calendar I can run in debian that does ical. Mozilla-calendar (sid) still segfaults. Le waah. This is seriously something I need to fix. I may have to write one soon, if something doesn't fall onto my desktop. I'm pretty sure I saw a php one on sourceforge that I guess I could set up somewhere, but it's extremely irritating that I can't find a good gnome app or something.

I bought lots of stuff today in order to fill a hole that has been created. It felt damn good. I bought a Minnie Cooper bag that I have wanted for years, and new sneakers which is good because my old ones were falling to pieces and new trousers from Ricochet because they were on sale and I felt like it. Nyah.

Now off for a glass of wine and then some Scrubs.

After months of struggling with trying to rsync between mac os x and various debian boxen and it going really really really slowly (like 500mb in about 8 hours), I have upgraded rsync on the mac from the fink package (2.5.5) to the darwin ports package (2.6.6) which matches what I have on my debian box, and it now works at normal speed.

The weird thing is this:

pushing from mac os x to debian - very slow
pushing from debian to mac os x - normal
pulling from debian to mac os x - normal
pulling from mac os x to debian - normal

Anyway. It works now.

All I have to say about my sunday is this:

Fuck libc6 upgrade. Fuck it right in the ear.
Oh, and trying to install sarge with a fucked cdrom is painful.