Olav Vitters

Had to approve a email message to foundation-list. Noticed a spam message in the queue from WebEx. Already knew that company, but apparently it is (now?) owned by Cisco. Anyway, there is no excuse for sending this to foundation-list.

The email ends with a sad:

This email may be an advertisement or solicitation. If you do not wish to receive marketing messages from WebEx, please select this link for removal.

Wonder what other solutions like WebEx exists. This as the company I work for unfortunately is a customer of WebEx. 🙁

So, after the GNOME Bugzilla upgrade done by Max Kanat-Alexander / Everythingsolved, a few more changes have been made:

• Stock Responses, by Frédéric Péters.
• Patch report, by Frédéric Péters (not linked yet from browse.cgi, an example).
• Describeuser, by Frédéric Péters (not committed yet, will have a different URL due to it being an extension).
• Weekly bug summary, by Frédéric Péters (not committed yet, will also have a different URL due to being an extension).
• Uses SSL now, almost solely done by Max Kanat-Alexander.
• Lots of fixes such as NEEDINFO->UNCONFIRMED, by Max Kanat-Alexander.
• Really small bugmail change and readd attachment link, by me.

Because upstream is going to use Bzr (we already use the bzr.bugzilla.org mirror), we use Bzr as well. This makes merging and so on much easier. Anyway, the additions done by Frédéric are done as extensions. This should make it easier to use them in other Bugzilla installations. The code can be found at http://launchpad.net/bugzilla.gnome.org.

If you’re wondering what features are still missing, see the email from Max Kanat-Alexander to desktop-devel-list.

Not attending GUADEC as it happens at the same time as some personal stuff.

Nice to see development improvements thanks to Git. Are there any more? Wonder if we should/could request a gnome.gitorious.org. Meaning: hosting by gitorious (so not official), and main repos on git.gnome.org. Then we’d just have a simple hook on git.gnome.org to trigger an update of the mirrors/clones on gitorious. Anyway, just a thought.

Read today about the following (shortened quote):

This morning, at around 05.00 UTC, Maersk Alabama, a 1,100 TEU container vessel, was attacked by pirates and presumed hijacked. The US flagged vessel has a crew of 20 US nationals and is owned and operated by Maersk Line, Limited in the US.

This made me recall a news article which I read a few weeks ago regarding another piracy attempt. The story included pictures where you could clearly see bullet holes, shattered bridge glass and a broken (presume by bullets) windscreen wiper. The master anonymously told that the only way they avoided being boarded was sheer luck.

I don’t want to go into the details about what can be done about piracy. What I would love is the abuse of calling copyright infringement ‘piracy’ to stop.

Not sure of the best way to translate BHV’er, but I volunteered to be one where I work. This means I’ll be responsible to perform First Aid, tackle small fires (only when just starting) and alarm/ evacuate people during emergencies (ensure everyone actually leaves their desks, plus taking special care of people who need extra help, e.g. people with leg injury, etc). Depending on the size of the organization and some other criteria, every company within the Netherlands is required to have a predetermined number of BHV’ers. Seems this is even an European requirement (law).

I’m not sure yet what the various tasks are. I was mostly interested in the First Aid training; the person who asked for volunteers knew less about the tasks than I did. Currently I know I have to follow a 5 day first aid training. I know there are regular exercises where BHV’ers test evacuation plans. Plus help out during the yearly ‘walk down the stairs at an annoyingly slow pace’ (evacuation exercise involving the whole building and also fire brigade). This is what I’ll know I’ll be responsible for, for the rest I’ll have to get an explanation from our Health and Safety officer.

As volunteer I’ll get nice benefits such as First Aid training and the ability to walk around in a bright orange jacket.

Thoughts and so on regarding FOSDEM:

• Booking the first hotel solely based on price, overall review figure (didn’t read the review themselves), location (city centre) and free wifi availability resulted in a nice hotel and ensured I didn’t spend too much time on that (ignoring the non-hotel things I was investigating before).
• Still don’t understand why many people from Brussels pretend they can’t speak Dutch
• Perhaps better if you’ve gotten used to it, but I can’t easily find my way in that city
• While attending the GNOME stand for a short while I noticed the following things:
  • The people usually attending those stands are amazing. I only attended for 1 or 2 hours (not sure how long it was).
  • We sold loads of t-shirts
  • I got a nice Mandriva t-shirt from Frederic Crozat
  • Not too many men ask for size S
  • A lot of questions on why we had those Nokia devices and how GNOME was involved
  • The GNOME event box is really nice
    It has a beamer, screen, webcam, nokia devices, etc. Although 3 digits is not enough for a padlock (figured out the combination for one of the locks, box itself was unlocked anyway).
  • Someone strongly suggested we should add a pink theme
  • A lot of people asked if the stickers were free
    Really nice compared to the (not software related) stand where everything was taken if not bolted down
  • The t-shirts were only 5 EUR for foundation members. Asking why people weren’t a foundation member resulted in some nice answers (often “not yet”, although 2 seemed to imply they were KDE e.V. members, not sure why they didn’t say so)
• Some electricity problem in Rotterdam meant the train went via Utrecht instead. Including transfer an (estimated) 1.5 hour addition to my travel time. Heard the “I’m never doing this [taking the train] again”. Well, it is far easier to recall one bad experience instead of adding up all the hours standing in traffic. Not implying that I was happy with the extra travel time. Service was good though, they said which track to go to for all the stations they missed, this including departure times.
• While in the train, I had some fun trying to find out stuff about the people traveling with me. Likely a result of watching this video.
• Some people carry around a CD player as well as a MP3 player and use both.
• Regarding FOSDEM 2009:
  • Perfectly organized
  • Loved the cloak room (left my luggage there)
  • Loads of volunteers. Thank you all!
  • Great signs everywhere
  • Bus ride to Brussel-South station was very welcome, especially as the FOSDEM site included an estimated arrival time (made planning easy).

I’ve upgraded the following things:

• SVN server
  Uses version 1.5.4 on the server plus all the repositories have been dumped & loaded to ensure every module uses the latest repository format
• ViewVC has been upgraded to latest trunk (as of today

SVN server upgrade
This features merge tracking. For it to be fully reliable, non merge tracking clients shouldn’t be used anymore. In short: we might need to ban SVN 1.4 and older from committing to the repository (anonsvn is of course ok). Aside from merge tracking (and various other changes), the repository on the server is also a lot smaller, in size is about 66% of what it was before. This is due the old repos format (v3), it was very inefficient with binary files.

Although you can upgrade the repository format by use of svnadmin upgrade, the --help mentions it only does the bare minimum. So I’ve created my own hacky script instead.

ViewVC upgrade
It has been a while since I last upgraded this to upstream trunk. I noticed a problem with unidiffs. There could be other problems as well, please file a bug for those (after checking for known bugs).

ViewVC is a lot nicer in the trunk version, noticed the following niceties:

• Displays file/directory properties (such as svn:externals and svn:executable)
• Different syntax highlighting (Pygments, doesn’t seem to highlight as much as before)
• Upstream email mangling (Bugzilla style). Perhaps I’ll modify this, liked out method better (replacing @ and . by a space)
• Slightly more resistant against strangenesses in query/RSS stuff
• Supports intraline changes (not sure if this is new, but wasn’t enabled before)

I’ve also enabled pagination and set it to 800. It means if something generates over 800 entries, it will show a ‘Next Page’ button. Useful for very long logs. I don’t think anyone is really interested in the full log by default. Unfortunately it works per default also for the main repository view, otherwise I would’ve set the value much lower (e.g. 100).

Since last week the bzr-playground machine has been setup as a syncrepl consumer. This means that all SSH key changes (plus new accounts) will automatically be able to use bzr-playground. Note: I mean to host private branches, of course people SSH is optional if people either commit to svn.gnome.org or just attach the result to a bugreport.

Bzr-playground is usable for anyone with SSH keys set in their GNOME ldap account; it is not restricted to just people with SVN access. Also, the LDAP replication is minimal, the bzr-playground server knows little more than usernames + public SSH keys.