2009-06-08: INN 2.5.0
After more than six years of development, I'm pleased to announce that INN
2.5.0 has finally been released, due primarily to the work of Julien
ÉLIE over the past few years.
As one might expect from a development release that first branched six
years ago, the changes are too numerous to mention in a journal entry.
For the complete list, see the
INN 2.5 NEWS file. Major
changes include SASL support for nnrpd, significant improvements to
support the standardized NNTP protocol, a rewrite of the network code for
better IPv6 support, and significant improvements to innreport.
It's great to see this release become the base for future development,
since a lot of cleanup work went into it. INN 2.4 was old enough that it
was becoming difficult to maintain, and INN 2.5 has a much stronger test
suite, uses a modern Autoconf, and has other similar improvements.
You can get the latest version from ISC's FTP site. Documentation and other details are available from my
INN page, and open bugs, source code browsing,
and similar pages are available from the INN development site.
2009-06-08: Resurfacing
Another Stanford-area picture. It's not as good of a picture as I thought
it was when I took it (a bit over-exposed, for instance), but I still like
the feel of it. It matches my feeling today, which was a day for picking
leaves out of the fence that had caught them until I could look at them.
I've been silent over the past few days because I was helping organize and
host the 2009 AFS and
Kerberos Best Practices Workshop. There were the usual unexpected
last-minute problems, but we managed to sort them all out and everything
went exceptionally well. Most of the thanks for that is due to Lucrecia
Kim-Boswell, who did all of the hard coordination work and did an
absolutely wonderful job.
As you might expect, though, I had basically no free cycles to post
photographs, reviews, or journal entries during the conference. Not only
was there too much to do, it was also intensely social, which exhausts me.
A very close friend was able to come out for the conference as well, so I
spent evenings and the surrounding weekends talking and playing video
games. It was a great week, but very high-energy.
Surprisingly, I came out of it feeling much less tired than I expected and
much more energized. Sunday and today I did a ton of cleanup and
catch-up. I'm now feeling on top of things and excited and interested in
doing some coding and diving back into projects. I'm taking next week
off, so I should have lots of time to use that energy for non-work things
for a change, such as catching up on Debian work and some of my non-work
software projects.
2009-06-09: Progress on all fronts
This is a cottonwood catkin lying across a root. I thought the purple
color was remarkable, particularly how it stains the root a little around
where the catkin fell. These days, I'd probably take this picture closer,
but I like the sense of context it has.
One of the things that's making me the most happy about the past three
days after the conference and company is that I'm accomplishing things on
a wide variety of fronts. I didn't just get the house cleaned up, or some
surprise high-priority work done, or a few work projects pushed forward,
or some background cleanup and conversion done. I did all of that at the
same time, and it felt relatively effortless and natural. This is rare,
and I suspect it won't stay as good as it is now (and I'll have to avoid
the natural letdown when I lose the momentum), but while it lasts it's a
great feeling.
I'm trying to watch what I'm doing so that I can copy those actions when
I'm not feeling the same degree of momentum and try to recreate it through
putting myself in the right mental state.
I've converted the wallet repository to Git, so you can now view it on
git.eyrie.org. I
probably won't have time to do a new release before I go on vacation, but
I'm hoping to get at least one and possibly two releases out this summer.
It's been far too long since I've been able to put work into it, and there
are a ton of things I want to do.
2009-06-15: Vacation
An Amtrak Superliner car at the San Jose Diridon station. This
unfortunately wasn't the train I was taking, since I love the Superliner
cars with their legroom and nice reclining seats. The new cars they
mostly use around here do have tables, which the Superliner cars don't,
but the seats aren't quite as comfortable.
What with the short week before going on vacation, I didn't get entirely
back into the normal rhythm of things, so I've not been updating as
regularly as I'd planned. But it's a nice excuse. I have the next week
off, which may mean more time to work on some non-work software projects,
but which more importantly involves a lot of reading and playing video
games.
2009-06-18: Relaxation
One of my mother's roses ('Gold Glow' is the cultivar).
I've now reached the part of my vacation where I've recovered energy and
I'm enjoying poking at things instead of just reading and playing video
games. I like this part of vacation. It gives me an opportunity to work
on things that I normally don't have either time or energy to do when
working full weeks.
Also accomplished: showing my mother some of the highlights
of the Food Network, getting her hooked on the excellent
Teaching Company linguistics
course that I've been listening to, one bit of picture-taking around the
neighborhood and front yard, and showing off all the pictures I've taken
in the last four months.
Today, the plan is to do a few more software releases and maybe write some
book reviews.
2009-06-18: Lintian 2.2.11
It had been about a month and a half since a Lintian upload, so we of
course had accumulated a ton of fixes that no one was yet benefitting
from. I probably should have done a release a while back.
The changes in this release are mostly lots of little things that most
people aren't likely to notice unless they had run into the specific
problem that was fixed. Lintian now uses libapt-pkg-perl to do version
number comparisons instead of forking a copy of dpkg, which I hope will be
a lot faster and consume less memory (due to the version comparison cache
we no longer need) on archive-wide runs.
Thanks to Adam D. Barratt, who did the lion's share of the work for this
release.
2009-06-18: Policy 3.8.2
Due to an ill-advised change to the build dependencies of debian-policy
that I made and could have sworn I'd tested (still not sure what
happened), debian-policy was failing to build. We knew about that a while
back and talked a bit about what to do, since we hadn't accumulated many
changes, but then we all ran out of time. Someone finally filed the bug,
so Bill Allombert took care of doing the upload yesterday (thank you!).
This is a very incremental release since I still haven't had a chance to
work on some of the larger changes we have pending. The most significant
change is that debconf is now mandatory for all user prompting, including
for essential packages. They have to at least try to use debconf first.
However, since debconf is not essential (and making it essential would
create other bootstrapping problems), essential packages or their
dependencies are allowed to fall back on other prompting mechanisms if
debconf isn't available. Regular packages must just depend on debconf and
use it.
A new Lintian release updated for 3.8.2 is forthcoming, probably later
today.
2009-06-18: Lintian 2.2.12
This is the release that knows about Policy 3.8.2. It ended up being a
bit more extensive than I had expected, since I started poking at the bug
list last night and added fixes for three or four other things. I also
read over the X fonts portion of Policy and added checks for several
things that weren't previously checked.
Nothing here should be particularly exciting and hopefully won't cause any
problems.
A complete archive-wide run of Lintian is now in progress. Hopefully the
change to use libapt-pkg-perl will make it run faster and take less
memory.
2009-06-19: Vacation Friday
The arrangement of rocks on wood had a zen-like calm feeling for me and an
interesting subtle pattern. I love noticing prosaic things like this
randomly when I'm out walking with a camera.
Vacation is concluding quickly, unfortunately, but it's been a nice
vacation. A bit packed with things I wanted to do and look at, but I've
also finished a couple of books, played some video games, and poked at
some Debian work when I've felt like it. And I still have a long weekend
left.
The archive-wide Lintian run is making good progress, and I think the
changes in version comparison are making it a little bit faster. Lintian
still eats a lot of memory, which indicates to me that there's still
something less than ideal, but hopefully it will be better.
I've been successfully ignoring work other than keeping up on e-mail and
letting other people pick up the problems. I'm hoping that after I get
back to Stanford I'll be able to take some time to release new versions of
a few software packages before diving back into the project grind.
Despite some worries about losing portability, I think I've talked myself
into using libtool for building my PAM modules, and I'd like to set up a
test suite for pam-krb5 and do a new release of it soon.
2009-06-20: Last vacation weekend
Well, I could use another week of vacation, but I seem to be gathering
more momentum and finding it easier to do accomplishment-like stuff
instead of relaxing-like stuff. Hopefully that means I have enough
vacation to feel refreshed and able to dive back into work. I didn't do
quite as much reading as I wanted, but now the US Open is on and I'm
enjoying watching that more than reading at the moment.
Yesterday, I uploaded new OpenAFS 1.4.11pre1 packages for Debian, which
include the new documentation built from editable source. I still need to
update some of the supporting Debian documentation a bit and we should
yank the old documents from the OpenAFS CVS repository so that I can
remove the disclaimer in debian/copyright. But I should be in fairly good
shape for the 1.4.11 release.
I also did some work on Debian Policy last night and this morning,
committing five bug fixes and proposing wording that's now awaiting
seconds for several more. I sent out a heads-up about eliminating the
provision for packages to modify ld.so.conf and so far haven't gotten any
feedback; hopefully we can get that into the next Policy release.
2009-06-21: Meandering
I'm in an uninspired mood this evening for picture selection, so have a
picture of morning glory from last year. Flower pictures are always
pretty. [ETA: Apparently this is actually calibrachoa or trailing
petunia, not morning glory.]
Today was a rather meandering day, in which I had little focus for
anything in particular and just did a bit of this and a bit of that. I
suspect this is largely because I had the US Open on TV most of the day,
and while it doesn't feel that way at the time, having anything on TV
takes a lot of focus away.
Nothing wrong with meandering for a vacation Sunday, of course. I do wish
I were feeling more of an energy bounce coming into the last days of
vacation, though. I'm mostly feeling it slip away faster than I want and
dwelling a bit too much on the things I'd wanted to do and haven't done.
This is making me irritable and unnecessarily negative. Tomorrow, I'll
work on snapping myself out of it, and probably take some time away from
both the TV and the computer after the US Open concludes.
2009-06-25: Back to work
Looking south from platform five at the San Jose Diridon train station.
I'm back at work, which so far is going well. Vacation didn't feel long
enough, but it clearly was enough to recharge my energy. I'm doing
reasonably well at prioritizing and focusing, and as a result I've already
gotten quite a bit done this week. Wednesday was my most productive work
from home day in quite a while, which is a trend that I'd like to see
continue.
One thing that's easier to see coming off of vacation than it was before
vacation is why some of my scheduling plans haven't been working. I keep
trying to do things in the evening, but after working eight hours or more,
I'm mentally beat. After I come home and eat and spend some time with
friends, I'm having a great deal of difficulty focusing enough to post a
journal entry or write book reviews.
I'm not sure how much is tiredness after working and how much is having
cycles of energy through the day, but either way, the solution is probably
to try to move more low-energy things to the end of the day and move
anything higher-energy towards the beginning. This may mean pushing even
harder to do things like writing book reviews before work instead of
afterwards. I think the other key will be to not fight against being
tired so hard that I stay up late pulling out tiny bits of productivity at
the cost of being well-rested and energized during the more productive
time the next day. I'm currently experimenting with a relatively hard
bedtime to prevent that.
Anyway. Still doing lots of time management pondering, as you can tell.
2009-06-26: Weekend!
A path along the Nanaimo River. This feels like a nice, summer picture
(and a picture that feels cooler than apparently this weekend is going to
be around here).
One week done after vacation, although of course it doesn't feel like a
full week since I didn't come back until Tuesday night. I didn't do a
great job of keeping momentum up today, and therefore didn't do a good job
of leaving work early like I was planning on doing so. I have a hard time
leaving early on a Friday unless I feel like I've been very productive
that day, even if I did well for the rest of the week.
But I've made a lot of progress on the new features for the WebAuth 3.6.1
release (and the Git
repository is now publicly available), and I'm staying current on my
other projects. I feel very good about the week.
I'm doing laundry now, and then I'll have nothing specific that I need to
do this weekend other than do grocery shopping (and even that I could put
off if I wanted). I want to play some video games, since I've missed that
while I was on vacation, and find other good ways to relax, although since
I'm coming off a short week, I might work on some non-work things so that
I'll feel more caught up for the next weekend (a nice, long holiday
weekend).
Oh, and write book reviews. Since I'm within two reviews of being caught
up writing them, for the first time in months and months.
2009-06-29: New desktop
Saturday, I finally built the new desktop system for work, which I also
use as my primary home directory and mail server and a build system for
Debian packages and other software. Today, I switched over to the new
system. It's pretty and much faster, and also has the advantage of being
built within the last five years, so I don't have to worry as much about
the hard drive dying.
The new system is an HP Firebird 802, bought straight off their web site.
The drawback from a Debian perspective is that it uses nVidia motherboard
video (nForce 760i SLI), but it's supported by the non-free Linux drivers
(despite being missing from the README). I'd prefer ATI or Intel video
with free drivers, but not enough to veto the system for it. Otherwise,
it's water-cooled, very quiet, and has a four-core Intel processor, 4GB of
memory, and two 250GB hard drives.
I kept notes on the build and
configuration in case they prove helpful for anyone else.
This is the first time I've built a system with LVM, and I even did an
online resize of the root logical volume since the installer used an
extremely small 7GB default size and I couldn't figure out the easy way to
increase it in the installer. I like the flexibility of allocating space
as I need it into separate logical volumes.
2009-06-30: Summer haul
I've not been reading as much as I normally do this year, but last month I
found more time and devoured a few books (I have three more waiting for me
to find a chance to review). So as a reward, I get to buy more books. I
was particularly excited about this order.
Jacqueline Carey — Naamah's Kiss (sff)
Jacqueline Carey — Santa Olivia (sff)
Jane Jacobs — Dark Age Ahead (nonfiction)
Urusla K. Le Guin — Gifts (sff)
Ursula K. Le Guin — Voices (sff)
Ursula K. Le Guin — Powers (sff)
Jack McDevitt — Deepsix (sff)
Jack McDevitt — Chindi (sff)
Jack McDevitt — Omega (sff)
Karen Traviss — City of Pearl (sff)
Karen Traviss — Matriarch (sff)
I've already read (and reviewed) City of Pearl, but I read a
borrowed copy and I like the series well enough that I wanted to own it.
When buying the rest of the series, I'd somehow missed Matriarch,
so now I can keep reading.
The only question is what I'm going to dig into right away and what I'm
going to save for long plane flights later this month.
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