Website slightly broken

Hm, some stuff has not been working before and some additional stuff broke when I updated to Muse-3.02.02. RSS is not working at the moment and some additional features might be broken. Will have to check next weekend.

If you want to break your website too, download the ebuild here.

Posted at: 20:44 | Permalink | category: /english/technical

Paris and some poetry

Lately I did not have enough time to browse through the Tonspion or download.com for interesting music. I would need to automatize the process of fetching new mp3's but I currently don't see when I will have the time for this little python project.

Anyhow, two things are worth mentioning. One is a song from Stefan Krachten. It is called Paris and they play it from time to time on soma.fm. I was happy to see that this is available as free music.

The second piece is Pointof Scheißegal from Mirco Buchwitz. It is german poetry and somewhat weird. I hope I'll hear more stuff like this from the guy tonight...

Posted at: 18:25 | Permalink | category: /english/personal/media

Downtime

Have been down since yesterday. I definitely need some monitoring tool. Oh, there is too much to do....

Anyhow, back again!

Posted at: 16:40 | Permalink | category: /english/technical

Quick flickrfs update

flickrfs is still under rapid development. Version 1.1.9 has been released yesterday and I adapted my ebuild today. Now you can run as a normal user which is nice. Here is the release announcement with more information about the changes.

Posted at: 23:35 | Permalink | category: /english/technical/gentoo

EU politics

I am about to completely loose any faith into the political system of the European Union. I still believe that the basic idea about the Union is pretty good but the politics behind it amaze me yet again.

The Commission of the EU recently authorized import of maize 1507 for use in animal food.

I am not so much against the decision itself since I don't see a large risk if it is neither cultivated nor used for human food. But the fact that this decision has been taken while the member states of the EU are still evenly divided between rejection and acceptance of genetically modified food is amazing.

The commission apparently has the right to decide as long as the ministries of agriculture are yet undecided.

I am back to the same problem the I had when I tried to follow the news on software patents. I simply have no clue how decisions are taken in the EU. I do have a better overview over the different bodies that form the government of the union now. But I am still helpless when it comes to predicting the possible outcome of the decision process.

At some point during the discussion on software patents I made the effort of reading through a lengthy description of the "workflow" of a new law. Reality did not even come close to that. There seem to exist a number of rather interesting, unwritten laws that are only known to the politicians involved in the process.

As a citizen of this union I simply wish to be able to understand how new laws are being generated. I would like to know how I could try to influence decisions that touch topics I am interested in. I acknowledge that this is also not an easy task in German politics. But I have at least the feeling that I know the general directions while I am completely lost concerning the EU.

And it is not possible to simply say "I don't care". The laws made by the EU are in general applicable everywhere throughout the union. Even if Germany reject GMOs, the company selling maize 1507 can enforce the law by appealing to a court.

In addition to my confusion I have the general feeling that the large companies are somehow much nearer to the process than any of the organizations that actually care for social concerns.

Would be nice to know if the constitution would have changed anything if it would have come into being.

Posted at: 22:42 | Permalink | category: /english/personal/news/science

flickrfs

I visited Flickr rather often the last weeks. I am always amazed by the beautiful photos one can find there. It really makes me crave for a good digital camera.

Recently a new tool to access the image database has been released. It is called filckrfs and maps the images onto your local hard drive.

A simple session looks somewhat like this:

mkdir /mnt/flickr
flickrfs /mnt/flickr &
cd /mnt/flickr/tags/public
mkdir lazy:coffee
ls lazy\:coffee/

At this point you get a listing of all images that match the tags "lazy" and "coffee". Nothing will be downloaded at this point, so it is pretty lightweight.

Only if you actually look at the image, it will be transferred from flickr.com:

xview lazy\:coffee/lazy\ latte

The whole thing is implemented in python and uses the python-fuse library for which I did write an ebuild a while ago. So I just had to create an ebuild for flickrfs. The application is still slightly rough around the edges but after some trial and error it works for me.

Actually the only thing you will have to do initially is to start the application once without running it in the background (as the root user since you can only run flickrfs as the admin of your system):

flickrfs /mnt/flickr

This will open the firefox browser and you are required to log in into your flickr account. This should then return an authentication token that will be saved for further access to flickr.

If this step does not succeed you will receive a message about an "invalid frob".

For me the procedure failed with the firefox browser. But it was no problem to set flickrfs to use "elinks" as a text based browser. I was able to log in this way and got my authentication token.

And now I'm having fun...

UPDATE:

Actually I think the problem with firefox was just that I already had it open as the non-root user. This prevented flickrfs from getting the token. If you ensure that your browser is closed when you run flickrfs the authentication should work just fine.

Posted at: 22:54 | Permalink | category: /english/technical/gentoo

Debugging Python

Python has nice capabilities for introspection which really helps when you want to debug a python script or program.

I use a debugging module for the different python projects I am working on. I added a wiki page that demonstrates how you can use the module. It provides useful debugging output from very simple debugging statements.

The module source code can be downloaded here. It is also part of the webapp-config tool which has a live code repository here.

Posted at: 11:19 | Permalink | category: /english/technical

webapp-config release plan

In case there will be no further problematic bugs discovered, we will add the eclass on Sunday. The python version of webapp-config will follow on Wednesday if no major problems arise with the new eclass. But the changes Renat added to the class should provide for a very smooth migration.

Meanwhile I started my own branch to add new features. I have the feeling that the webapp-config "database" is very prone to becoming corrupted so I feel a need to restructure the way webapp-config records source location and features as well as virtual install locations. No finalized plans yet, but I think we definitely need a --move switch to allow the user to move installed web applications without breaking the database.

Posted at: 11:08 | Permalink | category: /english/technical/gentoo

Meat from cloned animals

Just catching up on the recent news. And this article on meat from cloned animals needed some comment. There is one passage that made me angry. The article states:

Advocates of livestock cloning say it will improve the quality of steaks and dairy products by propagating the animals that are disease-resistant, give lots of milk or produce lean and tender meat.

If these are the main reasons given by the companies that would like to sell such products then we simply don't need it. The selection of "better" products is in no way different from what the food industry has been doing for decades now. The process might have been more difficult since breeding is less predictable.

But did it give us food that tastes better? Oranges, apples, meat? Granted, the food I can buy today looks great. Just don't try to eat it...

So why would we need another technique to "improve" our food? Especially if it's cloning, since there is not that much known about the side effects of cloning.

Would really wish they would tighten the rules on GMO in the EU again.

Posted at: 08:49 | Permalink | category: /english/personal/news/science

Paying taxes

Only four days left until I have to start submitting monthly tax reports. Time to discover the state of ELSTER support for Linux. The German ministry of finance did issue a law that the tax reports, due every month, would have to be handed in electronically starting at the beginning of this year. Maybe not a bad idea since it reduces the amount of paperwork. But they did only manage to release a tool that works with Windows. Nice choice. Especially if the law makes it mandatory to use the electronic procedure.

Luckily a number of good programmers were willing to create a free tool for the Linux world. There existed already a request to provide a Gentoo ebuild for the tax library and the tax GUI. I added the necessary installation scripts.

The application works fine but it basically maps the paper form to an electronic version. The entries that have to be filled could be called "cryptic" at best. I thought the Internet might provide me with a nice guide on how to fill the form but I couldn't find anything useful.

So I considered it a bright idea to call the ELSTER hot-line. The conversation went something like this:

... So I have been searching for some kind of help concerning that form. Is there something available on the Internet?

Well, not really. Usually you already know how to do that or ask your tax adviser. But the help of the ELSTER-Software is really good. Do you have it open by chance?

Oh, no sorry. I don't have a Windows machine here. I'm using Linux.

Laughter at the other end of the line ... Heh, well that is the drawback of using such an operating system. If you'd be using Windows you could use our software.

Eh,... well ... but you might as well implement your software for something other than Windows?!

Ah, yes. Actually it is planned to provide an on-line version that will work for all operating systems.

Yes I know. Thanks anyway, I'll guess I'll have to find my help somewhere else. Have a nice day...

I don't care if they provide a Linux version or not. There will always be programmers to fill such a gap with nice tools like taxbird. But that this guy on the help line simply laughed at my choice of operating system really made my day.

Posted at: 15:50 | Permalink | category: /english/technical/gentoo

Python

Nice, looks like the new webapp-config might be released around next weekend. If there will be no major bugs found during the next week it should be ready for unstable by then.

But actually I wanted to note that I updated my python wiki page which now holds a nice summary on my effort to improve my python work environment. This includes some emacs settings, debugging of python scripts and pylint integration. I might correct some of the sections again this week so it might get mentioned again.

Posted at: 23:44 | Permalink | category: /english/technical

webapp-config progress

With Stuart back from holiday, Renat in bug fixing mode and myself settled again (after moving to Hamburg), the python version of webapp-config finally gets nearer to deployment. Today I imported it into the trac repository that Stuart set up.

So I will probably play a little bit with trac since I never got around to install it myself. Once I'm finished with that there will be a last round of bug fixing and maybe we can get it in the tree then. So, two to three weeks? Let's see...

Posted at: 13:52 | Permalink | category: /english/technical/gentoo