blog/archives/2008/06zack's home pagehttp://upsilon.cc/~zack/blog/archives/2008/06/zack's home pageikiwiki2009-11-28T12:00:16Zfancy bibliography entryhttp://upsilon.cc/~zack/blog/posts/2008/06/fancy_bibliography_entry/2009-11-28T12:00:16Z2008-06-30T15:31:50Z
<h1>sooner or later in a bibliography I should add ...</h1>
<p>Quoting from the bibliography of a paper from the <a href=
"http://www.sigmod.org/">ACM SIGMOD</a> conference:</p>
<pre><code>[11] Sergio Leone, Clint Eastwood, Eli Wallach, and Lee Van
Cleef. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly / Il Buono, il Brutto,
Il Cattivo (The Man with No Name). Produzioni Europee
Associate (Italy) Production, Distributed by United Artists
(USA) 1966.
</code></pre>
<p>... one of the things I would have killed for having written by
myself.</p>
firefox 3 un-rantinghttp://upsilon.cc/~zack/blog/posts/2008/06/firefox_3_un-ranting/2009-11-28T12:00:16Z2008-06-26T08:19:53Z
<p><a href="http://gwolf.org/node/1837">Gunnar</a>, have a look at
this: <img src=
"http://upsilon.cc/~zack/blog/posts/2008/06/firefox_3_un-ranting/iceweasel-ssl.png"
alt="iceweasel-ssl.png" />. So your example using <a href=
"https://penta.debconf.org">the Penta website</a> was just a bad
one, and I personally agree with the "INVALID" resolution of
<a href="https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=441831">your
bug report</a>. In fact, showing a <em>partially</em> encrypted
connection as an insecure one is an overall advantage for (l)user
securities, as with the browser interfaces we are used to use, we
don't know which parts are actually sent encrypted and which are
not. As you can see in the example above a fully encrypted
connection is properly reported as such by Firefox 3.0.</p>
<p>FWIW: I'm overall satisfied with Firefox 3.0, especially about
the new URL bar <a href=
"http://www.grep.be/blog/en/computer/cluebat/firefox_sucks">Wouther
is disliking</a>. Yes it is a bit slower than before, but even on
my 4-year old laptop it is perfectly usable.</p>
<p>The HTML title shown there? Well, it is rather handy when I
start typing <code>bugs.debian.org</code> and then I've to
discriminate among tons of almost identical bug report URLs ...</p>
<p>Is the <code>about:config</code> hand-holding dialog worst than
the pop-up the first time you "have provided unencrypted
information" in a random form? It is not, we have probably just
forgot about the first time we unchecked the corresponding
checkbox.</p>
<p>All in all, the only "feature" of the new Firefox I found
incredibly stupid is the SSL certificate exception mechanism.
Installing the untrusted certificate is what? ... 5 click-away from
the initial page? That is just dumb. (And as it is well-known that
habits form anyhow, getting the habits harder to form is just a way
to piss-off users.)</p>
debian weather is backhttp://upsilon.cc/~zack/blog/posts/2008/06/debian_weather_is_back/2009-11-28T12:00:16Z2008-06-09T15:26:51Z
<h1>What's the weather like in Debian?</h1>
<p>One of the cool things developed during <a href=
"http://www.edos-project.org">EDOS</a> (now <a href=
"http://www.mancoosi.org">Mancoosi</a>) has been <a href=
"http://packages.debian.org/sid/edos-debcheck"><code>edos-debcheck</code></a>.
Using it it is possible to check (incredibly quickly) whether some
package in a given distribution cannot be installed according to
its dependencies. When there are such packages it usually means
that the distro is buggy s it is shipping uninstallable packages
(there are some corner cases, but they are rare).</p>
<p>In fact, <code>edos-debcheck</code> has been run daily (as a
service maintained by <a href=
"http://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=treinen">Ralf</a>) on
Debian's main suites and some derivatives for years now. The
resulting <a href="http://edos.debian.net/edos-debcheck/">list of
uninstallable packages</a> is linked from <a href=
"http://edos.debian.net">http://edos.debian.net</a> and is being
used by the QA team; I've no idea if it is being used by the
Release Managers too, but it probably should be.</p>
<p>A cool toy built on top of <code>edos-debcheck</code> was the
<em><a href="http://brion.inria.fr/anla/">Debian weather</a></em>
(part of a more generic service called Anla, I'll blog about it
sooner or later ...). Debian weather basically used to present the
status of a given Debian-based distro in term of how many
uninstallable packages were shipped using the weather metaphor: the
fewer the uninstallable packages, the better the weather. I wrote
"used to" because Anla was stopped about 1 year ago, and is being
re-engineered these days.</p>
<p>In the meantime it was a pity not to have the Debian weather (as
<a href="http://www.enricozini.org/blog/pdo.html">Enrico</a>
pointed out with me), so I spent some time to resurrect it on top
of <code>edos-debcheck</code> daily runs: <strong><a href=
"http://edos.debian.net/weather/">Debian weather is
back</a></strong>, enjoy!</p>
ocaml 3.10.2 is in testinghttp://upsilon.cc/~zack/blog/posts/2008/06/ocaml_3.10.2_is_in_testing/2009-11-28T12:00:16Z2008-06-01T16:38:00Z
<h1>OCaml 3.10.2 meets Lenny</h1>
<p>As per title: OCaml 3.10.2 (... and friends of course) today has
entered testing, as such it will be released with Debian Lenny.
Yay.</p>
<p>This transition was the second binNMU-based and went flawlessly
(while the first one was hit by a bug in the script generating
binNMU/dep-wait requests automatically). This way transitions are
way easier to handle, and would probably be real PITAs now that we
have about 120 OCaml-related source packages to care about.</p>
<p>Kudos to all who helped, Luk -release side, and the other fellow
Debian camlers.</p>
signature gotta jobhttp://upsilon.cc/~zack/blog/posts/2008/06/signature_gotta_job/2009-01-05T17:01:30Z2008-06-01T16:38:00Z
<h1>Nuovo lavoro - nuova signature</h1>
<p>... ed anche un tributo a Manoj, per un "interessante" punto di
vista su XML.</p>
<pre><code>Stefano Zacchiroli -*- PhD in Computer Science \ PostDoc @ Univ. Paris 7
zack@{upsilon.cc,pps.jussieu.fr,debian.org} -<>- http://upsilon.cc/zack/
I'm still an SGML person,this newfangled /\ All one has to do is hit the
XML stuff is so ... simplistic -- Manoj \/ right keys at the right time
</code></pre>