misrouted: goto 1

I've had a little setback with misrouted: it turns out that my original idea of how the universe of CP objects work (ie we have item and containers) turns out to be deeply wrong.

While parsing some complex rulebase with the old implementation it turns out that the objects are divided in 3 classes: items, containers and container-of-listable-items (ideas on naming are welcome). This is because you can have a network, which is a collection, that can contain a group, also previously a collection, in a different way then that the group contains the network: all members of the group are in the network versus a custom method looking if all possible ip's in the network are in the group. Also the trivial method I used the last method kind of broke down when it tried to expand a /8 network into ip's. :-S

So this means surgery at a pretty deep level in the class hierarchy and the old program could just about handle it, but the scars run deep. So misrouted is being rewritten to use the new setup. The good news it that I've thought of a more complex, but not O((N_rules**4)**N_firewalls**2) method of simulating the effects of a rulebase on traffic.

on blobs

I notice that the binary blob discussion is again on lwns front page. Recently I got a new portable from work and this gave me some new insight. In short: binary-only drivers are so bad people will buy other hardware.
The machine (a Lenovo Z61m) uses a X1400 ATI chip, so I have to use the ATI binary-only driver. Well. I'm trying to use it.
The amount of grief I'm getting from it would convince even billg himself that opensource drivers are mandatory in an opensource system. Strange errors pop up and you're just lost, googling only gives you forums where other poor users are trying to make it all work. Due to the dynamic nature of xorg and kernel development the driver will never 'catch up' and problems will keep popping up. And there is little I can do except complain to the responsible person and urge him to buy the Intel only portable next time.
If this keeps on Intel will just sweep the Linux hacker's market, and with it the heart and minds of a lot of people. My next machine will be an Intel, the first one in years, because I cannot get an AMD with a open graphics card, and I think I won't be alone in this.

A deja-vu moment

Here I was reading up on how to install software on the PVR box we bought (a dream 7025). I find the developers information corner and read the ipkg documentation. Talk about a deja-vu. I feel I'm going to get along just fine with ipkg creation.

In other news I've uploaded a new version of slime to main. Yeah. Many thanks to Luca, Marco and the other slime developers!

on GR's

While I battle FTBFS problems with my packages I barely notice the -tank and GR emails flying past, so when I see GR I always think it means GR. Which is something positive, healthy and nice to do, unlike following debian-vote/debian-legal. It must be the effect of my 'think positive' project :-).

Oaxaca teachers strike

During the post-debconf6 trip we stayed in Oaxaca and in my flickr images you will have noticed the striking teachers. People that visited the place may be interested in the fact that Indymedia reports that the government removed the sit-in with force.

stupid CL errors

• Do not assume :always does a check on an empty list:

  [1]> (loop :for x :in '() :always (oddp x))
  T

  is the correct result. But deep inside logic involving "have all entries that property?" it can be surprising.
• 0 is not NIL. Stop laughing, it took me 2 days to find that one part of the program thought it was talking T/NIL while the other talked 0/1 or 2. One (declare (type boolean result)) and a few runtime errors later the program gives sane results again.

Pictures sort-of-up

I've uploaded the Debconf6 and Post Debconf6 trip pictures to flickr.

There is still a time-shift problem with almost all the pictures from the trip, I'll have to explore the flickr API to shift the timestamps forward 41 hours. I already corrected my local copies, which I now need to upload to the debconf gallery :-).

Then I'll write a report on the trip on LJ.