Planet Open Ghana

I’d draw a caricature involving a Toyota car, representing capitalism, with a stuck gas petal and Barack Obama trying to fix it. But as I cannot draw very well, especially recognizable people, I created this collage:

The photo of Obama was created by Beth Rankin.

Yesterday, I found the 3/10-issue of the German “Linux-Magazin” in my mailbox. (I don’t dare to call it the March issue – they are a bit off schedule...) On page 62, you can find my 3½ page article about creating a symbol font with FontForge. I briefly covered the topic on my blog and later thought that it would made a nice article, even though I’m not an expert on this area. The article will be freely available in about three years.This is already my third publication, after my article on the Cross-Site-Authentication attack that was published in the same magazine (circulation ~63.000) and in its international counterpart in 2005 and my recent article in the “freeX” magazine (circulation ~15.000). Looks like I’ll have to add a  “Publications” section to my website soon...

A long while ago I wrote a plugin for gaim called gaim-thinklight that blinks ones ThinkPad ThinkLight when a new message arrives. By now it is called pidgin-blinklight and supports some other hardware as well, but has not changed since over a year. Today, I implemented a new feature, and I’m curious if it will actually work:

Until now, the blink pattern was hardcoded: ON, wait 150ms, OFF, wait 125ms, ON, wait 150ms, OFF. Since version 0.11, pidgin-blinklight will calculate these three delay times based on the contacts login name. So different contacts will have very slightly different blinking patterns. The idea is that, after a while, you start to recognize your frequent buddies already by the blinking. The wait times are from the range from 50ms to 250ms, I hope that range works well.

Users of Debian unstable will get the new version automatically. If you want to compile pidgin-blinklight from source, you will have to grab it from the debian ftp server. The source is in the pidgin-blinklight Darcs repository.

The XML-Editor Serna by Syntext has been published as Free Software a few months ago. This was very good news, because there was a lack of a good free XML editors with a good graphical view on DocBook documents, which I needed to recommend to users of zpub. Therefore, I investigated packaging Serna for Debian. I had to patch a few things to make it compile on and64 and to use components shipped by Debian where possible. Today, I could finally close the RFP bug filed by W. Martin Borgert, as the serna package was accepted by the ftp-masters. The first bug (SEGFAULT on startup on lenny) is already filed. I hope this is a good sign, as it shows that there is interest in the package.

For my packaging workflow, I used git-svn to import the upstream SVN branch into a git repository. I then use git-dpm by Bernhard R. Link to manage my changes as patches in the new 3.0 (quilt) debian source package. I must say that I prefer this approach to git-buildpackage, as there is only one git branch to publish. I hope that Bernhard uploads git-dpm to Debian soon.

Serna is quite a big software project and uses stuff that I know little about (Qt, C++ with python interaction etc.). Also, the package currently bundles the DITA-OT package, which should rather be packaged separately. Therefore, I’d be glad if co-maintainers would join the effort.

In a comment to my previous blog post, I linked to the DebConf photo gallery page with the DebConf8 mugshots. Felix Brandt, a friend of mine, noticed the per-picture view statistics there and plotted them, differentiating between male and female. He finds that the number of views on an image gives a fairly good indication of the sex (or gender?) of the person in question:

The most notable exception is the image of bubulle. He does not even look feminine. Maybe it’s because he’s like a mother to us Debianers, always kind and always helpful? :-)

This observation fits my experience when I created a top-100-statistic of individual picture page views of my personal gallery: I got a collection of pretty much all pictures of girls in bikinis, lying at some beach, across the various pages and years, and hardly any other picture. I won’t post these top-100 here, as I don’t want to additionally increase the effect...