Tim Retout's www presence

GNOME Bugzilla edit rights

Last night, I was granted permission to edit/close bugs on GNOME's bugzilla. Because of the logarithmic way in which the points system works, I now have three more bugzilla points than I did this morning. :)

Posted: 22 Apr 2008 00:00 | Tags: Planet WUGLUG, Planet UWCS, gnome

GPG trustdb batch updates

A while ago, I mused on how network latency affects my email usage - one other cause of slowness in my mail client has been GPG key verification. Occasionally, when Evolution wants to check a signature, gpg takes 30 seconds or more to run, and the text of the message is not displayed until the end.

The reason gpg runs so slowly is that it sometimes checks its trust database to make sure it's up to date. However, it does not make sense to run this at the time you are trying to verify an email - it will just slow you down. Fortunately, this is very easy to fix - add 'no-auto-check-trustdb' to gnupg.conf, and set up a nightly cronjob to run 'gpg --batch --check-trustdb'. Ensure that you have 'anacron' installed if your system is not always on.

I have been trying a few methods for solving the network lag problems with email, but haven't reached a conclusion just yet.

Posted: 09 Apr 2008 00:00 | Tags: Planet WUGLUG, Planet UWCS, gpg, email, desktop

Linux Hardware Support

Just over a year ago, Greg Kroah-Hartman announced the Linux Driver Project - companies could get Linux drivers written for their hardware free of charge, if they provided specifications (possibly under NDA). There is now an April 2008 Status Report for the project - they are short of companies and hardware to write drivers for. This is probably because Linux hardware support is excellent in all but a few specific areas - there is some interesting discussion of the efforts being made to support wireless devices and graphics cards later on in the thread. (If you're looking to get involved with Linux kernel development, cleaning up greg's LDP git tree would be a good place to start.)

Speaking of graphics drivers, VIA appears to be following Intel and ATI in releasing the necessary documentation to write good drivers for its chipsets. Suddenly the future is looking quite bright for Linux hardware support - almost all hardware will already work out of the box, and things are only improving over the next couple of years.

Posted: 08 Apr 2008 00:00 | Tags: Planet WUGLUG, Planet UWCS, linux, via

Demise of Windows XP

June 30 - "That's the last day when large computer makers — the Dells, HPs and Lenovos of the world — will be allowed to preinstall Windows XP on new PCs." -- Computerworld story

What caught my eye about this was the fact that OEM manufacturers actually won't be allowed to continue installing XP. This seems quite odd to someone used to distributions of GNU/Linux - sure, security support from the distribution might end, and you might well be hard-pushed to find someone to support your seven year-old software, but if your customers want the older, faster version of the operating system, you will always be allowed to sell it.

Posted: 06 Apr 2008 00:00 | Tags: Planet WUGLUG, Planet UWCS, windows

Debian BSP

I spent my weekend in Cambridge at the Debian bug squashing party. It was good seeing people again. I even squashed a bug, but then spent Saturday forwarding non-RC bugs upstream, and kernel hacking today. :)

Walked back to Cambridge station - about 40 minutes, along the river for part of the way, and it was a nice evening. Living where I do, I don't walk as much as I used to... perhaps I should do more at weekends.

It didn't snow very much in Cambridge. Back in Rugby there was an inch or so on the cars, and it was threatening to start again as I walked home. Hopefully it will all have cleared by tomorrow.

Posted: 06 Apr 2008 00:00 | Tags: Planet WUGLUG, Planet UWCS, debian, bsp

I'll be at DebConf8

Lamby reckoned I wouldn't be able to resist using the DebConf8 blog sticker thing. And he was right.

My horrendously expensive plane tickets arrived last week.

Posted: 03 Apr 2008 00:00 | Tags: Planet WUGLUG, Planet UWCS, debian, debconf, debconf8

PostgreSQL UK 2008

Yesterday, I was at the first ever PostgreSQL UK conference, in Birmingham. The venue was familiar from various events last year, such as GUADEC and PyCon UK - the Conservatoire is becoming quite established as a relatively cheap, central UK venue for technical events.

I gave a talk about monitoring PostgreSQL databases on behalf of credativ. (Slides for all the talks are available on the PostgreSQL wiki.) I got a reasonable level of comments and feedback afterwards, and perhaps those will help with the development of some better monitoring solutions. The act of preparing the talk also let me discover a few different monitoring tools that look useful - perhaps I'll get the chance to look at them at some point.

As for the conference itself, there were some interesting talks about PostGIS, full text searching, and analysis of EXPLAIN output. I think it was worth attending just for those; but we also got to meet a bit more of the PostgreSQL developer community in the UK. We also got in on the beginnings of the new UK user group - hopefully they will be organising more meetings over the coming months.

Posted: 03 Apr 2008 00:00 | Tags: Planet WUGLUG, Planet UWCS, postgresql, credativ, conference