Today, as an experiment, I attempted to fix a Debian bug while on the train to work. I use a 3G card from Three.co.uk in my Lenovo Thinkpad x121e, and my commute is from Southampton Central to Fleet (changing at Winchester) - just under an hour. 3G coverage is not 100%, but tends to be better around the major stops. First, I found a bug. I used udd.debian.org to browse for a relatively simple RC bug, and found bug #674992 in actionaz. The fix was outlined in the report already, so there was very little thinking required. Next, I confirmed the FTBFS using cowbuilder. Unfortunately, this required downloading roughly 120MB of dependencies - I have 1GB of data per month, but I couldn't afford to do this every day. I was lucky in that I was near Basingstoke at the time, so had a good HSDPA signal to get the bulk of this. The build had failed before I reached Fleet. In the background, I updated debian/control and debian/changelog with the fix. I was able to set off the build, but had to suspend the laptop until lunchtime before it could finish. Cowbuilder needed to download only a few extra build-deps, as the vast majority were cached from the initial run. On the train home, I checked over the result, signed it and uploaded. In this instance, the built package was small enough to upload, but I could see this being a problem with others. Finally, I sent the nmudiff, although that was delayed briefly by a drop in connectivity before Southampton Airport. Thoughts: firstly, part of me is amazed that this is possible. Secondly, there could be a case for a local Debian mirror on my laptop. Otherwise, an interesting experimental extension to UDD would be "Required bandwidth" - the sum of the recursive build-dependencies plus the upload size of the diff/binaries.

Following on from the weekend of change, I've got engaged to Kate. :) We now need to organise a combined housewarming/engagement party...

Agile processes harness change for the customer's competitive advantage. Principles behind the Agile Manifesto After two and a half years at Smoothwall, I'm moving on - Friday is my last day. Since I joined the development team, we have adopted Agile development, set up a pretty nifty Gerrit/Jenkins code review + integration system, and introduced dpkg for package management. Along the way, I helped with a bunch of important features for the business, like a ground-up rewrite of the web filter, and time-based browsing usage quotas. ...

I've finally got around to deleting my Facebook account. I'd love to claim that this was a grand gesture against privacy-invading apps, or a bid to recoup vast amounts of my spare time... but it's not, really. I rarely logged in to the site, these days, so Facebook has very little of my personal data.

Michael Meeks gave awesome talks at FOSDEM, so Kate was inspired to hack on LibreOffice. I was inspired to write this blog entry in a list. She probably wins. Building LibreOffice master on Debian stable failed for her with a segmentation fault in GNU Make. A bit of searching threw up Savannah bug #20033, which is hitting everyone on the upstream mailing list. Bumped severity and offered to NMU Debian bug #622644. Then actually tried building make-dfsg in cowbuilder, and aclocal fails in the clean environment because /usr/share/aclocal does not exist. I think it's related to Debian bug #565663, but I'm still poking it.

Recently, I tried to get 3G working on my Lenovo ThinkPad X121e - it has an Ericsson F5521gw mobile broadband card. This is supported by ModemManager, but all I got were unknown errors (276 and 272). Searching online, there were very few results (hence this short note) - just previous unrelated Linux kernel issues. I found someone with the same problem on Fedora, but no solution, so I started off by filing a bug report with Debian. ...

So since my last post about perl tutorials, the Perl Tutorial Hub has leaped from page 2 to be the top result for the relevant Google search. The Leeds tutorial has dropped off the first page. I couldn't figure out how such a dramatic reversal could have happened, until I asked Mithaldu on IRC; the admins of the old Leeds tutorial have added a (delayed) redirect. So, Google has interpreted that as a 302 status, and given perl-tutorial.org all the old inbound links, presumably. ...

Hello, World! Last year, a bit of a fuss was kicked up in the Perl community about the low quality of search results for the phrase "Perl tutorial". Various ideas for fixing this were proposed, including the handy Perl tutorial hub, but kicking Leeds University off the coveted top spot is going to be a real challenge. The problem is, most Perl tutorials on the internet were written for Perl 4; modern Perl doesn't get a look-in. It's a miracle anyone manages to learn Perl at all... ...

So I was about to configure an FTP server to let a friend upload content for a website... and then I came to my senses and remembered sftp exists. It's supported by the same graphical clients, and avoids me having to figure out SSL certificates and so on. Next problem: we want to both edit the site. Okay, so I create a group, make it the default group for both users... and now I need to set the umask to 002 so that all group members can edit all files. There's no option in the client... ...

This week, Google released an extension called BITE which lets you file bug reports from within Chrome (or Chromium). If you are testing web applications, it lets you attach screenshots and/or automated tests to reproduce the bug you've found. There's just one small catch: they haven't released a server to go with the client. Oops. Apparently the internal systems are too tightly integrated to make that possible. I have hacked up enough stubs of a BITE server in Perl to get the client to "log in" and show off some features. (Warning: it doesn't actually do anything useful yet.) ...