Søren Hansen

Someone on #ubuntu-motu asked what those "dpkg-shlibdeps: warning: format of libfoo.so not recognized" that you sometimes see during package builds means. I've seen those errors before, but never really cared. They were - after all - just warnings. :-) Nevertheless, I got curious and searched wide and far, but to no avail. Looking at the source code for dpkg-shlibdeps.pl in the dpkg-dev package, it turns out that it's actually the NAME "libfoo.so" and not the FILE "libfoo.so" that's causing the trouble. dpkg-shlibdeps checks the NEEDED headers of an executable to determine which libraries it needs AND which version of said libraries. It determines the library version by examining the filename. If it needs version 1.5 of libfoo, it can refer to either libfoo1-5.so or libfoo.so.1.5. If it has any other format, you get the above error. That's pretty much it.

A friend of mine just told me about a carton of wine he saw in Australia. Somewhere on the side of the carton it said: "This product may contain traces of nut and fish." FISH??!

I had the coolest experience today.. I was sitting in an auditorium for a math lecture. I lose my concentration and my eyes begin to wander around.. I see The Lost Ones sitting there with their very distinctive Windows XP laptops.. They're not that interesting.. I started looking for people running something else.. It suddenly dawns upon me. Everyone else is running Ubuntu. I honestly couldn't spot anyone that wasn't running either Windows XP or Ubuntu, and the latter crowd was like.. 50%, I think. It's just the greatest feeling to know that you've played an - although tiny - part in making that happen.

So, finally back home after a couple of VERY stressful weeks we had to form groups for the P1 project at university. The project suggestions for CS students were all something about web programming or something like that. Not very interesting and not very scientific if you ask me.. The suggestions for the math students, however, were quite interesting. They had "number theory and encryption", "coupling theory" (I think) and "Computer algebra", all of which I consider to be text book examples of computer science projects. So I decided to ditch the other CS students and either write about RSA encryption which I've done before so that'd be quite easy, I think, or something about coupling theory which I know next to nothing about.. In the end I went with the coupling theory thing, so I suppose I'm going to have a tough semester ahead of me. Tough but interesting and educational.

I have just joined the esteemed, exclusive ranks of Ubuntu members with 4 out of 3 possible votes.

Oh, yeah, and sabdfl gave me his personal permission to tell him "fuck". I don't think a lot of people can brag about that.

Today, we handed in our very first project report at university. And almost a full day ahead of time.. W00t! It's not a real project report, though, but only like half of it. The objective was to write a good analysis of the problem and propose a solution for it, so no actual coding or anything like that. :-( We've got an exam next wednesday which I'm pretty confident will be ok, but let's see. :-D

Finally!

I can't really explain how good it feels to finally package something that doesn't just get stuck in REVU or on the debian-mentors mailing list.

The package is libmms and here's the proof

. A special thanks to slomo and \sh for advocating the package.

The good news: I got mms:// url's working in Ubuntu's gstreamer.

I've packaged libmms (about frickin' time since I actually helped developed it) and devised a patch for gstreamer.

The bad news: It probably won't be available in Ubuntu until the Dapper Drake release.

Of course.. the very day I start wondering: "Hmm... I wonder when and where the next Ubuntu conference is going to be?" it appears that the last chance for applying for sponsored attendance was last Thursday. Just my luck..

Well, I hope I'll manage to do enough Ubuntu work to make myself noticed and actually apply in time for the next conference. Though, with my luck, I bet it's going to be right when I've got some important exam.

I was getting fed up with having to manually switch between my home WiFi configuration and the one at university, so I installed waproamd. The essid at university is "AAU", so I created a file in /etc/waproamd/scripts called "essid:AAU":

#!/bin/sh

ifup $IFACE=uni

In my /etc/network/interfaces I have this:

iface uni inet dhcp
     wireless-essid AAU
     wireless-key off
     up /usr/sbin/vpnc-connect tnb1
     down /usr/sbin/vpnc-disconnect

So whenever waproamd discovers a wireless network with essid "AAU" it connects to it, and I don't have to do a thing.

All I have left to do now is some sort of automagic proxy configuration...

I hate it when stuff doesn't work. I can spend hours and hours and hours getting stuff to work and it never works. That really sucks. There is however, something that sucks a LOT more. When you spend hours and hours and hours and hours getting something to work, and it doesn't help. Then, when you finally ask someone else for help, and you want to demonstrate that it doesn't work, guess what? It bloody works. And now you can't make it fail. That REALLY pisses me off!

Our first project at university is called the P0 project. The P0 project is only half a project. Normally a projects contains an analysis of the problem, a number of proposed solutions, maybe an implementation of one of the solutions, and a conclusion. The P0 project is pretty much just the problem analysis. Our project is about the administrative and organisational problems involved when writing a project like this. Like figuring out what everyone else is doing so that you don't do stuff that's already being done, logging stuff we talk about on IRC, sharing links to info about the subjects, etc.. Let's see how it goes.

Yesterday, I attended a presentation about Mono. I have to say that I'm impressed. Not only is C# not quite as braindead as I expected, but the seamless integration with C libraries, the highly efficient JIT, the possibility of compiling other languages like e.g. Python code into CIL and making it work with C# apps is really exciting!

Ok, we have a winner. Well, Wordpress which was the other contender for the honor of being by preferred weblog software suite has officially removed itself from the battle. I meant to time how long it took for me to delete an unwanted comment (spam or whatever) and when I thought I removed the comment, I removed the entire post. I was on a timer, so I probably just hurried too much, but that was enough for me. So Serendipity is the official winner! Let's see if I can actually maintain a blog this time.

Ok, I've once again decided to try to have a weblog. The difference this time is that I don't have an employer anymore that might be upset if I ranted about stuff that happened to me at work.. This is part of a test, BTW. I have two blogs right now to test which is easier and which annoys me less.