My play deb repository no longer carries binaries for iPhoneOS 2.2, or any other version for that matter. Apple prides themselves in DRM (Digital Restrictions Management) in a way that makes them look totally ridiculous to anyone with only the tiniest amount of technical knowledge or political empathy. Gah. I don't see why I should support that with free software. Besides, it's not a good tool for geocaching, either.

Some years ago, this would not have surprised me, but these days it's rare to find a company doing similar stunts. While the iPhone may help them through the current economical crisis, I dare suggest they build more variants of the iMer instead :þ At least these have hack value.

jupp development has been split into two active development lines: jupp for DOS (based on joe 2.8) and jupp for Unix (based on joe 3.x).

There are binaries for both DOS (jupp for DOS) and Win32 (jupp for Unix, via Cygwin) available.

The jupp for DOS development line incorporates only minor patches relative to the original source code (it wasn’t that buggy as the sourceforge development made the code later…) and a jupprc file tuned for it but feature-complete with joe-3.1jupp10’s one.

The jupp for Unix development line incorporates all of the very extensive patches to the binary, and an enriched jupprc with, due to popular demand, syntax highlighting enabled by default — even though I still loathe it personally, and feel with Rob Pike when he questions the use of pretty printers. It will also try to correctly guess CR-LF vs LF-only line endings, indentation, and terminal colour. Furthermore, the language selection of the jupp flavour is now en par with that of the joe flavour, and the Python variants honour the standard coding style of theirs (needed that by the third quarter of last year, remember?). Autoindent is still off, by default, though — with reason.

Now give it a try. Hint: ^J (Ctrl-J) invokes the help.

The NetInstall directory contains a new intermediate snapshot of MirOS BSD/i386 built last night. I also brought the fixes for older snapshots a little more up to date. Enjoy!

mksh has just been adjusted to behave as future POSIX will demand, after a lengthy discussion (on the bug-bash and miros-discuss mailing lists as well as the Debian bug tracker), for “set -u” (-o nounset). This, as well as the “stop () {…}” fix, must be tested extensively.

Therefore I urge all of you to

 % CVS_RSH=ssh; export CVS_RSH
 % cvs -d :ext:_anoncvs@anoncvs.mirbsd.org:/cvs co -PA mksh
 % cd mksh
 % (sh Build.sh -r && ./test.sh -v) 2>&1 | tee log

and possibly send me the log. See an earlier post for more information about testing mksh(1) snapshots, as well.

Tests for better standards compliance and bugs, especially in corner cases, are also welcome. Known are: all but the first command of a pipeline are run in subprocesses (made to be an mksh feature, not a bug); the lexer is not recursive (issues with parenthesēs and comments in COMSUBs); some IFS/whitespace issues. Fixes for these bugs, and maybe for the regression tests (they may or may not be correct) are desirable… as well as development related communication.

On an unrelated side note, aptituz told me that Debian etch already had Debhelper v5, and as such, the mksh package has been converted over from Debhelper v4 (yay, RCS IDs in debhelper configuration files! but what about changelog (no-no) and menu? dunno…).

Leute, nehmt euer iPhone gerne dazu, auf dem Weg zum Schwimmbad Queen (Masters of the Universe) zu hören, aber bitteschön nicht zum Navigieren. Beim Versuch, das entfernte Ziel zu erreichen, sind wir an lustigen Stellen (Acker und so) gelandet; die mobile Suche war irgendwie von der Adresse leicht verwirrt. Die geocaching.com-Anwendung ist auch bescheiden, die kommt mir vor als wär ich aufm PocketPC und hätte vergessen, static navigation auszuschalten.

Irgendwie… ist’s warm, ich bin müde, satt, und hab grad keine Lust, an mksh(1), BSD::arc4random, oder gar vnd(4) zu arbeiten ☺

Ist aber denk ich mal erlaubt. Dafür waren wir heute beim Einkaufen wieder geocachen (Statistiken siehe unten, irgendwann einmal „inventarisiere“ ich die aber mal richtig, Duplikate und so, denn das erste Hundert sollte ich vollhaben bald). Nervig ist, wenn man wegen Bremsen (der Viecher, die ich eigentlich so nur vom Bodansee kenne) die Suche abbricht, bevor sie richtig begonnen hat. Immerhin, einige haben wir gefunden, mit Lust auf mehr.

Fahrradmitnahme bei der DB ist auch so ’ne Sache, sicher, es ginge, irgendwie. Aber spontan wars mir dann doch zu aufwendig. Auch wenn ich es jetzt gerne hier hätte ☻

Ich hab nocd bei mir, und eine ganze Pixelreihe (horizontal) ist kaputt. Noch einer. Das nervt, nur nwt bleibt seinem Nutzer seit 1993 treu ☹

gecko2@ hat lustige Musik da, ganz gut, mal was Anderes. Wie die aber alle heißen muß er selber ins wlog schreiben :þ

Hier nun (nicht im RSS) die Statpix (:
(Update: images moved here)
Leider fast keine OCs hier in der Gegend.

Ich bin jetzt bei gecko2@ für ’ne Woche, mal entspannen. ObRecovery: für zirka 2 € mehr habe ich durch IC-Nutzung eine Stunde Fahrt eingespart. Vive le Deutsche Bahn :þ

Pläne: viel offline sein. Ansonsten vielleicht ein wenig mksh(1)-Hacking (siehe letztes Posting) oder so.

Gestern mußte ich noch einen Fipptehler bei kwalletcli fixen ☹ dafür sollte™ heute auf Arbeit alles gut gelaufen sein.

mksh(1)'s "set -u" handling will change RSN to match what POSIX will mandate in the next version, matching similar changes in GNU bash 4 and AT&T ksh93.

Most of the thread can be seen on the miros-discuss@ mailing list archives (although both MARC and GMane seem to not have all related eMails... weird).

I have developed kwalletcli, a command-line interface to the KDE Wallet and would like public feedback, before releasing an 1.00 version, both on the source code and an experimental Debian package of it.

Nice things it can do:

• get and set password stanzas in the KWallet via CLI
• contains a CLI wrapper around pinentry’s Aegypten protocol
• contains an Aegypten protocol server, pinentry-kwallet, which checks the KWallet before deferring to another pinentry of your choice
• contains an ssh-askpass(1) alike kwalletaskpass tool
• can be used in gajim and pidgin to store Jabber passwords in the KDE Wallet (not included; patches for these will be made separately)
• plugins for other tools do not introduce dependencies due to separation via CLI API
• nice, (hopefully) consistent shell CLI API
• low dependencies: KDE 3 (for kwalletcli itself — KDE 4 might even work, with minor Makefile changes, but that was not tested), another pinentry (x11, qt, gtk-2, curses — all tested) if needed, gpg-agent if needed, mksh to run the scripts, ssh-add(1) to make use of kwalletaskpass
• with appropriate agents, GnuPG 2 and SSH keys can be made available to pure CLI sessions as well, if one has logged in via KDE first (we do this at work on our standard desktops, courtesy by me)
• OSI certified Open Source™ Software under a free, very unrestrictive, licence

Any feedback welcome! Direct it to the miros-discuss mailing list.

Update 09.07. — version 0.90 -> 0.91-1
I also crafted a patch for gajim to use kwalletcli, let's see if it gets in. More to follow.

Update 09.07. — version 0.91-1 -> 0.92-1
People who port this to KDE 4 (create a kwif4.cc file) welcome!

Update 12.07. — version 0.92-1 -> 0.93-1

Update 27.07. — version 0.93-1 -> 0.94-1

mksh development is mostly done by a single person, "the mksh team" (as seen on Debian derivate from Canonical that cannot be named forums, out of all places!), a.k.a. me, myself and I. Sometimes, actual users report bugs or even send in patches. I keep track of oksh's development as well, of course. But there are times I would like to get feedback on issues from other people working on pdksh or its descendants. I mailed, for that specific issue in question, the Debian developer who created the original patch which addressed the scenario except for a corner case (interestingly, as the world is small, discovered in a Debian(!) init script from a package maintained by aforementioned formorer, on a DomU running Lenny — don't underestimate the effect of synergy) but would really like to talk to some of the OpenBSD devs about it; they mostly know what they're doing, even if I worked on ksh for longer than most of them, many eyes do help, and most of the time I do not know what I'm doing XD

[Update] There's also the issue of inter-(POSIX-compatible)-shell discussion. For instance, "set -u" vs "$@", which has come up in Debian #522255 because GNU bash4 decided to switch to the behaviour used by the Bourne shell (from V7 to SVR4.2), all Korn shells, ash and its descendents (like posh) except dash, to not treat it specially. (Funny too how they suggest 「${@:-}」 or 「${@:+}」 instead of 「${1+"$@"}」 (from the GNU(!) autoconf texinfo documentation) as replacements.) Oh well, zsh also behaves like bash2/3 and dash, but then, it's not even a POSIX compatible shell. *sigh* Now I wonder what AT&T ksh93 will do and a confirmation if it's indeed being forcibly changed by POSIX (IMHO, they could at least "agree to disagree", like they usually do, and make it vendor defined, so that scripts could not depend on it — "set -u" is something I don't use anyway).

So if you're interested in the further development of MirBSD, The MirOS Project, one of its subprojects, such as The MirPorts Framework, mksh(1), MirMake, even jupp-2.8 or jupp-3.x, please talk to me.

[Update] Do the same for POSIX compatible shell discussion, if you are going to take mksh, its goals, needs and history seriously. (Yes, it also has bugs, like a non-recursive parser troubling COMSUBs, but they may be fixed long-term, especially if people contribute. Ideas, at the very least.)

Thanks in advance.

Hell yeah. I promised a wlog entry about the Linuxtag 2009 visit. I planned on making it somewhat detailed, enumerating a couple of things I did other than catching a few geocaches with a company's EeePC and MirBSD and CacheWolf on a USB stick, and getting ill.

Alas, things often are not as desired, and I had to work last week, while still slightly ill, and I just never came around doing it. I arguably could write up something now, but I forgot most(!) of it already, don't want to publish incomplete things out of fear from (accidental) omissions, sit on nwt (my dear 80486DLC laptop) and... well, procrastinated too much. And I had a long work day and am very much enjoying my AfriCola+SchlösserAlt beer, thank you very much.

So, without further ado (why the fuck do Amis tend to have trouble with homophones, by the way?), comrad's pictures:

It definitively wasn't as technical an event as FOSDEM, and much less people asked about mksh, but at least now I got my OpenPGP signed by two more Debian Developers who do not intend on switching keys in the next couple of months... *sigh* Anyway, world domination coming, this is required for I am still a DM, but wouldn't say no to DD status either. Why, à propos, do I have <tg@d.o> and only realise that because of spam mails sent there? Anyway, met formorer from grml in real life, quite nice too. We got some donations for the buttons and grml CDs, but the money got distributed among many people.

Hah! These CentOS guys! They made me promise to say CentOS rocks if it included mksh; they were going to file a bug at RHEL for its inclusion. I looked today, they didn't. So I won't say it rocks. It rather annoys, truth be told. Especially since it comes without a decent shell, and I had to make an RPM of OpenNTPD myself! Imagine that!

I spent the past week in Biarritz for the Carbon 2009 conference. Biarritz is located in the Basque country on the shores of the Atlantic ocean. It used to be a resort for the rich ones (Napoleon, for instance, had a summer residence there), and the town still has that kind of feeling to it. The conference took place in the Casino, right on the beachfront, and in a former Casino transformed to a convention center, with a nice view over the ocean. We had only a few hours of sun here and there; we did take a bath in the ocean but it was quite cold.

I did an oral presentation about the "Structure and Reactivity of Carbon Nanotube/Manganese Oxide Nanocomposites", which was well received, I think. There were some interesting questions, and everything went well—except for the fact that the "moderator monitor" in Keynote stopped responding at about the third slide. On the big screen however, everything continued smoothly. Other talks were very interesting, too: Kazu Suenaga from AIST in Japan showed atomic-resolution electron microscopy images and even videos of reactions taking place inside the microscope. Wow.

For the people presenting posters, the situation was less rosy though: all the poster sessions were in parallel to a buffet, so you had to choose between eating and looking at the posters.