Erfahrungen, Meinungen und Halluzinationen

The repository-key expiration date has been extended recently. The expiration date of the renewed key has been set to be October 3rd, 2013. You will have to update the key in your apt keyring by either using (e.g.) the pgp.mit.edu keyserver:

apt-key adv --keyserver subkeys.pgp.net --refresh-keys E394D996

or a local keyfile in ASCII format at wgdd_archive_key.asc

wget -O - http://debian.wgdd.de/stuff/wgdd_archive_key.asc | apt-key add -

or by updating the wgdd-archive-keyring Debian package. Detailed information can also be found here.

I was looking for a small and simple blogging engine to reinstall my old blogging domain www.wgdd.de without having to reinstall Wordpress, which is to my opinion much too large for my small blog. Unfortunately there seem to be only few alternatives, e.g. zine (too old) or jekyll (well, might be an alternative) and several of them haven't seen any updates for years. So I decided to give a try to NanoBlogger, which is also available in Debian. If you don't know this software: it is a static website generator made of common UNIX tools and doesn't require any database nor webserver backends.

After figuring out how to start (there is some nice documentation) I imported all my wordpress articles (manually) and news from another website of mine. Some downsides I discovered: some commands don't work es expected, e.g. nb edit tag X simply says no changes were made! goodbye.i That's not intuitive. Also figuring out how to change an entries posting date wasn't easy. It basically boils down to the following steps (consider this entry itself):

1. create an entry (with or without setting a TIMESTAMP, save it and update the weblog (the latter is done automatically) - these steps will automatically fill the DATE field and name the file accordingly to the output of date -u -d "2012-10-05 21:53:06"
2. now either way by adding a TIMESTAMP field editing the file or adding it via commandline: don't touch the DATE field!; just adjust the date in the TIMESTAMP field; after saving the file, nanoblogger will fix the DATE field itself
3. next time you are editing the file, the TIMESTAMP field is still present: if you are not going to change it again, you must remove it; otherwise nanoblogger will report this error: invalid entry TIMESTAMP or conflict

Some more downsides:

• It becomes slower with increasing entry count. Especially when making a change to blog.conf, which requires a complete rebuild of the weblog, this might become annoying.
• After changing an entries timestamp, its tag assignments are lost.
• Articles cannot be as easily managed as entries, although it is not claer to me, why. E.g. deletion of an articles is impossible (why not: nb delete article X (just make X and assignment based on any sorting order listing articles)?
• Looks like entry descriptions are not put into the meta-description tag of the resulting file (clear bug?).
• Internationalization doesn't seem to be easy (customizable). It would be nice to have the possibility to create files containing the chosen language. Also it would be nice if the lang attribute would be set accordingly to xml:lang based on a chosen language, e.g. by setting a variable BLOG_LANG. I've already fixed _this_ locally. Another idea would be to have a LANG field in the entry meta file, which content would then be added to the lang and xml:lang attributes of the relevant container element. Maybe I'll try to fix this locally too.
• The tag handling isn't that comfortable. Would be nice to have a field for this too.

However, you see I'm still using this software. So it's not that bad, right :) However I hope, development is going on with this software.

I was also checking, if and how I could integrate this blog into my other website debian.wgdd.de where I used to have a similar news layout in a manually maintained HTML file. The good thing was, that the basic layouts were pretty similar. I was able to achive almost the same layout design by just renaming the div-containers in nanoblogger output (templates/main_index.htm) accordingly to my chosing and adding an import-statement at the top of the blog CSS stylesheet importing my own stylesheet. This worked pretty nice. However, there were still some duplicate selectors (happily no ID- or CLASS-based duplicates). So IMHO customization would still have been difficult including large changes - e.g. applying customizations to all template files in templates/, making it necessary to synchronize the layout design code in around 10 different files. So I decided against the layout customization and searched for a way, to dynamically load only the blog container without the title bar and the sidebar into a HTML file. My first (PHP-based) solution basicly looks like this:

<?php
$doc = new DOMDocument();
$doc->preserveWhiteSpace = false; 
$doc->load('http://invalid.tld/index.html');
$doc->formatOutput = true;

$xpath = new DOMXPath($doc);
$xpath->registerNamespace("html", "http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml");

$result = $xpath->query('//html:div[@id="content"]')->item(0);

echo $doc->saveXML($result);
?>

I'll play with this a bit more. In an ideal world, I would like to import only entries related to the debian tag. Unfortunately nanoblogger doesn't provide a site containing only such blog entries (only a site containing the titles of such posts). I can imagine a way to do this: it would require another xpath query or an iteraion over $result. And this is the possible downside: it might increase load time further, which I don't want. However, it's a start.

Stay tuned.

Update

I was able to solve a few issues and I discovered, that I don't need the PHP code above. The blog software provides parts of the website via the /parts/ directory, e.g. parts/index.html (recent blog entries) or parts/category/index.html (category entries).

The following distribution releases have been removed from my Debian repository, because support by the Debian/Ubuntu project has been dropped or is about to be dropped: Debian lenny (5.0) and Ubuntu hardy (8.04), intrepid (8.10), jaunty (9.04) and karmic (9.10).

There won't be any updates to bluefish packages for these distribution releases too. The following entries in your /etc/apt/sources.list will lead to HTML error code 410 running apt-get or apt-file:

deb     http://debian.wgdd.de/debian lenny main contrib non-free
deb-src http://debian.wgdd.de/debian lenny main contrib non-free

deb     http://debian.wgdd.de/debian oldstable main contrib non-free
deb-src http://debian.wgdd.de/debian oldstable main contrib non-free

deb     http://debian.wgdd.de/ubuntu hardy main restricted universe multiverse
deb-src http://debian.wgdd.de/ubuntu hardy main restricted universe multiverse

deb     http://debian.wgdd.de/ubuntu intrepid main restricted universe multiverse
deb-src http://debian.wgdd.de/ubuntu intrepid main restricted universe multiverse

deb     http://debian.wgdd.de/ubuntu jaunty main restricted universe multiverse
deb-src http://debian.wgdd.de/ubuntu jaunty main restricted universe multiverse

deb     http://debian.wgdd.de/ubuntu karmic main restricted universe multiverse
deb-src http://debian.wgdd.de/ubuntu karmic main restricted universe multiverse

Maybe you have downloaded one of my snippets to /etc/apt/sources.list.d/. In this case the following files contain offending entries and are obsolete:

/etc/apt/sources.list.d/debian.wgdd.de_lenny.list

/etc/apt/sources.list.d/debian.wgdd.de_ubuntu_804_hardy.list
/etc/apt/sources.list.d/debian.wgdd.de_ubuntu_810_intrepid.list
/etc/apt/sources.list.d/debian.wgdd.de_ubuntu_904_jaunty.list
/etc/apt/sources.list.d/debian.wgdd.de_ubuntu_910_karmic.list

The repository-key had expired. The expiration date of the renewed key has been set to be October 20th 2012. You will have to update the key in your apt keyring by either using the pgp.mit.edu keyserver or a local keyfile in ASCII format at wgdd_archive_key.asc or by updating the wgdd-archive-keyring Debian package. Detailed information can also be found here.

With the release candidate 2 for Bluefish 2.0 my repository provides bluefish packages for the amd64 and i386 architectures. They will be automatically installed when you update your installed bluefish-unstable packages:

# apt-get dist-upgrade
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  bluefish bluefish-data bluefish-dbg bluefish-plugins
The following packages will be upgraded:
  bluefish-unstable bluefish-unstable-data bluefish-unstable-dbg bluefish-unstable-plugins

The latter became so called "transitional packages" and don't provide any functionality. They can be safely removed after upgrading to the bluefish packages:

# apt-get autoremove --purge bluefish-unstable bluefish-unstable-data bluefish-unstable-dbg bluefish-unstable-plugins

The package upgrade/installation will further replace any installation of the bluefish packages of Debian and Ubuntu!

It is true that making /var/cache/pbuilder/build a tmpfs makes a noticeable speed difference. But it seems you cannot cache the downloaded debs: ln: creating hard link ...: Invalid cross-device link.

I recently bought an external USB harddrive, made by Toshiba. It's the HDDR500E03X model with 500GB space, internal shock sensor and ramp loading technology. Now yesterday I learned, that I can also cover its health status using the smartmontools. The usb* device types did not fit, but the sat did. It is as easy as running:

smartctl -d sat -c /dev/sdb
smartctl -d sat -t long /dev/sdb

Connecting a NOKIA 6310i mobile phone via serial DLR-3P cable and the serial connector of the laptop (for Bluetooth see part II): After installation of the gnokii package(s) the the configuration file says:

model = 6510
connection = dlr3p

Then gnokii reports:

$ gnokii --identify
GNOKII Version 0.6.28
IMEI         : XXXX
Manufacturer : Nokia
Modell       : 6310i
Product name : NPL-1
Revision     : V 5.22

So I got a little bit further with my little toy.

Bluetooth

Bluetooth works. The packages gnome-bluetooth and bluez are installed and the kernel module bluetooth is loaded. hciconfig reports this:

# hciconfig
hci0:   Type: USB
        BD Address: XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX ACL MTU: 310:10 SCO MTU: 64:8
        UP RUNNING PSCAN
        RX bytes:11354 acl:105 sco:0 events:286 errors:0
        TX bytes:4012 acl:99 sco:0 commands:66 errors:0

I tried to connect to a SAMSUNG and a NOKIA mobile phone. After enabling visibility of the phone the bluetooth-applet showed the device. However I got an error saying The name org.openobex was not provided by any .service files when trying to access the mobile device. This was solved by installing obexd-server obex-data-server. Then I was able to access the phone contents via Bluetooth.

Virtualization

I recently tried to debug the mopac7 build error. I installed the qemu(-kvm) emulator. Loading of the kvm_intel module failed with kvm: disabled by bios. But this was easy to solve by enabling the Intel virtualization technology in the BIOS: push and hold the ESC key during startup until the laptop tells you to press the F1 key. Then enable the related BIOS option and you are done.