Kollegammal csutortokon Szegeden jartunk az idei MSzNy-en, ahol elo is adtunk. A slide-ok itt erhetoek el (valosagos tinyurl!), illetve a konferenciakotetbe is irtunk egy cikket.

So Lennart already had great slides about what is the preferred attitude when you’re hacking Free Software (don’t expect gratefulness && be grateful), but recently there was such a great example, I wanted to mention it. :)

So I saw there is a new etckeeper release and I checked its changelog, mentioning me. What the hell? I didn’t contribute anything to that project in the past 3 years! It turned out it was a patch that was considered "too new" at that time, but now got merged. ;) Remember, if you contribute, usually integration takes much less time, so no need to whine about it.

A pontos reszletekre mar nem emlekszem, lenyeg, hogy valamikor augusztus elejen leadtam a Lenovo netbookom szervizbe (kotyogo ventillator, megrepedt haz, elveszett (!) enter billentyu), es pofatlanul sok ideig ultek rajta, valamikor oktober vegen lett kesz a cucc. Persze garancialisan csak az elso problemat javitottak, de megis a legzavarobb a hihetetlen lassu kiszolgalas volt. Ma jott egy email, hogy ertekeljem a szerviz munkajat, a form elkuldese utan a fenn lathato kep fogadott. Ki hany hibat talal benne? ;)

One typical migration people do when changing phones is migration of contacts and calendar items. In case of mine, this is about migrating data from an S40 phone to Google apps, where every smartphone can sync from.

Migrating calendar items is easy: gammu can save the data from the phone to a .ics file and Google Calendar can just import that. The situation is a bit harder for the phonebook, as Google Contacts would take a .csv, while gammu as its own ini-like format for storing this data.

I already found a script doing something similar, but the result was unusable. ;) Given that the whole task is not that complex, I decided to write my own converter, available here.

SCM commit mailing lists are handy in case you want to comment others' commits in an email. OTOH they are problematic, as they generate a lot of mails, and in case I subscribe to the list, usually I don’t read those commits at all. (In case you have time to read them, that’s a different use case.)

So here is an example how to reply properly — without having to subscribe.

More than 3 years ago I gave a talk on Frugalware, and part of that was a comparison to various other distributions, including SUSE. My argument against SUSE was its closed development process.

Times change, earlier this year they even renamed their build system to signal its open nature.

I wanted to try it out how open they are so I made an experiment.

First, I created a cpm package in OBS to get familiar with the packaging process a bit. (Note that anyone can just register and use the build system to share their binaries-- sadly we don’t have resources in Frugalware to provide something similar.) Then I happily noticed that their mutt package already contains my favorite sidebar patch, though the edge of the sidebar looked awful. So on Monday I mailed the maintainer of the mutt pkg if he would take a patch, fixing this issue. I got a positive reply today, submitted a patch and in minutes it got accepted.

So it looks like they are really open, which is just cool. :)

Szoval a multheti konferencia utan meg maradtunk 3 napot varost nezni, nagyjabol a kovetkezoket erintettuk:

A szallasunk a Bastille-hoz kozel volt, de legkozelebb biztos valami minosegibbet fogunk valasztani:

Persze ezek ellenere is jol sikerult az utazas. A kepeinket erre tessek.

I’ve been invited to the first LibreOffice conference in Paris to give a short talk about this year’s GSoC work of mine: the RTF import rewrite in Writer. (Here are the slides.)

It also allowed me to allocate some time on hacking, including:

Thank you for the invitation, it was great fun!

I did not care about boot speed for a long time, since servers usually restarted only for kernel upgrades, laptops suspend to ram all the time, and I have no desktop machine at home for years now. Though one use case started to motivate me recently: I use virtual machines a lot, and waiting for them to boot up is boring.

So I looked at the systemd-analyze blame output, and it turned out that for a base-only install the only service that takes a lot of time is netconfig. It’s because it was a oneshot service, so the whole boot process waited for dhcpcd to get an IP. A much better solution is to just start netconfig in the background and move on — and that’s exactly frugalwareutils in git does now.

Before:

After:

When we got back from Munich, Andras had an idea what is the current bottleneck with the build when there are a lot of languages enabled, and it was the po2oo script, which is part of translate-toolkit.

First I tried to optimize that script, but then I tried to do the same gettext-to-SDF conversion from scratch, without using that framework at all, and it seems that caused a drastic speedup.

There were a few iterations, but now the two patches are in master, along with a fix in fast_merge.pl, which was there since at least commit 654810b (2009-06-17). ;)