We have these WIP repos (stands for Work In Progress), but uploading packages there was always a manual task. This is quite unhandy when the WIP repo is being worked on for multiple months.

We already had some minimal support for WIP repos in the sync client, but it was not enough, the pacman/repoman configs were no propagated from the server to the build nodes.

I recently got some time to work on this and now it's there - once all the build nodes will be upgraded to 1.0, we will be able to use this feature without any limits. :)

RMS was here in Hungary and he held a session about copyright. The interesting thing was that he talked about copyright of music, books, etc. - not just software.

There are two videos here.

I just found this here:

"The Eclipse plugin and builtin-merge projects were integrated into the mainline source code. The latter student remains a very active contributor to our project."

Heh, that'd be me. ;-)

So we got this bugreport yesterday, and I wasn't able to reproduce it on my x86 box, but I saw it on my iBook. It turns out that LESSCHARSET, which I set just for git, handles this case for me as well. At least after setting it, the manpage is correct on my iBook as well.

The weird thing is that it's still wrong for crazy@ - though I don't know if this will solve the problem of the reporter or not.

I started working on a new song in lilypond, I still like it, though no idea so far how to display a simple "A^4", it seems "a:4" does something much more complicated. ;)

I recently started using picu, which is a nice tool (I just mirror pictures at Picasa as I like the comment/notify/label features of it.), but it had two annoying bugs (no proper header and too gmail-centric), so I sent this patch upstream today.

Heh, and this is the 100th hacking post. So far it seems it was not a bad idea, I can search back "what did I hack on 22th", and sometimes I can link posts from here as a HOWTO, so writing it in English was a good decision.

We had this problem recently that on the console the fonts were not entirely correct, for example lat2-16.psfu.gz was replaced by lat2a-16.psfu.gz. I finally found why it was still broken in the setup: I forgot to update the Makefile to include the new font in the initrd. ;-)

Now the fonts are perfect again.

I just started searching for an alternate serial driver for Erlang as the semi-official one has zero documentation, and found what?

There is a gen_serial module by spearce, we know each other since last year's GSoC. ;)

Sadly the driver seem to be Windows-only so it's not that interesting, but the world is small.

We recently had to move forums.fw.o to a new machine and first boobaa offered a hosting. I had only ftp access, but that isn't a big problem - the bigger one is that we have this mailing list - forums two-way gateway and we failed to configure it. They have virtual domains / mailboxes on the machine (using SQL) and the machine kept rejecting mails sent to the forums by the mailing list. After debugging for about a day, we decied to just move it an other box where there are no virtual announts, and I just had to add some trivial aliases to /etc/postfix/aliases.

Sigh.

OTOH, Frugalware 1.0rc2 is out, and now we can continue bugfixing. :-)

We all know the usual problem with sql escaping, there is even a comic about it.

There is an other SQL-related project, sphinx, which is a quite efficient search indexer (especially for whole word search), but it also needs escaping. Given that in sphinx "foo-bar" means "all records containing foo, but not bar", if you really want a single-word "foo-bar", then you need to use "foo\-bar".

And that's the fun part, as the escaping order matters a lot. Basically if you escape mysql first and then just insert the sphinx query, then you just created an injection yourself. ;)

So the final query will look like "foo\\-bar" if you did the escaping in the right order.

It's also notable that the official sphinx php API seems not escaping the ";" char, which is also a bug, as this way you can modify the search query in the way you want.

I earlier wrote about I was experimenting with PowerShell, so I had to install Windows in a virtual machine. It's not a big problem, we at the uni get a license to use it for free till the end of our studies (or something like that), so I started to search for what emulator should I use.

Of course my favorite is qemu, but till I don't have kvm-enabled hw and kvm support isn't fully merged from kvm, it's slow.

Given that I had to use some other emulator, I thought I gave vmware a try, they offer a 30-day trial and I wanted to see what's new in their recent versions - I think I last tried it about 2 years ago. It seems the automagic gui screwed up something and there is no more vmware-config.pl, so I gave it up.

Last, I tried Virtualbox. Man, it's fast! Of course it's bloated as well (external kernel module, guest addons, etc) - but if I forget about these issues, it really gaves me the same experience vmware gave me when I last tried it. Impressive.

As a side note, git-1.6.2 is out, sadly I haven't got much time for it - only 5 patches of mine are in the changelog. But at least now the pdf version of the user manual is supported out of the box.