As you might have noticed, the original source of Web-Of-Trust Graph information went offline and probably won't come back. As a result also pathfinders like the one of Henk P. Penning are stuck in February 2012.

As I always found this kind of statistics interesting I've hacked the pks2wot python script that is part of the wotsap package to use normal hkp instead of the pks client and running it against my own sks keyserver which seems to work good enough to do a weekly dump of the current web-of-trust which can be found at http://wot.christoph-egger.org/download/. I'd be happy to hear if this is useful to anyone besides myself.

Hardware

To make things clear: I'm having a Android 4.0.$recent tablet with considerably more horse-power than my Nokia n900 smartphone so don't tell me this is due to under-powered hardware – the android is 3 years newer both in hardware and software.

Background Tasks

Being somewhere with my Android Tablet. Network is kind of crappy and this site takes minutes again to load. So the most natural thing to do would be doing something else while the site continues loading in the background. This works really well on the n900. It might work with android. But of course when you switch to another Program the browser might also be shut down while you're doing something else and randomly when you switch back to your browser, not only the site hasn't loaded but the browser also forgot where you were heading. Now if you followed e.g. a link in a email you might have closed the mail program long ago (or the mail program has decided to stop) and you have to find the link again, wait again for the site to load. And remember not to background the browser or you might have to start over again.

With the n900 Maemo smartphone I was able to load several pages in the background with whatever application in the foreground (like playing tuxracer) so don't tell me android has to do this to give enough power to the foreground process. If a Meamo device can load 5 pages in the background while a OpenGL game is running in the foreground there is no reason Android, with more CPU and RAM, can't load a single page in the background while I check email.

Software installation

Can you imagine a system where you are unable to install software from your standard repository without registering an account first? Like after nearly two decades of Linux distributions? Maemo had this for mobile devices – more than five years ago. Plus, on Maemo you'll easily find tons of good, free (as in freedom) and banner-add-free software – try this on androids "Play Store".

Migrating a mediawiki instance from the old server to a new box. Of course it does not work (returns an empty 500 Error page). Of course there is no entry in error.log. Of course there is no obvious match of verbose/debug in a grep over the config files. Lovin' it

While other people are squashing RC bugs I was using this week to fix (or investigationg) some more kFreeBSD issues -- mostly looking at failed build logs and trying to fix the problems and after some nice fish for dinner writing things up.

• First issue this week was #639178 a build failure in tar I had reported earlier and didn't manage to process the response. After sending some findings to the bug I noticed Petr was faster and did actually find out a lot more detail. Short story: success in that test suite requires linux behavior and the failure on kfreebsd is covered by what POSIX allows
• #640156 multiarch related changes resulting in a nonfunctional ldd breaking clutter-gst build
• #640012 postfix is hard-coding kFreeBSD versions … up to 7 and therefore won't build on a 8.2 kernel. It also doesn't handle absence of NIS on Hurd and kFreeBSD #545970
• #640159 iozone3 just needed a bit of massaging to combine the FreeBSD backend with the linker flags needed for kFreeBSD
• Installing the build depends for openjdk-* resulted in a installation failure for some time. Looking closer it turned out a minimal testcase was installing menu and python2.6 together. Turned out dash's test builtin wasn't working #640334 because it was relying on the intuitive but not POSIX mandated behavior of the faccessat syscall #640325
• #640341 ed decided not to build on kfreebsd-i386 in the 40 minutes between -2 and -3 upload. Without any actual source changes. Just trying agan tricked it to build again but probably someone should look what went wrong actually
• #640378 leveldb needed enabling the FREEBSD_OS kind of build with the linux style of linker flags (additional -lrt)
• #640385 owfs was failing to some symbol difference (but otherwise building although being a *fs ;))
• the gcc family of packages still has some heisenbug repeatedly failing when doing regular builds on the buildds. Independent which one. Multiple times in a row. Building on my test VM or my notebook doesn't show that problem (but takes ~10h). Building on the same buildd in the same chroot with the same sbuild flags and it's still building fine.

I'm coming as well! Really looking forward to meet the people from Debconf9 again. Also people from the Games Team and the buildd and kfreebsd folks. And ideally there will be some more people interested in (Common) Lisp as well, we'll see