random

Debian mail is being slow again, which doesn't help in trying to coordinate the d-i team working on the release. I did the "final" initrd upload yesterday, but it turns out to FTBFS on m68k and hppa, I know of very rough fixes but am still waiting for the maintainers for the respective architectures to get back to me with better fixes.

I looked over some of our oldest installation reports, closed some, and sent out an enourmous ping to 350+ of the rest, asking their submitters to please try again with a modern debian installer. I hope this will generate some useful data. Since we seem to be falling hopelessly behind on processing installation reports, with a backlog of over 700 now, I will probably just eyeball and close any reports that I don't hear back from the submitters on.

(Erm, that won't help master's slow mail problem, will it..)

It's probably time to revisit the usefullness of installation reports. It's rare for a report now to be about more than one problem, as opposed to early ones that were typically about what worked at all. So it would be better to get them reported to the right package in the first place.

I was hiking around in Steele Creek last evening and ended up on the ridge, near dark having taken the wrong fork in the path and about half an hour out of my way. Barely made it home before full dark. Still it was a good hike.

I have finally seen Eternal Sunset of the Spotless Mind, and rather enjoyed it, although it may turn out to be too sappy to reward watching it again. I also finally saw Dogma, and was suprised find it not offensive (not the religion, but the tendancy Kevin Smith has for lowbrow jokes) and enjoyable, and I quite liked the God character at the end.

A few days ago, I got not one, but two independant requests for me to write nearly the same article. From different people working for two loosely affilitated publications. Strange. With luck both articles will happen.

I have a crazy bochs+screen+expect setup that lets me test an entire d-i install in bochs with one command. It takes about 3 hours, but the plan is to run it overnight and add the result to my automated d-i test page. Still needs some work though; I got it to run from cron, but if it's run from cron it cannot mount the CD. Strange.