random bits and peices

The taint of netscape lingers on. Mozilla firebird has appalling DWIdM behavior when resolving urls that consist of only a non qualified domain name, when the web server is down. I have not been so enraged by a peice of software in recent memory. My laptop narrowly missed going through the car's windsheild (warparking). I expect that the verisign sitefinder people are busy trying to hire the intreped mozilla developers. Mozilla is purged from my laptop, and I'm using w3m again. Won't last.

Yesterday something strange with debconf. I had been unable to reproduce bug #226963 for a long time, and its submitter was also having trouble. Then suddenly the same bug popped up again (filed against xfree86), and I was able to reproduce it with ease, and fixed it. I suspect that whiptail's behavior changed in the corner case of exactly what it returned when nothing was input into a string input box. But why did it pop up briefly weeks ago, and disappear until today? Odd, but not important enough to investigate in depth.

In d-i land, encouraging progress with the m68k port, but otherwise we've been stalled too long with busybox tar issues. Lately I've had a hard time mustering any helpfulness to stupid user questions on irc and the mailing list. Not sure why, just a mood I guess. Maybe d-i needs a FAQ.

I noticed that fceu ultra moved to main because of the efp ROM, which is free software and in main. Unfortunatly, nestra hangs when running this ROM, so I am leaving it in contrib. I did mail its author and file a bug report though. So much for getting rid of one of my two packages in contrib so easily.

Yesterday and today I've been working with Per Olofsson on a very odd series of sponsored NMUs, of pcmcia, including builds of the pcmcia kernel modules (which I hope nobody still uses). It was potentially very complex, but Per managed to make it impressively easy.