Present Perfect

Case in point.

Today I could not remember my password on Digg. I asked to change it, and tried to changed it to "my standard passwords for sites I barely trust". Doing that made it clear why I wasn't able to log in with that password to begin with.

Digg requires passwords to be at least 6 characters long but *only*
contain letters or numbers. So my standard password for this kind of sites was not compatible.

Yesterday I had to create a CERN account to be able to do something on the Europython site. So I tried to use the same password.

CERN wants you to use symbols from at least three groups of the following: small letters, capitals, numbers, and other symbols. So again, my standard password for this kind of site doesn't work.

This happens all the time. How hard would it be for a site to let you see what the password policy is so you can mentally browse through your passwords and pick the one that fits their policy ?

Is it just me being cranky, or do other people suffer web pass rage ?

Case in point. Today I could not remember my password on Digg. I asked to change it, and tried to changed it to "my standard passwords for sites I barely...

Just added this bit to moap

[moap-trunk] [thomas@otto trunk]$ moap bug -U http://bugzilla.gnome.org/ query "product=GStreamer&component=gst-plugins-base&target_milestone=0.10.2"

324216: [cdparanoia] missing patches from 0.8

324696: [videotestsrc] does not start counting the time from zero when restarted324900: Problem compiling gst-plugins-base with Forte

325984: [playbin] cannot handle sources that produce raw audio/video

325990: patch videotestsrc for using glib types

326601: GstRingBuffer crashes with alaw/mulaw caps

327114: [theoradec] should post tags on the bus

327216: vorbisdec segfaults on certain queries

328423: [gnomevfs] doesn't handle case when gnomevfs can't init

326881: [playbin] stream selector connects to 'state-changed'

Compared to this screenscraping horror, a lot less code and a lot more robust.

I decided to use queries with CSV since both Redhat's and GNOME's bugzilla seem to support it.

AFAICT, GNOME's supports ATOM but not RSS, and Redhat's supports RSS but not ATOM. Yay for the magic that is Bugzilla !

Just added this bit to moap [moap-trunk] [thomas@otto trunk]$ moap bug -U http://bugzilla.gnome.org/ query "product=GStreamer&component=gst-plugins-base&target_milestone=0.10.2" 324216: [cdparanoia] missing patches from 0.8 324696: [videotestsrc] does not start counting the time from...

I put out a new moap release. Here's a short list of changes:

• moap doap freshmeat -b allows forcing a branch name (e.g. 'Default')
• distro checking code to give hints on how to install dependencies
• RSS2 feed generation from .doap release entries using Genshi or Cheetah templates
• ability to operate on multiple .doap files
• make moap changelog prepare also check the CHANGE_LOG_EMAIL_ADDRESS variable
• implement searching for your project's home page using Yahoo or Google
• parse wiki attribute of a DOAP Project

Jan wants to do some GStreamer releases, so I think I'll be working to add some features for that to moap this week.

As you may have noticed, moap now has a logo, and I like it a lot. I asked Christophe, Fluendo's visual wizard, to create me a logo based on the hammer and sickle, in orange, Tango-style, and with Russian-looking letters. He gave me three choices, I picked one, he gave me another three refining my choice, I picked one, and then he gave me another three, and I picked one. I can't believe how easy this process was compared to me trying to come up with something on my own. I should make T-shirts with this logo.

Happy hacking !

I put out a new moap release. Here's a short list of changes: moap doap freshmeat -b allows forcing a branch name (e.g. 'Default') distro checking code to give hints...

This week, after receiving a Google API key from a kind mecenas (which probably violates the EULA and thus she shall go unnamed) I implemented another one of my wishlist features for moap: looking up your project's home page using Google or Yahoo.

This is part of my preparation for my GUADEC talk on Practical Project Maintenance. Especially in the early days of a project, you need to make sure people can find your project easily, not only on the name of your project, but also on keywords related to what your project does. People are out there googling for keywords that should lead to your particular project if it's any good.

Since Yahoo's web API is completely open, I'm defaulting to yahoo's search for now. I must say I was always down on Yahoo like everyone else. But Google has gone from a search engine to a an ad company and made their API less useful, while Yahoo - who made the transition of search -> ads a long time before - actually trumps Google on accessible API for the search part.

Anyways, a curious thing has happened. My project page used to be hit number 5 on Google for the keyword "moap". After reading some page recently on Google optimization, telling me I should have as many key words as possible in the first paragraph and such, I expanded the text on the start page a little. I did not yet add keywords - as I need to figure out how to do that with Trac. I also added a logo and a favourite icon - which is unrelated to the optimization I want to do but I wanted to make it look a little nicer than the default page.

Now, today I run the search again, and I'm not even in the top 100 anymore. Did Google not like my logo ? Did Google know I was going to shuffle a complaint in this blog post before I even wrote it ? I don't know ! I don't understand this whole search engine thing.

Luckily, Yahoo has the project page at hit number 3. Another reason to like Yahoo...

I'm going to do another release of moap soon.

Feel free to leave tips on optimizing my entry page for search results !

This week, after receiving a Google API key from a kind mecenas (which probably violates the EULA and thus she shall go unnamed) I implemented another one of my wishlist...

I want to like beagle, I really do.  I want to use it, and I want it to work for me.  Some of the smartest people in free software have hacked on it, and I can only say good stuff about them.

So where's the disconnect ? I have been going crazy for the last week trying to figure out why my home machine is consuming 100% CPU when it should be idling because I'm not doing anything on it.  I can tell it's doing stuff because the fans are blowing like crazy.  When I move my mouse to wake up the screens and X, I can see my CPU monitor suddenly going from 50% (on this HT machine) back to 0%.

It wazzz in my PC.  Eatsing my CPU.

But I couldn't figure out what it was, as it went away when I checked, and I had no second computer in the house to log into the machine.

Tonight I brought my laptop back home, and it's poor old beagled.  It's probably been Doing Stuff for the last week, and it has had 100% of one hyperthread for more than 75% of the time to it in.

But it is Not Yet Done.

And it goes skulking off into the corner whenever the X session wakes up - typically the sort of nifty hack Joe or Jon would have come up with.

Who can tell me What It Is Doing ?

Here's a textdump of beagle-status output if it helps:

Every 5.0s: beagle-info --status                        Fri May 18 22:15:40 2007
Scheduler:
Count: 1755041513
Status: Finding next task to execute

Pending Tasks:
1 Delayed 0 (5/18/2007 10:15:41 PM)
File Crawler

2 Maintenance 100 (5/18/2007 8:55:15 AM)
Final Flush for FileSystemIndex

3 Maintenance 0 (5/18/2007 8:55:18 AM)
Optimize FileSystemIndex

Any tips on debugging beagle - from a user perspective - are welcome too.

I want to like beagle, I really do.  I want to use it, and I want it to work for me.  Some of the smartest people in free software have...