jd:/dev/blog

I've been on holidays for one week now, breaking my usual workflow. Well, that allowed me to rest and to think about what I'd like to do and things I need to handle during next weeks.

The urgent things this next days will be my primary server replacement. It is currently dying, and I already had to change its power supply twice in a month. Unfortunately, I'm now at a point where I do not have any spare piece so if things go wrong again, I'm screwed. I need to collect some money and buy a new server, or maybe get a server if someone have an old or spare one to give me, I do not know yet.

On the awesome front, I'm about to release awesome 2.3, which will be the final minor release of the major branch 2. This will lead me to work on awesome 3 at a slower rate and a cooler pace.

Then, the thing I do not have to hurry for is awesome 3. There's no big problems in awesome 2, and the xcb-util stuff are not stabilized yet. After my gentle yelling on XCB mailing list, it seems that things will move but will slowly. So I do have time to make things right and do what I want on that branch, making bugfix release on awesome 2 if needed. You can read more about futur on my last post about awesome.

All this should give me some more spare time to work on the upcoming Debian release, lenny, which I'd like to work on. Two years ago (my god, time flies), we've done good work with the french cabal squashing critical bugs and I'd like to go back on this and squash asses again.

I was just taking a look at #awesome IRC stats, and I saw that there was a huge traffic 2 days ago. That was weird, so I did take a look in my log files. And yes, in fact, something happened.

At 03:26 GMT+1, suddenly, several hundreds of users joined the channel in somethng like 1-2 minutes, and then just left in same timeline. Some minutes after that, some guys began to talk with one of the real awesome user who was hanging out there.

It seems that these guys describe themselves as a "Turkey Hack Team".

I've seen a lot of hacked box in my (short) sysadmin life. Many of my customers have no idea of what security is, and this week I'm still working for a customer with an hacked box.

And one of the thing I never got was why all these "hackers" were downloading and installing IRC bot or IRC proxy on these compromised boxes. I say "hackers" with big quotes, because when I see in their command line history somethings like "rm .bash_history; logout" or "./exploit_of_dead_to_become_root" when the user they got the password has sudo right, I must laugh.

Now, I understand: it seems there are doing some sort of "parade", making all their bots joining an IRC channel and then left. That's so amazing. that I can say for sure: if I'd be a chick, I'll be stripping my shirt vehemently.

But the thing is that so far I've no idea if a turkey hack team is somehow related to chickens.

Long story short: I'm busy.

These days are quite busy. I'm working (you know, I need to eat so I've a job), to the point that I have many vacation days to take. So I'll be in holidays and offline from friday for 10 days.

I'm still working on awesome developement. Code base is quite good now, so I don't do 30 commits/day anymore, and update are less frequent. It's very nice that the users base is increasing every day, without polluting the mailing list and the BTS with bug reports and request for documentation. That means we at least achieve to do a not-so-bad code with a not-so-bad documentation. The feature requests list is still a bit long, but I think it will decrease in the next weeks.

On a human side, that's the biggest project I ever managed and it's very pleasant to have so many users and contributors.

I've some more project I'd like to work too. I plan to write a small git stats generator in Python when I'll have some more spare time. I'd also like to do some developement work around LDAP and Python for my servers, but I did not find the courage to do it neither the good library to handle LDAP object correctly (a DB_Object way would be good).

I'm always following Debian developement with one eye, so I'm not totally out. I really hope I could to some bug squashing like I did with several Debian buddies 2 years ago for the etch release.

Stay tuned.

Today I decided to add some EWMH support to awesome. It now supports a bunch of this extensions quite nicely.

However, while reading the spec and writing the code, it appears that this forces a window manager to behave in only one way: have a poor desktop support, and no multi-head/XRandR/Xinerama support at all.

The main caveats are that in Xinerama/XRandR mode, you'll have only one root window. And the root window is where you must store the NET_WM X properties… So you cannot handle screens in a independant way like awesome does. That's really a shame.

There's also a big problem for window managers like awesome which are happy to draw several desktops at the same time. There's no support for stuff like that.

So far, I think EWMH is nice but is really too narrow-minded for softwares and people who want to think window management in a different way.

awesome 2.0 just released. Great.

Someone on #awesome pointed me to a post of Don Stewart comparing the rise of the new tiled window managers. This is quite encouraging, and I hope awesome will grow more with the next releases!

awesome 2.0-rc1 released and waiting in Debian NEW queue.

awesome developement is in a very good shape.

We're now more than half way on the 2.0 road. The contributors base is increasing, since there's now 2-3 people regularly sending patches, so this is very good, and the (still small) users base is increasing smoothly.

The awesome core code is step by step rewritten in a better and more generic way. The next big work is tabs implementation, that I am still postponing right now because of the core which is not ready to handle. It needs to become even more generic to not break everything by adding such a feature.

I still hope to release awesome 2.0-rc1 by the end of november.

Wouhou, yesterday was quite a productive day.

First, I've released mod_defensible 1.4 which is just one line different from 1.3 but fix a huge bug (RC in Debian) with udns 0.0.9. Already uploaded to sid.

Second, I've updated greylistd in Debian and I've set myself as maintainer after 5 NMU in something like 1 year.

Then, I've pushed some updates to awesome. I may release 1.2 in the week, since it seems bug free and has some useful new features. We're now quite close to Xmonad functionalities as far as I can tell.

And the beat goes on…