Riding the Pangolin
4 November 2011

Just took the plunge, using the excellent bandwidth and local mirror at UDS: `Just took the plunge, using the excellent bandwidth and local mirror at UDS: ` Nothing blew up in my face, so it seems today is a good day to die^Wupgrade.
On a rather calm ten-hour flight to Orlando I once again did some pygobject, udisks, and Apport hacking (It’s scary how productive one can be when not constantly being interrupted by IRC, email, etc). One more visible change amongst these was finally fixing a five year old five-digit bug to integrate apport-retrace into the GUI, now that it does not potentially wreck your installation any more. If the apport-retrace package is installed, the crash detail dialog will show a new “Examine locally” button: ... Read More

Happy Birthday Ubuntu!
20 October 2011

7 years ago, The Ubuntu 4.10 “The Warty Warthog” was announced. A huge congrats to the community, Canonical, and especially Mark for getting so far from “there” to “here”. This brings back old memories of my first conference in Oxford in August, the great-great-grandfather to what is UDS these days. Back then, there was no company, no Launchpad, no Blueprints, no work items, no detailled plans, just a bunch of ideas, BoFs, and this was a third of the entire crowd: ... Read More

Gestatten, Elite
9 October 2011

Ich habe gerade Gestatten, Elite zu Ende gelesen (ging schnell, hab erst gestern angefangen). War im Grunde genommen nichts wirklich Neues, was man nicht irgendwie schon gewusst oder geahnt hätte. Aber die gut recherchierte und bewiesene Vehemenz, mit der sich die Oberschicht abschottet und sich selbst als eine Art neuer Adel erhält und das vielbeschworene Leistungsprinzip untergräbt war dann doch schon recht schockierend für mich. Eine der “Elite”-Schulen die dort unter die Lupe genommen wird — Schloss Neubeuern — haben wir auf unserer Sommerradtour gesehen. ... Read More
Hot on the heels of the PostgreSQL 9.1.0 release I am happy to announce that the final version is now packaged for Debian unstable, the current Ubuntu development version “Oneiric”, and also in my Ubuntu backports PPA for Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, 10.10, and 11.04. Enjoy trying out all the cool new features like builtin synchronous replication or per-column collation settings for correctly handling international strings, or an even finer-grained access control for large environments. ... Read More
PostgreSQL 9.1 has had its first release candidate out for some two weeks without major problem reports, so it’s time to promote this more heavily. If you use PostgreSQL, now is the time to try it out and report problems. We always strive to minimize the number of major versions which we have to support. They not only mean more maintenance for developers, but also more upgrade cycles for the users. ... Read More
The tool to reprocess an Apport crash report to produce a symbolic stack trace, apport-retrace, has been pretty hard to use on a developer system so far: It either installed the packages from the crash report, plus its debug symbol packages (“ddebs”) into the running system (which frequently caused problems like broken dependencies), or it required setting up a chroot and using apport-chroot with fakechroot and fakeroot. I’m happy to announce that with Apport 1. ... Read More
Wir sind wieder da, und diesmal sogar völlig ohne menschliche oder radtechnische Schäden! Im letzten Jahr ging unsere Radtour an der Donau entlang von Passau nach Wien, was eher gemütlich war. Diesmal hat es uns an den Inn verschlagen, wo wir die Kultur vom letzten Jahr eingetauscht haben gegen das Hochkeuchen und Runterrasen eines alpin geprägten Berg-Wegprofils. Das war unsere erste Radtour mit “richtigen” Bergen, wo man auch schon mal 200 Höhenmeter in der Stunde hoch und wieder runter schafft. ... Read More
Hot on the heels of the Announcement of the second 9.1 Beta release there are now packages for it in Debian experimental and backports for Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, 10.10. and 11.04 in my PostgreSQL backports for stable Ubuntu releases PPA. Warning for upgrades from Beta 1: The on-disk database format changed since Beta-1. So if you already have the beta-1 packages installed, you need to pg_dumpall your 9.1 clusters (if you still need them), and pg_dropcluster all 9. ... Read More
Two weeks ago, PostgreSQL announced the first beta version of the new major 9.1 version, with a lot of anticipated new features like synchronous replication or better support for multilingual databases. Please see the release announcement for details. Due to my recent moving and the Ubuntu Developer Summit it took me a bit to package them for Debian and Ubuntu, but here they are at last. I uploaded postgresql-9.1 to Debian experimental; currently they are sitting in the NEW queue, but I’m sure our restless Debian archive admins will get to it in a few days. ... Read More