Due to popular demand ("I would give you something, if you'd offer Flattr."), which really just came up after WineHQ started linking to the download page, I've added a Flattr link to the wine-unstable download page. I still wanted to keep it as unobtrusive as possible and just use a text link.

In other news I've uploaded 1.3.19 today, sorry that I didn't manage to do so before the weekend was over, but the upstream release happend after I went on a short trip to Bremen.

And since some people didn't seem to read the notes on the download page, I'll try it through this channel: the package download page is NOT an APT repository. I want people to carefully consider the pros and cons before installing software from a third party. So please don't point your sources.list to the download page. Thanks!

I'm using gitosis to manage my Git repositories on the public server. That server was recently upgraded to Squeeze and I didn't create a new repository on that server so far but today I wanted to and got:

ERROR:gitosis.serve.main:Repository read access denied
fatal: The remote end hung up unexpectedly

A search yielded some results with people messing up their keys or forgetting to create the configuration file entry or something similar. None of this was my problem. As it turned out, the post-update hook for the admin repository has been moved from /usr/share/python-support/gitosis/gitosis-0.2-py2.5.egg/gitosis/templates/admin/hooks/post-update to /usr/share/pyshared/gitosis/templates/admin/hooks/post-update, but the symlink hasn't been updated on upgrade. After running a simple

ln -sf /usr/share/pyshared/gitosis/templates/admin/hooks/post-update post-update

in the hook directory of the admin repository everything worked again.

Steve Kemp recently announced his resignation from Debian. That left a few of his packages without a maintainer, one of them was Chronicle. As a Debian Developer using Chronicle, I've adopted this package. The upstream development will still be mostly done by Steve. The packaging is done in a Git repository. The 4.6-1 upload consists of a new upstream version and some housekeeping stuff on the packaging side (like switching to a minimal debian/rules, fixing some Lintian warnings and complying with the latest version of the Debian Policy).

I'd like to take this opportunity and thank Steve for all his work for Debian. Hopefully he'll be back to Debian in the future.

I've just uploaded a new KVIrc SVN snapshot (r5829) to Unstable. This one took a little longer than the "normal" ten days because the transition of the previous version waited for some other packages to migrate first. This transition might also take longer than we hope for, due to #625607 in EGLIBC, which leads to a segfault in CMake on SPARC.

The stable update to (more or less) upstream's 4.0.4 is also almost ready. We hope for an upload soon.

Some might remember, that I have been asked in the past to add Flattr to the available support models. And after considering this a little more, I wanted to add support options to my blog too. So I looked into the different options already available and found, that while Flattr offered a donation option, they had no graphic available like the PayPal donation button. Thus I contacted the Flattr guys and they responded almost immediately by sending me a tarball with two images and an example HTML file. You can see that in action below (this is the ECMAScript version, the CSS version can be seen on the right side of this website):

If you want to use it on your own homepage here is, what you need to do:

1. Download the images (normal, hover) to your server/webspace.
2. Add the following to the page(s) where you want to see the Flattr donation button:
   
   
   You need to replace [USERID] with your registered user name.
3. You're done!

You can, of course, also just download the first image and skipt the whole hover effect stuff. And, of course again, you can also use CSS to implement the hover effect, as I do it on this site. In that case just remove the img tag from the code snippet above, add a unique id (let us assume it is flattrDonate) to the a tag and add the following to your style sheet:

#flattrDonate {
        display:        block;
        background-image: url('/imgs/flattr_donate_normal.png');
        width:          56px;
        height:         21px;
}

#flattrDonate:hover {
        background-image: url('/imgs/flattr_donate_hover.png');
}

Obviously you need to change the URL to point to your copies of the two images.

Just a short announcement for the impatient: Wine 1.3.20 packages are available. As of this writing it's only the source package, the binaries follow as soon as they're built.

As a small side note: this is, as far as I can remember, my quickest upload of a Wine version (only about 15 minutes after the release was tagged upstream).

I've uploaded liblwp-authen-oauth-perl to Debian today, [UPDATE: currently the package is waiting in NEW (please note, that the previous link might not work, in case the package has entered the archive already or the page hasn't been generated yet). and is now in the archive. Thanks a lot to the FTP Masters for the quick processing!]

LWP::Authen::OAuth allows to easily integrate OAuth authentication into Perl programs and libraries. Some of you might already guess, why I have an interest in OAuth for Perl: as a user (and maintainer) of Chronicle I'd find it neat, if there could be some Flattr integration (especially a automatic submission of new posts to Flattr). This sent me searching for an Perl implementation of the Flattr API. Unfortunately this turned up nothing, therefore I'm now planning to write some sort of Net::Flattr Perl module, which I can then use in Chronicle for one task or another.

Net::Flattr (preliminary name, but probably the final one, as the implementation of the Twitter API is called Net::Twitter) is going to be a library, which should offer the same functionality as Flattr's PHP library. For now there are some scetches to this extent on my hard drive, but nothing showable. I hope I find the time soon to write this but it shouldn't be too difficult. ;-)

Apart from my particular use case, you can use LWP::Authen::OAuth for any other OAuth-requiring API. I hope the package helps you to build more cool tools for and on your Debian system!

Early in May a new flatmate came to live with me: Josephine!

I waited long for this to happen and can't tell how glad I am to finally have her with me. Her arrival was heralded by fire and the smell of many burned things and like thunder and lightning she entered her rightful place here.

Enough introductions, I'd like to present Josephine to you:

Before I close this post, I'd like to thank An-U (German homepage), the artist, for painting this awesome piece of art!

Today I was playing with some RDF information, initially triggered by my entry about Josephine. While at it I decided to add some information explicitly to the head tag, including

Obviously I wanted to add those two tags to my templates, so Chronicle adds that to all files. Unfortunately this resulted in an encoding error of the "ä". Some digging in the source of chronicle showed, that HTML::Template-new() was called without ensuring, that the tempalte files were parsed as UTF-8 encoded. The solution was to add a filter.

The just uploaded version 4.6-2 contains the required patch and if you don't use the Debian packages you won't be left out for long, as Steve already applied the fix upstream.