I'm writing a Rails application for the microblogging strategy for Debian (which I used to call, debian-twitter, but you know how us Debian folks are ). I came up with a strange issue, that at first I thought was ActionController's fault or some crap.

So, I was testing one of my controllers with something like this:

cat /tmp/mm.txt | curl -d @- http://localhost:3000/message/new

/tmp/mm.txt is a PGP signed message which then I just send as POST data to my application. So far so good. However, when accessing the data from Rails, using request.body.read, I was a getting a single line, with the newlines (carriage returns) removed. So I started looking at how ActionController was getting the HTTP data and stuff. But then I tested:

cat /tmp/mm.txt | lwp-request -m POST  http://localhost:3000/message/new

And that had the carriage returns in place.

So, I started looking at the curl man page and discovered this little gem:

–data-binary <data>

(HTTP) This posts data exactly as specified with no extra processing whatsoever.

If you start the data with the letter @, the rest should be a filename. Data is posted in a similar manner as –data-ascii does, except that newlines are preserved and conversions are never done.

If this option is used several times, the ones following the first will append data as described in -d/–data.

cat /tmp/mm.txt | curl --data-binary @- http://localhost:3000/message/new

…did indeed the tricky. Maybe someone needs this info some day.

I was in New York for three full weeks, before, during and after DebConf 10 took place. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to attend talks or go hang out with folks as much as I would've wanted. Most of the time I was busy at the office with a new product launch we have been preparing for the last few months. However, I was able to come and say hi to a few people, attend the C&W party and talk with friends and ran into. I was, however, following all conversations on IRC so I was pretty informed of all of what was going on. Some random thoughts:

• Being surrounded by so many amazing Debian people made me realize how much I've been apart from the project. My involvement decreased pretty much since I moved to New York. But because of that, I'm now slowly retaking my activity, trying to work on actual things that I use on my daily work instead of just packaging tons of shit that nobody really cared about.
• DebConf is pretty awesome. After attending six out of the last seven Debian conferences, you get to establish a nice connection with people and they become your friends. This year, even if I only came a couple of nights, I made stronger friendships, and for that I'm thankful. It is only within Debian that this human part of bonding really takes place.
• I really regret missing a couple of events: First, the Day trip to Coney Island and the Cyclones game; and the group photo. Both because of work, yes.
• It was interesting to hear the thoughts from one of the Bosnian attendees about next year's DebConf there. I'm really sorry I can't recall his name, but it shocked a bit that he stated that they might try to find better speakers next year, because a lot of them "sucked a lot" here. All I can say is that, even though everybody's opinions are valid, this might come from an outsider, not used to Debian conferences. Where are you going to find better speakers? Us developers are the only speakers out there, good or bad, we are the ones making the conferences by and for.
• I like Zach's attitude as DPL, even when I introduced him to a very nice friend of mine that came to the party to hang out.

DebConf 10 rocked and I appreciate everybody's participation in it. See you in Banja Luka, next year!

This is how we roll at DebConf 10.

That chair protects our router

Generalizations are fun, they always are because they tend to offend people and offended people by stupid shit is usually lots of fun.

Here Debian, as a whole, fails; it sucks. Here Debian blows ass, the entire project is whack.

My good friend Chris Lee sent me this:

If you can't see the above iframe, go here.

Debian, full of fail. Wasn't this generalization fun?

Let the non-sense bullshit horses be released.

 Biella passed this flyer around on the Debian-NYC mailing list. If you are in New York City this Friday, you won't want to miss this Eben Moglen's talk.

If you can't see the embedded object, go here or to this post's permalink.

The Cherokee web server project is hosting the Cherokee Summit 2010 in Madrid, Spain on May 7th and 8th. The summit will be focused on high-performance and scalable Web technologies. I truly believe this is a major opportunity for hackers, developers and administrators looking for the new alternatives on the Web to bond and share experiences to benefit each other's projects and enterprises, and keep up to date on this field.

If you are interested on attending, proceed to the registration site (it's free of charge but seat-limited) and see you there in May!

Remember Vitacilina? A small aggregation library I wrote last year to be intended to replace Planet on Planeta Linux? Well, it never quite replaced it but it achieved some level of stability since I was using it for a number of tasks at work. So, during this long holiday weekend, I received a notification that the Request To Package bug I had filled against the Work-Needing and Prospective Packages in Debian has already been taken care of and the library had been uploaded. Of course, I could have made this myself a long time ago, but at the time it was simpler and faster just to hope someone else would do it at some point.

So, Dario did it. He packaged it and uploaded version 0.1 under the umbrella of the Debian Perl Group. Hurray!

But then I realized that Alexandr Ciornii had implemented some nice changes to Vitacilina back in September that I never got to include or release as a CPAN distribution. And so I just did. I've uploaded 0.2 to CPAN and you can fetch it with cpanf Vitacilina or wait for the Debian Perl folks to update it

So Debian-NYC, mainly the DebConf10 local team, organized a workshop for people interested on Debian packaging. The nice people of drop.io offered their handy location in Brooklyn.

So this is the first attempt to bring new comers to Debian aiming DebConf10 next summer. Micah and dkg are the ones leading the workshop so far.

Pictures!

Peter, I have a single word for you: Moose.

During DebConf9 I had the opportunity to work together with Señor Micah to try to bring Passenger back to shape and get it back to the NEW queue on Debian. We spent way too much time dealing with the build  for the pkg-ruby-extras build model than to the actual fixing and updating. At the end we came up with a very well updated and DFSG-compatible (in contrast to the one that Brightbox provides, which isn't bad either to be honest) package for the 2.2.4 version.

Our current main interest was trying to get the package into Debian by cleaning up the licensing issues on some of the included files and try to come up with improvements in the near future (such as using Passenger directly from Nginx, instead of the Apache-only module). The future is bright and it'll bring sunshine to all of us.

Given that the package is still on the queue and there's a hell lot of other packages to be processed, you can grab the package here and if it fulfills your expectations, make sure you offer me and/or Micah a beer next time you see us around.