First, Hello Planet Debian ! Some words about me I m a new member of the X Strike Force, the debian team responsible for packaging Xorg. I basically stepped in with the openchrome driver.
I also have wider interest in free software or open source in general, but you can have a look at the rest of my blog, so I won t bother you with too much details. More about X Talking with various attendant at MiniDebConf Paris, I got the impression that people think working on Xorg is hard. I must say: It s not ! First debian work is mostly packaging, and the developers of the applications we package (debian call them upstream) are pretty responsive, so you won t be on your own.
Most of the work is preparing the packages for their new release, place them in experimental first, and ask for testers.
Then people test and the real work start: we receive bug reports.
Sometime seeing the report, it s easy to point the user to test some other version, do some change, remove some old libraries in /usr/local/lib.
Sometime we need to ask for more information. I said we, but for now unless it s about openchrome, I can t help much, but I follow the bugs on the X mailing list and learn from others response, I think I ll be able to help soon. An other way to help: TXBW I m sure you ve read about RCBW, kudos to every one posting some and to every BSP attendant.
But if you thought X was hard, you certainly find the remaining RC bugs too hard (Or if not, you might want some distraction with an easier task). So I have a proposition for you: Triage X Bugs of the Week (TXBW) As Lucas told on his blog I ve proposed him a patch to help triaging X bugs using UDD. And he accepted it, Thanks ! So here is the link I m using: XSF unstable bugs sorted by date.
But remember the udd database is not live data, if you close a bug, it won t disappear immediately.
Also please read the X Strike Force Bug Closing Procedure before starting. To conclude my TXBW data (well TXB of the Day so to speak)

• #233204 pinged submitter.
• #334461 closed, no longer occur.
• #204378 proposed a development direction, if anybody is really interested in actually using XDM, please have a look.
• #303889 closed, ion3 no longer available to test.
• #369389 closed, the report details very old versions.

I hope this can be a success like the RCBW initiative is.
Currently there are hundreds of X bugs, more that a half are at least one year old so they deserve to be triaged ! The X Strike Force (still) needs you !

Gnash has moved from bzr to git, at least for the moment - Savannah's bzr setup is slow and unlikely to improve, so the choice is git or Launchpad, apparently. (Thinking selfishly, I'm a lot more familiar with git than with bzr, so I hope it stays this way.) My instructions from July have changed only slightly:

git clone git://git.sv.gnu.org/git/gnash
cd gnash
./autogen.sh
./configure --enable-renderer=agg \
            --enable-media=GST \
            --enable-gui=gtk \
            --with-plugins-install=system
make
sudo make install
sudo make install-plugins

Buried near the end of the bug reports wiki page is a useful tip for debugging - export GNASH_OPTIONS=writelauncher before starting the browser, and gnash will write out the instructions for starting a local copy. In practise, these instructions seem to appear as a file called /tmp/gnash-debug-1.sh, and that will reference a file matching /tmp/gnash-cookies.* - so don't bother trying to dig through the debug log. With this tip, it's possible to get the browser out of the loop, and focus on debugging gnash (which should be enough for most problems). At least, that's what I hope - I've spent the last hour or so just figuring this stuff out. Hmpf.

During my recent trip to Massachusetts for CalConnect XIX I passed back via New York, surfing a few nights on the couch at the Washington Cube Garden¹. This was just enough time for my new Davis VantagePro2 to arrive by UPS ground (phew!) causing me much consternation, as the box was about twice as wide as I expected it to be. On opening it I discovered that the reason for the size was the physical dimensions of the rain gauge, leading me to realise that I had actually bought exactly what I wanted: a high quality weather station. Also leading me to wonder how the hell I was going to get it halfway around the world with me the next day. Unfortunately that extra wide carrying case was in no way going to fit inside my suitcase. Fortunately it came with a handle. And those wonderful people at Air New Zealand gave me a Koru Gold upgrade for a 50th birthday present, so it was time to put it to the test... Travelling on the subway out to JFK was it's own little adventure, but I made it out to terminal 5 and wandered around a bit before concluding I needed to be in terminal 7. Once I was in the right place I found the fancy people's check in counter and the nice lady there was only too happy for me to carry it to New Zealand, though she did aver that perhaps the security scanners would be dubious. Not a hitch there though: I guess they're used to letting everything through that's not specifically denied, so weather stations are fine because nobody would be silly enough to even think of doing that... Being Koru Gold really helped at this point though, because it enabled me to queue jump use the priority boarding line when getting onto the plane, and every airline in the US seems to have gone all-out for this "checked baggage costs more" approach, so the planes all fly with empty baggage holds and totally overstuffed overhead lockers. If this progresses I shouldn't wonder that the planes will get so top-heavy they roll over, but through the miracles of priority boarding I was able to commandeer all the locker space I needed before anyone else had even made it past row 40. I confess that I was a little worried that it wouldn't be quite such plain sailing getting through LAX. I mean we all know what reputation this delightful little exit port has. In the event it was totally anitclimactic. If it has a handle on it, and it's about the same size and shape as a largish carryon then it's fine. There have been no recorded stabbings with wind vanes anyway - at least on aeroplanes - so clearly they are perfectly safe. Finally back in my country of birth, thinking I was home free, I breathed a sigh of relief transferred my bags and nipped off to the Koru lounge for a much needed shower and change of clothes after I snuck the station through another scanner. By now the handle had broken, so it was looking decidedly more 'box' like and less 'carryon' like, and when I eventually rolled up at the gate with my boarding pass the attendant made a valiant attempt to relieve me of it, but she was too slow and I danced around her and swanned up the gangway to take my seat. I was slow, this time, having missed the first boarding call, and all overhead lockers were crammed full. There was no seat in front of me to put the weather station under. Fortunately a nearby cupboard proved fit for purpose and it was secreted there and we were underway. At this point the guy two seats over said "didn't I see that weather station in New York?". Of course being bright yellow does make it a little conspicuous I guess, and I'm not renowned for my own inconspicuousness myself. So that's how I got my new weather station home, and you can see right away that doing things the easy way would never even occur to me. Possibly this is why I run Linux: there just isn't enough challenge when you run a different operating system. On Windows someone has always written a program for your new weather station, and a Mac user wouldn't be seen dead with it because it's black and beige and comes in a bright yellow box! So now I had to find some code to write. I looked around and very rapidly discovered that some software called vproweather was available, which would happily talk to my weather station and download the data from it, write web pages, stuff it into a MySQL database and so forth. All, obviously, far too easy, so I thought aha! I could convert that to PostgreSQL, and then I would be happy and relax with the thought of a job well done. So I downloaded the code in question an impressive several hundred kb of C code, cranked open a text editor and started to crawl through it and see where I could add the magic pixie dust to make it work with PostgreSQL. But it was not to be. My eyes glazed over or scales fell from them or something, and I realised that this particular edifice was beyond my help. Back to square one. I downloaded the Vantage Serial Protocol docs from the Davis Instruments website did some quick googling and decided I should write a module to talk this protocol. And I should write it in Perl (it was a Thursday, and Perl always seems more sensible on a Thursday, and not because of Douglas Adams, either). I beavered away into the night. Rain threatened, so I raced outside and installed the new weather station on the roof in the hopes that it's magnificent rain collector would collect. I raced back inside and was able to count the first (and so far, only) tip of the bucket. And so I now release upon the world Davis::VantagePro my first perl module. Well, the first one I care to share with the world, anyway. I have stressed it with very little testing, lumbered it with no planning or design whatsoever and so I feel it only fair that I should cast it upon the world with very little thought for it's survival or existential goals.

¹ I seem to recall one night we came up with some fantastic names for Micah & Biella's Washington Square apartment, but I couldn't remember any of the good ones and had to slap a new one on there. I should also mention my stay at the Acetarium in Boston, which was a fabulous few days, but it would pad this blog post needlessly, and I've already done that.

After having created my Debian presentation template, I wanted to share it so that future speakers can reuse my work. Surely there should be a place for this. I quickly found Ubuntu s dedicated wiki page, and for Debian the relevant place was on the website. However looking at that page, it s obvious that the website is not the proper place: the page has not been updated with new talks since 2005. It s just to much burden for any speaker. A wiki page is much more convenient in that regard. Switching to the wiki means we loose translations but that s still better than an outdated translated page on the website. So I went ahead, I created http://wiki.debian.org/Presentations and I filed a bug against www.debian.org to suggest to move the content to the wiki (see #601337) and to leave a link pointing to the new wiki page. So the content of the website needs to be injected into the wiki. This is an easy task for someone that wishes to start contributing to Debian. Thus it s your task. Once completed send a mail to 601337@bugs.debian.org to inform the webmasters that the wiki part of the work has been completed. They just have to drop the old pages and replace them with links to the wiki. PS: If you have given a Debian talk recently, please put your slides online and link to them on the new wiki page.

9 comments Support my work

Just discovered (thanks to XTaran): df -T -- show file system type.

$ df -Th
Filesystem    Type    Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/benz-root
              ext3    6.6G  4.9G  1.4G  79% /
tmpfs        tmpfs    1.6G     0  1.6G   0% /lib/init/rw
udev         tmpfs    1.6G  228K  1.6G   1% /dev
tmpfs        tmpfs    1.6G     0  1.6G   0% /dev/shm
/dev/sda1     ext3    236M   21M  203M  10% /boot
/dev/mapper/benz-home
              ext3    135G   82G   53G  61% /home
newton:/home   nfs    459G  145G  291G  34% /nfs

I ve been looking at git dpm. It s a tool for managing Debian packages in git. The description promises the world: use of git to maintain both a set of patches to some upstream software along with the history of those patches both at the same time. It also promises the ability to let me share my development repositories. The overhead is much less than topgit. My feelings are mixed. It does deliver on its promise to allow you to maintain your upstream patches and to use git normallyish. It produces nice quilt patch series. In order to understand the down side, it s necessary to understand a bit about how it works. It maintains your normal branch roughly the way you do things today. There s also a branch that is rebased often that is effectively the quilt series. It starts from the upstream and has a commit for every patch in your quilt series containing exactly the contents of that patch. This branch is merged into your debian branch when you run git dpm update-patches. The down side is that it makes the debian branch kind of fragile. If you commit an upstream change to the Debian branch it will be reverted by the next git dpm update-patches. The history will not be lost, but unless you have turned that change into a commit along your patches branch, git dpm update-patches will remove the change without warning. This can be particularly surprising if the change in question is a merge from the upstream branch. In that case, the merged in changes will all be lost, but since the tip of the upstream branch is in your history, then future merges will not bring them back. If you either also merge your changes into the patches branch, or tell git dpm about a new upstream, then the changes will reappear at the next git dpm update-patches. The other fragility is that rebasing your debian branch can have really unpleasant consequences. The problem is that rebase removes merge commits: it assumes that the only changes introduced by merge commits are resolution of conflicts. However, git dpm synthesizes merge commits. In particular, it takes the debian directory from your debian branch, plus the upstream sources from your upstream branch, plus all the patches you applied and calls that your new debian branch. There s also a metadata file that contains pointers to the upstream branch and the quilt patch series branch. In addition, debian/patches gets populated. Discarding this commit completely would simply roll you back to the previous state of your patches. However, this loses history! There is no reference that is left pointing to the patches branch; the only reason it is still referenced is that it s a parent of the commit rebase is throwing away. This isn t really all that unusual; if you merged in any branch, deleted the branch and rebased away both the merge and the commits from the branch, you d lose history. I do find it a bit easier to do with git dpm. However, it s more likely that you ll manage to rebase and keep the commits from the patches branch. In particular, if the horizon of your rebase includes a merge of the patches branch,then for every patch that involves changes to the debian branch from the point where rebase starts rewriting history, you will see a commit included by your rebase. My suspicion is that this commit is more likely to generate conflicts than usual because it s a patch on top of the upstream sources being applied to a partially patched debian branch. However I have not fully worked through things: it may be that such a patch is exactly as likely to cause conflicts as it would in a git dpm update-patches operation. If that succeeds and you do not manage to fail to pick one of these commits, you ll end up with roughly the same debian sources you started with. There are two key exceptions: the git dpm metadata file is not updated and your debian/patches is not consistent with your sources. The first means you re in the state of the previous paragraph: git dpm update-patches will blow away your changes. The second means that any source package you produce is going to be kind of funky if not out right broken. It is possible to recover from git dpm plus rebase. I think if you git dpm checkout-patches, then cherry pick the patch related commits from your debian branch that were introduced by the rebase, then git dpm update-patches, you ll be in a sane state. Obviously you could also recover by finding the pre-rebase commit and resetting there. I m assuming though that you actually needed to rebase for some reason. Of course git dpm does involve a space penalty. You generate a commit for every patch in your quilt series for every version of the upstream sources you deal with. Also, you will introduce and store every version of the quilt series directly in your debian directory. The extra commits probably aren t a big deal: the blobs probably delta compress well. I m not sure though that the quilt patch blobs will compress well with other things. In my opinion the ability to get nice quilt patches is well worth the space penalty. In conclusion, git dpm is a sharp tool. Actually, I think that s understating things. Git dpm involves a bunch of rotating blades. You stick your face and foot between the blades, and if you use it correctly, there s exactly enough clearance that nothing gets damaged and you get some fairly neat results. Other outcomes are available. I m still trying to evaluate if it is worth it. I think the tradeoff might be different for something like the krb5 package which is maintained by two very experienced maintainers than say for Shibboleth which seems to involve several more maintainers. I m not sure that there is much git dpm can do to make things better. Even detecting loss-of-foot events might be kind of tricky.

Last week, I wrote a couple of patches to add support for transparency when Emacs is displaying GIF images. Until now, it was displaying the color used to define transparency in the file data. Now it displays the image correctly by using the frame color as the transparency color, like it's done for other image formats. The patches have not been merged yet, but will probably be soon.

Thanks to Eric Whitney s benchmarking results, I have my money shot for my upcoming 2011 LCA talk in Brisbane, which will be about how to improve scalability in the Linux kernel, using the case study of the work that I did to improve scalability via a series of scalability patches that were developed during 2.6.34, 2.6.35, and 2.6.36 (and went into the the kernel during subsequent merge window). These benchmarks were done on a 48-core AMD system (8 sockets, 6 cores/socket) using a 24 SAS-disk hardware RAID array. Which is the sort of system which XFS has traditionally shined on, and for which ext3 has traditionally not scaled very well at. We re now within striking distance of XFS, and there s more improvements to ext4 which I have planned that should help its performance even further. This is the kind of performance improvement that I m totally psyched to see! No related posts.

Thanks to Eric Whitney s benchmarking results, I have my money shot for my upcoming 2011 LCA talk in Brisbane, which will be about how to improve scalability in the Linux kernel, using the case study of the work that I did to improve scalability via a series of scalability patches that were developed during 2.6.34, 2.6.35, and 2.6.36 (and went into the kernel during subsequent merge window). These benchmarks were done on a 48-core AMD system (8 sockets, 6 cores/socket) using a 24 SAS-disk hardware RAID array. Which is the sort of system which XFS has traditionally shined on, and for which ext3 has traditionally not scaled very well at. We re now within striking distance of XFS, and there s more improvements to ext4 which I have planned that should help its performance even further. This is the kind of performance improvement that I m totally psyched to see! No related posts.

Story I bought Xperia X10i this summer during DebConf10 in NYC, I loved this phone from very beginning however what bothered me was that it was still stuck on outdated Android 1.6. To get your own custom Android on it, wasn t quite possible because no one managed to hack bootloader even though some of the guys at XDA where getting pretty close. Long story made short, Sony Ericsson has finally release their Android 2.1 update, but made it available only for Nordic region, they explained it all on their blog where they also sent a message for paranoid users as they called them. I thought, if I gave it all this time I can wait a little bit longer, but then one of my friends (@sahinovic) gave me a good pointer to go in right direction with using custom ROM, Nordic for example? So this is where I got my idea. I want 2.1 update now! Please note steps below will get you Android 2.1 update, but AFAIK you ll also lose your warranty 1. Root your phone If you don t have your phone rooted, this can now be done in single click. Get X10 Root and follow instructions on screen. 2. Edit system/default.prop Get Root Explorer, mount r/w (upper right corner), edit system/default.prop Lines you re concentrating on are 1 and 3 Let s say they are:

ro.semc.version.cust=1237-0333
ro.product.name=X10_1237-0333

Edit them to look like:

ro.semc.version.cust=1234-8465
ro.product.name=X10_1234-8465

Save the file and it s gonna create automatic backup of original file. 3. Get the updates using SEUS Turn off your phone, launch SEUS, plugin in the USB cable while holding back button, SEUS is going to tell you have updates for your phone Follow on screen instructions. Enjoy the update Conclusion X10 is a pretty sweet phone, but with it being so closed, it also closes a lot of doors to hacking it and playing with it, great example would be this update itself, since right now Android 2.1 update is an outdated one. However 2.1 update brings new life into it, just as it s a brand new phone, it s more responsive and much much faster. And do take a backup before this update, because I lost everything from my contacts to internet settings, but all files on my sd card remained intact. If you want to discuss anything regarding this topic please do so in comment area below or find me on Twitter.

It s already the fourth issue of Flattr FOSS: it means 20 different projects using Flattr that I presented you. Here are the 5 suggestions for November:

1. Redshift is a small utility that adjusts the color temperature of your screen to make it less aggressive on your eyes, in particular during evening/nights. It uses the time of the day and the geographic location to know whether it s night or day. I discovered it this summer and I liked it, although I m not running it permanently.
2. Noscript is a Firefox plugin to control what sites can execute javascript, flash and other plugins. All those are creating supplementary security risks and you browse safer if you allow only some sites to run them. This is the number one entry on Flattr in the opensource category, it recently took the place of dpkg.
3. phyMyAdmin is a web interface to manage MySQL databases. If you have such a database on a web-hosting service, you have likely already seen it in action. It s an award-winning software with a 12 year history, it s not so common for PHP applications.
4. Chromium maintenance in Debian. Chromium is a rapidly-evolving & complex software and Giuseppe Iuculano has been tirelessly working on packaging it. Almost alone within Debian. He deserves kudos for his work even though he reused work made by Fabien Tassin on the Ubuntu package.
5. Dulwich is a pure-Python implementation of the Git file formats and protocols. It s an important building block for interoperability between Bazaar and Git: bzr-git (a Bazaar plugin providing Git integration) is notably using it. Given the large usage of bzr in Ubuntu and the popularity of Git world-wide, it s important to have such gateways.

This article is part of the Flattr FOSS project.

Update: mentioned the work of Fabien Tassin on the chromium package within Ubuntu.

6 comments Support my work

The AEIOU Foundation The AEIOU Foundation [1] is a support and advocacy organisation for people on the Autism Spectrum, note that they clearly say Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) on their About page, some of what they write would be less wrong if it was claimed to apply to only non-verbal Autistics or people claimed to be Low Functioning Autistic (LFA). But in regard to the Autism Spectrum they just don t seem to know much about it, a lot of their web pages seem to be based on the assumption that anyone who is on the Spectrum will be lucky if they can ever live independently. However it seems that most people who can be diagnosed with an ASD have typical social skills by the standards of the IT industry and can get by without any special assistance. The entire site seems to be written about people on the Spectrum by people who know little of their experiences and contains hardly any information that matches what I ve read from various people on the Spectrum (of course there are a wide range of experiences that differ greatly). They have a link to Autism Related Sites which starts with Autism Speaks (the Wikipedia page about Autism Speaks is worth reading note the section about immunisation research which has been repeatedly debunked and the section about legal action against a young autistic blogger). There are many good reasons why Autism Speaks is so widely hated among people on the Spectrum. I think that recommending Autism Speaks is a sign of willful ignorance of almost everything related to Autism. In their page about describing Autism to NTs they say Imagine if you suddenly woke up in a foreign country, did not speak the language and had no way of effectively communicating with the people around you . I ve been diagnosed with Asperger Syndrome by a psychologist who considers that to be the same as High Functioning Autism (HFA) and I ve visited more than a few countries. I find the comparison of the Autistic experience to visiting another country to be so strange that I don t even know where I would begin if I was to comment on where it went wrong. Finally they have a scrolling bar listing their advertisers at the bottom of ever single page on their site. If someone was going to design a web site specifically to annoy people on the Spectrum then such a scrolling banner would be a good place to start. Now they probably do some good things to help families with children on the Spectrum. But their ability to do good is really hindered by the lack of input from people on the spectrum, Rachel Cohen-Rottenberg (leader of the Vermont Chapter of the Autistic Self Advocacy Network) wrote an interesting post about AEIOU and noted that none of the people who run AEIOU are Autistic [2]. The Communication Shutdown Someone got the idea that Neuro-Typical people (NTs) should try and understand what it s like to be on the Spectrum which is a reasonable idea. But they decided that the way to do so is to have them refrain from Internet based socialisation and not use Facebook and Twitter for one day. It seems to me that most people on the Spectrum primarily socialise via the Internet, so ceasing Internet based socialisation is likely to make their experience less like that of people on the Spectrum. I m getting a mental image of a bunch of NTs deciding to go to a night-club for their Internet free evening and then imagining that they are somehow empathising with the experience of people who can never enjoy a night-club. As an aside, a web site which has anything at all related to disabilities shouldn t rely on Flash the Communication Shutdown site totally fails in this regard. No Stereotypes Here has an interesting analysis of this situation, among other things they comment on the irony of having someone ask them to stop using twitter as part of this campaign [3]. One thing that they suggest is for NTs to have a day without any communication at all. Some Suggestions for People who Want to Understand As a communication exercise, try going shopping without speaking, just use hand gestures. For bonus points try doing so in a foreign country where you don t know the language so you need bidirectional non-verbal communication with some luck you can complete a transaction without the shopkeeper realising that you are a foreigner. This won t actually give you much of the Autistic experience, but it s a good exercise in understanding how communication works. Someone who wanted to know the down-side of being on the Spectrum could find a sports bar where most patrons support one team and then enter the bar while wearing a jersey indicating support for an opposing team. I don t recommend doing this because it really wouldn t be fun, but for a quick approximation of the experience it would probably work well. It seems to me that paying $5 to a charity and then boasting about doing so on your Facebook page for a day is an easy thing to do. A harder task would be to spend a day reading about the experiences of the people in question and then giving $5 to a charity that is well regarded by the target group. Another possible way of gaining some understanding would be to have a party where everyone brings their laptop and uses only electronic communication no speaking at all. This is in fact fairly close to what some of the Geekier (possibly Autistic) members of the IT community do.

• [1] http://aeiou.org.au/
• [2] http://www.journeyswithautism.com/2010/10/22/speak-up-on-november-1st/
• [3] http://nostereotypeshere.blogspot.com/2010/10/real-communication-shutdown.html

I m experiencing since some time (out of the blue) spontaneous reboots of some of my dom0s on lenny/i386 (others don t have this effect). As result of this, I started rolling out linux-image-2.6.32-bpo.5-xen-686 from bpo and backported xen and xen-common from testing:

# dpkg -l grep xen grep bpo
ii libxenstore3.0 4.0.1-1~bpo50+1 Xenstore communications library for Xen
ii linux-image-2.6.32-bpo.5-xen-686 2.6.32-26~bpo50+1 Linux 2.6.32 for modern PCs, Xen dom0 suppor
ii xen-hypervisor-4.0-i386 4.0.1-1~bpo50+1 The Xen Hypervisor on i386
ii xen-linux-system-2.6.32-bpo.5-xen-686 2.6.32-26~bpo50+1 Xen system with Linux 2.6.32 on modern PCs (
ii xen-tools 4.1-1~bpo50+1 Tools to manage Debian XEN virtual servers
ii xen-utils-4.0 4.0.1-1~bpo50+1 XEN administrative tools
ii xen-utils-common 4.0.0-1~bpo50+1 XEN administrative tools common files
ii xenstore-utils 4.0.1-1~bpo50+1 Xenstore utilities for Xen This fixed the problem of spontaneous reboots for all of the systems I have migrated . until now! Last week I tried this solution on my private system and it failed in some way.

A full dump of the syslog is also available. It looks like /etc/rcS.d/S03udev is hanging in some way .. the syslog for this looks like:

Oct 29 20:51:07 mordor kernel: [ 17.728120] Code: 04 00 00 00 00 83 3c 24 10 74 32 77 0c 83 3c 24 08 0f 85 9f 00 00 00 eb 12 83 3c 24 20 74 30 83 3c 24 40 0f 85 8d 00 00 00 eb 35 <0f> b6 01 8b 54 24 20 89 02 c7 42 04 00 00 00 00 eb 79 0f b7 01
Oct 29 20:51:07 mordor kernel: [ 17.731554] EIP: [<c1184d4c>] acpi_ex_system_memory_space_handler+0 189/0 221 SS:ESP 0069:ec135d74
Oct 29 20:51:07 mordor kernel: [ 17.731791] CR2: 00000000eda86000
Oct 29 20:51:07 mordor kernel: [ 17.731881] [ end trace 7b8af581772a1c55 ]
Oct 29 20:51:07 mordor kernel: [ 18.116622] input: PC Speaker as /devices/platform/pcspkr/input/input6
Oct 29 20:51:07 mordor kernel: [ 18.427607] Error: Driver pcspkr is already registered, aborting
Oct 29 20:51:07 mordor kernel: [ 232.381814] Adding 10000452k swap on /dev/sda2. Priority:-1 extents:1 across:10000452k The dom0 is there hanging in some way I don t have an exact way to get the system proceed from there usually I need to wait some seconds and pressing ^C after a while will get the box up.
Anyways I remember there are some problems with udev >= 150 and older kernels, which is also documented in the squeeze release notes. Maybe there is also a problem with older udev and newer kernels? But why is this combination working on other systems? Booting linux-image-2.6.32-bpo.5-686 works without any issue anyways, so it seems xen related. Any idea is appreciated!
UPDATE: I ve also reported this via #602109.

It turns out that pdfedit is pretty good at extracting text from pdf files. Here is a script I wrote to do that in batch mode.

#!/bin/sh
# Print the text from a pdf document on stdout
# Copyright: (c) 2006-2010 PDFedit team  <http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfedit>
# Copyright: (c) 2010, David Bremner <david@tethera.net>
# Licensed under version 2 or later of the GNU GPL
set -e
if [ $# -lt 1 ]; then
    echo usage: $0 file [pageSep]
    exit 1
fi
#!/bin/sh
# Print the text from a pdf document on stdout
# Copyright:   2006-2010 PDFedit team  <http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfedit>
# Copyright:   2010, David Bremner <david@tethera.net>
# Licensed under version 2 or later of the GNU GPL
set -e
if [ $# -lt 1 ]; then
    echo usage: $0 file [pageSep]
    exit 1
fi
/usr/bin/pdfedit -console -eval '
function onConsoleStart()  
    var inName = takeParameter();
    var pageSep = takeParameter();
    var doc = loadPdf(inName,false);

    pages=doc.getPageCount();
    for (i=1;i<=pages;i++)  
        pg=doc.getPage(i);
        text=pg.getText();
        print(text);
        print("\n");
        print(pageSep);
     
 
' $1 $2

Yeah, I wish #!/usr/bin/pdfedit worked too. Thanks to Aaron M Ucko for pointing out that -eval could replace the use of a temporary file. Oh, and pdfedit will be even better when the authors release a new version that fixes truncating wide text

Today I forgetfully left my USB drive at home when I took off for a night at the yurt. This has happened before and generally involves staring at an scp for rather too long, probably getting low on battery power in the process, and is followed by not quite having files in the places I expect and forgetting to delete them from my small laptop SSD later. With git-annex those annoyances can go away. So I wanted a couple of gigabytes of files that were left at home behind a slightly slow link. Rather than scp them to my laptop for several hours, I just did a quick ssh into a server, and browsed through my stuff there, running git annex get $foo & on files and directories I wanted. Then went to eat dinner and play board games while the content was scped across the slow link from home. Now I can quickly download it all to my laptop from that fast server (named "finch"), like this:

git pull
git annex move . --from finch

That removes the data from the server too, freeing its space back up for next time. And the files are in their regular places on my laptop, automatically. And I can simply git annex drop . when I need that space back without worrying about losing any data. (Hmm, this feels a little bit like it did to switch from doing everything by hand with dpkg to using apt-get..)

I m attending the mini-Debconf Paris and I just gave a talk about the latest improvement of dpkg-dev the package providing the basic tools used to build Debian packages. Latest is a bit stretched since it embraces the last 2-3 years of development. My talk covered the following topics:

• Support of symbols files by dpkg-shlibdeps, dpkg-gensymbols
• Support of new source formats by dpkg-source
• Supplementary options for dpkg-source
• Cross distribution collaboration with dpkg-vendor
• Custom compilation flags with dpkg-buildflags
• Miscellaneous improvements to other tools

The slides are relatively verbose so that you can understand them even if you did not attend the talk. Click here to get the slides. Related links This section points to various articles that cover more extensively some of the features mentioned in my talk. Concerning dpkg-source:

• About new source formats
• How to customize dpkg-source s behaviour in your Debian source package
• How to create Debian packages with alternative compression methods
• How to use multiple upstream tarballs in Debian source packages?
• Managing distribution-specific patches with a common source package

Concerning dpkg-maintscript-helper:

• Correctly renaming a conffile in Debian package maintainer scripts
• The right way to remove an obsolete conffile in a Debian package

Concerning dpkg-vendor:

• How to generate different dependencies on Debian and Ubuntu with a common source package

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I disabled my Facebook account about a month ago. See the blog post when I started my Facebook hiatus for the reasons. Now, almost one month into my hiatus, I must say that it has been surprisingly easy. While I do think I probably missed some interesting things my friends are doing (or maybe even did not get invited to some parties; a lot of things are Facebook-only nowadays, unfortunately) I do have the impression that I have much more spare time and that I'm more productive. To my most important friends (in particular my girlfriend of course) I've been keeping my contact out of Facebook anyway, so I didn't lose anything there. So essentially I'm continuing my Facebook hiatus for an indefinite amount of time. I just wonder how to inform my Facebook friends that are expecting my back anytime soon ... and I do hope they'll at some point realize that some of their friends are not on Facebook by choice, but still deserve to be invited to parties and such.

When I was walking past Southbank when I saw some Parkour being practiced. I watched for a while and spoke to the instructor after the informal lesson was finished. He s a professional instructor with the Melbourne branch of the Australian Parkour Association [1] and he sometimes gives free advice to newbies that he meets on the street (in this case a group of 6 teenage boys). From the web site it seems that the standard lesson fee is $15 for an indoor lesson or $10 for an outdoor lesson with a $5 discount for members of the Australian Parkour Association [2], which is really cheap for a 2 hour lesson! APA membership costs $10 to join plus a $50 annual membership fee. It s worth reading the ParkourPedia information about the spirit/philosophy that is Parkour [3]. It s interesting to note that there can be no official Parkour shows because if you do it for anyone else then it s not Parkour so much for all the Parkour videos on Youtube. Also another issue with the Youtube videos is that Parkour isn t about doing the most dangerous things you can possibly survive in an urban environment, it can be practiced in country areas and isn t supposed to be unreasonably dangerous. The outdoor Parkour lessons start near the Arts center in the middle of Melbourne and presumably some of them go past Southbank as it has some interesting things to jump over. So it s worth watching out for people jumping over various obstacles instead of walking around them. They may not be doing a Parkour show, but it s in public and anyone can watch.

• [1] http://www.melbourneparkour.com.au/
• [2] http://www.parkour.asn.au/
• [3] http://parkourpedia.com/about/what-is-parkour

I've been ill this week. The only hacking I've been doing is of the cough variety. :) I think I'm recovering, though. This evening, I finally checked out LibreOffice, to get an idea what's going on - kicked off a build, joined the mailing lists. Some of the easy hacks look quite feasible, but there's always a bit of work to get started. The community looks very welcoming, though, so no problems there. The various Perl bits in the installer/build system seem an obvious place to get started. I've also got an eye on the mdbtools code - I theoretically maintain the Debian package, and have come close to forking it. But I aspire to be writing "real" patches, of course. I've been thinking about where I should put my development time over the next year or so, and LibreOffice is likely to be one of those places.

While preparing for the upcoming mini-debconf Paris, I noticed that we don t have any good presentation template for OpenOffice.org Impress. I spent a few hours browsing Debian presentations put online by many speakers and was unable to find one that would suit me. This situation was clearly unacceptable and I decided to spend a few hours to fix this. I selected a very nice wallpaper created by Alexis Younes, used The Gimp to add a translucent white box so that the text can still be read, and combined all this in a OpenOffice.org Impress template. Click here to download the template. You can also get the Gimp XCF file for the background image. By the way, the same wallpaper has been used by Sam Hocevar to create nice-looking Debian business cards. PS: I contacted Alexis Younes by mail and he agreed to put the wallpapers under GPL-2+. It has been clarified on his webpage.

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