Does anyone know how to setup a partial subversion mirror? Essentially we have a source code tree, containing various subdirectories, including doc, test, src/tld/domain and src/experimentalcode/usernames.
We'd like to allow public access to the main source subtree, while not exposing the various user directories to the web server (the master subversion is separate anyway; since I want to use Trac I need a local SVN copy!) I'm currently trying to setup "tailor" to do this, but it is not trivial: it seems easy at first to just ignore any change in a particular folder. But when you encounter "move" aka "rename" operations that rename a file from the non-exposed folder to the exposed folder, they will obviously fail on the "stripped" repository. So they need to be mapped to an "add" operation there! Any hints? I might have it working using some hacks in tailor, but I'd like to know any simple solution, if there is any ...

In my professional role as Ubuntu CTO, I take on a number of different perspectives, which sometimes compete for my attention, including:

• Inward supporting the people in my department, alignment with other departments in Canonical and reporting upward
• Outward connecting with customers, partners and the free software community, including Debian
• Forward considering the future of the Ubuntu platform and products, based on the needs of their users, our customers and business stakeholders within Canonical
• Outside-in taking off my Canonical hat and putting on an Ubuntu hat, and looking at what we re doing from an outside perspective

My recent work, as Canonical has gone through a period of organizational growth and change, has prioritized the inward perspective. I took on a six-month project which was inwardly focused, temporarily handing off many of my day-to-day responsibilities (well done, Robbie!). I ve grappled with an assortment of growing pains as many new people joined Canonical over the past year. With that work behind me, it s time to rebalance myself and focus more outside of Canonical again. It s good to be back! In my outward facing capacity, I ll shortly be attending Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. I attend several free software conferences each year, but this is a different crowd. I hope to renew some old ties, form some new ones, and generally derive inspiration from the people and organizations represented there. Being in the San Francisco Bay area will also give me an opportunity to meet with some of Canonical s partners there, as well as friends and acquaintances from the free software community. With my head down, working hard to make things happen, it s easy to lose perspective on how that work fits into the outside world. Spending more time with people outside of Canonical and Ubuntu is an important way of balancing that effect. Looking forward, I ll be thinking about the longer term direction for the Ubuntu platform. The platform is the layer of Ubuntu which makes everything else possible: it s how we weave together products like Desktop Edition and Server Edition, and it s what developers target when they write applications. Behind the user interfaces and applications, there is a rich platform of tools and services which link it all together. It s in this aspect of Ubuntu that I ll be investing my time in research, experimentation and imagination. This includes considering how we package and distribute software, how we adapt to technological shifts, and highlighting opportunities to cooperate with other open source projects. My primary outside-in role is as chair of the Ubuntu Technical Board. In this capacity, I m accountable to the Ubuntu project, the interests of its members, and the people who use the software we provide. Originally, the TB was closely involved with a range of front-line technical decisions in Ubuntu, but today, there are strong, autonomous teams in place for the most active parts of the project, so we only get involved when there is a problem, or if a technical question comes up which doesn t fit the charter of an established team. It s something of a catch-all. I d like to re-establish the TB in a more central role in Ubuntu, looking after concerns which affect the project as a whole, such as transparency and development processes. I m also re-joining Debian as a non-uploading contributor, to work on stimulating and coordinating cooperation between Debian and Ubuntu. I m looking forward to working more with Zack on joint projects in this area. This change will help me to support Canonical and Ubuntu more effectively as they continue to grow and change. I look forward to exercising some mental muscles I haven t used very much lately, and facing some new challenges as well.

I decided recently to publish interviews from Debian contributors and I picked Joey Hess as my first target. He s one of the few who have heavily influenced Debian by creating software that have become building blocks of the project, like the debian-installer (Joey uses the shorthand d-i to refer to it). My questions are in bold, the rest is by Joey (except for the additional information that I inserted in italics). Who are you? Hello, I m Joey Hess. I m one of the oldtimers in Debian. Actually, I just checked, and there are still up to nineteen active Debian Developers who joined the project before I did, in 1996. I got started fairly young, and am just 34 years old. I spend part of my time working with Lars Wirzenius, another Debian oldtimer, on Branchable. It makes it dead-easy for anyone to make a website that is built from Git, using my Ikiwiki engine to do wiki and blog style things. These days I spend the rest of my time working on free software, when I should really be looking for work to pay the bills. What s your biggest achievement within Debian or Ubuntu? I guess I m mostly known by Debian developers for writing debhelper and perhaps debconf. Probably founding the Debian Installer project has been a bigger impact for users. I m fairly equally proud of all three projects. But while it might sound corny, I am more proud of the accumulation of all the smaller things done in the context of Debian. It s more of a deep connection to the project. All the bugs fixed, and filed, and packages uploaded, and late night discussions, and just being a part of the larger project. What are your plans for Debian Wheezy? Hmm, I stopped thinking of Debian releases by code names back around Slink. So, few specific plans for Wheezy. The main thing I would like to help make happen in Debian next is Constantly Usable Testing, and it transcends releases anyway. The only specific plans I have for Wheezy are that there will probably be a new debhelper compat level, and I hope d-i will finally switch to using git. RH: You can learn more about Constantly Usable Testing in my article Can Debian offer a Constantly Usable Testing distribution?. If you could spend all your time on Debian, what would you work on? Getting Debian on all these computers that we carry around in our pockets and can t easily run apt-get on and hack on. Phones that is. It s a bigger problem than just Debian, but I think Debian needs to find a way to be part of the eventual solution. The FreedomBox concept at least hints at a way around the current situation with embedded computers in general. What s the biggest problem of Debian? I believe that the biggest problem is institutional, social and technological inertia. Every specific case of something that frustrates me about Debian today can be traced back to that. You contribute regularly to Debian mailing lists, yet I don t remember any aggressive/frustrated mail of you. How do you manage that? Are you avoiding heated discussions? Rats, sounds like all my wonderful flames of years past have been forgotten! Seriously though, after I noticed thread patterns, I started trying to avoid participating in the bad patterns myself. Now I limit myself to one expression of an opinion, and I don t care who gets the last word. If people can t be convinced, it s time to find another approach to the problem. Also, code talks. Most of the programs you wrote for Debian are in Perl. Do you regret this choice? I love that question! No, no regrets. My only concern is whether the language limits contributors or users. I have not seen Perl significantly limiting the use of anything except for debconf (we had to rewrite it in C for d-i). And I do not notice fewer contributions to my Perl-based code than to other code. I do sometimes regret when someone tells me they had to learn or re-learn Perl to work on something I wrote. But while I m enjoying writing new things in Haskell now, and while I hope it will mean less maintenance burden later, I don t think using Haskell will make it easier for others to contribute to my programs. Anyway, for me the interesting thing about writing a program is the problem it solves and the decisions made doing it. Choice of language is one of the less interesting decisions. Is there someone in Debian that you admire for his contributions? Well, lots. You re tempting me to throw a dart at a map. So arbitrarily, I ll say Anthony Towns. We could all learn something from how he s approached making big, fundamental changes, like introducing Testing, and making Debian Maintainers happen.

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Thank you to Joey for the time spent answering my questions. I hope you enjoyed reading his answers as I did. Subscribe to my newsletter and don t miss further interviews. You can also follow along on Identi.ca, Twitter and Facebook. PS: If you want to suggest me someone to interview, leave a comment or mail me.

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It seems like VServer is not something for long run because it does not seem to want to be upstream and there is also no good future for having it as patch in Debian for long run. So I should look for alternatives and probably migrate to some other solution while upgrading my server to Squeeze (once it is released or really close to the release). There are various options, starting with OpenVZ, through Linux Containers (LXC) up to full virtualization (probably KVM based). With OpenVZ the situation won't be much better, so it is not a real option. For various reasons I don't want to go to full virtualization, I simply thing containers are good enough and avoid too much overhead in some situations. So the only remaining solution seems to be LXC. There even seem to be some people who managed to migrate from VServer, which is good and will be definitely helpful. Now it's time to play with lxc a bit before I will try to implement it for real.

Filed under: Linux 4 comments Flattr this!

*blows the dust off his blog*

It's been quite awhile since I last wrote anything in this thing, so I guess its a good time as any, off the tails of UDS-N, to finally sit down and write something down. Since my last blog posting in May, I've been travelling around the world, attending conferences, and trying to represent both Ubuntu and Debian itself, and Canonical in all my travels. I was recently posted to China for a full month where I lived and worked out of an office, made friends with fellow Ubuntu users, and tech enthusiasts, had a wonderful time meeting with people with the Beijing Linux User's Group, and worked hard within my team at Canonical, and the legions of Ubuntu Developers to help make one of the best releases we've ever had.

As I was writing specs and drafting work items, I came to the point that I was reflecting on my own personal goals and growth in life. Two years and change ago, I was a struggling junior at Rochester Institute of Technology, a little less than two years ago, I started working full time with Canonical, and this year, I've gone and traveled to many places I've only dreamed about; Anchorage & Barrow, Alaska; Tampere, Finland; Prague, Czech Republic; and Brussels, Belgium, just to name a few. I packed up and lived in China for a month (an amazing experience, and I look forward to going back and visiting again sometime in the near future). Had you told the me of two years ago what I would be doing now, I'd probably think you were smoking something good.

One thing I've discovered in my life is that if you want to do something, you need to get out there and just ****ing do it. This may seem simple, but I think of the dreams a lot of people have that never seem to come to fruition. When I have an opportunity, I take it; going to Alaska was a dream I harbored for many years, especially entering the arctic circle, and heading to Barrow. That entire trip was booked on roughly four days notice, and the side trip to Barrow was planned the day before it actually happen. I don't regret any of it; it was one of the best things I ever done.

It brings me to what I consider the flux of this blog posting. For those who know me, I've had a goal of visiting every state within the United States. At this time last year, this map looked like this

As of two weeks ago today, this map looked like this:



Now, by the end of the day today, it will look like this:



The point I'm trying to make is if you want to do something, do it the first chance you get, or just don't do it; I say this because you never know when you will be able to do it again.

As for completing a life goal, well, it feels pretty amazing :-). I may write about that in a future blog posting ...

I miss the days when Debian was about making software work well together. These days the user mailing lists are full of posts from users asking for help on Ubuntu [*1*], people suggesting that we copy what Ubuntu has done, and people asking for "howtos" because documentation is too scary or too absent for them to read. Yesterday the whole commercial spam on Planet debate started. Its yet another example of how in-fighting[*2*] seems to be the most fun part of Debian for too many. Me? I started and folded a company. I got Debian help and users. Some threw money at me. Joey Hess? Started making the nice-looking ikiwiki-powered branchable.com. Commercial? Yes. Spam? No. I guess there is little I can do. I could quit - as over time I've become less patient dealing with the project as a whole, but simultaneously more interested in dealing with a few specific people. But I suspect the net result would be no change. Either people would say "Ok , bye" or worse still offer my flttry: "Don't go - we lurve you". Meh. I shouldn't write when I'm annoyed, but living in a hotel will do that to you. Footy-Mc-Foot-notes. Cos HTML is hard. Lets go shopping Eat Cake.

1

The Ubuntu forums are largely full of the blind leading the blind. Or equally often the blind being ignored. I do believe that an Ubuntu stackoverflow site would be more useful than forums. But that's perhaps naive. People will still most often say "My computer doesn't work" missing all useful the details. The only obvious gain is you can avoid "me too!!!" comments, and "fix this now or I'm gonna go .. use gentoo?".

2

Back a few years when people were less civil some mailing lists and irc channesl were unpleasant places to be. These days we've solved half the problem: People mostly don't swear at each other. The distractions, the threads that don't die, even if you ignore them and don't join in the "hilarity" they still have a devisively negative effect.

Well, kinda. Just follow the comments on this bug report regarding a sound problem in Fedora 14. A user reported about not being able to get mp3 play smoothly and a few other confirmed the issue with Fedora 14. Tests pointed at the kernel or sound driver. A user (Michael Young) and the Linus him self proved this wrong. and Michael found out it caused by a feature in glibc. From there Linus provided a work around till the glibc guys will fix the issue (and as for now they claim it s not a bug). I m sure the user who opened the bug reported didn t expect this whole chain of events it s quite amazing.
Filed under: Fedora

Someone on Hacker News asks about the future of programming languages, and I realized that it's a pretty interesting topic. Here's my take on it: Programming languages are about people, and the compromises they may or may not make in order to communicate their intentions to computers. The technology in question may change, but there will likely always be people involved, and as long as that's true, looking at the problem through the lense of economics provides useful results. Therefore, looking at programming languages pretty much requires that you look at the economics of them:

• Network effects are important, but obviously don't squeeze out smaller languages entirely. I.e. it's good to be able to get libraries, find people to hire, books to read, friends to chat with about problems, etc... This means that future languages will have to seek out a critical mass of users.
• Since the times of Fortran, languages have been getting more efficient in terms of programmer time, because programmer time stays the same or gets more expensive, while computer time keeps getting cheaper, and language implementors keep getting better at making things fast under the hood. This means that languages of the future are likely to let you do more with less, all else being the same.
• Learning a programming language will continue to be a fairly involved process for most people, meaning that for many, it's more efficient to learn a few languages well and use them for as much as possible, rather than to try and find the 'perfect' language for each problem. This rewards general-purpose languages, compared to niche languages. This also rewards flexible languages that can be used in many different environments.
• Computers are only going to become more and more important, meaning that more people are going to want to develop the skills to work with them. Not all of them will be experts, and many may not know much, but have a vision for how a program could solve a particular problem in a field they are knowledgeable about. This means a low barrier to entry is important, because those novices will pick easier languages, become progressively more competent in them, and thus (network effects) contribute to their diffusion. Case in point: PHP. Future languages should be capable of solving hard problems, but should also make it easy to get started solving simple problems too.
• Working on languages is lots of fun, so even though there aren't necessarily monetary rewards, people will continue to play with and explore new ideas. I don't see there being a limited supply of new languages in the future.
• The costs of switching from established languages will continue to be high, so future languages will still need to interact with "legacy" languages like Cobol, Fortran, C, Java, and so on, that are so widely established in industry that systems written in them will be with us for a long time yet.

I wrote this in a hurry. Have I missed anything? How do these factors apply to languages you see emerging?

I've found some time to implement m-obex protocol based on documentation provided by samsyncro project. However I don't have any phone to test it, so any testers are welcome :-). The testing should be quite easy - just get current Git version of Gammu (either using git or use snapshots) and try to use commands which manipulate with contacts and calendar:

gammu getallmemory ME
gammu getallcalendar
gammu getmemory ME 1
gammu getcalendar 1
gammu addnew test.vcf
gammu addnew test.vcs

In case you have not yet used Gammu with your phone, the configuration for USB cable should look like:

[gammu]
device = /dev/ttyACM0
connection = at

And for Bluetooth:

[gammu]
device = address of the phone
connection = blueobex
model = mobex

Of course there is no guarantee that any of the commands will work, because all I could verify is that code compiles and looks correct. It might as well do something bad to your phone, so backup is recommended.

Filed under: Gammu 0 comments Flattr this!

The Italian L10N team has not been very active nor growing in recent years. In particular, we pretty much failed at attracting new members in our team, with the result that untranslated files are piling up and manpower is scarce. Following a suggestion of our uber-active Francesca, we decided to try a new move to invert the trend: organizing brief weekly online sprints open to everybody, where graybeard translators will help newcomers getting to grips on Debian L10N infrastructure while collaboratively working on yet-untranslated targets. Last week, we tried our first and very introductory sprint, with a preliminary meeting on IRC to give instructions and setup ad-hoc pads. As a result, we ended with linux-2.6 po-debconf and a web-page completely translated and proofread by almost fifteen people in just a couple a hours. The key point however is that the majority of participants were fresh L10N-newbies, which we hope will join us permanently very soon after this first contact. Encouraged by the initial positive result, we already announced our next sprint for Thursday 11th, which will be focused on package descriptions translation (preceded by a crash course on DDTSS, its related web interface). We hope that even more users will join us this time, and encourage other stalled translation teams in experimenting a similar approach to revive activity and encourage participation.

If you want to see a really big Google Calendar, check out this calendar. Essentially, it is all the events from over 100 other calendars (all containing swing dancing events) merged into one, resulting in often more than 50 events every day, occasionally over 20 at the same time). The data is approximately the same that can be seen on this map; in fact I'm trying to move the data keeping from a custom database (which has superior filtering capabilities such as synonyms in text search) to just having Google keep the data for me (meaning it will eventually not require me to have an own web server for this). I'm doing some filtering such as removing events that don't have parseable geo information (I'm adding GeoRSS:where elements, in fact), some text to html conversion of the entry contents and filtering out inappropriate events via some regular expressions (e.g. only including "Swing" not "Ballroom" events from a calendar) There are still a couple of things to resolve. I'm not sure that recurrence exceptions are propagated properly to the combined calendar; the updates could work more incrementally, and I have to resolve some timezone issues due to the global nature of the calendar: I need to make sure the timezone information is preserved, since usually it makes more sense to give the events in local (to the event) time. P.S. sorry, the code is too specialized and needs cleanup, I won't share it yet.

I wrote yesterday about our scare with Jacob. It s been quite the day. Before I go into it, I want to say thank you to all the many of you that have sent comments and support our way. Terah and I haven t had the chance to reply to many of them, but we have read every one, and very much appreciate it! Terah spent the night with Jacob, and I spent the day with him today (others were present for parts of it too). Jacob was mostly in good spirits. He was up and around, pushed his IV around himself in the room and to the bathroom. He called it my VI machine (not a typo take that, Emacs, eh?) He continued to enjoy measuring his trips to the bathroom. We went exploring a few times. He would walk or run down one of the long corridors in the hospital, holding my hand, while I pulled the IV along. We often went by the cafeteria, which he called the kitchen. One time he insisted that I get a cup of coffee from the free coffee dispenser. I insisted that I didn t want to, but eventually asked, Shall I get a pretend cup of coffee? Yeah! So he watched me get a pretend cup, pretend to fill it, and pretend to drink it and smiled and clapped for me after. He spent hours watching videos of trains on YouTube. This is a favorite activity at home too, but we obviously limit the amount of time he can spend doing it. I had to limit the amount of time he spent with it today too, of course, but he got rather more time with it than usual. Jacob had his usual books, but I thought we might try something new today. This morning, I loaded The Tale of Peter Rabbit (with illustrations) onto my Kindle. Jacob loved it, and enjoyed pressing the Next Page button in the Kindle. We read it twice, and he is interested by the promise of other stories about rabbits. It also probably didn t hurt that his grandma had given him a rabbit in the hospital yesterday. As we got on towards evening, I told him that tomorrow could be a normal day. His response: enthusiastic applause and a big grin, plus YAY! Jacob loved eating today. He wolfed down breakfast and lunch. He enjoyed the lemonade I brought for him again, and played with some toys, and yes, watched some more train videos in the afternoon. He also pretended to ignore the visitors he got as much as possible (pretty typical for him actually). The doctor came by at about 6:00PM and again was just stunned at how well he s doing. Jacob neither complained of any pain nor acted like he had any even when the nurses would rub neosporin on his wounds. The doctor was still just stunned at how well he was doing. He told us his last tractor accident resulted in a death before LifeWatch could arrive, and the one before that turned a good student and a promising athlete into a wheelchair-bound person with a vocabulary of 20 words. I can t believe I m discharging him today, but try as I might, as I go over all the details, there s no reason for him to stay. I thanked him for all his help, and he said, I didn t do anything for him. All I did was figure out what had happened to him . I guess we have the CT to prove that something really did happen, but the fact that he showed up at my office in the first place was stunning enough. Jacob started to get more excited after the IV was unhooked from him. He didn t particularly like having the needle removed, due to the pain of taking off the tape, but was happy to have it gone. He was making plans: will we stop by the train station on the way home? It s the middle of the night maybe a train will be there! (If it s dark outside, it s middle of the night to him) We agreed to stop by the cafeteria to pick him up one last lemonade, than stop at the train station. The nurses offered a wheelchair to take him out to the car with. I said I didn t think he d want it. One of them said, Wouldn t you like a FUN ride in a WHEELCHAIR? Jacob: No. Me: I suspect he will want to run out of here. Nurse: OK then. We walked, or half ran, to the cafeteria to get his lemonade. Then we went out to the car. He was excitedly jabbering about everything: the car, my radio, and especially the train station. We did drive by, and at least got to see a freight engine go past. He noticed the Christmas lights starting to be set out along Main Street, and said, Dad, it s CHRISTMAS! Well, almost Then he got quiet, and eventually fell asleep in the car. He had almost fallen asleep while eating his lunch, but stayed awake, and then got interested in other things so he had no nap today. When we got home, I unbuckled him and pulled him out of his seat. He opened his eyes for just a second, wrapped his arms tightly around my neck, put his head on my shoulder, and fell back asleep while I carried him up to his room. I put him down on his own bed. He had a contented sigh, pulled his favorite blanket up to his neck like he loves to do, and was back asleep in no time. Our little boy is home, safe and sound. It s a happy day.

I had been planning to write today about my great uncle Milt Goerzen. Milt passed away last Thursday after a long struggle with dementia, and his funeral was this morning. I was there, and was inspired by a few things I heard. But that will have to wait, because today brought one of those few moments in life that s a sense of an impending possible great loss. I can remember two others: one was when Terah passed out, and the other was when we heard that our place was on fire and our house had burned down (it turned out the house hadn t, but much of the rest had). I got a call during Milt s funeral. I didn t answer because I was, well, at a funeral, and the phone was on vibrate. When I had the chance to check the voicemail, it went something like this: I think we have an emergency with Jacob. He got run over by a tractor. He says he s OK, but I m taking him to the doctor right now. I tried to return the call, but cell phone reception wasn t cooperating. The most I got was he s OK . It s hard to describe how a moment like that feels. My mind jumped to telling Jacob I love you , and how lately when he hears that, he will snuggle in for a big hug, and say, Dad, I love you toooooooooo! On the one hand, I heard the he s OK part, and on the other hand I couldn t forget the tractor running over him part, and my mind leapt at the worst. It turns out that, while I was at the funeral, Jacob had been standing on his usual spot on the tractor, sort of to the side of the driver. He was enjoying himself like usual. The tractor hit a large hole that wasn t really visible. The combination of the jolt and the dip the tractor took towards Jacob s side knocked him off and he went directly under the big rear wheel before the tractor could be brought to a stop. I caught up with him and his grandpa after he had seen the doctor and just as he was being admitted to the hospital. He saw me and crawled over, making his sort of sad and scared sound he sometimes doesn t want to verbalize things when he s in that mood. I held him close and he seemed to appreciate it. He had to have blood drawn, and he was scared of that. I remembered his inquisitive mind, and reminded him how much he liked watching the tube fill up with blood last time he had a blood test (which he calls a blood shot ). That wasn t helping, until the actual blood test started. He cried when the needle went in, but then calmed down as the nurse, getting into the act, pointed out that there was blood filling up the tube. Hmmm! said Jacob. Then she gave him a band-aid. It has an airplane, said the nurse. Um-hmm! said Jacob. I pointed out that it looked like the airplane we were on when we flew home from New York. Jacob got a big smile and said, Yes, it IS that one! He got a sticker there too. Then it was off for an x-ray to check for broken bones and a CT scan to check for internal injuries the tractor had gone right over his abdomen. He had to get an IV at the CT scan, which he certainly didn t like. After it happened, however, he found it very interesting especially when the nurses explained that they would give him a drink through the hose attached to his hand. After that, we went to his room, with orders for him not to eat or drink anything until it was clear he didn t have digestive problems. While we waited at various steps along the way, Jacob wanted to sit on my lap and watch train videos on YouTube on my phone. He loves train videos, and brought my phone s battery nearly to depletion through the course of the afternoon. Jacob eventually seemed to get back to a bit of his usual self. At one point, while Terah had made a run home to pack an overnight bag and grandpa ran some errands of his own, Jacob wanted to leave the room. He had gone exploring in the hospital with me before: when Oliver was born, and when Terah had her thyroid surgery. So this was something he just associated with the hospital. That and lemonade, which is free any time of the day or night in the cafeteria. So we went exploring, even ventured outside into a courtyard for a bit. He was walking fast and seemed good. We had several visitors: grandparents and his aunt and uncle. Jacob got a stuffed rabbit and a colorful bug box with windows (for putting bugs inside for observation). Eventually the doctor came by and gave us the results: the x-rays showed no problems. The labs showed some elevated liver enzymes, which he expected, but no serious trouble. The CT showed contusions on his lung and bruising on his heart which would heal completely in time. He allowed Jacob to have a liquid supper (so I quickly got him the lemonade he had been wanting while the nurses got him some Jello). The doctor examined Jacob, pushing at various places, asking Does it hurt here? No. Does it hurt here? No. Here? No. Are you hungry? Yes. Does it hurt here? No. He gave me a look that said: really? It doesn t hurt ANYWHERE? What could I do but shrug my shoulders? Jacob has some abrasions on his face, arms, and back, which will probably eventually hurt (and sure enough, about 10 minutes later he started getting a little pain when he tried to move, which the doctor checked out) Then the doctor said, I hope you know you have a walking miracle today. This is just amazing. You have some thanking to whatever guardian angels you like tonight all I can say about this is that the Lord must have had some other plan for him. There s no way he could have survived that. Jacob s doctor is one that we really respect: he s scientific in his analysis, cites studies as a matter of routine, doesn t prescribe antibiotics for things that he knows they have a small chance of helping, is common-sense about not over-treating things and yet always engaged in an emergency. That little speech from him was something I d never expected to hear from him. He went on to add that I always visit my sickest patients first. You were my last visit this evening, so that should tell you something. Any other kid as healthy as he is, I might discharge already but I m just not justified doing that with a boy that s, well, been driven over by a tractor this morning. He also wanted to monitor Jacob s progress throughout the coming day, especially his digestive system. They wanted to measure his urine output, which he, predictably, found to be very interesting. Terah said I think it is about 150 ml. Jacob said, No mom, it is closer to the two hundred line. Me: Since when does Jacob know about the number 200? Terah: I don t know . he s 4, where would he have gotten it? Between that, and using every opportunity to tell people that there were not one but TWO red light switches in the x-ray room, Jacob s definitely himself in some ways already. So, that feeling of some impeding great loss is gone, replaced by being more than a bit overwhelmed by how fortunate we were today. We also appreciate all the help we ve had with Jacob and Oliver today.

OK, I don't wear a red/white striped tee-shirt, but there are less people. So, will you be able to play Where's Bubulle on that really recent picture? Send answers to christian+WHITELIST AT perrier DOT eu DOT org. I'll publish the poll results.

Even though we had approximate dates from very start, I would like to announce official dates when DebConf11 will be held in Banja Luka, Bosnia and Herzegovina.


DebCamp: 25th 31st July 2011 DebConf: 1st - 7th August 2011
We encourage you to arrive one day earlier (24th July for DebCamp, and 31st July for DebConf), final departure date will be 8th August.
Vacation, it s in our plans to talk to travel agencies, so for those who wanted vacation after DebConf11 as its participants can enjoy shores of Bosnia, Croatia, Montenegro and Greece by discount prices. We re already looking forward your stay on Balkans! Adnan


http://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/DebConf11/BanjaLuka

You re probably manipulating Debian packages everyday, but do you know what those files are? This article will show you their bowels Surely they are more than file archives otherwise we would just use TAR archives (you know those files ending with .tar.gz). Let s have a look! 1. It s two TAR file archives in an AR file archive! A .deb file is actually an archive using the AR format, you can manipulate it with the ar command. This archive contains 3 files, you can check it yourself, download any .deb file and run ar t on it:

$ ar t gwibber_2.31.91-1_all.deb
debian-binary
control.tar.gz
data.tar.gz

debian-binary is a text file indicating the version of the format of the .deb file, the current version is 2.0 .

$ ar p gwibber_2.31.91-1_all.deb debian-binary
2.0

data.tar.gz contains the real files of the package, the content of that archive gets installed in your root directory when you run dpkg --unpack . But the most interesting part which truly makes .deb files more than a file archive is the last file. control.tar.gz contains meta-information used by the package manager. What are they?

$ ar p gwibber_2.31.91-1_all.deb control.tar.gz   tar tzf -
./
./postinst
./prerm
./preinst
./postrm
./conffiles
./md5sums
./control

2. It contains meta-information defining the package and its relationships The control file within the control.tar.gz archive is the most fundamental file. It contains basic information about the package like its name, its version, its description, the architecture it runs on, who is maintaining it and so on. It also contains dependency fields so that the package manager can ensure that everything needed by the package is installed before-hand. If you want to learn more about those fields, you can check Binary control files in the Debian Policy. Those information end up in /var/lib/dpkg/status once the package is installed. 3. It contains maintainer scripts so that everything can just work out of the box At various steps of the installation/upgrade/removal process, dpkg is executing the maintainer scripts provided by the package:

• postinst: after installation
• preinst: before installation
• postrm: after removal
• prerm: before removal

Note that this description is largely simplified. In fact the scripts are executed on many other occasions with different parameters. There s an entire chapter of the Debian Policy dedicated to this topic. But you might find this wiki page easier to grasp: http://wiki.debian.org/MaintainerScripts. While this looks scary, it s a very important feature. It s required to cope with non-backwards compatible upgrades, to provide automatic configuration, to create system users on the fly, etc. 4. Configuration files are special files Unpacking a file archive overwrites the previous version of the files. This is the desired behavior when you upgrade a package, except for configuration files. You prefer not to loose your customizations, don t you? That s why packages can list configuration files in the conffiles file provided by control.tar.gz. That way dpkg will deal with them in a special way. 5. You can always add new meta-information And in fact many tools already exploit the possibility to provide supplementary files in control.tar.gz:

• debsums use the md5sums file to ensure no files were accidentally modified
• dpkg-shlibdeps uses shlibs and symbols files to generate dependencies on libraries
• debconf uses config scripts to collect configuration information from the user

Once installed, those files are kept by dpkg in /var/lib/dpkg/info/package.* along with maintainer scripts.

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I've always loathed cheap particle board and peg bookcases, and when I broke one while reorgaising the living room at the Hollow today, I finally found a good use for them. They're great fun to chop up with an axe, and make for a very hot fire in the stove later. I released git-annex 0.03 today. The main improvements are being able to configure the backend to use on a per-extension basis in .gitattributes, a fsck subcommand that will find dangling annexed content, and bugfixes, including massive memory use savings. The big feature under development next is an idea Josh Triplett and I batted around; a way to checkout annexed files to edit their contents. Today I also got the radio working well here. Set up a car radio with a 40 foot wire for an antenna, and I finally got it almost static free. Pity that running a nslu2 on the same power circuit causes interference, so I am not able to use that to feed in music via the radio's AUX jack yet, which is the eventual plan. And the radio's powered USB outlet is wasted, I had hoped to run the nslu2 from that. Seems I can run the radio for 9 hours and still have plenty of solar power, even this time of year. Wish it were colder..

I blogged back in August about my frustration in finding a new laptop that had everything I was looking for. I'd figured I would eventually end up with the Toshiba R700, given my positive experiences with the R200. The lack of stock proved a problem, and the differing specs between the US and UK models also annoying. I started trying to source the Sony and finally found the HD model in stock from Vizik, but the helpful people there talked themselves out of a sale by saying the Full HD was too much for 13" (they also failed to have a 3G Full HD model).

I'd only brought the EEE 901 to the US with me, so after a month of that as my only machine at home I was starting to get a bit fed up; the keyboard is too small for constant use and it crawls when subjected to my normal usage patterns rather than just used as a lightweight network terminal. So it became obvious I was going to have to compromise on what I wanted. And if I was doing that I wanted something a lot cheaper, as I thought I may potentially want to upgrade sooner than usual.

In the end I've gone with an Acer Aspire TimelineX 1830T. It cost about a third of what the more fully featured laptops I was looking at were going for, which was a considerable bonus. The 2 things I ended up compromising on were the SSD and 3G support. And the name; I wasn't entire sure about what the build quality would be like.

As it turned out I needn't have worried; it appears to be perfectly well constructed - no noticeable flex while typing, solid enough, yet still fairly light. The keyboard is pleasant to use (admittedly I'm coming from the EEE, but it's a good size and responsive enough for me). I'm a bit uncertain about the touchpad, which has no physical separation from the rest of the case, but it's been ok so far. I miss the multitouch of the EEE, but it looks like there are some patches for Synaptics multitouch flying around that might eventually lead to useful support. I've ended up with a Core i5 470UM at 1.33GHz - what I ordered was the i5-430UM at 1.2GHz (and that's what the box/label on the laptop said), but I'm not complaining at the slight speed bump. It's fine for my needs. The 1366x768 screen is lovely, even in 11.6". Bright, if sometimes a little too shiny..

Installing was of course fun; it reminded me of when I got the R200 - neither the wifi nor wired interfaces were supported by the Debian installer, even from testing. I found a patch to get the (Atheros) LAN working (and have filed #599771 about potentially getting the support into squeeze's kernel) and that got me up and going. The wifi is a Broadcom BCM43225; too new for the old Free driver and the recently released Broadcom Free code causes the machine to instantly crash (I understand it has some SMP issues). So I'm stuck with the binary blob wl driver from broadcom-sta for now. I have hopes the Broadcom driver will improve though; it seems to be getting active love in the staging tree. The graphics are Intel, so well supported. And I'm getting at least 4 hours of battery life out of it, which I think could be improved with some tweaking.

So, er, yeah. Not what I set out looking for, but considerably cheaper and actually seems to meet my needs pretty well - it had its first weekend away trip this weekend and performed admirably; not too heavy in my hand luggage, decent battery life and no worries about it being too flimsy to survive. I'm still surprised it's an Acer...

So, with the GNASH_OPTIONS=writelauncher hint from last time, you have got a script which runs gnash. It is still running a remote SWF file, though - you want to modify that file to isolate a test case, and for that it will need to be on the local filesystem. First, look in the gnash-debug-1.sh script to find the URL for the SWF, and download it. It's the last option passed to gnash. In order to convince the file that it's still being served from the web server, you now need to swap the '-U' option in the gnash command line for a '-u'. This is enough for gnash 0.8.8 to play the file. Unfortunately, if you are running current git master, this does not work. You also need to feed the SWF from standard input to gnash - i.e. use '-' as the last option, and redirect the SWF file to the gnash command:

/path/to/gtk-gnash -u http://some/url [more options] '-' < downloaded.swf

If any of this is documented, I'm buggered if I can find it.

Security is more than bug fixing. Security fixing/updating, the thing most people are exposed to, is reactive security . However, a large area of security work is proactive where defensive abilities are put in place to try and catch problems before they happen, or make classes of vulnerabilities unexploitable. This kind of security is what a lot of people don t understand, and I think it s important to point out so the distinction can be clearly seen. In the Linux kernel, there s yet another distinction: userspace proactive security and kernel proactive security. Most of the effort in kernel code has been protecting userspace from itself (things like Address Space Layout Randomization), but less attention has been given to protecting the kernel from userspace (currently if a serious enough flaw is found in the kernel, it is usually very easy to exploit it). One project has taken great strides with proactive security for the Linux kernel: PaX and grsecurity. There hasn t been a concerted effort to get its pieces upstream and it s long overdue. People are starting to take proactive kernel security more seriously, though there is still plenty of debate. While I did my best to push some userspace protections upstream earlier in the year, now it s time for kernel protections. What to help? Here is the initial list of things to do. Dan Rosenberg has started the information leaks discussion, and I ve started the read-only memory discussion. Hopefully this will go somewhere good.