I’ve been in release frenzy mode lately. Yesterday, we managed to get eBox 0.7.1rc1 out! This (pre)release fixes tons of bugs, adds PDC support and features a installer based in Sarge Debian Installer + 2.6.12 kernel. And a few hours ago we have released Battle for Wesnoth 1.1.1, with lots of new features, graphics (see new castle) and enhancements. Are you one of the few who hasn’t tried Wesnoth yet?

So that’s all, my three-year relationship with my wonderful (ex)girlfriend finished as fast as it started and a bit more painfully
To be fair, it has been really great, which just makes the whole issue a bit worse just now, but at least I don’t have the feeling of “having lost my time”, which is a really good thing. I’m kind of devastated now, but discovering that you have tons of great (old and new) friends ready to help you through it and that FLOSS development still inspires you, makes things look really brighter. In addition, I’m going to finally get rid of long-time procastinated items in my todo list, like getting my driving license and improving my spoken English. PS. Wesnoth 1.1.2 is out!
PS2. Oh, I’ve just known about ETA cease-fire, now that’s good news, well, not for all.

My last blog post was over two months ago. I guess that’s enough to get an idea about how busy I’ve been lately (or for how long can I procastinate blogging ). In my free software life, there has been a new Wesnoth release, 1.1, the first post-1.0 one, and 1.1.1 is really near and has plenty of new features/graphics. Besides Wesnoth, I’ve built KOffice 1.5-beta packages something like a hundred times in the last two weeks, the first fifty were targeted for Sarge, in order to get klik bundles that could be shipped in the OpenDocument Fellowship CD that was going to be distributed somewhere. The next fifty ones to get a nice KOffice 1.5-beta for current unstable/experimental users. I’ve also sponsored adept and katapult uploads to Debian, and they’re already in at last. KDE in Debian also has KDNSSD enabled now, using avahi as backend. In real life, besides working, I’ve moved to a new home, in fact I’m living on my own home for the first time. And the best news, I’m living with my girlfriend . In these two months we’ve already bought a Playstation 2, a DVD/DivX player and a bike-in-a-bag. After struggling with several companies we already have DSL (4Mb, weeeee!) and I’ve already ordered a Mac Mini to have a nice Debian server. We’re also waiting for a Lego Mindstorms RIS 2.0 PS. I already have a flight for Debconf6! See you in MEX

I started doing some bug triaging yesterday night after going over bugs in some packages I’m interested in. (I have a small list of packages which I can’t use, or need to be fixed in some way, before I can start using them and every now and again I check on progress. eg. I want the nvidia-kernel-source module to work with Xen.) Since I was tired I only did a few things, but I’m going to do some more today; merging duplicates and closing older ones, simple stuff. None of the packages are ones that I can NMU (OK I guess I could, and fix a couple of minor bugs, but they won’t be improved enough to make it worthwhile - if that makes sense?) Talking of NMUs .. anybody is welcome to upload “my” packages if there is a need, and feel free to poke around at my bug list. I can sometimes be slow with them. I’ve been semi-seriously considering the idea of dropping all my packages, and working exclusively on security stuff instead.. I haven’t made a decision yet but I’ll mention it here in case I do ..

So, now that I finally feel that belpic in Debian is in working order (in unstable), let's talk about the interesting things one can do with it. You have an eID, run Debian, just bought yourself a cardreader, and feel "now what"? This is the blog post for you ;-) Note that there are still some rough edges; but I still have time to fix those before etch releases, so that's not much of an issue. First, you need some support packages. If you bought a cardreader from Zetes or got one from the Government somehow, then you have an ACR38 reader and you need a hardware support package to be able to use it; the package in question is called libacr38u. Obviously you will also need the belpic packages. For now, just install all of them—there still appears to be a dependency issue which I will need to fix; I'll announce on this blog when that has been done. Just run

aptitude install $(apt-cache showsrc belpic sed -e '/^Binary/!d;s/^Binary: //;s/,//g')

and you will install them. I uploaded these packages to backports.org, too, where they'll hopefully show up some time soon (the current packages are still at 2.3.13 for some weird reason). This will give you:

beidgui

a graphical application that will allow you to view the data on the card, and to change your PIN code (as long as you still know your current PIN code and don't need to unblock it with the PUK; for the latter, you need to go to your local town or city or district hall).

beid-pkcs11-tool

a command-line tool that will allow you to change your pin and do some other interesting things. Note that while this is a command-line tool, you still need a GUI environment to be able to run it; there are cases where the libbeidlibopensc2 library will open a dialog window to ask you for your pin, without going through the application.

beid-tool

a command-line tool with not much options; it doesn't allow for much more than to test whether your installation works.

beidcrld

a daemon that will update the CRLs (Certificate Revocation Lists) when there is a network connection, so that you can verify the validity of the card in your reader. If you have a permanent Internet connection, there is also OCSP (Online Certificate something Protocol) which will verify the validity of your certificates against an online server, and which the preferred way to do this. Future versions of the belpic packages will have a /etc/default/beid which will allow you to disable beidcrld.

beidpcscd

a daemon that is used if you need libpcsclite to talk to your cardreader. If you have an ACR38 cardreader, you need this. I personally have a different one, which uses openct, so I don't...

a whole bunch of libraries

However, only three are really interesting: libbeidlibopensc2, for low-level operations on the card (such as "read a file", "sign some data"; libbeid2, for high-level operations on the card (such as "read identity data", "read a picture"), and libbeidlibjni (JNI library, if you want to use the eID from Java). Libbeidlibopensc2 and libbeid2 are packaged separately; libbeidlibjni is packaged together with libbeid2 (though that might change in the future, not sure).

Some files to support mozilla, firefox, and other browsers.

The most interesting ones from a user point of view are /usr/share/beid/beid-pkcs11-register.html and /usr/share/beid/beid-pkcs11-unregister.html. Note that registering the module isn't enough to be able to use it; you will have to perform some additional steps which are outlined on eid.belgium.be, the government website about the eID.

Additionally, there is also OpenSC which you may want to install. The point there is that things like OpenSC's pkcs15-tool and pkcs15-crypt do not have a counterpart in the eID toolkit, so if you want that, you need to install it. So, that's the software in the eID toolkit. But what can you do with it? There are a number of things. For starters, of course, there's the beidgui, which allows you to view, save, print out, and do other interesting things with data on a card. If you work on a place where you regularly need to work with eID data, this may just be the appliation for you. If you have set up your browser to support the eID, you may want to go to mijndossier.rrn.fgov.be, a website set up so that everyone can view their own information in the Rijksregister. I'm sure there is a French version of that URL, but don't ask me—I don't know it. You probably already know about tax-on-web, where you can do your tax application online. It is possible to install a signing module into Mozilla Thunderbird, and to sign your emails using S/MIME and the eID card. This will give you a signed email which is legally binding; might be interesting for those of you out there interested in not having to use as much paper signatures. Details, again, on eid.belgium.be. The same is true for signing documents in OpenOffice.org. I haven't tried doing any of this myself yet, though. Of course, you can sign any text file as well, using pkcs15-crypt from OpenSC, or extract the certificates on the card using pkcs15-tool. Just run them with the --help parameter to find out about their options. And that's about it, I guess. More interesting links can be found on a a portal maintained by Danny 'godot' Decock on the eID.

In case anybody was ever curious I’ve explained why I’m skx. I admit at times that I’m curious how/why some developers chose/use the logins or nicknames they do .. but never quite enough to ask. If you want to share please feel free to comment, I’m sure people would be interested in learning more about their fellow developers…

I am quite happy to see that we will be able to make GConf FHS-compliant in etch.

Here are the packages still shipping files in /etc/gconf.

That makes really few, given that:

• goobox has been fixed,


• yank will probably be removed from the archive,


• we will probably be able to remove gconf (the GNOME 1 version) now that gnucash 2.0 has entered unstable.

This leaves only 2 bugs : #380728 (apt-watch, I only noticed it today) and #369858 (gnome-panel). Gnome-panel is the only case that couldn't be handled by dh_gconf, and I'll try to push one of the solutions that were thought of ASAP.

Thanks to everyone who made this possible, especially package maintainers who updated their packages so quickly (e.g. one hour for goobox).

I found a small loop in koha's z39.50 search results page which did:

(define (output-page)
  (display (current-results))
  (if (pending-results?) (output-page)))

On the face of it, that makes sense. The problem comes if all searches complete between the display and the more-results? test: if so, the last batch of results won't be displayed. So far, I've only noticed it causing a problem on fast connections. I've fixed it in CVS to do:

(define (output-page)
  (let ((refresh? (pending-results?)))
    (display (current-results))
    (if refresh? (output-page))))

Worst case, it displays an unnecessary page. If only all bugs were so shallow.

All being well by the time you read this I’ll have prepared and issued my first security advisory! I’ve documented the process a little. I could probably tidy it up a little bit more more I’ll share it now in case it is useful/interesting to people. Update: This was only possible because Joey + Moritz both helped me work through the process.

Reading Jordi's blog, I cannot but agree with him (in most points): I plainly cannot understand Israel's actions in the last weeks. I can sadly understand how some people defend them, specially people not living in Israel - I was talking with a friend today, a friend who does not share a single political viewpoint with me, but still... The world seems to be completely polarized. Some have the impression that Israelis live under constant shelling, that life is unsustainable in that poor country, the last corner of civilization in that mess called the Middle East, and that the Arab countries (which are huge and petroleum-rich) just want to throw Jews to the sea or worse. The rest of the world think that Israelis are mass-murderers who decided to take a heavily populated bit of land and martyrize its originary population by any possible means, establishing an Apartheid.
Both views are false. But of course, both views hold their bits of truth.
I cannot claim to be neutral on this: Although I lived there in total for ~18 months, I am an Israeli by choice (I adopted the Israeli nationality in 1996 and wanted to live my life there - I came back to Mexico for personal reasons, and I later decided to stay here). I have not been to Israel since then - But I try to keep myself informed. And, living in a Jewish family, it's hard not to be somewhat informed - and of course, shocked at your relatives' opinions. Jews outside Israel tend to be right-wingers. I lived in a kibbutz, and I still sympathyze with Meretz, the most leftwing Zionist party.
I won't restate what Jordi eloquently said. I know not everybody who reads my blog reads Jordi's as well - Please do. If you missed it some lines above, here is the link. I insist: I agree with most of what he wrote. What could Israel do to protect itself from its enemies? The answer is simple: Don't give them a reason to hate you.
One year ago, I was optimistic because Israel was heading the right way. Of all people, Ariel Sharon (one of Israel's most hawkish, right-wing strongmen of all times) decided to withdraw from Gaza, and hinted that areas in the West Bank would follow. No, not the best way possible, not as his predecessor Menahem Begin did with Egypt leading to a strong and long lasting peace, and certainly not in the very notable way Itzhak Rabin did with Jordan, getting peace and even friendship. But at least, Sharon accepted the reality, and seemed he meant to let Palestinians build their state. When he organized a new party which reduced Likud to a shadow of its past, one of Israel's most prominent figures for the peace camp, Shimon Peres, joined. Amazing.
But still, there is too much hatred. Of course, life in Gaza is plainly not sustainable. You can walk the Gaza strip side to side in less than one hour, and North to South it's less than 50 Km long. Still, over 400,000 people live in there. The area is simply unsustainable.
Gaza depends for everything from Israel. Of course, according to the never-stable security status, the border between Gaza and Israel opens or closes every day. When I lived in Zikim, mostly every day there were five or six Arabs working with us... Except for the days when they weren't there. And, of course, Israel also depends on the Arabs for much of its hard labor jobs (as it's always the case when two economically disparate populations live together).
Anyway, back on track: Besides giving the Arabs their slice of land (which in a squeezed area as Israel is always hard; people have fought for such small spaces it's hard to believe), the only thing Israel can do is help them. It has worked before: Israeli Arabs (the Arabs living inside the internationally recognized borders of Israel) are full citizens. Yes, there is racism in the country towards them, and yes, they are not really equal with Jewish Israelis - But they have voting rights, they have the right to be elected, they can optionally join the army (it's not compulsory as it is with the Jewish population), and they get government aid. Arab towns are poorer than Jewish towns, yes, but they have their dignity.
The problem in Gaza and South Lebanon (somewhat less so in the West Bank, but also) is that it's plainly all made up of refugee camps. Refugees that were born there, and whose parents were born there as well. And, let me emphasize this, they are not Israel's fault. The refugees fled the newborn Israel because the Arab states said (in May 1948) they would enter Palestine and butcher everybody, inviting Arab civilians to flee and then get back home - of course, 700,000 (out of 1,300,000 who lived in Palestine by then) Arabs did so. And when the Arabs lost the war, the Palestinians were denied citizenship by all the Arab countries except for Jordan (not surprisingly, the most stable of them all, and with which Israel has the closest relation). They were given refugee camps to live, one over the other. When Egypt signed the peace with Israel, it demanded back every inch of the Sinai - But not an inch of Gaza. And not a single Palestinian refugee.
I agree here with Jordi as well: There is a huge military operation in Gaza, but it's more spectacular in Lebanon today. The media talks about Lebanon, but not about Gaza. And the crisis in Gaza is not easier. But how can it be solved in a permanent way? Israel does neither have land to spare to give to the Palestinians - and even if it did, most of Gaza is surrounded by the Negev, a desert where it would not be easy for them to get anything better than what they have inside Gaza. As desirable as it would be to have a completely independent Palestinian state, Gaza would just remain a concentration camp. There is too much hatred, and neither Arabs nor Israelis want to keep working together, not trusting each other. The only solution I can find to this is to have an agreement with Egypt, where Egypt opens its border with Gaza, gives either nationality or work permits to Gazan Palestinians, and Israel injects capital to develop Northern Sinai, to give some hope of survival to the almost half million people.
The same in Lebanon: Israel was widely applauded to withdraw from South Lebanon in 2000. The area is mostly peaceful - For $ DEITY 's sake, what is the kidnapping of two soldiers in a six year period compared to soldiers being killed in the occupation army every week or two? Israel did well to leave Lebanon. Lebanon was starting an incredible national rebuilding process, as Robert Fisk tells us (Spanish only. I could find only the first paragraphs of the original English version, which appears to require subscription) of the wonders of the rebuilding process, reduced to rubble again. Of course, Israeli and Syrian armies left Lebanon. The Lebanese government and army are plainly too weak to care for the country. Hezbollah (which, indoubtely, is a terrorist entity, no matter how many benefical aspects it does have) have poured tremendous amounts of money to rebuild its area of influence, South Lebanon. Of course, they rebuilt, healed and educated with a strong ideological inclination, and that's not good for Israel. What can Israel do to leasen the Islamist influence? Simple: Send aid. Don't just leave. Don't leave a void, don't invite bad people to loot, don't invite extremist people to recruite future bombers. Turn occupation into aid. Build hospitals. Build houses. Give money, give infrastructure. Do it behind your back, as you gave money to the South Lebanon Army for almost 20 years. But make the people see you don't want to kill and rob them - Make the Lebanese Arabs feel their neighbour as a friend, although different. Bring back the good border. What's that? That's the nickname for the Lebanese border between +- 1950 and 1970 - The only border that was stable, that was not filled with hatred, where Israeli doctors treated Lebanese patients across the fence. And still today, the border is just a simple fence.
How can you convince a people of not killing themselves to kill the invasor? Don't act as an invasor. Act in all your best self-interest - Save them from poverty and from indignity.

Tenth day in Addis Procedure to check if all the services of Dream University are up and running If a machine blocks pings, use arping instead.

1. Test DHCP:

   $ sudo ifdown eth0
   $ sudo ifup eth0
   $ ifconfig
   

2. Test the DNS:

   # See if the DNS machine is on
   # The network
   $ ping -n 192.168.0.1
   # See if the DNS resolves names
   $ host www.dream.edu.et
   

3. Test the gateway:

   # Ping the gateway
   $ ping gateway
   # Ping an outside host
   $ ping -n 10.4.15.6
   

4. Test the proxy:

   # Ping the proxy
   $ ping proxy
   # Open a web page and see if it displays
   # See if it caches
   http_proxy=http://proxy.dream.edu.et:3030/ wget -S -O/dev/null http://www.enricozini.org  2>&1   grep X-Cache
   

5. Test the mail server:

   $ ping smtp
   $ nmap smtp -p 25  grep 25/tcp
   $ if nmap gateway -p 25  grep 25/tcp   grep -q open ; then echo "It works"; fi
   $ send a mail and see if you receive it
   

To do more advanced network and service monitoring, try nagios:

• http://www.nagios.org/
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nagios

New useful tools seen today

wget - The non-interactive network downloader.

Special devices

• /dev/null:
  • On read, there is no data.
  • On write, discards data.
• /dev/zero:
  • On read, reads an infininte amount of zero bits.
  • On write, discards data.
• /dev/random, /dev/urandom
  • On read, reads random bits.
  • On write, discards data.
  • Difference: /dev/random is cryptographically secure, but it can hang waiting for system events

Example uses:

wget -O/dev/null http://www.example.org
dd if=/dev/zero of=testdisk bs=1M count=50
mke2fs testdisk
sudo mount -o loop testdisk  /mnt

Tiny little commands

• true - do nothing, successfully
• false - do nothing, unsuccessfully
• yes - output a string repeatedly until killed

Example uses:

• while /bin/true; do echo ciao; done
• Using /bin/false as a shell
• yes boring-tool-that-asks-lots-of-silly-questions

Some more shell syntax

• 2>&1 Redirects the standard error in the standard output
• 2> Redirects the standard error instead of the standard output

Some people run commands ignoring the standard error: command 2> /dev/null this causes unexpected error messages to go unnoticed: please do not do it. What to check if a machine is very slow

• See if the ram is full: $ free If it is, you see what are the fattest programs using top, pressing M to sort by memory usage.
• See if there are lots of programs competing for CPU: $ top
• Check if you have I/O bottlenecks: $ vmstat (but I don't know how to read it)
• For a desktop on older hardware, you can try xubuntu instead of ubuntu

More VIM command mode Command mode allows to perform various text editing functions. You work by performing operations on selected blocks of text. Some common operations:

• y: copy ("yank")
• p: paste
• P: paste before
• d: cut ("delete")
• c: change
• i: insert
• a: append
• .: repeat last operation

Some common blocks:

• w: word
• : paragraph
• left and right arrow: one character left or right
• up and down arrow: this line and the one on top or below
• f letter: from the cursor until the given letter
• v: selection
• V: line selection
• ^V: block selection

Examples:

• yw: copy word
• dw: cut word
• yy: copy line
• dd: cut line
• V (select lines) y: copy a selection of lines
• V (select lines) d: cut a selection of lines
• p: paste

The best way to learn more vim is always to run vimtutor. Installing squirrelmail To install squirrelmail:

1. apt-get install squirrelmail
2. /usr/sbin/squirrelmail-config and configure IMAP and SMTP. In our case, since we use IMAPS, the IMAP server is imap.dream.edu.et, port 993, secure IMAP enabled and SMTP is smtp.dream.edu.et.
3. Read /usr/share/doc/squirrelmail/README.Debian.gz (with zless) for how to proceed with setup. A short summary:
   • link /etc/squirrelmail/apache.conf into the apache conf.d directory
   • customise /etc/squirrelmail/apache.conf for example setting up the virtual hosts, or running it only on SSL

To have different virtual hosts over HTTPS, you need to have a different IP for every virtual host: name based virtual hosts do not work on HTTPS. You can configure multiple IP addresses on the same computer: use network interfaces named: eth0:1, eth0:2, eth0:3... These are called interface aliases. You cannot setup interface aliases using the graphical network configuration and you need to add them in /etc/network/interfaces:

    iface eth0:1 inet static
          address 192.168.0.201
          netmask 255.255.255.0
          gateway 192.168.0.3
    auto eth0:1

This is the trick commonly used to put different virtual HTTPS hosts on the same computer. Links squid documentation:

• http://www.squid-cache.org/Doc/
• http://www.squid-cache.org/Doc/FAQ/
• http://www.deckle.co.za/squid-users-guide/Main_Page

Shell programming:

• http://www.freeos.com/guides/lsst/
• http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Bash-Prog-Intro-HOWTO.html
• http://www.tinker.ncsu.edu/LEGO/shell_help.html

Performance analysis:

• http://flaviostechnotalk.com/wordpress/index.php/2005/06/05/performance-analysis-on-linux/
• http://www.cyberciti.biz/faqs/2006/07/linux-performance-tools-to.php

Setting up mail services:

• http://wanderingbarque.com/howtos/mailserver/mailserver.html

For a long time I have considered F-Spot to be a nice concept application, but not really fit to be the center of Linux digital photography experience due to general bloat and (most importantly) due to the lack of many important features that would compensate the interface lock in that this application demands. In this post I will try to list all the deficiencies and lacking features of F-Spot that I have found while using it to manage my photo flow.
First let’s talk about the bloat. I will compare F-Spot to GThumb. There are few points of comparison: first start up, viewing a bunch of photos and importing a bunch of photos. When starting up GThumb uses 17 Mb RSS memory (10 of them shared with all other Gnome programs) while F-Spot uses 33 Mb RSS memory (17 of them shared with other Mono programs, of which I do not have any). When viewing a folder with couple hundred photos GThumb uses 25 Mb RSS memory while F-Spot grows to 55 Mb RSS. On import GThumb calls gphoto that adds 3-5 Mb RSS to the memory usage, while F-Spot seems to implement some/most of the photo protocol internally and can easily grow in memory up to the size of the photos being imported (which is kind of problematic while importing a gigabyte of photos), but usually the memory usage on import hangs around 250-300 Mb and hovers around that level for some time after the import is complete. For me personally it does not make much a difference (I have 2 Gb RAM now), but conservative memory usage is still critical for a good Linux application because people expect Linux to be faster and high memory usage can slow down anything. In my opinion no photo management operation should take more then 50 Mb of private RSS memory (even importing several gigs of RAW files from the camera).
Now let me try to describe the optimal work process of a (semi)professional photographer, so that we can see what is missing in F-Spot to accommodate such work-flow and what is done right.

1. The photographer takes one (or several) cameras, lenses, flashes, memory cars, spare batteries and tripods and goes to an event/photoshoot/modelling session/walk in the park/wedding/…
2. He takes 3-5 Gb of pictures from lots of different angles with different cameras, different lenses on different memory cards with different settings. Most of them will be the highest quality available on the camera, usually those will be RAW images.
3. Upon getting back to his computer, the photographer wants to drop all the data to a staging place dedicated to this event. He wants to do it fast and simple without sorting trough the photos at the moment, but at the same time he might want to split the staging areas (multiple models within one session) or join them (one model from different cameras). Sometimes he might not even have time for that and would just want to dump the data now and run to another event.
4. After several shooting events the photographer finally has reserved the time to sift trough some of the photos from the staging area (modelling jobs first, then the friends wedding and the walk in the park as last)
5. First the photographer decides to check if the times on the photographs are correct and discovers that at some shooting sessions one of the cameras was set to another timezone. He select all shots from that camera across several (but not all) staging areas and adjusts the time.
6. Now he rechecks the logical groups of photos (which photos should be in which staging area) by dragging the photos around, splitting and joining the staging areas
7. When the overall structure is clear, the photographer selects one (most important) staging area and starts working with images in that staging area not caring about any other images
8. First he browses in full screen trough all the photos rating them in quality scores form 1 to 9 by pressing corresponding number keys. Rating a picture automatically advances to the next picture, which happens very fast because the software precaches several photos ahead for speed and displays without any flicker. Speeds in the order of 2 photos per second are expected on good enough hardware. One key operations for “view 100% zoom”, “rotate”, “view exif” and “quick note” are available. RAW images are automatically translated for preview with default settings.
9. With couple clicks bad photos (with score of 4 or under) are selected and erased
10. Now the photographer starts working with individual photos
11. First step is the RAW->Jpeg conversion. An appropriate tool is brought up with default setting already applied and a preview of the photo showing up (like in dcraw). The photographer adjusts the conversion parameters (including and option to make a HDR-like effect by compressing the dynamic range of high bitness pictures). The converted Jpeg is saved as a version of the original photo and becomes the default for operations that do not understand RAW.
12. A separate plugin is used to reduce digital photo noise from the pictures (new version)
13. Photographer makes adjustments to the image inside F-Spot. Each modification makes a new version.
14. Still not satisfied, the photographer starts Gimp from inside F-Spot and make further edits. Each time Gimp saves the file, F-Spot makes another version.
15. The photographer erases some versions of the picture and also joins multiple near-duplicate shots into one picture as versions of that picture. One version is always marked as the top version and the photographer can easily change it.
16. The good photos are tagged and imported to the main collection
17. A subset of the photos is exported to: Flickr, personal Gallery installation, plain html photo album, a zip file with small (1024x…) versions of the photos, … Only the top versions of photos are exported. If unconverted RAWs are top versions, then they are converted to Jpeg with default settings. In most cases photos are also downsized before export according to the preferences. Highest quality downsizing is used (anti-aliasing) and also additionally small unsharp mask is run on each photo
18. The photographer does advanced searches and advanced tag selections to select and display or export subsets of his main collection
19. The photographer has three instances of F-Spot: his laptop, his main work PC and a backup hard drive that can be attached to either of them. He needs to keep his F-Spot photographs synchronised between the three locations for backups and for distributed work. Also after some point the main photo archive becomes too big to store it (with all versions) on the laptop or even on the main PC, so the photographer selects a set of older photos and selects an option to archive them. The next time a connection is established with the backup drive, all versions of archived photos are copied to the backup harddrive and the laptop and the main PC only keep 90% quality Jpeg format picture of the top version of each photo downsized to exactly fit the display resolution of the device. If even that takes too much space then “Archive Only” option is selected which insures that the backup harddrive has the copy of the photo and then erases it from primary data stores completely.
20. When the backup harddrive is connected it is also very simple to make DVD/HDDVD/Blueray backup copies of subsets of photos from the archive with all the metadata and versions in such a way that other software (and even dedicated media devices) could easily browse the top versions of photos directly from the backup media. Of course, restoring from such backups also must be tested.

So, to summarise, the changes needed for F-Spot are:

• Support for the concept of staging areas and staging area manipulation
• Much better performance on import
• Camera timestamp correction tool (#)
• Quick rating tool (#)
• RAW support for controlled conversion and automatic conversion at export (#)
• Support for external editor with automatic version control and format conversion (#)
• Noise reduction plugin support (#)
• Support for version manipulation - join (#, #) and split (#) version stacks
• Preferences for export methods with resize and quality options and automatic enhancement options at export
• Multiple instances and data sync (#)
• Archival support and total archival option
• Backup (also from archive) support (#, #)
• More powerful search and filter options (#) with automatic options from exif data (#): People/Mike AND Events/wedding AND (camera/RebelXT OR camera/SonyF717) AND setting/noflash AND lens/wide

As you can see, many of those issues are already reported to F-Spot bugzilla, but have recieved little attention. So what shall we do about it?

I'm a little behind having seen my last film on Monday, but here we go:

• Arthouse Ultraman ( ): Four episodes of the latest incarnation of Ultraman (think Superman meets Power Rangers), directed by guest directors, including two by Takashi Miike. It's pretty childish show, but these episodes kept me pretty entertained. I doubt the show would in general though.
• The Glamorous Life of Sachiko Hanai ( ): This movie was basically a soft-core porn flick. When it wasn't being that, it was just being completely strange and random.
• The iDol & Sukeban Boy ( ): Some shortish films that weren't that entertaining. Sukeban Boy was mostly an excuse for toplessness. The iDol was only interesting in that it was written and directed by a westerner.
• Train Man ( ): A nerd who finds true love by asking for advice on message boards, apparently inspired by true events. It was a nice story, but the crowd was relating to it a little too much.
• Synesthesia ( ): An interesting concept of people with a condition where there senses are blended, eg you can see sounds, or hear colors. The ending drags too much and is completely confusing and incomprehensible.
• The Five Venoms: Pretty standard Kung-Fu movie plot, but fun action, with those classic animal styles that are silly but somehow still cool. I'll try to find the sequel.
• The Great Yokai War ( ): A child's movie by Takashi Miike, what could be better? This was definitely a kids movie, but it had enough sophisticated humor to keep me interested. Fun movie.
• Executive Koala ( ): A very strange movie with a man-sized koala as an executive, with a world mostly inhabited by humans but with the occasional giant animal person. Bizarre twists and turns of psychology and homicidal koala behavior. A weird one, but somehow compelling.
• Re-Cycle: Had the fortunate chance to see this with the lovely ndusart. An amazing, visually stunning movie by the Pang Brothers. A writer gets sucked into a strange world of her own creation. It's a bit of horror, drama and suspense rolled into one. Highly recommended.

Hello Planet Debian! Goodbye University Vacations!:-)

[Debian]

Thanks to Luk Claes, new translate-docformat was uploaded to fix Policy 7.6 Violation. madcoder has a list of affected packages. During the weekend I work on my packages, I'm waiting for my sponsor to get them uploaded to the archive closing the "adoption process" and fixing a few bugs and lintian warnings. There are some news from the DDTP and no news from the CVS pserver for non-DDs (and unfortunately, in this case: no news, bad news). I also sent a mail do debian-l10n-portuguese about the future of our list, we need to change a few points, create and update documentation, change our coordinators in some areas (they are MIA for quite a while now) and structure the team to be ready for future changes and also to work focused to get as much translations as possible in "etch".

[Life]

That's it... end of my University Vacation. Back to classes, busy schedule for the semester, I hope to manage everything in a very good way, so I can keep up-to-date with my Debian work.

Thanks to Cl ment Stenac (zorglub), my nice AM, this diary now appears in Planet Debian. Two old posts already appeared, but this is the first post that I made being aware that it will appear in Planet. :-) Thanks to Cl ment and Paul Wise.

I’ve been thinking a lot about software above the level of a single device lately, so I set out this weekend to finally get two-way email synchronization working on my Blackberry. My main goal is to have a single inbox I can access from multiple devices without having to ever deal with the same message twice (i.e., if the message is read/filed/deleted/etc. on one client, it’s marked read/filed/deleted/etc. on all clients), with full support for disconnected operation. (I care much less about the oft ballyhooed push email feature—I’m perfectly content to wait 15-20 minutes for email to be delivered.) Since what I want more or less perfectly describes IMAP, I figured Blackberry Internet Service, which uses standard Internet protocols for mail delivery and supports IMAP, would be sufficient, and that I wouldn’t need Blackberry Enterprise Server, which hooks into Exchange and other “enterprise” messaging systems. Unfortunately, I appear to have been wrong. While messages read and deleted on the Blackberry are reflected on the IMAP server, the reverse is, surprisingly, not true (surprisingly because, unlike POP, which behaves similarly in BIS, IMAP is a bidirectional protocol). In other words, when messages are read or deleted on another client (e.g., the Thunderbird running on my laptop), those changes aren’t reflected on the Blackberry; so, as a result, the Blackberry accumulates every message I receive when it’s not in use, making a periodic “Delete Prior” necessary to get rid of all the accumulated junk (which obviously deletes the useful messages too, like, ahem, the ones with my flight information in it). Worst of all, after several days of trying to figure out why IMAP wasn’t working the way I was expecting it to, I discovered this is the expected behavior (see note 5—”Messages deleted from the source mailbox are not automatically deleted from the device”), rather than a bug. What to do? I could obviously break down and upgrade to Blackberry Enterprise Server. I’m not too keen on setting up an Exchange server just for this (which would cost hundreds of dollars, particularly after the cascading upgrades typical of Microsoft products, e.g., I’d need to get Windows Server too). As an alternative, there appear to be a number of companies that offer a BES hosting service. However, the costs add up pretty quickly—another $10/mo. to T-Mobile to allow BES traffic through (the “business tax”), $10/mo. for BES hosting, and $10-15/mo. for Exchange hosting on top of that (BES hosting is an add-on to Exchange hosting in every plan I’ve seen). That’s a grand total of $35/mo. just to get email marked read or deleted on my Blackberry when I read or delete it in Thunderbird. Hrmmph. Another idea is to find a Blackberry IMAP client, but there seem to be a dearth of these. The main one that comes up both in web searches and that’s described in Blackberry Hacks is from a company called Reqwireless which, tantalizingly, was acquired by Google last year but whose products, frustratingly, are no longer available. In any event, I want something that integrates with the Blackberry’s excellent inbox, which aggregates email, SMS, missed calls, Google Talk messages, etc. in a single stream, and I’m not sure if a separate IMAP client will be able to do that. Other observations: This page says that “two-way [Blackberry] sync is coming soon” to Yahoo Mail. However, “coming soon” doesn’t really help me. Funambol looks very promising, but it’s going to take me a little while to wrap my head around what exactly I need to do to deploy it. Not exactly point and click. Scalix offers Scalix Wireless Solution that works with Blackberry and is integrated with the Enterprise and Small Business Editions. At $60/user with no minimum number of users and a free trial, this looks promising too. Zimbra offers Zimbra Mobile, which “includes the ability to leverage Zimbra’s third party mobile partners that offer two-way sync to Blackberry and other devices” (whatever that means). However, I’m assuming this comes bundled with the Network Edition, which is sold with a minimum of 25 users, and that probably makes it unaffordable to an individual user like me. Any other suggestions?

Continuing the saga of the lost wallet, it turns out that my uneasy premonitions about "Sidney"'s phone message were entirely correct.

He called me up at work, gave me a long spiel about how I should be glad he came from such a "respectful" family, mentioned that "someone" had gone through the wallet and taken the cash, and then asked again if there was a reward. Rude, I thought, but hey, rewards for wallets aren't unheard-of and he is doing me a favor...so I said, sure, I'll give you $20. There was a long pause, and then he said "that's really insulting, you know?" Taken aback, I asked what he was thinking of, and he said that he was thinking of more like a few hundred dollars.

A FEW F**ING HUNDRED DOLLARS?

That isn't quite what I said, I just said "No" and "I don't know what makes you think that's a reasonable amount." At this point he started asking again about "don't you want your wallet back?" and making vague threats about what would happen if it got into the "wrong" hands. I made one mistake, raising my bid to $40 (I shoulda just cut him off there), but finally told him I had to get off and get to work. He wouldn't give me a number to contact him at but said he'd call me later.

So, at this point it was obvious that a pretty nasty character had my wallet, so I double-checked that all my important cards were cancelled and started ordering duplicates of the remaining ones. I called my apartment manager (since my provisional license had my home address on it) and warned them to keep an eye out for suspicious people hanging around my apartment, just in case.

I did try calling the police; however, they were just as useless as you'd expect (considering I didn't know how to get in touch with the wannabe extortionist). The only thing they could suggest was that I try making arrangements to collect the wallet, then arrange to have a police officer arrest the guy when he showed up. Given the fact that I have no actual evidence of the extortion, though, I figured the main result would be to leave someone that I already know is a bad character, and who has my personal information and address, a grudge to hold against me. Not a good long-term move.

What depresses me most about all this is that "Sidney" is far more representative of the average person than I am, or (I assume) most readers of my blog; and he may very well be better adapted to the world than I am. People suck, life sucks, and the world sucks; I should be grown-up enough at age 25 to not care by now, but I still do. :-(

I am not happy with dh_pthon in the current state that it was (NMUed into) debhelper. It is preventing me from feeling good about or generally maintaining debhelper. This is a plan for fixing that.

1. Transform dh_python into a perl module or program by some other name and possibly different interface, and put this in some other package(s).
2. Modify dh_pysupport and dh_pycentral to call above so they take over dh_python's part of the work.
3. Reduce dh_python to a no-op warning script and put on deprecation track for removal.
4. Add a regression test to debhelper that fails if any debhelper script exceeds 150 lines, excluding POD docs. (Done in svn)
5. If at any point the python maintainers find an approach that does not invole multiple competing implementations and that is either simple or has the complexity encapsulated into some other program, I can add back a dh_python. Until then the current mess will be Not My Problem.
6. Be much, much, much more cautious accepting niche programs into debhelper in the future. :-(

Possible technical complications:

• dh_pthon supports params for passing additional module directories. dh_pysupport does too, but it seems that dh_pycentral does not. Need to check if this means that noone using dh_pycentral can use it with non-standard directories, so none of them pass directories to dh_python.
• dh_python has -V and -X flags that affect its behavior and the other two programs would not have access to this information.
  • I doubt that -X is used widely. Grep.
  • -V is a redundant interface, since it does something approximating what debian/pyversons does. So things should be able to switch to the other interface, except in edge cases (although IMHO it's not an appropriate interface for a debhelper program), and for the edge cases, -V could be added to the other two programs.
• It's possible that someone might set dh_python's -n flag but not also set it on their call to dh_pycentral or dh_pysupport. Can't imagine why though.
• Not all packages use the new python policy yet. For example, debconf doesn't. I'm not sure if that's a bug or not. One alternative would be reverting dh_python to the pre-NMU version (plus a small shim to make it a no-op if it detects the new policy), to avoid breaking such packages until they transition.

Copley Square in Boston is a busy place on Fridays, it seems, though I would guess it depends on the Friday. Today there was a whole bunch of people gathering to protest Israel’s recent actions towards Lebanon, a couple hundred people on bikes for Critical Mass (which I was there for), and a couple Green Party members handing out “fruit for free,” “soybeans, cherries, and strawberries in the bag!”, wearing some shirts that said something about voting for Ralph Nader. So, the Green Party handed out food to the bikers while we were circling up and getting ready to head out, and the bikers and protesters cheered each other on as we rode by, in a sort of bizarre, random symbiotic relationship. Today was also the first time I rode through the heart of a thunderstorm. We were passing through Harvard Square when the worst of it hit, though it was really obvious that we were heading into the storm a good deal of time beforehand. Some parts were a little like riding blind into a sheet of pins, but it really made the whole thing just a little more exhilarating. Especially when you get to ride through six inches of runoff on Mass Ave. Mmm, puddles. Luckily, I had the foresight to check the forecast and pack my laptop into a plastic bag since I didn’t go home before riding out with a couple friends from the Media Lab. Really, that’s amazingly lucky on my part. I never think of these things in advance. I think, however, that the laptop was the only thing dry in the bag by the time I got home. The ride petered out in the middle of Brighton somewhere, and a guy from BU and I broke off to head back. Neither of us really knew exactly where we were, or how to get back to our respective residences. There is nothing quite like the feeling of being completely lost at dusk, with the whole night before you to find your way back home. It’s a good feeling. IMHO. Provided you’re not lost in a sketchy neighbourhood. After a little while of based-off-the-sun-setting-in-the-west wandering, I was about to break out the laptop and go wifi hunting. Somehow, we just ended up asking for directions at a 7-11. I love friends made in really weird and random ways.

How good is Linux as a tool for the uninitiated, really? When journalists review Linux, they usually concentrate on the initial installation experience. Given their deadlines, that's logical: they don't often have time to spend months on using it, so installation is all they have time for. I wanted to know how good Linux, or more specifically Debian with GNOME, is for the uninitiated, or more specifically, for someone who has been using Windows for a number of years, and switches to Linux. I'm specifically uninterested in the installation experience. To see what it is like, I recruited a friend of mine, and gave her my old laptop with Linux pre-installed and pre-configured. She has agreed to try switching all her computer use to Linux, and tell me about any problems she has. We'll do this for several months, to make it realistic. Anyone can suffer through a week in a new computer environment. She's now used Linux for a bit over a week. The initial session, when she tried out the new computer at my home, went pretty well, with only a couple of real problems. Here's an edited version of the notes I made:

Bringing up the network (the laptop is configured to use NetworkManager): She found the networking subfolder of the computer folder in GNOME: "Why does it say 'Windows Network'? And why is that empty?". Later: "Why does 'Network tools' not configure the network?". She doesn't know if configuring network in Windows would be as bewildering, never having done it. She can't find anything useful about network configuration in the GNOME help system. Eventually I point out the Network Manager icon in the notification area. She selects a wireless network to connect to and enters the WPA password I give her. She then gets the GNOME Keyring dialog and doesn't understand what it is, wondering why she needs to give the WPA password a second time. She then proceeds to open some windows. "Minimization works, good." She is happy that there is a task bar at the bottom of the screen, and happens to find the "Show desktop" button there as well: "Oh, you can hide all the windows here if you have many." She finds mplayer and thinks it looks OK. She comments that she doesn't really care what player she uses, she uses several under Windows, too, and all of them have quirks. XChat has too many networks to choose from at startup. She's never had to choose an IRC network before, IRCnet being the default for Mirc (or the Mirc installation she has, anyway). She wonders why XChat didn't ask for a server to connect to after selecting the right network (XChat has a lot of servers configured for each network and chose one of them). She continues to configure XChat: "Oh Lord, NO spell checking." She finds the color selector in XChat (the GNOME or GTK+ default one) to be very confusing. The "Nicks not to highlight on" setting is bewildering, does it mean that XChat highlights by default all nicknames, even for other users? She'd like "shut up completely" setting for XChat sounds. Giving ops from a popup is intuitive. XChat in general seems intuitive to her. Next, Bittorrent, using the GNOME torrent downloader. The .torrent file is saved directly to the desktop, which is good. The downloaded file goes there too, which is good, too. Seems intuitive enough, but doesn't seem to have very many settings: it would be nice to be able to prioritize different parts of a multi-file download. She also can't get it to continue a download after restarting the client (possibly related to multi-file torrents). Next, OpenOffice.org. The Windows version doesn't split up into Base, Writer, Impress, etc, but finding the interesting one (Writer) is no problem. That Abiword was installed, too, was a bit confusing. Totem: space doesn't play/pause (except in full screen mode). Sound volume control is a bit confusing, since it has to be done using multiple slidebars (master, pcm, etc) in the GNOME sound control dialog, and also in Totem. After maximizing Totem, quitting it, restarting it, the window is now as big as the whole desktop (minus top and bottom panels), so maximizing and un-maximizing doesn't seem to have much effect, which is weird.

Other problems have surfaced since. The big one was that I had configured a simple firewall for her that didn't let anyone connect to her laptop, meaning that torrenting was not working very well. I use the same firewall settings on my own laptop, but since I mostly torrent for Debian's ISO images, and those have really fast seeders, I've never noticed that I don't torrent outward. Ah well. She also doesn't like the GNOME torrent client very much. It lacks ways of monitoring and controlling the torrenting process that she cares about: seeder and peer counts especially, or (but less importantly) changing the order in which parts of a multi-file torrent are downloaded. We tried installing Azureus, but the version in Debian etch at the time seems quite broken. Firefox seems to occasionally also work very badly for her, taking tens of seconds to load pages, but this seems to be a known bug that will be fixed in the next upstream version. We'll upgrade when we can, and hope that fixes it. Firefox's default font size was too small. Same for the default window size. And sometimes, maximizing the window still doesn't make the contents become bigger (but it works under the Windows version of Firefox). I haven't seen this myself yet, but if I do and can replicate it, I'll file bugs. Another problem that was due to my bad installation: I had forgotten to install acpid, so every time she booted, she got an error message saying "Can't access ACPI events in var/run/acpid.socket". Her exact words when reporting this were: "I don't want to know. Really, I don't. But, just in case you do." That's it for now. I may write an updated report later, if there's any interest. (For the curious, I'm intentionally not naming her, to let her try the experiment in peace, rather than getting her mailbox full of well-intentioned advice on things to try or do.)