It looks like quite popular thing on Planet Debian to start using flattr. I registered most of software on which I'm involved already week ago, but I did not have much time publicizing it. Surprisingly people have found things just on flattr without any external links. You can see all of them listed on my flattr profile. Today I decided to add my blog as a thing and integrated it to my blog, so you can now see flattr button under each post. I decided not to spread this into RSS, at least for now :-). If you have not yet heard about flattr it is social micropayment site (lot of buzzwords included, so it has to be cool, right?), where you need to register, put there little amount of money and it will be spread each month among projects you "flattr". Sounds like a nice idea for appreciating free software.

GSoC 2010 is over for some time and I should write some summary how students projects ended up. The very short summary is that all five students were successful and their work got merged. Follows description of the project in no particular order. Thanks to Martynas Mickevicius you can now get charts out of various parts of phpMyAdmin. They are used on server status pages or you can get query results in form of several charts. It seems to work pretty well at least what I've tried so far. Ankit Gupta was working on Visual Query Builder for phpMyAdmin. Unfortunately this is only project which is not yet merged to master branch, mostly because some UI things were not yet finished. But hopefully it will be merged soon. Adnan Mughal was converting our schema export feature from PDF to support multiple formats. You can now get the schema as SVG, DIA or even Visio formats, some of them will require a little bit of tuning still, because the scaling is not perfect. Ninad Pundalik did a lot of work on AJAXifying phpMyAdmin. His changes touched quite a lot of places and there are still some rough edges (as you can see in our bug tracker), but this is definitely welcome improvement and I hope it will get stable soon. Piotr Przybylski basically continued in his effort two years ago when he had reimplemented setup script and now he had focused on user configuration. It can be stored in session, browser local storage (HTML 5 feature) or in separate table in phpMyAdmin configuration storage (that's new name for pmadb). This is something what people were requesting for very long time and I'm happy we can finally bring this feature. And last but not least is Lorikeet Lee, who spend lot of time on tuning user interface of phpMyAdmin. The most visible changes are on export and import pages, which now should be less scaring for new users, but there are other changes in lot of other places, for example the main page. Generally it was a great summer and I hope we will be so successful also next year. PS: You can try all these features on http://demo.phpmyadmin.net/.

GSoC 2010 is over for some time and I should write some summary how students projects ended up. The very short summary is that all five students were successful and their work got merged. Follows description of the project in no particular order. Thanks to Martynas Mickevicius you can now get charts out of various parts of phpMyAdmin. They are used on server status pages or you can get query results in form of several charts. It seems to work pretty well at least what I've tried so far. Ankit Gupta was working on Visual Query Builder for phpMyAdmin. Unfortunately this is only project which is not yet merged to master branch, mostly because some UI things were not yet finished. But hopefully it will be merged soon. Adnan Mughal was converting our schema export feature from PDF to support multiple formats. You can now get the schema as SVG, DIA or even Visio formats, some of them will require a little bit of tuning still, because the scaling is not perfect. Ninad Pundalik did a lot of work on AJAXifying phpMyAdmin. His changes touched quite a lot of places and there are still some rough edges (as you can see in our bug tracker), but this is definitely welcome improvement and I hope it will get stable soon. Piotr Przybylski basically continued in his effort two years ago when he had reimplemented setup script and now he had focused on user configuration. It can be stored in session, browser local storage (HTML 5 feature) or in separate table in phpMyAdmin configuration storage (that's new name for pmadb). This is something what people were requesting for very long time and I'm happy we can finally bring this feature. And last but not least is Lorikeet Lee, who spend lot of time on tuning user interface of phpMyAdmin. The most visible changes are on export and import pages, which now should be less scaring for new users, but there are other changes in lot of other places, for example the main page. Generally it was a great summer and I hope we will be so successful also next year. PS: You can try all these features on http://demo.phpmyadmin.net/.

Ok, this happened, chromium-browser was removed from testing and will not be included in Debian squeeze. Some days ago (before the hard freeze) I contacted the release team and asked about a possible inclusion of Chromium 6 in squeeze. The main reason of this request is that in April there was at least one major refactoring of the SVG code (webkit). The internal webkit copy is too outdated in chromium 5, and backporting any future SVG security patches (and unfortunately the story says they are frequent) is very hard. I got no answer, and after one week of silence and the hard freeze announcement, I realized that chromium 5 is not supportable and decided to upload chromium 6 in unstable (It was already in experimental). I asked the Release Team to unblock chromium-browser 6.0.472.53~r57914-3 or remove chromium-browser 5.0.375.127~r55887-1 from testing. Well, after one hour they removed chromium-browser from testing. I failed, my efforts to get chromium in Squeeze were in vain. Debian failed, a modern and much appreciated web browser will not be included in our next stable release.

• Italian

Related posts:

1. Why would you prefer chromium-browser in sid over google-chrome
2. Chromium ready for unstable

It was back in July that I got my amateur radio license, and I haven t written much about it since. It s about time I do. I ve been really enjoying it. I am now wishing I hadn t put off getting into it for so many years. It s a lot of fun and promises to be a lot of fun for a long time. Why? I am frequently asked, What can you do with amateur radio? Yes, you can talk to people all around the world, but of course you can do that with the Internet. Talking to people all around the world can be done with no infrastructure in between, so that s a pretty neat feature, but not compelling to everyone. I have realized that the question is poorly-framed. I had asked that question myself for a long time and only recently realized that I was asking the wrong question. I think the better question would be, What makes amateur radio fun and a good way to spend your time? One thing I ve discovered is that the amateur radio community has an amazing sense of community. Hams, almost universally, seem to love helping out each other, whatever the task may be: setting up antennas, learning how to operate a radio, even fixing a flat tire. I ve seen this directly, and heard about it from others, time and time again. There s an excellent article out there by Nate Bargmann called Why I consider Amateur Radio an asset in my life that makes for good reading. There is a lot of fun in amateur radio. It was quite exciting the first time I talked to someone out of state, realizing that the piece of wire in my trees, and 100W of transmitter power, were all it took to get a message 700 miles away. And even more exciting when I talked to a person in Kazakhstan the same way. No satellites, no phone lines, no undersea cables just my antenna, his, and radio waves. Then there s the fun in talking to somewhat random people. It s not completely random, as I m only talking to people that have passed a test there are about a million of us in the USA. (And for the long-distance HF communication, a more rigorous exam is required, so the number is probably less than that.) But when I call CQ an invitation for anyone listening to reply I never know who will reply. I ve talked to a retired Canadian museum curator, a Mississippi farmer, a resident of Long Island, Russians participating in a contest, two Hawaiians participating in a different contest, and the list goes on. Some of these have been brief contacts lasting only seconds, while others have been conversations that stretch on towards an hour. I liken amateur radio to buying my first iPod. I had never owned a portable MP3 player. I had always figured, why bother? How often am I away from a computer or a CD player? But once I got one, I realized how nice it was. It was convenient to just store my entire library on there and not have to try to sync it across multiple devices. It was convenient to not have to carry CDs with me in the car, and to listen to music at places I hadn t tried to before. The same sort of thing applied to getting a Kindle, and to amateur radio. I didn t realize how much fun it would be until I tried. Some Memorable Moments Towards the end of showing you some things that have been exciting, here are a few memorable moments from my ham radio experience so far. Saturday night was one. I was tuning around listening to anybody to talk to. I heard some people calling CQ in heavy accents. I eventually realized that the All-Asia contest was going on, and figured out how to participate. I made my first voice-mode contact with people on a different continent and it was with Kazakhstan! Within a few minutes, I also talked with three stations in Russia. I had not expected that. I ve made contact with several stations in the Indianapolis area, where I used to live. It was particularly fun to talk to W9IMS, located at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, which operates around race times only. Again I discovered that station simply by tuning around on the band. I took a 5W handheld radio with me to New York City during my trip there for Debconf. It was a lot of fun to talk to random New Yorkers while visiting, and they were all very interested in my impression of the city, what I ve done so far, and what they thought I ought to do. Some offered specific tips (such as which train from Manhattan to Brooklyn offers a good view while elevated). A local ham, W0BH, gave me some basic training on how to operate during amateur radio contests. During these contests, hams try to make contact with as many other hams in as many places as they can. I didn t think this sounded like a lot of fun. Until I tried it. It was indeed a lot of fun, and interesting being occasionally that rare Kansas station that a bunch of people are trying to talk to at once. One evening, we lost power. I tried calling the electric company, but there was no answer over there for some reason. We re out in the country, and there are no neighbors visible that can inform us whether it s a big problem that the power company probably knows about, or whether it s localized to us. So after wondering what to do for a minute, I thought I d get on the radio and ask. (We own a backup generator for these situations.) Almost right away I heard from a person driving in his pickup. He told me he saw a widespread outage, and heard on his police scanner about other towns that were down for the same reason. I wouldn t have known otherwise.

C++0x has a workload of new features[2]... Today I'm having a look at lambdas. Lambdas are available in g++-4.5, for now only available in experimental. What are lambdas? You can think of it as something akin to a struct with operator(). But it's a more than that: it's closer from a closure, something that Scheme fans are very familiar with: the closure code block captures its outter environment in its body. Closures are a very powerful tool that are being retrofitted in many languages (for instance Java). They can be used as building blocks for many useful programing idioms such as continuations. Enough for theory, let's have a look at this new beast. How do they look like?

  [](int i)   return i + 1;  ;

This is the increment lambda. You can declare a lambda in any function or method. Written like this, the lambda compiles[1] but it's not very useful: it's an anonynous lambda that is neither stored nor used. How to read this? The square brackets open the declaration of a lambda. Then you declare lambda parameters and its body. Nothing suprising so far except for the declaration opening. Using a lambda To use it add arguments, for instance:

  [](int i)   return i + 1;  (0);

would compute the value 1. Storing a lambda The type of a lambda is automatically deduced. You can hint its return type if you need to. To store it you need to use another new C++0x keywork, auto, that was taken back from C:

  auto inc = [](int i)   return i + 1;  ;
  std::cout << inc(0) << std::endl;

Notice that calling a named lambda is not different from calling a function. If you need to hint the lambda return type you can use ->:

  auto mult = [](int x, double y) -> double   return x * y;  ;

Capturing environment You can use lambdas to capture outter environment. A more complex, not working, example:

  void f()  
    int x = 5;
    [](int w)   return w + x;  (0);
   

Tha lambda declaration + invocation does not work, because the x variable we're referring to is declared in the outter scope. To enable capture of the outter scope, we can rewrite the previous example like this:

  void f()  
    int x = 5;
    [=](int w)   return w + x;  (0);
   

The = sign in the square brackets (which are really the capturing clause) means we will copy every variable from the outter scope. Hence we can access x from our anonymous lambda. Now what if you want to change x?

  void f()  
    int x = 5;
    [=](int w)   return w + ++x;  (0);
   

This does not compile: the environment is read-only by default. If you really want to increment x then you need to write:

  void f()  
    int x = 5;
    [=](int w) mutable   return w + ++x;  (0);
   

Yes, mutable. The value returned from the lambda is what you would expect. But guess what? x value is not changed when the lambda returns. Indeed, we've copied outter scope variables by value. To really affect outter scope you need to change the capture clause:

  void f()  
    int x = 5;
    [&](int w)   return w + ++x;  (0);
   

We use the ampersand to capture the environment by reference, and thus we can change x value. We could also be more explicit about what we want to capture:

struct A  
    int z;
    A() : z(0)  
    void f()  
      int x = 5;
      [this, &x](int w)   z = w + ++x;  (0);
      std::cout << "x: " << x << ", z: " << z << std::endl;
     
 ;

The lambda in f() explicitely mentions environment variables which are captured by value: this, because we change this->z, and also the local variable x. Complete example It's easier to write functionnal-style code. As Sarah just said: 10 years from now everyone will realize how powerful functional programming is, then we'll be the masters of the universe!

#include <algorithm>
#include <iostream>
#include <vector>
int main(int argc, char* argv[])
 
  std::vector<int> v =   1, 2, 3  ;
  // Show then increment
  std::for_each(v.begin(), v.end(), [](int& e)   std::cout << e++ << std::endl;  );
  // Show content now
  std::for_each(v.begin(), v.end(), [](int e)   std::cout << e << std::endl;  );
 return 0;
 

[1] Use g++-4.5 --std=c++0x to activate C++0x mode
[2] More complete g++ C++0x feature list available here

After a bit of work, I got the sheeva plug working the way I wanted it to. First of all, I grabbed a spare 1G USB flash disk I had laying around and installed Debian squeeze to it by following tbm s instructions here: http://www.cyrius.com/debian/kirkwood/sheevaplug/install.html After debian was installed to the USB disk, I removed it from the plug and used dd on my laptop to create an image of the filesystem. I mounted the filesystem as a loopback device and created a jffs2 partition image from it after doing a bit of minor tweaking. I placed the USB disk back in the plug and booted to it. Using this intermediate filesystem and the mtd-tools package, I wrote the new jffs2 image to the NAND mtd device. I then modified the uboot environment to suit, saved, and now have a working setup. Detailed instructions are below. pre-requisites Connect the plug to your network with the rj-45/cat5 cable. Connect a USB flash drive to the plug. I used a 1G drive, but 512M should be sufficient. Install the tftpd package on a machine on your network. You ll also need screen on the machine that you use to connect to the plug s serial terminal. I ll assume these are the same host. You need the IP address of the tftp server. In this example, we will assume that the IP is 192.168.1.2 and that you will assign 192.168.1.200 to the plug. $ sudo apt-get install tftpd screen Place uImage, uInitrd, and uBoot in the /srv/tftp directory: $ sudo wget -O /srv/tftp/uImage http://www.cyrius.com/tmp/beta1/marvell/sheevaplug/uImage
$ sudo wget -O /srv/tftp/uInitrd http://www.cyrius.com/tmp/beta1/marvell/sheevaplug/uInitrd
$ sudo wget -O /srv/tftp/uBoot http://wp.colliertech.org/cj/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/07/uboot.bin Connecting to the serial console We are now ready to boot the plug. Note that you have to be quick with the screen command. I recommend you type it out and get ready to press the enter key. You have to interrupt the bootloader in order to enter the u-boot console. Attach the power and immediately enter the following command: $ screen -S sheeva /dev/ttyUSB0 cs8,ixoff,115200 If you did this right, you should see a prompt like this: Marvell>> update uboot As per tbm s instructions, you can now update the uboot if needed. Instructions for that are here: http://www.cyrius.com/debian/kirkwood/sheevaplug/uboot-upgrade.html I ll put them inline here for completeness.

Marvell>> setenv serverip 192.168.1.2 # IP of your TFTP server
Marvell>> setenv ipaddr 192.168.1.200 # IP of the plug
Marvell>> bubt uboot.bin

be sure to answer n to the question about env parameters. Now reset the device. Don t forget to interrupt the bootloader so we can get back to the prompt:

Marvell>> reset

Let the device know that you will be running a mainline kernel and set the arcNumber:

Marvell>> setenv mainlineLinux yes
Marvell>> setenv arcNumber 2097
Marvell>> saveenv
Marvell>> reset

Install Debian to the USB disk Interrupt the boot process once more. We are now ready to run the debian installer. I ll leave the details as an exercise for the reader. The following should put you into the installer, which you are probably quite familiar with by now. NB: I will assume that you will use a single ext3 partition for the entire system. This will make it easier to build a jffs2 image out of the resultant partition on the USB disk.

Marvell>> setenv serverip 192.168.1.2
Marvell>> setenv ipaddr 192.168.1.147
Marvell>> tftpboot 0x01100000 uInitrd
Marvell>> tftpboot 0x00800000 uImage
Marvell>> setenv bootargs console=ttyS0,115200n8 base-installer/initramfs-tools/driver-policy=most
Marvell>> bootm 0x00800000 0x01100000

build a jffs2 image Once the installation has completed, power down the plug and remove the USB disk. Put the USB disk in the machine you used to get the console on the plug and note what device the kernel assigns to it. In my case, it was given sdc, so debian is installed to /dev/sdc1. I will use these values for this example. If the filesystem was automatically mounted, unmount it. Create a disk image of the partition and mount it as a loopback device.

$ sudo umount /dev/sdc1
$ dd if=/dev/sdc1 of=/tmp/debian.img
$ mkdir /tmp/mnt
$ sudo mount -o loop /tmp/debian.img /tmp/mnt

You can now remove the USB disk and return it to the plug. Modify the /etc/fstab file. The root filesystem will be /dev/mtdblock2 and of fs type jffs2. My fstab file looks like the following:

proc            /proc           proc    defaults        0       0
/dev/mtdblock2 /               jffs2    errors=remount-ro 0       1

We can now create a jffs2 image from the mounted and altered fresh install:

$ sudo mkfs.jffs2 -l \
  -e 0x20000 \
  -X zlib \
  --eraseblock=128KiB \
  --pad \
  --output=/tmp/rootfs.jffs2 \
  --compression-mode=priority \
  -n \
  --squash \
  -r /tmp/mnt

write jffs2 to nand Now that we have an image to flash to the NAND, let s boot off of the USB disk. It should now be attached to the plug. Power on the plug and use screen to get a console. Interrupt the bootloader and enter the following commands:

Marvell>> setenv bootargs_console console=ttyS0,115200
Marvell>> setenv bootcmd_usb 'usb start; ext2load usb 0:1 0x01100000 /boot/uInitrd; ext2load usb 0:1 0x00800000 /boot/uImage'
Marvell>> setenv bootcmd 'setenv bootargs $(bootargs_console); run bootcmd_usb; bootm 0x00800000 0x01100000'
Marvell>> run bootcmd

Log in as root with the credentials you configured during the install. You will need to install a few packages in order to complete the nand flash. You can then ssh to the host on which you created the jffs2 image and cat it to stdout, piping this to nandwrite:

$ sudo apt-get install mtd-utils
$ ssh user@192.168.1.2 cat /tmp/rootfs.jffs2   sudo nandwrite /dev/mtd2 -p -

You now have a jffs2 image on the nand. Configure u-boot One more reboot to set u-boot s environment, and you will be done. Power down and remove the USB disk. Power on and get the serial console using screen. Break into the bootloader and enter the following commands:

Marvell>> setenv bootargs_console console=ttyS0,115200
Marvell>> setenv mtdpartitions mtdparts=orion_mtd:0x400000@0x100000(uImage),0x1fb00000@0x500000(rootfs)
Marvell>> setenv bootargs_root root=/dev/mtdblock2 rw rootfstype=jffs2
Marvell>> setenv bootcmd 'setenv bootargs $(bootargs_console) $(mtdpartitions) $(bootargs_root); nand read.e 0x00800000 0x00100000 0x00400000; bootm 0x00800000'
Marvell>> saveenv
Marvell>> reset

You should now be good to go.

Since the introduction of the 3.0 (quilt) source format, it is now possible to integrate multiple upstream tarballs in Debian source packages. This article will show you how to do the same with your own package shall you need it. It s quite useful to easily integrate supplementary plugins, translations, or documentation that the upstream developers are providing in separate tarballs. Step by step explanation We ll take the spamassassin source package as an example. The upstream version is 3.3.1. The main upstream tarball is named as usual (spamassassin_3.3.1.orig.tar.gz) and contains the top directory of our source package. We already have a debian directory because the package is not new. Upstream provides spamassassin rules in a separate tarball named Mail-SpamAssassin-rules-3.3.1.r901671.tgz. We grab it, rename it to spamassassin_3.3.1.orig-pkgrules.tar.gz and put it next to the main tarball. The pkgrules part is the component name that we choose to identify the tarball, it s also the name of the directory in which it will be extracted inside the source package. For now that directory doesn t exist yet so we must create it.

$ mv Mail-SpamAssassin-rules-3.3.1.r901671.tgz spamassassin_3.3.1.orig-pkgrules.tar.gz
$ cd spamassassin-3.3.1
$ mkdir pkgrules
$ tar -C pkgrules -zxf ../spamassassin_3.3.1.orig-pkgrules.tar.gz

This is already enough, the next time that you will build the source package, the supplementary tarball will be automatically integrated in the generated source package.

$ dpkg-buildpackage -S
[...]
 dpkg-source -b spamassassin-3.3.1
dpkg-source: info: using source format  3.0 (quilt)'
dpkg-source: info: building spamassassin using existing ./spamassassin_3.3.1.orig-pkgrules.tar.gz ./spamassassin_3.3.1.orig.tar.gz
dpkg-source: info: building spamassassin in spamassassin_3.3.1-1.debian.tar.gz
dpkg-source: info: building spamassassin in spamassassin_3.3.1-1.dsc

The supplementary tarball is now part of the source package but we re not making anything useful out of it. We have to modify debian/rules (or debian/spamassin.install) to install the new files in the binary package. A special case: bundling related software In very rare cases, you might want to create a bundle of several software (small perl modules for example) and you don t have any main tarball, you only have several small tarballs. Rename all the tarballs following the same logic as above and when building the source package you can ask dpkg-source to create an empty (and fake) main archive for you with the option --create-empty-orig:

$ dpkg-buildpackage -S --source-option=--create-empty-orig

Use with care as the version number you give to the bundle is what users will see and it s likely unrelated to the version number of each individual software. Common mistakes Forgetting to extract the supplementary tarball If you forget to extract the content of the supplementary tarball in the pkgrules directory, dpkg-source will emit lots of warnings about those files being deleted. In fact, you did not delete them but you only forgot to create them in the first place.

dpkg-source: warning: ignoring deletion of directory pkgrules
dpkg-source: warning: ignoring deletion of file pkgrules/20_fake_helo_tests.cf
dpkg-source: warning: ignoring deletion of file pkgrules/60_shortcircuit.cf
[...]

Using a bad version number for the supplementary tarball Sometimes the supplementary tarball has a version of its own that does not match the upstream version. You must still name the file in a way that matches the upstream version of the main tarball otherwise it will not be picked up by dpkg-source and it will generate a new patch in debian/patches/ containing the whole new directory. It s possible to encode the version number of the supplementary tarball in the component name (in our example above we could have picked pkgrules-r901671 as component name) but this means that the name of the associated directory will regularly change and you must adapt your packaging rules to cope with this. However this last trick has the benefit of being able to update the additional tarball without bumping the upstream version. A sourceful upload of a new revision of the package will be accepted by the archive: the main tarball is ignored since it s unchanged but the supplementary tarball is taken since it s a new file for the archive (it has a different filename). Be sure to move away old versions of the additional tarball when you do that if you don t want to upload several versions of the same tarball by mistake! Misextracting the supplementary tarball dpkg-source is very smart when it extracts the supplementary tarball and you should be as well when you manually extract it. If the tarball contains only a single top-level directory, that directory is extracted, renamed to match the component name and moved in the source package directory.
If the tarball contains several top-level files or directories, then the target directory is first created and the content of the archive is directly extracted into that directory. Here are commands to install the files in both cases (we re already in the source package directory):

$ mkdir pkgrules
# Archive contains a single top-level directory
$ tar -C pkgrules --strip-components=1 -zxf ../spamassassin_3.3.1.orig-pkgrules.tar.gz
# Archive contains many top-level entries
$ tar -C pkgrules -zxf ../spamassassin_3.3.1.orig-pkgrules.tar.gz

2 comments Support my work

I started to give flattr a try, too. It is a social micropayment site and the similarity of its name to the verb flatter is on intention. It is meant to say thanks in small amounts month by month to "things" you like. One such thing I created is my blog you can find the link to it below every entry. To be able to flattr someone one needs to create an account on the site and put money into their account. After that it's possible to follow the flattr button links. If you are reading my blog on my site and have JavaScript enabled you just have to click the flattr part of the image (not the number) to do so. If you are reading it through my feed or with JavaScript disabled you will have to click a second time on the flattr site to make the flattring happen. Another thing I've created is Debian BTS: cleaning up. I use this link in my mails to the Debian BTS for my stable RC cleanup efforts, or general proper closing of bugs that aren't getting archived. Through the help of UDD I've created me helpful overview pages of bugs that need attention for this. The third thing I've created is Package Maintenance. If you are a fan of one of the packages I maintain and want to thank me for taking proper care of it, feel free to also click this one. Please be aware that this shouldn't be seen as an Upstream appreciation if one of the projects I package for Debian uses flattr themself then you should definitely (also) consider flattring them for their own. About Upstream projects that use flattr: One of the packages I invest quite a lot of effort into started using flattr: wesnoth. They have put the flattr button on their entry page at wesnoth.org, here is the direct link to their first and general thing: The Battle for Wesnoth. Please be reminded that the things you did flattr in a previous month can again be flattred the next month. This is especially true for general purpose things like what I am using currently. Others might create things for every single blog entry, or very specific tasks, to allow people to flattr them more often in a month and get a bigger share of the cake. So keep in mind which things are general ones and consider returning to them. Enjoy!

/debian permanent link Comments: 1

This summer of 2010 has been memorable. It started with a difficult period following the hospitalization and death of my mother, a series of very intense and equally memorable conferences catapulting me out of my funk and ending with a trip to Ireland, perhaps one of my most pleasant trips ever. I have always wanted to go there, as I have some good Irish friends and I was also quite attracted to the place due to its history, so when the opportunity came for me to go, I did not hesitate to book my ticket. I was not left disappointed in any way, shape or form, although since I barely experienced the gray, misty, and rainy weather Irish is famous for, my experience may admittedly be a bit skewed. These are some of things I did and some of my fragmented thoughts about Ireland and some photos, proof that the weather was UnIrish Ireland and The Irish: Well I can t as no one can speak of The Irish as if they were some unitary group but I did learn a lot about Irish history and managed hang out with a number Irish folks (even a family) and one thing that seems to mark Ireland as distinct, what makes it stand out from the rest of its Western European brothers and sisters, is the pervasive sense of history bleeding into the ambiance, perhaps because it is so tragic. The short version of the history, if you don t know it, is that the Irish, especially the Catholics, got repeatedly screwed by the British monarchs/rulers/planters/government/ for nearly a thousand years, the last five hundred of those being particularly harsh and ugly, a cycle of slight gains crushed by various forms of tyranny and violence at least until part of the country achieved independence (Northern Ireland is a bit of a different story). I may have gone a bit out of my way to learn about Irish history, more than I have done for any other place, but this historical consciousness seemed to be inescapable, precipitating into all sorts of conversations and places. To take one example, I went to see Gaelic Football, one of the two beloved national sports (the other being hurling), and the minute you learn anything about this sport, you learn that it is intimately bound with the Irish fight for independence and nationalism. The Irish are also very warm, kind, and outgoing. They also seem to curse an awful lot as well, so much so cursing is a bit of a national pastime, which yes, I (f*cking) loved as I tend to have a bit of a foul mouth myself, curbed I will admit, in recent years and in the classroom. It crept up in a lot of places but was most pronounced during the All Ireland Semi-Final Gaelic football game when the ladies (not lads, mind you) behind me were constantly yelling at the referee, hurling the c-word (rhymes with trunk) whenever they made a call they disagreed with. EASA/Maynooth.: I went to Ireland to attend the largest Anthropological meetings in Europe, and in specific an all day panel on digital anthropology, which seemed like a great opportunity given we are a a bit of a minority. The conference was impressively large with roughly 1200 attendees (can you believe there are that many anthropologists?), smoothly run, and the all-day panel on digital media was quite lively and I got to meet some really interesting folks. I was a tad sad to find out Maynooth is the only university in Ireland with an Anthropology department (for crying shame lads!!!) but at least it is located in a darn stunning university: the old quarters of the campus are strikingly beautiful. Anonymous: I have done some work on Anonymous and well when I found out there was going to be a raid/protest at the Church of Scientology (a pretty dismal, and run down church), I got in contact with Irish anon to let them know I was coming. Although someone first decapitated me (at least in character with their norms, right?), when I showed up in person, they were not only civil but really quite hospitable (greeting me with one of my favorite songs). Overall it was a great day. I was reminded of important differences among Anons (Irish Anon s take their anonymity pretty seriously, the New York Anons do not) and also good to experience the social life and metabolism of a protest, especially one attended by folks who have lost family to the church. Dublin: Since I stayed with my friend and his family in Dublin, this is where I spent most of my time. I was able to hook up with various friends, including one from graduate school who just got back from years of fieldwork in Rwanda and hearing about his experiences and stunning but stunningly sad project made me feel like mine in comparison was Child s Play (in fact, it really was). I got to see the Debian crew (many who work at Google) and I finally paid a visit to the office, which was exactly how I imagined it to be (good and abundant food, good lighting, lots of toys and bikes, lots of Star Wars posters.. Yep, it could have been in Silicon Valley). But I was surprised at the young age of the marketing and sales folks who were hanging in their lounge when I ran into them. In fact when I saw them I thought like I was looking at my freshman class or something! It was great to see the Debian folks (though no one I met was actually Irish), as well, one of my favorite things to do whenever I visit a foreign city. I walked my heart out in the city getting a blister in a shoe that I thought was blister proof and while not as picturesque as some other European cities, it has a ton of character and no shortage of Guinness and pubs (no surprise there). My favorite places/things were: The National Library (great exhibit on Yeats, but make sure to use the multi-media as that is where all the information is stuffed), St. Stephen s Park (overflowing with chubby ducks and lovely flowers), the prison Kilmainham Gaol (would not advise a visit if you are feeling in any way down, there is some heavy shit you learn during the tour), the simple stained glass that seemed pretty common, and finally the Long Room in Trinity Church, which you enter after the Book of Kells (I realized just how much I adore books when I visited this old library stuffed from floor to ceiling with old old old books). The West Coast: I did not think I was going to head out west but after hurricane Earl started its burst along the eastern Seaboard and I was able to change my ticket for free so I stayed a few more days. I went to the Burren and the Cliffs of Moher both totally stunning, really majestic. As is often the case with these type of these natural wonders, I am often left elated and awed but such strikingly wondrous places also seem to subsequently spur a more melancholic state of mind and heart. Friends, Family, and Dogs: While in Dublin I stayed with my friend A. and his extremely hospitable family, which included, a brother, a father, and three Irish mutts, one of which, Buster (pitt bull/lab mix), pretty much stole my heart. Buster s true love, is food, so much so he almost poised himself to death a little while back snorting down something he shouldn t have costing the family a pretty penny to save him. My friend no longer lives there but came from Berlin and it was a real treat to not only spend days layered upon each other with a friend (it has been an awful long since I have done that outside of conferences) but also meet his family. You learn a lot about your friends that way and in this case, there is some serious and I mean serious intellectual jousting that happens, sometimes bordering on warfare but generally it plays out in more contained, civil and fascinating fashion. Now I understand why my friend is armed with seemingly endless knowledge: it was needed for purposes of defense at home. So in essence, a great, great trip and a fantastic way to end a memorable summer and transition into what I hope will be a bit of a monkish (I call it monk mode) period for this academic year. I am (so so so) fortunate enough to have a fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study and am going to try my darnest to take advantage of the fact I am not teaching (Hell Yes!) and hide away and accomplish all that I have set out to do.

We will celebrate Independency Day here in Brazil tomorrow (the year was 1822 for those into world history). I took the time to visit Belo Horizonte and meet a few googlers I don't see in a while. The cool part is that Rodrigo and his wife Ellen are also in town. We (me and Rodrigo) used to work in the same team at Google here in Belo, he's now living in Zurich.

I'm swinging on the front porch shade, with happy wifi bars lit up on my laptop. A good network makes for a happy home, isn't that how the saying goes? (Maybe not yet.) Typically that's easy to achieve -- here it wasn't. The house is solar powered, the only connection to the outside is a phone line. So I needed a computer that would work in that environment, using minimal (12 volt) power, and getting the most out of the limited bandwidth while providing those happy wifi bars. At DebConf we learned that the name for these little home servers we have been building for years is "FreeDomBox". All right then, here's my latest FreedomBox build.

A typical inexplicable tangle of computer bits.

• Computer: NSLU2. There are faster choices than the "Slug", but on dialup, speed doesn't much matter, and there are not many lower-powered choices. And with the NSLU2, I can take advantage of years of development and experience, that has resulted in great support for running eg, Debian on it, and deep available knowledge of hardware hacks. It's proven, cheap, highly reliable hardware, and I had it lying around.
• Power: The NSLU2 is a 5 volt computer. There are some highly (90%) efficient 12 volt to 5 volt converters, which I covet. But the cheap and easy option is a automotive USB power adapter. So power is coming in to the NSLU2 on a USB cable. It's possible to just plug that into its usb port and it will run. But that wastes a port. Instead, I made the other end of the usb cable have a NSLU2 power socket on it. So, no wasted ports. The system has available as many amps as the voltage converter supplies. Not many. Booting it with too many usb gadgets attached could be an issue. (If I need to run an external usb hard drive, it had better have its own power supply.)
• Wireless: ZyDAS 2501 USB dongle. Not my first choice, just one I had lying around. This device cannot run in AP mode. It is, by the way, possible to use some USB dongles in AP mode with a modified hostapd, but the few I know that work are out of stock. No problem; this house won't have many visitors, and I can tell them the details for connecting using Ad-Hoc wireless mode.
• Storage: 64 gb thumb drive I had lying around. Hmm, last time I touched a NSLU2, I had only 1 gb drives lying around. Progress.
• Modem: My NSLU2 is modified to have an external serial port, so I can use an external modem if desired. But I suspect a USB modem will use slightly less power, even though this third USB device means I need a USB hub too. I was doubtful about finding a USB modem dongle that works with Linux, but it was actually no problem, the USR5637 Just Works.
• Software: Debian Linux of course. For the first time I'm using the polipo web proxy cache, and it works marvelously on dialup and on this low-spec system. Combined with dnsmasq, this makes web browsing over dialup actually not painful.

Since the solar house is in the sticks, the result is a server I call "stick".

Long time no see Not much hacking in the last few months. Not much ranting either (some of you I m sure will appreciate ;-). Anyway, I recently grew excited to learn that ZFS is coming to Debian. I decided to bite the bullet, patched the missing bits in GRUB and Parted, a few small changes in D-I and there s now a modified Debian Installer with ZFS support for you to play with. Enjoy! Note1: I didn t have time or interest in warping D-I into the N:1:M model used in ZFS. Instead, this installer assumes each zpool has exactly one device and exactly one filesystem. However, you can later add more devices ( zpool attach ) or create new filesystems in the same pool ( zfs create ). Note2: Don t ask for i386, it was intentionally left out. ZFS is designed with modern CPUs in mind. It can work on i386 with special tuning but I don t want to encourage users to do this unless they re well aware of what they re doing.

Two updates for Debian today.

I'm the upstream for psmisc and 22.13 finally got released, which also meant 22.13-1 Debian package got released too. There was some delay to it (see below why) but it is now out. Unless you run a mips or superH architecture, there is not really any exciting changes, but should make it compile for those two architectures and then at least get the mips buildd underway so the versions all line up.

Secondly, gjay had two minor bug fixes and was updated. If the analysis daemon kept playing music instead of looking at it or the vorbis files were not being recognised, then this new version will help there. The mpg123 command line patch will be rolled into the upstream too.

I'm also working on getting gjay to work with the Exaile player. If you want it to work with your player the easiest thing is to send me patches or code snippets that do the following:

• Detect your player is running
• Can give me the currently played song, preferably the filename of it. Exaile doesn't so I'll put it a kludge to guess it from title and artist
• Remotely send a playlist to your player and get the player to start

Last of all, my second son was born last week. It's back to those night feeds again and is probably why I've not written as much code as I normally would; but I wouldn't change that either.

Emdebian Grip 1.0.1 (based on Debian GNU/Linux 5.0.6) is now available.

Emdebian Grip is binary-compatible with Debian, providing smaller packages for use on embedded devices. Emdebian Grip selects a subset of Debian packages and removes documentation and other non-binary content without recompiling the source code. Currently, Emdebian Grip supports amd64, arm, armel, i386, mips, mipsel and powerpc in the stable distribution. ARM support will be dropped in the next stable release in favour of armel.

This is the first update of the stable distribution Emdebian Grip (based on Debian GNU/Linux 5.0), bringing Emdebian Grip up to date with Debian 5.0.6. This update mainly adds corrections for security problems to the stable release, along with a few adjustment to serious problems.

Please note that this update does not constitute a new version of Emdebian Grip 1.0 or Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 but only updates some of the packages included. Systems will upgrade to 1.0.1 via the Emdebian mirror after an installation.

For more details on the changes within Debian through 5.0.1, 5.0.2, 5.0.3, 5.0.4, 5.0.5 and now 5.0.6, see the Debian news website.

As well as updates to packages which already existed in Emdebian Grip 1.0, the update includes many new packages, including apache2, aspell and variants, and matchbox.

e.g. 822 packages were released for armel in Emdebian 1.0; this update increases that number to 1,297.

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* It is same old life, apart from: + Guitar is going good. Learning first thing apart from computer in life + Learning C++ and openFrameworks for helping friend for project. More details later.. * Packages: + I ve uploaded Gwibber 2 after waiting for ages to experimental now. Now, OAuth sucked life from all previous version of Gwibber stable version will not have twitter working. I m thinking what can be best solution for that. + Code::Blocks is with me now. I m talking to upstream to do better things with license issues. It will not make to stable, but backport version is planned. * Kavin: + Arr. He can reach to my any books, gadgets and even laptop.

Really, I should have known better than to buy myself a rather 'bleeding-edge' laptop. I suppose I've been lucky with my last couple of laptops and was thinking that pretty much everything works on Linux. Or maybe I'm being picky, because in fact pretty much everything does work on my new Dell Studio. I bought this laptop mainly because it has a 1920x1080 screen, without being a 17" monster. I had such a monster about four laptops ago (an enormous Sony Vaio weighing in at around 5kg and with a 1hr battery life) and it was an disaster: lots of weird proprietary stuff that never worked, like the external speakers in the docking station. But I loved that screen right up until the day Fraser threw a pair of scissors into it. With the advent of mass-market 1920x1080 screens I've been waiting for them to arrive in laptops at a reasonable price, and the availability of this screen in a few possible laptops seemed to me to be that point. It's a Dell Studio 15, and as well as the nice screen, it comes with a new Intel i7 Quad Core CPU, 6G RAM, 640G hard drive and a Blu-ray drive. While there are a few similar models around this one seemed to have the best mix of features-for-weight-and-price, so I bought my first Dell. I built a USB key with the latest Debian Installer from Squeeze and installed that and everything came up pretty well. I had to use the broadcom-sta driver for the wireless, since the BCM 43224 is not (yet) supported by the free b43 driver (though from looking the mailing list people seem to be working on it, and it looks like it might not be too far away). Everything seemed good. X came up on the (georgeous) screen. I don't care too much about 3D performance, but it was nice to note that the ATI 5000 series is expected to have full support as soon as it's integrated into the right places - it seems the code is written, and public, it just isn't incorporated into the 'radeon' driver quite yet. The fact that ATI is nowadays a free-software friendly company was one of the reasons for choosing this, in preference to an NVidia-based laptop. But it seems that it isn't all roses. The fan in the laptop seems permanently on, and not on, in a quiet-just-barely-audible way, but ON, in an 'IN UR LAPTOPZ KOOLIN UR P0RCESSAZ' kind of a way. Too damn noisy for me to concentrate in a quiet room. I've investigated what's going on, and it seems likely there are some ACPI misunderstandings happening. Some googling and some pecking around in /sys makes me wonder if the laptop expects some kind of configuration choice between favouring Active cooling and Passive cooling, and it's defaulted to the first one. Perhaps you get better benchmarks that way. Linux ACPI also seems to only half understand it, it has two thermal zones, and one of them always appears with 0 temperature. I can see set points for the fans, but have no control over them. In particular this got me out reading the ACPI 4.0 specification, and it explicitly mentions this choice of favouring 'Active' vs 'Passive' as being done by configuring the passive trip point setting to a higher value than the low & high active trip points. In the ACPI 4 spec (page 409) it says:

To implement a preference towards performance or energy conservation,
OSPM can request that the platform change the priority of active cooling
(performance) versus passive cooling (energy conservation/silence) by evaluating
the _SCP (Set Cooling Policy) object for the thermal zone or a corresponding
OS-specific interface to individual devices within a thermal zone.

This laptop is showing 'passive' at 95000 millidegrees celsius, and 'active' at 55000 / 75000 so right in line with the suggestion. However I don't see any way in Linux to change these trip point values, and in any case I'm not convinced the laptop is actually obeying them at all. It should be that if I do nothing on the laptop for a while the temperature would surely drop below 55 degrees celsius. Surely a modern laptop will sit at under 40 degrees when it's quiescent, and the temperature sensor that does show me something sits at around 30 degrees in this too, 26.8, to be overprecise. That one doesn't budge either. Looking in /sys/ I can't for the life of me find a way to set that cooling policy, and when I disassemble the DSDT it looks like a noop... Thinking that perhaps there was a newer BIOS, I looked at the Dell site and found there was one. Great! Investigating even further, it seems Dell hardware has some interesting capability via libsmbios and some utilities which will let me install my BIOS from a Linux system... even better! Linux is a second-class citizen though, and when I look for the Dell BIOS Hdr file I need there is no version of the file for this laptop - let alone the current BIOS version. And when I download the BIOS from Dell's website and unzip the first layer of packaging I find that both of the files inside will only run on Windows. I added a FreeDOS boot stanza to Grub 2 in order to discover this, also discovering in the process that this is not well explained, and I could not find how to do it on the FreeDOS or Grub2 websites, so in passing, here is what I added into /etc/grub/40_custom :

menuentry 'BIOS Flash 1558 A09' --class os  
        set root='(hd0,msdos1)'
        linux16 /boot/memdisk
        initrd16  /boot/1558_A09.img
 

Which certainly does boot FreeDOS from Grub2, into the image built from the 8M FreeDOS base image, and which I called '1558_A09.img' because that seems to be one of Dell's reference numbers for this model / BIOS version. So still no BIOS update for Andrew, it seems, and the laptop is probably going to continue to be noisy for some time. Possibly forever. Suspend/Resume works though. Kernel mode-setting for the ATI Radeon Mobility HD 5450 (or whatever it is) seems to work. Building kernels seems to work. The Blu-ray drive seems to work, at least as far as reading CDs - just because I got a laptop with a "Full HD" screen doesn't mean I watch movies on it: those pixels are for programming on! In any case, after reading the literature of pain about playing Blu-ray disks on Linux I'm convinced that we won't be shelling out to buy one any any time soon. After a bit more frustration I did manage to get the BIOS installed, using the hack I found here of running the Windows BIOS update under Wine and copying the BIOS file out of the temp directory while the error message is displayed. I could then download a random DOS-installable Phoenix BIOS to get copy of phlash16.exe and put those two files on the FreeDOS image I created earlier. Finally I was able to put that learning about how to boot FreeDOS from Grub2 to good use! Unfortunately, having jumped through all of those hoops (including the frustration of trying to build and use Dell's firmware-extract tools on a Debian system), the fan continues to grind away at annoying volume, with no way that I have been able to find to control it, and the temperature sensors also seem wrong, since one doesn't budge from 0 and the other doesn't budge from 26800. During boot I get a bunch of error messages, like:

[    1.049936] \_SB_.PCI0:_OSC invalid UUID
[    1.052202] pci 0000:00:1c.0: PME# supported from D0 D3hot D3cold
[    1.052210] pci 0000:00:1c.0: PME# disabled
[    1.065228] pci 0000:07:00.2: PME# supported from D0 D1 D2 D3hot D3cold
[    1.065237] pci 0000:07:00.2: PME# disabled
[    1.079086] Unable to assume PCIe control: Disabling ASPM
[    1.086412] HEST: Table is not found!
[    1.249906] ACPI: Fan [FAN0] (off)
[    1.249959] ACPI: Fan [FAN1] (off)
[    1.250093] [Firmware Bug]: ACPI: ACPI brightness control misses _BQC function
[    1.259118] acpi device:02: registered as cooling_device2
[    1.262132] thermal LNXTHERM:01: registered as thermal_zone0
[    1.262139] ACPI: Thermal Zone [TZ00] (27 C)
[    1.262561] thermal LNXTHERM:02: registered as thermal_zone1
[    1.262571] ACPI: Thermal Zone [TZ01] (0 C)
[    1.262598] ERST: Table is not found!
[    2.769664] i801_smbus 0000:00:1f.3: PCI INT C -> GSI 18 (level, low) -> IRQ 18
[    2.769670] ACPI: resource 0000:00:1f.3 [io  0x1840-0x185f] conflicts with ACPI
                         region SMBI [bus 1840-184f pref window disabled]
[    2.769672] ACPI: If an ACPI driver is available for this device, you should use it
                         instead of the native driver

I don't yet know what this all means, so I guess I'll be signing up for the linux-acpi mailing list to see if there's anything I can do to get things working better. Any pointers will be gratefully received :-) Right about now I wonder if maybe I should have gone for the HP or the Asus, even if they were a little heavier and a bit more expensive and next time I get a new laptop I must remember not to spend more than $900 (USD$600) on it. [Updated: 2010-09-08... Noise Problems Solved

In case anyone else hasn't found these tweaks:

termcapinfo xterm xterms xs rxvt ti@:te@

In ~/.screenrc gives you Shift-PageUp and Shift-PageDown control again, without resorting to Ctrl-A Esc, inside screen. (Best to do

$ cp /etc/screen.rc ~/.screenrc

as a starting point first, if not done already.)

Also:

/set scroll_page_count /2

/save

In irssi itself (easier than editing the config) gives you internal PageUp, PageDown control within the irssi window.

In each case, the manpage is so long and impenetrable that these may be obvious to those with a special knowledge of terminals but mere mortals like me can't find it in / understand the docs.