[Note: I wrote this more than three weeks ago, but due to me being lazy again (yeah right) I’m just publishing this now. Well, here goes:] Due to a project working on (in Perl,) I’m asking the great Lazyweb for their great insight into the problem of sending outgoing mails. It all started when I was trying to set up my own mail system on my laptop perlis. After months of doing most of my mails under GMail and finding it impressive, but not quite adequate for my needs, I decided to go back to my old desktop workflow of downloading all my mails using ESR’s fetchmail over IMAP, and using my preferred MUA (Gnus, in this case to write my replies/posts/spam and send them using an MTA. However, since the time I’ve been checking my mails on revan, the amount of mail that I have been receiving has gone up to less than manageable proportions for my old system, so I had to revise my way of getting my email fix. Ultimately, I went on to use John Goerzen’s offlineimap to synchronize my IMAP Maildirs locally and do my mail stuff from there. No problem at the receiving front. On the sending of emails, I ran to a slight problem. I used to use an MTA to relay my mails to a smarthost for delivery, but since things have changed a bit (new ISP that blocks port 25, for one I have to find some other means. Although I could probably configure my MTA to use (and authenticate to) a smarthost, I found that approach to be too heavy for comfort (even when using a special-purpose MTA such as masqmail.) Furthermore, I’d like to have more control on how I send my mails (like which mails using one of my email addresses should go to a particular smarthost.) So, here is my attempt to solve my problem: a small, user-configurable mail submission agent. It small because it is written in Perl, and makes the most out of it (being a Perl user means you gotta love CPAN It’s user-configurable, involving a small INI-style file in the user’s home directory (I would prefer, however, to do away with tinkering with config-files altogether and do all configuration via some friendly interface.) It’s not much, but it works. And it’s working for the past three weeks or so now. I call it kartero because its the Spanish-Filipino word for postman (and yes, that’s exactly what my program does. It’s not much, but you can pick it up and try it yourself. Complaints; violent reactions: you know where to send them.

• The latch is badly designed
• MacOSX 10.4.9
• heavy (compared to an X40)
• 2 USB ports? That’s it? I accidentally jab the Firewire port with my USB devices
• That camera looks tiny
• Amazed how it detected the open wireless network. nice.
• Slow
• Track pads are terrible. Even my Dad concedes he hates it. Give us a nipple anyday.
• Plugging in my external USB fat32 hard drive didn’t work! With nfs to access my media, I was surprised how to listen an mp3, you have to copy the file into Itunes. Omg. And watching a movie. Quicktime with no fullscreen playback. OUCH.
• I’ve had to get used to looking at the top bar carefully
• ctrl+trackpad button is right click. OMG. Pain.
• samba doesn’t seem to work right
• I can’t figure out how to scroll through photos. I think there is some crap Canon image software (why do camera manufacturers seem compelled to ship terrible software with their hardware?) getting in my way here.
• Quite noisy when doing something
• Software update doesn’t seem able to resume unlike Debian. :(
• It absolutely HOGS the Internet connection! WTF! Do I have to implement QoS now? How can my Debian machines share the Internet and Wireless nicely, but not this Macbook?
• Can’t shut it down after an update
• Zoom is pretty cool for my dad
• I am slowly starting to discover the shortcuts and how to manage Windows. Alt+Tab fealt wrong though. Can’t launch dictionary. Maybe it’s not installed?
• The interface isn’t that great. Intuitive my ass. They often move the close button about.
• Updating Itunes, “Please quit iTune before conti…” Pity it can’t update a running application like Debian.
• Installing .dmg files isn’t nearly as easy as apt-get
• When I close the lid, it stops doing what it supposed to do. I HATE THAT. If you have power, do not suspend whatever.
• The shell and some sensible default applications like vim is quite nice
• I’m not a fan of the widescreen dimensions.

Btw this is my Dad’s Macbook. I’m still married to Debian SID and a Thinkpad.

Now that's what I call ironic: Pam Jones (Groklaw) links to an article about a report authored by Lauro DiDio, and seems to agree, at least partially. (Actually, the article PJ links to just links to another article about the report, and the report itself apparently isn't available online.) I suggest we ask Rob Enderle what he has to say about this situation.

As I have stated here long ago, I do not really believe in the Debian Project Leader. Yes, it has an importance. Yes, it's not merely a decoration figure. But I do doubt it can really make much of a difference. I don't hold exactly the point of view I held back then, but it's still quite close ;-) Anyway...

[ 1 ] Choice 1: Wouter Verhelst
[ 7 ] Choice 2: Aigars Mahinovs
[ 3 ] Choice 3: Gustavo Franco
[ 2 ] Choice 4: Sam Hocevar
[ 4 ] Choice 5: Steve McIntyre
[ 4 ] Choice 6: Rapha l Hertzog
[ 5 ] Choice 7: Anthony Towns
[ 3 ] Choice 8: Simon Richter
[ 6 ] Choice 9: None Of The Above

As it's not a post I strongly believe in, with that many proposals in play, I cannot say I thoroughly reviewed each of the platforms/rebuttals/debate (I did follow them all, of course). I agree with most of what most of them propose (Sorry, Aigars, but I don't agree with you a bit ;-) ). One thing is, yes, worth noting: During the dunc-tank brouhaha, I spoke very little, but was mostly supportive of AJ's pushing a real new proposal. Why am I ranking lowish AJ, Rapha l and Steve (who were, after all, in there)? Because I did really appreciate AJ having the guts of pushing, of being brave enough to go into uncalm territories trying to change Debian. Is that the change I want? No, I don't really think so, so I'm not voting him (or Steve, as the 2IC, or Rapha l, as one of the board members) very high. And yes, one of the reasons I'm ranking Wouter first is his tendency not to be too passionate in flamefests. And, of course, not having much of a platform - Having an overly ambitious platform which would change the conception of Debian both towards the inside and towards the outside is completely unrealistic. And that's one of Aigars' cardinal sins :)

Life sometimes goes in a funny direction, like a full circle d j vu: 20 years ago, I was studying Technology of Computerized Systems (a combination of electronics and programming). Now, 20 years later, I'm starting a dream job as the Business Development Manager of Artec Group and their core business is you guessed it exactly that. The really cool thing about Artec, from a Free Software advocate's point of view, is that they contribute firmware and drivers for their products to LinuxBIOS and the Linux kernel. At this point, my initial tasks will focus on marketing and selling Artec's flagship OEM product, the ThinCan. What is the ThinCan? Actually, you're already familiar with one iteration of the product: the Linutop is a branded ThinCan, delivered with a custom hardware configuration, plus custom casing artwork designed by Fr d ric Baille of Linutop SARL and loaded with Fred's favorite Xubuntu configuration. In the Linutop's case, their business model is to fill the market niche for a simple Internet surfing platform that fits 80% of average people's daily computing needs, so the hardware configuration they ordered reflects that. Still, as several readers of this blog noticed, the "Linutop" could make a fantastic thin client and, sure enough, that was the main purpose behind the ThinCan's original design; it sells well in the Fortune-500 market as an RDP client running under Windows CE. However, until recently, there simply wasn't much demand for a contemporary X11 terminal solution based on the ThinCan. That is, until LTSP took off, thanks to the contributions of Edubuntu and similar educational Linux distributions. Sure enough, someone spotted the opportunity and contacted Artec to order a branded ThinCan iteration with Etherboot and PXE support, which they call the Linuterm. By the way, for those who need a really cheap OEM thin client, I've got a great spring clearance offer for you:

Artec has about 500 pieces left of their older DBE60 ThinCan model, based on the AMD Geode SC2200, and we're selling them at 100 euro / piece, plus VAT and shipping.

The DBE60 is configured with three USB 1.1 ports, one parallel printer port, one 100baseT Ethernet port, one VGA port (up to 1024x768 @ 16bpp 60-85Hz or 1280x1024 @ 8bpp 60-75Hz) and one 1/8" stereo audio output jack. Its BIOS provides Etherboot support and its motherboard is populated with 64MB of RAM and 32MB of Stratoflash. It comes delivered with a European AC adapter. The Geode SC2200 is fully supported by the Linux kernel with the sole exception of a missing ALSA snd-scx200, but this could easily be ported from AMD's deprecated OSS driver and X.org support is provided by the "nsc" driver.

Minimum order size is 10 pieces. Contact me via my full name (unaccented, with one hyphen and one dot) at artecgroup.com quoting this special offer.

PS: someone was asking if that DBE60 special is also available in the aforementioned Fortune-500 configuration. It indeed is: add 16 euro / piece for the Windows CE 4.1 license with an RDP client.

The major problem — one of the major problems, for there are several — one of the many major problems with governing people is that of who you get to do it; or rather of who manages to get people to let them do it to them. To summarize:- It is a well known and much lamented fact that those people who most want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it.

It’s election time, as Debian Developer I get to chose who is going to be the Debian Project Leader for the next year - but I don’t really care. If we can’t get a naturally strong leader, then I don’t think it matters at all. A naturally strong leader is one who actually leads and do so by strong consensus instead of just wanting to rule. For a naturally strong leader the election is a mere formality and he will run virtually unopposed. So my vote is:

- - -=-=-=-=-=- Don't Delete Anything Between These Lines =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
e0acebd2-71f1-4df8-ae4d-50355ad7aa81
[ 1 ] Choice 1: Wouter Verhelst
[ 1 ] Choice 2: Aigars Mahinovs
[ 1 ] Choice 3: Gustavo Franco
[ 1 ] Choice 4: Sam Hocevar
[ 1 ] Choice 5: Steve McIntyre
[ 1 ] Choice 6: Rapha l Hertzog
[ 1 ] Choice 7: Anthony Towns
[ 1 ] Choice 8: Simon Richter
[ 1 ] Choice 9: None Of The Above
- - -=-=-=-=-=- Don't Delete Anything Between These Lines =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

What about “None of the Above” option? Isn’t that excatly what I want? No, not really. I don’t think we would be better of by not electing one of the candidates than we would by electing one of them. So “None of the Above” should be ranked equally with the others. Why vote at all? I want to make a point, as feeble as it is, which is clearly different from just being lazy. I want to show by active participation that I don’t think the election matters. Effectively a whatever option. Now go grab some beer…

I just voted :) Dunno yet if that worked, but if not, I'll manage... as I'm pretty tired I decided to vote one plattform, not person, the same as NOTA (as I really think those ideas won't do Debian any good, quite the contrary). Maybe I'll change that in a few days, dunno yet.

Due to being quite busy with work the last days or rather weeks, this was my first act as a DD, which I couldn't do before. I'm still using my guest-alioth account and due to the freeze (yay!) no uploads yet.

Quite to the contrary (not really, but I find it very ironic) I've build my first rpm yesterday :-) I ported fai to fedora... more on this soon.

Since a week ago debian-community.org runs on its own server, currently managed by three admins with fai. The webpage is still static html, but ikiwiki should be up on the weekend, in some free minutes I already looked into it and played with it on the new machine. I'll write a more detailed blog entry about this when it's ready.

#369666: "mailx is recommended, and that is the proper dependency, as it by default need mailx, but can be configured not to need it." Umm, call me crazy, but if you ship the package needing it by default, I call that a dependency. In my humble opinion, that bug should be release critical, as it renders the package unusable in its default installed state.

There were quite a lot of small changes in my personal e-mail, web server and DNS infrastructure during the last months. While for more than ten years all my mails came together on a Linux account at the Students Representatives of Computer Science (German: Fachschaftsrat Informatik, short: FS Info) at the University of Saarland and all but one domain was hosted at my former employer, now nearly everything (including this blog) has moved to a Hetzner root server run by me and some friends and running Debian Sarge for AMD64. Most of these moves happend divided in small steps during January and February this year. Only one move happend a little earlier than expected: Without any notice all external mail to my FS Info account got lost in a black hole one hop in front of the FS Info mail server. It looks like the RBG of the Dept. of CS at the University of Saarland didn’t like my face —eh— mails anymore and just dropped them. No bounces, no notices. Not that I knew them as friendly and kind, but blackholing active e-mail accounts without notice leads to dismissal at other places. They should really go and hear alphascorpii’s BOFH talk. So my long-time e-mail address abe@fsinfo.cs.uni-sb.de is no more valid and any mail there won’t get read or answered. But I don’t mind if you send any junk there, it’s not my job anymore. For luck the hoster of my deuxchevaux.org domain, Internett, which I used for all non-university e-mail, changed the forward within a good hour, so I only lost incoming mails of about one and a half day (which was the time until I noticed the blackholing), namely most mails written to all of my addresses at 30th and 31st of January 2007. If you wrote me around that time and miss the answers, you now know why. The few people I expected mail from, already have been contacted. So for the future, write emails only to abe@ either deuxchevaux.org or — if you can’t remember how to spell that (no, you’re not the only one ;-) — noone.org (“no one” as in “nobody”, not “no. one” as in “the best” ;-) And so since then none of my coworkers can make fun of me because I don’t have root on the box where my mail is received. ;-) One of the moves also gave me the possibility to get “my own” Jabber server, so the time with those two jabber addresses (abe@jabber.noxa.de and abe@amessage.de), where usually at least one had some problems with some gateways are also over. If you want to contact me using Jabber, use abe@noone.org, equal to my easier to remember e-mail address. ;-) So there’s still left to move: web, mail and DNS of deuxchevaux.org and beckert.at (domain of my parents) and my old web pages on fsinfo.cs.uni-sb.de as well as Planet Symlink. And of course the redesign of my web pages, which I’ve planned since more than a half decade… ;-) The infrastructure in my real-life home also changed: My gateway to the world is now a 266 MHz MIPS based ASUS WL500g Premium (which I named “pluriel” after the multifunctional Citroën C3 Pluriel) running FreeWRT 1.0.1 which replaced tryane, an as noisy (power supply fan) as compact Unisys Aquanta CP mini-desktop with a passively cooled 200 MHz Pentium MMX.

The Children’s Online Protection Act, or COPA, requires website operators who provide commercial material that could be “harmful to minors” to verify their users’ age, for example, with a credit card. The statute was immediately challenged as unconstitutional under the First Amendment. A preliminary injunction against enforcement of the law was upheld by the Supreme Court, which remanded the matter for factual development as to whether filters could accomplish the same purpose while interfering less with free speech. (Ironically, the ACLU found itself in the unusual position of arguing for Internet filters in this case.) It was just about one year ago that the Government sought to enforce a subpoena against Google for records of user queries and URLs stored in Google’s database. The court granted the motion with respect to stored URLs but not queries in Gonzales v. Google. It was never quite clear what the Government would really do with the data or why they pushed so hard to get it after receiving what they needed from other search providers. (The U.S. apparently argued Google’s search results would “add luster” to its analysis). In any case, the statute has now finally been held unconstitutional. As Ed Felten insightfully points out, unlike in previous instances where courts have struck down Internet speech regulation, in his opinion, Judge Reed did not provide a roadmap for Congress to try yet again to enact a law that would pass First Amendmend muster. Maybe Congress will leave the issue alone for a while:

Two things make the judge s ruling relatively roadmap-free. First, it is based heavily on factual findings that Congress cannot change things like the relative effectiveness of filtering and the amount of HTM material that originates overseas beyond the effective reach of U.S. law. (Filtering operates on all material, while COPA s requirements could have been ignored by many overseas sites.) Second, the alternative it offers requires only voluntary private action, not legislation. Congress has already passed laws requiring schools and libraries to use content filters, as a condition of getting Federal funding and with certain safeguards that are supposed to protect adult access. The courts have upheld such laws. It s not clear what more Congress can do. Judge Reed s filtering alternative is less restrictive because it is voluntary, so that computers that aren t used by kids, or on which parents have other ways of protecting kids against HTM material, can get unfiltered access. An adult who wants to get HTM material will be able to get it. Doubtless Congress will make noise about this issue in the upcoming election year. Protecting kids from the nasty Internet is too attractive politically to pass up. Expect hearings to be held and bills to be introduced; but the odds that we ll get a new law that makes much difference seem pretty low.

Who of us, computer literate people, is not used to multitasking when working? We are bombed with information from different sources when in front of computer and we try to get the info as soon as it is produced. But this is no the only environment when you made things in a multitask way: I am sure you have tried to cook while you clean or you read Slashdot at the same time, however not the way your mother does (it is not that my mother reads Slashdot, though), who puts on the fire something that is long to be cooked, and then goes for house cleaning. You try to do that almost at the same time in realtime: pity you don't have a core duo brain and body. The problem is that all we think that this way we perform more: "hey! we are doing a lot of stuff at the same time!" You reply the email as soon as it arrives, though you were writing that report your boss asked you in about that issue, and at the same time you can even drink a coffee, and IM your friend about which movie are you going to watch tonight. But this article in New York Times can help you to see that this is not true. As any CPU out there is penalized when multitasking, as it has to change context, the same happens to us, but for our brain that gap is longer. It is not a good idea to try to multitask and at the end not achieve any of the goals we made. Perhaps this is the reason that can explain Debian Etch release delay. Stop multitasking!

Well, obviously this one needs a shorter name. The problem I'm trying to solve here is that SONAMEs, or rather the way they are used today, only handle the issue of a single, fully contained library changing ABI as one of its header files changes. However, libraries do not exist in a vacuum; as a bare minimum, they use definitions for types and alignment requirements built into the compiler, and if any of these changes, so does the library ABI. Hence, the idea of using a single number to denote the ABI is not really sufficient. The correct solution would be to embed all ABI information into the soname (libapt-pkg, for example, uses "libapt-pkg-libc6.3-6.so.3.11" on amd64, which is better but still not perfect). Obviously, this would require massive changes to the build scripts in all libraries and educating all library authors, so it is not going to happen (soon). So, what other options are there? As the kernel ABI (the syscall interface) is supposed to be really stable, we probably do not have to worry about that. So, we only have a problem if there are libraries with different assumptions about each others' ABI in the same userspace program. This can happen in two ways: The compiler changed (as in the case with the recent C++ transitions), or a library that is an indirect dependency of something that also has another dependency (direct or indirect) changes ABI. I've talked (briefly) about the former in an earlier post already. To illustrate the latter, a small example: There is a library, libuseful.so.0 that provides a number of functions, among these: struct complex_number

  float real;
  float imaginary;

 
void complex_multiply(
  struct complex_number *result,
  struct complex_number const *lhs,
  struct complex_number const *rhs); Now another library, libresourceful.so.0, comes along and implements complex_divide on top of complex_multiply. Since the definition for complex numbers from libuseful makes a lot of sense, the include file for libresourceful reads #include "libuseful.h"
 
void complex_divide(
  struct complex_number *result,
  struct complex_number const *lhs,
  struct complex_number const *rhs); Now one of the more serious people in Debian decides to write pointless 1.0, which takes two complex numbers and calculates (a*b)/a, using both complex_multiply and complex_divide, and links against libresourceful.so.0 and libuseful.so.0. Some time passes, and shortly before Debian freezes, libuseful's author decides that she needs more precision, so she changes the floats to doubles, bumps the SONAME and releases the new version. Shortly thereafter, someone notices that libresourceful is now using an outdated version of libuseful, and recompiles libresourceful. Since the header of libresourceful did not change, noone thinks of changing the SONAME, after all, changing it would render us incompatible with other distributions. Now, pointless 1.0 depends on libuseful.so.0 and libresourceful.so.0, which in turn uses libuseful.so.1. It still believes complex numbers are made from floats, however libresourceful now disagrees. The (a*b) expression is calculated correctly, using floats, however the result is then passed to the complex_divide function which expects a pair of doubles. Not good. Obviously, there is a number of things people have done wrong in this example. First of all, if you inherit type definitions or anything else from another library, your ABI becomes bound to theirs. As you cannot know statically what version your library will be linked against, you need a script that computes your ABI version at build time. If you do not want that, you need to repeat the type definitions in your header and (deep-)copy the data from one of your structures into one provided by the library you are using (I can already hear the screams of the performance fetishists). The assumption that, just because a dependency changed, there is not necessarily a need to bump the soname is not fundamentally incorrect; if no interfaces are being propagated, it is certainly correct, and most libraries do not really do this (for example, a HTTP library uses the resolver, but never passes the hostent structures upwards). Detecting this is difficult to do, although Sun has a few tools to help here. So where does that leave us? In my opinion, the most sensible thing a distribution can do is to make sure such a constellation never gets installed to an user's system. If there is any doubt, we need to err on the side of caution (aka use a bigger hammer). This is a "wacky ideas" post, so I also need to propose a totally untested thing that might work (or not), but at least has passed the stage of me sleeping a night over it. Ideally, dpkg would enforce that. In order to do that, it needs appropriate metadata that tells it that a certain constellation is probably wrong. The thing we want to avoid is an application using multiple versions of the same library at the same time, where "use" is denoted by a dependency relationship. So what we need is a way for a library package to declare that it is wrong to (indirectly) depend on this package and a package out of a certain group at the same time. I can see two ways of doing that, each with its own advantages and disadvantages: The "explicit" way is to add a new dependency relationship (that is where the subject "Conflicts-If-in-Same-Dependency-Tree" comes from), where you would conflict in this way with a virtual package that is named after your library without the SONAME version, and at the same time provide that virtual package (which is a technique that should not be unfamiliar to Debian people). The hypothetical libuseful above would then state Package: libuseful0
Provides: libuseful
Conflicts-If-in-Same-Dependency-Tree: libuseful So installing pointless_1.0 would pull in libuseful0 and libuseful1, dpkg would see the conflict and refuse. For upgrades, it would refuse the libresourceful0 upgrade, as that would create an inconsistent situation. The only way out of there is to recompile pointless. The advantage is that the modifications to dpkg would be manageable (at least compared with the other option, which I will introduce shortly), the obvious disadvantage is the massive number of virtual packages introduced. The "implicit" way of doing that is moving the SONAME into its own field in the control file, and teaching dpkg that two packages with the same name and different SONAME fields can be installed at the same time, although not depended on by the same package. This is a really nasty change to dpkg and also requires a syntax for dependencies that includes the desired SONAME version, but it gives us a lot of other advantages. The one immediately visible is that it does not bloat the Packages file too much, and does not introduce lots of virtual packages, although the net effect inside apt and dpkg is probably going to be the same. A really cool side effect though would be that the soname is no longer part of the Package: field, and thus it becomes possible to insert it using substvars. This, of course, is a cool thing when library authors come to their senses and include ABI information for dependent libraries into their SONAMEs. Since this has gotten lengthy, thanks for reading this far. Of course, questions and comments are requested, and if you are interested in pursuing this, please get in touch, either via email or if you can wait that long, at the "Wacky Ideas" BoF at DebConf. The last thing for me to do here is to welcome Joachim to the "post your ideas" "meme".

A while back, I entered a competition to win one of a few prizes. The results came in, and it looks like I was a runner up, netting me a Mac Mini.

First, a rant about Mac OS X. It appears that there is no way to:

• Use a non-mac keyboard without using an external keyboard definition file
• Set the MTU for wireless connections
• Set the 'switch windows' to something other than the awful ctrl+F4
• Set the end and home keys to go to the start and end of the input line, respectively

They also asked me to " become one of our evangelists and tell your developer friends and colleagues about Zimki".
Well, I'm not so sure about evangelism, but I'll certainly blog about their platform, as it's fairly interesting.
So, what exactly is Zimki?
Well, it's basically a server side Javascript parser, based on SeaMonkey. The thought of using Javascript as a server side language is, initially, enough to make you run a thousand miles. After you get over your initial shock of this and examine it a little more closely, it does make at least a moderate amount of sense. It's entirely OO, so you should be able to pull in common functionality, perfect for the quick deployment of Webapps that Zimki is designed for.
Of course, this does rely on having the core libraries available. The only ones which seem to exist at the moment are:

• trimpath.js - a JavaScript templating language
• wiky.js - a Wiki markup language
• feed.js - an RSS / Atom feed generator

So, I can make a wiki which uses a template, and outputs it as an RSS feed. The rest I have to code myself - or do I?
This brings me nicely on to the next issue: documentation. There is a thorough lack of it. Thus, more classes may exist, but who knows. This is my MAJOR bugbear about Zimki. Give developers docs, and a nice coding environment, and they're happy. Zimki doesn't have either. Oh wait? I haven't mentioned the coding environment?
All editing seems to be done via a text box with some AJAX magic on the save button. But the save button doesn't work in Linux. Oh, and you can't indent your code. And you can't use a local editor.

This may sound all doom-and-gloom for Zimki, but it isn't. The editor could do with some attention, but it's not a show stopper. Zimki does manage to throw together HA concepts, backups and database (ish. The database object idea which Zimki uses is something I really don't like, but that's personal preference). The cost model they use is rather... odd. A charge is made for each call to the Zimki framework. I'm not a beancounter though, so I can't tell you how cheap/expensive this system is. If you know JavaScript well, and want to develop a complete webapp in it, this is certainly a good tool.

Now hopefully they'll get some documentation together and so people can actually USE the thing. If you're bored, why not play with my app that I wrote.

Marc, that's fairly easy. HUB really stands for Hosed Utter Beast (yes, I just have had one of them break this morning. Well, it was a SWITCH, not a HUB, oh well...), WEB is all that's Weird, Erotic or Broken. HTH.

Yesterday I went to bed too late because I was captivated by the last episode of The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom, a series by Adam Curtis. Even since I saw Pandora's Box I've been an avid viewer of his work. The Trap talks about what freedom is, and this morning I realised that many things he talked about can be seen in the OSS world, and more specifically in Debian. I'm certain Biella can write something much better (and shorter) and I'm still thinking about it, but I wanted to write some stuff down.
One of the main ideas is the modern western culture has been formed to appeal for people thinking like a model in the 'prisoners dilemma': they only case to further themselves. This lead to the idea that life (not only the economy) should be like a free market, and that people should be 'free' to choose what they liked. Of course in practice the rich are 'free' to send their kids to better schools then the poor who are 'free' but constrained to send their kids to worse schools. The program called this negative freedom: there is constrained freedom. Think of it as Microsoft's vision of freedom, their 'freedom to innovate' (which they don't), your freedom to select which of the N licences of vista is good enough for you. This limited freedom is more stable then the positive freedom that is actual seeking true freedom, without constraints. This positive freedom was then developed by Satre, Fanon and Shariati into the idea that true freedom could only be gained by armed struggle, to gain freedom but also an identity that transcends the simple individual.
The whole idea of the two freedoms was described by Isaiah Berlin and he also had the idea that freedom can only be gained by limiting the power of the state over the individual, otherwise both concepts of freedom would become tyrannical because the powers that be would decide what freedom is, and then suppress anybody that does not agree with that idea. Examples are the communists in the USSR, but also how the Americans turned to torture, imprisonment without tribunal to 'liberate the Iraqi people'. Or older still the Reign of Terror during the French revolution.
All of this has some relevance to OSS and Debian in particular. Don't we search freedom from constraints (licences, absence of source)? Don't we want a revolution in the use of computers? Are we not using disruptive means to get it? The introduction of a samba file-server in a pure MS environment by a disgruntled admin who just wants stuff to work could be seen as being almost a terrorist method of working. Not that we want to terrorise the population, but make them aware that an alternative exists. And this to chance the system. Sometimes the whole mindset does seem to be a little too much confrontational, almost towards having a real conflict. Just think about the many references that some disaster should wipe out the Seattle area. Are we not at risk of becoming tyrannical in many ways? Ignoring any Debian discussions, there is the whole FreeBSD/OpenBSD split, people complaining that wikipedia is removing contents the consider valuable, projects refusing to create howto's and introductions to keep the newbies away etc. OOS does seem to have a tendency to become tyrannical in some aspects. Not that this is always bad, see the benevolent dictators handling the Linux kernel or python.
If I understand the idea's correctly it means that even if we want freedom, from the moment we start using the powers of the project to limit somebody we start the slide towards being oppressive and tyrannical. Somehow I fear that all this will lead to a lot of reading and thinking...

Dear Lazyweb, I was asked if I could easily setup a system with the following characteristics for a sport club:

• A server in the office room (= locked) hosts the music library
• Two clients (for the two training rooms) are connected to the server
• Each rooms' client can select it's own music (preferrably using a touch screen), pause, play and pitch.
• Trainers can create, save and recall playlists for their class
• It should be possible to associate additional metadata to the music, such as measures-per-minute speed information.
• If possible trainers should be able to generate playlists remotely using a VPN connection; however it needs to be ensured that they cannot download the music this way (the sport club has a license for music use in training classes, but obviously not for anything else)

Two setups I was considering:

• NSLU2 and some USB disks as storage
• DAAP on the NSLU2 for music serving
• Rythmbox, Banshee or maybe even iTunes as client

This would likely require the least effort. It doesn't offer the playlist features I wanted (or only partially), and there are some access control limitations. No remote access. But for example the clients could even be Windows boxes I wouldn't have to deal with myself.

• Full linux server, maybe NSLU2 would be fast enough?
• Two MPD instances running there, streaming the audio to the clients
• Clients with a small GTK or Web UI to control MPD instances on server

Has better playlist sharing capabilities, and the web UI could probably be used remotely, too. But MPD doesn't allow extra metadata such as BPM information, it would need to be modified. Much more work. Maybe some solution using XMMS2 or VLC would also be possible. And the ideal solution would allow some pitching. Do you have any recommendations for me? Please send them via EMail to erich AT debian DOT org. IMHO, the key factor will actually be the UI for the trainers. It should allow them to easily locate a song when needed, or put a couple of songs into a playlist to use during their class. Carzy DJ mixing capabilities aren't needed; party evens will likely have a real DJ around. This setup is solely meant to help the trainers getting their music ready in no time. Right now there are always issues with cables gone missing, CDs in the wrong covers, CD readers not reading certain CDs, etc. pp. And after all CDs have a pretty bad usability; you can't reorder songs easily according to your needs, and you'll often have to switch CDs. Having the music on a harddisk and using playlists can offer some good improvements here. So instead the UI should allow easy searching of tracks, easy access to a large number of playlists and such key functionality. Note that this is just an idea floating around so far; I don't know if it will become reality sometime. Adding some PCs to the rooms, eventually even with a touch screen, is some expenditure; that money might be better spent differently.

This wasn't very widely announced but last week featured a partial sun eclipse over central, south and east Asia. The eclipse was really partial but happening at sunrise in some countries, it gave some opportunities to shoot very nice pictures such as these ones:

• Goa silhouettes
• Turan sunsire

The new moon, combined with a Venus conjonction, also offered this nice view from Lisbon which is one the nicest cities in Europe, IMHO. Good opportunity for those of you who didn't alreay know about the Astronomy Picture of the Day to learn about it, add Jamie Zawinski's RSS feed (http://www.jwz.org/cheesegrater/RSS/apod.rss) to your feed reader and just enjoy one nice picture daily.

(Title stolen from Holger Levsen) Whenever I see this image [mozilla open Standards], I want to make a spoof of it titled: Every time you make an Ajax app, god kills a firefox. But I would certainly be violating Mozilla trademarks by doing so (their artwork, logos and trademarks such as "firefox" are not OpenSource). Anyway: AJAX is a hackaround, in particular it is not an open standard. Please use it only where it's really needed. Granted, there is worse (e.g. Flash; prepare for incompability hell now that the first opensource plugin can playback youtube videos - as you might be aware, many Linux distributions can not ship Adobe Flash, so they'll likely start shipping this plugin as soon as it's somewhat working sufficiently; or ActiveX which only works with MSIE...), but that's not really a good excuse for this abuse of Javascript that is called AJAX. On a side note, since I already mentioned flash - I can really recommend the Flashblock mozilla extension. A must have: you can view any flash if you need to by just clicking on it, but they won't be loaded automatically anymore. So you can easily access youtube (just one extra click!), but won't be bothered by flash ads and such stuff. Oh, and Adobe. They're probably the biggest blocker for a widespread Linux adoption judging by this article [computerworld.com], which is already very positive on Linux ("Unlike many of the applications included on new Windows systems, these don't seem to come with annoying self-launching advertisements, such as the irony-challenged Trend Micro Anti-Spyware pop-up upgrade pleas that plagued my HP system at home."): maybe his biggest issue is that he couldn't just run his Adobe Photoshop Elements on Linux. Of course there are application trying to offer the same functionality; starting with Gimp, digiKam and Krita (and I'm not sure he tried Krita and digiKam as well; they are probably more similar to Adobes product), but I can understand his wish to be able to continue using the same applications. (My personal recommendation: start using Opensource applications on Windows, e.g. Firefox, Thunderbird, Inkscape (great vector graphics program!) (and it's using open standards: SVG), Gaim (multi-protocol instant messenger and tons of others. They're free, so even if you don't use them every day, you didn't waste money on them... and if you happen to like them: you can be sure that they'll be working the same if you do the switch to Linux at some point in the future. Be prepared for when Microsoft says you PC is too old.

I abandoned paper calendars in 1997. For a few years I used various Palm devices, then Evolution. For the most part, this has worked fine. One of the drawbacks is that I have not had any info in my calendar about official holidays in Finland. That would be useful so that I would know when other people are going to be responding to e-mail slowly, and get annoyed if I call them on business. Evolution can deal with several calendars at the same time, and can import calendar files in various formats. A couple of years ago I found an iCal file with Finnish holidays, and imported that to Evolution, but it's out of date by now. This week I decided to look for a new one, but before I did, Droidy, the fastest interface to search engines, found one for me. Unfortunately, it was severly lacking, and did not even include Midsummer Eve, the biggest summer festivity in Finland. I then decided to make my own. I skimmed the web pages of The Almanac Office at University of Helsinki. They used to have the monopoly on making calendars in Finland (and what a silly anachronism that was), and they still have the copyright on name days, but that stuff doesn't interest me. The list of holidays is uncopyrightable, and that's the info I extracted from their pages. I also looked at the list of times when food stores are allowed to be open. That's actually more important to me than holidays. I ended up making two .ics files: aukiolot2007.ics for opening hours, and suomi2007.ics for the holidays. They're probably riddled with errors: if you find any, e-mail me and I'll fix and update. I hope they're of some use for someone. (I realize that someone is going to tell me about a complete and officially supported .ics file with all the above data as a response to this log entry. Good.)