When I first started using Free Software yes, that s quite some time ago I found it the right thing to do. It felt like I was first time ever really controlling what my computer does. Took just a bit of time to notice I really never knew anything about it. Well, almost at least. Then when I started contributing to Free Software this obviously changed. One of the freedoms is to learn from the code you re running. And I did it by reading, contributing, doing nonsense with it, reimplementing it you know the deal. Starting to work on Debian was something that just evolved out of it. Doing so gave me the opportunity to give back. I never achieved that actually, though. At least I don t consider my contributions even remotely sufficient to make up for the great deal of software that I use sometimes without noticing it. Still there s lots of stuff that I don t have a clue of and I rely on other developers to do their (volunteer) job. Otherwise my knowledge wouldn t help much. I could never continue kernel development if those kernel hackers all stepped back for instance. I guess, it s getting more and more difficult the closer the piece of code is to hardware. Another thought I had was about Free Software in general. It s more than just the code (although it might be the most important part), it s also a concept that needs to be communicated. Firefox on Windows shows how Free Software can have a big market share in an otherwise closed source environment. Yet I m not sure all users know about it being open source and what that means (hear them talk about Freeware instead). And who is dealing with this conceptual stuff? I decided to do something about all that. Now I don t really have money but a bit I thought I could share. And I could set yet another sign by publicly talking about it, or casually mentioning that I consider Free Software and Linux a good thing. So you will see a mail signature now below all my mails. I always wondered what one might gain with such and now I found a reason to include one. It reads:

Debian Developer                                 www.debian.org
Member of the Linux Foundation                    www.linux.com
Fellow of the Free Software Foundation Europe      www.fsfe.org

DebConf newbies: we want you! You've probably already read a nice blog post by Joey about the DebConf Newbies initiative. Let me recap in case you didn't: Debian will invest some money to explicit sponsor DebConf10 attendance for "non-regulars", i.e. for those that have not attended DebConf ever, or quite in a while. If you are interested you should check the wiki page and mail Joey as requested. (Including a big thank you to him would be more than appropriate, given that he'll be taking care of most gory details.) Why are we doing this and why is it separate from the regular DebConf sponsorship process? Answering the latter is rather easy. The initiative has sponsoring criteria different than regular DebConf sponsoring (which is well oiled and taken care of by the DebConf orga team) and it didn't seem fair to mix the two, possibly keeping out from regular sponsoring requests some people, just because of this new initiative. Also, as we're well past the deadline for requesting regular DebConf sponsoring, it wouldn't have been nice to induce extra work to the DebConf sponsoring team (and Joey has been kind enough to volunteer anyhow, so ... ). Answers to the former question (why are we doing this in the first place?) are possibly subjectives. My personal belief is that attending DebConf increases the enthusiasm of attendees and ultimately will make them better Debian citizens. It surely happened to me years ago: in the beginning of my Debian membership (as DD, since DMs did not exist back then) I just cared about my pet packages. It was only after meeting the Debian crowd in person at a FOSS event (LinuxTag 2004, IIRC) that I got really enthusiastic about Debian, gradually increasing my involvement in the project. I've never regretted it. I hope it can happen to some of you too, possibly starting with DebConf10.
See you in New York!

Last weekend, I went to the Grenslandhallen in Hasselt, to see Belgium compete against Estonia in a Fed Cup tie of the World Group playoffs. The winner of this tie would gain a seat in the top-tier World Group next year, which opens the possibility of winning this competition. The Belgian team was the strongest possible one, with all four best Belgian female tennis players Yanina Wickmayer, Kim Clijsters, Justine Henin, and Kirsten Flipkens. On paper, the team should not have had any problems beating the Estonian team. Unfortunately, Justine fractured her pinky finger during practice on wednesday; and while it did not make it impossible for her to play, it did reduce her fitness somewhat, which meant that on Saturday, Kim and Yanina had to defend the Belgian colors. They did and won, but then Kim injured some muscle in her foot, which made it hard for her to walk on Sunday, let alone play. With only Justine, Yanina, and Kirsten available, coach Appelmans chose to put Justine on the field. Though she made a valiant effort, she unfortunately did not manage to beat an unleashed Kaia Kanepi, who it must be said played a terrific match. As such, it fell on Yanina to bring home the tie in the fourth singles rubber against Maret Ani. Being a bit nervous in the start of the first set, she made some unnecessary errors; but after a few games, she came through and started to play much better. Unfortunately, by that time the score was already at 5-1. Yanina won her first service game of the match to bring it to 5-2, but it wasn't enough, and Ani won the first set somewhat easily. She couldn't put anything on the table against a storming Wickmayer, however, and after two more sets, the outcome of the match and, by extension, the tie was clear: a win for Belgium. I can't help but note that Wickmayer has been a great player for the Belgian fed cup team these past few years, however. Since her first Fed Cup participation in 2007, she holds what is, given her ranking at the time, a rather impressive 9-4 win-loss record in Fed Cup. If it wasn't for Wickmayer, the Belgian team would not be where it is now. It was Wickmayer who won her three matches against Canada, one as part of a doubles team, to prevent demotion from world group II to the Europe/Africa zone back in 2009, with a 3-2 score. It was Wickmayer who won the crucial third rubber against higher-ranked Radwanska in February to beat Poland, with the latter even holding the home field advantage. And it's now been Wickmayer who won two of the three rubbers against Estonia that were needed to win the tie. So Congrats, Yanina!

I'm going to Debconf 10:



I've also decided to put in a late submission for a talk about multistrap - a description of the new features in multistrap for creation of complex chroots and bootable root filesystems using apt to collect packages from multiple repositories and/or suites.

The current version of multistrap in experimental has gained a lot of features and will soon be migrating into Debian unstable where it will replace emdebian-rootfs and emsandbox - the old debootstrap scripts which haven't worked properly for a while. Documentation is lagging a bit but I'm in the process of updating the emdebian website with detailed docs on how multistrap can be used.

Also in NEW is pdebuild-cross, an extension to pbuilder which uses multistrap to create a cross-building chroot tarball and provides pbuilder hooks to allow svn-buildpackage to cross-build directly from SVN using pbuilder support. pdebuild-cross will, in time, replace most of the functionality in the old emdebian-tools package and dramatically simplify the dependencies of the old package in the process. The talk will briefly cover that too. pdebuild-cross is a little hamstrung by the well known bugs in apt-cross but alternatives can be easily incorporated when the time comes.

A serious limitation of the N900 connectivity subsystem IMHO is the inability to create multiple connections. One can only have one connection at a time. read more

Yesterday, my co-worker notified my about a promotion of 3DSupply and I recognized, that they have new design and you have also the choise to select from various models and colors for your shirts. I like the new site much more than the old.
For just speading they word, they offer to give a shirt (or any other item < 20 Eur) for free. So it seems to be a good idea to equip my dear wife, which is a teacher of catholic religion, with a new Jesus shirt.
Update: Today I got a reply from 3DSupply, stating that they deny the shirt request, cause I don t have 10 posts in the last 6 month. As this is unfortunately true, due my always limited time, I can t find this hard requirement in their terms. Looks like my blog doesn t match their minimal requirements and I m advised to equip my girls somewhere else with geekware. :o)

Sam Harris gave an interesting TED talk about whether there are scientific answers to moral questions [1]. One of his insightful points was that when dealing with facts certain opinions should be excluded it would be good if journalists who report on issues of science could understand this. Another insight was that religious people most strongly agree with him regarding the issue of whether there are factual answers to moral questions but they think that God just handed the answers to their ancesters rather than making it an issue that requires consideration. He cites the issue of gay marriage as being a distraction from moral issues such as genocide and poverty. He asks how have we convinced ourself that every culture has a point of view worth considering? . He asks how the ignorance of the Taliban on the topic of physics is any less obvious than on the topic of human well-being. Dan Gilbert gave an insightful TED talk titled Why Are We Happy? [2]. One interesting fact he cites is that people who become paraplegic are no less happy in the long term than people who win the lottery. He points out that a shopping mall full of Zen monks is not going to be particularly profitable and uses this fact to explain the promotion of natural happiness over synthetic happiness in our society. Dan Barber gave an amusing and informative TED talk How I Fell in Love with a Fish [3]. He speaks about ecological fish farming and how the fish are more tasty as well as the farm being good for the environment. The farm in question is in the south-west of Spain, hopefully there will be more similar farms in other parts of the world soon. Gary Lauder gave an interesting brief TED talk about road signs [4]. His main point was to advocate a road sign saying take turns , but there are already signs in the US at freeway on-ramps saying that 1 or 2 cars may enter every time the light turns green which is a similar concept. The innovative thing he did was to estimate the amount of time and petrol wasted by stop signs, add that over a year based on the average income and then estimate that an annuity covering that ongoing expense would cost more than $2,000,000. This makes two stop signs at an intersection have an expense of $1,000,000 each. He suggests that rather than installing stop signs it would be cheaper to buy the adjacent land, chop down all trees, and then sell it again. Alan Siegel gave an insightful TED talk about simplifying legal documents [5]. He gives an example of an IRS document which was analysed with a Heat Map to show which parts confused the readers the IRS adopted a new document that his group designed which made it easier for taxpayers. He advocates legislation to make legal documents easier to understand for customers of financial services. Tim Berners Lee gave an interesting TED talk about Open Data, he illustrated it with some fantastic videos showing how mashups have been used with government data [6] and how the Open Street Map project developed over time. Martin F. Krafft gave an interesting Debconf talk about Tool Adoption Behavior in the Debian project [7]. One thing that I found particularly interesting was his description of the Delphi Method that he used to assemble a panel of experts and gather a consensus of opinion. The post-processing on this talk was very good, in some sections Martin s presentation notes are shown on screen with the video of him in the corner. As an aside, I think we really do need camera-phones. The Big Money has an interesting article comparing the Mafia Bust Out with the practices of US banks [8]. Mark Roth gave an exciting TED talk about using Hydrogen Sulphide to trigger suspended animation [9]. They are now doing human trials for suspending people who have serious injuries to reduce tissue damage during the process of surgery. Pawan Sinha gave an interesting TED talk about how brains learn to see [10]. He started by talking about curing blindness in people who have been blind since birth. But he then ended by showing some research into the correlation between visual processing and Autism, he showed that an Autistic child had significantly different visual patterns when playing Pong to an NT child. Adora Svitak gave an insightful TED talk about what adults can learn from kids [11]. She made some particularly interesting points about the education system requiring that adults respect children more and expect them to do better than their parents which is essential for all progress in society. The NY Times has an interesting article on animal homosexuality [12]. In terms of research it focusses on lesbian relationships between albatrosses. But a large part of the article is devoted to the politics of scientific research into animal sexuality. BrowserShots.org shows you what your web site looks like in different web browsers [13]. Cory Doctorow wrote an insightful article titles Can You Survive a Benevolent Dictatorship about the Apple DRM [14]. He describes the way the Apple Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) doesn t stop copyright violation but does reduce competition in the computer industry. He is not going to sell his work on the Apple store (for the iPad or iPhone etc) and suggests that customers should choose a more open platform. It s unfortunate that he didn t suggest a better platform.

• [1] http://www.ted.com/talks/sam_harris_science_can_show_what_s_right.html
• [2] http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/dan_gilbert_asks_why_are_we_happy.html
• [3] http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_barber_how_i_fell_in_love_with_a_fish.html
• [4] http://www.ted.com/talks/gary_lauder_s_new_traffic_sign_take_turns.html
• [5] http://www.ted.com/talks/alan_siegel_let_s_simplify_legal_jargon.html
• [6] http://www.ted.com/talks/tim_berners_lee_the_year_open_data_went_worldwide.html
• [7] https://penta.debconf.org/dc9_schedule/events/381.en.html
• [8] http://www.thebigmoney.com/articles/money-trail/2010/03/19/bust-out?page=full
• [9] http://www.ted.com/talks/mark_roth_suspended_animation.html
• [10] http://www.ted.com/talks/pawan_sinha_on_how_brains_learn_to_see.html
• [11] http://www.ted.com/talks/adora_svitak.html
• [12] http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/04/magazine/04animals-t.html
• [13] http://browsershots.org/
• [14] http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/456751-Can_You_Survive_a_Benevolent_Dictatorship_.php

Starting about a year ago, I started following the release of videos from TED events. If one looked interesting, I would download the video to watch later. In this way, I accumulated a substantial collection of talks which I never managed to watch. I spent a Saturday evening working my way through the list. These are my favorites out of this batch.

• Daniel Kahneman: The riddle of experience vs. memory exploring the subtle and evasive nature of happiness, how we can study it, and the surprising way in which it manifests in our lives
• Alain de Botton: A kinder, gentler philosophy of success a critical look at how we evaluate ourselves and others, and how this shapes our social constructs
• Elizabeth Gilbert on nurturing creativity an insightful questioning of commonly held and accepted ideas about the creative process, and how they could be changed for the better
• David Logan on tribal leadership a taxonomy of tribal groups in modern society, and how leaders influence them
• Eric Dishman: Take health care off the mainframe a radical perspective on health care, and how technology can help to transform it into a more decentralized and personal system
• Erin McKean redefines the dictionary a humorous and accurate look at lexicography: where it came from, where it is and where it needs to go
• Janine Benyus: Biomimicry in action deriving design inspiration from natural systems
• Jill Bolte Taylor s stroke of insight a riveting first-person account of a stroke from a brain scientist: funny, bizarre, transcendent and awesome
• Margaret Wertheim on the beautiful math of coral coral reefs, non-euclidean geometry, general relativity and more unfold from a global community art project
• Temple Grandin: The world needs all kinds of minds a look at different types of mental capacities within the autism spectrum, how they create our perception of the world, and how they can be nurtured in young people

I recently bought a Belkin 600VA UPS (model F6S600auUSB) and here's what I had to do to setup the monitoring and automatic shutdown on Ubuntu 9.10 (karmic). (This procedure should work on recent versions of Debian as well.)

This UPS comes with a proprietary monitoring tool (written in Java) and you can find instructions to get this working on the Ubuntu forums, but I was looking for a free solution that would integrate well with the rest of the system. So after reading this blog post I decided to go with the Network UPS Tools project:

$ apt-get install nut

Once the nut package is installed, I edited /etc/nut/nut.conf to set:

MODE=standalone

and created the following files:

$ vim /nut/ups.conf

[belkinusb]
driver = megatec_usb
port = auto
desc = "Belkin UPS, USB interface"

$ vim /etc/nut/upsd.conf

# MAXAGE 15
# LISTEN 127.0.0.1 3493
# MAXCONN 1024

$ vim /etc/nut/upsd.users

[local_mon]
password = MYPASSWORD
upsmon master

$ vim /etc/nut/upsmon.conf

MONITOR belkinusb@localhost 1 local_mon MYPASSWORD master
POWERDOWNFLAG /etc/killpower
SHUTDOWNCMD "/sbin/shutdown -h +0"


Then all that was left to do was to restart nut:

$ /etc/init.d/nut restart

and check syslog for any errors:

$ tail /var/log/syslog

While nut is running, it will monitor the UPS and report any power problems to syslog. Once the UPS is running on battery, it will make sure the computer is safely shut down before power runs out.

Hopefully future versions of GNOME Power Manager will be able to integrate with nut directly and display battery information through its notification icon.

Since writing my post about whether the National Broadband Network can ever break even [1] I ve had a number of people try to convince me of it s merit. He is my summary and rebuttal of some of the arguments for the NBN: The FUD Claims are made that Australia may fall behind the rest of the world, children may be disadvantaged in their education, or many other bad things may unless a faster net access is provided to everyone. That is FUD. If we are going to spend $43,000,000,000 then we should have some evidence that it will do some good. One thing to note is that rural areas will not get anything near the 100Mb/s speeds that FTTH will deliver to people in the cities. So if faster net access is actually essential then it would probably make sense to start by delivering ADSL2+ speeds to rural areas something that is not planned to be part of the NBN. Some people claim that having slow net access (ADSL2+) is going to preclude unknown future uses of the Internet. However the NBN is only going to be 100MB/s so any such claim is essentially that unknown things will happen in the future to make 24Mb/s too slow, but those unknown things won t make 100Mb/s too slow . I started using computer networks when a 1200/75 modem was considered fast. Over about the last 25 years typical net access speeds have increased from 1200b/s to about 12Mb/s, that s a factor of 10,000 speed improvement! Now the people who believe that we only need to multiply the current speed by a factor of 4 to address all future needs could be correct, but it seems unlikely and doesn t seem like a good idea for a $43,000,000,000 bet. If they were talking about 1Gb/s net access then things would be different in this regard. Technological Development Some people compare the NBN to the Apollo Program and suggest that the scientific research involved in implementing a FTTH network might result in useful developments in other areas. The Wikipedia page about Fiber to the premises by country indicates that Hong Kong had 1Gb/s available in 2006. It seems that a service which is rolled out 4 years later and 10 times slower than in Hong Kong is not going to involve a huge amount of research. Certainly nothing like the Apollo Program. It would allow multiple HDTV channels to be viewed at the same time According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics in 2001 the average Australian household had 2.6 people (3.0 in NT) [2]. The incidence of every member of a household wanting to watch a different live TV channel at the same time is probably quite low, it seems that young people nowadays spend as much time watching Youtube as they do watching TV. Based on the Wikipedia bit-rate page it seems that an ADSL2+ link could stream two HDTV channels. I could use fiber speeds today There are some people who claim that they need faster speeds for their data transfers right now. The problem is that the latency of data transfer is a bottleneck in transfer rates. In some quick tests between servers that have reasonably fast connections to the Internet I was only able to get one international transfer in excess of ADSL2+ speed (24Mb/s or 3MB/s). I was able to transfer data between London and Germany at a speed of 11MB/s which was possibly limited by the 100baseT Ethernet connection in the data center in Germany. Now if the people who pay for that German server were to pay more then they would get a higher speed. So anyone who downloads anything from my web site in it s current configuration would get a significant performance boost by using an NBN connection if they live in Europe! But if they live in Australia then they will probably get a fraction of that speed (a quick test indicates that my ADSL2+ connection gives me about 500KB/s from my web server. I need to have at least three transfers going at the same time to get more than 600KB/s when downloading files from other countries, and it s rare to have a single download run at a speed higher than 100KB/s. It would be handy if I could download at higher speeds from my ISP s mirror (which seems to be the only way someone in Australia can even use full ADSL2+ speeds). But it s certainly not worth the $5,000 per household installation cost of the NBN to get that. I m sure that there are some people who really do have usage patterns that could take advantage of fiber net access, one possibility would be downloading large files from a local source such as a major web site that uses a CDN. It seems likely to me that the majority of people who fit this category are using major porn services. Fiber would be good for Video-Conferencing To be better than ADSL for video-conferencing a NBN connection would need a faster upload speed. Internode is already selling NBN connections for the trial areas [3]. The cheapest fiber plans that they offer are at the 50/2 speed, that s 50Mb/s download and 2Mb/s upload in theory ADSL2+ should have a higher upload speed. In my tests the best result I ve got from sending files over my ADSL2+ link to another country is about 110KB/s (880Kb/s). The fact that the theoretical speed of a fiber connection is better than the measured speed of an ADSL2+ connection in this regard doesn t mean much, let s not assume that a fiber connection will get it s theoretical maximum speed. Not that you necessarily need higher speeds for video-conferencing, Youtube is one of many services that uses a lot less bandwidth than the upload speed of an ADSL2+ connection. Also video-calls which are supported on most 3G mobile phones use even less bandwidth again. I want an NBN connection to run a server at home The fastest connection for uploading that Internode offers to home users is the Home High plan at 100/8 speed, that is maybe a bit more than twice as fast for uploading as ADSL2+. They also offer a SOHO plan that supports 16Mb/s upload speed (at extra expense) and suggest that customers who want higher speeds contact their business sales department. But they include both sending and receiving data in the bandwidth quota for the fiber connections. Transmitting data at 16Mb/s isn t that great for a server. The cheapest virtual server plan on offer from Linode [4] includes 200GB of data transfer per month and has significantly higher transmission speeds. You could get a Linode virtual server plus an Internode ADSL2+ connection for about the same price as an Internode fiber connection to the home. There are two down-sides to virtual servers, one is that they are limited in the amount of RAM that they have (I can easily afford to buy 8G of RAM for a home system but renting an 8G virtual server is going to be expensive) and the other is that the storage is limited. Shared storage on virtual servers can be slow and is limited in size. If you need to run a server with a few terabytes of data storage (which is cheap on commodity SATA disks but expensive on server-grade disks) and you don t need to transfer much of it then a home server on the NBN might do well. Otherwise it s probably not going to work well for server use. The NBN will avoid people leaving their PC on to do downloads and save electricity To save electricity you would have to have a significant incidence of situations where a download can complete fast enough over the NBN to allow the user to turn their PC off before going to bed but be slow enough over ADSL to require that it be left on overnight. That would probably only apply to downloads from a CDN or from a local ISP mirror. From the Internode mirror I can download a test file at a speed of 850KB/s (I guess this means that my ADSL connection is not delivering full speed I suspect poor quality wiring in my home and would try to fix it if the current speed was too slow). In 5 minutes spend brushing my teeth I could download 250M of data, in the same time if I had a 100/4 connection on the NBN I might be able to download almost 3G of data. So in the unlikely event that I wanted to download a CD or DVD image and turn off my PC immediately before going to bed then the NBN would be a good thing. But then of course I would want to burn the CD or DVD image to disc and that would take long enough that I would leave it on overnight My ADSL connection gives really low speeds or I m out of range for ADSL Some people who live only a short distance from an exchange are unable to get ADSL2+. Some people live a long way from exchanges and are outside ADSL range. The ideal solution to these problems is not to provide fiber access to the majority of the population, it is to provide ADSL to everyone who is near an exchange and maybe provide fiber access to some people who are a long way from exchanges. I find it rather ironic that some people in the country are essentially saying because net access in the country is so slow we need fiber in the cities . The NBN is not going to give fiber to rural areas, satellite is one of the options that will be used. Really High Speeds I have been informed that to get the distances needed for the NBN they have to use Single Mode Fiber, this permits scaling up to higher speeds at some later time by changing the hardware at the end points. So we could end up with a Hong Kong speed network at some future time with the same fibers. This is a good thing. But I don t think that we need to get fiber installed right now so that we can use 100Mb, we could wait until there is enough need to get the faster transmission rates from the start. At the moment it s just a waste of money.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2010/02/17/can-the-nbn-ever-break-even/
• [2] http://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs@.nsf/mediareleasesbyTopic/52BF7AD1530122AACA256C75007E400F?OpenDocument
• [3] http://www.internode.on.net/residential/broadband/fibre_to_the_home/plans/

With only a few days until the Ubuntu 10.04 "Lucid" release I'm starting the planning for a release party here in the Kansas City Metro area on the evening of Friday April 30th 2010, I'm not 100% on the venu yet , ideas welcome but I have setup a wiki page entry to get the discussion going.

I'd also like to setup a time before hand ( maybe an hour prior ) to do a "key signing party" for anyone that would like to exchange information. If there are any Debian Developers in the area I'd be thrilled to have one stop by to sign keys too, even if they could not or wish to not stay for the Lucid Release party, I still need one to begin part 2 of the NM process.

Just drop a note in the comments or email me ( me@brandonholtsclaw.com ) if you need any more info.

Nearly a year ago people starting worrying about the complexity of SHA-1 being reduced and the potential availability of viable attacks against things such as PGP keys that used SHA-1. Many people (myself included) generated a new key, or updated preferences on keys that were otherwise strong enough. There were worries about what this might mean for Debian. We were getting ahead of ourselves a bit though. Firstly there haven't been any public viable attacks that I'm aware of (though of course this doesn't mean we shouldn't continue to migrate away), but secondly there's a much easier method of attack. PGP v3 keys. To quote RFC4880:

V3 keys are deprecated. They contain three weaknesses. First, it is relatively easy to construct a V3 key that has the same Key ID as any other key because the Key ID is simply the low 64 bits of the public modulus. Secondly, because the fingerprint of a V3 key hashes the key material, but not its length, there is an increased opportunity for fingerprint collisions. Third, there are weaknesses in the MD5 hash algorithm that make developers prefer other algorithms. See below for a fuller discussion of Key IDs and fingerprints.

At the time of writing Debian has 21 remaining v3 keys. This is a significant improvement over a year ago, when we had 200, but it's still 21 more than I'd like. I've been chasing people since last May (starting with those who had v3 + v4 keys, all of whom now only have a v4 key) and we're down to the stragglers. So it's time to name and shame, in the hope of kicking them into action. The following keys are what's left (doesn't match the currently active keyring because we've had a few replacements since the last promote):

0x0D2156BD3D97C149 Michael Stone <mstone>
0x225FD911CD269B31 Carlos Barros <cbf>
0x31E73F14E298966D James R. Van Zandt <jrv>
0x366CD3FEEBC11B01 Chris Waters <xtifr>
0x37A73FE355E8BC4D Frederic Lepied <lepied>
0x3E973117DCC528E9 Ardo van Rangelrooij <ardo>
0x5C7A46637953F711 Rich Sahlender <rsahlen>
0x5D6560F85F30F005 Craig Brozefsky <craig>
0x6B0E322836129171 Jim Westveer <jwest>
0x723724B4A5B6DD31 Christian Meder <meder>
0x7629B22ED71DAABD Adrian Bridgett <bridgett>
0x8FFC405EFD5A67CD Adam Di Carlo <aph>
0xB0D269DE17F3D4D1 Matthew Vernon <matthew>
0xBC151FC8D2A913A1 Peter S Galbraith <psg>
0xC1A0A171C2DCD3B1 Jim Mintha <jmintha>
0xC3168EBA23F5ADDB Ian Jackson <iwj>
0xCE951B1160D74C7D Patrick Cole <ltd>
0xE82A8B0D57137FE5 Paul Seelig <pseelig>
0xF20E242CE77AC835 Brian White <bcwhite>
0xFBAA570C3087194D Alan Bain <afrb2>
0xFFD1B4AC7C19FD19 David Engel <david>

Of these keys only 2 voted in the recent DPL election. 8 have failed to make any response to my mails (3 since last August). Only 9 have uploaded a package since August 2008. And 10 were already known to the MIA database. Some of them have stated they'll sort out a new key, but not yet done so.

If you are one of these people, please either get a new key sorted and signed and reply to the mails I've sent you, or reply and say you no longer wish to be involved in Debian. And if you know any of these people, encourage them to get a new key sorted and offer to sign it for them.

Something that regularly happens when I get to see other peoples shell scripts is me thinking Why do they not use the powers of bash? . Sometimes it s fine to not use bash specific features, like when you are limited by the Operating System you have to run on (don t you try some commercial Unix systems. Or this WIndows crap. Brrr). Sometimes you want it for some perceived performance win, sometimes a full bash doesn t fit the target system (think embedded devices). Thats all fine, don t come up with those, I know them. What I mean is - people are using things that bind you to bash and your hashbang also makes your script use bash. But people still jump out to a different command just for some variable modification which are easily doable in bash too. A few examples follow, always imagine them in a script starting with the header of

#!/bin/bash
set -e
set -u

---

Example Get rid of newlines (actually, any replacement you can think of):

var1="something with
space and
linefeeds"
var1=$ var1//
/_ 
echo $var1

This is a simple but powerful demonstration of the Pattern substitution bash can do for you. Read its manpage, it can do much more than what I list here, but the above simply replaces all occurences of a linefeed with an _. Make the double // a single one and it is just the first that is replaced.

---

Example Removing a prefix (or suffix) from a string:

VAR1=$ VAR1##sync:archive: 

This removes the text sync:archive: from the beginning of the VAR1 variable. Replace the ## with %% and its gone from the end. The topic to look for in the manpage of bash is Remove matching prefix pattern (or suffix, of course).

---

There are many more possibilities, you might want to look through the Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide, it contains some helpful information. Or read the bash manpage. Or (shameless self-ad) look at the latest ftpsync script, the one and only official (mirroradm) supported mirror synchronization for the ftp.*.debian.org mirrors.

On 21st and 22nd August 2010 the fifth (wow, impressive how fast time goes) FrOSCon is taking place St. Augustin (near Bonn) Germany. Like in the past its hosted by the faculty of computer science of the University of Applied Sciences Bonn-Rhein-Sieg in collaboration with the student body and the Linux/Unix User Group St. Augustin.

A few days ago this years Call for Papers started and will end on May 23rd. So if you want to attend on a really cool conference please submit your paper - and even if you don't want to give a talk join us at the Debian booth :).
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While I normaly don t care much about Ubuntu, I m subscribed to lauchpad.net for the packages I m involved within Debian.
Sometimes apears informative stuff there, which reminds me about my todos or just pointing me to real problems. Most of the time, I m just ignoring the reports, as the are useless or just unrelated to me packages in Debian.
But in some cases the reports are just making my day.

One of the features of Windows 7 is that hitting windows+p will pop up a little dialog that allows you to configure your active display outputs. This is an improvement over previous versions of Windows, which would generally instead have a variety of random vendor-specific tools that would function differently, look ugly and make you cry. So, hurrah to Windows for moving into the 21st century.

Most laptops have a display switch key. This is sent in a variety of ways, generally either via the keyboard controller, via WMI or via ACPI. In Linux we take all of these events and turn them into KEY_SWITCHVIDEOMODE, making it easy to implement standardised behaviour.

This is, obviously, far too straight forward.

Microsoft, rather than introducing an input mechanism that allows all of these events to hook into the windows+p infrastructure, provide the following recommendation:

As documented in this Launchpad bug, vendors are starting to do this. It's been seen in HP and Dell machines, at least, and it's presumably going to become more widespread.

So, if your display switch button now just makes the letter "P" appear, say thanks to Microsoft. There's a range of ways we can fix this, although none of them are straightforward and those of you who currently use left-Windows-p as a keyboard shortcut are going to be sad. I would say that I feel your pain, but my current plan is to spend the immediate future getting drunk enough that I stop caring.

(The good news is that the same set of recommendations says that you can no longer put a Windows sticker on a monitor unless it has a valid and accurate EDID. The bad news is that that implies that you've previously been able to put a Windows sticker on a monitor without it having a valid and accurate EDID)

At my last job, I created several web applications designed to replace built-in apps on mobile phones. While modern browsers and HTML5 made this incredibly easy in many ways, we still ended up writing native (i.e. non-web) code for most of our applications. There were a few different areas where the browser alone didn't meet our needs, but one that I found suprisingly common was background processing. Consider the following mobile applications:

• Calendar or clock with alarms.
• E-book reader that syncs content from a server.
• IM or email client that notifies the user of new messages.
• Shopping list that pops up whenever you are near the store.

Ideally, each of these apps will perform some actions even when the user does not have it open. (Background processing is not strictly necessary for the e-reader, but it would be useful to ensure the library is up-to-date even when opened in a place with no network connection.) You can't do this with a web app. Web Workers don't solve the problem, because they run only while the web page is open. What we need are headless web workers.¹ The API Headless workers could use almost the same API as Web Workers. Instead of responding to messages from a web page, they would listen to events from the host system (browser or OS). These events might include time intervals, power-on/resume, changes in network connection, geographic locations, or "push" notifications from a remote server. The event-driven architecture of JavaScript in the browser allows the host system a high level of discretion over resource consumption. There's no special code needed to suspend processes and later restore their state, because JavaScript workers are naturally inactive between events. The host can provide limits on CPU or memory usage per event, with a separate message to notify processes whose handlers were aborted. And it can limit the number of concurrent processes by choosing when to dispatch events to listeners. Some listeners could even be disabled completely at times (like if the device is busy or the battery is low), and notified later of the events they missed. This is almost a return to the old days of cooperative multitasking. Mobile computing is definitely driving everyone towards higher-level process control in the OS, and different assumptions for applications. It's not surprising that my whole proposal resembles Android and iPhone 4.0 multitasking in several ways, since I've been doing development on Android for the last 18 months and encountering many of the same issues. The UI Headless workers do need some way to interact with the user. They could display standard system notifications (via Growl on the Mac, libnotify on Ubuntu, the status bar in Android, etc.) using W3C Web Notifications, which already have an experimental implementation in Chrome. Users also needs to know which sites have background tasks installed. Headless workers could be represented by icons in a standard location (perhaps a toolbar in desktop browsers, or the home screen on a mobile device). The icons could display ambient status; clicking one would reveal a menu with options to configure or remove it. Questions This proposal might be hard to standardize, especially where it's tied to specific OS capabilities. For now I'm just curious: would it be useful? You can write a native app or a browser extension to solve this problem today. But would it be worthwhile to have a standard, cross-platform way to do it? Has anyone else run into problems that this approach could solve?

1. Because all web standards should have names that sound like Harry Potter creatures.

Once again, I was invited by several different groups to be present at FLISOL, a quite interesting phenomenon: FLISOL (Latin-american Free Software Installation Festival) is s very large-scale, very loosely coordinated thing put together for five years already in over 200 cities in basically every Latin American country. Go to the FLISOL page, it is quite interesting to try to understand it! Now, I don't like FLISOL. I managed to avoid it in 2005 and 2006; in 2007, I was present at a FLISOL, although I didn't know beforehand it was the reason for the conference I was invited to. In 2008 and 2009 I took part for reasons I should not go into right now. This year, again, I will not be part of any of its activities (regardless of rumors to the contrary I was invited to be present at a panel on ACTA, but I have not followed the topic enough to be aware of anything besides the very basic aspects, I have no authority to speak about it; I told the organizers I would like to be there as part of the audience, but not present the topic. And I am quite work-stressed, so I doubt I'll make it). Why am I against FLISOL? FLISOL itself, as I said, is a positive and interesting phenomenon, and I have enjoyed the conference cycles which often happen together with it. What I am against is installfests In my opinion, in the stage we are at today, instead of promoting Free Software, an install-fest just works against it. Free Software Linux-based distributions at least is widely known already, as a concept, even though most people dare not come anywhere close to it. Few people outside our already consolidated groups recognize programs such as the Mozilla and OpenOffice suites as being also Free Software, and valuable, quality alternatives for their everyday needs in the environments they currently use. If we need to show how to install and understand the GNU/Linux ecosystem to people who have not got close, it is not IMHO to end users. Installing a GNU/Linux system is easy enough for anybody interested in doing it, or at least, for him to request a one-on-one help session, handholding and understanding the basic ideas. We need, in any case, for the computer corner shop technicians to be somewhat acquinted, at least with the basics, at least with one popular distribution (and with the fact that there are many, and that they are different). People who have not had the curiosity and courage to try to install Linux by themselves do not need to be evangelized (a verb that should be out of our vocabularies by now, as that phase in our movement should be over by now) End users have simple needs: Things should work, and be as surprise-free as possible. They don't want to depend on a specific time-starved person (or even on a small group of people, all of which have a sanctity delirium/aura). When they go to technical support, they expect the problem to be solved Not even understanding what was wrong. End users are willing to pay a small fee to anybody to help them solve their problems. The key word is anybody. If we (myself, or me and my 10 friends who were there at the gathering, or any sufficiently defined small group) are the only support point for the OS, it is no good. Online support forums are not good either, in my experience, as the end user will prefer just lugging the computer to the nearest technician and get it fixed. Even if fixed means just installing one more readily-available package (not to mention, of course, when an update breaks something). I have witnessed, after an install fest, people walk very happy with their new system as a new toy. After a week or two, they cannot install the latest virus^Wscreen saver, or a legitimate program they need for their work. As it does not work, they take the computer to the technician... Who will end up formatting his system and installing something more usual. On the other hand, some people prefer installing a dual-boot system That guarantees the user will feel he is carrying some kind of moral superiority on his computer, and will often remember he has something Not Evil. This will often happen, of course, at boot time When they see GRUB at boot time, and rush to select Windows before That Strange Thing starts up. Anyway... Go ahead, install Free Software, enjoy the day. The conference cycles are usually interesting, and are the best part of it all I'm not saying you should stop doing it. But I'd urge you to take the focus away from the mass-installs, which become often just lost work (even detrimental to furthering Free Software). Try to see things as a non-technically-interested user would. Try to design ways to get corner shop technicians interested. Maybe that can be useful in the long run.

After skipping 3 entire releases, and 18 months later, here we are, finally: GDM 2.30 is entering unstable. How can you be so late? For those who haven t followed and just wondered why Debian is so late this is lame this sucks Ubuntu is better because they have the latest version and Fedora is even better because they even have versions that don t work at all, here is the short story: the GDM rewrite wasn t really usable until 2.28 (which is the version with which Ubuntu started to ship it, incidentally). Add to that the time to make a transition plan and to integrate it properly, and that makes actually only 6 months. Big thanks go to Luca Bruno (Lethalman) who did most of the job. A quick look at the changelog will give you an idea of the amount of work involved to bring it to our quality standards. GDM 2.20 and 2.30 Since the rewrite has absolutely zero compatibility with previous versions, it will not be upgraded in place. Therefore, while newly installed systems will get GDM 2.30 by default for squeeze, those upgrading from lenny will keep GDM 2.20. The 2.20 version will be dropped after the squeeze release. If you want to upgrade your GDM, simply run apt-get install gdm3. It should work for simple setups, and there s a hack that makes upgrades work even when logged on X. Everyone who has needs for advanced features (such as LTSP people) should make sure GDM 2.30 suits their needs during the squeeze cycle, since the old version will not be here anymore after. GDM packages need your help Finally, here is a call for translations. Anyone can help: just grab the gdm3 sources, get the .pot files and translate them to your language. Beware, there is one file in debian/po for the desktop files and one in debian/po-up for the patches. (I will try to merge them in a later version.) Then submit your translations as bug reports.

Bdale has just opened up the Garbee and Garbee web store to sell Altus Metrum electronics including TeleMetrum and TeleDongle. The TeleMetrum boards aren t quite ready to ship, so they re marked as out of stock for another couple of days. That s because we ve decided to switch GPS antennas to improve GPS reception and we won t have enough of those until Friday to start shipping boards. The TM boards themselves are working great and we ve flown them several times. We ve already sold a couple of TeleDongle boards for use without TeleMetrum. These boards contain the CC1111 transceiver chip along with an 8-pin connector that can be used for USB, SPI or serial communication. This adds long-range wireless digital communication to almost any project. Steve Conklin has posted his plans for these boards. We sell TeleDongle as either bare boards or packaged in a pretty blue box with a USB cable attached. All of the hardware designs are licensed under the TAPR open hardware license and software under the GPL. All of the tools used to design the hardware and build the software are also free software (already packaged for Debian, of course) so you can take these designs and do whatever you want with them.