What is Debian Desktop?
Debian Desktop is a Debian's subproject created to be a joint effort of
all groups involved or related with the desktop to give our users a
better environment to use and easier to install experience.

Actually we've members from: pkg-gnome, pkg-kde, pkg-xfce, pkg-galago,
tasksel and utnubu. We count with help from d-i and debian-cd members too.
The initiative merged the former Debian Desktop development page, debian-desktop
mailing list for the discussions and debian-desktop alioth project - its svn actually
hosts the desktop-base source package.

We did our best to deliver for our users a interesting desktop experience (including
laptop users) and it includes GNOME, KDE or Xfce (that's your choice) in our upcoming release: 4.0 (Etch).

What will be into Debian Etch Desktop ?
The desktop (task: desktop, installable through aptitude or tasksel):

• X Window System: Xorg 7.1
• Office suite: OpenOffice 2.0.4
• Graphics suite: GIMP 2.2.13

It also includes a simple window manager (twm), zeroconf (avahi), printing (cups) and scanning (sane) support

GNOME desktop (task: gnome-desktop, also installable through aptitude or tasksel):

• GNOME core: 2.14 with some 2.16 modules, eg.: totem (xine backend as default)
• Web Browser: Firefox 1.5 and Epiphany 2.14.3
• Feeds Manager: Liferea 1.0.26 (Liferea is Epiphany friendly)
  
• Mail/Calendar app: Evolution 2.6.3
• Instant Messaging Tool: GAIM 2.0.0beta5
• Multimedia Player: Rhythmbox 0.9.6
• Network (wired/wifi) manager: Network Manager 0.6.4
• Graphical Package Manager: Synaptic 0.57.11 with update-notifier
  
• Graphical Partition Manager: GParted 0.2.5
• CD/DVD Creation: GNOMEBaker 0.6.0
  
• Power Management Tool: GNOME Power Manager 2.14.3

It also includes bluetooth (bluez-gnome) support, multimedia in the browser support (totem mozilla plugin), bittorrent support (gnome-btdownload)

KDE desktop (task: kde-desktop, also installable through aptitude or tasksel):

• KDE: KDE 3.5.5 (base, pim, multimedia, graphics, artwork, network, utils and admin)
  
• Network (wired/wifi) manager: KNetworkManager 0.1
• CD/DVD Creation: k3b

We tried to add all the gnome task features into kde task too. KDE itself already contains a lot of them, if you find something missing please tell us at debian-desktop@lists.debian.org for a better next release, and wait your contribution enter Lenny.

Xfce desktop (task: xfce-desktop, also installable through aptitude or tasksel):

• Xfce: Xfce 4.3.99
• Calendar tool: orage 4.3.99
• Text editor: Mousepad 0.2.8

It also includes multimedia support and xfce goodies.

What if i've Debian testing or sid installed using GNOME or KDE or Xfce?
Open a terminal, check your /etc/apt/sources.list and run as root:
aptitude update
aptitude install desktop $foo-desktop

Please replace $foo with GNOME, KDE, Xfce - e.g: aptitude install desktop gnome-desktop

Note that desktop and $foo-desktop aren't metapackages - packages that usually contains just a few files (the required) to be installed in the system and its main feature is depend, conflict, recommend or suggest other packages. desktop and $foo-desktop are tasks and are in the tasksel source package, maintained by the tasksel team. The debian-installer uses tasksel to install a set of packages, and you should too.

How can i download Debian Desktop for tests?
The easier way to install is downloading a CD or DVD image from http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer . Please download
Debian Etch RC1 images or later for GNOME and something newer
(eg: weekly builds) for KDE or Xfce. Please note that DVD usage
is preferred, if you're going to use a CD broadband is recommended.

There are special first CDs images containing not GNOME key packages
but KDE or Xfce, look for debian-testing-i386-$foo-CD-1.iso (don't worry,
we've at least amd64 and powerpc images too) at:
http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/weekly-builds/i386/iso-cd/

How can i install Debian Desktop GNOME?
The first DVD image contains the entire GNOME set of packages, just
follow the installer and after the base system install select "default
desktop environment", if the system doesn't suggests it for you and
proceed - no network is required during installation.

The first CD image doesn't contains the entire GNOME set of packages,
just follow the installer and after the base system install select
"default desktop environment", if the system doesn't suggests it for
you and proceed - broadband connection is recommended.

How can i install Debian Desktop KDE?
Before the installer boots, please type:
install tasks=kde-desktop

* The first DVD image contains the entire KDE set of packages - no
network is required during installation.

* The first CD image doesn't contains the entire KDE set of packages -
broadband connection is recommended.

Note: Alternative first CD is available (see above).

How can i install Debian Desktop Xfce?
Before the installer boots, please type:
install tasks=xfce-desktop

* The first DVD image doesn't contains the entire Xfce set of packages
- broadband connection is recommended.

* The first CD image doesn't contains the entire Xfce set of packages
- broadband connection is recommended.

Note: Alternative first CD is available (see above).

My main debian builder went off-line a little while ago. I'm trying to find a replacement, but it seems it will take a little while, what with everything else going on. By a builder, I mean an unstable machine capable of building packages. Most of my machines run stable, as they're doing Real Work and "not breaking" is one of debian's best features. Surprisingly, it seems that the debian project machines either don't have chroots on which developers can install build-deps, or I didn't find the right instructions. I was offered a free virtual host for package building, but I don't feel comfortable building packages on a remote server I don't control and whose security I can't really verify. Now, I've built an unstable chroot on one of my company's more secure servers and built the package there. There were a few complications, such as the debootstrap version in stable not being able to build an unstable chroot, but a quick backport fixed that. debootstrap seems a lot slower than I remember. Am I doing something wrong? Is there a better solution for building packages if you don't have a local unstable machine up?

As of this writing, the DNS/infrastructure hasn't quite caught up, but ofbiz.apache.org ought to be live soon. "Apache Open For Business", aka OFBiz, has been promoted out of the incubator (the term the ASF uses for projects hoping to become full-fledged ASF projects) to its own top level project. As J Aaron Farr mentions, they managed most everything on their own, and were a project that wouldn't have looked out of place as part of the ASF even from the beginning of the incubation period, which made my job as a "mentor" pretty easy. What will be interesting is to track the project going forward. It has tremendous potential, because it focuses very much on providing not only the low level tools (which is still where most open source is), but also on creating good business models and processes, which is relatively newer terrain in the open source world. I think they face a couple of important challenges. First and foremost, a way to lower the barrier to entry. OFBiz is a big collection of code that in some ways tends to stand alone compared to the "mainstream" in that it uses its own tools in terms of the framework. Also, since it encompasses so much, it's a lot to come to terms with when you get started. This means that the initial step of the "learning curve" is pretty high, and I imagine that a lot of people stumble. Clearly, it's not a simple application, but I think efforts to make it more approachable will pay off in terms of attracting more users (and eventually, developers). The broader challenge is simply the fact that in some ways, this is uncharted territory for free software, so it remains to be seen what sort of "ecosystem" (if you'll pardon the buzzword) grows up around it. For instance, at this point in time, no one, least of all the core developers, sees it as a program that you simply download and run, but rather as a place to start from for integrators and developers who mould the code to fit the needs of the particular firm adopting it. That's working right now, but perhaps at some point it will be more of an out of the box system. Or maybe not - attempting to make it work well for a vague 'everyone' might just be chasing taillights and prove ultimately fruitless. Unfortunately, I still haven't had the opportunity to use it "in anger", as they say, so I don't have much to say about it technically, but from a business point of view, I really like their data model, and the system of processes they've put together, which allows you to capture a great deal of use cases in a very flexible way, which is no mean feat. In any case, a big round of congratulations to the core developers, and best wishes for the future!

In the first two posts about Christmas, I remembered Christmas at home and with my dad's family. Today I'm remembering Christmas with my mom's family, and tomorrow -- the last post on this subject, I promise -- more recent Christmases.

The first thing that comes to mind about Christmas with mom's family is Grandma's peppernuts (pfeffernuesse to any Germans reading this). Grandma made wonderful peppernuts. And she made huge batches of them for Christmas. I remember gallon jugs being passed around.

Peppernuts are a small sweet dough, rolled out, and cut into pieces about the size of a peanut M&M, then baked. My mom has been making them, and they look like this:



In fact, I can't really remember what sort of main dishes we used to have. Guess I had a one-track mind. I suspect that we also had some of Grandma's famous cherry moos (rhymes with "close").

Us kids usually were the only ones to get gifts there, but that was fine with me. It was also great to spend time with my uncles and aunts, none of which lived in the area. They were always good for some jokes, or maybe a math puzzle.

I seem to recall that Grandma and Grandpa also joined our family for our Christmas celebration on Christmas Eve some years. Here's my Grandma reading from the Bible to my brother one of those Christmases:



Grandma has always loved being around her grandchildren, and she always seemed to have plenty of time for each one of us.

Thinking of my Grandpa Klassen reminds of first of the German hymn Nun Ist Sie Erschienen (MP3 and PDF in the comments at that link). It's still sung, in German and English, at Christmas in our church.

Grandpa was great with the harmonica. And the song I best remember him playing at is Nun Ist Sie Erschienen. I remember sitting on his lap many times listening to him play it. And I'm pretty sure it was a year-round song for him. Terah and I even had it sung at our October wedding -- if it was year-round for Grandpa, that was good enough for us. It's always special to sing the song in church.

I was going to have a picture of Grandpa with his harmonica here, but I didn't get it ready in time. So I'll have to describe it. Imagine a black and white picture of a gentle man, dressed conservatively, holding a harmonica in his hands. He's looking towards it tenderly -- it seems to be something important, and maybe it represented fond memories for him, too. I'll post the photo as soon as I get a copy of it.

Back on December 1, 1990, just at the start of Christmas season, I remember the phone ringing. Dad answered, and I knew quickly that something was wrong. Grandpa had died earlier that day, while doing something he loved -- visiting his children and grandchildren in western Kansas.

His funeral followed shortly. At 11, I was starting to become interested in photography, and I set up my tripod and took this picture of the church on the day of his funeral.



So many people still remember the church that day and commented that having the sanctuary all decorated for Christmas was the perfect way to remember Grandpa.

Grandma still talks about it, too. My mom and I played a piano duet arrangement of Nearer, My God, To Thee. After we finished, Pastor Epp said, "If the music in heaven is anything like that, it will be a wonderful place indeed." He passed away not long after that, too, but Grandma still remembers that comment verbatim (and I'm sure would gently correct me if I made the tiniest of mistakes recalling it here).

In a few days, we'll be celebrating Christmas with Grandma -- and also her 92nd birthday. I bet there will be some peppernuts there.

While its not the normal action people usually expect from me, I just felt the need to have a little posting saying Thanks to somebody. Who? Well. All of you doing work on a regular basis, like * Application Managers, who regularly process people that want to get Debian Developer status. They are doing a lot of work, asking questions, giving tips and in the end submit their report. Usually thats a process of multiple days up to some months work, depending on the time the Applicant and the AM has. * FrontDesk. who makes sure that the process keeps on running by managing all sorts of weird things people come up with, * Sponsors, who help non-DDs to get their package into the Debian Archive, * The release team, who always tries to get the best possible release out of the door, * All those people that make Debian what it is - the biggest and best distribution ever, * everyone that goes and fixes bugs in debian packages to keep the quality as high as possible, * all people that help people by answering questions on one of our mailinglists, on IRC or in web forums, * every upstream author that releases his software under a free license and happily works together with distribution maintainers to make their software the best it can be, * all those that help to organize DebConf, the yearly Debian Conference with all the time-consuming tasks that that includes, * the people that keep the infrastructure running that allows us to develop our own little gems, like the Debian Admins, SPI Admins, Alioth Admins, IRC Network Operators and anyone who provides and maintains machines for a free project out there, * those behind everyone I mentioned - the families. Who have to look for something else during the time people do all the mentioned work, * everyone who can resist feeding a flamewar, Did I forgot someone? I’m sure I did, so - start your own post and say thanks, without people spending a lot of their spare time you would not have such a great distribution to use and ease your life! Have a good new year and continue the good work!

I love that one of the benefits to working on free software is that it exposes you to tools that you wouldn't normally be aware of. A prime example is software that you can use for writing documentation, like LaTeX and revision control systems. At work I've been writing up a fairly long document. Normally at work I'm forced to use OO.o or word because I have to trade the file back and forth with my boss, but this time since I'm doing all the actual writing, I've been using LaTeX and git to manage the thing. In addition, I need a bibliography and references, so I basically needed something like LaTeX. I send my boss an rtf (made with latex2rtf) and pdf (made with pdflatex) when I want comments, and I can still use the highly structured style of LaTeX to make sure that things like my lists get formatted properly every single time. Trying to do this in Word was both frustrating and time consuming.

The best part about the experience has been using revision control though. Having atomic changesets with a log message is something we tend to take for granted in free software work, but compare it to the change tracking in OO.o and Word. It's amazing how much easier it makes it. I can actually see what I was thinking a few days ago, which was the last time I had been revising the document. Being able to visualize the changes and history with tools like qgit are even nicer. And tags... I don't think OO.o or Word lets you tag specific revisions, but I know that when I do this with Word, I end up with a ton of documents labeled "DavidRev1" and so forth, and I always mess up the revisions by using "Save" instead of "Save As".

And this doesn't even touch on the things I haven't done yet. I haven't done any branching, for example. I'm sure that when I write my thesis, I'll end up using that, but just knowing that it's available is exciting. The thing I wish I could do most though is actually put the repo up somewhere and have me and my boss actually use it the same way a normal shared source code repository is used.

The standard sorry ending to this story is that getting these things in broad use is basically a pipe dream. It continually amazes me that people will put up with Word or Powerpoint when it's so often the wrong tool for the job. The simplest things, like being able to look at a document's history and the diff and know in a minute exactly what you were thinking when you put down your work a week ago, help so much. It's sad because the technology problem has been largely solved (a small GUI frontend would be the last piece), but the evangelism problem remains. One thing is for sure, I'm not looking forward to writing my next paper in Word.

When They Might Be Giants started releasing kid’s albums back in 2002 with “No!”, I didn’t really understand why they had chosen to go in that direction. Two years later, though, I had a kid, and now I realize They are marketing geniuses.

(my kid)

They Might Be Giants made their mainstream debut in 1986. The oddball audience that really got it would have been between 13 and 25 years old at the time (as was I). Most of those folks now have settled down into stable jobs, disposable income (read: can afford to purchase music), and kids. For those of us worried about inculcating our children with an appropriately developed sense of irony to get them through the next century, TMBG is the perfect prescription. We can play our kids these new albums and rest assured that our kids will eventually appreciate Terry Gilliam, Ze Frank, John Belushi, and the like. And learn the alphabet (mp3) (ogg) while they’re at it:

F is far too fussy and only eats with fancy wine
G eats only gourmet but never can decide
H burns food so horrible
all I tastes is smoke
J just likes drinking juice
and K drinks only soda

(Please note the Cake tribute — which is interesting, since Cake was undoubtedly influence by TMBG.) (If you don’t get the joke, it’s “soda.”) The target audience, of course, is still “us” — those of us over 30, who are more likely to actually purchase music rather than copy it. It’s an interesting reversal of the more typical marketing plan which involves getting kids to nag their parents to buy things. It thus makes a lot of sense that TMBG is selling tracks direct online from their website in unencumbered formats — $9.99/album in MP3 format, or $11.99/album as FLAC files. An extra two bucks for lossless audio? Of course I’ll buy that! You should too.

eBox is growing a lot lately, and updating screenshots is always a cumbersome task, so, prompted by a workmate, I decided to do something to get automatic screenshots. The first step was to get an automatic way to install eBox from scratch to have something to get screenshots from. That was quite easy using the Xen facilities available in Debian. I only had to write a role for xen-create-image and now I can get an eBox up and running in a couple of minutes executing a simple “xen-create-image –role ebox –hostname ebox-screenshots”. Using eBox introspection capabilities and some Perl magic, it was quite easy to autogenerate a list of the URLs that we should take screenshots from. Once we had the URL list and a running eBox all we have to do was to have a browser logging in the eBox web interface and loop through the URLs taking screenshots. To achieve that I resorted to Ruby, Konqueror, KSnapshot and DCOP, and it took less than 40 lines of code to do it. The first problem was spawning Konqueror and KSnapshot instances and getting a DCOP reference for them, but that was easily done using Ruby’s fork, which is quiet convenient:

konqpid = Kernel.fork exec("konqueror --geometry 1024x768+0+0")
ksnappid = Kernel.fork exec("ksnapshot")
konqwin = KDE::DCOPRef.new("konqueror-# konqpid ","konqueror-mainwindow\#1")
ksnapshot = KDE::DCOPRef.new("ksnapshot-# ksnappid ","interface")
The second problem I faced was logging in the eBox interface, I had to enter the password and submit the form. Fortunately Konqueror’s DCOP interface offers a really nice “evalJS” function:

konqwin.openURL("https://# ip /ebox/")
konqhtml = KDE::DCOPRef.new("konqueror-# konqpid ","html-widget1")
konqhtml.evalJS("document.getElementById('credential_0').value = 'ebox'")
konqhtml.evalJS("document.login.submit()")

and we’re in! Now we only have to loop through the urls taking the screenshots. I had a little problem because ksnapshot expects you to click the left mouse button before taking the screenshot. Fortunately that could be easily fixed using xte from the xautomation package to simulate the click.

urls.each url
konqwin.openURL("https://# ip /ebox/# url ")
name = "# konqwin.caption.split(/-/)[1].strip.gsub(/ /,'_') "
ksnapshot.slotGrab
system("xte 'mousemove 100 100' 'mouseclick 1'")
ksnapshot.save("# outpath /# name .png")

The code I pasted lacks a bit of initialization and some sleeps I put there to synchronize the stuff, but basically that’s all. I just love Ruby, KDE and DCOP

You still got some money left after buying all those Christmas presents? How about donating some of it for a good cause:

• Wikipedia

Wikipedia is entering 2007 as one of the 10 most visited websites in the world. That's a great proof of our success. However, with this success comes a new set of challenges and responsibilities. As we plan for the future of Wikipedia and all of the Wikimedia projects, our two most important goals now are the reliability of our content and the long-term sustainability of every project in which we are involved. To meet these goals we have a lot of work to do, so I am asking for your help. In the coming year, the Wikimedia Foundation anticipates dramatically increasing spending to keep up with server and traffic capacity demands, add new staff on the organizational level, improve our software and develop methods to better ensure high quality content, all while making progress toward our goal of giving free knowledge to everyone.

-- Florence Devouard, Chair of the Wikimedia Foundation

Creative Commons

It's once again time to show your support for Creative Commons. Digital technologies are connecting people in ways that were never before possible but that network is fragile. Creative Commons needs your support to help enable a participatory culture a culture in which everyone can actively engage in the creativity that surrounds us. We need your support to assure access to cultural, scientific, and educational content that has been pre-cleared for use by its authors.

Free Software Foundation (FSF)

Freedom is more precious than anything else we have and we need to protect it while we still can.

-- Eben Moglen in his FSF year end video appeal (OGG, 24 MB)

Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)

EFF is a nonprofit group of passionate people lawyers, technologists, volunteers, and visionaries working to protect your digital rights.

Tor: anonymity online

Tor is a toolset for a wide range of organizations and people that want to improve their safety and security on the Internet. Using Tor can help you anonymize web browsing and publishing, instant messaging, IRC, SSH, and other applications that use the TCP protocol. Tor also provides a platform on which software developers can build new applications with built-in anonymity, safety, and privacy features.

Or how about some organizations not directly related to Free Culture or Free Software?

• Amnesty International (AI)

Amnesty International (AI) is a worldwide movement of people who campaign for internationally recognized human rights. AI s vision is of a world in which every person enjoys all of the human rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other international human rights standards.

Red Cross

The International Red Cross (and Red Crescent Movement) is an international humanitarian movement whose stated mission is to protect human life and health, to ensure respect for the human being, and to prevent and alleviate human suffering, without any discrimination based on nationality, race, religious beliefs, class or political opinions.

Watching my sister's Welsh boyfriend slowly learn Finnish, I'm reminded of the fact that the language is often considered difficult. At any rate, it is spoken by a very small percentage of the world's population. Some Finns therefore think they can safely use it abroad to talk about anything, even if it is embarrassing or sensitive. I've found that not to be true. There's other Finns everywhere. There's always someone who will hear and understand if you say something not meant for outsiders. A couple of anecdotes might prove this. In 1990, I was abroad for the first time, in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, for an ACM programming competition. I and a team mate spent one evening in a local bar, talking with each other. After a while we were interrupted by a Finnish woman who lives in Eindhoven. Luckily, we hadn't said anything too bad, she just recognized fellow Finns and wanted to say hi. In 1999, I was in London for a conference, and had a bit of free time, which I spent walking on Oxford Street. At some point, I was walking behind two young men, in their early twenties. They were speaking fairly loudly, commenting on the physiological features of the woman walking in front of them. The woman eventually stopped, turned around, and started swearing at them. Loudly. In Finnish. My theory is that Finns are slowly taking over the world by spying on each other abroad. That's why there's always at least two Finns anywhere.

These are my ten wishes for 2007. Since Santa didn’t arrive in this part of the world, I think I’m asking this to the Three Wise Men (in spite of they were brought here by the Spanish catolicism, but hey):

1. Dignity, land and respect to the Mexican indigenous groups.
2. Return and good health for Commander in Chief, Fidel Castro.
3. Strongest antineoliberalism in the Latin American region.
4. Right wing oppression brought down in Bolivia.
5. Good year socially, economically and politically to Nicaragua with its new hope.
6. An even better year in Cuban trades; they were the best growing economy in Latin America by exporting to South America and China.
7. Stop to the free trade agreement and military bases with the US in Ecuador.
8. Peaceful solution to the Colombia-Ecuador border conflict.
9. Democracy established in some of those countries where it’s more needed, like Central America.
10. More social successful programs in Venezuela.

And my bonus one:

• Peace from R o Grande all the way down to Tierra del Fuego.

I've just been trying to set up a MythTV system, I've had the hardware for this for a while but until my TV broke I hadn't found the time to work on it.

My planned hardware was a P3 system for both frontend and backend. However the Debian MythTV packages take over 250M of memory for each of the frontend and backend programs (more than 500M for Myth programs alone), combine that with some memory use for MySQL, for the X server, and for the rest of a functional Linux system and a machine with 512M of RAM does not perform well. Unfortunately it seems that most (if not all) desktop P3 systems only support 512M of RAM (at least none of my collection of P3 machines does). P3 server systems support considerably more RAM (I used to have a SMP P3 server with 1G of RAM), but a server class machine is not what you want in your lounge room. P4 systems support more RAM but also take more than twice the electricity of P3 systems. The extra electricity use is a waste for a machine that will probably run 24*7, and also requires extra cooling (and therefore probably louder fans which is bad for a machine used for playing audio). Given that I desire the capabilities of a P4 in terms of RAM support and electricity use that is not excessive, my options are one of the recent Intel Core CPUs or AMD64 (both of which apparently use less electricity - not sure whether they would use as little as a P3) or a CPU designed for low power use (maybe a Via). Either option costs more than I prefer to spend (I want to use a second-hand machine valued at $129).

Of course if I could get Myth to use less memory then that would allow me to run both parts of MythTV on the one machine. Please offer any advice you can think of in regard to minimising memory use for Myth on Debian.

Given that I am unlikely to be able to optimise memory use as much as I desire it seems that I will have to go to a split model and try using an existing Pentium-D server machine as the backend and the P3 as a frontend. The up-side of this is that I can turn off the frontend machine when it's not being used (the server runs 24*7 anyway). I will need to get more RAM for the Pentium-D machine, but I had wanted to do that anyway.

The next thing I will have to do is to write SE Linux policy for MythTV and find out why /usr/lib/libmp3lame.so.0.0.0 needs both execmod and execstack (and either fix the library or write policy to permit that accss). I'm happy to have a MythTV server program running on a stand-alone machine with unrestricted access to all resources, but when it's going to run on a machine that is more important to me I need to lock it down.

Now to the design of MythTV. It's unfortunate that they don't support better multitasking options. One feature I would like to see is the ability to play MP3s in the background and then have the music pause whenever TV is selected. When I watch a live show (such as the news) I would like to listen to MP3s before it starts and then at the end of the show (and maybe during commercial breaks) have the MP3 playing resume where it left off. This is exactly the traditional lounge-room functionality we are all used to, when a commercial starts you mute the TV and un-pause the CD player! The advantage of MythTV is that you could do both with a single button - or even automatically with advert recognition!

The method of selecting MP3 files to play is also a little cumbersome and the option to add a song after the current one in the play list doesn't seem to work. Also it's a pity that there is no convenient option to sort the music list by artist, genre, or sone name - there are grouping options but they are all separate and I would like to change the sorting via a single key press.

The startup sequence of MythTV regenerates some images (which takes a few seconds), it seems that this is something that could be cached for a faster startup. Also when I add new MP3 files to the store I have to manually request a re-scan. It's a pity that it can't just check the size and time-stamp of the directories which contain MP3 files and do an automatic re-scan if they change.

We had a tough time getting out of Encinitas yesterday. It seems like everything was going wrong. I'd forgotten to order food for a sick aunt and her family in New Jersey the night before, so I was scrambling with apologies and new orders all morning. Then, when we finally got out of town, we hit traffic for about an hour near Santa Ana. Blech! Fortunately, it's a nice stretch of California highway, and we could see Catalina Island off on the horizon to the west. Our Christmas-eve-eve (or Festivus, if you will) was spent at Maj's parents' house in Long Beach, with about 30+ Jenkinses plus various offshoots and friendly relations. They have a huge house near Long Beach/Belmont Shore, with a giant tiled patio area that goes right into the house. It was a good place for a party. Amita June got some nice gifts from family, including a screaming monkey doll dressed as Superman. Yeah, we already have one screaming monkey doll with an "I LA" t-shirt, so this new one will join our growing collection of screaming monkeys with poor sartorial taste. tags: christmas belmont shore festivus long beach amita june

Typewriters are broken Yesterday Amita June and I were playing with pyKeys, from the awesome pyToddler suite of tools, and I realized that typewriter keyboards are broken. I was showing her that when she pushed on the key marked "Q", a "Q" would appear on the screen. But that's not what happened: instead, a "q" appeared on the screen. That's not a bug in pyToddler, of course: that's just the way typewriters work. If you click on the button marked with a capital letter, it prints the lowercase letter on the paper or screen. To get the capital letter itself, you have to put the keyboard in another mode, or use a modifying chord key. I'm not sure why this is the case. It's clear why we use modifier keys to make capitals, since we type lowercase keys much more often. But why do keyboards show the capitals printed on the keys, then? tags: typewriter keyboard pytoddler pykeys

Free Culture Christmas If there's anything that gives a bracing jolt of Christmas cheer, it's 235 Creative Commons Christmas songs. Thanks to Uwe Hermann for compiling this fine list. tags: cc christmas open content music christmas song

mbpeventd has just got a new name for Christmas, and it’s now called pommed :-) I went toward a more generic name as we’re adding support for the PowerBook too (plus it’s a semi-private joke for Yves-Alexis and me). This should, by the way, make it in the next release or the one after the next. New features:

• Graphical clients ! Yay !
• Fn mode can now be set by pommed
• New -d option for debug

gpomme is a GTK+ client suitable for all environments; you should start it when your session starts.
wmpomme is a WindowMaker dockapp, as the name shows. The next version will feature set methods in the DBus interface, and PowerBook support if it’s ready by then. Due to the name change and new packages, the package is in NEW. You can grab it on http://people.debian.org/~jblache/pkg/pommed in the meantime. This release means the mbpeventd-dbus branch is closed :-) Merry Christmas to you all.

A few days ago I installed Debian/Etch on my Thinkpad. One of the reasons for converting from Fedora to Debian is that I need to run Xen and Fedora doesn't support non-PAE machines with Xen. Ironically it's hardware supplied to me by Red Hat (Thinkpad T41p) that is lacks PAE support and forces me to switch to Debian. I thought about just buying a new dual-core 64bit laptop, but that seems a bit extravagant as my current machine works well for everything else.

Feeling adventurous I decided to use the graphical mode of the installer. I found it a little confusing, at each stage you can double-click on an item or click on the continue button to cause the action to be performed. The partitioning section was a little unclear too, but given that it has more features than any other partitioning system I've seen I wasn't too worried (options of creating a degraded RAID array and for inserting a LUKS encryption layer at any level are really nice). The option to take a screen-shot at any time was also a handy feature (I haven't yet inspected the PNG files to see what they look like).

Another nice feature was the way that the GUI restarts after a crash. While it was annoying that the GUI started crashing on me (and would have prevented a less experienced user from completing the install) the fact that it didn't entirely abort meant that I could work around the problem.

I have not yet filed any bug reports against the installer because I have not done a repeatable install (there is a limit to how much testing I will do on my most important machine). In the next few days I plan to do a few tests of the graphical installer on test hardware for the operations that are important to me and file appropriate bug reports. I encourage others to do the same, the graphical mode of the installer and the new encryption and RAID features are significant improvements to Debian and we want them to work well.

I have realised that it won't be possible to get SE Linux as good as I desire before the Etch release, even if the release is delayed again. I'm not sure how many fixes can go in after the release (I hope that we could move to a model similar to RHEL - but doubt that it will happen). So I now plan to maintain my own repository of Etch SE Linux packages and for other packages which need changes to make them work in the best possible manner with SE Linux. I will append something like ".se1" to the version of the packages in question, this means that they will be replaced if a security update is released for the official package. Apart from the SE Linux policy packages (for which any security updates will surely involve me) the changes I am going to make will not be major and will be of less importance than a security update.

I will also add other modified and new packages to my repository that increase the general security of Etch. Apart from SE Linux all the changes I intend to host will be minimal cost issues (IE they won't break things or increase the difficulty of sys-admin tasks), and the SE Linux related changes will not break anything on non-SE systems. So someone who wants general security improvements without using SE Linux might still find my repository useful.

Well I have a new computer which is running Debian Etch. The process was painful though. For a start I stupidly forgot to check that the motherboard had on-board graphics (hint: no) and so I didn’t order a graphics card. Sadly the motherboard also doesn’t have an AGP slot, so I couldn’t migrate a working card from elsewhere. Instead I had to go out and buy a PCI-express card from a local store. Once that was done I figured installing Etch would be simple. Not so. Update:: Tale of woe snipped. Apparently to netboot into the Etch installer I need to add:

nosmp,acpi=off

The “nosmp” worries me since it is a dual-core processor .. but once I’ve played around and upgraded the kernel I’ll see if removing that causes problems. Update #2: 64-bit host running Xen and X.org. Took me an hour to work out that the sound being “quiet” no matter how much I raised the volume control was due to me plugging in the speaker cable to the wrong socket and not the traditional alsa weirdness I was used to! Strangly even with USB enabled I cannot mount my external USB drive - so that is NFS shared for the moment.

The first step is to configure the CRM114 files, and these are now in pretty good shape as shipped with Debian. All that I needed to do was set a password, say that I'd use openssl base64 -d, and stick with the less verbose defaults (so no munging subjects, no saving all mail, no saving rejects, etc, since I have other mechanisms that do all that). The comments in the configuration files are plenty good enough. This part went off like a breeze; the results can be found here (most of the values are still the upstream default). The next step was to create new, empty .css files. I have noticed that creating more buckets makes crm114 perform better, so I go with larger than norm crm114 .css files. I have no idea if this is the right thing to do, but I make like Nike and just do it. At some point I'll ask on the crm114-general mailing list.

    % cssutil -b -r -S 4194000 spam.css
    % cssutil -b -r -S 4194000 nonspam.css

Now we have a blank slate; at this time the filter knows nothing, and is equally likely to call something Spam or non-Spam. We are now ready to learn. So, I girded my loins, and set about feeding my whole mail corpus to the filter:

 /usr/share/crm114/mailtrainer.crm               \
   --spam=/backup/classify/Done/Spam/           \
   --good=/backup/classify/Done/Ham/            \
   --repeat=100 --streak=35000                  \
         egrep -i '^ + train Excell Running'

And this failed spectacularly (see bug #399306). Faced with unexpected segment violations, and not being proficient in crm114's rather arcane syntax, I was forced to speculation: I assumed (as it turns out, incorrectly) that if if you throw too many changes at the crm114 database, things rapidly escalate out of control. I went o to postulate that as my mail corpus was gathered over a period of errors, the characteristic of Spam drifted over time, and what I consider Spam has also evolved. So, some parts of the early corpus are at variance with the more recent bits. Based on this assumption, I created a wrapper script which did what Clint has called training to exhaustion -- it iterated over the corpus several times, starting with a small and geometrically increasing chunk size. Given the premise I was working under, it does a good job of training crm114 on a localized window of Spam: it feeds chunks of the corpus to the trainer, with each successive chunk overlapping the previous and succeeding chunks, and ensuring that crm114 is happy at any given chunk of the corpus. Then it doubles the chunk size, and tries goes at it again. All very clever, and all pretty wrong. I also created another script to retrain crm114, which was less exhaustive than the previous one, but did incorporate any further drift in the nature of Spam. I no longer use these scripts; but I would like to record them for posterity as an indication of how far one can take an hypothesis. What it did to was have crm114 learn without segfaulting -- and show me that there was a problem in the corpus. I noticed that in some cases the trainer would find a pair of mail messages, classify them wrongly, and retrain and refute -- iteration after iteration, back and forth. I noticed this when I added the egrep filter above, and was not drowning in the needless chatter from the trainer. It turns out, I had very similar emails (sometimes, even the same email) in the Ham and the Spam corpus, and no wonder crm114 was throwing hissy fits. Having small chunks ensured that I had not too many such errors in any chunk;and crm114 did try to forget a mail differently classified in an older chunk and learn whatever this chunk was trying to teach it. The downside was that the count of the differences between ham nd Spam went down, and the similarities increased -- which meant that the filter was not as good at separating ham and Spam as it could have been. So my much vaunted mail corpus was far from clean -- over the years, I had misclassified mails, been wishy-washy and changed my mind about what was and was not Spam. I have a script that uses md5sums to find duplicate files in a directory, and found, to my horror, that there were scores of duplicates in the corpus. After eliminating outright duplicates, I started examining anything that showed up with an ER (error, refute) tag in the trainer output; on the second iteration of the training script these were likely to be misclassification. I spent days examining my corpus and cleaning it out; and was gratified to see the ratio of differences to similarities between ham and Spam css files climb from a shade under 3 to around 7.35. Next post we'll talk about lessons learned about training, and how a nominal work flow of training on errors and training when classifiers disagree can be set up.

I'm pretty happy about the way the 'Ten Web 2.0 APIs you can really use' episode of the LinuxCast came out so well. I'm not very used to talking for recording, and like everyone I don't particularly enjoy hearing my own voice recorded (do I really sound like that?), but it was fun to do, and I think it's a nice adjunct to the Ten Web 2.0 APIs you can really use article itself. tags: api podcast linuxcast linuxworld

Tijuana We're on a trip in Southern California this week, so we decided yesterday to go to Tijuana for the day. Maj, Amita June and I got out of the condo we're staying at in Encinitas early in the morning -- well, early for a vacation day -- and headed down to downtown San Diego. It's a trip of about 25 miles, with one tricky turnoff at highway 805 that seems to get me every time I visit this part of the world. Going into Mexico with a car can be a bit of a hassle. Many American insurers don't cover cars going into Mexico, and you'll often get asked about insurance when you cross over. There are some quick-and-dirty insurers on the border that can give you one-day insurance or other short-term coverage, but we have a rental car right now, and most (all?) rental car companies forbid with bitter, mouth-foaming forbiddance driving the car across the border. Fortunately for us, San Diego has a great way around this problem. Their trolley system goes from downtown San Diego right up to the border in San Ysidro. So, we picked it up in the Civic Center downtown, after a brief stop at the Downtown San Diego Vistors Center (to get tourist material), a shopping foray at a stall outside of the downtown Macy's (to get Amita June a pair of purple Crocs), and a side trip into the Westin for a bathroom break. Man, the Westin in San Diego has nice bathrooms! I'd heard about these trolleys in the past, and I guess I'd expected a kind of fancy tourist train, but it's really just the Blue Line for typical light-rail trains for San Diego and its suburbs. The seats were comfortable, but the train right-of-way went through some of the least scenic parts of Southern California I've ever seen. There's something about this corner of the United States of America that's depressing and end-of-the-world; I get the same feeling about other borderlands, like around Plattsburgh and Laredo. The end of the line for the trolley is completely opaque as to how get into Mexico. We wandered around past some ugly strip malls until Maj spotted a tiny oblique walkway that said "US PROPERTY SUBJECT TO SEARCH AND FINE" and in much smaller letters "a Mexico - to Mexico". We went through a wiggly walkway and across the no-man's land between the scary metal fence at the US border and the actual Mexican customs area. Nobody was there, but we got the feeling we were being watched. At the end of this weird walk was a very nice tourist info center, where we got some maps and brochures and such. Another 10 minutes walk through the streets up against the fence, we got to Avenida Revolucion, the central way through the Tijuana/Zona Centro. It had been a while since we'd been to a city with aggressive touts, so getting yelled at by people in shop doorways or in the street was a bit of a jolt. I hate the invasion of my anonymity, and I'm pretty reflexive about saying "NO NO NO NO NO" to everyone, but Maj is a little more practical. "If everything is run by aggressive sideshow barkers, you're going to miss out on everything," she points out. "Sometimes, you have to say 'yes', even if you don't like the way the question was asked." By the time we hit av. Revolution, we were pretty tired, so we stumbled into the first restaurant we found -- El Torito, a big nightclub with go-go cages, a mechanical bull, and a tattoo parlour on premises. I was attracted by the racy Absinth Mexico posters. "Family restaurant, family place," said the touts, seeing the baby in the stroller. Sure. The food wasn't bad -- I made the mistake of ordering the fish Vera Cruz, but the waiter made a smelly-face and suggested I get the shrimp instead -- and the cocktails at 1PM were generous and inexpensive. Probably the nicest part was a guy with a guitar who came over and asked to sing. "We've got enough music," said Maj, pointing at the ceiling where loud disco tunes were booming. But he was insistent, so we let him play, and he sang a loud Besa Me Mucho that drowned out the Ricky Martin and had us, the waiter, and nearby diners singing along by the end. Amita June was fascinated by the sounds, and clapped along when he was done. After lunch we walked down av. Revolucion, which had a dense layer of souvenir shops and discount pharmacies offering Viagra and Cipro without a prescription. One weird repeated theme was donkeys painted as zebras, hooked up to carts where you could sit and get your picture taken for $2. Some of the donkeys looked pretty good in their zebra stripes, but most looked pretty bummed out. I'm not sure why tourists would expect to get their picture taken with a zebra while in northern Mexico. It got a lot nicer as we got down to the end of the block, and we kicked ourselves for being so lazy when we passed Chiki Jai, a charming little restaurant with tiled walls and rough wood furniture. Much more to our tastes than El Torito. We stopped at the monumental Jai Alai courts, with a beautiful facade and a nice statue out front. Ducking into the Tia Juana's next door, we did a diaper-change break and had some chips and salsa and pineapple juice (and Dos Equis Dark on tap for Papa). Then we started walking back to the border. On our way back, we got off of Revolucion and walked over to the city's Cathedral. It was a much more realistic part of the town -- shopping and bars and restaurants, true, but less ridiculous touristy crap. When we got to the cathedral, there was a holiday street fair going outside, with games and food stalls and people laughing and walking around with kids. It felt a little more human than the pressure-tactics-dense world of Revolucion. On our way back to the border crossing, we dipped briefly into the red light district at the head of av. Constitucion (who knew?), then made the long slog back to the USA. We didn't get much in the way of souvenirs, but Maj bought a nice set of luchador dolls for her brother, complete with a tiny wrestling ring. The line at the border was huge, and we had to wait at the trolley station for another 30 minutes before one left for SD again. By the time we got back downtown, around 5:30, we really weren't up for a dinner in the San Diego/Gaslamp Quarter like we'd originally planned. So we piled into the car, paid the $20 parking to get out, and headed right into rush-hour traffic that led to the over-populated and under-networked North County (San Diego County). Would I take the trolley to Tijuana again? Maybe. Next time, I'd probably go to one of the stops between San Diego and San Ysidro, where there are free parking lots and a little less hassle. tags: tijuana san diego travel san ysidro

Hazards of vacation homes I was just rifling through the fridge here at the condo in Encinitas and found what I thought was a delicious Abita beer, the fine drink you have when you can't handle another hurricane in New Orleans. But it turned out to be an Abita Purple Haze, a gross raspberry-wheat beverage. Unfair! It has probably been stuck in the back of the fridge of this condo for years. Fortunately there was still another Stone Pale Ale, from the North County local microbrewery, to satisfy my lunchtime beer needs. tags: stone brewing abita beer

Although you've not behaved very good, Santa Claus has a present for you: the entire GNOME 2.16.2 desktop in experimental. All core applications are here, only some bindings are still missing. Which means it's time for the most courageous to test it. With the experimental APT source configured, it should be a matter of apt-get install -t experimental gnome-desktop-environment. Be warned, it's still rough around the edges:

• GTK+ makes liferea crash repeatedly;
• there are a few glitches in the file chooser;
• there is only one working icon theme (the default one);
• evince seems to crash on some files;
• the keyboard switching stuff doesn't work at all.

But there are also many pleasant speed and UI improvements in most modules. Unfortunately for many, it is currently only available on amd64. Now, if a group of reindeers could rebuild it on i386, the children would be much happier. Otherwise, I will take some time to rebuild them in an i386 chroot in a few days.

The Lexus GS 450 hybrid petrol/electric car has been given the award for Australia's best luxury car!

The judging for this contest rated fuel efficiency as low importance, because luxury car owners traditionally aren't very concerned about such things. The Lexus won because of it's quiet engine (can't beat an electric motor at low speed), high performance (3.5L petrol engine that outperforms mode 4L engines because of the electric motor assistance), safety, security, and other factors.

There has been an idea that hybrid cars are only for people who want to protect the environment at all costs. The result of this contest proves that idea to be false. The Lexus won by simply being a better luxury car, the features that benefit the environment also give a smoother and quieter ride and higher performance - which are factors that are very important to that market segment! Also it wasn't even a close contest, the nearest rival achieved an aggregate score of 9% less (a significant difference as there was a mere 2.5% difference in score between the 2nd place and 5th place).

This of course shouldn't be any surprise. The high torque that electric motors can provide at low speed is well known - it's the reason for Diesel-electric hybrid power systems in locomotives. It was only a matter of time before similar technology was introduced for cars for exactly the same reasons. The next development will be hybrid Diesel-electric trucks.