I have been reading a great many posts about Android lately, some consisting of criticism, some of praise and some simply addressing issues in the Android community . Let s have a look at those. Matt Porter s Android Mythbusters presentation and Harald Welte s reaction
I haven t seen the presentation live, but I had a look at the slides. Impressing work done by Matt putting all this information together. However, we all knew that Android only (ab-)uses Linux, without making use of the GNU userland for a long time, didn t we? In his presentation Matt has shown things such as Android s udev replacement that uses hardcoded values for device node creation and (on his blog) Harald has then come up with a statement I have found to be very strong:

The presentation shows how Google has simply thrown 5-10 years of Linux userspace evolution into the trashcan and re-implemented it partially for no reason. Things like hard-coded device lists/permissions in object code rather than config files, the lack of support for hot-plugging devices (udev), the lack of kernel headers. A libc that throws away System V IPC that every unix/Linux software developer takes for granted. The lack of complete POSIX threads. I could continue this list, but hey, you should read those slides. now!

Now both of these statements target technical details, but the root of the problem seems to be elsewhere. Where is my Android 2.0? Okay, that heading might not be making any sense in the context of this post at a first glance, but let me elaborate on that. Google and the Open Handset Alliance refer to Android as being an Open Source operating system, but the project is different from real Free Software projects: development takes place in a closed group and the results are shared with the community later on, when they are deemed to be ready. This means that innovation also takes place behind closed curtains and that the community is not involved in the actual development process at all. Lately we have seen the result of that, as Motorola is bragging about working close with Google on Android 2.0 ( Eclair ), but the AOSP source trees, open for everyone to have a look at, show no signs of version 2.0. In fact no changes that might even remotely suggest the release of a new major version have been made public in the past few weeks. So where is the openess there?
Actually, the Motorola Droid has already shipped with Eclair on 6th, but still, there is no indication that Eclair will be made available to the broader public. In short Android seems to be developed behind closed curtains, with hardly (read no) community input whatsoever and is sometimes released as Free Software, not what I would describe as an open development process. The Android Market problem As we have seen in the past Google is enforcing their copyright on proprietary applications that ship with pretty much every Android device, such as the Android Market. This has become really clear when Steve Kondik received a cease and desist letter when packing the Google-proprietary applications into his ROMs. Okay, it s Google s right to enforce their copyright and there is nothing wrong with actually doing so, the thing I really have a problem with is something else: the Market is proprietary. Now what this means should become rather clear. You can have an Android device without Google s proprietary bits, but with default settings you just do not have any way of installing additional software. In my opinion the Market should be freed by Google themselves, or the community has to react and come up with a free replacement to overcome the vendor lock-in. Oh, you might know a replacement called SlideMe (or Mobentoo) already. Well, that bugger is proprietary too, so not a solution at all. Nokia and Maemo to the rescue In most discussions about the openness of Android someone throws in Nokia and Maemo, as a solution to the dilemma. Reading all those positive comments I simply had to give it a try, but all my hopes were destroyed within a few minutes. Let s start with the good news and let alone the reason why my hopes were destroyed for another minute or two. Maemo is based on Debian GNU/Linux and various Free Software components, such as GTK+, gstreamer, esd and friends. Most of the system is Free Software which is a good thing(tm) and reading all of this really got me into Maemo. Okay, some applications seem to be proprietary, but I am sure that could be fixed rather easily, so I could once for all use a truly open phone. and then came the SDK installer shell script:

#!/bin/sh
# Copyright (C) 2006-2009 Nokia Corporation
#
# This is proprietary software owned by Nokia Corporation.
#
# Contact: Maemo Integration <integration@maemo.org>
# Version: $Revision: 1110 $

Now there is one question you should ask yourself: Why would someone trying to promote his platform as being open make the *installer* script for its SDK proprietary? Come on, it s an installer script, how much of your secret juice could be in there? What s the problem with people modifying it and working on this installer script in an open development environment? I had high hopes for Nokia actually doing a bit better than Google, but it seems they ve failed to do so. It may be me overreacting, but a proprietary SDK installer shell script scares me enough not to install the SDK and have a look at it for now nor to think about buying a Maemo-based device in the near future. Please Nokia, either get the facts straight or provide us with a free SDK to your free & open platform. So, in short, Google is bad at working with the community and creating a truly open development process, and Nokia simply fails in terms of not scaring off prospective developers for their open platform with the proprietary SDK installer. Do you have any solutions in terms of an open phone environment, apart from what OpenMoko has come up with?

... we are moving to bigger office building at the moment ;-)

So far, our household has resisted any piece of the iPhone onslaught. Yes, I carry an iPod Classic, but that s different. Terah s old Palm m100 is becoming a problem. The platform is dead, and the desktop sync drivers for it are decaying rapidly in every operating system. Not only that, but we would really like to be able to share calendars between us. Terah doesn t need a phone or a mobile data plan. After thinking about it a bit and getting some advice, we decided to get her the $200 8GB iPod Touch. And it arrived Friday. I ve used portable devices plenty before. I had my share of PalmOS devices: III, V, Clie; an HP 200LX DOS-based err netbook; a Zaurus; and an N810. The first thing that struck me about the iPod Touch was beauty no surprise there. The interface exuded an air of stability, like it wasn t going to just crash when something went wrong. It felt solid and well-planned. Physically, it s thin. Really thin. That s perhaps the most impressive thing about it of all. Sometimes the GUI masked underlying performance issues. For instance, it may take awhile to draw a web page. On the N810, you get to watch as different bits of the screen appear. On the iPod Touch, you sit there staring at a white screen with a spinning wheel for awhile, and then suddenly poof, the webpage is there. I d have to say the Apple approach feels better. Terah and I decided to sync with Google Calendar, and that setup was easy and well-done on the iPod Touch easier than on the Blackberry with Google s own app, in fact. The only question was that Contacts was a bit counter-intuitive; select the Google account and nothing shows up, but everything is there under the generic Contacts bucket. The Calendar worked very well, even properly handling meetings and invitations. The mail app works well, though it takes a long very long time to scroll through a lengthy email to get to the attachment at the bottom. There s no go to bottom of message feature that I could see, and my idea of pinching the screen to make the text tiny to make scrolling faster didn t work. The mail setup, though, is a complete and utter pain. There is no way anybody that doesn t know a lot of details about SSL certs could have made this work. When you add a mail account, it requires you to have an IMAP and SMTP server defined. It would like to use SSL/TLS with these, which is great. But if it can t validate the cert, it pops up a dialog box asking if you want to continue. You can say yes, but it just sits there for a couple of minutes and then fails with a mysterious error. I had to put my cert up on a webserver, point Safari at it, and install the cert to the device before it would talk to it. That solved IMAP. SMTP was another matter too. Strangely, on the initial account setup, there is no way to put in the port number for SMTP server. Yet it won t save your account until it can connect to one. Of course, most ISPs block the smtp port, so this was bound to fail. Finally I pointed it at a server on my local network temporarily, then went in and edited the account to point it to the real server with the second non-25 port it listens on for just such situations. Safari works really well. It s probably the best mobile browser I ve seen yet (I haven t seen Android or Palm Pre yet.) It is far better than the N810 browser, both in terms of speed and in terms of ability to reformat pages to fit the device. The tabbed browsing is a lot faster switching than the N810 s separate windows, and nicer too. The app store essentially lived up to my expectations. It was very easy to use, and obviously a closed proprietary ecosystem. The free apps that existed there mostly were adware. I looked for a Jabber client, and wasn t happy with any option. Some of them required Apple Push Notifications, with a complex network of two servers between the device and the Jabber server. No thanks to that invasion of privacy. And that brings me to the topic of weird limitations. iPod Touch apps, in general, can t run in the background. You exit Safari, and when you get back in, it s reloading that webpage. Now many apps are good at remembering their state, but this feels very PalmOS to me. You can t use the iPod Touch at all until you first sync it with iTunes. That is incredibly weird. The device has Wifi, people. Plus, why should I have to register it with Apple anyhow? And then there s the lack of a file manager, or anything like it. I can t scp a file from my computer to the iPod Touch like I can my N810, nor the other way round. It is generally unclear how much of the 8GB is in use, and by what. Terah needs a password-keeping program. There are several in the app store. I d really like one that uses Bruce Schneier s standard Password Safe format which is supported on just about any platform you care to name. Couldn t find one. Even if I could, I guess it wouldn t do me any good, since you can t copy the file to a PC anyhow. Sigh. Overall, Terah is very excited with the device, and I must admit to being so too. Its faster web browser means it s probably a good replacement for the N810 especially if you want a calendar, which the N810 completely lacks. It makes an excellent PDA, perhaps the first PDA I ve seen that equals the usability of the old PalmOS. On the other hand, it isn t really a power user s device. There are a lot of surprising limitations and missing features that competing devices have had for years.

Note: via Blog post (obviously different formatting) and sent by email roughly: Lying in one, lying in all. That is from Steve Waddington. Please see the attached screenshot I have obliterated service identifying information. I find it telling that what I said in my original post, of all the things there the one you decided to fact-check was the number of emails between us. And you got that wrong. What was is you said again? Falsum in uno, falsum in omnibus? Do you still stand by that statement? If you have looked at the original complaint, no one asked for anything but information on 'what went wrong'. It simply noted that fact that payment occurred, and we were disconnected and went on to say "We find the above experience of diconnecting [sic] our service by EXETEL a very poor customer relationship experience." The response to that could have been: "Yes, that is a poor customer experience. We will look into it and see if we can improve." Instead we had an accusatory email back commenting, firstly, of the amount of time of the disconnection. As if someone paying for something and not receiving it for only 1 minute is OK. The point being missed we paid for something and we did not receive it. The point being missed -- this is a poor customer experience The second email then, falsely, accused us of not actually paying in the first place! Later the individual concerned, after the TIO complaint, clarifies that 'yes', we did indeed pay. Very telling indeed, then, when you were pointed to my blog entry and rather than pick up on the stratgeic ("we are getting feedback, for free, on how we can improve our processes") you looked at the tactical ("he is lying! How I prove it and thus be happy in ignoring what was said"). As I said, It is easier to hear when your fingers are not in your ears. In light of your recent blog post, and the recently released TIO report, I find Exetels' behaviour all the more perplexing. Complain to Exetel, get your service contract summarily terminated. Complain about Exetel, and get libelled publicly. But I guess when you have 1/6th (163 out of 620) of your complaints related to Customer Service (from the TIO report) and 3% of your own existing customers (from your blog post) complaining, you get the reputation you earn.

From left to right: Obey Arthur Liu, Olly Betts, Stefano Zacchiroli, Dirk Eddelbuettel, Sylvestre Ledru, Jelmer Vernooij.

Dear Planet,

We arrived at the Google Summer of Code 2009 Mentor Summit and are having a blast here. The weather is awesome, the candies are plenty and the conference rooms are comfy at the Googleplex. We will write to you again soon.

Cheers

The Debian people Arthur, Olly, Zack, Dirk, Sylvestre, Jelmer

A topic I've been trying to understand more about for some time is color calibration. I've used lprof to get a very rough starting point for my old CRT (sorely in need of replacement by now...) Since hardware colorimeters are not cheap and probably not many can be used with Linux (I've not really looked, to be honest) I've wondered if I couldn't use the one device that is (should be) calibrated that I already have: my camera. With some kind of feedback loop like shoot screen, analyze img file, adjust settings, shoot again (and the same process for the printer, and, possibly a bit more error prone since the freshly calibrated printer would be used to produce the template, the scanner), shouldn't it be possible to arrive at sane settings? The camera explicitly allows using sRGB or Adobe RGB color model, so I'd think the colors should be more or less narrowly defined, at least when shooting raw or using manual white balance. (Another thought: I have a dual screen system. Can X even do this? And if X can do it, is it possible to tell Gimp to set this up? But this is just idle speculatio. I've not really looked at Google's results yet, either.) Update: Haven't really thought about ambient light. But the display emits light, so I'd shoot the screen in a darkened room, with white balance of the camera set manually. OTOH thanks Jo l if I can get a colorimeter for not much above 100$, it's not worth investing too much time. I had always thought these devices were much more expensive. divide_by_zero Yes, I know CRT are usually much better than LCD, but OTOH my screen apparently starts to show its age: it will suddenly, and visibly, change brightness and color every few hours. I suspect the high voltage circuitry is not too stable anymore... And I won't buy another CRT, those things are just huge...

Every now and then, people ask me why Debian? Why, among so many projects to choose from, I first liked, then got into, and finally I got committed into Debian, and not anything else? Of course, one of the main points back in 2000-2001 when I started using it, and still to this very day is a strong identification with the ideological side. Yes, I am a strong Free Software believer, and Debian is what best suites my ideology. Still, I did not only get into Debian because of this And I was reminded about this by an article in this month's Usenix ;login: magazine: An anecdotal piece by Thomas A. Limoncelli titled Hey! I have to install and maintain this crap too, ya know! (article requires ;login: subscription, but I'll be glad to share it with whoever requests it to me I have of course no permission to openly put it here in whole online. Yes, I am expressly sending a copy of this text to the author, I will update this if/when I hear from him) [update] The author has kindly allowed me to redistribute his article's PDF Download it here. Before anything else I'll go on a short digression: I am writing a bit regarding the Free Software participants' culture, and this is a trait I love about it: The lack of formality. Even though ;login: (and Usenix as a whole) is not exactly Free Software, it runs quite close to it), it is a well regarded magazine (and association) with an academic format and good (not deep or highly theoretical, but good) contents. Still, it is quite usual to see titles as informal and inviting as this one. And it happens not only here I have been fearing having to explain at work, over and over, why I have requesting permissions to go to Yet Another Perl Conference, Festival de Software Libre or DebCamp, tagging them as academic settings. Or why I am wasting our library's resources on buying cookbooks, recipes and similar material on the most strange-sounding subjects. Anyway, back on track This article I found refers to the lack of value given to the system administrator's time when selling or purchasing (or more in general, as it happens also in Free Software, when offering or adopting) a product. Quoting Thomas:

A person purchasing a product is focused on the features and benefits and the salesperson is focused on closing the deal. If the topic of installation does come up, a user thinks, Who cares! My sysadmin will install it for me! as if such services are free. Ironically, it is the same non-technical executive who dismisses installation and upkeep as if they are free who might complain that IT costs are too high and go on a quest to kill IT spending. But I digress. I can understand why a product might be difficult to install. It is hard enough to write software, and with the shortage of software developers it seems perfectly reasonable that the installation script becomes an afterthought, possibly given to a low-ranking developer. The person purchasing the product usually requires certain features, and ease of installation is not a consideration during the procurement process. However, my ability to install a product affects my willingness to purchase more of the product.

Thomas goes on to explain his experience with Silicon Graphics, how Irix was so great regarding install automation and how they blew it when switching to Windows NT; talks very briefly about IBM AIX's smit, a very nifty sysadmin aid which is basically a point-and-click interface to system administration with the very nice extra that allows you to view the commands smit executes to perform a given action (and then you can copy into a script and send over to your hundreds of AIX machines) Incidentally, by the time I started digging out of what became the RedHat mess of the late 1990s and passed briefly through OpenBSD on my way to Debian enlightenment, I was temporarily the sysadmin for an AIX machine And I too loved this Smit approach, having it as the ultimate pedagogical tool you could ever find. Anyway, I won't comment and paraphrase the full article. I'll just point out to the fact that this was what ultimately sold me into Debian. The fact that I could just install anything and (by far) most of the times it will be configured and ready to use. Debian made my life so much easier! As a sysadmin, I didn't have to download, browse documentation, scratch head, redo from start until I got a package working Just apt-get into it, and I'd be set. Of course, one of the bits I learnt back then was that Debian was for lazy people Everything works in a certain way. Policy is enforced throughout. So as a sysadmin, I should better get well acquinted with the Debian policy and know it by heart. In order to be able to enjoy my laziness, I should read it and study it. And so I did, and fell in love. And that is where my journey into becoming a Debian Developer started. Why am I talking so nostalgic here? Because I got this magazine on the mail just last weekend And coincidentally, I also got bug report #551258 I packaged and uploaded the Haml Ruby library (Gem, as the Rubyists would call it). Haml is a great, succint markup language which makes HTML generation less of a mess. It is even fun and amazing to write Haml, and the result is always nicely formatted, valid HTML! And well, one of Haml's components is haml-elisp, the Emacs Lisp major mode to do proper syntax highlighting in Haml files. Of course, I am an Emacs guy (and have been for over 25 years), so I had to package it. But I don't do Emacs Lisp! So I just stuffed the file in its (supposed) place, copying some stuff over from other Emacs packages. During DebConf, I got the very valuable help of Axel Beckert to fix a simple bug which prevented my package from properly being installed, and thought I was basically done with it. I was happy just to add this to my ~/.emacs and get over with it: However As Mike Castleman points out: This requires manual intervention. So it is not the Debian Way! Reading Mike's bug report, and reading Thomas' article, made me realize I was dilluting something I held so dearly as to commit myself to the best Free Software-based distribution out there. And the solution, of course, was very simple: Debian allows us to be very lazy, not only as sysadmins, but as Debian packagers. Just drop this (simplified version) as $pkgroot/debian/haml-elisp.emacsen.startup and you are set! This will make the package just work as soon as it is installed, with no manual intervention required from the user. And it does not, contrary to what I feared, bloat up Emacs Adding it to the auto-mode-alist leaves it as known to Emacs, but is not loaded or compiled unless it is required. Deepest thanks to both of you! (and of course, thanks also to Manoj, for pointing out at the right spells in emacs-land)

Attachment	Size
Thomas A. Limoncelli: Hey! I have to install and maintain this crap too, ya know! (Usenix's ;login: October 2009	144.5 KB

Another trio concert at CSO, but very different from the most recent classic piano trio. Tonight was once again a chance to see Dianne Reeves (wikipedia) but this time accompanied simply by two guitarists: Russell Malone and Romero Lubambo (wikipedia). Given that Dianne Reeves (who we had seen in just a few month earlier in our neighbourgood) has plenty of stage presence, the format made for a more intimate concert yet with plenty of groove at times too. The three had been touring in Europe for 25 shows, and it was a really nice performance and a great way to end the week. Recommend if you can catch them somewere.

So Debian-NYC, mainly the DebConf10 local team, organized a workshop for people interested on Debian packaging. The nice people of drop.io offered their handy location in Brooklyn. So this is the first attempt to bring new comers to Debian aiming DebConf10 next summer. Micah and dkg are the ones leading the workshop so far. Pictures!

8 GB of storage will more than suffice for a nice and clean Debian installation ;-) If you live in germany, i absolutely recommend http://www.pulster.de/ for all free phone accessories!

Today I was working all day on python-debianbts 1.0 and uploaded it to unstable a few minutes ago. This version breaks backwards compatibility with previous versions. I removed lots of unneeded old cruft like the HTMLStripper class needed ages ago when I was still using HTML instead of debbugs SOAP interface. A new method get_usertag(email, *tags) was introduced. It returns a dict containing usertag-buglist mappings. If tags are given the dict is limited to matching tags, otherwise all available tags of the given user are returned:

In [1]: import debianbts as bts
In [2]: bts.get_usertag( debian-python@lists.debian.org )
Out[2]:
 dist-packages : [547838, 547832, ..., 547858],
  dpmt-todo : [332913],
  policy : [373301, 373302, ..., 377089],
  python-oldnum : [478467, 478442, ..., 478441],
  python2.1 : [351108, 351110, ..., 351131],
  python2.2 : [351108, 351109, ..., 351161],
  python2.6 : [547838, 547832, ... 547858] 
In [3]: bts.get_usertag( debian-python@lists.debian.org ,  python2.1 ,  python2.2 )
Out[3]:
 python2.1 : [351108, 351110, ..., 351131],
  python2.2 : [351108, 351109, ..., 351161] 

get_bug_log(nr) now returns a list of dicts with the keys: header (string), body (string), msg_num (int) and attachments (list). Before 1.0 it returned a list of Buglog objects. The Bugreport class now supports every information provided by the SOAP interface. I tried to stay as close as possible to the data SOAP provides, so I renamed existing attributes (like Bugreport.nr which is not supported by SOAP but is now Bugreport.bug_num) and also added the quirky ones like: id and bug_nr, found and found_versions, keywords and tags, fixed and fixed_date which always seem to provide the same data. Instead of the Bugreport.value() method which provided a number representing the openness (in terms of: open, closed and archived) and urgency (like: grave, important, ) to make bugreports sortable by their status, the Bugreport class now has a __cmp__ method which makes bugreports comparable. The more open and urgent a bug is, the greater it is. Openness always beats urgency (eg: an open whishlist bug is greater than a closed grave one). While pre 1.0 versions of python-debianbts more or less served the needs of reportbug-ng, it now tries to stay as close as possible to the data provided by SOAP. As a result many parts of reportbug-ng had to be fixed for the new version. I hope this makes python-debianbts more attractive for other projects dealing with Debian s bug tracker. As always: python-debianbts is on github and forks, patches or other kinds of collaboration are very welcome. For the curious here a litte quickstart. it shows how to get all important bugs from reportbug-ng and prints out the bugnumber and summary:

# Get all important bugs of reportbug-ng (returns a list of integers)
bugnrlist = bts.get_bugs("package", "reportbug-ng", "severity", "important")
bugnrlist
[548871, 439203, 542759]
# Get the actual bugreports (returns a list of Bugreport-objects)
bugs = bts.get_status(bugnrlist)
for bug in bugs: print bug.bug_num, bug.subject
    .:
542759 [reportbug-ng] Erroneously reports nothing or repeats previous package s report
439203 Doesn t give any explanations of the severities and what they mean
548871 reportbug-ng: does not check for newer versions before reporting a bug

In my last blog entry I used the term "image-hack". It seems like it has been considered to have a negative feeling attached to it. Even though I consider this very amusing in a community that likes to pride itself with the term "hackers" I guess I can understand why people consider it a negative term. Even though technically a mockup of a website in image form actually feels just a crude hack it wasn't meant to belittle what pixelgirl has produced. Her image-hack looks extremely well. Unfortunately no further contact after the debconf was established and personally I'm not convinced how the tiny image would work for other pages besides the start page and removing the DSAs and News from the start page is a no-go, we actually do receive positive feedback for that. So it is what it is, an image-hack. An extremely well done one, but still just that.

Humm... Has anybody else seen a pattern like this? I am getting a flurry of root login attempts at my main server at the University since yesterday 7:30AM (GMT-5). Now, from the machines I run in the 132.248.0.0/16 network (UNAM), only two listen to the world with ssh at port 22 And yes, it is a very large network, but I am only getting this pattern on one of them (they are on different subnets, quite far apart). They are all attempting to log in as root, with a frequency that varies wildly, but is consistently over three times a minute right now. This is a sample of what I get in my logs: [update] Logs omitted from blog post, as it is too wide and breaks displays for most users. You can download the log file instead. Anyway This comes from all over the world, and all the attempts are made as root (no attempts from unprivileged users). Of course, I have PermitRootLogin to no in /etc/ssh/sshd_config, but I want to understand this as much as possible. Initially it struck me that most of the attempts appeared to come from Europe (quite atypical for the usual botnet distribution), so I passed my logs through: The top countries (where the number of attempts 5) are: I am attaching to this post the relevant log (filtering out all the information I could regarding legitimate users) as well as the full output. In case somebody has seen this kind of wormish botnetish behaviour lately please comment. [Update] I have tried getting some data regarding the attacking machines, running a simple nmap -O -vv against a random sample (five machines, I hope I am not being too agressive in anybody's eyes). They all seem to be running some flavor of Linux (according to the OS fingerprinting), but the list of open ports varies wildly I have seen the following: Of course, it strikes me that several among said machines seem to be Linuxes, but (appear to) run Microsoft services. Oh, and they also have P2P clients.

Attachment	Size
Results of parsing the logs	21.58 KB
Relevant portion of the logs	1.05 MB

Oh well... in the last days my machine crashed during the nightly backup. When I restarted it the next morning I realized two problems: the LVM is not recognized anymore and my X crashes on startup.
With the help of Tino Keitel (scorpi) I fixed the first issue by installing an older version of the lvm2 package (namely: lvm2_2.02.39-7_i386.deb) and libdevmapper1.02.1 (namely: libdevmapper1.02.1_1.02.37-1_i386.deb). Tino reported this in Bug #546817.

But there's still the Xorg problem left. Xorg.0.log reports:



Maybe this is Bug #546586? I've already detached the second display, but it still crashes. Pointers and solutions appreciated!

UPDATE: thanks for the points! X is now working again!

Since I last evaluated and complained about wikis last year, I ve been using moinmoin for two sites: a public one and a personal one. The personal site has notes on various projects, and my task lists. I ve been starting out with the Zen To Done (ebook, PDF, paper) idea. It sounds great, by the way; a nice improvement on the better-known GTD. My To Do Page Anyhow, in MoinMoin, I have a ToDos page. At the top are links to pages with different tasks: personal, work, yard, etc. Below that, are the three big rocks (as ZTD calls them) for the day: three main goals for the day. I edit that section every day. The Calendar And below that, I use MoinMoin s excellent MonthCalendar macro. I have three calendars in a row: this month, next month, and last month. Each day on the calendar is a link to a wiki page; for instance, ToDos/Calendar/2009-10-01. The day has a red background if the wiki page exists, and white otherwise. So when I need to do something on or by a specific day, I click on the link, click my TaskTemplate, and create a simple wiki page. When I complete all the tasks for that day, I delete that day s wiki page (and can note what I did as the log message if I like). Very slick. The Task Lists My task pages are similar. They look like this:
= Personal = <<NewPage(TaskTemplate,Create new task,@SELF)>> <<Navigation(children,1)>>
<<BR>>
So, my personal task page has a heading, then it has an input form with a text box and a button that says Create new task. Type something in and that becomes the name for a wiki page, and takes you do the editor to describe it. Below the button is a list of all the sub-pages under the Personal page, which represent the tasks. When a task is done, I delete the page and off the list it goes. I can move items from one list to another by renaming the page. It works very, very nicely. Collecting Part of both ZTD and GTD is that it must be very easy to get your thoughts down. The idea is that if you have to think, I ve got to remember this, then you ll be stressed and worried about the things you might be forgetting. I have a Collecting page, like the Personal or Work pages, that new items appear on when I m not editing my wiki. They get there by email. MoinMoin has a nice email system. I ve set up a secret email address. Mail sent there goes directly into MoinMoin. It does some checks on it, then looks at a combination of the From and Subject lines to decide what to do with it. If I name an existing page, it will append my message the the end. If it s a new page, it ll create it. I have it set up so that it takes the subject line as a page name to create/append to under ToDos/Collecting/$subject (by putting that as the name on the To line). So, on my computers, I have a newtodo script that invokes mail(1), asks for a subject, and optionally lets me supply a body. Quick and painless. Also, I ve added the address to my mobile phone s address book. That way I don t have to carry around pen and paper. Need to get down some thought ? No problem. Hit send email, pull the last address sent to, give it a subject and maybe a body. Very slick. Wiki Software As a way of updating my posts from last year: I ve been very happy with MoinMoin overall. It has some oddities, and the biggest one that concerns me is its attachment support. It doesn t let you specify a maximum upload size, and doesn t very well let you restrict attachment work to only certain people. But the biggest problem is that it doesn t track history on attachments. If a vandal deletes the attachment on a page, it s GONE. They expect to have that fixed in 2.0, coming out in approximately November, 2010. I also looked at Ikiwiki carefully over the past few days. Several things impressed me. First, everything can be in git. This makes for a very nice offline mode, better than Moin s offline sync. The comment module is nicer than anything in Moin, and the tagging system is as well. Ikiwiki truly could make a nice blog, and Moin just couldn t. It also puts backlinks at the bottom of each page automatically, a nice feature. And it s by Joey Hess, who writes very solid software. There are also some drawbacks. Chief on that list is that ikiwiki has no built-in history of a page feature. Click History and it expects to take you to gitweb or ViewVC or some such tool. That means that reverting a page requires either git access or cut and pasting. That s fine for me, but throwing newbies to gitweb suddenly might not be the most easy. Since ikiwiki is a (very smart) wiki compiler, its permission system is a lot less powerful than Moin s, and notably can t control read access to pages at all. If you need to do that, you d have to do it at the webserver level. It does have a calendar, but not one that works like Moin s does, though I could probably write one easily enough based on what s there. A few other minor nits: the email receiving feature is not as versatile as Moin s, you can t subscribe to get email notifications on certain pages (RSS feeds only, which would have to be manually tweaked later), and you can t easily modify the links at the top of each page or create personal bookmarks. Ikiwiki looks like an excellent tool, but just not quite the right fit for my needs right at the moment. I ve also started to look at DokuWiki a bit. I was initially scared off by all the plugins I d have to use, but it does look like a nice software. I also re-visited MediaWiki, and once again concluded that it is way too complicated for its own good. There are something like a dozen calendar plugins for it, some of which even are thought to work. The one that looked like the one I d use had a 7-step (2-page) installation process that involved manually running SQL commands and cutting and pasting some obscure HTML code with macros in it. No thanks.

I was requested to forward this information to as wide an audience as possible. Possibly two months ago the legality/legitimacy of the actions carried out by the Hondurean armed forces, which captured a democratically elected president and without a judicial order or trial process forced him out of the country, starting a de-facto government, was something questionable. Each day, however, it becomes clearer and clearer the Hondureans are suffering a represive military-backed system which cannot be expected to fulfill as a trustable entity to conduct fair, credible elections. I got this message from a Hondurean friend (of course, whose identity I am not divulging) denouncing the government's invasion of the .hn domain name registry, which is handled by the Sustainable Development Network (Red de Desarrollo Sustentable RDS-HN). The National Telecomunications Comission (Comisi n Nacional de Telecomunicaciones, CONATEL) demands all domain name registration under the .hn top-level domain (TLD) to be suspende, and all the lists and databases regarding said TLDs to be handed over, detailing the IP ranges and the responsibles. They did this under the argument that RDS-HN is an Internet Service Provider (which it is not Being a registrar means they are responsible for the well-keeping of public information and of handling a public good, the .hn TLD, not that they provide any kind of regulated service to individuals or organizations), with military personnel disguised as civilians (and who refused to identify themselves). If you are interested, please read further on the text I received straight from my Hondurean contacts (Spanish) (or its unaccurate but often helpful automated translation to English, done through Google Translate) Even though this information is normally accessible via WHOIS and similar services (this only states clearly nobody in CONATEL was able to do what I just did legally and anonymously from my personal workstation), they did it in such a fashion in order to scare the operators and the society. Honduras is going through a very hard process. Whatever happens there will likely impact on the future reactions to the most retrograd and powerful sectors of society in the rest of Latin America. We do our best (even if as non-Hondureans living outside Honduras it only means raising our voices) to avoid the risk of our region going back to the sad, cruel and bloody 1970s history. [update] My friend Mave, who works at NIC Chile, sent as a comment to this post LACTLD's official stand on this regard (Spanish. English version also available). LACTLD (Latin American and the Caribbean ccTLD's Organization) clearly backs RDS-HN and condemns the illegal government's actions.

Attachment	Size
Detailing the intervention attempt of RDS-HN by the de-facto government agents (Spanish)	8.61 KB

Trends are deceptive - but I haven't come back to this blogging in a while :)

I did my first Windows XP install for a while today for friends. Their machine had slowed to a crawl and _needed_ a disk format and reinstall. Three sets of media to find, three sets of 20 digit codes to type in. Printer software not found - so they'll have to go and download a huge program bundle from the manufacturer's site. [And it always takes an alleged 39 minutes from first reboot irrespective of the actual speed of the hardware :) ]

New hardware put in - a DVD writer to replace a CD writer which had lasted ten years and moved between at least two machines - that's spectacular in this day and age. The new drive is also 10% of the cost of the old one - 17 instead of about 200.

Total time to put on Windows XP, an AV product, get Firefox and to get part way through an Office 2007 install was about three hours. That's without setting up any accounts, shared directories (or network - the attached wireless router didn't need any changes).

I could do a Debian install onto the 40G disk in well under half that to include X windows, openoffice.org, iceweasel and a desktop environment. It would also run far better in 512M which is what this machine has.

Thankfully, they have data backups and an older laptop which has been the family workhorse - and a new netbook which attached to the network readily, has more disk than all other machines in the house combined, and cost less today than the "big machine" cost ten years ago at about 3 x the performance.

Intelligent questions were asked about Linux - I _wish_ I'd known about Ken Starks' radio advert or had it to hand at the time. See the Blog of Helios at http://linuxlock.blogspot.com for details - it's Free/Libre/Open Source under a CC Atttribute Share-alike 3.0 licence, and is available in a short version used in the radio advertisement .ogg or .mp3 or the longer version (.ogg .mp3 All in all, a balanced and a reasoned argument for switching based on nearly everybody's real life experience :(

[UPDATE] - The owner of the machine was up until 1 a.m - 11 hours total - because the machine decided to do a defrag. :(