Help. I’m going mad. I am not getting anywhere with my mailing list problems. I subscribe to mailing lists on hendry@dabase.com, but I send from different shells where the return path isn’t the same. So time and time again I can’t contribute to free software mailing lists. Mailman typically gives me a:

Is being held until the list moderator can review it for approval.
The reason it is being held: Post by non-member to a members-only list

Whilst the human moderator usually never moderates (blame spam) or moderates far too late. I’ve lost track of the mailing lists I’m subscribed to, but I can’t post to or if I have posted to, keep track if the message actually got posted or not. :(( This is a serious barrier to contribution, thank you Debian list managers for getting your policy right… It would have been great to see from the mailing list software what it thinks your email (return-path) is in these rejection emails. When sending test emails via my hosting service, my return-path could be hendry@pico.dreamhost.com or hendry@knife.dreamhost.com or some other machine. Is my hosting service broken? So I can’t expect the zillions of poorly configured mailing lists to change. So I have to make my subscribed address, the same as my return-path. Feck. How do I do that on my shells? I don’t know of any SMTP servers that can relay to a specific SMTP host on a user level. I could use a nasty hack for my shells. That would probably break a ton of things. Surely not?

Throughout the last couple of years, I've had some bad decisions. I decided to start using my credit to work for me, and to buy things which I couldn't afford. Partly this was because I had a horrible ex, who I thought I should do things for, and partly because of just living outside of my means for a certain period of time. The long and short of it is, I've gotten myself into a bit of credit card debt. I'm not in any big trouble, just needing to pay it down so that I can get on with using that money for other things. There is a couple of web applications that I have in the works which will help me remind myself, but that's neither here nor there at this point. So, I have all of this credit at high interest rates, surely there is someone out there that will look at my credit and finance it at a lower rate, make some money off of me, right? I'm thinking that what I need is a consolidation loan - something to lump together my credit card debt and give me one monthly payment. What I call this, is debt consolidation. Thinking we are in the age of the internet, I type "debt consolidation" into google and give it a try. This is my first mistake. Apparently "debt consolidation" doesn't mean that you are consolidating your debt, it instead means that you are going into what I would call debt negotiation. This means you decide of your own volition that you are going to stop paying your bills, and try to negotiate with the credit card companies to pay off your debt at a fraction of your actual debt. But I don't know this, so I nievely fill out a couple of forms at "debt consolidation" sites. This gets pretty long, so I put in a break. Read on, MacDuff. The Scam The first people who got in contact with me were some people from Credit Solutions. Let me be clear on this: I'm not making broad generalizations about the company here - I can only speak of my own experiences. The person who I got on the phone went through a whole spiel, "explaining" how it works. He was very high-pressure and very fast talking, just from the start I didn't want to buy anything from him because he seemed like a used car salesman who decided that it was better to make money from nothing than from goods. Here's the explanation he gave me: You've probably been paying your cards down already, so you've paid 70-100% of the cost of your original loan. You stopped paying your cards, wait 3 months, and then they start negotiating with their "powerhouse lawyers". Then they negotiate you to pay your debt at 40-60% of the current balance, and the credit card companies get to take the remaining 40% as a tax loss. Now is when the math gets strange. The man on the phone attempted to say that this meant that the credit card company got 140% of the current balance. This doesn't make sense to me, especially because I'm a smart credit card consumer, and most of my debt is on 0% APR promotional rate cards. This means that they have made at most 3% of the balance from me, based on balance transfer fees. The man on the phone tried to dance around the issue, saying that they actually will get the 40% tax loss and that means they'll still get 140%. 140%? This doesn't make sense - 60% plus 40% is 100%, not 140%. Lets add to this that a tax loss is not the same as profit: a tax loss only gets you like, 30% of your loss. At this point, I've decided that I'm being taken for a ride already, but I ask how it works anyway. Here's how this particular company is setup: I pay into a savings account (of my own), automatically deposit around $200 a month, and they take money out. For the first three months, they take the WHOLE amount. After that, they take half the amount, and leave the other half. They then start negotiating with your creditors, and when they make a deal, they tell you "pay them now". In the end, they take 15% of the settled cost of your debt. On $6k settled debt, this is another $900. I really didn't want to do it now, mostly because of the high cost. The man kept coming back to my objections with "you can't borrow your way out of debt". Of course you can't borrow your way out of debt. That's stupid. I wasn't planning on borrowing money and then ending up with less debt. I was planning on borrowing money so that I'm not paying so much in order to have the debt. Apparently he thought I was an idiot, because he kept repeating it to me. He sent me a little packet of stuff, which laid out the whole plan. After that, he gave me a call back. This is when I got really defensive. I asked him point blank: "What is the worst thing that can happen to me if I go with this plan?" His answer: "You stop paying your bills." On the surface, this is true. The worst thing that can happen is that I stop paying my credit card bills. He neglected to mention the fact that ceasing payment on my credit cards would ruin my credit, cause insane fees for lateness, and possibly send me to forced arbitration with the creditors. Every creditor that I have ever had since 2002 has had an arbitration agreement, which basically would end up in garnishment of wages. The Scum About a week after my first bad experience with a debt "consolidation" company, I got a second call from a completely separate company. They introduced themselves on the phone as "Christian Financial Services" or some such. Basically the same deal, but this was a low-pressure sell instead of a high-pressure sell. He was much more reasonable, and talked me through the whole thing at my own pace, taking his time to lay everything out that I could understand it. It was basically the same deal, 15% and they negotiate for you, but they set up an escrow account instead of you doing it yourself. When I asked the same "worst situation" question, he gave me a realistic outlook, and this company is in a much better standing. If the creditors don't like their negotiation and take you to arbitration, you actually get representation from their company to help you out. I was almost willing to do it. Then I went and looked at their actual company online, and discovered that they are a chamelon of some sorts. They were originally called something similar to "USA Debt Consolidation" or something otherwise patriotic. Apparently they decided that God could be on their side, at least it's good advertising. What good company has to change their name to get religion on their side? A good company would not need to change it's name. The Sweet Some people have gone with these companies, and they have actually negotiated with the creditors in order to pay off your debt at a fraction of the price. If it happens, that's the sweet part of this. Just given an example of $10,000 credit card debt, it is possible to pay around $6,000 and have all of your debt paid off. It's basically saying that you can spend money that you won't have to pay back, ever. There is some hit to your credit rating in the short term, but in the long term, it starts going the other direction. The hard part is finding a company who will do this and who you like. I had an even harder hurdle to surmount - I don't really believe that it is ethical to do this. I spent the money, I should pay it back - that's the deal I made with the company when I signed up for the card. To me, I need to go through with paying them back. Luckily, I came into this with a decent credit rating, and will probably go out with a similarly decent one. Right now, I am a prime target for anyone who wants to give me a large loan at a decent rate - if I can pay less for the money I spent, I'm savvy enough to do it. The Alternative There is one other option which I looked into, and will represent the only company that I will link through this diatribe: Consumer Credit Counseling Services or Money Management International are truly non-profit and have good word-of-mouth from anyone I have talked to. They will not negotiate to settle your debt, but they will work with the creditors to get lower percentage, and help you through your budget. The couple of talks on the phone that I had with these people were very productive, and I got some stuff in the mail to help me out. You pay down the entirety of your debt. The downside is that you get a good size hit on your credit rating. My Choice In my position, I decided that I was on a good track myself already - I'm paying off my cards smartly, taking the highest APR out as quickly as possible. On my current plan, I will be completely debt-free in 3 years, less if I get some windfall of any sort. One of the bonuses of having a good credit rating is that people are willing to loan me money at promotional rates for some amounts of time. When my promos run out, I play financial musical chairs and get the lowest rate on all of my money. That's just for me though, to each his own. The most important part in all of this is that I got control of my budget, and started living within my means. My punishment for living outside of my means for so much time is that now I have to live well within my means. I have to live within the means set upon by having to pay a large chunk of each paycheck to the creditors. Once I'm outside this, it will be much easier for me to have lots of happiness and savings.

In a discussion about VCS's on #bzr, I proposed the following axis in which a VCS's underpinning can vary: * core data for a commit: snapshot changeset 'semantic patch' * commit identifiers: content hash namespace + sequence pseudo-random human assigned * file location mapping: Unique ids history analysis None We can then categorise systems (I apologise in advance for any errors in classification, please feel free to correct me :): CVS: snapshot namespace+sequence none git: snapshot hash none svn: snapshot namespace + sequence history-analysis darcs: semantic patch human assigned history-analysis Arch: changeset namespace unique-id bzr = snapshot pseudo-random unique-id monotone = snapshot hash history-analysis etc. One can also consider what a semantic patch pseudo random unique-id using system would be like :) Update: This has spawned the following wiki page

It seems that I have become quite a gadget-whore lately. I'm spending all my money buying one gadget after the other, no end in sight... Anyways, I finally got one of those fabulous Motorola A780, a Linux-based smartphone. Getting one turned out to be way more complicated (and expensive!) than what I thought it would be. In the beginning, all sounded quite good: my cell phone contract with o2 is two years old soon, so I can get a new (cheap) cell phone. Stupidly enough, o2 doesn't offer the A780 in their shops and there seems to be no way to order one either (they do offer other Motorola phones, though). After asking the same questions in different o2 shops multiple times (and almost giving up), I accidentally saw the A780 in the local Saturn (a German electronics store). And indeed, they sell the phone, and they can even prolong my contract with o2 (there's a dedicated o2 employee working in the Saturn store), so that I can profit in the form of a cheaper phone. Or at least that's the theory... In practive, however, I have a student-contract (saves me some bucks) which has the stupid "feature" that it can only be prolonged in o2 shops. Guess what, the Saturn guys cannot give me the A780 as they can't prolong my contract, and the o2 shop simply doesn't have the A780 at all. Argh! After grumbling, asking around, googling, and even more grumbling, I finally decided to do the following: I got a new "dummy" o2 contract in the Saturn (yes, I'll have to pay that for 2 years) which enables me to get the A780 and to get it cheaper. I'll keep using my old contract and my old SIM card for simplicity and leave the new one untouched. If you take into account the money I'll spend on the new contract it doesn't save me too much money, but at least it's distributed across two years... I'll terminate my (new) o2 contract tomorrow, to make sure I don't forget about it (I don't want to have it any longer than the 2 years I'm forced to live with)... Stupid, stupid world we live in. Nobody should be required to perform such "hacks" in order to get the phone he/she wants... Enough ranting now, here's some juicy details about the phone:

• ARM CPU (at 400 MHz, I think)
• 48 MB RAM, 48 MB on-chip flash memory, 256 MB Transflash card
• 240x320 touchscreen
• 1280x1024 built-in digital camera (can record videos, too!)
• USB (device, host, OTG)
• Bluetooth
• GPS (+ it comes with CDs with maps of Europe)
• Plays MP3s and videos
• Can send SMS, MMS, emails, and has an IM client
• and lots more great stuff...

For details on the hardware see this wiki page. The only thing which I'm missing is WLAN, but once USB host support works (the hardware does support it), you can easily use a WLAN USB dongle... I'm pretty sure I'll be having lots of fun with this thing, and I'll quite probably be contributing to the OpenEZX project, which was started by Harald Welte (of gpl-violations.org fame) and tries to create the first 100% Free Software GSM-phone using the Motorola A780 and similar phones. Judging from these blog posts by Harald, running your own 2.6 kernel on the phone is not too unrealistic anymore, and telnetting into the phone (via USBnet) seems to work fine already... Expect more spammingblog posts about the A780 in future...

As we are with Henry every day, we didn't really notice him turn from this: into this in the space of two months: Time for a new bed soon I guess! NP: Ray Of Light, Madonna

joeyh writes:

Long ago we had MOOs, MUDs, etc, and they were text based. Just words, you know.

As far as I can tell, there are still quite a few that thrive today. I feel less crazy about my other major hobby now. I’ve found that there’s a lot more flexibility in text-based virtual worlds. (Disclaimer: I run (and play) text-based MUDs and have not even read the article in question as I don’t subscribe to LWN.)

Yeah, my Fujitsu laptop has been dying for a year or so, it's had surgery for power, batteries, hard drive, sound, etc, it's lost every bit that could break off and still have a usable laptop (all the suede on the bottom, the lid fasteners, the pcmcia blcker, the case around the base of the lid.. the still working pcmcia eject button is my one remaining sacrificial breaky bit). It's got the marks to prove cats love it, along with all the results of throwing it in my book bag and taking off with no concern for carrying a laptop around. The screen has 4 or 5 dead pixels and recently one faint patial dead scan line. The lid is getting worryingly wobbly. The CD drive was once crushed in an airplane and then banged back into shape so it still fits in the machine and even ejects OK. I've rubbed the letters right off some of the keys on the keyboard. The speakers turned black and exuded some glue or something long ago during a hot summer, one of them is barely audible. The headphone jack broke. Oh and the laptop is also abused regularly by programs like firefox and openoffice that really didn't expect to run on a 900 mhz crusoe. All that, I can live with. The laptop bears its marks with pride, and amazingly, people still occasionally ooh and awe at it. Although more likely from a bit of a distance these days. The newest wrinkle is that I'm beginning to exceed the design specs for the keyboard. Apparently they just didn't design for it to be used so much. First some keys stopped working half the time on some days, yeilding the famous irc sessions where joeyh tlks without ny A's. Then the Function key's membrane stopped pushing it back up, so it always appears pressed, though still works. Now the Alt key is going the same route and the right side ofthespacebardoesn't work, leadingtoircsessions whereItalklike this. And it just feels like I can't touch type on it half the time anymore. A new keyboard is $100 or more. I think it's time to retire this to a d-i test machine and start looking for a new latop.

---

I looked at the IBM X-41 again, really like it, but still can't get past the low res display and fan. Especially with some reports that the fan runs constantly in linux. I looked at all the stuff on dynamism, but wasn't impressed enough to consider it. At the moment the Fujitsu P7120 is looking mighty appealing. Hey, it's even got the suede bottom again. And no fan.. Only problem is it has a touchpad.

You decide! Seen floating past my eyes in my freshmeat "new releases" feed this morning is "PhpMyPixelPage", "a pre-packaged PHP Web site for creating a [...] page which mainly contains a large array of small squares where each square can be sold as advertising space." First thing here is: the original "Pixel Page" was a cute gimmick done by a clever British University student, called "The Million Dollar Home Page". He did it to finance his studies (if he's not studying marketing, he should be), which worked really well -- he got his US$1 million, and now has plenty to spend on warm beer and grotty kebabs while getting his degree. The concept has since been copied a billion times, to (presumably) nowhere near the same effect. So a pre-built site generator isn't likely to be raking in the dough for anyone -- there's just too many copycats out there. The real cause for the title of this post, though, is the licence. According to the Freshmeat item, the licence is "Free for non-commercial use". Can anyone think of a non-commercial case of selling advertising? No, neither can I. The mind boggles.

Yesterday evening, around 17:00 UTC I finished building another DVD image after beeing up for almost 33hours. This time it is for the Cebit edition of the german Linux Magazin and Debian (we will have a booth there, see our Events page for more info, together with Credativ). If you are there you can grab the image there, or alternatively at the booth of Linux New Media/Linux Magazin. I built the image together with Alex (Tolimar), who did a great job keeping me focused on it, compiling stuff, helping with documentation, package selection and many other different things that needed to be done. We had our first big run with this image from (I think) Wednesday til Thursday, not taking any sleep in the night, to get it finished in time. Unfortunately we got the message that it needed some more changes, so we had the weekend to sort through it, and started again on Friday evening. Alex left on Sunday afternoon, where the image was basically nearly finished. Due to some little hickups it then needed until Monday 18:00 to really be final and sent out, which made me stay awake from Sunday, 09:30 til around Monday, 18:00 (local time). As usual (like the last 3 images I built for events in Germany) this is a multi-architecture image, again with i386, amd64 and powerpc included, ready to boot into our nice debian-installer for sarge. The kernel was updated to 2.6.12 for i386 and amd64, to support a few more newer machines. We also included a preseeding magic, so you can install a complete Debian Desktop only by deciding how to partition your harddisc and entering the username / password you want to use. You end up with a nice little Gnome-System, having a custom background, some links on the Desktop and bookmarks in Firefox and a disabled root account (use sudo :) ). This nearly automatic installation is available for german and for spanish, as we will bring some of these DVDs to the DebianDay in Mexico. For the spanish part Marga did a great job with the translation of all the various included Readme files to spanish in a normally much to short timeframe (we asked somewhere on Saturday IIRC), many thanks to her for that work. But it would be boring to have only those bits on this DVD, so we decided to include a few backports from backports.org too. There is a newer X, a newer OpenOffice, spamassassin and others included for at least i386. And still - we have included more. We included a recent build of openwrt and also the small edition of grml on this DVD. All in all users have around 45 - 50 different ways to boot from this DVD, which is a nice and big selection. Right now its hard to think of a collection that makes it “better/bigger/whatever” than that. Im sure there will be something with which we can outperform this, but right now its hard to imagine. Of course an etch d-i could be a point, maybe together with a Debian Livesystem (real Debian, not just “based on with random additions”), maybe many more preseeding configurations and not only one, we will see. If you have suggestions please mail me. If you want it: Yes, you can freely download the image, if you cant grab it on DVD while Cebit is running / from a LinuxMagazin, but this download will only be available after Cebit finished plus a few days more. Its never good to have a DVD for a magazine freely available before that magazine is public. :)

(almost) I’ve had some problems with disk space for a while, so much that I was “creating space” by creating an lvm logical volume of 5GB over 3 files (through loop devices) on 3 different partitions (/usr, /var, and /home) that all had less than 5GB free. But I needed 5GB free. So, instead of continuing relying on such brain damaged solutions, I decided to just switch everything on lvm, which, incidentally, would allow me to use lvm snapshots for pbuilder or similar tools (pbuilder doesn’t support lvm snapshot, as far as I know). Since my / partition is quite small (so small that I sometimes have space problems at kernel upgrade), I just decided to keep it and just transform my /usr, /var, and /home partitions into a big lvm physical volume. The challenge was to move all the files without any resort to external devices. Yes, I have other devices on other PCs, but they all are in about the same shape : full as hell. No way I could possibly free 40GB for backup. I couldn’t even burn some data : my DVD burner died a few weeks ago and I still haven’t bought a new one. I could’ve waited but well, I wanted to do it. So, the week-end before last, I decided to go on, and do it the painful way. I used my swap partition to move /usr and /var around, so that I could free the space from these 2 partitions to create the premises of the lvm physical volume. First trick: not enough space in the swap partition, so I just deleted a bunch of files (mostly /usr/share/doc/ and /usr/share/locale files) so that all would fit. After moving all around, I’d just unpack all installed debian packages so that the files are there again. Then, I managed to move everything by packs of 4~5GB, which was laborious. It involved creating temporary lvm physical volumes on temporary partitions and then moving the logical volumes’s chunks from physical volumes to other physical volumes on the same disk. Brain damage. Anyway, the big fright came when I had this stupid idea to delete partitions and create them again. Why ? because neither fdisk (no surprise) nor parted can resize a partition. Well, parted can, but it apparently can’t without playing around with the underlying filesystem. So, I deleted and recreated the partitions. And guess what ? They didn’t end up on the same sectors… The second stupid idea was to run pvcreate on the newly created not quite the same partitions… I thought I just lost everything. Pictures, personal repositories (especially 6 months worth (well, it took 6 months of real time, not of work time, but still) of work on xulrunner), everything. It’s actually not the first time I (almost) lose everything. I once did rm -rf / in a chroot… in which /home was mounted bound… and wrote a program to scan the file-system for the precious files (that’s the story of ext3rminator, which I still have to release once and for all). That was 3 years ago. First, calm down. Second, the bits are still on the disk (except maybe the bits overwritten by pvcreate). Third, calm down. Fourth, think. All I obviously had to do was to find the correct location of the partitions, and pray that the pvcreate didn’t blow everything. Which was almost okay. I could find 2 of the LVM volumes out of 3, while the third one seemed in a pretty bad shape. A bit of search with my friend google on another computer hinted me on vgcfgrestore. So I pvcreated once more over this broken volume, and used vgcfgrestore to get the volume group correct. It seemed okay. I could mount the volume. That was close. Well, to be sure, let’s run a fsck… ouch… inconsistency in some inodes. Okay, correct it. Once, twice… a couple times. Waw, is it that fucked up ? It can’t be that fucked up. So I took another look and discovered that the third volume was offsetted by a sector. 512 octets. Ouch, letting the fsck correct things was definitely not a good idea. Correcting again the partition table, pvcreating and vgcfgrestoring again, fsck, and let’s rock and roll. Conclusion(s):
- I only lost 150MB of MP3. I don’t care.
- Never ever use parted again, and never ever use fdisk in basic mode again.
- Avoid tricky procedures with stuff you are trying for the first time.
- Backups are for the weakest.

That's nice. Apparently SUSE/Novell are planning to no longer include any proprietary (kernel) drivers in their Linux distributions. (Most of) the kernel developers dislike binary drivers in the kernel and SUSE/Novell are clearly supporting the developers with their move. Although they plan a system for including binary drivers from userspace somehow, I still think this is a good sign. I hope it will help to convince some hardware manufacturers to release the source code of some of their (now) proprietary drivers... This whole debate was started by Arjan van de Ven's original post to the LKML in December 2005, AFAIK. (via Heise)

Yesterday, one user of whitelister reported me a bug. That made my day : this meant that there was actually users in the world that used whitelister, and thought it worth the effort to report a bug ! It motivated me to fix a couple of problems that I knew where there, and I released (and uploaded) a new version yesterday. I have to mention that whitelister will also soon be in production of a quite big mail system (even if not a FAI, we talk about MX that do more than 300k mails per week, which is not nothing). I have to mention that I also changed the license to BSD, I'm quite afraid of the direction the GPL is taking, and BSD is definitely better, spam is a too big problem, and if people want to do money with my idea, let them do it, if that can stop spam GPL has no sense at all when you don't plan to exploit the software yourself. When I'll release 1.0 (there is a couple of things I'd like to fix in how the configuration file is handled before) I'll try to give some public visibility to the project, because I really think it's based on a really good idea.

I already got some feedback about the "device driver check CD"-thing. People got confused about it, so I will tell you a bit more about my intentions (although I wanted to start doing this not until next week, duuh). What is wrong with current live systems? There are already several Debian-based live systems and they are doing a great job. But, from the Debian perspective, most of them have one or more of the following disadvantages:

• They are unofficial projects, developed outside of Debian.
• They mix different distributions, e.g. testing and unstable.
• They support i386 only.
• They change package's behavior and/or appearance by stripping them down to save space.
• They including unofficial packages.
• They ship custom kernels with additional patches not part of Debian.
• They are large and slow due to their sheer size and thus not suitable for rescue issues.
• They are not available in different flavours, e.g. CDs, DVDs, USB-stick and netboot images

Why create our own live system? Debian is the Universal Operating System: IMHO we should have an official live system for showing arround and to officially represent the true, one and only Debian system with the following main advantages:

• It's an official Debian subproject.
• It reflects the (current) state of one distribution.
• It runs on as much architectures as possible.
• It consists of unchanged Debian packages only.
• It does not contain any unofficial package.
• It uses an unaltered Debian kernel-image with no additional patches (except from live system specific ones which maybe required).

Creating the Debian Live framework Such a life system framework would allow to create different images for different scenarios:

• A small "base-system" for rescue purposes.
• A normal "desktop-system" for demonstration purposes.
• A special "diagnose-system" for device functionallity and detection purposes.

The last one is this "confusing" thing I mentioned before. Wouldn't it be nice to have a live system to easy detect hardware? Imagine, you could take such an image, burn it on a CD or copy it on a USB-stick, go to your hardware shop and boot it. Since this system would use only official Debian packages, you can easily verify if your favourite piece of hardware is supported by Debian. Doubts like "it runs with Knoppix, so hopefully it runs with Debian too" are history by that. Maybe someone could implement then some sort of application which checks the hardware against Kenshis Debian GNU/Linux hardware compatibility list and displays some sort of report about the compatibility level of the tested hardware. I will definitely work on that goal. But first, I have to do a bit of research about the best techniques and create the framework arround it... Thanks to Myon for setting up the record live.debian.net.

Yesterday morning the IP phones I'd ordered turned up, so that wrote off a few hours of the day. I ordered a Grandstream GS-102 and a Sipura SPA-841. They've both got their pluses and minuses, but I think overall, the Sipura comes out on top.

Grandstream GS-102

The good

• Backlit screen
• Passthrough Ethernet port (built-in single port hub)
• Does remote syslogging

The bad

• Pocket-calculator style screen
• Doesn't seem able to work behind a NAT without hardcoding the address of the gateway
• Won't sync with my NTP server
• Central configuration seems to be a paid-for extra

Sipura SPA-841

The good

• Extremely comprehensive web-based configuration
• 2 line support
• Oooh, does remote syslogging as well

The bad

• No screen backlighting
• Out of the box, DTMF didn't work with my Australian phone banking, so I don't know if it's generally not right (but it was fixable, the default tone length was too short it seemed)
• XML central configuration file format documentation seems to cost extra

Overall, if I'd just bought a Grandstream, I think I'd be quite unhappy with my purchase. If the Sipura just did backlighting, I'd be totally happy with it. A passthrough Ethernet port would be a bonus.

I watched last weekend Crash, a movie from 2004 that was played this year in Spanish theatres. It's is also an opera movie in which there are quite a lot of different stories happening at the same time and that are completely tied in one or other different ways. Very well written it is sometimes a drama and sometimes a thriller, or perhaps both at the same time, showing how differently behave and think characters with different racial backgrounds. One interesting thing is to see how stressed cops are in Los Angeles, because of everyone carrying a gun (or possibly), and how they behave aiming first their guns and being rude. This is completely different in Spain (and most of Europe), where a cop have to had a very powerful reason to pull his gun out of its holder.