Romain uploaded our first release of RProtoBuf to CRAN yesterday. RProtoBuf provides bindings for GNU R to the Google Protobuf implementation. Google Protobuf is (and I quote) a way of encoding structured data in an efficient yet extensible format that is used for almost all internal RPC protocols and file formats at Google. RProtoBuf had a funny start. I had blogged about the 12 hour passage from proof of concept to R-Forge project following the ORD session hackfest in October. What happened next was as good. Romain emailed within hours of the blog post and reminded me of a similar project that is part of Saptarshi Guha's RHIPE R/Hadoop implementation. So the three of us--Romain, Saptarshi and I---started emailing and before long it becomes clear that Romain is both rather intrigued by this (whereas Saptarshi has slightly different needs for the inner workings of his Hadoop bindings) and was able to devote some time to it. So the code kept growing and growing at a fairly rapid clip. Til that stopped as we switched to working feverishly on Rcpp to both support the needs of this project, and to implement ideas we had while working on this. That now lead to the point where Rcpp is maturing in terms of features, so we will probably have time come back to more work on RProtoBuf to take advantage of the nice templated autoconversions we now have in Rcpp. Oddly enough, the initial blog post seemed to anticipate changes in Rcpp. Anyway -- RProtoBuf is finally here and it already does a fair amount of magic based of code reflection using the proto files. The Google documentation has a simple example of a 'person' entry in an 'addressbook' which, when translated to R, goes like this:

R> library( RProtoBuf )                      ## load the package
R> readProtoFiles( "addressbook.proto" )     ## acquire protobuf information
R> bob <- new( tutorial.Person,              ## create new object
+   email = "bob@example.com",
+   name = "Bob",
+   id = 123 )
R> writeLines( bob$toString() )              ## serialize to stdout
name: "Bob"
id: 123
email: "bob@example.com"
R> bob$email                                 ## access and/or override
[1] "bob@example.com"
R> bob$id <- 5
R> bob$id
[1] 5
R> serialize( bob, "person.pb" )             ## serialize to compact binary format

There is more information at the RProtoBuf page, and we already have a draft package vignette, a 'quick' overview vignette and a unit test summary vignette. More changes should be forthcoming as Romain and I find time to code them up. Feedback is as always welcome.

So I finally got off my lazy butt and started the paperwork to get a formal recognition of studies equivalence for a undergraduate studies (Licenciatura en ingenier a de software) via CENEVAL's Acuerdo 286 (licenciatura). Part of the paperwork involves filling the form I photographed and attached to this node. This is the utmost example of ber-redundant paperwork... Where it requires my personal data, some of the fields are:

CURP

Clave nica de Registro Poblacional, Unique Populational Registration Key. This is a string composed by:

• WOIG: First letter and first vowel after the first letter of my first family name, first letter of my second family name, first letter of my given name
• 760427: birth date, yymmdd
• H: Sex (H = male, M = female, I guess)
• DF: State or federative entity I was born in
• LSN: First consonant after the first letter of the first and second family name and of the given name
• 03: Deambiguation digits

So far, so good.

Age

Well, cannot it be deduced from the CURP? It has my full birth date!

Sex

Well, cannot it be deduced from the CURP? It is a specific field in it

Birth date

Man, you already have it literally on top of the field!

Nationality

This tramit is only for Mexicans, so... what's the point?

Birth place

The CURP states already the state or federative entity I was born... But I'll accept this one, as not all states have only one city as DF does

Quite a nice catalog of redundancies. As a cherry on top of the cake, the phone number states I should write my long distance phone code (LADA historically, Larga Distancia Autom tica, Automatic Long Distance) only if I am in any of the states. I can only ask myself why... Anyway... Lets continue filling paperwork. Grah. Hopefully I will be able to get my papers... somewhen in the next half century.

I'm starting to notice a pattern here:

• Google executives are on trial because some sorry excuses for human beings picked on a retarded person and posted the video to youtube: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8115572.stm - this one is simply preposterous. Going after the execs of a company who did nothing to aid, abet, condone or in any way facilitate the abuse in question is absurd, and if extended to other industries would mean that you could pretty much attack any company whose products happened to figure in a crime somehow. Kitchen knives, hunting rifles, golf clubs, even automobiles would seem fair game.
• Italy is going after "user generated content" sites like Youtube and wants to force them to register with the government if they wish to operate: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/02/italy-preparing-to-hold-youtube-others-liable-for-uploads.ars
• And last but not least, this hit piece in the normally respectable Corriere della Sera: http://www.corriere.it/economia/10_gennaio_28/mucchetti_4de4be8a-0be8-11df-bc70-00144f02aabe.shtml
  - it's in Italian, but the gist of it is that Mr Mucchetti really has it in for Google because they operate out of Ireland in the EU, whereas he believes they should be registered in Italy as a publisher, and subject to Italy's myriad rules, regulations, and, of course, taxes regarding publishing. Despite, well, not really publishing much of anything themselves. He mentions "tax evasion" charges that had been considered, because the Italian division of Google is not where the adsense revenue in Europe goes. I suppose he figures that since the ads are bought by residents of Italy, the money should somehow stay in Italy? He also huffs and puffs about Italy's antitrust laws, which, in the same piece, he admits were created with the express purpose of not touching existing companies (the market share limit was set higher than the share of the largest existing company). Perhaps he would do well to reflect on political schemes and carve-ups like that and think about why companies like Google go to Ireland, rather than Italy. He also makes some quick mentions of network neutrality, and rambles on a bit about how it's a battle between the "Obamanian, Californian, search engines" versus the telecommunications industry, in "the rest of the world and above all in Europe". And of course he uses a liberal sprinking of keywords like "globalization", "multinational corporations", and "deregulated" to attempt to paint Google in terms of being a big, evil company throwing its weight around. One wonders if there aren't more pressing problems with the Italian media industry, such as the prime minister owning a large chunk of it?

One way of seeing things is that politicians and businessmen in Italy noticed Google was actually making quite a bit of money, and even if they don't quite understand this internet thing, they want some of the loot. And while Google certainly is becoming big enough to be cause for worry and discussion, the moves against them in Italy do not seem anything like a rational response calculated to offset severe failures in the market. In any case, it will be interesting to see what happens. Maybe, after China, we'll see Google quit Italy as well?

Agile Business Analysts? I have recently been fleshing out my thoughts on the role of business analysts in an Agile team. This is something I have historically addressed on a case-by-case basis with clients, but when thinking about it last week at a client site, I realized that I do have a general take on how the role and responsibilities of a business analyst change when a group moves to using an Agile process. Per the usual, I ll be using Scrum as the example process where needed. The Classical Roles Historically the business analyst has had two primary roles. In a process where cross-functional communication and collaboration are minimized, these roles are essential. What little communication that takes place between the business and the software development teams purporting to serve them passes almost exclusively through one or more business analysts. I view the business analyst in a phased development approach as having two roles; Translator and Gatekeeper. The Translator The business analyst is primarily tasked with taking the needs of the business and translating them into a written document that is then handed to the software developers and testers. This role s necessity is based upon some fundamental assumptions. First, programmers and testers are on the whole, too socially retarded to actually talk to the business persons and find out what they want. Second, the business is primarily viewed as being unable to focus its thought long enough to tell the programmers and testers what they need. Since a key value of an Agile approach to software development is to have individuals and their interactions be the driving force rather than processes an tools (see The Agile Manifesto), the obliteration of this role is a primary objective. The Gatekeeper Business analysts are also viewed the gatekeepers for requirements in classical, phased software process approaches. This is a somewhat unfair role, since they rarely have the authority to prevent business or technology changes, like a meter maid trying to stop an armed terrorist. It s even more unnatural since change always happens, so it s like the meter maid being assigned to an anti-terrorist unit with no additional training, authority, or weapons. The Agile Roles Some of the more extreme practitioners of Agile methodologies say that business analysts have no role in an Agile team. I disagree, provided the role of the business analyst is allowed to evolve. The roles I ve seen them take on as valuable members of an Agile team are Facilitator, Historian, and Journalist. The Facilitator A high degree of collaboration and interaction take place between business and technology in Agile Software Development. The business analyst can serve a critical need in these interactions, facilitating communication between business and technology and making sure that critical areas are being covered in an interaction. This can be a more fulfilling experience for an analyst, since they often talk to one side, then go to other to pass on the information, all the while thinking, Man, this would be simpler if you were both in the room with me at the same time. The Historian The business analyst s documentation skill is excellent for capturing significant information that often gets lost in a team of purely technical people. I have seen some great uses of business analysts in this area. One is to document the system that the team actually builds (not the big, up-front imagined system that is covered in a phased design stage). Another is capturing key technological and architectural decisions and the context in which they were made, so that when a group revisits certain items asking, Why in the world did we decide to do that? , they have the means to be reminded or informed why a particular path was chosen. The Journalist The business analyst can also be the team s journalist, making sure the latest information makes it out to all interested parties. One creative approach I ve seen at a client site is a business analyst who has a project blog. He posts entries after each meeting between the business and technology, documenting what new user stories were created (even scans in the story cards!), a summary of the discussions held, and documents any key decisions that might have been made. Oh, and he provides an excellent executive summary at the top that s suitable for anyone s review, right up to the CEO. Tell me you wouldn t love to have that guy in your Agile team.

Getting to X After having prepared a bunch of libraries, the idea was to get X in shape. I d like to thank Julien Cristau very much for his support all along the way, since I knew nothing about X. Basically the plan was to get:

• xserver-xorg-core-udeb: X itself.
• xserver-xorg-input-evdev-udeb: for input, as you probably guessed.
• xserver-xorg-video-fbdev-udeb: for output, as you also probably guessed.

Not much to say about the former, it only pulled two additional libraries compared to what was previously udeb-ified: libaudit0 and libselinux1. Since security modules aren t the primary concerns in this exercise, --enable-xselinux quickly became --disable-xselinux and those dependencies went away. Both drivers were trivial to tweak, nothing really worth noting there. Once those 3 additional packages added to localudebs/ and to pkg-lists/local, the mklibs tool really wasn t happy with them during the rebuild of the netboot image, since the drivers are X plugins, meaning they need symbols which aren t defined in other libraries. Example:

No library provides non-weak EventSwapVector

Since the idea is to get something working rather than getting something perfect at once, d-i s packages/mklibs/src/mklibs.py (installed as /usr/bin/mklibs) was told to stop raising an exception, and to print a warning message instead. Rebuilding an image was then working again. It took some time, but finally it got noticed those packages were actually all installed in the initramfs, so there was no need to try and load/install them manually during the installation process, everything was there already, and it was sufficient to switch to VT2 to see the /usr/bin/Xorg binary. Some packages were still needed: xkb-data, and x11-xkb-utils. The latter also pulled libxkbfile1, but well, an additional library doesn t sound very scary. At this point, one has to try and run Xorg. The result was a black screen, and no means of getting back to another terminal, be it inside Qemu or VirtualBox. Troubleshooting X First idea: adding the openssh-server-udeb package to the image, and start sshd from there. But then one has to go through the missing config file, tweaking privilege separation, generating a host key, setting a password, etc. And for whatever reasons, it wasn t possible to access it. That s where the DebianInstaller/NetworkConsole page on the Debian Wiki came into play: it includes a few steps to get a working sshd within d-i, painlessly. So, X was actually starting properly, but getting a black screen is now the default. One wants X -retro to get the well-known old behaviour. From udevadm info --export-db, it looked like input stuff were missing, and indeed, udev-udeb doesn t include /lib/dev/input_id and /lib/udev/rules.d/60-persistent-input.rules. Since scp seems broken, wget from the host did the trick followed by chmod +x for the input_id file, otherwise that doesn t work so well. But still, there were some missing evdev stuff. And indeed evdev wasn t to be seen in lsmod, nor available to be modprobe d. That s where it became a little dirtier: wget and udpkg on mouse-modules-2.6.30-2-amd64-di, followed by depmod to make sure, and then modprobe was OK. A little udevadm trigger run to ensure udev was fully aware of the new situation, and restarting X led to a moving cursor there, as well as a working keyboard, since it was possible to switch between terminals! Prove it! Alright, I m proudly providing you with a screenshot: (Really, I ve never been so happy to see this fracking black-and-grey-grid screen. I kid you not!) If we forget about the very few network-console-related questions answered to get an sshd running, please note that the installation process is still just starting, the very first debconf question is still unanswered. Now, patching udev again so that udev-udeb includes the two mentioned files was almost easy (details aren t important anyway), while pulling evdev.ko module automatically was trivial, just a matter of adding such a line to a packages list (I picked pkg-lists/netboot/amd64.cfg):

mouse-modules-$ kernel:Version 

Which means one can now, out of the box:

• Boot the ISO, select Install.
• Wait for the first question to appear.
• Switch to another terminal, and activate it.
• Run Xorg -retro there.

Next step Rework the Pango/Cairo/Gtk stack to use X11 instead of DirectFB.

The South Australian government wanted to force bloggers to disclose their name and post-code when commenting on an election [1]. According to Adelaide Now this included posts on Twitter and Facebook [2]. As expected there was a strong public reaction to this and Michael Atkinson (state Attorney General) stated that the law was not going to be enforced and that it would be retrospectively repealed after the election [3]. Which might have been the end of the issue, but he also said All MPs and all parties voted for Electoral law. Hope Libs, Greens, Family First, Independents etc will join us to support repeal which seems to be a clear claim that the Greens supported that legislation. The Greens are pretty good about freedom of speech issues so I immediately enquired as to what was going on. The following is from a Greens media brief issued yesterday by the office of Mark Parnell MLC (the Greens MLC in SA) which was issued before the new law was retracted: Attorney General Michael Atkinson must urgently clarify the scope of new electoral laws covering public comment on the internet, in the wake of concerns that the impact will be much wider than expected.

With only weeks to go before the election kicks off, there is an urgent need for the Attorney General to explain exactly what his laws are
intended to capture, said Greens MLC Mark Parnell.

When this was debated in Parliament last year, we were told that the law change would only affect electronic versions of a journal . Now there is
concern that the laws could extend further, restricting public commentary on media sites like AdelaideNow and ABC Online, he said.

When the Bill was debated in the Lower House, Michael Atkinson originally wanted to include ALL material on the web. However, the Government
backed down on this by the time it got to the Upper House, with Minister Holloway saying:
The intention is to limit the coverage of section 116 as it applies to the internet to electronic versions of a journal rather than any electronic publication on the internet.

A journal was narrowly defined as a newspaper, magazine or other periodical . Now I don t have a great objection to a law that demands that journalists identify themselves when commenting on an election, and I think that most people would not care about that. It seems that Michael Atkinson is repeatedly changing his claims to try and match popular sentiment. He has got form for this sort of thing, his past achievements include censoring the censorship debate about an R18+ rating for computer games [4].

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2010/02/02/precision-vs-accuracy-in-identifying-people/
• [2] http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/news/in-depth/labor-gags-internet-debate/story-fn2sdwup-1225825708827
• [3] http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/victory-atkinson-loosens-gag/story-e6frea6u-1225826104175
• [4] http://blogs.theage.com.au/screenplay/archives//010915.html

Andrew Dowdell and Michael McGuire have an interesting article in the Adelaide Now about censorship in the South Australian election [1]. The South Australian government wants to force everyone who comments on the upcoming SA election to provide their name and postcode. Attorney-General Michael Atkinson said the law was all about honesty . However a law that forces someone to not comment as Anonymous and instead forces them to use a name that sounds like something that might appear on a birth certificate and a postcode is not going to increase honesty at all. I think it s much better to honestly say I m not telling you my name than to lie and claim to be revealing your name. When the government forces people to give precise but totally inaccurate information it seems that it s going to be bad for everyone. It s even bad for the people who want to be identified, if most people who comment on a blog post are anonymous then I d like to be distinguished as the person who uses their real name! In the vast majority of cases the effort of determining who is using their real name will not be worth the effort. If someone comments on my blog under the name John Howard from Bennelong I will be very suspicious that they are using a fake name. But probably the vast majority of the English speaking population of the world wouldn t immediately identify such a name as fake. If someone wants to comment on my blog and they don t have a published phone number then I won t have any good way of identifying their address. If their name and postcode match an entry in a phone book then they still might be faking it they could take a random name from a phone book. If I was to demand that people who enter blog comments provide their phone numbers then I would have to pay the expense of phoning them as well as dealing with cases of people who are away from home, should I delay a blog comment for a month until the author returns from their European vacation? I have had a moderate amount of experience in writing letters to the editors of newspapers, and I have only once had an editor phone me to verify my details. In all other cases I guess I could have fooled them if I wished. I believe that there are already precedents regarding libel, if I approve a blog comment (or fail to unapprove it in a reasonable amount of time if it meats the automatic approval criteria) then I could be sued for libel if the contents of the comment are deemed to be suitably damaging. So if I was to try to get the real names of people who make comments on my blog then it wouldn t make it any easier for an idiot who wants to sue also anyone who wants to sue regarding an Australian political issue will probably find me a better target than most people who comment on my blog (a significant portion of whom are from the US and have much greater legal protections of their freedom of speech). Extending such a law to US based services such as Twitter is just silly. The stockholders and employees of a US based corporation can freely laugh at Australian censorship laws. Also it s pretty stupid to have a global scope on such laws, as a Victorian why should I care about the South Australian state laws? Implementing laws that can be easily broken inadvertently and can never be enforced against anyone who cares is just pitiful and will result in the MPs who vote for such laws being the object of derision. Vote for the small parties and independent candidates. Both Labour and Liberal want to censor us, put them in the second last two spots on your vote card! Now this law doesn t take affect until the writs for the March 20 election are issued. I encourage Australian bloggers to write bad things about the Liberal and Labour parties after the writs are released which are not libelous and which don t include your postcode. If they try to apply the new law then your blog post gets wide attention. If you plan to be a professional blogger then you could consider the $5,000 fine to be an advertising fee. If you don t want to be known then you can use a US based blogging service. I m going to continue to write political blog posts whenever I feel like it and I won t be telling anyone where I live. I will rely on the Streisand effect to save me. Update:
The politicians in SA have surrendered, the law in question won t be enforced and will supposedly be repealed after the election [2]. It will be interesting to see whether they really do repeal that law.

• [1] http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/labor-gags-internet-debate/story-e6frea6u-1225825708827
• [2] http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/victory-atkinson-loosens-gag/story-e6frea6u-1225826104175

OK, ok, i got a chroot and pbuilder now. So that should, I hope stop any more FTBFS bugs about missing depdendencies.

procps got uploaded that fixes some important bugs, but mainly they were small fiddly things. About the most significant enhancement was pmap now has a real working -x flag. It looks a lot like some of the other pmap programs out there and shows the RSS and Dirty bytes per map. Let me know if its useful or not.

However there still is 48 bugs in the package, so if you're feeling game wander over to procps bug page and have a look around, but here are some more interesting ones, such as why would a process start time be earlier than the boot time? Bug 408879 has this problem

Now, a nice can of worms is in a Linux system, what is free memory? What should the "free" program report? Currently free just reports what it sees in /proc, but in Bug 565518 should the slab count be taken out? I certainly won't be making any Debian-specific changes here as you could get different numbers depending on your distribution, or even worse the age of you Debian system.

procps is also my first attempt at using git-buildpackage which I found very helpful. There was one problem with it and that is how it works with the quilt patch program. If the quilt patches are applied, git doesn't know this and says all the files have changed. I know its how these two programs are supposed to work but its a little annoying.

Producing udebs How to patch That s actually quite trivial. Most packages from Josselin s 1st and 2nd lists are libraries, and generating udebs for libraries is easy. Basically it boils down to declaring a new binary package:

• Duplicate the libfooN entry in debian/control.
• Add the -udeb suffix to the Package line.
• Add a Package-Type: udeb line.
• Make sure Section is debian-installer.
• (Maybe) make sure Priority is only optional.

Now, populating it might depend on the considered source package, but thankfully, pkg-x11 packages are quite sane, using debhelper s dh_install. So duplicating debian/libfooN.install into debian/libfooN-udeb.install is usually sufficient. It s a bit trickier when dh_movefiles is used, but calling install and cp -r after the dh_movefiles call should be sufficient. Next step, tweak shlibs for libfooN. Without that step, a libbarM package built against libfooN would get libfooN in Depends, which is not appropriate. The idea is to get libfooN-udeb instead. Trivial: add --add-udeb=libfooN-udeb to the dh_makeshlibs call. Possible issues at that step:

• debian/shlibs or debian/libfooN.shlibs is used instead of dh_makeshlibs. Trivial fix: feed its contents to dh_makeshlibs through its -V argument, and delete that file. Caveat: when it comes to applying a patch removing that file, make sure it s actually removed, and not just empty. I m going to file a bug about that, the default behaviour with empty files seems a bit buggy.
• Several libraries are shipped: one can t pass several --add-udeb arguments. Solution: use several dh_makeshlibs -p$pkg -V$depends --add-udeb=$pkg-udeb call. (I thought it was needed for libx11 but I can t read, actually: libxcb1 libx11-xcb1.)

Various checks to perform:

• Make sure debian/libfooN/DEBIAN/shlibs is correct: it should have a udeb line. Example:

  libfoo N libfooN (>= some-version)
  udeb: libfoo N libfooN (>= some-version)
  

• Make sure the generated udebs have no non-udeb packages mentioned in Depends. Since I m still at the proof-of-concept stage, I ve iterated when I encountered such additional packages, without checking what was actually needed. The idea is to get rid of extra stuff once the final needs figured out. Of course, one has to track down the dependencies to get the packages incrementally built and installed (for the updated shlibs files).

Results (These files might be moved around during the following steps, but this post shall be kept up-to-date and point to them at all time.) Legend:

• Red box: package needing a patch.
• Green box: package already udeb-aware.
• Label with [n]: package patched at step N.
• Label with a *: warning when patching, shlibs file to be removed.

Graphs are scaled down to 75%, click for full size. Step 1:

• Patches: udebs-1/diffs/
• Udebs: udebs-1/udebs/
• Notes: as explained above, libx11-xcb1 is probably not needed.
• Dependency graph:
  

Step 2:

• Patches: udebs-2/diffs/
• Udebs: udebs-2/udebs/
• Dependency graph:
  

Adding udebs to a d-i image Basic d-i image General guidelines (see d-i documentation for detailed installation, needed packages, etc.):

svn co svn://svn.debian.org/svn/d-i/trunk/ debian-installer-trunk
cd debian-installer-trunk/installer/build
make build_netboot

If that breaks (e.g. due to missing packages), make sure there s a similar entry in sources.list.udeb:

deb http://yourmirror/debian squeeze main/debian-installer

If everything goes well, the generated image should be available as dest/netboot/mini.iso, and tmp/netboot/udeb.list should contain the list of embedded udebs. To give it a try:

qemu-system-x86_64 -cdrom dest/netboot/mini.iso

Actually adding udebs Drop all additional udebs under localudebs/. Needed Packages and Packages.gz should be generated on the fly (but beware, secure apt is then disabled, even for non-local udebs). Now, tell d-i we want some more packages. If all of them are wanted, one can do that:

for i in localudebs/*.udeb; do \
  dpkg-deb --showformat='$ Package \n' -W $i; \
done > pkg-lists/local

(Update: Thanks to Guillem for pointing out a better and cleaner way than dpkg --info $i grep Package: awk ' print $2 ') Generate a new image (note the rebuild part of the target):

make rebuild_netboot

Make sure they got added by looking in tmp/netboot/udeb.list and profit! What s next Future steps include:

• Making sure those udebs are actually usable.
• Reworking Pango/Cairo/Gtk udebs.
• Taking a look into X itself.

Stay tuned.

On Wednesday I got DAM approval and since Saturday late evening I m officially a Debian Developer. Yay! :-) My thanks go to

• Christoph Berg (Myon) whom I know for more than a decade since we studied together, and who s career in Debian was way faster than mine, but who on the other hand probably knows me better than nobody else in Debian which made him the perfect advocate;
• Bernd Zeimetz (bzed) whom I know from my times at DaLUG and who was the friendliest Application Manager I could imagine he s probably also one of the fastest (8 days from application to AM report :-);
• Luca Capello (gismo), who was the most demanding but also most inspiring sponsor I ever had and who became a very good friend after we found each other over my package conkeror.
• Arne Wichmann (Y_Plentyn) for being my first drop-in center for Debian questions (like can I directly dist-upgrade from 2.0 to 3.0? :-);
• Martin Zobel-Helas (zobel) who was always encouraging me to continue exploring new sides of Debian;
• Gerfried Fuchs (Rhonda) just for being there (and for being a package maintainer with good relations to upstream ;-);
• my coworkers at the IT Services Group of the Department of Physics at ETH Zurich, who always found new challenges in Debian for me to solve;
• and all those others who offered to also advocate me (e.g. Otavio Salvador) or sponsored my packages so far (or at least offered to do so), e.g. Alexander Wirt (formorer), Martin F. Krafft (madduck), Robert J rdens (jordens),

As Bernd cited in his AM report, my earliest activity within the Debian community I can remember was organising the Debian booth at LinuxDay.lu 2003, where I installed Debian 3.0 Woody on my Hamilton Hamstation hy (a Sun SparcStation 4 clone). I wrote my first bugreport in November 2004 (#283365), probably during the Sarge BSP in Frankfurt. And my first Debian package was wikipedia2text, starting to package it August 2005 (ITP #325417). My only earlier documented interest in the Debian community is subscribing to the lists debian-apache@l.d.o and debian-emacsen@l.d.o in June 2002. I though remember that I started playing around with Debian 2.0 Hamm, skipping 2.1 (for whatever reasons, I can t remember), using 2.2 quite regularily and started to dive into with Woody which also ran on my first ThinkPad bijou . I installed it over WLAN with just a boot floppy at the Chemnitzer Linux-Tage. :-) Anyway, this has led to what it had to lead to a new Debian Developer. :-) The first package I uploaded with my newly granted rights was a new conkeror snapshot. This version should work out of the box on Ubuntu again, so that conkeror in Ubuntu should not lag that much behind Debian Sid anymore. In other News Since Wednesday I own a Nokia N900 and use it as my primary mobile phone now. Although it s not as free as the OpenMoko (see two other recent posts by Lucas Nussbaum and by Tollef Fog Heen on Planet Debian) it s definitely what I hoped the OpenMoko will once become. And even if I can t run Debian natively on the N900 (yet), it at least has a Debian chroot on it. :-) A few weeks ago, I took over the organisation of this year s Debian booth at FOSDEM from Wouter Verhelst who s busy enough with FOSDEM organisation itself. Last Monday the organiser of the BSD DevRoom at FOSDEM asked on #mirbsd for talk suggestions and they somehow talked me into giving a talk about Debian GNU/kFreeBSD. The slides should show up during the next days on my Debian GNU/kFreeBSD talks page. I hope, I ll survive that talk despite giving more or less a talk saying Jehova! . ;-) What a week.

Today, I was glad to attend the biggest demonstration ever in favour of the Cabanyal neighbourhood of Val ncia, a traditional district populated by the sea people of the city. After decades of oblivion, the Valencian right-wing government is trying to execute an old plan to open Valencia to the sea , which means demolishing around 450 traditional houses, many of them under protection for their cultural and architectural value, to extend a big avenue until the beach. Patrimonial loss aside, neighbours would be forced to other areas in the city (sadly, this has been happening for a decade already), making Cabanyal-Canyamelar the new posh neighbourhood for the richer class, destroying its identity and replacing it with a new set of skyscrapers.

The local government of PP, led by the infamous Rita Barber , knows that getting the anti-riot police in the neighbourhood and forcing very old men and women out of the houses where they were born isn't what many people like to see in the evening news. They also know time is their ally; this plan is many decades old, and there's no need to hurry now, so it's better to apply silent mafia tactics on the problem. It's very easy. First, stop investing a single euro in the area and monitor the slow but effective results of the degradation. Have a bit of patience, and after quite a few years, start promoting the illegal occupation of the increasing number of empty houses by marginal collectives which will bring the associated introduction of drug dealing in the area. This will surely make even more people leave or accelerate their decease. Keep repeating this process, until the Cabanyal is really fucked up. Now, start promoting the rehabilitation plan , which unavoidably includes splitting the neighbourhood in two pieces, and destroying a substantial part of it. Hopefully, many of the neighbours not directly affected by the demolitions will back the plan, they can't be blamed for being really fed up after all. Do all you can to confront those in favour to those against. In the meanwhile, start harrassing owners, make them end up selling their property at ridiculous prices and as soon as this happens, demolish it very quickly. Don't even bother with cleaning up the rubble: an increasing number of sites like this all over the place may be what makes a few more families give up and leave. In the end, you either have an empty neighbourhood, or you've managed to demolish all the annoying houses that block your shiny avenue. However, if a Supreme Court argues that the remaining houses still have some cultural value, you might want to consider changing your local law to unprotect those architectural elements. Today, many thousands of Valencians marched around Cabanyal to say enough! . From the street, I saw several old women out on the balconies of their beautiful houses, their eyes wet with tears, while they observed in silence all that many people who were fighting for them. There's still a long way to go in the courts until this is all over, but at least these people have a little more hope today than those in el Carme or La Punta, who ended up losing similar battles, years ago.

I m using Gnome as my default DE after my KDE4 dissapointment, however what s bothering me for some time now is that I have to live with applications that I don t even use or like for that matter. So why live with those? Well if I try to remove some of those applications it ll want to pull down my whole DE along with them, however I couldn t believe solution was so simple. Applications I don t want to live with are: evolution, epiphany, empathy, ekiga, liferea, gnome-accessibility and couple of others. Step 1 might seem as it wants to remove whole DE, but it all it wants is gnome-desktop-environment which is meta/dummy package so don t worry. Step 1:

sudo apt-get remove epiphany epiphany-browser-data epiphany-data empathy
empathy-doc libempathy30 libempathy-common libempathy-gtk28 liferea
liferea-data evolution ekiga gok dasher orca gnome-accessibility
openoffice.org-evolution evolution-common evolution-data-server
evolution-webcal

Step 2:

sudo aptitude keep-all

Step 3: After you re done, you can use sudo apt-get autoremove or sudo aptitude -f install just so you can see it won t force you later on to remove any other deps. Yea, that was it

I got an eMail tonight. I guess this means I can say hello officially now. (Everything else is details, waiting and fixing some bugs and technicalities, or so.) Thanks to everyone involved, I learned a lot already. Oh, and I had a look into madduck's book (the old sarge edition, which I got for free recently) and found a nice graphic explaining what non-native english speakers (I even had latin first, and 3 programming languages!) don't, from the Debian constitution. Congratulations XTaran for making it as well, even visible on the website already! Please don't file an "Please package mksh R39b" bug again, I am aware there's a new version ;-) as I'm upstream too. I'm just short of time at the moment, and I'd like to put out high-quality packages. Besides, the webpage needs fixing first (while the checksums and the changelog for the release are there, no proper announcement is yet, and I'd like, for this version, to add a "upgrading caveats" section, since due to bugfixes and better standards compliance some scripts need to be updated; some of the pdksh behaviour favoured Bourne over POSIX even!

A long while ago I wrote a plugin for gaim called gaim-thinklight that blinks ones ThinkPad ThinkLight when a new message arrives. By now it is called pidgin-blinklight and supports some other hardware as well, but has not changed since over a year. Today, I implemented a new feature, and I m curious if it will actually work: Until now, the blink pattern was hardcoded: ON, wait 150ms, OFF, wait 125ms, ON, wait 150ms, OFF. Since version 0.11, pidgin-blinklight will calculate these three delay times based on the contacts login name. So different contacts will have very slightly different blinking patterns. The idea is that, after a while, you start to recognize your frequent buddies already by the blinking. The wait times are from the range from 50ms to 250ms, I hope that range works well.
Users of Debian unstable will get the new version automatically. If you want to compile pidgin-blinklight from source, you will have to grab it from the debian ftp server. The source is in the pidgin-blinklight Darcs repository.

The current state of g-i, the graphical version of the Debian installer is very concerning. Currently, the GTK+ version in squeeze (2.18 and soon 2.20) has very serious bugs in the DirectFB backend, which make it unusable for g-i. Because of that, the first alpha version of d-i will ship without graphical installer support. Unless someone steps up and does something, this will be the end of the graphical installer. Among other things, it means the end of support for several languages: Indic scripts, Thai, Amharic, and all RTL languages. Option 1: fix GTK+ DirectFB support Until now, we always found some good wills who volunteered to fix GTK+ so that g-i worked again. I d like to thank Attilio Fiandrotti and Sven Neumann for their past work, but unfortunately it seems they have better things to do now. If someone takes over their work and hacks on GTK+ to get it to work correctly again on DirectFB, we will be able to go on this way at least for the squeeze release. This requires someone with serious DirectFB knowledge who will not be afraid to dig into the GDK internals. Option 2: switch to X11 If GTK+ doesn t work on DirectFB, there is another plan, but it needs to happen fast. It should be possible to make the installer work on X11. This has the advantage that we know X11 works fine and is maintained in the long term, and so does the X11 GTK+ backend. This has also the drawback to make the installation media slightly larger. This requires quite some work on udebs:

• Packaging of a number of libraries: at least libx11, libxi, libxext, libxrender, libxft, libdrm, libgcrypt, libpciaccess, libpixman, libxau, libxfont, libudev
• Maybe a few extras: libxcursor and dmz-cursor-theme (to have a nice cursor), libxrandr (to be able to select the installation resolution), libthai (for Thai language support)
• Packaging of the X server: xorg-server, xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
• Changes in the gtk+2.0 configure scripts so that other X11 extensions can be explicitly disabled
• Rework of udebs for cairo, pango1.0 and gtk+2.0 so that they are built against X11
• Rebuild the installer against the X11 GTK+ version
• Changes in the installer startup scripts: start the X server, configure the keyboard the X11 way, etc.

It looks like a lot, but there s nothing complicated in it. Anyone familiar enough with Debian can do this, with a little support from the maintainers of said packages. So this could well be you. Assuming you re interested in keeping g-i alive. Alternatives Other possibilities to support complex languages include:

• Use festival to ask questions and voice recognition software for the answers (we offer no guarantees for accidental wiping of your hard drive).
• Boot a live OS in a virtual machine and ask the user to run Google translation on the text (unfortunately we d need to ask in English).
• Render PNGs of all questions that could be asked and display them directly using DirectFB (requires migrating to Blu-ray by default for installation media).
• Port the installer to use the GTK+ Win32 port and pre-seed all the debconf questions before rebooting.
• Come on, be creative.

I have recently been evaluating small laptops, and wound up purchasing the Thinkpad X200s. It arrived a few days ago, so here are some first impressions. The Hardware The X200s is, in a word, awesome. It is light and portable, built solidly, and very fast. With the 6-cell battery, it feels light. The 9-cell makes it physically bigger and heavier, but even so, it is still a light unit even then. The fans run only rarely, and battery life looks to be towards the upper range of what I was expecting, so I am pleased with that. The screen is a very high-DPI one, and quite bright. However, it is also one of the only drawbacks: its vertical viewing angle is quite poor compared to most other screens I ve used recently, meaning I m frequently adjusting it to get the best angle relative to my head. The keyboard is a pleasant change after having using the Eee 901 for so long. I hadn t realized just how much of a pleasant change it would be. I was concerned about the lack of a touchpad, but it appears that the touchpoint device is a lot better than it was on the Thinkpads I used a few years back. I miss a touchpad, but not very much, and far less than I thought I would. Debian Squeeze Of course, one of the first things I did with it was to wipe off Windows 7 and install Debian. Now a word about Debian. I rarely do fresh installs. I normally tar up my machine and move it over to new hardware when needed, and upgrade the software over time. However, I wanted to make this a 64-bit install and had no suitable image to move over. I decided to try the default Gnome install in squeeze since I hadn t tried Gnome in awhile and was about due to give it a shot. I was very impressed. Squeeze will make an awesome desktop OS. Everything worked perfectly out of the box. It suspended and resumed. X came up in full resolution without me having to do anything. Ethernet worked, and I was helpfully invited to supply the non-free firmware for the wifi on a USB stick during install time. Hardware brightness and volume keys work. The docking station is fully compatible with Linux. Sound works. The hardware lock screen key even works. Bluetooth works out of the box. It is a well-integrated, extremely fast, and smooth setup. Cups is installed out of the box by default, and accepts network printer broadcasts by default too. So I snapped in an Ethernet cable, and when I went to print a few minutes later, I just could. It didn t even strike me as special until later. Yes, that s right I plugged it into the network and, with absolutely zero action on my part, could print to all the printers at work or at home. The update-manager that Gnome uses by default (I wonder if Debian s KDE installs yet use one? I have never seen one in KDE) is a wonderful work of simplicity compared to Windows 7 s madness. You click the update icon, click the button to start updating, and 30 seconds later get a message that 45 updates have been installed. With no ominous reboot now message. This is no surprise to me as a long-time Debian developer, but I just wanted to highlight it here. I think I should file a wishlist bug on update-manager asking them to improve the wording in the box to say There is no need to reboot your computer :-) I still have my gripes about Gnome. It only lets me choose some pre-defined settings for screensaver timeouts, for instance. I still feel that KDE gives me more control. But Gnome seems to be better integrated with the entire system, faster, and less buggy. This difference is especially acute at login time. This laptop logs me in far faster than my Core 2 Quad machine at home running KDE (from sid) does. So, of course, my next task is to integrate xmonad with Gnome. Should be fun. Now, a final word on why I wrote this. None of these components have been a surprise really to me (aside from the completeness of the hardware support for this laptop). But what I want to bust is the myth that somehow Debian is difficult to use on the desktop. It isn t. This setup was easier by far than the Windows 7 install I did on a different machine recently. Although it has less eye candy than Windows 7, it exudes solidity, performance, power, and yes, ease of use in every way.

It still doesn t seem to be getting the coverage, but this is the sixth year that I ve written about the World Economic Forum, which is basically where large corporations try to tell governments how to rule their populations, as described in this VIRUS article. This year, it is overshadowed in the UK by war-starting former Prime Minister Blair giving evidence to the Iraq enquiry. If you have satellite television, you can watch it live on SFinfo at 13e (schedule). There s more detailed listings on Klack. In previous years, English audio has been on one side of the stereo channels. It looks like almost none of the SFinfo coverage is live this year. Maybe they ve noticed comments like mine from 2005:

I am convinced that if more people watched it for themselves, there wouldn t be any need to publicise against them. Without the soundbiting and polishing of TV news, these people are scary. They re less slick than the European Social Forum, too.

If you find live coverage on any other stations, please could you leave me a comment here?
In that vein, BBC News has Ten things you didn t know about Davos (thanks Policomm). Amongst other things, this isn t the 40th WEF and Bill Clinton was the first sitting US president to attend, so its influence is a fairly recent mistake. Once again, there an official programme, as well as @davos which seems to be talking much more than listening seems appropriate for WEF, no? To close with a quote that s also in the VIRUS article:
But I don t want to go among mad people, Alice remarked.
Oh, you can t help that, said the Cat: we re all mad here. I m mad. You re mad.
How do you know I m mad? said Alice.
You must be, said the Cat, or you wouldn t have come here.
-Lewis Carroll, Alice s Adventures in Wonderland (Puffin Books, 1946)

A number of small fixes have been committed to the upstream X.org GIT to improve support for the "Red Cloud" Geode variant (called GX2 for late NSC chips and GX for newer rebranded AMD chips) and we desperately need volunteers to test those changes, before we release a new upstream tarball. If you have some Red Cloud hardware on hand and at least basic knowledge of how to compile software on Linux distributions, please contact me to the e-mail address listed in the ChangeLog. Thanks! PS: if you're on Ubuntu, test packages are available for Lucid via my PPA.

Tollef forced me to take over libpam-passwdqc after I had reported bug #517967. passwdqc is a toolset that can be used to enforce password strength policies at exactly the right place: there s a PAM module, and with the next version, you can also use a library and command-line tools read on below. The toolset gives administrators flexibility in defining the minimum password length based on the number of character classes a user tries to use. It also includes libpam-cracklib functionality and prevents the use of trivial passwords. I appreciate this functionality, so I had little choice but to make the best out of it:

• I uploaded libpam-passwdqc 1.0.5-1 to unstable, fixing a few bugs on the way, and bringing the packaging up to speed.
• I wrote a message to upstream introducing myself and was happy when I got an almost immediate response from two developers, suggesting that development was thriving. Yay!
• Having been pointed to the upstream CVS-Git clone, I based the packaging off the repository, rather than the tarballs. This required me to juggle directories a bit, as well as to repack the tarballs. Oh well.
• Next, I fixed the bug I reported, and now libpam-passwdqc can be installed and configured in a jiffy, thanks to Steve Langasek s impressive work on pam-auth-update. Someone also reported this feature request as LP#314775, but I don t use Launchpad, so someone else will have to triage it there.
• Finally, I imported the latest upstream work into the repository, which had me change the source package name. The benefit of version 1.1.4 in addition to improvements and bugs fixed is that the functionality is now also available through client programs in the passwdqc package, as well as in an independent C library. Due to the new packages, the upload is currently waiting in the Debian NEW queue, so hold your horses for a few days.

Debhelper 7 is really nice. Thanks, Joey.

Linux.conf.au 2010 has come to an end and I am looking back at an intense week of conferencing. A big shout out to the organisers for their excellent work. I think LCA (as well as DebConf) just keeps getting better every year. This does not at all discredit previous organisers, because they were the best at their times and then passed on the wisdom and experience to help make it even better in the following year. The week started off with the DistroSummit, which Fabio and I organised. Slides are forthcoming, as I failed to get them off the speakers right after their talks it s interesting how stress levels and adrenaline can cause one to forget the most obvious things. This is where experience comes in. I ll be there again next year, I hope, to do things better. The theme of the day was cross-distro collaboration, and we started the day a little bit on the Debian-side with Lucas Nussbaum telling us about quality assurance in Debian, alongside an overview of available resources. We hoped to give people from other distros pointers, and solicit feedback that would enable us to tie quality assurance closer together. Next up was Bdale Garbee who talked about the status of the Linux Standard Base. While I am really interested in such standardisation efforts, I realised during his talks that I had considerable difficulties paying attention because as organiser of the conference, I had all sorts of other things occupying my thoughts. I proceeded to tell the audience the room was mostly filled throughout the day with an estimated 40 50 folks, and I d say about half of them stayed throughout, while the other half came in and left the room between talks. I could not get the projector to work with my laptop after the upgrade to Kernel Mode Setting, and thus used the whiteboard to give a brief introduction to vcs-pkg.org, talk about the current state of affairs, summarise the trends in discussions around patch management and collaboration, give an outlook of what s up next, and solicit some discussion. Sadly, just like during Bdale s talk, I found myself worrying over the organisation of the day, rather than actually taking in most of the discussion. Fortunately, others have written about the most important points, so I defer to them. Michael Homer then told us about GoboLinux s Aliens system, which is a way to integrate domain-specific packages with distro-specific package maintenance e.g. how to get APT to handle CPAN directly, or how to let YUM manage Python packages. The ensuing discussion was interesting, and we carried it over to the next slot, because Scott, the next speaker, was stuck in traffic. To summarise briefly: scripting languages have a lot of NIH-style solutions because it works for them, but these are a nightmare to distro packagers. One symptom of the status quo is that complex software packages like Zimbra are forced to distribute all required components in their installation packages, which make distro packaging, quality assurance, and security support even harder. I don t think we found a solution, other than the need for further standardisation (like the LSB), but the road seems to be a long and windy one. Laszlo Peter introduced the audience to SourceJuicer, a new build system used by OpenSolaris. The idea is that contributors submit packages via a web interface, kicking off a workflow incorporating discussion and vetting, and only after changes have been signed-off are packages forwarded to auto-builders and eventually end up in the package repository. This is very similar to upload ideas I ve had a while ago, which I ve started to (finally) implement. Unfortunately, SourceJuicer seems very specific to OpenSolaris, as well as non-modular, so that I probably won t be able to reuse e.g. the web interface on top of a Debian-specific package builder. After the break, Dustin Kirkland stepped up to tell us about his user experience of Launchpad. Unfortunately, I found his talk a bit too enthusiastic. Launchpad undoubtedly has some very cool features and ideas, but it s just one of the available solutions. The dicussion of Launchpad also dominated the next talk, in which Lucas Nussbaum told us about the Debian-Ubuntu relationship. While his presentation showed that the relationship was improving (Matt Zimmerman made the point that there are rather many relationships, rather than one relationship), I was a bit disturbed by the comments of Launchpad developers in the room, ranging from Debian is declining anyway to Just use Launchpad if you want to collaborate with others and not go down . There was a slight aura of arrogance in their comments which tainted my experience of the otherwise constructive discussions of the day. Overall I had a great time. Debian and Ubuntu made up the vast majority of attendants, with only a handful of representatives from other distros present. I wonder why that would be. One reason might be that around 70% of LCA attendants declared themselves Debian or Ubuntu users, and so there weren t many other distros around. Another might be that I still haven t spread the word enough. Let s hope to do better next year! Thanks to all the speakers. We may have organised the day, but you made it happen and interesting! Slides and recordings of the talks will be linked from the archived website when they become available (yes, the archive page does not exist yet either).