Kiwis have to be one of the cutest birds of all time. A bit chubby and clumsy looking, they are (to me, at least), walking, breathing icon of furry cuteness. Truth be told, I did not see one live in action during my recent trip to New Zealand, but I did see a Weka bird which is pretty similar. (Micah and I just consulted the Internets and agreed that we did in fact see cherubic Kiwi not a Weka. In fact, Micah almost ran one over on the west coast of the southern island but his quick reflexes born from years of saving servers while typing saved the bird. So as you can tell by now I finally got to go to New Zealand for a few weeks, even able to travel the south island before attending THE Linux conference of the region, LCA where I gave a talk (video to be posted when available). I jumped at the opportunity and was thrilled to find out that I could actually spend some time traveling around before the intense week long conference. So on January 5th I headed down with Micah to what I have found out is one of the windiest cities on earth ( Windy Wellington ) for a few days before heading to the south island to do a loop on the northern half of the island. I wanted to conquer the mountains made famous by a certain set of movies, but last semester was all about sitting in front of the computer, a sort of agonizing life of the mind, which did not prepare me physically for mountain trekking or as it call it there, tramping. So we decided to stick close to the coast (with one transalpine train that serenaded us through some awesome mountain passes) and hike along the coast, snorkel and swim, and kayak. After Andrew showed us around Wellington, we headed to the sea town of Kaikoura brimming with sea life, such as seals, dolphins, and birds. The two highlights there were our snorkeling trip and a hike along the peninsula. Originally we were going to go diving but I arrived to NZ with a head cold so we opted for the sinus friendlier version and snorkeled in the massive kelp forest, which was strikingly beautiful (I am used to tropical reefs and waters). There happened to be a lot of seals and given their curious nature, they would dart over right next to you and play. One seal I called him the twirler was chubby and mellow and twirled next to me for a long while. The lady seals were sleeker and faster and liked to dive deep down and the zoom up and surprise you. As someone who has spent a lot of time underwater, I found it fun and weird to be with animals that pay attention to you given that most of the sea life ignores you. The hike in Kaikoura was fantastic as well. You go high on a bluff and stare down at this water sparkling with the most beautiful blue hues brought out even more majestically by the white rocks. If I were to go back I would hike along the water and up above on the bluff. After a brief stopover in Christchurch to visit a friend, we took the transalpine train (across Arthur s pass) which was superbly beautiful and arrived on the west coast whose seas are far more rough, rocky, andtemperamental than on the east coast. The vegetation is lush as lush can be and you get the feeling that dinosaurs would have been a happy lot in these parts. The cool part about this area are the many rivers that feed into the ocean (we spent an afternoon swimming and exploring the caves in one) and then what are called the pancake rocks, which are odd geological creatures that really amaze. We then made our way to the Marlborough Sounds area, which includes the city of Nelson (apparently the sunniest in New Zealand) as well as many olive and grape vineyards in outlying areas. We spent some time in the Alpine lakes region hiking but more of the time on the coast. The highlight for me and it is a place I would love to go back to is the Abel Tasman National Park. We spent time hiking and kayaking there and you can even hike down the coast for 5-6 days (there are excellent camping facilities along the way). The coast is simply majestic with alpine like forest conditions (unfortunately a cool old tree whose name I can t remember is no longer common). This forest is situated along the most stunning waters, an electric but totally clear turquoise blue deceivingly inviting because the water was quite cold (but not as cold as the Oregon coast over the summer, which I went swimming in only once after weeks of bike travel). Along with the blue, parts of the coastal waters were a stunning clear green that I have never seen despite my many sea travels. If you ever plan on going to the South Island, I would not miss this area and might even try to spend a few days or more hiking the coastal trails and listening to the cool-as/sweet as birds, one of which has double vocal cords so it sings what sounds to be like totally electronic bird calls. We returned via the same ferry a massive 7 story ship from Picton to Wellington but the conditions were far far worse during our return trip. When we got out of the sounds, we hit the Cook Straight, notorious for being rough and tumble. And indeed, once we hit the waves, I felt like I was no longer in a boat but amusement park ride, the bow of the ship thrown high only to fall hard on upon the waves. It was sort of fun or fun for about 10 minutes until people, most especially kids, started yaking all over the place. It was really the most flagrant yakfest I have ever experienced (I mean it is a 7 story ferry, you can fit a lot of people on that boat) and that made the sail particularly difficult. I have pretty strong sea legs, never once getting sick sick during the year I spent at sea but massive yaking will bring out the sea sick feeling in even the hardiest of sea souls and I was thrilled to arrive in Wellington. Wellington is the only large city I spent any considerable time in and it is a pretty awesome one. The city center area is flat and by the water, with a magnificent area filled with museums, the national library, parks, breweries, and piers where kids like to jump off high things. The botanical gardens were the most beautiful I have been to and since I am a flower nut, I was in high heaven. In this area there are a ridiculous number of great coffee shops (NYC has a thing or two to learn as we don t have enough, I suspect it has something to do with insane real estate prices). The city is surrounded by hills populated by houses, some of the precipitously perched on cliffs that require lifts to get to! It was a wonderful home base for what was a sweet as conference (as they would say down there). And I hope to write about it sometime soon.

Kiwis have to be one of the cutest birds of all time. A bit chubby and clumsy looking, they are (to me, at least), walking, breathing icon of furry cuteness. Truth be told, I did not see one live in action during my recent trip to New Zealand, but I did see a Weka bird which is pretty similar. (Micah and I just consulted the Internets and agreed that we did in fact see cherubic Kiwi not a Weka. In fact, Micah almost ran one over on the west coast of the southern island but his quick reflexes born from years of saving servers while typing saved the bird. So as you can tell by now I finally got to go to New Zealand for a few weeks, even able to travel the south island before attending THE Linux conference of the region, LCA where I gave a talk (video to be posted when available). I jumped at the opportunity and was thrilled to find out that I could actually spend some time traveling around before the intense week long conference. So on January 5th I headed down with Micah to what I have found out is one of the windiest cities on earth ( Windy Wellington ) for a few days before heading to the south island to do a loop on the northern half of the island. I wanted to conquer the mountains made famous by a certain set of movies, but last semester was all about sitting in front of the computer, a sort of agonizing life of the mind, which did not prepare me physically for mountain trekking or as it call it there, tramping. So we decided to stick close to the coast (with one transalpine train that serenaded us through some awesome mountain passes) and hike along the coast, snorkel and swim, and kayak. After Andrew showed us around Wellington, we headed to the sea town of Kaikoura brimming with sea life, such as seals, dolphins, and birds. The two highlights there were our snorkeling trip and a hike along the peninsula. Originally we were going to go diving but I arrived to NZ with a head cold so we opted for the sinus friendlier version and snorkeled in the massive kelp forest, which was strikingly beautiful (I am used to tropical reefs and waters). There happened to be a lot of seals and given their curious nature, they would dart over right next to you and play. One seal I called him the twirler was chubby and mellow and twirled next to me for a long while. The lady seals were sleeker and faster and liked to dive deep down and the zoom up and surprise you. As someone who has spent a lot of time underwater, I found it fun and weird to be with animals that pay attention to you given that most of the sea life ignores you. The hike in Kaikoura was fantastic as well. You go high on a bluff and stare down at this water sparkling with the most beautiful blue hues brought out even more majestically by the white rocks. If I were to go back I would hike along the water and up above on the bluff. After a brief stopover in Christchurch to visit a friend, we took the transalpine train (across Arthur s pass) which was superbly beautiful and arrived on the west coast whose seas are far more rough, rocky, andtemperamental than on the east coast. The vegetation is lush as lush can be and you get the feeling that dinosaurs would have been a happy lot in these parts. The cool part about this area are the many rivers that feed into the ocean (we spent an afternoon swimming and exploring the caves in one) and then what are called the pancake rocks, which are odd geological creatures that really amaze. We then made our way to the Marlborough Sounds area, which includes the city of Nelson (apparently the sunniest in New Zealand) as well as many olive and grape vineyards in outlying areas. We spent some time in the Alpine lakes region hiking but more of the time on the coast. The highlight for me and it is a place I would love to go back to is the Abel Tasman National Park. We spent time hiking and kayaking there and you can even hike down the coast for 5-6 days (there are excellent camping facilities along the way). The coast is simply majestic with alpine like forest conditions (unfortunately a cool old tree whose name I can t remember is no longer common). This forest is situated along the most stunning waters, an electric but totally clear turquoise blue deceivingly inviting because the water was quite cold (but not as cold as the Oregon coast over the summer, which I went swimming in only once after weeks of bike travel). Along with the blue, parts of the coastal waters were a stunning clear green that I have never seen despite my many sea travels. If you ever plan on going to the South Island, I would not miss this area and might even try to spend a few days or more hiking the coastal trails and listening to the cool-as/sweet as birds, one of which has double vocal cords so it sings what sounds to be like totally electronic bird calls. We returned via the same ferry a massive 7 story ship from Picton to Wellington but the conditions were far far worse during our return trip. When we got out of the sounds, we hit the Cook Straight, notorious for being rough and tumble. And indeed, once we hit the waves, I felt like I was no longer in a boat but amusement park ride, the bow of the ship thrown high only to fall hard on upon the waves. It was sort of fun or fun for about 10 minutes until people, most especially kids, started yaking all over the place. It was really the most flagrant yakfest I have ever experienced (I mean it is a 7 story ferry, you can fit a lot of people on that boat) and that made the sail particularly difficult. I have pretty strong sea legs, never once getting sick sick during the year I spent at sea but massive yaking will bring out the sea sick feeling in even the hardiest of sea souls and I was thrilled to arrive in Wellington. Wellington is the only large city I spent any considerable time in and it is a pretty awesome one. The city center area is flat and by the water, with a magnificent area filled with museums, the national library, parks, breweries, and piers where kids like to jump off high things. The botanical gardens were the most beautiful I have been to and since I am a flower nut, I was in high heaven. In this area there are a ridiculous number of great coffee shops (NYC has a thing or two to learn as we don t have enough, I suspect it has something to do with insane real estate prices). The city is surrounded by hills populated by houses, some of the precipitously perched on cliffs that require lifts to get to! It was a wonderful home base for what was a sweet as conference (as they would say down there). And I hope to write about it sometime soon.

Work doesn't often send to me places as great as Manilla in the Philippines, but here I am. It's a reasonably modern place and to me feels more like America than Asia in so many ways, posssibly because of its history. One thing is for sure, noone follows road rules here. Red lights are a suggestion and a zebra crossing is just some painted lines that you do need to stop at.

As for food, it's not that different, in fact this sad lot is about what was different:

• McSpaghetti - Was supposedly sugar coated spaghetti but actually was very tame, my son would of loved it.
• Wow Steak from KFC - Neither Wow nor Steak, like a big chicken nugget with gravy and rice
• Halo Halo - A dessert drink which was sugared or preserved fruit, milk and ice.

Generally though the food has been pretty good but nothing I could get at home.

Good news about Gjay, the previous maintainer said it was ok for SourceForge to hand over the control of the program to me so I've set it up in git and started working on it. Most of the work was getting the code up-to-date to the later gtk APIs and making it work with audacious instead of xmms. It's almost ready for (re)initial release and there is even an ITP ready to go.

Git is a rather interesting and new (for me at least) version control system. I've been using cvs for more years than I'd care to think about and svn but while it is a bit different as you'd expect I haven't had it get in my way. In fact I've been so impressed with Git I have put a few other projects into it, mainly with the collab maintence Debian project for a few of my packages.

A short while ago I bought a new device, a HP Mini 5101. Basically a slightly oversized pocket calculator, but exactly what I wanted: It is painful to do anything real on it, but it can be used if there is really no better way. And this is exactly what I want to take with me on the vacation starting soon. A device that ensures I will not use it for more than the emergency case and as backup storage for pictures I take. This little thing has a tiny 10.1 (non-glare, I want it painful but even there is a limit. Idiot mirrors, brrr) TFT (1366x768), an Atom N280 with 1.66GHz, 2G RAM, a 160Gb disc, 3 usb ports, wifi, gigabit lan, bluetooth and a 3G module. It ships with one of those pain adventures with which the seller shows you how much they hate you (Windows XP), but that did only boot twice yet. Once to check everything works, for the second read on. It weights 1.3kg and HP imagines some 8 and a half hour runtime with the 6-cell battery. ACPI and powertop predict between 7 and 14hours, depending on my workload and probably the phase of the moon. But 7 will do nicely. Of course I put a Debian on this device. It runs all well. As it has no optical drive its either usbboot or netboot and off it goes. Easy install, only need to remember installing the broadcom-sta packages and building the module for the kernel to get wifi. Otherwise its a simple install and the stuff works out of the box. Except for one thing. I can not get this goddamn 3G module to work. It works fine in Windows, confirming this was the second time I did boot this abomination of a bad joke. When using that HP manager thingie for 3G, its all fine and works. When you then reboot into Linux - it also works. Annoying. It is one of those Qualcomm Gobi USB chipsets and to function it needs it firmware transferred over. Fine. Using google one can easily find gobiloader, which is meant to do that. Just get the firmware from Windows and let gobiloader do the rest. Except - it does not work. Everything I can find tells me it should, ie. various posts on various places on the net, the usbids the device has when without firmware and after this windows crap put firmware into it, everything looks exactly like it should. Yet, gobi_loader simply hangs itself right in the first while (1) loop, where it wants to send the first real data after the set of 3 magics it send before. The write never times out, the firmware never gets into the device, its not usable. Argh. Dear lazyweb, anyone out there with an idea? I tested various firmwares (the one I found in Windows, the one you can find at vendors download page, various of the 10 different you find in each), even let it run for some while before interrupting. Unfortunately I do not have enough clue in this area to debug what is happening here, nor to fix this up myself.

In desperate need to organize my collection of scientific papers, I had a look at various tools which could help me organizing them. Probably one of the best out there is Mendeley. Mendeley seems to be a very good tool to keep your massive collection of pdfs under control. Unfortunately a very basic function, namely looking up a newly imported paper in Google Scholar to get attributes like: Authors, Year, etc. right, is bundled with a Mendeley account. I guess that s their way of forcing the user to participate to their community stuff, since without the Google Scholar lookup Mendeley is pretty useless unless you want to fill all the attributes manually. So I decided to write my own tool to make the lookup. Unfortunately Google does not really want to give away that precious data: they don t provide an API and even block certain User-Agents from accessing the page. Then, there is also the problem of scraping the results page to get the right data. The first problem can be trivially solved by setting a common User-Agent string, the second one can be elegantly circumvented by using the bibtex files provided in the search results. The bibtex entries are however only showed if you enabled them in the settings, which are stored in a cookie. After a few tries, I figured that the CF attribute (citation format?) controls which bibliography format should be offered in the results page and CF=4 corresponds to bibtex. Generating a fake cookie is easy, but you have to know what must be included. In this case it looks like a 16 digit hex as ID and the CF attribute is sufficient. The ID is probably supposed to be your id, but a randomly generated one also works like a charm. The resulting cookie looks like this: GSP=ID=762a112b5c765732:CF=4 All you have to do now is to query Google Scholar using the user string and the cookie:

...
# fake google id (looks like it is a 16 elements hex)
google_id = hashlib.md5(str(random.random())).hexdigest()[:16]
GOOGLE_SCHOLAR_URL =  http://scholar.google.com 
HEADERS =  User-Agent  :  Mozilla/5.0 ,
         Cookie  :  GSP=ID=%s:CF=4  % google_id  
def query(searchstr):
     "Return a list of bibtex items. " 
    searchstr =  /scholar?q= +urllib2.quote(searchstr)
    url = GOOGLE_SCHOLAR_URL + searchstr
    request = urllib2.Request(url, headers=HEADERS)
    response = urllib2.urlopen(request)
    html = response.read()
    # grab the bibtex links
     

And Google Scholar will offer you links to the bibtex files of the results. Getting those links is easy since they all start with "/scholar.bib". Just search for those and download the targets. The complete code is available on github. It can be used as a python library or a standalone application, you just call it like this: gscolar "some author or title" and it will print the first ten results in bibtex to stdout.

As a german I'm used to strange translations in computer context.
I saw it back when I was using Microsoft products and I regulary stumble upon it on Debian systems. But whats actually kind of funny:Debian is outstanding in that regard.
An example:
Debian has that "wonderful" package manpages-de which provides a german manpage for ps.
It contains a formulation that is so inaccurate and not really funny:

"--cumulative Daten von toten Kindern einbeziehen (als Summe zusammen mit den Eltern)"

For the English only speakers: That can be roughly translated to "Collect data from dead children
(summed with their parents)". For me this somehow sounds like we are a butcher OS and so I reported #495441 but nobody cared about it yet.

Today I had another WTF on german translations because when I wanted to upgrade my system I read the following sentence:

"Sind Sie sich sicher, dass Sie die oben genannten Pakete installieren bzw. aufr sten wollen?"

Cold war, anyone?

Well its a classical case of using a word-by-word translation instead of a meaning-orientied translation. Its a fact that 'upgrade' can be translated to 'aufr sten' (as done above) but in that case its just not appropriate. As a matter of fact most german people I'm aware of would actually confuse the meaning with a meaning such as in a military context (therefore the "Cold war, anyone?" text above). And just btw. if we would rely on computing power to translate it back into English we would get:

Are you sure itself that you want to install and/or rig the packages specified above?

So it seems that Babelfish has a similar pereception.

On Monday I visited the Australian Open [1] it s one of the world s greatest tennis championships and it s on in Melbourne right now. IBM sponsored my visit to show me the computer technology that they use to run the event and display the results to the world via their web site and to various media outlets. The first thing that they showed me was the IBM Seer software on the HTC Hero phone (which runs the Google Android OS). Seer can be freely downloaded from the Android store. The most noteworthy feature is that it uses the camera in the Android phone to display a picture of whatever you are looking at with points of interest superimposed (such as the above picture where I asked for locations of events and toilets). But it also displays a map view and has some other features I didn t get a chance to test such as viewing twitter data relevant to the event. We really need this augmented reality feature enabled with tourist data for major cities. I m sure that there s lots of interesting things I haven t seen in my own home city, if I could just pull out a phone and see a map of what s around me whenever I m bored I could see some of them. I think that this has the potential to change the way we use phones, in theory this was available as soon as Google Maps was released, but Seer seems to be the start of a whole new range of developments. One of the uses of this will be for identifying the background in tourist photos, no more of the me in front of old building descriptions. Here is a Youtube Video of the Seer software in action [BMLgHGV4zWM]. The tour guide explained that to get the software to work on an iPhone would require the 3GS for navigation as the earlier iPhones don t have a compass. The Seer software was initially developed for The Championships, Wimbledon 2009 which happened at about the same time as the iPhone 3GS release. I expect that there will be enough iPhone 3GS units sold before Wimbledon 2010 to give IBM a good incentive to port Seer to the iPhone. Three (my phone company at the moment) has just sold out of the HTC Magic which has a digital compass. They are selling the HTC Touch Pro and HTC Touch Diamond that appear to lack a digital compass. Vodaphone is offering a HTC Magic free on the $29 contract right now. The other Australian mobile phone companies don t seem to offer any Android phones. So it seems that the only option right now if I wanted to purchase a phone in Australia that can run Seer is the Vodaphone HTC Magic, and that s a phone that was released almost a year ago (a long time with recent progress in phone development it s the modem before the HTC Hero I tested) and which has only a 3.2MP camera (the LG U990 Viewty I used to take the picture for this post has a 5MP camera and is older than that). So I expect that there aren t many people using Seer in Australia. If you happen to be in Melbourne and have an Android phone with a digital compass then you may want to visit the Australian open to try the Seer software. It should work equally well from outside the security fence I ll write about the other things I saw over the next few days.

• [1] http://www.australianopen.com/
• [2] http://www.androlib.com/android.application.com-mobilizy-ogilvy-ibmseer-australia-ptEE.aspx

Knowing full well that it will cause many of my readers to tut and roll their eyes at me I derive slight pleasure from confessing that I have now eaten at McDonalds on 6 continents. To make it worse I only did so in Asia and Australia so I could say I had.

It does lead me into a slightly more valid ramble. I'm not particularly bothered about eating on my own. I like food (even if I'm picky about what I like), but I prefer it with company. This means I'm not particularly great about being organised to cook complicated things when I'm on my own; largely the whole thing just turns into dealing with hunger. It also mean I'm bad at finding nice places to eat out while travelling. Which, when you're travelling for a month to some interesting places, is a bit of a bugger. I've got a bit better at actually going to nice places, and trying not to bolt my food into me so I can get out ASAP but instead enjoy it. A book helps. Also places that aren't quite as busy (which if you have no agenda is nicely achieved by letting your body clock desync from the world around you). Unfortunately I didn't really do so until after Hong Kong. Guess I'll just have to go back at some point...

(More on my travels at some point, maybe. I've started the tortuous journey home now.)

Just an update about sgeps, because it seems to have made a small stir (which is more than I expected).

• Yes, I know about emacs foo.gpg. Admittedly I found out while I was developing sgeps, but I kept on my track anyway. The real reason was that I was having fun, but I could also mention that sgeps doesn't store data unencrypted on disk, not even temporarily. I'm not sure about vim foo.gpg. (Update: Joey Hess telle me it does the right thing.) Anyway, I don't want to fire up an editor (or switch to an already opened one) just to get a password.
• I had also found out about pwman too. My script started as pwman.pl but it was renamed later. I like the simplicity of sgeps better, especially the lack of any UI besides the CLI, but pwman is probably good in its own way, but it doesn't fit my usage pattern.
• It seems the Gentoo people don't share my qualms about making very small packages, and apparently sgeps is now packaged for Gentoo Linux.
• Mehdi Dogguy already contributed suggestions (including better error handling) and even a patch implementing sgeps --delete. Thanks to him!
• An anonymous commenter suggests that sgeps should be able to store notes as well as passwords. That wasn't a requirement I initially had, but I won't reject the patch if it comes He also argues that it should be able to push the password into the X11 paste buffer. Again, why not, if it doesn't break anything.

I've hooked one of my laptop's terminals up to the net, so anyone with IPv6 can telnet in and see it. I've long wanted to be able to broadcast my terminal sessions on occasions when it makes sense. Like when I'm fixing someone's bug, or closely collaborating with someone distant. I am also interested in finding things to host on IPv6. Right now, that means only people who care will be able to access it. So it seems the trick is to find places where that is a benefit. I plan to keep an eye out for more things like this. (A side benefit of using IPv6 is that it makes it easier to serve content from my laptop, that moves from network to network.) So, tune in to my termcast! termcast

Following my questions on the freeness of the Nokia N900, I received quite a lot of comments. I m trying to summarize the most important points here.

• Maemo is not 100% free software. There are some proprietary components. The Free Maemo wiki page lists them all, and there are some explanations on Why the closed packages.
• The Mer project (install notes for N900) aims at providing a 100% free alternative to Maemo.
• It s possible to rebuild/upgrade the kernel, however the newest kernel build-depends on a fiasco-gen package that is not provided. It is being worked on.
• Nokia is sponsoring someone to work on Maemo derivatives.

For all the details, see the comments and Tollef s blog.

Here's a short overview of 3.0 source format support in git-buildpackage 0.4.64:

• git-import-dsc & git-import-dscs import 3.0 (quilt and native) format packages.
• git-import-orig: imports gzip and bz2 compressed archives. Other formats will be enabled once pristine-tar supports them (#499489).
• git-buildpackage handles creating gzip, bzip2, lzma and xz compressed tarballs with the --git-compression option although it could get a bit smarter and autodetect the compression type.

One loose end is the handling of multiple upstream tarballs (#561071, #561072). I'd be great to hear from people already using this feature how this can best be added into the gbp workflow. The newer kids in town gbp-clone, gbp-pull (for keeping the repo up to date when using team maintenance) and gbp-pq (for managing the quilt patch-queue) don't care about the underlying source package format. These three are a bit underdocumented in the manual but information about the workflow is in the wiki.

I'm glad you asked, since I've been pondering this for a while. $subject is my new project slogan. Now I'm not sure whether we can actually use it, because a) it's stolen from Debian, and b) another (commercial, proprietary) database product already uses the "universal database" line.

I have come to appreciate that the "universality" of a software proposition can be a killer feature. For example, Debian GNU/Linux, the "universal operating system", might not be the operating system that is the easiest to approach or use, but once you get to know it, the fact that it works well and the same way on server, desktop, and embedded ensures that you never have to worry about what operating system to use for a particular task. Or Python, it's perhaps not the most geeky nor the most enterprisy programming language, but you can use it for servers, GUIs, scripting, system administration, like few other languages. It might as well be the "universal programming language". A lot of other software is not nearly universal, which means that whenever you move into a new area, you have to learn a lot of things from scratch and cannot easily apply and extend past experiences. And often the results are then poor and expensive.

The nice thing about PostgreSQL is that you never have to worry about whether to use it, because you can be pretty sure that it will fit the job. Even if you don't care whether something is "open source" or "most advanced". But it will fit the job. The only well-known exception is embedded databases, and frankly I think we should try to address that.

Lucas asks about how free the N900 is, whether he can download and recompile and reflash. I'll try to answer some of those questions. No, you can't download all the source. Part of it is just not open. I am not privy to Nokia's decisions on why or why not to open up, but it seems like the user interface bits are only partially open. Hildon itself is open so you can poke at widgets and see how those work. The address book is not open. The telepathy component that talks to the cellular modem is not open. As for having to accept EULAs, I honestly don't remember accepting one of those, but I'm not going to say there are none. There's at least one which is every time you install a package where you have to check a box saying "Yes, I know this package is third party and will not sue Nokia if it causes my house to burn down, my wife to divorce me or causes somebody to steal the car". It's annoying, but I'm willing to live with it. The contents of apt's sources.list is:

deb https://downloads.maemo.nokia.com/fremantle/ssu/apps/ ./ 
deb https://downloads.maemo.nokia.com/fremantle/ssu/mr0 ./ 
deb https://downloads.maemo.nokia.com/fremantle/ovi/ ./ 
deb http://repository.maemo.org/extras/ fremantle free non-free
deb http://repository.maemo.org/extras-devel/ fremantle free non-free

(technically, it comes from /etc/apt/sources.list.d/hildon-application-manager.list, not sources.list.) I believe the built-in applications are generally not free, so rebuilding everything that is free will for instance leave you without any address book UI, the built-in map application or camera. Sadly, the X driver is also proprietary, so you won't be able to see anything either. I don't think you can usefully install another free distro on the N900. You might be able to, at some point, assuming somebody goes to the effort. The last question is "- Besides the non-free telephony stack, are there any other antifeatures I should be aware of?". The telephony stack is implemented around Telepathy, which is LGPL-ed free software. While it's correct that telepathy-ring (which talks to the cellular modem), the call UI and most of the address book are proprietary, the rest of Telepathy is free. There are SIP and XMPP connection managers that are free, and you can install more connection managers for MSN, IRC and so on. Also, I think it's important to emphasise that the telephony stack does not contain any antifeatures. The closest thing you would be able to find is probably the restriction to one active and one held call at the same time, but as one of the developers said: "That's to prevent the UI from going mad". While I like to tout the N900 as a free phone, it is in no way completely free. Large parts of it are free, and almost as importantly: most of the programming interfaces are free and at least somewhat documented, so if somebody wants to replace the built-in camera application with a free one, they can replace the DBus interface that the camera app provides. Ditto for maps applications, the address book and so on.

Recently, Eclipse started ignoring clicks on dialog buttons for me. This seems to be due to some changes in gtk 2.18. It does not use native windows for all widgets anymore, and SWT seems to rely on it. Thanks to this blog post, I have this fix in my bashrc: The Debian bug tracker also knows about this problem, which is partly fixed for the eclipse packages. Bad luck that I am using a download from eclipse.org.

The XML-Editor Serna by Syntext has been published as Free Software a few months ago. This was very good news, because there was a lack of a good free XML editors with a good graphical view on DocBook documents, which I needed to recommend to users of zpub. Therefore, I investigated packaging Serna for Debian. I had to patch a few things to make it compile on and64 and to use components shipped by Debian where possible. Today, I could finally close the RFP bug filed by W. Martin Borgert, as the serna package was accepted by the ftp-masters. The first bug (SEGFAULT on startup on lenny) is already filed. I hope this is a good sign, as it shows that there is interest in the package. For my packaging workflow, I used git-svn to import the upstream SVN branch into a git repository. I then use git-dpm by Bernhard R. Link to manage my changes as patches in the new 3.0 (quilt) debian source package. I must say that I prefer this approach to git-buildpackage, as there is only one git branch to publish. I hope that Bernhard uploads git-dpm to Debian soon. Serna is quite a big software project and uses stuff that I know little about (Qt, C++ with python interaction etc.). Also, the package currently bundles the DITA-OT package, which should rather be packaged separately. Therefore, I d be glad if co-maintainers would join the effort.

I m running Debian/Unstable on an EeePC 701, I ve got an SD card for /home etc but the root filesystem is on the internal 4G flash storage which doesn t have much spare space (I ve got a full software development environment, GCC, debuggers, etc as well as running KDE4). On some of my systems I ve started the practice of having two root filesystem installs, modern disks are big enough that usually it s difficult to use all the space, and even if you do use most of the space the use of a second root filesystem only takes a fraction of a percent of the available space. Today I discovered a problem with my EeePC, I had upgraded to the latest Unstable packages a few days ago and now when I run X programs the screen flickers really badly every time it s updated. Pressing a key in a terminal window makes the screen shake, watching a video with mplayer makes it shake constantly to such a degree that it s not usable. If that problem occurred on a system with a second root filesystem I could upgrade the other a few packages at a time to try and discover the root cause. But without the space for a second root filesystem this isn t an option. I hope that Btrfs [1] becomes ready for serious use soon, it seems that the btrfs snapshot facility might make it possible for me to preserve the old version in a bootable form before upgrading my EeePC (although even then disk space would be tight). So I guess I now need to test different versions of the X related packages in a chroot environment to track this bug down. Sigh.

• [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Btrfs

My Google Bugs page started off as a blog post back in 2006, but I ve moved it to a more permanent home and started to bring it up to date. Recent additions include the China Controversy updated, a recent search bug added andDNS service added. In just over a month, BathLitFest will be holding a debate on Is Google Good For You? Sunday 28 Feb, 1pm 2pm. The key questions are:

In the data-sharing and database age, how much information are we prepared to give away about ourselves and who, ultimately, controls that information? Is the price of convenient, high-speed communication an almost total loss of privacy? And is it right that one company knows more about us than our government, or even than we know ourselves?

Tickets are on sale, priced 7. That s pretty much what I was pointing out back in 2006. I don t hate Google or anything, but we should be realistic: it is a for-profit company, so probably won t be doing anything truly for free. There s always a payback and we should recognise it as part of making an informed choice about whether to trade with them. It s nice to see these questions getting a more mainstream airing. If you ve got any updates for the Google Bugs page, please let me have them.

So, a while back, Google started providing location services. This seemed pretty cool, but I kind of ignored it until recently when I was playing with my Android s location API. With the GPS off, and no cell towers visible (my basement gets terrible cell service), my phone knew within about 500 feet of where it actually was. All I was connected to was my wifi. Bottom line: it seems that Google, among other methods, is likely wardriving while photographing for Street View. They are now able to pinpoint wifi access points if they happened to see it while driving through your city. I m really rather astonished that no one is freaking out about this; I m a bit unnerved. I implemented the location-of-your-wifi API quickly, so I could terrify myself further. You can do lookups via my location website too, if you want. UPDATE: yeah, it would seem to be crowd-sourced wifi and cell tower triangulation data. I should say Google is WarCrowding .