Christian writes about differences on the international level; how even something as simple as people's names isn't always easy, and that one has to be quite careful to avoid calling people 'Dear Verhelst', or some such, because you assumed that their first name was indeed their given name, while in their culture the last name is the given name. Funnily, Christian advocates using capital letters to clarify which part of one's name should be considered the family name. Sorry to disappoint you, Christian. Writing one's last name with all capitals is a French typographical convention. While it is understood in other places, it is not often used outside of France (except in organisations with a strong link to France, obviously); and it is, in fact, shouting. It is also not actually helping any. I should, in fact, somewhere in my mailbox archive have an email reply from a South Korean guy that starts off like so: Dear TIA, to which I then had to explain that no, TIA is not my first name, it is an abbreviation for "Thanks In Advance". Note the use of capitals.

It seems strange to me. I don't think I know people as aware of internationalization issues as Bubulle, a.k.a. Christian PERRIER, and I have the feeling his last post regarding how he shall address himself is somewhat short-sighted. That might just mean I am in an even worse position. First, I recognize Christian's concern, but not only when dealing with people from around the globe It happens in my everyday life. When you show an ID stating Gunnar Eyal Wolf Iszaevich, the first reaction is a blank stare of disbelief, only to be followed by a question: So, what is your name? So I understand Christian wants to make it easier for people to guess what his name is in the least obtrusive way possible. I have seen the convention he suggests (uppercasing the family name) AFAICT used by French and Japanese people. But for me, it is intuitively backwards. If I were to emphasize a part of my name, it would be the part by which I expect people to address me with I would write GUNNAR Wolf. And yes, I usually leave out my second given name and my mother's family name, as it is customary here. Well, anyway... Reading my name, few people would guess I live in Mexico. Even fewer will believe I was born here. And if somebody calls me by the wrong part of my name, I won't feel at all offended. I strongly prefer my name to be used, as I like to be addressed casually, but quite often I am introduced as Dr. Wolf, in what at most would be an ex-profeso honoris causas doctorate, or at least an ignoratis causas one.

I started to write this review last night, and went looking for Wil Wheaton s blog, where many of the stories came from, so I can link to it from my review. It was getting late, I was tired, and so I was a bit disoriented for a few seconds when I saw my own words flash up on the screen. At the time, his most recent story had excerpted my review of paper books. Wow, I thought. This never happens when I m about to review Dickens. And actually, it s never happened before, ever. I ll admit to owning a big grin when I saw that one of my favorite authors liked one of my blog posts. And Wil Wheaton is one of my favorite authors for sure. I enjoy reading others too, of course, but Wil s writing is something I can really identify with like no other. My parents were never in a London debtor s prison like Dickens were; I was never a promising medical student like A. C. Doyle. But I was, and am, a geek, and Wil Wheaton captures that more perfectly than anyone. After I read Just a Geek a few years ago, I gave it to my wife to read, claiming it would help her understand me better. I think it did. In The Happiest Days of Our Lives, Wil recounts memories of his childhood, and of more recent days. He talks of flashbacks to his elementary school days, when he and his classmates tried to have the coolest Star Wars action figures (for me: calculator watches). Or how his aunt introduced him to D&D, which reminded me of how my uncle got me interested in computers. Teaching himself D&D was an escape for the geeky kid that wasn t good at sports, as teaching myself Pascal and C was for me. Between us, the names and activities are different, but the story is the same. I particularly appreciated Wil s reflections on his teenage years. Like him, at that age, I often found myself as the youngest person in a room full of adults. Yet I was still a teenager, and like any teenager, did some things that I look back on with some embarrassment now. Wil was completely honest with himself he admitted crashing a golf cart on the Paramount studio lot, for instance, but also reminds me that he was a teenager then. He recognizes that he didn t always make the best choices and wasn t always successful with what he did, but isn t ashamed of himself either. That s helpful for me to remember; I shouldn t be unreasonably harsh on my 16-year-old self, and need to remember that I had to be a teenager too. I also identify with him as a dad. He wrote of counting the days until he could teach his boys about D&D, about passing on being a geek to his sons. I ve had a similar excitement about being able to help Jacob build his first computer. Already Jacob, who is 3, loves using the manual typewriter I cleaned up for him, and spent an hour using the adding machine I dug out on Sunday while I was watching the boys. (I regret that I didn t have time to take it apart and show him how it worked right then when he asked). And perhaps his 2nd-favorite present of Christmas was the $3.50 large-button calculator with solar cell power I got him as an impulse buy at the pharmacy the other day. He is particularly enamored with the square root button because a single press replaces all the numbers on the screen with completely different numbers! I can t find the exact passage now, but Wil wrote at one point about his transition from a career in acting to a career in writing. He said that he likes the feeling he gets when his writing can touch people. He s been able to redefine himself not as a guy that used to be an actor on Star Trek but a person that is a good author, now. I agree, and think his best work has been done with a keyboard instead of a camera. And that leaves me wondering where my career will take me. Yes, I m an author, but of technical books. Authors of technical books rarely touch people s hearts. There s a reason we read Shakespeare and Dickens in literature classes, but no high school English teacher has ever assigned Newton s Opticks, despite its incredible importance to the world. Newton revolutionized science, mathematics, and philosophy, but Opticks doesn t speak to the modern heart like Romeo and Jiuliet still does. Generations of people have learned more about the world from Shakespeare than from Newton. I don t have Wil s gift for writing such touching stories. I ve only been able to even approach that sort of thing once or twice, and it certainly won t make a career for me. Like Wil, I m rarely the youngest person in the room anymore. His days of being a famous teenage actor on a scifi series are long gone, as are mine of single-handedly defeating entire teams at jr. high programming contests. (OK, that s a stretch, but at the time it sure felt exciting.) But unlike him, I m not completely content with my niche yet. I blog about being a geek in rural Kansas, where there still aren t many. I m a dad, with an incredible family. And I write about programming, volunteer for Debian and a few other causes, and have a surprisingly satisfying job working for a company that builds lawn mowers. And yet, I have this unshakable feeling of unsettledness. That I need to stop and think more about what I really want to do with my life, perhaps cultivate some talents I don t yet have, or perhaps find a way to make my current path more meaningful. So I will take Wil s book as a challenge, to all those that were once sure of what their lives would look like, and are less sure with each passing year: take a chance, and make it yours. And on that score, perhaps I ve done more than I had realized at first. Terah and I took a big chance moving to Kansas, and another one when we bought my grandparents run-down house to fix up and live in. Perhaps it s not a bad idea to pause every few years and ask the question: Do I still like the direction I m heading? Can I change it? Wil Wheaton gives me lots to think about, in the form of easy-to-read reflections on his own life. I heartily recommend both Just a Geek and The Happiest Days of Our Lives. (And that has nothing to do with the fact that the Ubuntu machine he used to write the book probably had installed on it a few pieces of code that I wrote, I promise you.)

Holy crap! I don't know how I made it, but my mailing-list spam review page is EMPTY!! It was a long way, started on 2009-04-05, but at least the biggest part is done (now there are only the new reports, much much less than the whole backlog).

Again, I'd like to invite anyone to contribute to have (an ideal) lists.d.o spam free:

• any non-DD can report spam messages clicking on the button on the message page on lists.d.o
• any DD can start here and then contribute reviewing the received reports.

I know it seems boring at first (and indeed it is), but we are many people, and anyonw contributes a little, it will be much faster and less-annoying. For example: why not review some message while waiting for your next package to be built? Or while you wait for the dist-upgrade to end? Or in any other situation where you got some minutes of spare time to dedicate to such an easy task?

Some links to those interested:

• Listarchive spam review main page
  
• wiki page
• spam review stats

Have fun!

Sometimes, the main task at any one time is simply going to take time and cannot be shortened. With my poor network connection, this tends to occur any time I need to do network tasks like multistrap and debootstrap tests, archive updates and the rest. The problem is that my network connection is so bad, most apt type tasks completely saturate all available bandwidth, especially when downloading a single large package like those built from gcc or OOo.

Thankfully, gpdftext has provided an intermittent task that is useful, intermittent, non-network dependent and relatively straightforward (so as not to be too distracting from the main task) without being sufficiently routine to make me think about automating it.
I've downloaded some 70 public domain novels as A4 PDF and I'm gradually working through them in gpdftext to tidy up the chapter headings and reformat as an A5 PDF, ready to be transferred back to my ebook reader.

This version of gpdftext isn't released yet (it's current SVN, 0.1.0) as it's in string freeze. However, it provides a fairly robust test of the next release.

Current list includes: Little Women, Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen, Lady Susan, Northanger Abbey, Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Peter Pan (Peter and Wendy), Lorna Doone: A Romance Of Exmoor, The Gap in the Curtain, The Thirty-Nine Steps, Through the Looking Glass (And What Alice Found There), Fanny Hill: Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, Moll Flanders, Robinson Crusoe, The Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, A Tale of Two Cities, David Copperfield, Great Expectations, Little Dorrit, Oliver Twist, The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes, The Hound of the Baskervilles, The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, The Return of Sherlock Holmes, Cranford, The Wind in the Willows, King Solomon's Mines, Tess of the d'Urbervilles, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Declaration of Independence, Just so Stories, Kim, The Jungle Book, The Man Who Would be King, The Arabian Nights, Lady Chatterley's Lover, Sons and Lovers, Women in Love, The Story of Doctor Dolittle, The Call of the Wild, The Game, White Fang, Moby Dick, Anne of Green Gables, The Well at the World's End, Pygmalion, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, East is West, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, The Jewel of Seven Stars, Anna Karenina, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Kama Sutra, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, The Aeneid of Virgil.

That should be enough for now.... (21 converted so far).

Dad! Shall we play tunnels and slippers? If you spend much time in our house, chances are you ll hear Jacob, our 3-year-old, ask me that question. It might sound a bit mysterious, but in 3-year-old logic, it totally works. One day, Jacob and I accidentally invented tunnels . I would sit on the couch, the footstool a foot or two away, with my legs on it. Jacob started crawling underneath the resulting tunnel , then got excited about crawling on top of it, crashing down off of it, or slowly sliding down. Sometimes I would take one leg off, and he would fix the tunnel. Afterwards, he d excitedly tell me, Dad! I fixed the tunnel all by myself! This being winter, I usually wear slippers around the house to keep my feet warm. Jacob steadfastly refuses to wear anything but bare feet, maintaining his feet are warm when asked. One day while we were playing tunnels, Jacob started trying to steal my slipper. I defended it by using my other foot to tickle him. He eventually got it, much to his delight. Then he d try to get the other slipper. If you were to listen to a CD of this, you d hear a frenzy of cackling, laughter from both of us, and eventual shrieks of delight as he steals the second slipper. At this point, what s a 3-year-old to do with two ill-gotten slippers? Why, put them on and try to run off with them, of course! So Jacob puts them on, and if I am too slow trying to recover them, will helpfully prompt me with Shall you get the slippers back? When I stand up, he ll shriek, and waddle off at top speed which isn t that fast, considering he s wearing slippers that won t fit his feet for another 15 years. Eventually I will make a big show of having very cold feet and wanting my slippers back. He will laugh in delight, and continue trying to escape. Eventually I ll catch him, lift him up high, and shake his legs until the slippers fall off. Then it s a mad dash to see which one of us will get them back on first. If I do, then it s back to the couch for more tunnels and slippers. So there you have it: tunnels and slippers. Interestingly, I asked Jacob the other day if he wanted to wear HIS slippers. He predictably said no. I pointed out that if he wears his, he d be just like me. He said, Here they are. Shall you help me put them on? I did. He walked around proudly. I asked him if his feet were warm. Yes, they were, he said. So you won t need to steal my slippers anymore? A brief look of panic crept across his face! I felt bad, until he replied with, No, my feet still VERY VERY cold, dad! Shall we play tunnels and slippers right now?

Enigma is a great game, with a unique mixture of puzzles with mouse skills and action. If you know the discontinued game Oxyd originally on the Atari ST in the 90s (also on Amiga and one version on DOS), then you know the principle of Enigma. Except that it has tons of more levels and is Open Source.Some weeks ago, I uploaded a 1.10 pre-release (approximately milestone 5) to Debian experimental. This is the soon-to-be-released new version, using a new level file format (with a much extended API to make level development even easier, ~50% less code per level now), new levels (of course), updated graphics (including support for new graphics modes), ...Unstable still contains version 1.01; the reason is simple that I knew there would be another 1.01 maintainance release coming. However I believe it doesn't offer much against the current unstable version; it largely marks an upstream release containing patches already in the Debian package (since communication with upstream is really good).So I have now two choices: refreshing the Debian unstable package to the "probably last" 1.01 release upstream, or going straight for the 1.10 milestones to give enigma some extra testing.

Everyone seems to be familiar with ebooks these days. I own a Kindle 2, and of course we ve spent weeks hearing how great the Nook will be, then weeks hearing how terrible it turned out to be. But nobody seems to be casting an eye back towards paper, so I thought I d rectify that here, especially since paper books have some serious stability issues that are often overlooked! Before I begin, I feel it wise to offer this hint to the reader: this review should not be taken too literally. If you have an uncontrollable urge to heave a volume of the Oxford English Dictionary at me as if I am some European prime minister, please plant your tongue more firmly in your cheek and begin again. Today I picked up a paper book to read just for fun The Happiest Days of Our Lives by Wil Wheaton. Long-time (since this spring!) Kindle user that I am, I immediately noticed the dashing use of color on its front cover, but when I opened it, I was disappointed that I couldn t scale the font size down from the default. It seems that paper books have only one font option what are all these Kindle forum posters complaining about with its six sizes of a single font? On the very first page, I encountered a word I wasn t familiar with (Namaste). I thought I knew what it meant from the context clues, and even had the thought that on the Kindle, I could just highlight it and confirm my guess. But my paper dictionary was in the basement, so I didn t bother looking it up until I wrote this post. (My hunch was reasonably correct.) Interface-wise, the paper book is solid, and crashes, lockups, or other malfunctions are rare. I have, however, noted severe stability problems when attempting to read outdoors, especially when it s windy (which, since I live in Kansas, is pretty much always). Pages start turning themselves, even without me making the turn page gesture. Sometimes the book will even lose its memory of my last page read. This is rather annoying, and might even involve a lengthy search for a suitable temporary replacement bookmark. Also, I haven t tried it, but I suspect that the trick of putting a Kindle in a ziplock bag to read at the beach or in the tub without risk of getting it wet would be impractical with a paper book. Paper does have its advantages. For one, it s faster to flip rapidly through pages on paper than on an ebook reader. If you know roughly where in the book something was written, but not the precise wording, searching can be faster on paper. On the other had, if you are looking for a particular word or phrase, the ebook reader may win hands-down, especially if the paper book has no index. Paper is so stable that some would argue that the extreme impracticality of making good backups isn t really a problem at all. But on the other hand, paper books degrade slightly each time they are used, and this condition can be aggravated by placement in bags for transport. Eventually, they will wear out. If my Kindle wears out, I can always restore David Copperfield from my backup copy to a new one. If my printed edition (all two volumes) of it wear out, then I have to hope that the used bookstore will still sell me another one for $10. Otherwise I d have to either drive 45 miles to find one for sale, attempt to deal with the DRM for paper books at a library, or wait a couple of days for Amazon to get it to my door. A fire or flood could be devastating. Paper books also have some advantages for showing photos; no ebook reader is close to the size and resolution of glossy paper photos books in a reasonable price. The contrast on most paper books is better than that of my Kindle, but some older ones are actually worse, smell dusty, and suffer from occasional display corruption as bits of them actually break off of the book device. As to cost, it is a mixed bag. Out of copyright classics are free as ebooks from Project Gutenberg and the like, while still costing money on paper. I have found that the accuracy of some of these paper editions can be rather questionable people have sometimes manually removed important bits of the story to save on printing costs, rather than let Google Books OCR mangle it for them automatically. On the other hand, used paper editions of more current works can be found for a fraction of the cost of the new ebook edition though you are often limited in selection of these bargains. But you can usually browse a paper book for a few minutes before buying it, which is rarely available for an ebook. What s more, libraries might let you borrow paper books for free. But you often have to expel greenhouse gases to get to them, and then they enforce DRM on you you only get to read it a certain amount of time before they start adding fees. You could easily wind up paying $2 if you keep it a week longer than you should have. With ebooks, of course, there is no free borrowing (and the Nook feature it too limited to count.) And you of course know that most libraries are run by the government, so they have your address. Trying to circumvent a library s DRM could wind up involving the police, so you had best comply. Making copies of a paper book is expensive and requires specialized equipment, even if you just want a copy for backup. Compatibility problems with paper books are rare, and are usually found among readers with poor eyesight. A few works can be found in large font editions, but most can t, so those readers are left needing expensive specialty magnifiers. All in all, I prefer reading books on my Kindle, but still read on paper when that s how I have a book.

The following snippet allows readline-style tab completion backed onto Django models. I am using this in management commands in preference to specifying primary keys as arguments. Example usage: Pressing <tab> at this >>> prompt will complete from the name field of the MyModel model just like a regular shell would. We call readline.set_completer_delims as our items may contain word delimeters - otherwise readline would attempt a seperate completion of (eg) "Bar" if one of our items was "Foo Bar".

I'm currently looking for some backup tool, but each tool lacks some features. I'd like to

• have rsync style (i.e. small) backups;
• multiple backup-from locations per host;
• backup should end on an webdav-device (but "local" in the filesystem will do for starters);
• encrypts to gnupg (multiple keys), but restoring/looking at the diffs doesn't require to either gpg-agent-export the key to the restore location nor to transfer the content to the site where the gpg-key is;
• allows to restore the version of previous days, and allows to view the differences created since then;
• "feels like unix", i.e. configuration in some text-file etc etc.

I took a deeper look at duplicity, but the encryption to gnupg means I need to copy files around. Also the webdav-uploader has some issues if backups get too large (i.e. uploads take too long). Any other hints? Or is it worth to start to enhance duplicity? Update: I'd like to generate the backup on the backuped system, but to manage them (i.e. purge old versions) on the backup system. And of course restore to any host within my control. Without exposing any affected gpg key, but just the one-time key(s) for the affected backup(s).

Started working on reservation system for Debian Monthly Meeting. Since there wasn't a simple useful opensource tool to handle reservation for Monthly Debian Meeting, I have decided to get my hands dirty and create a Google App Engine app to reserve Debian Monthly Meeting. So far it has been fun.

Continuing a Saturday after Christmas tradition (well, two years in a row, at least), have a new Lintian release. This release welcomes Raphael Geissert as a member of the Lintian maintenance team. He's been providing good patches for quite some time, so this was overdue. Releases have been infrequent lately, so there was a rather large bug backlog built up. I also took some time to rewrite the tag handling module and move its namespace around, which is largely why the larger version bump. This version has a few new command-line switches. --suppress-tags and --suppress-tags-from-file allows disabling specific tags that one never wants to see, added primarily for Emdebian to be able to turn off particular tags but possibly of use in other situations. -F or --ftp-master-rejects shows only those tags that might result in an automated reject, although currently doesn't distinguish between ones that can be overridden and ones that can't. I'm going to update lintian.d.o in a few moments and start an archive-wide run, since this release fixes a bunch of bugs and should hopefully fix handling of multiple versions of the same package in the archive. There are a lot of code changes in this release, so it may not be completely stable. I'm planning on making another release next Saturday.

Happy Holidays! Or, as my firewall reported this morning:

Dec 25 04:39:18 firewall kernel: [1054241.000084] sd 2:0:0:0: [sda] ABORT operation started
...
Dec 25 04:40:10 firewall kernel: [1054292.072173] raid1: sdb2: redirecting sector 3490144 to another mirror


I guess I m getting my firewall a new hard drive for Christmas. :)

A friend of mine is interested in trying out the Automatic Rule Based Time-Tracker arbtt which I programmed. Unfortunately, he is using Windows and up to now, arbtt only worked on Linux. But as I wanted to check out Haskell s cross-platform abilities for a while, this was a good opportunity to do so. I don t have Windows installed myself (and did not plan to do so), so I did all this under WINE, the Windows compatibility layer, which works very well: It takes only a few minutes to install the Haskell Platform for Windows and then I was able to run wine ghc --make and cabal install. I played around with some simple programs and was surprised by these timings:

$ rm *.o *.hi; ghc --make fourfours.hs ; time ./fourfours > /dev/null
[1 of 1] Compiling Main             ( fourfours.hs, fourfours.o )
Linking fourfours ...
real	0m1.909s
user	0m1.692s
sys	0m0.208s
$ rm *.o *.hi; wine ghc --make fourfours.hs ; time wine ./fourfours.exe > /dev/null
[1 of 1] Compiling Main             ( fourfours.hs, fourfours.o )
Linking fourfours.exe ...
real	0m1.631s
user	0m1.376s
sys	0m0.092s

So it is faster to run a compiled Haskell program on top of a compatibility layer than directly on Linux! The world is in order again, though, if optimization is enabled:

$ rm *.o *.hi; ghc -O --make fourfours.hs ; time ./fourfours > /dev/null
[1 of 1] Compiling Main             ( fourfours.hs, fourfours.o )
Linking fourfours ...
real	0m0.981s
user	0m0.876s
sys	0m0.108s
$ rm *.o *.hi; wine ghc -O --make fourfours.hs ; time wine ./fourfours.exe > /dev/null
[1 of 1] Compiling Main             ( fourfours.hs, fourfours.o )
Linking fourfours.exe ...
real	0m1.270s
user	0m1.036s
sys	0m0.072s

Funny. Anyways, I wanted to port arbtt. The only platform-dependent part is the capture module that gathers the list of open Windows. The Win32 package that comes with the Haskell Platform did not cover all the functions needed to do so, but creating additional function bindings is really easy with Haskell, as can be seen in the Graphics.Win32.Window.Extra module. I also replaced the locking code that prevents two instances of arbtt-capture to run at the same time by equivalent code using Windows mutexes (module System.Win32.Mutex). With these small changes and some CPP conditionals to make the code compile for either platform, the porting was done! Even accessing the files in ~/.arbtt works correctly on Windows, where it will look in the Application Data folder, without changing the code, thanks to System.Directory.getAppUserDataDirectory. But Windows users won t like compiling software on their own. They won t even like installing software by copying various files to certain directories. Therefore, I also had to create a Windows Installer. I picked Inno Setup, because it s Free Software and seems to be simpler than NSIS. The installer puts the compiled .exe files, the example categorize.cfg and the HTML documentation in the right spot, adds icons to the Start Menu ( Edit categorize.cfg , which fires up wordpad, a link to the documentation and the uninstaller), puts arbtt-capture in the Autorun folder, puts the path to arbtt-stats in the PATH variable and starts arbtt-capture at the end (the last three points being optional). Of course it undoes all this when removing the program again. I integrated the call to the Inno Setup installer into the usual ./Setup build process of Haskell packages. Some more details of how to create the Windows installer are mentioned in the README file. Now all this does not magically add a graphical user interface to arbtt, so users will still have to work with arbtt-stats on the command line even on Windows. If this is not a problem for you then you can fetch the latest installer from the arbtt homepage. And if you happen to become a serious user of arbtt on Windows and want to help maintaining the Windows port, I ll gladly share some responsibilities. I m very satisfied with the process and the result and I m happy to know that I can offer some of my programs also to Windows users in the future.It is also a big plus for Haskell with Python, shipping a program for Windows users is likely more difficult. The next step will be providing gtk-based graphical Haskell applications for Windows, including a nice installer that ideally includes all dependencies (gtk etc.).

Somehow, I'm still lacking the optimal media player application. Many popular ones are totally overloaded (e.g. amarok). Others like totem seems to be just a minimalistic frontend for a particular backend.My current choice:

• Single-shot playback: to view a random song or video I usually open them with Totem (the GNOME default) and that works okay
• Library: I use MPD as player because it just seems to be rock stable. As UI I currently use Sonata, but I don't use it for much more than choosing a song from the currentl playlist.
• Editing: ExFalso seems to have the best ID3v4 support, in particular it also allows multiple genre fields. (Note that Vorbis even suggests you should use multiple artist fields instead of the common "Arist A & Artist B" way of filling the fields)

However, there is one thing I'm really not satisfied with: when putting together a CD compilation for friends (say, as Christmas present), they are quite useless. A key issue here is the total playlist length. Guess what, I want to make sure it fits on a single CD. So I really need to know the total playlist length. Why do so many media players (e.g. totem, alsa-player-gtk, xfmedia4, vlc, mplayer, ...) not show you the total playlist length? They did read all the files to get artist and title. Many even have the individual song lengths, just not the total sum.In the past I've been using old XMMS1 to check for the total length, or a CD burning application like K3B by repeatedly importing my current folder.Right now, I'm using Quod Libet (since I like the tag-editing component exfalso a lot) to arrange the playlist. It also gives me the total length, albeit I belive I've had incorrect song lengths in it before (broken VBR files?), and it's not perfect, too: being database-driven it has really long startup times for occasional users (because of updating the database) and is much more heavyweight. I also believe I've lost some playlists because I had moved my files around once ... so I'm a bit sceptical.Anyway, there are still hundreds of media players I havn't looked at. Don't bother me to send me an email about one I havn't mentioned!But if you are developing a media player, please consider the use case of putting together a music CD for your friends. In particular, for users that do not use your player all day.

When being told about the differences between Puppet and Chef by Puppet fans, a few common talking points emerged. They included the terms DSL , declarative , and shell script . Shell script was probably the most entertaining meme, and referred to how, without dependencies, Chef was just like writing shell scripts in Ruby. In actuality, a Chef cookbook appears to be roughly 17 files in 7 different directories. Most of them end in .rb, but there is also a metadata.json to keep the metadata.rb company, and perhaps an .rdoc if you like that sort of thing. I have no idea who writes shell scripts this way. I am also stupefied that people say this is easier than Puppet, because I doubt I would want to perform system administration by writing one of these things. So when I started writing my own thing, I contemplated the dependency issue, and for a few minutes decided to be lazy and leave them out entirely. Once it dawned on me, however, that I was then writing shell scripts in Lua, I became ashamed. If I were going to go that route, why not just set up a git repository with a bunch of shell scripts, and set up cronjobs on each of the clients to do a git pull and run these shell scripts as root? After all, nothing beats shell scripting for shell scripting, not Perl, not Python, not Ruby, and least of all Lua. So I wrote a dependency resolver. It was easier than I had anticipated and I have vague plans to make it smarter than Puppet's. Then I'm justified in sticking to my Lua DSL . Now Steve has a list of requirements that seem to be relatively mild. I think he could easily get away with a VCS-shellscript-cron setup. The VCS pull can be tunneled over ssh or stunnel or anything else which will provide authentication and encryption, so there is no need for a fancy custom server with its own certificate authority. In short, all the tools are there and you just need glue. I will continue to pretend that I'll need more complex logic and power that only Lua can give me, so I'll end up doing VCS-Lua-cron until I change my mind.

It was interesting to see Clint Adams describe love and dissatification with configuration management. At work I've got control of 150(ish) machines which are managed via CFEngine. These machines are exclusively running Debian Lenny. In addition to these hosts we also have several machines running Solaris, OpenBSD, and various Ubuntu releases for different purposes. Unfortunately I made a mistake when I setup the CFEngine infrastructure and when writing all the policies, files, etc, I essentially said "OK CFEngine controlled? Then it is Debian". (This has been slowly changing over time, but not very quickly.) But in short this means that the machines running *BSD, Solaris, and non-Debian distributions haven't been managed as well via CFEngine as the rest, even though technically they could have been. A while back I decided that it was time to deal with this situation. Looking around the various options it seemed Puppet was the way of the future and using that we could rewrite/port our policies and make sure they were both cleanly organised and made no assumptions. So I setup a puppetmaster machine, then I installed the client on a range of client machines (openbsd, debian lenny, ubuntu, solaris) so that I could convince myself my approach was valid, and that the tool itself could do everything I wanted it to do. Unfortunately using puppet soon became painful. It has primitives for doing various things such as maintaining local users, working with cronjobs, and similar. Unfortunately not all primitives work upon all platforms, which kinda makes me think "what's the point?". For example the puppet client running upon FreeBSD will let you add a local user, setup a ~/.ssh/authorized_keys file but will not let you setup a password. (Which means you can add users who can login, but then cannot use sudo. Subpar) At this point I've taken a step back. As I think I've mentioned before I don't actually do too much with CFEngine. Just a few jobs:

• Fetch a file from the master machine and copy into the local filesystem. (Making no changes.)
• Fetch a file from the master machine, move it to the local system after applying a simple edit. (e.g "s/##HOSTNAME##/ hostname /g")
• Install a package.
• Purge a package.
• Setup local user accounts, with ~/.ssh handled properly.
• Apply one-line sed-style edits to files. (e.g. "s/ENABLED=no/ENABLED=yes/" /etc/default/foo)

(i.e. I don't use cron facilities, I add files to cron directories. Similarly I don't use process monitoring, instead I install the monit package and drop /etc/monit/monitrc into place.) There is a pretty big decision to make in the future with the alternatives being:

• Look at Chef.
• Stick with CFEngine but start again with a better layout, with more care and attention to portability things.
• Replace the whole mess with in-house-fu.

If we ignore the handling of local users, and sudo setup, then the tasks that remain are almost trivial. Creating a simple parser for a "toy-language" which can let you define copies, edits, and package operations would be an afternoons work. Then add some openssl key authentication and you've got a cfengine-lite. For the moment I'm punting the decision but I'm 90% certain that the choice is CFEngine vs. Chef vs. In-House-Fu - and that puppet is no longer under consideration. Anyway despite having taken months to arrive at this point I'm going to continue to punt. Instead my plan is to move toward using LDAP for all user management, login stuff, and sudo management. That will be useful in its own right, and it will coincidentally mean that whatever management system we do end up using will have on less task to deal with. (Which can only be a good thing.) ObFilm: Terminator II

It was interesting to see Clint Adams describe love and dissatification with configuration management. At work I've got control of 150(ish) machines which are managed via CFEngine. These machines are exclusively running Debian Lenny. In addition to these hosts we also have several machines running Solaris, OpenBSD, and various Ubuntu releases for different purposes. Unfortunately I made a mistake when I setup the CFEngine infrastructure and when writing all the policies, files, etc, I essentially said "OK CFEngine controlled? Then it is Debian". (This has been slowly changing over time, but not very quickly.) But in short this means that the machines running *BSD, Solaris, and non-Debian distributions haven't been managed as well via CFEngine as the rest, even though technically they could have been. A while back I decided that it was time to deal with this situation. Looking around the various options it seemed Puppet was the way of the future and using that we could rewrite/port our policies and make sure they were both cleanly organised and made no assumptions. So I setup a puppetmaster machine, then I installed the client on a range of client machines (openbsd, debian lenny, ubuntu, solaris) so that I could convince myself my approach was valid, and that the tool itself could do everything I wanted it to do. Unfortunately using puppet soon became painful. It has primitives for doing various things such as maintaining local users, working with cronjobs, and similar. Unfortunately not all primitives work upon all platforms, which kinda makes me think "what's the point?". For example the puppet client running upon FreeBSD will let you add a local user, setup a ~/.ssh/authorized_keys file but will not let you setup a password. (Which means you can add users who can login, but then cannot use sudo. Subpar) At this point I've taken a step back. As I think I've mentioned before I don't actually do too much with CFEngine. Just a few jobs:

• Fetch a file from the master machine and copy into the local filesystem. (Making no changes.)
• Fetch a file from the master machine, move it to the local system after applying a simple edit. (e.g "s/##HOSTNAME##/ hostname /g")
• Install a package.
• Purge a package.
• Setup local user accounts, with ~/.ssh handled properly.
• Apply one-line sed-style edits to files. (e.g. "s/ENABLED=no/ENABLED=yes/" /etc/default/foo)

(i.e. I don't use cron facilities, I add files to cron directories. Similarly I don't use process monitoring, instead I install the monit package and drop /etc/monit/monitrc into place.) There is a pretty big decision to make in the future with the alternatives being:

• Look at Chef.
• Stick with CFEngine but start again with a better layout, with more care and attention to portability things.
• Replace the whole mess with in-house-fu.

If we ignore the handling of local users, and sudo setup, then the tasks that remain are almost trivial. Creating a simple parser for a "toy-language" which can let you define copies, edits, and package operations would be an afternoons work. Then add some openssl key authentication and you've got a cfengine-lite. For the moment I'm punting the decision but I'm 90% certain that the choice is CFEngine vs. Chef vs. In-House-Fu - and that puppet is no longer under consideration. Anyway despite having taken months to arrive at this point I'm going to continue to punt. Instead my plan is to move toward using LDAP for all user management, login stuff, and sudo management. That will be useful in its own right, and it will coincidentally mean that whatever management system we do end up using will have on less task to deal with. (Which can only be a good thing.) ObFilm: Terminator II

I ve just bought a Packard Bell OneTwo (M3700), a 600 Euros all-in-one computer with a 20 multipoint touch screen (there are bigger models with 23 touch screen, wifi and some other options). This machine will be used to run OpenBravoPOS, a free (libre) point of sale software. So far, I think this machine is just perfect for the job. Getting it to run smoothly under Linux is not a walk in the park, however. There are some quirks and some assembly is required, but once you re done (that takes a couple of hours at most once you ve got all the info, which you have if you re reading this) this machine is just great. It s fast, with a 2.1 GHz Pentium Dual-Core (T4300) CPU, 4 GB of RAM, an Intel GM45 GPU with up to 256 MB of shared RAM, gigabit networking, a fast 320 GB SATA disk and a combo DVD-drive (not a slot-in, too bad). The screen is nice, and the touchscreen is incredibly smooth, precise and sensitive. The sound is good, the webcam is great and it works out of the box, too! Update: added a note about the card reader. Before you go Enter the BIOS and bump the amount of memory allocated to the GPU to 256 MB. By default, the machine ships with only 64 MB allocated to the GPU, which is low and ridiculous considering it is equipped with 4 GB Installing Debian Forget about installing Lenny with debian-installer on this machine. The standard installer with its 2.6.26 kernel doesn t support the network interface properly. Upgraded installer images with 2.6.28 or 2.6.30 kernels end up locking the machine solid before the first installer screen. Your best friend: System Rescue CD. Your other best friend: debootstrap. Before rebooting, install the 2.6.30 kernel from backports.org. It works like a charm, even if the 2.6.30 on the upgraded installer locked up solid. Go figure :) While you re at it, install X from Testing. You need a recent enough version of the intel driver that will support the GM45 chip. Configuring X This is the first and the biggest quirk on this machine. The LCD is actually wired up to both the VGA and the LVDS outputs on the graphic card, and advertises different resolutions on both. The native resolution (1600 900 on this model) is only advertised on the LVDS output. While fiddling with X, it becomes obvious that the VGA output is used as the boot video device. If you disable the output in X with xrandr, you loose the text consoles. My un(?)educated guess is that this setup allowed them to use a standard desktop PC BIOS instead of using a more expensive laptop BIOS. I may be wrong, but that s pretty much the only thing that makes sense to me. Anyway. If you want X to work properly, you ll have to tell it to ignore the VGA output entirely.

Section "Device"
 Identifier  "Intel X4500"
 Option  "Monitor-LVDS"  "Panel on LVDS"
 Option  "Monitor-VGA"  "Panel on VGA"
EndSection
Section "Monitor"
 Identifier  "Panel on LVDS"
EndSection
Section "Monitor"
 Identifier  "Panel on VGA"
 # The LCD panel is wired up on both VGA and LVDS
 # Ignore the VGA output as far as X is concerned
 Option  "Ignore"  "True"
EndSection

If you don t tell X to ignore the VGA output, you ll end up with a mirror setup and your desktop will use the smallest size so as to fit on both monitors. It isn t pretty, it s plain silly and we want those 20 used fully, dammit! See the full xorg.conf. Touch screen The touch screen is an infrared multipoint touch screen from Quanta. No kernel driver is needed, only an input driver for X is required. Start by adding an udev rule like this one:

SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ATTRS idVendor =="0408", ATTRS idProduct =="3000", SYMLINK+="usb/quanta_touch"

The touch screen will now appear as /dev/usb/quanta_touch, which is more handy and stable than /dev/usb/hiddevN. Grab xf86-input-hidtouch from HidTouch Suite on SF.net, and apply this patch. The aim of the patch is to ignore anything but the first reported pressure point. The touch screen is a multipoint touch screen and as such can report 2 or 3 (not sure) pressure points at the same time. The driver can t handle that yet. The patch also fixes a bad comment and an API difference with newer X versions. Build and install the driver, then edit xorg.conf:

Section "InputDevice"
 Identifier  "Optical Touch Screen"
 Driver  "hidtouch"
 Option  "SendCoreEvents"  "true"
 Option  "ReportingMode"  "Raw"
 Option  "Device"  "/dev/usb/quanta_touch"
 Option  "PacketCount"  "13"
 Option  "OpcodePressure"  "852034"
 Option  "OpcodeX"  "65584"
 Option  "OpcodeY"  "65585"
 Option  "CalibrationModel"  "1"
 Option  "CornerTopLeftX"  "0"
 Option  "CornerTopLeftY"  "0"
 Option  "CornerTopRightX"  "1600"
 Option  "CornerTopRightY"  "0"
 Option  "CornerBottomLeftX"  "0"
 Option  "CornerBottomLeftY"  "900"
 Option  "CornerBottomRightX"  "1600"
 Option  "CornerBottomRightY"  "900"
 Option  "CornerScreenWidth"  "1600"
 Option  "CornerScreenHeight"  "900"
EndSection

There you are. Working touch screen! Credit: the above touch screen setup instructions, including the patch (which I reworked slightly ) were taken from this post on the Ubuntu-fr.org forum. The instructions cover the Packard Bell Viseo 200T touch screen, which is identical to what s used on the OneTwo. If you re looking for a 20 touch screen, go for it; at 200 Euros it s a good deal. Sound The Realtek ALC268 codec as used in the OneTwo isn t properly supported yet, however using model=acer-aspire works for the integrated speakers and the headphone jack. Line out and the integrated microphone do not work. Webcam The webcam is a UVC webcam and the image quality is stunning. I m seriously considering stealing that webcam to replace the iSight in my MacBook Pro. It works out of the box without any firmware. Quite a good surprise :) Flash card reader The integrated flash card reader also works out of the box, for the card formats supported by Linux.

I'm a notoriously late adopter of new technologies. Sure, if I think that something is potentially a good idea, I'll go for it, but for the most part, I assume that things are stupid. I refused to use the WWW for many years, thinking it was idiotic. Now I use the WWW. I find microblogging to be inane and narcissistic at best, but I have derived mild amusement from Shaq on Twitter. Microsoft Windows is something I thought would be ridiculously unsuccessful, because it didn't do anything I would find useful. The list goes on and on, and includes something known in the popular vernacular as configuration management . I've been hearing about BladeLogic and Opsware for quite some time, and idly wondering who the incompetent fools are that need something like this. Back in my day we could manage 100 servers with relative ease; no centralized authentication (because it was a running argument about whether NIS sucked more than NIS+ or vice-versa), no cfengine, no prebuilt server images or any of that jazz. If, for some reason, we needed to make the same change to all servers at once, or some subset thereof, we would just script it. So when one of my acquaintances started raving about Puppet, I assumed it was equally pointless. We'll call him Downs. Downs exhibits a pattern of behavior where he will rave about something for a few weeks, sometimes without having even tried it first, and then eventually become disillusioned with it and start ranting with the same fervor with which he had insisted that whatever fad of the week was the greatest thing ever. It came as no surprise to me when he fell out of love with Puppet and started raving about how much better Chef is. In case you're wondering, he still has not tried Chef to this day. Finally someone convinced me of the value of Puppet. I do not think it is the Way and the Light, but I do see a few situations wherein it makes sense to sacrifice efficiency, flexibility, sanity, and system resources to gain a way of building a near-identical machine from scratch. Now, beyond the flaws inherent to a solution like this, Puppet does have some annoying flaws which I find unnecessary, and which Downs ranted about back when I had absolutely no idea what he was talking about. I disregarded his alleged preference for Chef, but I have heard intelligent people extoll the virtues of Chef, and to a lesser extent Bcfg2. So I took a very brief look at each of those, and was pretty much horrified by what I found. If I need something Puppet-like in the very near future, I will probably be choosing Puppet. I have no intention of running Puppet on machines I manage all by myself though. For that eventuality I am NIHing something with what I consider a better design. The current code is published, but it does not do very much, and requires linking with libdpkg.a which does not exist in any package (but Guillem's working on that, I think). I have no idea whether or not I'll have the motivation to finish it all by myself, but it is Free Software. This post is intentionally weak on details, or deets as the kids call them.