Two weeks ago I got myself a nokia n900 phone which is running maemo 5. So far I am quite happy with it, given that my previous phone was a sony erricsson p1i which is pretty crappy.
I've taken some notes about my experiences:

• under normal use the battery lasts for ~ 2 days, if I'm using 3G the whole day I need to recharge it daily though


• the terminal has a bug which results in the enter key not working under some conditions, ctrl-m works as a workaround though


• playing normal dvdrips in mplayer is absolutely no problem without downscaling, 720p doesn't perform though


• I somehow managed that my screen flipped and I wasn't able to flip it back, only a reboot solved that


• It is not clear to me which tools you will find in the list of installable packages and which are only visible with apt-cache search. I also managed to end up with a doubled launch icon in my application list for some application


• the termininal is not usable anymore after an ncurses program crashed, "reset" doesnt help either


• wireless uses less battery than umts, way less


• the back button in the browser is per default opening a fancy eyecandy browse history which is slow, so I mostly use backspace to browse back


• there is lots of useful tools in the extras-devel repository, e.g. I can control my mpd via mmpc from the phone which is great



• importing contacts works flawlessly, also merging existing contacts works as expected


• jabber (including xmpp calls) are integrated in the contacts information (you can merge a jabber uid into an existing contact)


• i've no idea yet what the internal video player is, but i wasn't able to play a non downscaled XviD file with it, mplayer does play it fine


• freely placeable widgets are awesome


• it's is really userfriendly and no geeky linux user phone


• i would prefer not having busybox per default, i can install bash but the libc is still from busybox which implies world readable password hashes in /etc/passwd, so no other user accounts on my mobile


• is there disk encryption available?


• n900fly can't cause any good


• gps with nokia maps is ok and I find it pretty usable even if a google maps client would be nice as well


• the mp3 mplayer sucks unless you have tagged your music properly, you can't just play some folder without having a playlist for it


• mplayer as an alternative from the console is no real alternative either, if you don't redirect its output to /dev/null it gets stuck in a loop when the display blanks,


• app manager locks dpkg lock even if you just list available programs, no idea why this is needed and no idea how aptitude and synaptic are doing this


• is there a good todo manager which comes with a widget listing todos?


• is it possible to install armel debian packages without having a debian chroot?


• sms are nicely organized per contact in an instant messaging fashion


• the builtin accelerator works nice and you can automatically flip the screen when you want to dial a number, sometimes happens by accident though


• the multiuser support works awesome and you get a nice overview of open applications in a compos fashion, it may be wise to have not 40 applications open though


• the list of processes is already huge (like 160 processes running in the background)


• i haven't checked out the sdk yet but I will do that soon as I need e.g. newsbeuter for RSS


• hardware feels robust, arm cortex a8 is imho a very good processor, RAM could be more (the phone is heavily swapping)


• you can not yet use the phone as a wireless access point without building your own kernel images, some people seem to be working on this


• you can manipulate all kinds of stuff through the sysfs, including the phone led and the vibration


• wireless certificates are sometimes shown to be invalid but there there is no details button, you can click only "done"

Those are the things I came up with while using the phone. The calling functionality and everything which is only phone related really works fine and the sound quality while talking to someone on the phone is also really good. So far I am really happy with the phone and I can only recommend it. I hope I'll have some time to port some applications to maemo soon.

The main sources of information used when hiring someone are their CV, the interview, and references. CV The CV is written by the applicant or sometimes for the applicant. Naturally it says only good things, if a CV notes no skill in a particular area then it may be used to exclude an employee from consideration. But the trend is towards including a reference to anything that you touch, so someone who lists DBA experience may merely have done a couple of CREATE TABLE operations. Interview The interview is a good test of people skills but is often of little value in assessing technical skills. The interviewer asks questions such as do you know technology X and the applicant says I know that really well . If the company is hiring another person with similar skills to current employees then they can have their current employees sit in on the interview and ask difficult technical questions, but for unknown reasons managers often don t take that option and get no advice from their technical people. Also if the company is hiring someone with specialised skills (EG they are about to implement a new application and want to hire their first employee to work on it) then it may be impossible for them to assess the technical merit of answers. Probably the best use of the interview is to match answers with the CV, if the applicant doesn t appear to know the contents of their own CV then they should be rejected. The biggest problem with interviews is when the questions are all of the form do you know X . Someone who really knows it will say yes as will someone who doesn t know enough to realise the limits of their knowledge and such ignorant people vastly outnumber the skillful people. The real problem is that the people who are moderately skillful will lose out. If someone asks me about my MySQL skills I will tell them that I m not really good at it. Sure I ve run replicated servers with tens of thousands of users running 24*7, but that doesn t mean I m really good at it probably most people who will claim to be great at MySQL without qualification would have less experience than me. References Reference checks rely on an unknown person saying good things about the applicant. For starters there is the issue of the number of references which may not be representative of their employment history EG the applicant could use as a reference the one manager who didn t sack them. The next issue is that there is little incentive for the referee to be honest, most people are aware of instances where someone once worked for a friend and can rely on good references for the rest of their career. If a reference is inaccurate then there is no realistic opportunity for redress. Finally every reference check that I am aware of (checks where I have been the referee or the applicant) has involved the applicant giving the phone number of the referee to the hiring manager! The phone could be owned by a friend or relative of the applicant, so logically a good reference that is based on trusting the applicant to supply the phone number only proves that the applicant is either good or really bad. To make a reference check prove something the recruiter would at a minimum have to phone the number listed in the white-pages for the corporation that used to employ the applicant, asks to speak to the manager of the relevant department, and then gets a reference. Calling a mobile phone number that is supplied by the applicant (which seems to be the standard practice) is essentially trusting the applicant and trust is the root cause of most security problems! Really most of this ends up as trusting the applicant to provide honest evidence that they are trustworthy and believing that the applicant s technical knowledge is good enough to be correct when they say that their technical knowledge is good. It can fail spectacularly when someone isn t trustworthy enough to provide honest evidence of their integrity or when someone doesn t have the skills needed to know that their skills are lacking. As an aside, even if the reference is given accurately and in good faith it may still be misinterpreted. The fact that telephone references are exclusively relied on exacerbates this problem. Ideally references would be in writing with some way of proving their authenticity (maybe using phone verification of the accuracy of the written document). Solutions So how can we solve this? Some people believe that career based social networking software will solve the problems, but as usual I think that software doesn t magically solve human problems. The first challenge when trying to use social networking to solve the problem is to find someone on your friends list who has relevant knowledge, this may be viable in a small industry (EG when someone from bank A applies for work as bank B in the same city). The next issue is that of false friends . I m sure that I m not the only person who has been pressured to add people as friends on social networking sites, the non-computer social interactions really don t prepare people for saying no you are not my friend (apart from high-school I guess). With professional social networking sites there are further issues, if you are working on a client site and a manager demands that they be listed as one of your friends then what are you going to do? So it seems to me that the social networking sites are at best a helper for the gossip network. If you think that a friend of a friend from a social networking site might be able to help you then you first ask your friend if the person in question is really a friend, and if so are they one of the shifty pseudo-friends you only hang out with because their company pays good money. But the problem with the gossip network is that it s mostly secret and is therefore subject to settling vendettas, I ve heard of senior managers going out of their way to spread false stories about former employees to settle scores. The best solution I can think of is for someone who has a reputation to publicly stake it on the accuracy of their references. If I m going to give a reference then I would be happy to do so via a GPG signed email or a blog post. This doesn t mean that my references will always be correct, but it would show that I try to give good references.

So far the networking of virtual machines has usually been managed by configuring a Virtual Ethernet Bridge (VEB) in the host, i.e. the good old implementation of 802.1D in the Linux Kernel:

A Virtual Ethernet Bridge (VEB) is a capability within a physical end station that supports local bridging between multiple virtual end stations and (optionally) the external bridging environment.

While this works well and in some cases is the best solution, in other setups performances or policy needs dictate that the traffic between virtual machines is forwarded to an external bridge (the Ethernet switch connected to the host) and back without having in the host a real bridge learning MAC addresses from its ports and implementing the STP. Enters the VEPA:

A Virtual Ethernet Port Aggregator (VEPA) is a capability within a physical end station that collaborates with an adjacent, external bridge to provide bridging support between multiple virtual end stations and external networks. The VEPA collaborates by forwarding all station-originated frames to the adjacent bridge for frame processing and frame relay (including "hairpin" forwarding) and by steering and replicating frames received from the VEPA uplink to the appropriate destinations.

Support for VEPAs has been added to Linux 2.6.33 with a simple change to the macvlan driver. The next step will be to use the macvtap driver (available in 2.6.34), which exposes a tap character device usable by kvm-qemu and "connected" to a macvlan-like interface.

In November 2007, we bought two of the first Eee PC netbooks available in North America: the model 4G in pearl white, one for me, and one for my wife. My plan was to start the Debian Eee PC project and get Debian working on them both which, thanks to the work of everyone on the team, has been a great success. Fast forward to February 2010, and they are still serving us well. Here is a list of hardware enhancements and issues over the past two years of continuous use: Battery life Asus claims 3.5hrs for the model 4G, though I don t think we ever experienced anything better than 2.5 hrs with wifi in operation. Today, I m down to something short of 2 hrs. If you consider the Lithium ion battery article on Wikipedia to be accurate, it is typical to permanently lose 20% capacity per year, so this sounds about right for the age of the battery. Touchpad The touchpad itself is fine. The buttons are not. They are hard to push and prone to become less responsive after a while, or to fail entirely. I now really have to bear down hard on my left button to make it work. Because the buttons are soldered to the motherboard, they would be hard to replace. Configuring the synaptics driver for tap-to-click is an acceptable workaround. Also, one of the first purchases we made was the Logitech VX Nano, one for each Eee, so most of the time now, we use our mice, falling back to the touchpad only when using a mouse is inconvenient due to space constraints (e.g. on the bus). Keyboard After two years of continuous use, both of our keyboards needed replacing. Some of the keys had been pounded flat and needed surgery (rubber springs sliced out of a scavenged Acer netbook keyboard and grafted on) to make them usable again. And aesthetically, the keyboards have really suffered, with a good percentage of the markings on the keycaps partially or completely eroded off. Fortunately, for $3 plus $10 shipping each, new keyboards can be ordered from a Chinese e-Bay seller. But with the new keyboards, there is still the problem with excessive flex in the keyboard making some keys less responsive than others. I m considering trying this hack to solve the problem. Display I have no complaints about the matte finish displays of either Eee. Both have stood up well. People tell me they don t care for a 7 display, but I find it bright, crisp and easy to get along with, so long as you maximize windows and increase font size as needed (e.g. for reading PDF books and magazines). When I really need the extra real estate, I just hook up an external monitor. Fan Some people complain about the noise of the fan, from the otherwise silent 4G (due to the lack of a hard drive) and seek ways to limit the amount of time the fan runs. We ve never had that problem. However, if any plastic bits break off inside the Eee, they will eventually find their way to your fan and get wedged. This has happened twice: once in my wife s Eee, and once in mine. Disassembly of the Eee to clear the blockage and get the fan running again was relatively painless both times. Plastic bits About those plastic bits: In my wife s case, I think the bit was some extruded plastic from the molding that had broken off. In my case, it was a deteriorating plastic post which was holding the hinge in place. More about this later. Sound Unfortunately, the integrated sound seems to be particularly sensitive to heat. During both fan failures, sound cut out. On my wife s system, it never fully recovered, and now only works on alternate Tuesdays, whereas on mine, after I unwedged the fan and brought the heat down, sound has functioned properly ever since. (Update: see my comments below on power adapters for an alternate theory about what killed sound.) We are waiting now for the delivery of a cheap ($1.42 including shipping, again from China) 3D Sound USB device which is reported to work on Linux. While some users complain about hum with this device, we re cautiously optimistic that on the Eee it won t be an issue. If it is, oh well, a buck and a half is a small gamble. Display hinge The plastic posts that hold the anchors for the machine screws for the hinge are fragile. Three out of four of these posts in my Eee have shattered, leaving the left hinge to float freely. For the past two days I was distressed about how I could fix this. Based on some helpful suggestions from #eeepc @ irc.freenode.net, I had worked out a plan to rebuild one of the posts with two-part epoxy, sand it and the fractured stub of the post, and use cyanoacrylate glue to affix it to the case. It sounded like fiddly work for which I didn t hold much hope of success. But this morning, I realized that the plastic in the bottom of the case was still sound, and that I could drop a screw into that hole, and with pliers, line up the anchor on the other side. This appears to work! I ll handle that hinge with care, but it should do me until I eventually repurpose the machine to some daily use that is less stressful on the hinge than daily travel on the bus. SSD and SDHC Some people were initially worried that the limited write life an SSD meant that you needed to take special measures to avoid its premature death, which I have always regarded as a myth. Our 4G SSDs each have no swap space, and ext3 filesystems. At the two year point, there are no problems. I expect our SSDs to outlast the other components. We did, however, eventually find the 4G to be a bit on the small side. We now each have Kingston 4G micro-SDHC cards for a bit of extra capacity for large media files and for some extra space for the apt cache. I recently priced the Lexan version of this card at $19 for a two-pack at Wal-mart, and these seem to work in the model 4G just as well (which seems to be an issue with this model not all SDHC cards work). Memory We found the 512M that came with the 4G somewhat constraining. Without any swap space (so we could maximize the space available on the small SSD) we decided our systems really needed a memory upgrade. At the time, 2G didn t seem overly expensive (though I no longer remember the exact price) so we splurged on 2G for each system, even though that was probably more than we needed. Power adapter When I first wrote this article, I forgot to mention the power adapter. The model 4G uses an unusual 9.5V power adapter for which it is hard to find a generic replacement. This unit is prone to fail in two places: in rare cases, (one out of 6 units that I have in some way assisted with: 3 of them mine, 3 belonging to others,) it will break at the wall plug end. The plug swivels into the unit for easy storage, but this adds a point of failure. More commonly, (in 3 out of six of the units,) the wires at the netbook plug end will fray due to stress on the non-angled cord, leading either to no connect, or to a short. In fact, since in the case of my wife s adapter, the netbook end of the cable shorted, making the cable heat up and the system spontaneously shut down after a little while, we can t say for sure whether the overheating of the Eee took out integrated sound, or whether this short did. On the one hand, I know for certain my own system, which never suffered a short, has responded to overheating by making the sound flaky, but it has never taken out sound completely. On the other hand, shorting the power cable can t be very good for the Eee, so who knows, maybe that s what ultimately killed my wife s Eee s sound. This is where it helps to have soldering skills, or a friend who can do the repair for you. In my case, it was the latter. While I was waiting for a replacement adapter I had ordered, we also found on eeeuser.com part#s for replacement plugs and sleeves from Digikey, total cost $20 including shipping, 10 pieces each. Cutting off the bad plugs on three units and attaching the new was a quick, straightforward operation, and succeeded in two out of three cases. Having carefully checked the failed repair, we deduced that the failure in that unit was at the wall end, and we judged there was nothing further we could do to try to save it. Even the unit that had previously shorted was returned to perfect health and has been in operation trouble-free ever since. Conclusion After over two years of continuous use, the model 4G has held up well for a $400 system. We definitely feel we have received our money s worth of value over that time. All of the problems we ve experienced so far have been fixable at very little expense, and we expect them to last at least another year before we seriously consider replacing them. In the next several months, I plan to order a high capacity 8-cell 10400mAh battery for my own system so that I can enjoy a 5-6 hr run time. The purchase will be roughly $55 including shipping, the most expensive purchase for my system to date, but still well worth it to extend the 4G s lifespan for another year or more.

The main reason for me to go to FOSDEM this year was to meet with other phpMyAdmin developers to be able to discuss some things personally rather than on mailing list or irc. We had quite a big list of topics to discuss and besides discussed some other things which will be made public at some point later. The good thing is that both my proposals were accepted, so we're about to migrate to Git, what will make our development less blocked by slow SourceForge.net VCS server (what mostly affected people sitting in Europe). The migration will happen shortly, I expect to provide testing repository during next few weeks and we will switch for real once all developers get used to it. The other important change is to switch our translation system to Gettext. The primary motivation behind this is to allow translators to use wide range of standard tools available for po files and also to allow web based translation using Pootle server in similar way we currently handle documentation translation. I have already prepared the migration plan to Gettext, but it will not happen before migration to Git as I want to benefit integration of Pootle with Git, what makes translations directly commit to the local repository.

Ed Mayo talking to the Phone Co-op meeting Yesterday I had the pleasure to be at the Phone Co-ops annual meeting, as those of you who follow me on identi.ca or elsewhere will already know. The proceedings included a speech from Cooperatives-UK Chief Exec Ed Mayo that included the co-op pub in Salford, spurning David Beckham s gift and this summer s Co-operatives Fortnight. As ever, the bits I liked best were the lively question-and-answer sessions, both on Ed s speech and the annual report. I took notes and reproduce them below, but I didn t capture every question, or every answer and none of this is verbatim. Questions to Ed about UK cooperation included:

• Can people in the co-op pub smoke? No, there s a bit of drinking in meetings, but not smoking. Some heated debates in meetings are defused by a break to go refill the glasses.
• Gordon Brown and Labour are starting to talk about cooperatives more. What should we do? We need to stand on our own two feet, but expect to be treated equally. A Mutuals Manifesto will be out online next month. In regulation, having the telecoms networks opened up to co-ops and not be so limited would help. One interesting possibility is with football co-ops / supporters trusts: it s been suggested that a fan co-op should have the right to buy a club if supported by 75% of season ticket holders.
• With all the business collapses and Cadburys being bought, what is the temperature of interest in mutuals outside the movement? Good. The only AAA-rated bank in the world is the Rabobank co-op, but remember that co-ops are not immune to failure. Cadburys is not a co-op and was always vulnerable to the current investor-led rules changing its ownership. People are not necessarily thinking of co-ops, so we need to reach out. It s a cynical, apocalyptic age, so we need to prove what we re doing. coops14 is an opportunity. The co-op bank saw a surge in new accounts after it was highlighted in one newspaper as an alternative to excessive banker bonuses. We need to encourage people to act. Reminded of a quote that the trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you re still a rat . Research shows that Britain today is a brutal and competitive place to grow up in, with only 45% of children trusting their friends. People have heard of cooperatives. We should try to build a more cooperative nation.
• Comment from the floor that the private sector won t take substantial cooperative competition lightly. We must look behind us and never give them a chance.
• Could the BBC become a co-op? Yes.

Questions about the annual report asked about:

• What is our target profit %? No hard target. This year s reduction was planned and it is still a profit.
• Why are we using UKMail instead of the Royal Mail? 10k price difference. It was a hard choice, debated by the board, but there is no co-op option and no particular preference for state ownership.
• Why are we considering energy supply? Telecoms is a deflationary market, so diversification is a wise move and energy supply is a top customer request.
• What is our churn rate? 1.5%/year, which is unsatisfactory to us, but still low by industry standards.
• Was the Avoco acquisition price too high? a good price by usual industry measurement (multiple of sales)
• Will we support coops14 Free and Open Source Software events, because there is an overlap? (I didn t catch the answer)
• Can we put leaflets in the shops? Matt Lane is working on this and other opportunities
• Can we encrypt bills and emails if customers want it? exec will take and deliberate on that
• Can we get some sales materials to Scotland? details taken to send them out next week

I propose a new feature for email software: Cosmetic carbon copy. CCC works very similarly to today's carbon copy feature: If you put an address in the CCC: list, when the recipients open the message, they can see the address. The one difference is that with "cosmetic" carbon copy, the CCC:d address never recieves the message. An example might illustrate the situation. Let's say someone (Alice) wants to invite Bob to a movie but doesn't want Charlie to come. She might send this email:

From: alice@example.com
To: bob@example.com
CCC: charlie@example.com
Subject: MOOOVIEEE!

Hey all my friends, join me for a movie tonight!

When Alice sends the email, Bob recives a copy. Bob thinks that Charlie received a copy, as he will be in the CC list. But Alice's mail software never sent Charlie a copy. So Alice can relax, knowing that Bob won't forward a copy to Charlie, since Bob thinks he already received it. Alice and Bob will meet up without Charlie, and Alice will quietly sigh in relief.

How can this work? Cosmetic carbon copy works on the same principle as blind carbon copy: the contents of the message are fundamentally independent from the recipients. Saavy email users have used the "blind carbon copy" feature for years. When you place an address in the BCC list, that address will receive a copy of the email even though other recipients won't see the address listed. This allows for a form of privacy between the sender of the email and that hidden recipient. This works because, like postal mail, email messages are delivered using an "envelope" that contains the actual recipients. When you compose a message in Alpine, Gmail, or Thunderbird, you are writing the contents of the envelope. When you hit send, the mail software looks for email addresses that should receive a copy. It creates one envelope per address, stuffs the letter inside, and sends the whole thing on its way through the Internet using a protocol called SMTP. When the recipient (Bob)'s email system receives it, the letter is pulled out of the envelope and placed in an inbox. Which means the envelope is entirely invisible to Bob, the recipient. Most mail software puts information about the envelope in email headers. Since each email recipient gets a separate envelope, In the case of cosmetic carbon copy, Alice's letter claims that Charlie was on the CC: list. But Bob can never learn that Charlie's copy was never sent. So to implement cosmetic carbon copy, Alice's mail program must understand this rule:

• For each address in the CCC list, copy the message to the CC: list in the email message.
• Create no new envelopes when sending the message.

Because of the last bullet point, this "carbon copying" is purely cosmetic rather than functional.

A possible privacy problem You might wonder, what happens when Bob hits reply-all to say "Yes, I'm coming"? Then (oh no!) Charlie might see the invitation. Not a problem: Most of my friends use Gmail, and Gmail users almost always hit Reply instead of Reply-All. Gmail used to have an experimental option called "Reply All by Default", but thankfully they removed that option. A future version of this specification might suggest mangling the last "." in the BCC:d email addresses with the ONE DOT LEADER character, which looks like "." but isn't one. That way, even if Bob clicks "Reply all," Charlie's email address is subtly incorrect and will bounce.

Future work The story I've told here is marginally simplified so it's understandable to a less-technical audience. Those who want a more technical version can request I submit an RFC. Perhaps in two months? (File under "games to play with email.")

FOSDEM is the usual awesomeness this year, I'm just too tired for too many words, so I'll keep this post very brief.

Once again, the videoteam needs your help. Please consider lending us your helping hands, so that we can record the room 1308 tomorrow/today (sunday) without burning out totally. From 10oo to 17oo there are seven talks scheduled with a total break time of 30min. And we are 3 or 4 people doing this, and have 4 jobs to fullfill: 2 camera operators, video and audio-mixer, not even mentioning handing microphones to the people in the audience. This obviously really cannot work.

So, if you can, please help us. Either just show up or even better, just show up and add yourself at the volunteer wiki page. Doing the latter will help us even more, as we can plan our ad-hoc work better.

Following an idea originated through contributions from Belgian beer, and to motivate zack a bit more to actually go for it, I've setup the alias leader@debian-community.org to point to his email address. Please send motivational emails ;-)

Quick public service announcement (which probably comes a bit too late, sorry): There's a coreboot developer room at this year's FOSDEM (Free and Open-Source Software Developer's European Meeting), which starts roughly... um... today. In 20 minutes, actually. Unfortunately I cannot be there, hopefully there will be video archives of the talks. If you're at FOSDEM already, here's the list of talks:

Sat 13:00-14:00 coreboot introduction (Peter Stuge)
Sat 14:00-15:00 coreboot and PC technical details (Peter Stuge)
Sat 15:00-16:00 ACPI and Suspend/Resume under coreboot (Rudolf Marek)
Sat 16:00-17:00 coreboot board porting (Rudolf Marek)
Sat 17:00-18:00 Flashrom, the universal flash tool (Carl-Daniel Hailfinger)
Sat 18:00-19:00 Flash enable BIOS reverse engineering (Luc Verhaegen)

Highly recommended stuff if you're interested in an open-source BIOS and/or open-source, cross-platform flash EEPROM programmer software.

I recently upgraded a critical file server at work, from etch to lenny. With that upgrade, samba version was bumped from 3.0.24 to 3.2.5. We were then hit by a quite severe bug where files ACLs are messed up on Excel files after saving the files (upstream #4308, fixed upstream in 3.2.8). I will probably consider fixing the official Lenny packages (there is no bug reported about this in Debian, though) along with a few other quite severe ACL-related bugs (Mathieu Parent, who maintains ctdb, pointed me to a few such bugs). However, I couldn't wait for such a long time and backporting the fix for #4308 isn't completely straightforward. So, I decided to upgrade our server to the latest Samba 3.2 version, namely 3.2.15 (upgrading to 3.4 series could bring other kind of regressions and we have no time to properly test everything...users already have their guns handy). This is where the Debian Samba packaging team unofficial repository becomes handy. It is meant as as service to users who want to run the very latest samba code and have the same packaging choices we have in supported Debian releases. We already had 3.2.14 there but I never took time to update to 3.2.15. This is done now. Moreover, as our production server uses the amd64 architecture, these unofficial backports are now available for both i386 (my usual build machine) and amd64. Using this repository is as easy as:

deb http://pkg-samba.alioth.debian.org/packages lenny-backports/
deb-src http://pkg-samba.alioth.debian.org/packages lenny-backports/

Please note that this APT source does not use GPG signing of Packages files. When I am less lazy, I'll try to at least sign it with my GPG key.

I got involved with open-source software before I learnt about software development in a university course. Naturally, when my profs tried to teach the waterfall model to me, I couldn t take them too seriously back then. After all, requirements specification design implementation verification maintenance is not really in line with the principle to release early, release often. Furthermore, since water cannot flow uphill, the waterfall model fails to represent development cycles, as they naturally appear, even in behemoth, ancient software nightmares. And yet, when embarking on a new project, I do tend to find myself first thinking about the big picture, instead of churning out the code. I am certainly not the best coder out there, and it might well be that I could benefit from learning to break down problems to get an earlier start on the implementation of components. However, I maintain that avoiding the waterfalls and engaging directly in extreme programming, agile software development, or pair-based approaches right away is not the answer. Rather, the best approach should probably involve a certain level of conceptualisation before code is produced. I am a big fan of test-driven development, and I like the scrum method for the very reason that it involves talking and challenging ideas (although I wouldn t follow the method down to the book). I like to think about trickles in the mountains where water droplets joyfully jump around. * * * When Glyn Moody spoke in his LCA2010 keynote about challenges we (as in society) face, and how open-source seems to have many answers, he dropped the following gem, which spoke right to my heart:

Twitter is the release early, release often principle applied to thinking.

By this simile, journal articles are produced according to the waterfall model. This may well be why they are usually outdated at the time of publication. Microblogging (like Twitter), on the other hand, is primarily used to publish stuff before it s ready, and which would never be published otherwise. With journals on one end, and microblogging on the other, I think the epiphany is found in between as with software development: web logs web applications that allow for easy publishing by anyone (which is a different problem not to be discussed here). Since articles on those platforms usually have at least a title and a body, they require just a little bit more thought than 140 characters of contracted brain farts, spilled into the world faster than it takes one to stand up, stretch, and sit down again. * * * Microblogging seems to be in line with where we re heading: more information, more self-promotion, more access to more people, and all that with lower barriers of entry. It s hard to argue against a trend, but I think we ve taken a wrong turn somewhere. The one specific instance of content is no longer relevant, and there is no more time in the day to read elaborate treatments of subject matters. Instead, what seems to prevail is a constant flow. This flow threatens to replace actual thinking and discourse, both of which require reflection and time a scarce resource used up by ever new, fast-flowing media. It seems to me that those who immersed in this flow are unable to get out, as if sucked in by a maelstrom. I ve seen people enter serious withdrawal within hours of not knowing what s going on in the world. One could miss out on something. If you re following people on one of those microblogging platforms, I challenge you to spend the weekend offline and when the urge hits, ask yourself what you are actually missing. I mean what you are really missing, and by that I mean anything other than the cozy buzz and hum of entertainment washed upon you, preventing you from having to think about what you could be (actively) doing instead. I hope it s not a lot. For else, I fear that this means that future generations will be stuck with this communication culture, just like water droplets can t ever play in the mountain trickle again. NP: Sola Rosa: Get It Together

There s been a lot written about the Amazon vs. Macmillan dust-up. I ve seen a lot of posts by people that work for publishers saying that there are costs to making a book, and that $9.99 just won t cut it for an ebook. They say that publishers invest in typesetting, editing, selection, art, and various stages of quality control. All of that is true. Too bad they aren t doing it with ebooks. I ve had some books published, and while the process varies from publisher to publisher, the editing process usually involves technical editors (people that check my facts), copy editors (people that help the writing and grammar), cover designers, and QC staff. Often I will see PDFs or printed pages at the final stage, and at that point can catch things like bad table formatting or lines split at inopportune places. My point here is that there s a lot of editing going on, and there are many pairs of eyeballs looking at the printed page before it goes to the presses. In the year or so since I ve owned my Kindle, I can absolutely guarantee you that this process is not happening with ebooks. Most of the time, it is quite obvious that nobody has even looked at the finished product. Some intern has whipped up a quick conversion from whatever typesetting software they use, give it a quick glance, and call it good. One of my own books, Real World Haskell, is available in Kindle form. O Reilly took better than average care of that process, but even so, I certainly didn t approve screenshots before it went out like I did for paper (not that I d have had time after the paper project was done anyway.) From memory, some of the flaws I m aware of:

• Huston Smith s Why Religion Matters included some illustrations, but they were scanned at such a low resolution that the text was completely unreadable, even at maximum zoom.
• All electronic editions of Lord of the Rings, not just the Kindle version, suffered some serious issues including missing words and deleting 19 characters after each instance of a particular letter.
• Shmoop converted Project Gutenberg versions of The Iliad and Odyssey, but converted each line of Gutenberg text to a Kindle paragraph, wrecking word wrapping.
• Countless examples of hyphenated words in the middle of lines (probably from someone forcing a hyphenation point in a print edition), paragraphs that should have been block-indented but weren t, etc.

In some of these cases, it is quite obvious that a human didn t even bother to look at the result. Harper Collins got a huge black eye after their LOTR fiasco, and still took quite a long time to fix it. Now, if the publishers were actually going to put as much care into the quality of their ebooks as they do into the quality of their paper books, then sure, I d pay almost the cost of a paperback. But very few of them are doing that. It is quite obvious to me usually by the end of the first chapter of a book whether anybody even looked at the result of their conversion. Bottom line: If they re going to sell me an inferior product, don t expect me to pay near full price. If they can get their act together on quality, only then would they have room to start arguing for higher prices. If all you re going to do with the ebook is run the paper version through some buggy filter, you haven t incurred much additional cost, and it is plainly visible to all. Note: I would like to say that Lonely Planet and O Reilly have done good jobs with the tools available, and while their results aren t perfect, they have done a good job working with rendering their sometimes very complex print layouts for a Kindle.

Scott recently noted that we don t have Klingon available in Ubuntu. Klingon is available in ISO 639, so adding it should be straight forward. Last time I blogged about this three packages needed changing, as well as Launchpad needing a translation team for the language. The situation is a little better now: only two packages need changing as gdm now dynamically looks for languages based on installed locales. libx11 still needs changing a minimal diff would be:

=== modified file 'nls/compose.dir.pre'
--- libx11-1.2.1/nls/compose.dir.pre
+++ libx11-1.2.1/nls/compose.dir.pre
@@ -406,0 +406,1 @@
+en_US.UTF-8/Compose:     tlh_GB.UTF-8
=== modified file 'nls/locale.alias.pre'
--- libx11-1.2.1/nls/locale.alias.pre
+++ libx11-1.2.1/nls/locale.alias.pre
@@ -1083,0 +1083,1 @@
+tlh_GB.utf8:           tlh_GB.UTF-8
 === modified file 'nls/locale.dir.pre'
--- libx11-1.2.1/nls/locale.dir.pre
+++ libx11-1.2.1/nls/locale.dir.pre
@@ -429,0 +429,1 @@
+en_US.UTF-8/XLC_LOCALE:       tlh_GB.UTF-8
 

Secondly, langpack-locales has to change for two reasons. Firstly a locale definition has to be added (and locales define a place a language and locale information like days of the week, phone number formatting etc. Secondly the language needs to be added to the SUPPORTED list in that package, so that language packs are generated from Launchpad translations. Now, gdm autodetects, but it turns out that only complete locales were being shown. And that on Ubuntu, this was not looking at language pack directories, rather at

/usr/share/locale

which langpack-built packages do not install translations into. So it could be a bit random about whether a language shows up in gdm. Martin Pitt has kindly turned on the with-incomplete-locales configure flag to gdm, and this will permit less completely translated locales to show up (when their langpack is installed without the langpack nothing will show up).

The annoucement below went out to R-SIG-Finance earlier today. For information is as usual the the R / Finance 2010 page:

Now open for registrations: R / Finance 2010: Applied Finance with R
April 16 and 17, 2010
Chicago, IL, USA
The second annual R / Finance conference for applied finance using R, the premier free software system for statistical computation and graphics, will be held this spring in Chicago, IL, USA on Friday April 16 and Saturday April 17. Building on the success of the inaugural R / Finance 2009 event, this two-day conference will cover topics as diverse as portfolio theory, time-series analysis, as well as advanced risk tools, high-performance computing, and econometrics. All will be discussed within the context of using R as a primary tool for financial risk management and trading. Invited keynote presentations by Bernhard Pfaff, Ralph Vince, Mark Wildi and Achim Zeileis are complemented by over twenty talks (both full-length and 'lightning') selected from the submissions. Four optional tutorials are also offered on Friday April 16. R / Finance 2010 is organized by a local group of R package authors and community contributors, and hosted by the International Center for Futures and Derivatives (ICFD) at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Conference registration is now open. Special advanced registration pricing is available, as well as discounted pricing for academic and student registrations. More details and registration information can be found at the website at
http://www.RinFinance.com
For the program committee:

Gib Bassett, Peter Carl, Dirk Eddelbuettel, John Miller,
Brian Peterson, Dale Rosenthal, Jeffrey Ryan

See you in Chicago in April!

Yesterday, I arrived in Bruxelles, coming from the Issy/Paris FusionForge meeting which will be described more later by Roland on Pl net Forge. Please tell Ohlol if you use it, for more visibility. My employer will also provide hosting for FOSS projects, but we'll need to formalise the hosting conditions first, plus Evolvis currently runs FusionForge 4.5 (aka "Debian GForge") but we're in the process of upgrading to a 4.8-plus-backports-and-patches, then 5.0 soon. There is a new inter-forge mailing list as well, see the info page. People from Coclico and the various *forges may want to subscribe there (forge developers, not so much users (hosters) or end-users (hosted project developers/users) though). At FOSDEM, Benny and I (and maybe gecko2) will be running the MirBSD booth, so no Debian staffing for me, sorry. But I will be there. Also please do ask me about mksh the MirBSD Korn Shell etc. There are flyers in German (not updated), English and French too! (One of the *forge guys did install mksh(1) after reading it, in fact.) Don't you people dare miss the two talks: from Benny about how to package with autotools and libtool correctly and from XTaran explaining Debian GNU/kFreeBSD. Benny's also famous for his talk about Painless Perl Ports with cpan2port; XTaran's famous for a whole bunch of other things. I still have some catching up (wlog entries, keysigning, webpages, etc.) to do, please bear with me. I don't really have a proper work environment with me. There's a chance I will not be attending the Beer Event in the Delirium Tremens caf (last year's still remembered). Benny will certainly be there, though. Could someone please order nice weather? I still need to eat some lunch and find a supermarket to shop for the weekend!

Audio information can be stored in a wide variety of formats, which vary in sound quality, file size, compatibility, etc. There are lots of extensions that cannot be read by some players. For this reason, many audiophiles are often confronted with compatibility issues. There are lots of audio conversion tools available on the web, but there are much more formats out there than they support. Most converters support only a few extensions and therefore they fail to satisfy users requirements.

Finding a high quality mp3 converter
has long been a challenge. Happily, software developers have designed Factory Audio Converter. It converts audio files to MP3, WAV, WMA, OGG, APE, MP4, FLAC, MPC, AAC. The array of input formats is even broader: MP3, RA, RMM, RAM, RPM, RM, RMVB, WAV, OGG, CDA, APE, APL, MPC, MP+, WMA, FLAC, AAC, M4A, MP4, TTA, OFR, SPX, WV, XM, IT, S3M, MOD, MTM, UMX, AMR, MP3/OGG compressed MODs, MIDI, VQF, AU / SND, PAF, IFF, SVX, WAV, SF, VOC, W64, MAT4, MAT5, PVF, XI, HTK, CAF. If you are looking for a flexible audio conversion utility, this one is the best!

Good audio converters feature batch mode. If you have a lot of wma files and would like to save them as mp3, you need a fast-working and powerful wma to mp3 converter. Factory Audio Converter can convert hundreds of files within seconds. If you have gigs of music on your PC, you can set the utility to convert all of them and turn in. You will get up in the morning to see all your files saved in your preferred format!

By aid of Factory Audio Converter, you can convert wma to mp3 right from the desktop. Once installed on a PC, the program integrates into Windows seamlessly, and Convert to option appears in the right-button menu. All you need to do is right-click on a wma file and select Convert to. You can also run Factory Audio Converter from within other programs via command line.

Advanced users do not only want toconvert wma to mp3
. They want to do it easily! User-friendliness all but heads the top-importance list of characteristics. Factory Audio Converter has a robust and intuitive user interface. It does not take any background to understand how to use it. The program wizard will guide you through the whole procedure. It will help you select your settings. You may either skip it and leave the default settings or specify your own settings. Sound quality will depend on your choice of bitrate, samplerate and channel.

The more new features a program has, the more likely it is to enjoy demand. Factory Audio Converter incorporates a built-in audio player and CD ripper. You can listen to your tracks prior to conversion and compare output and input files. The CD ripper will rip your CD files and help you save them on any type of hard drive. Factory Audio Converter permits you to change wav to mp3
and save a lot of drive space. Now you can use any portable player and listen to your favorite musicians any time, wherever you are!

You can buy Factory Audio converter at a price comparable to that of any other converter. However, few converters are comparable to Factory Audio Converter in terms of user friendliness and productiveness. <script class="owbutton" src="http://onlywire.com/button" title="My Friend Audio Business Converter Product" type="text/javascript" url="http://www.imbrandon.com/2010/02/05/my-friend-audio-business-product/"></script>

Playing around a bit with ssh tunneling right now. When I create a kind of VPN concentrator with a few tun interfaces: is there any reason why I can't just assign the same IP on all these tun interfaces? A quick test shows this set up working nicely, with ifconfig tunX localip pointopoint remoteip (the localip part being the same) setting up the routes to chose the right tun device for all remote IP addresses, and ping worked just fine for me. Firewall rules will always have the remote IP and/or the interface name to decide when a packet applies. Obviously setting up a listening socket at only one of these interfaces is not so trivial now since I can't just listen to the IP, but that's a restriction I'm happy with. Anything else I'm not thinking of right now?

Sarah got a piece of mail today from USQ, with a very ominous "Do Not Bend" on it. It turns out because she averaged a 6.5 GPA in semester 2, she'd qualified for a special Dean's Award for Outstanding Academic Achievement, and will get a mention on the University's website and in a bunch of newspapers. I'm really proud of her. Unfortunately, she had to withdraw from semester 3 (the Summer semester) study because all of the baby's brain stuff came up right towards the end of semester, and that on top of moving and trying to renovate was just too much for her. She's intending to take Semester 1 off, because the baby's due right around exam time, and then resuming study in Semester 2.

Yesterday, I found the 3/10-issue of the German Linux-Magazin in my mailbox. (I don t dare to call it the March issue they are a bit off schedule...) On page 62, you can find my 3 page article about creating a symbol font with FontForge. I briefly covered the topic on my blog and later thought that it would made a nice article, even though I m not an expert on this area. The article will be freely available in about three years.This is already my third publication, after my article on the Cross-Site-Authentication attack that was published in the same magazine (circulation ~63.000) and in its international counterpart in 2005 and my recent article in the freeX magazine (circulation ~15.000). Looks like I ll have to add a Publications section to my website soon...

According to an article in theWashington Post, Weekly Edition, 9 by Katty Kay and Claire Shipman, companies that employ more women in upper level management are more profitable than those that rely heavily on male talent to run their businesses.

This exciting (but not surprising) news is not limited to the United States, but is true throughout the world.

And it s not only one study, but at least half a dozen, from a broad spectrum of organizations such as Columbia University, McKinsey & Co., Goldman Sachs and Pepperdine University, that document a clear relationship between women in senior management and corporate financial success. By all measures, more women in your company means better performance.

One of the points made in the Washington Post article was that men may naturally be more prone to risk taking and competition (thanks to the hormone testosterone), but women are better collaborators and better at achieving long-term results.

So men, if you want your businesses to flourish, hire and promote more qualified women. The results are in, the statistics speak for themselves. Men are the hares and women are the tortoises, who will win the race steady and slow. <script class="owbutton" src="http://onlywire.com/button" title="More Women in Management, the More Profitable the Company" type="text/javascript" url="http://www.imbrandon.com/2010/02/04/more-women-in-management-the-more-profitable-the-company/"></script>