My patience with the noise of airlines has run out, on my trip from AU to US I didn t get any sleep due to the cramped seat and the noise of the plane. While I can t do anything about the cramped seat without spending a lot of money it seems that I can do something about the noise with moderate expense. I ve been researching Noise Canceling Headphones [1]. The principle of such devices is that they have a microphone on the outside and a speaker on the inside to generate sound that is 180 degrees out of phase which will then almost cancel out the ambient noise. Apparently such devices are very effective for low frequencies but less effective for high frequencies. High frequencies are more easily blocked by sound insulation, so the ideal seems to be around the ear headphones with lots of padding to passively stop noise with active noise canceling to deal with the lower frequencies. So I m now planning on buying a set of headphones before I leave the US. Choice Magazine (an Australian independent product review organisation) published a review of noise canceling headphones in 2007, it has some interesting information but is not suitable for buying advice today [2]. Choice gave the best results to the Jabra C820s which had just gone out of production when they published the review and by now could only be bought on eBay. The Jabra had an active cancellation of 14.3dB and a passive cancellation of 8.3dB. The best active cancellation of all the reviewed products was 19.5dB for the Bose QuietComfort 3 which incidentally only had a passive cancellation of 4.8dB. Both the Bose and Jabra products got good reviews in a mailing list discussion. It s a pity that Jabra is now only manufacturing products for call centers. I am not considering the headphones that go on top of the ears, they will inherently give less passive protection due to the design and they will annoy me. I am also not considering the ear-buds because I don t like putting things in my ears. I will note that there are some very positive reviews of some of the ear-bud devices. The Etymotic Research devices get very good reviews and are apparently on sale at reasonable prices in Apple stores (among other places) [3]. Anyone who wants noise-canceling headphones and disagrees with me about the desirability of ear-bud type devices should probably consider them. The Bose QuietComfort 15 is selling for $300 (NB for this post all prices will be in US dollars) [4]. It has microphones both inside and outside the ear cup to allow better detection of ambient sound. A single AAA battery is supposed to last 35 hours, it has a detachable audio cable (for use in just blocking noise), and comes with an airline adapter (for the two-port airline sockets). It does require being turned on to listen to audio, some headphones allow you to turn off the noise canceling feature to listen to music without a battery this doesn t matter for my planned use. They have a volume switch (low and high settings) to cope with airlines that set the volume too high. They are specifically designed for passengers in commercial jet aircraft. Surprisingly the Bose web site doesn t mention the number of dB of audio protection and none of the reviews I have read have mentioned it either. The store Brookstone was recommended, they have some unbranded noise canceling headphones, but as they are on the ear and more expensive than comparable Sony products ($130 vs $100) I eliminated them quickly. Sony has a good range of noise-canceling headphones [5]. They have ear-buds starting at $90 and on-ear headphones for as little as $50. They have two models of over the ear headphones that are advertised at $200 and $400. The MDR-NC60 costs $200 and reduces noise by 12dB at 200Hz while the MDR-NC500D costs $400 and reduces noise by 20dB at 160Hz. I don t know why they didn t measure both headphones at the same frequency or give any information on passive sound insulation. They state that the MDR-NC500D was voted as being better than the Bose QC2 and QC3 but made no such claim about the MDR-NC60 presumably the older Bose devices were rated as better than the MDR-NC60, and I have to wonder about how the Bose QC15 would compare to the MDR-NC500D. The MDR-NC500D has an internal Lithium-Ion battery that lasts 16 hours and can take a pair of AA batteries as well for a total of 28 hours. The Sennheiser PXC 350 claims up to 32dB of passive attenuation and up to 18dB of active noise compensation [6]. Their claims about NoiseGuard (TM) cause me to lack confidence in their products. The PXC 350 is advertised at $330 and the reviews that I have read suggest that the Bose might be a better product. Sennheiser also has PXC 450 which offers 23dB of active noise compensation and costs $450. I am not going to pay $450 for headphones. It seems that the choice for over the ear noise canceling headphones comes down to the Sony MDR-NC60 at $200 and the Bose QuietComfort 15 at $300. I have the impression that the Bose product is better, but whether it is $100 better is the question. Also while I haven t forgiven Sony for Rootkitting their customers [7], this is not going to prevent me from buying the headphones that best suit my needs. Does anyone have any suggestions? Did I miss a good brand that I should be considering? Does Sennheiser have some redeeming features that I missed?

• [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noise-cancelling_headphones
• [2] http://www.choice.com.au/Reviews-and-Tests/Technology/Phones-and-mobile-devices/Sound/Noise-cancelling-headphones-review-and-compare.aspx
• [3] http://www.etymotic.com/ephp/hf2.aspx
• [4] http://www.bose.com/controller?url=/shop_online/headphones/noise_cancelling_headphones/index.jsp
• [5] http://www.sonystyle.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/CategoryDisplay?catalogId=10551&storeId=10151&langId=-1&categoryId=3728&N=4294955699
• [6] http://www.sennheiserusa.com/private_headphones_travel-line_500371
• [7] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_rootkit

Until vSphere 4, the only way to add space to an existing VMFS was to add an extent. This means creating a new partition, most of the time on a new LUN, and extend the VMFS there (vSphere 4 is now able to resize a partition on a grown LUN). This is somehow equivalent to adding a physical volume in a volume group under LVM. But contrary to LVM, once you added an extent to a VMFS, it is impossible to remove it. Well, until now, it was. I just pushed my lvm branch of vmfs-tools (get a git snapshot tarball), which includes a new tool named vmfs-lvm, allowing to just do that. For the moment, the tool is not cluster-safe, which means you d better run it on an offline VMFS (i.e. make sure no server is using it). Data should not be at risk because the tool checks the removed extent doesn t contain any data, but it also assumes the filesystem is in a consistent state beforehand. The command line to remove an extent looks like the following:

# vmfs-lvm extent0 extent1 ... extentn remove

This will remove the last extent. Update: There was a bug when setting some values at volume level. The git snapshot link above has been updated accordingly.

Last year, after many years of peacefully living the whole year in GMT-3, our government decided that Argentina should use DST again. This was done in a rush, but patches were written and applied everywhere to have a correct timezone. Fixing the problem was not enough, tzdata's upstream decided to predict the future:

# From Paul Eggert (2007-12-22):
# For dates after mid-2008, the following rules are my guesses and
# are quite possibly wrong, but are more likely than no DST at all.
Rule    Arg 2007    only    -   Dec 30  0:00    1:00    S
Rule    Arg 2008    max -   Mar Sun>=15 0:00    0   -
Rule    Arg 2008    max -   Oct Sun>=1  0:00    1:00    S

Well, back in December 2007, October 2008 might have seemed like a long time in the future, and they assumed that sometime in the middle the correct date would be announced... But, predictably (knowing Argentina's current government), no DST has yet been announced. However, Paul Eggert's guesses had propagated to almost all UNIX distributions, so that at 0:00 Sunday Oct 5th, all our computers were suddenly one hour ahead of time. Affected systems: Debian, Ubuntu, Gentoo, Red Hat, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, Mac OS. Devices: ipod, maemo, Nokia N95. Websites: Clarin (a major newspaper - still broken 36 hours later), Gmail. And probably many others that I don't know of. I even read that Windows was affected, although I don't know how that might be possible, since as far as I know they don't use tzdata. Anyway, not satisfied with how they mistakenly predicted the future before, a few weeks ago (not enough time in advance to fix almost any systems, only sid had this release), they added this change:

# From Alexander Krivenyshev (2008-09-05):
# As per message from Carlos Alberto Fonseca Arauz (Nicaragua),
# Argentina will start DST on Sunday October 19, 2008.
#
# http://www.worldtimezone.com/dst_news/dst_news_argentina03.html
# http://www.impulsobaires.com.ar/nota.php?id=57832 (in spanish)
Rule    Arg 2007    only    -   Dec 30  0:00    1:00    S
Rule    Arg 2008    max -   Mar Sun>=15 0:00    0   -
Rule    Arg 2008    max -   Oct Sun>=15 0:00    1:00    S

So, they decided to take the word of a guy from Nicaragua (no bad feelings against Nicaragua, but I think that this kind of stuff should be informed by people from the affected country), and from a couple of articles that say that "According to some sources, we might have to change our clocks on the third Sunday of October". Would you change tzdata sources with such information? I definitely wouldn't. Anyway, Aurelien Jarno has already uploaded fixed packages, with no assumption regarding when the DST will happen, which is the sensible thing to do in a case like this. Thanks Aurel!

I've been working with Charlie DeTar and the Center for Future Civic Media on a project called Between the Bars which is a blogging platform for prisoners. The current platform is essentially a snail-mail to web gateway: prisoners send letters which semi-automatically scanned and posted to the site; comments are printed and mailed back. As we plan the launch of the project, we are trying to talk to as many stakeholders as possible -- this includes ex-prisoners, families and friends of people who are or have been in prison, non-profits working with prisoners, victims of people in prison, people who work in prisons or in corrections, probation officers, or almost anyone else with a perspective or set of experience that might help us understand the difficult space our project is trying to negotiate and who might be able to help influence the design. At the moment, we're not talking to current prisoners due to rules regulating research involving prisoners, but almost anyone else would be someone we'd love to connect with. We're interested in hearing from people about their experience with prisons or prisoners, about staying connected to families and friends while behind bars, and, ultimately, about how we might design, deploy, and support technology to help folks out. If you or someone you know are stakeholders and would be willing to talk about your experience and opinions with prisons, communication, and technology, please drop us a line at betweenthebars@mit.edu.

Well that all happened rather quickly. This morning, we met with our agent to go through all of the offer paperwork, at the bright and early time of 7:30am after (for me at least) a bad night's sleep staring at the ceiling. It wasn't that bad. A lot of disclosures, a lot of initialling and signing. Here's what the stack of paperwork looked like: The existing building reports didn't come back with any red flags. There's a little bit (around $1,000) of termite damage. We put in the contract that the sellers have to fix that. The hot water tank needs to be strapped to the wall to be in earthquake compliance. We put that in the contract too. A couple of hours later, we'd got all of the paperwork out of the way, and Nick said he'd present the offer to the seller's agent at 3pm. I got a phone call at about 5pm from Nick saying that they'd accepted the offer, with all of our conditions, so we're all ready to go for closing on the 23rd. Apparently the reason the sellers are so motivated is because they borrowed against the equity in this condo to buy a house, so they're eager to close the deal. We managed to negotiate the price down slightly to $519,000 (anything lower would have been a short sale for them, and we already know all about what that can entail). Even for that price, they've made a tidy profit on the $180,000 they paid 14 years ago. So this is working out really well, timing-wise. We'll close on the 23rd, go visit Chris, Bri and Clara in Atlanta for Christmas, and then have all of January to do any work on the place before our current lease expires. Just got to wait for the finance approvals and an international money transfer now. I'm slightly miffed that I booked it yesterday at 0.90 cents, and the AUD has risen to 0.92 cents today.

1. Response times should dramatically improve on this new server - without flooding planets too. Together with Simon Waters, I've moved from a real (but tired) server to a snazzy virtual one with bytemark. Various other bits will be being updated and the new site will start to host more useful data on translations and string freezes in progress.
   DNS is currently updating, but over the next 24hours the old server should be able to take a rest before being finally powered down.


2. In other news, my house in Plymouth is now on the market - I'm preparing to relocate to Cambridge. No more pharmacy, it's time to work on embedded applications full time. It's going to be a chaotic few months ahead . . .

Email scams have changed... for good and for bad (depends on the POV and the case).

I decided to pick two samples that demonstrate two directions scams seems to be taking:

NAME
ADDRESS
TELEPHONE
SEX

As simple as that. Now the subject takes a more important role than the content: "Your email ID has been awarded one million pounds. in our Tobacco Promo". This, I must say, seems to be one of the worst scam emails I've ever seen. Compare it to the following:

Dear Raphael,

This email might come to you as a surprise and the temptation to ignore
it as not serious could come into your mind but please consider it and
accept it with a deep sense of humility.
[...]
The sum of ( 10,700, 000.00 Million Pounds), has been floating as
unclaimed since 2002 in my bank as all efforts to get across the
relatives of our customer Mr. Ruben Geissert who deposited the money
have hit the stones. Unfortunately, He died of Cardiac Arrest in the
year 2002, without a registered nest of kin.

I've highlighted the important bits of the email; the difference is clear.

I was already wondering some time ago when this kind of "improvements" to the scam (and spam in general) emails would be seen.

What's next?


P.S. if you haven't voted at the Earth Hour website please consider doing so.
If you are having problems voting because of the flash application, here's a direct link.

Today, an episode of The Gadget Show aired in which they compared PC and Mac to put on their wall of fame . I was shocked that there was no mention of Linux at all in their rundown. Here is the email I just sent to them in response to the show:-

Date: Mon, 30 Nov 2009 22:16:28 +0000
From: Martin Meredith <mez AT debian DOT org>
To: gadget.show AT northonetv DOT com
Subject: PC vs Mac Yes, you mention windows But both PC s and Mac s have the ability to run a little thing called Linux Linux is the base of an operating system that s been around for years, often
making innovations BEFORE Windows or Mac are able to. It s an Operating system that s written by the people, for the people, which
shows in the fact that there are hundreds (if not thousands) of distributions
available to download and use for FREE!!!! A large motive behind the Linux movement is the fact that it s completely free.
Both in the sense of Free Speech, and in the sense of Free Beer. You don t have to pay for it, and you can do what you like with it. Compare the above to a Mac. With a mac, you re limited to the hardware you can use, you re limited in the functionality, etc etc. Comparing to Windows, you can see the benefit of the price. Constantly upgrading windows can cost a LOT of money. Ok, Linux does have it s flaws. Some hardware isn t supported correctly, and a lot of the software you ll find on the shelves of your local shop probably won t work with it. But, nowadays, with the advent of the iPhone, and to a lesser extent, Android based Mobile Phones, people are coming to expect easily available software. Enter the package Manager. Most distributions of Linux now offer an easy way to find and install applications, and some go a step further and give you an application that makes life even easier (See attached screenshot) Linux also has the benefit that, like the Mac, the fact that it s not Windows,
and something that 90%+ of people use, it s not a target for Viruses. Add that
to the fact that it has Least Privileged Access built in (Think Windows Vista
are you sure that you want to run this program as an admin? ), and has done
since the very beginning, and it makes it one of the most secure operating
systems you can find. Linux has come along in leaps and bounds in recent years, and is surely a
competitor for any operating system out there. While it may be unfamiliar,
with the advent of new technology, it s perfectly placed. This has been shown
by the fact that until Microsoft made a sly move to relicence Windows XP for
netbooks, it was hard to find a netbook with anything but a Linux based OS on it (and all those who tried out my eeePC 701 when it was new and shiny out of the box tended to prefer what was on that than Windows!)
Regards,
Martin Meredith Freelance Writer for Future Publishing
Debian Developer http://www.debian.org/
Ubuntu Developer http://www.ubuntu.com/
Deputy IT Manager for Mobile Fun Ltd. http://www.mobilefun.co.uk/

This weekend while I was on Guatemala just a few hours before to give a talk, my acer one decided to suddenly shut down, I tried to started again, remove the battery, plug the charger, etc, I actually even tried to boot it with some liv-usb distro, but the netbook keep shutting down a few seconds after boot I m still not sure what happend to the computer, it could be the motherboard or the HDD, I still have to check if it can be fixed Sadly, this was my main computer, I always used for almost everything, even for task when building a package tooked 50 minutes :p, but I m lucky since I did not loose any senssitive data (in case the problem is the HDD), and I still have other computers where I can work, but I still need to get used to a bigger screen/keyboard.

I got a new computer at home a week ago and finally got around to assemble all the parts. Which wasn t as easy as expected, especially fitting the CPU cooler was a hard fight. Specs For the curious, here are the specs:

CPU

AMD Phenom II X4 965 (4 3.4 GHz)

Mainboard

MSI 790GX-G65

Graphics

ATI Radeon HD 3300 (on-board)

RAM

8 GB, DDR3

Hard drives

2x SATA 1.5 TB (by Western Digital)

Ubuntu installation For testing and having a first look, I installed Ubuntu karmic koala (amd64). Installation went like a breeze, everything was detected and worked out of the box. Well, kind of graphics performance was dreadful. Which was kind of expected. Debian installation I originally thought about using Debian only inside virtual machines or change roots. Still, Ubuntu does not really feel like the real thing . So I went to install Debian, aiming at a sid/unstable installation. The first boot using the official squeeze snapshot netinst image (Binary-1 20091128-11:21) went fine. Up to the first prompt: No input was possible. Probably a problem with the USB keyboard I had connected (Logitech wireless). Out of curiosity I tried the graphical installer, which did not even get so far. It was stuck in an endless loop trying to start an X11 server. So I dug for a PS/2 connected keyboard and had more luck. I got to the point where the installer searches for the CD-ROM drive. As I did not want to dismantle my old system yet, I used an external USB DVD/RW drive. This was not detected by the installer so I was unable to continue installation. I guess, the NIC driver was also on the disc so no ethernet either. Today I installed the DVD burner into the tower and had more luck. It still amazes me how easy it is to create my default storage setup using d-i (LVM on RAID). However, the installer failed to reread the partitions after I created two on each drive, interestingly telling me about /dev/sda2 being busy. Perhaps a left-over swap partition from the Ubuntu install? Anyway, after running fdisk manually and writing the same partition table again, I was able to continue. The remaining d-i steps went fine, with just a nuisance: I was asked for the console font setting twice. And I had no idea what it was asking of me, AFAIK UTF-8 should be fine for all possible uses. I selected # Latin1 and Latin5 western Europe and Turkic languages. Not that I will see the console unless Xorg fails to run After having the base system running, I rebooted without selecting any more software, partly because I knew that the resync on md1 will need restarting after booting into the new system. The new system booted fine and I called aptitude to install build-essential, Xorg and both KDE and Gnome desktops. This pulled in MySQL via akonadi-server (ouch!) and I was asked for a MySQL root password. Seriously, I don t care, this is a desktop system. I tend to forget the password anyway and the last time, root was able to reset it. So I just hit Enter, leaving no password set. This lead to the installation asking me two more times for the password, which really sucks given that the server is only used by Akonadi for whatever reason and the last time I looked, it creates its own MySQL configuration. Albeit my old system is 8 years old, the new system still seemed slower. Which of course is due to disk latencies, given that /dev/md1 was being synchronized in the background. Anyway, I was eager to test the desktop experience and started gdm. X came up fine, but again I had no mouse and no keyboard (USB mouse, keyboard connected as well as PS/2 keyboard). I also was unable to switch to a VT, so I logged in remotely and rebooted the new system. After the reboot, hal obviously picked up the input devices and X11 worked fine now. At this point, I stopped as the sunday almost passed already. Summary: Debian installation still needs some improvements I think. Maybe our distribution is just too stable, after all my last install is 3 years back due to a disk crash Relevant Debian bugs

• #558679: My installation report with some logs included.
• #558681: Nagging about MySQL root password.
• #558686: Failure to reload partition table.
• #545933: No USB keyboard support
• #315553: Installation from optical drive on usb fails (but this is for kernel 2.4)
• #558691: No keyboard and mouse after fresh installation of xserver-xorg.

I'm due a new laptop; my Portege R200 is over 4 years old now, I find it much slower than my desktop (no surprise; P-M 1.2GHz/1.2GB vs Core 2 2GHz/4GB), it's had a new battery and it has an annoying whine on the screen unless you press the side in just the right way. It's still better for long periods of use than my EEE 901, which is why I keep it. In particular I'm off to LCA2010 in January, along with some associated travel beforehand, and I'll want more than the EEE for that, but probably not a brand new laptop. Which meant that when the R200 started throwing disk errors recently I wasn't particularly happy.

Having decided it wasn't worth buying a new 1.8" drive I looked for alternatives. eBay offered plenty of options for 1.8" IDE to CF adaptors and I picked up a Kingston 32GB CF card from eBuyer. I copied across the data from the old drive using a USB adaptor, frobbed grub sufficiently that I got it installed on the CF, then swapped out the drive for the adaptor + CF. I had to do the swap a few times; the first I forgot to have a kernel with ext2 support (the HDD was ext3, but I went back to ext2 for the CF). The second I'd done my usual trick of forgetting to populate /dev with things like console and sda* (ie enough to get to the point where udev will run). And then grub needed some prodding to boot without intervention. I got there in the end and I'm currently writing this from said laptop.

I've made a few changes to the Debian install in an attempt to make things smoother; basically the same tricks people have been using on EEEs or other slow SSD devices. No swap, Iceweasel synchronous toolkit writes disabled, filesystems mounted with noatime, /tmp on tmpfs, various daemons that I don't really use disabled. It's still noticably slower than with the HDD, particularly on writes. However it's quieter and as long as it lasts for the next 3 months I'm happy (plus after that I can reuse the 32G CF card somewhere else, which I couldn't have done with a 1.8" HDD as easily).

Now, back to eying the Lenovo X200s (ugly, trackpoint but 1440x900 display, good battery life) and Toshiba R600 (slower, lower res but pretty and trackpad).as potential replacements. Maybe there'll be something even shinier in 12" by next year...

So this is in some sense a nadir for shell scripting. 2 lines that do something out of 111. Mostly cargo-culted from cowpoke by ron, but much less fancy. rsbuild foo.dsc should do the trick.

#!/bin/sh
# Start a remote sbuild process via ssh. Based on cowpoke from devscripts.
# Copyright (c) 2007-9 Ron  <ron@debian.org>
# Copyright (c) David Bremner 2009 <david@tethera.net>
#
# Distributed according to Version 2 or later of the GNU GPL.
BUILDD_HOST=sbuild-host
BUILDD_DIR=var/sbuild   #relative to home directory
BUILDD_USER=""
DEBBUILDOPTS="DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=\"parallel=3\""
BUILDD_ARCH="$(dpkg-architecture -qDEB_BUILD_ARCH 2>/dev/null)"
BUILDD_DIST="default"
usage()
 
    cat 1>&2 <<EOF
rsbuild [options] package.dsc
  Uploads a Debian source package to a remote host and builds it using sbuild.
  The following options are supported:
   --arch="arch"         Specify the Debian architecture(s) to build for.
   --dist="dist"         Specify the Debian distribution(s) to build for.
   --buildd="host"       Specify the remote host to build on.
   --buildd-user="name"  Specify the remote user to build as.
  The current default configuration is:
   BUILDD_HOST = $BUILDD_HOST
   BUILDD_USER = $BUILDD_USER
   BUILDD_ARCH = $BUILDD_ARCH
   BUILDD_DIST = $BUILDD_DIST
  The expected remote paths are:
  BUILDD_DIR  = $BUILDD_DIR
  sbuild must be configured on the build host.  You must have ssh
  access to the build host as BUILDD_USER if that is set, else as the
  user executing cowpoke or a user specified in your ssh config for
  '$BUILDD_HOST'.  That user must be able to execute sbuild.
EOF
    exit $1
 
PROGNAME="$(basename $0)"
version ()
 
    echo \
"This is $PROGNAME, version 0.0.0
This code is copyright 2007-9 by Ron <ron@debian.org>, all rights reserved.
Copyright 2009 by David Bremner <david@tethera.net>, all rights reserved.

This program comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.
You are free to redistribute this code under the terms of the
GNU General Public License, version 2 or later"
    exit 0
 
for arg; do
    case "$arg" in
        --arch=*)
            BUILDD_ARCH="$ arg#*= "
            ;;
        --dist=*)
            BUILDD_DIST="$ arg#*= "
            ;;
        --buildd=*)
            BUILDD_HOST="$ arg#*= "
            ;;
        --buildd-user=*)
            BUILDD_USER="$ arg#*= "
            ;;
        --dpkg-opts=*)
            DEBBUILDOPTS="DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=\"$ arg#*= \""
            ;;
        *.dsc)
            DSC="$arg"
            ;;
        --help)
            usage 0
            ;;
        --version)
            version
            ;;
        *)
            echo "ERROR: unrecognised option '$arg'"
            usage 1
            ;;
    esac
done
dcmd rsync --verbose --checksum $DSC $BUILDD_USER$BUILDD_HOST:$BUILDD_DIR
ssh -t  $BUILDD_HOST "cd $BUILDD_DIR && $DEBBUILDOPTS sbuild --arch=$BUILDD_ARCH --dist=$BUILDD_DIST $DSC"

My primary workstation is a 3 and a half year old Dell XPS M1710 laptop and it is getting old the 320 Gb hard drive is getting small and slow, the 3 Gb or RAM (expanded from 2 Gb) look too small and screen is turning brown in one corner. Also dead or dying: keyboard (after cat+coffee incident), built-in speakers, battery, power adapter (twice replaced), DVD writer (rads but does not write any more) and fans (one replaced, one getting louder by the week). Also the video card is a bit slow for nowadays needs. So I set aside some money and started considering the options. In short, I could get another laptop OR get a regular computer for the same price but with twice the power. After considering all the laptop options up to 1000LVL, I decided to get a regular computer and if/when I ll need to travel I ll either take one of the old laptops with me or get a new netbook. Now comes the fun part choosing the components! So far my choices are as follows:

• 1080p LCD/TN monitor with a built-in DVB-T TV receiver, around 23 around 180 LVL (comparable options without the TV receiver are around 50 LVL cheaper, getting an extra digital TV in the house is a nice extra)
• Intel Core i5 processor and a corresponding motherboard from ASUS with 4 RAM slots and 1 video card slot (I like ASUS hardware and the TurboBoost technology of i5 sounds a very nice alternative to buying a high-Ghz dual core setup) 125 LVL + 80 LVL
• NVidia 250GTS video card (for my WoW raiding fun) 60 LVL
• 2*2Gb of DDR3 1600 KINGSTON RAM with lifetime warranty, leaving 2 slots for expansion later 60 LVL
• 1 Tb HDD (Samsung Spinpoint F3 HD103SJ got great scores in recent digital times reviews) 55 LVL
• Chieftec 500W PSU and case (good experience with them so far and good reviews) 70 LVL
• Blueray player with DVD-RW (why not at this price?) 60 LVL

And that is it a great setup that will last me a few years for around 700 LVL and it will have more partial upgradability than my laptop that I paid twice as much 3 years ago. Any tips? Did I miss anything? Is it likely that anything in the above list will cause me any trouble in latest Ubuntu/Debian installations? Update: got all of the above, except 500 Gb HDD of the same kind (faster, cooler, but higher price per Gb) and no Blueray (no drive in LV at the moment and did not want to wait a few weeks). The results are good, but I wish I would have gone with a 5 LVL more expensive video card that has a quieter cooler. Now I am buying a separate video card cooler for around 20 LVL that will be both more efficient and much quieter than the stock cooler I have Zalman VF1000 is the model. Has not arrived yet. P.S. It looks like updating a post in WP, automatically bumps it back into the Planet feed. Sorry

The RFC editor has finally released

• K. Murchison, Ed., C. Lindsey, D. Kohn: Netnews Article Format. RFC 5536, November 2009.
• R. Allbery, Ed., C. Lindsey: Netnews Architecture and Protocols. RFC 5537, November 2009.

They obsolete the venerable RFC 1036 (Standard for Interchange of USENET Messages) from December 1987. The new RFCs are the work of the IETF working group USEFOR, chartered November 1997 and concluded March 2009. I ve heard it was not quite the longest lived IETF working group ever. (I personally missed the group by a couple of months, since I started following Netnews and NNTP standardization in April, due to Alue.) Both RFCs are on the Standards Track, currenlty as Proposed Standards. In my opinion, they are a huge improvement over both RFC 1036 and son-of-1036 (which will probably be published as a Historic RFC real soon now).

Earlier this summer, I wrote a blog post on taking a principled position on software freedom where I argued that advocates of free/libre and open source software (FLOSS) should take a principled position because the pragmatic benefits associated with open source --- "better quality, higher reliability, more flexibility [and] lower cost" in OSI's words --- are simply not always present. More often than not, FLOSS projects fail. When they survive, they are often not as good as their proprietary competitors. Over the last year, I've been back at MIT taking classes, reading extensively, and otherwise learning how to act like a social scientist. My research goals, which I'm now beginning to focus on, are to help build a stronger understanding of the social dynamics in free software and free culture communities. With a slightly skeptical view toward my involvement with groups like the FSF and my work in the FLOSS community, at least one academic tried to suggest that taking a principled position in favor of software freedom might compromise the positivist social science research program in which I am engaged. "An advocate is too biased," they said. After many months of thinking seriously about this warning, I believe that this criticism can be addressed. After all, a principled position in favor of software freedom is a statement of how things should be, not a description of how they are. OSI will argue that open source leads to inherently better software. This statement, of course, is one that can be empirically tested and, in fact, there seems to be plenty of evidence that it is often wrong. On the other hand, the FSF's position that software should be free is ethical in nature. One can disagree with it, just like one can disagree with any other ethical position, but it can not be proved either right or wrong --- only convincing or unconvincing, logical or illogical in the context a certain set of other values that others might or might not share. Research has shown that the vast majority of FLOSS projects fizzle. A advocate who argues that FLOSS is inherently better is left trying to explain this fact and make excuses. As a result, OSI-style beliefs can certainly be a source of problematic bias in a social scientist. However, a person who believes that software should be free is welcome to recognize that it both fails and succeeds and to ask why. A principled idealist can argue in favor of behaviors that may be disruptive, difficult, or inefficient. Indeed, Stallman has never suggested that free software will be easier or better. Indeed, he routinely asks people to sacrifice their convenience for freedom. My goal, as a social scientist, is to understand why some FLOSS and free culture projects succeed and why many fail. I never take FLOSS's success for granted and, in fact, believe that proprietary software may often leads to better software in OSI's terms. Unlike an advocate who tows the OSI line, embracing evidence of the effectiveness of proprietary software is no way in conflict with my belief that software should be free. In fact, my desire to see software freedom grow becomes the driving force between trying to understand FLOSS's shortcomings! I am no more biased --- which is not to say completely unbiased --- than the person who both thinks that crime is wrong and who wants to study criminal behavior. In an analogous sense, starting out with the belief that all people are naturally law-abiding may be a problem in a way that beginning with the belief that people should be law-abiding is not. Starting from the fomer assumption, one has to explain away evidence to the contrary. Starting from the latter assumption, one can build an understanding of what drives people to obey or violate laws which, in turn, can help build a stronger society. To me, the question is not why FLOSS will succeed. Indeed, I believe its success is an empirical matter that remains very much up in the air. For me, the question is how it might. Embracing a principled position lets us face the facts and puts advocates and practitioners in a position to devise laws, social structures, and technologies to insure that it does.

RCBW - week #12 Here is this week squashes, by yours truly:

• 23/11/2009 bug #553122 - libtcl-chiark-1 - add missing ldconfig invocation, for *.so in linker locations
• 24/11/2009 bug #528152 - tulip - replace ttf-bistream-vera w/ dejavusans (patch from James Westby)
• 25/11/2009 bug #533993 - solfege - remove net need for xmllint (patch from Ubuntu by Alessio Treglia)
• 26/11/2009 bug #531220 - nut - fix ntp.conf postinst processing to avoid overwriting user settings
• 27/11/2009 bug #523912 - mit-scheme - add missing build-dep + tricky build due to bootstrap
• 28/11/2009 bug #521964 - libapache2-mod-lisp - fix APR version detection, patch by Antonio Radici
• 29/11/2009 bug #553257 - pidgin-hotkeys - remove unappropriate e-Xclusion in dh_shlibdebs

The funniest part of this RCBW issue is probably that Luk has started handing over RC bugs to me: from time to time I just get a /query from him with bug numbers In fact, this is more useful than one can imagine, because a considerable amount of time in periodic RC squashing is taken by triaging the RC bug list to choose your targets. Of course there is no guarantee that I'll be willing/able to fix handed-over bugs but, as a RM, Luk has evidently well-trained feelings about how hard would be to fix a given bug. All in all, for this week it worked well: 4 of the above 7 came from SchindlerLuk's list. ... and of course, let's welcome Simon on board! He is definitely doing a better job at spotting packages that should be removed from the archive rather than resurrected (potential negative effect that a NMU can indeed have on a package, de facto "saving" it from testing/release exclusion). In fact, the dilemma of "NMU vs Request Removal" raises various tricky questions. For instance, while we currently have pretty clear guidelines on how and, more importantly, when doing NMUs, we are more stringent on "Non-Maintainer Removals". Quoting from the Package Removal Requests wiki page:

    In all cases, if there is a maintainer and it's not you, mention the
    maintainer's opinion or, if you don't know it, mention how and when you
    tried to contact him.

It is of course reasonable to be more stringent on a measure that is way more invasive than a "simple" NMU. But if we start to rely on NMU-time as an important trigger for removal requests, then we could probably use a more aggressive and more distributed process for removals.

After all the U-turns by politicians, I got confused about how Three Strikes is developing. I think the current status is Mandelson trying to sneak it through as a Statutory Instrument and protect some of the most protectionist foreign interests ever seen. I ve written to my MP to express my disagreement. Andrew Heaney of TalkTalk has submitted a petition to abolish the proposed law that will see alleged illegal filesharers disconnected from their broadband connections, without a fair trial . It s not worded brilliantly, but it covers the vital point without a fair trial so I think it s still worth signing here. Thanks to Glyn Wintle for the updates on fsfe-uk. Meanwhile, unaccountable copyright collections agent PPL have picked the ideal moment to start harassing local community events. Please give generously: EMI only earned 298,000,000 last year. If you ve a bit more time, you could send a Message To Mandelson at ORG. I might not agree with ORG s structure, but they do make some cool protest sites. (Javascript required to view, as far as I can tell.) Even more flamboyantly, the Electronic Frontier Foundation is calling on people to phone up and Stop the Pirate-Finder General!

So I got a little bit further with my little toy. Bluetooth Bluetooth works. The packages gnome-bluetooth and bluez are installed and the kernel module bluetooth is loaded. hciconfig reports this:

# hciconfig
hci0:	Type: USB
	BD Address: XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX ACL MTU: 310:10 SCO MTU: 64:8
	UP RUNNING PSCAN
	RX bytes:11354 acl:105 sco:0 events:286 errors:0
	TX bytes:4012 acl:99 sco:0 commands:66 errors:0

I tried to connect to a SAMSUNG and a NOKIA mobile phone. After enabling visibility of the phone the bluetooth-applet (gnome-bluetooth) showed the device. However I got an error saying The name org.openobex was not provided by any .service files when trying to access the mobile device. This was solved by installing obexd-server obex-data-server. Then I was able to access the phone contents via Bluetooth. Virtualization I recently tried to debug the mopac7 build error. I installed the qemu(-qemu-kvm) emulator. Loading of the kvm_intel module failed with kvm: disabled by bios . But this was easy to solve by enabling the Intel virtualization technology in the BIOS: push and hold the ESC key during startup until the laptop tells you to press the F1 key. Then enable the related BIOS option and done.