I've come back from foss.in in Bangalore, India which I attended as a representative of the Debian project. Foss.in is the event formerly known as Linux Bangalore. It has broadened out to cover all aspects of Free and Open Source Software and is the largest such event in South Asia. I'm told almost 3000 people attended this year. I arrived on the morning of Monday the 28th. The conference organizers put up myself and other speakers at the guesthouse of the Indian Institute of Science. The accomodations were spartan but comfortable. They got considerably less spartan by the next day which was when I figured how the hot water tap worked. I shared my room with Kartik Mistry of Gujarati l10n fame. The first day of the conference was on Tuesday the 29th. The conference was taking place for the first time in a new venue, in several large canvas tents in the grounds of the Bangalore Palace. There were some technical difficulties; when we arrived on site in the morning, there was a line of people atleast several hundred long, waiting to register. Undoubtedly, some of them must have given up and gone home, but the fact that so many people persevered is a testament to the high level of energy surrounding the event. The talks began late too but everyone I spoke to seemed to take it goodnaturedly. I had planned to give two talks. One my standard half-hour "What is Debian?" song and dance. If you went to Debian Day at Helsinki, you already know what that's about and a 90 minute workshop on "Creating Debian Packages." Both were scheduled for Tuesday afternoon. Owing to the earlier delays, the first of these which was slated for 2:30pm didn't start until 4pm. The organizers actually asked me to roll both talks up into one supertalk which was not a problem for me. However, I made one fatal mistake. At lunch time I had noticed one of the food stalls was selling an inviting-smelling cheese pizza. Now, I've been to India enough times to know, "phirangis" simply don't eat dairy-based food in India unless they have some time to acclimatize to it first. I even said as much as I was eating the pizza. Somehow I rationalized that the cheese was pasteurized and well-cooked so the rule wouldn't apply to me but boy was I wrong. I first noticed signs of distress three-quarters of the way through "What is Debian?" I struggled valiantly to the end but then had to excuse myself to head off to the latrines and perform a hard reset of my gastro-intestinal tract. A couple of minutes of vomitting later, though a bit wobbly, I felt well enough to return and start talking about creating Debian packages. I didn't have slides for this one, I just used my laptop to show the innards of binary and source packages, all the various files in the debian directory, debhelper, debconf, and the lifecycle of package maintainence. Unfortunately wi-fi didn't seem to be stretching as far as my location so I couldn't show such nifty things as apt-get source and pbuilder but hopefully my descriptions of these things were impressive enough. There were lots of good questions from the sizable audience and I think we went over 90 minutes. Apart from some BOFs, I didn't really have any formal commitments for the rest of the conference so I spent it holding court at a table in the expo area. I was constantly busy demoing Debian, answering questions, and signing keys. I met Vaidhyanathan Mayilarangam who is a Debian developer, though inactive at the moment. He is going to start getting involved again soon. On Saturday the 3rd, I met the two currently active DDs, Ramakrishnan Muthukrishnan, and Ganesan Rajagopal. Throughout the days of the conference I also met many other figures on the Indian Free Software scene and made a lot of new contacts. That's it for now; in future blog entries I'll write about some of my impressions of the prospects and problems of Debian and Free Software in India. It remains for me to thank: Branden for authorizing funds for my plane ticket, Atul Chitnis and the other organizers and staff of foss.in, Mahesh Pai and Prasad Kadambi who assisted me in navigating Bangalore, and all the other friends of Debian, new and old, I met during my trip.

I'm currently trialing VMWare 5.5 on my laptop, to run Windows XP so that Vicky can use iTunes to manager her iPod (no, gtkpod isn't an option, and neither is SharpMusique). However, it's not working. :( I've installed iTunes, but when I plug in the iPod XP detects first an iPod and then a USB Mass Storage device. It appears that the Mass Storage device is overriding the iPod drivers so iTunes doesn't notice the iPod. And so I ask the Lazyweb: has anyone else seen this, and is there a way around it? Update: looks like the problem is caused by VMWare exposing my USB 2 controller as a USB 1.1 controller, which iTunes refuses to support as it would be too slow. Dammit! Any known workarounds? Update 2: there are suggestions that this may be fixed by using an older version of iTunes, so does anyone have a Windows iTunes 5 installer to hand? Apple are only providing the latest release on their site. NP: Laika Come Home, Space Monkeyz vs. Gorillaz

For me this year's event was the most successful and wonderful LinuxTag I've eve been to. I've worked during LinuxTag as much as I could and did my best to make it the best event ever. If I commit myself to something, I try to work properly and generate proper results. This was the same for LinuxTag. As a result, this year I had many tasks to work on. First of all I managed the community and free projects so that they had an opportunity to present themselves to the broad audience during LinuxTag. This required months of communication with members of all attending projects and negotiating their needs. It also required to gather information about the various parts of LinuxTag that also affected projects. Since it is boring having to answer the same questions all the time I decided not doing that anymore and once started to maintain an FAQ that intends to contain all important information for exhibiting projects. Last year I've also added an location plan with information about shops and restaurants nearby and this year I contributed a map for getting to the AKK where the legendary KaLUG party was organised. Being responsible for the projects I was required to decide which project are suited to get a sponsored booth, its size and its location. This year we have had the opportunity to use the ground floor of the conference building in addition to the regular exhibition ground, so that we've could use about 700m in total for the projects exhibition. I've worked nearly two entire weekends to get the booths assigned properly and to have proper graphics. For the conference building I also created the "official" booth map, booth naming, booth signs and booth numbering. One weekend was planned, the other was an accident since we had to rearrange some booths. Exhibiting projects and other community and Free Software oriented projects also had the opportunity to use two workshop rooms for workshops, BoF sessions, meetings and talks. For these I maintained the schedule and negotiated with the speakers and projects, and also acquired moderators for both rooms for the entire time. The people who organised the Accessibility booth people managed to get green light for building a large booth and a so called forum, which is an open talk area, but without any support. Since they couldn't fill in all slots and you can't dismantle a forum in the middle of the show, I've taken over its maintenance and schedule and managed to complete it with interesting talks, setting up, looking for moderators and dismantling. One of these talks I've even held on my own. Fortunately, a DJ contacted us and was able to provide his PA, boxes, microphone and stuff. Without him, the forum would have been an utter disaster. To support the projects we had to build up the network in the main exhibition hall for them on our own. Otherwise it would have cost us several thousand euro, which we didn't have. So I had to draw plans containing the cables we had to lay, calculated the length and decide where to deposit switches and stuff. On the day before the show opened, several supporters went around with a large ladder laying the cable. In the conference building this was done by the KaLUG. I've also coached the supporters during LinuxTag, and was even present at a special short meeting for and with supporters in order to reflect the past day and talk about the next day. This year was the first time I really had the time to attend the meeting and thank our supporters. Before the show started I've also negotiated food arrangements with a restaurant and a colleague so that we had lunch during the show. I ate from it as well, but didn't manage to eat every day unfortunately. Most additional signs of A4 and A3 size that we used during LinuxTag in order to help visitors and officials to find their way were designed and printed by me. Many of them were the result of last year's aftermath. Most of them were fixed with adhesive tape by our supporters. The Coding Marathon was supervised by me as LinuxTag representative. It was organised by HP, intel and Red Hat and, of course, negotiated with the acquise team of LinuxTag. The Coding Marathon was a half day programming session for visitors. The resulting code is released under the GNU GPL and winners were awarded with prizes at the end of each day. This required me to attend several phone conferences, name one or two interested people from "LinuxTag" who would propose a task and head the marathon during one day. Last year already, when I took over this job, With p2 and Arne I've already found two competent people, and this year also added Alex Schmehl for a task I proposed. Naturally, it was not possible for me to moderate the Coding Marathon during LinuxTag due to other obligations. When I arrived at LinuxTag the week before it officially started my first job was to build up the office and prepare the rooms so that the entire "team" could work inside properly. The first office should be used by supporters for general requests and customers, with a desk for me as well. The next room was meant to host the speakers office and the other rooms were intended to be back offices or private rooms. In order to be able to work properly in the office I've also brought with my some of my network equipment and set up the office LAN, server and printer. I had already experienced cable problems last year, that prevented us to use 100MBit/s switches, so that antiquated 10MBit/s hubs had to be used. I've also supervised our daily shopping tours and collected demand for various items from others. The most important items were fluids since it was quite warm during LinuxTag and collapsing core members and supporters are no fun. Other food had to be fetched as well. A lot of other items had to be purchased as well, in order to run LinuxTag and be able to fix or improve various areas. One or two supporters were taking the car for the shopping tours. When I arrived in Karlsruhe the HP booth was already being built. The other, smaller booths followed on Monday. Hence, on Monday and Tuesday I also supervised the building of the booths. It's important that somebody is around for questions, both from booth builders and from officials of the fairground. One also has to check if the booths are built properly and that they don't cause a risk for the exhibition hall, neighbour booths, smoke detectors and stuff. Issues should be corrected as soon as possible so that they don't become problems later. As soon as I arrived I also took over our own storage area and maintained deliveries for booths that haven't built up yet. Several companies negotiated with me before the show so that I knew which deliveries to expect and could move them to their respective booths as soon as they were built up. This year the first X.Org developers conference took place right before LinuxTag as well. I negotiated with both the X.Org people and the fairground people so that this developers conference could really take place. Unfortunately the plans and acknowledgements were sent out quite late so we were in a hurry getting everything set up and organised. Since we experienced network problems this year, they had not network as well, so did we in the office. Two days without a network connection. Pure horror. On Thursday the legendary KaLUG party took place. The location had to be prepared for the party, for which several supporters went there before the party has started. It was planned that I attend the party, so I went there at about 1 a.m. For some reason I didn't manage to leave the fairground earlier, and on the way to the AKK some of my friends who were also supporters were on their way home, excusing themselves for leaving before I arrived. Eumh... When I arrived at the party I first checked the situation and saw loads of uncleaned pots and stuff. Since nobody was cleaning them, I jumped into the mobile kitchen and started cleaning before I even ate or drank anything. That was fun, though a bit unplanned. The social event on Friday was organised by Claudia from a service provider who got some support from me before the show and during the show. Several supporters helped her clean the area that was unused for several years. During the evening I only gave away free tickets for the supporters and moved inside afterwards, always looking around if everything was ok, negotiating with her, of course. Very well managed, I can only say. This year I gave three talks during LinuxTag. Usually I only give zero or one during such an event, due to my other obligations. However, this time I felt, that I should make a maximum use of LinuxTag, anticipating the future. Hence, it started with Debian Security held during this year's Debian day, followed by Howto LinuxTag on the following day and finally Debian Internals together with other Debian developers. After the last talk I had about two hours to calm down again and initiate the general dismantling. Fortunately I've already planned a lot before the event because after my final talk I was a bit exhausted and needed to calm down and get into LinuxTag organisation again. Dismantling is the most parallel work at LinuxTag because all booths are dismantled at once and many people are running around with arbitrary stuff. One really has to take care of ones own stuff or it gets lost faster than one can shout. During the evening the entire fairground was cleaned, from all conference rooms the audio and video technique was removed again, all bottles and glasses were moved back into the office, the movable walls collected and moved back to their owners, the Internet caf was dismantled and computers moved back into their respective boxes. Some exhibitors had to use extra storage space temporarily. The Community forum in the conference hall had to be dismantled and chairs stacked properly. The same goes for tables and chairs used by the projects booths in both, the exhibition hall and the conference building. The network for projects had to be removed again, cables and switches secured. All additional signs had to be removed again. Since we have used some durable signs that could be used for future events again these had to be removed carefully and secured again. We've also ordered a container for paper since a lot of paper had to be thrown away and throwing away large amounts of junk is expensive. This way we were able to get rid of paper stuff a bit cheaper, but had to take extra care so that only paper went into this container. Hence, we needed a supporter who stayed with the container until it was fetched again. When the internal LinuxTag party in the office was nearly over, I came back into the office with all other areas finished, ready to start dismantling the office - usually the colleagues don't let me because they want to party and don't have any obligations anymore. That sucks a lot. So, again the internal party went on nearly without notice by me, but I'm used to that. This year I had already taken this into account and organised some stuff for an after work party (contrary to the other while-others-work party) outside of the office with supporters, friends and some team members that were still sober. This night we went to bed after 5a.m. and hence had a chance to get a quick breakfast already (we didn't use it, though). It was when we thought "Yes, this was a hell of an event!" I usually went to bed at 1 to 3a.m. and got up again at 5 or 6a.m. so that I was able to work on the important stuff that I committed myself to, and so that I was able to chat with friends and supporters in the evening. That was something I really missed on past events. Last year I probably wouldn't have spoken to Alfie if he hadn't placed himself into my way as a brake block. Thanks Alfie! This year such a maneuver wasn't required. In order to be able to work on so many areas during LinuxTag I tried to optimise the workflow and the processing as much as I could. I also used several sheets and paper to write down stuff for later processing so that my brain was kept clear and I don't become insane (or more insane, for what it's worth). That worked quite well and all areas I worked in worked fine as well, since I had time to talk to people even during the day. Even after my talks I wasn't flooded by phone requests like last year. After the event I had to drive some 750km back, after having only little sleep. Getting to Karlsruhe is always the easy part. Driving back is exhausting because I'm usually quite exhausted and in need of a lot of sleep. I won't disclose how long it took me to reach Oldenburg but it was faster than last year.

* 1. General Public License. This program is free software, and may
* be redistributed or modified subject to the terms of the GNU General
* Public License (version 2) or the GNU Lesser General Public License,
* or (at your option) any later versions ("Open Source" code).

* 4. Notices. User hereby agrees not to remove, alter or destroy any
* copyright, trademark, credits, other proprietary notices or confidential
* legends placed upon, contained within or associated with the Software,
* and shall include all such unaltered copyright, trademark, credits,
* other proprietary notices or confidential legends on or in every copy of
* the Software.

Mmhmm.

6. Each time you redistribute the Program (or any work based on the
Program), the recipient automatically receives a license from the
original licensor to copy, distribute or modify the Program subject to
these terms and conditions. You may not impose any further
restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein.
You are not responsible for enforcing compliance by third parties to
this License.

NOTHING TO SEE HERE. NO GPL INCOMPATIBILITY. NO PROBLEM. ENTIRELY HAPPY. NOTHING WHATSOEVER TO BE CONCERNED ABOUT, CERTAINLY NO COPYRIGHT ISSUES WHATSOEVER

#ifdef __cplusplus
extern "C"

#endif

(Note: kernel module code)

#if LINUX_VERSION_CODE < KERNEL_VERSION(2,4,0)
#define get_zeroed_page get_free_page
#define try_inc_mod_count(mod) ((mod && !(mod->flags & MOD_DELETED)) ? __MOD_INC_USE_COUNT(mod), 1 : 0)
#endif // LINUX_VERSION_CODE < KERNEL_VERSION(2,4,0)

#if defined(CONFIG_ALL_PPC) && !defined(CONFIG_PPC_PMAC) && (LINUX_VERSION_CODE < KERNEL_VERSION(2,6,0))
#define CONFIG_PPC_PMAC
#endif

ENTIRELY COMPETENT CODE WRITTEN ENTIRELY IN THE LINUX KERNEL CODING STYLE

Note to Fedora Core 2, 3 and 4 users:The default stack size in original FC2, FC3 and FC4 kernels is only 4K. Because some drivers require more stack space to operate properly, we recommend using a kernel with a larger stack size if you experience problems or crashes. You can either rebuild your own custom kernel, or get one of our replacement "stk16" kernels provided for your convenience through the distribution-specific Fedora Core 2i, 3 and 4 links above.

Or you could fix your drivers. Oh, except you can't, because they're actually chunks of the Windows one wrapped in code like the above.

This is truly an excellent piece of work.

Remember, kids, you're only paying $19.99 for code of this quality!

Linuxant are possibly worse than Orkut. And Fujitsu Siemens.

Yes, I finally got a (free) flickr account and uploaded some of my favorite photos from my photoblog to my flickr page. This has several reasons:

• Increased exposure to the public + I hope for many ratings and comments from other flickr users.
• I wanted to get a flickr account anyways in order to be able to comment on other people's photos.
• As my photos are Creative Commons licensed they can be "remixed". See the flickr remix group for some nice examples. I'll probably create some remixes of other people's photos, too.

Note: My photoblog will not die, I will continue posting new stuff there. I'll just use the flickr page for some selected shots. There's an RSS feed for the flickr page, if you want track my photos.

Seems I despaired too soon about not being able to get good-looking fonts in Emacs. Thanks to Duncan Mak I've been able to compile and install an Emacs with anti-aliased fonts on Ubuntu. Here's the recipe:

• Get the XFT_JHD_BRANCH of CVS Emacs, see XftGnuEmacs on the Emacs wiki, and this page from Deling Ren.
• Get a further patch, from this mailing list post
• Get the emacs-snapshot-debian directory from this arch repository and use it as the debian directory inside the Emacs source tree

Then I had to edit out the build instructions for the -nox variant of Emacs, as it didn't build properly, and to be sure, added this to the Emacs-gtk confflags section of debian/rules :

  emacs_gtk_confflags += --with-xft=yes

After that, fakeroot dpkg-buildpackage -b in the source directory, and some time later, Emacs packages with anti-aliased fonts. There are some limitations: you need to set the font in your ~/.Xresources file like this:

  Emacs*font: Monospace-8

You may also want to fiddle with the Xft.dpi and Xft.hinting X properties to get the fonts to match your desktop environment. OK, so it's a bit of effort, but worth it. Hopefully this patch will mature and make its way into future Linux distributions.

Without the vast number of voluntary supporters past LinuxTag events wouldn't have been possible at all. On the financial side LinuxTag has always made only little profit after the event. Without these nearly 100 volunteers who have supported us directly during the event and during its preparation the show wouldn't have been possible. Without the help of so many supporters during the event, the entire show isn't possible. Hence, it is important to either generate more income and be able to pay for hostesses and callboys or manage a proper environment in which many supporters want to help. For this, accepting the importance of the supporters, acknowledging their work and supporting them with food, fluids, fun and other advantages is very important. To my regret, I have to admit that this has not always been the case inside the core team. I have argued in favour of the supporters several times, so hopefully not much of it has been noticed by them. Supporters have worked in several different areas. I'll try to list them below but I'm sure I already forgot half of them even though I have coached most supporters directly or indirectly. We have maintained the parking ground so we were able to ensure that the Festplatz in the middle of LinuxTag is not abused as a parking place during the event. This required us to maintain a gate with at least one gatekeeper from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. This was a lot of work, and it wasn't that interesting, but good for people who want to read or hack in the gatekeeper pavilion. We have manually built the projects network in the exhibition halls. In the conference building it was built by the KaLUG. All information signs and plans had to be drawn, printed, magnified and fixed at their respective locations. There are a lot of additional signs that we have maintained to help visitors find their way. I'm sure still a lot of signs were missing. I have used the opportunity to prepare most of them after the last event, so that we have less work for the new one. Our own office had to be set up, since we've used naked rooms with only some cupboards, tables and chairs inside. More furniture had to be arranged, the network had to be built up, the server had to be installed or configured, the printer had to be attached, the network configuration needed testing, the desks had to be set up. For some years now one to three volunteers have helped us in the office in order to support the core team and so that we are able to present visitors, exhibitors, the press etc. We've had an an additional human firewall who worked for two or three days usually and was able to support most people already without clogging the office room. The firewall (Arne) himself had the idea to become a firewall several years ago and I have to agree that it was a very good idea. However, with the exhibitor support maintained at a special booth at the entrance less work had to be done for the firewall this year. Several large and self-standing signs had to be prepared or repaired after the had been broken at the last event or their content has been obsoleted. Signs for the gate from above had to be printed and fixed at proper locations so that exhibitors find their way. We have built up the entire audio and video equipment on our own with a service provider from Bremen. Since this affected up to six rooms a lot of equipment and cables had to be moved, installed and dismantled after the show. For this we've helped J rg and Sven with several volunteers. The business congress had to be prepared as well. Stuff for the attendees had to be created and taken to the conference building. The entrance counter for it had to be maintained and staffed. Doors had to be secured. Deliveries had to be maintained in a storage area, since before LinuxTag a lot of stuff is delivered to LinuxTag without the target booth built up already. During setting up the booth, the booth builders also had to be supported and problems detected, discussed and corrected. During the entire time of our siege of the fairground we've had to maintain our own storage of fluids and food. Due to the high temperatures having around enough fluids was very important. In addition to this demands for several goods also required us to send somebody out for shopping each day. In order not to die of starvation during the event we have also organised a delicious lunch for all supporters and core team members. Kudos to Thomas we were able to order large pots of salad and cooked food for two years so that we didn't have to eat unhealthy food (such as fat pizza for six days) and everybody could decide on their own how much they want to eat. In the years before we've had rented a cook and even ordered Pizza. The food had to be fetched from the restaurant, arranged, together with table clothes, cutlery and stuff, and finally taken back at the evening. Cutlery had to be cleaned regularly as well. For the social event the location had to be cleaned and prepared. This year we've had the great opportunity to use the Nancy Caf which was unused for about 10 years, and hence required a lot of cleaning. As it turned out just before the show began, it required a lot more cleaning than expected. However, thanks to the competent and highly motivated supporters the location was cleaned in time. Kudos to Claudia, this year's social event was also one of the most successful. For the legendary KaLUG party the location had to be prepared as well and the food cooked. Looking at the pictures, the pavilions had to be built, tables and chairs arranged, cutlery and fluids organised. In the evening all the stuff had to be cleaned as well. This year KaLUG had organised a so called "Sp lmobil" that helped with doing the washing-up, but somebody had to work in it as well. The KaLUG has maintained the Internet caf in the conference building and has set up the network for the exhibiting projects in the conference building. For this they have acquired a lot of computers and network equipment that had to be built up and dismantled after the show. They have also acquired a number of movable walls for separating booths and providing poster space. During the show we have distributed fluids for the conference rooms and exchanged information posters and flyers with the daily schedules. When you're giving a talk, your throat often gets quite dry, hence, a cup of fresh water is a good cure, but requires the organisator to maintain water and cups. Since the conference program changed daily posters and handouts had to be exchanged during the evening. Project exhibitors were supported directly by us while company exhibitors were supported by a service provider. Additionally all speakers had to be supported as well. The conference rooms were also maintained by a moderator who supported the speaker, announced the talks and speakers, ran (!) around with a microphone, helped in case of technical problems and maintained the schedule. Even though it may look strange for an outsider there are a lot of costs that emerge when such an event is organised at a commercial fairground. LinuxTag has always had the problem of only little yield after all bills have been paid after the show but had to start preparing the event for the upcoming year. In the past years it was always a struggle to continue with only little financial substance trying to get the next event set up properly. LinuxTag has been unique in its configuration, looking at its history, its organisation structure, its size and its components. There are basically only three ways of creating income: commercial exhibition, business congress and sponsoring. All three have obviously been on the descending path for several years now, reducing a lot of flexibility for the organisation. This income has had to be used for all expenses. On the other side there are a lot of areas that just cost money, such as the conference building, exhibition hall, hotel, travel reimbursements, projects booths, advertising. In addition to that we've had two service providers that have taken over some tasks and needed to be paid as well. A very rough overview is in my Howto LinuxTag talk from this summer.

  

Rough translation: "So these were the ones who were completely against Berlin wall...". El Fisgón, La Jornada newspaper, on recent declarations by George W. Bush saying the US will enforce the border with Mexico.

 

Steinar, your comments on the limited utility of Get/Set methods both struck a chord and touched a nerve with me. On the one hand, I completely agree that people need to spend more time writing methods that do something useful to an object rather than just exposing public methods. For example, how often have you seen something like this (in faintly python-inspired syntax):

 obj.count += 1
 [...]
 obj.count -= 1
 [...]
 if obj.count == 0:
 	obj.destroy

Instead of the far more descriptive (and well-encapsulated):

 obj.register_user()
 [...]
 obj.unregister_user()
 [...]
 obj.destroy_if_unused()

(or any one of a thousand other similar idioms). This is a contrived example, of course, and a real example would involve doing at least a dozen operations on an object's public attributes from another class (which results in class-associated logic being located in other classes in the system) instead of putting it in a method and calling that (thus keeping all of the logic with the data it's manipulating -- which is the point of OOP). Anyone who writes code like the first example above and calls it OOP is kidding themselves. Of course, you could make the code even more ridiculous with getter/setters:

 obj.setCount(obj.getCount()+1)
 [...]
 obj.setCount(obj.getCount()-1)
 [...]
 if obj.GetCount() == 0:
 	obj.destroy

Incidentally, if you ever see anyone turn the first example into the last example and say they're "improving encapsulation", please do the programming world a favour and kill them. kthx. On the other hand, Steinar, you say "I'm not denying that getters and setters for a few variables might make sense", which clouds the issue immensely. The idea of routing attribute access through a method is immensely useful. It even has it's own name -- the Uniform Access Principle. A few examples are in order (you might already have thought of these, Steinar, but who knows who reads my dribblings!):

• (Not taken from real life, but certainly plausible) An accounting system has an Invoice class, which contains line items. After an all-nighter binge-drinking Stupid, the original programmer wrote the Invoice class to store the total as a separate attribute. Then, after sobering up (and possibly some cluebat-inspired rehab) s/h/it decides to create the total by adding up the subtotals in the line items when someone wants the invoice total. Except, by now (it was a long rehab session), there's about 15,000 places which ask for inv.total, and finding them all and replacing them with inv.total() is Aegean-stables level pain.
• ("Based on a true story") A class that interfaces to some piece of physical hardware has an attribute whose value gets sent to the hardware. Either a hardware change or a "we didn't think of that" moment results in a requirement that the value of the attribute, as sent to the hardware, be within certain bounds. Just truncating to the required size isn't going to work. What you'd like to do is raise an exception (or log a call trace) when that attribute is set with and out-of-bounds value, so you can track who is setting the OOB and fix the problem at the source. But of course, since it's just an attribute, you can't do a bounds check and exception-throw, so it's call-wrapping-and-funky-logic time.
• (Taken from my last few days programming, but it happens often enough) A class hierarchy has a map of IDs and names stored in it (these are dynamic maps, but are set via config file so don't change over time or during program invocation). This is stored in an object attribute. Yay for object attributes. Then, somebody decides that a new class (in the same hierarchy) should be able to dynamically generate value maps in some circumstances (specifically, from a remote database). Since these maps can change in real-time, we can't just generate-and-cache.

In my real-life case, there were few enough places to change all of the calls to a method, and since it's all written in Python I could have played __getattr__ games to get back to a method if I'd had to, but it would have been messy. But imagine a system written in a language that doesn't (somehow) support the Uniform Access Principle, and which was widely deployed (possibly even used by programs outside of our direct control) so the users of the class couldn't be adapted easily. Nightmare. Now, the real solution to the problem is to only use languages which support the UAP (Python can be hacked to do it; Ruby is, IMHO, almost a case-study in How To Do It; and there are other good languages out there). But, in ass-backwards languages that can't transparently map attribute accesses to method calls, I'd rather deal with getX()/setX() everywhere than have to try and perform the necessary gymnastics to later support dynamic value generation from what-was-previously-an-attribute. If, on the other hand, your post was primarily targeted at said ass-backwards languages, or programmers who cargo-cult manual getter/setters everywhere, let me join you in your derision. <grin>

Firefox extensions The release of Firefox 1.5 has awakened my interest in the browser, and a few extensions can make life easier.

View Rendered Source Chart

Really handy for a structured view of an HTML page's source. The big advantage is that is displays generated source too, perfect for figuring out AJAX applications.

Foxpose

Sheer eye candy. Thumbnail all your tabbed pages into one page.

Del.icio.us

Browser button for working with the del.icio.us bookmarks site. I've been reluctant to use remote bookmarks before, this extension might just push me over the edge. Really well thought-out integration with the browser.

Rails in Emacs Seeing as I'm not quite prepared to switch to OS X just in order to get TextMate, I figured it was time again to play with my editing environment. Pages from InVisible Blog and Scott Barron give a lot of tips as to the current state of play with Rails and Emacs. I've now got a reasonably pleasant setup, though I wasn't inclined to go the whole way to running the ECB IDE inside Emacs. On Ubuntu, the packages you are looking for are: speedbar eieio semantic ruby-elisp mmm-mode. I also found pabbrev a very handy interface for tab completion. The future for Ruby and Emacs is looking hopeful. I learned that a proper Ruby grammar for the semantic package is being worked on, which will enable class browsing and intelligent completion. I am still disappointed that there's no version of Emacs that uses Xft or Pango for anti-aliased font rendering. To get sharp fonts, I still need to use a bitmap font like misc-fixed. If I were in the business of offering bounties for open source development, dragging Emacs into the GTK2/Pango era would be the biggest one. Checking the mailing lists indicates that Pango is not suitable for Emacs, but no alternative scheme ever seems to bear fruit. Yet if Aquamacs can do it... If somebody came along with a decent TextMate-a-like for GNOME, I'd pay good money for it. I've never been really happy with an editor since Cygnus Ed. Hallski and I keep talking about this, and only just manage to resist wasting months of time on trying to write one ourselves.

In several semi- or non-commercial associations work is done by volunteers who spend a lot of their spare time and energy for the goals of the association. This works fine as long as all people who are spending a lot of time on the goals are treated the same and work voluntarily. When some people decide that some people should get paid for their work, while others, who don't work significantly less, don't get paid for their work an uneasy situation is created. Why are some people treated better and get paid for their work while others don't get paid, but still work a lot on the same or similar issues? Why should those, who have to make money in other areas in order to live at all, continue to work voluntarily? I have always argued that in such constellations one must not have volunteers and paid workers do the same work. The only exceptions are volunteers who have stated that they want to do the same work, even though they don't get paid for it. Otherwise you'll create dissatisfaction of the volunteers, which in turn will most probably result in less volunteers, at least in the long term. Also volunteer work should be more interesting and relaxed than paid work, so that the volunteers have more freedoms and develop more fun doing the volunteer work they were asked to do. Paid work is fine for boring tasks that not enough volunteers are comfortable with, such as standing around asking visitors at an exhibition for their tickets, keeping people out of areas where they don't belong, working at a counter, folding and packing stuff etc. Looking at LinuxTag, we had such situations twice. First of all, two members of the board of directors have been on the payroll of the LinuxTag association for three or four months, while the others of the team have worked voluntarily. The same or at least a lot of similar work has been done by the same people before voluntarily. This has caused resentment by those who have worked for LinuxTag in their spare time, or even full-time for several months without getting a Penny for it. In addition to that there were two external service providers that have worked on some tasks (such as press coordination, social event and business acquisition) which didn't interfere with volunteer work. We've had those for years and especially for business acquisition it is important since they can maintain regular 9-to-5 business hours. These companies have worked very well, and we've had a great social event this year, after several years with extremely problematic social events. A second situation arose after it was clear that not enough hostesses were available and volunteers should work side by side with them. There is no problem as long as the volunteers want this. However, normally they don't. Many of them enjoy their freedom, not having to work for the entire time but having enough time to walk around and talk to people etc. Most volunteers feel very strange when they are asked to do the same job voluntarily while their neighbour is paid for it. In the Debian project I have always objected to paying some developers while not paying others. In my opinion, the best situation would be a company that employs a developer for regular company work but lets them work on Debian and Free Software issues for 30-60 % of their time. However, I have to admit that those, who work on Debian more or less for the entire day, and, hence, don't have enough time for their studies, jobs or work, will have to get some revenue or they will starve to death sooner or later. On the other hand, if they get paid for the work, they can't easily take a day off and enjoy their non-computer life. Err... I've heard that some people do...

I am about to give a presentation in Tacna, Per , at the VI SIIS, Universidad Nacional Jorge Basadre Grohmann. What is different this time? That I am waiting for the conference to start, sitting in my nice workplace at IIEc-UNAM. Yes, I was supposed to go and talk there (and was quite excited to go to the I ConclaDeb at Arequipa last week). Anyway, why cancel my talk, having the technical means to carry it out?
Less than five minutes from now we will start. There is only one thing I regret: As a complete multimedia neophyte, I could not suggest an application to do this from within Linux - We will be using MSN for the presentation. I have a friend's computer on my desktop, and MSN worked great (and at the first try!) for this - Who can suggest me a free alternative for doing this (specially taking into account that I cannot go to the other end and do much configuration on their side - It must be something speaking a standard format)
Anyway... Time to talk! I'll have my paper (Spanish only, sorry - Analizadores morfol gicos aplicados al lenguaje natural, aplicaciones para la b squeda de informaci n) online. Right now I only have my presentation there, but in a couple of hours, the paper should be there as well.

Some features are missing from powerpc32 kernel.oprofile and ptrace are missing some parts of implementation.I'm hoping on getting around to hacking them in my space travelling time.

Yes, we already talked about it sometimes: what is the compatibility target of GNU Classpath with the official Sun’s Java classes library? Everybody skipped JDK1.0. About JDK1.1, there are two objections: the first is who does still use JDK1.1?; the second is with all those progresses in Swing, XML and all the API’s that are not in JDK1.1, it’d be a strange idea to remove all these API’s from Classpath! Imagine the work of all the hackers involved. I can understand the two points and I even agree with them. But we have at the time I write this entry Classpath is 99.78% compatible with the JDK1.1 API! OK, you can say that Classpath is 97.61%, but there is still some non trivial work to be done in packages javax.swing.text, javax.swing.text.html, and maybe in some other packages. The point of this blog entry is: Couldn’t someone ask Sun for passing the TCK1.1 with Classpath? The someone could be Debian (of course, I have to ask other developers, the DPL and maybe the SPI) if the license of the TCK is acceptable and if it’s not too expansive. But well… it’s for TCK1.1!.. It shouldn’t be so expansive I’m sure the results of the TCK, even if it’s the 1.1 could help GNU Classpath developers to make the code more compatible with the Sun’s one, and that’s what we want!

I was actually very surprised, that this changed - I used to be worth nothing. I wonder what changed?

Sun! Sunlight is a wonderful thing. Yesterday I came back from a six day vacation in Madrid. The weather was not warm, a bit warmer than in Finland, but especially it was dry and sunny. Pretty good autumn weather, actually. The best week I've had for a while. This was my Quest for Sun '05. I stayed at Amaya's place, slept well and long every night, had a wonderful time with some Debian people, and walked outside and visited a couple of wonderful art museums. Thank you, especially, Amaya, Holger, and Miriam. And also vi and emacs, the feline foot fetishists who rule Amaya's apartment. I took some pictures. They're touristy snapshots, not meant to be art. I meant to make notes about my experiences during the week, but the nice, classy Moleskine notebook I bought especially for the trip got lost the first full day. Some moments stuck into my mind, however.

• Amaya's cats attacking my feet while I slept. At one point, one of them sat on my knees for a while and pounced every time I moved in my sleep.
• Tapas is a very good never-ending style of food. It just keeps coming: every time you get to the end of the plates you now have, the waiter brings more.
• Food in general was very good. Even cheap fast-food like kebab.
• Art museums in countries with a long history of art are bloody big. Both the Museo del Prado and the Museo de Arte Thyssen-Bornemisza seem to require about seven straight hours for a proper visit (I spent about three at each, and saw half of each). I think this is so that people will attract fewer cats by being too tired to move their feet during the night.
• Telling the history of love, bed, and sex to Amaya and Holger over a meal. I really should write that down some day. (They're editors.)
• One of Amaya's cats is crazy and likes showers. Or at least likes to sit in the shower after someone's used it.
• The Retiro park is wonderful. I could spend a lot of time just walking about in it. I did.
• Food in Spain is good. Spanish eating times are crazy, but you get used to them.
• Me: "Back when I was working on Kannel...". Person next to me: "Oh you worked on Kannel? It is such a nice program". Moments to live for. Enough to motivate me to write and publish some more free code.
• "Gracias", "buenos noches", and "de nada" is enough Spanish to get you live well for a week. Helps to have native speakers as guides, of course.
• Did I mention that the food is great?

Since the Quest for Sun '05 was a success, I definitely will do it again. A week of light (and sleeping properly) really improved my mood. Maybe even enough that I will be able to deal with the remaining months of dark, gloom, wet, and cold of the winter in Helsinki. The only big negative thing about this trip was flying. I suggest that international air travel henceforth shall be called "The Cattle Drive".