Search Results: "tar"

25 October 2009

Julien Valroff: Start compiz (or any non-default WM) automatically with GNOME

I have just noticed the latest gnome-session package doesn t use compiz as default WM if installed. I have had to found the right way starting it for my session, anf finally found the following was the easiest and cleanest solution: 
echo export WINDOW_MANAGER=/usr/bin/compiz >> ~/.gnomerc
Writing it here so that I can find it again

24 October 2009

Aigars Mahinovs: QEMU quit during console startup bind() failed

To get more Google juice to the problem. If you are trying qemu or libvirt or kvm or virt-manager and when you are starting up your second guest you see a message such like this:
QEMU quit during console startup
bind() failed
 Then two of your guests have the same port set for their VNC devices. Change the port in the VNC section to something that is free. A more specific erro would have save a half an hour of Googling.

MJ Ray: Three Strikes: Out?

The Guardian reported this week that rights holders will have to obtain a court order before punishing persistent offenders by reducing or cutting off their internet connections. This is an important step in the right direction. For too long, rights holders and their agents have been able to make allegations without fear of repurcussions, even though loss of internet access can be a terrible problem for customers, especially as more government services move online. In the US, we ve even seen rights holder agents acting against legitimate publishing by TV production companies these groups really are out of control! There are still unanswered questions about who pays when an allegation is made, with the cost usually being left with the customer, either directly (through having to pay the ISP an admin fee for the allegation) or indirectly (through higher ISP fees). Hopefully the courts would rule fairly on who should pays the costs in each case. The next step would be to prohibit things like Karoo s Three Strikes as unfair terms in consumer contracts.

23 October 2009

Bernhard R. Link: I'll never understand why some people consider it acceptable to depend on udev

This is just a reminder for all of you that have packages that depend on the udev package: I hate you. A Debian package depending on the udev package (with very few exceptions like for example the initramfs-tools package that actually uses udev) is so wrong.

Rob Bradford: GNOME in Moblin: Myzone

Howdy, i m sure most people are aware of the recent release of Moblin 2.0; a user experience for netbooks. I m going to write a few blog posts about how the Moblin user experience is built on the awesome technologies in the GNOME platform. So first up, let s look at the Myzone, we re starting here since this is the first thing I really worked on in the Moblin UX and i ve been able to see it through from early ideas to the 2.0 and 2.1 releases. So, deep breath, the idea behind the Myzone is to provide a springboard to things that matter to you most: your recent files and web pages you ve visited, your upcoming events and things you need to do, things that are happening on social web services and your favourite applications. Now then, that s the theory, how does it work:
Myzone in action
Myzone in action

Adrian von Bidder: Color Calibration

A topic I've been trying to understand more about for some time is color calibration. I've used lprof to get a very rough starting point for my old CRT (sorely in need of replacement by now...) Since hardware colorimeters are not cheap and probably not many can be used with Linux (I've not really looked, to be honest) I've wondered if I couldn't use the one device that is (should be) calibrated that I already have: my camera. With some kind of feedback loop like shoot screen, analyze img file, adjust settings, shoot again (and the same process for the printer, and, possibly a bit more error prone since the freshly calibrated printer would be used to produce the template, the scanner), shouldn't it be possible to arrive at sane settings? The camera explicitly allows using sRGB or Adobe RGB color model, so I'd think the colors should be more or less narrowly defined, at least when shooting raw or using manual white balance. (Another thought: I have a dual screen system. Can X even do this? And if X can do it, is it possible to tell Gimp to set this up? But this is just idle speculatio. I've not really looked at Google's results yet, either.) Update: Haven't really thought about ambient light. But the display emits light, so I'd shoot the screen in a darkened room, with white balance of the camera set manually. OTOH thanks Jo l if I can get a colorimeter for not much above 100$, it's not worth investing too much time. I had always thought these devices were much more expensive. divide_by_zero Yes, I know CRT are usually much better than LCD, but OTOH my screen apparently starts to show its age: it will suddenly, and visibly, change brightness and color every few hours. I suspect the high voltage circuitry is not too stable anymore... And I won't buy another CRT, those things are just huge...

Decklin Foster: Score: 5, Privileged

(No apologies to the original.) I get the impression that the Windows 7 launch is a lot like seeing an old boyfriend suddenly show up on your doorstep wanting to get back together. He's had some work done, apparently: stomach stapling to take off some of the weight, teeth whitening, and a radical nosejob to make him look as much like your current boyfriend as medical science will allow. He's handsome, of course, almost too handsome. He still uses far too much product in his hair and carries that desperate look in his eyes. The fragrant haze around him is the cologne he overuses to mask the scent of failure. But standing there in that form-fitting t-shirt, you'd almost forget for a moment what a psycho he was- how he used to shut down in the middle of a date and forget everything you were talking about and how he was only happy when you were paying attention to him. You'd almost forget about carrying around his legacy baggage or those nights when, for seemingly no reason at all, he would simply stop speaking to you and when you asked what was wrong he'd just spit a string of hex code at you and expect you to figure it out. You complained about him for years before finally deciding to get rid of him, and here he is again. Though, somehow, he seems like a completely different person now. "I'm up here," he says when he catches you staring at his package. Tempted though you may be, you know that over time he'll get bored and slow down on you just like he always does. And then you'll be right back where you started: trapped. He keeps you by convincing you that you don't have a choice. You're just not smart enough for one option or rich enough to afford the other. "But I'm different now," he says, batting his eyes innocently. "I've changed." Indeed he has. Apparently, he's really into Kabbalah now or something like that. It's helped him discover loads of untapped potential in himself. But it also means that you'll have to buy all new furniture to fit with his understanding of feng shui. That's not the only change he has in store for you. The minute you let him move in, he'll have a new alarm system put in that succeeds only in preventing your friends from coming over on poker night. He doesn't love you, but he doesn't hate you, either. The truth is that he couldn't care less one way or the other. He's here because he doesn't want to be alone. Like all human beings, especially those well past their prime, he wants to feel wanted and, after a string of lost jobs and bad investments, he needs a place to stay. But all in all, he's OK. He's a seven. He'll do, I guess. UPDATE: There was a Hacker News thread about the Slashdot link that got killed before I could reply to someone who left a negative comment. I'll reproduce it here for the sake of anyone still scratching their head.
Thank you for replying instead of simply downvoting. There are assumptions in the structure of the original text that I don't think most of the people discussing it (here, or over there) appreciate. To wit: the narrative of technology belongs to men. Women are objects. The dumbest, easiest way to make that stick out (I did it over breakfast, ffs) is to swap the genders. It sounds "wrong". The emotional-abuse stuff is more creepy. The physical descriptions are more awkward because men aren't leered at in the same way. It's not about evening things out, it's about subverting what the text doesn't say outright by making it obvious. I am, I'm sure, as aware as you that "deconstruction" is not (anymore) a word you say to sound smart, rather a word you avoid saying to avoid sounding like you're trying to be pseudo-smart, but sometimes you just gotta call a spade a spade. You're free to disagree with that (I assume you still will), but I think "not even wrong" is a little over the top.

Kees Cook: TPM as RNG

I was reminded about some TPM coding I d done to get random bytes from the pRNG on my TPM-enabled system from Matt Domsch s recent post. I m not fully convinced that the pRNG of the TPM is an appropriate source of entropy, but it does pass my simple FIPS-140-2 test. I had to find the Intel TPM docs to figure out how to enable TPM on my system. It was under Advanced / Peripherals . I was expecting it under Security , like every other BIOS I d seen. After that:
$ sudo apt-get install trousers tpm-tools
...
$ sudo modprobe tpm_tis
$ dmesg grep -i tpm
[676618.167313] tpm_tis 00:07: 1.2 TPM (device-id 0xFE, rev-id 70)
$ sudo service trousers start
...
$ tpm_version
TPM 1.2 Version Info:
Chip Version: 1.2.2.16
Spec Level: 2
Errata Revision: 1
TPM Vendor ID: WEC
TPM Version: 01010000
Manufacturer Info: 57454300
$ ./tpm-getrand hexdump -C
00000000 61 07 23 ff 71 3e 25 e8 f0 d5 de a7 a3 07 21 dc a.#.q>%.......!.
I could run rngd with a named pipe, but it d be nice to have a new driver that could run a command instead to get the next 20000 bits. UPDATE: I ve implemented this in rngd now.

22 October 2009

Gunnar Wolf: How can we advance without a tax increase?

There has been a lot of buzz recently in Mexico after a tax increase that has been announced for next year. The two main points I have seen criticized are:
Value Added Tax (IVA) increase from 15% to 16%
There was a great improvement regarding the original proposal by our de-facto ruler (why de-facto? Because it is still unclear whether he won the popular vote. He has about the same legitimacy as George Bush during his first term: Legal but illegitimate): In Mexico, there is a category of items regarded as fundamental, which are exempt of IVA (tasa cero). This category includes food and medicines Of course, this category makes up the bulk of the poorer people's consumptions, so they pay much less IVA than people with higher living standards. For a very long time, there has been a push to remove this exemption. This has been fortunately clearly understood and fought against. So, the presidential initiative, as I was saying, contemplated a global 2% tax which would not be IVA, and which would be applied universally. This tax would be earmarked to be applied to social programs, and was euphemistically called Impuesto de Combate a la Pobreza (poverty combat tax). Many people applied the concept of duck typing (if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck... It is a Value Added Tax). As many analysts, I believe this tax was meant to be the foot in the doorstop, leading to point out in a couple of years that anyway nothing is IVA-exempt anymore and the world has not come to an end, and we should apply universal IVA... So, the reduction in the increase (2% 1%) is not the most notable thing here The notable (and good!) thing is that they didn't succeed into killing the tasa cero.
3% tax on telecommunications
Many friends have started rallying (with the IMHO least effective way of protest you can find on Earth, just by stating their adherence in their Twitter and Facebook profiles. Wow, great deal!) that the original proposal included a 4% tax on telecommunications, and it appears that 3% will be applied. They say, quite fairly, that telephone and Internet access are no longer considerable a luxury, but a need to power the society into becoming better prepared, more competitive. My friends state as a contrast the Finnish ruling broadband access as a citizen right. What they seem not to realize is that the proportion of taxes in Mexico (collected from the responsible taxpayers, which is not by far the way for the bulk of the money in this country) is close to 30%, taking into account the big taxes (IVA, ISR/IETU) and the host of smaller ones. In Finland, the percentage of taxes payed by every person and remember that tax evasion is way lower than here!) is over 50%.
So What is my opinion on this? What would my ideal tax scheme be?
  • Nobody likes taxes. But the country needs far more infrastructure, far wider inverstments. We need higher taxes But we need those taxes to be collected from people with higher income. And yes, that would mean I would most probably pay more (as I do sit relatively high on the income scale Qualified work, even if you do not seek money for the sake of it, pays much better than non-qualified work; remember the minimal wage in Mexico is around MX$50 a day - Less than US$4 or 3).
  • The increases should be applied to the income tax (ISR). It is supposed to be around 30% for income levels over MX$5000 a month, with a very slight increase after that point. Income tax is highly deductible now, and most people with high income manage to ellude most of it. Many cases have been documented of companies as small as Walmart paying less than MX$1000 a year due to several (intentional? you bet!) holes in the legislation. That is where the bulk of the extra government income should come from!
  • For a couple of years, since I registered as a taxpayer (people receiving money exclusively as salaries under a given limit don't have to declare taxes) I have decided not to hire an accountant to make the numbers look prettier, and just do the numbers myself over the platform provided by SAT/Hacienda (the tax collecting authority). Yes, that means I am paying more than what I could But it also means I am paying what I should! And it is an expensive point of view, but I strongly invite others to do the same. If we criticize Walmart for making numbers look prettier, shouldn't each of us do the same? Shouldn't we all care to pay what we are supposed to, so that the government has enough funds to carry out its tasks?
Yes, I am painfully aware that an important portion of what gets into the government disappears due to corruption and ineptitude. Still, the only position from where I can criticize is from being clearly legal. The same point as I do with software: I cannot ask people to comply with my Free Software licensing if I use ilegally propietary software, can I? So no, I don't use any. Even legal propietary software, free-as-in-beer (i.e. Flash player). So, please think this over before you join the Lemmings into complaining about the tax increase. Yes, this is a bad moment to increase taxes. Yes, Mexico is the worst faring country in all of America in its response to the crisis; the GDP will probably fall between 8% and 10% this year and 2010 will not be much better. Yes, it would be better to increase competitivity. But, yes, we pay ridiculously low amounts of taxes And those of us who can afford a little reduction in our expenditure should do it. And those who make gross money should just stop it. Oh, and last point, regarding the #internetnecesario Twitter hashtag: Don't be Lemmings. Internet should be recognized a basic need for a free society. But right now in our country, it completely is a luxury, even if you cannot live without it. If you are Internet-addicted as myself, you most probably will not notice the 3% increase. FFS, We will pay MX$360 instead of MX$350 a month for my Infinitum connection. Will we really notice? In Mexico, middle and upper class are Internet-enabled. Lower classes are not. Things should change, no doubt. But it is not at all comparable to an universal IVA. Things should change and universal connectivity should be a given. But right now, calling Internet a basic good... is just out of touch with reality.

MJ Ray: Some Good Does Come From Ubuntu

I ve been mouthing off about Ubuntu again, after the forthcoming release parties were advertised in some pretty inappropriate places, lamenting:
Ubuntu has taken a voluntary-sector aim-for-100%-free distribution, built a private-sector free-and-non-free distribution and gets more love and free marketing from free software supporters than its parent, or than the whole-community events.
However, I did surprise someone by ending with
The silver lining is that most Ubuntu improvements are free software and are/can be contributed back to the free software world.
That s in part because Ubuntu finally made some progress on the Mailman colour mismash bug I tried to fix 5 years ago which is still unfixed in GNU as far as I know. So I think that as long as much of Ubuntu is free software, its contributors will still be doing some good work. I hope a mailman bgcolor/CSS patch is taken by other distributions soon.

21 October 2009

Ingo Juergensmann: Webcam driver gspca with newer kernels?

Apparently in newer kernels my webcam, a Logitech QuickCam Communicate STX, does not work anymore. At least not the way it worked still in 2.6.26.2. There are some results in Google search showing that I'm not alone with that problem. Like this one.

But for the records: when I start, for example, camstream, I get the following output:

QUOTE:

[...]
D: CCamPanel::SetVisibleSize(640x480)
>> void CWebCamViewer::RecalcTotalViewSize()
<< void CWebCamViewer::RecalcTotalViewSize()
<< CWebCamViewer::CWebCamViewer(CVideoDevice*, QWidget*, const char*)
D: >> CVideoDevice::IncrementPalette(0)
D: >> CVideoDeviceLinux::StartCapture()
D: CVideoDeviceLinux::SetPalette picked palette 0 []
W: Unknown palette
D: >> CVideoDeviceLinux::CreateImagesRGB()
D: << CVideoDeviceLinux::CreateImagesRGB()
D: << CVideoDeviceLinux::StartCapture()
D: << CVideoDevice::IncrementPalette()
D: >> CVideoDeviceLinux::run()...
W: Unsupported palette 0
W: run(): VIDIOCSYNC(1) failed (Invalid argument)
W: VDLinux::run() VIDIOCMCAPTURE failed (Invalid argument)
W: run(): VIDIOCSYNC(1) failed (Invalid argument)
W: VDLinux::run() VIDIOCMCAPTURE failed (Invalid argument)
W: run(): VIDIOCSYNC(1) failed (Invalid argument)
W: VDLinux::run() VIDIOCMCAPTURE failed (Invalid argument)
W: run(): VIDIOCSYNC(1) failed (Invalid argument)
W: VDLinux::run() VIDIOCMCAPTURE failed (Invalid argument)
.
.
.


When I run camstream with the LD_PRELOAD trick from that Ubuntu launchpad entry above, I get this:

QUOTE:

[...]
D: CCamPanel::SetVisibleSize(640x480)
>> void CWebCamViewer::RecalcTotalViewSize()
<< void CWebCamViewer::RecalcTotalViewSize()
<< CWebCamViewer::CWebCamViewer(CVideoDevice*, QWidget*, const char*)
D: >> CVideoDevice::IncrementPalette(0)
D: >> CVideoDeviceLinux::StartCapture()
D: CVideoDeviceLinux::SetPalette picked palette 4 [rgb24]
D: >> CVideoDeviceLinux::CreateImagesRGB()
D: << CVideoDeviceLinux::CreateImagesRGB()
D: << CVideoDeviceLinux::StartCapture()
D: << CVideoDevice::IncrementPalette()
D: >> CVideoDeviceLinux::run()...
libv4lconvert: Error decompressing JPEG: unknown huffman code: 0000ffd9


This gives me a working video image from my webcam, but sadly, the colors are bad/wrong. So, it's not usuable as well:

Snapshot with gspca webcam


As you can see, the colors are bad. Red is for example blueish/purple. The two folder on the right in thet shelf are coloured yellow and red in reality, but in the snapshot they appear to be light teal and purple.

20 October 2009

Adrian von Bidder: Debian Mecacorp ACME, Inc.

I've just read Vincent Sanders' Bits from the kernel team. First, a big thank you to him: this kind of detailed information about what the team intends to do, down to a very technical level, is needed much more often on d-d-a. Debian is about producing a distribution, which in the end comes down on how to make independently produced pieces of software work together, so getting all the fiddly bits right is the most important aspect of Debian's work. (And it is also where I think Debian still does better than all other distributions I've ever used.) What immediately sparked this article is (could it be otherwise? ;-) the part I didn't like too much about these Bits: ... was discussed ... ... was resolved ... ... further investigation ... would occur. and right at the top ... a member of the release team ... Of course the team should work together as a whole. Of course it isn't really relevant who of the release team was present. Of course, this information is contained in the minutes. But on the whole, these Bits read a bit like a press release of a large corporation where the spokesman reads a communique prepared for him by a marketing team responsible. I miss the personal touch that should in my opinion run in parallel with our promise of openness: it's not only that we don't hide bugs, it's also that we're not hiding behind a corporate identity , but that we're not afraid to name names (No, this is not in a foundation document as such. It's my interpretation of openness.) A start is simple use of active vs. passive: Why not we discussed/decided ... instead of it was discussed/resolved ? (It's used in a few places, I note.) I appreciate that naming names with each action item is probably better left in the minutes, but at least naming the release team member (he's not just a functionary...) and perhaps at the end a short paragraph about who was there would have improved the announcement. Also: none of the items has an ETA obviously Debian is famous for not having any ETA's but we're trying to change this, aren't we? So why not give at least a rough estimate which tasks would take a week, a month, half a year... to complete? I'm sure you discussed it (have yet to read the minutes), if only to guesstimate what is realistic within the timeframe of the squeeze release cycle. Debian not only is no company, but it's also, and I hope I'm not the only person who thinks this is important, a Linux distribution where no corporate body has the power to force changes on the community. The single person is important, because it's the single person who in the end decides to implement a thing this or that way. It may be the outcome of a team discussion and a team's decision, but the work is done by individual people and not by employees impementing a corporate policy.

Gunnar Wolf: Among the reasons that brought me to Debian...

Every now and then, people ask me why Debian? Why, among so many projects to choose from, I first liked, then got into, and finally I got committed into Debian, and not anything else? Of course, one of the main points back in 2000-2001 when I started using it, and still to this very day is a strong identification with the ideological side. Yes, I am a strong Free Software believer, and Debian is what best suites my ideology. Still, I did not only get into Debian because of this And I was reminded about this by an article in this month's Usenix ;login: magazine: An anecdotal piece by Thomas A. Limoncelli titled Hey! I have to install and maintain this crap too, ya know! (article requires ;login: subscription, but I'll be glad to share it with whoever requests it to me I have of course no permission to openly put it here in whole online. Yes, I am expressly sending a copy of this text to the author, I will update this if/when I hear from him) [update] The author has kindly allowed me to redistribute his article's PDF Download it here. Before anything else I'll go on a short digression: I am writing a bit regarding the Free Software participants' culture, and this is a trait I love about it: The lack of formality. Even though ;login: (and Usenix as a whole) is not exactly Free Software, it runs quite close to it), it is a well regarded magazine (and association) with an academic format and good (not deep or highly theoretical, but good) contents. Still, it is quite usual to see titles as informal and inviting as this one. And it happens not only here I have been fearing having to explain at work, over and over, why I have requesting permissions to go to Yet Another Perl Conference, Festival de Software Libre or DebCamp, tagging them as academic settings. Or why I am wasting our library's resources on buying cookbooks, recipes and similar material on the most strange-sounding subjects. Anyway, back on track This article I found refers to the lack of value given to the system administrator's time when selling or purchasing (or more in general, as it happens also in Free Software, when offering or adopting) a product. Quoting Thomas:
A person purchasing a product is focused on the features and benefits and the salesperson is focused on closing the deal. If the topic of installation does come up, a user thinks, Who cares! My sysadmin will install it for me! as if such services are free. Ironically, it is the same non-technical executive who dismisses installation and upkeep as if they are free who might complain that IT costs are too high and go on a quest to kill IT spending. But I digress. I can understand why a product might be difficult to install. It is hard enough to write software, and with the shortage of software developers it seems perfectly reasonable that the installation script becomes an afterthought, possibly given to a low-ranking developer. The person purchasing the product usually requires certain features, and ease of installation is not a consideration during the procurement process. However, my ability to install a product affects my willingness to purchase more of the product.
Thomas goes on to explain his experience with Silicon Graphics, how Irix was so great regarding install automation and how they blew it when switching to Windows NT; talks very briefly about IBM AIX's smit, a very nifty sysadmin aid which is basically a point-and-click interface to system administration with the very nice extra that allows you to view the commands smit executes to perform a given action (and then you can copy into a script and send over to your hundreds of AIX machines) Incidentally, by the time I started digging out of what became the RedHat mess of the late 1990s and passed briefly through OpenBSD on my way to Debian enlightenment, I was temporarily the sysadmin for an AIX machine And I too loved this Smit approach, having it as the ultimate pedagogical tool you could ever find. Anyway, I won't comment and paraphrase the full article. I'll just point out to the fact that this was what ultimately sold me into Debian. The fact that I could just install anything and (by far) most of the times it will be configured and ready to use. Debian made my life so much easier! As a sysadmin, I didn't have to download, browse documentation, scratch head, redo from start until I got a package working Just apt-get into it, and I'd be set. Of course, one of the bits I learnt back then was that Debian was for lazy people Everything works in a certain way. Policy is enforced throughout. So as a sysadmin, I should better get well acquinted with the Debian policy and know it by heart. In order to be able to enjoy my laziness, I should read it and study it. And so I did, and fell in love. And that is where my journey into becoming a Debian Developer started. Why am I talking so nostalgic here? Because I got this magazine on the mail just last weekend And coincidentally, I also got bug report #551258 I packaged and uploaded the Haml Ruby library (Gem, as the Rubyists would call it). Haml is a great, succint markup language which makes HTML generation less of a mess. It is even fun and amazing to write Haml, and the result is always nicely formatted, valid HTML! And well, one of Haml's components is haml-elisp, the Emacs Lisp major mode to do proper syntax highlighting in Haml files. Of course, I am an Emacs guy (and have been for over 25 years), so I had to package it. But I don't do Emacs Lisp! So I just stuffed the file in its (supposed) place, copying some stuff over from other Emacs packages. During DebConf, I got the very valuable help of Axel Beckert to fix a simple bug which prevented my package from properly being installed, and thought I was basically done with it. I was happy just to add this to my ~/.emacs and get over with it: 
  1. (require 'haml-mode)
  2. (add-to-list 'auto-mode-alist '("\\.haml$" . haml-mode))
  3. (require 'sass-mode)
  4. (add-to-list 'auto-mode-alist '("\\.sass$" . sass-mode))
However As Mike Castleman points out: This requires manual intervention. So it is not the Debian Way! Reading Mike's bug report, and reading Thomas' article, made me realize I was dilluting something I held so dearly as to commit myself to the best Free Software-based distribution out there. And the solution, of course, was very simple: Debian allows us to be very lazy, not only as sysadmins, but as Debian packagers. Just drop this (simplified version) as $pkgroot/debian/haml-elisp.emacsen.startup and you are set! 
  1. (let ((package-dir (concat "/usr/share/"
  2.                            (symbol-name flavor)
  3.                            "/site-lisp/haml-elisp")))
  4. ;; If package-dir does not exist, the haml-mode package must have
  5. ;; removed but not purged, and we should skip the setup.
  6.   (when (file-directory-p package-dir)
  7.     ;; Use debian-pkg-add-load-path-item per  9 of debian emacs subpolicy
  8.     (debian-pkg-add-load-path-item package-dir )
  9.     (autoload 'haml-mode "haml-mode"
  10.       "Major mode for editing haml-mode files." t)
  11.     (add-to-list 'auto-mode-alist '("\\.haml\\'" . haml-mode))
  12.     ;; The same package provides HAML and SASS modes in the same
  13.     ;; directory - So repeat only the last two instructions for sass
  14.     (autoload 'sass-mode "sass-mode"
  15.       "Major mode for editing sass-mode files." t)
  16.     (add-to-list 'auto-mode-alist '("\\.sass\\'" . sass-mode))
  17.     ))
This will make the package just work as soon as it is installed, with no manual intervention required from the user. And it does not, contrary to what I feared, bloat up Emacs Adding it to the auto-mode-alist leaves it as known to Emacs, but is not loaded or compiled unless it is required. Deepest thanks to both of you! (and of course, thanks also to Manoj, for pointing out at the right spells in emacs-land)
AttachmentSize
Thomas A. Limoncelli: Hey! I have to install and maintain this crap too, ya know! (Usenix's ;login: October 2009144.5 KB

Andrew McMillan: Using incron to autocommit changes in a folder

A friend e-mailed me this morning asking for some help with a problem he had where he wanted to make a folder writable by a group of people without making the files deletable. Stepping back from his question, I first pointed out that if the files are editable then they can be effectively deleted by removing the content from them, regardless of whether the directory entries themselves are retained. One solution which occurred to me would be to automatically version the content of the directory, and this reminds me of why versioning of /etc has never worked for me: it only happens when I remember to commit.
<!--break-->
Normally when I edit files in /etc, I am focused on achieving something now, and not on being able to undo it later. To this end I have written myself a script which will commit the contents of a directory (including adding new files and removing deleted ones) into a git repository, as follows: 
#!/bin/sh
#
# Allow for debugging.
[ -n "$DEBUG" ] && set -o xtrace
cd $1
MESSAGE="Autocommit"
# Initialise the directory if it's not in Git currently
if [ ! -d .git ]; then
  git init
  MESSAGE="Initial commit"
fi
# Any files that aren't in the directory, but are in the repository can be removed.
for F in  git ls-tree HEAD   cut -f2 ; do
  [ -e "$ F " -o -L "$ F " ]   git rm "$ F "
done
# Any files that are in the directory, but aren't in the repository can be added
git add .
# And commit...
git commit -m "$MESSAGE"
So this script takes one parameter: the name of the directory where changes have (presumably) occurred, and just blindly commits everything there. The magic glue, then, is the awesomeness that is 'incron' :-) My first target is the ~/bin directory of all of those useful little scripts that I tend to randomly edit without nearly enough version control: 
incrontab -e
home/andrew/bin IN_MODIFY,IN_DELETE,IN_CLOSE_WRITE,IN_MOVE \
     /home/andrew/bin/commit-directory /home/andrew/bin 2>&1   logger -t andrew-bin
With this, it means that whenever a file changes, is deleted from, moved into, or out of the directory we are monitoring, our commit-directory script is run. Just for testing I delete some ancient files that should have been killed a few computers back. A quick 'git status' in the directory shows everything was committed nicely. I edit a file and make some quick changes. Once again, I go into gitk and can see all the history. I sit back and ratchet my laziness another notch with a nice cup of tea, happy that, for now, at least, changes to my scripts are under revision control at last. Outstanding Issues Well, ok: it's usable as is, but there are a few small things that could be improved: I'll keep monitoring in the real world if these are real annoyances, and whatever other annoyances I find, and maybe I'll tweak that commit script a bit more - add a delay and/or some locking too it. I don't think that adding some push would be too big a deal either, and I'd love to get suggestions from Git geeks as to how to do this more simply/reliably too.

19 October 2009

Julien Blache: pommed v1.29: architectural fix

pommed v1.29 is a bugfix release, kind of. The fix is an architectural one related to the video mode switch feature. When pressing the video switch key, your graphical pommed client of choice checks which VT its X server is running on and whether this VT is the active one before executing your video mode switch script. To check that the VT is currently active, it is necessary to open one VT (we use the one our X server is running on) and perform an ioctl() call on it. Depending on your setup (login manager or startx, basically), your user will or will not have any right on the device node associated to the VT. Which means the VT state checking code would always fail in some setups. This is now fixed by moving that code into pommed itself, with a DBus method for the clients to call. You ll need to update both pommed and the clients for this to work, for obvious reasons.

Robert Collins: Government data please do it right


The Australian government 2.0 taskforce has an initiative to make data available for public remixing and use: after all its public property anyway, right? They have even run a mashup competition. Notably missing from the excellent collection of data that has been opened is the NSW Transport and Infrastructure dataset for public transport in NSW. There is a similar dataset for the Northern Territory in the mashup transport section. The NT dataset is under the fantastic cc-by licence. You can write an iphone app with this, a journey planner that you can cart with you while disconnected; a find the closest bus I can walk to tool, or well let the imagination run wild. The NSW dataset is under a heavily restrictive license. Its so restrictive I m not sure its feasible to write an open source tool using its data. The meta-issue is that NSW T&I department wants control over the applications built with this data. This adds a tremendous chilling effect on potential uses of the data: the department will have to approve, with a long lead time, every use of the data, and get to tell the application developer what to changes to make to their application. I strongly doubt that a simple remixing of the data (e.g. with weather reports to prefer buses on very wet day) would be permitted, as it would allow other users to just read the remix and get the original data /without entering into a license agreement/. I m sure there is some unstated risk of openess, or benefit of control, that is shaping this problematic approach. Whatever the cause, its not open at all. Given that the overall approach is fundamentally flawed, a blow by blow analysis of the custom license isn t particularly useful, however I thought I would pick some highlights out to save folk the trouble ;)
  1. The dataset is behind a username/password wall [that you cannot share with others].
  2. Licensees may not be private everyone must know you re using the data.
  3. You must link to the 131500.com.au website
  4. You may not charge users for an app that has to be redeveloped if the dataset changes shape
  5. Any application written to use the dataset must be given to the department 30 days before release to the public.
  6. The department gets to suggest changes to any announcement related to the developers app, the license agreement or the dataset.
  7. The dataset is embargoed you cannot share it with others.
  8. The use of the dataset has to be logged and reported.
  9. There is a restraint of use in there as well related to Inappropriate and Offensive Material. It wouldn t affect me, but sheese, given all the other restraints its hardly needed.
There are more gems in the details, but in short: The department will control what, where, when and how (the data is accessed, the application s functionality/appearance, how it was used). Hell, the 30 day requirement alone makes for slow delivery of whatever someone wants to build. I really hope this can be improved on.

18 October 2009

Christian Perrier: 4621 potential "spams" left to review for me

A few of us are working on spam removal from Debian lists archives. The wiki page linked above explains how to report spam on Debian mailing lists. This is in short as easy as bouncing a mail to a specific address, from your favourite MUA. These "reported spams" then need to be reviewed. Once a given message has been identified as "spam" by enough DD's (there are many false positives in the candidates, particularly in non English-speaking mailing lists), it is removed from the archives. Many mails have already been removed and any help is welcomed. Since Frans Pop launched this for debian-boot, back in May, I use 1 or 2 hours every Sunday to this work. After working on debian-boot only, I gradually worked on reported spams in other lists. As of now, I only have 4 lists where I still have work to do: The Chinese and the Spanish ones are tricky because identifying spam there is much less easy (for Chinese, I'm quite conservative and only tag very obvious spam....for Spanish, I read enough of the language to be able to target spam). What about you? Will you be able to help the few of us who work on getting clean archives (noticeably, Sandro Tosi, Giacomo Catenazzi, Cord Beermann, Luk Claes, Frans Pop, Bastian Blank, Luca Falavigna, Michael Koch, Bernd Steinmetz, Thoomas Viehmann, Florian Ernst, Adam D. Barratt, to name thos ewho reviewed more than 1000 mails)? Working on lists in your own language might be a good idea (I'm particularly thinking about lists in German, Spanish, Chinese and French).

17 October 2009

Benjamin Mako Hill: The Computer in My Pocket

If we've kept up with projections, by the end of this year, the world will be home to 3 billion mobile phones. That's nearly one phone for every other living human being. Although these phones open up a world of important new opportunities in communication, creativity, and cooperation --- and it's important not to understate this fact --- they also represent a step toward a sort of technological dystopia not unlike Stallman's Right To Read. Phones represent one of the most locked-down, proprietary, and generally unfree technologies in wide distribution. The implications for software freedom and technological empowerment are dire. But despite the fact that mobile phones represent what may be the greatest threat to software freedom today, the free software community has --- with a number of notable exceptions that I want to both thank and draw increased attention to --- been mostly silent on the issue. I know passionate advocates of software freedom who work tirelessly to rid themselves and the world of a handful of binary blobs in the Linux kernel --- important work that we all benefit from. And yet, even some of these "hardliners" don't seem to hold their phones to their same standards as their laptops. Ubuntu's decision to ship a new binary driver remains more controversial than the fact that the vast majority of the world's computer using population knows nothing other than phone-based computers that remain almost unthinkably unfree and which remain almost entirely unfreeable when compared to personal computers. For most of the world's computer users', there is no option of, and essentially no hope for, freedom on their current devices. It shocks me that anyone, especially free software advocates, would happily put up with such non-free computers.[1] I think part of the reason lies in the fact that most users of mobile phones, and even most phone users that care about software freedom and technological autonomy, don't think of their phones as computers. Thinking that our phones as computers will not solve any of the problems I've alluded to. But doing so remains an essential first step toward any solution. Although we must still work to build viable, widely accessible, and compelling free phones, we must first convince both users and developers that this is an important goal. Reminding people that our phones, both free and non-free, are powerful general-purpose computers remains an important and still largely unfufilled part of this process. We must find ways to remind ourselves and others of the fact that modern phones are powerful computers with powerful interfaces that are useful for a unimaginable variety of arbitrary applications. We must focus on the fact that these computers have microphones, sensors, and other sensors and that we trust them with our closest secrets and most sensitive data. We must not forget that, in almost all cases, these computers remain controlled, completely and ultimately, by companies that very few of us trust at all. I'm not sure how we will accomplish this task. But more of us need to think long, hard, and creatively about this problem. I'll be calling my phone "my computer" as a first, very personal, step. I have done this over the last week and it has led to some conversations with slightly confused acquaintances. Of course, this doesn't make my phone any less free. But it does mean I'm talking more about the non-freeness most of us have put up with too silently. At this stage, that seems like progress.
[1]Like many free software advocates, my phone is also a computer running a combination of free and non-free software. I use it unhappily and am doing what I can to change this.

Russell Coker: Links October 2009

Garik Israelian gave an interesting TED talk about spectrography of stars and SETI [1]. He assumes that tectonic activity is a pre-requisite for the evolution of life (when discussing the search for elements that are needed for life) and that life which is based on solar energy will have a similar spectrographic signature to the chlorophyl based plants that we are familiar with. I doubt both those assumptions, but I still found the talk very interesting and I learned a lot. Julian Dibbell wrote an interesting Wired article about an ongoing battle between the Cult of Scientology and 4chan [2]. I don t often barrack for 4chan, but they seem to be doing some good things here but of course they do it in their own unique manner. The article also links to a hilarious video of Tom Cruise being insane, among other things he claims that Scientologists are only ones who can help at an accident site. Has Tom Cruise ever provided assistance at a car crash? The Independent has an article by Robert Fisk about the impending shift away from the US dollar for the oil trade [3]. This is expected to cause a significant loss in the value of the US dollar. Robin Marantz Henig wrote an interesting article for the NY Times about the causes of anxiety [4]. It focusses on Jerome Kagan s longitudal studies of babies and young people. One thing that I found particularly interesting were the research issues of recognising the difference between brain states, internal emotional state, and the symptoms of emotions that people display (including their own description of their emotions which may be misleading or false). The tests on teenage social interactions that involved fake myspace pages and an MRI were also interesting. Juan Cole wrote an insightful Salon article titled The top ten things you didn t know about Iran [5]. The Iranian government doesn t seem to be a threat to anyone outside their country. Clay Shirky wrote an insightful post about TV being a heat-sink for excess spare time and considers the number of projects of the scale of Wikipedia could be created with a small portion of that time [6]. It seems that the trend in society is to spend less time watching TV and more time doing creative things. In a related note Dan Meyer has an interesting blog post about trolls who say You Have No Life [7]. The Making Light blog post about Barack Obama s Nobel Peace Prize has some insightful comments [8]. I doubted that he had achieved enough to deserve it, but the commentators provide evidence that he has achieved a lot. I wonder if he will receive a second Peace Prize sometime in the next 10 years. The Making Light blog post about bullies and online disputes predictably got diverted to discussion school bullying [9]. The comments are interesting. Making Light has a mind-boggling post about homosexuality and porn [10]. US Senator Tom Coburn s (R-OK) chief of staff Michael Schwartz made the case against pornography. All pornography is homosexual pornography , said Schwartz, quoting an ex-gay friend of his. Among other things there are many good puns in the comments. Cubicle Jungle is an amusing satire of the computer industry [11]. It s shocking how long it goes before it gets to the part that s obviously fiction. The WikiReader is an interesting new device [12]. It costs $99US and has a copy of Wikipedia on an SD card, they have a subscription service that involves posting you a new SD card every 6 months, or you can download an image from their server. They state that they have a filtered version of Wikipedia for children, I wonder how they manage that, I also wonder whether they have an unfiltered version for adults. The device runs on two AAA batteries and is designed to be cheap and easy. Naturally it doesn t support editing, but most of the time that you need Wikipedia you don t need edit access or access to content that is less than 6 months old. Exetel are scum, customers who complain are cut off [13]. Making Light has an interesting post about a New Age scumbag who killed at least two of the victims who paid $10,000 for a sweat-lodge workshop (others are in hospital and may die in the near future) [14]. The NY Times has an interesting article about Jamie Oliver and his latest project [15]. He is trying to reform the eating habits of the unhealthiest area in the US. The 15 pound burger sounds interesting though, I wouldn t mind sharing one of those with 14 friends

Dirk Eddelbuettel: Dianne Reeves: Strings Attached at the CSO

Another trio concert at CSO, but very different from the most recent classic piano trio. Tonight was once again a chance to see Dianne Reeves (wikipedia) but this time accompanied simply by two guitarists: Russell Malone and Romero Lubambo (wikipedia). Given that Dianne Reeves (who we had seen in just a few month earlier in our neighbourgood) has plenty of stage presence, the format made for a more intimate concert yet with plenty of groove at times too. The three had been touring in Europe for 25 shows, and it was a really nice performance and a great way to end the week. Recommend if you can catch them somewere.

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