Adrian von Bidder raises an interesting discussion on why public health care is difficult. Basically, it comes back to the challenge:

How much money should be spent on this person's illness? which is a very, very bad question. We try to sidestep it by only taking about statistics etc., but no matter how you look at it, you either do 20'000  per week medications for 80 year old patients who will die soon anyway and get a system society can't pay, or you don't and you get a system where the rich are better off than the poor.

The problem is, the majority of health costs are in the last few years of a persons life: when the body is breaking down. If viewed from the problem of health-care funding vs. eg. education, you have an ethical dilemma: is it worth it ? Here there are no easy answers. Nick Bostrom wrote a very interesting and persuasive essay a while back, The fable of the Dragon Tyrant. In short, we are getting somewhere with regenerative medicine While cures are hard to come by at this stage, there is a growing realization in medicine that senesence, what we used to call "old age", is curable. But we have a lot of psychological defensive mechanisms to help us cope with the carnage of old age that make us deny the problem: if we look afresh at "old age" knowing it to be curable, any delay in doing so is abhorrent. From a public, societal perspective, we spend a fortune every year on health. But we do so in a very disjointed way: we pay colossal amounts for health care, but also for basic health science: in the US, for example, the budget for the National Institutes of Health is about 30 billion dollars. Nearly twice that of NASA. Similar figures are spent in Europe, but there is this strange gap in the middle: the drug companies and medical industry. We start the development of new drugs with public money, and we buy the drugs with public money, but the choice of what drugs and treatments are developed are left to private industry, that is, a profit motive. This results in many cases in expensive treatments to treat symptoms rather than necessarily cure the problem. Faced with the huge costs of geriatric medicine and senesence, the response should be co-ordinated: funding a cure will be expensive, but save a fortune (Think, instead of a pensioner slowly dying and 'being a drain on resources', of 'experienced citizen in the prime of their productive, tax-paying years'). Instead of funding the basic science alone, we should be funding the complete drug and treatment development publically, only farming out the actual manufacture to private industry. It is silly to spend a fortune to keep merely keep someone alive at the age of eighty or so, when we know for a larger investment (bigger than a private company can do), we can cure them properly. The solution to the dilemma, then, is to stop thinking of the elderly being a drain, but actually applying our public efforts in a co-ordinated manner to solving the carnage of old age. Tags politics, health

For some time I've been pondering about buying a bicycle since it seems my weight has been increasing lately up to about 90 kg, which, for my height and age, is about 20 kilograms too much.

But since I am living in a rented apartment, storing the bicycle was a problem, until I realized I could buy a folding bicycle. When that idea hit me, I literally couldn't sleep until about 6 am and I searched the internet about the options, issues to expect, things to check.

In the end I found a Dahon Mu P8 bicycle someone was selling on a bidding site and, after seeing it I concluded that was in mint shape, so there was no reason not to buy it since the price was half of a new one, while this one was only a year old.

I bought the bike yesterday and rode it to work from the place where I met the person who sold it to me and it was quite an enjoyable experience. I still have to do some minor adjustments (saddle is a little bit loose and folding could be better if the handle bar was in another position) before I can ride it regularly to work, but that's just, well, a minor problem :-P.



Now I have a way to do regular exercise without feeling is a drag, so I expect to lose some weight soon after I start riding it to work regularly :-) . Maybe I'll manage to lose about 5 kilos until DebConf, which would be great.

Tim and my mother are both neonatologists at the Golisano Children's Hospital inside the University of Rochester. Earlier today, they had this conversation:

My mother: My son Asheesh is moving to Atlanta.
Tim: Is it for a girl?
My mother: I don't really know what the kids are doing as far as girls, but no....

In fact, I'm moving to Atlanta because Shotput Ventures funded me, Nelson Pavlosky, and my friend Raphael Krut-Landau to start a company to improve interactions in the open source / free software world. We get enough money to live in Atlanta from May 18 to August 6, and after that, we have to seek more funding. This has led to a series of ironies. The first is that I am working on a startup. The second is that I left San Francisco to do it. But I have already moved out of San Franisco, and I have left my job at Creative Commons. (Feel free to get in touch with me (outside my website's comments) about filling my shoes there.) Thanks, Nathan and Mike, for giving me the chance to contribute to CC, an organization and project that I have always had a great passion for. For a while, I may seem vague about the project I am about to undertake; it's because I still want to nail down some details between the three of us. When Nelson, Raphael, and I arrive in person, we're going to kick into gear. I've been chatting with a few of you over the past few months about ideas, and I do want to especially thank Karl Fogel and Mako Hill for helping the three of us think through what could be done. Some questions for readers:

• How could it be easier for new hackers to join the open source community?
  • What programs, like Google's Highly Open Participation competition or Google Summer of Code, actually stimulate the community?

• What could be done to make it easier for developers to highlight their contributions to Free Software?
• How could it be easier for end-users or businesses to pay for improvements to software they use?
• How could it be easier, as a developer, to find other projects to join? to find important or fun things to hack on?
• How could it be easier, as a developer, to get help from other hackers?

• What groups of users or developers are hidden because of the way we conceive of the community?

• How else can you imagine making life easier for developers or users in open source?

Feel free to email me (asheesh at asheesh.org) if you'd rather not comment publicly. I have a few ideas of my own, and I hope to be tossing them up for everyone to bat at soon! P.S. Noisebridge, I will miss you!

Cooperatives-SW (which I m currently helping to direct) has been approved for Co-operative Enterprise Hub funding for 2009. Well done to Viv and the rest of the hard-working team who have been doing miracles for co-ops in this region with relatively little funding for so long now. (But if you ve got a pot of money to donate, let me know, please.) Industrial and Provident Societies are the traditional form for registering UK Co-operatives, but there are a number of things in its 1960s law which aren t reflected in general company law (which was mostly updated since the mid-1980s). For starters, IPSes are registered with the FSA, whose website isn t as good as Companies-House WebCHeck for Limited companies. Cooperatives-UK are pressing for the law to be modernised. C-UK sent us a status update (which I can t find on their website yet) this week. Amongst other things, they re seeking to introduce provisions to allow online registration and filing for IPSes. I ve asked them to take the opportunity to press for similar provisions for LLP Co-ops, or directing Companies House to act on any such existing provisions. At the moment, it seems unfair that LLPs are excluded from online filing, so paying double for routine administrative filings and relying on the increasingly dysfunctional Royal Mail. Finally, the next Cooperatives-SW print/PDF newsletter should be out next week. Hope to see lots of you at the AGM in Plymouth on 23 June!

I've mostly been avoiding the computer this evening, but I did spend the last hour working on attempt #2 at distributed monitoring. The more I plot, plan & ponder the more appealing the notion becomes. Too many ideas to discuss, but in brief:

My previous idea of running tests every few minutes on each node scaled badly when the number of host+service pairs to be tested grew. This lead to the realisation that as long as some node tests each host+service pair you're OK. Every node need not check each host on every run - this was something I knew, and had discussed, but I assumed that would be a nice optimisation later rather than something which is almost mandatory. My previous idea of testing for failures on other nodes after seeing a local failure was similarly flawed. It introduces too many delays:

• Node 1 starts all tests - notices a failure. Records it
  • Fetches current results from all neighbour nodes.
  • Sees they are OK - the remote server only just crashed. Oops.
• Node 2 starts all tests - notices a failure. Records it.
  • Fetches current results from all neighbour nodes.
  • Sees they are OK - the remote server only just crashed. Oops.

In short you have a synchronisation problem which coupled with the delay of making a large number of tests soon grows. Given a testing period of five minutes, ten testing nodes, and 150 monitored hosts+services, you're looking at delays of 8-15 minutes. On average. (Largely depends on where in the cycle the failing host is, and how many nodes must see a failure prior to alerting.) So round two has each node picking tests at "random" (making sure no host+service was tested more than 5 minutes ago) and at the point a failure is detected the neighbour nodes are immediately instructed to test and report their results (via XML::RPC). The new code is simpler, more reliable, and scales better. Plus it doesn't need Apache/CGI.

Anyway bored now. Hellish day. MySQL blows goats. ObFilm: Hellboy

So I am sipping some hot chocolate made from a recently purchased cream substitute by the name of Mimiccreme. Honestly, the stuff tastes good and better, it froths, unlike most non-dairy substitutes. Yet there is a hitch (there always is). As I was whisking away at my cream (mixed with water), I was staring blankly at the box and noticed that they have applied for a patent, which is indeed the case. Since their formula is made out of nuts, their motto is Not Crazy Just Nuts and if they are granted the patent (though I am confused as to what they are trying to patent) it will be Nuts and Crazy as well. update: Ettienne pointed us in the comments to the the patent application

Months (even years) of activism, over 140 thousand signatures, and finally another small victory: Brazilian Minister of Justice Mr. Tarso Genro sent a letter [pt-BR] stating that Sen. Azeredo s bill is dangerous, and that the Ministry is working in an alternative (among other things). We had already incited a public hearing that were very fruitful [pt-BR] and might have brought the Ministry to the issue. But don t relax just yet, folks! Right now, working in this alternative , are people with every kind of agenda It s safe to assume that some of them are from the same lobby that pushed Sen. Azeredo first version of the thing. So, yes, this was another victory, but nothing really changed The bill is still approved by the Senate and still has to be reviewed by the Chamber-of-Deputies, and the alternative that will be presented by the Ministry is still under construction. What we accomplished is nothing more than making the Minister aware of the issue So, keep the pressure over your representatives, send messages to the Ministry, stating how you feel about the issue! Let s show them what we want them to do After all, that s why we elected them, in the first place, isn t it? [Published also at Trezentos, in portuguese]

I have finally figured out how to make clicking on a mp3 link in firefox cause the url to be instantly passed to mpd and played. If this seems like it should be easy, think again.. Firefox makes it hard, because while it lets you configure an program to run for a mp3, if the mp3 is not streamed, it will first download the whole mp3, and then run your program, passing it the local file. That's not what we want: It's slow, and it's much easier to queue an url in mpd than a new file. The trick to making it work is an addon called MediaPlayerConnectivity. Confusingly, this addon sometimes refers to itself as "MPC" -- not to be confused with "mpc(1)". Warning: This addon is a ugly mess that wants to do a lot of other stuff than play mp3s, so make sure to disable all that. MediaPlayerConnectivity's preferences allows you to specify a command to run for mp3 files (but annoyingly, not ogg vorbis). This command will be passed the url to the mp3. So you need to write a little script that runs mpc add and starts the queued url playing. My take on that is mpqueue, which uses the mpinsert command from mpdtoys to add the url just after the currently playing song in the playlist. Then it uses mpc next to skip to it. This way, after whatever you clicked on finishes playing, mpd continues with whatever was next in your playlist, and the music never stops. BTW, since I use a mpd proxy this is all done on whatever remote mpd the proxy is currently set to use, rather than my laptop. Clicking on a link and having the sound system in the next room switch to playing it is pretty nice. :) Previously: My mpd setup

A reply to Tore, who is probably partly wrong. I don't claim the U.S. system is good or bad, I don't know it. But I don't think public (which he seems to imply means free) health care is as easy as he suggests. I'm starting at his assertion that

Very few people break their legs intentionally to stay at a nice hospital. [Health care] is not a resource likely to be wasted once people are given free access to it.

The case of a broken leg is easy. What about chronic illnesses, especially those difficult to diagnose (some kinds of back pain, psychological problems, ...)? What about bored old people who spend their days talking to doctors about how bad getting older is? Easily available (cheap or free) health care has lead to hospitals being swamped with people with minor issues to the point where people with serious problems died because hospital staff didn't get to them in time. And, because the state's budget is not infinite, hospitals become badly run institutions with always-overworked staff leading to even fewer people wanting to work there etc. This has happened in the UK, for example (I think the system I have been reading about ages ago has since been replaced by a different one.) Switzerland doesn't have this problem (to this extent) because we really care about (this means, here: throw money at) our health system, but the result is that the mandatory health insurance becomes insanely expensive. There is talk about half the population needing state subsidies to pay for their health insurance within the next few years. Which, of course, will just move the cost from the whole population (via mandatory health insurance) to the whole population (via taxes) so I don't quite see the point... You'll note I don't propose solutions either. But I think it's important to acknowledge that health care is a difficult topic because, in the end, it always comes down to the question How much money should be spent on this person's illness? which is a very, very bad question. We try to sidestep it by only taking about statistics etc., but no matter how you look at it, you either do 20'000 per week medications for 80 year old patients who will die soon anyway and get a system society can't pay, or you don't and you get a system where the rich are better off than the poor. Or you delegate the decision to the doctor or the insurance or ... and try to minimize the number of people who deserve (can you see it, the hard question didn't get away!) treatment but don't get it. Update 20090508 - Response to comments I'd like to thank you for commenting. I didn't know (and sorry about that didn't care to research) that the U.S. system is even more expensive than ours, since my main message is just that health care is about hard decisions. Some people always will be left out. Elaborating a bit on the 20'000 a week medication: partly, I agree with Adrian and Tore: patent-supported monopolies on medication plays a part. Partly, because I stipulate there will always be rare illnesses where a few cases per year worldwide will have to pay for all the research and production of the medication. Of course, the cost can be distributed so that the patient (or his insurance) doesn't have to pay it, but society as a whole will still pay. So the hard question won't go away easily, now it's just become Do we fund research for this rare illness with fewer than five cases per year worldwide? Of course, now we're not speaking of people anymore, but already just of cases, and we're not cutting treatment for an actual person but we're just cutting budget on research, so it may be easier on the conscience, but it's still fundamentally the same question. Conclusion? Health-care will always be a difficult topic, and it will never be free. The cost can just be distributed in different ways.

My desktop machine blew up, so I got a lovely fresh install of Jaunty. And, X and Gnome still disagreed by default about my actual screeen size... it was unreadably small with the default fonts. I've posted the following instructions before - these are basically unchanged except that the location of the fonts dialog has moved. Tip for folk that would like X to show fonts (i.e. the GDM log in screen) in the correct size: Teach X about the dpi setting! Step 1: run xdpyinfo and look for the dimensions: line. There will be something like this: dimensions: 1280x768 pixels (266x161 millimeters) resolution: 122x121 dots per inch Grab a ruler and measure the screen you have. If it matches the millimeters reported by X, then skip step 2. Step 2: edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf, and locate your Monitor section: Section "Monitor" Identifier "Generic Monitor" Option "DPMS" DisplaySize 265 160 EndSection Add in a DisplaySize like I have there. Now logout of your GUI and restart X - you can run /etc/init.d/ g,k dm restart from the console, or do what I do - just hit ctrl-alt-bkspace so it restarts. Your login screen should change appearance slightly - either the fonts and regions will get bigger if your dpi was set too low, or vice verca. Step 3: (For KDE users, someone please tell me what it should be, for GNOME read on)... Run xdpyinfo again and find the Resolution: line. Ignore the fact that it may not be square, grab one of the two numbers ( I suggest the higher).. Go to System, Preferences, Appearance, and the Font tab. Select 'Details'. There is a Resolution field there. Put in the single number you chose. Changes should take effect immediately. Applications I know of which benefit from having this set correctly: xpdf, gnome-* (panels are readable etc etc), firefox.

I m a social democrat/democratic socialist, and I m baffled by the health care system in the United States. I thought I d jot down/brain dump my main arguments for public health care: Everyone needs health care, but nobody seeks it out

Health care is a necessity in unpleasant circumstances. When you break your leg, you need health care. Very few people break their legs intentionally to stay at a nice hospital. Therefore, it is not a resource likely to be wasted once people are given free access to it. Given that everyone needs it when they need it and don t when they don t, paying it via the state budget is unlikely to cause waste.

Hospitals become badly run when run for profit

I think the point of motivation from the objective self-interest is overstated and harmfully over-emphasized, but the point bears making. For-profit hospitals are run for profit. Fancy that. A for-profit institution has an interest in your using their services as much as possible, at the expense of who-ever is paying the bill, be it your health insurance, or your fifth mortgage. A public institution wants to get you out of the system as soon as possible - by curing you. So the self-interest of the patient aligns much better with a public hospital. Although a certain measure of inefficiency is added when run by a governmental organization, I believe the inefficiency induced by the hospital s profit motive is probably much greater, perhaps more so in countries without a corporate culture in the government that seems to accept ineptitude. Close enough for government work is *not* a phrase used in Norway - for a reason. (Nevertheless, it bears mentioning that the most efficently-run hospital in the United States is the government-run Veteran s Aid.)

Denying health care to people who need it is not nice

The justification that a system has to be that way for the greater good is dangerous and bad and wrong. People needing health care should have it under all circumstances, and I consider it a matter of elementary respect for the dignity of human life that health care should be a right of citizenship. What kind of society measures the worth of a human being by the size of their wallet?

Healthy people are more productive

If you re the bean-counter sort, this point may appeal to you. I don t think it very relevant, but it seems quite plausible. The societal cost of people calling in sick is probably greater than any potential cost in efficiency from nationalization.

One point specific to the US: The current implementation in the US is, AFAICT, deeply flawed and needs Change (WCBI) anyway.

The US health care system is insanely flawed. It needs to change anyway - why not do so with a bang rather than a whimper. I think that the Democratic resurgency has given the party a mandate for quite a lot of bang. When a president wins on a single word, change , then go change things.

Got any more points? Disagree? I d love a conversation in the comments.

So, as a birthday present to me, I just returned from watching the new movie. Since the official release date is only in two days (but movies are traditionally released on wednesdays in Belgium, so they moved it ahead over here), and since this was in fact the first time it was shown, I guess there's not that many people who've seen it yet. So I won't disclose too many details. I can say that it's an interesting movie. Funny, exciting, and with an unexpected ending. Hrm. Well, no, that's not exactly true; the buildup to the ending starts pretty much halfway in the movie. However, you wouldn't expect it before seeing it, that's for sure. Best joke in the whole movie, in my opinion: Pavel Andrejevitch "wictor, wictor" Checkov trying to authenticate to the computer. "Access code unknown". grin.

There will be a general meeting on the #koha IRC channel on Wednesday, 6 May 2009 at 19:00 UTC with a nominal finish time of 21:00. To convert to your timezone, try date -d @1241636400 (thanks to SPI (Joerg?) for that idea). The meeting will include Koha 3.2/tip status and timeline, Koha 3.0.x status, Koha bugs database, KohaCon 2009 report. The full agenda is on the wiki. Connection details are shown on the wiki front page but are basically irc://irc.katipo.co.nz:6667/#koha Hope to see you there, or a summary should be linked from the comments here later.

Last week at eurocrypt, a small group of researchers announced a fairly serious attack against the SHA-1 digest algorithm, which is used in many cryptosystems, including OpenPGP. The general consensus is that we should be moving in an orderly fashion toward the theater exits, deprecating SHA-1 where possible with an eye toward abandoning it soon (one point of reference: US gov't federal agencies have been directed to cease all reliance on SHA-1 by the end of 2010, and this directive was issued before the latest results). Since Debian relies heavily on OpenPGP and other cryptographic infrastructure, i'll be blogging about how Debian users can responsibly and carefully migrate toward better digests. This post focuses on some first steps for users of gpg, and for Debian Developers and Debian Maintainers in particular. The good news is that gpg and gpg2 both support digest algorithms from the stronger SHA-2 family: SHA512, SHA384, SHA256, and SHA224. By using these stronger digest algorithms some of your signatures may be un-readable by users of older software. However, gpg and PGP (a proprietary implementation) have both had support for at least SHA256 for well over 5 years. Debian's gnupg packages have supported the full SHA-2 family since sarge. However, most existing signatures in today's Web of Trust were made over the SHA-1 digest algorithm, which means that abandoning it immediately would cause the Web of Trust as we know it to evaporate. So we need to rely on SHA-1-based signatures until a reasonably-fleshed-out Web of Trust based on stronger digests is in place. Since we don't want to have to rely on SHA-1 for too much longer, we need to collectively start the transition now. So what can you do to help facilitate the move away from SHA-1? I'll outline three steps that current gpg users can do today, and then i'll walk through how to do each one:

• start making data signatures and web-of-trust certifications using stronger digests,
• explicitly state your preferences for stronger digests when receiving private communications, and
• If you are currently using a 1024-bit DSA primary key (which relies for signatures on a 160-bit hash, traditionally SHA-1), transition to a new 2048-bit RSA key.

The first two are simple, quick, and painless actions. You'll be done with them in minutes! The third is tougher, and while you can start it today, key transitions take a little bit of time to complete. Read on for a HOWTO! This entry has been truncated read the full entry.Tags: cryptography, openpgp, security, sha1, tip

Ok, since a few days there is always the same going on on one of the companies (hosted) servers: the RAID1 syncs in a loop because a medium error always happen during the rebuild progress:

May 5 21:55:28 spion29 kernel: [2339524.778339] md: md2: recovery done.
May 5 21:55:28 spion29 mdadm: RebuildFinished event detected on md device /dev/md2, component device mismatches found: 512
May 5 21:55:30 spion29 kernel: [2339526.287680] RAID1 conf printout:
May 5 21:55:30 spion29 kernel: [2339526.287702] --- wd:1 rd:2
May 5 21:55:30 spion29 kernel: [2339526.287712] disk 0, wo:1, o:1, dev:sda3
May 5 21:55:30 spion29 kernel: [2339526.287721] disk 1, wo:0, o:1, dev:sdb3
May 5 21:55:30 spion29 mdadm: RebuildStarted event detected on md device /dev/md2
May 5 21:55:30 spion29 kernel: [2339526.295476] RAID1 conf printout:
May 5 21:55:30 spion29 kernel: [2339526.295487] --- wd:1 rd:2
May 5 21:55:30 spion29 kernel: [2339526.295497] disk 1, wo:0, o:1, dev:sdb3
May 5 21:55:30 spion29 kernel: [2339526.295515] RAID1 conf printout:
May 5 21:55:30 spion29 kernel: [2339526.295523] --- wd:1 rd:2
May 5 21:55:30 spion29 kernel: [2339526.295531] disk 0, wo:1, o:1, dev:sda3
May 5 21:55:30 spion29 kernel: [2339526.295541] disk 1, wo:0, o:1, dev:sdb3
May 5 21:55:30 spion29 kernel: [2339526.295589] md: recovery of RAID array md2
May 5 21:55:30 spion29 kernel: [2339526.295598] md: minimum guaranteed speed: 1000 KB/sec/disk.
May 5 21:55:30 spion29 kernel: [2339526.295608] md: using maximum available idle IO bandwidth (but not more than 200000 KB/sec) for recovery.
May 5 21:55:30 spion29 kernel: [2339526.295625] md: using 128k window, over a total of 390628416 blocks.
May 5 22:11:52 spion29 kernel: [2340506.396514] ata3.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action 0x0
May 5 22:11:52 spion29 kernel: [2340506.396539] ata3.00: irq_stat 0x40000001
May 5 22:11:52 spion29 kernel: [2340506.396552] ata3.00: cmd 25/00:00:a2:20:ed/00:04:0e:00:00/e0 tag 0 dma 524288 in
May 5 22:11:52 spion29 kernel: [2340506.396553] res 51/40:00:c9:21:ed/18:00:0e:00:00/e0 Emask 0x9 (media error)
May 5 22:11:52 spion29 kernel: [2340506.396601] ata3.00: status: DRDY ERR
May 5 22:11:52 spion29 kernel: [2340506.396611] ata3.00: error: UNC
May 5 22:11:54 spion29 kernel: [2340507.733453] ata3.00: configured for UDMA/133
May 5 22:11:54 spion29 kernel: [2340507.733795] ata3: EH complete
May 5 22:11:54 spion29 kernel: [2340507.844814] sd 2:0:0:0: [sdb] 1465149168 512-byte hardware sectors (750156 MB)
May 5 22:11:54 spion29 kernel: [2340507.851787] sd 2:0:0:0: [sdb] Write Protect is off
May 5 22:11:54 spion29 kernel: [2340507.851809] sd 2:0:0:0: [sdb] Mode Sense: 00 3a 00 00
May 5 22:11:54 spion29 kernel: [2340507.852536] sd 2:0:0:0: [sdb] Write cache: enabled, read cache: enabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA

Usually I would wait for the rebuild to be finished and asking the hosting provider to replace the second disk (sdb), but as the medium error causes just another rebuild process, this won't work for obvious reasons. So, the next plan is to fail the drive sdb and get a replacement disk then. Hopefully the first disk won't fail as well then... but well, Murphy, Backup, stuff... sigh

I have just uploaded Embedded GLIBC (EGLIBC) into the archive (it is currently waiting in the NEW queue), which will soon replace the GNU C Library (GLIBC). The EGLIBC is a variant of the GLIBC which stays source and binary compatible with the original GLIBC. While primarily targeted for embedded architectures, it has some really nice points:

• More friendly upstream (especially with regard to embedded architectures): Encourage cooperation, communication, civility, and respect among developers (as opposed to this).
• Stable branch with fixes for important bugs (a real one, not like the GLIBC one which is left unchanged).
• Better support for embedded architectures.
• Support for different shells (GLIBC only supports bash).
• Support for building with -Os.
• Configurable components (do we really need NIS or RPC support in debian-installer?).
• Better testsuite for optimized or biarch packages.

We do not use some of these features yet, but this upload is a first step. From the user point of view, the package names are unchanged (except the source package and the binary package containing the sources) so no transition is needed.

Since Lenny was the first Debian release to feature CUPS under its new package naming strategy, I started going through 'rdepends' results to see which packages in Squeeze still present dependencies for *cupsys* packages. Much to my amazement, there's quite many. If you are the maintainer of a package that still has those dependencies, please fix them ASAP. Alternately, if you're aware of any favorite package that does, please do not hesitate at filing a patch to help the maintainer update their debian/control. Comes June 2009, transitional CUPS packages will be removed from our debian/control.

I have mentioned the flashrom utility in my blog in the past. This is a small command line tool which allows you to update your BIOS/coreboot/firmware chips without opening the computer and without any special boot procedures. Yesterday, flashrom 0.9 was finally released. Here's a short passage from the release announcement:

After nine years of development and constant improvement, we have added support for every BIOS flash ROM technology present on x86 mainboards and every flash ROM chip we ever saw in the wild. Highlights of flashrom include:

• Parallel, LPC, FWH and SPI flash interfaces.
• 157 flash chip families and half a dozen variants of each family.
• Flash chip package agnostic. DIP32, PLCC32, DIP8, SO8/SOIC8, TSOP32, TSOP40 and more have all been verified to work.
• 75 different chipsets, some with multiple flash controllers.
• Special mainboard enabling code for dozens of nonstandard mainboards.
• No physical access needed. root access is sufficient.
• No bootable floppy disk, bootable CD-ROM or other media needed.
• No keyboard or monitor needed. Simply reflash remotely via SSH.
• No instant reboot needed. Reflash your ROM in a running system, verify it, be happy. The new firmware will be present next time you boot.
• Crossflashing and hotflashing is possible as long as the flash chips are electrically and logically compatible (same protocol). Great for recovery.
• Scriptability. Reflash a whole pool of identical machines at the same time from the command line. It is recommended to check flashrom output and error codes.
• Speed. flashrom is much faster than vendor flash tools.
• Supports Linux, FreeBSD, DragonFly BSD, Solaris, Mac OS X. Please refer to the README for build instructions.

Please note that rewriting your flash chip can be dangerous and flashrom developers make no guarantees whatsoever. That said, many users have successfully replaced proprietary tools such as awdflash, amiflash and afudos with flashrom.

Download: flashrom-0.9.0.tar.gz
SVN: svn co svn://coreboot.org/flashrom/trunk flashrom
Debian: apt-get install flashrom Do yourself a favor and try flashrom next time you want to upgrade your BIOS. No more floppies or bootable CD-ROMs with DOS/Windows binaries or similar crap. Run flashrom conveniently from the Linux command line, or even via SSH or serial console if you want...