Yesterday was my grandma Klassen s funeral at Alexanderwohl Mennonite Church, where she had been a member for decades. My uncle, a pastor, gave the meditation. He had been a missionary in Vietnam during the war, and he remained there after the United States withdrawal. During that time, things were very dangerous for him, and all means of communicating with the family back home were completely cut off. My grandparents had no way of knowing if he was OK. He later heard of a conversation my grandma had with a neighbor one day during this time: Neighbor: You must be so worried about your son in Vietnam! Grandma: Not really. I gave him back to the Lord the day he graduated high school. Neighbor: If you re not worried, then I m REALLY worried! Grandma: Why worry? Heaven is just as close to Vietnam as it is to Kansas. That exchange sums her up pretty well, I think. She was so deeply religious that it gave her a great sense of peace about life. We heard so many stories about her this week. We heard how, when she was already in her upper 80s, she helped a farmer get his equipment out of the mud and ran some heavy farm machinery. She was in charge of my cousin s schoolwork for a little while (she lived with them back then, and his parents were taking a trip). She apparently made sure he did every little assignment left for him in exacting detail, even the ones that his mother had said were extra , just in case he needed something else to do. Apparently when his parents got back, he said he loved his time with grandma, but begged them to never put her in charge of his schoolwork again! I told the story of learning to play chess when I was a child. My grandpa was teaching me the game. I was having some trouble learning some of the rules, and was frustrated because he was also beating me (like usual). After a little while of me getting more and more frustrated, grandma said something to him in German and all of a sudden I started winning. Yesterday evening was the community Good Friday church, with the combined choirs of our church and Alexanderwohl singing. That wasn t the easiest thing to do after the funeral in the morning, but I m glad I did. Tomorrow I ll be singing again for Easter.

At work, we have a bit of a vested interest in the Puppet and Facter packages that are in Debian, because we ultimately consume them in Ubuntu. We noticed that what was in Debian unstable was lagging a bit behind what was released upstream, and when one of my co-workers tried getting in contact with the Debian developers that were maintaining the Puppet package and got no response, I got involved. I got in touch with Micah Anderson and got myself and Nigel Kersten added to the Alioth project for Puppet. Despite Jamie Wilkinson being listed as the maintainer of the facter package in Debian, he claimed this was news to him, and Matt Palmer, who was listed as an uploader, didn't really claim much knowledge of maintaining the package either, so we took that as blessing to take over that package as well. This is where the fun begins. I've been meaning to try out Git ever since Debconf 7, where all the cool kids were using it and raving about it. I've been meaning to make the Debian DHCP package collaboratively-maintained, and use Git for the revision control, but I haven't quite gotten off my good intentions and done it yet. Part of the problem is not knowing exactly what workflow I should use, and suffering from paralysis by analysis, reluctant to experiment, because I don't want to go down the wrong path. Anyway, this is about Puppet, not DHCP. The Puppet package, as it turns out, is already maintained in Git on Alioth, so the problem here was more one of figuring out what the current workflow was, and trying to follow it. This is where Nigel came in. Conveniently, the upstream Puppet development is done in Git also, and Nigel is a contributor to Puppet upstream, so he had some Git-fu. So between the instructions on how to get started with Git on Alioth and what he knew, we could start fumbling around. It seems like the Alioth Git repository was also tracking the upstream Puppet repository, as there were commits in the Alioth one by Luke Kanies, and we didn't really imagine that he was doing Debian-specific stuff. Here's what we ended up doing to try and get what was in the Alioth repository up to the upstream version 0.24.8 of Puppet:

git clone ssh://apollock@git.debian.org/git/pkg-puppet/puppet.git

This part was fairly straight forward. Clone what's in Alioth locally.

git remote add reductive git://reductivelabs.com/puppet
git remote update
git fetch --tags reductive

Next, we added a remote branch that tracked upstream. We called it "reductive", and we updated it. The bit that took some fiddling with was fetching the tags. Nigel later figured out that tags are inherently private to a repository, and normally stay that way. So if I have a local clone of say the upstream Puppet repository, I can tag it to my heart's content, and normally those tags would stay in my local repository, because they're probably only meaningful to me.

git checkout -b upstream/0.24.8 0.24.8

This bit took a bit of work to arrive at as well. What we wanted to do was create a new branch called upstream/0.24.8, which was at what was tagged 0.24.8 in the reductive repository. Nigel pondered what would happen if you already had a tag or a branch called "0.24.8" before you added the remote repository. This is also why we had to fetch the tags from the remote repository, so we had something to check out.

git checkout master
git merge upstream/0.24.8

Next, we switched back to the master branch and merged the contents of our local upstream/0.24.8 branch that we just created. This now got the Puppet source in the master branch up to what was released as version 0.24.8. (and this is better than just running uupdate?) We did some fiddling with the debian/control file and debian/changelog and fixed up a few things that Lintian was bitching about, and were done. I'd set up a sid chroot with cowdancer previously, and had to do some faffing around with git-buildpackage to convince it to use pbuilder. I ended up using

git-buildpackage --git-builder="pdebuild --debbuildopts '-i\.git -I.git' --basepath /var/cache/pbuilder/base-unstable.cow"

So now we've got most of what we want to ship checked into Git on Alioth. I have no idea if we've done it "right", I suspect we may have done something wrong by operating on the master branch. Looking at the revision history in the Git repository on Alioth, it looks like previously things have been done a few different ways. I certainly want to write up a definitive workflow once we've figured one out. We haven't uploaded the new package to unstable yet, because we're still trying to give it a modicum of testing, and we'd like to sort out the Facter package as well. The Facter package was a more greenfield exercise, as while there was already a Git repository on Alioth for it, it was empty. So Nigel had to do some futzing around to get it checked in the right way to make git-buildpackage want to build it. He did this by himself, so I'm not sure exactly what he did. I've since discovered that it's probably lacking some dependencies it needs, so that'll need to get fixed before it gets uploaded. I look forward to reading blog posts from the smart people who actually know how to use Git properly, telling me how we should have done it. I'm still very interested in coming up with a proper workflow for preparing packages and committing the changes, and for doing code review.

I got interesting comments on my previous post about SSH through jump hosts, that made me think a bit. The first one of them suggested to use a syntax that unfortunately doesn t work on anything other than zsh, but had the nice idea to add a login for each jump server. Sadly, this only works when there is only one hop, for reasons similar to those we will explore below. The second one suggested / would not be so good a separator, because it would fail in svn+ssh urls and such, which is a good point that I didn t think of only by lack of such use case. The simplicity of the resulting configuration was nice enough. This decided me to take a shot at implementing something that would allow adding both login and port number for each jump server. The first implementation detail to set was which characters to use for login, port number and hop separators. I chose respectively % (@ is unfortunately impossible to use because ssh would take it, leaving out any hop before the character), : (pretty standard) and + (not allowed in DNS, and not too illogical as such a separator, I thought). The result can look like dark magic when you are not savvy with sed and regular expressions:

Host *+*
ProxyCommand ssh $(echo %h sed 's/+[^+]*$//;/+/! s/%%/@/;s/:/ -p / ;s/\([^+%%]*\)%%\([^+]*\)$/\2 -l \1/ ) PATH=.:\$PATH nc -w1 $(echo %h sed s/^.*+//;/:/!s/$/ %p/;s/:/ / )

The syntax you can use to connect through jump hosts is the following:

ssh login1%host1:port1+login2%host2:port2+host3:port3 -l login3

We ll see further down why we can t put a login for the final destination host. Or if you want to skip the boring implementation details, you can also skip to the end, where a slightly more compact version lies: while writing this post, I got some optimization ideas. Let me try to split the sed syntax to make it a little more understandable:

s/+[^+]*$//; # Remove all characters starting from the last + in the string (i.e. keep the n - 1 first hops)
/+/! # If the string doesn t contain a + after the previous command (i.e. there is only one hop remaining), do the following, otherwise, skip until the closing curly brace
s/%%/@/; # Replace % with @ (% is doubled because of the ProxyCommand)
s/:/ -p / # Replace : with -p . Combined with the previous command, we rewrite login%host:port as login@host -p port
;
s/\([^+%%]*\)%%\([^+]*\)$/\2 -l \1/ # Rewrite hop1+hop2+login%lasthop as hop1+hop2+lasthop -l login

The second sed goes like this:

s/^.*+//; # Remove everything up to the last occurrence of + in the string (i.e. only keep the last hop)
/:/! # If there is no : in the string, do the following, otherwise, skip the next statement
s/$/ %p/; # Add %p at the end of the line
s/:/ / # Replace : with . These last three instructions prepare a host port combination for use with nc.

Let s see what the ProxyCommand looks like for some examples, skipping PATH setting and nc option for better readability:

host1+host2

ssh host1 nc host2 %p

login1%host1+host2:port2

ssh login1@host1 nc host2 port2

login1%host1:port1+host2:port2

ssh login1@host1 -p port1 nc host2 port2

Now, maybe you start to see why we can t put a login on the last hop: not only does it make no sense for nc, but also the main ssh process that runs the ProxyCommand and will actually talk to the remote host won t have any knowledge of it. From the above examples, it also appears obvious why we replace login%host:port with login@host -p port : so that the ssh command in the ProxyCommand gets the proper arguments for login and port. Note we could also replace with host -p port -l login for the same effect. With even more hops, this is what happens:

host1+host2+host3

ssh host1+host2 nc host3 %p

login1%host1:port1+host2:port2+host3

ssh login1%host1:port1+host2:port2 nc host3 %p

Each of these ProxyCommands will trigger another ProxyCommand quite looking like our first few examples. In the first hops, if we d just replace all % with @ , in cases where logins are given everywhere, we d end up with a ProxyCommand like the following:

ssh login%host1+login%host2 nc host3 %p

As we saw above, we can t use a login on the last hop, which means this ProxyCommand wouldn t work as expected and is why we have to rewrite login1%host1+login2%hop2 as login%host1+host2 -l login2 with the last instruction in the first sed. In the end, this is what happens:

login1%host1+login2%host2+host3

ssh login1%host1+host2 -l login2 nc host3 %p

login1%host1:port1+login2%host2:port2+host3:port3

ssh login1%host1:port1+host2:port2 -l login2 nc host3 %p

In this last example, you see the :port2 part is not changed into -p port2 . Actually, it would still work with the latter form : the ProxyCommand ssh login1%host1:port1+host2 -p port2 -l login2 would itself have ssh login1@host1 -p port1 nc host2 %p as ProxyCommand, in which %p would be replaced by port2, given as argument to -p. Based on this and with further small optimizations, we can slightly shorten our ProxyCommand to the following :

Host *+*
ProxyCommand ssh $(echo %h sed 's/+[^+]*$//;s/\([^+%%]*\)%%\([^+]*\)$/\2 -l \1/;s/:/ -p / ) PATH=.:\$PATH nc -w1 $(echo %h sed s/^.*+//;/:/!s/$/ %p/;s/:/ / )

sed instructions decryption is left as an exercise to the reader ;). Update : modified the shortened version to fix the issue spotted in the comments.

Hmm, this is a little story of how to break Xorg in Sid and then use Squeeze to fix it.

I never liked having extraneous packages, so I don't like xserver-xorg-video-all - I just want xserver-xorg-video-foo (nv in the case of the laptop in question). So the latest upgrade from Sid wanted to bring in all the video (and input) packages and I tried to work around it. Hmm. Turns out, I could use -o Apt::Get::Download-Only=true and dpkg --force-depends -i to get the packages I wanted. The thing is, one of the modules needs to be installed for the dependency on xserver-xorg-video-all to be met by a Provides. It's the Provides that has changed. So I installed xserver-xorg-video-nv by force and logged out. Oops. No X.

Various other hacks later, I tried to build xserver-xorg-video-vga (which I thought was probably the missing one) only for the build to fail on amd64. Brokenness. Hmm. (it doesn't build in a pbuilder chroot either, bug filed.)

I've always run a pure Sid install but I know people who mix Sid and Squeeze, so I added a Squeeze source and started doing a lot of apt-get install xserver-xorg-video-foo/testing - again concentrating on just the video packages I need. Aha! X restarted - umm, but the mouse didn't move and the keyboard did nothing in X, only in the existing terminal. Repeat process with xserver-xorg-input-all/testing and I'm back in a working X. Phew.

My own fault, I know (I shouldn't have forced the package installations, should have just waited for the complete dependency chain to be available), but it's nice to get out of this mess so easily.

On our move down to California, Angie, Leif and I stopped by the Creationism Museum. I mentioned this a couple of Augusts ago. Unfortunately, I didn't want to post about it without having the pictures, and I've only just finally got around to uploading them. I suck, news at 11.

http://picasaweb.google.com/kaladron/CreationismMuseum

We went with Stephanie, and had a great time. We got there a bit late, so didn't get to see the floor show and stuff, but we did get a chance to see the exhibits. The people there were a little reminiscent of the TV show Circle Square, where the people were just a little too friendly, and blinked just a little too rarely.

How we heard about the creationism museum was from an Interview on CBC, where the guy who opened the museum talked about how they were trying to show a different interpretation of the results of archaelogical digs, and how they saw this as a religion, and that science is just another religion. We were a bit shocked when we got to the US to discover that the guy is somewhat less rational there, claiming that what they're doing is good pure science, etc.

The premise is an interesting one: They start with the literal truth of the bible and then interpret everything against that backdrop. The argument is a vaguely reasonable one: Scientists do this all the time using what they've learned in school. They've learned that the universe is billions of years old, and therefore will do carbon dating a certain way, etc. If you start with the bible saying that the universe is 6000-odd years old, then results wind up getting interpreted differently.

The key to most of how the world wound up the way it is is apparently tied up in two major events: First, the story with the apple (Sorry I'm a little light on details, I didn't grow up Christian) caused people to start eating meat and wearing clothes.

Aside of the moment, my in-laws have a great fridge magnet from restoringeden.org: "God's original plan was to hang out in a garden with some naked vegetarians"

The second big event was the great flood, which killed all the dinosaurs, caused turbulence, moved continents around, and some other stuff.

Amusingly enough, when looking for a link to the CBC review, I found a review of a complaint about the interview: http://www.cbc.ca/ombudsman/ombudsmanweb/39.htm

Anyhow, had a great time. Enjoy the photos. =)

Yeah, proprietary software is bad, but let's at least install it the Debian way. The following walkthrough assumes Debian lenny.

• Install some prerequisites:

  $ sudo apt-get install mysql-server-5.0 apache2-mpm-prefork libapache2-mod-php5 php5-mysql php5-curl php-pear mono-gmcs php5-imap curl dh-make-php dpkg-dev fakeroot build-essential cdbs php-http-request php-mail php-net-smtp php-db php-auth
  

• Download and extract FogBugz:

  $ cp ~/Downloads/fogbugz-setup-php-6.1.44.tar.gz .
  $ tar xvfz fogbugz-setup-php-6.1.44.tar.gz
  $ cd fogbugz
  

• If you do not wish to install FogBugz to /opt/fogbugz, modify INSTALL_DIR at the top of install.sh to point to your intended target (e.g. /srv/bugs.example.com).

• Create Debian packages of the missing PEAR libraries. For some reason, the php-mail-mime package in lenny is not recognised by FogBugz's install.sh, so we create a replacement.

• Run ./install.sh. You should see something like:

$ sudo ./install.sh
/***************************************\
*            FogBugz 6 Setup
\***************************************/
--    Checking for required tools
 +      found mono 1.9.1
[..]

• FogBugz will offer to mangle your Apache configuration. Choose no and run the following, replacing /srv/bugs.example.com where appropriate:

  $ sudo ln -s /srv/bugs.example.com/Accessories/fogbugz.conf /etc/apache2/sites-available/fogbugz
  $ sudo a2ensite fogbugz
  

• FogBugz will then offer to mangle your PHP configuration. Choose yes; but move the last handful of lines from (e.g. /etc/php5/apache2) into /etc/conf.d/fogbugz.ini.

• After restarting Apache, you should be able to visit http://bugs.example.com/fogbugz/install1.php to continue installation.

• On first run, FogBugz will "warn" about the lack of missing eAccelerator, a PHP JIT. Unfortunately, whilst eAccelerator is "open-source", useful distribution of it is illegal. Alternatives available in lenny would include php-apc and php-xcache.

I finally more or less completed my switch to KDE4. Thanks the great great KDE maintenance team we have. Simultaneously, X.org packages were updated so possible problems may have ben triggerred by it more than KDE, though. At first glance, this new KDE is nice and has great improvements but generally speaking painfully slow..:-) So, I began deactivating again all visual effects so that my poor old Dell X1 survives the upgrade. I was also greatly annoyed by losing the "Terminal sessions" which I was very actively using with Konsole. No more "Terminal Sessions" menu in my task bar to connect to various hosts over the network. Bleh. I have to redo everything with Konsole's "profiles". Also sucking a lot is the default setting for fonts in Konsole (antialiased fonts). It makes scrolling painfully slooooooow. I just deactivated this and it's much much much better. I also lost my old mail notification utility (Korn). It is still working but having it running leaves a kio_mbox process eating all my CPU. Actually, korn is still something from KDE3, so I might expect it to be rebuilt for KDE4, hopefully. I never found anything as good as it in the gazillion of mail notification utilities we have. Maybe my dear Lazyweb will help. I'm still left with weird keyboard behaviour which is hard to identify. Apparently the delay before key repetition starts when one leaves a finger on a key has changed in some way and despite my attempts to restore this in the adequate KDE thing, it doesn't change that much. I suspect some weird interaction with X.org stuff. Such "minor" details are very annoying as they interfere with year of (bad) typing habits. In general, as a very old KDE user (I adopted it back in 2001 or so because of Kbabel), I'm somewhat happy with that upgrade but it will take time to be used to all the new concepts (ah, these "Plasmoids" thing...) and also restore the overall speed of my machine...:-)

Going for a run--or a race--almost always meant grabbing the GPS and often also meant setting a target pace and distance. For the last four and a half years, this was measured by a Garmin Forerunner 201. That's the large rectangular model in the original "brick" form factor. I've come to love the device. Training is great because the distance log, as well as the pacing, keeps you honest. Racing is probably better because it helps a lot with the pacing (but then I also had PRs in race where I had forgotten the GPS at home). But there is a downside. This model sometimes takes forever to find tracking, and has interference / weak signal problems when it is cloudy or moist. But worst of all, it just bonks out in the 'urban jungle' downtown where it drops signals too easily. And now after all these years the display had some minor damage, the strap didn't really hold anymore, and it was generally time for something new. On Tuesday it even lost a quarter mile when we were going for a short but really fast three miler. But then a few days prior I had followed fellow Debian marathoner Christian and used my birthday at the end of this month (as well as the upcoming Boston Marathon) as an excuse for conspicuous comsumption. After some price comparison, I ordered a factory reconditioned Garmin Forerunner 405 from this web discounter at a nice rebate to the regular price. It arrived this afternoon, seemingly shining new and I have been fiddling with it for the last little while. This device features wireless data transfer to a usbstick. This meant booting the laptop in windoze for the first time in years to load the 'client software' after which data transfer proceeded. The Garmin Connect site has very slick presentation and aggregation of the data. The trouble is of course how to get the data there when running Linux... Christian had mentioned the garmin-forerunner-tools package. Unfortunately, this seems to really be written for the Forerunner 305 models as it doesn't see the device at all. Some more googling lead to this page and the gant tarball. All still fairly raw, but with some prodding in the settings of the 405 ('pairing' set to 'on', 'force send' set to 'yes'; which may have to be reset each time ?) I got my two xml files off the gps watch. Yay. We'll see what mode I will settle one. With the 201 and its ancient serial port, I basically just dropped the run and training histories which their fairly limited data collections. Last but not least, fellow Oak Park runner Peter Sagal had a humorous Runner's World column on the whole GPS geekyness. If he'd only known how to pair it with programming geekyness...

While I did not think I would continue hacking on VoiDroid after achieving a semi-broken proof-of-concept implementation, it seems that I can t get out of it easily :-). I spent today trying to implement a solution which would allow the native C++ code to call into Java - for example, if we have a call in progress, and want to update the call status displayed to the user when it changes. The JNI library has some native callbacks which are getting called on call state changes, but getting the information to Java turned out to be a quite an experience, which, I thought, would be amusing to document, and, hopefully, save someone some quality bang-head-on-desk time. 1. Some of the threads calling native callbacks were initiated in Java (and thus known to JVM), and some where not, they were started in the native code. As JVM did not know anything about them, JNI calls would fail without too much explanation. Eventually I figured that out, and started attaching them as appropriate (JNI provides facilities for that). 2. Even after attaching, I could not resolve references to my classes from the native code, until I found a mysterious line in JNI docs: When a thread is attached to the VM, the context class loader is the bootstrap loader.. Basically, it means that when you attach a native thread, it is only capable of resolving built-in Java classes. 3. I later found a reference to a technique, suggesting to cache a good classloader from a Java-initiated thread, and later set the classloader for the attached thread to it. I implemented that, only to find out that Android s JVM is not your regular JVM, so things are slightly different here, and this technique does not work. 4. Luckily, there is an incredibly useful post describing the problem, and suggesting a workaround: caching an instance of needed class globally in native code, after calling NewGlobalRef on it, to avoid garbage collection on exit from a native function. I did that, however I only had access to the class, and Android JNI only supports calling NewGlobalRef on an object, so I had to create a dummy object in the native code (JNI_OnLoad() function, actually) and cache that. 5. That finally enabled me to call into Java from native, attached threads (w00t!). Unfortunately, you are not allowed to modify the UI (exactly what I wanted to do from my Java callback!) from a non-UI thread, which brought me right back to the drawing board. 6. As callbacks initiated from native code would not work for this reason, it was suggested to me to use a classic producer-consumer mechanism, getting Java call into the native library block until new information gets delivered by a native thread. Easily done with some pthread mutexes, and the goal is close, right? 7. Wrong! Now the problem was that if I started a UI Java thread, which would call the native function in a loop to retrieve the data (it would not actually spin, as the native function blocks until new data is available), then it would be declared not responding by the UI framework in a few seconds. I could start a non-UI thread for that, but you guessed it a non-UI thread is not allowed to update UI! Instead of resolving the problem we just shifted it into the Java land. 8. While I was simply thinking about stuffing the result into a class variable and passing it to the UI thread this way, this tutorial, showing how to display a progress indicator while doing some heavy calculations in the background, provided a more elegant idea. One can use Android s android.os.Handler class to pass messages (with arbitrary payload) between threads. That was the last piece of the puzzle, which allowed me to finally achieve a working implementation (some 10 hours or so later :-).

I devoured Racing the Beam last night. It does a great job at getting inside the Atari 3600 platform and explaining how it affected the early games that ran on it. Full of great examples, like Yars Revenge displaying its own code onscreen as a visual effect, to avoid needing a random number generator. Teaches how to analyse screenshots of 3600 games and see how the crazily limited hardware was coaxed into drawing them. Highly recommended, just wish it were twice as long. (I also enjoyed that the book itself is a nice recursive hack. Its (fairly cheap) printing process didn't allow reproducing the detailed color photos of the games needed for reference. So they printed them on the inside of the dust jacket instead.)

---

While I just missed out on the heyday of the Atari 3600, I was writing similar games on my 130XE a bit later, mostly limited by having to use slow BASIC. This was probably the first video game I ever wrote, judging by its filename ("VIDIO").

You're the green dot, zipping across the screen. Each time it reaches the right side, it wraps back to the left, leaving a wall behind. Crash into the wall and you lose a life.

As I've mentioned before, I still enjoy VIDIO, both its simplicity and gameplay. And the key to its gameplay is that the dot moves fast and the controls are not very precise, making it hard to go thru a given hole in the wall. And the controls are not very precise because of a limitation of the platform. The BASIC program can only sample the joystick position occasionally, and so there's little fine control. So, Racing the Beam has helped me realize that the platform made this game what it is.

---

BTW, here's the code to VIDIO. (more)

Sound Juicer "Bonnie and Clyde" 2.26.1 has been released. Tarballs are available on burtonini.com, or from the GNOME FTP servers. Some crashes have been fixes:

• Read the track artist instead of album artist in Musicbrain3
• Don't crash if the release date is unknown
• Read tracks when falling back to gvfs

Finally, a call for someone with deep LAME knowledge. The GStreamer LAME element is, well, lame because it sets a number of properties to default values that make it very difficult for LAME to work well. Someone who understands how all of the LAME settings operate needs to sit down, vet the settings and remove the pointless ones, unset most of the rest, leaving the 'preset' setting as the only one which has a default value. At the moment there are many contradictory default settings which mean LAME produces rather badly encoded files. Any takers?

Ok, so at work, pretty much the whole company uses Windows, of some sort. The web team, however, are pretty adamant that they use the best tools available for them, and we use Ubuntu because of this (because it s the easiest option that we all have the same distro, and as long as it s Linux, we don t mind) Anyway, at the moment we re working through the process of moving all our internal business applications from Visual Basic.NET (urgh!) to PHP + a web based app. The Product Owner for this is one of the bosses, who currently uses Windows Vista. He has, however, seen us all using Ubuntu and it s got him interested in using it. He s said that he wants to try using Ubuntu, and see whether he can get his work done on that, and slowly transition to it, as obviously, he needs to be able to use Windows for the .NET stuff (which sadly, doesn t work well under WINE). So, we set him up a Virtual Machine, and he got to grips with what he was doing, great. Except for the fact that he had to allocate memory to it, switching back and forth between windows and Ubuntu was a pain. He eventually gave up on this idea, and got a spare machine, a spare monitor, and set it up next to his machine. Still, however, it was a bit of a pain, he d have to switch position on his desk, start using a different keyboard and mouse, and i was all a bit of hassle. Recently, we ve gotten a big screen (which isn t actually that big!) for the Web Team to monitor the servers, our order download service, etc etc. We were showing our manager some of the stuff we could do with it, and he asked the question So, how do you control it - to which my response was to move my mouse off of the edge of my screen, and onto the big screen. So is that a third monitor? he asked. No I replied, it s another machine. Enter Synergy So this is the point where I explained to our manager exactly what synergy is. Trying to explain it however, is a bit of a hassle, so I ll try my best here. Synergy is an application that allows you to control another machine s keyboard and mouse from your own PC. It s a bit of a mix between a KVM switch, and Remote Desktop, but it doesn t require extra hardware, and you dont have to relay the video across the network to show it on your screen too. At this point, our boss got a glint in his eye Does it work in Windows? he asked. At this point, I didn t realise that he had a seperate machine for Ubuntu. I told him it did anyway, but I wasn t too sure whether it worked with Vista Lets give it a go anyway So we went over to his machine, and I installed quicksynergy on his ubuntu box, while he downloaded the Windows installer for Synergy. 5 minutes later, he was grinning like a maniac as he moved his mouse from one machine to another. Now he s happily using Ubuntu without any hassle, it s just a third screen to him - with different stuff on it. I think the moral here is, there are different ways to get people to be able to use Linux, and Synergy is one of those great tools that enable people to use Linux without having all the hassle that comes with switching over. I think also, a quote from m manager sums it up.

This is one of the best things I ve seen all year. I thought it d take forever to setup, but it was so quick. I can be so much more productive now

I hope that this will be one of the turning points for my manager, and we ll have another convert by the end of the year

From the Bits from the Debian Installer team mail to d-d-a:

It has been decided that, in order to not slow down the development processes, D-I SVN should be branched when the work on preparing a release starts. Even if SVN doesn t make the process very easy, changing the VCS we use is currently not an option we prefer.

SVN, branching, d-i. There s no word to describe how painful it is to work on d-i using SVN. d-i is big, SVN is slow in about everything it does. Now add branches to the mix. That mail left me very disappointed; first because I thought switching to git was sort-of planned for after the release of Lenny, and now it s off the table, second because some things in this mail are just wrong. Oh well. No d-i for me, I guess, then.

Many people in the western world are completely unaware that in the Moldavian Republic there is an ongoing protest against the current Communist Party which is at power after the parliamentary elections held on Sunday. The protestants accuse the Communists of election fraud and there are numerous reports of dead people being recorded as voters, people which, by religion, chose not to vote, and other several people which couldn't have voted.

Tuesday the protests took a violent turn, apparently "aided" by some instigators which were reported to be seen as recording the protesters, taking notes and, generally, not fitting the picture. During the day the national television broadcasted absolutely no information on the events, and aired documentaries, cartoons and no news on any of the protests. To me, this looked very much alike what the Romanian Television aired during the Romanian Revolution in December '89 when during the fights in the streets of Bucharest the Television aired no images from the centre of Bucharest.

But, back to Moldavia, at the end of the day, sadly, the Parliament and Presidency buildings were devastated, making it easy for the Communist leaders to produce some disinformation propaganda based on real footage.

Yet again, sadly, but it seems under the protection of some of the aforementioned instigators, the flags of the EU and Romania were waved at the highest levels of the Parliament building during the time the protesters allegedly took over that building (there were several reports that the Police forces actually simply let them in, without actually needing/being forced to do that; also the passivity of the policemen seen in the footage from Romanian televisons was obvious).

As many Moldavian students live and study in Romania, some of them wanted to go home and take part at the protests happening in Chi in u. To their surprise, many of them were denied the right to enter their home country. Many, if not all, Romanian journalists were also denied access in the country accusing alternatively technical issues, lack of proper papers (although only the passport or the ID card was officially required), lack of safety, or simply refusing without reason.


Today, the Moldavian president Voronin, accused Romania as being behind the manifestations in Chi in u, Moldova's capital and said it will declare as a persona non grata the Ambasador of Romania in Moldova, and thus forcing him to leave Moldova within 24 hours. He went even further and said that visas will be required from now on for Romanian nationals. As soon as this was announced, it was one of the most invoked reasons by the Moldavian customs as a rejection reason, although, according to Moldavian Embassy officials in Romania, no rules or procedure were known for the release of visas for Romanian nationals.

Also, during Wenesday, Moldavian crossing points were opened and closed alternatively but incosistently accros the entire border for Moldavian nationals. Romanian nationals were denied in most cases (although some Romanian truck drivers were reported as allowed to cross). At some point during the day the Moldavian officials from the customs told the Moldavian students awating at the border that they are offered access on the condition they go direclty home with the buses provided by the Moldavian customs and were warned that going to Chi in u wasn't a smart choice for them. Some of the information from students which managed to enter their home country suggested that is advisable to not enter the country since they were going to be denied of the right to leave the country later, when they were to return to Romania to their studies (after Easter).

What's sadder is that the Moldavian voting system is built in such a way that the vote counting, in the end is done by Government officials behind closed doors, inside a Ministry. OTOH, the international official observed the things which happend in public, but did not see any of the dead voter lists (since they were not present when those votes were casted), and declared the vote as mostly legal and without major or significant incidents.


According to the media, before the elections, the Communists were credited with 35-37% of the votes in an independent poll, while in the exit poll conducted by the Communists themselves they were credited with 42-45% of the votes. In the end the last official partial results credited them with approximately 51% of the votes.

About Vladimir Voronin, it is a known fact that he has double citizenship, Moldavian and Russian and is a reserve general within the Russian Army and currently has a pretty nice pension from the Russian state.


All I can say is that, although the Moldavians' desire to have a real democracy is a legal and reasonable request, the western world chose, due to the international circumstances, to look the other way around and not to incommodate Russia in any way. Moreover, to accuse Romania to have unionist desires an act upon those desires is planly stupid since now Romania is part of the EU and Moldova uniting with Romania is simply impossible now, since Moldavia's economy would sunk even more the fragile and regressing Romanian economy and Romania would instantly fail the EU requirements which would mean disaster for us.

I just wanted to make an USB stick bootable and wondered why mkdiskimage -4 /dev/sda 0 32 64 complained about the disk having too many cylinders. After a few moments, it ocurred to me that since libata, the system hard disk has become sda and that the stick was sdb or sdc. One ctrl-C later, fdisk confirmed both counts: That I accidentally started mkdiskimaging my main system hard disk and that the partition table was already gone. A few hours later, the notebook is back in business without too much data loss. Lucky me. My notebook has an alibi installation of Windows XP in its first primary partition sized 4 GB. Since I aborted the mkdiskimage process early enough, I hoped that only the windows installation was hosed. The Linux system is entirely in LVM (with crypted LVs), and LVM hadn t noticed yet that its PV was gone. I reckoned that I still had a chance to rescue my data if I didn t reboot. So I hastily commandeered an USB hard disk (thanks, $CUSTOMER, for quickly supplying one), fdisked, pvcreated and vgextended it and started the pvmove. While this was happening, I theoretically was able to continue working, which I didn t because I was afraid of losing. About half an hour into the copy process, the USB disk chose to deregister itself and the pvmove aborted. Rebooting the disk made it reappear as sde (it was sdd before), and miraculously, a new pvmove call just worked. However, a good fraction of actions on the shell resulted in a lot of input/output errors on the screen. I guessed that this was the first sign of my data finally dying, but I let the pvmove continue. After the pvmove was finished (which was rather fast since the move of the crypted LV means that the crypted data is moved and not de- and recrypted), I had to recreate a /dev/sda2 partition with type 8e before the LVM tools allowed me to vgreduce the VG. I then zeroed out the first 10 GB of the internal disk and spent a few hours reinstalling and patching XP from scratch before I finally went through the pvcreate, vgextend, pvmove routine in the other direction. Then the big moment arrived: fsck of all LVs. I guess that the reason for the input/output errors was that /usr was completely hosed (no single file outside lost+found), but /home and all other file systems holding data where the way back to the (a week old) backup would have been quite painful were ok. I pulled /, /usr and /var from the backup to be consistent again, updated to current sid (avoiding KDE 4 for the time being) and could start working again. The only real loss was a few hours of work that were stored in /usr/local which died along with /usr, so the result of my stupidity was not very catastrophic but still a good lesson. And I have learned that LVM is a robust and resilient beast. Good work. Now I d like to know what happened to my /usr - I always had the impression that pvmove should not break data even when the target disk suddenly goes away...

The workshop I went to recently and the ICT Champions in general ( Website Under Development - release early, anyone?) seem to be funded by public and charity money. As I mentioned, the worst thing was all the needless promotion of certain companies products, so why are they promoting private products instead of being neutral and open? That s bad for Britain, bad for the competing products that are co-produced by the Voluntary and Community Sector and bad for the VCS workers because it trains them in single-tool methods instead of transferable skills. Let the private sector pay for their own adverts! Why can t we stop making this mistake? Which brings me to the other problem with that ICT advice: well-meaning common-sector businesses like ours can t update it autonomously, for two reasons:

1. All the texts I saw were under various Non-Commercial and No Derivative licences which make them hazardous or unusable to IT support businesses.
2. Particularly on Free and Open Source Software, the advice is at best misleading and unhelpful. This is very frustrating: based on our private work and success in explaining things, I m sure we could do better, but for various reasons, no-one is paying for us to publish that. Instead, someone s paying to publish statements like There s no such thing as open source written by someone from an association that includes Microsoft and Oracle.

Again, why is public and charity money paying for the private sector s marketing? Why is it published under blocking copyright terms, scattering broken glass across the path just built? Where can we get funding to publish our explanations?

Jacob has lately been telling us gate gamma kassen so sick (Great Grandma Klassen is so sick), after his visit to the hospital, and it s true. Today started normal enough, but by 2:45 I got an email from my mom, saying that grandma had taken yet another turn for the worse; her pulse was racing, her temperature feverish, and her breathing shallow and difficult. The last grandchild that was going to be there made it, and got the last flicker of recognition from grandma. I wrapped some things up at work. Then I made the short drive from work to the nursing home, and got there just after 4. I went in to her room there, and it was full of family. Two of her children were singing her favorite hymns. I can never forget my uncle s deep bass voice as he stood at her bedside, holding her arm, while my aunt patted her head, both of them singing. Grandma s only remaining sibling, her younger brother Melvin, sat on the other side of the bed, looking on. Grandma s white table and chairs, which were in grandma and grandpa s house as long as I can remember, and followed grandma through all of the four other places she lived in the last years of her life, were in her room at the nursing home too. It always felt like home to be with grandma and those familiar things that she always took with her. Despite what was happening, I was glad she was back at home. My uncle motioned me over to her bedside, and I took her hand for a few minutes. It felt cold and weak; for the first time, she didn t grab my hand at all. A nurse came in to check oxygen saturation, but the machine wasn t able to get a reading due to poor circulation to her hand. She wasn t able to get a heart rate either because the heart was racing so fast. She discussed briefly whether the family wanted them to continue giving her oxygen, and they decided that they would, for her comfort. My uncle and aunt kept singing. I blew my nose and dabbed at my eyes, and there were hugs all around. And just a few minutes later, grandma peacefully stopped breathing, maybe 20 minutes after I had arrived. They went to get the nurse, who came back to listen to grandma s heart again, though we knew what she would find. She took the stethoscope off, and she almost lost her composure, but managed to say you can turn the oxygen off now. Several people gave grandma a last hug. After a few minutes with just the family, they told the nurses to go ahead and call the funeral home. That set off a lot of activity making arrangements for the next few days, funeral plans, and the like. I stepped back into grandma s room a few times, while the family was in the sitting area right outside it discussing. I looked around at the family photos on the wall, the old table and chairs, the recliner. Now, these are the things that were grandma s. It didn t feel like home anymore. Terah and Jacob were stuck at home Terah s car was at the mechanic for repair today. I called to give her the news. She wanted to come to be with the family, but I didn t really want to leave. She tried calling some friends to see if they could give her a lift to the mechanic, but not one of them was available. I talked to her again and suggested she just call the mechanic. She wasn t even halfway through describing the situation when he interrupted with, We ll have it at your place right away! Well, I don t expect you to have to do that, or you could certainly wait until you close. Nope, this isn t your average community, we ll bring it right over. You should be there. Grandma has enjoyed a simple life and had requested a simple death: no extraordinary measures at the end of life, no embalming either. So, by law, the burial must happen within 24 hours of death, and will be tomorrow. After all the arrangements, people realized nobody had supper yet. We went to the quickest available option pizza and ate there. It was paid for out of grandma s remaining money the last meal of so many that she provided for her family over the years. It was a happy meal. As I drove home, NPR news was on the radio. There were the same stories we hear all the time: the economy, the mideast, the president. Normally I m interested, but today I shut it off. Today is different. Tomorrow, for the second time in four years, I will help carry a grandparent s casket a few days before Easter. I ll end tonight with this photo. It was taken soon after Jacob was born. Grandma came to the hospital and held him. That smile sums her up perfectly.

I live in a 55 year old house. That's not something to be worried about, of course, but it does mean that my house needs major maintenance works to continue to be in good shape. This week, said major maintenance jobs began. We are in the process of replacing all of the windows - It might sound a bit scary by today standards... But if you have ever been here... Well, this house was built in a very different era, when the newly built University City lied several kilometers South of the city border and land was cheap here. Most houses in the area were built for University teachers (this particular house was for twenty years home to Marcos Moshinsky, Mexico's most important Physicist who, coincidentially, passed away last week; Dr. Moshinsky was my father's teacher and mentor). Anyway, we just started the window teardown process. The workers are going quite faster than I expected. Still, I am worried about the waitfor(). As anybody who has come to this house will know, we live on a very busy avenue. Even 30 years ago, when my parents moved here, they installed double glasses on every window - But did some mistakes (i.e. we have some broken glasses which are unchangeable for practical purposes). This time we decided to buy from an established vendor for this kind of windows. Double-glass windows are common in colder regions - But here, they are quite rare. Strange, being this a noisy city... So we researched a bit, and found a vendor with good quality - Multivi, in Puebla. What we didn't count on... Is that they were so informal. We paid in late December and were told delivery would take around two months... And we are still waiting, this time pressing them for a commitment. After all, we are already lacking several windows, and... Well, around May we start having rains. We DEFINITIVELY don't want to be stuck without windows by May! Anyway... I recently sent out a semi-VAC anouncement to debian-private. And this is extensive to any project I am related to: The next days I will be paying more attention to whatever needs to be done at home. Please don't expect prompt replies to mail from me (yes, as if I usually replied promptly...) I do have network access, but not much computer time.

A few hours ago, a new version of kernel-package was uploaded to experimental. This is a major change,and I would appreciate it if folks took it out for a spin, kicked the tires, and provide feedback about where this version is lacking. This is only part of the way along in this development cycle. I would like to add a debug-info separation, either in a different directory than / in the image packages, or a separate package by itself. I would also like to create an overlay directory for /usr/share/kernel-package/, so people can inject code or override the defaults for kernel-package easily. I am also willing to make any changes to standardize the handling of hook scripts for kernel packages in Debian.