So I know, I know. There are a lot of annoying memes circulating on the net/facebook/[pick your spot] and well, sometimes the best thing to do is stop the damn thing by ignoring its existence. But I have to say, I have completely, totally and absolutely have loved reading the 25 things notes on facebook. It just provides a window into the extraordinary character that emerges from the collection of mundane events/likes/pleasures that make up people s lives. Reading them took me back to elementary school when and where I was an avid slam-booker. I have very fond of collecting and reading the tidbits of thoughts and information people left behind in my notebook. What also struck me about these recent 25 thingie notes is how odd or not as interesting, I think, it would be to have them recited to you over coffee or at dinner. Now I could be wrong here but I think the list-like quality would just not fly in a conversational context. A few facts with more embellishment would work but a whole string of thoughts would just sound flat and out of place. A reminder that format does matter for engendering certain types of knowledge. So here is my list.. 1. I looked like a boy for the first three years of my life (but a cute one, I think).
2. I love dogs so much that I often think that if I had a criminal streak, I would be a dog nabber.
3. I would routinely bring home dogs from the street when I was a kid. Many of them ended up dead after being hit by cars (they liked to return to the street and this only happened to 2 of them).
4. My favorite concert was Jimmy Cliff in a parking lot. There was lots of rain and lots of weed.
5. I like have a penchant for tall men. My mom claims it was because I lacked a strong father figure in my early childhood years. Who knows if that is the case.
6. I knew the instant that I took an anthropology class I wanted to be an anthropologist. I guess I made it happen (and it was one of the few moments of clarity in life).
7. I started the first environmental club in my high school and my car was called the recycle-mobile because there were always cans in the back seat.
8. I love the ocean; swimming, snorkeling, diving, sailing, and just watching it, though the cold ocean is not always by cup of tea.
9. I had terrible insomnia for a year and slept for a good chunk of it on a couch. I like the snuggle feeling I got from sleeping against a back.
10. I am very indecisive person. It is annoying as i tend to worry a lot about whether I made the right decision.
11. I was a shy kid and barely talked until meeting my best friend in kindergarten, Yael
12. I also failed the psychological test to get into school but my mom managed to get me in anyway.
13. I often wonder if I would have been a nun if I had lived prior to 1900s to escape various domestic obligations. I think it might have been fun to be a nun.. Fun to be a nun also has a nice ring to it.

14. I am currently struggling with an Etsy addiction and the UPS delivery guy asked if delivering packages would be a daily occurrence.. I just find all the stuff amazing and it brings me back to my artist days when I used to paint and spend a heck of a lot of time in the darkroom.
15. I have recurrent issues with nausea and have been hospitalized for it a few times. It is gut wrenching and really uncomfortable when it happens.
16. When I left NYC in 1997 I thought i would never come back. I am here now and quite happy.
17. I was obsessed with Ultimate Frisbee for many man years. I played more than I studied and finally gave up as it was ruining (or perhaps ruined?) my neck. I still miss it.
18. I LOVE tostones and would eat them everyday if they were not, you know, so bad for you.
19. I have been using IRC for 7 years and consider some of my best friends to come from there.
20. Some folks have asked how I became interested in politics and I am pretty sure it was Doonesbury.
21. When I was like 4 we went to some fair and I swore that I almost got flung off some rickety ride but this could be totally wrong. It was really frightening.
22. The coldest night of my life was spent in Los Nevados, Venezuela and the scariest car ride I ever took was leaving Los Nevados in a jeep and something that resembled a road.
23. A few sucker fish once tried to stick on me while I was doing a decompression stop after a dive. My dive buddy smacked the fish, which had devil faces, with the regulator, saving me from what would have been a really sort of sucky situation.
24. I am trying to learn how to surf and am really sorry that I did not do so when a teenager since I don t exactly have the time to really learn.
25. Since I am not sure how to end, I will do so with a

So I know, I know. There are a lot of annoying memes circulating on the net/facebook/[pick your spot] and well, sometimes the best thing to do is stop the damn thing by ignoring its existence. But I have to say, I have completely, totally and absolutely have loved reading the 25 things notes on facebook. It just provides a window into the extraordinary character that emerges from the collection of mundane events/likes/pleasures that make up people s lives. Reading them took me back to elementary school when and where I was an avid slam-booker. I have very fond of collecting and reading the tidbits of thoughts and information people left behind in my notebook. What also struck me about these recent 25 thingie notes is how odd or not as interesting, I think, it would be to have them recited to you over coffee or at dinner. Now I could be wrong here but I think the list-like quality would just not fly in a conversational context. A few facts with more embellishment would work but a whole string of thoughts would just sound flat and out of place. A reminder that format does matter for engendering certain types of knowledge. So here is my list.. 1. I looked like a boy for the first three years of my life (but a cute one, I think).
2. I love dogs so much that I often think that if I had a criminal streak, I would be a dog nabber.
3. I would routinely bring home dogs from the street when I was a kid. Many of them ended up dead after being hit by cars (they liked to return to the street and this only happened to 2 of them).
4. My favorite concert was Jimmy Cliff in a parking lot. There was lots of rain and lots of weed.
5. I like have a penchant for tall men. My mom claims it was because I lacked a strong father figure in my early childhood years. Who knows if that is the case.
6. I knew the instant that I took an anthropology class I wanted to be an anthropologist. I guess I made it happen (and it was one of the few moments of clarity in life).
7. I started the first environmental club in my high school and my car was called the recycle-mobile because there were always cans in the back seat.
8. I love the ocean; swimming, snorkeling, diving, sailing, and just watching it, though the cold ocean is not always by cup of tea.
9. I had terrible insomnia for a year and slept for a good chunk of it on a couch. I like the snuggle feeling I got from sleeping against a back.
10. I am very indecisive person. It is annoying as i tend to worry a lot about whether I made the right decision.
11. I was a shy kid and barely talked until meeting my best friend in kindergarten, Yael
12. I also failed the psychological test to get into school but my mom managed to get me in anyway.
13. I often wonder if I would have been a nun if I had lived prior to 1900s to escape various domestic obligations. I think it might have been fun to be a nun.. Fun to be a nun also has a nice ring to it.

14. I am currently struggling with an Etsy addiction and the UPS delivery guy asked if delivering packages would be a daily occurrence.. I just find all the stuff amazing and it brings me back to my artist days when I used to paint and spend a heck of a lot of time in the darkroom.
15. I have recurrent issues with nausea and have been hospitalized for it a few times. It is gut wrenching and really uncomfortable when it happens.
16. When I left NYC in 1997 I thought i would never come back. I am here now and quite happy.
17. I was obsessed with Ultimate Frisbee for many man years. I played more than I studied and finally gave up as it was ruining (or perhaps ruined?) my neck. I still miss it.
18. I LOVE tostones and would eat them everyday if they were not, you know, so bad for you.
19. I have been using IRC for 7 years and consider some of my best friends to come from there.
20. Some folks have asked how I became interested in politics and I am pretty sure it was Doonesbury.
21. When I was like 4 we went to some fair and I swore that I almost got flung off some rickety ride but this could be totally wrong. It was really frightening.
22. The coldest night of my life was spent in Los Nevados, Venezuela and the scariest car ride I ever took was leaving Los Nevados in a jeep and something that resembled a road.
23. A few sucker fish once tried to stick on me while I was doing a decompression stop after a dive. My dive buddy smacked the fish, which had devil faces, with the regulator, saving me from what would have been a really sort of sucky situation.
24. I am trying to learn how to surf and am really sorry that I did not do so when a teenager since I don t exactly have the time to really learn.
25. Since I am not sure how to end, I will do so with a

So I know, I know. There are a lot of annoying memes circulating on the net/facebook/[pick your spot] and well, sometimes the best thing to do is stop the damn thing by ignoring its existence. But I have to say, I have completely, totally and absolutely have loved reading the 25 things notes on facebook. It just provides a window into the extraordinary character that emerges from the collection of mundane events/likes/pleasures that make up people s lives. Reading them took me back to elementary school when and where I was an avid slam-booker. I have very fond of collecting and reading the tidbits of thoughts and information people left behind in my notebook. What also struck me about these recent 25 thingie notes is how odd or not as interesting, I think, it would be to have them recited to you over coffee or at dinner. Now I could be wrong here but I think the list-like quality would just not fly in a conversational context. A few facts with more embellishment would work but a whole string of thoughts would just sound flat and out of place. A reminder that format does matter for engendering certain types of knowledge. So here is my list.. 1. I looked like a boy for the first three years of my life (but a cute one, I think).
2. I love dogs so much that I often think that if I had a criminal streak, I would be a dog nabber.
3. I would routinely bring home dogs from the street when I was a kid. Many of them ended up dead after being hit by cars (they liked to return to the street and this only happened to 2 of them).
4. My favorite concert was Jimmy Cliff in a parking lot. There was lots of rain and lots of weed.
5. I like have a penchant for tall men. My mom claims it was because I lacked a strong father figure in my early childhood years. Who knows if that is the case.
6. I knew the instant that I took an anthropology class I wanted to be an anthropologist. I guess I made it happen (and it was one of the few moments of clarity in life).
7. I started the first environmental club in my high school and my car was called the recycle-mobile because there were always cans in the back seat.
8. I love the ocean; swimming, snorkeling, diving, sailing, and just watching it, though the cold ocean is not always by cup of tea.
9. I had terrible insomnia for a year and slept for a good chunk of it on a couch. I like the snuggle feeling I got from sleeping against a back.
10. I am very indecisive person. It is annoying as i tend to worry a lot about whether I made the right decision.
11. I was a shy kid and barely talked until meeting my best friend in kindergarten, Yael
12. I also failed the psychological test to get into school but my mom managed to get me in anyway.
13. I often wonder if I would have been a nun if I had lived prior to 1900s to escape various domestic obligations. I think it might have been fun to be a nun.. Fun to be a nun also has a nice ring to it.

14. I am currently struggling with an Etsy addiction and the UPS delivery guy asked if delivering packages would be a daily occurrence.. I just find all the stuff amazing and it brings me back to my artist days when I used to paint and spend a heck of a lot of time in the darkroom.
15. I have recurrent issues with nausea and have been hospitalized for it a few times. It is gut wrenching and really uncomfortable when it happens.
16. When I left NYC in 1997 I thought i would never come back. I am here now and quite happy.
17. I was obsessed with Ultimate Frisbee for many man years. I played more than I studied and finally gave up as it was ruining (or perhaps ruined?) my neck. I still miss it.
18. I LOVE tostones and would eat them everyday if they were not, you know, so bad for you.
19. I have been using IRC for 7 years and consider some of my best friends to come from there.
20. Some folks have asked how I became interested in politics and I am pretty sure it was Doonesbury.
21. When I was like 4 we went to some fair and I swore that I almost got flung off some rickety ride but this could be totally wrong. It was really frightening.
22. The coldest night of my life was spent in Los Nevados, Venezuela and the scariest car ride I ever took was leaving Los Nevados in a jeep and something that resembled a road.
23. A few sucker fish once tried to stick on me while I was doing a decompression stop after a dive. My dive buddy smacked the fish, which had devil faces, with the regulator, saving me from what would have been a really sort of sucky situation.
24. I am trying to learn how to surf and am really sorry that I did not do so when a teenager since I don t exactly have the time to really learn.
25. Since I am not sure how to end, I will do so with a

Its getting close to valentines day again so I thought some of you geeks out there would appreciate a post I made last november about a hack that was inspired by an XKCD comic. Anyhow here is a link to the original post titled Roses are #ff0000 , hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Its getting close to valentines day again so I thought some of you geeks out there would appreciate a post I made last november about a hack that was inspired by an XKCD comic. Anyhow here is a link to the original post titled Roses are #ff0000 , hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

initramfs-tools design principle is to ship a generic initramfs. The design explicitly allows lots of customization through hook and boot scripts. A previous post focused on the history of initramfs-tools. Several contributors enhanced initramfs-tools since the Debian Etch release so the non exclusive new feature list:

• The initramfs contains all drivers/ ata,block,ide,mmc,scsi modules instead of a stupid hard coded list. This gives bonus points for getting more future proof.
• Configurable small initramfs: The MODULES=dep mode walks /sys/ for the needed drivers of the specific box. This was the most wanted feature and is the new default for some Debian-Installer embedded architectures. The code seems in between well tested even if some corner cases might still emerge. The smaller initramfs is needed for specific bootloaders and helps on slow target boxes.
  For a even smaller initramfs you can kick busybox if you don't have an lvm2 root or don't need it's debugging tools.
• Quicker initramfs build: The update-initramfs command uses dpkg trigger and thus not every postinst update-initramfs(8) call leads to a new initramfs build. Also the build time got improved.
• Improved panic message (yes users need to be handhold at this point :).
• Potential debug log is visible after call to init(8) inside /dev/.initramfs/.
• update-initramfs got hardened against failure on update or ro partitons.
• The klibc utilities got worked on: chroot, fstype, ipconfig, mount, nfsmount sync.
• Fixed various bugs in NFS and networking setup due to incorrect option parsing.
• Allow to blacklist modules on boot by cmdline bootarg blacklist=modulename.
• Allow non root usage of mkinitramfs.

As bonus to some cleanup and docs update we have also seen a Ubuntu sync and are not too diverged.

New day, new luck... and next try... ;-)

Today I received two emails with even newer BIOS updates for my problem. The second, latest version 1.80p did actually fix the problem of not booting with 4 GB of RAM. I haven't tried the first, previous version 1.80k yet, so I can't tell if that worked as well.

Anyway, despite the fact that the machine now recognizes 4 GB dual-ranked memory, Linux uses 3.1 GB of it - at least when not using Xen... But first without Xen, standard Debian 2.6.26-1-686 kernel:

[ 0.000000] Initializing cgroup subsys cpuset
[ 0.000000] Initializing cgroup subsys cpu
[ 0.000000] Linux version 2.6.26-1-686 (Debian 2.6.26-13) (waldi@debian.org) (gcc version 4.1.3 20080704 (prerelease) (Debian 4.1.2-24)) #1 SMP Sat Jan 10 18:29:31 UTC 2009
[ 0.000000] BIOS-provided physical RAM map:
[ 0.000000] BIOS-e820: 0000000000000000 - 000000000009fc00 (usable)
[ 0.000000] BIOS-e820: 000000000009fc00 - 00000000000a0000 (reserved)
[ 0.000000] BIOS-e820: 00000000000e4000 - 0000000000100000 (reserved)
[ 0.000000] BIOS-e820: 0000000000100000 - 00000000bff30000 (usable)
[ 0.000000] BIOS-e820: 00000000bff30000 - 00000000bff40000 (ACPI data)
[ 0.000000] BIOS-e820: 00000000bff40000 - 00000000bfff0000 (ACPI NVS)
[ 0.000000] BIOS-e820: 00000000bfff0000 - 00000000c0000000 (reserved)
[ 0.000000] BIOS-e820: 00000000fffc0000 - 0000000100000000 (reserved)
[ 0.000000] BIOS-e820: 0000000100000000 - 0000000140000000 (usable)
[ 0.000000] WARNING: BIOS bug: CPU MTRRs don't cover all of memory, losing 2048MB of RAM.
[ 0.000000] ------------[ cut here ]------------
[ 0.000000] WARNING: at arch/x86/kernel/cpu/mtrr/main.c:706 mtrr_trim_uncached_memory+0x123/0x183()
[ 0.000000] Modules linked in:
[ 0.000000] Pid: 0, comm: swapper Not tainted 2.6.26-1-686 #1
[ 0.000000] [] warn_on_slowpath+0x40/0x66
[ 0.000000] [] _spin_lock_irqsave+0x16/0x2f
[ 0.000000] [] _spin_unlock_irqrestore+0xd/0x10
[ 0.000000] [] release_console_sem+0x173/0x18c
[ 0.000000] [] vprintk+0x2d2/0x2de
[ 0.000000] [] generic_get_mtrr+0x2e/0x11e
[ 0.000000] [] printk+0x14/0x18
[ 0.000000] [] mtrr_trim_uncached_memory+0x123/0x183
[ 0.000000] [] mtrr_bp_init+0x20c/0x214
[ 0.000000] [] setup_arch+0x254/0x6bb
[ 0.000000] [] printk+0x14/0x18
[ 0.000000] [] start_kernel+0x62/0x2d7
[ 0.000000] =======================
[ 0.000000] ---[ end trace 4eaa2a86a8e2da22 ]---
[ 0.000000] update e820 for mtrr
[ 0.000000] modified physical RAM map:
[ 0.000000] modified: 0000000000000000 - 000000000009fc00 (usable)
[ 0.000000] modified: 000000000009fc00 - 00000000000a0000 (reserved)
[ 0.000000] modified: 00000000000e4000 - 0000000000100000 (reserved)
[ 0.000000] modified: 0000000000100000 - 00000000bff30000 (usable)
[ 0.000000] modified: 00000000bff30000 - 00000000bff40000 (ACPI data)
[ 0.000000] modified: 00000000bff40000 - 00000000bfff0000 (ACPI NVS)
[ 0.000000] modified: 00000000bfff0000 - 00000000c0000000 (reserved)
[ 0.000000] modified: 00000000fffc0000 - 0000000140000000 (reserved)
[ 0.000000] 2175MB HIGHMEM available.
[ 0.000000] 896MB LOWMEM available.
[ 0.000000] Entering add_active_range(0, 0, 786224) 0 entries of 256 used

Now, when I try to boot Xen hypervisor & kernel, Linux recognizes 4 GB of memory:

[ 0.000000] Initializing cgroup subsys cpuset
[ 0.000000] Initializing cgroup subsys cpu
[ 0.000000] Linux version 2.6.26-1-xen-686 (Debian 2.6.26-13) (waldi@debian.org) (gcc version 4.1.3 20080704 (prerelease) (Debian 4.1.2-24)) #1 SMP Sat Jan 10 22:52:47 UTC 2009
[ 0.000000] Reserving virtual address space above 0xf5800000
[ 0.000000] BIOS-provided physical RAM map:
[ 0.000000] Xen: 0000000000000000 - 00000000f5730000 (usable)
[ 0.000000] 3199MB HIGHMEM available.
[ 0.000000] 728MB LOWMEM available.
[ 0.000000] Entering add_active_range(0, 0, 1005360) 0 entries of 256 used
[ 0.000000] Zone PFN ranges:
[ 0.000000] DMA 0 -> 4096
[ 0.000000] Normal 4096 -> 186368
[ 0.000000] HighMem 186368 -> 1005360
[ 0.000000] Movable zone start PFN for each node
[ 0.000000] early_node_map[1] active PFN ranges
[ 0.000000] 0: 0 -> 1005360
[ 0.000000] On node 0 totalpages: 1005360
[ 0.000000] DMA zone: 32 pages used for memmap
[ 0.000000] DMA zone: 0 pages reserved
[ 0.000000] DMA zone: 4064 pages, LIFO batch:0
[ 0.000000] Normal zone: 1424 pages used for memmap
[ 0.000000] Normal zone: 180848 pages, LIFO batch:31
[ 0.000000] HighMem zone: 6399 pages used for memmap
[ 0.000000] HighMem zone: 812593 pages, LIFO batch:31
[ 0.000000] Movable zone: 0 pages used for memmap
[ 0.000000] DMI 2.3 present.
[ 0.000000] ACPI: RSDP 000F9BC0, 0014 (r0 ACPIAM)
[ 0.000000] ACPI: RSDT BFF30000, 0030 (r1 A M I OEMRSDT 6000816 MSFT 97)
[ 0.000000] ACPI: FACP BFF30200, 0081 (r2 A M I OEMFACP 6000816 MSFT 97)
[ 0.000000] ACPI: DSDT BFF30360, 3417 (r1 P4V88 P4V88001 1 INTL 2002026)
[ 0.000000] ACPI: FACS BFF40000, 0040
[ 0.000000] ACPI: APIC BFF30300, 0052 (r1 A M I OEMAPIC 6000816 MSFT 97)
[ 0.000000] ACPI: OEMB BFF40040, 003F (r1 A M I OEMBIOS 6000816 MSFT 97)
[ 0.000000] ACPI: LAPIC (acpi_id[0x01] lapic_id[0x00] enabled)
[ 0.000000] ACPI: LAPIC (acpi_id[0x02] lapic_id[0x01] enabled)
[ 0.000000] ACPI: IOAPIC (id[0x02] address[0xfec00000] gsi_base[0])
[ 0.000000] IOAPIC[0]: apic_id 2, version 3, address 0xfec00000, GSI 0-23
[ 0.000000] ACPI: INT_SRC_OVR (bus 0 bus_irq 0 global_irq 2 dfl dfl)
[ 0.000000] ACPI: IRQ0 used by override.
[ 0.000000] ACPI: IRQ2 used by override.
[ 0.000000] ACPI: IRQ9 used by override.
[ 0.000000] Using ACPI (MADT) for SMP configuration information
[ 0.000000] Allocating PCI resources starting at c4000000 (gap: c0000000:3ffc0000)
[ 0.000000] PERCPU: Allocating 28552 bytes of per cpu data
[ 0.000000] NR_CPUS: 32, nr_cpu_ids: 2
[ 0.000000] Built 1 zonelists in Zone order, mobility grouping on. Total pages: 997505
[ 0.000000] Kernel command line: root=/dev/md2 console=tty0
[ 0.000000] Enabling fast FPU save and restore... done.
[ 0.000000] Enabling unmasked SIMD FPU exception support... done.
[ 0.000000] Initializing CPU#0
[ 0.000000] PID hash table entries: 4096 (order: 12, 16384 bytes)
[ 0.000000] Xen reported: 2792.268 MHz processor.
[ 0.004000] Console: colour VGA+ 80x25
[ 0.004000] console [tty0] enabled
[ 0.004000] console [hvc-1] enabled
[ 0.004000] Dentry cache hash table entries: 131072 (order: 7, 524288 bytes)
[ 0.004000] Inode-cache hash table entries: 65536 (order: 6, 262144 bytes)
[ 0.004000] Software IO TLB enabled:
[ 0.004000] Aperture: 64 megabytes
[ 0.004000] Kernel range: c3bce000 - c7bce000
[ 0.004000] Address size: 27 bits
[ 0.004000] PCI-DMA: Using software bounce buffering for IO (SWIOTLB)
[ 0.004000] Memory: 3888208k/4021440k available (1843k kernel code, 124136k reserved, 742k data, 196k init, 3275968k highmem)

Sadly, the machine gets so slow that it needs >20 mins (1100 secs) to boot. Most likely something is broken with PAE on this machine so it get's awfully slow.
I'm curious what the Asrock support will say about this!? ;)

Side note: I'm really satisfied with the good response from Asrock Support. Asrock might not be the company with the best mainboards available, but its support seems very good to me: very responsive and care taking!

Bruce Schneier is very sceptical about the new hard drive encryption standards released by a group composed of virtually all major storage vendors. He points out that the established software solutions have worked just fine, while this new standards adds complexity (and probably flaws, too) at the hardware level. I'm not so sure myself in which direction the balance goes:

• Encryption (without the key management, which I do not suppose the standard covers) is not that complex to get right and it can easily take advantage of hardware acceleration. (Yes, I don't quote numbers here. Schneier claims he hasn't had problems with encryption speed, but doesn't have numbers either ...)
• It should be a lot easier to subvert a software component than it is to subvert a hardware component.
• It is a lot harder to correct errors in hardware / firmware than in software and get users to apply the updates.
• In many cases the key management is the weak point, not the encryption itself. And key management is hard to get right regardless of where the encryption sits.
• I'm sure the abysmal track record of encrypted drives affects only the cheap USB drives and not the type of hardware we're talking about here. But, can I really be sure? (Serious) software solutions come from companies where security is the main business, whereas the hardware encryption will be implemented by storage companies which so far haven't had to care much about these issues.
• Finally: This standard should replace a number of proprietary solutions since some vendors already do offer encrypted drives anyway. Assuming the standard is sane, this should certainly be a Good Thing in any case.

In August I got a very nice HP 2510p notebook which is now my main system for development. This took a while for two reasons. First of all the system did not resume 100% reliably. This has now been solved, although the final patches needed for that will only be in 2.6.29, but that's no problem as I run upstream kernels anyway (I do quite a bit of kernel testing). Kudos have to go to Rafael J. Wysocki who has been doing a huge amount of work to improve the suspend/resume code in the kernel. Second of all I wanted a docking station so I could continue to use my 19" monitor, with the laptop's LCD as second display. I bought the docking station in December. The challenge then was to automatically (de)activate the external display when the notebook is (un)docked. Unfortunately there are no ACPI events, but the hp-wmi module (written by Mattew Garrett) sends docking events to the input subsystem. I wrote a small program to catch these events and a script that uses xrandr to switch displays. There were two issues with that setup. The first docking event was getting lost, but I managed to fix that. And the X server would crash when starting some applications (einstein and virtualbox) after undocking, but there's a patch for that too now. The notebook is now really well supported and stable.

• suspend/resume works completely reliably
• the docking station works nicely and so does the dual display setup
• wireless works nicely
• the SD card reader works (was used to develop support for MMC/SD cards in Debian Installer)
• the accelerometer works (so I can play Tux Racer and Neverball by tilting the notebook) using the lis3lv02d module, and Pavel Machek recently even added freefall detection, including example code to park the hard disk (targeted for 2.6.30)
• the fingerprint reader works, though I'm not sure I actually want to use that for logging on to the system

The system is currently running Debian/lenny with a KDE desktop and a 2.6.29-rc3 kernel. Working with upstream developers to get this far has really been worthwhile, and fun.

My home file server, Asterisk PBX, firewall and general router is apparently dying. I am looking forward to replacing it, because it s old and eats too much power anyway. Now I just need to figure out what to put in its place. Basically I need a low-power machine that ll be always on, with at least two LAN ports (three would be better, but I can also connect the cable modem with USB), and a means to connect at least two harddrives with at least 1Tb capacity. I d rather use SATA for the drives than USB, but I would be willing to investigate eSATA and external drives too. However, I want to have direct access to the drives and not be forced to use some sort of proprietary RAID. At the moment, I am investigating the Thecus N3200PRO, which has quite a reasonable hardware selection. The device has a low-power AMD Geode processor, but for some reason I have it stuck in my head that the ARM would be a better choice. Does anyone have experience with this device? Or maybe someone would like to make a different suggestion? Mail me! I d prefer a device that I can get working without too much learning or frickling. The less I have to learn/know about and touch hardware, the better. It would help if the machine booted off the harddisk, for then I could install Linux elsewhere and move the disks. Alternatively, network booting and a serial console would work, although I hear that USB makes that unnecessarily painful. I d like to avoid flashing ROMs or other black magic just to get it working. NP: AC/DC: Powerage Update: The folks at EXSYS kindly replied and filled me in with some information regarding the N3200PRO. Thanks! First of all, Thecus officially claims that it is not possible to install Linux on the device (although the device is running Linux, according to the hardware list). Second, the machine boots off a Flash-ROM, which makes the installation more difficult than I d like it, and apparently also one-way: once the Thecus firmware has been overwritten, there seems to be no way to get it back. I am looking elsewhere now, because even though the hardware is exactly what I want, I won t give money to a company who impose shackles on their customers and force them to use software that may not be up-to-date, and which is probably castrated I d be surprised if the N3200PRO spoke IPv6, for instance. Nevertheless, I ve asked about installing Debian in the Thecus User Group forum and I also dropped a message to Thecus itself. I ll keep this post up-to-date, so come back for more.

sorting text records on the first column only It turns out that join is a strange beast. Let's say you have two files, which are textual records using TAB as separator, containing different columns beside the first one, which is the record key. Using join you can do cool stuff like join file1 file2 to obtain a join in the relations sense, by default on the first column. The join manpage states that the two fields must be sorted on the join field. This is of course to avoid complexity explosion. The annoying thing is that if you forget to do that, you will miss tuples, without any warning, which is not good (and can actually be at least spotted avoiding complexity explosion ...). So yeah, if I'm here it's because after having been hit by this, I finally read the fine manpage But how to sort on the join field? Turns out that dear old sort -u file sponge file is not enough. Why? Because by default it will use all keys to sort and then you will end up sorting also on data values; needless to say that such sorting methods is not stable among the two different files you want to sort in turn. OK then, let's try with sort -u -k 1 file sponge file. Not even, but close. ... because sort with this syntax will start sorting at key 1 (which is the default), but then continue sorting with the other keys, in the hope of doing you a favour. The magic line is then sort -u -k 1,1 file sponge file, which tells sort to (damn) sort using only the first (damned) key and stopping there. Thank you sort. Have a nice day. PS I've been sick this week, but I'm definitely getting better, so I can finally announce that I'm going to FOSDEM 2009, yay, see you there!

Ted T'so wonders about the LUGs over the world, seeking to answer a conversation he recently had at the Linux Foundation. He quotes a blog posting in Lenovo, Local User Groups - gone the way of the dinosaur? . I think this is an interesting point to gather input from others. In Mexico City, we did have a strong LUG several years ago, holding not-very-regular-but-good-quality-wise meetings, roughly monthly, at Instituto de Ciencias Nucleares. I was active there ~1996-2001.
By 2001, however, the group stopped acting as one - Maybe one of the main factors is that we had a very strong, unquestionable group leader and cohesion factor (Miguel), who worked at Nucleares and regularly got said auditorium. Once Miguel left to form Ximian, the group slowly disgregated. In one of the last LUG meetings, we started working towards the National Free Software Conference (CONSOL)... Nowadays, in Mexico (as a country) we have several conferences around the year, although I'd be hard-pressed to say whether any of them really fills the needs of a LUG (and my answer would probably be negative). Now, there are several smaller groups that have popped up in the void left by the Mexico City LUG - Mainly LUGs local to universities or faculties... And yes, a 25-million-people city is too large to have a single, functional LUG - Just the geographical size of the thing is too daunting. Besides, we are too many people, even though few of us are contributing any real work. But I also recognize that a local *users* group should care about making the users better, before focusing on making the world a better place ;-) Anyway... My intention with this post, besides writing what I see, is to ask to other people that read me (I know this blog is syndicated at Planeta Linux Mexico, maybe even people reading in other Latin American countries through Planeta EDUSOL) to write what they see at their local communities. To make this a bit more useful, please leave a comment (in English, if possible) at this blog, so this can be used as a summary for Ted's request as well.

At the Linux Foundation, I recently had been brainstorming with some my colleagues about ways in which we might be able to reach out to the various local Linux User s Group (LUGS). So I was quite surprised when I saw a blog posting from Lenovo s Connections blog asking the question: Local User Groups - gone the way of the dinosaur? and even more provocatively, Has the web now relegated the user group to history, along with dot matrix printers, cassette tapes for mass storage, and dial up modems with acoustic couplers? I checked on the web for a number of LUG s, such as the Boston Linux and Unix User Group (BLU) and the Silicon Valley LUG (SVLUG), and they appeared to be active, at least in terms of mailing list activity and event calanedars. But of course that doesn t indicate how many people are actually attending the face-to-face meetings, and how strong the LUG s are in general. So let me ask here do you attend or participate in a LUG? How active is it? What do you get out of participating in a LUG?

I've been meaning to try NoMachine NX for a while. Its promise of fast remote X11 sessions sounded exactly like what I wanted to log into my work desktop remotely (I really like having a remote desktop with saved state you can just pick up from when using remote access). That was pretty much all I knew about the software, so I was a completely blank slate. The getting started guide is the perfect example of how not to write a getting started guide. Firstly, Section 1 - "Getting started" - gives me a full history of the product, goes into significant depth about the challenges of forwarding X11 requests, talks about the caching and compression implementation, round-trip latency measurement, the details of two-way proxying system and discusses every other feature of the software. My eyes glazed over after about the first paragraph. That's all great -- I just want to know what to do! At this point, I assume that I'm required to run some sort of daemon at the remote end. I download and install the server package (it is explained that the server package requires the client and agent packages as well, fine). I'm paging down, looking for something to get me started. I'm happy to see Section 7 - "Set up your NX Server environment" (remember, at this point I though I needed some daemon running in the background constantly). It even has some commands commands to type, so I tap away, running nxserver --useradd nxtest --system. My server binary doesn't even seem to recognise these options. I give up, assuming that the server isn't running and nothing will work. The getting started guide has abruptly ended and I have no idea what to do. As it turns out, it's all completely trivial. Here's the missing "getting started guide".

• Download and install the client, agent and server packages on the remote end. You need to have ssh access to this box.
• Install the client on your end.
• Run /usr/NX/bin/nxclient. It will start a wizard where you input the remote host name.
• The client will, under the hood, ssh to the remote end, open the tunnel it needs, start the server and do all the magic required to make things "just work". A remote desktop will appear.
• That's it!

Additional tips:

• It's easy to tunnel this connection (for example, if you have to bounce through a ssh gateway to your internal network). Do something like /usr/NX/bin/nxssh -o 'Compression=no' -L 2022:remote.host:22 -f -N user@sshgateway.company.com and then connect the client to localhost:2022. You don't want to compress this link, as NX is already doing it.
• The only way I can find to make a new session is to start nxclient with the --wizard command.
• Don't click "Disable encryption of all traffic" if you're tunneling. AFAICT this tries to redirect the client to a non-encrypted port, which obviously won't get through.

Other than the documentation, it really works as promised, making remote X11 usable. One really nice feature is that it is smart about the resolution of the remote desktop, filling up your local screen. Add to that you don't need anything setup but your normal ssh connection, and it's a great remote desktop solution.

We have started to look into kdb+ as a possible high-performance column-store backend. Kx offers free trials -- and so I have played with this for a day or two, both the general system, data loads and dumps and in particular with the interface to R, Based on the few files (one C source with interface code, one R file to access the C code, one object file to link against, one header file and a simple Makefile), it took just a couple of minutes to turn this into a proper CRAN-style R package. Anyway, the reason for this post was that the R / kdb+ glue code works well ... but not for datetimes. I really like to be able to pass date/time objects natively between systems as easily as, say, numbers or strings (and see e.g. my Rcpp package for doing this with R and C++) and I was a bit annoyed when the millisecond timestamps didn't move smoothly. Turns out that the basic converter function in the code had a number of problems: it converted to integer, only covered a single scalar rather than vectorised mode, and erroneously reduced a reference count. A better version, in my view, is as follows:

static SEXP from_datetime_kobject(K x) 
 
	SEXP result;
	int i, length = x->n;
	if (scalar(x))  
		result = PROTECT(allocVector(REALSXP, 1));
		REAL(result)[0] = (kF(x)[0] + 10957) * 86400;
	  else  
		result = PROTECT(allocVector(REALSXP, length));
		for(i = 0; i < length; i++)  
		    	REAL(result)[i] = (kF(x)[i] + 10957) * 86400;
		 
	 
	SEXP datetimeclass = PROTECT(allocVector(STRSXP,2));
	SET_STRING_ELT(datetimeclass, 0, mkChar("POSIXt"));
	SET_STRING_ELT(datetimeclass, 1, mkChar("POSIXct"));
	setAttrib(result, R_ClassSymbol, datetimeclass);
	UNPROTECT(2); 
        return result; 
 

This deals with vectors as well as scalars, converts Kdb's 'fractional days since Jan 1, 2000' to the Unix standard of seconds since the epoch -- including the R extension of fractional seconds -- and as importantly, sets the class attributes to POSIXt POSIXct as needed by R. With that, a simple select max datetime from table does just that, and vectors of timestamped records of trades or quotes or whatever also come with proper POSIXct behaviour into R. Note that it needs TZ to be set to UTC, though, or you get a timezone offset you may not want.

In order to have pretty highlighted oz code in HTML and TeX, I defined a simple language definition "oz.lang"

keyword = "andthen at attr case catch choice class cond",
          "declare define dis div do else elsecase ",
          "elseif elseof end fail false feat finally for",
          "from fun functor if import in local lock meth",
          "mod not of or orelse prepare proc prop raise",
          "require self skip then thread true try unit"
meta delim "<" ">"
cbracket = " "
comment start "%"
symbol = "~","*","(",")","-","+","=","[","]","#",":",
       ",",".","/","?","&","<",">","\ "
atom delim "'" "'"  escape "\\"
atom = '[a-z][[:alpha:][:digit:]]*'
variable delim " " " "  escape "\\"
variable = '[A-Z][[:alpha:][:digit:]]*'
string delim "\"" "\"" escape "\\"

The meta tags are so I can intersperse EBNF notation in with oz code. Unfortunately source-highlight seems a little braindead about e.g. environment variables, so I had to wrap the invocation in a script

#!/bin/sh
HLDIR=$HOME/config/source-highlight
source-highlight --style-file=$HLDIR/default.style --lang-map=$HLDIR/lang.map $*

The final pieces of the puzzle is a customized lang.map file that tells source-highlight to use "oz.lang" for "foo.oz" and a default.style file that defines highlighting for "meta" text.

Someone suggested the clever idea of counting IRC channel users as a metric to use for langpop.com, so I went ahead and gathered that data. Since this is the first month, there are a few glitches (I missed #fortran - sorry guys), and a thing or two to iron out, but I thought I'd go ahead and publish the new results. IRC counts towards the "discussion" portion of the stats, rather than the main part. Like everything else, it has its biases - I used the Freenode network, which is definitely more about free software than other places might be. One number that really jumps out is just how popular the Haskell channel is - it's right up there with all the most popular languages. It will be interesting to see if, over several years, all the "talk" about Haskell starts to translate into people using it for fun and for their jobs. I welcome comments on this post, but there's also a Google group I've set up for discussion of the results, data sources, languages, and so on: http://groups.google.com/group/langpop/ Another idea I'm kicking around is to create a separate page for "up and coming" languages, stuff like Scala, Clojure, F#... that kind of thing. It might have to use different metrics, because the newer languages often don't show up on many of the ones I use for the languages we currently have.

Sound Juicer "I Should Be Crying, But I Just Can't Let It Show" 2.25.2 has been released. Tarballs are available on burtonini.com, or from the GNOME FTP servers.

• Port to Brasero (Luis Medinas)
• Fix Solaris builds (Brian Cameron)
• Drop libgnome (Iain Holmes, Emilio Pozuelo Monfort)
• Fix conflicting mnemonics in the message area (Bastien Nocera)
• Fix mb3 backend (Bastien Nocera)