I ve been having fun with identi.ca and twitter recently, but some of my contacts, friends, followees, subscriptions (or whatever you want to call them) send many more messages than others. One contact gave a running commentary on his progress up the floors of a building yesterday. Fine, but a bit of a torrent of data. If someone posts and leaves it for a while, it s sometimes an explanation of where they ve gone, so I d like to check people s last tweets. I ve seen some clients do that and it seems there s a method in the API to do it. The API returns XML, so I m using XSL to transform it to xhtml (I ve still not taken the time to learn the XML CSS ways) with the following commands:-

	wget --no-check-certificate -O - https://username:PASSWORD@identi.ca/api/statuses/friends.xml   \
	sed -e '1a\
<?xslt-param name="site" select="identi.ca"?>\
<?xml-stylesheet title="Site Summaries" type="text/xsl" href="twitters.xsl" ?>
' > identica.xml

And here s twitters.xsl which converts the downloaded xml to xhtml:-

<?xml version='1.0' ?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0"
 xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
 xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
<xsl:param name="site">twitter.com</xsl:param>
<xsl:template match="/" xml:space="preserve">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><head>
<title><xsl:value-of select="$site" /> Friends</title>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="mirrors.css" />
</head><body>
<dl class="statuses">
<xsl:apply-templates />
</dl>
</body></html>
</xsl:template>
<xsl:template match="/users/user" xml:space="preserve"><dt><a href="http:// $site / screen_name "><img src=" profile_image_url " /><xsl:value-of select="name" /> (<xsl:value-of select="screen_name" />)</a> - <a class="time" href="http:// $site / screen_name /statuses/ status/id "><xsl:value-of select="status/created_at" /></a></dt><dd><xsl:value-of select="status/text" /></dd>
</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

Have fun! (And what have I done wrong?)

People keep asking me about the beard thing... Here's my take on what happened and why. Just before I left for LCA 2009, my wife offered to send along one of the limited edition prints of her award-winning waterfall photograph. She knew from prior years that the LCA organizers often host an auction or raffle to raise money for some worthy charity at the conference banquet. Since the photo was taken at Milford Sound on the way to last year's LCA in Melbourne, there was a connection between the photo and LCA. We had no idea what this year's charity might be, nor did we anticipate that her photo would become the centerpiece of the evening's fund-raising activities. The charity selected this year was an organization that is trying to save the Tasmanian Devil from extinction. Professor Hamish McCallum, the chief scientist with the program, gave a talk after dinner and before the auction began. The native population is suffering from a fatal facial tumor disease that results in horrible lesions, and is likely to kill off all the Devils within a decade or three. My family and I all have a strong love of nature, and Karen and I had the pleasure of touring Tasmania after LCA 2003 in Perth, so this seemed like a great charity to raise money for with her photo. As often happens at LCA, the auction and related fund-raising activities got complicated. This year, the photo alone was bid up to $2500 (which was very cool!), before people started offering things for higher bids. For years, going maybe as far back as Perth, I've been cajoled about shaving my beard if the bidding hit some level, and have always said no. This year, someone offered $5000 if I would shave my beard, and again I said no. Much later, after more cajoling and many counter offers, when the bids and various matching offers had us approaching $20,000 in total donation to the charity, I relented and announced that if we hit a total of $25,000 going to the charity I would consent to a shave. The resulting frenzy, including the suggestion that if it went high enough Linus should do the shaving, and the formation of a bidding consortium that kept raising more money and bidding against itself, was completely unexpected! Others have tried to capture details of the insanity, but the bottom line is that by the end of the evening, the total had blown way past anything we could have imagined, and by the end of the conference the total going to the charity was on the order of $40,000! Why did I agree to let Linus shave my beard? To be honest, I'm not entirely certain. I only had one beer that evening, so I can't blame intoxication. The fact that it would yield a worthy charity something over 10 times what my wife's photo alone had drawn as a maximum bid seemed significant to me. In hindsight, I also think I was at least a little bit curious to see what my face looked like after having a beard since sometime around September of 1982! In any case, I made the offer, insane amounts of money were raised, and on the last day of the conference, over the lunch hour, Linus took trimmers in hand and removed my beard in front of an audience. The reactions have been completely overwhelming. A local TV station and a local newspaper in Hobart were both there and ran stories. The ripple of mentions in the blogosphere was and is just astounding. There's even a silly Shaving Bdale game created overnight by the "Mad Scientists" at Secret Lab! And from all over the globe, people I do and don't know have been sending emails and finding me on IRC to plead with me to grow my beard again! Right after the shave, my good friend Keith Packard said "Bdale, grow it back!". Before I left Hobart, my wife emailed saying she and the kids hoped I wasn't waiting until I got home to start. Joey Hess blogged a hairy tale about how I'd scarred the minds of young Debian developers. The leader of Debian-RS sent word by email that the group all hoped I would re-grow my beard. And on and on and on... I'm really not used to being the center of so much attention! Being suddenly without beard felt weird in lots of silly little ways. I was hyper-sensitive to drafts. The feel of cold beverages hitting my upper lip was downright strange. And I kept wanting to scratch what wasn't there! After making faces at myself in the mirror for a while, I decided I really wasn't happy, and do prefer being bearded. So I haven't shaved since Saturday morning in Hobart, and am pretty scruffy looking. My wife said today that I'm "already starting to look like Bdale again". At the current growth rate, I have high hopes of having at least some facial dignity back by the time I speak at FOSDEM. And no, I won't be shaving my beard off again any time soon...

Sarah was discharged today. I decided to scrap trying to go to work, as I'd just have to leave at some point to pick her up. The hospital had to ensure that the nurse from Critical Care Systems was able to come to our home before they could discharge her, so that the IV antibiotics could be continued. We left the hospital at about 11:30am, and he got to our place just after 1pm. He whizzed through the whole process, as she was due for more antibiotics at midday and he wanted to get the IV started. She's on a four hourly course. Fortunately, that doesn't mean we have to change the IV every four hours. The way it works is the bag has enough antibiotics in a (presumably saline) solution to last six infusions on a four hourly frequency, and it's hooked up to a pump (that'll cost us $5000 if we don't give it back at the end), which takes care of everything. So once a day at around noon, Sarah has to disconnect the old bag, flush the line with saline, do something with some Heparin to prevent clots in the line, and hook up a new bag. The bag and the pump fit into a carry bag that can be worn like a bum bag or slung from her shoulder and looped through a belt. It'll be her permanent companion for the next (hopefully only) two weeks. The PICC has two ports (and I don't think that's the correct term) on it, and the IV is only hooked up to one, so the other one should be flushed and "Heparinised" regularly as well. The nurse comes back in a week with more supplies and to do some maintenance on site where the PICC line enters her arm. Critical Care Systems seems pretty impressive. They provide all the gear, fill the prescription, and bring it all out to you (by a nurse). They provide a 24 hour hotline to call if there's any problems, questions or concerns, and can dispatch somebody to us if necessary. We've got syringes preloaded with saline and Heparinised saline, more alcohol swabs than you can poke a stick at, and the fridge is full of IV bags. It's awesome that medical technology has progressed to this point, where Sarah can go about her business almost as normal, instead of being stuck in a hospital for another two weeks just because she has to have a tube in her arm. To prove this, the little trooper was back at her CNA course this evening, and starts clinical training tomorrow night.

Jennifer 8 Lee gave an interesting TED talk about the spread and evolution of what is called Chinese food [1]. In that talk she compares McDonalds to Microsoft and Chinese restaurants to Linux. Her points comparing the different local variations of Chinese food to the variations of Linux make sense. The CentOS Plus repository has a kernel with support for the XFS filesystem, Postfix with MySQL support, and some other useful things [2]. Mary Gardiner comments about the recent loss of a blog server with all content [3]. One interesting point is that when you start using a service that maintains your data you should consider how to make personal backups in case the server goes away or you decide to stop being a customer. Val Henson makes some interesting points about the reliability of Solid State Disks (SSD) [4]. Some people are planning to replace RAID arrays of disks with a single SSD with the idea that a SSD will be more reliable, this seems like a bad idea. Also with the risk of corruption it seems that we have a greater need for filesystems that store block checksums. Lior Kaplan describes how to have multiple Linux bonding devices [5], the comment provides some interesting detail too. programmableweb.com has a set of links to sites that have APIs which can be used to create mashups [6]. One of the many things I would do if I had a lot more spare time is to play with some of the web APIs that are out there. Gunnar Wolf has written some insightful comments about the situation in Israel and Palestine [7]. He used to be a Zionist and spent some time living in Israel so he knows more about the topic than most commentators. Charles Stross has written an informative post about Ubuntu on the EeePC [8]. What is noteworthy about this is not that he s summarised the issues well, but that he is a well known science-fiction writer and he was responding to a SFWA member. One of his short stories is on my free short stories page [9]. He also wrote Accelerando which is one of the best sci-fi novels I ve read (and it s also free) [10]. Don Marti has written about Rent Seeking and proprietary software [11]. It s an interesting article, nothing really new for anyone who has followed the news about the coal and nuclear industries. Erik writes about The Setting Sun and points out that Scott McNealy had tried to capitalise on the SCO lawsuit but Red Hat has ended up beating them in the market [12].

• [1] http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/jennifer_8_lee_looks_for_general_tso.html


• [2] http://wiki.centos.org/AdditionalResources/Repositories/CentOSPlus?action=show&redirect=Repositories%2FCentOSPlus


• [3] http://puzzling.org/logs/thoughts/2009/January/3/backup-policies


• [4] http://valhenson.livejournal.com/25228.html


• [5] http://liorkaplan.wordpress.com/2009/01/03/network-bonding-types-and-configurationin-linux/


• [6] http://www.programmableweb.com/


• [7] http://gwolf.org/blog/about-recent-events-and-possible-outcomes-israel-and-palestine


• [8] http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2009/01/i_get_mail.html


• [9] http://doc.coker.com.au/fiction/free-short-stories/


• [10] http://www.accelerando.org/


• [11] http://zgp.org/~dmarti/wiki/freedom/rent-seeking/


• [12] http://www.mega-nerd.com/erikd/Blog/setting_sun.html

Arthur Liu is doing a great series of posts following up on the results of Google Summer of Code '08 projects in Debian. (post 1 post 2) Most of them failed to produce code that's actually used in Debian, though there were some very successful projects, too. My experience with ikiwiki in '07 parallels that: latex Patrick Winnertz produced a working teximg (latex -> image) plugin that's in ikiwiki. The initial proposal also included doing latex -> html and wiki page -> latex conversions; that work never happened. file upload and image gallery Ben Coffey had an ambitious proposal to add file upload support to ikiwiki and also write an image gallery plugin using that. Ben did produce a working file upload interface, but that code never got into ikiwiki. This was due to a combination of at least three things:

1. The only outside communication with the ikiwiki community was doing a design proposal at the beginning, and a code dump toward the end of the project.
2. There was an existing complex spec for how to limit who could upload what files, but Ben didn't choose to implement those access controls.
3. The code dump was not even noticed until much later, when I was putting the finishing touches on my own implementation of an attachments plugin.

By the way, since I happened to do that attachments plugin as a paid consultant, I have an interesting data point: It took me 19 hours total to implement it, vs roughly a summer of work for the GSoC project. I don't mean this to reflect poorly on Ben, it just shows that someone who is familar with a code base and has thought a lot about a problem can work on it much more efficiently than a newcomer. AFAICS, Ben never did get to the gallery part. His involvement in SoC was cut short for personal reasons. Wiki WYSIWYG Editor Taylor Killian produced a working interface to Wikiwyg, but it tragically never made it into ikiwiki. This seemed to be going swimmingly -- Taylor set up a subversion repository for his work and produced several revisions of the wikiwyg plugin in response to feedback. At the end of the summer, it was close to ready to be included in ikiwiki. Then we lost contact with Taylor, and his site fell off the net. Subversion repo: Gone. Tarballs: Gone. The final tragic part of this story is that I had a local copy of all of Taylor's work. And when I moved ikiwiki over from subversion to git, I set up a wikiwyg branch, and put his work into it, and happily deleted my other copies of his work. But I made some kind of newbie mistake pushing that branch, and so his work never made it onto my git server, and at this point seems completly lost. (I still hope to hear from Taylor..) gallery Arpit Jain produced a working gallery plugin for ikiwiki. But that code never made it into ikiwiki. The main stumbling block seems to be that it used the lightbox javascript library, which, at least at the time was licensed under a non-free CC license. The code is present in a branch in ikiwiki's git repo, but at this point there is still no image gallery plugin in ikiwiki, though others are now working on other implementations. Conclusions I learned some important things from participating in the '07 SoC:

• There needs to be a well-defined place where students check in their code regularly, and where it is regularly reviewed. Either give them each accounts and branches in the project's main subversion repository, or better use distributed VCS. Ikiwiki switched to git as a direct result of the problems I saw with students publishing their code in the ad-hoc ways that resulted from not having that. And I keep backups of every ikiwiki git repo I am aware of, because any could fall off the net at any time.
• If your goal is to have a student develop something that is included in your project, that needs to be one of up-front success criteria for the SoC project. Otherwise, most of them will fail to get all the way there. Students need an incentive to deal with licensing issues, to respond to maintainers' feedback, and to keep following up until their code is merged. I suspect that requiring students leap over this sometimes very tall bar will scare a lot of them away though. You have to decide whether your goal is indeed to get working code in production, or if it's more to mentor a student for the summer.
• Just because one is very familiar with a code base and very productive in working on it, and has had lots of success getting others to contribute to it in the usual free software manner, does not mean that one will be a good mentor for a student working on that code base. In fact, it probably means you won't be, unless you have some prior experience teaching students. Which is why I've not participated in SoC since. :-/

In my living room, there's a TV, with a computer connected to it. In that computer, there's a DVD-ROM player, a hard disk, and a card with a TV output. On that hard disk, there's Debian with xine to view DVDs When I originally put it there, I would pick up the keyboard to do some user input. This works, but a keyboard is klunky. So, instead, I've been working on jsxine, a little application that does not much more than open a window, and tell xine to play a DVD there, but use the joystick for UI[1]. My 'joystick' is a Logitech Wingman Gamepad Extreme, which has a cable long enough for me to be able to use it comfortably from the couch, so I can use it as a sort of remote control. The current version has quite some things hardcoded: button 0 is 'select', button 5 is 'eject', button 6 'previous chapter', button 7 'next chapter', and button 8 is 'start or stop playing'. The primary two axes move around in the DVD menu; and other stuff is not yet implemented. This layout, of course, makes a lot of sense on this particular gamepad, but I doubt it does on other joystick devices. And since I want this to eventually be useful for other people, too, I recognized that I would need some way to configure things. My initial stab at configuration would create a hash table of available actions, read out a configuration file, and then find the appropriate function pointer in the hash table. While this works, it has one rather important downside: adding a configurable action would requrie another item in the hash table; this would eventually make the hash table horribly long. So I thought, why not use the configuration value to ask the dynamic linker to get me a function pointer? With a little help from my friends, that's exactly what I did. Proof-of-concept code:

#include <dlfcn.h>
#include <stdio.h>
int function()  
	printf("In function!\n");
 
int main(int argc, char**argv)  
	int (*funcptr)(void);
	void* handle;
	printf("foo\n");
	handle = dlopen(NULL, RTLD_NOW);
	funcptr = dlsym(handle, "function");
	funcptr();
	return 0;
 

Compile with cc -ldl -rdynamic. Et voila, that gets you an application which can do a lookup of function names at run time. Long live C. Of course, there's a bit of a danger in the above example. A user could just write a config file that has things like 'open' and/or 'write' as arguments, or the like. One should make sure that it can be obvious from the function name that it does indeed define an action; for example, by giving them a common prefix, and prepending that prefix to the function name before handing the name off to dlsym(). But other than that, this seems to work. It apparently also is documented in the FreeBSD documentation on dlopen(), so maybe it's not as much a hack as I thought... Oh well. Note that on GNU systems, you can also put a #define _GNU_SOURCE before the #include <dlfcn.h>, you can drop the dlopen() call and go straight to dlsym(), with RTLD_DEFAULT as the handle. [1] Yes, I could have done a Xine plugin. I didn't want to. This is as much a project to produce something useful as it is a project to hack and have fun.

Sigh. I'm not part of the FOSDEM organisation team, and this is by choice. I know that I wouldn't find the time to help organize a conference of the scale of FOSDEM, since I'm rather liable to forget to do important things at times. Having said that, I happen to run a company together with Philip Paeps, who is now one of the main FOSDEM organizers; apart from that, I've also managed the Debian presence there for the past few years (lost count how many exactly), and arranged the key signing party for a few years with Joost Van Baal taking over for me starting this year. As such, I'd like to believe that although I'm not exactly in to all their secrets, I do have a front-row seat when it comes to how things are going there. FOSDEM is the "Free and Open Source Developers' European Meeting". It has been that since 2001, and will always remain so. Yes, originally it was called "OSDEM", because frankly, the organisation of the original OSDEM was done by a group of people who like Open Source, without necessarily subscribing to the Free Software ideals. The core group of the organisation is a rather diverse group; for instance, Philip has been known to be rather... negative... about Ubuntu, while Mark (one of the press contacts) has done some activism and translation work for Ubuntu. The change of name from OSDEM to FOSDEM was done not because the organisation's ideas about software were changed overnight by a mail from Richard Stallman or anyone else from the FSF; but rather, because they were open-minded enough to understand that having a name which only says 'Open Source' would be excluding a considerable part of the community that encompasses both Free and Open Source people. This is why the name wasn't changed in FSDEM; it is FOSDEM. I'm quite sure that the fact that FOSDEM is so open-minded about many of the controversial issues that have separated our community over the years not just Open Source vs Free Software, but so many other things as well is one of the main reasons why FOSDEM is so popular today: because everyone, and I truly mean everyone, will find something that he or she likes. That is why I'm so saddened that some people seem to find it necessary to not only whine, but also boycott a conference, because they believe that FOSDEM should not take money from a big Free Software/Open Source contributor, just because they also happen to be a company, and as such make business deals with Microsoft. Note that I'm not either defending or condemning Novell's attitude here; but it is a fact that not everyone in the larger Free and Open Source community feels the same way about the whole Novell/Microsoft deal (else there wouldn't be an openSUSE anymore), and as such they still deserve a place on FOSDEM. Over the history of the organisation of FOSDEM, it's always been a place where everyone could get their opinion out; whether it be the opinion that "Free Software Must Rule The World", or that "It's All About The Way You Do Things"; as long as your opinion is shared by a large enough number of people in the larger FLOSS community, it is welcome. I feel that blocking one organization from sponsoring the event, just because they have made some deals which a significant group of people, one which nevertheless does not encompass the whole of the FLOSS community, disapprove of, would set a dangerous precendent that might jeopardize the very core of what makes FOSDEM so great: its impartiality. Thank god that didn't happen.

Now, It s probably obvious to anyone reading this blog what my thoughts on Open Source and Licencing are, so I won t go into that. However, I ve recently found a new author, who I m liking a LOT. His name is Cory Doctorow, and after reading some of his short stories, I thought I d look into his longer stuff. As I ve mentioned before, I m a fan of feedbooks.com - and, as an author who s releasing his works under a Creative Commons licence, his stuff is also there. I started reading one of his books called Little Brother (http://www.feedbooks.com/book/2466). I read the intro, and I was hooked. It s kind of hard to explain what I mean, so I d suggest if you re interested, goto the link above, and click on the PDF link, then read pages 4 through 12 (the introduction/foreword to the book) and you ll see what I mean. I ll probably review the book once I ve finished it (curled up in bed with my trusty eeePC), but from what I ve read, and that intro, Cory Doctorow is fast becoming one of my favourite authors. You can find more about Cory Doctorow, and his works at http://craphound.com/

New releases for both Gammu and Wammu are getting closer and I'd like to invite anybody to translating these programs to his language. Both projects use gettext, so if you are familiar with it, you can download po files from SVN and translate in your favorite editor. If you prefer an easy way, you can use web based interface (Pootle): For Wammu: https://l10n.cihar.com/projects/wammu/ For Gammu: https://l10n.cihar.com/projects/gammu/ You don't have to translate everything at once, but every translated term counts! If you hesitate where to start, fist look at Wammu, it is usually the application, which user tries first and having it translated is nice. Starting from this release, Gammu man pages can be also translated and these can be also considered a priority translate material to ease learning curve for unfamiliar users, their texts are located in separate po file - docs.po.

And I thought the recovery from original heart surgery was a bit rocky... Let me try and gather my thoughts... Yes, Sarah's got gall stones, no, they're not the problem. Yes, she's definitely got a staph infection, no, it's apparently (again, fortunately) not the bad type, but unlike last time, it is in the blood. Apparently that makes endocarditis a bigger concern, the consequences of which are rather scary to put it mildly. I'm guessing this is why they're pumping her full of IV antibiotics. The doctor(s) that is/are looking after her only do their rounds in the morning, so we've only got all of this information out of band from the cardiologist who popped in to see her this afternoon and sneaked a peek at her chart. So the exact course of action is unclear. He mentioned the possibility of getting a PICC line, which can stay in for up to a month, so they can continue giving her IV antibiotics for a while. We don't know if that means they could or would then discharge her. They want to do an ultrasound of her heart tomorrow to make sure everything's still okay there. Pain-wise, she's doing better. She hasn't had any more IV pain medication since this morning (just oral stuff), but she hasn't got much of an appetite since throwing up last night. She did eat some dinner though. Nausea has been coming and going throughout the day. Despite all of this, she's in fairly good spirits and is fairly mobile. I'm going back to the hospital tomorrow morning to try and catch the doctor(s) when they do their morning rounds. Somewhat ironically, this hospitalisation is now buggering up her attendance at the Certified Nursing Assistant course she's doing in the evenings. She was due to start clinical training this week. Somehow, even if she were to be discharged tomorrow, I don't see how working in an aged care facility with a PICC line, an open (albeit packed and covered) chest wound and a staph infection is going to be a good idea for anyone involved.

The changes to whitehouse.gov are being used as an example of ephemeral digital content.

At the exact moment Barack Obama was inaugurated, all traces of President Bush vanished from the White House website, replaced by images of and speeches by his successor. Attached to the website had been a booklet entitled 100 Things Americans May Not Know About the Bush Administration - they may never know them now. When the website changed, the link was broken and the booklet became unavailable.

At the same time, the Obama administration is chafing under rules that don't allow them to use Facebook, gmail, Blackberries, and Twitter. Because of this pesky Presidential Records Act.

Suddenly, they have to relearn how to communicate, because the law has not caught up with the way people live. They are being forced to return to older technologies (or they will once those technologies start working properly), and abandon or become more guarded in their use of newer technologies.

Anyone else find the dissonance am(az us)ing? Seems that anyone who really wants a copy of that missing booklet will be able to access it via FOIA in a few years (unless it got wiped with all of Cheney's files). Meanwhile, if the new guys find a way to stop being hobbled by the law, their digital content will likely be truely ephemeral, since they have become addicted to "newer technologies" that eliminate all expectations about data's preservation and privacy. I think this is one case of the law not keeping up with technology that I can support. It might be more fair to describe it though, as technology not keeping up with the law.

My talk about how I combine open source and rockets at LCA 2009 that included my first public presentation of the TeleMetrum design was well received, and I was invited to repeat it during Open Day on Saturday. Now that I'm home again, I need to get some parts loaded on a board so we can start testing!

It was kind of interesting to see this the other day, on the train from Monselice to Padova: That's a Debian system, kernel 2.6.8.1, which appears to have some problems booting. That's not the only problem with the train system in Italy, unfortunately: My Padova->Monselice train, roughly a 20 minute train ride, was 65 minutes late, and would end up being nearly an hour and a half late. Ouch! To be fair, the train system in the US is actually even worse, if that can be believed. And in Austria, while they run on time, they're so expensive and don't run often, so that it's often much more convenient to drive.

Moving on from the horrible tax situation, I m struggling to get three pieces of hardware working. I m terrible with hardware. Can anyone help me get these working better, please?

1. I ve been lent an Asus M5200N after I busted my shoulder with a 7kg laptop at #davebcs. I ve managed to enable processor scaling as ondemand, but like the page says, the fan is noisy. Other sites report that the Centrino s thermal limit is 100C, so is it OK to set the fan not to kick in until 78C on the sensor? The default is 40C which means it s permanently on - the coolest the fan makes it is about 74C.
2. The Asus has Ubuntu on it (intrepid I think). Is there an easier way to get my three GPRS connection working than copying the config files from the old laptop and using the terminal? Network Manager doesn t seem to work and I can t see what it s trying to do or why it s failing (where s its debug log?). Alternatively, is there a distribution better suited to occasional laptop use than Ubuntu?
3. I ve been lent an iPod Touch. However, when plugging it into the USB on the Asus, the screen says simply iTunes and the quick start guide says to connect it to iTunes. Can gtkpod do this, is there another way to start it up from Ubuntu, Debian or GoboLinux, or shall I beg access to a computer running iTunes?

Thanks for any answers. I may send out small gifts in return because questions 2 and 3 seem very awkward to me.

Time to Report After a good start, I ve hit a bump in the road getting all the various TTLLP annual reports filed with the various offices on time. Well, less a bump in the road, more of a gaping chasm. Well, less a gaping chasm, more of a black hole with the potential to consume as many resources as you can throw at it. As usual, it s the financial reports and rax return which are the problem. After making a good start by closing the 2007-8 books in plenty of time, we ve had some small problems which we ve overcome, but the blocking problem now is that HMRC are using an obsolete address for the company. I only just found out that was the problem yesterday. That s doubly odd because I changed my address at the same time (which they re using) and we ve submitted two tax returns since then with the correct address. Once I got through to the telephone helpline, they told me to go to the tax office (in the nearest town just now, but scheduled for closure) to change the address. At the tax office, they told me to use a telephone in the corner and I had no need to have gone in person. HMRC s left hand doesn t seem to know what its right one is doing! The guy on the end of the phone confused me with jargon, but the upshot is that it will take up to 3 working days to correct our address, then we can request new access to our accounts which will take up to 7 days which means we ll miss the filing deadline. I think it s time to complain about the broken address. I ll dent my progress. Anyone else finding the changed tax filing process bloody taxing this year? Finally, anyone got free and open source software for online filing of partnership tax returns? There s a 10 shareware Excel spreadsheet tool out there, but I guess I ll have to borrow someone s Excel to run it (it won t work in OpenOffice, will it?). Is there a better way? If not, I ll tell parliament.uk about HMRC driving Windows sales (slowly chipping away at the monopoly).

Fellow countrymen, happy Republic day to you all. Any trip to Punjab is incomplete without atleast one visit to the daily tamasha at the Wagah-Attari border. This is probably one of the few places on earth where you would see the Pakistan flag right next to the Emblem of India.

I arrived at the place a couple of hours before the vening flag down ceremony but was too late to be able to get a comfortable seat in the crowd of a few thousands; the place was already packed. Luckily, a BSF ranger (who incidentally was not allowing the crowds in any more) looked at my tripod and camera, thought I was a journalist and led me to the VIP section which is as close to the gates as one can get.

For a very long time preceding the ceremony, there is nationalist music blaring on the tannoys, crowds screaming in unison: LA ilAha ill-Allah on the Pakistani side and vandE mAtaram, bhArat mAtA ki jai on the Indian side. On either side of the border gates, kids run up and down the road with their respective national flags while young men climb onto the top-most walls and wave flags high in the air. One gentleman was commenting that while women on 'our' side are allowed to dance and sit anywhere, 'they' don't allow that, "see how the men and the women there are grouped separately".


The half hour of the retreat ceremony is full of action with the Indian BSF rangers in their red turbans and khakhis, and the Pakistani rangers in black salwaar-kameez marching heavily down the road, glaring into each others eyes, competing on who can kick higher into the air and possibly also on who has the best kept moustache. The rangers on either side of the gates know that they are entertaining their home crowd and spare no effort to do their best.


The retreat ceremony is so popular that it is difficult to allow in all the people that come in to watch. So a clone of the ceremony has been setup at the Hussainiwala border. However, Hussainiwala is popular not because of the flag retreat, much less because the 1971 war memorial still has a lot of marks of artillery firing, but because of Bhagat Singh's memorial. The memorial moves one to tears.


Few more pictures from the Hussainiwala memorials:

Executive summary To avoid confusion with the proprietary versions of GForge (known as GForge Advanced Server, GForge Express Edition and GForge Community Edition), the free/libre/opensource codebase will from now on be separately maintained under the name FusionForge by the main developers of the free GForge 4.x codebase. Since this is mostly a renaming, the migration path for existing users will be smooth. Longer version, with details After the initial forking from the Sourceforge codebase, the development of GForge has long been hosted, and many enhancements directly developed, by the GForge Group (GForge, LLC), with regular contributions from outsiders. The results of these evolutions were public and free, subject to the GNU GPL. In parallel, the GForge Group wrote a proprietary re-implementation of GForge, which it sold under the name "GForge Advanced Server", or "GForge AS" for short. This re-implementation added some features for "the enterprise", but was not contributed wholesale to the GForge codebase under a free license. Although some of the features were contributed to the public, the GForge Group concentrated its efforts on its (proprietary software) business model, with more versions appearing, such as "GForge Express Edition" and more recently "GForge Community Edition". As a result, it became increasingly harder for the public to know which version was which without doing extensive research (indeed, some users mistakenly installed one version instead of the other). A consequence was that the free software codebase suffered from a loss in visibility, which lowered its momentum to the point that there haven't been any moderately important releases since the (currently stable) 4.5.x series was announced in late 2005. So, in order to clarify things, avoid further confusion, and regain some of the lost momentum, it was decided by a group of leading contributors that the free software version of the GForge codebase would from now on be developed under the FusionForge name, and its development would be hosted on FusionForge.org. So is this a fork? Well, we don't know yet. It could arguably be called one, since we're taking the code and running away with it under a new name. However, we believe it's not a fork unless both roads continue their own way (more of a oddly-shaped bend). What happens to the GForge codebase developed by the GForge Group at gforge.org remains to be seen, although for the sake of our users we will backport security fixes to the gforge.org Subversion repository (at least for the 4.5.x series and the unreleased 4.6 and 4.7 pre-series) for some time. The bulk of the development will move on to FusionForge and the repositories at FusionForge.org, though, and users are encouraged to migrate at their own pace. Since we're basically continuing the evolution rather than starting from scratch, the migration path should be rather smooth. So why the FusionForge name? Because there were actually lots of locally-patched versions of GForge (and Sourceforge), and we felt it was a waste of resources that should be fixed. It seems many people and organisations took these codebases at some point in time and evolved them for their own needs. Sadly, many of the changes were not contributed back or even published, so lots of efforts were duplicated. Fortunately, many of the people managing these locally-patched forges are now realising that "out-of-tree" patches and features require quite some manpower to maintain. Some formal inter-project discussion is already taking place, and we hope to achieve actual merging of most of the interesting features that have been developed here and there into a common base that can be reused locally with minimal changes. We'd like to "un-fork" as much as possible. We also expect that, by using standard components and tools, we'll facilitate the work of potential contributors, thereby reducing the risk of a new era of fragmentation. And who are we anyway? We're Christian Bayle, Roland Mas and Alain Peyrat, long-time contributors to GForge and responsible for over 95% of the commits over the past two years, as well as a few relative newcomers. Christian and Roland have been maintaining the Debian packaging since the "Debian-SF" era, and Alain has been focusing on code quality. The three of us have, for various reasons, a vested interest in maintaining a lively codebase in a healthy ecosystem. What are our plans? Our short-term goals, as currently planned, include:

• pushing a stable FusionForge release out of the door;
• cleaning up and auditing the database schema to ensure consistency and increased performance;
• merging in new plugins, in particular for new version control systems;
• continuing streamlining the installation process to make it more portable across distributions.

Longer term goals are less well defined, but we're thinking about the following:

• increasing code quality by the use of modern automated tools;
• encouraging a lively stream of external contributions, to reduce the gap between the official version and the locally-patched ones;
• defining an explicit governance model and release process for the FusionForge project;
• as a consequence, a more frequent and predictable release schedule;
• increasing data portability and interoperability with other forges, to reduce lock-in for users and projects.

Some of these items should be facilitated by our switch to a distributed version control system and a new coordinated workflow. Also, the Debian i18n team has been kind enough to offer to host our translation effort on their Pootle server, which means translators will have a much easier time doing their job. We hope to hear from users and contributors alike in the near future. For more information, we can be reached via our fusionforge-general mailing-list (see our lists), which is also suitable for general discussions. We can also be found on IRC (#fusionforge on the Freenode network).

Giving up on a position within a free software project when you know you re no longer managing to do an effective job is a wonderfully liberating experience. Now that I have started to talk with Miriam Ruiz about handing over the Debian Jr. project, I can stop worrying about the leadership task and just have fun with it. I can always count on Miriam for recommendations for games in Debian my kids may enjoy, as she has a passion for finding good games to package for Debian, and in particular, games for children. Over the past few weeks we ve had some fun with her picks. At the same time, I always have Debian Jr. in mind. How can we ensure kids can have the most fun with this? How do we equip their guides to help them? What we ve done with each new piece of software is to find a quiet time when one or more of the children can start playing with it on their own while we watch, offering such guidance as they need, but for the most part just letting them loose with it. Each wrinkle of the brow, each impetuous thump of the mouse, every illuminated grin and exclamation of delight is noted. We try to see what frustrates or pleases our kids and discuss it both with them and the Debian maintainers and upstream developers. This is an excercise we ve managed to pull off without being overly intrusive and the results have been well worth the effort. Using a few of Miriam s picks we tried this week, we were able to draw their play into the free software development process. Here s a brief summary of those sessions: Platinum Arts Sandbox puts into children s hands the ability to role play in a 3D world and edit that world using simplified controls. The expressions on the faces of our kids as they played were priceless: both the ups and the downs. I wanted to capture this on video and share it. After having established a rapport with upstream, we took a 20 minute clip of one of our play sessions and gave a copy to them to use to help further their work. Here is the edited result. They were very pleased to have that kind of feedback and found the video valuable for determining where the software still needed improvement and to notice which aspects particularly pleased the children. I happen to know that Hex-a-hop is one of Miriam s personal favourites. We have a household full of puzzle-lovers so this puzzle game was an instant hit. While on irc on #debian-jr with Miriam we relayed in real-time some of the reactions as they played this and a handful of her other picks. This gave her some confirmation of areas she knew needed work as well as inspiration for upcoming releases of these packages. During this play session, which also included StegaVorto, kartofel, Anagramarama, Funny Boat and Vodovod, my youngest girl, age 7, plunked down on the couch next to me as her 10-year-old sister played. Then she started to notice I was typing what people in the livingroom were saying and doing on irc. She took a mild affront to me copying her own words and actions, so I decided it would be better to let her participate so she would feel included. At this point, I started playing secretary for her, typing what she dictated to me while she read the responses from the display. Later, I just handed her the keyboard so she could type and read the responses on her own. She was still at it long past bedtime and it was with some reluctance that she finally gave up the keyboard. We all had a lot of fun and look forward to doing this again. We are particularly careful with privacy, taking care to share pictures, videos, and other personal details only so far as we believe it does not put our children at risk. Also, we need to ensure we observe in a way that is welcome and doesn t interfere with their enjoyment. But with a little bit of prudence and a practiced eye and ear for what increases or diminishes enjoyment of the software, we can involve our children directly in the free software development process. I commend to anyone who has the privilege to share free software with children to use this method to communicate with maintainers and developers, increasing your own enjoyment of the software in the process and that of children and their guides everywhere.

This week's emacs-snapshot release (20090118-1) reached a new milestone with more than 700 downloads in just under a week. I guess this is quite an achievement considering that not everyone wants to download 25MB of Emacs packages on a weekly basis, so thanks to all my users for their continued trust and support!

Here's a quick update on the status of the Emacs 23 release: the last remaining feature on the roadmap was finally completed this week with the merge of the rmail-mbox (pmail) branch into rmail. The pretest (GNU lingo for beta ) phase could start as early as next week, which is not to say that the release itself is right around the corner since a few major tasks need to be finished first, like updating the manuals. The release could also be delayed by the proposed (and long overdue) switch from CVS to Bazaar, pushed by newly-minted Launchpad evangelist Karl Fogel.

That being said, aiming for a release in 2009 isn't entirely unrealistic, and I really can't wait to see Emacs 23 reach a wider audience. It is the culmination of many years of work in lots of areas (Unicode support, font backend, multi-tty, Cocoa, ...) and is by far the best Emacs version to date!

If you are in the NY-area and would like to help out with the project described below, they are looking for volunteers. Help FLOSSIFY the enormously popular book Digital Foundations. The event is being hosted Feb 6-8 at the lovely Eyebeam with some Free as in Beer and Grub provided! ******************************************************* FLOSSIFY 1 : Digital Foundations
For a long time educational courses have been cheap marketing
for proprietary software companies. Can a student really afford all
those expensive softwares required by the courses? No. Ever hear of a
software company kicking up a fuss because students are using
unofficial versions? Well, it does happen but not often. And why not?
Because proprietary software companies know, as the universities know,
that once the students leave their training they will be indoctrinated
with those tools and simply slipstream into being paid up proprietary
software citizens. Simply put, unlicensed software used in education is
tolerated because it is cheap marketing. This is how tools become industry standards . FLOSS Manuals is fighting this flow by converting textbooks that
use proprietary software to using free software in their examples. We call this process FLOSSify . We convert the book from
closed software to Free Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) hence we
FLOSSify the book. Our first text book is the wonderful Digital Foundations book produced
by Michael Mandiberg and Xtine Burrough
(http://digital-foundations.net/). Its a text book designed to teach
software by teaching design. The current toolset it uses is the Adobe
Creative Suite and we will convert these examples entirely to using free
software. FLOSSIFY 1 : Digital Foundations will focus on a fun 3 day event at
Eyebeam, NYC. Anyone is welcome to attend and some food and beer will be
provided. Come and meet some of your old geek friends, make some new,
and help make a step towards unshackling education from proprietary
software. FLOSSIFY 1 : Digital Foundations
Eyebeam, New York City
Feb 6-8
starts 10ish
finishes when we are done
fast connection, a table, some chairs, and beer and food provided
contact adam@flossmanuals.net for more info venue:
http://eyebeam.org/
540 W. 21st Street, (between 10th and 11th Avenues)
New York, NY 10011
Tel. 212.937.6580 Fax: 212.937.6582