I thought my loss of 20kg over a period of two years was kinda impressive. I was wrong. Whoa. Norbert, congrats. I only hope you did it in a way more healthy way than I did (which basically boils down to "eating way less than I should, and having bad eating habits when I do").

fEnIo learnt an important lesson about the kernel firmware loader: it (usually) does not work as expected for non-modular drivers. The reason is that the request_firmware() interface is synchronous. Since it's usually called in the initialisation section of drivers, the userspace firmware loader is not available yet if the calling driver is built-in in the kernel. The request_firmware_nowait() asynchronous interface was designed to replace it, but most drivers have not been ported yet. When a driver calls request_firmware(), a uevent is sent by the kernel to udev over a netlink(7) socket, requesting that a specific file is uploaded. udevd runs /lib/udev/firmware.agent, a simple shell script which will look for the $FIRMWARE file in a few directories and then copy it to the designated place in the driver $DEVPATH in sysfs. If the driver is initialised before userspace is started then the loader will not be available, and the request will fail. A possible solution is to run udev in the early userspace environment (initramfs), but just compiling the driver as a module is usually simpler.

I really like the simplicity of Blosxom as blogging framework and I also like Perl very much. But somehow this Perl 4 alike global variables madness of Blosxom v2 sucks in several ways: It effectively prevents Blosxom from being used with mod_perl and it’s just not what I would call an API. I would like to have a more object-oriented plugin API and it should be save for use with FastCGI, mod_perl or similar possibilities to cache the parsed script code instead of reparsing with each request. Another thing should be a tagging facility. Had to write that by myself for Blosxom v2. (Wasn’t that hard though.) But since Blosxom v3 development seemed to have stopped in May 2004, I have been thinking about and looking for alternatives. First thought was to write a Blosxom clone by myself using Embperl as framework (as I did with web galleries after not finding any web gallery software fitting all my needs). But since I got infected with Ruby recently, I also thought about writting a Blosxom clone in Ruby, which would give me quite a lot of Ruby experience and would make a good fit since Ruby as well as Blosxom have some kind of Zen (or KISS) philosophy. The next thought was: I can’t be the first to come up with that idea and googled a little bit. First thing I digged up was Rage, some kind of Blosxom on Rails. But I didn’t find any source code although the author seems to prefer open source software. Seems as if it is seems to be ready for production but not ready for public release. The next thing I found was hint to some Blosxom clones in the Ruby Application Archive (RAA). Unfortunately two of them (sakura and lily) seem to have Japanese only web pages. :-( But for luck the third Ruby based Blosxom clone found in the RAA, Blosxonomy, seems to be quite well featured, under actual development, has a english written web page and one of if its main concepts is taggability. And also the other core concepts sound fine: simplicity, extensibility and compatibility. Sounds really perfect and I’ll probably give it a try, but not on my current blog host: There is no Ruby installed and it’s not my own box.

Now playing: Rolling Stones — Ruby Tuesday

Usually waking up an hour after your flight has left is a bad sign -- like, a sign of imminent doom, that things are about to get horribly worse. At least, that's how it usually feels and this being the third 6:25am flight I missed in 2005, I was well-accustomed to that feeling. Luckily I got re-routed through Tampa, then Los Angeles, and I finally ended up in my San Jose, CA destination with a lovely Val awaiting me. She seemed shocked; said I was far shorter than she expected, then she realized I was walking with a group of Stanford basketball players and that, though they dwarfed me, I still managed to have at least an inch on her. (Val is "5'9 and three quarters!", according to her.) A lot of the visit was a bit of a blur. After arriving, I quickly showered, and was promptly told by Val that my skater rat apparel just wouldn't do and that our New Year's Eve party was meant to be dressy. A black shirt and some funky necklace managed to placate her, luckily, as well as my excuse of having just flown in from out of town with no instructions to dress pretty. Off to the party, where I met a load of brilliant and entertaining people, including Lina who was positively heartbroken by the lack of fireworks.
Lina and me in the ballpit The next day included eating vegan duck for breakfast, visiting Google offices for fun (not profit), getting lost with Val in some frightening redwood forest, Indian food in SF with Janet, Jen, and Val. Actually, the Indian food might deserve an entry of its own -- the owner of the restaurant actually spoonfed me, which was bizarre and funny. Afterwards, we went to visit Kristal and laughed at various things, including the most hilarious website ever. "Oh yeah baby, check out my throughput." Of course, that feeling of imminent doom was not entirely wrong. I contracted some kind of California Plague while there and spent my flight back doubled over with body aches, fever, and chills. Overall, well worth it. Happy New Year, everyone!

Ever since I got my portable ogg player a few months ago, I've been listening to music on a fairly regular basis, particularly when working on my computer (read: programming, mostly). I've noticed that what music happens to be penetrating my skull has a bit of an effect on my coding -- both from a productivity point-of-view (ever so slightly), but more interestingly, from an enjoyment point of view -- some songs just feel like they go well with cutting code, so I enjoy both the music and the coding more than I do normally. My personal favourites have been songs like Meatloaf's Bat Out of Hell, Robbie Williams' Let Me Entertain You, and several tracks off Evanescence's album Fallen. (On the Evanescence point, when my wife first bought Fallen and played it, about 10 bars into the first track, I said "now that is music to hack to" -- interesting how I got that feel so quickly). The common factor that I can identify there is that they're all powerful tracks, with a strong, driving rhythm and a feeling of speed. They also all sound good really, really, loud (much to my wife's displeasure). So, in the interests of scientific discovery, I'd like to know what other people like to listen to when they're writing their stuff. Both from a point of view of "what else can I stock my iRiver with to encourage my coding", and also to see if people's tastes in Music To Hack To is universal, or a personal thing. E-mail your thoughts to mtht@hezmatt.org, or if your blog is syndicated on Planets Debian, Ubuntu, SLUG, or Linux Australia, Just Blog About It and I'll pick it up. Summaries to follow.

Bob Sutor: “Standards can allow innovation by providing a strong underlying foundation on which to build the new ideas. Do standards themselves need to be innovative? No, but they can lead to innovation downstream. Can waiting too long to create open standards hinder innovation? Absolutely, if de facto standards force or convince people not to try to innovate in certain areas. So please don’t simply say ’standards might hinder innovation.’ That’s overly simplistic and doesn’t take into account how things evolve over time.”

Every now and then I set a day for myself to bring my big old desktop CPU to an internet cafe to update my Debian and Ubuntu installations, dchroots and pbuilders, because I only have a dialup connection at home (and of all things, from a softmodem.) It became such a habit that I decided to make the most of it, and use the time it takes for me to go and update to go around every internet cafe in town and see how people would react to my GNU OS Today was one such day. I went to one particular internet cafe in front of Daet Elementary School this afternoon, and with my CPU I proceeded to try to get it working on their local network and feed off its Internet connection. Unfortunately for me, however, I went there just in time for their renovation of their place, which involved moving the individual computer nodes out of place and causing some confusion, all in the name of installing some type of cafe management software (aka a Sub7-type BB tool) which ultimately caused them to use static IPs for each node on the network–waah, no DHCP! Had this been a year ago, this might have been a big problem; but now, I run the excellent pdnsd, the proxy DNS server, in conjunction with resolvconf and squid. I originally intended this amazing duo to work so that I was able to serve a nameserver 127.0.0.1 for each of my dchroots, saving me from copying my main /etc/resolv.conf to each dchroot; but now, I have surprised myself again with this, since pdnsd cached just about enough DNS entries for me to be able to just the most-frequently used parts of the Web (Google, FreeNode, etc.) It took me a while before getting down and dirty with /etc/pdnsd.conf and pasting the example “root-servers” in /usr/share/doc/pdnsd/examples/pdnsd.conf , and allowing myself full Internet access without DHCP. Now, I got my pbuilders updated, but not the dchroots; I only got a max of 7 kilobytes per second of download compared to the usual 25, Sigh… you just can’t have too much of everything…

Alexander Schmel writes in his web log:

Update: Small correction: We got some feedback. Liw raised some concerns. His mail was answered 8 minutes after we received it by a committee member. Since he didn't answered I guess he is satisfied by the answer or at least doesn't feel very strong about that point.

To clarify: On December 27, I mailed the talks committee and questioned the fact that Debconf6 will have a talk on OpenSolaris, when there are good Debian related talks rejected. I have received their response, and I understand their reasoning. I strongly disagree that their reasons are sufficient to approve the talk. I haven't responded yet is because I'm thinking about the appropriate way to do that. Celebrating the new year also intruded. Silence does not necessarily signify assent.

Which Office Moron Are You?
Rum and Monkey: jamming your photocopier one tray at a time.

Well... a week ago I thought, that when I would be back, I would write an other personal blog entry. After I already told you, that I was quite nervy meeting her parents, I could tell you now, that everything went quite well, and that we had quite some fun. But getting back, I was confronted with a not so nice thing, which tainted my mood a bit. So no details, just a complaint. Well, but one step at a time. First a small explanation: I help a bit organizing the DebConf-6. I'm member of the "review committee" whose job was to discuss the proposals we got in answer to our Call for Papers. After that we accepted and rejected different proposals, and didn't get any feedback at all. Well, we did that short before Christmas and then half of us went to holidays. I was one of them, and managed to check my emails from time to time, without receiving any comments about the decisions we made. Therefore I thought everything was quite well, until I retourned. Then I got back, connected to my irc client (where I was logged in all the time, but was marked as away), and saw a small note in my awaylog, asking me for some rational about something mentioned a few lines earlier. I didn't know about what - I just log someone mentioning my name or some keywords (e.g. packages I maintain or am interested in). Sounded somehow important, so I asked back what the questions was. Soon I got informed, that there were complains about a talk proposal we rejected. After a bit confusion (according to my memory and some note we indeed accepted the talk), we found out, that we did a small mistake in the database, so the submitter of that specific proposal got the wrong mail telling him the proposal was rejected. Not a big problem; we could still mark it as accepted and send them the information the other accepted proposal got. So at this point you might wonder, what the big fuss is all about. Well, first of all: The complains about the rejected proposal reached us by luck. Luckily I was in the channel, where the rejection was discussed. Luckily I was connected at that time. Luckily my irssi didn't crashed. Luckily I checked my awaylog carefully. Luckily I was informed about the whole matter. Luckily we could solve the problem. After nearly two weeks I thought everything was fine (and therefore did nothing), it took just two or three hours to solve the problem (most of the time was spent to carefully formulate a difficult mail in a foreign language). Not a big problem at all - although you might wonder why they raised their concerns in a complete other channel on an other network, instead of simply asking us. What I really dislike is the form they used to raise their complains. When they complained they asked if the DebConf was bought by Sun or the committee on crack and similar things. I'm sure they didn't really meant it that way, but after losing a couple of good friends to drugs telling me, I am on crack (or any other drug) is one of the biggest insults you can give me! Wondering if I (or a volunteer project I'm working for) got bribed by a company isn't much nicer. So let me say this: Yes, we rejected proposals. Yes, we rejected even some proposals we found good in some way or an other. Neither have we been on crack nor have we been bribed! We rejected some proposals because they didn't fit to DebConf, were a rerun or had big overlaps with other proposals we accepted. We rejected some round tables, because the one proposing it didn't provided us with useful information: Whom to invite and what to ask. Sometimes we had mixed feelings about proposals; we usually then accepted them if we knew the one who made the proposal is a good speaker, we rejected some where we knew the proposal come from a bad / disorganized / boring speaker. We did that in a public discussion and answered questions by non committee members when they were raised. I really don't think we did anything wrong, beside the small mistake when we rejected a proposal which was accepted, and I think we got a nice mixture for the main track with some really good talks! As said: Telling me I'm on crack is a big insult. Nevertheless I tried to stay calm, tried my best to solve that matter, and later wrote a mail, apologizing for the mistake. Part of that mail was that we didn't liked their way of raising their complains (showing that I knew what they said about us). I expected at least an answer, thanking us for solving the problem, perhaps even a small apology about the insults. But till now - two days later - I didn't received anything, not even a small "thanks" via irc :( Now I just could forget the whole story. But then I saw it again: Someone wondering about the committees decision in the same channel, instead of just asking us! Damn! If you want to know why we rejected your proposal, just ask! Stop griping in unrelated channels. That's just a wast of other peoples time, resulting in nothing but damage to to the DebConf. Update: Small correction: We got some feedback. Liw raised some concerns. His mail was answered 8 minutes after we received it by a committee member. Since he didn't answered I guess he is satisfied by the answer or at least doesn't feel very strong about that point.

Just hacked a few new features for my Blosxom plugin Tagging. It now shows you how many times you’ve used that tag. The number is always shown as title attribute to the link, but can optionally also be shown in parentheses behind the tag name or by the (CSS based) font size and/or color (start and end sizes/colors configurable). Also some default values changed (to my current configuration :-). I saw that font size feature quite often during the last weeks and I liked it. I first tried to figure out, which system offers that feature and found that at least Serendipity’s freetag plugin offers it, but didn’t want to download Serendipity just for the plugin. So I decided, the algorithm for calculating the font sizes shouldn’t be that hard to find and coded it from scratch by my own. :-) And while coding it I noticed that changing the color instead of the font size could be done the same way and that this feature isn’t much more difficult. So I implemented it, too. Another new feature is that you now can configure the minimum number of postings a tag should have to show up in the list of tags. The result can be seen in my blog on the right side under “Available Tags”.

Now playing: Falco — Der Kommissar

Irony:

Yeah, and i have mails from you which where degrees of magnitude more
insulting than those, and i have still not forgiven you about the way you
hurt me in april. So tone done your arrogance a bit, please.

Friendly,

Sven Luther

According to Mark Shuttleworth:

The DCC distro doesn't use the Debian kernel, and it modifies key pieces of the infrastructure like the linking system and core system libraries. So it's not really Debian at heart.

According to the DCC 3.0 release notes:

5 [packages] are the LSB 3.0 compatibility environment, which adds LSB 3.0 compliance in such a way that the sarge glibc and pam packages don't need to be modified

It took me a long time to figure out how to read these two statements in a way that wasn't thuroughly contradictory. The DCC dropps in ld-lsb.so linker in for LSB binaries and uses that to make them link to some modified libraries somewhere outside the normal link paths, but that's more like the distro having two hearts (one of which is used only to circulate blood through the very limited set of available LSB binaries) than not being Debian at heart.

---

Mark again:

There is now discussion of modifying many, many more packages, for example to use the Ubuntu X.org packages rather than the Sarge XFree86 packages.

DCC again:

25 [packages] are a backport of X.org from etch.

So if they're using Debian's X.org already, why would they be planning to go to Ubuntu's?

---

Mark:

The DCC distro doesn't use the Debian kernel, and it modifies key pieces of the infrastructure like the linking system and core system libraries. So it's not really Debian at heart.

Mark again:

The DCC kernel and Ubuntu kernel will be very similar if not identical in future DCC releases, and I expect that collaboration will spread to other parts of the system such as X, ACPI etc.

If you think about it, this is in a sense the strangest pairing of statements of all...

My expectations for Web 2.0 include standards for aggregating not only blog posts, but also calendar data and tracker items. I'd like to be able to subscribe my todo list manager to the list of bugs against my packages or tell the BTS that it should synchronise a bug with the upstream BTS. What needs to be solved first is the synchronisation problem: every so often, planet gets flooded with old posts. The current approach of assigning unique ids to items does not help much as either unchanged items need to be reloaded on each update or changed items that kept their id go unnoticed, and hell breaks loose when items get new ids.

A few years ago, the New Zealand government agencies for tourism and immigration created a series of three advertising movies, known by the acronyms FotR, TT, and RotK. As proof of truth being stranger than fiction, they were generally mistaken for real movies, perhaps because they're excessively longer than normal ads. For whatever reason, they were shown in movie theaters in many countries, and a bunch of people saw them. I watched only the first one in a movie theater, though, and skipped the two others. To further promote truth's strangeness, the movies are not only available on DVD, but they're available on DVD in so called extended versions, with even more footage. For a lark, I borrowed all three from a friend, as extended versions, and have now watched the first one. I must say that these are the best ads I've ever seen. I've also been heavily influenced: I spent half an hour browsing NZ immigration rules and job ads. Alas, there doesn't seem to be much interest in a Linux programmer there. Pity, it seems to be a very photogenic country, and I have tens of thousands of shots left in my camera's shutter.

Four years ago I started translating the Mozilla suite into Galician, and from that point on I managed to keep the translation completely up-to-date, even being one of the fastest ones to create translations (when Mozilla 1.0 was released, three translations for it were released at the same time: Chinese, Asturian and Galician), and later expanding my efforts into Firefox and Thunderbird. However, after two years, things started to go wrong: support for translations was starting to fail without warning, there were some undocumented changes to the language pack format and there was a movement to integrate translations officially into the Mozilla organization that would make it extremely inconvenient for me to go on working in Mozilla, so in July 2004 I resigned from the effort and stopped updating the translations. Well, it was not exactly a thing of “oh, now it is not worth the effort", but “those SOBs are taking all my past hard work down the crapper and they were supposed to stop updating the suite so why are they releasing a fucking new version?". And also “I’m here translating this shit and nobody appreciates it so fuck it all” Much angst and stuff, and I not only stopped with Mozilla: I stopped translating pretty much anything else and almost vowed not to translate again. And I made the T-shirt and all (some of you saw it in DebConf 5). During the Christmas break I didn’t have much to do, and it had been very long since I had last programmed for pleasure, so I decided to create a set of scripts for converting Mozilla XPI language packs into a huge PO file and back (days later I was told about translation-tools, but I was in the mood to hack and it worked with a lot of small PO files, which I didn’t want). Then, I imported my old Firefox 0.8 translation, created a POT for 1.0.7 and updated the translation. I may well start making Galician Firefox translations again – but unofficially. There’s already an official Galician team, which intended to start after my resignation but is, apparently, stuck in bureaucratland. Also, some horror stories I’ve heard about make me want not to work officially with Mozilla. Plus, some of the things that made me angry back in the days are still there. For example, the documents about translating Mozilla all newbies are referred to are badly outdated. And there are no new, unified documents. But I intend to take it easy. I will not invest emotionally on this again, because I don’t want to go back to spending a couple of months playing Frozen Bubble while I think bad thoughts about Mozilla developers. Anyway, I’m moderately happy now. I’ve hacked on my own, for pleasure, for the first time in months; I achieved a goal and I’m slowly regaining my motivation to do other stuff. I hope. That was all.

Hot on the heels of Joey's tale of getting rid of base-config (the second stage of the installer) in Debian, we've now pretty much got rid of it in Ubuntu Dapper too. The upshot of this is that rather than asking a bunch of questions, installing the base system, and rebooting to install everything else, we now just install everything in one go and reboot into a completed system. This does mean that, if your system doesn't boot, you don't get to find out about it for a bit longer. However, it has lots of advantages in terms of speed (the much-maligned archive-copier mostly goes away), reducing code duplication (base-config had a bunch of infrastructure of its own which was done better in the core installer anyway), comprehensibility, and killing off some annoying bugs like #13561 (duplicate mirror questions in netboot installs), #15213 (second stage hangs if you skip archive-copier in the first stage), and #19571 (kernel messages scribble over base-config's UI). To go with Joey's Debian timeline, the Ubuntu history looks a bit like this:

• 2004 (Jul): First base-config modifications for Ubuntu; we need to install the default desktop rather than dropping into tasksel.
• 2004 (Aug): Mark phones me up and asks if I can make the installer not need the CD in the second stage by copying all the packages across beforehand. Although it's a bit awkward, I can see the UI advantages in that, so I write archive-copier at the Canonical conference in Oxford.
• 2004 (Sep): Mark asks me if we can ask the timezone, user/password, and apt configuration questions before the first reboot. With less than a month to go until our first release, I have a heart-attack at how much needs to be done, and it eventually gets deferred to Hoary.
• 2005 (Jan): Matt fixes up debconf's passthrough frontend for use on the live CD, and we realise that this is an obvious way to run bits of base-config before the first reboot. It's rather messy and takes until March or so before it really works right, but we get there in the end.
• 2005 (Apr): I get "put a progress bar in front of the dpkg output in the second stage" as a goal for Breezy. Naïvely, I think it's a simple matter of programming, since I'd already done something similar for debootstrap and base-installer the previous year.
• 2005 (May): I hack progress bar support into debconf. Nothing actually uses it for anything yet, except as a convenient passthrough stub.
• 2005 (Jul/Aug): I actually try to implement the second-stage progress bar and realise that it's about an order of magnitude harder than I thought, requiring a whole load of extra infrastructure in apt. Fortunately Michael Vogt saves the day here by writing lots of working code, and the progress bar works by early August.
• 2005 (Sep-Dec): Upstream d-i development ramps back up again, with tzsetup, clock-setup, apt-setup, and user-setup all being cranked out in short order and the corresponding pieces removed from base-config. I merge these as they mature, and manage to get agreement on including the Ubuntu debconf template changes in upstream apt-setup, which helps the diff size a lot.
• 2005 (Nov/Dec): Joey and I chat one evening about the Ubuntu second-stage progress bar work, and we end up designing and writing debconf-apt-progress based on its ideas, after which Joey knocks up pkgsel in no time flat.
• 2006 (Jan): The rest of the pieces land in Ubuntu, and we drop base-config out of the installer. To my surprise, nearly everything still just works.

Although it caused some friction, I'm glad that we did the first cuts of many of these things outside Debian and got to try things out before landing version-2-quality code in Debian. The end result is much nicer than the intermediate ones ever were.

It has been a tumultuous decade of involvement with Debian for me. I had been on the mailing list since mid 1994, but I was reasonably happy with my SLS system (installed using 40 floppies, including about a dozen for just X11 alone), and while I found Debian intriguing, I was not about to go through the pain of a brand new install until I felt that the new project was viable in the long term :-) I actually jumped ship in the spring of ‘95 and installed 0.93R5. The next step came with Bug 1766, my very first bug report: Bug in script checksecurity in package cron, on 25 Oct 1995. Once in, I rapidly went to the next phase: Here is the sum toto of the NM process I went through: my Hello, World mail. Those were the days :-). There was nothing between my ITP and the upload. My first significant package was kernel-package, since I was always missing something in the series of steps needed to build a kernel, and I started getting into it in the summer of ‘96. This is where the second part of my apprenticeship started – even though I had 3-4 packages in the archive, my kernel images were not yet trusted; so I sent my images to my sponsor (Hi Simon), who then uploaded the images to master. Somewhat later, I also was involved in the early design stages of apt, and the dependency sorting algorithms. While I was fairly silent during the whole DFSG/SC debates (to the extent I was labelled a mindless follower of Bruce –heh), I took an active part in the constitution debates (possibly due to the fallout of the beach story. Anyway, I seemed to want to get us a constitution, after it had seemed stalled for months. It is interesting to note how the technical committee was initially setup, there was a proposal, and then Ian Jackson responded by saying he wanted to appoint the ctte members, since he had been around for a while and was also the DPL. The earliest data I can find is from June of ‘98, as seen in a mail later that year, when the initial list of committee members was created (I also seem to recall I was not on the list initially, but I was added in the early days, before the committee was actually formed). I was interested in the technical policy fairly early, taking a stance that policy was more than just a bunch of ignorable guidelines. Eventually, a [thread that tried to reach a compromise][other] gave us something like the views we (well, I) hold today – including what happens when packages do not follow policy, and about policy editors. And abuse of power. About this time, the policy Czar resigned, burned out, and hounded by accusations of delusion of power. So I first proposed the whole policy editor and consensus approach to letting policy evolve, which eventually led to a formal delegation recently. Brian Basset was our very first secretary. My first involvement with things that would lead on to the secretaries job started with trying to do voting for policy. Then, around 2000, our the secretary and treasurer Darren Benham went MIA, and Raul, as the chair of the technical committee, had to take over and run the DPL election for 2001 – and forgot that DPL elections are supposed to be secret ballots. Ben Collins tapped me for the secretaries position mid-2001, as I recall. It is hard, in a decade or so, to find anything I have not touched – but NM is one such area. Apart from an early pre-current-NM mail, I have not been very involved in NM. Or the Debian installer. Or Debconf. Hmm. I seem to have drifted away from things that Joey Hess is involved in, which is a pity, he is high on the list of people I respect in the project, and this lack of interaction with as time goes on irks me.