Just a note that the slides are available (non-slideshare link) for my presentation Tuning an old but free phone (description) that I held in the tremendously great event FSCONS 2010. It could be described as a smaller scale FOSDEM, but that would be actually down-playing it since the free software effects on society are something that I've actually never seen elsewhere on such a scale. My talk was among the purely technical ones, though.

I was planning to hold on with this blog post until the recorded videos arrive, but since it seems it might not be during this year I will just post this now that slides are available.

I've shared a few photos as well at Flickr...


Keynote: Karin Kosina, The Inanna Project. A tech + art workshop for female artists in Damascus, Syria. An experiment in art, technology, and the transformative power of Free Hardware and Software.


Erik de Bruijn, The Future of RepRap, a self-replicating open source 3D printer that fabricates arbitrary objects including parts of itself.


Social event at the Berg 211.


Malin Nilsson on Gender, class and global flows. Using free software to fuel a revolution in home based industrial work.


Keynote: Glyn Moody, Ethics of Intellectual Monopolies.


Keynote: Glyn Moody, Ethics of Intellectual Monopolies (audience).

A few summaries available on a Qaiku seminar channel.

Last week s post generated a lot of interest so I will make a small update to keep you posted on the status of GNOME 3 in Debian experimental. Experimental is not for everybody But first let me reiterate this: GNOME 3 is in Debian experimental because it s a work in progress. You should not install it if you can t live with problems and glitches. Beware: once you upgraded to GNOME 3 it will be next to impossible to go back to GNOME 2.32 (you can try it, but it s not officially supported by Debian). Even with the fallback mode, you won t get the same experience than what you had with GNOME 2.32. Many applets are not yet ported to the newest gnome-panel API. So do not upgrade to it if you re not ready to deal with the consequences. It will come to Debian unstable and to Debian testing over time and it should be in a better shape at this point. Good progress made Most of the important modules have been updated to 3.0. You can see the progress here. The exception is gdm, it still needs to be updated, the login screen looks quite ugly right now when using GNOME 3. Frequently Asked Questions and Common Problems Why do links always open in epiphany instead of iceweasel? You need to upgrade to the latest version on libglib2.0-0, gvfs and gnome-control-center in experimental. Then you can customize the default application used in the control center (under System Information > Default applications ). You might need to switch to iceweasel 4.0 in experimental to have iceweasel appear in the list of browsers. Or you can edit ~/.local/share/applications/mimeapps.list and put x-scheme-handler/http=iceweasel.desktop;epiphany.desktop; in the Added Associations section (replace the corresponding line if it already exists and lists epiphany only). The theme looks ugly, and various icons are missing. Ensure that you have installed the latest version of gnome-themes-standard, gnome-icon-theme and gnome-icon-theme-symbolic. The network icon in the Shell does not work. Ensure you have upgraded both network-manager-gnome and network-manager to the experimental version. Some applications do not start at all. If an application loads GTK2 and GTK3, it exits immediately with a clear message on the standard error output (Gtk-ERROR **: GTK+ 2.x symbols detected. Using GTK+ 2.x and GTK+ 3 in the same process is not supported.). It usually means that one of the library used by that application uses a different version of GTK+ than the application itself. You should report those problems to the Debian bug tracking system if you find any. Some people also reported failures of all GTK+ applications while using the Oxygen themes. Switching to another theme should help. BTW, the default theme in GNOME 3 is called Adwaita. Where are my icons on the desktop? They are gone, it s by design. But you can reenable them with gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.background show-desktop-icons true and starting nautilus (if it s not already running). (Thanks to bronte for the information) Why do I see all applications twice in the shell? The package menu-xdg generates a desktop file from the Debian menu information, those are in a menu entry that is hidden by default in the old GNOME menu. Gnome Shell doesn t respect those settings and displays all .desktop files. Remove menu-xdg and you will get a cleaner list of applications. APT pinning file for the brave Since last week, we got APT 0.8.14 in unstable and it supports pattern matching for package name in pinning files. So I can give you a shorter and more complete pinning file thanks to this:

Package: *gnome* libglib2.0* *vte* *pulse* *peas* libgtk* *gjs* *gconf* *gstreamer* alacarte *brasero* cheese ekiga empathy* gdm3 gcalctool baobab *gucharmap* gvfs* hamster-applet *nautilus* seahorse* sound-juicer *totem* remmina vino gksu xdg-user-dirs-gtk dmz-cursor-theme eog epiphany* evince* evolution* file-roller gedit* metacity *mutter* yelp* rhythmbox* banshee* system-config-printer transmission-* tomboy network-manager* libnm-* update-notifier shotwell liferea *software-properties* libunique-3.0-0 libseed-gtk3-0 libnotify* libpanel-applet-4-0 libgdata11 libcamel* libcanberra* libchamplain* libebackend* libebook* libecal* libedata* libegroupwise* libevent* gir1.2-*
Pin: release experimental
Pin-Priority: 500
Package: *
Pin: release experimental
Pin-Priority: 150

Putting the file above in /etc/apt/preferences.d/gnome and having experimental enabled in /etc/apt/sources.list should be enough to enable apt-get dist-upgrade to upgrade to GNOME 3 in experimental. But if you have packages depending on libimobiledevice1, you might have to wait until #620065 is properly fixed so that libimobiledevice2 is co-installable with libimobiledevice1. Update: integrated the explanation to reenable the desktop icons thanks to bronte s comment.

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Update: I reported the deluge issues and added a new problem about the lack of click on tapping on the touchpad.

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I know that installation reports and upgrade reports need to be submitted to the BTS, but I just want to point out some issues for people that might hit the same issue on upgrade from lenny to squeeze.

But before that I must say I like the new Debian site(s) look.

Issue number one: When upgrading from lenny's deluge to squeeze's deluge, the new version of the app is quite different from the prevoious version. Here are some things to take into account:

• when starting for the first time the new version it will take ages to check (and probably recalculate some checksums); make sure you don't mind the I/O activity when you start it; a torrent will not be available until this check is done
  
• the new version relies on a client-server model which is disabled if you use the "classic mode" (Edit->Preferences->Interface)
• some features available in the old version are not available in the new version (e.g.: graph for traffic and embedded search function)
• some features are availbale as modules, but there are just a few modules
• when starting the graphical interface in the new mode, don't use the "Start daemon" button, use the "Connect" button. If you start the daemon via the "Start daemon" button the "Connect" button will become "Disconnect" although the client is NOT connected. Using the "Connect" button directly solves the problem.
• There is an ugly side panel (on the left side) which, IMHO has no real function or use, except filtering in the view the active downloads or similar things
• when choosing the place to save a torrent and trying to set that place as the default location, deluge will not remember that setting
• closing now (with the daemon option) the app will close just the client, but the server/daemon will remain in the background, unless is explicitly closed (there is a dedicated menu entry)
  

Issue number 2: I seem to experience some weird glyph/graphic area reshuffling in GNOME (maybe X?) after recovering from hibernate. With a total (according to my current sloppy counting) 5 resumes, things get back to normal, but I suspect the next hibernate-resume cycle will restart the glyph reshuffling cycle.

By glyph/graphic area reshuffling I mean alterations of the shapes of the glyphs (and some areas on the background picture) in such a manner that it seems that within a set of 8/16/N (?) lines are shifted/rotated sideways with some undefined and different ammount each, but in a reproducible manner ("b" will always be doodled in the same way, no matter if is in the word "be" or if is in the word "absurd".

I'll try to provide some picture in the bug report, once I report this issue in BTS.

Update: I reported this in Debian's BTS and upstream (with screenshots, too). I am not convinced the problem is in the kernel since I tried an old kernel and saw the same issue. I suspect X is at fault.

Issue number 3: This is more like a convenience issue. In the past I was using "hibernate" with uswsusp which I understand is now broken beyond repair and replaced by pm-utils. The thing I miss in the hibernate process now is the ability to abort the hibernation process as it was possible in lenny's uswsusp by pressing the backspace key during the storing of the state on disk phase.


Issue number 4: The upgrade process was quite tedious because once I tried upgrading aptitude, python2.6 was pulled in and almost all apps ended up needing upgrading due to the chaining of necessary package upgrades.


Issue number 5: For some weird reason pulseaudio was initially installed making playback of any audio impossible (the apps wanting to emit noises would just freeze but they were TERM-inatable) and later I've seen a default null audio sink was defined for me. Killing pulseaudio and removing the ~/.pulse directory fixed the issue (but I should probably see why pulseaudio didn't work properly in the first place because I suspect the problem will reappear at the next restart - I usually use hibernate).

Issue number 6: Tapping the touchpad no longer results in a click. Maybe some packages got removed? And, no, it is the same when I remove the external mouse, so it is not because of some smart behaviour of that sort.

Otherwise I am quite satisfied with the result of the upgrade. A huge "thank you" to all people involved in the development of squeeze.

With all the buzz around GNOME 3, I really wanted to try it out for real on my main laptop. It usually runs Debian Unstable but that s not enough in this case, GNOME 3 is not fully packaged yet and it s only in experimental for now. I asked Josselin Mouette (of the pkg-gnome team) when he expected it to be available and he could not really answer because there s lots of work left. Instead Roland Mas gently answered me Sooner if you help . First steps as a GNOME packager This is pretty common in free software and for once I followed the advice, I spent most of sunday helping out with GNOME 3 packaging. I have no prior experience with GNOME packaging but I m fairly proficient in Debian packaging in general so when I showed up on #debian-gnome (irc.debian.org) on sunday morning, Josselin quickly added me to the team on alioth.debian.org. Still being a pkg-gnome rookie, I started by reading the documentation on pkg-gnome.alioth.debian.org. This is enough to know where to find the code in the SVN repository, and how to do releases, but it doesn t contain much information about what you need to know to be a good GNOME packager. It would have been great to have some words on introspection and what it changes in terms of packaging for instance. Josselin suggested me to start with one of the modules that was not yet updated at all (most packages have a pre-release version usually 2.91 in experimental, but some are still at 2.30). Packages updated and problems encountered (You can skip this section if you re not into GNOME packaging) So I picked up totem. I quickly updated totem-pl-parser as a required build-dependency and made my first mistake by uploading it to unstable (it turns out it s not a problem for this specific package). Totem itself was more complicated even if some preliminary work was already in the subversion repository. It introduces a new library which required a new package and I spent a long time debugging why the package would not build in a minimalistic build environment. Indeed while the package was building fine in my experimental chroot, I took care to build my test packages like the auto-builders would do with sbuild (in sid environment + the required build-dependencies from experimental) and there it was failing. In fact it turns out pkg-config was failing because libquvi-dev was missing (and it was required by totem-pl-parser.pc) but this did not leave any error message in config.log. Next, I decided to take care of gnome-screensaver as it was not working for me (I could not unlock the screen once it was activated). When built in my experimental chroot, it was fine but when built in the minimalistic environment it was failing. Turns out /usr/lib/gnome-screensaver/gnome-screensaver-dialog was loading both libgtk2 and libgtk3 at the same time and was crashing. It s not linked against libgtk2 but it was linked against the unstable version of libgnomekbdui which is still using libgtk2. Bumping the build-dependency on libgnomekbd-dev fixed the problem. In the evening, I took care of mutter and gnome-shell, and did some preliminary work on gnome-menus. Help is still welcome There s still lots of work to do, you re welcome to do like me and join to help. Come on #debian-gnome on irc.debian.org, read the documentation and try to update a package (and ask questions when you don t know). Installation of GNOME 3 from Debian experimental You can also try GNOME 3 on your Debian machine, but at this point I would advise to do it only if you re ready to invest some time in understanding the remaining problems. It s difficult to cherry-pick just the required packages from experimental, I tried it and at the start I ended up with a bad user experience (important packages like gnome-themes-standard or gnome-icon-theme not installed/updated and similar issues). To help you out with this, here s a file that you can put in /etc/apt/preferences.d/gnome to allow APT to upgrade the most important GNOME 3 packages from experimental:

Package: gnome gnome-desktop-environment gnome-core alacarte brasero cheese ekiga empathy gdm3 gcalctool gconf-editor gnome-backgrounds gnome-bluetooth gnome-media gnome-netstatus-applet gnome-nettool gnome-system-monitor gnome-system-tools gnome-user-share baobab gnome-dictionary gnome-screenshot gnome-search-tool gnome-system-log gstreamer0.10-tools gucharmap gvfs-bin hamster-applet nautilus-sendto seahorse seahorse-plugins sound-juicer totem-plugins remmina vino gksu xdg-user-dirs-gtk gnome-shell gnome-panel dmz-cursor-theme eog epiphany-browser evince evolution evolution-data-server file-roller gedit gnome-about gnome-applets gnome-control-center gnome-disk-utility gnome-icon-theme gnome-keyring gnome-menus gnome-panel gnome-power-manager gnome-screensaver gnome-session gnome-settings-daemon gnome-terminal gnome-themes gnome-user-guide gvfs gvfs-backends metacity mutter nautilus policykit-1-gnome totem yelp gnome-themes-extras gnome-games libpam-gnome-keyring rhythmbox-plugins banshee rhythmbox-plugin-cdrecorder system-config-printer totem-mozilla epiphany-extensions gedit-plugins evolution-plugins evolution-exchange evolution-webcal gnome-codec-install transmission-gtk avahi-daemon tomboy network-manager-gnome gnome-games-extra-data gnome-office update-notifier shotwell liferea epiphany-browser-data empathy-common nautilus-sendto-empathy brasero-common
Pin: release experimental
Pin-Priority: 500
Package: *
Pin: release experimental
Pin-Priority: 150

The list might not be exhaustive and sometimes you will have to give supplementary hints to apt for the upgrade to succeed, but it s better than nothing. I hope you find this useful. I m enjoying my shiny new GNOME 3 desktop and it s off for a good start. My main complaint is that hamster-applet (time tracker) has not yet been integrated in the shell.

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Yesterday one of my free software halves was very, very happy, because after a lot of work, GNOME 3 was released!

I've been following GNOME 3.0's development since Debian got the first GNOME Shell snapshots uploaded to experimental. While my first experience, on an old, 2 or 3 generations behind Athlon 800MHz with 512MB of RAM was horrid due to the lack of features (it wasn't even an alpha!) and the incredible slowness due to the crappy Radeon 9200, I've seen it evolve to the gem that was released yesterday. I haven't been so excited about GNOME since GTK+ and GNOME 2.0 were released after their eternal development cycle, and was happy to see how positive the atmosphere in #gnome-hackers was last night when vuntz sent the email and everyone was able to relax after a very long sprint of hard work. Congratulations everyone, because not only this a great, solid release, but it's also a brave one. Change does not come without resistance, but I am very sure the path GNOME opened last night has a bright and innovative future. I will be delighted to walk this path to enjoy it!

Today we gathered the representatives of different distributions that are present at GNOME.Asia to discuss what GNOME could do to improve its support for distributions that distribute it, especially in matters of long-term support. It is kind of sad that there weren t any representatives from Canonical nor Red Hat, but the discussion turned out really interesting and we learned a lot about the packaging habits of each other. Furthermore, there were several concrete leads that were explored, which will lead to proposals from the GNOME foundation to all distributions. Helping with long-term support The most widespread GNOME version in the LTS releases that happened recently is 2.30, which is used by Debian squeeze, Ubuntu LTS 10.04, RHEL 6, and Solaris 11. It looks like an accident, but on the other hand:

• GNOME 2.32 isn t really suitable as is for an entreprise distribution;
• Linux distributions agreed on a kernel version to support long-term, so this had an impact on their release schedules, and this might well happen again for the next release.

In the future, a decision to use a common GNOME release could, anyway, only come from the distributions themselves, not from GNOME. A proposal that many people agreed upon was to give distribution maintainers commit access to old branches that GNOME module maintainers don t touch anymore. This way they could share their patches more easily and make new releases of these old branches. This would imply, of course, setting up rules about what changes are allowed, that distributions would have to agree upon (how to treat feature additions for example). Managing bugs Currently it is hard to tell, for a distributor, whether other distributions are affected too and whether they have released a fix for that. It was agreed upon that Launchpad s feature of linking bugs between distributions, including version tracking, would exactly fill that need. One of the solutions would then be to add such a feature to Bugzilla, but it is a lot of work since currently it doesn t have any kind of version tracking. Another proposal was to deploy a new Launchpad instance to do serve as a hub between downstream bug systems and the GNOME Bugzilla. The condition for this to work would be to make it extremely easy to clone bugs between it and Bugzilla, and also if possible from the downstream bug systems. On the side-related topic of how not to crawl under bugs, it might be possible to get bugs forwarded with a single command from the Debian BTS to Bugzilla, using the XML-RPC interface. Upstream also considers that bugs sent to Debian are generally of higher quality than those from e.g. Ubuntu, and would be OK with us routing some of them directly to upstream (like we already do for Evolution). Communicating about the availability of patches Currently distributors are hardly ever informed that patches relevant for their distribution have been committed. They often learn of them by sheer luck while lurking on Bugzilla. The distributors-list ML is clearly the relevant media for that purpose, but it is clearly not used enough. It would need to be advertised more among both GNOME module maintainers, and among downstream maintainers as well. On this matter, the disappearance of the x.y.3 GNOME releases (starting with 2.28) was evoked. The problem was that most of those releases were about insufficient changes to justify e.g. stable updates in distributions. The proposed solution is to encourage maintainers of modules with bugs to fix to release new versions (through an annoucement on desktop-devel-announce), and to send a list of modules with new versions to downstream distributors so that they can integrate them. This avoids the GNOME release team the hassle of making a new release, while still giving distributions that use them some bugfixes. Providing a new service to LTS distributions The idea of having the GNOME foundation employ a person to gather, on the GNOME side, all changes that are relevant to older GNOME versions, and prepare new stable versions, was discussed. This would be a new service for which commercial distributions would need to pay a fee. It s not clear how this information would be privately disclosed and the impact on non-commercial distributions. But it doesn t seem likely that e.g. Red Hat would be interested since they employ a lot of core GNOME hackers who are already doing this job.

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I don t know what impact these proposals can have on GNOME packaging in Debian, but apart from the last one that I find dubious, it seems that they could greatly improve our support of GNOME in stable Debian releases, be it by having more versions to upload during the freeze, or by having more stuff in point releases. Fr d ric Muller promised to come back to us with more concrete stuff.

Bdale is a long-time Free Software believer, he has been contributing even before Debian existed in the prehistoric era of free software. Anyone who went to a big Free Software conference has seen one of his colorful t-shirts. Or maybe you have heard the story where he got his beard shaved by Linus Torvalds to raise funds to protect the Tasmanian Devil. More seriously Bdale has played and continue to play a number of important roles in the Debian community. He also represents one of the biggest corporate sponsors (both for DebConf and for the servers that Debian owns): Hewlett Packard. My questions are in bold, the rest is by Bdale. Who are you? I made my first personal contribution of source code to what we now call Free Software in 1979. I started with HP in 1986 and for nearly a decade have served the company as Chief Technologist for Open Source & Linux. I am president of Software in the Public Interest, which is the umbrella organization providing legal and financial existence for Debian in the USA. I also represent users, developers, and Debian interests on a number of boards including at the Linux Foundation and the Freedombox Foundation. I m happily married with two children. Many people in Debian have met some or all of my family. They all joined me for Debconf in Edinburgh, and my daughter Elizabeth also attended in Caceres and New York. I joined Debian in 1994. I ve been responsible for a number of packages essential to our base system continuously since that time. But I ve also contributed to the project in many other ways over the years. I ran the first server that was fully dedicated to Debian. Ideas of mine influenced the development of project infrastructure, from the early design of our mirror network to structuring the archive around a package pool . I started or made significant early contributions to 5 ports of Debian to non-i386 architectures. I served as Debian Project Leader (DPL) in 2002-2003, was acting Secretary for a while, and have served on the Technical Committee for a number of years. Over the years, I ve also had some interesting hobbies. I helped design, build, and program pieces of various amateur radio satellites. I enjoy making physical things, and have many tools for working in wood and metals. My son and I are very active in the world of high power model rockets. And with my partner (and fellow Debian developer!) Keith Packard I m now running a small business making and selling open hardware and open source avionics for hobby rockets. You can read more about that at http://altusmetrum.org. You re the chair of the Debian technical committee. Can you quickly explain the role of this committee? I think many people assume the Technical Committee has a larger role in Debian than it really does. Section 6 of Debian s constitution defines the official role of the Technical Committee. Most importantly, the committee exists as a last resort place to resolve technical conflicts between Debian developers that they are unable to resolve by themselves. Most of the power in Debian is left in the hands of individual developers, who are usually able to collaborate with each other to make good technical decisions. So the Technical Committee s resolution process has only rarely been needed, which I think is a very good thing. From my point of view, the technical committee is not working. In many cases, the committee does not take any (timely) decision and just waits until the underlying situation has evolved to a point where the intervention of the committee is no longer needed. Do you agree with this and how can you explain it? I think it s very important for all of us to remember that everyone working on Debian does so voluntarily, and people who volunteer their time generally deserve a measure of respect and appreciation for their efforts. No issue is brought to the Technical Committee unless resolving it is expected to be really difficult, or at least contentious. And often, the issues brought to the committee have been as much or more about personality than technology. That makes some of them really hard to solve. So I do not agree that the technical committee is not working. It seems to me that the decisions that bog down and take a long time are the ones where arguments start out or become emotional instead of technical. In this context, if committee members can help lead public and private discussions in a way that causes a situation to evolve to the point where a decision is no longer needed, that may be healthier for the project in the long term than a quick vote that satisfies some contributors at the expense of others. The last important change that was made to try to revive the committee was the addition of two new members (Don Armstrong and Russ Allbery). Is there anything else that could be tried? The biggest improvement I could personally wish for is something people sending issues to the committee can help with. As the ultimate technical decision making body for a project whose output is mostly software, the more a request can be put in terms of a decision about source code, the easier it will be for us to make a decision. That won t always be possible, but when we re forced to try and dream up alternatives and then figure out whether anyone would actually be willing to write the code to implement those alternatives, the process takes a lot longer than choosing between competing patch sets or deciding whether a patch should be included. Besides your role in the technical committee, you have held the role of mediator/facilitator/advisor on numerous occasions. Because you re an old wise bearded guy who travels a lot and knows many Debian contributors I would like to thank you for all this work that few people notice. Are there been times where this has been a real burden for you? Thank you for mentioning this. I ve put a lot of my heart into Debian over the years, largely because it s a project and a community that continues to amaze and inspire me. I feel fortunate to have been able to meet and work on Debian with so many outstanding people from around the world. Many are now my friends, with all the silly and serious things being a friend implies. I ve been asked for and have given advice many times. I ve helped celebrate birthdays, marriages, new jobs, and the arrival of children. Sadly, I have also found myself having to try and find the right words to mark the loss of some of these friends The only time any of this feels like a burden is when there s some important problem that many people care about, that I m working behind the scenes to help fix, but can t really talk about publicly without causing more harm than good. It s distressing to have people think you don t care or aren t helping, when really you re doing everything you possibly can just not in a publicly visible way. Of course I understand that this is an impossible situation. If you can t see what s happening, there s no way to know if something is happening or not. That s why I advocate doing as much as possible in Debian, and SPI, and everywhere else I contribute in as open a way as possible. You have been Debian Project Leader and you promoted the vision of Debian as the Universal Operating System. What does universal mean for you? The biggest thing to me at the time was the idea that Debian could be anything. Those who chose to work on Debian would ultimately determine what Debian became. I also wanted to make sure we thought about as broad a set of potential users and collaborators as possible. But this vision provided a framework for pursuing a whole range of worthwhile increases in Debian s scope of utility, some of which I articulated in my DPL platforms, some others put forward. Internationalization, porting to more supported architectures, our inclusive and evolving approaches to accepting new developers and new packages, and so forth. I think this vision has served us well, and it pleases me that it has stayed a part of our collective thinking for so long. We re again in Debian s electoral period, what do you think of the work done by the current DPL? I m very happy with what I ve observed of Stefano s activities during his first year as DPL. He has an obvious enthusiasm for Debian, communicates well both in one to one interactions and in front of a crowd, and I think represents Debian very well. It is interesting that he s running unopposed for re-election this year. I choose to interpret that as evidence he s doing a good job, the project is running well, and nobody feels the need to try and take the job away From him. I m glad he s willing to continue in this role for another year. What s the most important thing that Debian should achieve in the wheezy timeframe? I don t yet have a very crisp personal wish-list for wheezy. But I would certainly like to see multiarch support finally completed! I m also very interested to see what comes from the CUT work. You have been an early supporter of multiarch , a project to allow easy installation of foreign architecture packages. It s on good track for Wheezy. Do you think it s an important milestone? My original motivation for requesting multiarch support was to enable support for 32-bit x86 binaries on ia64 Itanium systems, in the time leading up to the sarge release. I ended up creating the ia32-libs package, which I m not proud of. The emergence of 64-bit extensions to x86 (the amd64 architecture) made this a much broader issue. Today, I run a 64 bit kernel and a 32 bit user space on my notebook. There are problems with just moving entirely to 64 bit but I would like to be able to run some applications that work with large data sets in full 64 bit mode!

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Thank you to Bdale Garbee for the time spent answering my questions. I hope you enjoyed reading his answers as I did. Subscribe to my newsletter to get my monthly summary of the Debian/Ubuntu news and to not miss further interviews. You can also follow along on Identi.ca, Twitter and Facebook.

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A meme that keeps going around is that Asperger Syndrome (AS) is somehow universally good. The DSM doesn t list things that are beneficial, so any diagnostic criteria has to be for something that has some serious down-sides even if there are positive aspects to it. Of course on the Internet the debate won t just end there.Positive Aspects of ASThe main positive aspect of AS is intense concentration on topics of Special Interest, if a Special Interest is something that is related to a high paying job (such as computer programming) then that s a really good thing. Of course a Special Interest that isn t related to well paid employment or for which most people get paid little and only a lucky few get paid really well (such as music) isn t going to be a good thing by objective criteria.It seems that most people on the Autism Spectrum have sensory advantages over Neuro-Typical people (NTs). Better vision and hearing are quite common. It s good to be able to notice small and quiet things that most people miss, but that s not a benefit that most people seem to particularly desire. The down-side is that loud sounds and bright lights are more unpleasant and it s easy to be distracted by things that other people won t notice.The desire to give lectures has obvious benefits for any profession where giving lectures is a large part of the work, this is one reason why so many Aspies end up in academic careers. The down-side is that this is usually combined with a lack of ability to recognise when people aren t interested in receiving a lecture.Things can work out quite well for people on the Autism Spectrum who have a special interest that relates to a well paying career, who don t have any problems that prevent them from getting and keeping a job.Neutral Aspects of ASOn forums some Aspies report that they don t want to have friends, presumably their needs for friendship are met by the interaction with other forum members. As far as I can determine they are happy like that. I m sure that such people are a lot happier than people who want friends and don t have any.The incidence of asexuality among Aspies is apparently a lot higher than among the general population (something like 30% vs 1%). This isn t a bad thing for those people (I am not aware of any evidence to suggest that asexuals are less happy than people with average sexual desire), but it is evidence to suggest that Aspies are not the next stage in human evolution.Negative Aspects of ASThe DSM-IV diagnostic criteria for AS has as section C The disturbance causes clinically significant impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning , in the proposed changes for DSM-V it s merged into Autistic Disorder with section D being Symptoms together limit and impair everyday functioning [1]. These seem like clear disadvantages, it doesn t seem possible to be diagnosed as being on the Autism Spectrum without having some real disadvantage.Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASDs) seem to usually be correlated with Sensory Processing Disorder. Symptoms of SPD can include a lack of tolerance for noise, lights, certain types of clothing, dirt, and lots of other things as well as being physically clumsy. SPD is not in the diagnostic criteria for any ASD but it seems that most people on the Spectrum experience it to some degree and many regard it as the worst down-side of Autism.Spiritual Aspects of ASI ve seen a claim that AS gives them some advantage over NTs in terms of spiritual development. When someone manages to prove that their God exists or whatever other supernatural belief they have is based on fact then I ll consider this possibility.I think it s worth noting however that most religions seem to place some emphasis on humility, that seems to go against claiming that one s neuro-type is genetically predisposed to being successful at religion.ConclusionThere are many positive, neutral, and negative aspects of AS that I didn t list, I only mentioned some of the more common ones. How the positive and negative aspects compare differs on an individual basis, some people seem to be better off by objective criteria. But it seems that the best outcome is to have a different life experience that isn t objectively worse, which usually seems to involve a career in computers, science, engineering, or academia.Really if we were better then the Neuro-Typical people (NTs) would envy us, and I haven t seen much evidence of that. The NTs who do think that AS is a good thing seem to have little knowledge of AS.

• [1] http://www.dsm5.org/ProposedRevisions/Pages/proposedrevision.aspx?rid=97

The Abel prize for 2011 has been awarded to John Willard Milnor.[1] In response to a query from Dr. R. Ramachandran who writes about Science and Science Policy for The Hindu'' newspaper group, I wrote the following short piece which others may find interesting as well. Milnor is well-known for his work on topology and geometry. He has also made significant contributions to algebra and even number theory. In addition, he has written a number of books which are loved by graduate students in Mathematics all over the world. One of the striking early results of Milnor was the example he gave of a seven dimensional space which is topologically a sphere but its geometric (differentiable) structure is different. This was the first example of an "exotic sphere". A nice way to state his main result (due to Ajit Sanzgiri) is that "Groups of homotopy spheres are homotopy groups of spheres". Milnor received the Fields' Medal in 1962. In addition, the work of a number of later Fields' medallists such as Donaldson, Thurston, Mori and Voevodsky can be seen as having roots in the work of Milnor.

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[1]The last time I wrote about the Abel Prize was to contribute to a guest post to Rahul Basu's science blog: The Far Side. Unfortunately, Rahul is no longer among us. This post is dedicated to the memory of Rahul Basu.

A while ago I received a new desktop machine (8 cores, 8Gb of memory ...) at work. Since for the moment I kinda happy to work on my laptop using an external screen, I decided to put the hw to a good use and to explore a bit more some more exotic (at least for me) xen features. In particular I spend half a day playing with different xen network settings. The bridge model, that should work out of the shelf, is the easiest one. To setup this up, you basically need to specify a couple of options in the xend-config file and you're done. This is the "default" network configuration and is should work out of the box in most situations. Using this method, since all VMs' interfaces are bridged together (surprise !) with the public interface, your network card is left in promiscuous mode (not a big problem if you ask me...). Once your VMs are up, you can then decided to use your default dhcp server, autoconf your VMs with ipv6 only, or do nothing as you please. An other popular method, albeit a bit more complex, is to setup a natted network using the script network-nat (this one is an evolution of the third method that is 'network-routed') . I played with it, but since I wanted to have all my DomU on the same subnet, this setup wasn't satisfying for me. In particular, by default, 'network-nat' assigns a different subnet to each DomU. Using the natted set up you can also configure a local dhcp server to give private IPs to your VMs all done transparently by the xen network scripts. I've noticed that there is a bug in the xen script that does not make it very squeeze friendly. Since the default dhcp server in squeeze is isc-dhcp and few configuration files got shuffled in the process (notably /etc/dhcp3.conf is not /etc/dhcp/dhcp.conf) , the script needs a little fix to work properly. I'll report this bug sometimes soon... Goggling around I found a different setup that is called brouter, that is a hybrid between a bridge configuration and a routed configuration. This is the original (??) article well hidden in an old suse wiki.

I've done few modifications here to add natting. So basically, all virtual interfaces connected each to one DomU are linked together by a bridge (xenbr0). The bridge with address 10.0.0.1 is also the router of the subnet. All DomU are configured to used dhcp that assigns a new ip and specifies the router of the subnet. The dhcp server is configured to answer requests only on the xenb0 interface avoiding problems on the public network... routing is configured using iptables : Note that since the dhcp server is configured to give addresses only on the virtual network, we need to restart it after creating the bridge interface, otherwise isc-dhcp-server will refuse to run. Mum says that I should configure the bridge in /etc/network/interfaces to make the dhcp server happy at startup, but I felt a bit lazy, so I let to task to xen... In the next episode, I'll add ipv6 connectivity to the virtual subnet and then start playing with puppet... ipv6 is almost done, puppet... I started with the doc... The complete script from the suse wiki and with my modifications is below (only lightly tested):

Quite probably, the best thing got for myself during the last year was my Kindle. I just love it! It has changed the way I interact with knowledge, and saved me from hours of boredom. But it has also taught me the value of scribbling along the book pages and of underlining passages. Yes, I hold a deep regard for my regular (paper) books, and I never scribble on them, not even on text books. In any case, I can scribble on a post-it or something like that. Still, when you underline or comment on a passage in the Kindle, what can you do with your annotation? Well, not much. Annotations (called clippings in Kindlespeak) are stored on an easily accessible My Clippings.txt text file, very easy to parse and work with. So, I devoted yesterday evening to coming up with a first prototype of an app that I think can be very useful if you use clippings extensively: It displays each clipping with its base information separately, allows you to filter on the specific book to which each clipping is related as well as on the clipping type. So, if it interests you, clone it away from github!

git://github.com/gwolf/kindleclip.git

Written in Ruby, Gtk (Glade). No further libraries are (currently?) needed. The code is far from beautiful, but is a first stab towards functionality. Any comments welcome!

Sam Varghese has written an article that is very skeptical of the educational value of the OLPC project [1].Are Laptops Any Good for Schools?Sam cites an article in the New York Times by Winnie Hu about schools removing laptop programs due to a lack of success [2]. Winnie s article gives an example of a school shutting a program because of getting new teachers who lacked computer skills and some examples of schools which had issues with the repair cost. The solution to that would be computers that are more robust and easier to use by all accounts the OLPC systems are solidly constructed and easy to use!It is claimed that using laptops doesn t increase test scores. Using only test scores to compare educational methods is a way to lose, probably any school which does nothing other than try to increase test scores is worth avoiding. One example from Winnie s article is a report by Mr. Warschauer of students at a middle school in Yarmouth, Me., who used their laptops to create a Spanish book for poor children in Guatemala and debate Supreme Court cases found online . What value can you place on having students develop books for poor children in other countries and debate Supreme Court cases? If this sort of program became popular then it would lead to the countries which do it becoming better places to live in future decades!Mr. Warschauer also claims that If the goal is to get kids up to basic standard levels, then maybe laptops are not the tool. But if the goal is to create the George Lucas and Steve Jobs of the future, then laptops are extremely useful . I would go further than that, I think that providing the educational environment that involves international charity work and analysis of important court cases would lead to students having the skills to become good engineers, designers, and artists who work for people like George Lucas and Steve Jobs. No matter what you might do the vast majority of children will not grow up to be like George Lucas and Steve Jobs, there is a very limited number of positions for such people. But those people employ a huge number of creative people who do interesting and enjoyable work for good pay.I don t think that Winnie s article supports criticism of the OLPC project. I don t think that Winnie s article even contains sufficient evidence to match the headline.Playing GamesSam also cites an article about the misuse of school computers for playing games [3]. Of course there are ways of limiting access to games based on time etc. For a Linux system you could have a root cron job that runs chmod on /usr/games at various times, and preventing users from easily running programs that they install isn t difficult.Not that games are all bad, the flash-based games on www.physicsgames.net do teach kids some things about physics although I admit that much of that could be learned by playing with balls, skate-boards, etc.The Problem with the OLPC ProjectI think that the policy change to make OLPC systems only available to disadvantaged children was a mistake. The give one get one program was a great idea, maybe not the most effective way of getting funding but good for getting developers. While the new Sugar on a Stick project to put the OLPC GUI on a bootable USB device [4] it doesn t compare well to having dedicated hardware IMHO.Minimal Use of ComputersI have previously written about the weight of school bags and how laptops can alleviate the risk of health problems related to carrying heavy text books [5]. Since that time ebook readers and tablets have become incredibly cheap. Ebook readers are really light and the recent tablets are also very light (particularly the smaller ones). It seems to me that every school should at least be moving towards every student having an ebook reader and to use ebooks for all books that are part of the curriculum.At the moment there are a bunch of tablets on sale for about $150, that includes tablets that can access the Internet via Wifi or via 3G and a cheap 3G plan costs less than $150 per annum. If tablets were used for some of the computer tasks related to schools then a lot of the difficulty of repairing hardware would be removed. Tablets don t offer as many options for messing up the software configuration and if the hardware breaks it s easy to transfer the data onto a new tablet from the cloud with a maximum cost of $150 to replace the hardware.Also a cloud-based computing model could permit students to access all the same data from school and home while using desktop computers at both locations.Current SuccessNatalie Craig wrote an interesting article for The Age about The Lab a drop-in computer center for kids on the Autism Spectrum run by Dale Linegar and Stefan Schutt [6]. The fact that kids who have communication difficulties can find it easier to communicate electronically should be fairly obvious to everyone in the free software community, but the creation of an organisation to support such kids is noteworthy I think that such centers should be funded by the government and run in every city.Salman Khan gave an interesting TED talk about his project the Khan Academy [7] which is an online video-based teaching system that evolved from some Youtube videos he produced to tutor his cousins. Salman pointed out that his cousins said that they would rather watch his videos than have him teach them in person, it seems that they liked being able to pause and rewind the talk as well as avoiding the pressure of human interaction. The Khan Academy has videos in Adobe flash format, but conveniently they have download links so those of us who don t have the Flash plugin can still view the content [8].One of the interesting things about the Khan Academy is that in school use the videos are being assigned to kids as homework and the class time is used for teaching children to do worked examples what has traditionally been homework.So it seems that there are real examples of special-needs kids and average kids benefiting from different types of electronic learning.ConclusionI think that almost everything about the education system is broken. I also think that in many ways the education system has reached a local maximum, so there is no small way of improving things, and adding computers without making any of the significant changes needed to fix the big problems probably can t do a lot of good. In spite of this computers can provide some real benefits and I expect that those benefits can be better than the benefits of other potential ways of spending the money (IE it s worth the opportunity cost). I also have no doubt that almost anything can give a negative result if done badly enough, so I don t interpret examples of computer use failing in a school as anything other than evidence of a failing school.While the Khan Academy has some results that seem very positive I think that s only the first step of what needs to be done. It also seems to be based around users who have good Internet access which often isn t the case in places where the OLPC is being deployed. This implies that we need to get systems like the Khan Academy designed to operate in a disconnected manner, maybe with a remote server that s not connected to the Internet. This should be possible if funding is available.Sam suggested that there needs to be a scientific study of the effectiveness of the OLPC. I think that every project which involves significant amounts of public funding should be researched to ensure that it s an effective use of resources. 400,000 laptops is going to cost something more than $40,000,000 so it seems reasonable to devote a few person-years of research to determine how effective they are and which of the possible ways of using an OLPC will give the best results.I am confident that a good study of the effectiveness of the OLPC would demonstrate that it provides real educational benefits when correctly incorporated into an educational program. I also expect that such a study would show some significant differences in the effectiveness of various ways of using them. But we shouldn t be relying on confidence, we need some test results.

• [1] http://www.itwire.com/opinion-and-analysis/open-sauce/44673-lca-2011-is-the-olpc-about-technology-or-education
• [2] http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/04/education/04laptop.html
• [3] http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/11/business/11digi.html?adxnnl=1
• [4] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_on_a_Stick
• [5] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2008/05/24/school-bag-weight/
• [6] http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/autistic-kids-learn-to-fly-in-cyberspace-20110219-1b0fj.html
• [7] http://www.ted.com/talks/salman_khan_let_s_use_video_to_reinvent_education.html
• [8] http://www.khanacademy.org/

If you were watching itv1 last night (or since), you might have seen the co-operative group s Join the Revolution advert that hints at how buying from co-op shops helps to support a wide range of other co-operative efforts. This isn t unique to that co-op our co-op has been helped by the group and many others over the years, both formally and informally, and we ve helped other co-ops too but the shops are one of the biggest co-ops and it s great to see them getting the message out there. It s rather less great that my mobile phone is convinced that John the Revolution is much more probable. Got to love software. If only it was free software I could fix

I've received a few requests to help with failing builds in the past, mainly for packages I maintain (either officially or unofficially). And most of those requests revolve around custom Wine builds. Because this is recurring, I'd like to take the opportunity to write down some general answers which solve most of the problems, so I can point people to this entry.

• Use pbuilder (cowbuilder is a good companion to pbuilder).
• If you've modified the packaging, make sure you didn't introduce bugs, which lead to your failure (this implies careful reading of your build logs).
• If you didn't update the packaging and just used a newer upstream version to build your packages, you should check what was changed upstream (maybe you need some additional Build-Depends or something similar) and whether the unmodified Debian package (including the .orig.tar is buildable in current Sid.
• If you added patches (maybe taken from some upstream bug tracker), make sure it's not those patches, which cause the breakage.
• When you do a backports build make sure all build dependencies are satisfied.

Apart from that, you'll most likely find a lot of answers in the Developer's Reference and the New Maintainers' Guide. Nothing of this is news to Debian Maintainers, but I hope it helps people doing a build for themselves, when they're less experienced.

In the software community, people hold strong opinions on the subject of listening to users. Some feel that users are an essential source of information for making successful products, as evidenced in the customer development methodology, and seek to involve users deeply in product development. Others believe that users don t know what they want, invoking the quote attributed to Henry Ford, If I d asked customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse . Some say that user needs are unknowable except through the lens of a marketplace, where people choose in aggregate which products suit them best, and customers vote with their wallets (anything else is anecdata ). Regular readers will not be surprised that I believe they are all right, but only in certain contexts. The right strategy for involving users in product decisions will depend on factors related to the product itself, the market, and the product development method being used. One of the most important is the life cycle stage of the product: is it a new and rapidly evolving concept, or a mature commodity, or somewhere in between? Simon Wardley explains this well over on his blog, so I won t rehash his points here, but will add a few of my own. If what we re looking for is inspiration for a new product, it s here that Henry Ford was right: users generally won t hand you a complete product vision on a silver platter. They ll frame their input in terms of what they know, and the choices already available to them. However, this doesn t mean that users don t have a role to play in this instance: watching users can be a great source of inspiration. It s the combination of domain knowledge and passionate imagination which triggers the creative spark. Henry Ford applied his engineer s interests to a problem which was evident all around him. If our goal is to test whether a new product is a good fit for its users, there is no substitute for user feedback. We can guess at whether there is a fit, and our intuition may be good, but users are the ultimate judges, and we don t know if we re right or wrong until users evaluate it. So ask them! By engaging in dialogue with individual users, we can learn unexpected things which will help to refine the idea. If we don t find what they think until our new product is released, we risk making something that no one wants. Why wait until it s too late? It can be challenging to extract useful feedback for a product which doesn t yet exist, but this effort is well worth it to avoid wasting much more effort in software engineering. When our objective is to incrementally improve an existing product, individual anecdotes can mislead us. A given change may be an improvement for one user, but a disaster for another. What we want to know is whether the new version is better for the population as a whole, and in this case, we do well to rely on data. There are pitfalls here as well, of course. We need to choose our questions carefully, and realize that users will often resist any change: not because they re stodgy by nature, but because they have to invest effort in adapting to the change. I think of incremental improvement as a joint investment made between product developers and their users, to improve the whole system of people and technology for the better. By choosing the right tool for the job, we can make better decisions, improve faster, and ultimately solve the right problem for our users.

Is there a way to access a MySQL database over the network from PHP and be confident that

• the connection is actually using SSL, and
• the server's X.509 certificate was successfully verified?

As far as i can tell, when using the stock MySQL bindings, setting MYSQL_CLIENT_SSL is purely advisory (i.e. it won't fail if the server doesn't advertise SSL support). This means it won't defend against an active network attacker performing the equivalent of sslstrip. Even if MYSQL_CLIENT_SSL was stronger than an advisory flag, i can't seem to come up with a way to tell PHP's basic MySQL bindings the equivalent of the --ssl-ca flag to the mysql client binary. Without being able to configure this, a "man-in-the-middle" should be able to intercept the connection by offering their own certificate on their endpoint, and otherwise relaying the traffic. A client that does not verify the server's identity would be none the wiser. One option to avoid a MITM attack would be for the server to require client-side certs via the REQUIRE option for a GRANT statement, but the basic MySQL bindings for php don't seem to support that either. PHP's mysqli bindings (MySQL Improved, i think) feature a command called ssl_set() which appears to allow client-side certificate support. But its documentation isn't clear on how it handles an invalid/expired/revoked server certificate (let alone a server that announces that it doesn't support SSL), and it also mentions:

This function does nothing unless OpenSSL support is enabled.

Given that debian MySQL packages don't use OpenSSL because of licensing incompatibilities with the GPL, i'm left wondering if packages built against yaSSL support this feature. And i'm more than a little bit leery that i have no way of telling whether my configuration request succeeded, or whether this function just happily did nothing because the interpreter got re-built with the wrong flags. Shouldn't the function fail explicitly if it cannot meet the user's request? Meanwhile, the PDO bindings for MySQL apparently don't support SSL connections at all. What's going on here? Does no one use MySQL over the network via PHP? Given the number of LAMP-driven data centers, this seems pretty unlikely. Do PHP+MySQL users just not care about privacy or integrity of their data? Or (please let this be the case) have i just somehow missed the obvious documentation? Tags: mysql, php, question, security, ssl, tls

Once again, there will be another round of the Summer School Advanced Scientific Programming in Python . This year in St. Andrews, UK. Quoting from the official announcement:

Scientists spend more and more time writing, maintaining, and debugging software. While techniques for doing this efficiently have evolved, only few scientists actually use them. As a result, instead of doing their research, they spend far too much time writing deficient code and reinventing the wheel. In this course we will present a selection of advanced programming techniques, incorporating theoretical lectures and practical exercises tailored to the needs of a programming scientist. New skills will be tested in a real programming project: we will team up to develop an entertaining scientific computer game. We use the Python programming language for the entire course. Python works as a simple programming language for beginners, but more importantly, it also works great in scientific simulations and data analysis. We show how clean language design, ease of extensibility, and the great wealth of open source libraries for scientific computing and data visualization are driving Python to become a standard tool for the programming scientist. This school is targeted at PhD students and Post-docs from all areas of science. Competence in Python or in another language such as Java, C/C++, MATLAB, or Mathematica is absolutely required. Basic knowledge of Python is assumed. Participants without any prior experience with Python should work through the proposed introductory
materials before the course.

You can apply on-line at http://python.g-node.org Applications must be submitted before May 29, 2011. Notifications of acceptance will be sent by June 19, 2011. No fee is charged but participants should take care of travel, living, and accommodation expenses. Candidates will be selected on the basis of their profile. Places are limited: acceptance rate in past editions was around 30%. Prerequisites: You are supposed to know the basics of Python to participate in the lectures. Please consult the website for a list of introductory material. If your re a scientist and interested in Python, I cannot recommend this summer school highly enough. The Summer School is always fun, the faculty members are very nice and always willing to help and answer questions. The balance between lectures and exercises is in my opinion very good, and you ll learn a lot about Python during the week. The highlight of every Python School is always the Pac Man tournament, where groups of students will implement their own Pac Man agent (in Python) and compete against the other agents in a tournament till the bitter end! The students of the previous editions were usually very happy during and after the School. Speaking of happiness, since no fee is charged for the Summer School, you ll have more money left over to invest into the excellent Scottish pubs!

Dear lazyweb, I m using Gnome for quite some time now and I m always satisfied with the interfaces I have to whatever I need. There is one thing, though, that I miss: a calendar. I don t like evolution, I don t need another mail client. What I want is a simple, yet sophisticated application that I can put appointments in and which reminds me of them (recurring issues should be possible, too). It may but doesn t have to be somehow attached to the Gnome clock or whatever. Though I expect it to look Gnome-like and be accessible from the panel. Do you know such? And is there even a Debian package for it? Thanks.

Hrmh... I am listening to a local news radio station. Of course, what I am about to write lacks information and insight but it follows a conversation I have had with several groups of friends. Our de-facto president has decreed that the tuition for private schools will be deducted from the Impuesto sobre la renta (revenue/profit tax) up to a given tuition level (IIRC up to MX$2000 a month per child per school). The interviewed subsecretary said they expect this deduction will reach MX$13,000 million, around US$1,000 million. This is, about a third of what is assigned to the National University (UNAM). At a first sight, this sounds good. However, I just thought about a discussion I have had with many friends. This money the government will hand back to the taxpayers has to be cut from somewhere (after all, we are not in a country with huge superavit or anything like that). Why does this sound unfair ot me? Because it benefits the few in perjudice of the many. I did a quick search, and found this work based on numbers published by INEGI ten years ago: According to the last table, the money spent on private education was between 5% and 10% of that spent on public education Of course, it is almost impossible to infer the number of students from this alone. I know I could find authoritative data on this regard by searching a bit more, but after all I don't want to spend all (work!) evening on a blog post unless it creates some discussion. Lets say, just for the sake of the exercise, that this means that ~3% of the country's students learn in a private school. In Mexico, the quality of the basic public education (primary/secondary, ages 6 to 18) has fallen hugely in the last decades. Even when I was to school (but not when my parents), the first subjective sign that a family had broken the low-income barrier is that they were finally able to send their children to private schools. Because, no matter how bad they are, public schools are perceived to be worse. Of course, I was among the "lucky" ones to be in a private school. Higher education (universitary level) is still way better ranged. Anyway... I want to get this post over with. Why do I oppose this subsidies/tax devolution? Because it will lead to widen the difference between private and public education. And because it will be benefical only for medium-high and high classes People who are formaly employed (as I am) do not present a tax declaration, so we won't get any deductions. Between and of the country's economically active population work informally (from selling in the street to covering up huge transactions in large locals). Most of the population don't (directly) pay "impuesto sobre la renta", and will not get the benefit of this subsidy. This money has to be taken from other sources in order to be given to private education. If the government wants to improve the education for everybody, why not assign it to the public sector? To specific areas in the public sector, if they don't want to hand it over to the (yes, very, incredibly) corrupt SNTE (National Union of Education Workers)?

I've been using Doxygen for a while now, and, no surprises, I find it fantastic ! The only thing that is really missing there is a decent support for Ruby... Allright, Ruby already has a documentation system, rdoc, but using only one for everything has its charms, and Doxygen is doubtlessly much more evolved than rdoc. Maybe when I have time, I'll have a look at writing it. (but that won't be before a long time...). Update: I finally had some time to write and publish this patch. It is available on github