It s good to see that reportbug 4 finally has a graphical user interface it s GTK, but nobody s perfect Anyways, I m really glad to see reportbug aiming to improve it s usability. Reportbug finally shows all the bugreports for a package in a list which is easily filterable. So when you re confronted with a huge list of bugreports but searching for a specific problem, you can just enter a few letters in the filter and the buglist will shrink immediately. This missing feature was basically the most important reason why I developed reportbug-ng: Users are expected to don t report bugs which are already filed against a package, but the main tool which was used back then to report the bugs didn t make this task trivial. Now it does and it s a good thing! Compared to reportbug-ng, reportbug shows the bugreports of a package in a tree-view, while rng shows them in a table-view. The difference is that reportbug could theoretically group serveral bugs together, like merged bugs. It currently only uses this feature to group bugs of the same severity and status. Rng does that by coloring the lines. Unfortunately in reportbug all nodes are collapsed by default, which is not very usable since you have to expand every node in order to see all bugreports. This costs the user several clicks in order to see all bugreports. It s also not possible to sort the bugs via the columns of the table, e.g. sort by date of last action which I think is a huge feature in order to quickly find certain kind of bugs (old bugs, bugs sorted by date of last activity) but that s probably easy to fix. Another good news is that Reportbug now brings it s own editor so the user is not forced anymore to use an console based- and maybe unfamiliar editor to compose his bugreport. This is a huge step forward regarding usability. It also moves the concept of writing a mail to the BTS a bit more away from the user which is a good thing. Maybe the BTS will support an alternative way to receive bugreports in the future so mail clients may become superfluous for reporting bugs. Under the hood reportbug still parses the HTML from http://bugs.debian.org/ go gain the bugreport instead of the BTS SOAP interface. This coupling is of course dangerous since even the smallest change in the BTS webdesign could break reportbug. But SOAP support is already on the todo list of reportbug s devs. I can only encourage this step, when reportbug-ng moved away from HTML-parsing to SOAP the actual amount of work it took was much less then I thought, I think it took me just one or two days and as a result there is python-debianbts which provides a bridge between the SOAP interface and Python. In summary I think this is an important improvement for reportbug. There are still some minor issues like the welcome screen always showing, the nodes collapsed by default and the columns not beeing sortable but those are small issues and easy to fix. I m very happy to see this improvement, since it will motivate the not so tech-savvy folks to report bugs, and more bugreports will ultimately lead to a better distribution. Good work guys!

While everybody agrees the current patenting system (especially software patents) is broken, there is little agreement about what to do about it. Many would like to return to some earlier state "when patents worked properly". So here is a proposal, not necessarily a magic bullet, but a step. The point of patents is/was to make a process "patently clear". Anyone who has read modern patents knows they are anything but clear: they are written in legalese, and engineers and inventors are recommended not to read them: it is both pointless, and dangerous: dangerous, because wilfully infringing patents triples the damages awarded compared to just being ignorant. In other words, you are unlikely to realise that you are infringing a patent (it is so poorly worded) and will accidentally infringe it, earning extra penalties for you diligence in checking. So the solution: Explicitly make patents something "a person with ordinary skill in the art" shall be expected to have read.

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Tags patents, politics

This is my recipe for easily running kvm as an unprivileged user without using sudo and custom network configuration scripts. /etc/network/interfaces:

iface kvmnet inet static
        address         10.5.0.1
        netmask         255.255.255.0
        broadcast       10.5.0.255
        pre-up          vde_tunctl -u md -t $IFACE
        post-down       vde_tunctl -d $IFACE
        up              echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward
        up              iptables --table nat --append POSTROUTING --jump MASQUERADE --source $IF_ADDRESS/$IF_NETMASK
        down            iptables --table nat --delete POSTROUTING --jump MASQUERADE --source $IF_ADDRESS/$IF_NETMASK

~/bin/kvm:

#!/bin/sh -e
iface='kvmnet'
macaddr='DE:AD:42:00:00:01'
model='virtio'
exec kvm \
    -net nic,vlan=0,macaddr=$macaddr,model=$model \
    -net tap,vlan=0,ifname=$iface,script=no,downscript=no \
    "$@"

Configuring a PV network interface is optional, but it is more efficient and if the guest uses udev and a modern kernel it will just work. Bonus tip: use "-vnc :0 -usbdevice tablet -serial telnet:127.0.0.1:4444,server,nowait" for a headless guest which if needed will still have proper consoles.

OK, it's gone 2am and I'm still battling with what was meant to be a simple task - check the latest (unreleased) changes in tslib on my touchscreen device.

First problem was that I forgot that the balloon is running Lenny, so I suddenly needed the armel libc6 from Sid. OK, that's not bad, a bit of a pain to have to install it but less pain than creating a Lenny chroot to cross-build tslib - marginally.

Second problem was more awkward - turns out that emdebian-tools 1.6.1 has broken the more fragile cross-build support which carefully wraps broken libtool installations. I was intending to work out how to fix each one of those before Squeeze anyway. The fix for the workaround was relatively straightforward and will be in 1.6.2, due for release once I've had some sleep.

Third problem was something much older - turns out that this broken libtool wrapper had only been able to work for the default cross-building architecture since about emdebian-tools 1.4 or 1.5 and if asked to build for a different arch, it got the wrong symbols. Hmm.

The diffs for each of these changes appear simple but, as ever, identifying the cause of the bug was harder. (In this case, sometimes the error showed up as "C++ compiler unable to create executables" - thanks autotools, that's really handy to know; other times it showed up as ERROR, symbols from ./.libs/libfoo are ABI 4 but symbols from libc are ABI version 0 - still cryptic but at least it is entirely accurate.)

Still, I've now been able to test tslib 1.0-7 and it works just fine and I've got an extra upload of emdebian-tools 1.6.2 to make tomorrow. Ah well.

After spending a considerable amount of time releasing your Free Software project to the public, you will probably want to make sure that it reaches as many of the people it could be useful to as possible. Here are a few tips to get you started.
Homepage: Is this software for me?The first thing you will probably think about is to create a homepage promoting your project. There are a lot of good tips on how to create an effective homepage, but I will focus here on the contents that you should include.

Screenshots are one of the most important elements you can include on your homepage. First-time visitors will only spend a few seconds on your site before deciding whether or not the information is relevant to them. You need to be able to summarize in a few pictures what your project is all about.

Would you be willing to read long white papers or to go through long build instructions just to find out that this software isn't going to be useful to you after all? Probably not. Make sure you can help users figure this out in a few seconds, even if your software lacks a graphical user interface.

Of course you will also want to describe the project in a few words and provide links to the source code and other services you may have available.
Hosting ChoicesWhere to put your contents is somewhat of a personal choice but there are a few things to keep in mind.

First of all, depending on the size of your project and its related data, the hosting site should may need a significant amount of storage and bandwidth. Furthermore, you should check whether download statistics are collected by your hosting provider. While not strictly necessary, it can be very motivating to watch these numbers go up!

Free Software hosting sites like Google Code, Source Forge and LaunchPad also provide different services like bug trackers and source control repositories.

Some people prefer a distributed approach to source control and issue tracking to avoid trusting their master copy of the data to a third party. Setting up a separate code repository on sites like Github or Gitorious is an option to consider.

All of these hosting providers promote the software they host to varying degrees. Have a look around before deciding where you should park your project.
Announcing your ReleaseFinally, what would a website be without other sites linking to it? The obvious place to start would be the main search engines, but that in itself is unlikely to bring much traffic in the early days of your project.

Sites dedicated to Free Software are more likely to bring visitors to your shiny new project. The most famous place for Free Software release news is Freshmeat. Whether or not you visit this site regularly, you should know that its contents is widely read and syndicated and you should not pass on this great opportunity to let people know about your software.

Other directories that may be of interest include the Free Software Foundation Directory and Ohloh (especially if you offer a publicly available source code repository).

Now that the word is getting out, it's time to start thinking about supporting these new users!

GNOME 2.26 was released last week, and I couldn't help adding myself to the long list of celebrating posts in Planet GNOME. Looking at the release notes, it looks like this release adds a good number of very visible features, and also keeps improving on ongoing transitions like gvfs.

The Debian GNOME team is obviously not ignoring this fact and started to work very hard on updating GNOME for squeeze as soon as the lenny freeze was over. First, the new versions of GLib and GTK+ were uploaded to unstable, and managed to transition to testing very easily. The rest of GNOME 2.24 bits, which had been patiently waiting on experimental for months, has been uploaded with care not to disrupt any of the many transitions the Debian release team is currently dealing with. You can have a quick glance at how things are going in our 2.24 status page, but the summary is that most of GNOME 2.24 is in unstable, with a few notable exceptions which are held back by ongoing testing transitions. Namedly, evolution-data-server is trying to trickle into testing, which is in turn holding the final bits: gnome-panel, nautilus and related packages, but we think this will be over soon. As soon as GNOME 2.24 is safe in squeeze, we'll immediately turn our focus to the new GNOME 2.26 release. Our initial plan is to package the trivial bits and leaf packages which can't break stuff for unstable, and herd the more complex modules via experimental, to avoid breaking unstable at all. There are some exceptions; we plan to keep gnome-session 2.22 in unstable/testing until 2.26.1 is released to avoid getting a broken session saving in Debian. People might wonder why we insist on hitting what would seem a dead horse by first dealing with 2.24 and not 2.26 directly. The main reason is that these packages had been ready for a long time, and were in good shape to transition to testing quickly and with little pain. Preparing 2.26 directly would mean throwing away a lot of hours of packaging and polishing effort, and it's not like we're releasing squeeze any time soon anyway. Enjoy the hopefully not too bumpy road to 2.26!

I finished reading David Copperfield on the Kindle a few days ago. This is a review of the novel, not the Kindle. I m not an English major, and so I m not going to pretend to be one. I m not going to discuss what themes the book touches on, what category it fits in, or generally dissect it to the point where it s more monotonous than fun. I read the book because I wanted to, not because I had to write a paper about it. I must say, first of all, that this has got to be one of the best books I ve ever read. The vivid descriptions of the characters were just fun to read. One particularly meek man was described like this: He was so extremely conciliatory in his manner that he seemed to apologize to the very newspaper for taking the liberty of reading it. Some of the scenes in the novel are amazingly vivid and memorable. The hilarious and tense scene towards the end where one of the main villains is taken down was one, and of course just about every scene involving David s aunt is too. Dickens is a master of suspense. He does it through subtle premonitions in the book. You might not even really notice them as you re reading. But it sure had an effect on me: I had trouble putting the book down, and stayed up later than I should have on more than one night to keep reading another chapter or three. Like any good book, this one left me to think even after I was done reading it, and left me wanting to read it again. Right now. There are some practical downsides to it, though. It was written in the 1850s, and some of the vocabulary and British legal, business, and monetary discussions are strange to a modern American audience. Nevertheless, with the exception of the particularly verbose Mr. Micawber, you can probably make it through without a dictionary, though one will be handy. I read it on the Kindle, which integrates a dictionary and makes it very easy to look up words. I learned that a nosegay is a bouquet of showy flowers. And that Mr. Micawber was fond of using words obsolete since the 17th century, according to the Kindle. If you remember that pecuniary emoluments refers to a salary, you ll be doing OK. The other thing that occasionally bugged me was that the narrator (David) would comment on some sort of gesture, or comment that wasn t very direct, and then say something like, But she didn t need to be more explicit, because I understood the meaning perfectly. Well, sometimes I didn t. Though I usually figured it out after a bit. I was never quite sure if Dickens was being intentionally needling to the reader, or if an 1850s British reader would have figured out the meaning perfectly well. But that was part of the fun of it, I think.

• Leif slept through most of the night most nights last week. Then was sick this week. We haven't got back to that space yet. I'd say "I have faith", but I think that's when god looks at the little Unitarian and chuckles to himself with an "aren't you cute".
• Apparently I have thousands of photos that I hadn't uploaded. This is going to be more work than I thought.
• What sucks is waking up at 4am not because Leif woke me up, but because I was hungry. Taking until 5 to figure this out. Until 5:30 to fall asleep, to have Leif wake me up at 6.
• We get communauto tomorrow. I'm so excited! First trip: Ikea. And of all the exciting things I could want from there? I want kitchen knives. At 5, I put the margarine on the toast with the back of a fork.
• I really hope I can get to the gym today.
• In 4 minutes, I will wake Leif and Angie up and we'll start our day.

Showtime, synergy!

When some Debian developers set up microblogging for whole Debian project, I decided it's really time to at least try it ;-). So if you are interested in reading my rants, you can follow them on identi.ca or twitter. I'm not really sure how long I will actually use it, but for now it seems to be good way to dump thoughts which are really not worth anything more.

Memefactory! :

What do you get when you combine a lecture, vaudeville and Double Dare? Memefactory! Three gentlemen with five computers and three projectors take the audience on a fast-paced, whirlwind tour of every major Internet meme, famous piece of Internet media and YouTube footage imaginable. The modus is not depth, but breadth, and constant audience participation is required. Over the course of the evening, the audience will produce an entry for every internet phenomenon possible, including but not limited to: LOLCats, Bouncing GIFs, Me Singing [blank], Reaction Videos, Folk Covers of Hip Hop Classics, FAILs, Redubbed music videos, and more. Some will become famous like Boxxy, most will drink beers and a brave few will be nude.

Memefactory! :

What do you get when you combine a lecture, vaudeville and Double Dare? Memefactory! Three gentlemen with five computers and three projectors take the audience on a fast-paced, whirlwind tour of every major Internet meme, famous piece of Internet media and YouTube footage imaginable. The modus is not depth, but breadth, and constant audience participation is required. Over the course of the evening, the audience will produce an entry for every internet phenomenon possible, including but not limited to: LOLCats, Bouncing GIFs, Me Singing [blank], Reaction Videos, Folk Covers of Hip Hop Classics, FAILs, Redubbed music videos, and more. Some will become famous like Boxxy, most will drink beers and a brave few will be nude.

daniel@emurlahn:~/programming/aptitude/head$ hg log -r tip
changeset:   2611:c81f562751d6
tag:         tip
parent:      1665:94b597a663a7
parent:      2610:78100f86756d
user:        Daniel Burrows <dburrows@debian.org>
date:        Mon Mar 23 10:49:47 2009 -0700
summary:     Merge the entire post-lenny branch into head.
daniel@emurlahn:~/programming/aptitude/head$ hg log -p -r tip   diffstat -m   tail --lines 1
 239 files changed, 105227 insertions(+), 16334 deletions(-), 69203 modifications(!)

That's right: active [aptitude /projects/aptitude] development is now taking place in the head branch again, after a hiatus of about a year while I worked in a branch while waiting for Lenny to be released. Lenny is released now, and so the post-lenny and gtk branches have been merged into head and renamed to avoid accidental commits (you can find them under the names post-lenny-branch-is-closed and gtk-branch-is-closed). Future releases will come out of the head branch (http://hg.debian.org/hg/aptitude/head).

I wish that gnome-terminal was able to support multi-line URLs, or that mutt was able to render long urls on a single logical line. If you use mutt in gnome-terminal, you may have noticed that urls that wrap to another line cannot be opened using gnome-terminal's context menu. Of course, resizing the terminal to be wide enough works around the problem, but is not always practical. Another workaround is to pipe the message to less. While the url will still be displayed split across multiple lines, gnome-terminal will then recognize the whole url as one thing. Why does less work where mutt fails? Well, it seems that mutt and less print the url differently. less simply prints the whole url, and lets gnome-terminal wrap it to the next line. mutt prints the first line of the url, then moves the cursor to the start of the next line, and prints the remainder. This could be fixed either by making gnome-terminal smarter about finding the end of urls that are sent to it in multiple pieces, or by making mutt (or likely really ncurses) change how it outputs long lines.

I generally try not to get caught up in writing auxiliary tools for my free software projects. My experience in the past has been that given how little spare time I have each week, a tool that takes more than an hour or two to write quickly ends up becoming a time sink that prevents me from making progress on the main project. But occasionally it's worth the effort. I spent the last couple weeks putting together a tool to extract information about a dependency search from a log trace of aptitude's resolver. The search is displayed in a log interface that shows both the steps of the search in order, and the tree structure of the search. It took a long time to write, but after working with it for just a few hours, I was able to track down the bugs in the resolver modifications I was trying to write; without a tool like this, it would have taken a lot of painful grepping through log files to get all the information I needed. In other news, the resolver now stores the choices it has made as a single set of choices, instead of using two different sets for the two types of choices it can make. There's no user-visible change (although I did fix another performance problem that affected safe-upgrade), but this will pave the way for adding more types of choices in a cleaner way: in particular, the resolver should get explicit support for package replacements in the near future. The code for this is available in the tools directory of aptitude's experimental Mercurial repository, http://hg.debian.org/hg/aptitude/post-lenny. When I get around to merging it this with the main repository, it will also be available at http://hg.debian.org/hg/aptitude/head.

---

A brief digression regarding the implementation language The tool is implemented in Haskell, a decision that I'm not sure was the right one. Haskell's data model was perfect for this task: having algebraic datatypes allows me to precisely represent cases where parts of the structure can't be inferred from the log file, or can only be inferred incompletely. And of course there are the other well-known benefits of Haskell (pure, a strong type system, good support for higher-order programming, etc). But all those benefits were wiped out by the time I spent fighting the runtime. The thing is, Haskell is a lazy language. In theory, this means that it never evaluates anything you don't need and that you can work with arbitrarily large (even infinite) values and only allocate the parts you actually use. In practice, this means that you have to pay excruciatingly close attention to every single expression you write, or as soon as you run your program on non-trivial input, it will either run very slowly, eat all your memory, die with a stack overflow, or all of the above. Oh, and did I mention that laziness means that you can't have a runtime debugger, that trace statements are mostly-useless, because your program doesn't run in any predictable order, and that it's impossible to get backtraces when there's a fatal error? I think if I were doing this over again, I'd use O'Caml. I'm less familiar with it and its syntax is clunkier, but I have used it productively in the past and it provides the core stuff I wanted from Haskell (functional programming with algebraic datatypes). If someone could make a language that was pure, had Haskell's nice syntax and type features, but was also strict, and that had decent tool support and development resources, I think I'd be in nerd heaven.

Wow, long time without one of these posts. I actually have material that will have to wait for the next issue already!

• On Golden Pond: Henry Fonda and Katharine Hepburn play a delightful couple in their late years. He s old and grumpy, among other things, and she s kind and just gorgeous. Then a daughter comes to visit (the daughter is played by Jane Fonda, btw).
• Eastern Promises: it s been one year since I recommended in this very blog A History of Violence. David Cronenberg has done it again, again with the help of Viggo Mortensen. The scene in the sauna is magnificent.
• L auberge espagnole: a French guy comes to Spain (Barcelona) as an Erasmus student for a year, and meets with some other Erasmus students (and somebody else). Very enjoyable, and has a sequel that I haven t seen yet.
• The Visitor: I wish I remembered more about this movie, because it left me very pleased; that just means I can watch it again sometime, and says something about the movie too. An ode to people who believe in making good to others, but not a cheesy ode at all.
• The Station Agent: this movie was sold to me on the basis that I d just be watching life pass by through a small number of people. It really felt that way most of the time, and it wasn t boring. As it happens, same writer and director than The Vistor above, Tom McCarthy.

Today is my 38th birthday. (Chronologically that is. It was on Thursday by tithi.) As a present I got an Acer Extensa EX 4630-3922 laptop. I added an extra 2GB of RAM to the listed configuration and still managed to spend less than $500. It came with Windows Vista but shrinking that to a minimum and installing Linux (Kubuntu Intrepid) on it was completely uneventful. Now the next step will be to learn about Xen or KVM (Who's winning these days?) so I can add Debian Lenny and RHEL 5.2 to the mix. The only complaint I have so far is the anemic battery life which barely reaches 2.5 hours though perhaps that might improve with a bit of tweaking.

Last month, Codethink turned 2 years old, to coincide we had a company-wide hackfest in Brussels straight after FOSDEM. It really brought home how much it d grown. Just a year ago there was just me and Mark. Now we are 8! So i m gonna take a moment to shout out to the great job these guys are doing. In order of appearence . Mark Doffman
Mark has been consistently working on transforming AT-SPI (the GNOME Accessibility and UI automation technology) into a D-Bus based cross-desktop project. From nothing a year ago, working with Mike Gorse from Novell, he s now got something that more or less works and it s getting a lot of focus and testing as we plan for GNOME 3.0. I m looking forward to a brave new future for cross toolkit accessibility on the Linux desktop. John Carr
John came to us from working on Conduit, and he s continued on his dream of making all the devices and web services of the world talk seamlessly to each other. John s been in charge of pushing the Wizbit project along and now the core of this is pretty stable, he is going to be turning his eye to working on using Wizbit for synchronisation. J rg Billeter
A stunning hacker who needs no introduction! J rg s been continuing to hack on Vala and it s getting more and more mature each week. His main work, however has been on the stunning tracker-vstore, a branch of tracker that brings full RDF capabilities, which Philip van Hoof has been blogging about. I ll be writing a biggish blog post on this soon and what RDF could really mean for the desktop experience. Karl Lattimer
Karl came to us from working on UI at Nokia. At Codethink he s continued to focus on graphics technology and user experience, bringing his keen eye to Wizbit, amongst other things. One of the most impressive things I ve seen for a while was Karl s kinetic scrolling widget for the Wizbit timeline view. I m hoping we can turn this into something more general in the future. Ryan Lortie
Another hacker who needs no introduction, Ryan s our low-level infrastructure guy. He s been working on GNIO, a library to do network operations using GIO stream abstractions and continuing to hack on DConf, which is gradually coming together. He s also been helping J rg out with Vala. Mukund Sivaraman
I knew Muks from his GIMP work, and his work on Herb is really impressive. Muks is mostly working on top secret stuff that we can t talk about, unfortunately! Peter Charlton
Our documentation guy. This guy knows how to write and knows how to take something vague and unintelligable and turn it into crystal clarity. Invaluable! Of course, through all this I ve been here, dancing about architecture and generally doing the best I can to hold the whole shebang together. I ve been mostly working on some top secret stuff which hopefully will be getting opened up soon. I ll dance about that then

After integrating Matt Palmer's installer patches for D-Link DNS-323, I have now created installer images based on Debian lenny. They will work both on the D-Link DNS-323 as well as the Conceptronic CH3SNAS. I've also written an installation guide and other information, including how to use the recovery mechanism through the serial console.