Now you know what to do.

Hint: it starts with Further and ends with Discussion .

I've not followed the current voting closely, because I was moving from Berlin back to Rostock last weekeend. But I find it strange that the issue with firmwares is still not solved since Etch.

That's more than two years ago and within these two years nobody cared to solve the firmware blob issue. This leads me to the conclusion: nobody cares about unfree firmware in Debian except there is a release upcoming and then some people start shouting "UNFREE FIRMWARES!!! That's against the social contract!"

So, when it's against the SC, why hasn't this issues been resolved in the last two years? Apparently noone cared enough and therefore it's not that important to stop the current release, IMHO.
My point of view is: firmware blobs are part of the hardware and not some sort software that needs to be free. Of course it's nice if firmware blobs are actually free and open. But the alternative would be hardware with real ROMs that either can't be updated (because they're soldered onto the board) or, if they're socketed, extra costs because you'll need to buy ROM updates and exchange your little ROM chip by a newer version.

I prefer to have firmware blobs released with lenny soon, but maybe I'm missing some points...

Last week I reported that 95% of British Residential ISPs Censor - but I think I m OK, so I d like to quickly update on what I ve seen happen since then:-

• My question to the Phone Coop s election candidates has gone unanswered - not sure why
• I asked 3 how to switch off IWF filtering on Tuesday - first call-back on Wednesday couldn t do anything except escalate it. I m still waiting for further reply at the time of writing.
• Cockspiracy reports no good news from Virgin Media - you can have porn on your cable TV but not on your cable internet, OK?
• Digital-Scurf Ramblings shows Daniel Silverstone accusing Virgin Media of being unfit for purpose, as I understand it
• EFF: Internet Censors Must Be Accountable For The Things They Break
• Looks like a positive result with the Aussie plan to censor Web in shreds
• I read the preface to Animal Farm: The sinister fact about literary censorship in England is that it is largely voluntary. Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban. because of a general tacit agreement that it wouldn t do to mention that particular fact. George Orwell, 1945. Still current in 2008?

Debian has a secretary that:

• doesn t close the General Resolution: Project membership procedures vote in time. It s 6:30 (UTC) right now, with a vote running till (past) midnight, and no results around, and the vote is still under Voting Open .
• doesn t open the General Resolution: Lenny and resolving DFSG violations vote in time. Still at 6:30 (UTC), this vote is under In Discussion , while it should have started at (past) midnight.
• shortens the voting period for that stupid vote to one single week while it hasn t been requested, as Sledge confirmed after my asking for a reference.
• initially failed to send the ballot to debian-devel-announce@.

Epic FAIL. (I won t mention again the incredible decision of putting everything into a single vote, others have done so already. And that s of course the worst of all.) Update: Just for fun (or despair), I sent another ballot for the General Resolution: Project membership procedures vote. And guess what?

This is an acknowledgement for your vote [record msg00356.raw] for
the vote "Project membership procedures"
sent in on Mon, 15 Dec 2008 08:37:16 +0100, with the subject
"Re: Final call for votes: GR: Project membership procedures"
 
Your vote has been recorded as follows
 
I note that this is not your first vote.
The time now is Mon Dec 15 08:08:06 2008
Thanks for your vote.

I m lacking words, and running out of popcorn.

Next semester I am teaching a new undergraduate course tentatively titled Technology, Society, and Media: The Body under Transition, in Movement, and under (Massive) Transformation(s). As designed, the course should address technology and media in fairly broad stokes (which I do) but I narrow and control what is a truly unwieldy subject by framing the issues/readings in relation to the human body. Generally speaking, we will interrogate the ways in which technology engenders or erases bodily/human possibilities/capacities and especially the ethical and political ramifications that precipitate from the use/abuse of technology. We traverse a wide range of topics from the telegraph (and how it was used to speak with the dead) to the role of human enhancement technologies of today, to questions of surveillance and privacy, among many other topics. I am pretty far along with the syllabus and pretty happy with it. So far I think I have struck a nice balance between fun/light/accessible readings and some which are bit more theoretically dense. I am still looking for one or two pieces, perhaps one on tattoos and body modification and another about karaoke. If anyone knows any great articles on these topics, do pass along the information. I am probably most excited about the cluster of issues that address eugenics (and most students know next to nothing about America s central role in unleashing the Eugenics movement), disability rights activism, human enhancement technologies, and transhumanism. Considering human enhancement in light of previous efforts to enhance our population brings into relief the similar and distinct ethical issues that haunt this field. One of the most hot button issues of today concern the use of human enhancing drugs. The prestigious journal Nature has just published an editorial on the topic of cognitive enhancement drugs,Towards responsible use of cognitive-enhancing drugs by the healthy, which is a fairly interesting read and covers some of the main controversies. For me, however, the interesting issue is not only whether human enhancement is right or wrong though this is certainly important but what our embrace of these drugs tell us about the conditions under which our bodies live and labor. That is, I think we are actually missing out on posing some other important questions simply by framing this int terms of human enhancement. I suspect, and this is where ethnography would really help out, that many people turning to enhancement drugs may not be medically sick, in the technical sense but I don t think they are healthy either. Many who turn to these drugs feel pretty worn, pretty exhausted, pretty frazzled (the perfect word, I think, is agotado, Spanish for exhausted) and use these drugs as crutches, as band-aids, as an elixir to help out one preserver in tough work circumstances. I am sure there are folks who take these drugs feel fine and are just trying to push their limits and capacities but I troll many many many patient support sites and it also seems to me that many people live under a state of low-grade chronic state of unwellness. Given the pace of society, given what and how we eat, given the extraordinary rates of depression in our society ,given the fact that babies are born with 200 + chemicals in their bodies (what a way to start out life) I am skeptical that enhancement really captures what is going on with these drugs. I have not yet come up with the right term, but I am trying to come up with a phrase that would reflect the ways in which these drugs are not used as therapies for a discrete condition (Type 1 diabetes) but how they are a collective response to a state of low grade chronic unwellness that seems to mark the lives of a whole lot of people. This, I think, would be one responsible approach to human enhancement technologies that would contextualize their use within a much broader frame, one that is attuned to how bodies have been made, remade, and limited under actual material conditions of labor and life in the 21st century.

This is really ironic, I've been waiting for a long time to have the right to vote in Debian. Now I have it, but I'm not sure if I want to exercise it. I don't think I need to explain much, many already did that before on planet. It basically boils down to:

• A GR that's an irrelevant overreaction; and whatever gets out of it wouldn't change much: for the paranoids, if J rg really wanted to push his idea after a GR opposing it, he only needs to tweak it a little to be different from "the changes described on the debian-devel-announce mailing list" [ref] and get on with it. If the intention was to send a message, that doesn't need a GR.
• Another GR which is: a perversion of our voting system, disconnected with reality, and a trap. Heck, if I wasn't reading the fine print I would say that any DD that doesn't vote for "Reaffirm the Social Contract" [ref] should be expulsed expelled right away, as we all agreed to "uphold the Social Contract and the DFSG in your Debian work" [NM], right? But it turns out that you're actually voting to postpone Lenny until hell freezes over, or so.
  I also think that the Secretary is abusing his position to push his agenda here.
• We are being pathetic, should people still trust our judgement to build the "best operating system"?

So, I second Noodles' proposal, to make this sillyness go away for good. Meanwhile, I have to decide if voting 2..21 or not voting at all. Tags: Planet Debian, Debian, Pol tica

First time

• I started Debian: some years ago.
• I uploaded a package: some months ago.
• I prepared a stable upload: some weeks ago.
• I voted: some days ago.

So far, so good. But after having voted in reply to a possible abuse of position, now we have a vote with another abuse of position, as pointed several times on debian-vote@. Too bad we haven t seen any reply from the DPL. Yet? In the meantime, I was pointed (thanks!) to a marvellous secretary sucking page, best viewed with a CSS3-enabled browser. Screenshot from midori follows (note that it could be even worse with konqi from experimental, at least so am I told): Oh, and another first time but not Debian-related:

• 3-hour swimming session: some hours ago. Bed time.

Today the voting period starts for this general resolution about firmware and the Lenny release. As many have pointed about before this is very complex vote with many orthogonal issues. The issues and some of the options:

• Where do we want to ship firmware that doesn't comply with the Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG)?
  • If it doesn't comply with the DFSG it should go to non-free
  • Change the DFSG so that we don't require source for firmware
  • Create a separate section for it.
• Is a DFSG violation a release critical bug or can we make a release with known DFSG violations?
  • DFSG violation are release critical
  • Sourceless firmware can be part of Lenny as long as we are legally allowed to do so.
  • Sourceless firmware can be part of Lenny
• It's not clear whether some blobs in the kernel comply with their license and the DFSG
  • Remove those parts that are not clear or don't comply with the DFSG
  • Assume that blobs in the kernel are source
• Does the release team have the right to decide if something is release critical or not?
  • Override them and say that DFSG violations are release critical
  • Explicitly give the release team the power to decide whether a bug is release critical or not

And then we're going to decide all of that in 1 single vote. I interpret the options we have as: Choice 1:

• non-free firmware should go to non-free.
• It is a release critical bug
• remove unclear parts
• override the release team

Choice 2:

• We're not saying anything about where non-free firmware should go
• sourceless firmware can be part of Lenny as long as we are legally allowed to do so.
• We're not saying anything about the unclear parts
• Don't override the release team

Choice 3:

• We're not saying anything about where non-free firmware should go
• sourceless firmware can be part of Lenny
• We're not saying anything about the unclear parts
• Don't override the release team

Choice 4:

• We're not saying anything about where non-free firmware should go
• We're not saying anything about whether it's a release critical bug or not
• We're not saying anything about the unclear parts
• Release team decides if something is release critical

Choice 5:

• We're not saying anything about where non-free firmware should go
• We're not saying anything about whether it's a release critical bug or not
• Assume that blobs in the kernel are source
• Don't override the release team

Choice 6:

• Change the DFSG to not require source for firmware
• We're not saying anything about whether it's a release critical bug or not
• We're not saying anything about the unclear parts
• Don't override the release team

Choice 7:

• We're not saying anything about where non-free firmware should go
• We're not saying anything about whether it's a release critical bug or not
• We're not saying anything about the unclear parts
• Don't override the release team

So in my opinion, options 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 all decide on 1 of the 4 questions, and only 2 of them about the same question. I also don't see any bugs filed against the linux-2.6 package about any issues the kernel might have with firmware, so I have to wonder why we're voting about this. My current vote is "2222221". I'm not sure it's the best options, but I currently don't see a better one.

I have been always desiring to have a NAS adapter and printer server so I can easily share and use both my USB printer and a USB hard disk from every corner in the house. I was doing that when I had a home server, but when it died I losed that functionality. Once of the main reasons to buy a new one was to have this option again, but today I have discovered in Xataka a little device: Addonics NAS Adapter. This is just what I wanted: NAS adapter, little size, can power 2.5 inch. HDD directly, and USB print server. Files are shared by Samba or FTP client, and can act also as DHCP server. As a bonus it has a little bittorrent client which can track 4 torrents at a time, and download them to attached USB device. The only thing I would like to know if is using an USB hub both a printer and a HDD can be attached at the same time. If that can be done, then for only $55 we have a winner. The only last wish that it uses Linux in their core (probably).

This vote is a joke. It mixes very different questions, among them:

• do we trust our release team ;
• shall we delay the Lenny release for firmware issues or not (We answered that twice in the past with huge majorities btw) ;
• shall we modify the meaning the the SC/DFSG.

And you're supposed to make one single option win. Not all options deal with those three questions at once. So definitely, like Julien states it: It's a TRAP. That's why there is one and only one winning stategy to that vote:

• rank (like Christian did) Further Discussion first.
• rank all the answers to the previous questions at the same level 2 (e.g. for me it's probably option 2 and 4 or something similar).
• do not rank the rest (or rank it 3 or greater or - or whatever).

This vote is a perversion of our voting system, don't fall for it. Edit (answer to Neil): Neil, you don't get it, if you make anything else than Further Discussion win, you actually let one option of the vote win. As most of the ballot options only answer at most 2 of the underlying questions I cited above, and only one for many of the options, you give the power to the secretary to decide what the option you voted for meant. This is unacceptable, therefore, you have to put further discussion first. We just don't want to let one single man (that showed that he's totally unable to prepare a sane vote, without pushing his agenda at the same time) decide the real issue of the vote.

David Welgon has a nice post regarding his opinions on pros and cons on running a startup in Europe (Italy) and the USA (SF/Bay area). The first of the Italy cons got my attention:

Less of a startup culture and mentality. It's more typical to get a "job for life" and hang on to it for all you're worth. Many Italians are tremendously creative, industrious, inventive people, but are going to find it more difficult to express that in some form of business.

I know I am unlike many people, specially in this field... But anyway. I live in Mexico. Many factors in The Way Things Work are pushing people towards having an enterpeneur mentality - And what you see as a point against, I see as a very big advantage.
Some people have what it takes to run a business, and that's great. However, I think it is wrong to assume most people will benefit from running their own business - And specially in a country as mine. I cannot speak much about Europe, but from what you say, it confirms it is a good model of what I'd like Mexico to morph into.
Too many people start their companies with dreams of glory, thinking they have something to differentiate from the rest of the marketplace - and they lack it. So instead of enriching an existing company with more, and better focused, technical talent, they will end up making it poorer with yet another generic company with nothing new to offer, paying famelic wages to their employees, finding a way to skip the social security payments. And there are lots of legal ways to do so in Mexico - and a growing segment of the population has neither health care nor retirement savings, as this makes their day-to-day incomes substantially more juicy... But the future will bite them hard. Well, not only them - It will bite all of us. I still think we will inevitably, sooner or later, evolve into a more caring society, a society where the strong protects the weak, where it (via the State, the government) ensures nobody has under the minimum needed to have a decent life.
And, although I am essentialy a Socialist at heart, I do recognize there is place for people getting more money than others - After all, courage and creativity should be encouraged, and true enterpeneurs should get compensed for what they give to the society - But the ridiculous, stupid differences we get to see, specially in third world countries (remember that the world's richest man, Carlos Slim, lives on the same city I do, and around ~15 years ago even lived less than five blocks away from me... But I do have close family where having food daily on the table is far from a fact) are something that should disappear for good.
Loyalty to your employer and long-term job commitment are two values I hold very dear, and hope to be able to practice. So far, I have worked for eight years for UNAM (1999-2003 and 2005-present), and I hope to continue here for many years to come. I was just talking about this with a friend - The payment itself is far less than what I could get somewhere else, but the work conditions and long-term viability are more than enough to repay for the difference. And I am sure many of my friends and acquintances would be much better off if they stopped prioritizing getting more money now in respect to leading a better, richer life - And, of course, if we all valued more giving back to the society, as we will probably all need to ask from it sooner or later.

Travelling rather a lot this year has left me spending plenty of time staring at showers[1]. There seem to be three broad categories of shower UI design. The first is the one that exposes the raw functionality of the underlying implementation:

(image by bean, reused under cc-by-nc 2.0)
Showers work by mixing hot and cold water and feeding them through a shower head. This implementation allows direct control of the hot and cold feeds. The user can obtain any combination of pressure and temperature that the supply contraints make possible, but at the cost of it being impossible to adjust single variables. Changing the pressure without changing the temperature is difficult. One of the most common alternatives I've seen this year is the following:

(image by anearthling, reused under cc-by-nc-sa 2.0)
Here, power and temperature are unified into a single control. The major problem with this design is that it's generally impossible to have any pressure setting other than full on. The benefit is that the temperature can be altered without any significant concern over the pressure. Simplification through limiting functionality. Finally, we have setups like:

(image by stevec77, reused under cc-by-nc 2.0)
Though not clearly shown, this interface separates temperature and pressure into independent functions. The number of UI elements is identical to the original "hot/cold" case, but the user is now able to set temperature and pressure independently without having to worry about the interaction between the two. This is obviously more effort to implement but improves usability, decreases complexity and doesn't clutter the interface.

So, if this is a solved problem, why do I keep coming across implementations that suck?

YES THIS IS A METAPHOR FOR SOFTWARE DESIGN

[1] Often in a certain degree of confusion, but that's not really the point here

Via Steve (new domain name, otherwise as usual), this inspiring little PowerPoint-ish presentation from Dr. Steven Chu, Obama s choice for Secretary of Energy: This video features about as many charts per minute as did An Inconvenient Truth, but left me far more hopeful about our long-term prospects on Earth. It is reassuring to see so many powerful positions being filled by people with domain expertise, rather than partisan hacks. If this administration doesn t get us back on course, we might as well stop having children. Technorati Tags: Steven Chu, Obama, Climate Change, Energy, Environment

Michael Arrington of Techcrunch comments on the US vs Europe in terms of startups: Joie De Vivre: The Europeans Are Out To Lunch It's a pretty rough and coarse-grained view of things, but there's a grain of truth there. I've written about this a little bit before. It's something that I feel qualified to talk about, having lived and worked in both the US and Europe (Italy and Austria to be precise), and in that time, generally gravitated towards startups. Here's my quick take on a list of what's good and bad about each. Please note that these are of course not true for everyone, that things are changing, but are still things I think are generally true, even when I could think of several counterexamples for some of them myself. Also, it's very important to keep in mind how diverse "Europe" is, so most of what I write is really about Italy, and to a much smaller degree, Austria. I'd be very curious to hear your own experiences in the comments. Europe Bad

• Less of a startup culture and mentality. It's more typical to get a "job for life" and hang on to it for all you're worth. Many Italians are tremendously creative, industrious, inventive people, but are going to find it more difficult to express that in some form of business.
• The side effects of this mean that there are fewer people to talk with, and network with, fewer potential employees willing to risk a startup, and so on. For instance, people are at times more suspicious of a new company - both clients and suppliers.
• As I mentioned in my other article, it takes a lot more money to get started in many European countries - something like 10,000 Euro in Italy. Other places like the UK are cheaper, and apparently Germany is introducing some legislation to ease the burden on new companies. I really hope this changes in Europe because it's such an easy change to make: don't extract money from companies until they're making it.
• More bureaucracy. I think that higher taxes, once you are profitable, might be worth paying for the social system you get in Europe, but the cost of sorting out paperwork falls inordinately on smaller, newer companies. Big, established firms can hire people to deal with all the rules and regulations, and probably have contacts in the government that can help them out in some cases. Smaller firms are the ones whose time is really going to be wasted running around to different offices trying to figure out what they have to do.
• Smaller, fragmented markets. Localization is not a lot of fun in some ways, and trying to translate everything into all the languages of the European Union is a huge undertaking. In the US, you get a huge market with just English and the US Dollar. Even beyond language issues, the culture changes less in the US from place to place, meaning that you have a more homogeneous target.
• Lack of acceptance of failure, both culturally and institutionally. If you go bankrupt in Italy, it's a very serious problem. Apparently (although this is second hand, I'm not 100% sure of it - maybe someone can confirm whether it's actually true?), you can even lose the right to vote. Plenty of people in the US try several times before they get it right.

Good

• Even if your undertaking fails, you still have health care. Likewise, there are other bits and pieces of social support (that change from country to country) that mean you're probably not going to land quite so hard on your rear if things go wrong.
• Lots of smart, educated people. I never lacked for plenty of smart people to talk shop with in Padova, and didn't miss the California bay area at all from that point of view. Open source is really big in Europe - perhaps, in part, because for many people it's a better avenue for their talents than creating a business, when doing so is difficult and less common.
• Work/life balance. Sorry Mike, but the amount of people who are truly going to strike it rich is pretty small. If they want to work hard, great, but it's nice to have some other options, in terms of good, lasting friendships (rather than everything revolving around work), knowing plenty of people from outside your field, people living in and belonging to a community (how many people spend their whole lives in the bay area?). When I moved from San Francisco to Padova in 2000, I went from a world gone mad with money and the dot com craze to one where there were rich and poor, families, young people, old people, and many people who were not working for some dot com. That's not to say that people don't work quite hard in Italy - two hour lunches are a thing of the past for most anyone I know.
• Smaller fragmented markets can be an advantage, too. By the time some valley-based startup finally gets around to noticing that languages other than English exist, it's possible to capture a smaller market. Ok, so you won't be the next Google that way, but there's good money to be had in doing so.
• In some ways, the staid, established, don't rock the boat way of doing things in some industries may present big opportunities for outsiders to come in and pull the carpet out from under everyone. This is especially true of internet/web companies that can get started quickly and cheaply.

US Bad

• If you're not careful, you can get completely sucked in to work - your life revolves around it, your friends are mostly work friends, and if something happens to your job, a lot of that goes poof. This is especially true in places like the bay area, where so many people are 'transients' - just there for a few years, without any real roots in the area. This is ok if you'll potentially make a big pile of money, but long term it's unhealthy.
• Less of a sense of building for the long term. Personally, I don't want a "job for life", but I think there is some value in loyalty (the genuine sort, not the sort created by legally not being able to lose a job) between employer and employee that has been lost in the US. Being able to count on someone growing with your company, and as an employee, knowing that your company will do what it can to help you out even in tough times are things that capture some value. The US seems to be heading towards a "Coasian" world where everyone is a freelancer, and while that efficiency is hard to deny, I wonder what is lost in the process.
• The competition is tough. Sure, it is in Europe too, but in Europe everyone may compete quite hard during the year, but still all take that one month vacation (although that is becoming a bit less common, especially amongst people my age), whereas in the US almost no one gets that kind of benefit - even if you wanted to take unpaid time off, people would look askance at that kind of behavior. That said, if you need to stay open in, say, August, in Italy, to compete, you are in big trouble, because for many businesses it's simply impossible because it's a chain reaction: all your suppliers and clients shut down, so you really have no choice.

Good

• There are certainly bureaucratic obstacles in the US, but are much more maneageable, and don't hit smaller/newer companies quite so badly.
• It's cheap to get started. As per my other article, the actual state filing fee in Oregon for an LLC is $55, and that's all you really need.
• The culture is definitely there, especially in the right places like the Bay Area, but even in plenty of others.
• You aren't bound to employees for life, and it's easy to find freelancers. I know I'm contradicting myself, but I think it's actually a complex issue, and there are definite advantages to not having people who expect or at least want to find that job for life.
• A large target market. Go online in one state, and you can, for the most part, deal with customers all over the US, in one language.
• Things turn around faster. I have more of a sense that when there are problems, they get fixed. Companies (the debacle of the automakers notwithstanding) are more often allowed to fail, or at least put in Chapter 11. Sometimes this means that when things are bad, they get really bad, but also turn around and get better sooner.

Conclusions An interesting example of all this from my own experience was Linuxcare. The company was, culturally, a Bay Area startup, with the headquarters in San Francisco, founded by very startup oriented guys (one of whom, Dave Sifry, went on to do technorati, and is currently working on yet another venture). However, most of the actual open source talent was in our satellite offices, in Australia, Italy and Canada, places where, perhaps, people were not so distracted by the prospect of "make money fast!!! hurry!!!" that they had time to work, learn, and create some really great open source code. To be honest, I find myself torn. Business-wise, I prefer the US. However, outside of that, there's a lot to be said for Europe. I also think that some of what's good about business in the US is coming to Europe, albeit slowly in some cases, in Europe. People my age here can see what's going on elsewhere, and try and copy what they like. A lot of what's good about Europe, though, might be more difficult to import into the US, especially the livability of the cities. In any case, I can conclude that it's a complex, difficult topic best discussed over a glass of wine.

---

Mike Hommey blogged today about Per-process namespaces.
That reminded me to blog about switchsh, a very useful program (now in sid) to help workaround those programs that believe that /bin/sh is always /bin/bash, in other words: it bind-mounts bash as /bin/sh.

Package description follows:

Small program to bind-mount bash as /bin/sh for its child processes.

It can be used when bash is not the default shell interpreter but a given
program makes use of bashisms (features not required by Policy for sh) and one
wants to run it without changing (or can not change) the default sh.

Let's take a look at how switchsh can help us:

$ cat evil_script.sh
#!/bin/sh
echo -ne "Hello!\nPlease enter your name: "
read
echo "So, you are $REPLY, right?"

$ readlink /bin/sh
dash
$ ./evil_script.sh
-ne Hello!
Please enter your name:
read: 4: arg count
So, you are , right?
$ switchsh ./evil_script.sh
Hello!
Please enter your name: Raphael
So, you are Raphael, right?

But lets consider the following case:

$ cat evil_script.pl
#!/usr/bin/perl -W
my $res =  git gc &>/dev/null ;
if ($? eq 0)  
    print "Done\n";
  else  
    print STDERR "bang! something went wrong\n";
 

$ ./evil_script.pl
fatal: Not a git repository
Done
$ switchsh ./evil_script.pl
bang! something went wrong

But what happens when bashisms are used on a binary object? Say in OpenOffice.org, in X.org, Wine, or any other large project that take not less than a couple of hours to build in a "normal" machine? you really want to have switchsh in those cases (and file a bug as soon as you notice that running a program with and without switchsh makes it behave differently).

is a no. It just does not work. I mean, it does work if you want to listen to music using mplayer in 8 KHz quality, but don't even think to use it to phone using SIP. I've first tested with bluez 3 which is part of Debian. It roughly work, but sometimes it stops working and you have to restart hcid, or to clean its cache. Not very stable. I've then tried using bluez 4, compiled from scratch. It works much better, i.e. I can run mplayer a thousand of times without having it stopping to work, but I'm totally unable to use it with twinkle or ekiga. And I don't even talk about ekiga still unable to set a custom ALSA output. I even try to hack it via gconf-editor! That's really a shame.

The best way to get me to read a blog entry you've made is to apologize about it in the next one ... So I've gone and clicked on the link to Amaya's previous entry. Getting a warning that I'm about to be presented with a page that may contain material only suitable for adults. What the hell, Amaya is an adult and so am I, so let's just confirm this. I was truly shocked to see her entry that indeed did contain the extremely dangerous word “love” in it (can't imagine what else may have triggered the filter.) Together with Youtube's apparent tightening of their filtering (I'd not have noticed except that Illiad commented on it) it seems the Intarwebs are now being converted to a happy teletubby-land. So I'm forced append this disclaimer now: Attention please, the text you've just read may have contained strong words, opinions, sentences, punctuation characters and all kinds of dangerous information only suitable for inhabitants of a small planet somewhere in the vicinity of Betelgeuse.

1. Dishwasher, by Pete Jordan
2. Windfalls, by Jean Hegland
3. River of Gods, by Ian McDonald
4. Powers, by Le Guin
5. Real World Haskell, by O'Sullivan, Goerzen, Stewart
6. Matter, by Iain M. Banks
7. Ars Magica, by Tweet & Rein Hagen

Nice set of books. Pity I'm in the middle of all of them. Lately I have a hard time finishing many novels, I think because waiting for the plot to play out gets boring. Although River of Gods has mostly just confused me with too many viewpoint characters. And by this, where each box is a chapter, and that big box I'm just at the start of scares me: Dishwasher is fun light reading. If I'd thought to bring it to its owner, Jay, who misplaced it, I could have picked it up from where I left off months ago and read it on the plane. Double oops. Oh well, there's always my next doctor or dentist appointment. Powers is a probably great book by Le Guin. I hope there are many more to come, but the tendancy is to savor what's available. Also, I have it in dead tree edition, which I tend to save up for when I need them. Windfalls is such a dead tree book, hibernating in the yurt for me to get back to them some day. I may have to start it over, since it's pretty involved, and rather out of my usual comfort zone. Real World Haskell is coming along well, I hope. Matter hasn't pulled me in yet, oddly. Ars Magica I've been flipping through the PDF of idly.

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Anyway, after all that, turning up a random story generator in 1 kilobyte of code couldn't help but feel like a relief.

Init Seven has once again established themselves high on my ranking of awesome service providers. After battling and not resolving the problems with crap nVidia hardware, I was ready to return the server to Transtec, despite having invested a full day of work into it. Having a machine in a rack across town, with the looming danger of simple network traffic taking out the network card along with the bridged IPMI remote console (thus requiring me to head out to the colocation centre each time there was a problem) was just not going to justify the expense for the server. Init Seven connected a second switch port to my VLAN, which now allows me to hook the IPMI card directly to the LAN. This does not solve the problem with the sub-zero-quality crap manufactured by nVidia, but at least it makes it possible to resurrect the machine remotely, until the problem with the hardware has been addressed and dealt with by the forcedeth driver. And if that is not possible (due to nVidia pile of shit), then the last option is a separate network card attached to the riser card slot. In related news: Transtec was quick to proxy to the Supermicro s support (the motherboard manufacturer), and within a few hours, I had a newer forcedeth.c file. I compiled the driver, which seemed to handle larger packets just fine at first. Unfortunately, just as my hopes were up, the problems came back even with the driver from Supermicro. Back to start, do not collect any money. Regardless, I ve been impressed by Transtec s support level so far. Yes, I did purchase a five year express warranty extension, but it wasn t very expensive, definitely nowhere near the price for a real SLA. And yet, my requests to date have each been answered within a day at most, including such extravagant things as them providing doanloadable floppy images of the BIOS update, which Supermicro only distributes as Windows .exe file. Now if only they (and everyone else) would stop shipping nVidia hardware NP: AC/DC: Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap