John Robb writes about the normalisation of salaries that is driven by the use of the Internet and global corporations [1]. He cites an example of IBM forcing many of it s employees to work in developing countries for lower wages. It seems to me that IBM is leading the field in this regard and many other companies will do the same. The computer industry which has been very well paid for the last 20 years seems likely to have some significant reductions in wages. Some computer jobs can t be immediately outsourced to other companies such as network cabling, hardware repair, and training. But they will experience a pay reduction due to competition from software engineers and other people who s primary work is easily outsourced. For a job hunter it seems that the best thing to do is to look for work that requires site visits and customer contact. One of my long-term clients has a large business in installing wireless devices. For a long time they have had an open offer for me to climb up towers and install wireless devices. If the rates for system administration and software engineering in Australia (and the outsourced work from the US that I sometimes do) drops to Indian pay standards then I might do some of that wireless work. When recommending that my clients hire people to do software engineering or programming work I am considering seeking out people in low-wages countries that I know through the free software community. I believe that through an organisation like Debian I can find people who are as good as the people I have been finding through my local LUG but who can feel happy earning a much lower rate. My clients seem to periodically need PHP work, so if you live in a low wages country, have good PHP skills, and are well known in the free software community to a degree that I can feel happy in skipping personal meetings then you can email me your CV. Don Marti has written about the Linux vs Windows situation on Netbooks [2]. He suggests that neither Intel nor Microsoft is set up for a Netbook world. If both Intel and Microsoft were to pay the majority of their employees rates that are only slightly greater than typical wages in India then things might look a little better for them. During the dot-com boom I was working in Europe (firstly in London and then later in Amsterdam). It was a lot of fun in many ways with large amounts of money, easy work, and parties. The down-side was that I had to work with druggies and other people who were not suitable employees as the companies I worked for felt that they had no choice. Since the dot-com crash the quality of the people I have worked with has increased significantly which was a good compensation for the lower pay. Also I believe that the lack of silly money was one factor that helped Linux and other free software increase market share after the crash. I expect that the economic depression that we are now entering will have a similar effect. I will earn less money, have fewer parties, and work harder. But generally the quality of the staff in the IT industry will improve and the usage of free software will increase. As an aside, Don suggests that people who create web sites etc will want more expensive machines. I regularly use my EeePC for running servers in several data centers, I do all types of system administration and system programming on it. The screen resolution is not that great, but it shouldn t be difficult to design a Netbook that can drive a 1920*1200 external display (as is being commonly deployed in new hotel rooms - it seems that all new large-screen TVs have VGA and DVI input). A netbook which can drive a 1920*1200 display and a full-size USB keyboard could allow me to do some very effective work in a hotel room while also allowing me to work when traveling in public transport. Now all I need is for the hotel booking sites such as www.wotif.com to allow me to search for rooms that have such a display. A business hotel could even provide a USB keyboard in the room to allow guests to travel light. Of course it would be possible to design a slightly larger laptop at a Netbook price point, the extra plastic and metal needed to make a larger frame and keyboard costs almost nothing and given the low prices of large desktop TFT displays I find it difficult to believe that the factor of two difference in price between the cheaper and more expensive Netbooks is due to the display. My main machine is a Thinkpad T41p, I really don t need a high-end machine on my desktop. I am considering the practice of avoiding purchasing expensive machines as a matter of principle. Maybe if we try and avoid buying expensive machines we can help drive the market towards Netbooks where Linux has an advantage.

• [1] http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2009/02/journal-normalizing-wagessalaries.html


• [2] http://zgp.org/~dmarti/business/netbooks/

Geeks are creatures of the screen. Many, I have found, are also great lovers of books. I have peered into the homes and apartment of many and books usually adorn the walls and the tables. The exist in abundance. Though I am more or less paid to read for a living but these days, I don t seem to the time to do extra reading and I often mourn the fact that I spend so much time getting scraps of stories and information from the net as opposed to delving into a great book, over the course of weeks and weeks (and as opposed to reading, often hurriedly but totally intensely, for class).
I do manage to get in some good articles and last night, I pushed through the heaviness of sleepiness to read a pretty interesting article People of the Screen by Christine Rosen. Though a bit too alarmist for my taste, I enjoyed reading it, largely because it was written well and also brought some interesting questions and points to the table about the transition from a print culture to a digital one. One point, that I was not surprised to read, is the most avid of screen users (programmers, the digerati), are also avid readers. But among the less (economically) privileged, who have different educational relationships to books and who also may not have the time to read, reading in the traditional sense, is may soon be a more or less historical fact. What I also enjoyed reading about and contemplating are the different material properties of the screen vs print book and the ways in which these affordances might create a different user/intellectual (almost existential, the author would argue) experience. For example, she argues that the emotional relationship to treeware books are more profound, or that reading a long novel (vs playing a video game) is about submitting your will at least for a while to the narrative and the story. I don t agree with all of her assessments but I certainly agree that there are phenomenological differences between reading words on sheets of paper and the pages of a compact book, and then reading from the blue hue of a screen, often sitting upright, and whose text, at least for me, does not seem quite alive as it is when imprinted on bounded paper. But I don t think this necessarily has anything to do with some inherent properties of the screen. For example, writing on the screen does nothing but enliven text for me. When it comes to writing, I cannot imagine doing it any way but via the screen and the keyboard. I can play around with some words and erase with impunity. I can move around a whole paragraph here and there, split it into two or three and as such it feels dynamic and quite alive. I am sure I have lost, or there is something to lose, by not going straight from brain to pen but I never did all that much serious writing without the keyboard and so perhaps there was nothing to lose, no bodily transitional for me to undergo, and thus nothing to really mourn. So, I suspect many readers of this blog are voracious writers and readers, on screen and off screen. Do you, can you read novels on the screen? If you love the printed book, why? Are you concerned about the loss of this medium? Or is there nothing to really worry about since technologists will eventually create a new digital medium that will surpass, in terms of a good user experience, the printed book?

Geeks are creatures of the screen. Many, I have found, are also great lovers of books. I have peered into the homes and apartment of many and books usually adorn the walls and the tables. The exist in abundance. Though I am more or less paid to read for a living but these days, I don t seem to the time to do extra reading and I often mourn the fact that I spend so much time getting scraps of stories and information from the net as opposed to delving into a great book, over the course of weeks and weeks (and as opposed to reading, often hurriedly but totally intensely, for class).
I do manage to get in some good articles and last night, I pushed through the heaviness of sleepiness to read a pretty interesting article People of the Screen by Christine Rosen. Though a bit too alarmist for my taste, I enjoyed reading it, largely because it was written well and also brought some interesting questions and points to the table about the transition from a print culture to a digital one. One point, that I was not surprised to read, is the most avid of screen users (programmers, the digerati), are also avid readers. But among the less (economically) privileged, who have different educational relationships to books and who also may not have the time to read, reading in the traditional sense, is may soon be a more or less historical fact. What I also enjoyed reading about and contemplating are the different material properties of the screen vs print book and the ways in which these affordances might create a different user/intellectual (almost existential, the author would argue) experience. For example, she argues that the emotional relationship to treeware books are more profound, or that reading a long novel (vs playing a video game) is about submitting your will at least for a while to the narrative and the story. I don t agree with all of her assessments but I certainly agree that there are phenomenological differences between reading words on sheets of paper and the pages of a compact book, and then reading from the blue hue of a screen, often sitting upright, and whose text, at least for me, does not seem quite alive as it is when imprinted on bounded paper. But I don t think this necessarily has anything to do with some inherent properties of the screen. For example, writing on the screen does nothing but enliven text for me. When it comes to writing, I cannot imagine doing it any way but via the screen and the keyboard. I can play around with some words and erase with impunity. I can move around a whole paragraph here and there, split it into two or three and as such it feels dynamic and quite alive. I am sure I have lost, or there is something to lose, by not going straight from brain to pen but I never did all that much serious writing without the keyboard and so perhaps there was nothing to lose, no bodily transitional for me to undergo, and thus nothing to really mourn. So, I suspect many readers of this blog are voracious writers and readers, on screen and off screen. Do you, can you read novels on the screen? If you love the printed book, why? Are you concerned about the loss of this medium? Or is there nothing to really worry about since technologists will eventually create a new digital medium that will surpass, in terms of a good user experience, the printed book?

Actually, I went to FOSDEM 2009. It was really a blast. I would thank the whole FOSDEM team and the Debian team, especially the video team who did a fascinating work doing video streaming the right way (!= simple way). Here are the slides for my talk (Debian and Google Summer of Code 2008: wrap-up and insights) in PDF format: debian-fosdem09-gsoc08. The videos of the talks of this FOSDEM should be up soon and I will post the extended version of what I said as a blog post; as soon as I ve finished merging the changes from the slides back onto the blog post. Cheers and see you at the next FOSDEM. LH: cheers, really cool talk right now.

Yesterday I phoned into The Phone Co-op AGM 2009 and heard the reports, most of which you can read in the PDF annual report from the AGM website. There were also various questions from members, which I scribbled down as follows:-

What does ADSL mean?

Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line. Essentially, what we sell as broadband.

How many day-equivalents of training did part-time employees get on average? (I think this was the question, but I got a bit lost.)

Information not immediately available. ThePhoneCoop will research and reply later. The number of part-time employees is an asterisk footnote in the non-financial performance indicators.

Where are the Phone Co-op s investments?

Most of the share capital is for investment in TPC, but surpluses arise for various reasons and are invested outside. Current locations include 40k in long-term investments, including 10k in the Co-operative Group, 20k in Westmill wind farm, 5k in a hydro power project; 60k is in the ICOF share account, 1.4m in the Co-operative Group, [...I missed some. I was struggling to keep up. Some of this may be wrong anyway...] 486k in Midcounties Cooperative share account, 20k in Chelmsford Star; total of about 2.9m.

Is ICOF deciding recipients of the sustainability fund or The Phone Co-op?

The arrangement with ICOF is now ending for various reasons and now TPC will partner with Black Country Reinvestment Society. Don t want to manage the fund directly because it s not a core task for a phone company.

The increase in turnover is described as mainly to existing customers. Has there been an increase in the number of customers?

The Phone Co-op is recruiting 150-200pcm residential and 30 business customers, but losing a similar number. Have recruited new staff to try to improve this.

Is share account interest being cut in line with banking interest?

Just cut to 3%, but there has been a net inflow of investment. Current interest receipts from TPC cover it due to long-term investments, but they will mature, so the interest rate will be cut gradually to keep it sustainable.

Purchase from other cooperatives is 11% and falling. What is being done to increase it?

[I missed the answer to this.]

What is happening about getting a new office?

The Phone Co-op still has an option on a site in Chipping Norton, but no planning permission. An alternative commercial building which was being discussed with its owner was lost to housing (planning permission granted there!). There is a general lack of suitable sites available and things are happening cautiously in the current climate.

If we re trying to save paper, why did members receive two envelopes in the post for this AGM?

The report was sent from Calverts directly, to save time, postage, staff and report miles

Is the description of non-white in the performance indicators a problem for mixed white+non-white people?

Will look into this.

How many affinity schemes are there?

There are currently 300 and they are being reviewed for the best way to work better with them.

Are acquisitions likely?

Expect the credit crisis to being opportunities. There are benefits from more traffic and so on. TPC has been contacting potential suppliers and intermediaries asking after other providers in difficulties.

What is the deferred income shown in the financial statements?

Pre-billed broadband and similar products.

Is the investment in the Co-operative Group risky?

TCG holds around 4bn in assets under and is one of the longest continuously-traded companies in the UK.

Are ThePhoneCo-op s 0845 numbers advantageous to TPC or the caller?

Still yes for TPC, paying 1p/min at peak; probably not advantageous to caller these days.

There are 15% sales to cooperatives shown. What s the largest cooperative and what % of that is it?

Shown in the annual report. [The numbers in report work out to about 15% of all sales I think. So, nearly all sales to cooperatives are sales to Midcounties?]

All errors and omissions in the above are mine. I heard the allocation approved, then I had to leave before the special meeting and the presentations. If anyone has links to them or coverage, please leave me a comment. Other comments welcome, too.

Herein I present a rant on one-tailed tests in the social sciences; feedback welcome:

Unless you have a directional hypothesis for every coefficient before your model ever makes contact with the data, you have no business doing a one-tailed statistical test. Besides if your hypotheses are solid and you have a decent n, the tailedness shouldn t determine significance/lack thereof. Thought experiment: assume you present a test in a paper that comes out p=.06, one-tailed. That means you have a hypothesis that doesn t really work to begin with (sorry, approaches conventional levels of statistical significance ). More importantly, if you just made up the tailedness hypothesis post facto to put a little dagger (or heaven forbid a star) next to the coefficient, you really did a two-tailed test with p=.12 and then post-hoc justified it to make the finding sound better than it really was. Now here s the center of the rant: I really don t believe you actually knew the directionality of your hypothesis before you ran the test and were willing to stick with it through thick and thin, since I know that you d be figuratively jumping up and down with excitement and report a significant result if the sign was not as expected and it came out p=.003 two-tailed (p=.0015 one-tailed, opposite directionality), rather than lamenting how it turned out with p=.9985 on your original one-tailed test. I dare say nobody has ever published an article claiming the latter (although I might give it a positive review just for kicks). And I really don t feel the need to have these discussions with sophomores and juniors, hence why I prefer books that just talk about two-tailed tests (aka not Pollock [a textbook I really like otherwise]) so I don t feel the need to rant.

See also: this FAQ from UCLA, which is a little more lenient but not much.

Time for the weekly Lintian release. I wasn't sure if I was going to have time to commit another substantial bunch of work, but I got on a roll last night and found some more time today. The main infrastructure changes in this release are the beginnings of a rewrite of the handling of relationship fields and support for generating indices of source packages (needed for several other checks). The latter is sadly going to make Lintian a bit slower. Among the more minor changes are a few new checks, some of them pedantic. One of particular note is a new info-level tag recommending +dfsg instead of .dfsg in version numbers. 1.0.dfsg1 > 1.0.1, which usually isn't what's desired, but 1.0 < 1.0+dfsg1 < 1.0.1. Thanks to Paul Wise for the bug report. I've been bitten by this one in the past. Hopefully for the next release I'll get a chance to convert all of the check scripts over to using the new relation interface of Lintian::Collect, which will also mean more caching of data and less duplicate work for each package. I'm working on the bits from the Lintian maintainers post. Raphael Geissert had some good ideas for additional information, so I need to find some more time to expand it.

If you go for an ultrasound or some other imaging procedure, they may give you a CD with the images that requires some overly complicated and under-featured Windows viewer. Chances are these images are in DICOM format, which is like the AVI of the medical world. Your first clue will be that file might report the file as an unoptimised QuickTime movie, e.g. After figuring out the file type wasn't actually anything to do with QuickTime, I tried some of the many different tools and methods to convert this to something viewable. Unfortunatley, the DICOM viewer in GIMP and ImageMagick (probably the same thing?) didn't like the files at all, and neither did a range of other tools. I finally managed to do it with the dcm2pnm tool from the Debian dcmtk package -- just point it at the file and it spits out a PNM which is easily converted by all graphics tools. You can also encapsulate a series of images in a DICOM file, like a little movie. dcm2pnm extracts these easily, but requires the --all-frames options. An ffmpeg recipe to turn these extracted files into a more easily viewable movie is: I certainly can't guarantee this will actually work for you, as DICOM appears to be an extremely complicated format with many possible vendor extensions. But hopefully it's a starting point!

I've been banging my head against this all day and it doesn't make any more sense than it did when I started. I have a need to write some code that can manage job control on a terminal. More specifically, I need to run a single process and stuff it into the background at will, so that it gets suspended when it tries to read from the terminal. So, there's a controller process and a subprocess process.

 controller  ----------> subprocess
               manages

The man-pages and glibc info documentation make this look simple: disable TOSTOP if it's enabled via tcsetattr() so that the subprocess can write to the terminal, then start the subprocess in a new process group (by fork()ing and calling setpgid()). Once it's going, you can put it in the foreground or background by calling tcsetpgrp() to set the terminal's foreground process group to the subprocess (to put it in the foreground), or to the controller process (to put the subprocess in the background). Whenever the subprocess is in the background, it will be sent SIGTTIN if it tries to read from the terminal. I have everything working -- except for the very last sentence of that last paragraph. I can see my processes being put into the right process group, and I can see them going into the foreground and the background. For instance, here the first line is the controller process and the rest of the lines are the process group of the subprocess (this one started a few other processes).

STAT CMD                           PID  PGID TPGID  PPID   SID
Ss+  ./src/aptitude              26989 26989 26989 26980 26989
S    ./src/aptitude              26991 26991 26989 26989 26989
S    /bin/sh -c /usr/sbin/dpkg-p 27027 26991 26989 26991 26989
S    /usr/bin/perl -w /usr/sbin/ 27028 26991 26989 27027 26989
Z    [dpkg-preconfigu] <defunct> 27034 26991 26989 27028 26989
S    /bin/sh -e /tmp/lynx-cur.co 27039 26991 26989 27028 26989
S    whiptail --backtitle Packag 27043 26991 26989 27028 26989

If I try to move the background process into the foreground, it is marked as the foreground process in this session:

STAT CMD                           PID  PGID TPGID  PPID   SID
Ss   ./src/aptitude              26989 26989 26991 26980 26989
S+   ./src/aptitude              26991 26991 26991 26989 26989
S+   /bin/sh -c /usr/sbin/dpkg-p 27027 26991 26991 26991 26989
S+   /usr/bin/perl -w /usr/sbin/ 27028 26991 26991 27027 26989
Z+   [dpkg-preconfigu] <defunct> 27034 26991 26991 27028 26989
S+   /bin/sh -e /tmp/lynx-cur.co 27039 26991 26991 27028 26989
S+   whiptail --backtitle Packag 27043 26991 26991 27028 26989

Note that the background process is not suspended, even though it's busy reading from the tty. If I manually suspend the process group with kill -TTIN -26991, it stops as expected:

STAT CMD                           PID  PGID TPGID  PPID   SID
Ss   ./src/aptitude              26989 26989 26991 26980 26989
T+   ./src/aptitude              26991 26991 26991 26989 26989
T+   /bin/sh -c /usr/sbin/dpkg-p 27027 26991 26991 26991 26989
T+   /usr/bin/perl -w /usr/sbin/ 27028 26991 26991 27027 26989
Z+   [dpkg-preconfigu] <defunct> 27034 26991 26991 27028 26989
T+   /bin/sh -e /tmp/lynx-cur.co 27039 26991 26991 27028 26989
T+   whiptail --backtitle Packag 27043 26991 26991 27028 26989

So the signal isn't being blocked or ignored. I can also run programs in a normal shell, outside my harness (e.g., links &) and watch them auto-suspend, but the same thing doesn't happen when I start them directly under my controller process. It's not even that they're starting as foreground processes: I start them in the background, and they never see a SIGTTIN. Does anyone have a clue what's going on? Hopefully it's as simple as a flag I have to set somewhere... Oh, and for extra fun, this is all happening inside a VTE terminal widget. That shouldn't make a difference (after all, it's what gnome-terminal uses, and SIGTTIN behaved as expected when I tested it there), but who knows, it might be relevant. [UPDATE] I did a little more testing: I was bringing the subprocess into the foreground whenever the terminal was active, so I couldn't try typing into the terminal while the subprocess was in the background. If I do that, it does get SIGTTIN and it suspends. So it looks like select() doesn't count as a read for the purposes of job control. I doubt there's much I can do to get around that.

Quite a fair amount of time has flown since my decision to implement an emacs mode for the proposed machine-readable format for debian/copyright files. A have to admit that I had left that sleeping for quite a long while. But I took my courage, and rewrote nearly everything I had done so far. I'm quite happy with the results, to be truthful. The debian-mr-copyright-mode features:

• syntax highlighting
• a coverage mode show all files in the package, including the ones not covered by the copyright file
• the coverage mode shows which glob matches a given file
• it provides links to visit files and go to the declaration leading to a given label

The aim of this mode is to provide a quick check for uncovered files in a package, and also means to verify if the license of a file is not misrepresented. The code can be downloaded from the git repository, accessible using

git clone git://git.debian.org/git/users/fourmond/debian-mr-copyright-mode.git

No debian package is available for the time being, although that could definitely change after lenny is out. I hope this emacs mode will help the new format to be widely adopted.

Offline qemubuilder hacking. I am on airplane for 6 or so hours, and found that approx has an offline mode. Nice. With '$offline true' configuration on /etc/approx/approx.conf, approx will try to serve the outdated Packages.gz etc files to the client. It only works when you have previously already downloaded the required packages once, but that was good enough to debug the problem of qemubuilder not running for mipsel and armel. I broke it sometime ago, I have git head running locally now which seems to be running.

In case anyone's interested, here are some notes on the ASUS Eee Box, more specifically the b202 model, Linux edition:

• I use the box as a media center, so I initially wanted to connect it to my 720p HDTV using a DVI/HDMI cable. Unfortunately it's apparently impossible to use the TV's native screen resolution (1360x768) via HDMI, the best you can get is 1280x720, which results in a somewhat blurry image. Worst yet, the HDMI input has an overscan problem, approximately 50 pixels on each side are missing... which means that your GNOME panels will be invisible. I'm not sure if this is caused by the Eee Box or by my TV set but if you absolutely want HDMI, waiting for the b204/b206 model with its built-in HDMI might be a good idea. (In the end, I used my TV's VGA input.)
• It's more powerful than I thought. The Linux version ships with a 160GB SATA hard drive and 2GB of RAM (instead of 1GB for the Windows version) and the Atom N270 CPU is pretty fast. It plays 720p MPEG4 video (such as this file) with lots of CPU to spare, and the quality is really great.
• The optical S/PDIF audio output doesn't work under Linux, as far as I can tell.
• It's extremely silent despite the fan and hard drive.
• The Gigabit Ethernet controller is a nice touch, netperf reports a speed of 611 MBits/s. In practice the drive's speed will be the bottleneck, of course.
• To avoid tearing issues when playing video with Xv, use the Intel Video Overlay adaptor instead of the (default) Textured Video adaptor. (Use xvinfo to get the port number.)
• OpenGL performance isn't great; Compiz with basic effects will run fine, mplayer can play most video files using the gl/gl2 output without frameloss, but games will be slow. (Not that I expected much from the Intel GMA950 anyway...)

All in all I'm pretty happy with the Eee Box. If you have any questions, feel free to email me or leave a comment below.

I was browsing GitHub, getting to know the system and feeling pretty amazed by it (seriously I felt I discovered Orkut for developers)... when some thought just stroke me: how do they save space? Yes, I know git is pretty efficient when it comes to saving space. Yes, I also know that space are becoming cheaper with time, but still, they claim to have +50k developers hooked up their servers if they re not doing something about space, things will go inefficient quite quickly. Rails alone seems to have 464 forks! If all of them represent one bare clone of the canonical repository on GitHub s side, that is a lot of space wasted in duplicated things Git has one amazing feature: hashing the objects it keeps track of. It surely doesn t seem too complicated to design a schema that avoids having two copies of objects with the same hash. So all those forks of Rails, on GitHub s side, would be just hardlinks to the canonical repository Surely people working in GitHub are smart enough to have though about it on their own Who knows? Maybe that s exactly what they re doing already! If so, can I ask them to share their schema, since it can become very useful to the rest of us? If not, can we beat them ;-D?

Everybody seems to be using git these days I am not very found of hypes , as I told you before, but there s been some time I ve been evaluating git. I was happy with svk for quite a long time Lately, though, I ve been developing and extending a lot of ruby libraries, and all of them seem to be hosted at GitHub and using git So, why not give it a serious try? I chose a simple task on my TODO-list: to extend xmpp4r-simple to support XMPP PubSub, so I could use it in an internal project at my company. So I cloned its git repo and started developing. Not a really hard task, since all I had to do was use the underlying library (xmpp4r not surprisingly also in GitHub) and mimic what Blaine s done for the callbacks and it was ready (and working although I still need to put more time on the test suite). I am still exploring It will take some time to migrate my stuff (and maybe a lot will remain in my company s Subversion), but that s what git-svn is for, isn t it? Right now I am looking for ways to work with git-buildpackage and Debian git tools Do you have some advice on that?

It has been a quite long time since I blogged about D-I. As everybody now probably knows, D-I RC2 for lenny was released on January 31st, which now allows releasing Lenny. While the last work for Lenny is going on, I noticed that, during this week, one of our "new" translators completed the first two parts of Debian Installer translations...which is the key for a language to be "activated" (with translations flowing to packages). So, this morning I activated Kazakh in Debian Installer, which means that we will be painting a significant part of the world in red (dear readers, were'nt you missing "my" neat maps?). Of course, this is way too late for lenny, but given the high activity of that team now, I don't doubt that Kazakh will be part of Squeeze D-I. So, the count is now 64 and I really have to move my a** to shake those 16 translators and teams that are listed in "work in progress". Most of them are indeed silent, unresponsive, or just sleeping..:-)

This is a giant rant with a small point at the end. So be warned. Earlier this week, I booted up Windows for the first time in a few months. About 2 minutes after it came up, just after I had started up an app, it informed me that it desperately needed to restart because it had applied some updates, and unless I clicked cancel, it would. So I restarted. The Saga Begins Then I opened up the program for my negative scanner. This device has an infrared dust-detection system that is not well supported in SANE. I can insert a 6-frame negative, it will load it in, identify where the 6 frames are, and scan it at 4000 DPI. So anyhow, I opened it up and started scanning. Surprisingly, it was REALLY SLOW. Normally it takes about 3 minutes per frame, and I could tell it wasn t going to do that. It sounded as if the computer couldn t keep up with the scanner. I tried to get Windows to tell me if it was talking to the scanner at USB 2.0 speeds, but this information was nowhere to be found. So I went down under my desk and moved some USB devices to different ports. Got back up from under the desk, and: BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH was there. Reboot. Scanner now works at normal speed. So I started it scanning, then went off to watch the Purdue game with Terah. Came back a little while later, expecting it to be ready for the next negative, only to manage to catch it in the nick of time before it helpfully rebooted my machine again due to yes more updates. So I saved, rebooted, and finally scanning worked after that. Also I disabled automatic installation of updates. A Turn For The Worse A few days later, I was getting expecting a new camcorder, and I was planning to use Windows for video editing. Originally, my hard disk had Windows, a Windows emergency recovery partition, and Linux on it. When I upgraded my motherboard and added a SATA HDD, I moved almost all of Linux to it. So there was now a lot of free space on that original drive, and the recovery partition is useless with the new motherboard anyhow. So I figure: delete that recovery partition, and expand the NTFS partition to take up the whole of the disk. Easy enough, right? So I do this, and much to my annoyance, Windows now refused to boot. It would just hang. No boot menu, no splash screen. Just hang. Linux saw and could access the NTFS partition just fine. So I went hunting for my XP install CD. Finally found it. Boot off the thing. It spends 5 minutes loading drivers for all sorts of things I don t have off the CD, then promptly crashes, saying inaccessible boot device. A hunch or two later and I m twiddling bits in the BIOS to try to get it to see my SATA DVD burner properly. No luck. I finally download the drivers for my chipset from Gigabyte, have to use Wine to extract them, then scrounge up a working floppy to put them on. Reboot. Blue screen again but a different one. Twiddle some more bits in the BIOS. Reboot. Success! Recovery console is mine! I run chkdsk, and fixboot, which everybody in the forums says will fix this. Neither made any difference at all, but the recovery console could see the NTFS partition just fine. Grumble. More googling, and I try testdisk for Linux. It twiddled some bits on the NTFS boot sector and my partition table. Reboot. And UGH. Now Linux won t even boot and Grub won t start. Download Debian live CD. Boot from it. Inspect disk with fdisk. Turns out testdisk just renumbered my partitions. Restore the previous numbering: Windows on partition 2, Linux /boot on partition 5. Save, reboot. Grub is back. Linux boots. Try Windows. And . Still hangs, but this time only after saying that HAL.DLL is missing or corrupt. Reboot into Linux. HAL.DLL is right there where it should be, and at the size it should be. Ponder this for a bit. I then tried looking at boot.ini. On a lark, I wondered if deleting the recovery partition meant that boot.ini no longer considers Windows to be partition 2, even though that s what the partition table says. Change it to partition 1, save. Reboot. SUCCESS IS MINE! WINDOWS BOOTS! Only 4 hours after expanding its partition. I told some friends about this trouble booting. What on earth did you do, John? I expanded the NTFS partition. And the response: Ahh. That ll do it. Expanding a partition is something we do routinely on Linux. Even on running production servers. Even WHILE THEY RE RUNNING. And I never have a problem like this. And even if I did, I wouldn t have to use some tool written FOR A DIFFERENT OS to fix it. Argh. The Problems Multiply A few days later, I got a new Canon Vixia HG20 camcorder. It shoots in AVCHD format 1920 1280@60i, h.264, which is a standard format for hard disk or SD card HD camcorders. I needed some basic video editing software that would let me do simple edits and burn a BDMV or AVCHD disc onto DVD+R formats that Blu-ray players can play, yet are cheap to make. After poking around, I decided to download the free trial of Ulead/Corel VideoStudio Pro X2. The free trial supposedly was the full version of the program, though it quite obviously wasn t after installing it. So I bought the full version and was greeted by about an 800MB download instead of the 120MB full version free trial download. Now here s the thing about VideoStudio Pro X2. IT S CRAP. It has crashed on me at least two dozen times, usually when I click the Play button. Its interface is really clunky. There s no way to mark a start and an end point, and say just delete everything between there, regardless of what clips they re in. The AVCHD disc creator wants to re-encode the entire project, even though it s ALREADY IN AVCHD. Though you can work around that by exporting the entire project to an AVCHD *FILE* which is smart enough not to re-encode it then making a disc from that. The project properties likes to say I m editing 720 480 even when I m editing 1920 1080, and doesn t even have a box for 1920 1080. Though after some Googling, it turns out that the project properties settings are irrelevant anyway. Yay for good design? So after all this crashing, I went out and did some more Googling. I found this lovely quote:

In short, every application I and our Labs tester tried iMovie, Pinnacle Studio, Ulead Video Studio, Sony Vegas and Avid Liquid at best could open but barely play some clips, and more often simply hung or crashed.

So what we have here is a whole culture of mediocrity. Everybody advertises that they work with AVCHD, yet nobody actually WORKS with AVCHD. And this is the format that the industry is rapidly moving to for HD HDV s days are quite numbered.

I has arrived in Brusselz and had pizza and beer already :-)

In other news, we have a test stream up and the rest of the preparations look good, so I'm confident you can haz streemz from the Debian dev room at FOSDEM! (Times are UTC+1)

Just follow the instructions from Erics mail the debconf-video list.

It's a totally unclear when we will be able to enter the room on Saturday, and it might only possible at 13oo, right when Bens and my talk about our video work is scheduled. That has been done on purpose, so in that case we can use our talk slot for setting things up. I don't hope this will happen, but it's the worst case...

Oh, and if you're at FOSDEM, please help us out, we still have some volunteer slots to fill. And more importantly, have a whole lot of fun!