Jennifer 8 Lee gave an interesting TED talk about the spread and evolution of what is called Chinese food [1]. In that talk she compares McDonalds to Microsoft and Chinese restaurants to Linux. Her points comparing the different local variations of Chinese food to the variations of Linux make sense. The CentOS Plus repository has a kernel with support for the XFS filesystem, Postfix with MySQL support, and some other useful things [2]. Mary Gardiner comments about the recent loss of a blog server with all content [3]. One interesting point is that when you start using a service that maintains your data you should consider how to make personal backups in case the server goes away or you decide to stop being a customer. Val Henson makes some interesting points about the reliability of Solid State Disks (SSD) [4]. Some people are planning to replace RAID arrays of disks with a single SSD with the idea that a SSD will be more reliable, this seems like a bad idea. Also with the risk of corruption it seems that we have a greater need for filesystems that store block checksums. Lior Kaplan describes how to have multiple Linux bonding devices [5], the comment provides some interesting detail too. programmableweb.com has a set of links to sites that have APIs which can be used to create mashups [6]. One of the many things I would do if I had a lot more spare time is to play with some of the web APIs that are out there. Gunnar Wolf has written some insightful comments about the situation in Israel and Palestine [7]. He used to be a Zionist and spent some time living in Israel so he knows more about the topic than most commentators. Charles Stross has written an informative post about Ubuntu on the EeePC [8]. What is noteworthy about this is not that he s summarised the issues well, but that he is a well known science-fiction writer and he was responding to a SFWA member. One of his short stories is on my free short stories page [9]. He also wrote Accelerando which is one of the best sci-fi novels I ve read (and it s also free) [10]. Don Marti has written about Rent Seeking and proprietary software [11]. It s an interesting article, nothing really new for anyone who has followed the news about the coal and nuclear industries. Erik writes about The Setting Sun and points out that Scott McNealy had tried to capitalise on the SCO lawsuit but Red Hat has ended up beating them in the market [12].

• [1] http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/jennifer_8_lee_looks_for_general_tso.html


• [2] http://wiki.centos.org/AdditionalResources/Repositories/CentOSPlus?action=show&redirect=Repositories%2FCentOSPlus


• [3] http://puzzling.org/logs/thoughts/2009/January/3/backup-policies


• [4] http://valhenson.livejournal.com/25228.html


• [5] http://liorkaplan.wordpress.com/2009/01/03/network-bonding-types-and-configurationin-linux/


• [6] http://www.programmableweb.com/


• [7] http://gwolf.org/blog/about-recent-events-and-possible-outcomes-israel-and-palestine


• [8] http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2009/01/i_get_mail.html


• [9] http://doc.coker.com.au/fiction/free-short-stories/


• [10] http://www.accelerando.org/


• [11] http://zgp.org/~dmarti/wiki/freedom/rent-seeking/


• [12] http://www.mega-nerd.com/erikd/Blog/setting_sun.html

Arthur Liu is doing a great series of posts following up on the results of Google Summer of Code '08 projects in Debian. (post 1 post 2) Most of them failed to produce code that's actually used in Debian, though there were some very successful projects, too. My experience with ikiwiki in '07 parallels that: latex Patrick Winnertz produced a working teximg (latex -> image) plugin that's in ikiwiki. The initial proposal also included doing latex -> html and wiki page -> latex conversions; that work never happened. file upload and image gallery Ben Coffey had an ambitious proposal to add file upload support to ikiwiki and also write an image gallery plugin using that. Ben did produce a working file upload interface, but that code never got into ikiwiki. This was due to a combination of at least three things:

1. The only outside communication with the ikiwiki community was doing a design proposal at the beginning, and a code dump toward the end of the project.
2. There was an existing complex spec for how to limit who could upload what files, but Ben didn't choose to implement those access controls.
3. The code dump was not even noticed until much later, when I was putting the finishing touches on my own implementation of an attachments plugin.

By the way, since I happened to do that attachments plugin as a paid consultant, I have an interesting data point: It took me 19 hours total to implement it, vs roughly a summer of work for the GSoC project. I don't mean this to reflect poorly on Ben, it just shows that someone who is familar with a code base and has thought a lot about a problem can work on it much more efficiently than a newcomer. AFAICS, Ben never did get to the gallery part. His involvement in SoC was cut short for personal reasons. Wiki WYSIWYG Editor Taylor Killian produced a working interface to Wikiwyg, but it tragically never made it into ikiwiki. This seemed to be going swimmingly -- Taylor set up a subversion repository for his work and produced several revisions of the wikiwyg plugin in response to feedback. At the end of the summer, it was close to ready to be included in ikiwiki. Then we lost contact with Taylor, and his site fell off the net. Subversion repo: Gone. Tarballs: Gone. The final tragic part of this story is that I had a local copy of all of Taylor's work. And when I moved ikiwiki over from subversion to git, I set up a wikiwyg branch, and put his work into it, and happily deleted my other copies of his work. But I made some kind of newbie mistake pushing that branch, and so his work never made it onto my git server, and at this point seems completly lost. (I still hope to hear from Taylor..) gallery Arpit Jain produced a working gallery plugin for ikiwiki. But that code never made it into ikiwiki. The main stumbling block seems to be that it used the lightbox javascript library, which, at least at the time was licensed under a non-free CC license. The code is present in a branch in ikiwiki's git repo, but at this point there is still no image gallery plugin in ikiwiki, though others are now working on other implementations. Conclusions I learned some important things from participating in the '07 SoC:

• There needs to be a well-defined place where students check in their code regularly, and where it is regularly reviewed. Either give them each accounts and branches in the project's main subversion repository, or better use distributed VCS. Ikiwiki switched to git as a direct result of the problems I saw with students publishing their code in the ad-hoc ways that resulted from not having that. And I keep backups of every ikiwiki git repo I am aware of, because any could fall off the net at any time.
• If your goal is to have a student develop something that is included in your project, that needs to be one of up-front success criteria for the SoC project. Otherwise, most of them will fail to get all the way there. Students need an incentive to deal with licensing issues, to respond to maintainers' feedback, and to keep following up until their code is merged. I suspect that requiring students leap over this sometimes very tall bar will scare a lot of them away though. You have to decide whether your goal is indeed to get working code in production, or if it's more to mentor a student for the summer.
• Just because one is very familiar with a code base and very productive in working on it, and has had lots of success getting others to contribute to it in the usual free software manner, does not mean that one will be a good mentor for a student working on that code base. In fact, it probably means you won't be, unless you have some prior experience teaching students. Which is why I've not participated in SoC since. :-/

Here s for the second installment of my review of this past year s Summer of Code at Debian. See the previous part here: Debian Summer of Code 08 : Where are they now (part 1/3). I apologize for being so late at getting this second part out but I have been very busy. Still, I ll get the last part out before FOSDEM. Those of you who ever had to write a Java compiler (ok, Java subset, but the OOP part was here ) in brainfucking Ada will understand what I went through working on two of my most loathed languages. Debian NAS, improve support of Debian on NAS devices Presentation There is a large range of inexpensive Network storage devices available on the market. For some of them, such as Linksys NSLU-2 and Thecus N2100, we have added support, but there is many many more devices we could support. For this summer we look forward at supporting multiple Marvell Orion based devices (as outlined in Martin Michlmayr s talk Running Debian on Inexpensive Network Storage Devices), such as Revogear Kuro Box Pro, Buffalo Linkstation, QNAP TS-109+, If you don t have old computers lying around to turn into NAS servers, you need to sleep at night without the soothing sound of computer fans or if you actually pay your own electricity bill, you might want to have a look at standalone NAS devices. They re cheap and can be made vastly more capable by slapping a Debian on it. If you ever heard of DD-WRT, you know the spirit. The project was mentored by Riku Voipio, with help from Martin Michlmayr. The project proposal (sorry, Google cache) was introduced by Martin, who did a presentation about it the previous year at FOSDEM. Student Per Andersson was a 24 year old student working towards a MSc in computer science at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden. He had been looking for ways to join Debian but with school still being priority one, he didn t find time to dive in. Result This project was successful. The Kurobox Pro is now supported and several useful tools were packaged to make life easier with these NAS devices. Martin Michlmayer is still working on Debian NAS related stuff. Per was happy to be invited to the Emdebian work session in Extremadura and has been active within debian, maintaining the packages he created during the Summer of Code. Cran2deb, generate Debian packages from R packages Presentation GNU R has become the preeminent platform for computing with data . The CRAN archives contain over 1300 source packages of very high-quality, and BioConductor has again almost as many focuses on bioinformatics. We want more of these in Debian, and going beyond the 50+ packages we currently have suggests more scripting and automation. R is a pretty big among statisticians and all of them they wasted no time writing their own package to work on particular research subject. It s a lot like Perl with CPAN or LaTeX with CTAN. It s always a pain to discovery that a particular R package is not wihtin Debian and having to resort to unmanaged installation of said packages. The project was mentored by Dirk Eddelbuetel. The project proposal (which is nowhere to be found but seemed to be good) was introduced by Dirk, along with another proposal he did for R. Student Charles Blundell is a research student at.. hum.. didn t do my homework about that. Anyway, you can find him around R related projects. Result This project was successful. Cran2deb is happilly turning more than 1400 of the ~1500 CRAN R packages, all with correct dependencies. The work has since been moved to R-Forge. It s working, we re almost there. We just need it to be polished and we ll get a whole bunch of new packages into Debian. Charles pinged me about the status of Cran2Deb after the previous post. He admits that he hasn t done much about cran2deb recently because of his new position as a research student but hopes to commit again to it soon. I do encourage him to get these R packages into Debian. I had to manually install some packages myself when I had to use R for school because they weren t into Debian and it s not pretty. Mergemaster, interactively merge changes in configuration files Presentation FreeBSD has a shellscript called mergemaster which is used to interactively merge changes in configuration files, based on 3-way diffs. Debian s approach to configuration file differences is much more primitive: either keep the original file, or blow it away (including all local changes) and use the Debian-provided file. It would be nice to get a system such as mergemaster into Debian. Important is to remember that Debian contains two often-used configuration file management systems: ucf, and conffiles; porting mergemaster in such a way that it will be used in both cases would be great. The handling of configuration files during upgrades has always been a little.. brutal, with the user being asked at gunpoint to make a good decision, lest the upgrade won t continue or configuration files get borked (ever tried automerging nagios configuration files?). Having a less stressful upgrade experience is a good thing since the point of Debian is to make package management a stressless thing. The project was mentored by, hum, Manoj Srivastava. I have no idea who came up at first with the proposal. UPDATE: Wouter Verhelst mailed to say that he made the original proposal. Student Max Wiehle was a physics student at the University of Heidelberg. He did a Summer of Code stint (Archive.org copy..) as a student for Beagle Project in 2006 which, I suppose, was successful. He s been active in the past with Gnome and desktop related projects. Result This project was somewhat successful. He posted an update one month into the program with repositories with code to test. Last commit to the mergecf branch of project was September 19th but it was never merged in. According to Steve McIntyre, it s dead, Jim. I couldn t find any further public involvement of Max within Debian. PAS NSS Debian Installer, improve support of PAM and NSS at install-time Presentation It would be very important for the Debian allowing the user to configure additional PAM and NSS modules (eg. LDAP, NIS) during the installation process inside the Debian Installer. To do this, we have to provide tools and helpers to modify /etc/nsswitch.conf and /etc/pam.d/common-*, as well as changing the maintainer scripts for the packages libpam-* and libnss-* to apply the required changes at install time using debconf and these helpers. To be honest, I will probably never use this. I don t do that many coordinated installs in the same place to warrant doing funny authentication with PAM and NSS, and if I did, I would probably use a more elaborate tool to personalize the install, like FAI. On the other hand, I can see the appeal of being done with authentication mechanisms before the first boot. The project was mentored by Fabio Tranchitella. The proposal came from the student. Student Juan Luis Belmonte was a computer science student. He worked in a couple of companies in the area of Sarragossa. He is now founding debug_mode=ON. Result This was quite a disappointement after seemingly good work. Although Juan was satisfied with the project, the PAM package maintainer (Steve Vorlon Langasek) was not. He was never asked about this project (but didn t intervene timely either when the accepted projects were announced though). In his words, it was the wrong solution to the problem . You can find his lenghty rationale on the wontfix bug report that resulted from the project. It really was a problem of communication with the Debian developpers since Juan could certainly have done the right work if pointed to it. Juan didn t ask thoroughly for existing work and Steve didn t publicize his (enough). That s all for now. The information is quite fragmented I admit. Most of it was pulled from Google, mailing lists, commit logs, blogs, whatever. If some projects are lacking in information here, it s because I couldn t find it readily (which is an issue in itself!). In my next post, I ll try to give a student point of view of the Summer of Code in general, and more specifically, at Debian. It will be post 2.5/3 since it s getting a little longer than I planned. Release early, release often, as the say.
If you re a student or a mentor mentioned above, feel free to fill any of the blanks in my report. It s much appreciated. You re not a student or mentor mentioned above and have an opinion on how to improve the next Debian Summer of Code ? Feel free to comment.

No that's nothing about IBM and HPC, but it's still cool:


Taken brand new this morning from the shop (with that smell of a new engine still there). Mh, the plate is now "DJ ..." while the other one was "DD ...": would it be a sign something is changing? The hell no! ;)

That means I'm recovering well, I'm now walking without any crutches or tutor, and my knee is almost bending like the other one (well, still some degrees behind, but still), but it still hurts at every step I take. In about a week I'll be able to back swimming with the team (competition will be for next year though).

That even means I'll have to come back to work :( I'm now used to get to sleep late, wake up even later, "work" all day on stuff I like (Debian, the book, or so) so it will be a shock at the beginning, even because I'll be assigned to a new client, so all different.

Enough words, now it's time to go and have a ride on the "beast" :)

The World Economic Forum opens today (28 Jan) and runs until the weekend. This year most of the high-power planning sessions and feel-good corporate social responsibility whitewash has been replaced by sessions such as What Happened to the Global Economy? (Er, it broke because you bet more money than existed in the world?) There s a report from France24 and a programme of sessions. Like WEF in previous years, selected sessions are broadcast on SFinfo in German and Original Languages (often English) on Hotbird at 13east. Additionally, this year, there are webcasts (maybe the podcast version will play on free software) but it seems that none of the computing sessions are up for broadcast. Economics rules the airwaves for 2009. My main reason for posting here is to boggle at the WEF myspace competition. Isn t Myspace about the least appropriate of the big social networks for an economics forum? I suspect some payment or benefits from the network that Rupert Murdoch s company bought. There s also @davos which seems to be talking much more than listening seems appropriate for WEF, no?

Sigh. I'm not part of the FOSDEM organisation team, and this is by choice. I know that I wouldn't find the time to help organize a conference of the scale of FOSDEM, since I'm rather liable to forget to do important things at times. Having said that, I happen to run a company together with Philip Paeps, who is now one of the main FOSDEM organizers; apart from that, I've also managed the Debian presence there for the past few years (lost count how many exactly), and arranged the key signing party for a few years with Joost Van Baal taking over for me starting this year. As such, I'd like to believe that although I'm not exactly in to all their secrets, I do have a front-row seat when it comes to how things are going there. FOSDEM is the "Free and Open Source Developers' European Meeting". It has been that since 2001, and will always remain so. Yes, originally it was called "OSDEM", because frankly, the organisation of the original OSDEM was done by a group of people who like Open Source, without necessarily subscribing to the Free Software ideals. The core group of the organisation is a rather diverse group; for instance, Philip has been known to be rather... negative... about Ubuntu, while Mark (one of the press contacts) has done some activism and translation work for Ubuntu. The change of name from OSDEM to FOSDEM was done not because the organisation's ideas about software were changed overnight by a mail from Richard Stallman or anyone else from the FSF; but rather, because they were open-minded enough to understand that having a name which only says 'Open Source' would be excluding a considerable part of the community that encompasses both Free and Open Source people. This is why the name wasn't changed in FSDEM; it is FOSDEM. I'm quite sure that the fact that FOSDEM is so open-minded about many of the controversial issues that have separated our community over the years not just Open Source vs Free Software, but so many other things as well is one of the main reasons why FOSDEM is so popular today: because everyone, and I truly mean everyone, will find something that he or she likes. That is why I'm so saddened that some people seem to find it necessary to not only whine, but also boycott a conference, because they believe that FOSDEM should not take money from a big Free Software/Open Source contributor, just because they also happen to be a company, and as such make business deals with Microsoft. Note that I'm not either defending or condemning Novell's attitude here; but it is a fact that not everyone in the larger Free and Open Source community feels the same way about the whole Novell/Microsoft deal (else there wouldn't be an openSUSE anymore), and as such they still deserve a place on FOSDEM. Over the history of the organisation of FOSDEM, it's always been a place where everyone could get their opinion out; whether it be the opinion that "Free Software Must Rule The World", or that "It's All About The Way You Do Things"; as long as your opinion is shared by a large enough number of people in the larger FLOSS community, it is welcome. I feel that blocking one organization from sponsoring the event, just because they have made some deals which a significant group of people, one which nevertheless does not encompass the whole of the FLOSS community, disapprove of, would set a dangerous precendent that might jeopardize the very core of what makes FOSDEM so great: its impartiality. Thank god that didn't happen.

KohaCon 2009, the conference for the premier free software integrated library system (Koha) will be held in Plano, Texas, USA on 16-17 April 2009. This is a FREE conference. There is no registration fee, but we are requesting that all attendees pre-register. More details on koha.org, with links to schedules and notes and so on. It seems unlikely that I ll get to Texas at that time. Travel bookings have just opened, but I have a higher-priority event in April which hasn t fixed its date yet. With any luck, there ll be some social media around KohaCon for us poor Euros to watch and maybe even take part.

The changes to whitehouse.gov are being used as an example of ephemeral digital content.

At the exact moment Barack Obama was inaugurated, all traces of President Bush vanished from the White House website, replaced by images of and speeches by his successor. Attached to the website had been a booklet entitled 100 Things Americans May Not Know About the Bush Administration - they may never know them now. When the website changed, the link was broken and the booklet became unavailable.

At the same time, the Obama administration is chafing under rules that don't allow them to use Facebook, gmail, Blackberries, and Twitter. Because of this pesky Presidential Records Act.

Suddenly, they have to relearn how to communicate, because the law has not caught up with the way people live. They are being forced to return to older technologies (or they will once those technologies start working properly), and abandon or become more guarded in their use of newer technologies.

Anyone else find the dissonance am(az us)ing? Seems that anyone who really wants a copy of that missing booklet will be able to access it via FOIA in a few years (unless it got wiped with all of Cheney's files). Meanwhile, if the new guys find a way to stop being hobbled by the law, their digital content will likely be truely ephemeral, since they have become addicted to "newer technologies" that eliminate all expectations about data's preservation and privacy. I think this is one case of the law not keeping up with technology that I can support. It might be more fair to describe it though, as technology not keeping up with the law.

It took more than a week this time, because I was ill, but new testing Gammu version is here. This time there are finally no really major changes, only fixes of regressions (PostgreSQL SMSD brokeness) and bugs found by testing and reported by users. Full list of changes:

• Fixed getting of network name from saved message.
• Fixed encoding of text to some encodings in AT engine.
• Detect more Siemens CME error codes.
• Windows binary is again with MySQL support.
• Initial native support for Motorola phonebook (bug #748).
• Use getpass if available for PIN code prompt.
• Fixed parsing of phone number from incoming calls.
• Added ID for Nokia 1112.
• Dropped obsolete packaging/debian and point users to proper packages.
• Fix crash when operator logo is empty.
• Fix memory leak in SMS backup.
• Fixed processing of SMSD outbox with PostgreSQL (bug #803).
• Automatic detection of lib64 directory for installation.
• Allow separate installation of some components on Windows.

You can download sources and Windows binaries (now for first time you can select which parts you want to install) from usual place: http://cihar.com/gammu/, Debian users will find packages in experimental soon and RPM users can use my repository at OpenSUSE Build Service. PS: I'd like to thank to "j t" who kindly donated me Nokia 6822 for testing.

I will not be able to make it this year, I have more pressing issues to deal with, and CCC was already too stressful to handle for me.
In any case, do enjoy and don't forget to wave at the camera in the Debian Room!
I'll be watching you people!

Time to Report After a good start, I ve hit a bump in the road getting all the various TTLLP annual reports filed with the various offices on time. Well, less a bump in the road, more of a gaping chasm. Well, less a gaping chasm, more of a black hole with the potential to consume as many resources as you can throw at it. As usual, it s the financial reports and rax return which are the problem. After making a good start by closing the 2007-8 books in plenty of time, we ve had some small problems which we ve overcome, but the blocking problem now is that HMRC are using an obsolete address for the company. I only just found out that was the problem yesterday. That s doubly odd because I changed my address at the same time (which they re using) and we ve submitted two tax returns since then with the correct address. Once I got through to the telephone helpline, they told me to go to the tax office (in the nearest town just now, but scheduled for closure) to change the address. At the tax office, they told me to use a telephone in the corner and I had no need to have gone in person. HMRC s left hand doesn t seem to know what its right one is doing! The guy on the end of the phone confused me with jargon, but the upshot is that it will take up to 3 working days to correct our address, then we can request new access to our accounts which will take up to 7 days which means we ll miss the filing deadline. I think it s time to complain about the broken address. I ll dent my progress. Anyone else finding the changed tax filing process bloody taxing this year? Finally, anyone got free and open source software for online filing of partnership tax returns? There s a 10 shareware Excel spreadsheet tool out there, but I guess I ll have to borrow someone s Excel to run it (it won t work in OpenOffice, will it?). Is there a better way? If not, I ll tell parliament.uk about HMRC driving Windows sales (slowly chipping away at the monopoly).

Continuing my recent interest in making diagrams of things, this weekend's project was a visual representation of what the global state files of apt and dpkg are, what's stored in them, and how they're manipulated. As before, this includes only the core part of the system (ok, I squeezed aptitude in there too), for the simple reason that I'm not smart enough to include more stuff in the diagram without making it utterly illegible. As it is, it's already pushing the boundaries of how much you can fit on a single page of paper: This image is also available in svg and pdf formats. Be warned, though, that the SVG might display oddly in anything but Inkscape, and the PDF only displays correctly in Acrobat Reader. If you want to print off a copy without wasting toner, if you don't have a program capable of printing the above, or if gradients offend you, you can also download a simpler version of the diagram: Also available as an svg file or a pdf file. Unlike the last diagram I produced, this one was made in Inkscape. It took pretty much the whole weekend, most of which time I spent learning features of Inkscape that I didn't end up using. Oh well. I've come to the conclusion that Inkscape is an amazing graphics program and an utterly terrible diagram editor. Although to be fair, it seems to be one of the best, if not the best, diagram editors in Debian; also, if you slog through it and you have more graphical talent than me, the diagrams will look very good. [EDIT]: fixed an oversight in the first version of the diagram (apt-get also writes the extended_states file).

A little while back, Terah was leaving the house one morning. On that particular morning, we had an unusually intense even for Kansas wind. It caught the storm door and whipped it around with such force that it bent the metal arm that goes into the pneumatic plunger, and even bent the bracket that the arm connects to. It was not possible to un-bend either of them with household tools, even with dad s help. So I went to the hardware store and picked up a replacement. But I had been putting off actually replacing it because, well, the door almost closed automatically and there were more important things to get to. Until yesterday. I got out the tools and went to work. Jacob was around and took an interest in the activity. I was stretched out on the floor on my stomach working with the drill to try to get out some extremely tight screws without stripping them. And Jacob, at one point, got down on the floor on his stomach right beside me, and proudly announced I (am) like dad! Terah was working on something nearby, and noticed this, and went for the camera. Unfortunately, I had left its CF card in my digital audio recorder. She found the other card, and was hurrying to put it in so she could get the cute picture. Even more unfortunately, she inserted it sideways. CF slots have 50 tiny pins in the space of 1.7 inches. The slots normally force the card to align properly, but not when the card is put in sideways. It slid back and bent a pin back. The slot is thus unusable. I was going in to town anyway to pick up my bike from the bike shop, so I stopped at Moler s Camera on the way. This is my favorite camera shop it s the sort of place where you take a seat at the counter while they help you. I showed the sales guy the camera and he knew off the top of his head that the cost to fix it is $206. Which is pretty much in line with reports on the Internet. The old camera is a Canon Digital Rebel XTi (EOS 400D). It s over 2 years old, so out of warranty, but I wasn t planning to upgrade soon. On the other hand, the camera shop estimated that they could buy the XTi from me for about $150 to $200, considering its condition, and a new XSi (EOS 450D) is $570 at B&H. So about $200 to fix the old one, or about $400 cost to us to get a new one and the next model up, which uses SD instead CF, and thus will never have a bent pin again. With that kind of cost, we decided to spring for the XSi. Plus, it would take about a month to get the repair on the XTi. So there you have it. The wind can be expensive and cause camera upgrades.

About a week ago I updated the KDE 4.1 backports for Lenny with the fourth and last revision of KDE 4.1.
As previously announced, this will be the last update available at http://kde4.debian.net What is next? The repository will continue there, so Lenny users can choose between KDE 3.5.9+ and KDE 4.1.4. But since 4.1.4 packages are not official, they do not have support: no bugs in the BTS or security updates.
If you are using Debian Lenny for stability and security purposes, you should use KDE 3.5. Testing users (future squeeze, current Lenny) can continue using them until KDE 4.2 reaches testing. Again, remember, no bugs in the BTS or security updates, but they will get a clean upgrade to KDE 4.2 in the near future. Unstable users. I have found that there are people using unstable with the backports, when they should be using experimental KDE 4.1. If this is your case, you can stick with 4.1.4 until KDE 4.2 reaches unstable or switch to experimental in a few days and get KDE 4.2 (no yet! it needs to be released first :) ). Last, but not less important, thanks to all the people helping with the backports: MoDaX for helping as backup and the rest of the Qt/KDE team who worked in the experimental packages. HE, zobel and aba for his sysadmin tasks. apol for allowing me torture his PowerPC machine. All those who translated the instructions into their languages and
helped to others users in mailing lists and forums. A quick note about KDE 3.5 to be released in Lenny As most of you have realized, the packages of KDE 3.5 in Lenny and unstable are a mixture of KDE 3.5.9 and 3.5.10. Given that KDE 3.5.10 was released after Lenny was frozen, we could not push this new version into Lenny, however the KDE 3.5 packages were patched about June last year with the latest changes in KDE 3.5 from the KDE subversion. This means some of the modules with the version 3.5.9 are exactly the same that is shipped as 3.5.10.
The only big stuff missing are the kicker improvements shipped in kdebase and some bug fixes in kdepim. But in global, it is closer to KDE 3.5.10 that to KDE 3.5.9. If you want to see what changes are you missing, check the KDE 3.5.10 changelog.

I will be in brussels from 2009-02-06 until 2009-02-11, and I'm going there for the following three reasons:

• to attend FOSDEM
• to discover a new city
• to get some additional entries for my <shameless plug>new project SmokeOrNot</> :)

Executive summary To avoid confusion with the proprietary versions of GForge (known as GForge Advanced Server, GForge Express Edition and GForge Community Edition), the free/libre/opensource codebase will from now on be separately maintained under the name FusionForge by the main developers of the free GForge 4.x codebase. Since this is mostly a renaming, the migration path for existing users will be smooth. Longer version, with details After the initial forking from the Sourceforge codebase, the development of GForge has long been hosted, and many enhancements directly developed, by the GForge Group (GForge, LLC), with regular contributions from outsiders. The results of these evolutions were public and free, subject to the GNU GPL. In parallel, the GForge Group wrote a proprietary re-implementation of GForge, which it sold under the name "GForge Advanced Server", or "GForge AS" for short. This re-implementation added some features for "the enterprise", but was not contributed wholesale to the GForge codebase under a free license. Although some of the features were contributed to the public, the GForge Group concentrated its efforts on its (proprietary software) business model, with more versions appearing, such as "GForge Express Edition" and more recently "GForge Community Edition". As a result, it became increasingly harder for the public to know which version was which without doing extensive research (indeed, some users mistakenly installed one version instead of the other). A consequence was that the free software codebase suffered from a loss in visibility, which lowered its momentum to the point that there haven't been any moderately important releases since the (currently stable) 4.5.x series was announced in late 2005. So, in order to clarify things, avoid further confusion, and regain some of the lost momentum, it was decided by a group of leading contributors that the free software version of the GForge codebase would from now on be developed under the FusionForge name, and its development would be hosted on FusionForge.org. So is this a fork? Well, we don't know yet. It could arguably be called one, since we're taking the code and running away with it under a new name. However, we believe it's not a fork unless both roads continue their own way (more of a oddly-shaped bend). What happens to the GForge codebase developed by the GForge Group at gforge.org remains to be seen, although for the sake of our users we will backport security fixes to the gforge.org Subversion repository (at least for the 4.5.x series and the unreleased 4.6 and 4.7 pre-series) for some time. The bulk of the development will move on to FusionForge and the repositories at FusionForge.org, though, and users are encouraged to migrate at their own pace. Since we're basically continuing the evolution rather than starting from scratch, the migration path should be rather smooth. So why the FusionForge name? Because there were actually lots of locally-patched versions of GForge (and Sourceforge), and we felt it was a waste of resources that should be fixed. It seems many people and organisations took these codebases at some point in time and evolved them for their own needs. Sadly, many of the changes were not contributed back or even published, so lots of efforts were duplicated. Fortunately, many of the people managing these locally-patched forges are now realising that "out-of-tree" patches and features require quite some manpower to maintain. Some formal inter-project discussion is already taking place, and we hope to achieve actual merging of most of the interesting features that have been developed here and there into a common base that can be reused locally with minimal changes. We'd like to "un-fork" as much as possible. We also expect that, by using standard components and tools, we'll facilitate the work of potential contributors, thereby reducing the risk of a new era of fragmentation. And who are we anyway? We're Christian Bayle, Roland Mas and Alain Peyrat, long-time contributors to GForge and responsible for over 95% of the commits over the past two years, as well as a few relative newcomers. Christian and Roland have been maintaining the Debian packaging since the "Debian-SF" era, and Alain has been focusing on code quality. The three of us have, for various reasons, a vested interest in maintaining a lively codebase in a healthy ecosystem. What are our plans? Our short-term goals, as currently planned, include:

• pushing a stable FusionForge release out of the door;
• cleaning up and auditing the database schema to ensure consistency and increased performance;
• merging in new plugins, in particular for new version control systems;
• continuing streamlining the installation process to make it more portable across distributions.

Longer term goals are less well defined, but we're thinking about the following:

• increasing code quality by the use of modern automated tools;
• encouraging a lively stream of external contributions, to reduce the gap between the official version and the locally-patched ones;
• defining an explicit governance model and release process for the FusionForge project;
• as a consequence, a more frequent and predictable release schedule;
• increasing data portability and interoperability with other forges, to reduce lock-in for users and projects.

Some of these items should be facilitated by our switch to a distributed version control system and a new coordinated workflow. Also, the Debian i18n team has been kind enough to offer to host our translation effort on their Pootle server, which means translators will have a much easier time doing their job. We hope to hear from users and contributors alike in the near future. For more information, we can be reached via our fusionforge-general mailing-list (see our lists), which is also suitable for general discussions. We can also be found on IRC (#fusionforge on the Freenode network).

If you are in the NY-area and would like to help out with the project described below, they are looking for volunteers. Help FLOSSIFY the enormously popular book Digital Foundations. The event is being hosted Feb 6-8 at the lovely Eyebeam with some Free as in Beer and Grub provided! ******************************************************* FLOSSIFY 1 : Digital Foundations
For a long time educational courses have been cheap marketing
for proprietary software companies. Can a student really afford all
those expensive softwares required by the courses? No. Ever hear of a
software company kicking up a fuss because students are using
unofficial versions? Well, it does happen but not often. And why not?
Because proprietary software companies know, as the universities know,
that once the students leave their training they will be indoctrinated
with those tools and simply slipstream into being paid up proprietary
software citizens. Simply put, unlicensed software used in education is
tolerated because it is cheap marketing. This is how tools become industry standards . FLOSS Manuals is fighting this flow by converting textbooks that
use proprietary software to using free software in their examples. We call this process FLOSSify . We convert the book from
closed software to Free Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) hence we
FLOSSify the book. Our first text book is the wonderful Digital Foundations book produced
by Michael Mandiberg and Xtine Burrough
(http://digital-foundations.net/). Its a text book designed to teach
software by teaching design. The current toolset it uses is the Adobe
Creative Suite and we will convert these examples entirely to using free
software. FLOSSIFY 1 : Digital Foundations will focus on a fun 3 day event at
Eyebeam, NYC. Anyone is welcome to attend and some food and beer will be
provided. Come and meet some of your old geek friends, make some new,
and help make a step towards unshackling education from proprietary
software. FLOSSIFY 1 : Digital Foundations
Eyebeam, New York City
Feb 6-8
starts 10ish
finishes when we are done
fast connection, a table, some chairs, and beer and food provided
contact adam@flossmanuals.net for more info venue:
http://eyebeam.org/
540 W. 21st Street, (between 10th and 11th Avenues)
New York, NY 10011
Tel. 212.937.6580 Fax: 212.937.6582

Since I keep ending up in situations where I need to clean up postfix queue from mails sent by a single host and always forget the command, I'm posting it here. Maybe someone else will find it useful as well. To begin with, you need to determine the IP address of the culprit you want to eliminate. How you do this, is up to you. Grepping logs or examining the files in the queue both work. But for some reason there doesn't appear to be a good tool to get statistics on the sending IP addresses, only the origin and destination domains. Once you have determined the IP address which you want to purge, you can use the following spell. You might have to repeat the same line for active and incoming queues as well, but usually deferred is the queue I have the most mails. grep -lrE '[^0-9]10.20.30.4[^0-9]' /var/spool/postfix/deferred xargs -r -n1 basename postsuper -d - It's important that the IP address has escaped dots, because dots can account for any character. In the worst case it will end up matching a lot of wrong IP addresses. Another important bits are the '[^0-9]' groups in both ends of the pattern. Those make the IP address only match that particular IP address. Without that extra limitation 1.1.1.1 would match anything that has 1 as the last number in the first octet and 1 as the first number of the last octet. For example: 211.1.1.154 would be a valid match. The other important bit, yet oddly unknown, is the postsuper command. Postsuper modifies the queue and -d flag makes it delete files in the queue by QueueID. For some reason I keep on seeing all sorts of find -exec rm spells all over, which isn't really that nice for the daemon itself. So here it is, one more tidbit I've been meaning to write up for quite some time now. Enjoy!

A few months ago, I asked for suggestions for magazines to subscribe to. I got a lot of helpful suggestions, and subscribed to three: The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The Economist. Today, I m reviewing the only one of the three that I m disappointed in, and it s The Economist. This comes as something of a surprise, because so many people (with the exception of Bryan O Sullivan) recommended it. Let s start with a quote from the issue that found its way to my mailbox this week:

A crowd of 2m or more is making its way to Washington, DC, to witness the inauguration of Mr Obama. Billions more will watch it on television. [link]

Every issue, I see this sort of thing all over. An estimate, or an opinion, presented as unquestioned fact, sometimes pretty clearly wrong or misleading. For weeks before Jan. 20, and even the day before, the widely-reported word from officials was that they had no idea what to expect, but if they had to guess, they d say that attendance would be between 1-2 million. In the end, the best estimates have placed attendance at 1.8 million. Would it have killed them to state that most estimates were more conservative, and to cite the source of their particular estimate? That s all I want, really, when they do things like this. I knew going into it that the magazine (to American eyes) essentially editorializes throughout, and I don t have a problem with that. But it engages in over-generalization far too often and that s just when I catch it. This was just a quick example from the first article I read in this issue; it s more blatant other places, but quite honestly I m too lazy to go look some more examples up at this hour. I do remember, though, them referring to members of Obama s cabinet as if they were certain to be, back before Obama had even announced their pick, let alone their confirmation hearings happening. One of my first issues of The Economist had a lengthy section on the global automobile market. I learned a lot about how western companies broke into markets in Asia and South America. Or at least I think I did. I don t know enough about that subject to catch them if they are over-generalizing again. The end result is that I read each issue with a mix of fascination and distrust; the topics are interesting, but I can never really tell if I m being given an accurate story. It often feels like the inside scoop, but then when I have some bit of knowledge of what the scoop is, it s often a much murkier shade of gray than The Economist s ever-confident prose lets on. Don t get me wrong; there are things about the Economist I like. But not as much as with the New Yorker or the Atlantic, so I ll let my subscription lapse after 6 months but keep reading it until then.

We're still managing to keep to the weekly release cycle and put substantial changes into each version. This makes me happy. I'm hoping that we'll be able to keep slowly working the bug count down. This release merges quite a bit of work done by Raphael Geissert, most notably the addition of pedantic tags. Lintian has quite a few open bugs for checks that are useful in only some contexts or that check coding style issues that not everyone agrees with or wants to be bothered with, and we've been holding off on implementing those since I'd like to encourage everyone to enable info-level tags and I didn't want to just put them all in there. Now we have a new level, --pedantic, which includes all the picky stuff and the stuff that may be completely wrong. It's up to each maintainer whether to use --pedantic at all. The tags won't be in the default lintian.debian.org view (right now, they're not there at all). If you do use --pedantic, please don't worry too much about making your package pedantic-clean unless the tags really seem like a good idea. Also, as noted in the man page, adding overrides for pedantic tags is probably not worth the effort. You should look over the report and apply human judgement. I expect this mode to be useful for sponsors, who want to be alerted to possible issues but can decide for themselves which ones to mention. This release will also add a new page on lintian.debian.org that shows tags sorted by severity and certainty. Not only will this be useful for people looking for problems in the archive, it will also help the Lintian maintainers with updating severities and certainties. (For example, looking at the test page, I think a lot of the important tags should probably be serious instead.) I'm currently doing a full archive run from scratch with the new version to make sure that I plugged the memory leak problems that Lintian had before and to finish fixing #507849. Once that run finishes, I'll send a "bits from the Lintian maintainers" post to debian-devel-announce with information about the pedantic mode and the new tag page.