I saw a posting about PowerDevil, the new KDE power management interface. It's somewhat disheartening - for the most part, it falls into the same traditional errors made in power management (ie, letting you change cpufreq settings, using "presentation" as a power management setting rather than getting applications to actually do the right thing). But my point isn't to bitch about PowerDevil. My concern is more about why we're still failing to get the message across about certain power management myths. Implementing power management incorrectly leads to wasted power, dead polar bears and wet carpets. It's important that we get this right.

• To a first approximation, the Powersave governor will only save you power if you're playing 3D games. The performance governor will basically never give you extra performance. Don't use them. Use ondemand instead. Do not make it easy for your users to choose them. They will get it wrong, because it is difficult to explain why this result is true.
  
• Thermal management is not the job of a power manager. Using power management to implement thermal management will result in your computer taking up more power overall, reducing battery life. Implement things in the right places.
  
• When people say "Presentation mode", what they mean is "Disable screensaver and automatic suspend to RAM". This is not a power management policy. It is an application behaviour policy. The sensible behaviour is for applications to request that these things be disabled when they switch to full-screen presentation mode. The foolish behaviour is to request that your users select "Presentation mode" in their desktop and then start their presentation in their application and then finish their application and then remember to disable "Presentation mode".
  
• It takes no more energy to scan out a framebuffer drawn with the 3D engine than with the 2D engine. If you're spending a significant proportion of the time on the GPU when in your desktop environment, you're already doing something wrong.

One of the problems is probably that most desktop programmers don't know how hardware behaves. How can we change that?

Gintautas Miliauskas blogs about a computer program that can generate something which reportedly really sounds like composer-written music; apparently it has passed a 'turing test' where people listened to music generated by this thing, and music written by a human composer. I'm afraid, however, I'll have to disappoint him a bit, really. If we ignore the effect that music can have on the emotional state of a living being for a moment, then it's a plain and simple fact that music is pure math:

• 'An octave' is the musician's term for 'a doubling in frequency'. As many people know, a center A on a piano is tuned at 440Hz; it follows that an A one octave higher is tuned at 880Hz, and that the one which is one octave lower will be 220Hz.
• 'Chords' are based around that, too. A regular C chord, for example, contains the C, E, and G notes; and usually, a C at one octave above the first C is included, too. The frequency of a G is exactly halfway between the two C notes, and the E is about halfway between those. Most chords are built in such a manner; the sound waves of those notes will build an interference pattern that is perceived as a chord.
• A melody usually starts with the base note of the key in which the piece is written, and almost always (except during a short time in the early baroque) ends with that same base note. Note that the 'base' note is not the same thing as the "bass" note (although the base is often used in the bass).

There are many other things in music that can be expressed as mathematical rules; learning to how to compose music involves learning those rules, which is a long and tedious process. Now I'm not saying that following those rules will necessarily lead you to an interesting piece of music; the fact that it's possible to create something ugly while still using chords etc. But since so much of it already is math, I can imagine it not being extremely hard to figure out what the other rules are (the ones a composer figures out by imself as opposed to being taught them), transferring them into a computer program, and using that to generate music. That's not to say that such a thing is easy to do, and I'm sure it's still an impressive feat to create a computer program which can create "nice" sounding music; but I don't think this would qualify as 'artificial intelligence'. At least not any more than Deep Blue

Gnash 0.8.4 will be finally included in Lenny. There have been many improvements since 0.8.4, and it looks as though even more will be included in next release. Gnash current release cycle is 3 months, so next upstream release is planned for January 2009.

My home workplace is slowly and steadily mutating into a never ending story. I do not remember blogging every aspect of it, but after three graphics cards, an even older mainboard and two DVB-S-Cards, my home workplace PC currently does what I expect it to do: Run Debian unstable, drive two 20 inch DVI TFT monitors with 1600x1200 pixels each and receiving DVB-S transmissions. I do not think that these are exaggerated expectations, but it took over three months to find a combination of hardware which will actually do what I want. The hardest part was finding a AGP graphics card which can drive two DVI monitors with 1600x1200 pixels each. After failing with two different Matrox cards (the G550 not being able to do 1600x1200 pixels if the monitors are connected via DVI), I finally settled on a used GeForce FX 5200. In the beginning, the binary nVidia module didn’t hurt as much as I expected. Unfortunately, this rapidly changed with the 2.6.27 Linux kernel. Unfortunately, the Linux kernel changed its interface with 2.6.27, which stopped the nvidia-kernel-source 173.14.09 from sid from compiling. Contrary to what is told in #500285, the driver doesn’t compile on my system even when I clean out /usr/src/modules/nvidia-kernel prior to unpacking the driver .tar.gz. I already thought that my problem was solved when I noticed nvidia-kernel-source 177.80 in Experimental. The module compiles just fine against kernel 2.6.27, but...

Nov 21 17:30:53 weave kernel: NVRM: The NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 GPU installed in this system is
Nov 21 17:30:53 weave kernel: NVRM:  supported through the NVIDIA 173.14.xx Legacy drivers. Please
Nov 21 17:30:53 weave kernel: NVRM:  visit http://www.nvidia.com/object/unix.html for more
Nov 21 17:30:53 weave kernel: NVRM:  information.  The 177.80 NVIDIA driver will ignore
Nov 21 17:30:53 weave kernel: NVRM:  this GPU.  Continuing probe...
Nov 21 17:30:53 weave kernel: NVRM: No NVIDIA graphics adapter found!

Don’t closed source binary-only drivers just suck? I mean, granted, the FX 5200 is a five year old design, but it does its basic office job just fine. So I currently can choose to stick with a legacy kernel of the 2.6.26 series to be able to run the legacy nVidia driver, or can shell out money for a new graphics card and a new mainboard, a new CPU and new memory (since current graphics cards aren’t available for AGP any more). Just fine. Sucks. If I get around to buying a new box, which graphics card manufacturer is to be trusted these days? nVidia is out of the question after my current experiences, Intel doesn’t make graphics cards as far as I know, and ATI/AMD? I hear that they have recently seen the light, but are their open source drivers mature enough so that ATI/AMD products can already drive high resolution dual DVI setup? I currently do not care about 3D performance, I just want to push around windows on a flat KDE desktop and to some serious work. All I want is screen real estate and a picture of decent quality. I’d appreciate any hints and comments, and surely hope that there will be some kind of upstream support for the 2.6.26 kernels until I have refitted my home workplace hardware.

A few years ago, not long after we got married, it was getting close to Christmas — the first Christmas we’d spent together. We set out one Saturday morning in Indianapolis to find a Christmas tree. We both have allergies, so a real tree was out of the question. An artificial tree it is. We went to the mall. We went to Sears, to Target, and to any number of other places that I’m sure I’m forgetting. We saw trees that spun, trees that had red needles, trees with fiber optics in them, trees with some incredibly fake-looking snow, pre-decorated “generic” trees, and all sorts of things that just screamed “tacky.” What we didn’t find were trees that looked like… trees. I think there were a few Terah would have been OK with, until I had to veto them on the grounds that they were too fake, too short, to skinny, or whatever. So I thought I’d check the Internet. I came upon Tree Classics, and we ordered a 7.5ft Evergreen Supreme. We (or, well, *I*) got some good-natured teasing for being crazy enough to order a tree over the Internet. This was before people were quite used to the idea that you can buy anything online — and, as far as I know, Tree Classics was the only company (except perhaps for Sears) selling trees online back then. But it arrived and we put it up and liked it. It looked like a tree, it was nice and full. And it shipped direct from the manufacturing plant in Illinois. The downside to that particular tree was that it took several hours to assemble each year. Over the years, whatever unlucky family members happened to be visiting our house over Thanksgiving would get a nice Thanksgiving dinner — and then a pile of tree branches to shape. We started getting more haphazard over the years, and this year, decided that our now 7-year-old tree had survived three moves and a toddler, and we could do with a new, easier-to-assemble model. So I hopped online again. We didn’t even bother with the big box stores this year. There are more places selling Christmas trees these days, but we wound up buying another tree from Tree Classics. They had basically the same types of trees as other places, but a wider selection and generally better prices. Though their website isn’t quite as fancy. We got a 7.5ft Kensington Spruce this year. It arrived Monday and we set to assembling it as soon as we could. Our Christmas tree has had this tradition of getting put up on about Dec. 23 and then staying up until about Valentine’s Day because we are great at procrastinating with the long job of assembling it (and the almost-as-long job of disassembling it.) We got a pre-lit tree (standard incandescent white light bulbs, of course) this year. It came in about 4, rather than several dozen, sections. The injection-molded branch ends are amazingly realistic. We got it assembled in record time. But it didn’t look very full. The injection-molded ends seemed all squished together, and despite following the instructions, didn’t really bend out like we thought they should. So Terah called Tree Classics today. The woman that answered gave her a tip on how to do it (”splay” them out, side to side, then shape them up and down after that). She’s got it started, and we’ll probably finish out the shaping tomorrow. Tree Classics had also exchanged a few emails with me prior to our purchase to help answer questions about whether their current trees are easier to assemble than their prior ones, and questions about the appearance of their different standard and LED pre-lit options. Overall, we’ve been happy with them and will order from them again in the future, I’m sure.

I've been looking at netbooks, since indications are that my laptop's hard drive will die again soon, and that its LCD may follow. I can't seem to find any netbook with a resolution better than 1024x600. I'm used to 1280x768; dropping down will be a real shame, but seems unavoidable. I'm very interested in a machine with no moving parts. So far the only one I've found is the Dell Inspiron Mini 9, which has passive cooling, so no fan, and of course uses a SSD. I'm not completly sold on it though -- its battery is only a 4 cell; its wifi may not be well supported. The Eee 901 is attractive due to its battery, but has a fan. I'm very noise sensative these days, and the fan would have to be whisper quiet to be acceptable. And even then I think it would annoy me. (Even quiet laptop hard drives annoy me.) All in all, I wish I could wait another 6 months to a year and see if the next generation improves any. OTOH, I could buy both of these for less than the price of my current laptop.

Last spring, I posted If Version Contol Systems Were Airlines, which I really enjoyed. Now, because I seem to have a desire to take a good joke way too far, it’s time for: IF PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES WERE CHRISTMAS CAROLS I apologize in advance. (Feel free to add your own verses/carols in the comments.) Away in a Pointer (C) (to Away in a Manger) Away in a pointer, the bits in a row.
A little dereference to see where they go.
I look down upon thee, and what do I see?
A segfault and core dump, right there just for me. I saw thy init there, a reaping away
My process, from its address space, so sorry to say.
I thought I had saved thee, from void pointers all,
But maybe I missed one, and doomed you to fall. Be near me, debugger, I ask thee to stay
Close by my terminal, and help me, I pray;
To find all the bugs and the void pointers too,
And if my kernel oopses, help me reboot for you. Joy to the Wall (Perl) (to Joy to the World) Joy to the Wall, the Perl is come!
Let awk receive her King;
Let every grep prepare him room,
And bash and sed shall sing,
And bash and sed shall sing,
And bash, and bash, and sed shall sing. Joy to the keyboard, we’ll use it all!
Let men, shift keys, employ;
Implicit variables, and globals never fall.
Repeat the line noise now,
Repeat the line noise now,
Repeat, repeat, the line noise now. Perl rules the world with truth and ASCII,
And makes the doctors prove
The glories of carpal tunnel hands,
And we do it more than one way,
And we do it more than one way,
And we do it, and we do it, more than one way. Hark! The Herald Coders Sing (Haskell) (to Hark! The Herald Angels Sing) Hark! The herald coders sing,
“Map and fold, recursive King;
Recursion and patterns wild,
Pure and IO — they’re reconciled!”
Joyful, all ye functions rise,
Join the typeclasses of the types,
With recursion, do proclaim,
“Laziness is born in this domain.” Refrain
Hark! The herald coders sing,
“Map and fold, recursive king!” Monads, by highest Heav’n adored;
Monads, their depths still unexplored;
Late in time, behold they’re good,
Never once were understood.
Veiled in functions, the Monads stay,
Used for IO, and more, each day,
With excitement, Monads say,
“Arrows are stranger, so with us stay.” (Refrain) Hail the glorious compiler of Glasgow!
Hail the threaded run-time system!
Join the beautiful Cabal of Hackage,
Upload there thy perfect package.
We know best, what we will Handle,
You’re safe with us: no pointers, no vandals.
Born to make your exceptions throw,
Unless you unsafePerformIO. (Refrain) Lispy the Paren (to Frosty the Snowman) Lispy the paren was a jolly happy soul,
With a lot of cars and a little cons
And two ends made out of curves.
Lispy the paren is a fairy tale, they say,
He was just common, but the children know
how he came to life one day.
There must have been some magic in that
Old Symbolics they found.
For when they placed him on its disk,
It recursed around and ’round. O, Lispy the paren,
Was recursive as can be.
And the coders say it would take a day
To put his parens away.
Clunkety clunk clunk,
Clunkety clunk clunk,
Look at Lispy go.
Clunkety clunk clunk,
Clunkety clunk clunk,
Consing on the car. Lispy the snowman knew
The keyboard was hot the day,
So he said, “Let’s cons and we’ll have some fun
now before they Scheme away.”
Down to the function,
With a list there in his RAM,
Running here and there,
all around the LAN, saying
“cdr me if you can.”
He led them down the streets of disk
Right to the traffic bus.
And only paused a moment when
He heard them holler (quit). Oh BASIC Night (to O Holy Night) Oh BASIC night, the LEDs are brightly glinting;
It is the night of the dear GOSUB’s birth!
Long lay the world in sin and error printing,
Till you appeared and the RAM felt its worth.
Shiver of fear, line numbers do inspire,
For yonder breaks a mostly harmless GOTO.
Fall on your bits, O hear the Visual voices!
O BASIC divine, O BASIC where GOTO was born!
O BASIC, O Holy BASIC, O BASIC, you’re mine! Some want to say, “GOTO is harmful always,”
But what of them, in their post-modern world.
We PRINT the truth, in the line-numbered goodness,
But Dijkstra appeared, and the faith, it was lost.
A thrill of hope, when .NET BASIC announces,
But Visual BASIC, what kind of thing are you?
Fall on your GUI, O see the old line numbers!
Behold BASICA, O BASIC when DOS was born!
O numbers, O lines, spaghetti divine! Guido We Have Heard on High (Python) (to Angels We Have Heard on High) Guido we have hard on high
Sweetly indenting o’re the code,
And the functions in reply
Their exceptions sweetly flowed. Refrain Indent….. in your whitespace careful!
Indent…… in your whitespace careful! Spaces, why this jubilee?
Why semicolons have you so wronged?
What backslashes must we use
If we want our lines so long? (Refrain) Come to Guido here to see
“One Right Way” is good, of course.
There’s no need for Perl, you know,
We have to be more verbose. (Refrain) Now the PEP will show the way
To the future, we shall see.
Banish lambda and the rest
Of the things we liked the best. (Refrain)

Wow, in an hour or so I'll be heading to The Mill, where the unique Chimo Bayo will be performing live. HUA!

So I've bitten the bullet and ordered an ASUS Eee PC 901 W006 from Amazon. This has 1Gb of memory, 20Gb of solid-state storage, and is preloaded with Linux. All being well it will arrive tomorrow, and then I can try installing Lenny upon it. From the Debian Wiki it seems to be a painless process. I guess we'll see.. ObFilm: Twelve Monkeys

Thanks to Koha, TTLLP is partly a library services worker cooperative and just now there’s a massive flame-storm about the largest library services consumer cooperative - OCLC, the Online Computer Library Center - because it just updated the terms for sharing its book data collection. OCLC seems to be treating it as a private asset that it can exploit, not the common resource that many librarians thought it was. I’ve been watching this fire with interest - because, at best, I don’t think it’s helping other cooperatives that sell to libraries - and here is my summary. OCLC and the Great Library Scandal is a good introduction and there’s a summary of the Talis Podcast about OCLC WorldCat Record Use Policy with Karen Clahoun and Roy Tennant which reveals some of the OCLC thinking. Just like CC and Open Source? Still No is a great illustration of how some librarians think OCLC is reaching the wrong conclusion, which then leads to asking Is OCLC truly cooperative? and What would it look like if OCLC was broken up? A commenter on Tom Watson: Library data asks: “Why would libraries play this game?” Well, the road to hell is paved with good intentions and this road has taken 40 years. First off, OCLC is essentially a good idea - libraries cooperating to act as a counter-weight to the large library service companies. However, I believe OCLC predates many recent company rule innovations (stronger common asset locks) and data licensing innovations (Share-Alike, Fiduciary Licensing and the general free and open source software movements), so there’s nothing to stop them trying to privatise the assets (library data) that the libraries have given to OCLC and it was only a matter of time before someone tried. I’m having a similar discussion with another organisation that has been given data by its members under vague terms and is now apparently about to exploit that data for the organisation’s benefit, to the detriment of some members. TTLLP is a member but has not contributed much data because I was suspicious of the lack of terms. In time, hopefully, asset locks and more awareness of data licensing will eliminate these problems, but there’s going to be a lot more people getting burnt first. Finally, a quick shout-out to the Open Library Environment as a possible emerging alternative to OCLC for practical services. Raw Thought: Stealing Your Library: The OCLC Powergrab covers some of its motivation (and includes a link to a petition to OCLC, if you want something to sign), but I share Stefano’s (now there’s someone I’d not read in 7 or so years) analysis of some of the challenges:

“any grass-root approach that will get big enough to take on OCLC on the metadata collection and redistribution service that libraries need will have to incorporate under the pressure of its users (if only for legal liability protection) and will have to find an answer to the same set of problems (policy, governance, financial sustainability) that OCLC has.”

This might be a good message to write in Spanish... But then again, a long time ago I decided this is an English-posting site. So be it, I'll only have to give more background information.
This day marks the date when, 98 years ago, Francisco I. Madero started the Mexican Revolution - About a decade of unrest, civil war and ideologies. The revolution is what created the violent, uncivil image of the Mexican, which accompanied us for long years in many foreigners' minds. The revolution brought to an end 30 years of a single-man rule, the Porfiriato. But that's only the major symptom - The Revolution had many, many other consequences. About one million (out of a 10 million population) people died. There was a very significative rearrangement of the society, a rearrangement that took about half a century to settle. But I won't write more background - You can always ask the wikipedia about our Revolution.
The reason I am posting this is that, as it usually happens in this time of year, several so-called analysts in the media have started asking, was the Revolution really worth it? Did it change anything at all? Did the Revolution in the end win, or was it defeated from within? Should we still celebrate it?
And there are, yes, reasons to doubt it. Renato Leduc, at the same time a great journalist and a delicious poet, says it as many - while at the same time, as nobody else: Tiempos en que era Dios omnipotente / y el se or Don Porfirio presidente / Tiempos, ay! tan iguales al presente, or ya se est n muriendo todos / Jes s qu desilusi n...! / se est volviendo gobierno / Ay dios...! La revoluci n.
Anyway... Our media overlords insist on us forgetting the struggles and the real changes that came from them, on rewriting the history... Probably they will push us later on to have the cristeros as the real fathers of the Nation?
Even if so many bits of reality didn't change after Porfirio Diaz's regime fell in 1910, I find it insulting to think that even 70 years of PRI -with very sharp differences between periods, with huge differences between the PRI-born governments- are comparable to 30 years of a one-man rule; even with brutal repressions such as the dirty war against so many subversive movements in the 50s-80s (as officially There Was No Armed Struggle Anymore, just some pesky communist subversives), it cannot be compared to the Porfirian Peace (ask Cananea and R o Blanco). Today we might have a shameful concentration of money and power in very few hands (including the world's richest man), but it certainly does not reach the point of 1910 where most of the Mexican soil was owned by less than 30 families, with latifundios as big as many states...
Anyway - So far, nothing new - just bits I heard here and there, and my reactions to them. But this morning, around 8:25, I tuned in to Noticias IMER, the news program of one of the few public, non-gubernamental, independent radio stations. An interview was under way, but I could not get the interviewed person's name (I guess, a historian - will write to ask for his data). His comments were very interesting, and very worth echoing. I'll try not to distort him.
The Revolution started off very organized, and with a very simple goal: Get Porfirio Diaz out, and call for real federal elections. Sufragio efectivo, no reelecci n. Of course, the fight was very short, and Madero became the president, with an overwhelming majority. Of course, also, the reactionary sectors set up a coup and killed Madero. Victoriano Huerta seized the power - and that's where the real revolution really began. Groups all over the country (some of which were at unrest since Madero, as they were not seeing the changes they needed - changes that would bring an end to the huge class differences and disrespect to the native Mexican population) rose in arms, and forced Huerta into exile. Then, they battled each other for many more years. It became known as la bola - When somebody joined the revolutionary forces, people said he went to fight with the crowd. But, inside the crowd, there were very different points of view. No, Carranza, Villa and Zapata (the foremost leaders in the hardest part of the fight) were not power-hungry barbarians - much to the contrary. They had very full, very complex views of the problem and possible solutions. I won't delve much into them, also, as I'm not an expert...
Villa and Zapata had the most compatible approaches, seeking an aggresive land redistribution, a communal property system (closest to most of the indigenous population's roots, what we would now call usos y costumbres). For the government, both favored going towards a Europe-like parliamentary system, where the parliament were the real force, and the president (or prime minister or whatever) would only be the designated person to implement the parliament's decision. Both Villa and Zapata feared the evil stemming from the unlimited power that the Presidential Chair symbolized (Fui soldado de Francisco Villa / de aquel hombre de fama mundial, / que aunque estuvo sentado en la silla / no envidiaba la presidencial). They met at the Aguascalientes convention, and were quite close to each other - but were defeated by the superior Venustiano Carranza (Constitucionalista) army.
Carranza, although vilified for his corruption (nowadays, carrancear is still a synonim for stealing), had an opposite view - also originating from a very deep analysis. Carranza saw that what brought down Madero was, in the end, the lack of power of the President to rule the country without support from the legislative power. So, he pushed a political program making the President the strongest man in Mexico. He and his people wrote and passed the 1917 Constitution, valid today. This constitution goes to great lengths pushing revolutionary ideals - Land and wealth redistribution, universal and free education, keeps a complete separation between state and church, ensures state control over strategic areas... The 1917 constitution is one of our history's greatest achievements.
But, of course, it is not perfect - it paved the way for a hegemonic party controlling the real power behind it all. PRI started as a very heterogeneous mixture of the whole revolutionary family, but slowly became a bureaucratic, stagnated monolith.
And in a somehow ironic twist of destiny, the forces that today push for deepest changes, and precisely in the same direction that Villa and Zapata wished, are... Ej rcito Zapatista de Liberaci n Nacional (EZLN) and Frente Popular Francisco Villa (FPFV). EZLN is far more successful and advanced in its social experiment. Again, I won't comment further in what I don't really understand.
As a last point, the commenter I'm quoting (and whose name I must get, to update this post!), said that practically in every country that has transited from any sort of dictatorship towards a more-or-less believable democracy (say, everywhere in South America, or Spain, or Eastern Europe, or...), one of the first steps has been to update or replace the constitution with a new one, preventing the mistakes overlooked by the previous one from being reinstated. In our country, we have long heard about the "Reforma del Estado", a very nice-sounding-term which nobody believes in. After the 2006 electoral mess (no matter who won in the end, everybody will agree it was a mess that should be prevented from happening again, we had high hopes of real changes being introduced. A parliamentary, or at least semi-presidentialist regime was strongly suggested as a way forward. Changing the electoral system towards having second-rounds if needed. _anything!_ But no, we were stuck with... The same as always.
So, did the Revolution win or lose? It is clear to me. It won, and it really shaped -for better- what would happen in the next 100 years. However, in a century, we have been able to twist the law to make it turn against itself. I have to agree with my EZLN-minded friends (I sympathize with EZLN's general goals, but don't think its way forward is the right way to go): Pushing the change from within the government is just wishful thinking, but a strong delusion. However, is there a way to push our country forward without repeating a violent cycle? I really hope so. Our current situation is simply pathetic.
I lack a good closing for this post... So I'll let good old Jefe Pluma Blanca, Renato Leduc, do it for me.
Tiempos de Pancho Villa
y de la guerra de mentadas y tiros en la sierra.
Tiempos de fe
no en Dios sino en la tierra Por el cerro de la Pila
fueron entrando a Torre n
mi general Pancho Villa
y atr s la revoluci n...
Ay jijos...! ya se nos hizo
cu nto diablo bigot n... Ya viene Toribio Ortega
subiendo y bajando cerros
y no te enredes ni enga es
que ah anda Pablito Se ez
haciendo ladrar los perros. Cu nto usurero barb n...!
Ay jijos... c mo les vuela
de la levita el fald n...!
Ay jijos... ya se nos hizo:
triunf la revoluci n...! Tenemos camino andado...
No hay que juntarse con rotos
siempre te juegan traici n
ya Madero est vengado
ya muri la usurpaci n. En su caballo retinto
lleg Emiliano Zapata
bonita su silla charra
y sus botones de plata
pero mucho m s bonito
su famoso Plan de Ayala... Este gallo es de navaja
y no es gallo de espol n
si quieres tierra trabaja
trabaja no seas huev n... Ya lleg don Venustiano
con sus anteojos oscuros
y Villa y Zapata gritan:
No s que tengo en los ojos...
porque ya en Pablo Gonz lez
se vislumbra la traici n
Ay reata no te revientes
que es el ltimo jal n...! ya se est n muriendo todos
Jes s qu desilusi n...!
se est volviendo gobierno
Ay dios...! La revoluci n.

I just read the news that PC Magazine is being canceled. It’s not exactly a shock, given the state of technical magazines right now. I haven’t read one of those in years, since they turned to be more of a consumer than a technical publication. But I hope I am not the only one out there that remembers PC Magazine from the mid to late 1980s. I had two favorite parts in each issue: the programming example, and the “Abort, Retry, Fail” page at the back of the magazine. The programming example was usually some sort of DOS (or, on occasion, OS/2) utility. It was usually written in assembly, and would be accompanied by a BASIC program you could type in to get the resulting binary, as assemblers weren’t readily available. The BASIC program was line after line of decimal numbers that would decode them and write out the resulting binary — sort of a primitive uuencode for paper. Trying to type those in gave me some serious eyestrain on more than one occasion. By now, I forget what most of those utilities did, but I remember one: BatchMan. It was a collection of tools for use in DOS batch files, and could do things like display output in color or even — yes — play monophonic music. It came with an example that displayed some lyrics about batch programming on-screen, set to what I later realized was the Batman theme. Geek nirvana, right? But Batchman was too big to publish the source code, or the BASIC decoder, in print. It might have been one of those things that eventually led me to a CompuServe account. PC Magazine had some deal with CompuServe that you could get their utilities for free, or reduced cost — I forget. CompuServe was probably where I sent my first email, from my account which was 71510,1421 — comma and all. In later years, you could pay a small fee to send email to the Internet, and I had the amazingly attractive email address of 71510.1421@cis.compuserve.com. Take that, gmail. PC Magazine eventually stopped running utilities that taught people about assembly or batch programming and shifted more to the genre of Windows screensavers. They stopped their articles about how hard disks work and what SCSI is all about, and instead have cover stories like “Vista made easy!” I am, sadly, not making this up. Gone are the days of investigating alternative operating systems like OS/2. It appears that “Abort, Retry, Fail” is gone, too. It was a one-page thing at the back of each magazine that featured braindead error messages and funny stories about people that did things like FAX an image of a floppy disk to a remote office — before such stories were cliche. Sort of like DailyWTF these days. The sad truth is that the people that would FAX an image of a floppy are probably the ones that are reading PC Magazine today. I still have a bunch of PC Magazine issues — the good ones — in my parents’ basement. I also still have my floppies with the utilities on them somewhere. One day, when I get some time — I’m estimating this will be about when Jacob goes to college — I’ll go back and take another look at them.

Good news everyone, new Gammu testing version is out. This time biggest fix is Bluetooth support for Mac OS X, accompanied with fixed locking on some architectures and improved debug configuration, to allow proper integration with python-gammu. Full list of changes:

• Reimplement locking and add tests for it.
• GSM_SetDebugFileDescriptor now accepts flag whether file descriptor can be closed (bug #749).
• Soname change due to API breakage (see above).
• Fixed compilation on Mac OS X, thanks to Juan A. Bertolin for testing.

You can download from usual place: http://cihar.com/gammu/, Debian users will find packages in experimental soon.

The next Software in the Public Interest board meeting will take at 2000 UTC (noon PST / 15:00 EST / 20:00 GMT / 21:00 CET) on Wednesday 19 November 2008 on irc.oftc.net #spi. The agenda is online, but I’ve not seen an announcement yet. I’m surprised there’s not much on the agenda. Missing topics include supporting FACIL. What else do you think SPI should be doing?

Let’s start with a photo: That’s Jacob over at the pumpkin patch near us. He found something to inspect, and spent awhile doing it. As he does. He’s taken a liking to our cat, Nash. Jacob calls him “cat Nash”. Never just “Nash”. When we get home from somewhere, if the cat is around, Jacob will say, “Hi cat Nash! Hi cat Nash!” Then he’ll bend over, touch his head to Nash’s back, and try to give him a hug. Nash, surprisingly, doesn’t mind this. Jacob enjoys being a part of — well, everything. He will repeat back new words and phrases, trying to learn how to say them, even if he doesn’t understand what they mean yet. His favorite recent outdoor discovery is that grain silos are all over the place. He’ll point them out excitedly as we drive down the road. I had never noticed just how many there are. One day, he pointed at a water tower and said “SILO!” I understood why he said that, but I told him it was a water tower. He remembered that, and learned to tell them apart in a day or two. Then one morning he surprised me with, “Water tower. Water inside.” How he figured that out, I don’t know. There’s another photo of him at the pumpkin patch. The other day, I accidentally triggered our smoke alarms while checking one for a battery. After that, Jacob loved to say “BEEP! BEEP!” Sometimes followed by “Smoke larm. Hurt ears.” We learned how to say BEEP BEEP loud and also quiet. He’s certainly a lot of fun at this age.

Times are exciting. Our book, Real World Haskell, is now available in a number of venues. But before I get to that, I’ve got to talk about what a thrill this project has been. I created our internal Darcs repository in May, 2007. Since then, the three of us has made 1324 commits — and that doesn’t count work done by copyeditors and others at O’Reilly. We made available early drafts of the book online for commenting, which served as our tech review process. By the time we finished writing the book, about 800 people had submitted over 7,500 comments. I’ve never seen anything like it, and really appreciate all those that commented about it. As for availability, RWH is available:

• For immediate purchase with electronic delivery, from O’Reilly’s page
• For immediate viewing on Safari Books Online, at its book page
• Paper editing timing is still tentative, but we’re estimating arrival in bookstores the week of December 8.

People are talking about it on blogs, twitter, etc. We’re excited!

My current desktop PC has an RS790-based Radeon on-board graphics controller. It also has a Radeon X1900 plugged in. Playing with my Watts Up, I found that the system was (at idle!) drawing around 35W more power with the X1900 than with the on-board graphics.

This is clearly less than ideal.

Recent Radeons all support dynamic clock gating, a technology where the clocks to various bits of the chip are turned off when not in use. Unfortunately it seems that this is generally already enabled by the BIOS on most hardware, so playing with that didn't give me any power savings. Next I looked at Powerplay, the AMD technology for reducing clocks and voltages. It turns out that my desktop hardware doesn't provide any Powerplay tables, so no joy there either. What next?

Radeons all carry a ROM containing a bunch of tables and scripts written in a straightforward bytecode language called Atom. The idea is that OS-specific drivers can call the Atom tables to perform tasks that are hardware dependent, even without knowledge of the specific low-level nature of the hardware they're driving. You can use Atom to do several things, from card initialisation through mode setting to (crucially) setting the clock frequencies. Jerome Glisse wrote a small utility called Atomtools that lets you execute Atom scripts and set the core and RAM frequencies. Playing with this showed that it was possible to save the best part of 5W by underclocking the graphics core, and about the same again by reducing the memory clock. A total saving of 9-10W was pretty significant.

The main problem with reducing the memory clock was that doing it while the screen is being scanned out results in memory corruption, showing up as big ugly graphical artifacts on the screen. I'm a fan of doing power management as aggressively as possible, which means reclocking the memory whenever the system is idle. Turning the screen off to reclock the memory would avoid the graphical corruption but introduce irritating flicker, so that wasn't really an option. The next plan was to synchronise the memory reclocking to the vertical refresh interval, the period of time between the bottom of a frame and the top of the next frame being drawn. Unfortunately setting the memory frequency took somewhere between 2 and 20 milliseconds, far too long to finish inside that time period.

So. Just using Atom was clearly not going to be possible. The next step was to try writing the registers directly. Looking at the R500 register documentation showed that the MPLL_FUNC_CNTL register contained the PLL dividers for the memory clock. Simply smacking a new value in here would allow changing the frequency of the memory clock with a single register write. It even worked. Almost. I could change the frequency within small ranges, but going any further resulted in increasingly severe graphical corruption. Unlike the sort I got with the Atom approach to changing the frequency, this corruption manifested itself as a range of effects from shimmering on the screen down to blocks of image gradually disappearing in an impressively trippy (though somewhat disturbing) way.

Next step was to perform a register dump before and after changing the frequencies via Atom, and compare them to the registers I was programming. MC_ARB_RATIO_CLK_SEQ was consistently different, which is where things got interesting. The AMD docs helpfully describe this register as "Magic field, please use the excel programming guide. Sets the hclk/sclk ratio in the arbiter", about as helpful as being told that the register contents are defined by careful examination of a series of butterflies kept somewhere in Taiwan. Now what?

Back to Atomtools. Enabling debugging let me watch a dump of the Atom script as it ran. The relevant part of the dump is here. The most significant point was:

MOVE_REG @ 0xBC09
src: ID[0x0000+B39E].[31:0] -> 0xFF7FFF7F
dst: REG[0xFE16].[31:0] <- 0xFF7FFF7F

, showing that the value in question was being read out of a table in the video BIOS (ID[0x0000+B39E] indicating the base of the ROM plus 0xB39E). Looking further back showed that WS[0x40] contained a number that was used as an index into the table. Grepping the header files gave 0x40 as ATOM_WS_QUOTIENT, containing the quotient of a division operation immediately beforehand. Working back from there showed that the value was derived from a formula involving the divider frequencies of the memory PLL and the source PLL. Reimplementing that was trivial, and now I could program the same register values. Hurrah!

It didn't work, of course. These things never do. It looked like modifying this value didn't actually do anything unless the memory controller was reinitialised. Looking through the Atom dump showed that this was achieved by calling the MemoryDeviceInit script. Reimplementing this from scratch was one option, but it had a bunch of branches and frankly I'm lazy and that's why I work on this Linux stuff rather than getting a proper job. This particular script was fast, so there was no real reason to do it by hand instead of just using the interpreter. Timing showed that doing so could easily be done within the vblank interval. This time, it even worked.

I've done a proof of concept that involved wedging this into the Radeon DRM code with extreme prejudice, but it needs some rework. However, it demonstrates that it's possible to downclock the memory whenever the screen is idle without there being any observable screen flicker. Combine that with GPU downclocking and we can save about 10W without any noticable degradation in performance or output. Victory!

I gave the code to someone with an X1300 and it promptly corrupted their screen and locked their machine up. Oh well. Turns out that they have a different memory controller or some such madness.

So, obviously, there's more work to be done on this. I've put some test code here. It's a small program that should be run as root. It should reprogram an Atom-based discrete graphics card[1] to half its memory clock. Running it again will halve it again. I don't recommend doing that. You'll need to reboot to get the full clock back. This isn't vblank synced, so it may introduce some graphical corruption. If the corruption is static (ie, isn't moving or flickering) then that's fine. If it's moving then I (and/or the docs) suck and there's still work to be done. If your machine hangs then I'm interested in knowing what hardware you have and may have some further debugging code to be run. Unless you have an X1300, in which case it's known to break and what were you thinking running this code you crazy mad fool.

Once this is stable it shouldn't take long to integrate it into the DRM and X layers. I'm also trying to get hold of some mobile AMD hardware to test what impact we can have on laptops.

[1] Shockingly enough, it's somewhat harder to underclock graphics memory on a shared memory system

Some time ago I spoke to Craig Keating about his plans for a new secondary school in the center of Melbourne. His plan was to focus on the core academic areas and cater to academically gifted students. He had some interesting ideas for his business, one of which was to pay teachers rates that are typical for private schools (higher rates than government schools) but not have any sport programs in the evenings or weekends (private schools typically require teachers to work every Saturday and one evening every week in coaching a sport). This would therefore give an hourly pay rate that was significantly higher than most private schools offered and would thus allow recruiting some of the most skilled teachers. One of his ideas was to intentionally keep the school small so that every teacher could know every student. One of the problems with most schools is that they take no feedback from the students. It seems that this serious deficiency would be largely addressed if the teachers knew the students and talked to them. He pointed out that in the history of our school system (which largely derived from the UK system) the private schools had a lot of sporting activities as a way of filling time for boarding students, given that few schools accept boarders (and those that do have only a small portion of the students boarding) the sports are just a distraction from study. This is not to say that sports are inherently bad or should be avoided. He encouraged parents to take their children to sporting activities that suit the interests of the child and the beliefs of the parents instead of having the child be drafted into a school sport and the parents being forced to take an unwilling child to sporting activities that they detest (which I believe is a common school experience). My own observation of school sport is that it is the epicentre of school bullying. There is an inherent risk of getting hurt when engaging in a sport. Some children get hurt every lesson, an intelligent person who ran a school with an intensive sports program might statistically analyse the injuries incurred and look for patterns. Children who are not good at sport are targeted for attack, for example when I was in year 7 (the first year of high school) one of my friends was assigned to the “cork bobbing” team in the swimming contest - this involved a contest to collect corks floating in the toddler pool for the students who were really bad at swimming. At that moment I knew that my friend would leave the school as the teachers had set him up for more intensive bullying than he could handle. Yet somehow the government still seems to believe that school sports are good! This is not to say that physical activity is bad, the PE 4 Life program [1] (which is given a positive review in the movie Supersize Me [2]) seems useful. It has a focus on fitness for everyone rather than pointless competition for the most skilled. I have just seen a sad announcement on the Keating College web site [3] that they will not be opening next year (and probably not opening at all). The Victorian Registration and Qualifications Authority (VCRA) announced in November that the application to be registered as a school (which was submitted in March) was rejected. The first reason for the rejection was the lack of facilities for teaching woodwork and metalwork. As the VCRA apparently has no problems registering girls’ schools that don’t teach hard maths (a teacher at one such school told me that not enough girls wanted to study maths) it seems unreasonable to deny registration to a school that doesn’t teach some crafts subjects and caters to students who aren’t interested in those areas. The second reason was the lack of facilities for sport and PE. Given the number of gyms in the city area it seems most likely that if specific objections were provided eight months earlier then something could have been easily arranged to cover the health and fitness issues. When I spoke to Craig he had specific plans for using the city baths, gyms, and parks for sporting activities, I expect that most parents who aren’t sports fanatics would find that his plans for PE were quite acceptable. The third reason is the claim that 600 square meters of office space is only enough to teach one class of 24 students. That would mean that 25 square meters is needed for each student! I wonder if students are expected to bring their own binoculars to see the teacher or whether the school is expected to provide them. :-# The government has a list of schools that work with the Australian Institute of Sport [4]. These schools provide additional flexibility in studies for athletes and probably some other benefits that aren’t mentioned in the brief web page. I don’t object to such special facilities being made available for the small number of students who might end up representing Australia in the Olympics at some future time. But I think that a greater benefit could be provided to a greater number of students if there were a number of schools opened to focus on the needs of students who are academically gifted. This doesn’t require that the government spend any money (they spend hundreds of millions of dollars on the AIS), merely that they not oppose schools that want to focus on teaching. Currently the government is trying to force Internet censorship upon us with the claim that it will “protect children” [5]. It seems obvious to me that encouraging the establishment of schools such as Keating College will protect children from bullying (which is a very real threat and is the direct cause of some suicides). While so far no-one has shown any evidence that censoring the net will protect any child.

• [1] http://www.pe4life.org/


• [2] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2006/09/22/supersize-me/


• [3] http://www.keatingcollege.com.au/


• [4] https://secure.ausport.gov.au/asc_internet/ais/scholarships/ais_athlete_career_and_education/ais_ace_-_what_we_do/educational_guidance


• [5] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2008/11/18/other-reasons-for-not-censoring/

So, the yum package manager (and, I assume, RPM underlying that) has a fairly neat (to my naive eyes, anyway) implementation of multiarch support -- on an amd64 system you can install i386 packages, and they go into a separate lib tree, and there's no conflicts or unhappiness. It even installs both the i386 and x86_64 versions of libraries automatically when you ask for them, which is a nice touch. However, the dependency resolver doesn't quite seem to have gotten the hang of some of the corner cases. For instance, if you want to install a noarch package that depends on an architecture-specific package, but for some reason only the i386 version is available (say, your local package repo hasn't quite built the x86_64 version yet) then yum will happily install the i386 version and say "OK, dependency resolved". Nice try, but no cigar. What makes it a bit more irritating is that once you work this out and the x86_64 package is available, you need to remove the i386 version of the package by hand in order for it to pick up the x86_64 package and install it. Just asking yum "hey, can you install this package" results in "nope, it's already installed, go away".

Currently there is a debate about censoring the Internet in Australia. Although debate might not be the correct word for a dispute where one party provides no facts and refuses to talk to any experts (Senator Conroy persistently refuses all requests to talk to anyone who knows anything about the technology or to have his office address any such questions). The failures of the technology are obvious to anyone who has worked with computers, here is an article in the Sydney Morning Herald about it [1] (one of many similar articles in the MSM). I don’t plan to mention the technological failures again because I believe that the only people who read my blog and don’t understand the technology are a small number of my relatives - I gave up on teaching my parents about IP protocols a long time ago. One of the fundamental problems with the current censorship idea is that they don’t seem to have decided what they want to filter and who they want to filter it from. The actions taken to stop pedophiles from exchanging files are quite different from what would be taken to stop children accidentally accessing porn on the net. I get the impression that they just want censorship and will say whatever they think will impress people. I have previously written about the safety issues related to mobile phones [2]. In that document I raised the issue of teenagers making their own porn (including videos of sexual assault). About four months after writing it a DVD movie was produced showing a gang of teenagers sexually assaulting a girl (they sold copies at their school). It seems that the incidence of teenagers making porn using mobile phones is only going to increase, while no-one has any plans to address the problem. The blog www.somebodythinkofthechildren.com has some interesting information on this issue. Two final reasons for opposing net censorship have been provided by the Sydney Anglicans [3]. They are:

1. Given anti-vilification laws, could religious content be deemed illegal and be filtered out? Could Sydneyanglicans.net be blocked as illegal if it carries material deemed at some point now or in the future as vilifying other religions? If it s illegal in Vic say, and there isn t state-based filtering (there wont be), will the govt be inclined to ban it nation wide?


2. Given anti-discrimination laws, if Sydneyanglicans.net runs an article with the orthodox line on homosexuality, will that be deemed illegal, and the site blocked? You can imagine it wouldn t be too hard for someone to lobby Labor via the Greens, for instance.

So the Sydney Anglicans seem afraid that their religious rights to discriminate against others (seriously - religious organisations do have such rights) will be under threat if filtering is imposed. I was a bit surprised when I saw this article, the Anglican church in Melbourne seems reasonably liberal and I had expected the Anglican church in the rest of Australia to be similar. But according to this article Peter Jensen (Sydney’s Anglican Archbishop) regards himself as one of the “true keepers of the authority of the Bible” [4]. It seems that the Anglican church is splitting over the issues related to the treatment of homosexuals and women (Peter believes that women should not be appointed to leadership positions in the church to avoid “disenfranchising” men who can’t accept them [5]). It will be interesting to see the fundamentalist Christians who want to protect their current legal rights to vilify other religions and discriminate against people on the basis of gender and sexual preference fighting the other fundamentalist Christians who want to prevent anyone from seeing porn. But not as interesting as it will be if the Anglican church finally splits and then has a fight over who owns the cathedrals. ;) A comment on my previous post about the national cost of slow net access suggests that Germany (where my blog is now hosted) has better protections for individual freedom than most countries [6]. If you want unrestricted net access then it is worth considering the options for running a VPN to another country (I have previously written a brief description of how to set up a basic OpenVPN link [7]).

• [1] http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2008/11/11/1226318639085.html?page=fullpage


• [2] http://doc.coker.com.au/safety/mobile-phone-safety/


• [3] http://www.sydneyanglicans.net/forums/viewthread/3673/


• [4] http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2008/06/22/1214073053814.html


• [5] http://www.abc.net.au/worldtoday/content/2004/s1213397.htm


• [6] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2008/11/17/national-cost-slow-net-access/#comment-16729


• [7] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2008/05/24/ipsec-is-pain/