I am not quite here but give me another year and I will be close or even there/

With all the effort being poured into Javascript lately, it's pretty evident that that's the way forward. However, there are still some neat things you can do with applets that you can't do with Javascript. For instance, I use the microemulator applet to let people play with a simulated phone on the Hecl web site. Unfortunately, the user experience hasn't that good. While playing around with the code for that site, Firefox crashed a number of times, and I've heard other browsers have trouble as well. No fun. So it is with some satisfaction that I found this: https://jdk6.dev.java.net/plugin2/ It's an updated Java plugin that seems to work much, much better than the old one. Unfortunately it doesn't appear as if it will be in the new Ubuntu, as it was released recently, but I'm quite happy to have something a bit more stable to develop with. You can download that version of the Java SDK or JRE here: http://download.java.net/jdk6/ It's good to see this effort, even if it may be a bit late.

This was a pleasant surprise: La Sardegna adotta il software libero What that means is that the region of Sardinia (Sardegna, in Italian) will be adopting "software libero" for their IT infrastructure.

As I wrote previously, I started looking around for a new hosting provider, as Layered Tech is jacking up their prices too much. This isn't something I consider 'fun', as it will involve a lot of time swapping things over, with the potential for problems, but the amount of money disappearing every month is too much to ignore at this point. After some dithering, I finally went ahead and spent some money for a minimal slice at Slicehost. Linode seems pretty competitive too, but I more or less flipped a mental coin. I was actually ready to go ahead the other day, but I stopped to think some more after seeing that Slicehost has been acquired by Rackspace. In terms of seeing hard working people rewarded for their efforts, I am of course happy for the guys at Slicehost, but it also leaves a few questions:

• Sometimes, perhaps not immediately, but after a while, there is less incentive to bust your butt if you cashed in in a big way.
• Rackspace is not my kind of hosting outfit: they don't even list their prices where people can see them, like Slicehost, Layered Tech, and most everyone else does. I've heard they're good, but quite expensive. I don't need 'managed' servers - I can do that myself.
• The FAQ says that Slicehost will continue as a going concern in its own right, but there's always the chance that they were acquired for their tech, and that the FAQ just says that they will continue to operate to keep their current clients from bolting.

Of course, good things could come out of the deal too, so I decided to put my paranoia aside and test the waters. There are a lot of things to like about a system like Slicehost's: it's relatively quick and easy to set up new slices, fiddle with the resources that each slice has, and so on, compared with a physical server. Furthermore, they have a reputation for not 'overbooking' their servers, which is why I wanted to get away from a VPS in the first place, many years ago. Setting up a slice was very quick and easy, but unfortunately got off to a rough start: their "fraud detection" system had a problem with me being in a different place than my billing address. Luckily, they were very fast at correcting the problem. As an aside, I think that fraud detection is probably best left to the credit card companies, although of course I don't really know their business, so maybe that particular check has saved them some money/frustration in the past. Upgrading the Slicehost Ubuntu to Intrepid In any case, once I got it up and running, I wanted to test out the upgrade to Intrepid, as that's going to be out in less than a week, and I might as well upgrade while I have 'fresh' servers to play with, and prior to installing a bunch of stuff. It went very well. I did a do-release-upgrade -d, hit 'yes' to everything, rebooted, and everything was fine! Admittedly, I don't have anything running on the server yet, so that kept things short and sweet, and didn't require the upgrade of various systems which might have had troubles, but so far so good If you'd like to sign up for Slicehost, it looks like they give you a referral code. Mine can be utilized by going here.

I finally got around to getting myself a new mobile phone, as it looks like the Android phones may take a while to arrive here in Europe, unlocked, and my old phone was fading. I ended up selecting a Nokia 6120 in order to get something that runs Symbian, which has a decent amount of apps above and beyond the Java ME stuff. So far, I'm fairly happy with the phone. Here are some notes:

• It's small and light. Nice!
• It runs Java ME (J2ME) applications surprisingly slowly. I'm non-plussed by this. And no, it's not just Hecl, even ShopList, which is quite simple and small (~ 6K), takes several seconds to start up. This is not appreciably faster than on my cheap phone from several years ago.
• My old, cruddy phone was able to recharge (slowly) via USB. This one doesn't, as far as I can tell.
• I bought it from Amazon.de, and the bozos who were the 'real' sellers sold me a phone intended for the polish market, meaning the dictionary languages installed are all eastern European - no Italian, which I need. Not the phone's fault though, and I guess it's probably possible to replace that stuff.
• The camera has some weird issues where it leaves streaks. I realize that it's only a phone camera, but it ought to be able to do better. Here's an image from my recent trip to Oslo, by way of example:

• Creating videos wors pretty well though.
• Playing video is just a bit jerky - it mostly keeps up, but not 100% of the time, when you lose a few frames.
• Nokia ought to do a better job making sure that it's integrated with Linux (Ubuntu in my case). That said, things work quite well, by and large, and I was able to get things done with relatively little fiddling.
• The amount of progress over a few years is very impressive. This phone completely blows my old phone out of the water. Sure, it's a bit pricier, but it's way more capable.

All in all, I'm happy with it, but I think that my next phone will be some kind of Android-based device, as that system is way more hackable than Java ME, and the people developing it seem to 'get it' a bit more. That said, I'm glad I got it - I needed something modern to play with Hecl on, and hopefully I will be able to work on using some of the fancier bits of the phone from Hecl. Oh, and by the way, I'm always on the lookout for phones to try Hecl with - even if they're old and worn out, the only thing that matters is that they are able to run Java ME applications. Contact me for shipping information:-)

As most people probably know by now, the Android source code is available, as promised: http://source.android.com/ The next part is the interesting part, though, in my opinion. Source code is wonderful, and a huge gift from Google, but the real "secret sauce" for the most successful open source projects is the community. It will be interesting to see how Google manages this aspect of their project. It could be a situation where they create, and the public consumes, and it's fairly one way, with the odd patch here and there going back. Or it could be that they'll really let people get involved. Running a community for something this big, with this much code, and this much interest to the world at large is a daunting task, but Google certainly has the open source expertise to figure it out, so what we end up seeing will depend on exactly how Google wants to manage things. All in all though, a big step for open source - congratulations to all the people at Google who made it happen!

Java ME has served me reasonably well as a platform to develop Hecl on over the years. It certainly has some problems, but it has two huge advantages: it's everywhere, and it's reasonably accessible, in that I can develop for it on Linux. Lately, all the buzz has been about the iPhone, and Android, and this seems to be irritating the guys at Sun who are tasked with creating interest around Java ME. Some of what they've been putting out in response is pretty weak. Look at this: http://blogs.sun.com/hinkmond/entry/google_phone_needs_work Don't they have better things to do than sitting around drawing dead Androids? Here are a few things that I can think of for them to be doing:

• http://java.sun.com/javafx/downloads/ - No Linux version. This is supposed to be 'the future', but it all looks murky to me. What is it, exactly? Who will be running it? When can I get a phone?
• Clarify what the deal with open source and Java is. I go here: http://www.sun.com/software/opensource/java/ and I see some stuff about open sourcing implementations, but it takes a lot of clicking to anything that looks like what I might actually want. I finally get to a phoneme thing, and that looks interesting, but kind of buried off in a corner.
• Get out there and talk with developers. Google has several 'developer advocates' on Freenode's #android irc channel, as well as various people involved in different aspects of the effort who drop by from time to time. #j2me is fairly quiet, and I've never seen hide nor hair of anyone from Sun.
• Stop ragging on Android and iPhone. Be proud of what you've got, but realize that like everything out there, you can't rest on your laurels. Talk about the cool things you're doing, and spell it out clearly why I should be interested, or how it will make my life better.
• Fix up your web sites. There are a ton of pages on Java ME and JFX and this that and the other thing. Make it clearer, simpler, more direct.

Here's are a couple more "nyah nyah nyah" pieces. In this one he even quotes John "SCO has something on Linux" Dvorak: http://blogs.sun.com/hinkmond/entry/stop_the_gphone_madness_says http://blogs.sun.com/hinkmond/entry/i_love_google_because_google They're catching flack in the comments because of the attitude. The last post above is about how Google released a new Java ME version of their gmail application. Duh, of course they did; they want to make their stuff as widely available as possible, and no one disputes that Java ME is all over the place. But Sun can sit there and pat themselves on the back, or they can concentrate on what their vision of mobile programming for the future is. We know that Java ME is currently what's out there, and widely deployed. Pointing that out with regards to what Google is shipping is pointless. To be fair, there are plenty of posts are about interesting things they have going on, but there have been too many of these "mud slingers" about the competition, and it makes Sun look scared. Take the lead, show the stuff you're working on, tell us when we can expect it, show us the source code, show us the vibrant community, tell us about the events. Also, admit your mistakes. Everyone makes them - the difference is in how you deal with them. Tell us how you're going to improve stuff in the future so they won't happen again. Apple and Google have done some nice stuff with the iPhone and Android. If all Sun does is say nasty things about platforms that a lot of people are clearly interested in and like, it looks like they're out of touch with reality. The reality is that Sun does have good tech and good people, but they need to do a more effective job with what they have, and push a more positive message about what they're doing.

I am not quite here but give me another year and I will be close or even there/

) I wish everyone a happy Diwali and nothing but good fortune and prosperity in the new Gujarati year called Sharvari (V.S. 2065) This year the local mandirs got wise and lobbied the city for permission to hold a firework display however we had horrible weather today so we didn't go. I had already prepared my own stash of fireworks anyway so we enjoyed them at home. On the presents front, I got a much needed woollen hat, another tulasi plant (lets see how long before I kill this one.) and a gift certificate for audiobooks which I used to get "Slaughterhouse 5" by Kurt Vonnegut, "Naked Lunch" by William S. Burroughs, and "A Clockwork Orange' by Anthony Burgess. And of course all the sweets I could eat. Once again I crushed all beneath my booted toe at Hungry Hungry Hippos.

I'm now reaching the very bottom of the Debian localization radar that points out packages with pending debconf l10n bug reports. About 20 packages are currently still under work (either waiting for the maintainer's answer, or in a translation update round...or waiting for the package to go out from DELAYED). That should be completed in about 10 days. The remaining packages are those with very recent l10n bug reports and I can't decently nag maintainers for bugs sent since less than one month. The result is now that we have 3 languages that reached near 100% completeness: German, French, Portuguese. Czech is over 97%. Swedish has been dramatically revived and now over 85%. And some more translation teams such as the Basque, Russian, Italian and others have taken this last opportunity to get as many translations as possible in the game. The overall quality of several packages I NMU is not optimal. I often refrained myself from trivial fixes as this is not the policy during freezes but that's really sad. I might initiate a QA NMU campaign when we enter the squeeze development round, to fix all those trivial lintian warnings (obsolete debhelper compat level, maintainer scripts ignoring errors, debian/rules ignoring make errors, typos here and there, etc.) Anyway, once this l10n NMU stuff is done, the question becomes: what will I do now and until we release lenny? Maybe come back to the French translation of the Developer's Reference which I worked on during the trip to Debconf8, then left aside since then....

I could argue and make reasonable points - but instead I'm going to be childish/annoying/ignorant/confrontational/blunt:

SELinux sucks.

If I wanted a rational debate I'd approach the topic differently - this is a clue that you shouldn't attempt to convert me. I got distracted during the "Should selinux be standard? thread, so I will optimistically assume it will not be. Why? Because SELinux is annoying to configure if you understand it, and pointless if you don't. ObFilm: From Dusk Til Dawn

Alain Williams just sent me a link to the Atheist Bus Campaign which was started to raise £5,500.00 GBP in order to buy adverts on the sides of busses in London. As I write they have raised £111,832.43, so over 20 times what they needed for the London busses. I'm so impressed with this that I gave them £100.00 Update: I note the campaign's page, where among other things they link to a clip from the BBC's Have I got news for you which is rather amusing about this, particularly the last joke. Also, Justgiving's blog seems in awe about how this has taken off. As they mention, there's even a wikipedia page about this.

I’ve just been setting up jabber. I followed the advice from System Monitoring on setting up ejabberd [1]. I had previously tried the default jabber server but couldn’t get it working. The ejabberd is written in Erlang [2] which has it’s own daemon that it launches. It seems that Erlang is designed for concurrent and distributed programming so it has an Erlang Port Mapper Daemon (epmd) to manage communications between nodes. I’ve written SE Linux policy for epmd and for ejabberd, but I’m not sure how well it will work when there are multiple Erlang programs running in different security contexts. It seems that I might be the first person to try running a serious Jabber server on SE Linux. The policy was written a while ago and didn’t support connecting to TCP port 5269 - the standard port for Jabber inter-server communication and the port used by the Gmail jabber server. The ejabberd has a default configuration file that only requires minor changes for any reasonable configuration and a command-line utility for managing it (adding users, changing passwords, etc). It’s so easy to set up that I got it working and wrote the SE Linux policy for ejabberd in less time than I spent unsuccessfully trying to get jabber to work! It seems that Jabber clients default to using the domain part of the address to determine which server to talk to (it is possible to change this). So I setup an A record for coker.com.au pointing to my Jabber server, I’ll have the same machine run a web server to redirect http://coker.com.au to http://www.coker.com.au. For Jabber inter-server communication you need a SRV record [3] in your zone. I used the following line in my BIND configuration: _xmpp-server._tcp IN SRV 0 5 5269 coker.com.au. Also for conferencing the default is to use the hostname “conference” in the domain of your Jabber server. So I’ve created conference.coker.com.au to point to my server. This name is used both in Jabber clients and in sample directives in the ejabberd configuration file, so it seemed too difficult to try something different (and there’s nothing wrong with conference as an A record). I tried using the cabber client (a simple text-mode client), but found two nasty bugs within minutes (SEGV when a field is missing from the config file - Debian bug #503424 and not resetting the terminal mode on exit - Debian bug #503422). So I gave up on cabber as a bad idea. I am now testing kopete (the KDE IM client) and GAIM aka Pidgin. One annoying bug in Kopete is that it won’t let me paste in a password (see Debian bug #50318). My wife is using Pidgin (formerly known as GAIM) on CentOS 5.2 and finding it to work just as well as GAIM has always worked for her. One significant advantage of Pidgin is that it seems impossible to create a conference in Kopete. Kopete uses one window for each chat and by default Pidgin/GAIM uses a single window with a tab for each chat (with an option to change it). I haven’t seen an option in Kopete to change this, so if you want to have a single window for all your chats and conferences with tabs then you might want to use Pidgin/GAIM. Another annoying thing about Kopete is that it strictly has a wizard based initial install. I found it difficult to talk my mother through installing it because I couldn’t get my machine to see the same dialogs that were displayed on her machine. In retrospect I probably should have run “ssh -X test@localhost” to run it under a different account.

• [1] http://sysmonblog.co.uk/?p=11


• [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erlang_(programming_language)


• [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SRV_record

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Java ME has served me reasonably well as a platform to develop Hecl on over the years. It certainly has some problems, but it has two huge advantages: it's everywhere, and it's reasonably accessible, in that I can develop for it on Linux. Lately, all the buzz has been about the iPhone, and Android, and this seems to be irritating the guys at Sun who are tasked with creating interest around Java ME. Some of what they've been putting out in response is pretty weak. Look at this: http://blogs.sun.com/hinkmond/entry/google_phone_needs_work Don't they have better things to do than sitting around drawing dead Androids? Here are a few things that I can think of for them to be doing:

• http://java.sun.com/javafx/downloads/ - No Linux version. This is supposed to be 'the future', but it all looks murky to me. What is it, exactly? Who will be running it? When can I get a phone?
• Clarify what the deal with open source and Java is. I go here: http://www.sun.com/software/opensource/java/ and I see some stuff about open sourcing implementations, but it takes a lot of clicking to anything that looks like what I might actually want. I finally get to a phoneme thing, and that looks interesting, but kind of buried off in a corner.
• Get out there and talk with developers. Google has several 'developer advocates' on Freenode's #android irc channel, as well as various people involved in different aspects of the effort who drop by from time to time. #j2me is fairly quiet, and I've never seen hide nor hair of anyone from Sun.
• Stop ragging on Android and iPhone. Be proud of what you've got, but realize that like everything out there, you can't rest on your laurels. Talk about the cool things you're doing, and spell it out clearly why I should be interested, or how it will make my life better.
• Fix up your web sites. There are a ton of pages on Java ME and JFX and this that and the other thing. Make it clearer, simpler, more direct.

Here's are a couple more "nyah nyah nyah" pieces. In this one he even quotes John "SCO has something on Linux" Dvorak: http://blogs.sun.com/hinkmond/entry/stop_the_gphone_madness_says http://blogs.sun.com/hinkmond/entry/i_love_google_because_google They're catching flack in the comments because of the attitude. The last post above is about how Google released a new Java ME version of their gmail application. Duh, of course they did; they want to make their stuff as widely available as possible, and no one disputes that Java ME is all over the place. But Sun can sit there and pat themselves on the back, or they can concentrate on what their vision of mobile programming for the future is. We know that Java ME is currently what's out there, and widely deployed. Pointing that out with regards to what Google is shipping is pointless. To be fair, there are plenty of posts are about interesting things they have going on, but there have been too many of these "mud slingers" about the competition, and it makes Sun look scared. Take the lead, show the stuff you're working on, tell us when we can expect it, show us the source code, show us the vibrant community, tell us about the events. Also, admit your mistakes. Everyone makes them - the difference is in how you deal with them. Tell us how you're going to improve stuff in the future so they won't happen again. Apple and Google have done some nice stuff with the iPhone and Android. If all Sun does is say nasty things about platforms that a lot of people are clearly interested in and like, it looks like they're out of touch with reality. The reality is that Sun does have good tech and good people, but they need to do a more effective job with what they have, and push a more positive message about what they're doing.

Java ME has served me reasonably well as a platform to develop Hecl on over the years. It certainly has some problems, but it has two huge advantages: it's everywhere, and it's reasonably accessible, in that I can develop for it on Linux. Lately, all the buzz has been about the iPhone, and Android, and this seems to be irritating the guys at Sun who are tasked with creating interest around Java ME. Some of what they've been putting out in response is pretty weak. Look at this: http://blogs.sun.com/hinkmond/entry/google_phone_needs_work Don't they have better things to do than sitting around drawing dead Androids? Here are a few things that I can think of for them to be doing:

• http://java.sun.com/javafx/downloads/ - No Linux version. This is supposed to be 'the future', but it all looks murky to me. What is it, exactly? Who will be running it? When can I get a phone?
• Clarify what the deal with open source and Java is. I go here: http://www.sun.com/software/opensource/java/ and I see some stuff about open sourcing implementations, but it takes a lot of clicking to anything that looks like what I might actually want. I finally get to a phoneme thing, and that looks interesting, but kind of buried off in a corner.
• Get out there and talk with developers. Google has several 'developer advocates' on Freenode's #android irc channel, as well as various people involved in different aspects of the effort who drop by from time to time. #j2me is fairly quiet, and I've never seen hide nor hair of anyone from Sun.
• Stop ragging on Android and iPhone. Be proud of what you've got, but realize that like everything out there, you can't rest on your laurels. Talk about the cool things you're doing, and spell it out clearly why I should be interested, or how it will make my life better.
• Fix up your web sites. There are a ton of pages on Java ME and JFX and this that and the other thing. Make it clearer, simpler, more direct.

Here's are a couple more "nyah nyah nyah" pieces. In this one he even quotes John "SCO has something on Linux" Dvorak: http://blogs.sun.com/hinkmond/entry/stop_the_gphone_madness_says http://blogs.sun.com/hinkmond/entry/i_love_google_because_google They're catching flack in the comments because of the attitude. The last post above is about how Google released a new Java ME version of their gmail application. Duh, of course they did; they want to make their stuff as widely available as possible, and no one disputes that Java ME is all over the place. But Sun can sit there and pat themselves on the back, or they can concentrate on what their vision of mobile programming for the future is. We know that Java ME is currently what's out there, and widely deployed. Pointing that out with regards to what Google is shipping is pointless. To be fair, there are plenty of posts are about interesting things they have going on, but there have been too many of these "mud slingers" about the competition, and it makes Sun look scared. Take the lead, show the stuff you're working on, tell us when we can expect it, show us the source code, show us the vibrant community, tell us about the events. Also, admit your mistakes. Everyone makes them - the difference is in how you deal with them. Tell us how you're going to improve stuff in the future so they won't happen again. Apple and Google have done some nice stuff with the iPhone and Android. If all Sun does is say nasty things about platforms that a lot of people are clearly interested in and like, it looks like they're out of touch with reality. The reality is that Sun does have good tech and good people, but they need to do a more effective job with what they have, and push a more positive message about what they're doing.

Here are some pre-release DAViCal 0.9.5.90 (i.e. nearly 0.9.6) packages now. Since there is a lot of refactoring that has gone on under the covers here, I'll publish these packages so that people can tell me about all my embarassing mistakes, and I can correct them, before I upload them to places where they might get installed more or less automatically. In particular if you do find problems with these, and can catch me on the #davical on irc.oftc.net during the coming week I should be able to include a fix into the real 0.9.6 release next week. If you can't get on IRC then an e-mail will also be fine. The full release notes are here but the short version is that this fixes a number of bugs, notably one to do with importing calendars containing repeating events with exceptions. The big change is that this adds the initial support for the draft scheduling extensions to CalDAV, in particular the lookup of free/busy information.

I was just reading the latest catalogue from Dick Smith Electronics (a chain of computer stores in Australia). The first interesting thing that I noticed is that laptops are cheaper than desktops in all categories. For any combination of CPU power and RAM in a desktop system I can see a laptop advertised with similar specs at a lower price. Of course you won’t get such a big display in a laptop, but big displays don’t always work well. I just read an interesting review of LCD display technology [1] which states (among other things) that TN panels (which provide poor colors and a limited viewing angle) are used in all current 22 inch monitors! They state that the Dell 2007WFP (which I own) comes in two versions, I was fortunate to get the one that doesn’t suck. Based on that review I think I’ll refrain from all further monitor purchases until the technology gets sorted out and it becomes possible to reliably buy the better monitors at a decent price. The most expensive desktop system that Dick Smith advertised in their catalogue has a 22 inch monitor. It seems that with desktop systems being more expensive an increasing number of home users will use laptops instead, which will of course change the economics of manufacture. Maybe the desktop computer is about to die out and be replaced by laptops, PDAs, and mobile phone type devices (blackberries etc). Another interesting thing is an advert for a LASER pointer (it seems that they haven’t been banned as “terrorist weapons” yet). Being on special for a mere $27 is not the interesting thing, what is interesting is that the advert claims “projects up to 500m indoors“. I’m sure it will be handy if I ever have to give a presentation at the Airbus factory. But otherwise it seems quite unlikely that I will ever get an opportunity for a 500m indoor space. The prices on digital cameras have been dropping consistently for some time. Now they are selling a Samsung S860 (8.1MP with 3* optical zoom) for $98. This is (according to the specs at least) a very powerful camera for a price that most people won’t think twice about. I expect that an increasing number of people will buy new digital cameras every year the way white-box enthusiasts buy new motherboards! Hopefully people will use services such as Freecycle [2] to dispose of all their old cameras, to both avoid pollution and get cameras into the hands of more people. Very few monitors are being sold with resolutions greater than 2MP (1680*1050 is the highest you can get for a reasonable price). So an 8MP camera allows significant scope for cropping and resizing an image before publishing it on the web. Even the 4MP cameras that were on sale a few years ago (and which are probably being discarded now) are more than adequate for such use.

• [1] http://www.pchardwarehelp.com/guides/lcd-panel-types.php


• [2] http://www.freecycle.org/

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