So, as it was previously anounced (and recently re-invited by Micah), this weekend is the debiannyc BSP. This makes me think on my lack of involvement on the technical part of Debian (I’m still socially involved with friends and groups) for the last couple of months. So, for the sake of encouraging others to join us on Saturday if you in the city (or the tri-state area, or beyond!), here it is, my personal list of tasks I’m willing to work on:

• Retake/rewrite the tools and scripts I used to mess WNPP with.
• Check what other things are missing to improve WNPP.
• Deal with some of the lists.debian.org bugs wearing my listmaster hat.
• Install Debian on a Vortex86 machine I’ve been having around for the last couple of months.
• Dig into Ruby and Perl RC bugs and try to squash some of them (after all, this is a BSP, and RC bugs is the primary target!).
• Encouraging Raquel to take a look at some of the previous www.debian.org re-design proposals and try to come up with something useful out of it.
• Have lots of beer while doing all of above.

See you at Vireo! UPDATE: The BSP was a lot of fun. Striking now the things I actually did from my list.

It started harmless when Thomas asked on Linux User Group Switzerland mailing list if someone knows a tux-shaped alarm clock. But the topic of that thread quickly moved to two other things in tux shape: the Tux Droid, a device similar to the Nabaztag, but needs a Linux host with USB, and ACME Systems’ Tux-Server, a ETRAX CRIS based Foxboard inside a tux-shaped case. We found out that Telion, the Swiss importer for Foxboards, also imports ACME Systems’ Tux Case — although the Tux Case is not mentioned on their website. Even better: They had a few old Tux Cases in stock which don’t fit anymore on current Foxboards since the position of the power socket changed. (So only one hole in the case was missing.) And they wanted to get rid of them quite fast: They offered us the Tux Cases for 10 CHF (6€) each instead of 28 CHF each (17€) if we buy all of them. Of course we couldn’t reject this offer and bought all five remaining cases. Another part of the thread was about performance. Although ETRAX CRIS is used by its inventor AXIS in many of its products (they’re famous for the Linux based web-cams) many were not sure if the board’s performance would be sufficient for their ideas. Another disadvantage of the ETRAX CRIS architecture is that no mainstream Linux distribution supports it. Another point was the Foxboard’s price (169€, ca. 268 CHF). Bones just mentioned that an NSLU2 costs only about 100 CHF (60€). Probably on IRC someone (probably Bones, too) wondered if it’s possible to fit a NSLU2 into such a quite inexpensive Tux Case. We took Wikipedia’s picture of the NSLU2 board, compared the size of the USB ports on that picture, compared them with real-life USB ports and found out the size of the board that way. And when I got my Tux-Case I noticed that the NSLU2 board really could fit into the Tux-Case. Since I’m already building a bigger NAS-like home server, I have no use for another, much slower NAS. But since I more or less gave up the also ARM-based Thecus N4100, another ARM-based machine in my hardware collection wouldn’t be bad. So it didn’t took long and the idea was born to build the NSLU2 board into a Tux-Case and let the website tux.ethz.ch run on it. (I inherited its administration from Beat and it’s currently just a virtual host on one of our webservers.) Then it would be a server named Tux, serving Tuxes, looking like a Tux and running Tux’ operating system Linux. :-) I ordered an NSLU2 at Brack for 117.60 CHF (ca. 70€). Played around with the original firmware for a moment, but it’s horrible from a security point of view: You can’t even change the admin password (default: “admin”) if no USB harddisk is attached. And no, a USB stick doesn’t suffice. So I didn’t wait long and tried to install Debian’s “armel” (ARM, Little Endian) port on it. But the NSLU2 refused the “new firmware” with the error message “Upgrade: no enough free space.”. While this is not in the Debian specific NSLU2 FAQ, it is mentioned in the general troubleshooting FAQ. As described in there, first upgrading to the most recent firmware version and then uploading the Debian installer worked fine. After I had successfully installed Debian Lenny on a pqi 4 GB USB sticked into the NSLU2 and verified that everything is working fine, I opened the NSLU2 case and checked if it really would fit into a Tux Case. It does, but very, very close. You’ll have to drill some holes and the ethernet socket will stick out Tux’s shoulder, but everything else should fit perfectly after a few mounting parts inside the Tux Case have been removed. As a proof of concept I laid the NSLU2 board on the Tux Case’s back: So later the LEDs will be in Tux’ one shoulder while the network socket will be in his other shoulder. And the USB stick will be inside his paunch via a USB hub.

One of the most interesting new technologies that has come out recently is Cloud Computing, the most popular instance seems to be the Amazon EC2 (Elastic Cloud Computing). I think it would be good if there were some open alternatives to EC2. Amazon charges $0.10 per compute hour for a virtual machine that has one Compute Unit (equivalent to a 1.0 to 1.2GHz 2007 Opteron core) and 1.7G of RAM. Competing with this will be difficult as it’s difficult to be cheaper than 10 cents an hour ($876.60 per annum) to a sufficient extent to compensate for the great bandwidth that Amazon has on offer. The first alternative that seems obvious is a cooperative model. In the past I’ve run servers for the use of friends in the free software community. It would be easy for me to do such things in future, and Xen makes this a lot easier than it used to be. If anyone wants a DomU for testing something related to Debian SE Linux then I can set one up in a small amount of time. If there was free software to manage such things then it wuld be practical to have some sort of share system for community members. The next possibility is a commercial model. If I could get Xen to provide a single Amazon Compute Unit to one DomU (not less or more) then I wouldn’t notice it on some of my Xen servers. 1.7G of RAM is a moderate amount, but as 3G seems to be typical for new desktop systems (Intel is still making chipsets that support a maximum of 4G of address space [2], when you subtract the address space for video and PCI you might as well only get 3G) it would not be inconceivable to use 1.7G DomUs on idle desktop machines. But it’s probably more practical to have a model with less RAM. For my own use I run a number of DomUs with 256M of RAM for testing and development and the largest server DomU I run is 400M (that is for ClamAV, SpamAssassin, and Wordpress). While providing 1.7G of RAM and 1CU for less than 10 cents an hour may be difficult, but providing an option of 256M of RAM and 0.2CU (burstable to 0.5CU) for 2 cents an hour would give the same aggregate revenue for the hardware while also offering a cheaper service for people who want that. 2 cents an hour is more than the cost of some of the Xen server plans that ISPs offer [3] but if you only need a server for part of the time then it would have the potential to save some money. For storage Amazon has some serious bandwidth inside it’s own network for transferring the image to the machine for booting. To do things on the cheap the way to go would be to create a binary diff of a common image. If everyone who ran virtual servers had images of the common configurations of the popular distributions then creating an image to boot would only require sending a diff (maybe something based on XDelta [4]). Transferring 1GB of filesystem image over most network links is going to be unreasonably time consuming, transferring a binary diff of an up to date CentOS or Debian install vs a usable system image based on CentOS or Debian which has all the updates applied is going to be much faster. Of course something like this would not be suitable for anything that requires security. But there are many uses for servers that don’t require much security.

• [1] http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/


• [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_chipsets


• [3] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2008/05/28/xen-hosting/


• [4] http://xdelta.org/

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I just got a new bug titled Very weird translation template, need comments in .pot file to clarify, and giggled to myself. I was wondering how long it would be for this bug to be filed. The problem is that whilst most of the translatable strings in Tasks are pretty boring: "Tasks", "today", "Priority" and so on, all of a sudden the template goes a bit mental:

"^(?<task>.+) (?:by due on)? (?<month>\\w+) (?<day>\\d 1,2 )(?:st nd rd th)?$"

Apparently the average translator doesn't think that learning PCRE-style regular expressions, and reading the source that uses this string to understand how it is to be used, is appropriate. [note: this is sarcasm] Maybe I should have added some translator comments to clarify exactly what I meant by this. These monster strings (all in koto-date-parser.c) are GRegex regular expressions which are used to parse the user's input to try and extract meaningful date information. To translate these strings you'll need to have a basic understanding of regular expressions: if you don't then skip them and hopefully someone who does will finish the translation. If you know regular expressions then translating these strings is easy, honest. The golden rule is to never translate the words which look like this: (?<foo>. These are markers which identify portions of the input (such as task or month) and need to remain in English, although they can be moved around if required. The rest of the strings are translatable. I'll give an example using the French translation by Stéphane Raimbault. First, the string in English and a worked example:

"^(?<task>.+) (?:by due on)? (?<day>\\d 1,2 )(?:st nd rd th)? (?<month>\\w+)$"

First, we have a sequence of any characters identified as task, which magically expands to be as many as possible. This is optionally followed by one of the words "by", "due" or "on". This is followed by one or two digits identified as day followed by "st", "nd", "rd" or "th". Finally a sequence of characters which is identified as month. If the user had entered "pay bills on 2nd june" then task would be "pay bills", day would be "2", and month would be "june". Tasks can then turn "june" into a month number through other translations, and it now knows what date the user entered. In French, this translates as follows:

"^(?<task>.+) (?:pour pr vu pour le)? (?<day>\\d 1,2 )(?:er e)? (?<month>\\w+)$"

See, I said it was easy! All I need now is a legion of translators who understand regular expressions enough to correctly translate the new Tasks... [this, again, is sarcasm] Luckily, plans are afoot to move the Tasks source to the GNOME Subversion server, so the full fury of the GNOME translation team can attack this. NP: Trailer Park, Beth Orton

I would like to add some clarifications to the debate on linux sound APIs that happened last friday on planet. First, despite being portrayed as such, I am nothing like an OSS zealot. I was just recently surprised that OSS developpement still exists and that no one cares. Hence, my initial motivation for my post was to correct false informations, not to advocate for any solution. Now, since the debat has been opened to the issue of linux sound APIs, I feel like adding my two bits. In particular, unlike Josselin, I don't believe that the debate is irrelevant. I, too, would like that we consider two levels for sound APIs:

• Low level, decidated to some specialized applications
• High level, used for simple sound applications, in particular in a desktop environement.

However, there are few points that are missing in Josselin's claim:

• This distinction was not an initial design for ALSA. ALSA was aimed at being both low level and high level, in particular with the pcm virtual devices. However, the lack of documentation and the absence of any high level programming interface for the high level pcm virtual devices just made this goal totally fail.
• Desktop environements didn't agree on a common standard. Even though there seems to be some solutions that are emerging now, like pulseaudio, this is not at all a standard yet. For instance, all graphical mixers I know about only support ALSA.

So, yes, I believe there is still a debate which should not be closed be throwing away idealistic solutions, but by discussing the real issues and trying to settle real solutions. Lennart also commented on previous message that he had adressed most of the remarks concerning the initial guide. In particular, he notices that OSS4 does a lot of audio processing in-kernel, objecting that this means that OSS4 will never be part of the official kernel. This is true, but it doesn't mean there are no life outside of the stock kernel. Here, again, it is a matter of liberty of choice. If some audio applications are better suited for OSS4, then I don't see why we shouldn't provide this alternative.

So, while everyone was watching the Bush Bank Bail-out plan get rejected by Congress, they also found time to approve more bad copyright law, an RIAA-backed initiative to attack cooperative download tools like BitTorrent. Thankfully, the attempt to empower the Department of Justice to prosecute on behalf of Big Music was lost (DoJ didn’t want the task anyway) and the Bush administration is minded to veto it. But that’s been the least of my politician annoyances in September. Earlier this year, we were encouraged by Cooperatives-UK to get involved with our Local Strategic Partnership. I went to North Somerset Partnership’s event but I was less than impressed by it. There’s no obvious way that NSP is capable of promoting cooperation. Publishing a thick glossy book about sustainability makes me wonder if it’s capable of doing anything sensible - most people I’ve shown it to have either laughed at it, or got angry about the wasted resources. They’re not the only LSP we have here. Last week, I went to the West of England Partnership’s Transport Forum which

“horrendously perverted the idea of a “forum” - the event would have been better titled “Joint Transport Lectures” because nearly all our time was spent watching council officers and consultants tell us how wonderful transport is here (they’re meeting 18 out of 21 targets, you know!) and what roads and bus roads they will build next. … The whole event seems like a colossal waste of resources for all involved.”

So, I seem to be having a bad time with politicians recently. If the above wasn’t enough, we got a reply to our petition requesting ODF at the National Archives which amazingly doesn’t mention Open Document Format at all. I’ve written to our MP (John Penrose) asking about that. And finally, I asked Climate Change Minister Joan Ruddock MP

“If there’s no windfall tax to fund it, how will the government remove the climate-harming services from the market and encourage new suppliers (particularly Third Sector ones who should show concern for their communities and sustainable energy) into the market?”

and got the non-answer of

“The Government is tackling a very wide range of issues that impact on Climate Change through a variety of mechanisms. The energy efficiency programme recently announced is directed at those most in need and where a small expenditure can produce a significant and lasting saving in energy use. Thus saving households money and reducing CO2 emissions.”

What the heck has that to do with removing harmful services and encouraging new suppliers? If any politicians want to be held in better esteem, try giving some straight answers instead of imitating the above, please. “Yes, Minister” was meant to be a satire!

I just sent a letter to the very well-known national newspaper El Universal. At least I think I did, as their contact form is a sad excuse of unusability.
The reason I contacted them is the publication, over a week ago, of a note where they invite children to take part in a contest by IMPI towards fighting piracy. But not only they engage in doublespeak and prior judgement by further pushing the term piracy for an action that has nothing to do with it, they also expect children to denounce their parents and teachers if they engage in such a destructive activity. Think Josef Stalin for a while, and you will get the picture.
Anyway - This will not be the first letter sent on this topic, and I know most of my readers know and share my arguments. I am not translating it into English. But if you are a Spanish-speaker (or a Spanish-reader), you might find it interesting.
Please read my open letter to El Universal and to Jorge Amigo Casta eda, Director General del Instituto Mexicano de Propiedad Intelectual, and help me get it through to as much media as possible.

Ever since my former desktop machine gsa died and I started using only laptops at home, I noticed a need for a home server for storing all my MP3s, holiday pictures, games, and backups of my other machines. And I also want a filtering web proxy at home again. Current situation Currently my Norhtec MicroClient Jr. “c2” with it’s 120 GB 2.5" harddisk does some of these jobs (mostly storage and backup), but it neither has the disk space nor the performance to do all the things I want. For storage I once bought a TheCus N4100, the big brother of the popular and officially Debian supported N2100. Unfortunately there are a few things different than in the N2100 (NIC without MAC) which makes it much more difficult to get Debian on it and the original firmware doesn’t support NFS at all. *grmpf* I had hints from others who managed to get Debian on this NAS, but I didn’t find the time and leisure to really dig into cross-compiling kernels. (Although with the new 1.3.06 firmware, so called modules became possible also for the N4100 and a SSH module has been posted with which a Debian chroot could be installed and the required kernel build on the machine itself.) I though wasn’t very angry when the N4100+ came out shortly after I bought the N4100, because the N4100+ was no more an ARM based device but had a Celeron processor inside instead. And a NAS which is built on average PC hardware wasn’t as appealing as some device based on some more exotic architecture mainly used in embedded devices. :-) The Mini-ITX Appeal This view changed rapidly, when Raffzahn showed me a few Mini-ITX boards and cases. I surfed around on Mini-ITX.com store and stumbled upon the NAS-like ES34069 case from Chenbro featuring four S-ATA hotswap 3.5" slots, a slim-line CD-ROM drive slot, a SD card reader, and enough space for an additional 2.5" hard disk and a low profile Mini-ITX board. Additionally, the VIA EPIA SN series of Mini-ITX boards sports 4 S-ATA ports and either a passively cooled 1 GHz C7 processor or an actively cooled 1.8 GHz C7 processor. That should be enough power for a small multi-purpose home server while still keep the power consumption low. And I’m not the only one having this idea, Mini-ITX.com suggests this combination and Chenbro officially supports the VIA EPIA SN boards. Additionally, Debian 5.0 Lenny seems to run fine on the SN series, only lm-sensors seems to have problems with SN18000G and SN10000EG (but not SN18000 and SN10000E). So when the Chenbro ES34069 case showed up in digitec’s online shop, I ordered one there and a VIA EPIA SN18000G board at Brack. I didn’t order any disks since for data storage I plan to use the four Samsung 400 GB 3.5" S-ATA disks I bought for the N4100, and for the system I plant to use the 2.5" disk I initially bought for my MicroClient JrSX “c1”, but then continued to use it only with the CF card. Not yet sure, if I’ll also equip the slim-line optical drive slot, too. The case took several weeks to deliver and the mainboard hasn’t arrived yet. Instead I got an e-mail from Brack that VIA products are currently very difficult to get in Switzerland. Reason is said to be that VIA tries to channel the distribution of their products to a single distributor. (Sounds somehow similar to what Apple tried with the iPhone and failed.) Mini-ITX boards and power consumption So I now have a nice case without a board. There aren’t that many Mini-ITX boards out there sporting 4 S-ATA ports. One which cleary stood out was the new Intel DG45FC Mini-ITX board with LGA775 socket. (In Switzerland neither available at Brack nor at digitec, but e.g. at PCP.) But reading the specs of this board it was also clear that it wasn’t thought for NAS systems but high-performance HTPCs — the focus seems to be on multimedia performance which a NAS doesn’t need. Its newer sister, the Intel DQ45EK Mini-ITX board is focussed more on office and business PCs than on multimedia. But Intels remote adminstration is not really a plus for me (don’t need it, I’ve got SSH ;-) and it’ neither cheaper than the DG45FC nor has it significantly lower power-consuption. Despite the 120W power-supply there are people who already combined the Chenbro ES34069 with the Intel DG45FC or DQ45EK board, e.g. one of the administrators of the German NAS-Portal forums built such a machine and this German guy who wants to build a Windows Home Server based on such a combination. At least the NAS-Portal administrator found out that the board consumes so much power that together with the 4 S-ATA disks the included 120W power supply doesn’t suffice and the system is not stable in this configuration. Trusted Reviews review of the DG45FC explains why: It’s one of the first Mini-ITX board not following the MoDT idea, has a desktop chipset instead a mobile chipset and therefore hasn’t all of the power-saving features of those mobile chipsets. But it’s easy to see anyway: Most of the CPUs supported by the DG45FC and DQ45EK boards have a TDP of 65W. Offically the processor cooler delivered with the case supports processors with up to 65W, but 65W is already more than the half of what the power supply delivers and according to the Trusted Reviews review, the board itself consumes another 35W itself. So for the four 3.5" S-ATA disks — which are usually not as economical as notebook disks — about 20W are left. This can’t work! The guy from NAS-Portal.org plans to solve the problem by using a universal 180W notebook power supply instead of the original one. In comparison to the 100W of the both Intel boards, VIA’s SN18000G consumes only 26W (the fanless SN10000EG even only 22W) and that’s board and processor! That’s about ¼ of what the Intel board consumes. Imagine the difference between having a 100W light bulb (suffices for a whole small room) shining 365 days a year compared to a 25W light bulb (often used in bedside lamps) in a year. Other Mini-ITX mainboards with 4x S-ATA include the following ones:

• Jetway JNC62K: According to Mini-ITX.com it fits into the Chenbro ES34069 case, but requires at least a 120W power supply which again questions its power consumption and its usage together with four 3.5" harddisks, although it is recommended for the ES34069 by Mini-ITX.com. But I haven’t made that good experiences with NVidia chipsets yet, so this board seems currently no option for me anyway. OTOH there’s German speaking guy who build a ES34069 based server using this board and only three SATA harddisks and runs the OpenSolaris based and commercial NexentaStor on it, so the hardware can’t be too exotic. (Review at Bit-Tech; Review at MiniITX.biz)
• Albatron KI690-AM2: Already over one year old and Silent PC Review says it has an extremely restrictive BIOS and poor fan control. (Another Review at TweakTown)
• iEi KINO-9454-R20: Seems to support only Pentium 4 and Pentium D.
• Several Commell mainboards: LV-66A (VIA C7 1.5 GHz), LV-672 (Pentium 4), LV-674 (Pentium D).
• Gigabyte GA-6KIEH-RH (not yet available)
• Kontron 986LCD-M/mITX: Socket mPGA478 and mPGA479, supports Intel Core 2 Duo Mobile beyond others; 3x GBit network interfaces, but also quite multimedia focussed — the review at EPIACenter.de (German written) says using it for NAS or a network-focussed machine is casting pearls before swine. :-) But the same counts for the DG45FC surely, too. ;-) Importer for Switzerland seems to be fabrimexSystems and end customers can buy it e.g. at ichbinleise.ch (which seem to sell only Kontron mainboards), but it’s way more expensive than the Intel DG45FC and even more expensive than the VIA SN18000G.
• J&W MINIX™ 780G-SP128MB: Another new multimedia focussed mainboard, but unless ATI drivers are way less usable than the NVidia drivers, I prefer not to use ATI graphics cards. (Review at MiniITX.biz)
• Advantech AIMB-221, AMD/ATI based and said to have a power-consumption less than 100W and a low TCO. But 100W are still too much for the 120W PSU. (German review at MiniTechNet)

Conclusion For now, I decided to wait a little bit more for my VIA EPIA SN18000G board which still seems to be the best board for the Chenbro ES34069 case although not really cheap. But if I once in a not that distant future decide to have a desktop at home again, I’m quite sure it’ll sport a cute Mini-ITX case (perhaps a nice black-orange HFX micro M1 case by mCubed — unfortunately the M2 is no more available in a color combination including orange ;-) with an Intel DG45FC or Kontron 986LCD-M/mITX and a decent Core 2 Duo processor. Software Plans Of course my home server will run Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 Lenny on it, with software RAID-5 and LVM2 over the 1.6 TB of S-ATA disks resulting in 1.2 TB available disk space which will be offered using at least NFS, SMB and SSH (think sshfs). Planned software includes BackupPC (a very fine pulling backup system for machines which are not online 24/7) and Privoxy. I’ll perhaps also install Tor and a caching proxy like Squid or Polipo. Another idea is to run Mediatomb on that machine. :-)

"At least in this part of McCain-Palin energy policy it doesn t seem that Palin will add much to the debate other than supporting the official position on clean coal." -- y Matthew McDermott, treehugger.com .

Where has Mrs Palin ever added to the debate? Well except for me to mention her in my blog and getting mentioned on almost any other news source.

Remember, put your C$6 to work, vote green.

Although I doubt there are any French historians who read this blog, there may be a few IP historical wizards who can help me answer the following question about Denis Diderot, the editor and one of the main writers of the famous Enlightenment Encyclopedia, who apparently was a pro-copyright kinda guy. According to this Carla Hesse article, Diderot, who participated in the emerging debates around idea of copyright, argued that products of the mind are more uniquely the property of their creator than land acquired through cultivation (Hesse, p. 34). She furnishes us with the following quote from Diderot that captures this moral sensibility:

What form of wealth could belong to a man, if not the work of the mind. If not his own thoughts … the most precious part of himself, that will never perish, that will immortalize them? What comparison could there be between a man, the very substance of a man, his soul, and a field, a tree, a vine, that nature has offered in the beginning equally to all, and which the individual has only appropriated through cultivating it

My first questions is, if this is the case, did he differentiate between the literary efforts of, lets say a novel, which he wrote as well, and his Encyclopedia whereby the former would be eligible for copyright protection (as it has to do with personal thoughts and originality) whereas the later would not because it was less about originality and more about cataloging human affairs, actions, and knowledge (though of course it did require work of the mind). Another more simple way of putting this is: did he desire/seek copyright protection for the Encyclopedia? It is also worth noting that a good chunk of the Encyclopedia documented the practical arts or in other words, craft. As Richard Sennet describes it in his amazing book on craft making as follows: It volumes exhaustively described in words and pictures how practical things get done and proposed ways to do them (2008: 90). Remember too this was a project of collaboration and he apparently collaborated with many scientists as well. So the subject matter was a domain of knowledge whose utility, so to speak, could come to fruition if it had an ability to be passed on person to person, generation to generation. This makes me want to know even more than I do (and I do want to know) whether he viewed copyright as appropriate for a literary work that basically described the practical arts and which was also created through the hands and minds of many (though he did did seem to sweat and labor more than anyone else.). Any thoughts? Answers?

My workmate Pep was kind enough to drive me home back from work today. Ideally I would have cycled home as always, however today my bike was stolen again. It's not the first time or the second one, not even the third. My red Orbea is the fourth bicycle that gets stolen since cycling became my primary means of transportation more than 10 years ago. Sadly, in Val ncia, the norm is to get your bicycle stolen every few years, if you need to leave it unattended during work hours. In this case, its even worse as the bike stays inside the University campus all day, supposedly guarded by security personnel, and in a place where dozens of people tie their bicycles, with constant presence of the people who work in the CPI complex. This bicycle was given to me by Cherry when she left Val ncia, just a week after the previous one had been stolen. She had bought it to cycle around the Valencian mountains during her 6 month stay in Clara's lab, and was immensely kind to give it to me when she learned what happened to mine. I planned using the mountain bike during the long 9 d'octubre weekend, but I'll have to see if someone can lend one for this year's cycling trip. It seems I'll have to resort, again, to my 29 year old Laida to move around Val ncia, which will need an extensive repair of both wheels and brakes. Time to visit Benimaclet's bicycle workshop.

I ve previously ranted about the Lufthansa website. Trying to help out a blind friend obtain some assistance from Miles & More, the Lufthansa frequent flyer programme, I can confidently say that the two companies have a common origin and probably read the same customer service guidelines, which must be somewhat along the following lines:

• require your customers to fill out a web form by not providing any alternate contact information;
• make your website inaccessible to screen readers, so that visually disabled people cannot get in touch with you;
• require full contact data to be filled in before the contact form can be submitted, even if the customer is logged in and the system thus has access to all the data;
• auto-reply to ever form submitted with a mail that assigns a case number to your request, but provide no information on how to use that number: no link where I can inquire about the status of a case, and no means to post follow-up information;
• send this email from do-not-reply@miles-and-more.com to emphasise how customer-oriented your company is and how well you have understood the potential of email;
• when (if) you eventually send a real reply, send it from service@miles-and-more.com, which gives the impression of a real email address, and quote the case number in the subject, along with the first line of the customer s original request, like this: Re: To Whom It May Concern (#17 (#1729700) / (#M1449889) . For extra bonus points, use non-matching parentheses;
• try to ensure not to take into account any of the data provided with the original request and prefer stock replies to useful content;
• do not give the name of a person, but sign the email with something like Miles & More Service Team ;
• refuse all mails sent to service@miles-and-more.com with a note telling people to use the web form to provide feedback (with a cryptic link) and that your email is not being forwarded or read;
• when the customer uses the cryptic link to provide follow-up to the open case, possibly under the impression that the reply will be associated with the original case, assign a new case number and ensure that another team member answers the email with pretty much exactly the same information as the last reply you sent. Under no circumstances assume that the customer has already asked a given question before and couldn t make sense of or wasn t satisfied with the answer provided in the last round.
• should a customer enquire about alternative means of contact, tell them they can send regular mail via the post office, and that you are sorry that at the moment , you cannot reach the company by email.

If you follow the above guidelines carefully and possibly add a twist here or there, you can rest assured that you ll fit in quite perfectly with most of your competitors and companies in many other fields. You ll understand that the customer is evil and you have to protect your company and your customer service staff from them, by making it extraordinarily difficult and inconvenient to reach them, and ensuring that they won t get any further than the computerised guard at the front door. It s not like they are your most important asset. Interestingly, neither Swiss, SAS, nor Thai have read these guidelines. I hope they will never find them. NP: Porcupine Tree: The Sky Moves Sideways

According to my small business advisor it is possible to advertise your company, service, or product on the internet. Who knows what gem of advice they'll offer next? In unrelated news all mail delivered to me personally in HTML-only format(s) will be dropped. I've given up being patient. Finally OpenID - what a pain it is to implement! I've fought with it over the weekend, in amongst rewiring my lighting. Setting up a Perl script to authenticate to an OpenID server is just gnarly. (I now have motion-sensitive lighting in my bathroom, which my kitten loves, and radio controlled lighting in the bedroom. Lazyness is ..) ObQuote: Resident Evil Extinction

OpenSSH can be compiled against OpenSC. Since the latter has support for the Belgian electronic ID card, that means you can use your eID card to log on to a remote server using OpenSSH. To do this is fairly simple, once you know how it works. First, obviously, you need to have ssh compiled against opensc. Unfortunately, the Debian package comes with that option disabled, but it's easy to enable that:

sudo apt-get build-dep openssh
sudo apt-get source openssh
cd openssh-*
$EDITOR debian/rules

Find the "Common build options", and add another line:

confflags += --with-opensc=/usr

Now add another changelog entry, so that your next apt-get upgrade won't overwrite your locally-modified SSH package:

dch -i

Next, build and install the package:

dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot -b -uc -us
cd ..
sudo dpkg -i openssh-client*

You now have an OpenSSH that can access smartcards. So, how do you use it to log on to a remote system? Simple:

pkcs15-tool -c
ssh-keygen -D 0

The first command will tell you the order of the certificates on the card. In my case, the Authentication certificate is first, while the Signature certificate is second. You do not want the Signature certificate; you only want the Authentication certificate. The second command will output the RSA public keys that are on the smartcard in both SSH1 and SSH2 format, in the same order as in the pkcs15-tool output. You only want the SSH2 version, and you only want to get the Authentication key. That key needs to be added to your ~/.ssh/authorized_keys on the remote host. Note that the '0' assumes that your smartcard is in slot 0; if that doesn't work, 'pkcs11-tool -L' should tell you which slot you need. After we've done this, we're ready to start using the smartcard to log in. While ssh-add has an option to load keys from a smartcard, this only works with smartcards that allow one to download the private key from the smartcard into the computer's RAM. This is not possible with the eID (and for good reason), so you can't use ssh-agent with your eID card. However, you don't really need it.

beid-pkcs11-tool -l -t

This will log in to the Authentication key on the smartcard (note that while it is possible to log in to the Authentication key, it is not possible to do the same with the Signature key). You will get the familiar belpic login window now, and the smartcard will now allow use of the private key. In order to actually use this key, you need to specify one extra option to ssh:

ssh -I 0

The -I option instructs SSH to use a smartcard key as a private key. Since we're already logged in to the smartcard, we do not need to enter a PIN code (and regardless, SSH does not know how to do that). You will now be logged on to the server. Note that there is no way to 'log out' of a smartcard; the proper way to do that is to remove your card from the cardreader...

It's been nearly 10 months after the previous Tasks release, for which I profusely apologise. I wanted to fix one final bug before releasing, which sadly took five months to get around too... I eventually fixed it last night, so here is Tasks 0.14.

• Magic date parser when adding tasks
• Support libunique in the GTK+ port (Jonny Lamb)
• Support OWL window menus in the GTK+ port
• Save and restore the edit window size
• Add a clickable note icon (#548)
• Ellipsize the undo/redo menu items (#741)
• Make sure the date popup doesn't go off the screen (#752)

The most interesting change in this release is the magic date parser, which first landed back in March. This lets you use Google Calendar style descriptive tasks such as "release tasks today", "do shopping next tuesday" or "pay bills on 2nd". There are many patterns that are matched but I need two things from any users of Tasks.

1. Translations. At the moment there are only English and French translations for the strings, which are critical for the parser to work. Translators, please update the translations!
2. Feedback. The parser handles all of the natural language expressions that I thought would be useful. There are probably plenty more which are not handled, so if you find one which isn't handled (or is handled incorrectly) then please file a bug.

Oh, and one last thing. The OpenMoko and Maemo ports have likely bitrotted. New functionality has been added to the platform abstraction and I don't think those ports were updated. If someone actively uses Tasks on either Maemo or OpenMoko and is willing to test builds before release, please contact me.

I am a big fan of zotero as it has helped me manage my research, especially collect, tag, time stamp, and keep web pages that are likely to vanish. I can’t recommend it enough. I have yet to use its bibliographic functionality and apparently it is this functionality which has made it the subject of what what looks like a pretty questionable law suit. It has been a while since a IP lawsuit has really caught my attention (only in so far as it was the same old thing, not because it was not important) but this one definitely has caught my attention (and caught me off guard as well as I never really associated End Notes with Zotero, in so far as they seem to work pretty distinctly). I am eager to see how an academic institution, George Mason in this case, will react. I just hope they stand firm and also get some great legal team to help out.

Importing bugs from the Debian Bug Tracking System into UDD (the Ultimate Debian Database) in a reasonable time is challenging. The BTS uses flat files to store bug information, and importing a bug typically requires reading a ’summary’ file, and a file containing the verisoning information, both of a few hundred bytes. That looks easy, but when you multiply it by ~70000 unarchived bugs, it takes a lot of time (about 40 minutes) to read those ~100k files, because the import process will block on every I/O. The problem is not the amount of data to read (19.8 MB for summary files, 7.4 MB for versioning files), but the number of files (69612 summary files, 17507 versioning files). The obvious solution is to preload all the files into the page cache, so they are there when you need them. But you can’t simply do that with find /org/bugs.debian.org/versions/pkg -type f -exec cat \+ &>/dev/null, because that wouldn’t fix anything: you would still block on each file, and prevent the I/O scheduler to reorder the reads and optimize them (it’s called elevator for a reason). So, how do I tell the kernel “I’m going to read that in the future, please preload it?” readahead(2) is blocking, so it’s not helpful. The right solution is to use posix_fadvise(2), that allows to declare an access pattern. Using fadvise to preload all the files takes less than 5 minutes, and importing the bugs after that takes less than 8 minutes, so it’s really a big win. Does someone know if there’s already an fadvise-based tool that allows to preload a list of files? That’s something that I could need in other contexts as well.

Hey - I usually have a personal policy of not talking about my current employer on my blog. It's why I didn't join Planet Ubuntu until after I'd left Canonical, for instance. This blog isn't theirs. I can promise you that no PR department I've ever worked for has approved the gratuitous overuse of the word "fuck".

But FUCK, this is cool: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/09/our-position-on-californias-no-on-8.html

My readers might remember that Angie and I spent a bunch of time writing letters to my Member of Parliament back in Canada in support of gay marriage, donated to egale, attended a church that got intervener status in support of gay marriage, and ultimately attended the senate debates where equal marriage became the law of the land.

And then, a year ago, we moved to this place. A place where this is still considered an issue. A place where people are willing to do what would never be considered back at home: They're willing to take away the rights that people have and are exercising to marry their partner of choice. And I don't have a voice. As a non-citizen, I can't sign a petition, I can't donate money to political campaigns, and I have no representative to contact and inform how important this is to me.

I was pleased to learn this afternoon that Google has decided to publicly make a stand for the rights of people in California. It's just one more thing that makes this the coolest job I've ever had.