Last weekend, Sarah and I went to the Maker Faire again. I love how I don't even have to negotiate with Sarah to go, she loves it just for watching the Combot Cup, where the combat robots destroy each other spectacularly. Ever since Jon Oxer gave his Hardware/Software Hacking: Joining the Real and the Virtualtalk at Google about, I got vaguely interested in electronics again. The Arduino board seemed like a pretty cool thing to hack on, and since it seemed like I'd need to get vaguely electronically savvy to do a thing or two for the dream home we want to build one day (which coincidentally seems to quite similar to what Jon's currently building), I figured I'd have to get my act together and learn the difference between an Ohm and an Amp. The last time I dabbled in electronics was as a kit, with the ubiquitous Dick Smith Funway 1 kit. So the Maker Store at the Faire had copies of Making Things Talk, bundled with an Arduino starter kit, so I lashed out on one of them, a BoArduino, and a little breadboard-based electronics kit. I've been flicking through the Making Things Talk book, and reading the projects. The Arduino board seems really cool. The Processing/Wiring language seems fairly straightforward. I'd decided that my "project" would be a water monitor for the cat water bowl. We have a dish with a little tank on it, not unlike the office water cooler, and it usually lasts about 7 days. We typically refill it on a Saturday as part of the weekend chores. Sometimes our schedule gets a bit disrupted (we go away, we have visitors) and we forget. Or worse, we're away, have a house sitter, and they completely forget to check it. It's only happened a couple of times, but we really don't want to neglect the cats. So I thought a water sensor would be a perfect project. One of the projects in the book involves a Bluetooth modem, so I figured that as the MythTV box has a Bluetooth adapter, and would be within range of the water bowl, I could use it to monitor the water sensor (as well as stick a blinking light on it). The end goal is to have the house call us (via Asterisk and eSpeak) if the water bowl gets empty. So I ordered a Bluetooth modem, the exact part number in the book, and it arrived on the weekend, and I got around to playing with it today. To cut a long story short, I was messing around with it attached to a USB to TTL serial cable, and I was trying to get it to talk to my laptop, and instead of swapping the TX and RX lines, I swapped the V_CC and ground lines, and well, I let the magic blue smoke out. What I discovered, after the fact, was that the Bluetooth chipset had been changed since the book had been written, and so the commands for the chipset were different. So most of my second-guessing whether I had the TX and RX round right way was because of that. So I'm miffed with myself for frying the thing within hours of getting my hands on it, and I'm miffed with the supplier for maintaining the same product ID for a product that has changed componentry. Chalk that one up to experience... To add insult to injury, Spark Fun is out of stock of the (cheaper) item that it turns out I want instead. I doubt I'll get my hands on it until after we get back from Zurich, so it'll be another three weeks before I can begin to make any progress. I guess I can try to prototype the water-sensing part with the board connected to my laptop with the USB cable in the meantime...

• 1 am, cautiuosly feeling my way through a construction site with a dim flashlight, weird bits of metal on concrete, sticking to the center as there are no guardrails. Suprised by a spot in the middle where the stars are bright and clear.
• Crossing the other way one day, since a train parked for an hour blocking the road. It's nearly done except for the approaches, but I still nervously look for police cars. View of Holston mountain.
• Twilight yesterday, threatening to storm, and suddenly I realise there are other pedestrians on the bridge ahead of me. Crossing over from illicit to legit. Kids walking down the center line. Cerimonial tent in the park.
• Evening today and I only bring myself to walk over it with traffic whizzing by because I know this is the last crossing that will be special.
• (A few days from now, in a car. Up and over. Another boring, ugly concrete bridge.)

If you look at the po-debconf stats pages, you'll see that, as of today, the French translators translated 9693 strings out of 9688...:-) We are so clever! This is actually an annoyance on the scripts that generate these pages. Sometimes, in packages, the debian/po/*.po files contain *more* strings than the debian/po/templates.pot files. This happens when maintainers do not run "debconf-updatepo" in the clean target of their debian/rules files. People, there is a lintian warning for this...:) We will try to correct this (actually, more Nicolas Fran ois than me, indeed) but that will make my stats less easy to do... So, "sadly", we are indeed only about 99%... That said, the NMU campaign is still going on. Portuguese is now ahead of Czech (ranked 3rd). Russian passed Swedish and is very close to Spanish for rank 7. And, among the most actives, Finnish and Basque are still climbing up quickly.

I am having a problem of my tiny Fonera router restart on me endlessly whenever I have two laptops with Azureus running connect to the network, so I started to investigate. I could not get any meaningful error messages from the router before it reboots and the only weird thing I could find in the statistics was the huge number of active connections. When I have one laptop with Skype running, Firefox browsing a few pages and Internet radio playing the number of active connections was around 200. Starting Liferea for RSS bumps that to 300. Nothing serious. However, as soon as I start Azureus (with no active downloads!) the number of active connections jumps by 400-500, starting one download adds another 300 connections. That is despite setting a maximum global limit of active connections to 100 in Azureus preferences. After 5-10 minutes the number of connections goes down to 500 (with one download active), but with two laptops with Azureus in the same wireless network the initial spike is high enough to kill the router in 2-3 minutes, force it to reboot and then do it all over again, and again, and again … No I am thinking whether to spend around 50 for another router or try to work with Azureus folks to try to fix this.

Lalala, it’s me again. Don’t shout, it’s not a long post! :) What did we do since I last dared to post with my Ftpmaster head on? (Yes, I should put a summary of all my blog posts into a Bits from mail sometime.)

• Fixed some bugs, like all of the waiting Please create/remove pseudopackage FOO ones. So we now have a BTS entry for wiki.debian.org, release.debian.org and the security-tracker.
• Merged a patch from Thomas so we now correctly reject packages where the maintainer tried to be clever, editing the changes file to get an orig.tar.gz mentioned after forgetting the -sa parameter to dpkg-buildpackage. SIGH. Especially sigh as that ##censored## wasn’t able to understand the format of those lines. Nor did he look, or he would have immediately spotted his mistake. Unfortunately it is not the first time this maintainer broke stuff with uploads he never checked in any way. Including uploads for important packages. Bah.
• Merged another patch from Thomas, which generally makes NEW look nicer. It drops the unneeded Checksums-foo headers completly, no need that we see them there again, they just waste space and are useless for us. The patch also changes the html files we generate for all packages in NEW, something which I added to dak a few months ago - based on a patch from Thomas. :) The stylesheet now applied got sent in from Mart n Ferrari who already created the style for the removals page.
• Done a whole lot of NEW. Yes, I continue to do most of NEW, as I’m still (and possibly for some time) are the one with the most experience and speed in doing it. Thomas is doing NEW too, mostly by picking a few packages and processing them. (Before someone yells - he is doing a very good job with removals and override changes, an area where I haven’t looked much into since he got added to the ftpteam).
• Did, together with Mark Hymers, a lot of cleanup work in the code, using pychecker and pylint. We only started, but there have been various changes already, like
  • change “import daklib.foo” and then using daklib.function to “from daklib import foo” and then using foo.function. Granted, the Ideal way would be to go “from daklib.foo import function1, function2, function3” (or so), explicitly naming every thing you use. Or even better, make the whole dak fully object oriented. Or so. Or whatever. :)
  • replaced all own string exceptions, which are deprecated, with real exception classes.
  The cleanups we did made pylint rate the code 5.21, with the initial rating (before we did anything cleanup related) was 3.59/10. (As if it would count, but still) :)
• Added two more headers to mails generated by dak and the queue daemon, X-Debian: DAK and X-Debian-Package: $something, following a suggestion from Bug #479953. Hopefully other tools follow this schema too, at least I announced it on debian-devel-announce, so hopefully it will be taken as a quasi-standard. :) Ok, yes, I admit, the queue daemon is currently not adding the X-Debian-Package header. It does add the X-Debian: DAK header, but not the package one. I got a headache when looking at it, its old and grown perl code. If someone wants to send a patch, fine, the bzr repository has it in tools/debianqueued-0.9. Update: Now the queue daemin also adds the X-Debian-Package header as I got two patches addressing the issue, in two different ways. Thanks to Stephen Gran and Matt Kraai for their work!

Comments: 2

From Berne, the Swiss capital, hails a band I really like by the name of Z ri West. The name itself is a pun: the folks from Berne love their city (rightfully so!) and join the rest of Switzerland in looking down a bit upon Zurich, which is metropolitan and hip and has often been considered the real capital of Switzerland. Located west of Zurich, Berne is thus Z ri West , and by using this name, the Bernese band ridicules the Zurich folks a bit. Well, that s my interpretation anyway and I make no claim over its correctness, and I surely don t want to get mixed up in local politics! Where was I? Oh yeah: Z ri West (Flash-using homepage] make rock music, and they re good with their instruments. The result are groovy and melodic sounds, which everyone in Switzerland knows. What I find particularly amazing about this band are their lyrics. Kuno, the singer, sings almost all songs in the Bernese dialect, which I ve learnt to the point of understanding it, though I can t speak it yet. It s a beautiful dialect, and Kuno displays magnificent control over it. When I say beautiful, I do not only mean its sound, but also the way it allows one to express thoughts, situations, feelings, etc.. It s very lyrical, often poetic, but always very much to the point. It sounds natural, yet not at all blunt. In addition, Z ri West s songs display no haste. Again, this is a bit ironic since the Bernese are said to be slow, but what I mean is that the band is unafraid to take their time to recount what they have to say. Forget 4/4 beats and verse-chorus-bridge-verse-chorus, it s a lot more as if the band shaped the music around the story they re telling. (Of course I have no reason to claim that the Bernese are actually slow. According to my dear (Bernese) friend Isabel, they are just considerate to give the rest of the world enough time to parse and understand their sophisticated verbal and non-verbal output). I won t be able to convey all of the lyrical beauties of their music to you, but what I want to do is translate my favourite of their songs, which is based on a story by Peter Bichsel and it s called America does not exist . Keep in mind that their version rhymes, which I won t be able to achieve in the translation. I ll try to keep the flow though. Imagine a jazzy, slightly Latin groove to it. And it s sung, not spoken.

This is the story of Colombo
not the one from the TV show
but of a guy who once lived in Spain
and who was a bit of a freak
capable of nothing
and always telling weird stuff
without giving it much thought
until one day someone told him: you ve got to learn a trade
you have to live your life
nobody takes you for real like this
and most just laugh about you
what are the options
he asked - what do you do
I m an explorer - the other guy said
I sail my ship out to the sea
through the various parts of the globe
that sounds very interesting - I d like that too
and so Colombo said - I ll become a famous explorer And he told it to everyone
and everyone just started laughing
and he said: just wait and see
and the people didn t believe him
and he got sulky
and the people almost died laughing
and he left the town
and hid somewhere in the forest
where he remained for 13 weeks - 13 weeks in the shrubs
and the people searched and felt ashamed
and noone knew where he might be
and noone laughed anymore when suddenly on a wonderful morning he was back
then everyone rejoiced
and when he said: i told you so
I discovered a new land
it s out there somewhere in the sea
then everyone listened
and was kind to him
and tried hard to make some dreadfully serious faces The explorer from the first verse
Amerigo Vespucci is his name
just happened to be in town
and said: good for you, but I won t believe you until I see it myself
and went off to set sail immediately
and after exactly 13 weeks and a day and a night he was finally back
and the people all went down to the port
and Colombo was nervous, almost ill because he had lied
and he was horribly frightened
and pale
and looked noone in the eyes But Vespucci smiled and stood in front of the people
and blinked at Colombo and told that he had found it
and Colombo was so glad that he didn t tell on him
and called out Amerigo Amerigo and the people joined in And Colombo became famous and until the end of his days
he was never actually sure and never dared to ask
whether America really existed
over time, more people went there and when they came back
they told stories and they tell the same stories until today
and noone knows anything more than he knew before
and everyone saw exactly the same
and that sounds very dodgy
and tastes a bit like screenplay and Hollywood America doesn t exist
they never found it
America doesn t exist
it s all just a tale
America doesn t exist
it s all lies and made up
America doesn t exist
America is just a rumour

NP: Z ri West: Z ri West

www.ted.com is a premier partner for the Miro player [1]. This is a free player for free online content, the site www.getmiro.com has the player for download, it has binaries for Mac OS/X, Windows, and Ubuntu as well as the source (GPL licensed), it is in Debian/Unstable. It supports downloading in a number of ways (including bittorrent) and can keep the files online indefinitely. A Debian machine connected to the net could be a cheap implementation of my watching while waiting idea for showing interesting and educational TV in waiting areas for hospitals etc [2]. When I first checked out the getmiro.com site it only seemed to have binaries for Mac OS/X and Windows. But now I realise that it’s been in Debian since 11 Sep 2007 under the name Miro and since 12 Jun 2006 under the name Democracyplayer. I have only briefly played with Miro (just checked the channel list) and it seems quite neat so far. I wish I had tried this years ago. Good work Uwe Hermann! I hope that the Miro player will allow me to more easily search the TED archives. Currently I find the TED site painful to use, a large part of this is slow Javascript which makes each page take an unreasonable delay before it allows me to do anything. I am not planning to upgrade my laptop to a dual-core 64bit machine just to allow Firefox to render badly written web pages. Biella recently wrote about the Miro player and gave a link to a documentary about Monsanto [3]. One thing I really like about this trend towards publishing documentaries on the net is that they can be cited as references in blog posts. I’ve seen many blog posts that reference documentaries that I can’t reasonably watch (they were shown on TV stations in other countries and even starting to try tracking them down was more trouble than it was worth). Also when writing my own posts I try and restrict myself to using primary sources that are easy to verify, this means only the most popular documentaries.

• [1] http://blog.ted.com/2008/01/miro_player_lau.php


• [2] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2008/02/23/watching-while-waiting/


• [3] http://healthhacker.org/satoroams/?p=907

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So i've been struggling with an Ubuntu 8.04 networked workstation. It uses libpam-mount to mount the user's homedir (actually, the mountpoint is one level up from the homedir) automatically at login over CIFS. One of the problems i ran into with this arrangement happened because i was following the pam_mount configuration instructions too literally. In particular, README.Debian.gz says:

For every application used for logging in, there is a file of the form /etc/pam.d/xyz, add the following line at the end of the file:
@include common-pammount

In particular, ubuntu's /etc/pam.d/gdm defaults to:

#%PAM-1.0                                                                                                                                                               
auth    requisite       pam_nologin.so
auth    required        pam_env.so readenv=1
auth    required        pam_env.so readenv=1 envfile=/etc/default/locale
@include common-auth
auth    optional        pam_gnome_keyring.so
@include common-account
session required        pam_limits.so
@include common-session
session optional        pam_gnome_keyring.so auto_start
@include common-password

When i added the @include common-pammount directive to the bottom of this file when using pam_mount, new GNOME sessions failed badly: the gnome-panel didn't appear (which means that the user couldn't log out conveniently), and two error messages popped up at each login with nasty details like:

No database available to save your configuration: Unable to store a value at [...], as the configuration server has no writable databases.

The problem seems to be that libpam-gnome-keyring actually kicks off gconfd-2 during its PAM session invocation. If that comes before libpam-mount's PAM session invocation, then the home directory isn't mounted for the keyring, and gconfd-2 decides that it is unable to save any settings. Since gconfd then persists for the rest of the session, further GNOME session components try to talk to it and it refuses, even though the gconf db is now available (via the mounted homedir). Since the order of the lines in a /etc/pam.d/* are semantically relevant, i'm usually very reluctant to tamper with the defaults. However, i think the correct /etc/pam.d/gdm for this scenario (or any pam-mount scenario using GNOME where the homedir might not be present at all before the session) is actually:

#%PAM-1.0                                                                                                                                                               
auth    requisite       pam_nologin.so
auth    required        pam_env.so readenv=1
auth    required        pam_env.so readenv=1 envfile=/etc/default/locale
@include common-auth
@include common-account
session required        pam_limits.so
@include common-session
@include common-password
@include common-pammount
auth    optional        pam_gnome_keyring.so
session optional        pam_gnome_keyring.so auto_start

With this configuration in place, i can successfully log in with a test user, anyway (and move on to the next problem, which appears to be SQLite over CIFS, ugh). These sorts of problems are tough to nail down:

• Is this overall problem due to a bug in the documentation for libpam-mount?
• In gdm for its default weirdly-ordered PAM config?
• In libpam-gnome-keyring for launching gconf-d-2 in the first place?
• In libgconf2-4 for gconfd-2 not being able to notice when the directories it wants become available?

Or maybe it's just a configuration detail that i should have known about and expected to deal with in the first place. Ah, well.

I bought an HCL MiLeap X for Shruti (who is in the tenth standard) and the IMSc purchased an eeePC for "general use". Now that I have both machines in front of me, it seems like a good time to review them.

SimilaritiesLet's be clear that we are not comparing "jamun" to "aam" (or apples to oranges, if you prefer); these machines have quite a few similarities. Both are aimed at young students who are starting to use the computer for "real work" for the first time. Both the machines run GNU/Linux, and have similar dimensions and features --- even the prices are close. However, we are here to "raise the differences and not bury them"!

Physical appearanceThe eeePC is marginally lighter and more compact. The MiLeap appears to be more rugged though I didn't dare drop either machine to check!The eeePC has a rectangular touchpad which appears to have only one button but in fact this button has a left and right! The MiLeap has two regular buttons and a circular(!) touchpad.The MiLeap is bulkier but has a nice handle to lift it by. The eeePC can be carried like a book and has a matt finish.Both were proclaimed "cute" by Shruti and Sudeshna; I depend on their opinions in such matters!

Hardware featuresThe eeePC scores over the MiLeap X in terms of hardware features. The former has a web camera, a VGA out and one additional USB port. At the same time, the remaining features of both devices are likely to be adequate for most users --- 900 MHz low power processor, graphics adapter, wireless, ethernet, smart card reader. The eeePC has 4GB storage to the 2GB on the MiLeap, but the larger base software install on the eeePC means that the user has about the same amount of working area on both machines.The extra hardware features on the eeePC do give value for the 10% extra that one pays for the eeePC; the latter costs Rs. 17K to the MiLeap's Rs. 15.5K.

SoftwareThis is where the difference between the two is most striking. The MiLeap comes with a pre-installed "classmate" version of EduBuntu. The net result is that this looks and feels like a regular GNU/Linux system configured with software appropriate for educational use.The eeePC on the other hand has a completely icon-driven interface where even getting a terminal is not easy (Ctrl+Alt+T). However, this is just the icing on top of a regular icewm cake. The applications that actually run are just the regular ones --- not customised to fit in with the point-and-click interface.The eeePC terminal has really small fonts and is a regular xterm so that fonts are not as easy to fix as they are for the Gnome terminal used by EduBuntu on the MiLeap. Overall, EduBuntu applications which are based on Gnome are more consistent with the interface than the mix and match between KDE, Gnome and icewm that has been attempted by Xandros; the latter has a lot of promise but needs more work!It was easier to install software on the MiLeap since the EduBuntu repository is significantly larger than Xandros' repository as used by eeePC. In particular, on the MiLeap we installed nethack-qt since that is Shruti's favourite game and openvpn which is needed for us to connect to IMSc from outside the LAN.The installation of the MiLeap is that of Intel's ClassmatePC on which it is based. The entire installation is on a squashfs filesystem image. The base system is used via unionfs at run time on both machines. This makes for easy "reset to default".Suspend-to-ram does not work on the MiLeap; it should be fixed by installing the Linux 2.6.25 kernel.

PhilosophyI have long believed that un-prejudiced minds (like children) will take more readily to GNU/Linux than the hordes of "experienced" (mostly adult) computer users who have well-formed opinions about "user-friendly" software and how particular applications should behave.The "standard" GNU/Linux interface actually encourages exploration and the "tune-it", "tinker" and "fix-it" approach to learning about computing. It is not a sealed box with a "do-not-tamper" sticker. (This tinkering attitude is further enhanced by the approach taken by the designers of the Sugar interface for the XO Laptop.)Since both the systems are based on GNU/Linux (and Debian derivatives no less!), I am nothing short of thrilled at how far things have come. However, will the interface of the eeePC actually encourage exploration? Perhaps the EduBuntu interface of the MiLeap will prove too daunting for a novice. (Shruti does not classify as one since she used GNU/Linux "forever".) Only time will tell ...As Larry Wall has famously said: "There's more than one way to do it!" These devices certainly prove the truth of that assertion within the GNU/Linux world.Devices like these could push GNU/Linux into mainstream usage much more effectively than the "battle for the desktop". Hence, it is perhaps not surprising the both MicroSoft and Apple are trying hard to get into the game. However, it is only GNU/Linux that can comfortably provide a plethora of applications in less than 2GB! Until small solid state disks become significantly cheaper, those guys will have to wait.

Miro helps you Mira (watch) Videos in a snazzy and easy to use way. Software like Miro and Zotero is why I free software. And speaking of videos, one of my readers has provided information about a wonderful documentary on Monsanto and here is a video with Michael Pollan ( an amazing journalist writing on the politics and technology of food) who recently spoke at Google.

Starting to play with eeePC. Thanks to ASUS, I am now playing with an eeePC. With the help of Andrew Lee, I have set up LXDE environment, with full wifi support (through madwifi), and other goodies. I'm now looking into making the boot time shorter. I like the concept of finit, which is just to rewrite most initialization in C, nothing can beat that. However, Debian in general will need something more extensible than that. insserv and CONCURRENCY=shell helped the boot time a bit but it's still in the orders of approx. 60 seconds, which isn't quite fast enough.

Helping a user run GNU/Linux programs on a proprietary system when one knows that the user has no intention of switching to the use of a free system is generally a bad idea. It is sometimes called "enabling" and is generally considered a waste of one's time.All the same, there are situations when one is faced with a Mac¹ with strict instructions not to reboot or otherwise "disturb" the existing system.The news in brief is:

Debian Etch runs with Xorg (vesa driver) under Parallels.
It installs using "mini.iso" for network based install.

Using this one can run all the GNU/Linux programs one needs. It "disturbs" the existing system less than things like "fink" or "MacPorts".Another alternative is "VirtualBox" from Sun which is free for educational use (and has an "Open Source Edition" too!).QEMU offers yet another alternative. Since it emulates all the hardware it is significantly slower. However, on current hardware, the speed will be more than adequate if you just want to use standard desktop tools from GNU/Linux.

Pros

1. Applications run in the environment they were designed for.
2. Speed is "native" for running computational code as there
   is no emulation going on for this part.
3. X applications work in full screen mode.
4. Full networking support.

Cons

1. Can only run in 32-bit mode.
2. Currently runs X in "vesa" modes so you don't have
   accelerated graphics.
3. Some keys like F10 and Ctrl+Alt Alt+Enter are trapped by
   MacOS so you may have to remap these keys if your application
   uses them. (For example, Ctrl+T instead of F10 for aptitude).
4. Possible delay in disk access since parallels provides an
   "emulated disk".

Not yet tried

1. Sharing files (Samba/NFS/SSHfs?)

---

1. Also known as Macintrash. ↩

"your download link will arrive momentarily at the email address you submitted. to ensure the email does not get marked as spam, please instruct your email client to accept mail from nin.com." I wonder how many spambots are busy blasting off zillions of spams with headers forged to be from nin.com as we speak? Best of all, the spams can be customised, you know that many of the people getting them will enjoy this music. (Sometimes I wish I could take advantage of these money-making opportunities as they present themselves to me..)

I would not blame the people I speak to regularly for getting some kind of fatigue regarding Nine Inch Nails. It seems like a week hasn't gone by this year without something happening: a single, an album, or tour dates. It didn't come as much of a suprise that a new album was released in it's entirety this monday gone. ID3 tags in previously-released singles said "watch nin.com on 5th of may". It wasn't even that suprising that the whole album was free, either. What was a suprise, to me at least, was that this album is fantastic. I'd heard two tracks prior to the album being released (although one only by a few days). Whilst I enjoyed them, they were pretty safe, lyrically and musically. They didn't push any boundaries. They also did not forshadow the album at all. This album is the best Nine Inch Nails release this century. It's too early to tell whether it stands higher in my estimation than 1999's The Fragile. If so, it's the best release since 1994. I had not even considered this a possibility. I also think it's the best album to present to someone who isn't familiar with their work to see if they'd like to look for more. It has a good range of tracks covering loud, aggressive, introspective, instrumental, dancable, dark and delicate. I'm now starting a self-imposed ban on listening to the album, so as to not overdo it too much so early on. Regardless, I can still hear The four of us are dead playing over and over again in my head. This is a strong candidate for my favourite NIN song ever. It made me think of what the Cure should be writing. Each track in this release (like each of the 36 tracks in the last album) have their own unique embedded picture in them. There is scant software in Debian that can handle these, unfortunately. I think "tagtool" can add and remove art. Amarok copes admirably. Rhythmbox doesn't, unless you apply this patch, which is stagnating in gnome's BTS, unfortunately. For the lazy (with 32bit x86), here's a tarball of a recent-ish rhythmbox rebuilt with this patch. I'd supply a Debian package but I didn't feel like building the documentation at the time. I haven't found a single program for the n800 that can handle the artwork.

Roberto Lumbreras reported bug #480000 on Wednesday May 7th. As bug #470000 was reported as of March 8th 2008, we're still keeping nearly exactly the pace of 2 months for 10,000 bugs, so 60,000bugs a year. Bug #500000 should then be reported around Sept 7th 2008. As a consequence, the candidates for winning the 500000th bug contest are still Miguel Gea or Kartik Mistry. Jacobo Tarrio has his chances, though. I haven't done any MBF to keep chances of winning the contest myself. See you around July 7th for bug #490000!

Some of you might have noticed that in the recent weeks I wasn't active at all online. This was because I was on a vacation in Italy. On the way back I was eager to write about my experiences, but after entering Romania, I found out that may parents had been involved in a motorcycle accident due to a careless driver.

The accident took place on the second day of the Orthodox Easter (on the 28th of April)[1] while my parents were coming back from my sister's, just 20 km away from my home town, Caracal, in a village called Z noaga. There, a Daewoo Cielo was parked on the left side of the road[2], facing the direction towards Caracal. The driver decided that it was a good idea to turn his vehicle and, according to his declaration, instead of looking himself if there was anything comming, he asked a passenger if there were any cars comming.

Since a motorcycle is not a car, I guess the passenger thought it was OK to answer "no".

So the driver simply started his maneuver and managed to occupy the entire right lane, according to the accident schematics (I saw the official police schematics of the accident site with my own eyes). There were only 30 cm from the front most point of the car to the ditch on the right side of road, while the rear wheels were on the mark indicating the axis of the road. That left only 2 meters free on the opposite lane out of the 6.60 meters wide road, so there was no way for my father (driving the motorcycle) to avoid the collision, in spite of the fact he was travelling at about 40-50 km/h[3], within the legal speed limit (50 km/h).

My father barely had enough time to avoid the central pillar and aim for the rear right door of the car, obviously, a safer place to hit. Still, this wasn't enough to keep my mother on the motorcycle, a safer place for her than anywhere on the road.

My mother was projected over my father and over the car, and, luckily, landed on the side of the road, between the asphalt and the ditch, on an area covered with grass. She landed straight onto her head (the helmet protected her really well), and the shock of the landing propagated along the spine, resulting in the fracture of the L1 vertebra. She also got a fissure in the right clavicula, but that should already be OK now.

My father managed to remain on the motorcycle, but the impact was violent enough that he managed to bend the gas tank and has two huge bruises on the inside of his thighs (one for each leg). He also accuses pains in his shoulders and the lower end of the spine (unfortunately he "managed" not to do the medical investigations after the accident), but I hope all of these will pass soon and will have no ill effects. Also, out of sheer luck, at that time, my father was wearing a full-face helmet, contrary to his habit of earing an open-face helmet; due to this, his face was protected and suffered no harm, while the chin of the helmet broke after the impact with the motorcycle windshield. Also some deep scratches starting from the half of the helmet windshield up to the top of the helmet were the signs of a (probably second) violent impact with the motorcycle windshield.



So, the next time you are on the wheel, please look out for motorcycles, too. Motorcycles do exist on the road!

Also, I advice anyone driving a motorcycle to wear good protection equipment like a full-face helmet, jacket, pants, boots, gloves, etc. These helped a lot my parents, and will help you too, if, God forbid, you are involved in an accident.


My mother is in a cast that covers her from hips to shoulders to help with the fracture recovery and also wears a collar (just for safety reasons since she is suffering of spondyloses).
My father is able to walk (with some pain) and seems not to have any injures (I will take him for a close investigation some time soon in spite of his stubbornness).



[1] worrying for us (me and my future spouse), my parents didn't told us and waited for us to return to Romania
[2] in Romania the vehicles travel on the right side of the road, so the driver also drove on opposite lane, a fact which, according to the law, is punished with the suspension of the driving license
[3] he speed was confirmed by the measurements done by the police

Well a brief post about what I've been up to over the past few days. An alioth project was created for the maintainance of the bash-completion package. I spent about 40 minutes yesterday committing fixes to some of the low-lying fruit. I suspect I'll do a little more of that, and then back off. I only started looking at the package because there was a request-for-help bug filed against it. It works well enough for me with some small local additions The big decision for the bash-completion project is how to go forwards from the current situation where the project is basically a large monolithic script. Ideally the openssh-client package should contain the completion for ssh, scp, etc.. Making that transition will be hard. But interesting. In other news I submitted a couple of "make-work" patches to the QPSMTPD SMTP proxy - just tidying up a minor cosmetic issues. I'm starting to get to the point where I understand the internals pretty well now, which is a good thing! I love working on QPSMTPD. It rocks. It is basically the core of my antispam service and a real delight to code for. I cannot overemphasise that enough - some projects are just so obviously coded properly. Hard to replicate, easy to recognise... I've been working on my own pre-connection system which is a little more specialied; making use of the Class::Pluggable library - packaged for Debian by Sarah. (The world -> Pre-Connection/Load-Balancing Proxy -> QPSMTPD -> Exim4. No fragility there then ;) Finally I made a tweak to the Debian Planet configuration. If you have Javascript disabled you'll no longer see the "Show Author"/"Hide Author" links. This is great for people who use Lynx, Links, or other minimal browsers. TODO:

I'm still waiting for the creation of the javascript project to be setup so that I can work on importing my jQuery package. I still need to sit down and work through the Apache2 bugs I identified as being simple to fix. I've got it building from SVN now though; so progress is being made! Finally this weekend I need to sit down and find the time to answer Steve's "Team Questionnaire". Leave it any longer and it'll never get answered. Sigh.

ObQuote: Shooting Fish

One of the biggest questions which has to be answered when one starts a blog is what is the blog engine going to be? (Using a readymade hosted solution like LiveJournal or blogspot is for wimps.) Since the blog is going to be on IMSc's "people" server, there are a lot of choices. The scripting language for the engine is usually a choice between PHP, Perl, Ruby and Python (though with nanoblogger, even a POSIX shell is possible!). The gem looked tempting for a while. Eventually, I realised that the engine is far less important than the entries. Start writing the entries with some engine. It should be "relatively easy" to migrate the entries to a different engine. In some sense, having put essays on the web in the past, a change of engine (from wetware to software) is what I am doing anyway!So the temporary choice is the snake --- think of this is as the snake in the monkey's shadow. Specifically, this blog is currently powered by pyblosxom.

Configuring pyblosxom

StructureSince everything on this blog is meant to be public, all of its data and configuration information is kept in public_html. As far as I can see this causes no security issues --- but if some turn up then it may change!Current directory structure is

blog/ ->
    config.py   Configuration file
    drafts/     -> draft entries
    sources/    -> sources where required
    entries/    -> format of entries is "string"-"date"
    flavours/   -> not tutti-fruity!
    plugins/    -> actual plugins used
    style/      -> stylesheets and images
    index.cgi   -> pyblosxom.cgi renamed
    .htaccess   -> for apache2

Any and all of these files (except drafts) can be examined by extending the URL http://www.imsc.res.in/~kapil/blog by the file or directory name.The development of my web pages is done on my user machine and these are synchronised with the "real" web pages using unison. The local copy of my web pages is managed using git.The plugins were downloaded from the pyblosxom web site.The flavour was downloaded from snarfed.org.Since everything about this blog is visible, there is probably no need to document things further.

Minor cribsI couldn't find anyone who had documented how they had setup their blog using pyblosxom. This meant that it took a while for me to set things up.The apache2 web server behaved rather differently from mathopd. In particular, the latter does not need or use .htaccess files and just declaring that index.cgi was the a CGI script and was the "index file" for the blog/ directory was enough for the blog to start working. However, I had to struggle with apache2 as it needed "Rewrite*" entries in the .htaccess file in order to pick up the style sheets and the blog pages.

On one computer I am taking care of, I suddenly started getting:

$ ps2pdf fa_808.ps fa_808.pdf
/usr/bin/ps2pdfwr: line 45: exec: gs: not found

What's wrong?

$ ls /usr/bin/gs
ls: cannot access /usr/bin/gs: No such file or directory
$ wajig find-file /usr/bin/gs
ghostscript: /usr/bin/gs
$ wajig list ghostscript
ii  ghostscript                                             8.61.dfsg.1-1               The GPL Ghostscript PostScript/PDF interpret
ii  ghostscript-x                                           8.61.dfsg.1-1               The GPL Ghostscript PostScript/PDF interpret

That is really weird, the file /usr/bin/gs is simply missing, even though I have the ghostscript package installed. Ok, let's reinstall it:

$ wajig reinstall ghostscript
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required:
  libwine-capi libstdc++5 libopenal0a xgnokii libglut3 libcapi20-3
  libggi-target-x lib64gfortran2 libsvg1 lib64gomp1 libggi2 libgii1
  libgii1-target-x libxine1-gnome cups-pdf lib64objc2
Use 'apt-get autoremove' to remove them.
The following extra packages will be installed:
  akregator gs kaddressbook kaddressbook-plugins kalarm kandy kappfinder karm
  kate kcontrol kdebase-bin kdebase-data kdelibs-data kdelibs4c2a
  kdepim-kfile-plugins kdepim-kio-plugins kdepim-kresources kdepim-wizards
  kdesktop kghostview kicker kitchensync kleopatra kmplayer kmplayer-common
  kpersonalizer ksplash libarts1c2a libgnutls26 libgs8 libilmbase6 libkcal2b
  libkdepim1a libkleopatra1 libkmime2 libkonq4 libkpimidentities1 libktnef1
  libopenexr6
Suggested packages:
  kdeaddons-doc-html ntpdate ntp-simple perl-suid egroupware ffmpeg xawtv
  gnutls-bin
The following packages will be REMOVED:
  digikam kde-amusements kde-core kdeaddons kdebase kdebase-kio-plugins kdepim
  kmail kmailcvt kmplayer-plugin knights konq-plugins konqueror
  konqueror-nsplugins korn smb4k
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  gs libgnutls26 libilmbase6 libopenexr6
The following packages will be upgraded:
  akregator ghostscript kaddressbook kaddressbook-plugins kalarm kandy
  kappfinder karm kate kcontrol kdebase-bin kdebase-data kdelibs-data
  kdelibs4c2a kdepim-kfile-plugins kdepim-kio-plugins kdepim-kresources
  kdepim-wizards kdesktop kghostview kicker kitchensync kleopatra kmplayer
  kmplayer-common kpersonalizer ksplash libarts1c2a libgs8 libkcal2b
  libkdepim1a libkleopatra1 libkmime2 libkonq4 libkpimidentities1 libktnef1
36 upgraded, 4 newly installed, 16 to remove and 683 not upgraded.
Need to get 53.1MB of archives.
After this operation, 42.9MB disk space will be freed.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]? n
Abort.

Oops, unstable is broken at the moment. Ok, what now? Well, snapshot.debian.net comes to rescue again. Find "ghostcript", version "8.61.dfsg.1-1" and here we are:

$ wget http://snapshot.debian.net/archive/2008/03/02/debian/pool/main/g/ghostscript/ghostscript_8.61.dfsg.1-1_i386.deb
$ wajig install ./ghostscript_8.61.dfsg.1-1_i386.deb

And all is fine now:

$ ls /usr/bin/gs
/usr/bin/gs

Surveillance, massive patent litigation, and toxic trails are just a few of the atrocities that are part and parcel of the global giant Monsanto. They do not just produce a lot of the worlds GE crops but some MAJOR FUD with real muscle as this disturbing in-depth article demonstrates . Whether it is their shadowy, relentless fight against American farmers to “protect” their patents or their fight to scare dairy farmers from labeling their milk BST free, they deploy an astonishing range of legal and extra-legal tactics to make sure they stay on top. Below is a smattering of some of their creepiest tactics, which kinda make the RIAA look angelic in comparison.

“To gather leads, the company maintains an 800 number and encourages farmers to inform on other farmers they think may be engaging in seed piracy. Once Pilot Grove had been targeted, Monsanto sent private investigators into the area. Over a period of months, Monsanto s investigators surreptitiously followed the co-op s employees and customers and videotaped them in fields and going about other activities. At least 17 such surveillance videos were made, according to court records

“Studies by health authorities consistently found elevated levels of PCBs in houses, yards, streams, fields, fish, and other wildlife and in people. In 2003, Monsanto and Solutia entered into a consent decree with the E.P.A. to clean up Anniston. Scores of houses and small businesses were to be razed, tons of contaminated soil dug up and carted off, and streambeds scooped of toxic residue. The cleanup is under way, and it will take years, but some doubt it will ever be completed the job is massive. To settle residents claims, Monsanto has also paid $550 million to 21,000 Anniston residents exposed to PCBs, but many of them continue to live with PCBs in their bodies. Once PCB is absorbed into human tissue, there it forever remains.”

The company contends that advertising by Kleinpeter and other dairies touting their no rBGH milk reflects adversely on Monsanto s product. In a letter to the Federal Trade Commission in February 2007, Monsanto said that, notwithstanding the overwhelming evidence that there is no difference in the milk from cows treated with its product, milk processors persist in claiming on their labels and in advertisements that the use of rBST is somehow harmful, either to cows or to the people who consume milk from rBST-supplemented cows. Monsanto called on the commission to investigate what it called the deceptive advertising and labeling practices of milk processors such as Kleinpeter, accusing them of misleading consumers by falsely claiming that there are health and safety risks associated with milk from rBST-supplemented cows.