With the price drop, I finally decided to get a 32GB iPod Touch, and I have to admit, Apple has done a really nice job. Its decisions about which applications it decides to arbitrarily blacklist from its AppStore (either now or without warning in the future) is evil, of course, but I don’t plan to develop on a locked-in platform such iPod/iPhone, so that’s not a problem. And of course, given AT&T’s evil customer service, I won’t be getting an iPhone any time soon (life’s too short to play cat and mouse with Apple’s cell phone locking games), this was probably my only opportunity in the short time to play with the iPhone/iPod touch’s e-mail application. My reaction? Apple’s programmers and UI designers are very, very, good. As Jim Zemlin has pointed out, if Apple’s locked-down platform is a prison, it’s a velvet lined one. And I’m not one to like living in prisons, even if they are gorgeously appointed with 50 inch flat panel TV screens and an ocean view. But still, I’m happy with the iPod Touch; it’s relatively cheap for its functionality as an mp3 player, with web and e-mail access via wifi as a bonus. The only thing that is important is that I not harbor any illusions that this is not an open device, but a locked down platform. So that means I won’t invest any time in developing for it; nor will I invest any money in any for-pay applications (after all, Apple has the right to disable them at any time, for any reason they deem good and proper). And if any one really thinks Apple wouldn’t do anything like this, remember, they’re the company that just filed a patent on implementing DRM on clothing and sneakers! Still, it would be nice if an open platform, such as the Nokia N800 had the functionality and usability of the iPod touch. One day, perhaps…

If you search for bacula mysql backup on Google you won’t find any recipes to make a backup of your MySQL databases. Sure, you can just copy the files, but then you’ll have a big nasty surprise when you need to restore it. So I decided to make my own script to create a copy of the MySQL database I can back up and restore with Bacula. I run it every day on the server, and it dumps every table to a separate file, overwriting the previous file only if the contents have changed. In this way, when I do an incremental or differential backup, Bacula will copy only those tables whose contents have changed. Of course, consistency among tables is lost, as every table dump is done within a separate transaction, but… well, I’m copying a MySQL database with MyISAM tables, so it’s not like there was much consistency to start with :) And so I leave here the script in case someone else would like to replicate my setup. And if someone else can tell me if there’s a wonderfully simple way to make backups of MySQL databases with Bacula that I’ve somehow overlooked, I’m all ears :)

#!/bin/bash -e
CWD=$(pwd)
[ -n "$1" ] && CWD="$1"
sql()  
        mysql -B "$@"
 
clean()  
        sed 1d   sort -u
 
was_table_modified()  
        UNCHANGED=1
        for dbfile in /var/lib/mysql/$2/$3.*
        do
                if [ "$1" -ot "$dbfile" ]
                then
                        UNCHANGED=0
                fi
        done
        return $UNCHANGED
 
DATABASES=$(echo "SHOW DATABASES"   sql   clean)
for db in $ DATABASES 
do
        [ -d "$CWD/$db" ]   mkdir -p "$CWD/$db"
        TABLES=$(echo "SHOW TABLES"   sql $db   clean)
        for table in $ TABLES 
        do
                FILE="$CWD/$db/$table".gz
                if was_table_modified $FILE $db $table
                then
                        mysqldump --opt $db $table   gzip > "$FILE".new
                        if [ ! -f "$FILE" ]   ! cmp -s "$FILE" "$FILE".new
                        then
                                mv "$FILE".new "$FILE"
                        else
                                rm -f "$FILE".new
                        fi
                fi
        done
done

Linpus Lite (or maybe just aspire one mail) is only going to last a few more days on this aspire1, it's beginning to annoy me:
Update
sylpheed has now replaced aspire mail. OK, I still use aspire mail for calendar and addressbook stuff (for now), but sylpheed is a much better email client.

1. aspire one mail has no GnuPG support


2. aspire one mail has no non-HTML composition support. No, really, it doesn't even send plain text alongside the HTML. email sent from the aspire to myself comes in as an attachment in other email clients! (i.e. spam)

So, I would have to investigate a different email client but then there are niggles with Linpus itself:

1. the aspire default kernel build lacks the pl2303 kernel module so that I can't use the aspire to control my balloon3 board over usb serial


2. intermittent problem with network manager forgetting WPA passphrases

Testing continues - probably resulting in installing Lenny at the end of this week. Some of these things might be fixable using pages like taoofmac and Reg Hardware.
Unfortunately, the problem with usbserial means that I'll have to take two laptops if I want to demonstrate the balloon3 board in places.
I also don't seem to be able to locate any copyright files which makes me nervous. Maybe it's just a lack of knowledge of Fedora (at least not since FC5).

Upstream just announced the release of Xfce 4.6 Alpha (codenamed “Pinkie”). I've already prepared some packages, which I won't upload to experimental yet, because the packaging is not yet ready for upload (mainly copyright stuff) and because it's alpha quality, and as we are in testing freeze period, and about (:) to release Lenny, I don't want to mess with that. So, in case you'd like to test them, they are available from my personal repository. As usual, be advised there won't be any official support for those packages. Don't report bugs on Debian BTS, and report software bugs on Xfce bugzilla. Feel free to pass on #debian-xfce on freenode if you need some help, but be prepared to front problems :) Basically there are some new packages:

• xfconf (configuration framework)
• xfce4-settings (xsettings and internal settings daemon)
• libxfce4menu (menu library)

Use apt-get dist-upgrade after updating your apt sources, It'll remove part of Xfce 4.4.2 (and especially xfce-mcs-manager, replaced by xfconf/xfce4-settings) and upgrade another part. Some packages may stay, like libxfce4mcs for example, which is still needed if you use notification-daemon-xfce. This one will be replaced by xfnotifyd at some point in the future (maybe for beta 1). It's advised to do the upgrade from outside of Xfce 4.4.2, just in case. Most settings will be migrated at first run. Look at the new announce for links to know issues, bug reports etc. Happy testing, and remember: don't do that on production boxes.

There's only one week left for D-I translation updates. I wholeheartedly thank Otavio who agreed for such a long string freeze as it allowed me to do my best to get translations completed. And this is a huge communication effort, considering how easily the translators vanish... 46 languages are now qualified for the release, without discussion. Since my last blog entry, welcome back to Greek, Esperanto, Hungarian, Norwegian Nynorsk, Wolof. There are still uncertainties for 14 languages: Amharic, Bengali, Bosnian, Catalan, Danish, Estonian, Kurdish, Latvian, Macedonian, Northern Sami, Slovenian, Albanian, Tagalog, Ukrainian Again, several of these have *very few missing strings*. In short, if your language is among these 14, there are 6.5 days left (the end of the translation update round is on Saturday 20th midnight UTC). RUSH! What will happen in 6.5 days? I will examine the situation of each of those languages and discuss it with the D-I release managers. On a case by case basis, we will decide together to keep them or not. Etch has 58 supported languages (English included). Lenny currently has 47 that are sure. Will Lenny be the first Debian release ever with *less* supported languages in D-I than the former release? It would give some groung to my claim that Debian translators are currently escaping somewhere else (guess where?).

A common trait of virtually all of the media in Mexico -and, as far as I have been able to see, in Latin America- is the push for society to be afraid. The government and the media (which go hand-in-hand, mainly due to a series of favors owed to each other - currently stemming from the government's illegitimacy and lack of trust from the general population) wants us all to think the country is as violent and as dangerous as it has never been before.
And yes, I cannot and won't try to deny that there are many critical points that need attention - But the answer cannot be militarization, cannot be further restraining the civil liberties, cannot be criminalization.
The only way to prevent crime is to reduce poverty. And poverty is not reduced by giving foreign "investors" (bah, ask people living on cities that border the USA if the maquilas have brought any kind of investment or somehow bettered the living conditions of the population!) access to segments of the economy so far limited to the government - Poverty will only be reduced when the government starts reviewing the tax systems to remove the legal loopholes that make it possible for a large enterprise to get tax exemptions on most of their income, and make the lower income people pay zero taxes, even get social aid.
But back to the topic: Since the 1994 crisis (the "decembrine errors"), we are being constantly bombed about the raging insecurity in Mexico. Maybe we have been bombed with that same ideas for more time, but I was not very politically conscious before that. When things go a bit smoother on the political side, the media relaxes the "we are so fucked" mantram.
When our de facto president current ruler took power, on December 2006, he had so much opposition he could not for months attend a single public event. So far, he is still avoiding them; everywhere he goes, the place must be cleared and sanitized of anybody who might show he just does not agree with the imposition we had. What was his first government action? To decree that every branch of the government would get a 10% budget cut on the salaries - but the security forces (the army, the different police corporations) would have a 46% raise.
After almost two years of ineptitude, they keep chanting the old "oh, we are living such dangerous times" mantra. The security forces recently got yet another raise, and everybody in the media says this country cannot be lived in anymore.
And people buy that crap.
Up to a month or two ago, the general outcry is that the drug lords had taken over the country - And, yes, in several areas of Mexico, their presence is bigger than the official security, or the security agencies are completely coopted by them. But not even His Majesty Felipe Calder n I "El Ileg timo" can say with a straight face that "we are winning the war against the drug lords" (a war brought by himself, of course - Think of it as Mexico's Irak. Think of Calder n as Mexico's Bush.) - A new attention sink was needed.
Of course, this country is not safer than Finland. But crimes do happen there as they happen here. Here, we have got a tremendous movement because of one brutal kidnapping in August, and everybody now thinks that everybody is at risk of dying kidnapped.
So today, after over a month of bombarding us with fear about kidnaps, I am sick of reading stupid reactions. What made me post this was a request for ideas at a local Free Software-related portal about monitoring known potential criminals. Of course, such a proposal would violate the right to anonimity and to lead a personal life even a convicted criminal has. And, of course, the cries of people that think the society should castrate rapists and kill kidnappers, basically going back 4000 years in history. People, let me hand you a stone and a stick so you can club the whole society to death.
The first step towards getting out of this security nightmare perception we have is to be critical towards what the media tells us - and to understand (and _really_ understand. I won't buy your argument that "it's easier to rob somebody for MX$4000 than to work a full day for MX$100", as it's only easier on one level, but it is a tremendous cost on many others) what makes good people act against the society.

It’s not easy to choose a laptop, and part of the problem is that most people don’t seem to start from the use of the laptop. I believe that the following four categories cover the vast majority of the modern use of mobile computers.

1. PDA [1] - can be held in one hand and generally uses a touch-screen. They generally do not resemble a laptop in shape or design.


2. Subnotebook [2] AKA Netbook [3] - a very small laptop that is designed to be very portable. Typically weighing 1KG or less and having multiple design trade-offs to give light weight (such as a small screen and a slow CPU) while still being more powerful than a PDA. The EeePC [4] is a well known example.


3. Laptop [5] - now apparently defined to mean a medium size portable computer, light enough to be carried around but with a big enough screen and keyboard that many people will be happy to use them for 8 hours a day. The word is also used to mean all portable computers that could possibly fit on someone’s lap.


4. Desktop Replacement [6] - a big heavy laptop that is not carried much.

There is some disagreement about the exact number of categories and which category is most appropriate for each machine. There is a range of machines between the Subnotebook and Laptop categories. There is some amount of personal preference involved in determining which category a machine might fall in. For example I find a Thinkpad T series to fit into the “Laptop” category (and I expect that most people would agree with me). But when comparing the weight and height of an average 10yo child to an adult it seems that a 10yo would find an EeePC to be as much effort to carry as a T series Thinkpad is for an adult. It seems to me that the first thing that you need to do when choosing a laptop is to decide which of the above categories is most appropriate. While the boundaries between the categories are blurry and to some extent are limited by personal preference it’s an easy second step to determine which machines fit the category you have selected (in your opinion) once you have made a firm decision on the category. It’s also possible to choose a half-way point, for example if you wanted something on the border of the “Laptop” and NetBook categories then a Thinkpad X series might do the job. The next step of course is to determine which OSs and applications you want to run. There are some situations where the choice of OS and/or applications may force you to choose a category that has more powerful hardware (a CPU with more speed or features, more RAM, or more storage). For example a PDA generally won’t run a regular OS well (if at all) due to the limited options available for input devices and the very limited screen resolution. Even a NetBook has limitations as to what software runs well (for example many applications require a minimum resolution of 800×600 and don’t work well on an EeePC 701). Also Xen can not be used on the low-end CPUs used in some NetBooks which lack PAE. Once you have chosen a category you have to look for features which make sense for that category. A major criteria for a PDA is how fast you can turn it on, it should be possible to go from standby to full use in less than one second. Another major criteria is how long the battery lasts, it should compare to a mobile phone (several days on standby and 8 hours of active use). A criteria that is important to some people is the ability to use both portrait and landscape views for different actions (I use portrait for editing and landscape for reading). A NetBook is likely to be used in many places and needs to have a screen that will work well in adverse lighting conditions (a shiny reflective screen is a really bad thing), it also needs to be reasonably resilient as it is going to get bumped if it is transported a lot (a solid state disk is a good feature). It should also be as light as possible while having enough hardware to run a regular OS (an EeePC 701 with 512M of RAM and 4G of storage is about the minimum hardware for running a regular distribution of Linux). A desktop replacement needs to have all the features, lots of RAM, a fast CPU and video hardware, and a big screen - it also needs a good keyboard (test by typing your name several times). The “Laptop” category is much the same as the desktop replacement, but a bit smaller, a lot lighter, and better battery life. It seems very difficult to give any specific advice as to which laptop to buy when the person who wants the advice has not chosen a category (which is often the case).

• [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pda


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


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


• [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eeepc


• [5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laptop


• [6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desktop_replacement_computer

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So, does anybody know of a command-line RSS reader? I want something that will save state and output recent entries in a nicely parsable manner. Maybe URL\tTitle\tDecscription\n or somesuch.

So here's why I'm asking.

I got to thinking that it might be nice to automatically post to Twitter when I've got a new blog post up, rather than manually have to say "just wrote a blog post."

Then I also got to thinking that when I see an interesting URL that I'm going to Twitter about, I'm also almost always adding it as a bookmark to Delicious. Why not make a fortwitter tag on Delicious, and automatically post my comments about them to Twitter, saving me having to do it twice?

So I've got Twidge that can be nicely used in a shell script to do this stuff. I'm hoping to avoid having to write a shell script-friendly RSS aggregator. But I'm just prone to do it if nobody else has already, though I'd really like to avoid reinventing the wheel.

LaTeX provides a listings package to typeset code. The standard output is great for black-and-white printouts, but not for beamer presentations, where a more dynamic color scheme would be suitable. Having recently worked on slides with Python code, I have prepared a file that you can include to get nice colourful code that looks good on a presentation: My code is based on a snippet found on Ubuntu forums. I added some more keywords and tweaked the color scheme to correspond to the one that IDLE uses (that color scheme is not ideal, but my audience uses IDLE for coding and I wanted some consistency). To use the package, copy the file to the same folder as your document and include it in the header:

\include pythonlisting 

Then, to render code, use python sections:

\begin python 
def foo():
    print "bar"
\end python 

Note that if you want to use this in a beamer frame, you will have to mark the frame that contains Python code as fragile, like this:

\begin frame [fragile] Some Python code 
\begin python 
def foo():
    print "bar"
\end python 
\end frame 

Update (2008-09-13): the dictionaries in http://dictd.xdsl.by/dicts are probably more complete than the ones provided here, see this post for more information. It is very convenient for me to have a local dictd server set up, not only to look up obscure English words and jargon, but also for translation from foreign languages. Dictd is quite fast and powerful, with a multitude of dict clients to choose from. There are some pretty good free dictionaries too. For German, the dictionary in the Debian (Ubuntu) package dict-de-en (German-English + English-German) is fairly good. For Russian, the Mueller English-Russian dictionary (mueller7accent-dict) is great. Unfortunately, the Mueller dictionary does not contain translations from Russian to English. I have been using ksocrat for that purpose, but KSocrat is a little buggy and its usability does not shine. I looked around on the web for a downloadable Russian-English dictionary in dict format, but surprisingly could not find anything useful. There are quite a few online translation sites, heaps of small DOS-era utilities and some home-made Windows stuff, but nothing that would be easy to feed to dictd. What I did find was Sdictionary. Sdictionary is a dictionary application that has a fairly large community. Its Russian-English dictionary with 300 000 words was more than adequate for my purposes, but the database format was incompatible with dictd, and I couldn't find a converter on the web, so I wrote one. The converter from Sdictionary to Dictd formats is a bash script that dumps an Sdictionary file to a plain text file and massages it a bit so that it can be fed to dictfmt. To use the script you will need to install PTkSdict from swaj.net (Debian package) and the Ubuntu packages dictfmt and dictzip. Then just drop the script in the same directory as some dictionary foo.dct and run ./sdict2dictd.sh foo (where foo is the name of the dct file). The script should produce foo.dict.gz and foo.index which you can install into /usr/share/dictd. The script is far from perfect and discards some formatting but it's better than nothing. The best solution would probably be to extend dictfmt so that it could read the Sdict dump files directly. If you just want a dictd Russian-English dictionary, I have uploaded the files converted from Sdict here: rus_eng_full.dict.dz (8MB), rus_eng_full.index (15MB). By the way, when running in daemon mode, dictd eats an unreasonable amount of RAM (it's taking 40MB resident memory on my machine). If the dict server is only for personal use, it makes sense to run it through inetd as described in /usr/share/doc/dictd/README.inetd.gz. It appears that the speed difference is not noticeable on modern computers.

Here's one more post for my own little "advertising section", where I introduce gender-related projects that I think are a good idea but deserve some more publicity. So, last time we had geekspeakr.com, this time I'd like to introduce to you the Eleonore Digital Project. In a nutshell they are organising a project where groups of students all over Europe work together in creating an educational 3D computer game that deals with the life of Eleanor of Aquitaine. Each team is assigned an episode or a certain aspect of Eleonore's life and they will research this, draft a concept and finally create their respective part or episode of the game. Doing this they will only work with free software, namely Debian as the Operating System, OOo, Blender etc. A longer (and better) description of what they want to do and the motivation behind all of this can be found in their project description or on the Eleonore Project site itself. In my opinion the project seems to be a really good idea and I wish them the best of luck! What I like most about it is that it is not exclusively for girls, so that it does not create a kind of "artificial biotope" for girls to work in. Instead it aims to rise the girls ratio by means of a project topic that (so I assume) mostly appeals to girls. And I am especially happy that when looking for a topic that appeals to girls they came up with something better than fan homepages, foto love stories, and what else you find in "girls IT projects" these days. I am pretty sure that reading and researching on the life of one of the most influential women in European history is going to do them much more good that creating princess-themes webpages! I am also quite happy that they picked Debian as their operating system. I think Debian being used in a school project is a nice example that it is in fact not as "user-unfriendly" as it is often claimed to be! I've also introduced the project to the Debian Women Project and Miriam had the very good idea to also forward it to the Debian Games Team, so I hope we'll get some good cooperation here.

I found some weird opcodes in the s390 instruction set some time ago. I finally want to use it as I have access to such a machine. The result is rather slim:

.globl cu41
        .type   cu41, @function
cu41:
.L2:
        cu41    %r2,%r4
        ipm     %r1
        srl     %r1,28
        chi     %r1,3
        je      .L2
        ltr     %r1,%r1
        je      .L3
        lcr     %r1,%r1
        lgfr    %r3,%r1
.L3:
        lgr     %r2,%r3
        br      %r14

The cu41 opcode translates UTF32 to UTF8. Each "parameter" is a register pair [1], which describes address and length of the buffer. This opcode will return after a not specified number of translated characters. The rest is boiler plate code for condition code checking. The loop makes sure that anything is converted within the function unless another error occured.

[1]	An even pair. gcc is not yet able to allocate such pairs on its own, so it is hardcoded.

I found some weird opcodes in the s390 instruction set some time ago. I finally want to use it as I have access to such a machine. The result is rather slim:

.globl cu41
        .type   cu41, @function
cu41:
.L2:
        cu41    %r2,%r4
        ipm     %r1
        srl     %r1,28
        chi     %r1,3
        je      .L2
        ltr     %r1,%r1
        je      .L3
        lcr     %r1,%r1
        lgfr    %r3,%r1
.L3:
        lgr     %r2,%r3
        br      %r14

The cu41 opcode translates UTF32 to UTF8. Each "parameter" is a register pair [1], which describes address and length of the buffer. This opcode will return after a not specified number of translated characters. The rest is boiler plate code for condition code checking. The loop makes sure that anything is converted within the function unless another error occured.

[1]	An even pair. gcc is not yet able to allocate such pairs on its own, so it is hardcoded.

It seems to be a common idea by non-bloggers that the comment they enter on a blog is somehow special and should be taken seriously by the author of the blog (everyone is a legend in their own mind). In a recent discussion one anonymous commentator seemed offended that I didn’t take his comments seriously and didn’t understand why I would take little notice of an anonymous comment while taking note of a later comment on the same issue by the author of the project in question. In most forums (and I use the term in the broadest way) an anonymous comment is taken with a weight that is close to zero. That doesn’t mean that it will be ignored, it just means that the requirement for providing supporting evidence or of having a special insight and explaining it is much greater. One example of this is the comment weighting system used by Slashdot.org (AKA “/.”). The /. FAQ has a question “Why should I log in?” with the answer including “Posting in Discussions at Score:1 instead of Score:0 means twice as many people will see your comments” [1]. /. uses the term “Anonymous Coward” as the identification of users who are not logged in, this gives an idea of how they are regarded. Advogato uses a rating method for blog posts which shows you only posts from blogs that you directly rank well or which match the trust metric (based on rankings of people you rank) [2]. I believe that the automated systems developed by /. and other online forums emulate to a some extent the practices that occur off-line. For any discussion in a public place a comment from someone who does not introduce themself (or gives an introduction that gives no reason to expect quality) will be treated with much less weight than one from someone who is known. When someone makes a comment their background will be considered by people who hear it. If a comment is entirely a matter of opinion and can not be substantiated by facts and logical analysis then the acceptance of the comment is solely based on the background of the author (and little things like spelling errors can count against the author). Therefore if you want your blog comments to be considered by blog authors and readers you need to make sure that you are known. Using your full name is one way of not being as anonymous but most names are not unique on the Internet (I’ve previously described some ways of ensuring that you beat other people with the same name in Google rankings [3]). The person who owns the blog can use the email address that is associated with the comment to identify the author (if it’s a real email address and it’s known by Google). But for other readers the only option is the “Website” field. The most common practice is to use the “Website” field in the comment to store the URL of your blog (most blog comments are written by bloggers). But there is nothing stopping you from using any other URL, if you are not a blogger and want to write comments on blogs you could create a personal web page to use for the comments. If the web page you use for such purposes gives links to references as to your relevant experience then that would help. Someone who has skills in several areas could create a web page for each one and reference the appropriate page in their comment. One problem we face is that it is very easy to lie on the net. There is no technical obstacle to impersonation on the net, while I haven’t seen any evidence of people impersonating others in an attempt to add credibility to blog comments I expect it’s only a matter of time before that happens (I expect that people do it already but the evidence of them getting caught has not been published anywhere that I’ve read). People often claim university education to add weight to their comments (usually in email but sometimes in blog comments too). One problem with this is that anyone could falsely claim to have a university degree and no-one could disprove their claim without unreasonable effort, another is that a university degree actually doesn’t mean much (lots of people remain stupid after graduating). One way in which adding a URL to a comment adds weight is that for a small web site the author will check a reasonable portion of the sites that link to them, so if someone impersonates me and has a link to my web site in the comment then there’s a good chance that I will notice this. OpenID [4] has the potential to alleviate this by making it more difficult to forge an association with a web site. One thing that I am working on is enabling OpenID on all the web sites that are directly associated with me. I plan to use a hardware device to authenticate myself with the OpenID server (so I can securely enter blog comments from any location). I expect that it will become the standard practice that comments will not be accepted by most blogs if they are associated with a URL that is OpenID enabled unless the author of the comment authenticates themself via OpenID. Even when we get OpenID enabled everywhere there is still the issue of domain specific expertise. While I am well enough known for my work on SE Linux that most people will accept comments about it simply because I wrote them, the same can not be said for most topics that I write about. When writing about topics where I am not likely to be accepted as an expert I try and substantiate my main points with external web pages. Comments are likely to be regarded as spam if they have too many links so it seems best to only use one link per comment - which therefore has to be on an issue that is important to the conclusion and which might be doubted if evidence was not provided. The other thing that is needed is a reasonable chain of deduction. Simply stating your opinion means little, listing a series of logical steps that led you to the opinion and are based on provable facts will hold more weight. These issues are not only restricted to blog comments, I believe that they apply (to differing degrees) to all areas of online discussion.

• [1] http://slashdot.org/faq/accounts.shtml


• [2] http://www.advogato.org/person/raph/diary.html?start=224


• [3] http://doc.coker.com.au/internet/personal-seo/


• [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Openid

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OK, it's still running Linpus Lite and yum but that's enough to get things like drivel and ssh installed. Add in xchat-gnome and it's quite usable. The whole machine bounces around quite insanely when I'm typing this blog entry on my lap, though.
pilot-qof and a bit of XSL from the data-freedom package from the same source, allows easy import of ICS calendar data and VCF contact data.
Aspire Mail is clearly based on evolution.
I'll live with Linpus (sounds freakishly similar to lupus - or maybe that is just my medical bias) for a month or so - I'll get Debian on this sometime before my return to Extremadura.

It's been a year or so since I last reported what I was up to in my "day job." The last year has been a productive, if sometimes schizophrenic, period. I've had a good time working with Eric von Hippel (innovation and free and open source software research guru) and have decided I'd like to do a bit more of that. So I'm taking classes again -- mostly sociological methods courses -- to try to learn a bit about becoming a social scientist. To do so, I've enrolled in the Technology, Innovation and Entrepreneurship PhD program at the MIT Sloan School of Management and am working on putting together an interdisciplinary -- probably even interdepartmental -- research program. My basic research questions remain the ones that have motivated all my work: How can I get a better understanding of communities producing free stuff? How can I help those communities do so more effectively? MIT has a large number of people who share these goals and interests. Who knows, if I can put together enough of them and an academically rigorous research proposal that will provide a real benefit to the free software and free culture communities I care about, I might even manage to get a degree out of it! I'll also be staying on as a fellow at the MIT Center for Future Civic Media where I'll continue to maintain and expand Selectricity, work on Revealing Errors, and more.

Yay. A Meme. And I have a bad enough headache to write something… My own machine set uses something from the Babylon5 series, so I have delenn (laptop), vorlon (desktop) (Yes, contrary to common believe it is not named after that prior Release Manager of Debian :)), sheridan/vir/kosh/lyta/morden (various servers). More interesting is the naming scheme i took for DebConf hosts: Characters from the Simpsons, but the names have to make some kind of sense with the function of the machine. And names from members of the Simpsons family are forbidden and to be used for machines directly at a DebConf venue only. Some of the names we use are cmburns, smithers, apu, skinner, quimby, wiggum, herb, krabappel, horatio, cletus, kent, krusty. Look for the TXT records to know who it is, all of them have one. Finding out why the hosts carry those names is left as an excercise to the reader, except for two to demonstrate the twisted brain you need to get it :)

• krusty - Krusty the Clown. Was the master video relay for DC8 (and will be for some others) and as such presenting/managing/getting a/the show to the people watching from outside.
• horatio - The Sea Captain. Is used as the shell machine for DebConf people that do not have an own shell box, but which we want to have in IRC for basically 24/7. So shell <-> sea.

At work it is extremely boring, descriptive names for the function. Like mail1, mail2, etc.

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Oh, and also, lets shoot madduck. Comments: 1

The Linux kernel source relies on a case sensitive filesystem. If you attempt to get the sources via git this will manifest as an error along the lines of:

fatal: Entry 'include/linux/netfilter/xt_CONNMARK.h

There are several header files like this the names of which differ only in case and just can’t be represented on a filesystem that doesn’t distinguish between cases. This is most commonly seen by people attempting to build embedded Linux from Windows.

Logging on the Freerunner By default, the FreeRunner comes without a system log daemon, and rightfully so, because you don't want a daemon filling up /var, and a nightly cron job to rotate logs, on a mobile phone. However, I do not want to give up logging. If there are bugs I want to investigate, I like to be able to look at the logs. The solution: remote logging. Configure the phone to send all log info via UDP to my laptop, and configure my laptop to listen for UDP syslog messages from the phone only. How to do it:

1. apt-get install rsyslog (see below how other logging daemons fail)
2. Add a /etc/hosts entry for the laptop on the phone: 192.168.0.200 base
3. Add a /etc/hosts entry for the phone on the laptop: 192.168.0.202 openmoko
4. Replace the phone's rsyslog rules to send everything to the laptop:

   ################
   ##### RULES ####
   ################
   # Everything goes to the main computer, via UDP, if available
   *.*     @base
   #
   # Emergencies are sent to everybody logged in.
   #
   *.emerg                         *
   
   

5. Tell the laptop's rsyslog to accept UDP messages from the phone only:

   # provides UDP syslog reception
   $ModLoad imudp
   $UDPServerRun 514
   $UDPServerAddress 192.168.0.200
   
   

That is all. When the phone is not connected, the UDP packets from the logger will go nowhere. When it gets connected to the laptop, a script is triggered that creates the 192.168.0.200 interface, rsyslogd will listen on that interface and the UDP packets will be logged. This has the extra potential to be able to get error messages in case of bugs in the SD card driver, which I seem to hit from time to time. Why rsyslog sysklogd could receive the messages from the phone, but can only listen on all interfaces, and therefore requires me to set up firewall on my laptop in order to get packets from the phone only. syslog-ng can and can be told to listen on a given interface, but it will refuse to start if that interface isn't available. Since the phone is on an hotplugged interface that comes and goes, this is totally unacceptable. And finally, rsyslog is going to replace sysklogd both in Debian and in Fedora, so it's just as well a good excuse to switch.

What we are having here is a quite non-typical ARM based motherboard. It features a pre-production version of Marvell 78x00 series ARM SoC, clocked at 1GHz. It features multiple on-board sata and gigE connectors, as well as pci-e slots and DDR2 ram slots. Fairly "meh" in x86 world, but on the ARM world most systems are designed mainly for low power consumption, tiny size and low cost. Which, while creating allows creating many exciting devices, makes finding meaty buildd's tricky. When we intruduced armel port, the security people rose the concern that arm buildd's are too slow. Especially from the security Point of view, where getting security fixes out fast is important - every second of waiting for security builds to finish someone could be exploited!

Luckily, some people from Marvell had heard about our need and arranged to donate a developer board for us!

So far, the build speed improvement, compared to our current (Thecus N2100) buildd's is very promising. When looking at build times of some slow-building packages which likely will see security uploads:

Package     Thecus   MV78100   HPPA    MIPS
linux-2.6   39h      11h       6h      17h
webkit      17h      5h        3h      4h
qt4-x11     59h      17h       7h      13h
xulrunner   14h      4h        1.5h    3h

We see that with a Marvell board we are more in the line with other architectures. And the production hardware is going to be even faster! There is a dual-core version as well, but it's not SMP. Both cores are independent, and would basically both run their own Linux image. If manage to find a easy way to implement and manage that, we could run two theoretically run two independent buildd instances on the same board.

See the Linux Devices article for more details about the MV78x00 in general.