I see that github have recently announced their pricing plans. Looks like they’ll not be having many kernel developers using their “open source” plan - my current working Linux .git is 261Mb but you start having to pay at 100Mb. git may be very space efficient but the kernel is an enormous project. Mind you, the whole web service based approach of github is fairly alien to kernel development - a large part of what it’s doing is replacing the combination of mailing lists together with git send-email and git am (or their equivalents) that the kernel relies on for code exchange and review. Interestingly it appears not to have done anything that provides the discussion and review side of things - that seems like a surprising omission for a web 2.0ish thing.

So, you know, SCO has been suing various people in the Linux community for the last few years, claiming that some code in Linux was stolen from them. So, I’m willing to bet that a lot of people were wondering: what exactly is SCO UnixWare? Well. Have I got a treat for you. Thanks to this wonderful thing called the Internet, you too, can experience SCO UnixWare in it’s full glory. Right, so! I wouldn’t want to stop you from experiencing perhaps, the most enterprisy OS ever. Lets get it on. Installing the OS — the most enterprisy installer ever. The SCO installer is the most ass-backwards convoluted thing someone could have ever invented. It’s downright bloody insane. But, a picture is worth a thousand words, or something like that. This is the boot splash screen. You’ll see it a lot. The release 7.1.3 text goes back and forth a lot, kinda like the Windows XP startup screen except with less artistic talent. After a little while, you boot into a language selection screen. You choose English, and it presents you with: You press F10 to continue. Pressing F10 is kinda like rolling a 2d6, except it’s more enterprisy. You’ll be pressing F10 a lot. It asks you to enter a license key. But, SCO doesn’t really care about licensing it seems. You press F8 to tell it that “you don’t have a license”, and it gives you the option to use an “evaluation license which expires in 60 days”. You choose yes, you anti-capitalist pirate. Don’t worry, at this point, the SCO installer has probably phoned home and told them to add you to their SCOsource litigation. It starts unpacking drivers, and asks you if you would like to use the driver configuration utility. You exit out of the driver configuration utility. It asks you for the system hostname, and installation method. Time to partition your hard drive. Finally. This is what it’s all about. Wow, that was easy wasn’t it. You press enter three times, kinda like the free software OS we know and love. It asks you what packages you would like to install. You choose the default. Mostly because I couldn’t be assed. Now you go back to setting up the network??? You think back, and recall vaguely that you set up the network already. Apparently you didn’t, as it now wants you to manually configure your ethernet adaptor, despite the fact that it autoconfigured itself moments ago. You enter in some information to make it happy. It asks you to set the clock. You enter in some data and press F10. It asks you to set up a user, set the root password and set the system security level. It asks you to accept the license agreement, in a very enterprisy way. Infact, it’s so enterprisy you don’t have to read the actual license. You choose “display licenses”; because you’re curious. You see the following copyleft licenses: It asks to be sure you really want to install this enterprisy OS. You hit F10, acknowledging your willingness to sell your soul to satan SCO. Installation begins, you wait about 20 minutes, and the thing is finally installed. You look up and see it installing netscape. You sigh, as you know what that means. It installs documentation. You nearly fall asleep. Wasn’t that percentage meter more a little while ago? You go back to whatever you were doing. Finally, it “sets up UnixWare”, and tells you that it has finished. You hit Enter. But, you forgot to eject your CD. Ok, you reboot finally. It boots back into unixware, and you get presented with the bootsplash: It boots up for the first time. It asks if you would like to install anything off of CD2 or CD3. You choose no, and it spams you about some update support contract thing. It decides to rebuild your kernel for some random reason. By rebuild, I mean, “relink using binary blobs”. But, I digress. The system reboots, because it rebuilt the kernel. The system boots, you’re presented with even more advertising. This concludes our look at SCO UnixWare. I hope you’ve found it fun. There’s more fun images in this directory, including a mollyguarded shutdown and much more.

Theorem: If aptitude is used, set to automatically remove unneeded packages and every not willingly installed package is marked auto, the system’s cruftiness is always 0.

Intel is always seen as good guy, who is writing open source drivers, releasing at least some specifications for hardware. Unfortunately it is not always the case. If you want to use their new embedded solution - Menlow CPU and Poulsbo chipset, they provide you lot of crap. Basically what you get is a zip file containing several Microsoft Word documents, badly formatted text files (end of lines at each 80 chars), PDFs and some zip and tar archives. If you look to one of these archives, you will get binary graphical installer, which will install license, uninstallator and yet another set of tarballs. These tarballs finally contain binary and source packages you need to make graphics work on this platform. Maybe somebody did this to practise various ways of compressing and distributing things, but it is really amazing how many times you need to decompress several archives to actually get to the things you want. Unfortunately at the end you will find out that libgl1-mesa-dri-psb binary (DRI driver for graphics) has no sources and Intel is not willing to give them to you. Bad luck if you have slightly different distribution than one of these which are supported (FC6, Midinux-build9, ubuntu-gutsy, ubuntu-hardy) and the provided binary simply crashes.

So, since Emacs is apparently switching to bzr, I thought I'd try it out. The first thing I noticed is that cloning the repository is very slow. So slow that I killed it, thinking that it was stuck, but it wasn't. It turns out that the official page recommends downloading a tarball instead, so I did that.

Once I had my local Emacs branch, I tried a simple bzr log to see how recent the repository was. It sat there for a whole minute before even starting to show something. Apparently, all the history commands are slow... This is with a hot cache:

$ time bzr log >/dev/null
bzr log > /dev/null  44.89s user 0.58s system 99% cpu 45.563 total
$ time bzr version-info
revision-id: cvs-1:monnier-20080313012033-9ewl8gg4q3bw01z3
date: 2008-03-13 01:20:33 +0000
build-date: 2008-03-13 20:14:17 +0100
revno: 87445
branch-nick: sandbox
bzr version-info  6.41s user 0.14s system 99% cpu 6.549 total
$

Six seconds just to show me the current revision?!

Compare with my favorite scm, in a repository that contains the same history, also converted with cvsps:

$ time git log >/dev/null
git log > /dev/null  1.81s user 0.05s system 99% cpu 1.862 total
$ time git show >/dev/null
git show > /dev/null  0.02s user 0.00s system 85% cpu 0.023 total
$

Fortunately, other bzr commands such as status, diff, commit are pretty fast so this might be a problem with the conversion process, or something. At least I hope so, because as is it's completely unusable!

They figure out how the filesystem works, and start hacking. Heh. Actually, I did the same thing once myself. The difference between Carlo and myself was that in my case, only a few files that were not in backup had been deleted, rather than 3G worth of data; hence, using a hex editor, a cursory glance at the Linux source code, and a few hours to kill was all that was needed to recover. (via) (With apologies to Linus, and any Real Women reading this)

Before I start on this, note that SPI's next board meeting is next Wednesday at 1900 UTC on irc.oftc.net #spi and logs should appear here and on spi-general less than a day after. I expect the agenda will appear here. Last Tuesday morning, someone asked about SPI holding copyrights. On Tuesday afternoon, I answered with the policy and the only practice example I found. SPI's policy is fine. SPI's practice seemed unclear. On Wednesday morning, I clarified that reply to one board member and made a suggestion to one who seemed to want to ask a lawyer. On Sunday afternoon, after a staggering number of posts which weren't really getting anywhere, I tried to drag it back to the practice example a bit rudely, but that's the level the discussion had fallen to by then. It didn't go down well. It seems rude is fine from other people, but not me. Damn baggage. There was a sequence of posts telling me that SPI members weren't even allowed to ask about this task. I replied to one on Tuesday morning and took the useful bits off to debian vote. Yesterday, I lost my cool, really, and posted too much, replying to all the stupid posts suggesting that you can only ask if you wear the right hat, and one or two particularly ugly personal attacks. Sorry about that. Meanwhile, over on IRC, a draft solution to the problem has been developed/found. So all's well in the end. I give big thanks to Jimmy, Sam and Lucas in particular and a big apology for responding to the mailing list abuse.

Bubulle asked about whether anyone has computed the number of bugs open (and by inference close) and I've just found a link from the DD statistics pages:
Debian Bug Tracking System News - These are the bugs touched during the last four hours. The data will be updated in 40 minutes.
Active Bugs 110443 (+9) 9230042 kb
Archived Bugs 366389 (+0) 24156850 kb
Debian NEW closable bugs 41
Source packages in incoming.debian.org 19
Package movement for testing +17 -2
Orphaned packages 360
Popularity contest Debian 76404 (+0) Ubuntu 448702 (+0)
Total registered dpkg/apt Users 525106

There's an RSS feed too.

Well, after many failed attempts, here I am on my problematic HP laptop with a USB key mounted, a balloon3 board booted under an Emdebian root filesystem and visible over USB-to-serial using /dev/ttyUSB0 via screen.
Thanks to Daniel's tip about screen /dev/ttyUSB0 115200, my USB to Serial converter (Maplins with a Prolific PL2303 chipset) is working on my problematic HP laptop.
The proviso is that I have to reboot to enable all this stuff - allow the laptop to hibernate and all this USB stuff just disappears.
The only remaining problem is the wireless - I haven't decided yet whether to patch the current stock Debian kernel (I've had enough problems without getting into more kernel issues) - I may simply buy a replacement external wireless unit or just not use wireless until the b43 driver is capable of working with the Broadcom Corporation BCM94311MCG wlan mini-PCI (rev 02).
The magic runes for enabling USB are to add some more options to the grub boot list (on the 'kernel' line):

 noapic nolapic noirqfixup

minicom still doesn't like serial over USB (on this laptop, it adds an extra line feed and then refuses to pass on any keyboard entry to the device in a similar manner to the powerpc laptop) but screen works nicely. Thanks Daniel.
With noirqfixup added, I can also plug in other USB things like a USB mouse and actually see them work. This is all good news because apart from adding these mysterious runes to Grub, this is a completely standard Debian box running Sid and with no particular configuration changes or tweaks in the system setup.
This means that I can now get on with uploading the emdebian-tools package split to Debian unstable, adapting the Emdebian root filesystem for balloon3 to support USB networking by default and suggesting screen as an alternative to minicom in the control information for the new emdebian-rootfs package. (The package split is now in Emdebian SVN - main trunk - if you are interested.) I'm also downgrading my old G4 iBook to running Lenny instead of sid and it will now stay running Lenny as Debian stable when Lenny is released. It just makes it easier to not have to keep downloading massive updates on the brief occasions that I now use the iBook.
Now if I can just work out why hibernation forgets 'noirqfixup', I'll have a usable HP laptop....
Not bad for a machine that I once considered as a complete non-starter.

I have just watched The Wire’s last episode. For those who don’t know about it, The Wire is the greatest TV series ever created (Salon and Slate back me on this). It’s been acclaimed by critics, but widely disregarded by audience. I’ll never forget Jimmy McNulty, a troubled Irish American dipsomaniac murder detective (played by brilliant Brit Dominic West) or Omar Little, a Robin Hood-like stickup homosexual man in west Baltimore. The rest of the deeply portrayed characters of the show are great too, but above all of them, the real starring role belongs to Baltimore. I am sure Baltimore’s reality goes way beyond this show, but I don’t think a show can get more real than The Wire. Each season focuses on a different topic, such as drug-dealing, unions, politics, the press, always keeping the police department around. The story arcs are really long and complex, The Wire is not the kind of show you can enjoy watching a single episode of, but more like, as its own creator - a former Baltimore Sun journalist - put it, a “66 hour movie”. Well, I could keep praising it for hours, but lots of people have done that already, even Barack Obama loves it (:P, let’s ride the hype). Praise available in Spanish too Besides, Eliot Spitzer has made wiretaps really popular again these last days Really, you must see it.

I finished reading the electronic advance reader’s copy last night. Overall, I’m glad I read it, though it was quite infuriating. The book is set about a decade in the future. In the book’s world, anthropogenic climate change and global warming turned out to be a hoax; instead, a global cooling (caused by solar variation) was beginning. At the same time, the bird flu (H5N1) became a major pandemic. The United States was governed by the democrats and “the bitch” (a thinly disguised demonisation of a certain democrat presidential candidate), who handled everything wrong. The book is a fictional autobiography (or a series of blog posts) by a US army officer who became famous during those turbulent times, first commanding a company finding its own way back home after being abandoned in the Middle East (the later stuff I won’t describe to avoid spoiling the book). The Last Centurions is a television propaganda show featuring his unit in action, intended to counterspin anti-military news reports. Several chapters early in the book are pure political ranting by the narrator: how anthropogenic climate change is false, how socialized medicine is bad (and causes lots of unnecessary deaths during a pandemic), how republicans are good and democrats are evil et cetera et cetera et cetera. (Then again, it’s a Ringo book, political ranting is a given.) Given my political persuasion, it was not easy to read: I kept yelling, “where are your footnotes!” I actually tried to verify some of the claims the narrator makes, and found nothing persuasive. Still… in the end, it all turned out to be justified. It explains the character, and it explains the world. Perhaps it should be a bit trimmed during editing (remember, I read the author’s submission draft which has not been through the usual editing and copyediting cycles), but a lot of it is necessary for the story. The premise that anthropogenic global warming is a false theory made it very hard for me to suspend disbelief. However, given that premise (and the premise of a totally incompetent government in the USA), the story is compelling and interesting. There’s a quite a bit of military action as we have become to expect from Ringo. The beginning grabbed me, – apart from the couple of chapters of exposition – held my attention tightly to the end, and left me shell-shocked. I especially liked the wife’s edits. I’m sorry that we didn’t get to see their courtship. I don’t know if I’ll ever want to re-read the book, but I’m still rating it at 5/5. The book is now available as an e-ARC, and will be released as a regular book in August. There is a companion site at www.thelastcenturion.com.

I think that Matt Hartley is spot on on his Top 10 Linux Desktop Hurdles. Commented:

1. Regression testing is hard. Assuring that hardware that worked will still work in the next version of the distribution is where many Linux distributions fall down. At least I think Debian here does better than some others.
2. Mobile devices. I've written about this already some months ago. I want to just plug in my smartphone and sync it with my calendar application. I don't think this is too much to ask.
3. Software compatibility. I don't do video editing and I'm comfortable with the Gimp, but I witness people having difficulties with OpenOffice.org all day. Mostly, it's because either they were MS Office power users and stuff like form letters are different between the packages, or it is because the state issues silly form/macro based MS Office documents.
4. Wireless. Hmm. I haven't had real problems with Wireless in quite some time. But then, I know that I need to watch what kind of hardware I buy, so YMMV.
5. Hardware compatibility lists. Debian doesn't have one, so that's apparently a good starting point ;-)
6. Compiling drivers. I don't understand this complaint. The user should never even come to the point where he needs to compile a driver. But I think here Debian with module-assistant is quite good.
7. The Patent Trap a.k.a. I Want To Watch DVDs. This is a serious issue, and will probably not be going away unless some heavy duty political stuff is happening. Organisations like PubPat and the new End Software Patents initiative will help. In my opinion, though, these are not taking it far enough. Patents are monopolies granted by the state — in all other areas (post, railways, telecommunications), it has been agreed that monopolies are bad, so why not just abolish the broken idea of patents, too?
8. Off the Shelf Software. Hmm. My clientele is not the lone Linux user at home but the business user who has an IT support dept, so I don't see this issue for me.

Issues #9 and #10 is just “the community sucks” in nicer words. He's not wrong as such, but I think Matt's view is pessimistic on these.

Sidney, Adelaide, Atlanta, Bangkok, Brisbane, Canberra, Chicago, Christchurch, Copenhagen, Dublin, Manila, Melbourne, Montreal, Odense, Ottawa, Perth, Phoenix, San Francisco, Suva, Tel Aviv, Toronto and Vancouver all turning off their lights for an hour in the name of fighting global warming.

NASA to take orbital photos of Earth Hour cities on March 29.

watch the video digg it!

---

Before my hard disk adventure, I used to use whereami to manage my laptop network setup. Whereami is pretty good. It allows me to detect whether a cable is connected to my NIC, and not even bother wasting several minutes in trying to get a DHCP lease. It can run tests on several interfaces, and decide that I am "home" if it finds a known network on either the wireless or the wired interface. Most importantly, it allows me to build a script based on where I actually am, so that I can have my laptop modify several configuration settings that depend on the actual network I'm on -- say, whether or not to use a proxy, or whether or not to use an SMTP smarthost. I was having issues with whereami lately, however, and thought to look for something else. After all, it's true what they say; whereami does not properly integrate with ifupdown. If you use whereami, modifying the network configuration involves "/etc/init.d/whereami start" or some such; just "ifup eth0" will break things horribly. Additionally, I was having issues with my WPA setup; there is a testwpa, but it does not seem to work for me for some reason—and I can't seem to figure out what's going on in order to file a bug. Apart from the two issues above, I was having some minor annoyances with my setup; enough so that after reinstalling my system, I thought to try something else. The guessnet package is designed to properly integrate with ifupdown, so I thought I'd give it a try. I don't think it is what I'm looking for, though.

#  route_data = $ lookup 
#			$ readfile /etc/whereami/topmost_location 
#		 lsearch /etc/exim4/smarthosts 
  route_data = $ lookup 
  			$ extract eth0 
				$ readfile /etc/network/run/ifsftate 
			 
		 lsearch /etc/exim4/smarthosts 
		$ lookup 
			$ extract wlan0 
				$ readfile /etc/network/run/ifstate 
			 
		 lsearch /etc/exim4/smarthosts 

The upper version is what I used with whereami (but not active, see the comment marks :). My script would write something to /etc/whereami/topmost_location, and several other things (including my exim configuration, as shown above) would use that to automagically modify their configuration. Which is pretty cool. The lower version is the equivalent of the upper version with guessnet. How ugly. And then I didn't even see a way to avoid ifup from trying to 'up' eth0 if the MII tells me there is no cable in the NIC. Oh my.

Someone asked on the PyGTK mailinglist if it is possible to reuse certain parts of a libglade window several times within an application.
It certainly is, and it's not even hard to do!

I've quickly written a demo application to show how it's done.

The user interface designed in glade is really simple, a textbox with two toggle buttons underneath. Activating one button will display a second, disparate textbox beside the original one. Deactivating it will remove that second textarea.
The other button will display and remove a copy of the first textbox which was there from application startup.
The full widget tree of this interface is shown in the first screenshot.

The actual code to the demo application is rather brief.
Continue reading "PyGTK/glade object reuse"

Someone asked on the PyGTK mailinglist if it is possible to reuse certain parts of a libglade window several times within an application.
It certainly is, and it's not even hard to do!

I've quickly written a demo application to show how it's done.

The user interface designed in glade is really simple, a textbox with two toggle buttons underneath. Activating one button will display a second, disparate textbox beside the original one. Deactivating it will remove that second textarea.
The other button will display and remove a copy of the first textbox which was there from application startup.
The full widget tree of this interface is shown in the first screenshot.

The actual code to the demo application is rather brief.
Continue reading "PyGTK/glade object reuse"