It's done: today I heard about the last (passing) mark for the last course I need to follow for my Master in Applied Computing Science, at Utrecht University: a paper about RFID security and privacy as part of the Cryptography course. Besides some small paper still due for (ahum) my Bachelor, the only thing left is my thesis with associated research. Today I got an invitation for my first working day at ORTEC in Gouda, next month, where I'll be doing research (and implementation) on some exciting new route planning algorithms. It'll require some getting used to it, five days a week, 8 hours a day, for the rest of the year. One of the biggest challenges will be getting up in time every single day, but I'm sure I'll be fine with that eventually. I have confidence that the interesting research will make up for it completely! Already this Friday I'll be going to FOSDEM with Thijs, partly by train, and partly hitchhiking a ride from Joost. Too bad my laptop practically died... But reading mail etc. not the most important thing in FOSDEM, you can do that at home too I hope to meet yet again a whole lot of old and new Debian people over there. For the first time in 3 years no talk from me, other duties took too much time lately. I'll need to discover how much time I'll be able to spend on Debian as a full-time employee, but I think it'll make it easier for me to divide my time: I really missed doing Debian stuff from time to time, and I need to fix up a number of neglected areas real soon now. Good night!

Well, I was so tired of my mini hp 2133 that I decided to exchange it or selling it. The main reason of this is the lack of Linux support from VIA (No 3d acceleration, no free driver for Wifi, etc). I was looking at http://www.mercadolibre.com.ve/ and I found a guy who was selling/exchanging a G1. When I saw that, I thought: this could be the chance to get a G1 without using the credit card . So I contact this guy, I met him at La Vereda del Lago de Maracaibo and after checking both devices we made the exchange.

I have to say that I am happy with the exchange because I was using a Motorola w180 which is a fuckin' shame of phone. Besides, the G1 is in very good shape.

The G1 is a very amused phone. I had to reset it. Such a process was very easy. I followed the procedure at http://www.androidcentral.com/factory-reset-tmobile-g1/

It's time to go to bed now, or I hope so . I think I have done a good exchange, don't you think so?

With the vrms meme raging on Planet Ubuntu, I noticed some people still have sun-java6 installed. I ve been using openjdk-6 since Hardy, and everything I use works fine with it (e.g. Vuze, Catan, Eclipse, FreeMind, and even Facebook s photo uploader thing). Given the Ubuntu Tech Board s remove sun-java6 from the archive Agenda item, it s possible sun-java6 (being redundant and orphaned) would go away in Ubuntu Karmic (sun-java5 is already gone because Sun will drop support for it in October, and sun-java6 is not far behind). I ve heard some noises about openjdk-6 not working for people, but I haven t actually seen any direct technical evidence of something working in one and not the other. Seeing as Jaunty s OpenJDK was certified by Sun, it would be very interesting to find failures, as this would indicate that Sun s certifications are missing something. Looking for examples of failures in Google, I couldn t find anything with obvious test-cases that failed with openjdk-6. I suspect I m just not trying hard enough, but I m curious what other people have run into. Test for yourself:

sudo apt-get purge sun-java6-jdk sun-java6-jre sun-java6-bin sun-java6-plugin
sudo apt-get install openjdk-6-jdk icedtea6-plugin

(Don t forget to restart your browser.)

*whew* I did a bunch of things yesterday. We took our kinderg rtner to her first Friday at her new school (and were about 10 minutes tardy. oops). We then took our toddler to a nearby playground with swings and slides and let her expend some energy. After she had been sufficiently exercised, we walked back home, stopping at a coffee shop on the way. The baristo (you call male baristas baristos, right? :) ) recognized my MC Frontalot shirt and asked whether I had caught him the previous weekend at PAX. Unfortunately, I have not attended PAX since 2006, but I *did* purchase the tee directly from The Front himself ;) When we got home, I worked a bit on an English Language parser implementation and then went to the University of Washington to meet with Emily Bender about getting in to the Professional Master s program in Computational Linguistics. It all looks good, and I even got the good news that the GRE is no longer required! After the meeting, I headed home and poked at the parser for a little while longer. I then picked Scarlet up from after-school care and brought her home. I then hopped in the car and drove toward Bellevue to meet up with Monty while he s in town. I over-estimated the amount of time traffic would steal on my way to Bellevue, and had an extra hour to blow. So I dropped by building 41 and shot the IronPython bull with Dino. It turns out he s got an android phone, too. I told him it was possible to put a debian chroot on it and that he should even be able to apt-get install ironpython to his phone soon ;) We talked briefly about the CodePlex Foundation and Sam Ramji s departure from The Evil Empire. Dino seems skeptical about the project. I don t have enough information to have much of an opinion. However, it sounds like some folks I trust are involved, so I m hopeful. I left MS just in time to make it to the wrong address at the specified time. My phone had just enough juice to call Monty to get the right address and then use the navigation system to find my way there. I wasn t able to make reservations at the place we intended to go for dinner until 8:15, so we went to the Barnes & Noble for a bit. They only had one NLP book in stock and the examples are all in Python. I should learn that language one of these days As we were leaving the Pacific Place, Monty mentioned to me that he is on the advisory board for the CodePlex Foundation, and that they have been responsive enough to his input that they changed the Mission statement, at his recommendation, just one day before the Foundation was publicized. He feels that this is a very good direction for Microsoft to be heading. My brother Chris was kind enough to watch the kids while we went out to dinner. Quick note: he recently graduated from UW with a BA in Electrical Engineering and is looking for work using his acquired knowledge, in case anyone needs one of those ;) We met up with my wife, Hannah and our friends, Mike & Cynthia at our place. Monty graciously avoided mentioning the terrible state in which our apartment has recently found itself. The kids were super cute and polite and said hi/bye. Over dinner we discussed building an android app (Monty has one, too ;) ) to automate the process of creating bounties for apps and getting folks to implement them. We also talked about MySQL and MariaDB, of course. Hannah and I recalled my time working for MySQL, Inc. on the MaxDB project and some subtle cultural differences we noticed while traveling. It was interesting getting the inside scoop about the Sun acquisition and some of the recent goings-on in the MySQL/Sun/Oracle world. I wasn t aware, for instance, that the EU is balking on the merger because of monopoly concerns.

Although Django is well packaged for Debian, I've recently come to the conculsion that the packages are really not what I want. The problem is that my server runs Debian stable, while my development laptop runs unstable, and Django revisions definitely fall into the "unstable" category. There really is no way to use a system Django 1.1 on one side, and a system Django 1.0 on the other. After a bit of work, I think I've got something together that works, and I post it here in the hope it is useful for someone else. This info has been gleaned from similar references such as this and this. This is aimed at running a server using Debian stable (5.0) for production and an unstable environment for development. You actually need both to get this running. This is based on a project called "project" that lives in /var/www

1. First step is to install python-virtualenv on both.
2. Create a virtualenv on both, using the --no-site-packages to make it a stand-alone environment. This is like a chroot for python.

   $ virtualenv --no-site-packages project
   New python executable in project/bin/python
   Installing setuptools............done.
   

3. The unstable environment has a file you'll need to copy into the stable environment - bin/activate_this.py. The stable version of python-virtualenv isn't recent enough to include this file, but you need it to essentially switch the system python into the chrooted environment. This will come in handy later when setting up the webserver.
4. There are probably better ways to keep the two environments in sync, but I simply take a manual approach of doing everything twice, once in each. So from now on, do the following in both environments.
5. Activate the environment

   /var/www$ cd project
   /var/www/project$ . bin/activate
   (project) /var/www/project$
   

6. Use easy_install to install pip

   (project) /var/www/project$ easy_install pip
   Searching for pip
   Reading http://pypi.python.org/simple/pip/
   Reading http://pip.openplans.org
   Best match: pip 0.4
   Downloading http://pypi.python.org/packages/source/p/pip/pip-0.4.tar.gz#md5=b45714d04f8fd38fe8e3d4c7600b91a2
   Processing pip-0.4.tar.gz
   Running pip-0.4/setup.py -q bdist_egg --dist-dir /tmp/easy_install-Wu9O-U/pip-0.4/egg-dist-tmp-xjSdxq
   warning: no previously-included files matching '*.txt' found under directory 'docs/_build'
   no previously-included directories found matching 'docs/_build/_sources'
   zip_safe flag not set; analyzing archive contents...
   pip: module references __file__
   Adding pip 0.4 to easy-install.pth file
   Installing pip script to /var/www/project/bin
   Installed /var/www/project/lib/python2.5/site-packages/pip-0.4-py2.5.egg
   Processing dependencies for pip
   Finished processing dependencies for pip
   

7. Install setuptools, also using easy_install (for some reason, pip can't install it). There is a trick here, you need to specify at least version 0.6c9 or there will be issues with the SVN version on Debian stable when you try to get Django in the next step.

   (project) /var/www/project$ easy_install setuptools==0.6c9
   Searching for setuptools==0.6c9
   Reading http://pypi.python.org/simple/setuptools/
   Best match: setuptools 0.6c9
   Downloading http://pypi.python.org/packages/2.5/s/setuptools/setuptools-0.6c9-py2.5.egg#md5=fe67c3e5a17b12c0e7c541b7ea43a8e6
   Processing setuptools-0.6c9-py2.5.egg
   Moving setuptools-0.6c9-py2.5.egg to /var/www/project/lib/python2.5/site-packages
   Removing setuptools 0.6c8 from easy-install.pth file
   Adding setuptools 0.6c9 to easy-install.pth file
   Installing easy_install script to /var/www/project/bin
   Installing easy_install-2.5 script to /var/www/project/bin
   Installed /var/www/project/lib/python2.5/site-packages/setuptools-0.6c9-py2.5.egg
   Processing dependencies for setuptools==0.6c9
   Finished processing dependencies for setuptools==0.6c9
   

8. Create a requirements.txt with the path to the Django SVN for pip to install, then and then install it.

   (project) /var/www/project$ cat requirements.txt
   -e svn+http://code.djangoproject.com/svn/django/tags/releases/1.0.3/#egg=Django
   (project) /var/www/project$ pip install -r requirements.txt
   Obtaining Django from svn+http://code.djangoproject.com/svn/django/tags/releases/1.0.3/#egg=Django (from -r requirements.txt (line 1))
     Checking out http://code.djangoproject.com/svn/django/tags/releases/1.0.3/ to ./src/django
   (project) /var/www/project$ pip install -r requirements.txt
   Obtaining Django from svn+http://code.djangoproject.com/svn/django/tags/releases/1.0.3/#egg=Django (from -r requirements.txt (line 1))
     Checking out http://code.djangoproject.com/svn/django/tags/releases/1.0.3/ to ./src/django
   ... so on ...
   

9. Almost there! You can keep installing more Python requirements with pip if you need, but we've got enough here to start.
10. Create a file in /var/www/project called project-python.py. This will be the Python interpreter the webserver uses, and basically exec's itself into the virtalenv. The file should contain the following:

    activate_this = "/var/www/project/bin/activate_this.py"
    execfile(activate_this, dict(__file__=activate_this))
    from django.core.handlers.modpython import handler
    

11. Now it's time to start the Django project. I like to create a new directory called project, which will be the parent directory kept in the SCM with all the code, media, templates, database (if using SQLite) etc. In this way to keep the two environments up-to-date I simply svn ci on one side, and svn co on the other.

    (project) /var/www/project$ mkdir project
    (project) /var/www/project/project$ mkdir db django media www
    (project) /var/www/project/project$ cd django/
    (project) /var/www/project/project/django$ django-admin startproject myproject
    

12. Last step now is to wire-up Apache to serve it all up. The magic is making sure you specify the correct PythonHandler that you made before to use the virtualenv, and include the right paths so you can find it and all the required Django settings.

    DocumentRoot /var/www/project
    <Location "/">
        SetHandler python-program
        PythonHandler project-python
        PythonPath "['/var/www/project/','/var/www/project/project/django/'] + sys.path"
        SetEnv DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE myproject.settings
        PythonDebug On
    </Location>
    Alias /media /var/www/project/project/media
    <Location "/media">
        SetHandler none
    </Location>
    <Directory "/var/www/project/project/media">
        AllowOverride none
        Order allow,deny
        Allow from all
        Options FollowSymLinks Indexes
    </Directory>
    

With all this, you should be up and running in a basic but stable environment. It's easy enough to update packages for security fixes, etc via pip after activating your virtualenv.

Linux 2.6.31 was released today. This was a fairly busy release for the ASoC subsystem, with updates including:

• DAPM supply widget, for automatically managing things like charge pumps and gateable clocks which may be used by more than one widget.
• Core support for setting up constraints for symmetric sample rates (for systems with a shared LRCLK).
• Support for a range of new CODECs: STAC9766, WM8940, WM8960, WM8988, and WM9081
• New CPU support too: MPC5200 AC97 and the I2S interface of the Stretch S6000.

Plus lots of updates and fixes to existing code, especially to the OMAP and TWL4030 drivers.

Lately, while using the Twitter web interface with Javascript turned on, I've been redirected to a Privoxy error page whenever I click on an external link:

Request for blocked URL

Your request for http://twitter.com/link_click_count?url=http%3A%2F%2Fexample.com&linkType=web&tweetId=1234567890&userId=12345678&authenticity_token=f5920ebf56bfa111c54bb9f86814cafa76de00fa was blocked.

Block reason: Path matches generic block pattern.

Looking a little closer at the blocked URL, I noticed that for every external link you click, Twitter logs the destination URL, the originating tweet and your user ID.

So what can you do to opt out of this tracking?
Disable JavascriptThis is by far the easiest solution. You can simply install an extension like Noscript and use Twitter with Javascript turned off. That's what I do most of the time since the website is mostly usable without it.

A very fortunate side-effect of using Twitter without Javascript is that you can avoid a number of the worms which propagate through that service from time to time.
Use Privoxy to disable the link counterFor those times when I have to enable Javascript on the site, I use Privoxy, a great privacy-enhancing web proxy, to alter the Javascript code executed when clicking on external links. This effectively disables the extra tracking and takes me directly to the intended URL.

First of all, make sure you have this line in your /etc/privoxy/config:

filterfile user.filter

then, add this filter to /etc/privoxy/user.filter:

FILTER: twitter-link-count Disable the Twitter link tracker
s@twttr\.countClick=function@twttr.dsbldCountClick=function@Uig

and finally turn this filter on for the affected URLs (/etc/privoxy/user.action):

  +force-text-mode +filter twitter-link-count   
.twimg.com/.*/javascripts/twitter.js

Switch to IdenticaIf you want to avoid similar privacy problems in the future, you can also switch to an Open platform which respects your basic freedoms.

The main contestant in this space is Identica. It's a great alternative to Twitter and has a lot of interesting features (like groups and XMPP integration) which are not yet available on Twitter.

The StatusNet developers have kindly released their source code under the AGPL and their goal is to build the most open micro-blogging system out there.

So go over there now and claim your username!

Thanks to Meebey! Sorry for the being out of touch thing and the not posting anything recently thing. A vacation took me by surprise and clocked me right upside the head. Next on the TODO list:

• Update the dlr-languages package to indicate dependence on the new release
• make sure it builds correctly on my sid box
• present changes to doko
• ???
• profit

It wasn't too long that Kim Clijsters retired from Tennis, with Justine Henin following her not too long after that. At that point, with the next best player, Kirsten Flipkens, being ranked a hundred-something, I thought it'd be a long time before we'd see Belgian women's tennis reappear. Certainly I didn't think we'd be hopeful this year already. As such, I'm delighted to be able to say that not only is Kim Clijsters making a smashing come-back already beating Venus Williams, ranked 3rd on the WTA lists, at the US open, and only a few months after her returning to tennis at that but Yanina Wickmayer, ranked 50-something on the WTA lists by now, has managed to reach the last 16 players. With Kirsten besting her career record by reaching the 3rd round of the US Open (before being ousted by Kim, no less), I feel the future of Belgian Women's tennis is looking very bright indeed. Perhaps I should think about getting that cable subscription, so I can actually watch the matches.

TurboGears 2 packaging - (another) status update Brief status update on TG2 packaging. As expected, this week has been very busy and I'm writing the update offline on a train, but nevertheless I've good news to share:

• a lot of packages uploaded to NEW have been accepted. Please join me in welcoming to the experimental archive: python-toscawidgets, python-repoze.who ,-plugins , python-repoze.what ,-plugins , python-webflash. Thanks to ftp-masters for the quick processing of these days.
• python-tg.devtools (which provides the integration with paster to quickstart TG2 projects) has been both ITP-ed and uploaded to experimental/NEW (as usual, it is also available from my repository on people.d.o, see my first post on TG2 packaging for access details).
• zope.sqlalchemy (build-dep for the tg.devtools tests) has been packaged by the Zope team, and will uploaded "soon"
• the packaging of turbogears2 itself has been resurrected starting from the last work on it in the Python Module Team repository by Gustavo Noronha (which, BTW, has been terribly useful in clarifying various doubts of mine around related software products, thanks Kov!)

... the last item above would theoretically mean that TG2 is already usable, but it is not the case due to the infamous #507909 which breaks both TG2 and TG1 in unstable (the latter was working in Lenny, and I had to resort to a Lenny chroot for a recent course I've taught about web development). In short, turbojson is in unstable, in spite of the lack of several of its dependencies, making impossible any import of it.

• to fix that, I've started by ITP-ing PEAK_rules, but haven't yet had time to complete its packaging. A few more will come next.

..., stay tuned, keep faith, bear with me, almost there, ... etc.

Having (temporarily) flung myself back into a bit of professional Rails app development, I'm doing a JS-heavy site (just to maximise the WTF factor). Since I'm Old Skool, I'm going with Prototype, as it's the javascript library I'm least unfamiliar with. The problem, though, is that I do about a fifth of my work on the train, where I don't have access to the Internet, and the Prototype people haven't seen fit to provide a downloadable version of the docs in HTML. There's a PDF[1], (which lacks any sort of hyperlinking (how very 1990s) and whose page numbering in the TOC doesn't match up to the PDF page numbers), and a CHM which has hyperlinks that don't work half the time. Apart from that, all the docs are online-only, and not very scraping-friendly (wget --mirror doesn't rewrite links correctly when you're also mangling the filenames for local-friendly access -- patch in the making if I can be arsed). So, long story short, I need a non-traditional way to get myself some local docs. Turns out it isn't as hard as it sounds, as evidenced by the below command list:

	git clone git clone git://github.com/sstephenson/prototype.git
	cd prototype
	git submodule init
	git submodule update
	sudo gem install treetop
	rake doc:build

This will peg your CPU for an inordinate amount of time (a smidge over 10 minutes for me; -j 3 would have made things a lot quicker), but you'll end up with a doc/index.html which has some useful stuff in it. It'll look nothing like what's on the website, but it's something, and should be enough to keep me going on those long, lonely train journeys.

---

1. which looks like someone should be expecting a C&D from O'Reilly for look and feel, unless it's a semi-sooper-sekrit O'Reilly production that they don't want to put their name to directly.

Something I have been thinking a lot about lately is why social science and humanities journals have been slower to move toward the land of open access in comparison to the hard sciences. There are a few obvious reasons but there are others which are still a mystery to me. I understand why existing journals can t easily pry away from established relations and obligations so I am not all that surprised that these journals, whether in the hard sciences or soft , have not gone open access. But perhaps newly minted journals are in better position to start right off the bat with an OA agreement. This is what the International Journal of Communication recently did and I am sure there are other examples. So today I was disappointed to find out that the following new Anthropology journal theJournal of Legal Anthropology has seemingly gone down a traditionalist copyright route. But I don t just want to point fingers here as I know editors are often in a very difficult position when seeking sponsorship and support for a new journal. That is, achieving OA, I understand is no walk in the park. And yet given their mission and given that it is a legal journal, it also makes sense to have some sort of open format:

International in scope, we hope it will be accessible beyond a specialist legal anthropology area and, in practice, both widen what is understood within the discipline of anthropology as legal and position the legal as also socio-cultural in terms of contemporary anthropology. The journal is produced by anthropologists interested in making anthropology accessible (translatable) in other settings and disciplines, and by legal practitioners with support from academics working in human rights, conflict and related areas

A walled garden is not suited for the flowers of access to grow. But perhaps they tried and failed. If this is the case, it would also be good to learn of these experiences, which can be used in future cases to pave the path toward greater access.

Something I have been thinking a lot about lately is why social science and humanities journals have been slower to move toward the land of open access in comparison to the hard sciences. There are a few obvious reasons but there are others which are still a mystery to me. I understand why existing journals can t easily pry away from established relations and obligations so I am not all that surprised that these journals, whether in the hard sciences or soft , have not gone open access. But perhaps newly minted journals are in better position to start right off the bat with an OA agreement. This is what the International Journal of Communication recently did and I am sure there are other examples. So today I was disappointed to find out that the following new Anthropology journal theJournal of Legal Anthropology has seemingly gone down a traditionalist copyright route. But I don t just want to point fingers here as I know editors are often in a very difficult position when seeking sponsorship and support for a new journal. That is, achieving OA, I understand is no walk in the park. And yet given their mission and given that it is a legal journal, it also makes sense to have some sort of open format:

International in scope, we hope it will be accessible beyond a specialist legal anthropology area and, in practice, both widen what is understood within the discipline of anthropology as legal and position the legal as also socio-cultural in terms of contemporary anthropology. The journal is produced by anthropologists interested in making anthropology accessible (translatable) in other settings and disciplines, and by legal practitioners with support from academics working in human rights, conflict and related areas

A walled garden is not suited for the flowers of access to grow. But perhaps they tried and failed. If this is the case, it would also be good to learn of these experiences, which can be used in future cases to pave the path toward greater access.

In the last few weeks I needed to write a short utility at $WORK. I decided to use my trusted Common Lisp. Turned out that my old utility still would be ok, but 'upstream' had changed from CSV files to 'json' files.

A short google query, downloading the two libraries that exists to parse these files and within a few minutes I could read and parse the new fileformat.

Don't tell me CL doesn't have libraries...

ObDebian: yes I still need to update cl-irc and package said jason library... it's somewhere in my long todo list.

• Marco d Itri about adding support for yet-unknown-to-kernel-drivers devices. More specifically: how to make udev tell ftdi-sio that it should accept a certain VendorID/ProductID combination in addition to previously supported ones.
• Thomer M. Gil about ICMPTX, a combination made from proxy and server that tunnels IP through ICMP. Nice thing if you need a connection from some NATed and heavily firewalled location I guess. (Thanks go to Runa Sandvik for finding this.)
• Non-technical in a way, but still a nice link: Image of the Shuttle transiting the sun, thanks to Pablo Lorenzzoni for this link.
• Another post by Marco d Itri that explains how to install Debian on a SheevaPlug. Not that I need this info now, but it might come in handy some day.

That s it for now, will update the post if I find more interesting links in the next few days.

This document explains how to use deboostrap --foreign to build from scratch and install a minimal Debian system on the Sheevaplug (but it is equally applicable to many other embedded systems). The only piece missing to be able to install from bare metal is a working kernel and initramfs pair, so this document assumes that you already have a kernel which can mount the root file system from a USB key. For the Sheevaplug, the factory kernel in the internal NAND flash will work fine. The Debian kernel package puts us in a chicken and egg situation: it cannot mount the root without an initramfs (because all drivers are modular), but we cannot build one until we can boot the system. I suppose that, as an exercise of style, somebody could create a minimal initramfs with busybox and the kernel modules needed to mount the root and then mount it manually, but if you really lack a working kernel then it's probably faster to boot the file system image for the first time using qemu and the "versatile" debian-installer target. The first step is to run the first stage of debootstrap on another system (which does not need to be ARM), to build a temporary root file system. I use the --variant and --include options to build the smallest possible system with network support, but they can be omitted.

debootstrap \
         --foreign --arch=armel \
         --variant=minbase \
         --include=linux-image-2.6-kirkwood,module-init-tools,udev,netbase,
                   net-tools,ifupdown,iproute,whiptail,vim-tiny \
         sid ./target/ http://ftp.it.debian.org/debian/

As usual when using debootstrap, some manual configuration is needed:

cd target/
echo bokassa.mi.bofh.it > etc/hostname
vi etc/network/interfaces
vi etc/resolv.conf
echo LANG=C > etc/default/locale
echo '127.0.0.1 localhost' > etc/hosts
cat <<END > etc/fstab
/dev/root / ext3 noatime 0 1
tmpfs /tmp tmpfs defaults 0 0
#/tmp /var/tmp none bind 0 0
END

I took some hints from http://wiki.debian.org/ReadonlyRoot to reduce writes to the flash file system:

# the blkid cache is evil anyway
ln -s /dev/null etc/blkid.tab
# this link will be created anyway by the package
ln -s /var/lib/initscripts/nologin etc/nologin
# it's better to not use a static mtab with modern kernels
ln -s /proc/mounts etc/mtab
# unless you plan to use multiple removable network interfaces, persistent
# interface names are not needed
: > etc/udev/rules.d/75-persistent-net-generator.rules

Two small workarounds are needed:

# if this is not set then the preinst of linux-image-* will die trying
# to ask a debconf question in the debootstrap second stage
echo 'do_initrd = yes' > etc/kernel-img.conf
# a workaround for bug #520742
: > etc/udev/disabled

Now you can format a USB pen drive and copy the root file system on it:

mke2fs /dev/sdb1
tune2fs -i 0 -c 0 /dev/sdb1
mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/
rsync -aH target/ /mnt/
umount /mnt/

After powering the plug press a key to get to the U-Boot prompt and use the factory kernel to boot from USB:

setenv bootargs console=ttyS0,115200 root=/dev/sda1 rootdelay=10 panic=10 init=/bin/bash
run bootcmd

Then you can run the second stage of debootstrap, finish the bare minimal configuration and start init:

./debootstrap/debootstrap --second-stage
# disable the gettys for /dev/tty[1-6], which do not exist
vi /etc/inittab
# and add one for the serial console
echo 'T0:2345:respawn:/sbin/getty -L ttyS0 115200 linux' >> /etc/inittab
# do not forget to set the root password or you will not be able to login...
vi /etc/shadow
rm /etc/udev/disabled
exec /bin/bash
mount / -o ro,remount
exec /sbin/init

Congratulations, now you can login on the system and start to install the packages you like:

echo 'deb http://ftp.it.debian.org/debian/ unstable main' > /etc/apt/sources.list
echo 'APT   Install-Recommends "false";  ;' > /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/no-recommends
apt-get update
# dash is much faster
apt-get install dash
dpkg-divert --add /bin/sh
ln -sf dash /bin/sh
# I do not like these, YMMV
rm /vmlinuz /initrd.img
rmdir /selinux /srv
# the kernel is able to read the time from the RTC by itself, and this
# will allow using a read only root
echo HWCLOCKACCESS=no >> /etc/default/rcS
# faster boot
echo CONCURRENCY=shell >> /etc/default/rcS
# useless on this platform
mv /etc/rcS.d/S01glibc.sh /etc/rcS.d/K01glibc.sh
dpkg-reconfigure tzdata
apt-get install openssh-server screen iptables wget less

U-Boot requires that the kernel and initramfs have a special header:

apt-get uboot-mkimage
cd /boot/
mkimage -A arm -O linux -T kernel  -C none -a 0x00008000 -e 0x00008000 \
  -n Linux-2.6.29-2 -d vmlinuz-2.6.29-2-kirkwood uImage
mkimage -A arm -O linux -T ramdisk -C gzip -a 0x00000000 -e 0x00000000 \
  -n initramfs -d initrd.img-2.6.29-2-kirkwood uInitrd

Now you can reboot and configure u-boot to boot from the USB device. This is the variables scheme I like and it is not mandatory in any way, so I recommend that you read and understand the existing configuration before modifying it (some lines have been broken for readability):

setenv bootargs_nand $(bootargs)
setenv bootcmd_nand $(bootcmd)
setenv bootargs_root root=/dev/sda1
setenv bootargs_misc 'ro panic=10
  mtdparts=nand_mtd:0x400000@0x100000(uImage),0x1fb00000@0x500000(rootfs)'
setenv bootcmd_usb 'usb start; ext2load usb 0:1 0x00200000 /boot/uImage;
  ext2load usb 0:1 0x01100000 /boot/uInitrd'
setenv bootcmd 'setenv bootargs $(console) $(bootargs_root) $(bootargs_misc)
  $(bootargs_more); run bootcmd_usb; bootm 0x00200000 0x01100000'

Since now you are not using anymore the Marvell kernel tree it is mandatory to set these two variables and reboot:

setenv mainlineLinux yes
setenv arcNumber 2097
saveenv
reset

Installation to SD is identical, but requires an updated version of U-Boot with SD support. Due to a kernel bug which prevents autoloading the driver you will need to add mvsdio and mmc_block to /etc/initramfs-tools/modules and rebuild the initramfs. (Yes, the naming theme I use at home is "african dictators"...)

So I am sipping some hot chocolate made from a recently purchased cream substitute by the name of Mimiccreme. Honestly, the stuff tastes good and better, it froths, unlike most non-dairy substitutes. Yet there is a hitch (there always is). As I was whisking away at my cream (mixed with water), I was staring blankly at the box and noticed that they have applied for a patent, which is indeed the case. Since their formula is made out of nuts, their motto is Not Crazy Just Nuts and if they are granted the patent (though I am confused as to what they are trying to patent) it will be Nuts and Crazy as well. update: Ettienne pointed us in the comments to the the patent application

There is a lot of madness when it comes to psychiatry. One recent example of madness perhaps insanity is this faux peer review journal. At least there seems to be a growing counter-current in medicine that wants to sever the umbilical cord between doctors and drug companies as well as a vibrant grass roots move to embrace a different politics in and of madness.

What seems like eons ago, I ordered one of those SheevaPlug Development Kits. After about six weeks, they got around to shipping it, and then, yesterday, after I assume a tortoise had piloted it across the country on broken tricycle, it was finally delivered to me. I booted it up, observed that there was some kind of Ubuntu thing on it, and set myself to correct that problem. Within an hour I had managed to lock myself out. Here is something I should have read beforehand. Thanks to Martin Michlmayr, it is now running Debian and allowing me to log in. Here are some steps to follow if you would like to boot Debian off of a USB stick plugged into your Sheevaplug:

• Grab the tarball from http://people.debian.org/~tbm/sheevaplug/lenny/
• Make an ext3 filesystem on the first partition of your USB stick (ext2 will not work with the current image)
• Mount the USB stick's filesystem, unpack the tarball onto it, then unmount
• Plug the USB stick into the SheevaPlug's full-sized USB port
• Plug the SheevaPlug in, and use minicom or your favorite terminal program to console in over the mini-USB port (don't forget that you need to use the ftdi_sio module instead of usbserial; 115200,N,8,1, no flow control)
• Abort the autoboot, and type the following commands:

  setenv mainlineLinux yes
  setenv arcNumber 2097
  saveenv
  reset
  setenv bootargs_root 'root=/dev/sda1 rootdelay=10'
  setenv bootcmd_usb 'usb start; ext2load usb 0:1 0x0800000 /boot/uInitrd; ext2load usb 0:1 0x400000 /boot/uImage'
  setenv bootcmd 'setenv bootargs $(console) $(bootargs_root); run bootcmd_usb; bootm 0x400000 0x0800000'
  saveenv
  run bootcmd
  

That should be all there is to it. Next I'm wondering if SDIO wireless cards work.

A few weeks ago I wrote up a short review of Bernhard Pfaff's nice (but somewhat dry) Analysis of Integrated and Cointegrated Time Series with R (2nd ed) on unit root and cointegration modeling with R. This is now online at the Journal of Statistical Software.