Slow sunday afternoon? Choose a release goal and work on it!

Yesterday I focused on the goal-recommends issue: No unmet recommends relations inside main. I worked from 18:00 pm to 2:00am, aprox, and 32 bugs were closed.

16 Non Maintainer Uploads, closing 21 bugs:
* delo  (Closes: #378221, #414389, #416161, #452953)
* gpib  (Closes: #430998)
* php-net-smtp (Closes: #369273)
* rpc2 (Closes: #377829) (NMU Overriden by maintainer)
* rvm (Closes: #377410) (NMU Overriden by maintainer)
* smooth-themes (Closes: #379195)
* xmltex (Closes: #429564)
* acpitool (Closes: #436637)
* asciidoc (Closes: #452470)
* chasen (Closes: #363196, #452474)
* cl-screen-sbcl (Closes: #436641, #460444)
* cpufreqd (Closes: #436647)
* denemo (Closes: #439929)
* lacheck (Closes: #448911)
* sablevm (Closes: #346071)
* ddcontrol-db (Closes: #436649)

Filed for removal, will close 3 bugs:
* digikamimageplugins-doc (Closes: #448904)
* free-java-sdk (Closes: #429306, #401492)
* php4-apd Filed for removal by KiBi (Closes: #418319)

Orphaning uploads, closing 2 bugs:
* xcin2.3 (Closes: #276885)
* gnochm (Closes: #429304)

Packages only present in oldstable, closing 4 bugs:
* eagle-usb-utils (Closes: #448905)
* zd1211 (Closes: #378725)
* python-pysnmp4 (Closes: #377075)
* lessdisks-terminal (Closes: #361939)

Bugs marked fixed but never properly closed, closing 2 bugs:
* araneida (Closes: #436638)
* gtk2-engines-murrine (Closes: #430999)

That leaves a total of 2 bugs remaining to finish the release goal:
* #436650: syslinux: Please build (at least a subset of) syslinux for all arches
* #448890: bioperl: recommends packages not in main (pending, serious)

These don't seem trivial to fix, anyone dares to step in?

(Updated: Monday, March 31 2008 17:50)

OK, been quiet for a few days, at least on the blog, but in accordance with typical behaviour (for me at least) a quiet blog means a lot of things going on elsewhere. The smallest was a fix for deb-gview - combining a fix for opening files in the current working directory with a fix for the imminent dpkg 1.14.17 which modified the .changes file format a bit. That was relatively easy and I've uploaded 0.2.1 to unstable. gvfs hasn't made testing yet so there's no point in waiting for deb-gview to migrate before 0.2.1.
The largest change? Depends how you define large:

1. Large number of changes to package files - emdebian-tools 1.0.0
2. Large effect on Emdebian workload - dpkg 1.14.17

dpkg
dpkg bugs closed - emdebian-tools 1.0.0 pending - dpkg-shlibdeps is now able to look into directories containing libraries used by cross-built binaries provided that the right environment variable are set. Closes: #453267. dpkg-buildpackage will set PKG_CONFIG_LIBDIR (but not override an existing value) in case of cross-compilation so that pkgconfig finds .pc files in the directory specific to the target architecture. Closes: #439979.
These two changes will have a major effect on the overall workload required within Emdebian and give us a sane cross-building environment in Lenny which is ABSOLUTELY $^ @&*! FANTASTIC. Currently, 1.14.17 is in experimental but I've installed it on my system for testing purposes so that I can complete emdebian-tools 1.0.0:
emdebian-tools 1.0.0
Now here, I'm making some progress. A bug has been bothering me for some time with how emdebian-tools needs a Debian primary mirror to calculate various dependency information and other apt cache stuff whilst taking into account the host architecture. Simon and I now think that we can do the dependency stuff with a continually updated dpkg-cross repository and I can use libcache-apt-perl for the rest. So whereas dpkg-cross might still exist into Lenny, it is looking like apt-cross might not - at least not as an application. However, I'm not taking that step with emdebian-tools just yet. In the meantime, I'm simply using debconf to replace the automated selection of a Debian Primary Mirror and passing that mirror to apt-cross - something I should probably have setup a while ago.
As well as that bug fix, I've added a check to emchain so that users are warned if they don't actually need to run it, added the mirror support to the various scripts and removed the workarounds now fixed by dpkg.
'dpkg-buildpackage -a' is usable for nearly all packages once you have dpkg-dev >= 1.14.7. emdebuild >= 1.0.0 is only necessary IF:

1. You want to modify/update Emdebian patches (not just apply them) - i.e. if you have commit access to Emdebian SVN.


2. You need the one remaining wrapper: 'X-Build-Cross-Libtool: yes' which is my next main target. This is a package-specific problem and each incidence needs a package-specific solution via an appropriate patch. As such, the wrapper is likely to stay in place in emdebuild for some considerable time - at least until someone can rebuild the entire archive with a test that can identify which packages are still affected.


3. You want the build checks currently implemented by emdebuild but which I plan to spin out during the life of emdebian-tools 1.x. I want to standardise those build checks and abstract them into possibly a lintian-compatible check set.

Also, there should now be no need for any wrapper scripts that anyone may have devised to mangle LD_LIBRARY_PATH or PKG_CONFIG_LIBDIR - indeed,
explicit support for these within dpkg means that it is to be considered harmful from now on to touch these variables, except possibly in some specific corner cases.

OpenStreetMap party at Kaohsiung, Taiwan Apparently, yesterday we had the first OpenStreetMap event in Taiwan! We met in a caf /restaurant equipped with power plug, wireless network and overhead projector and we had a bit of an introduction, chat and lunch. Then we split in groups and exploited the fact that the newly built underground (KMRT) system is still free of charge, to spread around and map around the stations. Finally, we reconvened at someone's house to see how to put the data together, draw roads, tag and upload. Highlights of the day:

• How to turn a serial GPS into a data logger with 6 hours battery life . Then attach it to your bike using magnets from broken hard drives. Totally rocks!
• Previous OpenStreetMap data was collected by only one person, who took the fancy new High Speed Rail from the opposite side of the country and joined the party. This also made discussion about standardising tags for Taiwan rather easy.
• A group of people appeared wielding a number of "totally insane in every regard" Garmin GPSMAP units: it turns out they are with a civil action group that goes around mapping historical trails, abandoned railroads, aboriginal routes and mountain crosses and so on. Apparently, they did not know about OpenStreetMap: hopefully they'll join in.

Technical bits:

• The eeePC was very popular, and very handy for going around storing tracks, as you can just chuck it in one bag. JOSM runs fine, although it could really use an interface redesign to fit in the small screen. In fact, it could really use an interface redesign to fit in the standard 1024x768 screen of my laptop.
• We could not use the tracks made with the Garmins because we did not know we had to do "Setup -> Map -> Lock On Road = Off" and it was on by default. Now we know it for next time.
• Something like a SirfStarIII really helps in a city made mainly of very tall buildings with lots of steel and glass. My Sony-based cheap gps receiver that worked ok in the Bolognese countryside was next to useless here, continously losing the fix and producing a crazy zigzagging track of doom, only useful to figure out big long straight roads.
• Geocorrelation of digital camera pictures rocks! Who needs to store waypoints when you can just take pictures with the digital camera and have them show up as waypoints in JOSM? The trick of taking a picture of the GPS time and use that to compute time offset is great. Also, we found it easier to just fire up gpscorrelate to do the geocorrelation rather than figuring out how the tools in JOSM work.

Issues to address:

• There is a strong need for a zh_TW translation plugin of JOSM; I'll try to find out how to do it and pass on the information to who can do it.
• Road names could be written either in English or in Chinese characters. Currently English has been used for the name tag because osmarender cannot render Chinese characters. There is some planining to create an OSM mirror in Taiwan which renders twice, and allows to choose the rendering language for the map. I will try to get a planet.osm extract for Taiwan that people can use to experiment with this; thanks to people in #osm for giving me names of people to contact. I will try later after Europe wakes up from this even-earlier-than-usual sunday morning.

Via Lifehacker, legal cost-free books under copyright from Wowio. This is a great idea, and I give it even odds for being the future of books. (Or at least, part of books’ future).

What is WOWIO?
WOWIO is a new kind of online bookstore that enables readers to download ebooks for free, using commercial sponsorships to compensate authors and publishers. Readers get free ebooks. Sponsors get a powerful new channel to communicate their message to precisely the people they want to reach. Publishers get a new means of distributing their books, expanding their readership, and monetizing their intellectual property.

Does WOWIO use any kind of digital rights management (DRM)?
Since anyone can defeat the most “sophisticated” DRM with the print screen button, we believe that technology-based DRM is essentially a fraud. Our approach takes the market incentive out of misbehaving, rewards people for doing the right thing, and tries to stay out of the way of honest users. To help keep everyone honest, however, readers must authenticate their identity and agree to a licensing agreement when they set up their account. Then, each ebook is serialized with the reader’s authenticated name and a unique serial number, as well as other less visible markers. WOWIO will immediately terminate the account of anyone caught illegally distributing ebooks, and will prosecute serious offenders.

Technorati Tags: Wowio, Books, DRM, Digital Rights Management, Copyright

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Last week I went to Puerto Rico to take my so-called spring break to visit my mom. I expected a semi-relaxing visit as her caretaker, Milagro, would be around and I also expected one last visit with my mother before embarking on the difficult process of moving her into a nursing home, which I planed to do over the summer. But a day and a half after I arrived, we brought her to the hospital because she basically had stopped eating and even drinking water and now that she has been released from the hospital, she has been placed in a nursing home. We brought my mom to the hospital because she was malnourished and dehydrated. To admit her was an exercise in managing a fireball of pure fury. Even if she was weak, she mustered every last piece of her energy so as to transform herself from a little old lady to a little old lady of pure Russian terror, unleashing her wrath left and right, not to mention up and down. But well, thanks to her (I think, somewhat calculated) wrath, at least they took her in immediately (despite a truly truly packed packed emergency room). Once inside, it took 4 nurses and her caretaker to put the initial IV in her arm and then they threw in a little haldol to calm her down. We waited nearly a day to find out that her doctor, Dra Nazario ordered a feeding tube without consulting with me or my sister (of course at some point they would need consent). At first I did not want a feeding tube put in her. But after talking with various nurses and other family members in the hospital with parents with Alzheimers, I decided to go for it. It is clear that my mom just does not eat enough and when she does, she eats poorly and I did not want to go through another traumatic visit in the emergency room at some future date to do the same. After her operation and after a few days of getting food, she was conscious but barely so. She did not want to talk, did not seem to be able to talk, and this of course, was heartbreaking because we thought that the operation, 4 days without food, and the really difficult hospital entry did her over. But once she developed slight pneumonia and an UTI, funny enough, she actually came back to life pretty much as she was before the hospital (which is still pretty limited but at least she did not seem any worse and it will be interesting to see what happens after she gets proper nutrition for a few weeks). So in the last 9 days I spent a lot of time in the hospital, more than I have ever spent in one. Let’s face it they are creepy places and exude a low-level, sometimes higher grade level of architectural and atmospheric grossness. The smell is so distinct: part disinfectant, part something that I can only describe as that of pre-death (or pre-rot), a smell that especially lingers for it co-mingles with the palpable sense of anxiety and worry (and tiredness) that family members carry with them. I took my mom to Hospital Pavia, which is supposedly one of the better hospitals in the San Juan metropolitan areas, and like 3 minutes from my house. And generally things were orderly and run well but there were a few times, when I was floored and beyond livid by they way they treated my mother and it is clear that a hospital is only as good as the doctors and the ability of the nurses to carry out their orders correctly. (more…)

As I type this my internet connection is being once again powered by my DG834G. It's also very dark, but that's because I'm observing Earthhour (I don't think it'll change the world, but I don't mind sitting in the dark that much and there's only me in the house). After my last OpenWRT/AR7 experiment I thought I'd bricked the Netgear. I ended up using my BT Home Hub as a stop gap solution and wondered how to proceed. I bought a Conexant Accessrunner USB modem and tried it with the WGT634U. This proved more stable than the USB Speedtouch, but still resulted in a couple of line drops a day at least. AR7 still seemed the way forward. I picked up a D-Link DSL-502T off eBay. This has a USB port, an ethernet port and no wireless. However it's AR7 based and has 4MB of flash and 16MB of RAM; the same as the Netgear. It also has a serial header already soldered on, so it was easy to connect my level shifter up and have a play. I built up a recent OpenWRT and managed to install it successfully and then hook it up to my ADSL. All seemed quite stable and I was feeling pretty happy. In parallel with this I'd picked up a cheap D-Link G604T off eBay - this has a 4 port switch and wireless and is basically the same hardware as the Netgear. It was listed as faulty, but I was hoping to be able to use it for parts or at the very least for testing. As it turned out it worked perfectly; didn't need to reflash it or anything to get it going. I put the image I had working on the 502T on it and hooked it up. Again, everything seemed stable. I managed to get the wireless detected ok, but the driver doesn't seem to support AP mode that well - there are big warnings in dmesg when you enable it. It's an acx111 chipset and unfortunately there doesn't seem to be a lot of upstream activity - there's some work on a version using the in kernel 802.11 stack, but it doesn't currently compile with 2.6.24 AFAICT. Anyway. I had working ADSL with OpenWRT, albeit without wireless (having the switch was useful though, as the router lives beside the media box but also needs to be connected to the switch upstairs in the study). I'd chased Enta a week ago about IPv6 but still not heard anything, so I gave them another prod. This time I got a speedy response indicated my account was now enabled for IPv6 and providing me with a /64. I added +ipv6 to /etc/ppp/options and restarted PPP and it all just started working. In addition I've configured up radvd on the box so everything on the ethernet autoconfigs. Flush with the success of all this I thought I'd try my Netgear again and see if it was really dead or if I could get the original firmware back on it. For some reason that worked first time and the router booted fine. So I thought I'd try OpenWRT again, given that I had an image I knew worked fine on another AR7 router - if it didn't work on the Netgear I'd know there was some sort of hardware difference or problem rather than a build issue. And it worked. My DG834G is now running OpenWRT SVN r10685, doing IPv6 and generally everything I need except for wireless. I've updated my DG834G page a little bit, including a link to the OpenWRT config I'm using. Hopefully the wireless will get there; certainly most chipsets seem to be getting much improved upstream support these days and I'm sure it must be possible for the ACX guys to make use of the in kernel stack to reduce their work.

As blogged before, Debian is in the Google Summer of Code 2008.So far, we have rather few applications - much less than last year. This doesn't seem specific to Debian, other organizations have also been reporting fewer applications, and Google is considering a deadline extension. Maybe the low number is related to Easter holidays. Also at least at my university the summer term will start only on April 1st, just past the deadline. So many students probably are still away in holiday.Anyway: if you are interested in participating in the Google Summer of Code, chances are still pretty good. We don't have too many applications yet; not even all of the projects on the Wiki Ideas page have received a submission yet, only a few have received more than one; and even with those a well-written submission standas a good chance. Also some new ideas have been added in the meantime.In particular missing from our submissions list are:

• MergeMaster port
• debexpo
• CDD webtools
• security policy

(see the Wiki page for details on these projects).Especially the lack of a submission for the MergeMaster port is surprising. Many people would love to see a good configuration file merging tool in Debian. I can only guess that people are thinking "awh, everybody is going to submit an application for this one, I don't have a chance here". You currenlty DO have a chance, because there is no single proposal in for this one yet!If you have any questions, IRC channel #debian-soc in OFTC is pretty useful.

There are many reasons to hate Java, it's like shooting fish in a barrel. But in the last weeks I found some more, half of them aren't even fault of the standard API (the usual culprit), and I want to share my frustration with the rest of the world. It has no unsigned types Say you want to manage binary protocols, files, etc. You'd like to store and retrieve bytes and words in machine format, of course, but you'll have a hard time finding the right value because you can't have a goddamn unsigned byte! So if you want —for example— to read the length of a string which can be bigger than 127 as a single byte, you'll end doing some aberration like this:

byte strl = foo_retrieve_byte();
int real_strl = strl < 0 ? 256 + strl : strl;

You can't inherit constructors Maybe there's something in the OOP dogma that mandates this, but if I want to define a new exception that does nothing, but allows me to differentiate a custom class of errors, I don't want to explicitly write dummy constructors instead of writing an empty class —which is simpler and cleaner— and have the four standard exception constructors for free. So, you'll have to do this:

public class FooException extends BarException  
	public FooException()   super();  
	public FooException(String s)   super(s);  
	public FooException(Throwable t)   super(t);  
	public FooException(String s, Throwable t)   super(s, t);  
 

Instead of this:

public class FooException extends BarException    

You can't declare destructors Say you've coded a nifty jdbc wrapper that automates most of the boring stuff, like automatically freeing the connection to the connection pool when there was an exception thrown, logs errors and maybe queries, handles auto-commit settings, etc. In the simple case, you'd create an instance, do some work, and then close the connection; if there was an SQL exception, you little class will take care of it and re-throw. BUT, if in the middle of your work in the calling code, you have an unrelated exception, you need to catch it or you'll leak connections, because the wrapper class doesn't have a way of handling this, even if the object gets garbage collected! In the end, I had to write tons of times the same stupid code:

try  
	j = JdbcWrapper.new(foo);
	j.doSelect(bar);
	unrelatedObject.unrelatedMethod();
	j.doUpdate(baz);
  finally  
	j.close();
 

You don't have a sane way of controlling the terminal Most of the time, when dealing with web applications, you won't need this. But when you're doing some serious stuff, you might need to write a CLI application (oh, noes!); and then do some stupid thing like asking the console to stop echoing characters so you can ask for a password. You'd think that the smart guys that designed Java would have devised an portable library to handle this trivial task, but no! Guess what I found when looking at a way of doing this? Some idiot at SUN recommending (and many dummies following) a background thread that spits backspaces faster than the user can write! Of course, SUN will tell you that using Strings is insecure for storing passwords, because they cannot be wiped out like byte arrays. But they fail to mention something as basic as not showing the fucking password in the first place, or something as important as wiping the object after using it: you can't lock memory from Java, so you risk that it could end in some slack in the swap file. No, you can't leave stdin/stdout/stderr fscking alone! When dealing with the previous problem, you say fuck portability and just call stty -echo to do the job. Well, you'll find a little surprise! Even if you don't ask for the process' reader/writer streams, the Runtime class will pipe(2) and dup(2) your child process' standard streams. With this excellent approach you cannot have a child process output stuff to the user, nor even errors; you cannot allow the child process access the tty (stty obviously can't do shit with a piped stdin). And there's no fucking way to tell it to stop crippling your standard streams! The only solution I could find was a very ugly shell hack:

Process p = Runtime.getRuntime().exec(
	new String[] "sh", "-c", "stty echo > /dev/tty < /dev/tty 2>&1" 
);

No, you can't handle signals After doing the previous hack, you find that if you interrupt your process while waiting for user input, your console will remain in noecho state. So the obvious thing is to catch SIGINT and friends and call stty again to restore the console. HA! You will find that there's no standard way of doing that, and if you really need it, you have to resort to undocumented com.sun.* classes which aren't even guaranteed to be present in every JVM. My solution was to set up a shutdown hook, which solved this problem, but would not solve other very common problems that are solved usually with signal handlers. Tags: Planet Lugfi, Planet Debian

El Reg reviewed the Archos 705 yesterday. They only gave it 50%, which I think is a little harsh. I bought one of these back in November when they first came out, as something to help easy my daily commute by train. I have to say I don't regret the purchase; while there are various niggles that annoy me it basically does what I want. My main drive was the size of the screen. There are plenty of options available if you want in the region of 4", but I wanted something bigger that could still be shoved in a bag without any hassle. The 705's 7" screen is great. I can sit it on the tray table on the train and it gives a clear viewable image that doesn't leave me squinting trying to see it. The second concern was the battery life. At 7" you start to get into the UMPC area. However there didn't seem to be anything around that both offered enough battery life and had the grunt to decode DivX. I need a guaranteed 2hrs (ideally a bit longer) so I can watch something without being interrupted. I've certainly had over 3hrs on the Archos and various reviews claim it'll do 5hr for video without problems. Archos call the 705 a DVR. I've no idea why; I certainly wouldn't consider it one. I have the DVR station, but I've only used it to connect the Archos up to a hotel room TV and never for actually recording anything. There's no tuner (neither analog nor digital), so you need a Freeview/cable/satellite or similar box to provide a signal. Plus it seems pointless to convert a digital TV signal to analog and then for the Archos to have to re-encode it. Much more sane to record TV on your PVR and pull the file off that and onto the 705. Except there you hit a bit of a problem. By default the Archos supports DivX and WMV. To get MPEG2 or H.264 support, or indeed AC3 audio, you need to pay extra for a license that will enable the appropriate codec. This is annoying and I've ended up just using mencoder to convert Freeview records to an Archos friendly format rather than shelling out more for the codecs. Archos do seem to have dropped the ball here. The MPEG2 license fee seems to be $2.50 per device. The TI licensing seems to be about $2 for MPEG2 + AC3. Archos sell the plugin for €19.99. I doubt AC3 licensing is over $15, which rules out Archos merely keeping the cost down for customers by allowing them to pick and chose which codecs they want to avoid paying license fees. The 705 also comes with a web browser. Which, of course, you have to pay for. I ended up getting this thrown in with my 705 + DVR station bundle. It's powered by Opera and reasonable enough. The only time I've really made use of it is while staying in a hotel; it was quite nifty to have the 705 hooked up to the TV and be able to lie on the bed with the keyboard remote control and lookup film times or interesting places to go. Internet access is provided by wifi; if it had bluetooth as well then I might make use of it on the train, but as it is it's not really something I use much. As I said at the start I'm still happy with my purchase. It's not a cheap item, but it has the screen size and battery life I wanted and there wasn't a lot else out that offered both. Having to pay for codecs is a bad move on Archos' part, but I've avoided doing so by re-encoding. If you want something that's a decent media player of this size then the 705 is definitely worth considering; if you're not sure about the size aspect you may be better off with a 605 (the 4.3" screen version) or even something from Cowon (who unfortunately don't seem to have anything in the 7" range). Finally, if you already own a generation 5 Archos device, you might be interested to know that shell access has been obtained. The device is pretty locked down (signed kernel modules, no /dev/mem, signed root cramfs filesystem), but there's an arcwelder exploit to get an ssh login over wifi and an Archos Hacking forum on Archosfans.

Some time ago, I packaged statsvn, a pretty neat SVN repository analysis tool based on statcvs. To be truthful, I was quite amazed that no one had packaged it before, as I find it quite handy. It is currently in contrib, as it depends on statcvs that depends on libjfreechart-java that currently only works with Sun's java on AMD64 machines (at least, see the bug report). A few comments about it: though it can work fine with remote repositories, it is highly recommended that you either take down the number of -threads, as many repositories out there do not like too many concurrent ssh accesses, or you rsync the whole repository to your local hard drive and work from a checkout of the local copy, as it will burn much less bandwidth and server time. Of course, statistics of this kind are not to be taken too seriously, as they can be seriously biased by commit mistakes for instance, but they give the impression that work is being done, and that is pleasant ;-)...

If you noticed, a lot of services I run were offline last night. This is because either Supermicro or Micron sucks (I haven’t decided which), and the motherboard of that server got fried. Luckily, it’s nice replacement was also ready on the same evening. So, everything is restored from backups. If I missed something, please let me know about it. On another note, the replacement has AMD Opterons and a much larger RAM capacity. 16 slots!

Yesterday, I read an article on CNN called From $70K to food bank.

It describes a woman who was laid off in February from a job paying $70,000 a year. "Weeks later", with bills "piling up and in need of food for her family", she went to a food bank.

The article proceeds to talk about the subprime lending situation at great length, which is largely irrelevant to this person's situation.

Then we learn she applied for food stamps, but was denied. There's a quote from this person about how frustrating that was, and general "tugging at the heartstrings" trying to make us feel sorry for this woman with two children whose mother moved in to help make the house payment. It seems to me that this is a correct decision; someone that can pay a $2500 mortgage each month ought to move into an apartment before trying to leech food or money from social service agencies.

And that's where this story gets interesting.

She has an interest-only mortgage, and is managing to pay the $2500 bill each month.

If you're not familiar with an interest-only mortgage, here's how it works. The bank loans you money to buy your house -- say, $200,000. This is a loan, and you have to pay interest on it each month, just like a regular mortgage. But with an interest-only mortgage, you never pay off the loan. You could be making monthly payments for 30 years and still owe $200,000. In general, the only ways to "pay off" this kind of loan is to sell your house, or get a conventional mortgage that pays off the interest-only loan.

Interest-only mortgages were largely banned after the Great Depression. Prior to that time, they were how mortgages normally worked. But there are several problems with them. One is that you have to pay on them forever, even after you retire. Another is that you can't move unless you can sell your house for at least as much as the bank financed, even if you've lived there for 20 years. In times of declining housing prices and unemployment, that really stinks. People often default on the loans, and from a bank's perspective, that really stinks, too.

Interest-only mortgages are usually used by banks financing construction (we had one for a few months when we renovated our farmhouse) or other short-term projects such as professional real-estate investors that buy old houses and fix them up to sell at a profit. Except for these things, in general, they should never be used for a primary house. It's not in the interest of the bank or the homeowner.

But since you never pay off the principal, the monthly payments can be lower. It seems likely that this woman took a knowing gamble, buying a home more expensive than she could afford, and somehow found a bank willing to finance this. Problem is, both she and the bank took a knowing risk. If she ever ran into financial difficulties, she'd have to sell the house quick. But now the house is probably worth less than the value of the mortgage, so selling it won't remove the loan -- BUT it would let her pay off a large part of the principal, reducing her monthly payments and giving her some wiggle-room to buy food and pay off the rest of it.

It seems to me that she is unwilling to own up to the calculated risk she took, and wants society to help bail her out. Don't get me wrong; I think we need to help people that run into hard times. We need to help make sure they still have the tools they need to find a job and a place to stay. But bailing out people that take huge financial risks shouldn't be the job of society. Let's help them land softly, but not be enablers keeping them in a home they never could -- and still can't -- afford. Fortunately, I don't think anyone in government (or running for president) is suggesting we should.

Not only that, but her bank shouldn't have ever made that loan. Banks should be held accountable to not sell unwise products to people that rely on them for their primary residences.

Here's another interesting point: in just a few weeks, she had burned through her entire savings.

This, unfortunately, is a quite typical situation for many Americans. My financial planner, and I think most experts, suggest that everyone ought to have 6 months of income in liquid non-retirement assets (savings accounts, investments, etc.) in case something like a layoff happens. Very few Americans have this.

And when it comes down to it, isn't that part of the problem? The economy thrives on consumer spending. Or, put more starkly, overconsumption. If people start saving like they ought to, and stop feeling like they're outcasts just for not keeping up with the Joneses and buying every last gadget or the biggest house, we'd all be in better shape -- but the economy wouldn't have grown as much.

The growth it would have seen, had we all been more responsible, would have been a lot more durable and recession-proof, I think.

NMs, I’ve just realized who’s gonna help you. Her name is Morgan le Fay.

Adria — You will all burn in the fires of eternal DAMnation.
Morgan le Fay — Not if I have anything to do with it!

Stargate: The Ark of Truth (1:29:18)

At the moment I’ve got more time to work on these things than I have had for a while. I’ve got Etch support going quite well (see my post about my Etch repository [1]), the next step is to back-port some packages for AMD64 to get it working as well as i386. I’ve got an i386 Xen server for SE Linux development (which is also used for my Play Machine’s [2] DomU - so it’s definitely not for anything secret). I can give accounts and/or DomU’s to people who have a good use for them (the machine has 512M of RAM so could have 4-5 DomU’s). Currently it seems that the 2.6.24 kernel in Debian doesn’t work for Xen (at least on with an i686 CPU). I have filed bug report #472584 about it not working as a DomU [3]. This combined with the fact that according to bug report #466492 it doesn’t work as a Dom0 (which I have verified in my own tests) [4] makes the package linux-image-2.6.24-1-xen-686 unusable. Due to the inability to use 2.6.24 Xen I can’t do SE Linux development for Lenny in a DomU (Lenny tools build policy version 21 and the Etch kernel I’m using only supports policy version 20). So I have repurposed one of my servers for Lenny (unstable) development. I can give user accounts on that machine to anyone who has a good reason (and there are some people who I would give root access to if they need it). The current policy packages in Unstable are built without MCS support. This is a problem as converting between a policy which has MCS or MLS and one which doesn’t is rather painful (purge policy, reinstall policy, and reboot are all required steps). I have filed bug report #473048 with a patch for this - my patch may not actually be much good (I don’t understand some aspects of Manoj’s code) but it does achieve the desired result [5]. I won’t be making Apt repositories for such things as I expect that the changes will get into Debian fast enough. The next thing I am starting to work on is MLS support for Debian (currently it only supports the Strict and Targeted policies). See the Multilevel Security Wikipedia page for some background information on the technology [6]. I don’t expect that many people will use MLS on Debian in production environments, and it wouldn’t surprise me if no-one used it on a production server (although of course it would be impossible to prove this). But I still believe that it’s worth having for educational purposes. I am sure that there are packages in Debian of a similar size that will get less use so it’s not a waste of disk space on mirror servers! The only real down-side to adding MLS support is that it will increase the build time for the Debian SE Linux policy packages, currently they take 13 minutes to build on a 1.1GHz Celeron system (the Xen server I mentioned previously) and I expect that the machine in question will have build times greater than 20 minutes with MLS included. I will probably need to set up an Unstable DomU on a dual-core 64bit machine for the sole purpose of building policy packages. I will also have to investigate use of the “-j” option to make when building the policy to take advantage of the dual cores. I often do small tweaks to policy and it’s annoying to have to wait for any length of time for a result. The version of Coreutils that is currently in Unstable will have ls display a “+” character for every file when running SE Linux (I have filed bug report #472590) about this [7]. It is being actively discussed and at this stage it seems most likely that the functionality from Etch in this regard will be restored (which is using “+” to represent ACLs only not SE Linux contexts). It seems likely to me that I will find a few other issues of a similar nature now that I have started seriously working on Unstable. For the benefit of Debian and upstream developers who get involved in such discussions, please do not be put off if you join a discussion that is CC’d to the NSA SE Linux mailing list and have your message rejected by the list server. The code of conduct is much the same on most mailing lists, and the SE Linux list is not much different to others. The difference is that before your get your email address white-listed for posting you have to agree to the terms of service for the list. The people who run the list server appear to work more than 40 hours a week so there should not be a great delay. If anyone wants to get a message about Debian SE Linux development sent to the list without delay on a weekend then they can send it to me for forwarding. I am aware of some discussions about SE Linux and the Debian installer. I have not responded to them yet because I wanted to get some serious coding done first as an approach of “I haven’t done much coding recently but trust me I’ll fix the problems for you” might not be accepted well. I will start investigating these issues as soon as I have my Debian/Unstable server working well in enforcing mode. Update: I’ve just filed bug report #473067 with a patch to enable MLS policy builds [8].

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2007/10/19/my-se-linux-etch-repository/


• [2] http://www.coker.com.au/selinux/play.html


• [3] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=472584


• [4] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=466492


• [5] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=473048


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


• [7] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=472590


• [8] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=473067

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There is one particular aspect of Microsoft’s document format going through ISO process that I had a hard time to find a counter-argument against: “Well it is better to have multiple open formats, isn’t it?”. Last night when I was presenting in a Document Freedom Day event, I finally got one. When multiple standards exist in the same area, two options can exist:

1. Cooperative standards - providing similar functionality in different ways that can coexist in the same medium without a significant overhead. An example of this are the credit cards - they have multiple ways that the card information can be transferred to the bank: visual writing down of the data, imprint, magnetic strip and the chip. Any of these ways can be used and all of the are equally valid;
2. Conflicting standards - providing the same functionality in incompatible ways. The example here is the power adaptors - the form of the power plug is an open and public standard (AFAIK), but so many of them exist in different places that it creates all sorts of problems both for companies producing electronic equipment and for frequent travellers.

What Microsoft proposes is much worse than the power plug mess, because the power plug standards are at least restricted by region. But imagine going to another country and having to be ready that you hotel could have any one of 8 power plug types at random. And while electricity is rather easy to convert looselesly, complex documents are far more .. complex. It is like having to buy 8 different power bricks for each of your electrical devices to be prepared for all possible voltages, frequencies, waveforms, polarities and whatnot. Having more than one ISO document standard in a horrifying idea for any programmer that will have to ever work on software that will need to support both of them - twice the work for no etra benefit whatsoever. If Microsoft can prove (in technical terms) that their file formats present capabilities that Open Document can not, then the only sane way to implement those in the ISO format is to add those capabilities as an extension of the existing Open Document format and not to reinvent the wheel. Microsoft also has a habit of pointing to JPEG and PNG being “competing”. Well, they are not - those are complimentary standards, because JPEG is designed for compression of photographic details while PNG is designed for the compression of bitmapped vector images. Something like DejaVu could be seen as a superset of the two formats. So, if you ever need an argument against more standards - remember about the power plugs.

This pony will make you happy. Even if it’s not pink.

Due to hardware problems with the fibre channel controller and a read-only mounted filesystem as a result, backports.org is currently unavailable. It will last at least until tomorrow morning, just use one of our mirrors in the meanwhile.

So for those of you following along, you'll notice that I've just had surgery in the most expensive place in the world. Luckily for me, Google (my employer) has an amazing set of health care packages, so I haven't had to be concerned with total financial destruction.

But how close would it have come?

That's the game we're about to play! I invite you, dear reader, to make a bid on how much you think the 4 days in hospital including the surgery, will cost.

Here's some info to help you along:

* Two days and one night of angiogram, embolism, general anesthetic, and chapstick cost ~$67,000 (The stick of chapstick was $17, apparently. Gotta love itemised billing.)

* One day of prep to make sure that the above day wouldn't kill me was $750

* A friend of mine at a different hospital had aorta replacement surgery for $250,000. She apparently had a longer hospital stay and a longer surgery, but with fewer surgeons.

* I was in the hospital for 4 days.

* The surgery was ~7 hours long (We think they started at 11, they forgot to phone Angie when they started)

* There were at least 3 surgeons involved, plus physicians assistants, etc.

Winner gets one of (next time I see them, and assuming i'm physically able) one of (their choice):

* Back rub
* Reasonably good glass of nicest port available at reasonably-close-by bar (Let's say not to exceed $25 for the glass)
* Dinner at some vegan-friendly place.

Let the bidding begin! Bidding closes when I receive the bill.