I think I'm about ready to start running my SMTP proxy/filter for people now. I've got two users setup and it seems to be holding up just fine. I've managed to remove the need to manually create things, so I'm capable of adding new domains on the fly. For my personal mail handling yesterday was the first day I've received over 10,000 messages. These are the stats from yesterday showing what happens at SMTP-time:

Total Mails    : 13302
Total SPAM     : 12620 (bounced back)
Total Accepted : 682
Spam Percentage: 94.87%

So I've dropped 95% of incoming mail at SMTP time, which is a big win. Of the mail which was actually delivered I'd guess that pyzor, razor, and spambayes marked a further 50% of it as spam. So my proxy needs to do better ... but it's pretty impressive. TODO: Find people to run as guinea pigs, register a domain, profit.

Since a few days I'm a happy customer of Lichtblick, the biggest electric utility (Stromanbieter) in Germany which provides 100% green energy (or kostrom as it's called in Germany). Why? I was getting tired of all those hypocrites and liars (a.k.a. politicians) who keep on talking about global warming and renewable energy, but fail to produce any real results since many, many years now. So I decided to do my (small) part to help reduce CO₂ emissions, the greenhouse effect, and global warming. After measuring the energy consumption of all my power-sucking devices and replacing or turning off some of them, and after replacing all lightbulbs with highly efficient energy saving lightbulbs, changing the electric utility was the next logical step. First try (failed) As probably almost everyone in Munich, I was a customer of the Stadtwerke M nchen (SWM). According to the last electricity bill I got from them, their sources of energy are: 17% renewable energy, 83% fossil energy sources, 0% nuclear power. Well, at least they don't use nuclear power, that's a big plus IMO, but 83% polluting, fossil crap? Thanks, but no thanks. So I opted to use their kostrom M-Natur tariff, which (they claim) provides 100% renewable energy. They use the so-called Aufpreismodell (sorry, German only), i.e. you pay a few cents extra per kWh, and this extra money is invested in renewable energy sources (mostly small hydropower plants around Munich). As I found out a few hours later (d'oh!) this "Aufpreismodell" is not really ideal (you still pay a conventional electric utility instead of one with 100% renewable energy, for instance). In addition, I stubled over a petition for the city of Munich to stop investing in a new fossil fuel power plant (bituminous coal, to be more precise). Which I promptly signed (and which went to several local parties including the greens, the mayer of Munich, and others).
Now, this is what I call hypocritical behaviour — on the one side they claim/pretend to be environmentally friendly by promoting their "M-Natur" tariff, and at the same time they invest even more money in fossil fuels? WTF? Anyway, it seems the petition did have at least some impact, the aren't allowed to invest more money into that fossil fuel powerplant than they already did. For me that was more than enough reason to immediately revoke my M-Natur tariff, and what's more, I switched to a completely different company now, Lichtblick (see also the respective Wikipedia page). I'm not willing to support such energy policies/politics with my money anymore. Lichblick Lichtblick is an kostromanbieter in Germany, supposedly the biggest one.
Their "energy mix" is 100% renewable energy (which is correct, unlike with SWM, as they do not own any additional fossil fuel plants). 76% of that is hydropower, FWIW. Their prices may be a bit higher than those of conventional electric utilities, but not all that much; you might even pay less, depending on where you live and which tariff you have now. You can use their price calculator to find out. Btw, some other good choices in Germany are Greenpeace energy, Elektrizit tswerke Sch nau, and Naturstrom AG. How the switch went Easy. Grab the respective PDF, print it, fill in the required info, and send it to them. Alternatively, they also offer online registration. It'll take a few weeks until the switch is performed; they have to contact your current electric utility etc. In my case it took ca. 4 weeks. There are no additional costs for switching. There is no "downtime" whatsoever (not even a few seconds), German law requires that you always reliably get your electricity 24/7 (and it indeed worked just fine for me). So, that's that. From now on I'm happily using green energy all day (and night) long. I'm doing my part in Saving The Planet (tm) and I sleep a bit better at night... P.S. No, I'm not getting paid by Lichtblick (or anybody else) to write this.

I've recently finished writing an article for Free Software Magazine, who, as part of sponsorship deals, are able to distribute a free book to their authors. I thought that that would be easy enough, but on second thought, I'm actually not sure... These days I'm reticent to get books on things that are documented on the web - those sorts of books tend to get stale pretty quickly. I think I'm more in the market for a 'classic', but even there, I'm not really sure. I have a lot of good ones already (scroll down on this page: http://www.welton.it/freesoftware/), and as you can see from that list, "documentation" style books quickly become dated. To tell the truth, I haven't actually bought any computer books in a while, having focused more on marketing, business, economics and the like, which aren't "documented" online as thoroughly as most programming topics are. So, I'm lookng for suggestions. One possibility is the recent Erlang book by Joe Armstrong, but even that is mostly covered by docs on the erlang.org web site. Free Software Magazine's publishing sponsors are: Apress, Addison-Wesley/Prentice Hall, O Reilly, No Starch and Packt - and I can select any book from them, to my knowledge. Suggestions? Thanks!

I think I’ve just invented a new sport… Everyone knows the game of Googling your own name, and finding out all sorts of fascinating things that you have forgotten or didn’t realise had made it onto the Interwobble. Here’s a new twist, use the Internet Archive Wayback Machine instead and read through things like old versions of your homepage. I’m honestly shocked at just how much incriminating material I’ve found, both from my own website and segfault.org This comment on my site from Leonard Richardson and my reply especially amused:

What percentage of the time are you drunk? This is to settle a bet. Okay, well on an average week I guess I go out for 3 nights. Friday night starts at 5:30 and ends 12 hours later, the other two days would be probably from 9:30 to 2:30am, so 5 hours. So we can say I spend 22 hours innebriated. Just under a day, or 13% of the week. Some weeks that might be as much as 25% to 30% I guess tho. Who was the bet with, and more importantly, who won?

This explains a lot …

or why I need to start prioritizing ACKs...

At least in unstable that's the case, thanks to santiago who uploaded rtorrent yesterday. Unfortunately(for people using testing) the new version 0.11.8/0.7.8 for libtorrent/rtorrent is out, that's why I will wait until rtorrent got into testing so there'll be no mismatch of versions between the library and the client (actually rtorrent 0.7.4 and libtorrent 0.11.7, should be rtorrent 0.7.7) and then will start looking a sponsor for the new packages of libtorrent/rtorrent (which are going to be ready later tonight).

The release plan for Xserver 1.5 and Xorg 7.4 was discussed during the X.org Developers' Summit in Cambridge (September 10-12th). This is what we expect to ship with Lenny, so here are some details about the upcoming. Timeline As usual, there will be a 6 months release cycle. So Xorg 7.4 is expected on March 1st, 2008. There won't probably be any new Xserver release before that since some changes (already merged) require all drivers to be updated anyway. So Xserver 1.5 is expected on the same date. Since there are already some known problems in Xserver, they also plan to release Xserver 1.4.1 on November 1st. PCI Rework The master branch of Xserver already contains the long-expected pci-rework which is supposed to fix all the PCI domains and other non-trivial PCI hierarchy support (important for ia64, but also for some powerpc and sparc users). RandR People having Intel, ATI or recent Nvidia boards learnt to love the RandR 1.2 extension which provides the ability to enable/disable, resize, rotate, move outputs within a single big virtual screen. More transformations should be possible with RandR 1.3. Hopefully, there will also be some standardization regarding output names in various drivers, or at least a way to retrieve the type of each output (LVDS, DVI, VGA, TV, ...). And the server should get an abstraction object to describe GPUs, which might make the support for multiple boards easier. Input On the input side, XKB 2 and XGE should be merged, which shouldn't be really visible to end-users but should make internals much better. Then MPX (Multi-Pointer X server) might be in Xserver 1.5 too (if all semantics issues get fixed first). It would mean support for multiple independent keyboard/mouse pairs or so. See the MPX page for details. Compositing Compositing still gets a lot of attention. Several distributions are actually thinking of enabling Compiz by default. EXA (the new acceleration architecture that has been designed for compositing) got improved a lot in Xserver 1.4. Several drivers including Intel and ATI r300 already work great with EXA (no need to use XAA + XAANoOffscreenPixmaps anymore) which means Compiz works very smoothly, even when resizing windows. XAA won't be removed soon though since lots of things needs to be fixed before that. There are also several videos available online, like this one. But one big piece is still missing for compositing: directed rendering to redirected windows. So far, if you start glxgears in Compiz, you will see that the gears completely ignore wobbli-ness of windows, other windows overriding them, cube rotation, ... they keep rendering of top of everything without any effect. Getting true support for compositing such windows requires lots of work in all parts of the DRI stack. Kristian H gsberg got it to work (and we even get a great demo). See Kristian's blog for details. Upstream devs are now working on integrating all modifications nicely in upstream Xserver, drivers, DRM module, Mesa, ... Once this works, you can get GLX_EXT_texture_from_pixmap for both direct and indirect rendering, and full support for GLX 1.4 in the server (only 1.2 is supported as of now). Also, redirected windows (let's say a wobbly window on a side of Compiz' cube) should get input events correctly thanks to input transformation in Xserver 1.5 (event coordinates will be converted into the redirected window coordinate space before being passed to the client application). Kernel-related reworks Compositing improvements actually require a large rework of the memory management in the server. Basically, we need a global management for both 2D and 3D object allocations, so that you can get both to work fine without having to change config options (things like XAANoOffscreenPixmaps or FbTexPercent). All this is related to the TTM (Translation Table Maps, see these slides for details) which has been under development for a while. It requires to change the interface with the kernel DRM modules, and it won't happen before 2.6.24. The Xserver part of the work is not big, so it might still be done before 1.5 is released. Fortunately, once all this is ready, people should stop complaining about memory allocation failures, Compiz being slow because one option is not enabled by default, ... Another hot topic in the X.org/kernel area is about moving modesetting in the kernel. When you get a kernel panic, you only actually see it if not running X (or if logging kernel messages through the network). So your machine freezes, you don't know why, you have no way to know, and you just reboot. Getting panic messages on X would be much better. To do so, the kernel needs to now which mode is currently in use on the monitor and then it will render the message on the framebuffer. This require lots of work, so it will unlikely be in Xserver 1.5 though. Miscellaneous Xserver 1.5 will also contain XACE (security framework), the cleanup of the ABI (explicit _X_EXPORT required), and possibly glucose (OpenGL acceleration for X, see Zack Rusin's blog). I asked whether there was actually some work on building the GLcore server module as a part of Mesa so that building Xserver does not require the whole Mesa source anymore. People seem to agree the current situation is a real pain for distributions and we should make this change happen. But the actual work has to be done in Mesa anyway, we'll see what happens.

My mother just asked me to get Google Earth (link to download page [1]) working on her machine so she can see where my sister [2] lives. So I download all 20 megs of the sucker (of course it had a horrible license agreement that precludes packaging for Debian or any other sane distribution) and ran it (under a different account of course because I don’t trust non-free software). It’s unfortunate that Google weren’t prepared to put in the extra effort of making Debian and RPM packages for it. When I examined the contents of the file there were sym-links from FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD to Linux and from amd64 and x86_64 to x86. So much for portability, just assume that everything is an i386 running Linux! The first problem I encountered is that it doesn’t support installing in text mode and demands X access, have the Google people never heard of sys-admins who do their work over low-bandwidth links and don’t use X? What happens if your sys-admin is using a braille terminal? When I enabled X by “ssh -X” I encountered the error below (Error 1). It seems that the installation program was not written with the X11 Security Restrictions in mind and only works with “ssh -Y“. The same applies to actually running the program once it’s installed. Finally it gave me a GNOME error dialogue about the Bitstream Vera Sans font not being installed. If they had made a Debian package then it could have depended on the package that provides the font in question. Now I’m left wondering which package provides it, and whether it’s even available (maybe they depend on non-free fonts). Once I got it working I found it to be incredibly slow on my Pentium-M laptop with 1.5G of RAM. I ran it on a Pentium-D desktop system in a Xen DomU (it’s only 32bit and I couldn’t figure out how to get the AMD64 version of Debian to run i386 programs without a chroot or a Xen instance). But it still wasn’t particularly fast. One problem is that the GUI is not well written, so I drag the Earth to rotate it from the initial view and the Earth moves slowly long after I have released my mouse button. Another is that my X server started using significantly more memory while it was running (and has not returned to it’s previous size). Google Earth is a really neat program that does some nice things. But I’m not going to buy a new Thinkpad to run it, and the experience of running it on a Pentium-D server is not that great either. I’ve just rm’d it from my laptop, I’ll leave it installed on the server but probably won’t run it often. I’ll try installing it on my mother’s computer (Celeron 2.4GHz with 512M of RAM) but I am not expecting it to run well. The machine is still new to her, I replaced her Pentium3 800MHz with 384M of RAM about a week ago. She never found the Pentium3 to be slow (and I don’t think that Google Earth is a good reason for an upgrade).

• [1] http://www.earth.google.com/download-earth.html


• [2] http://helen.coker.com.au/

(more…)

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With all the excitement of the Vuelta and the Tour of Britain (which I’m off to watch today), I’d missed that the Tour de Pologne also started on Sunday. TVP Polonia has coverage and broadcasts free-to-air to Europe at 19, 13 and 7 east. I think it may also be visible in Australia in a GlobeCast package (can you see it? Please tell me by leaving a comment.) Scheduled shows:-

Tue 11.09.2007 to Fri 14.09.2007

15:10-16:30 CET (live) and 20:00-20:05 CET (summary)

Sat 15.09.2007

13:25-15:05 CET (live, final stage) and 20:00-20:05 CET (summary)

I can’t actually watch this at 19 east except in perfect conditions at the moment because my dish is slightly mis-aligned. I don’t want to adjust it until after the Vuelta finishes, just in case I make a mistake and lose reception completely.

Joey started a stats pron meme, so lets join, with stats from packages.debian.org AKA puccini.debian.org, which I am the local-admin for. This machine has

	2007
Unique visitors	4952207
Total visits	8572139
Total pageviews	43332086
Total bandwidth (apache only)	783.28 GB
Additional traffic due to robots	53328963 pageviews adding 265.73 GB traffic

Looking at the other statistics April and May had a few percent more visitors, but other than that its pretty stable with around 600k unique visitors per month. We do not resolve IPs to hostnames due to the huge amount of useless traffic and load this would generate, so no statistics about the countries. But we do have some other stats. Like a Robot/Spider statistic. It looks like we had about 151 different spiders on our site, a few listed below.

Yahoo	is the most active spider, making some 97.54 GB of traffic
Googlebot	follows on second place, responsible for 43.92 GB
MSNBot	caused about 21.52 GB traffic
Python-urllib	is used by multiple bots and they all made up 43.29 GB traffic

Next interesting point is that of Operating systems.

Linux	is of course the most used one, 48.1% of our visitors told us they use it.
Windows	only on place 2, with 40.5%.
MacOS	all kinds of MacOS add up to 2.5%.

There are various others in the list, but none with more than 1%. Like Sun Solaris which was used for about 63k hits (compare it to Linux with 32 378 942 hits). 5423 users did want us to believe they use CPM, another 76 tried that with VMS. Of course we are interested in more details for the 48.1% Linux users, here they are:

Debian	15397537	22.8 %
Ubuntu	9050014	13.4 %
Suse	542635	0.8 %
Red Hat	107240	0.1 %
Mandriva (or Mandrake)	166545	0.2 %
Fedora	623242	0.9 %
Centos	69998	0.1 %
GNU Linux (Unknown or unspecified distribution)	6421731	9.5 %

Windows is boring, more than 33% are using the XP crap, all BSD version together, including that GNU/kFreeBSD variant have 0.1% all together. Browsers? Of course people do use lots of different browsers. The main browsers, if you ignore all the various versions, are Firefox with 44.7%, (shudder) MSIE with 17.7% and Mozilla with 14.6%. Konqueror is far behind with only about 8.5%, other browsers like Opera (3.4%) and Epiphany (1.5%) are even less used. One browser identification is interesting, namely Debian APT, which seems to be the “Fetch Changelog” function of aptitude. It generated about 200k hits (0.1%). Next point - from where do we get most people to our site? That are people not having any kind of referer information, 65%. The second place here goes to - yes, direct links from various people. Of course our search interface has most hits here, the rest is from some 80k different pages linking to us. Most of those seem to be upstream pages telling their users where to get a Debian package from (most are named something that fits “/software/download” or “is like sf/freshmeat” schema). Interestingly the links the BTS provides in their package overview going to packages.debian.org aren’t used all that much. Only about 30k hits in the whole year 2007 with the BTS as referrer. Only after all those individual links we have search engines giving us hits. That may be partly due to the fact that we did use robots.txt to block them (at least those that are good net citizens) for a long time from indexing our site. Final words: YES, I do know that the stats are likely to be wrong in any size you want them to be wrong. Yes, one cant really trust the User-Agent string, its too easy to change it. Yes, its easy to filter out referer, etc, etc, etc, but IMO its still nice to look at such things, it gives at least a little feeling for what we do burn all those CPU cycles. These stats are based on about 4.5GB of compressed apache logs from the last few months, it took some 14 hours to process the logfiles. Luckily future updates now happen once an hour and take only a minute or two… Ohh, you say Joeys meme was about mail stats? Damn. Ok, short text: 305k mails rejected in the last 7 days while we allowed 1097 mails to pass. For the yearly overview that means some 9.3million rejected and 73k accepted mails (that rate should get better, decreasing the accepted count, with the new etch setup we have now). Of course this isn’t as impressing as lists.debian.org mailstats are. :)

Given that Hecl is very much tied to the Java ME platform, this question is pretty important to me. I was thinking about simply posting it here, on my line journal, but having recently started reading The Wisdom of Crowds, I decided to have a little fun with it, and created a "prediction market" on the Inkling Markets (a YCombinator startup) web site: http://home.inklingmarkets.com/market/show/6481 Of course, if you just want to comment on your answer, that's ok too. My thoughts on the current possibilities:

• Java ME. Widely available right now, but Sun has made a few false steps. For instance, the difficulty of writing something that runs everywhere is a high barrier for hobbyists or small companies.
• JavaFX. Apparently, this exists because Java is seen as being not quite scripty enough to compete with dynamic languages, something that I think is a legitimate concern. However, it currently is not deployed, so it's hard to say what its future will be.
• Web/Javascript. If mobile phones get better/cheaper connections, it would be easy to see them going the way of the rest of the world - rather than native applications, they'd simply be html/javascript apps. Doesn't work for games and some other things, but makes deployment very easy. The big if is the network operators and what they want to do about traffic costs. Apple, for the moment, seems to be taking this route.
• Python. Currently available for Symbian. I don't see it as a big possibility, but who knows.
• Qt. Troll tech is currently shipping a development device, the "green phone". Since it's proprietary, this one seems like a long shot too, but you never know.
• Other. GTK on Linux, Tcl/Tk... maybe even Hecl! In this field, things can be tilted upside down surprisingly quickly, although that's not quite so true for anything involving physical devices.
• None. Java ME becomes less popular, but nothing concrete supplants it, and we end up with a hodge podge of technologies, with no clear leader.

In any case, I think it's a space that's bound to be very interesting, and loaded with interesting possibilities. Update YC.news user jsjenkins points out a silly oversight on my part: Flash Lite. It slipped my mind completely, but is certainly an important player in this market. The Java folks have to be hoping that history will not repeat itself.

It's been a busy week for Koha development, really. Some of my thoughts:-

[Koha-devel] ANNOUNCE: New Installer in master git tree

I announced the new Koha installer. It's not finished (see under KNOWN BUGS), but people are starting to use it, so I thought I'd better announce it. I'll explain more soon.

[Koha] AG KohaLa

The Koha Free Association is about to hold its first General Assembly, so I reposted the announcement. Anyone know what foreign developers should do about it, if anything?

Taking the Open Road: University Libraries Explore Options

Interesting article in E-commerce Times which mentions Koha as one of the more specialist packages libraries are investigating. Good!

Slashdot Libraries Defend Open Access

Not koha, but funny: Legacy journal publishers don't like Open Access? I'm shocked. Or something. Some of the comments are hilarious. Others remind me why I don't read much /.

Eurosport coverage of Vuelta a Espa a at 19 east continues with commentary in English (analogue only) and German. Scheduled times:-

Mon 10.09.2007

16:00-17:30 CET

Tue 11.09.2007

no show (rest day, but MTB coverage at 08:45)

Wed 12.09.2007

16:00-17:30 CET

Thu 13.09.2007

01:00-01:30 (recap?) and 15:45-17:30 CET

Fri 14.09.2007 and Sat 15.09.2007

16:00-17:30 CET

Sun 16.09.2007

18:00-19:00 CET (recorded?)

TVEi are broadcasting in Spanish at 13 and 19 east. You can also see the race on TVEI America, but I don’t know the reception details. Scheduled times:-

Mon 10.09.2007

16:30-18:00 CET

Tue 11.09.2007

no show (rest day)

Wed 12.09.2007 to Sun 16.09.2007

16:40-18:00 CET

I’ll post more times next week. It was good to see a strong Caisse d’Epargne showing, as I predicted, even if it didn’t last long…

I have just read an interesting post about Gear Acquisition Syndrome [1] as applied to the guitar industry. Apparently it’s common for people to spend a lot of time and money buying guitar equipment instead of actually playing a guitar. I think that this problem extends way beyond guitars and to most aspects of human endeavour, and that actively trying to avoid the problem is a key to getting things done. I believe that the author however makes a strategic error by then going on to advise people on how to buy gear that won’t become obsolete. Sure it’s good to have gear that will suit your future needs and not require replacement, but if you are repeatedly buying new gear then your problem usually is not that the gear doesn’t do the job but that you want to buy more. I used to suffer from this problem to a degree with my computer work, and still have problems controlling myself when I see tasty kit going cheap on auction. Here is a quick list of things to do to avoid GAS:

• Recognise the problems with getting new gear. It costs money (thus requiring you to do more paid work or skip something else that you enjoy). It needs to have the OS installed and configured which takes time away from other things (unless your job is related to installing software on new machines). Finally it might be flawed. Every time you buy a new computer you risk having a failure, if it’s a failure that happens some time after deploying the machine then it can cause data loss and down-time which is really annoying.


• Keep in mind what you do. I primarily do software work (programming and sys-admin). While some knowledge of hardware design is required for sys-admin work and the ability to make my own hardware work is required for my own software development I don’t need to be an expert on this. I don’t need to have the latest hardware with new features, the old stuff worked well when I bought it and still works well now. My main machine (which I am using to write this post) is a Thinkpad T41p, it’s a few years old and a little slow by today’s standards but for everything that really matters to me it performs flawlessly. If your job really requires you to have experience with all the latest hardware then you probably work in a computer store and get access to it for free!


• When you have a problem think about whether new gear is the correct solution. There are a couple of areas in which performance on my Thinkpad is lower than I desire, but they are due to flaws in software that I am using. As I am primarily a programmer and the software in question is free it’s better for me (and the world) if I spend my time fixing the software rather than buying new hardware.


• Buy decent (not hugely expensive) gear so that you don’t need to continually buy new stuff. EG if a machine is going to store a moderate amount of data then make sure it has space for multiple hard drives so you can easily add new drives.


• Don’t buy the biggest and baddest machine out there. New hardware is developed so quickly that the fastest gear available now will be slow by next-year’s standards. Buy the second-fastest machine and it’ll be a lot cheaper and often more reliable.


• Determine your REAL requirements that match what you do. As I do software it makes sense for me to have the most reliable hardware possible so I can avoid stuffing around with things that don’t interest me so much (and which I’m not so good at). So I need reliable machines, I will continue buying Thinkpads (I plan to keep my current one until it’s 5 years old and then buy another), I believe that the Thinkpad is the Rolls-Royce of laptops (see the Lenovo Blogs site for some interesting technical information [2]) and that continuing to use such hardware will keep me effectively using my time on software development rather than fooling with hardware. For desktop machines I have recently wasted unreasonable amounts of time due to memory errors which inspired me to write a post about what a company like Dell could do to address what I consider the real needs of myself and other small business owners [3] (note that Dell is actually producing more suitable hardware in this regard than most companies - they just don’t market it as such).


• Keep in mind the fact that most things you want to do don’t require special hardware. In fact for most tasks related to computers people were doing similar things 10 years ago with much less hardware. If you believe that it’s just the lack of hardware that prevents you from doing great work then your problem is self-confidence not hardware availability.

It’s interesting that a sports-shoe company has a slogan “Just Do It” while trying to convince people that having special shoes is required for sporting success. Most professional athletes started training with minimal equipment. Get some basic gear and Just Do It!. References:

1. http://www.harmony-central.com/Guitar/Articles/Avoiding_GAS/


2. http://www.lenovoblogs.com/insidethebox - feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/lenovoblogs/insidethebox


3. http://etbe.coker.com.au/2007/08/25/designing-computers-for-small-business/

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xserver-xorg-core 2:1.4-1 entered experimental yesterday (and should arrive in unstable in the near future). This Xserver 1.4 brings some nice improvements (like input-hotplug and better EXA), but it also has a couple minor bugs that I guess you will quickly notice. So before I get dozens of bug reports about them, here's a list with links to existing bug reports:

• X crashes during exit, causing the VT console to not be restored properly. Not directly visible when using a display manager since it will restart X before you notice a problem. But very boring when starting X manually (for instance with startx) from a VT console. Reported at #440547, known upstream, patch available.
• The LEDs (caps-lock, ...) do not work anymore. Upstream is aware of the problem but there are no known fix as of now. Not reported yet, I'll update this blog entry when it'll be done.

Nothing really bad so far then. Upstream plans to release Xserver 1.4.1 on November 1st. It's far from here, but it means there will be fixes committed on the server-1.4-branch in the meantime, so it will be easy for us to upload intermediate releases if needed.

I sadly read that Warsow are having internal problems. It’s a pity, because it’s a great free game (even with its non-free game data), and they deserve the best. In any case, I just wanted to talk about this because of something that’s quite usual in the development of free games: having non-licensed data. According to tigerchas’ note: “The non-licensed state of warsow media is what has allowed this to happen - and the team is now working on rectifying this. This whole episode has been very unsatisfying and has highlighted the problems of not having a global media license for warsow”. I’m not worried about the future of the game at all, it’s not that the reason I’m writing this entry. As they also say in the same post: “Don’t let this announcement affect you too much, warsownians. warsow has hit minor stumbling blocks in the past and this is simply another. Maps can come and go. Rest assured that the current mapping team will be working on other great maps for you to enjoy”. What I wanted to point out with all this, especially to games developers and teams, is that even when licenses are boring stuff and many of you might think that you can safely ignore them and it won’t affect you, especially when you start the development, reality shows that these things happen. I wish all the best for the Warsow team anyway, and to go soon over this. Keep up the good work!

In Santa Clara and still adjusting. The corporate housing that I'm in is nearly 4 hours by transit to the office according to the magic computers at 511.org. If I walk a mile on this side, and take a Google shuttle from the Caltrain, I should be able to get that down to an hour.

ahahahah, yeah right. I get a ride from Angie in the morning. It takes 15 minutes.

But *people*, c'mon.. This is California, right? Where are the people caring about the environment and hoping into mass-transit? Get out of your shiny Prius' and take a bus somewhere. Oh wait. You can't. Because it takes 4 hours to go 8 miles.

I'm thinking about this as I'm looking at churches and trying to decide if I feel like going to one this morning. I remember when I first joined the Beacon Unitarian Church, it was (as much as anything else) because I could walk to it. From the church, I could visit a half-dozen people who also lived walking distance from the church. How shall I build my community from inside temporary corporate housing in the middle of Santa Clara?

But we're starting to settle in a bit. We've swapped the van we used to drive across the country for a car. We've got a bank account. We've got a GrandCentral phone number which should follow us everywhere, and next we'll get an POBox so that as we move around a bit before settling in we'll at least have a permanent place to receive mail. It turns out that the State of California wants us to retake our written and road tests to move our licenses to here. That should be fun. Do you suppose it's an auto-fail if I yell "Christing fuck, people! Learn to drive!" as I merge onto the freeway? It's become a bit of a regular chant.

I spent much of my early childhood at the video arcade. I was fortunate enough to have a best friend who 1) Lived in the old quarters of San Juan where you could walk everywhere 2) Had three older teenage sisters who would take us when we were still quite young to the arcade, which also doubled as a fantastic ice-cream parlor. My favorite game there was galaga, and I played it incessantly (and had to use a foot stool too!!) As a result of all that childhood gaming, I am still pretty half decent at it. For example, I more often than not beat my partner (except under less than auspicious conditions, like being sleep deprived), which is pretty unbelievable as he is much more of a video game wizard than I and otherwise beats me in everything.
Back in my first year in grad school, a cohort of us would play Galaga after our large theory class, and I would also always win (and by a lot and then get crushed at foosball). So of course when I heard that there was a documentary on the very genre of arcade games that consumed so much of my early childhood, King of Kong and a movie that was rumored to leave you at the edge of your seat (which seemed like an impossibility to me), I decided to fork over the cash and check it out in the movie theatre last night. And it was well worth every penny. The movie somehow managed to capture a story and set of subjective experiences that I think are incredibly hard to portray via film: the individual and social intimacy that comes with machine interaction. The story lines revolves around two very different characters who are masters at conquering one of the hardest video games in the world, Donkey Kong and are trying to clinch the world record. The tale of rivalry between them is really good in and of itself and probably without this drama, the movie would have not worked. But what I also found amazing was how the movie conveyed the persistence of the (older) game. They live on in the lives of individuals and collectives, despite the rise of a whole, new class of games that are much more popular today. I am not sure how much longer they will live on, or if the movie was also inadvertently portraying the rise and slow decline of an era that will, in another 50 years, become part of the archive of dead history. Whatever the case, if you had a loving relationship with these games (or your friends or parents did), check out the movie. It really has some incredible footage and moments and will make you want to run to that old arcade, once again.

A common question is how to compare Fedora [1] and Debian [2] in terms of recent updates and support. I think that Fedora Rawhide and Debian/Unstable are fairly equivalent in this regard, new upstream releases get packaged quickly, and support is minimal. They are both aimed at developers only, but it seems that a reasonable number of people are running servers on Debian/Unstable. Fedora releases (previously known as “Fedora Core” and now merely as “Fedora”) can be compared to Debian/Testing. The aim is that Fedora releases every 6 months and each release is supported until a release two versions greater is about to be released (which means that it’s about a year of support). The support however often involves replacing the upstream version of the program used to make a package (EG Fedora Core 5 went from kernel 2.6.15 to kernel 2.6.20). I believe that the delays involved in migrating a package from Debian/Unstable to Debian/Testing as well as the dependency requirements mean that you can get a similar experience running Debian/Testing as you might get from Fedora. Stable releases of Debian are rare and the updates are few in number and small in scope (generally back-porting fixes not packaging new upstream versions). This can be compared to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) [3] or CentOS [4] (a free re-compile of RHEL with minor changes). Regarding stability and support (in terms of package updates) I think that Debian/Stable, RHEL, and CentOS are at about the same level. RHEL has some significant benefits in terms of phone support (which is of very high quality). But if you don’t want to pay for phone support then CentOS and Debian/Stable are both good choices. Recently I’ve been rolling out a bunch of CentOS 5 machines for clients who don’t want to pay for RHEL and don’t want to pay for extensive customisation of the installation (a quick kickstart install is what they want). The benefit of Fedora and Debian/Testing over RHEL, CentOS, and Debian/Stable is that they get newer packages sooner. This is significant when using programs such as OpenOffice which have a steady development upstream that provides features that users demand. If you want to try new features then Fedora and Debian/Testing are both options that will work. One reason I had been avoiding serious use of Debian/Testing is that it had no strategy for dealing with security fixes, but it seems that there are now security updates for Testing [5] (I had not realised this until today). References:

1. http://fedoraproject.org/


2. http://www.debian.org/


3. http://www.redhat.com/rhel/


4. http://www.centos.org/


5. http://secure-testing-master.debian.net/

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