• I've moved packages.ubuntu.com to a new server but until one day ago forgot to tell anyone about that :( The old server will probably go offline today and it might be some time until the IP address gets corrected in DNS and until these changes arrive at your DNS server. Sorry for any inconvienience caused. You can access the new server under the alternate address packages.ubuntu.lichtenheld.net for now.
• I've improved the search code for packages.debian.org a bit to give more usefull results even if the keyword is very generic. Feel free to test the new code at the usual address before I put it online on packages.debian.org. I will wait some days to give the translators a chance to catch up before doing that.
• If you are interested in packages.debian.org development and you will attend FOSDEM, please note that I will give a talk about it there in the Debian DevRoom. I would be glad if someone shows up ;)

I am going to make some suggestions to a company that might possibly sponsor development of free electronic text books for schools (suitable for running on an OLPC machine). I would appreciate any suggestions for things I should include. I will make my suggestions as a blog post summarising all input I receive and send the URL to the company in question.

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I started this blog 5 years ago. In that time, I've written about Linux on the desktop, photography, international peace, version control systems, ice storms, Haskell, health care, rural life, Kansas, and infants.

Today I realized something: I am the #1 hit on Google when you search for smelly ducting. This will take you to a story I wrote back in 2005 about an odd odor in our house. I believe it is my most popular story ever, with almost 100 comments -- and comments continue to trickle in, a few a week.

What's the right word to use for that? When the great worldwide democratizing force that is the Internet collectively decides that your most important blog post is about smelly ducting?

I'm glad folks know what matters. Wouldn't want to worry too much about what's going on in Iraq, Washington, or Kansas if your ducts smell, that's for sure.

Obviously every single Presidential candidate has missed out on a key issue in voters' minds. If only someone would come out with a freshly-scented ducting platform, this country could finally move forward!

So today is the last day of the 2008 Synfig January Challenge. It is hopefully the first of many synfig challenges, I hope that the February one will be for a new splash screen for Synfig. My entry is fairly simple and boring compared to the other entries, but it represents one thing about Synfig that I think about a lot: we need more developers! Anyway, here it is: There is nothing special in it, but I put up the source code too. Also, I've been informed that there will be an Open Video Developer meeting on Friday February 1st 2008 at 21:00 UTC on irc.freenode.net in #openvideo. Should be an interesting meeting, sounds like at least Synfig, Blender and Cinelerra people will be there, hopefully many more.

The Phone Coop (agent link) will hold its workshop and annual meeting on Saturday. If anyone is going and wants to car-share from the N.Somerset/Bristol area, let me know (new comments form follows this post). I can't quite afford a 5h train trip instead of a 2h car trip, but I'd quite like to reduce the damage. Also, we've just finished and sent the official reports for TTLLP yesterday. We've also various projects which I want to get finished, including the IPC::Open3 for Koha. If I'm a bit hard to reach this week, this might be why. We are still returning calls in batches in our breaks, though, so please please please leave a voicemail. Social Source South West is next Tuesday in Bristol. I'll be there. Will you?

On January 26th 2008, the OCaml community has its first meeting in Europe. There was 5 different talks, including one from me. The meeting was pretty constructive and i think some great things should come out of it. In this post, i will focus on the Debian maintainer point of view. The meeting was organized by me, with the help of Garbriel Kerneis and Vincent Balat. I wish to thank Mme Turgis from ENST/ParisTech who has made possible all this to happen. Introduction: I announce the creation of OCamlCore, a SS2L. It will provide commercial support for OCaml and related products. It will also provide community with some resources (including a GForge, a planet, some SCM repository...) For now, i will open administration to Debian people who wish to help (for root rights) and from the whole community for other task (gforge and general administration). For now, i will choose alone who can administrate and who cannot... This is not a very open position, but this server is also for my company. Xavier Leroy give us a nice talk that has let us see some future direction:

• OCaml 3.11 will have native dynlink
• hope to integrate GHC like type system (GADT: Generalized Algebraic Data Types)
• need to work on parallelism, following different paradigm

But above all, Xavier talked about the fact that there is a lack of manpower at INRIA and invited the community to build tools and other things (including a CPAN like distribution) to make the language more widespread. He also stated that a lot of things will stay in place in the name of backward compatibility. OCsigen Vincent Balat has given us a nice talk about OCsigen, a new framework for programming web application. This program is already in Debian and it is at the root of Debian discussion about moving .cm[ao] into libxxx-ocaml package. This new framework allows to program web application using continuation, which should ease a lot of aspect. It also features static type checking, including static verification of the generated HTML pages. GODI I was impressed to see G. Stolpmann coming to the meeting. Unfortunately, i cannot follow the whole talk, since i have some phone call to make, in order to book the restaurant. From what i have seen, it seems that GODI is growing, in term of manpower. They have some issues with OCaml 3.10, because of camlp4 and some packages. At the end of the conference, he was pushing for a more general use of GODIVA. In particular, it requires to have a very uniform way of building software. It should be the foundation of a build standard for OCaml software. In my humble opinion, i don't agree on this point. Basically, its proposal was based on configure/make all, which is too C style way of doing. It is not bad, but just exclude ocamlbuild enabled software. ocamlbuild Nicolas Pouillard has made an introduction on how to use ocamlbuild. I have discovered how it was working, since i didn't have time to work on this topic. It seems a good thing. I hope to be able to try it at some point. The conclusion was about modifying ocamlbuild to allow the use of multiple plugins. For now, the plugin is a separate file which is compiled first and then loaded, as a special case. Nicolas is looking for a full OCaml way to handle this for multiple plugins. OCaml in Debian I have spoken about different aspect of Debian packaging. After a short introduction and some history about OCaml in Debian, I come to some conclusions/problems:

• we have an early integration, which makes Debian handle a lot of packages, but this is due to a long history
• we still are not able to cope with libraries incompatibilities when rebuilding, we only have addressed ocaml package ABI problem
• the debian package management system is not really compliant with the OCaml way of creating libraries, which is our main problem
• native compilation is broken on 3 arches (Xavier Leroy told us that this should be solved for ARM)
• use of Alioth has made us more efficient to integrate packages
• Debian team are working by step: from time to time we begin to integrate a lot of packages, mostly because of some maintainers wishing to integrate a software with a lot of dependencies

Talking with Xavier give me some additional informations:

• ARM is fixed, it should compile with Debian stable on ARM, he explains that the problem is related to the multi ABI flavor of ARM
• he says that we should not have any problem concerning bytecode stripping of executable, if there is still some we should find the OCaml library that triggers this behavior
• I realize that this behavior can be triggered by ocamlmakefile, that still have a "-custom" option
• he promises me that he will send me a simple test to find custom bytecode application (combination of "file X" and a specific string at the end of the file)

At the end of the presentation, there were some questions. I discover that many people are ignoring the ABI problem with OCaml and its libraries. They seem to discover that it requires regular rebuild of our packages. I also have a discussion about the fact that Debian binary distribution doesn't fit developers need. It seems that developers prefer to have the source of libraries they compile and also the most recent release. But at the same time, people avoid using GODI, which also have the problem of needing to wait for a particular library to be released... After some discussion, I point that some companies prefer to live in a frozen world, which Debian stable can provide. Living in a frozen world helps company developers to have the same environment from the beginning to the end of a project - which can last years. It also help to avoid build environment de-synchronization between company developers. There was also a question about interaction between installed OCaml package and GODI software. I cannot answer it, expect with a "patches are welcome". OCaml on a JVM using OCaml-Java Xavier Clerc explained us how he has achieved running a full OCaml environment on a JVM. This work was pretty impressive, because he was able to compile OCaml top level and provide it as an applet. This is something amazing (and working). He stated also that this should allow to do some binding with java graphical user interface from OCaml. I was pretty busy with a phone call (to a restaurant for the dinner), so i don't have attend the whole conference. Anyway, the project is promising, but it needs to recompile every library using its compiler. I think this is not suited for Debian for now. Workshop The workshop was shorter than it should have been. This is due to accumulated time shift during the day. However, it was pretty interesting, because everybody can talked almost freely. The initial discussion was about the "Unicode situation". This was a question about Unicode in Unison, but there is no real solution about it. For reader information, unison has problem with filename containing UTF-8 char. In particular when syncing two directories which are on two file system with a different encoding on each. Even if the file can be represented on the two file systems, the comparison (between UTF-8 and ISO8859-15) fails. This is because the comparison is a byte to byte comparison. We discuss further the idea of OSR (OCaml standard recommendation) which was briefly discussed in the morning. I think David Teller (who have also done a great part of the IRC retranscription) was very keen on this idea. I invited Nicolas Pouillard to discuss the three following subjects. About camlp4 documentation, Nicolas told people about the he set up. About ocamlfind and ocamlbuild, he went back to the multiple plugin problems. About ocamlbuild and GODI, Gerd, Nicolas and Xavier tried to build a list of what metadata can be shared. This includes list of files to be installed (PLIST in GODI). Concerning the "feedback from the Gallium", Xavier explains that he has done this in the morning (which is true). I think that Xavier implicitly agreed on the fact that if this kind of event happens again, he can do another talk about future of OCaml. Concerning Summer of Code, I just remind that people can write description of Google Summer of Code project in the cocan wiki. Another one remind about Jane St Capital summer of code. Points concerning common interfaces raise the discussion about OSR. The organization of next year events doesn't raise particular interest. I think people would be interested to have one next year, if something comes out of this meeting.

I've been thinking about this for awhile, so time to put down some thoughts.

First, what is socialized medicine? If we listen to the politicians that label health care as "socialized", it seems to be "anything that is paid for by taxes and delivered free or cheaply to citizens." Putting aside the question of whether that meets the academic definition of socialism for the moment, let's look at things in the United States that are already socialized:

• K-12 education
• Police
• Fire fighters
• Public Libraries
• Roads
• Airports and air traffic control
• Military defense and offense

That's right. We trust the government with our children all day long for 13 years. For free!

Yet this is a country in which hospitals dump the homeless in the gutter for being unable to pay their bills. Even insured Americans find claims turned down for arbitrary reasons. People are afraid to change jobs for fear of losing health insurance.

Why is it bad to have the government pay for health care?

Here in the United States, our health care system is far from best in the world. It's not even top 10. Or 20. Our system encourages minimizing health care, and doesn't encourage preventative care.

I'd suggest that, in a democracy, it's best to have the government pay for health care. That's because, in a democracy, we are in control of the bureaucrats. If we wish to exercise common sense and pound into their heads that paying for preventative care makes good long-term sense, then we can do so at the ballot box.

So why the scare tactics about government being involved in health care?

Perhaps our real problem is that we have let government get out of our control? Perhaps we are too frightened of change to vote. Perhaps we've given up on a responsive government. Perhaps we think that the insurance companies and drug companies will never let us have a good health care system.

Yes, the lobbyists have a lot of power. But we have the power to remove it, and it's high time we used it.

The audacity of Obama to have hope. To say that we can do better. When Hillary Clinton falls in line with the Republicans and accuses him of having "false hope", effectively saying that we can't do any better, then is she -- or any Republicans -- really a candidate of change? I think that all these accusations from conservatives and Hillary that Obama has "false hope" has finally convinced me that he's the one to vote for. If everyone else claims that his ideas are too good, that his dreams too big, then I like him.

Oh, and you could substitute "college education" for "socialized medicine" everywhere in this article and get equally valid arguments.

This article is kind of interesting - it's a claim from a conservation group that using PCs to perform climate modelling is preferable to leaving them idle. The figures they provide are based on this brouchure from Tufts University, which provides an average power consumption per computer of 120 Watts and CO2 production of 1500 pounds per year. That gives a figure of 12.5 pounds of CO2 per Watt year.

The brouchure also contains the obviously false claim that an idle computer draws approximately the same amount of power as an active one. Anyone who's ever actually used a computer will have noticed that they get hotter when they're under load, and the baby thermodynamics would be crying if that energy didn't come from somewhere. The difference between idle and full load can be up to 100 Watts, though that includes extra draw from the graphics card. Something like the Climate Prediction application aren't likely to push the hardware that hard, but you're still looking at at least 20 Watts difference between idle and loaded on any reasonably modern computer. Using the Tufts figures and assuming that this results in an extra 16 hours of load per computer, that's somewhere around 170 extra pounds of CO2 per computer running the application per year - or, using the Tufts figure for the quantity of CO2 absorbed per tree, around 15 extra trees worth of required CO2 sequestration.

Distributed computing isn't a free resource. Each machine running one of these clients overnight is using something like 130 Watts more than a machine that's suspended instead. Deciding whether that's worth it is going to depend on your beliefs about how useful climate modelling is going to be in avoiding climate change. I'm leaning towards it being more of a political issue than a scientific one at this point, so my recommendation is to turn the things off.

(And please don't talk to me about the amount of energy wasted on demonstrating that cryptography can be broken when you've got enough processors to throw at it. The level to which anyone should be surprised at this result can be expressed in very few words)

As I use Drupal for Czech phpMyAdmin pages, it was only a matter of time till I will have (or want) to add some functionality. My first Drupal module is quite trivial, but anyway I already got positive feedback on it just after committing to Drupal CVS :-). Today I finished little cleanup which my initial version required and I decided to make a first release out of it. And what I'm still talking about? It's a module for adding measuring code for various web auditing systems used in Czechia. I didn't wanted to hack this somehow into templates and module which will provide block with those looks as best solution to me. You can get it on Drupal pages.

Main changes here are including the translations provided by Debian - thanks to all those who submitted po files.
No new functionality in this release - more an incremental improvement in the underlying codebase.
Future plans for QuickList
The 0.9.x series will continue the theme of incremental improvements, but once libqof2 is released, quicklist will begin to use QOF objects that are created dynamically from QuickList data as well as using QOF features like 64bit time and a choice of backends. I expect this to bring with it a SQL-query interface that would allow QuickList to provide a more usable report interface, finally replacing the missing functionality from the old QuickList. The QOF support will be implemented as a "read-only" mode, certainly initially, so that QuickList could read any QOF data source then produce SQL-based reports in HTML on the data. Eventually, this "read-only" mode should be able to handle "integral" data sources like the apt cache or other well-established sources where a suitable C API exists. This would allow any QuickList user to load the apt-cache, select data in any control field of any package using SQL syntax (via a GUI or via direct text entry), format a report in HTML and export that report to a file.
The QOF support would allow the code to support these data sources to be packaged as Glib modules (similar to libqofexpensesobjects0) to keep dependencies under control.
With this kind of support in place, I could finally be ready to release quicklist 1.0.0 sometime after Lenny.
If anyone is interested in any of these ideas, feel free to help with QuickList development.
http://quicklist.sourceforge.net/
Query Object Framework (QOF).

Finally making the last release of libqof1 before the imminent transition to libqof2. v0.7.4 includes a new pkg-config file that will become the default for libqof2 and later releases - qof.pc. In 0.7.4, this is installed alongside qof-1.pc to make it easier for packages to transition to the new file and to libqof2. (The transition itself simply consists of removing all the deprecated code in 0.7.4 in a single operation - use --disable-deprecated-qof to ./configure to see the effect.)
Once uploaded, I'll make releases of pilot-qof and gpe-expenses using the new pkg-config --libs qof call in ./configure (and a minimum requirement for QOF v0.7.4). GnoTime also needs to make this change (other changes for libqof2 have already been made - thanks Linas.)
There's plenty of time before libqof2 - I want to get the GDA backend operational before making the first libqof2 release. It's coming along but still experimental - this is why I have not asked for translation updates for 0.7.4, the strings that have changed are related to GDA which is not enabled by default in 0.7.4 and the strings will change again before libqof2 (QOF v0.8.0). I'll make a call for updates in good time before the 0.8.0 release. Depending on other tasks, this should be possible before Debian Lenny is released but if time is short, I'll wait until after Lenny.

http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2008/01/msg00006.html I fear it’s a little bit too late to introduce a release goal such as this one, which will probably have quite a few (tricky) side effects. I think it’s time to stop piling release goals, or we’re never going to release.

Due to the lack of entries so far I am amending the rules. It is no longer required that an entry be on the blog of the person who submitted it. Being on any blog that is aggregated by the conference Planet will do. This is known as a “guest post“. All it requires is that you email the post content to a blogger who you trust and they post it crediting you as the author. Guest posts are fairly common among serious bloggers, a google search will surely give more information.

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Apparently, the task scheduler in all Windows NT-derived versions up to (and including) Windows Server 2003 cannot run jobs under the "NT Authority\Network Service" security principal; "NT Authority\System" is the only so-called well-know security principal that can be used with it. Support for running tasks as "Network Service" or "Local Service" was only added in Task Scheduler 2.0, which is the version that ships with Vista and will be also included in Windows Server 2008.

Side note: I wonder why the link above, being a command reference for an administrative tool, is on the MSDN and not on the Technet site.

Practical implication is that without being able to use the "Network Service" principal, a distinct network account (domain account or server account) is required for any job that needs to access any network resource. This also means keeping track of another account and password — and taking care of controlling and auditing it's access; whereas the "Network Service" principal cannot normally be used for interactive sessions.

Annoyingly, the task scheduler UI also does not tell you that you can't if you try, but rather gives the un-helpful message "Access is denied. You do not have permission to perform the requested operation".
The same message is also shown when, for a regular account, the password entered does not match the actual account password. (This happened to me because the keyboard layout on a remote desktop session turned out to be not what I thought it was)
Anyone know if the error reporting has improved anything in the new task scheduler?

Apparently, the task scheduler in all Windows NT-derived versions up to (and including) Windows Server 2003 cannot run jobs under the "NT Authority\Network Service" security principal; "NT Authority\System" is the only so-called well-know security principal that can be used with it. Support for running tasks as "Network Service" or "Local Service" was only added in Task Scheduler 2.0, which is the version that ships with Vista and will be also included in Windows Server 2008.

Side note: I wonder why the link above, being a command reference for an administrative tool, is on the MSDN and not on the Technet site.

Practical implication is that without being able to use the "Network Service" principal, a distinct network account (domain account or server account) is required for any job that needs to access any network resource. This also means keeping track of another account and password — and taking care of controlling and auditing it's access; whereas the "Network Service" principal cannot normally be used for interactive sessions.

Annoyingly, the task scheduler UI also does not tell you that you can't if you try, but rather gives the un-helpful message "Access is denied. You do not have permission to perform the requested operation".
The same message is also shown when, for a regular account, the password entered does not match the actual account password. (This happened to me because the keyboard layout on a remote desktop session turned out to be not what I thought it was)
Anyone know if the error reporting has improved anything in the new task scheduler?

I'm a bit tired after driving up to Munich for the Android developer meeting, hosted by Google, and being "on" all day, but it was worth it. I was a bit apprehensive that it might be too 'introductory' in the sense of the Google guys telling you in person things that you could have easily looked up on the web, without spending a bunch of time driving around Austria and Bavaria. Fortunately, that wasn't the case. There was some of that, but also plenty of unstructured time to chat with Dan Morrill and Jason Chen, the two Google "Developer Advocates", who are both very friendly, informative and informed, approachable and put a lot of energy into what they do, despite being a bit tired from flying over from the US. It was nice to get a chance to talk with them, and considering that the platform is still changing, useful as well, because they were definitely listening to what people had to say to them. My thanks to them for a job well done. Here are some "impressions" I took away - note that they're not what anyone said, just ideas I got about what they said:

• Source code is being released when handsets ship because they want to work very closely with the hardware partners to make sure the phone experience is good (they said this). They want to "set the bar high", and they probably run the risk of someone snatching the code and slapping together a phone if they let out the source code to early. (They definitely didn't say this, it's just me connecting the dots).
• Despite interest for 'other languages', it really looks like they want everything to go through Dalvik in some way or another. Clearly, at some point in the future, there will be specs for writing Dalvik byte code.
• They won't talk about the upgrade strategy, something I asked about. I want to know that as a developer, I won't be stuck with N combinations of things that I have to support over the years. I want to know how they'll minimize that pain, but they're not currently able to discuss it.
• Talking with other people attending, there seemed to be some doubts about security and permissions for user data, since Android is moving away from the j2me "everything is private" model, to a model where data can be shared between apps, which opens up lots of good things, but also some potentially bad ones as well.

There's still really a sense of Android continuing to evolve, in a true spirit of openness. I liked that, as it means there is space for people to tell Google what they want, rather than simply being given a finished product and told that that's that... but then again, I would, being the open source guy that I am. I didn't get to show off Hecl quite as much as I would have liked to, but I did get to mention it a few times, so I guess I did ok.

...install a Babelbox, de-activate the "db_info babelbox/info" line in preseed_early and put the following in big capitals on a sheet of paper attached to the monitor:

BABELBOX CONTEST
Guess what language is used to install
that Debian system.

...and wait for the crowd to slowly gather around the box and start guessing. If you can offer stickers pins CDs to winners, that's even better. Hint: do not activate easy to guess languages. Good candidates (apart from all non Latin ones which are all *very* hard to recognize for the regular French geek, except maybe Japanese) are Hungarian, Basque, Slovenian. Arabic is too easy to recognize and so is Greek. Indic languages are a great success but Dzongkha is generally the winner. Hint 2: do not sort languages alphabetically by locales. Geeks are too smart and the geeks manning the booth will learn too quickly. Watch also people trying to switch to a console during the D-I runs and typing "cat /proc/cmdline". Hint 3: train yourself to recognize the languages before the contest so that you look clever... That worked pretty well during 1st day of Solutions Linux.

MySQL 5.0.51a was released today, which is a security hotfix release without any new features compared with 5.0.51. It fixes CVE-2007-6303, CVE-2007-6304, CVE-2008-0226 and CVE-2008-0227. These problems are already fixed in Debian with 5.0.32-7etch4 and 5.0.32-7etch5 for stable and 5.0.45-5 and 5.0.51-3 for unstable using the patches from MySQL, hence no need to write bugreports against the MySQL packages asking for an update to 5.0.51a.

We will update to 5.0.51a anyway with the next upload, but there's no need to hurry.