Many online video sites such as Youtube, Google Video, Dailymotion, Metacafe, and others only provide limited or inconvenient access to the videos; either they require you to install the proprietary Flash player (and I surely won't do that), and/or you can only view them online (but not download them). There are some solutions, each with advantages and disadvantages:

• youtube-dl, a command line script to download Youtube videos.
• metacafe-dl, same as above but for Metacafe videos.
• clive, a command line tool (with optional newt UI) for Youtube, Google Video (seems defunct at the moment) and Dailymotion.
• VideoDownloader, a Firefox plugin which is supposed to work with more than 60 video sites (Youtube and Google Video are among them). The only disadvantage compared to the other solutions: you need to start Firefox + X11 (no pure command line usage).
• UnPlug, a Firefox plugin similar to VideoDownloader, but with the advantage that it doesn't use the VideoDownloader web service (but rather figures out the video URLs itself).
• Gnash, a free software Flash video player is another option, but AFAICS it's not yet ready for daily usage (but it's getting there).
• swfdec, another Free Software Flash player, is actually working quite nice with Youtube already.

After the download, you can either view the videos using (e.g.) mplayer, or recode them into a more sane format. For all of the above programs there are Debian packages available, except for VideoDownloader/UnPlug (but you can easily install those from within Firefox). Update 2007-07-26: Added UnPlug and swfdec (thanks Joe Buck and Josh Triplet for the comments).

I am still looking for a solution that allows me to tag my mails similar to what Gmail offers. Having thought about this for quite a bit now, I can see three solutions, implemented at different levels in the mail flow: as filesystem, patch to the IMAP server (Dovecot), or patch to mutt. Since this post is about the filesystem, I'll concentrate on that, but I'll also touch upon the other two solutions briefly.

I've only taken a quick look at the quilt documentation but the
following thoughts occur to me:

1. emsource / emdebuild are similar to quilt and in some ways, I have
   reimplemented a subset of quilt in these scripts.


2. emsource handles 'quilt add' provided that changes are confined to
   files in debian/ (including new patches added to debian/patches).
   However, I was unable to find out how quilt handles unchanged files.
   e.g. emdebuild skips creating the patch if the diff is empty - does
   quilt do the same for files that have been added?


3. quilt is targetted at "upstream builds" and it will require various
   config settings to get quilt to both keep patches outside the package
   source directory AND handle situations where the package itself uses
   quilt with a different series of patches. emsource and emdebuild are
   completely separate from any existing patch method.


4. quilt does NOT make autobuilding emdebian packages easier. Conflicts
   are meant to be resolved by hand (e.g. emdebian-changelog.patch). A
   bespoke method can embed specific logic on handling such issues that a
   general method like quilt cannot.


5. quilt could be *almost* as transparent as the current method (which
   hides nearly all patch management within emsource and emdebuild) but
   would still require a wrapper to add support for keeping the patches in
   SVN.

Hmm. Think I'll stick for now. You can have too many nested tools.

24 July 2007 is the fourth birthday of Wikitravel, the free travel guide that I and my wife Michele Ann Jenkins started on July 24, 2003. It's been a long and complicated road, but I'm really proud of all the work Wikitravellers have done over these last four years. The project has gone from being a pretty-good idea to being one of the definitive travel resources on the Web. Winning the Webby Award for Best Travel Site this year was a real recognition of that trajectory. I'm wondering what 24 July 2008 will bring... it will be interesting to see. tags: wikitravel wiki travel wikiversary 24july2007

Vinismo It's only partly a coincidence, then, that today I'm launching, with my friend Niko, a new Open Content project dedicated to demystifying an even more complex and byzantine world: wine. Tonight we're demoing the site at DemoCampMontreal3, so it's as good a time as any to throw open the doors:

        http://vinismo.com/

We don't pretend to be wine experts or even connoisseurs. We're just two guys who like to drink wine and want to learn more about it. Ward Cunningham once said that wiki link is a great way to ask a question. We want to share the learning experience with people of all levels of expertise. We think that working together with our friends and family, with other Internet users, and with the public at large, we can create a detailed, readable, useful wine guide for people at any level of expertise. Our liberal Creative Commons license means that the guide is Free -- free for anyone to copy, modify, or publish in any medium. I need your help to make this project a success. If you can, I'd really appreciate if you could help us out with one or more of the following tasks:

• Please sign up to use our site at, and create a user page describing yourself.
• Drop us a note in the Wine Bar letting us know what you like and don't like about the site.
• Try adding some information about your favorite wines, wineries, wine regions or wine styles! It doesn't have to be perfect -- every little bit counts!
• Please forward this info to people you know who might be interested in Vinismo. They don't have to be experts to be interested in wine.
• If you have a blog, please post a link to our new site on it!
• If you use a social bookmarking tool, like del.icio.us, please add us to your list!
• If you use digg.com, please vote for our site there: http://digg.com/software/Open_Content_wine_guide_launches
• If you use reddit.com, please vote for our site there: http://freeculture.reddit.com/info/296au/comments

tags: wiki wine vinismo

Preface to the last post: I'm aware that my surprise at FSF using Skype does raise the old question "where do you draw the line?" - For example, do you refuse to use the fixed-line telephone system if your exchanges are not running free software? Me, I use the telephone system because it's effectively a monopoly and we don't have an alternative that works for me. I sometimes try to nibble at the system with the Phone Co-op and more VoIP use, but it's no fun banging my head against a wall. However, I boycott Skype because I can't tell what it's doing, there have been enough bad reports that I don't trust it and the alternatives of SIP and IAX work for me, but I expected FSF not to use Skype for idealistic reasons. FSF leaders like RMS have promoted things like Why schools should exclusively use free software [by Richard Stallman], carefully corrected inaccurate claims about free software and refused to mention some proprietary software products. They were often criticised for it, but they continued to do it (for good reasons IMO, even when I disagreed with them). So, FSF's Controller giving an interview over Skype seemed a rather surprising about-face. Then the interviewer claimed "Skype is free" and it went unchallenged. After the show, I sent the email...

I just sent this: Dear FSF, On the Radio New Internationalist show "Up in Smoke", during an interview with Peter Brown of FSF (about 43 minutes in), I was surprised to hear the following revelation that FSF uses Skype and the failure to challenge the claim that Skype is free software:

"Peter Brown: ... This interview today is being transmitted through Skype. We're talking through Skype. Now, that obviously is a direct threat to the entrenched telecoms and they would like to restrict that, to lower the quality of the voice connection and they want to do that with lots of other types of transmission. Rachel Maher: And can they do that? Because Skype of course is free and there's a really direct benefit for organisations like ours, which is a non-profit organisation using Skype technology. Will they be able to do that? Peter Brown: Yes, so what they can do is easily identify types of information being passed, so what they can typically do is downgrade the service that you're using, so that - for instance, voice communication - those packets of data can be slowed down, effectively making voice communciation more difficult. Now this can only really be achieved if they're able to manipulate legislation. Unfortunately, they have a long history of being very successful at this. I mentioned earlier on that Digital Restrictions Management are a threat to our freedoms because it's allowing them to erect gateways and to control what it is that we can view and do with our computers. ..."

I was disappointed not to find much on the FSF web site about the need for free VoIP software, building on GNU oSIP and other free software, instead of Skype's proprietary software, which has contained spyware and worms already. Will you be adding such information soon? What is the official FSF view of Skype and similar proprietary VoIP systems? Nevertheless, well done for covering DRM, net neutrality and the privacy problems of Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft in a relatively short interview. Regards, MJR

The dpkg team has a nice history of changing VCS over time. At the beginning, Ian Jackson simply uploaded new tarballs, then CVS was used during a few years, then Arch got used and up to now Subversion was used. When the subversion repository got created, the arch history has not been integrated as somehow the conversion tools didn’t work. Now we’re likely to move over git for various reasons and we wanted to get back the various bits of history stored in the different VCS. Unfortunately we lost the arch repository. So we have disjoints bits of history and we want to put them all in a single nice git branch… git comes with git-cvsimport, git-archimport and git-svnimport, so converting CVS/SVN/Arch repositories is relatively easy. But you end up with several repositories and several branches. Git comes with a nice feature called “git rebase” which is able to replay history over another branch, but for this to work you need to have a common ancestor in the branch used for the rebase. That’s not the case… so let’s try to create that common ancestor! Extracting the first tree from the newest branch and committing it on top on the oldest branch will give that common ancestor because two identical trees will have the same identifier. Using git_load_dirs you can easily load a tree in your git repository, and “git archive” will let you extract the first tree too. In short, let’s see how I attach the “master” branch of my “git-svn” repository to the “master” branch of my “git-cvs” repository:

$ cd git-svn
$ git-rev-list --all   tail -1
0d6ec86c5d05f7e60a484c68d37fb5fc31146c40
$ git-archive --prefix=dpkg-1.13.11/ 0d6ec86c5d05f7e60a484c68d37fb5fc31146c40   (cd /tmp && tar xf -)
$ cd ../git-cvs
$ git checkout master
$ git_load_dirs -L"Fake commit to link SVN to older CVS history" /tmp/dpkg-1.13.11
[...]
$ git fetch ../git-svn master:svn
$ git checkout svn
$ git rebase master

That’s it, your svn branch now contains the old cvs history. Repeat as many times as necessary…

Bloomberg: Tour de France TV Audiences Rise in Europe Even After Scandals (tip tdfblog ) reports audiences are up 6% in France, 11% in Spain and 40% in Denmark (to over 800,000). Italy's RAI reports 1.2million viewers, while ARD/ZDF averaged 1.4million until they pulled the plug over half a dope test. In the UK, the BARB Weekly Summaries show the tour's London-Canterbury Stage 1 charting with 178,000 viewers on itv4. That's up from 143,000 for 2006's stage 1 (up 24%). Last year's itv4 coverage seems to have peaked at 197,000, so it'll be interesting to see how later stages fare, as details are announced. Stage 1 was also shown on the more widely available (analogue+digital) itv1 channel. The itv1 coverage didn't chart, so it must have had less than 3.41 million viewers, but I can't see exactly how many. British Eurosport's reported audience for Stage 1 increased from 84,000 last year to 118,000 (up 40%). Their 2006 peak was 100,000 for the last Thursday highlights, so that's already broken. They've been advertising pretty widely, with really annoying Franglais adverts that mispronounce the race name ("Tardy France" eh?). There was also an overspill into other channels, which we don't usually see. Two of my favourites: Graham Jones: What do the Tour de France and a Victoria sponge have in common with your social networking web site? Channel 4: Tour de France's UK appeal (video feed) mms://a1167.v15478c.c15478.g.vm.akamaistream.net/7/1167/15478/v0004/origin.channel4.com/news/2007/07/05_bike.wmv

Last week, Terah, Jacob, and I boarded a train in Kansas. We were bound for Los Angeles, then would go up the coast of California, eventually winding up in Portland for OSCON.

Our first train was the Southwest Chief out to LA.



Jacob had a great time on the train. This is a picture of Jacob and Terah in our sleeping car room. Jacob slept in his carseat at night and played with us during the day. See all recent photos of Jacob.

We had the option to get off the train for a few minutes in La Junta, CO. I took some photos trackside.



Here's Jacob enjoying the lounge car. There were dozens of Boy Scouts on our train, heading to the Boy Scout camp near Raton, NM. Many of them hung out in the lounge car, so Jacob had plenty to watch and keep him entertained.



The lounge car has wrap-around windows. We got an expansive view of the Rockies on the first day of our trip, and of the California desert on the second. This route really gives you a feeling of being alone sometimes. There are times where you can look out the window, and as far as you can see, there is no evidence of people or civilization.

Here's a picture out the lounge car, looking at the train as it rounded a curve.



The lounge car was in the middle of the train, so the train really was longer than it might appear here.

We had a bit of an adventure in Lamy, NM. Apparently a terminal cancer patient was riding the train, and died in the night. We were held up for about 2 hours for authorities to arrive, perform their investigation, etc.

While we were there, passengers could get off the train and look around. I took a few photos there.



This is a photo looking towards the front of the Chief. It uses bi-level cars, so every car has an upstairs and a downstairs.

Just outside the Lamy station is an old dining car. It is now a stationary restaurant. The restaurant had closed just before we arrived, but they let me in to take a few quick photos anyway.



Just past Albuquerque, one of the two locomotives on our train failed. That meant that, combined with the delay at Lamy, we were more than 3 hours late into Los Angeles. That, in turn, meant that we missed our connection to the Coast Starlight. So the new plan was to take a bus to Bakersfield, then the San Joaquin train to Sacramento, where we could catch up with the Coast Starlight and get to Portland as scheduled.



Jacob really enjoyed the Bakersfield train station. I carried him up to the stone walls, which he enjoyed exploring with his hands.



This is the Bakersfield station. It's a nice building. But their large metal sign reads "To trains and busses." Someday I will forget about them misspelling "buses" on a large metal sign.

I've got two more pictures of Jacob at Bakersfield that you'd enjoy: one, two. He sure was a popular baby. We got countless compliments from strangers, and he got even more smiles and greetings from people. Even when he was fussy, people kept saying what a good baby he was. We were a little surprised at that. A few people even found his cry to be cute and funny!



One of the nice side-effects of missing our connection was seeing the grand old Sacramento train station. A beautifully-decorated building. We were there until about 12:30AM because the Coast Starlight had been delayed as well.

Terah saw a sign out the door saying "Quiznos: Now Open." I figured that meant that the store was open, not that the place was open late into the night, but she wanted to check. She stepped out and then back in again. "As soon as I got out, homeless people started yelling at me! Plus the store wasn't open," she reported.



On the Coast Starlight, we discovered the absolutely stunning Pacific Parlour Car. These cars were originally built in the 1950s for the Santa Fe railroad, and have been renovated and restored by Amtrak for service on the Coast Starlight. That's the only train where they run, and they are available only to first-class passengers.

I noticed stairs going to the lower level of the Parlour, and was curious what was down there. So I went down to check it out, and it is a small (18 seats, I think) theater!



We sat down there for awhile and talked to some of the other people.

The view from the Coast Starlight was amazing. The trip through the mountains was particularly nice. We saw mountains from the distance, up close, and at some points could look out our window directly down into a deep valley below. There were lakes, waterfalls, and little creeks all along.



And finally, this is the grand Portland train station. Still an active station and a sight to see, though not as nice as Kansas City's.

So that's the trip to Portland. More to come on the convention and the city itself.

Ian, I am not sure that “good package management” is a real selling point for anyone but system administrators. Home users do not care, as there is not that much difference between double-clicking an executable (that pops up a window, asks a few questions and then installs the software) and selecting a check-box in a list and clicking “apply” (followed by window, questions, etc.). In a business setting the users usually do not have permission to install software anyway, so they could not care less how it was installed, the only thing important is that it is there. In my opinion, the single technology that has had the most impact would be COM, the “Component Object Model”, because this is what the ISVs want: an easy way to define a (binary) interface that will allow components from different vendors to work together, ideally in the same virtual address space for maximum efficiency. The registry provides the necessary lookup functionality, so that you can construct an object of a given type by giving its class name or GUID to CoCreateInstance, and you get something back that provides the interfaces that this class implements, which is either the object directly or an RPC proxy. The latter happens, for example, when a multithreaded application wants to call methods in an object that is not threadsafe (COM will then serialize the calls) or when the object is provided by a system service (where we have dbus). The fact that the only thing you can rely on is the defined interface (a set of methods and data objects that map to getter/setter methods) makes it necessary to define the interface first and invest lots of Interfaces become immutable as soon as they are published, incompatible changes need a new interface name (that's where all the interface names ending in …2 or …3 come from). Under Linux, the closest thing is GNOME and their use of CORBA. If you were to write an application that runs within the GNOME framework, and if you wanted third party vendors to be able to plug into it, then you would probably publish an IDL file for it. Lots of “if”s there. Licensing is also an issue here. One thing the GPL fails to address, even in version 3, is the integration of components without linking into the same address space (which ORBit never does IIRC). Technically, the component provider and the component user communicate via sockets using a well-known protocol, so the component user is not bound by the GPL; the only thing that could be argued is that the IDL file defining the interface would be GPLd (although most jurisdictions consider interfaces as not copyrightable and/or permit “reengineering” for interoperability purposes). Some people might consider this “cheating” around the GPL, as any GPL'd program or library providing components could be used freely by any closed source application as long as the source code to the GPL'd portions was made available. Last (but not least) it is a matter of developer motivation. Third party vendors are, for most of us, not our target audience, and properly supporting them is going to be quite a bit of work. I've written about mixing different C libraries in the same executable image before, as a “nice to have” item. For components that should share the same image, like COM does, it is an absolute must, and COM goes to great lengths to make sure this actually works. For example, allocating memory that is to be passed to a COM method must be allocated using midl_user_alloc() from the RTC DLL and freed using midl_user_free() from the same; as this is a system library and compiler vendors are forbidden from bringing their own, everyone uses the same allocator pair (that internally just calls malloc() and free() from the Microsoft C library, but that is an implementation detail you are not supposed to know). On the Linux side, people do not care much about matching allocator functions, because in essence it all ends up in glibc's malloc()/free() anyway. When glib introduced their own allocators and started using them for their own structures, a number of applications started crashing unless you set a certain environment variable that told glib to pass everything through to glibc. Personally, I've spent the last days compiling toolchains in order to provide compiler packages that work “out of the box” on at least Debian etch, lenny and sid, and Ubuntu dapper, edgy, feisty and gutsy. Right now, I feel a lot like shipping statically linked binaries. Where Windows has mostly gotten out of the “DLL hell”, Linux has built its own variant of it:

The Windows DLL hell

is a hot place. Everyone is bringing their own grill lighter they believe does not cause cancer, starts a small fire and begins to roast marshmallows. The problem there is that the floor is covered with a sticky mixture of lighter fluid and everything is burning.

The Linux DLL hell

on the contrary is freezing cold. It has small isolated fires where a few friends are sitting, and they suddenly decide to move on and pour water over the fire and your marshmallows without asking first. Getting into a group is difficult, and if you manage it, all it means is that you are told to pick up your marshmallows before they extinguish the fire.

At this point, I'm going to be comment- and trackback-whoring; instead of answering the obvious question, I'm going to leave it open: Would a COM-style componentization model work in the Linux world, and attract software vendors, provided we can put out stable APIs and support them properly, or is that a red herring?

Both local papers are reporting that the council's investigations found nothing wrong but there's still nothing on North Somerset Council's web site. WWN: Reports that recyclable waste is being dumped in landfill sites have been rubbished by the council. The Weston Mercury - News: Recycling gets clean bill of health

Recently, online mapping seems to be going through a period of "if it isn't broken yet, keep adding features until it is." I'm looking for a UK mapping web site which must include contour data (useful for bicycles), be usable without JavaScript and cookies (useful for mobile browsing) and be easy to write a search form for (useful for web links and bookmarklets); and should include aerial photos, postcode search and other countries. I used to use Multimap but it recently started requiring JavaScript and ditched the OS maps which showed the contours. Streetmap is still usable, but the visible copy of the beta site makes it look like they're about to make the same JavaScript-hungry mistake (emailed). Google Maps works without JavaScript and cookies (despite its whinging on the front page) but doesn't have contour data. And it's Google, who I don't like for other reasons. OpenStreetMap, Maporama, Mapblast and Ordnance Survey all seem to require JavaScript (OS despite their own accessibility policy - emailed). Map24 just seems broken in ways I've not debugged. So, besides Streetmap for now, is there an easy-to-use UK web map with contours?

Here’s an interesting piece in the Washington Post about what might happen when the US withdraws from Iraq. I regret not blogging before the war started. It would have been good if I could have pointed to a blog post predicting the same thing before the invasion took place. I’ve always thought that the two possibilities for Iraq were for the country to be partitioned (which would be likely to weaken Turkey and strengthen Iran and thus be avoided by the US if possible) or run by an absolute despot.

Share This

* Yesterday, we had meeting with Mozilla guys, Chris and Seth at HBCSE. I was touch with Seth from some days and made this announcement on ILUG-Bom mailing list. Nirav was backbone behind this meet. 42 people did RSVP for meet. * I reached there at around 9.30 AM, Ankit was already there and he came long way from Pune (and paid 500/- from Thane to HBCSE too!), we met after 2 years and I felt great after seeing him - our l10n hero. We chatted while, ate ‘Idali’ and Chris and Seth was there at 10 AM. Perfect. But, there was only 6 people. We waited till 11 and setup tshirts on stage, projector etc. People were coming like they are coming in marriage! * I gave 1 minute welcome speech. Seth started talk at 11 AM. People grab Tshirts, Pins, Mouse pads (wow!) and cool stickers. Chris joined presentation to talk about how Mozilla evolve. We had nice discussion and question/answers too. Lunch was good. We had presentations from different people, including Ankit’s step-by-step procedure to start new language process for localization in Mozilla-* packages. * Krishnakant Mane showed us, how Firefox is capable with accessibility. I also thanks him here for Gnome-orca package (I did ITP after his demonstration in Dec ‘06 Lug meet). Siji showed some issues and its solution with printing. Dr. Nagarjuna presented ‘gnowledge’ extension for Firefox. Shantanu also gave demo on transliteration extension for Indian languages. * Somehow, Official lug meet didn’t happen. Speaker was missing! I seated together with other IRCers of #linux-india in canteen and we talked about various things. It was real fun to hear Pradeepto after long time. BG came too late (too late to have nice stickers!) * I officially hate Mumbai traffic, now. Many thanks to people who did RSVP and didn’t appear.

My brother Ted and his partner Nabil had a great commitment ceremony yesterday afternoon in Dolores Park in San Francisco. It was a beautiful day, and they had lots of friends who came out for them. I came up from Los Altos Hills with our parents, and my brothers Nate and Andy came with their friends and/or families, too. Ted and Nabil march to a different drummer, to put it mildly. Their ceremony was remarkably like a Quaker wedding, although I don't think they planned it that way. They had a nice picnic and tea party in the park for a few hours, let the guests get to know each other, and then called everyone together to listen to their promises to each other. (Very sweet, by the way). They then exchanged bejewelled carabiners -- those funky little mountain-climbing metal loops that people also use as keyrings. "We may lose necklaces or rings, but we're not going to lose our keys." The carabiners were decorated with the California state gem, benitoite (Benito-ite), which is rarer than diamonds. Brilliantly, their friends who designed the carabiners also managed to include a USB thumbdrive, on which they're going to copy all the pictures, stories, movies, and other digital paraphernalia from the ceremony itself. Ted and Nabil will be carrying around those pictures as long as they have the carabiners. Clever! After they'd exchanged the carabiners, they hooked them to their belts, and then hooked them together. "And now... we're HITCHED!" Thunderous applause. They then invited up anyone who wanted to make a toast. My brother Nate went first, and girt in a bastard sword (for unclear reasons), he made a great toast. A dozen other people, including my Dad, came up to speak. By then, Ted and Nabil were falling over with fatigue, so we had mercy on them and stopped coming up to say nice things about them. Everyone dug in to champagne and cake, and Amita June and her two cousins Elena and Tessa ran around on the huge playground in the park. Definitely a good, good wedding-like event. tags: ted nabil wedding carabiners commitment ceremony

Long day This morning we had a Skype conference call relatively early in the morning, and then a brunch with Nabil's family (who are visiting from Virginia and Philadelphia). It was really nice -- my folks decided to build a huge patio in their backyard, and it's great for having kids and family running around, as well as for outdoor brunches. (We haven't had a meal inside since we got here, actually.) This afternoon we drove up to Novato to visit Maj's grandmother Jeannette and her Uncle Kevin and Aunt Robin. Also present were Jeannette's lifelong friend Roseanne and Kevin's highschool pal Jim. Amita June loved running around their big backyard and playing with their sweet old dog Holly. She also got a lot of mileage out of their porch swing. Maj and Robin swapped cooking tips and renovation horror stories, and I got to listen to Jeannette and Roseanne tell gambling stories from various Southern California Indian casinos. Jim, meanwhile, was on his cell phone in another corner of the yard, negotiating with another gold prospector with a hand injury to work the friend's claim. Quite an evening. After a dinner of barbecued salmon, caprese salad, and corn-on-the-cob, Kevin and Robin's neighbors came over, and we talked more about statistical analysis, sheep-farming in Marin County and driving through Austria. A long drive back to my folks', but Amita slept the entire time, thankfully. Good for us all. tags: kevin robin novato jeannette indiancasinos porchswing amitajune

Voice jail I had to call Air Canada a few days ago to get our tickets to come out here to California, and I had a terribly frustrating time working my way through their automated systems to get to a human being that I needed to talk to. And I thought to myself, "Why do I hate these automated voice systems so?" I never call a 1-800 number or another voice system if my problem could in any way be handled automatically. I always go to the Web first, and only try to get on the phone if the particular special-purpose request I have hasn't been, or can't be, built into the Web interface. But the economics of call centres makes the company want to shunt me into one or another automated voice systems in hopes that I'll be satisfied and not bother a real human being. My only goal with a phone call is to talk to an intelligent human being who can handle my exceptional situation. But the interface is designed precisely to deny me that goal. Can that interface ever be anything but frustrating? tags: phones voicejail frustration interface

Least likely to succeed Ross Mayfield posted a nice pic of me offering to run his company in exchange for a hot meal. It's a good shot of me, actually. In other linking issues, my Technorati "Authority" value is now 101, putting me squarely into B-list Bloglebrity territory. Hooray for the second string! tags: b-list socialtext technorati rossmayfield bloglebrity

Just a brief note to announce that Galician has recently surpassed Brazilian Portuguese in the po-debconf translation page, and now it stands at the 11th position. Yes, this is exciting for me :) Only 264 strings left to catch up with Russian :) BTW I’m in Sunnyvale (California, US) until Aug 10th. If someone wants to meet, just email me. My email address should be relatively easy to find. If it isn’t, leave a comment or something.

Over the last few months I've been hacking on (yet another) image viewer for GTK+, using the hot new GVFS library (go Alex!) for asynchronous file handling and GtkImageView because I'm lazy. It's got a pretty lean interface at the moment and is fairly fast in use. My goal is to use it on my Zaurus for reviewing images from a CF card in the field, so performance is quite important to me. As the primary users are photographers, filenames are not shown in the interface (just thumbnails). There is a lot of work left to do, but I've used 0.1 for some time now. The source is being developed in a Bazaar branch at http://burtonini.com/bzr/katachi. I've just tagged a 0.1 release, a tarball of which is here. You'll need to build GVFS from git, and GtkImageView from svn, sorry. :) NP: Closes Volume 1, Boards of Canada

For a while now I've wanted a standalone internet radio; something that only required power and had wifi and would then stream audio from my desktop machine. A bit like the Slim Squeezebox but without the need to plug it into a HiFi setup. I'd found the range of devices based on the Reciva Barracuda module, but they all seemed a bit too expensive to impulse buy. Currys are now doing the Logik IR100, which uses this module, for £49.99, at which point I decided it was worth a look. I'd already done some investigation about the module. It runs Linux, Reciva do the Right Thing and make their code available, and it can have its firmware upgraded. There used to be a wiki of info, but it's disappeared recently. Richard Kalton has a blog of his progress - he's got a shell, but doesn't seem to have found any serial console pinouts and seems to have gained the info required to get a shell (which he doesn't disclose) from reading the flash off the board itself. 'bill888' also has a general Logik IR100 page. The radio itself seems quite consumer friendly. You plug it in, press the on button and tell it to search for networks. It then shows a list of ESSIDs which you can select from. It'll let you enter a WEP/WPA key if necessary, but I setup an unencrypted wireless network for testing. It then downloads a station list and you can chose what you want to listen to. Seems to do exactly what it says on the box. It doesn't support Oggs though. And all my music is Ogged. So I want in. As a first approach I'm trying not to take it apart - it doesn't seem like anyone's got serial access, or confirmed JTAG as working, so there doesn't seem to be anything to be gained by opening it up yet. So I decided to watch network traffic, in particular what it does when you ask it to check for new firmware. The initial request is for: http://copper.reciva.com/cgi-bin/service-pack.pl?serial=<serialno>;sp=<current service pack>&hw=<hardware id>&sv=<serial firmware>&check=1 This then sends a redirect to: reciva://copper.reciva.com:6000/service-pack/sp-wrap-cache/sp.255-c-158.tar Now reciva:// is an encrypted custom protocol it seems, that passes the serial number to the server, which then returns a challenge, which the device then hashes up and generates a session key, passes back to the server and asks for the file. You can see this in lib/rtp.c from the curl tarball on the Reciva GPL site. Unfortunately there are bits missing - several files (rtp_encrypt.h, rtp_encrypt.c, sernum.c) and it appears to want to talk to some sort of sernum daemon. As such I haven't been able to get a copy of the firmware upgrade tarball. :( However, if I could get one and have a look to see the format (is it a full file system image, or just changed files? Is it relative or absolute paths?) then I think it should be possible to build a new firmware image, hijack the connections to copper.reciva.com on my local network, and redirect to a http:// URL rather than a reciva:// URL, thus avoiding having to do the encryption stuff. Assuming, of course, that the upgrade isn't itself signed or encrypted. More prodding required...

I won’t re-explain in great length why I think it’s good to endorse the concept of Debian Maintainers. I have been enough involved in the debian-vote discussions (and the previous debian-project discussions). I would just like to remind everybody that we elected sam to see changes and progress on many areas. We haven’t seen many results yet, but I know that sam has been working hard and I’ve been helping him as much as I can on the problem of our DSA team (one day I might blog about it or even start a GR if the situation continues to not improve despite the numerous efforts that we’ve put into it). Here we have a concrete proposal for a change, and I believe a change for the better. But just like for every change, people have fears: they fear people who only care about technical excellence and not too much about philosophy, they fear that the quality level will drop, they fear that nobody will care about NM afterwards, etc. It’s legitimate to have concerns, to express them and to discuss them. But we should not let them take us over or we’ll end up abandoning all initiatives that are required to evolve and adjust to our moving environment. We need to encourage people who are ready to try out new things. In cases where it’s not entirely clear how the situation will evolve, it’s better to try out and react accordingly instead of doing nothing and hoping that people will wait us. When we do things while hoping for the best, the worst won’t come up true so easily. Have faith in our future.

In the past something-over-half-a-year (wow, time flies like crazy), i have shuffled my (virtual) toolbox fairly significantly. In the desktop department, I no longer use the full KDE desktop, only a few applications from KDE 3 (that is mostly konqueror, plus some of kdeedu). I still use amarok, although by now mostly just to manage my iPod, since it is outright laptop-hostile. Most of the time, it’s better (and much more power-efficient) to use iPod hooked into usb for power, at least as long as the music is there. For the rest, i now use the commandline players to play single albums (just music123 for most formats). For the window manager, i have opted for xmonad, after briefly using ion3 and a faint attempt at wmii (which didn’t quite work for me). Xmonad, however, works great and its simplicity is quite amazing. Despite its absolute minimalism, it is, after some getting used to, much more usable than the rest of WMs i have used. For terminal, i use urxvt, which is lighter and apparently also faster than konsole (i may reconsider that choice when KDE 4 konsole comes out). With xmonad, i don’t really need tabs anymore, i’m not sure why, but it may be related to more general change in my workflow. In the version control department, i am now using darcs for all the projects where i decide. I no longer use svk, since i no longer really know how to. Not working with it for a while, i lost the ability to use it efficiently (which possibly hints at the fact it is somewhat too complex). On the other hand, i am much happier with darcs, also since it is much more forgiving about mistakes and generally very deterministic. It requires some insight to be used efficiently i suppose, but this is mostly due to differences with more traditional systems (i believe). Today, i have finally moved my ikiwiki to darcs, which was the last thing using subversion/svk (well, i have only been able to use it through ssh and local svn for some months now, so i generally didn’t use it at all). This hopefully means that i will be able to add more content to this page and blog as well, since it is less effort now. I am still using emacs (GNU emacs 22, xemacs didn’t quite work for me when i have tried it — i have a somewhat nontrivial setup, too). I intend to try out vimpulse at some point, in addition to viper, to supersede my emacs-lisp hacks for visual line selection. I have also started working on replacing my internet-facing services, since they are running in an “emergency” (ie, not really working well) mode, after the xen system broke down completely (it was mostly un-upgradable due to fragility of xen packages and of the whole xen system — and since the setup relied on working xen for even basic internet connectivity, upgrades were extremely painful). I am migrating to a solution based on user-mode-linux, and moving all the services to a less power-hungry and less noisy machine (an oldish pentium 3 box). When this is complete, i should be able to read my private mail sanely again, since currently the spam filters don’t work and my inbox is mostly trash. This is unrelated to the xen breakdown, my mail used to be handled by a machine at a company i used to do admin work for. However, they removed my accounts (and therefore access to my mail) without a line of prior notice. I still have control over my domain at least (although there will be a problem when it gets to expire, i will have to arrange a transfer with the said company, i suppose). Morale of the story: never do that. (Yeah, and in the spirit of the post, i am still using mutt for reading mail).