For some reason my involvement with Fosdem is going up, not down. 
Yesterday, I've unpacked new toy - ColorHug. It came in small packet with CD (which is unfortunately not that useful as it should be), mini USB cable and a letter from Richard Hughes.
First attempt to use was of course just connect and make it work :-).
The basic access works out of the box:
$ /usr/lib/colorhug-client/colorhug get-firmware-version
1.0.3
$ /usr/lib/colorhug-client/colorhug get-hardware-version
Hardware Version 1
$ /usr/lib/colorhug-client/colorhug get-serial-number
000019
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Yesterday, I've unpacked new toy - ColorHug. It came in small packet with CD (which is unfortunately not that useful as it should be), mini USB cable and a letter from Richard Hughes.
First attempt to use was of course just connect and make it work :-).
The basic access works out of the box:
$ /usr/lib/colorhug-client/colorhug get-firmware-version
1.0.3
$ /usr/lib/colorhug-client/colorhug get-hardware-version
Hardware Version 1
$ /usr/lib/colorhug-client/colorhug get-serial-number
000019
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The new hardware looks like it s reliable. The one I swapped out 10 days ago crashed every 3 days or so for reasons I couldn t discern. I changed that one for a spare I had laying around and have been hosting my blog on the machine to exercise it. So far, no crashes, and a 10 day uptime. Note: this is not the hypervisor I am trying the xen -> kvm migration out on. This is the one I set up for the University of Washington Bothell s PRCCDC project. Now I need to bring their admin staff up to speed on administering it.
cjac@proliant1:~$ uptime 16:41:26 up 10 days, 22:15, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.01, 0.05And incidentally, I ve had more hits on the blog today than I have since the last time I started counting back in November:
Thanks all for giving me traffic with which to test the stack :)
Update: I managed to make sound work. For some weird reason, a mute switch option of some the many (and who knows how useful) switches of my sound card was enabled. Now the damn thing works. Did I mention that since I did the upgrade all my sound cards (I have a USB sound card, too) have listed as available inputs all the inputs of my internal sound card (mic, front mic, line in, CD, etc.) in Audacity? That makes for a very confusing and loooong sound input sources list! The upside is that I can finally record clips from televisions that do not provide such a feature and FastVideoDownload doesn't handle.
Our Dear Project Leader, Stefano Zacchiroli, regularly mentions
the fact that there's an amount of Debian money available for
hardware sponsoring of Debian developers, but it seems that not
much people benefit from it.
Each time I saw one of this reminder, I wonder if I should
apply, and the anser is usually no. The fact is that I don't think
any new laptop or desktop to do my Debian stuff, and the last time
I bought a box (my x201s last summer) it was not really
specifically for Debian tasks so I didn't dare to ask (not to
mention the fact I bought it because I did have the money to do
so).
And I think this is mostly the problem. I might be wrong, but I
think that most people which could benefit from this just don't
dare asking or don't estimate themselves eligible for it.
When I saw Ben Hutchings
post, where the first thing he says is about how hardware is
expensive, I thought hey, he should get some
Debian money for buying new hardware: building kernel is really
time consuming and having multiple powerful cores, more ram and
fast disks/SSDs really helps . Turns out that Ben just didn't
really want to spend too much money there, but the case still
stands. We also see from time to time people saying they'll be
offline for a while because of broken laptop or something like
that. Once again, maybe those people wouldn't mind some help from
the Debian project, and maybe they just don't think about asking,
or they don't dare.
So thinking about it a bit more, I think I wouldn't dare asking
money for myself, but maybe I could dare asking money for other
people (this is a bit like the flattr posts by Rapha l Hertzog,
where he incited people to give money to projects he liked). If I'm
not alone in this case, maybe those Debian developers who think
some of their peers would benefit some hardware could drop them a
mail with leader@ on copy, to propose just that. No need for huge
publicity on that (in order to not embarass people), though the
transparency rules still apply when it comes to Debian money.
Last year I shared my Debian related goals for 2011 . I tend to put more goals than what I can reasonably complete alone and this year was no exception. Let s have a look.
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I moved 600km away from Madrid, I quit my job because with all the coming and going I was barely making any money, and in order to keep a healthy, active mind, I'll keep working for Debian. I also started occasionally helping kandinski with sysadmin stuff for Barrapunto (the Spanish SlashDot), also for love, and because of incredible timing. This blog consists not only of posts created in it, but also older posts written elsewhere. The vast majority of them comes from older blog engine I used here (Nanoblogger), but almost same amount are posts written in Czech originally posted on abclinuxu.cz.
It turned out that when I was doing import of those, I somehow forgot (or rather did not care) to fix links between them and links to rest of abclinuxu.cz website. With few lines script and huge help of BeautifulSoup these should be now fixed. So you can properly navigate over almost seven years of my blogging history.
While looking at other failing URLs here, I've also added number of redirects, so that most people end up on pages where they expect :-).
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This blog consists not only of posts created in it, but also older posts written elsewhere. The vast majority of them comes from older blog engine I used here (Nanoblogger), but almost same amount are posts written in Czech originally posted on abclinuxu.cz.
It turned out that when I was doing import of those, I somehow forgot (or rather did not care) to fix links between them and links to rest of abclinuxu.cz website. With few lines script and huge help of BeautifulSoup these should be now fixed. So you can properly navigate over almost seven years of my blogging history.
While looking at other failing URLs here, I've also added number of redirects, so that most people end up on pages where they expect :-).
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I m also changing all of my disk layouts from being block devices per each guest partition to one block device hypervisor side per each /dev/xvd* guest side. The block devices all live on a single storage server and are being served via iSCSI. One of the guests is making use of AoE, but I m thinking I m going to move it to iSCSI, too, so there s one less d mon I need to maintain.
It s currently xen on squeeze. I want to experiment with kvm. I will miss xen-create-image, though.
Okay. Zelda wants to watch a movie, so I m going to stop blathering now.
Moo,
C.J.
I've mentioned before that I compete every year in the MIT Mystery
Hunt -- an enormous, multi-day, round-the-clock puzzle
competition held in January at MIT each year.
Last year, my team Codex won the hunt. The reward (punishment?)
for winning is the responsibility to write the 100+ puzzles, (and
meta-puzzles, and meta-meta-puzzles, and theme, and events) and to
put on the whole event the following year.
So over the last year, I've worked with a huge group of folks to put
together this year's hunt which had a theme loosely based on The
Producers. My own role was small compared to many of my teammates:
I contributed to some puzzle writing and to a bunch of "test-solving"
of candidate puzzles to make sure they were solvable, not too easy,
fun, and well constructed. During the hunt, I visited competing teams,
verified answer submissions, and took advantage of my jet-lag from my
return from Japan on the day of the hunt to work the night shift
distributing items to teams.
To get an idea of what the hunt is like, you can check out a puzzle I
wrote for this years hunt. The solution is linked from the corner
of that page.
Today I released two entirely different pieces of software with the
identical version number 3.20120115. Debian developers also will be soon
noticing a piece of software I released with the version number 9.20120115.
I expect to move more of my software to this version number scheme over
time, unless I find something badly wrong with it. It reflects how I think
about versions for my software; there's a kind of continual "now" that
development progresses through, in which individual releases have little
discrete meaning and at the same time, there can also be significant
discontinuities, that require the user to do something to deal with
(such as a new debhelper compat version, or a new git-annex repository
format).
Those two things are really all that I need a version number for my
software to communicate. I can do without the rest of the things that
version numbers are used for:
I will be helping to represent the FSF at FOSDEM next month in Brussels. I'm speaking in the Legal Issues Devroom on Saturday 2012-02-04. The presentation is called "Is copyleft being framed?":
This short talk will address the following questions, to inspire discussion and contemplation about how we frame descriptions of the state of licensing in free software.Let me know if you'll be there too!
- Numbers are increasingly being cited to show that the use of copyleft licenses, specifically the GPL, is declining. What do these numbers actually show, who is propagating them, and why? What do or might other numbers show?
- Is the "percentage of free software projects which use copyleft licenses" a useful way to judge the success of copyleft? Does an increase in the percentage of projects using non-copyleft permissive licenses indicate a failure of copyleft?
- As a small related case study, what role have the licensing terms of popular mobile application stores played in this debate, and how have those terms changed the frame of the discussion?
(This is not quite a Dear lazyweb post. If anything, it's Dear
lazyweb, I've done my homework, now what? )
I'm looking for the ultimate distributed filesystem. Something that's
simple to use, redundant, fault-tolerant, and still smart enough to
avoid the more obvious performance chokepoints. Ideally, it should
work for all of the following sets of files:
while working on RC bugs, I noticed that some DDs sent patches to the
BTS in the last weeks (yeah!) but did not upload the fixes in NMUs. short
request: could you please either state the reason for not uploading, or just
go ahead and dput/dupload the fixed packages?
Migrating a mediawiki instance from the old server to a new box. Of
course it does not work (returns an empty 500 Error page). Of course
there is no entry in error.log. Of course there is no obvious
match of verbose/debug in a grep over the config files. Lovin' it
Next.