Here s a summary of what happened at this conference. Opening address. Keynote from Nick Hurd MP, @minforcivsoc. Lot less money around. Called canals and rivers trust the biggest social enterprise. Blames lack of large social enterprises on culture, leadership and access to capital. First Big Society Capital investments announced tomorrow. Questions (and responses) about what had changed in commissioning (determination?), something about accountability in health I think but I didn t hear (more public scrutiny), other models besides worker-led (gov is agnostic, but that s just the type of mutuals so far), and capital renewal (gov is challenging the banks with Big Society Bank). This is going to get a bit long, so click through to our site to read what the other the speakers had to say and what that block of flats in the picture has to do with it Still here? Good! Harriet Hounsell from John Lewis Partnership was next. What s the Right level of profit? Structure of the partnership. The registry seems like the member services function and a bit more. Partner suggestions make a real difference. Beliefs have been tested. Recession hit us. Vivian Woodall, the co-operative phone, back to how it started. He knew people working for NGOs with high international phone bills. Bulk buy. Solid steady growth. Paid all tax. Living our cooperative values. Employee council and profit-shared. Adoption of new brand. Questions to both on redundancies (debate openly, try to redeploy, ultimately division of responsibilities: managers manage staff levels, not members), and being rejected as too small to help other social enterprises (ask why? Try local level instead of head office?), plus praise for John Lewis. Then there was coffee, workshops, lunch, workshops and coffee. I don t think I should report all of that, so a quick comment on the venue at Anglia Ruskin Uni Cambridge: is the Lord Ashcroft it s named after the same one who said it was legal to attack Iraq? Anyway Based on the workshops, I don t think our co-op will do SROI accounting any time soon (needs too much people time) and I m little the wiser on leadership. Some people are intrigued by collective management and cooperative working, though. The closing keynote was Wayne Hemingway, formerly of Red or Dead and now of Hemingway Design. He gave a quick history of himself and of those two enterprises and a bit of an entertaining ramble around. He seemed very much from the business end and how to use business to benefit society, but I ve not really looked at his companies before. I probably should do, as they ve a regeneration project in Lynn (pictured: before Wayne). Then it was the closing address, the thanks (yes, thanks to the workers and sponsors) and then time to head for the exit. It s a shame that some people who made good points during the keynotes (coop party!) left quickly instead of staying to chat.

Last Saturday I have held a talk at the Meta Main-Rhein Chaosdays 2012 in Darmstadt, an event of the local Chaos Computer Club groups and not unsimilar to Karlsruhe s yearly GPN. I was asked to give an talk on a advanced, Haskell related topic, so I took my audience on a guided tour through the memory of a running Haskell program, explained the different types of closures and their layout, and showed how info tables are used to allow the garbage collector to uniformly treat the objects. We also used that knowledge to roughly predict the memory footprint of a program processing a large file using the String data type. Besides showing raw bytes (using my ghc-heap-view package and a small utility function) I included two visualizations: One is the video of a copying garbage collector at work that I blogged about last week, and the other is a nice tool that a student of mine creates for his bachelor thesis: It allows you to visualize the heap structure of a (potentially partially evaluated) value from GHCi and interactively evaluate parts of the structure if you want, even thunks that are hidden behind other thunks, something that you cannot do from Haskell code. The following picture is a screen shot of ghc-vis visualizing the evaluation of the famous two-line primes definition: The slides of my talk do not cover everything that was included, but the transcript does. It is in German, so as before, if you want me to translate it, then (convince your professor or employer to) invite me to hold the talk again. The ghc-vis tool can be found on Hackage, more information about it is on the author s website.
Flattr this post

What I have done (on my packages for Wheezy) in the last weeks? imvirt 0.9.4-3 and 0.9.4-4 adds two upstream patches to remove an applicable use of /proc in Perls procfs_read() method, which fixes LXC detection and another patch to not count the dmesg lines twice within the KVM detection module.
Much thanks to Thomas Liske! mlt The 0.8.0-4 upload also adds two upstream patches to fix an major memory leak in the mlt_cache function and a crash with LADSPA plugins on dlclose().
And here much thanks to Dan Dennedy!
I have also uploaded 0.8.2-1 to experimental. roaraudio 1.0~beta2-2 and 1.0~beta2-3 added a few upstream patches to fix security and major use problems. The debdiff was a bit huge so it took a bit more time to unblock/migrate.
1.0~beta5-1 is also available in experimental.
Much thanks for the patch support to Philipp Schafft! otrs2 With the 2.4.9+dfsg1-3+squeeze3 upload (DSA-2536-1) there was an security update for otrs2 on Squeeze which fixes a cross-site scripting issue and improved the e-mail filter to detect nested tags. Those with a few other fixes migrated with 3.1.7+dfsg1-5 to testing, while I also uploaded 3.1.10+dfsg1-1 to experimental.
Now I can focus on the upcoming 3.2.x packaging. :)

Today was a black day for democracy in Germany. The German constitutional court ruled in favour of the European Stability Mechanism. In combination with last week s announcement by the European Central Bank to purchase government bonds without limits (breaking the No-Bail-Out clause at the core of their mandate more obviously and irreversably than ever before), the German people have lost a good deal of democracy today. Why? you may ask because from now on, fiscal and financial policy will be made in Brussels, by people enjoying full immunity, but who are not elected democratically by the European people, let alone the Germans, and they will freely decide over who has to pay and be liable for whom. I am talking about people like Klaus Regling, who was already involved the very first time the Maastricht Criteria were violated. He is now at the front of the largest and most powerful financial weapon ever conceived. With immunity. And people like Mario Draghi, whom I would possibly call the most corrupt person I know. His announcement to save the Euro at whatever cost accidentally came only a day before his motherland Italy had to go to the market for more money and was able to place a bond at such ridiculously low interest rates that anyone who s kept up to speed with Italy s development had to rightfully ask how that was possible. While in the past, for whatever reason, the European people have let the ECB get by saying that they are not bailing out countries when they buy bonds on the secondary market (wtf!), they have finally dropped that restriction (the law). And as of today, the ESM is ready to go, along with the fiscal pact. Germany is now liable for more than quarter of all of the Eurozone s past and future debts. And no citizen will be able to have any more influence in this, or reverse it. Budget, fiscal policy and currency control are forever gone. Not that parliamentarian democracies were ever direct. Yet, in the past, one could at least vote for those people whose promises one was inclined to believe the most. You can still do that in the future, but those people won t be able to influence fiscal or financial policy anymore. There is no way back. The ESM and its employees enjoy full immunity, and the ESM is forever-binding. There is no exit clause. Thanks to the ECB s law breaking and the ESM, which I consider highly unconstitutional, at least in Germany, Eurozone-countries may refinance their debts at interest rates that are in no way related to their ability to pay back loans. All other countries foremost Germany are henceforth liable for others debts. The fundamental rule of the EU that no country would have to stand up for another country, is gone with the wind. Within an hour, the markets reacted. Germany, which previously had to pay negative interest (a sign of stability) saw interests on its bond shoot up. And Spain, Portugal, Greece and others who couldn t previously refinance their old debts, are now getting fresh money cheaper than ever. Spain s president Rajoy today didn t even bother beating around the bush anymore, he s now going to apply for fresh money but won t bother with any saving schemes or other restructurings. Monti in Italy has suggested the same. Wouldn t you take money if you were offered it for free, without the need to pay it back? This is more than inflation, in my opinion. What is currently happening in Europe is active depreciation of individual wealth. Our heads of state are actively working against the people. The Euro has lost all credibility and everyone knows it. It is only a question of time until it will tremble and fall. Meanwhile, the market celebrates and continues their gambles while they still can, on the backs of our currency and our wealth. Most affected are the people who have savings in Euros, whose life insurances are decreasing in worth and who cannot afford to diversify into other asset classes or currencies. On the other hand, those who let their money do the work are being saved. Whoever previously invested into bonds of struggling states, hoping to reap massive interest gains, is now proven right. Brussels has eliminated the risk factor. What kind of message does this send??? Hands up if you thought that our politicians are even interested in closing the rapidly widening gap between rich and poor. Really? That s naive. The Eurozone is corrupt, and our currency has never been as virtual as today. Nobody can say whether saving the Euro at all cost is the right thing and noone knows whether what s currently happening is just bad. I would have wished that our politicians had taken the crisis as an incentive to fix the system in the interest of the people and with a long-term focus:

• Europe should have returned to the law it gave itself, without exceptions: The No-Bailout-Clause, as well as the Masstricht Criteria. In general, you cannot spend more than you earn, and this principle seems to have been forgotten entirely, and those who had most actively forgotten it, are being rewarded.
• A shared currency requires a shared fiscal policy. This policy has to be in place before the currency, the currency can only ever be the result of a common strategy. The EU has done this the wrong way around and it failed. Trying to put a fiscal policy in place now is patchwork that is guaranteed to fail. And putting fiscal policy into the hands of undemocratically chosen people in Brussels is not representing the people.

But on the contrary! Europe s policiticans are making it crystal clear that the foundation upon which it was built, the laws and rules, the promises and guarantees, no longer apply. The people were not asked. The promises once made were broken. Our politicians have ruled over our heads. More debts are being made, and more debts to pay off debts, and so on. It s long gotten out of control, now the process is institutionalised. I feel sorry for our kids. I find it irresponsible what is being done to them (in addition to the way we rape the environment). I also feel deeply with the people in the struggling countries who are being screwed by the crisis and are not at fault. What our politicians are doing is unfortunately not going to help long term. The problems are just postponed, and with every day, the inevitable crash will be more painful. I am sorry. Today is a black day for democracy. We have lost souvereignity. We have lost control over our currency. We have lost our budget rights. And I have lost my faith in the last instance of the German government that I trusted. As of today, I know that the German constitutional court is nothing more than a puppet in the hands of the politicians (who are themselves puppets of Brussels and the banks). The limit they imposed (Germany s liability must not increase beyond 190 billion Euros without the federal parliament s consent) is worthless. Soon the politicians will explain to us why it s inevitable that we must raise this limit. Not that the people could prevent it, but still I had hoped for a fundamental ruling. They should not have touched numbers. The EU had a no-bailout-clause from day one. It was conditional from the start. If one of the fundamental principles of a contract is broken, the contract becomes invalid. Not only did I expect the court to rule against socialised debt, I would have wished them to go a step further. The German national bank gave up control over the currency to the ECB only because the ECB incorporated the principles of the German national bank. Once the ECB overturned those principles, Germany should have reclaimed their souvereignity. But noone else in Europe would have wanted that. Merkel became a puppet herself. I am grateful that our daughter has dual citizenship. NP: Porcupine Tree: Live at Atlanta 2010

It happens occasionally that I need to validate an optimization by benchmarking, and the benchmark results are a bit noisy. Usually the situation does not ask for a heavy-duty statistical analysis, and I am too lazy for that anyway. However, sometimes having at least the fundamental statistics of a sample would be handy.

Obviously, calculating the standard deviation of a sample in the 21st century by itself is not a problem. There is LibreOffice, there is R, there's a bazillion statistical tools out there. They do feel a bit heavyweight for the task though, and the friction involved in starting them up and entering the data in the right format means that often I just do not bother. Google brings up some dynamic webpages for the task, a much more lightweight solution, but most of these are ugly and ad-riddled.

What's a programmer to do? Code up another weekend app, statsb.in, of course. And it is the way I like it: there is a textarea where it is easy to paste and edit inline snippets of text, say, shell script output in full; non-numeric data are ignored; statistics are computed on the fly (no stupid "Submit" buttons); and you can save the snippet on the server and get a short link (useful for footnotes pointing to data sources).

The service probably will not be expanded much further. After all, if those basic statistics are not enough, you are probably better off firing up a real statistics tool. However, I do plan to add another page for the most common task that I run into, namely, comparing the means of two populations (did my optimization have an effect?). In other words, calculating the p-value of the hypothesis that the means of two populations are the same. Stay tuned.

Hi, It's been three weeks already since the end of the Google Summer of Code 2012, and I've been told I still haven't blogged about the state of multiarch cross-toolchains. So, here it is! Building multiarch cross-toolchains This section is mostly a rehash of my previous post. Cross-toolchains build properly for most architectures in Debian, with the exception of arches having clashing ld.so paths. The following instructions assume you are using Wheezy or unstable, and have applied my patches. Adding a foreign architecture You are going to use some packages meant for a different architecture than your native one. This means you'll have to tell dpkg about a foreign architecture, for instance, armel.

# dpkg --add-architecture armel

Then, you need to update apt's database.

# apt-get update

If one of the repository you use only supports a subset of your configured architecture (for instance, when working with an unofficial port), you will need to use arch restrictions in your sources.list (see the manpage). Cross-binutils Absolutely nothing has changed there, it works exactly the same way it did before the GSoC. That is, grab binutils' source package, set $TARGET to a GNU triplet or a Debian arch, and run dpkg-buildpackage.

$ apt-get source binutils
$ cd binutils-*/
$ TARGET=arm-linux-gnueabihf dpkg-buildpackage -uc -us -b

Cross-gcc Building cross-gcc is done the same way it was before the GSoC, except it uses cross-arch dependencies instead of mangled packages for foreign packages. This means you shouldn't use dpkg-cross at all, but use multiarch instead. Then, building the cross-compiler is as easy as running (with $target being a Debian arch name):

$ export DEB_CROSS_NO_BIARCH=yes
$ echo $target > debian/arch
$ debian/rules control
$ dpkg-buildpackage -uc -us -b

Biarch/multilib and multiarch do not really play well. Using some trickery, you might be able to build multilib cross-compilers, but I would recommend building two cross-compilers instead. You will of course need to install the required build-dependencies, some of which are packages for the target architecture, but that is no different from building any other Debian package, provided that multiarch is correctly configured. This will produce cross-compilers packages using multiarch paths and cross-arch deps, along with some binary packages for the target architecture. Those binary packages are cross-built versions of the runtime libs. They are not needed, as they should be identical to the natively-built ones present in the archive, but using them shouldn't be a problem. Installing the cross-toolchains Installing cross-binutils is straightforward, installing cross-gcc itself is, but installing cross-g++ is not. Indeed there is bug #678623: g++-4.7 depends on libstdc++6-4.7-dev, which is multiarch-unaware and depends on g++-4.7. Assuming you've compiled your cross-gcc using my patches, the cross-compiled libstdc++6-4.7-dev will not have these problems, but still won't be co-installable with your native libstdc++6-4.7-dev, since it's not M-A: same. The easiest way to work around this issue is probably to download the binary package, modify its control file to include Multi-Arch: same , and install the modified package. Using the cross-toolchains Once installed, using the cross-toolchains should be as easy as running $triplet-gcc-4.7 file.c . Note the -4.7 part. Indeed, the cross-compilers packages do not provide the $triplet-gcc symlink. This matches what is done with the native compiler pase, where the gcc symlink is not provided by the compiler's package, but by the gcc package. However, there is no cross-gcc package or anything like that yet, which means you have to use the full name, or provide the symlink yourself. Another issue is pkg-config. To know where to search for libraries, pkg-config has to be told which architecture you are compiling for. Autotools does that by calling $triplet-pkg-config instead of pkg-config if it exists. The pkg-config binary packages comes with a wrapper you can symlink to: /usr/share/pkg-config-crosswrapper . Conclusion Despite a few shortcomings (bug #678623, missing symlinks, multilib issues and clashing ld.so paths), multiarch cross-toolchains are already usable on Wheezy. There is still quite a lot of work left (like fixing #678623, splitting gcc-4.7 in two, or changing wanna-build, britney etc. to handle cross-arch deps) but hopefully this will be done for Jessie.

Yesterday, IETF announced the publication of of RFC 6716, the Definition of the Opus Audio Codec, a low latency, variable bandwidth, codec intended for both VoIP, film and music. This is the first time, as far as I know, that IETF have standardized a multimedia codec. In RFC 3533, IETF standardized the OGG container format, and it has proven to be a great royalty free container for audio, video and movies. I hope IETF will continue to standardize more royalty free codeces, after ISO and MPEG have proven incapable of securing everyone equal rights to publish multimedia content on the Internet. IETF require two interoperating independent implementations to ratify a standard, and have so far ensured to only standardize royalty free specifications. Both are key factors to allow everyone (rich and poor), to compete on equal terms on the Internet. Visit the Opus project page if you want to learn more about the solution.

A big gap since the last Debian Day. On request I reviewed Gustavo Panizzo's Hexen 2 Package which is in pretty good shape and should be ready for upload fairly soon. A prerequisite for that is support for Hexen 2 in game-data-packager: I've hacked in preliminary support and pushed a package to experimental (version 31), it should be available not long after you read this. There's quite a lot more we could do with Hexen 2 support: rip the CD audio; encode it, there's an open question as to which codec to use, or to support multiple codecs; detect different versions of the game and re-order the CD tracks accordingly; support the mission pack; generalise any new ripping code so Quake support could use it; etc. etc.

Last year, via jwz, I watched the video "Archive Team: A distributed Preservation of Service Attack" from Defcon 19. I learned about the Archive Team and the work of Jason Scott. More recently I learned about the archive.org Shareware CD Archive. In the fledgling days of the Internet, shareware (and cover-mount) CD-ROMs were a popular way for files to be distributed. They therefore archive an interesting age in the history of modern Internet culture. Inspired by the above, I dug out some of my old shareware Doom CDs, ripped them, scanned their covers (where I had them) and uploaded them to archive.org. Here they are:

• The Ultimate Add-On Collection for Doom and Doom II
• D! 1000 (better CD scan needed)
• D! Zone Gold
• 3D Game Alchemy the CD that accompanied the book "3D Game Alchemy" (needs a better CD scan). I thought everyone had seen the stuff on this, but when Justin Fisher's NEMESIS.WAD appeared on Doomworld - relatively recently - I was surprised how few people were familiar with it.

They are all part of the growing Doom Level CD Collection. In most cases, the CDs are a super set of files that exist in the /idgames archive. I'm fairly sure there is some stuff on these CDs that never made out of BBSes or the AOL and CompuServe walled gardens onto the wider Internet, with the exception of these shovelware collections. A follow-on project would be to cross-reference their indexes with the /idgames archive and upload whats missing (that can be done so, legally.) Finally, I also had a single, solitary PC ZONE covermount CD that I held on to because it was a Quake (and Duke Nukem 3D) add-on special:

• CD Zone issue 48, March 1997

From an archive-perspective, Quake has not fared as well as Doom did. The Internet was young when Doom was popular, the World Wide Web was not the all-encompassing thing it has become and by accident rather than design nearly all Doom add-ons ended up being uploaded to a single FTP server: The Walnut Creek CDROM FTP Server, to a sub-folder /idgames. This single archive was mirrored wide and has lived on past the death of Walnut Creek. Today, it is small enough for casual enthusiasts to mirror, and has been kept alive by volunteer admins. The most popular front-end is now http://www.doomworld.com/idgames/. The WWW had grown up by the time Quake came along. There is an /idgames2, but it was never as popular as /idgames was for Doom. The Quake modding community was centered around a series of commercial websites such as Planet Quake, later part of the Gamespy network. Sadly the vast majority of web pages on the old Planet Quake site and similar sites have died completely from bit-rot. Large chunks of the history of the Quake community are therefore lost to a sort-of technological dark age.

I'm maintaining a host under acaia.ca. I intend to share it with friends and encourage them to use non-evil services to host their stuff. For now I'm providing the following:

• http://bookmarks.acaia.ca using semanticscuttle
• https://clipperz.acaia.ca/beta/ using clipperz
• http://owncloud.acaia.ca/ using owncloud
• ikiwiki for personal website and blog

...and testing these:

• https://contacts.acaia.ca/ using PHP iAddressBook
• http://minigal.acaia.ca/ using a minigal
• https://money.acaia.ca/html/ using Personal Finance Manager

As I'm not happy with minigal I'm trying mediagoblin, Zenphoto and Plogger for media hosting. Any other idea? I want light and simple stuff, my VPS is cheap. (btw, I didn't renew my flickr pro last month so I'm very likely leaving this service. I used flickrbackup to have all my pictures and some of meta-data saved, as they didn't provide me any better way to do a backup.)

Seems I've forgotten to announce Enca 1.13 here, but I won't do the same mistake with 1.14, which has been released today. If you don't know Enca, iit is an Extremely Naive Charset Analyser. It detects character set and encoding of text files and can also convert them to other encodings using either a built-in converter or external libraries and tools like libiconv, librecode, or cstocs. It's code is currently available at Gitorious. The full changes for 1.14 release are short:

• Allow standard names for belarusian and slovenian languages, thanks to Branislav Ger o for suggestion.
• Reset strictness when check buffer less than file size, thanks to Sam Liao.
• Fixed typos in man page, thanks to A. Costa.

Still enca is in maintenance mode only and I have no intentions to write new features. However there is no limitation to other contributors :-). You can download from http://cihar.com/software/enca/.

Filed under: Enca English 0 comments Flattr this!

10 months ago I was given a Samsung Galaxy S Android phone [1] to replace my Sony Ericsson Xperia X10. I also installed Cyanogenmod on it (here is a more detailed comparison of the phones with a focus on liberty [2]). But now I m using the Xperia X10 again. Hardware Reliability Some time ago a friend told me that he bought a Sony phone in preference to a Samsung phone because he didn t think that Samsung phones were reliable enough. I assured him that Samsung phones would be fine if you used a gel-case, but now I m not so sure. My mother in law has a Samsung Galaxy S which now has a single crack across the face, it doesn t appear that her phone was dropped, maybe it just bent a bit it s a fairly thin phone. My Galaxy S started crashing over the last few months and now many applications will crash any time I use 3G networking. Currently my Galaxy S is working well as a small Wifi tablet and hasn t crashed since I replaced the SIM with one that has expired. I wish that phone designers would make mode solid products with bigger batteries. The fact that the Xperia X10 weighs maybe 20g more than the Galaxy S (according to Wikipedia) isn t a problem for me. Even with the Mugen Power 1800mah battery [4] to replace the original 1500mah battery it s still nowhere near the limit of the phone mass that I m prepared to carry. Sony Upgrades Some time ago Sony released an Android 2.3.3 image for the Xperia X10. There is no Cyanogenmod image for the Xperia X10 because it has been locked down which greatly limits what can be done. Also Sony has a proprietary backup program on their Android 2.1 image which isn t supported on Android 2.3.3 this inspired my post about 5 principles of backup software [3]. Due to this pain I didn t even try to upgrade the Xperia X10 phones for me and my wife until recently. Before upgrading the Xperia X10 phones I was unable to use my wife s phone. The phone didn t seem to like recognising my touch so long touch actions (such as unlocking the phone) were almost impossible for me. I think that this is due to the fact that I have fairly dry skin which presumably gives me a higher capacitance. After the upgrade both phones are usable for me, so presumably either Sony or Google upgraded the algorithms for recognising touch to work better with varying screen quality. Comparing the Galaxy S and the Xperia X10 When I first started running Cyanogenmod on the Galaxy S I noticed that it was a lot faster than the Xperia X10 but I didn t know why. It was documented that there had been performance improvements in Android 2.2. Now that I m running Android 2.3.3 on the Xperia X10 I know that the performance difference is not due to the Android version. It could be due to Cyanogenmod optimisations or Sony stupidity, but it s most likely due to hardware differences. The Galaxy S has more RAM and storage which allows installing and running more applications. Now that I m using the Xperia X10 for the bare minimum applications (phone calls, SMS, camera, email, ssh, and web browsing) it works quite well. I still play games on the Galaxy S and use it for more serious web browsing via Wifi. I think that the value I m getting from the Galaxy S as a tiny wifi tablet is greater than the money I might get from selling a partially broken phone that s been obsoleted by two significantly better models. Conclusion The camera on the Xperia X10 is significantly better than the one on the Galaxy S, so going back to a phone that has a great camera is a real benefit. But being slow and locked down is a real drag. I was tempted to buy a Samsung Galaxy Note or Galaxy S3, but it seemed like a bad idea to buy a phone given that my contract comes up for renewal in about 6 months which means I ll be offered a free phone which while not really free is still going to be cheaper than buying a phone outright. Also in future given the low opinion I m now getting of smart phone reliability I ll try and keep a small stock of spare Android phones to cover the case of broken phones.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2011/11/21/galaxy-xperia-android-network/
• [2] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2012/05/06/liberty-mobile-phones/
• [3] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2012/02/07/5-principles-backup/
• [4] http://tinyurl.com/cyafvqq

Related posts:

1. Galaxy S vs Xperia X10 and Android Network Access Galaxy S Review I ve just been given an indefinite loan...
2. CyanogenMod and the Galaxy S Thanks to some advice from Philipp Kern I have now...
3. Liberty and Mobile Phones I own two mobile phones at the moment, I use...

Bookshelves are a wonderful thing. Kate and I have been living without enough book space since we moved in together - all our shelves have been double-stacked. Finding anything is a pain, because it's impossible to tell if you still own the book you're looking for. No longer. One short visit to Ikea (plus delivery and assembly), and we have a huge 5x5 Expedit bookshelf dividing our living area. It has comfortably absorbed our entire collection (plus boxes) - we have double-stacked it, but can access both sides. Books are grouped by subject matter, so can actually be found. (We have a huge O'Reilly collection, but gave up sorting by publisher when we discovered various non-computing books in there...) Now I can sit on the sofa, and have (paper) reading material within arm's reach. It's good to have something more to our living space than a television and a pair of laptops. As an added bonus, you can't see the washing up from the living room any more. Screw e-books.

After several months of effort by the i18n team (and quite a bit from /me), some NMUs, a lot of help by the release team to accept many unblocks, we finally reached 100% translation for debconf screens, in wheezy, for three languages. And, no, French is not among them (yet). The first to reach this heaven are Russian, German and Swedish with translations for all translatable debconf screens for packages in Debian testing (which will become the next Debian release). Three more languages (French, Czech and Portuguese) are waiting for one package to reach testing and another (Spanish) is waiting for three packages. We should then soon reach 7 complete languages. David Pr vot is even trying to get Danish as complete as possible, but it requires pushing for about 15 packages, with many NMUs and unblocks to ask. I started this work in early April, so it took about SIX months to reach this and be ableto happily make a lot of noise about such achievement. You have no idea how it is appreciated by translators....so you maybe have a better idea why I can be so noisy when some uncoordinated upload (for instance with modified localized material) breaks this... We'll have much more news about achievements in l10n for wheezy in the upcoming weeks. We had a lot of things that deserve some trumpets, bells or whistles..:-)

PostgreSQL 9.2 has just been released, after a series of betas and a release candidate. See for yourself what s new, and try it out! Packages are available in Debian experimental as well as my PostgreSQL backports PPA for Ubuntu 10.04 to 12.10, as usual. Please note that 9.2 will not land any more in the feature frozen Debian Wheezy and Ubuntu Quantal (12.10) releases, as none of the server-side extensions are packaged for 9.2 yet.

I think perhaps Alonzo Horton overstated the case but San Diego was a perfectly pleasant place to spend a week. Recently I was fortunate and attended the Linux Plumbers conference (and bits of Kernel Summit) and as on previous occasions there were some interesting sessions and some less helpful diversions.

Melodie went along with me, our first trip away together without the kids in a long time. We did the tourist thing for a few days including the USS Midway aircraft carrier tour (recommended) and the harbour boat tour (also recommended).

The conference was co-located with several other events and there seemed to be a lot of people around not connected with KS or LPC. For me the hallway track was, as usual, much more rewarding and I got to catch up with several old friends and make some new acquaintances. A lot of my colleagues were about attending the Gstreamer and Linuxcon conferences so there was the obligatory work evening event (which was pizza and beer, just done brilliantly).

A track that did stand out for me was the Clang / LLVM presentations. They gave an excellent overview of their progress towards making the Kernel compile with their tools, such innovation appears to be making both projects stronger.

One thing that occurred to me was the blandness of KS and LPC this time, usually there are at least some loud disagreements but I failed to attend even one session where there was more than small differences which were quickly resolved.

Perhaps such conferences, like the majority of people attending them, are becoming middle aged and a little complacent. An observation like that does make me wonder where the next change will come from and what it will look like. Just as open source software (including Linux) has disrupted the proprietary software industry in the last decade what will come along and disrupt us? Or is open source the end of the line and we will just continue to evolve?

I just posted the following question to ServerFault .and then realised there might be people out there in magical internetland who know the answer but never visit any of the SO sites, so i ve posted it here too. Feel free to respond here on on serverfault.

---

In a recent upgrade (from Openstack Diablo on Ubuntu Lucid to Openstack Essex on Ubuntu Precise), we found that DNS packets were frequently (almost always) dropped on the bridge interface (br100). For our compute-node hosts, that s a Mellanox MT26428 using the mlx4_en driver module. 1. Use an old lucid kernel (e.g. 2.6.32-41-generic). This causes other problems, in particular the lack of cgroups and the old version of the kvm and kvm_amd modules (we suspect the kvm module version is the source of a bug we re seeing where occasionally a VM will use 100% CPU). We ve been running with this for the last few months, but can t stay here forever.

net.bridge.bridge-nf-call-arptables = 0
net.bridge.bridge-nf-call-iptables = 0
net.bridge.bridge-nf-call-ip6tables = 0

---

Update 2012-09-12: Something I should have mentioned earlier this happens even on machines that don t have any openstack or even libvirt packages installed. Same hardware, same everything, but with not much more than the Ubuntu 12.04 base system installed. On kernel 2.6.32-41-generic, the bridge works as expected. On kernel 3.2.0-29-generic, using the ethernet interface, it works perfectly.
Using a bridge on that same NIC fails unless net.bridge.bridge-nf-call-iptables=0 So, it seems pretty clear that the problem is either in the mellanox driver, the updated kernel s bridging code, netfilter code. or some interaction between them. Interestingly, I have other machines (without a mellanox card) with a bridge interface that don t exhibit this problem. with NICs ranging from cheap r8169 cards to better quality broadcom tg3 Gbit cards in some Sun Fire X2200 M2 servers and intel gb cards in supermicro motherboards. Like our openstack compute nodes, they all use the bridge interfaces as their primary (or sometimes only) interface with an IP address they re configured that way so we can run VMs using libvirt & kvm with real IP addresses rather than NAT. So, that indicates that the problem is specific to the mellanox driver, although the blog post I mentioned above had a similar problem with some broadcom NICs that used the bnx2 driver. openstack, bridging, netfilter and dnat is a post from: Errata

highlight of the week: I "wrote" (i.e. copypasted) my first patch in haskell some days ago :) apart from that, nothing exciting:

• #618569 avelsieve: "Failure of authentication on TLS connections"
  apply upstream patch, upload to DELAYED/2
• #657046 alpine: "alpine: Alpine uses DES-56 in violation of RFC 5751"
  point to upstream commit, NMUed by a fellow DD during the Dublin BSP
• #657465 conserver-client: "conserver-client: prompting due to modified conffiles which where not modified by the user"
  send patch to the BTS
• #679069 viewvc: "CVE-2012-3356 / CVE-2012-3357"
  send patch to the BTS
• #680818 src:yate: "yate: FTBFS: build-dependency not installable: libopenh323-dev"
  review patch and add pointer to packaging svn
• #682351 git-annex: "git-annex: build fails because of failing tests"
  confirm problems in p/cowbuilder and add proposed patches, quickly applied by maintainer
• #682412 dynamips: "dynamips: FTBFS with multiarch paths: cc: error: /usr/lib/libelf.a: No such file or directory"
  send alternative patch to the BTS
• #684758 libphone-utils0-dbg: "libphone-utils0-dbg: /usr/share/doc/libphone-utils0-dbg empty after squeeze->wheezy upgrade"
  remove doc dir in preinst, it's a symlink now, upload to DELAYED/2
• #684843 src:krusader: "krusader: FTBFS: tstring.h:137:5: error: 'make_pair' was not declared in this scope, and no declarations were found by argument-dependent lookup at the point of instantiation [-fpermissive]"
  tag unreproducible
• #685376 makedev: "postinst fails on non-default Debian kernels and is useless on =<3.4"
  drop check for kernel version >= 2.4, QA upload
• #685542 d-push: "d-push: Error when using https://myserver/Microsoft-Server-ActiveSync"
  update directory variable in debian patch as suggested by "nb", upload to DELAYED/2

As I was upgrading harddisks I thought about giving windows 8 a spin. and got what I deserved. ;-) I had expected Grub to be wiped, however I was a little bit surprised that the existing Windows (Vista) installation (which was automatically integrated in Windows 8 bootloader) did not boot anymore. Vista's automatic system repair failed, manual intervention on the system console (bootrec) seems to have shredded the system (The partition table is messed up.) No data was lost, as I have simply switched back to the old hd again. I will need to re-do the harddisk upgrade, though.