Search Results: "will"

16 September 2007

Russell Coker: iRiver H320 and Liquid

Recently my iRiver [1] H320 had some milk based drink spilt on it. I’m not sure what the drink was (I discovered it when my iRiver stopped working and the drink was dry) but it smelled like coffee or hot chocolate when I washed it off (I considered tasting it but decided that knowing exactly which drink had damaged my iRiver probably wouldn’t help me fix it). The initial problem was that no buttons other than the play button (which is also used to turn it on) worked. When I first discovered this I had no way of hitting the reset button so my iRiver played until the battery ran flat. I tried to disassemble it by removing the five tiny phillips-head screws from the sides, but that didn’t make any part of it loose. I tried using a small amount of force on the front piece of plastic and broke two of the clips that hold it in place while getting another two loose without breaking (but there were still at least four clips to go). Then I realised that the problem was that the keys were physically sticking and that maybe if I washed the keypad out I might get it to work. So I spent some time in a cycle of dripping water into my iRiver, pressing the buttons to get some of the nasty stuff dissolved, and then using a towel to soak up some of the water with milk or whatever. After repeating this for a while the buttons all seemed to work well apart from the play button which kept registering presses when I wasn’t touching it. This meant that it always automatically turned on and then played a song in a stuttering manner as the play button is also the pause button and it paused and played as rapidly as it could. Finally I left it in the sun to dry for a few hours, which seemed to do some good. The play button mostly works now. Also it seems quite easy to get water between the front layer of protective plastic and the layer behind (which actually houses the keypad). So I have several large drops of water spread out between the layers which move around as I squeeze it. I think that if I get that dried out before algae can grow then everything will be fine.

Christian Perrier: RWC: Stunning Georgia

We watched either parts or the entire three matches yesterday. So, long report..:-) The day began with the most unbalanced game of this world cup, featuring New Zealand, world's top rugby team, against Portugal, ranked 22nd. Rugby in Portugal is played by about 4200 people only, in less than 50 clubs. All players are amateur but one (Gon alvo Uva, playing in Montpellier, France), being dentists, students, etc...and coming to RWC during their holidays. The result (108-13 and 16 tries) was expected but the feeling when Portugal scored a try was great, with the 40,000 attendees in Lyon supporting Portugal. Personnally, I had great time chatting on IRC with Miguel Figueiredo, one of the leaders of the portuguese l10n team in Debian, during the match. We watched Wales-Australia (20-32) during the evening. That game was obviously the key match of this pool, with the winner very probably finishing 1st in the pool. Wales playing in Millenium Stadium in Cardiff is always astonishing and show how much the Welsh people love this sport. During 1st half, Australia strongly dominated and logically lead 25-3 with 3 tries. Berrick Barnes, their new fly half (Stephen Larkham injured), is a very promising player and, imho, the match's MVP (even after being severely bashed by Gareth Thomas on Australia's first try). After half time, the Welsh team courageously fought and came back to 13-25, menacing Australia which was more hesitating. Unfortunately, Australia scored a try after a big mistake by Stephen Jones. So, even with good play by Wales and another try by the incredible wing player Shane Williams, Australia logically won this game. Again, a southern hemisphere team dominated a northern hemisphere one. This is probably what will happen during this entire WC and I bet that New Zealand, Australia and South Africa will end up in semi-finals, quite probably along with Argentina, unless France does a miracle and ends up 1st in their pool. I think that Australia is slightly weaker than NZ and RSA, though. So, my current bet is NZ-RSA for the final (this can happen, given their respective track to the final and given that they certainly will end up first of their respective pools). Finally, we watched the second half of Ireland-Georgia (14-10). *That* was quite a surprise. Ireland was very close to lose this game with Georgian forwards crushing them repeatedly at the end of the match and nearly scoring a try that would have made them win. Everybody was waiting for Georgia to swell after their strong 1st half (3-7) but they managed to fight until the last second, supported by Bordeaux 40,000 attendees (minus a few thousands of Irish supporters, of course). So, while the initial question was whether Ireland would score a bonus point, the final question became about them to *win* the match. This gives even more credit to Argentina's victory last Tuesday. Full standing ovation for Georgia at the end of the match. Today is again a busy day. I'll probably skip Fidji-Canada (which happens at the same time than France-Namibia) but certainly won't miss Samoa-Tonga and, of course, France-Namibia. Samoa have to win to keep their chances of qualifying (they can beat England, really) and, well, France has of course to win *and* score a bonus point. In this world cup where to so-called "small" teams are not that small, everything can happen and France is anything but safe, ehre.

Theodore Ts'o: Whack the Gopher

I recently came across three very well written and very thoughtful blog postings by Rick Cook (author of the Wiz Zumwalt Wizardry series):
  1. Copyrights, Whack-the-Gopher, and SFWA — Why I Quit
  2. The Economics of Theft: Son of Whack the Gopher
  3. WHACK THE GOPHER III: The Return of the Mutant Grandson
The incident which kicked off these postings was an informal DMCA takedown notice posted by the Vice President of the Science Fiction Writers of America, Dr. Andrew Burt which was created by a process only slightly more sophisticated than using word search for “Asimov” and “Silverberg”. Unfortunately, this takedown notice erroneously included a junior high school teacher’s list of 300+ recommended books (which naturally contained the strings “Issac Asimov” and “Robert Silverberg”, an on-line published science-fiction magazine that referenced the science fiction author Isaac Asimov in a review, and a creative-commons licensed science fiction novel which had been deliberately published on the web for free distribution, and for which the author had explicitly forbidden the SFWA from taking any action on behalf of his books. The entire incident was wonderfully filled with irony — from the fact that an organization of writers who purport to write about what the future might bring given scientific and technological advances could so totally fail to get the Internet or understand that such a campaign might cause them to alienate their readers and fan base, to the the fact that Doctor Andrew Burt, Ph.D. is a professor in computer science at the University of Denver with a research interest in copyright and electronic piracy, could so incompetently foul up a DMCA takedown request and not understand that “grep” might result in false positives that would require human checking (”Andrew? Your alma mater is calling; they would like their degree back…”) One good thing that has come out of this whole mess is that it has been, as junior high school teacher Nick Singer put it, “a teachable moment”, and an opportunity for people to reflect about issues of copyright, the rights of authors, ebooks, and the Internet. This is a hard problem; I very strongly believe that (at the same time) “Art wants to be free; Artists want to be paid” (to use a phrased coined by a friend of mine, Jesse Vincent (blog here), to the point that I’ve been willing to put my money where my mouth is. So far the solutions for achieving this are nowhere near perfect, but they are certainly better than sending out shotgun DMCA takedown requests. In any case, Rick Cook’s thoughts on the subject are a worthy contribution to the subject. He says he’s going to do one more article on his blog proposing an economic solution to this problem; I can’t wait to see what he has to say on the subject.

MJ Ray: Tour of Britain

ToB Taunton BannerJust a quick reminder that the BBC’s only Tour of Britain highlights show is on BBC 2 at 12:30 today (Astra 2D at 28 east, the same satellite as Sky UK+IE, but no subscription required). Official listings say this is highlights of the final stage but hopefully it will cover the other stages too. Hopefully, live coverage will get better next year, either online as cyclingfans editor Pete predicts or on TV.

15 September 2007

Biella Coleman: Save the Arecibo Observatory

There are many amazing things in Puerto Rico and one of them is the technologically (and I would add, aesthetically) stunning Arecibo Observatory, which was featured prominently in the Jodi Foster movie, Contact. Due to massive funding cuts, its future is threatened. This is a site of great scientific and cultural importance for PR, so I really hope they manage to find the funding that will make it survive far into the future. There is a facebook group
(by the name of “Do NOT close the Arecibo Observatory: Earth’s largest radiotelescope”) opposing the closure but I don’t yet know of any other site for halting the cuts. I will post one once I do. And if we lose the observatory, we might sadly lose another fine creature, the mysterious chupacabra who apparently was first called into his goat sucking action thanks to the great observatory of ours, which does send signals to find alien life. So sans Arecibo, we lose a great scientific instrument and may lose the beloved mascot of goat terror, the Chupacabra :(

MJ Ray: US Satellite TV Worse Than Europe

Satellite TV commented:
"Wow, all that seems pretty complex to me. The U.S is so much more simple, we just chose Dish Network or DirecTV or some kind of cable and call it a day. Then again I don't know if thats a bad or a good thing."
That's a bad thing. Look at the situation: In the US, there seems to be very little free-to-air (FTA) satellite TV for most of the country, except PBS and religious channels. The main US FTA FAQ answers "Should I drop cable/Dish/DirecTV and switch to FTA?" with "Probably not." I'd say "Probably yes" to similar questions in Europe, as long as you aren't dependent on one of the few incompatible pay-TV channels. Channels like MTV, Nick, TVEi and DW are all pay-TV in the US, but FTA in Europe. But if you're in the US, look on the bright side: Canada seems even more behind on this. In Europe, you can still call whatever satellite broadcaster (such as Canal Satellite, Premiere or even Sky) and get a system installed if you choose, but you can also install your own. That's what my FAQ is about: giving people in "the land of the free TV" some starting info on how to do that. Some broadcaster-supplied systems only really work well with one broadcaster's "approved" channels (Sky are particularly bad for that), are more expensive to upgrade than standard systems and don't give viewers the equipment to repair it when it breaks, which encourages them to keep paying the broadcaster's agents. Some of those agents do some pretty dishonest tricks when installing dishes, such as putting them far higher up than necessary, to discourage viewers from fixing it themselves and to advertise satellite TV to the neighbours. It's pretty easy to install a standard satellite system... if you can put up a wall bracket and tune in a video, you can probably do it. Alternatively, there are independent installers who will do it for you, who might seem like they charge more than the broadcaster's agents, but remember that a good one won't keep charging you every month or try to sell stuff to you forevermore!

MJ Ray: Reader Comments on Theora Herd Needs a Stairlift

I had an anonymous comment on the last post which claimed:-
"Theora support has low priority in free software projects because it's simply a bad codec. It has been marketed as "patent-free" but it's questionable how true that is. The patents over trivial functionality probably cover it too, and on the other hand the real "inventiveness" and validity of the more actively enforced patents covering better codecs is also questionable. The main reason Theora users are unlikely to be sued is that limiting free alternatives to such low-quality codecs already ensures they're not a competitive threat. If you want better free software encoding try FFmpeg or MEncoder with x264. The patent threats over that are more aggressive, but moving to Theora is not a good way to avoid them."
I'm not inclined to believe this for various reasons. In particular, I've seen good Theora results (higher quality for smaller file size than most), I've not heard of any credible patent threat to Theora and this claim was made anonymously (why?). Is anyone willing to support the above claims with their name? Alex Hudson commented:
"Tangentially related to your Ogg woes, the issue of software patents came up recently on the WhatWG discussions for a new HTML tag called 'video': http://lists.whatwg.org/pipermail/whatwg-whatwg.org/2007-June/011981.html Whether or not Apple's excuse is reasonable (submarine patents made more unlikely by existing licensing pools? Not sure about that argument....), it does seem Ogg faces an uphill struggle when you'd think supporting it is effectively no cost."
(2007-09-17: 3 comments)

MJ Ray: Low Carbon Lifestyle Tour on TV

It's nice to get email from someone previously mentioned on my site. Mukti Mitchell emailed:
"The Southampton Boatshow programme made by Meridian ITV will include 4 minutes on the Low Carbon Lifestyle Tour and will be screened this week as follows: Sunday 16th September 1800 ITV4; Monday 17th September After Midnight (0100 Tuesday 18th) ITV4; Thursday 20th September 1930 ITV Meridian (ITV1 in South England) (ITV4 Is a national network channel available via your free digi box.) The programme includes footage filmed on board yacht Chance during the round Britain tour. I hope you enjoy the programme."

Christian Perrier: RWC: South Africa-England

After Argentina-France on the first day, that one was planned to be one of the few big matches of first round. Of course, after the game won by South Africa (36-0), that seems pretty silly to say... The Springboks were definitely better than England, in all parts of the game. What stunned me, particularly after watching South Africa live , is their complete control on the game, which is a great improvement over their match against Samoa. South Africa scored three tries all of them great examples or organized attacks by the rear lines. Two tries for JP Pietersen, after 3 by Habana on first game: the South-African wing players rock. Despite this, the player of the game was definitely Jason Du Preez, the scrum half (hope this is the correct term in English) who organised all attacks from RSA. England was missing too many key players (several injured) to be able to be a menace for South Africa. They never were really dangerous, except maybe when the magic Jason Robinson has the ball in his hands (what a player!). I was particularly disappointed by their center back players, and even more particularly by Farrel. Ditto for Andy Gomarsall as scrum half. So, South Africa is now probably qualified with two quite easy games against USA and Tonga. England will have to fight to qualify and noone can tell if Samoa or Tonga can surprise them. Watching Samoa-Tonga on Sunday will be interesting and Samoa-England or Tonga-England are already key matches. A great rugby week-end is about to begin, again. Today, Wales-Australia is the match of the day, for sure, with wales playing home (some matches are not in France, but in Cardiff and Edinburgh). New Zealand-Portugal will be...interesting, though the only incertainty is the number of scored tries. And finally, Ireland-Georgia is of some interest for the French. Tomorrow, France could have hard times against Namibia. Of course, the challenge here is winning *and* scoring the bonus point. That match is 5 days before a key France-Ireland, so the challenge is also not wasting too much energy. Of course, tomorrow's top match for me is Samoa-Tonga while I whileprobably skip Fidji-Canada (too bad, I haven't seen those playing yet). BTW, if someone has a recording of the most intense match as of now (Japan-Fidji), I'd be delighted. Rugbystiquement v tre,

Chris Lamb: Why does using all the upstream cause lag?

It’s a common story. A housemate starts torrenting some American television series of dubious artistic quality and/or legality, or perhaps starts calling their girlfriend on some fluffy non-free privacy invading spyware and your SSH sessions start to lag. Why does this happen? When the upstream channels become saturated, data must overflow into the modem’s buffers. This causes TCP acknowledgement (ACK) packets originating from your SSH client to be delayed, resulting in an increase in the overall round trip time. This phenomena is usually worse on cable connections as their modems’ buffers are generally larger. Avoiding the problem can be pretty simple — limiting your upstream bandwidth just below its maximum helps, and some smarter solutions involving prioritising ACK packets work even better. Although these are best achieved at your router, a number of applications have their own limiting features: every BitTorrent client will have one, and other tools such as scp (via the ‘-l‘ option) have them too.

14 September 2007

Julien Danjou: Waiting so long

Oh my god, I'd be happy the day La Poste (french post offices) will call a kernel hacker to... Wait for it... Explain them what is a queue scheduler.

Jonathan McDowell: Drawing floor plans

Given that the new house is a body of water away I decided I wanted to draw out some floor plans that were to scale, so I could remember how things were laid out and try to get a feel for what will fit where. I'm sure there should be something out there which is easy to use and will allow this, but I ended up with inkscape and vim. I couldn't figure out how to get inkscape to let me specify the size (height/width) of a rectangle, hence ending up with vim to edit the raw xml. Hardly ideal. So. Am I missing how to do this in inkscape, and does anyone have any better suggestions for drawing floor plans? Preferably things in Debian or easily compiled up for it.

Evan Prodromou: 27 Fructidor CCXV

Argh... I know it seems like I've given up on blogging entirely, but that's not the case. I've just been spending a lot of time working on Evan Prodromou instead of on evan.prodromou.name, which has been a whole different kind of world. I'm mostly poking my head up to point to an article in the Montreal Gazette about my new project, Vinismo. Montreal entrepreneur uncorks Wikipedia of wine, says the headline. I guess that "Montreal entrepreneur" is little ol' me. Go figure! The article is nice and balanced -- it covers the obvious fact that one month after launch Vinismo is not the definitive end-all be-all of wine information... yet. Roberto Rocha, the article's author, is doing a great job covering local entrepreneurs and the startup Internet scene, and I'm glad that our site got his vote of approval. And check out the photo they took of me and Niko at the excellent Pullman Wine Bar. How sophisticated. Glad to be getting some press about the site, and good news for Vinismo. tags:

BarCampCanada1 I managed to convoke the very busy trio of Sylvain Carle, Simon Law and Fred Ngo yesterday afternoon at La ka to nail down some plans for this fall. (We were lucky enough to get the funny and insightful Madame Woo to help out, too.) The cement's not dry yet, but it looks like we're going to have BarCampCanada1 here in Montreal the 9-10 of Novemeber. That gives us about 8 weeks to plan out what we hope will be the biggest BarCamp ever in Canada. tags:

Cord Beermann: Analysis of subscribed Domains on Debian-Listserver.

From time to time we have the problem that a mail posted to a list triggers an autoresponse (vacation, bounce, tdma) from an unexpected source. Sometimes it isn't possible to identify the subscriber who is causing this. One example for this was 'petsupermarket'.

So i wrote a small tool, which takes Mailadresses as input and resolves the domains until it reaches IP-level, so it is possible to identify 'related' addresses to such an incident.

I now ran this tool for all 38656 domainparts mailadresses that are currently subscribed to some list at our listservers:

Unresolveable Domains                             :   443
Grounded Domains : 3
Domains with A : 1058
Domains with CNAME, A : 59
Domains with CNAME, CNAME, A : 3
Domains with MX, A : 36202
Domains with MX, CNAME, A : 1199
Domains with MX, CNAME, CNAME, A : 22
Domains with MX, CNAME, CNAME, CNAME, A : 5
Domains with MX, PTR : 36
Domains with unresolvable Hosts : 361


(You may have noticed that those lines doesn't sum up to 38656. It is possible to have more than one MX-Host, and it is also possible to have more than one IP in an A-Record. If one of those combinations falls into another category it is counted twice)

so we have 36528 domains that are completely configured correctly according to RfC 2821 with a MX-Record pointing to an A-Record, or without a MX-Record and an A-Record. These are 94.5% of all domains.

but we have 443 domains in our list, that didn't resolve at the moment i ran my script, those have to be investigated.

We also have 3 domains that are configured with 'IN MX 0 .' as decribed in this expired Draft, those also have to be investigated, and thrown out.

We have 1288 domains, which use CNAMEs (or CNAMEs pointing to CNAMEs) in their MX or directly on their domainname. RFC1034 says:

Domain names in RRs which point at another name should always point at the primary name and not the alias. This avoids extra indirections in accessing information.


then there are 36 domains which point their MX directly to an IP-Number. RFC 1035 says:

3.3.9. MX RDATA format

+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+
PREFERENCE
+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+
/ EXCHANGE /
/ /
+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+

where:

PREFERENCE A 16 bit integer which specifies the preference given to
this RR among others at the same owner. Lower values
are preferred.

EXCHANGE A <domain-name> which specifies a host willing to act as
a mail exchange for the owner name.

MX records cause type A additional section processing for the host
specified by EXCHANGE.


So according to that an MX has to point explicitely to a Full Qualified Domain Name, and it has to be an A-Record it points to.

However: Most MTAs (including ours) these days forgive this, and figure out the right thing.

At last: we have 361 Domains which MX and/or CNAME-Records point to Hostnames that are currently unresolvable. A quick check shows that often the problems only appear on one MX-Record, while another is correct, so the service is functional.

So maybe now it is a good idea and check your own DNS-Setup and the Mail-related Data.

Jose Luis Rivas Contreras: Unable to build rtorrent 0.7.8

I cannot build the new upstream rtorrent package (at least not as should been built) because of libcurl4-openssl-dev and the dependency on libssh2-0-dev that's a virtual package right now on sid (#442198). But I couldn't wait until curl get fixed so I downloaded libssh2-0-dev for lenny and installed it in my machine so I could build it (not with pbuilder but is built! :-) ) So you can find libtorrent 0.11.8 and rtorrent 0.7.8 binaries (and source of course) for amd64 right now on my server, in some minutes I will have the i386 binaries as well. The most important option added in this new release is the peer exchange option and a lot of commands for XMLRPC that in debian we can't enjoy by the moment. BTW, if someone can take care of xmlrpc-c which seems to be forgotten (or with a MIA maintainer) I would appreciate it (and finally be able to build rtorrent with XMLRPC support!!) Anyway, having rtorrent 0.7.8 in debian unstable could take at least a week more :-/ (while curl get fixed) so if you really want it grab them from my server or built it with my dsc diff.gz and orig.tar.gz and dpkg-source -x package_version.dsc and remember if you're building rtorrent you need libssh2-0-dev installed.

13 September 2007

Kai Hendry: Highly mobile

An antler ! In the past couple of weeks I’ve: Really interesting projects at work. I helped put together a position paper for an OpenAJAX/W3C meeting. It was accepted and now I’m off to San Francisco for the first time for the last week of September! It’ll be my first time in North America on my travels. Btw my employers are hiring! As for Debian work. I am still struggling to a get a stable security update of wordpress in. :/
I made an update to flup, which will hopefully be one of the last. Please consider moving your Web application to modwsgi. I was surprised to see Webconverger in the Linux Format magazine #97, which is great news. There should be big announcements soon concerning Webconverger. Busy, busy, busy! :)

Neil Williams: apt-cross moves to Cache::Apt:: and GPL-3 or later

Just completed the migration of the next version of apt-cross that is due to be uploaded once dpkg-cross pre2 can be uploaded to experimental. (This in turn is waiting for dpkg to support removal of the dpkg-cross diversions: #439979.)
AptCross:: has gone, replaced by Cache::Apt:: and the Cache.pm from NorthernCross is now called Lookup.pm for clarity.
This update solves a lot of niggles with the old apt-cross behaviour when dealing with non-standard repositories, CDROM archives, proxied mirrors and various other stuff that apt can cope with but which wget found difficult. (#440929, #442012)
Also, the entire package has migrated to GPL v3 or later - all the code was GPL v2 or later.
This means that emdebian-tools will also be migrating to GPL v3 or later when that is updated to use the new apt-cross and dpkg-cross code.
Sometime after Lenny, Cache::Apt:: will migrate into a source package of its own (on CPAN), allowing the apt-cross functionality to be merged into apt and the module to support other tasks in Emdebian.
In other news, gpe-cash is coming along and highlighting a few issues in libqof1, libqof-backend-sqlite and libqofexpensesobjects so there are improvements due there too. gpe-cash and gpe-expenses are also GPL v3 or later, as are deb-gview, quicklist (experimental) and pilot-qof now too.
Most have some machine-operable fields in debian/copyright and most have the new dpkg fields in debian/control.
Got a fix for gpe-bluetooth to upload tonight as well as (hopefully) the last go at getting homebank through NEW.

Gunnar Wolf: BLOBs in MySQL: Binary Laughable OBjects?!

Bah, MySQL keeps insisting on being a fun way to waste your time.
One of my clients hosts its systems at Dreamhost, a quite nice hosting company, which has... Well, a couple of strange details :-/
Anyway, people who work with databases know that a BLOB (or its equivalent) is the right datatype for storing images or, in general, files, right? After all, BLOB is just an acronym for Binary Large OBject. And if somebody has a BLOB field in the DB and searches on it, most RDBMS-bound programmers will at very least chuckle at a design flaw - BLOBs are just to be stored and retrieved, that's it.
Well, the system I wrote for this client uses a BLOB field - Ok, to be clear: I just declared it as a :binary in the corresponding migration. That should do the trick, and should allow me to keep my system RDBMS-independent, right? So I can still work on my development system using nice-and-trusty PostgreSQL
Anyway... My client said some documents were being corrupted. And that is Not NiceTM... Documents were being truncated at 63Kb. The bug was consistent across the three instances of my system in Dreamhost, but could not be reproduced at my machines - It didn't take too long to find out it must be the DB (and that's partly because I don't really trust MySQL :) ).
Turns out that, in MySQL speak, there are four types of blobs: TINYBLOB, BLOB, MEDIUMBLOB, and LONGBLOB. Forgoodnessake, WHY?! The stupidiest one is the tinyblob: A Binary Large OBject limited to 8 bits (255 characters). Regular blobs are 16 bit long (65535 characters - Aha! That's your 63.99Kb limit!). Mediumblobs are 24 bits (16 million), and longblobs are 32 bits (4000 million). And, of course, the blob datatype is not large at all.
Bah.
Anyway... At least this is an open and known issue already to the Rails people, and I do expect them to change the migration equivalencies to something saner.
Bah again.

Simon Richter: Things I do after spending a day in front of a computer

Okay, apart from finishing the move from the laptop back to the Pegasos (I compiled d2x-xl yesterday, today is reserved for the more serious stuff), this evening will be dedicated to cooking and my other pet project, xcontrol. So, it will be risotto, wireless networks and autobuilders, in no particular order. In other news, I've been running an archive rebuild to find out which packages actually implement the build-arch and build-indep targets. Out of the first 70, I've counted 11. Since so many packages would be affected, a mass filing of wishlist bugs is probably not the way to go, so I guess I'll set up a web page with the results (after making my autobuilder more robust; it still gets too easily confused) and try to shame people into updating their packages.

Russell Coker: Multiple Pointers in X

After having read Brice Goglin’s post about what to expect in X for Lenny [1] the thing that seemed most exciting is the support for Multi-Pointer X [2]. This allows multiple keyboards and mouses with a separate keyboard focus for each. So you can have two people typing two different things on the one desktop. This should be good for training related to GUI programs and will also have some interesting possibilities for large displays. I wonder if the concept of Pair Programming [3] could benefit from having two keyboards and mouses. The idea is that one person isn’t actively coding, but following what the active coder is doing may require reviewing other code that is not visible on screen. Another interesting feature is XACE [4] the X Access Control Extension. Among other things this is used for Security Enhanced X. Hopefully I’ll be able to find time to work on SE-X in Debian before Lenny is released.

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