After Dell, Lenovo decided to ask users which Linux distribution they should put on Thinkpads. Seriously, who cares? If I buy a laptop that comes with Linux pre-installed, my first step would be to reinstall it from scratch, exactly like with a laptop with Windows pre-installed. Because the choices that were made wouldn’t match mine (think of partitioning, etc). Or simply because I wouldn’t totally trust the hardware manufacturer. So, what would make me happier about a laptop?

• That installing any recent enough mainstream Linux distribution works without requiring tricks
• That it’s possible to buy it without an operating system, with no additional charge (and no, I don’t buy the “we need the OS installed to do some quality tests before we ship” argument. USB keys and CDROMs have been bootable for years.)

I couldn’t care less about which distribution comes preinstalled. If Lenovo wants to make me happy, there are two ways:

• Talk to free software developers: kernel developers, etc. Not distribution developers. And get the required changes merged in, so they will land in my favorite distribution after some time.
• If they prefer to play on their own, they could create an open “Linux on Lenovo laptops” task force, where they would provide the needed drivers in a way that makes it dead easy to integrate them in Linux distros and to report problems.

It’s not _that_ hard: some manufacturers got it right, at least for some of their products. There are many manufacturers contributing code directly to the Linux kernel, for network drivers for example. But maybe this is just about marketing and communication, not about results? Because after all, Dell and Lenovo will look nice to the random user. While playing-by-the-rules manufacturers are hidden deep in the Linux changelog.

Told you so ;-) When I was optimistic back when the AMD/ATI deal went public, and again when ATI made some statements about helping open source, many didn't share my view. It seems that slowly, ATI is really doing what they promised: allowing free drivers for ATI graphics cards become a reality. Yes, the drivers still need to be written, and currently ATI apparently isn't willing to do this (and I understand that the specs are not complete, lacking the 3D part), but hey, Linux wasn't built in a day...

In other words: Sex sells. We need blue LEDs. Blinking lights. More gadgets. The new Debian loader to boot into Debian installer from a Windows machine is totally cool. And it has become very obvious that we need a bootsplash in the installer (and if the user selects Desktop or Laptop in tasksel or whatever it's called these days, in the default install, too.) The people we are trying to reach via such migration tools are not technical people but average computer users - and they won't understand why Debian boots DOS at first because the graphical part comes up. (If you don't do tech support to non-technical users: any text mode screen will automatically be referred to as DOS. I've seen that again and again, and it's always difficult to explain to these people that “up to date operating system” doesn't automatically mean “GUI” Is this important? Of course it's not important for the current average Debian user (who knows quite a bit around Linux, and who also, I guess, has moved to Debian after having tried and discarded Fedora or SuSE.) But it's important for new users who migrate to Debian directly from Windows, who have a hard time using Synaptic with the default settings and who were just lucky (instead of having made a choice) when they bought it that their Internet access uses an Ethernet based device instead of a cheap USB modem. Do we want those users? They may be a burden to support, but overall I think that the wider our user base, the wider is the pool of potential contributors (translators, or even just users who help other users.) (... and incidentally: please, please, please let's skip the “accep the GPL” dialog. Or at least check the box by default. After all, the big difference to our proprietary competitors is that we don't restrict use and redistribution of the software at all, and modification only moderately, so if a user has decided to burn this CD-ROM and try this system, we shouldn't annoy him.)

Because I’ve been getting a little frustrated with the lack of trackback support, prohibition against Javascript, etc. I’ve decided to set up a Wordpress installation on my private machine. For now, I have things set up so that posts made on my Wordpress blog will get mirrored onto my LiveJournal account. I may do some friends-locked posts still on LJ, but my general philosophy is to not post anything I might consider private on a blog, friends-locked or no. So we’ll see how often I make use of that option.

Because I’ve been getting a little frustrated with the lack of trackback support, prohibition against Javascript, etc. I’ve decided to set up a Wordpress installation on my private machine. For now, I have things set up so that posts made on my Wordpress blog will get mirrored onto my LiveJournal account. I may do some friends-locked posts still on LJ, but my general philosophy is to not post anything I might consider private on a blog, friends-locked or no. So we’ll see how often I make use of that option. Originally published at Thoughts by Ted. Please leave any comments there.

So, this time it was for real! AMD really meant it when they announce the release of specifications of ATI boards last weeks. During XDS2007 at Cambridge, we received the actual specs, 2 PDFs files, 460 pages for the M56 (Mobility X1600, r5xx board) and 436 pages for rv630. The files are now online, but I am not going to give the link here since the web server already suffered too much today (and the URL is easy to find anyway). People should NOT understand this as if we were going to get an open-source driver for all ATI boards next weeks. First, these are only 2D specifications for r500 and r600. 3D specs are expected in a couple weeks once AMD fixes the remaining issues. r300 specs might arrive later. Also, these specifications are pretty hard to use, as expected. There are something like 9000 registers in r6xx boards, and these PDF files are just description of these registers. It's of course far away from being a "How-to write a driver?". So if you want to help, there will be lots of things to do. We also got a demo from some Suse guys of the driver there are working on. They got these specs about 2 months ago. And they already have some part of modesetting working. It means you might get your X server to start. There are about one hundreds different chipsets with their own quirks, so still lots of work to do. And then lots of performance things, 3D, ... to do. This driver is called "Radeon HD" so far. It will remain separated for now, but it might end up being merged with the upstream ATI driver later since the 3D engine are very similar (I personally hope it will happen). The reverse-engineered Avivo driver is dead now then. Fortunately, Jerome Glisse has been aware of the event for a couple months now, so he didn't waste to much time working on it. xserver-xorg-video-avivo will remain in Debian experimental until the new driver arrives. The good thing about Avivo is that it (and the ongoing Nouveau driver for Nvidia) led to the development of very nice reverse-engineering tools (revenge, renouveau, mmio trace, ...). They will be very useful for other graphic boards, or even some network hardware. Of course, many thanks to AMD for making this happen!

After one day off, we watched Argentina-Georgia yesterday evening. Interesting game because it directly affect France's chances to qualify after Argentina's win on Friday. Argentina had a big disadvantage by playing only 4 days after their historic battle against France. As a logical consequence, they appeared quite tired and very imprecise. On the other hand, Georgia fought very courageously with a strong pack of forwards, encouraged by most of the crowd in Lyon. Finally, Argentina won *and* scored the bonus point by scoring a try in the very last minute (which might become very important to qualify in this pool. Good game even if Argentina was not that impressive, but I still think this is mostly because of the 4-days delay. Today, 3 games were scheduled. We didn't watch USA-Tonga (15-25). USA was slightly favourite for that one but they also were quite tired by playing 4 days only after their battle against England on Saturday. This was the first match for Tonga and obviously the island players were less tired and played a good rugby to win that one. Japan-Fidji (31-35) seems to have been the most uncertain match as of now. I somewhat regret not watching it as these two are among the teams I like watching and 7 tries in the match probably made it very interesting. Tonight, we watched Italy-Romania (24-18). The italians compete with Scotland for the remaining qualifying spot in that pool, if one assumes that New Zealand will obviously win all its matches. So, Italy *had* to win that match. The quality of romanian rugby has decreased in the last 10 years, but they still have a good set of great players, most of them playing...in France (just like one third of the italian team, indeed). The match was quite indecise with italy keeping the ball all first half long, but only leading 8-0 on half time....and being surprised by two romanian tries at the beginning of second half (8-12). After a strong domination of Italy, Romania was logically sanctioned by one expulsion and a penalty try (for successive voluntary faults), but, until the end, Italy was still in danger. They finally made it, which was the most important for them, 4 days after they were sweeped out by the All Blacks. We're now eagerly waiting for *THE* game of this week, England-South Africa in the Stade de France on Friday. Elizabeth found out that a few tickets are still available, but for 253 euros each, we decided to watch it on TV. So, between 21:00 and 23:00UTC that day, don't even think about pinging me on IRC. I still haven't decided who I'll support the most as I'm not a huge fan of either team....but they're still among the best in the world, of course.

As mentioned yesterday, I went to watch the Tour of Britain for real in Taunton. It’s taken me a while to encode these (I’ll write about the technical details on another page soon), but here are the videos. They’re in the super-cool Ogg Theora format, in case that helps you update your media player with filters like these. (I probably should do some clever tricks to embed these videos in the page, but it’s taken me long enough to get this far, so please either download the files or drag-and-drop the links to your media player. If anyone can explain how to embed videos simply, please leave me a comment…) First of all, I went to Staplegrove Road, where I thought the peloton might slow slightly to get past a roundabout on their first pass through Taunton (Ogg, 514K) a bit after 11am, but they didn’t really. Then I got a brilliant position in the second row just by the finish line, which meant I didn’t see the big crash of the day until I saw the TV news in the evening, but I did see both the main sprints, for the stage win (Ogg 919K) and the yellow-jersey group (Ogg 382K). Finally, I went and watched the presentations - the yellow jersey (Ogg 1.3M) and the champagne spray (Ogg 643K) are shown here. The BBC has the broadcast rights to the tour of Britain and seem to be doing a terrible job: Live race news seems to be limited to a quick mention in the half-hourly sports bulletins on Radio Five (on satellite Astra 2D at 28 east to much of north-west Europe, or Medium Wave 909 and 693kHz). Each night, there’s a short (3 minutes?) summary report in the BBC1 TV news of that stage’s region, some time after 18:30 BST (so tonight in West Midlands, tomorrow Yorkshire and North Midlands, Friday North-west and Saturday Scotland, all Astra 2D). This is not shown on BBC News 24, as far as I’ve seen, not even in the Sportsday show. There will be one national highlights show on BBC 2 at 14:30 on Sunday (again, Astra 2D), the day after the race has finished. Official listings say this is highlights of the final stage but hopefully it will cover the other stages too. I feel they should take the rights away from the BBC and give ITV a chance. We had better coverage of this year’s Tour of Ireland (from itv4) than we have of the Tour of Britain - this is silly. For non-TV coverage details, including Twitter, see CyclingFans.com

This Saturday, September 15, is Software Freedom Day 2007. With more than 300 teams registered, there's a good chance that there's something going on near you. I'll be helping at the Software Freedom Day event in downtown Boston where I'll be giving a talk on a still undetermined topic. I'll also be helping out with GNU/Linux and RockBox installs and letting folks play with my XO and OpenMoko. If you are into free software, open source, or GNU/Linux, please show up to your local SFD event. Go ahead and bring your friends who are not yet familiar with free software -- this event is primarily for them. In Boston, there will be refreshments, talks, demonstrations, and installs. Bring your laptop, desktop, iPod, or other DAP -- or just bring yourself and a friend.

Since a few days I'm a happy customer of Lichtblick, the biggest electric utility (Stromanbieter) in Germany which provides 100% green energy (or kostrom as it's called in Germany). Why? I was getting tired of all those hypocrites and liars (a.k.a. politicians) who keep on talking about global warming and renewable energy, but fail to produce any real results since many, many years now. So I decided to do my (small) part to help reduce CO₂ emissions, the greenhouse effect, and global warming. After measuring the energy consumption of all my power-sucking devices and replacing or turning off some of them, and after replacing all lightbulbs with highly efficient energy saving lightbulbs, changing the electric utility was the next logical step. First try (failed) As probably almost everyone in Munich, I was a customer of the Stadtwerke M nchen (SWM). According to the last electricity bill I got from them, their sources of energy are: 17% renewable energy, 83% fossil energy sources, 0% nuclear power. Well, at least they don't use nuclear power, that's a big plus IMO, but 83% polluting, fossil crap? Thanks, but no thanks. So I opted to use their kostrom M-Natur tariff, which (they claim) provides 100% renewable energy. They use the so-called Aufpreismodell (sorry, German only), i.e. you pay a few cents extra per kWh, and this extra money is invested in renewable energy sources (mostly small hydropower plants around Munich). As I found out a few hours later (d'oh!) this "Aufpreismodell" is not really ideal (you still pay a conventional electric utility instead of one with 100% renewable energy, for instance). In addition, I stubled over a petition for the city of Munich to stop investing in a new fossil fuel power plant (bituminous coal, to be more precise). Which I promptly signed (and which went to several local parties including the greens, the mayer of Munich, and others).
Now, this is what I call hypocritical behaviour — on the one side they claim/pretend to be environmentally friendly by promoting their "M-Natur" tariff, and at the same time they invest even more money in fossil fuels? WTF? Anyway, it seems the petition did have at least some impact, the aren't allowed to invest more money into that fossil fuel powerplant than they already did. For me that was more than enough reason to immediately revoke my M-Natur tariff, and what's more, I switched to a completely different company now, Lichtblick (see also the respective Wikipedia page). I'm not willing to support such energy policies/politics with my money anymore. Lichblick Lichtblick is an kostromanbieter in Germany, supposedly the biggest one.
Their "energy mix" is 100% renewable energy (which is correct, unlike with SWM, as they do not own any additional fossil fuel plants). 76% of that is hydropower, FWIW. Their prices may be a bit higher than those of conventional electric utilities, but not all that much; you might even pay less, depending on where you live and which tariff you have now. You can use their price calculator to find out. Btw, some other good choices in Germany are Greenpeace energy, Elektrizit tswerke Sch nau, and Naturstrom AG. How the switch went Easy. Grab the respective PDF, print it, fill in the required info, and send it to them. Alternatively, they also offer online registration. It'll take a few weeks until the switch is performed; they have to contact your current electric utility etc. In my case it took ca. 4 weeks. There are no additional costs for switching. There is no "downtime" whatsoever (not even a few seconds), German law requires that you always reliably get your electricity 24/7 (and it indeed worked just fine for me). So, that's that. From now on I'm happily using green energy all day (and night) long. I'm doing my part in Saving The Planet (tm) and I sleep a bit better at night... P.S. No, I'm not getting paid by Lichtblick (or anybody else) to write this.

Eweek has an interesting article about Microsoft’s latest bad hiring idea [1] (their previous one was hiring a model to try and give the idea that IT work is cool [2]). They have created a web site hey-genius.com to try and get people who consider themselves to be geniuses to work for them. One significant problem with this idea is that the amount of ego required to claim the title of genius is significantly greater than the amount of ego that makes it impossible for two people to work in the same office. Google’s methods of trying to attract candidates are much more sensible, for example setting mathematical and logical problems and inviting people who can solve them to apply for work. People who can solve maths and logic puzzles tend to be good programmers because essentially programming is about solving such puzzles while also relying on having memorised a huge number of facts and numbers. If you can solve the logic puzzles then you are probably half-way to becoming a decent programmer. The next problem is that the web site doesn’t work very well. In fact it works so badly that some people have suggested that the aim of the exercise is to make job offers to the people who give the best suggestions as to how to improve the web site. It gave a black window with Konqueror and with Firefox it didn’t appear to offer full functionality (and required a pop-up for no good reason too). But one useful thing about it is that it links to the Microsoft Jobs Blog [3] which is a really good recruiting idea. There are posts about various benefits that MS offers it’s employees, about visits by MS representatives to schools, and other things that will surely be of interest to people who like MS. I recommend that everyone who works in HR reads that blog and considers whether something similar would work for them (I think it would work for all large companies). Another interesting thing to note is that there are glamour photos of recruiting agents. I suggested in my previous post that they should “find some cute female MS employees and get them to do the promotion”, well it seems that MS was already doing similar things before I suggested it! One significant thing that they could do to improve their jobs blogging is to have a blog with job adverts with category based feeds for all the different categories. This would permit someone who is interested in XML work to get a feed of the XML jobs category and wait for something suitable to come up. I believe that every company that advertises more than two positions per year should have a RSS feed of the job adverts. It allows syndication feeds of adverts from multiple companies which job seekers can poll for positions that match their skills.

• [1] http://ct.enews.eweek.com/rd/cts?d=186-8123-54-801-598009-794820-0-0-0-1


• [2] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2007/08/10/microsoft-hires-university-drop-out-for-recruiting-campaign/


• [3] http://blogs.msdn.com/jobsblog/

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It's sometimes funny what automatically added advertisements can produce. This morning when I complained about lack of Windows developers for Gammu and shared my unwillingness to work on Windows, Microsoft sponsored this email ;-).

On Wed, 12 Sep 2007 09:55:56 +0900
Michal  iha  <michal@cihar.com> wrote:
> I have totally no interest in investing into Windows license and
> finding out how to use totally free MSVC.
[...]
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------
> This SF.net email is sponsored by: Microsoft
> Defy all challenges. Microsoft(R) Visual Studio 2005.

Yes, I'm totally jealous of Brice, but this is like his sweet revenge for missing the fun at Debconf. In other news, I'm 27 years old now, D looks like a really promising language for my needs, and I desperately need to find some time to do basic grunt work on the video drivers so that I can really scrap discover from the xserver postinstall scripts. I need to find the time to do a lot of things actually, but that one's so close I can taste it.

Brice mentions pci-rework, which promises to make my grunt work only a temporary Debian-only solution, so once I'm done with that I'll work out a more permanent solution that should go in upstream. Ultimately, the goal will be to have the server automatically load the correct driver given what the driver itself claims to do. There's a reasonable method of choosing a driver in the current server, but it's neither fully correct nor flexible, and my goal is to have something that'll work every time and not require the server itself to carry around any information to make it happen. It's just one more thing on the long list of stuff that the server really should be doing, but it isn't.

There is this guy whose blog I found about a week ago. He does some really nice and funny sketches mostly with issues regarding Bucharest and things he finds out/encounters.

The fact that he is smart to see some of the rudeness happening in Bucharest doesn't help him notice he is manipulated by the press (and himself) and writes:

"La 6 ani de la 11 septembrie 2001, Osama bin Laden a scos capu' din vagauna cu o noua inregistrare video in care da lumii intregi 2 alternative: convertirea la Islam sau moartea!"

Which translates approximately to:

"Six years after September 11, 2001, Osama bin Laden shows his face out from his hiding place and makes a new video in which gives the whole wolrd 2 alternatives: converting to Islam or death!"

(I won't take into discussion the correct translation of the message from Osama, if the message is authentic, if Osama is payed by somebody interested in keeping the conflict open, if Osama's forces are actually active in Iraq, if Bush is Osama himself, if we're actually living in 1984 and Osama is already dead but the American manipulative government is using all sorts of recordings from him to keep people inside a cage and fed them propaganda, < insert your theory/idea here >....)

He links to this article, whose title might make one to think what the guy said is true (according to the article)...

But, if read carefully is clear that there are a few twists (in order of apparition):

• the alternatives were given to the American people ("urged the American people")
• the alternatives were for the ending of the war in Iraq ("there are two ways to end the war in Iraq")
• the first alternative is escalation of the conflict, not death; that would translate, IMHO, into "we will be fighting in Iraq and you can give up, but we will not", so I'd say surrender/retreat/keep fighting and probably die are all viable alternatives for the first one
• apparently he says converting to Islam is an alternative ("The second way, he continues, is to reject America's democratic system and convert to Islam.")
• but, if we read on we see that he actually says just to acknowledge that democracy is not at all a successful model, unless by success one thinks in terms of a system that achieves the interests of the corporations ("It has now become clear to you and the entire world the impotence of the democratic system and how it plays with the interest of the peoples and their blood by sacrificing soldiers and populations to achieve the interests of the major corporations")
• and more importantly, converting to Islam is not actually a condition, but there is an invitation to do that ("I invite you to embrace Islam,")

So, the conclusion is that it's really easy to fall into the trap of believing what the titles and headlines suggest, rather than what the articles actually say, especially if you keep your head open only to single stream of ideas (I guess you, my dear reader, are smart enough to see what I mean here).


Disclaimer, my analysis might be off, my English sucks, I might be Osama, I might be Bush, I didn't saw the recording, there's a cat on a freezer...

At least in unstable that's the case, thanks to santiago who uploaded rtorrent yesterday. Unfortunately(for people using testing) the new version 0.11.8/0.7.8 for libtorrent/rtorrent is out, that's why I will wait until rtorrent got into testing so there'll be no mismatch of versions between the library and the client (actually rtorrent 0.7.4 and libtorrent 0.11.7, should be rtorrent 0.7.7) and then will start looking a sponsor for the new packages of libtorrent/rtorrent (which are going to be ready later tonight).

For the past weeks, I’ve been working on getting an SGI Origin200 system to run Debian. Getting a working kernel for the machine took some time and lead to the discovery of 2 nasty bugs, which will be fixed in 2.6.23 thanks to Ralf Baechle (who found and fixed both bugs). There’s still some work left but the machine is in a usable state, except for a dead eth1 interface. Now I’m having some fun with the bootloader, namely ARCLoad in this case. ARCLoad supports all the Linux-supported SGI MIPS machines, but couldn’t load 64bit kernels on machines equipped with a 32bit PROM; all Debian kernels for SGI MIPS machines have been 64bit for some time now, so that means ARCLoad was unusable with these machines (note that the Origin200 comes with a 64bit PROM, so this wasn’t a showstopper for this project). Thankfully another bootloader, arcboot, is used for these machines and supports 64bit kernels. Stealing a snippet of code from arcboot I’ve now uploaded arcload 0.5-5 which fully covers our needs. The joy of free software. I’ve also been working on getting the latest rEFIt version to build with GNU EFI, which means updating GNU EFI to efi110. Took some time, but everything built in the end. I haven’t tested the resulting rEFIt binary yet, waiting some feedback from GNU EFI uptream before doing so.

After tonights dinstall run, we will freeze 3.1r7 for sourcefull uploads, unless someone has a very good reason for another package inclusion for oldstable. Adventureous admins (who have also a backup of their systems) might want to try to add olstable-proposed-updates to their /etc/apt/sources.list and try to upgrade. Please report any problems to the debian-release@lists.debian.org mailing list. release

The release plan for Xserver 1.5 and Xorg 7.4 was discussed during the X.org Developers' Summit in Cambridge (September 10-12th). This is what we expect to ship with Lenny, so here are some details about the upcoming. Timeline As usual, there will be a 6 months release cycle. So Xorg 7.4 is expected on March 1st, 2008. There won't probably be any new Xserver release before that since some changes (already merged) require all drivers to be updated anyway. So Xserver 1.5 is expected on the same date. Since there are already some known problems in Xserver, they also plan to release Xserver 1.4.1 on November 1st. PCI Rework The master branch of Xserver already contains the long-expected pci-rework which is supposed to fix all the PCI domains and other non-trivial PCI hierarchy support (important for ia64, but also for some powerpc and sparc users). RandR People having Intel, ATI or recent Nvidia boards learnt to love the RandR 1.2 extension which provides the ability to enable/disable, resize, rotate, move outputs within a single big virtual screen. More transformations should be possible with RandR 1.3. Hopefully, there will also be some standardization regarding output names in various drivers, or at least a way to retrieve the type of each output (LVDS, DVI, VGA, TV, ...). And the server should get an abstraction object to describe GPUs, which might make the support for multiple boards easier. Input On the input side, XKB 2 and XGE should be merged, which shouldn't be really visible to end-users but should make internals much better. Then MPX (Multi-Pointer X server) might be in Xserver 1.5 too (if all semantics issues get fixed first). It would mean support for multiple independent keyboard/mouse pairs or so. See the MPX page for details. Compositing Compositing still gets a lot of attention. Several distributions are actually thinking of enabling Compiz by default. EXA (the new acceleration architecture that has been designed for compositing) got improved a lot in Xserver 1.4. Several drivers including Intel and ATI r300 already work great with EXA (no need to use XAA + XAANoOffscreenPixmaps anymore) which means Compiz works very smoothly, even when resizing windows. XAA won't be removed soon though since lots of things needs to be fixed before that. There are also several videos available online, like this one. But one big piece is still missing for compositing: directed rendering to redirected windows. So far, if you start glxgears in Compiz, you will see that the gears completely ignore wobbli-ness of windows, other windows overriding them, cube rotation, ... they keep rendering of top of everything without any effect. Getting true support for compositing such windows requires lots of work in all parts of the DRI stack. Kristian H gsberg got it to work (and we even get a great demo). See Kristian's blog for details. Upstream devs are now working on integrating all modifications nicely in upstream Xserver, drivers, DRM module, Mesa, ... Once this works, you can get GLX_EXT_texture_from_pixmap for both direct and indirect rendering, and full support for GLX 1.4 in the server (only 1.2 is supported as of now). Also, redirected windows (let's say a wobbly window on a side of Compiz' cube) should get input events correctly thanks to input transformation in Xserver 1.5 (event coordinates will be converted into the redirected window coordinate space before being passed to the client application). Kernel-related reworks Compositing improvements actually require a large rework of the memory management in the server. Basically, we need a global management for both 2D and 3D object allocations, so that you can get both to work fine without having to change config options (things like XAANoOffscreenPixmaps or FbTexPercent). All this is related to the TTM (Translation Table Maps, see these slides for details) which has been under development for a while. It requires to change the interface with the kernel DRM modules, and it won't happen before 2.6.24. The Xserver part of the work is not big, so it might still be done before 1.5 is released. Fortunately, once all this is ready, people should stop complaining about memory allocation failures, Compiz being slow because one option is not enabled by default, ... Another hot topic in the X.org/kernel area is about moving modesetting in the kernel. When you get a kernel panic, you only actually see it if not running X (or if logging kernel messages through the network). So your machine freezes, you don't know why, you have no way to know, and you just reboot. Getting panic messages on X would be much better. To do so, the kernel needs to now which mode is currently in use on the monitor and then it will render the message on the framebuffer. This require lots of work, so it will unlikely be in Xserver 1.5 though. Miscellaneous Xserver 1.5 will also contain XACE (security framework), the cleanup of the ABI (explicit _X_EXPORT required), and possibly glucose (OpenGL acceleration for X, see Zack Rusin's blog). I asked whether there was actually some work on building the GLcore server module as a part of Mesa so that building Xserver does not require the whole Mesa source anymore. People seem to agree the current situation is a real pain for distributions and we should make this change happen. But the actual work has to be done in Mesa anyway, we'll see what happens.

Several months ago, I announced that I'd received a grant from mtvU and Cisco to work on a cool voting technology research project called Selectricity. A project in quotidian democracy, Selectricity attempts to apply some of the best voting technology and election methods research towards every-day decision-making. It takes research I did at the MIT Media Lab and packages it into a real, useful, application. I spent probably half of my time over the last several months managing a team of competent hackers and designers as we've built out the project. Last week, press releases and news stories went out as we launched our first production batch of features and a new design. You can check it out online at:

http://selectricity.org

There is a whole line-up of a groups and organizations, some high profile, that will be using the software in the coming months. There's also half a dozen killer new features that are built and waiting in the wings for a little polish and fanfare. We'll be testing and releasing those in the next couple months. No doubt, I'll be mentioning bits and pieces of my work on the project on my blog here. However, if you want to follow development, you should subscribe to the Selectricity News Blog where more full coverage will take place. You can leave feedback, suggestions, and bugs as comments on the blog or email it to team@selectricity.org. The election method code is already published and we'll be releasing the rest of the code under the AGPLv3 when the license is released by the FSF in the next few weeks.

Some time ago, Yahoo! Finance made some changes at their backend for the provisioning of png images which are also displayed by smtm. Version 1.6.9, which just went to Debian's master site and will go to CPAN in a moment, finally updates the code for that. My apologies for taking so long, and thanks to Michael Kurlin, Clinton R Lambe, Ian Seow and possibly others whose mail I haven't kept who sent me patches and heads-ups.