svn-buildpackage + cowbuilder It took me a bit to craft the appropriate alias for doing the final build of my svn maintained packages inside cowbuilder, so maybe others will find this useful:

alias svn-btc="svn-buildpackage --svn-builder='pdebuild --pbuilder cowbuilder --buildresult .. --auto-debsign --debsign-k zack@debian.org' --svn-lintian --svn-tag --svn-retag --svn-dont-clean"

whereas for the non-final build I use the usual:

alias svn-b="svn-buildpackage -rfakeroot -us -uc --svn-ignore --svn-lintian --svn-dont-clean"

The probably cryptic trailing letters are: 'b' for "build", 't' for "tag", 'c' for cowbuilder. Thanks to dancer for his tips on this ... and of course for cowdancer!

Earlier this year I blogged about using the twitter bot for Remember the Milk. I still use it fairly well, even though the SMS messages from the RTM come late a bit. It's working for me in order to get a good chain going for the thesis proposal. There are a couple other bots that I'm using which are on twitter as well.

The first bot that I use is the bot at timer. The timer bot will let you set a timer (surprisingly). You only need to send it a direct message with the amount of minutes as well as a reminder for you about what it was set for. For example, if you want to remember to plug the meter before it runs out in 40 minutes, just twitter 'd timer 38 plug the meter' to timer and in 38 minutes it will inform you that your timer is up. You can have multiple timers running at once, which is useful if you are perhaps having tea at a coffee shop while you are parked on the street.

Another bot I use is the gcal. Gcal is a connection to your google calendar through twitter. You can set up new appointments by messaging the gcal bot with something like 'd gcal Pick up joe at 7pm' or 'd gcal set up web application for judy tomorrow' and it will
add it to your calendar. I use it in the morning to track my weight. I just pull out my phone while I am at the scale and SMS 'd gcal my weight is XXX', and it adds the event as a day event on the day it was sent.

The last bot I will go over today is the mymm bot. It is slightly more complicated but still useful. When you're at the pump, you can direct message mymm a little info and get back the MPG that you have done since the last fillup. It helps me keep a tab on how good or bad I'm driving, which is a good thing. The car we drive usually gets about 24 MPG, but I learned through this that when I'm carrying a bunch of crap in the back, the MPG drops 3-4, so it's better for me to have an empty trunk.

I'm sure there are a bunch of other useful bots out there (ququoo is one, which I may cover in another post), but these are the most useful that I've found so far. Twitter is turning out to be much more useful than just random status updates.

Anyone who has done an operating systems 101 course is familiar with the standard hierarchical page-table structure. This is essentially a radix-tree where bits of the virtual address are taken as indexes into an array of pointers, each pointing to the next level down or, at the leaves, to a physical entry. One potential issue with this style of page-table is with a very large, very sparse address space (such as in a single address-space operating system) there will be many intermediate steps with possibly only a single translation at the end (i.e. lots of single pages scattered all around your address-space). Thus we can add a bit-field guard to each of the entries in the page table (Liedtke, 1994) to help indicate only those paths through the tree which are valid (similar to a Patricia tree). Translation first proceeds as usual; the top bits are used as an index into the top level table. However, each entry now contains extra information about further valid addresses. The guard is masked against the next bits in the virtual address; if it matches (e.g. in our example is 0x2) the next step can proceed directly to the leaf node, bypassing the middle look-up. The entry can be marked as either final (i.e. pointing to a leaf node) or intermediate, in which case the process continues with the next level (which also has its own guard, and so forth). Any entry that does not match the guard is known to be false, and therefore a fault can be raised. To examine this further, consider that we know that each page in our 24-bit address space above is 4KiB, thanks to the 2¹² = 4KiB offset. Therefore each of the 16 possible values of the top four bits selects 1MiB of the 2²⁴ = 16MiB address space; e.g. 0x0 selects the first megabyte, 0x1 the second and so forth. The second 4 bits selects a 64KiB region of this 1MiB, and the last 4 bits selects a 4KiB region of this 64KiB region. This scheme could work quite well if we were using only 16 pages each separated by 1MiB. Each of these pages would only require an entry in the top level with an appropriate guard which could then be marked as final and point directly to a physical frame. Once things become less sparse however, we need to start filling in middle levels. If you have 2 pages within a 16MiB region, you need at least one extra bit of address to tell them apart. If you have 3 or 4 pages, you need at least 2 bits to tell them apart, and so forth. It would therefore be beneficial to have variable level sizes to dynamically adapt and create the most efficient lookup possible given the address space layout of a process. For example, if you knew your process was only going map pages 0x123 (100100011) and 0x124 (100100100) a good option would be to make your top-level only two entries (i.e. check the top bit) with a guard on the entry at index 0x1 of 00100. You then need a second level with 8 pointers to differentiate the remaining 3 bits (each of these would be final and hence point directly to a physical page). The more pages you start mapping, the less bits you can discard with the guard. If you follow this through to a guard of 0 bits you end up with a linear page-table. It has been shown (Elphinstone, 1999) that fixed level sizes with 16 entries tends to work well. For a 32-bit address-space with 4KiB pages (e.g. 12 bits offset) this leaves 20 bits to be mapped by the page-tables; with each level mapping 2⁴ bits this means a 5 level tree. The guard values provide enough path-compression that the table is not constantly walked. The disadvantage is that it may "over-allocate" meaning more space is dedicated to page-tables than strictly required. Deciding where and when to split levels, what size indexes to put at each level and updating all the guard values dynamically to make the smallest, most efficient page-table would create a variable-radix page-table (Szmajda and Heiser, 2003). In summary, a guarded page-table is more useful the more sparse your address space is. A variable-radix guarded page-table is complex, but could offer advantages for implementing variable page-size support and thus having positive effects on TLB coverage.

Perhaps this conversation is a sign that we've been in the country for awhile:

"Terah, if you ever drive the pickup..."

"Why would I ever do that?"

"I don't know, but if you ever do, I just want you to know something. The reason there's a towel connecting the brake pedal to the steering wheel..."

At this point I had to wait for her laughter to die down.

"As I was saying, the reason there's a towel connecting the brake pedal to the steering wheel is that, unless you park facing uphill, the brake lights stay on all the time and will drain the battery."

More laughter followed.

I didn't even have the chance to tell her to remove the towel before she starts the truck. Oh well, guess she'll figure it out.

On the other hand, perhaps this is a sign that we haven't been in the country long enough:

Today as I went to lunch, I saw a long, narrow, light gray line across the door on my car. I was pretty annoyed that somebody would have pulled keys or something across it to do that. But as I got closer, I realized it was just a spider web. Terah and I park our cars a few feet apart, and every week or so there will be a spider web connecting the two of them when we go out in the morning.

Spot-on profile of Rick Rubin and the future of music in this Sunday’s New York Times Magazine (probably already much blogged about):

The kids all said that a) no one listens to the radio anymore, b) they mostly steal music, but they don’t consider it stealing, and c) they get most of their music from iTunes on their iPod. They told us that MySpace is over, it’s just not cool anymore; Facebook is still cool, but that might not last much longer; and the biggest thing in their life is word of mouth. That’s how they hear about music, bands, everything.

That last point is key. If any new business model will thrive, it will be one that is built around the social graph. Technorati Tags: Social graph, Rick Rubin, Music, New York Times, Facebook, Myspace, iTunes

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Today, I ordered a dedicated server for some friends of mine and me. We will split it up into 5 Xen instance, quite similar to Steve s xen-hosting. Thanks for the idea! Our project is name serverama, since our hosts will be named after Futurama characters.I might blog about the setup here, if I think it s interesting for the general public. I can t wait to get my hands wet in a chaos of RAID, LVM, Xen and virtual network bridges...

I've found some time for quicklist, finally, to move the port on to a second pre-release. New additions include a Recent Files submenu and GtkHTML report engine but the Sort and Filter options are not complete and adding a new report is problematic.
quicklist is now ready for some translations (the first one identified a problem in pre1 that prevented certain strings from showing up as translated). Also added a prototype manual using docbook that I've made available as HTML for dwww and making the docbook file itself available to yelp.
Currently, I'm undecided just where QuickList will fit between pure-Gtk2 and pure-Gnome2. pre2 uses libgnomeprint and libgnomevfs but yelp would bring in the main gnome libraries so yelp is just a Recommends and only as an alternative to dwww:

Recommends: www-browser, dwww yelp

I hope to find some time to fix the remaining bugs but if anyone fancies helping out, see http://quicklist.sourceforge.net/ and take a look at the current CVS prior to the pre2 upload. CVS provides a method to build the updated code docs for developers (rather than the Manual which is aimed at users) using doxygen - the version on the website is out of date. This includes a list of bugs and ToDo items - most of which are centred on removing the last vestiges of the original QuickList code and refactoring to make full use of libglib2.0-0 functions like GList and GHashTable instead of fixed length multi-dimensional arrays.

The latest version of d2x-xl works quite well, so I've started packaging it. Since it needs the data from the commercial game to work, it will probably end up in contrib. The interesting thing is that there is another project, Into Cerberon, working on a Doom 3 mod with free game data -- it would be interesting to see whether both projects could be combined in order to get a completely free game. Difficulty: Into Cerberon is planning for a triangle based engine while d2x-xl thinks in cubes. Update: Into Cerberon use the Doom 3, not the Quake 3 engine. Thanks "zulu9" for noticing. Also, Josh alerts me of some interesting (cough) licensing issues around this code. As I'm still busy wading through the uclibc source compiling a proper list of attributions and licenses (ftp-master thinks a blanket statement "If you link against this, the LGPL applies to you, if you look at the files, please see each individual file" is not enough -- I can somehow see their point, but it takes ages to do that) that will have somewhat lower priority. I know why I rewrite things from scratch rather than fix them these days...

Time to revisit this topic. I asked debian perl for advice on packaging a CGI with modules and my current solution is to use ExtUtils::MakeMaker - I'm just writing the PL files which will generate the configuration files. I also took a look at Module::Build and PAR::Tutorial but I'm not convinced that they're both as portable and as smooth as if I can do it all from MakeMaker. There are occasional posts about Module::Build problems on lists like this one on ledgersmb-users which worry me. After koha-1.2's bespoke installer, I really want to make it as easy and simple as possible, for both development and use. There are also periodic debates about M::B at perlmonks too. Maybe we can use PAR later, like this perlmonks post suggests and apparently KrangCMS does. Now, what have I missed? (2007-09-07: 3 comments)

Peter De Wachter and I have been packaging most of Kenta Cho’s games in the latest weeks. As it might take a while for them to reach Debian repositories, mostly because they’ll have to wait for libbulletml to go through NEW queue, and afterwards they’ll have to go through the NEW queue themselves, I thought it might make sense to have them available online. Some of them will need libbulletml, you might as well download it too if you’re interested. So far, the following games are available:

• Titanion
• Mu-cade
• Gunroar
• Torus Trooper
• TUMIKI Fighters
• PARSEC47
• A7Xpg
• rRootage
• Wok

I hope to finish Val & Rick soon too. We probably won’t package Suzuri and Masashikun Hi!, as they’d probably be quite difficult to port to Linux. Noiz2sa is already packaged in Debian (well, so is rRootage, but I will upload the newer version soon, I just don’t want to harass my sponsors too much, so please be patient). The games can be temporarily downloaded here, and libbulletml here. libbulletml has been coded in C++ by shinichiro.h, while BulletML design is Kenta Cho’s. You also have packages available for 360 degree barrages (bulletss) and White barrage (sdmkun) by shinichiro.h. The former is a small demo for libbulletml, while the latter lets you see and experiment the power of the language.

I've had this laptop for about three years now, with its installation dating from about 2.5 years ago. Today, because of a very silly reason, I need to use my laptop as alarm clock. So I did at 08:00, and entered a command to run a media player which will then play some random files in my home directory. The at command returned this to me:

job 1 at Tue Sep  4 08:00:00 2007

That is how useful at is to me.

Here are link-summaries of two interesting topics which have developed while I was away: the OOXML vote-buying scandal and the iPhone unlocking:-

Microsoft accused of rigging OOXML votes - ZDNet UK

A good summary of the start of this problem, in a complaint from FSFE. Fairly full description of the Swedish incident and suggestion that it's happening elsewhere. One Paid Partnership Programme One Vote, anyone?

SIS declared its own vote invalid

The Swedish standards body will not vote, due to a technical failure in the Microsoft-stuffed ballot.

New Zealand OOXML rejection 'not final' - ZDNet UK

It looks like opponents of OOXML are negiotiating surrender. Worrying.

NJ 17 year old Kid creates hack for the Apple iphone opens carrier network access beyond AT&T open4.org - create. share. earn.

It cracks me up that the iPhone was cracked, even if it did take him over 500 hours. I read it first on open4, which does the right thing and links both of George Hotz's sites.

BBC NEWS Technology Teenage hacker unlocks the iPhone

Slightly more information, but fewer links, from the BBC. They don't even seem to link the blog which is cited as a source. Very strange approach to the web from the BBC.

VOIP IP Telephony: iPhone hacker saga continues! Hotz gets $30000 for the phone

Then the iPhone was traded for a car...

Code to unlock iPhone cracked

Finally, this morning, I saw CNN report that a software-only crack is available. Network-locked phones are so 1990s anyway.

I previously posted about Interesting Ideas from George Monbiot, one of which was to establish individual emissions trading. Gyros Geier disagrees with this and cites the current emission trading schemes as evidence. There are several fundamental differences between George’s idea and the current implementations of emission trading. The biggest flaw in current emission trading schemes is that the emission credits are assigned to the worst polluters. George is proposing that an equal amount be assigned to all citizens. Assigning credits to the worst polluters is another form of by the polluting industries. The way to solve these problems through emission trading is to start by fairly assigning the credits (and what better way than to equally distribute them among all citizens) and to then reduce the amounts assigned over time. Gyros claims that emission trading which allows people who use little emissions to get large credits will cause people to have resources used in their name which they would not otherwise use. The solution to this is to assign to each citizen in a country a set of credits that is equal to the use by someone on the median income. Note specifically that setting credits equal to average use is not the right thing to do, the vast majority of the population produce significantly less emissions than average. The result of such a policy would be that people who produce median emissions (and most of whom would be close to the median income) would reduce their emissions as much as possible so that they could sell the credits, they would even have an incentive to spend money to reduce their emissions (for example by installing better insulation in their home) as it would be an investment. Then people who produce more emissions than the median would be forced to buy credits to support their extravagant lifestyle. This would give a significant reduction in emissions (the median income is about half the average income and I presume that the emissions produced are in line with income). Gyros also makes the startling claim that emissions trading increases emissions. I can’t imagine that being possible, in fact I can’t imagine how the coal industry could do more damage to the environment if they tried. Finally, taking a positive approach to blogging is a really good idea. I welcome discussion with people who want to claim that my ideas (and the ideas that I quote) are bad, but if you are going to do this please describe something that you consider to be better.

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So, we will be moving to New York City, starting next week. We hope to spend a year there, but who knows, we might be there for only a few months, weeks, or more than a year! Life changes, that’s why we are moving now, right? Only constant is change, isn’t it? Anyway, we are pretty excited about this. This has been something we have been expecting since May/June and we are finally ready to go, we’ll see how it goes, hopefully good. School from my side will have to get stalled, again. I’ll be able to study there, but don’t know for sure now, we are trying to settle first, and then see possibilities. So, if you know/have contact with, a good place in Manhattan, Brooklyn or perhaps Queens, please let me know, that’d be highly appreciated. Bummer, yet another two Mexicans in the States UPDATE: Of course, I’m looking for a good place to live (apartment in rent, or similar). Everything else has already been covered. :)

To Blog, or Not To Blog...

Amazon: in the hands of a few

Thinking about writing something for a while, about my Debian work or about my daily stuff, sometimes you lack the time or the motivation to do so, I should kept this more up-to-date so people can follow a little bit what's going on with me... specially considering that I try to keep this diary neutral about non-technical subjects, but hey! it is somewhat hard to be neutral in every single situation. Anyway, I found that I should help to spread the word from a Brazilian colleague, Sulamita, she posted about democracy (or the lack of it) today. Two videos, about the Amazon Forest area and some of the crazy things we find in Brazil. You can watch the Brazilian Portuguese version or the English one.

A lot of people are not aware of some of the political problems that Brazil faces in the last 10 years, it is not like it doesn't exist before, but it is getting worst and worst and, for a while, I've been wondering...

A lot of friends want to leave Brazil as soon as they can, I love Brazil but I can understand their motivation.


• Where do you find the desire to stay when you look around and you can't find fairness and equality? And if you look to the houses or places that should protect people, you realize that there is no protection?
• How do you keep the passion for a country with huge levels of corruption in public government, in police forces, in your law makers? And day after day, corruption schemas, robbery and law abuse are noticed on the television?
• What to do when you realize that the perception of the disloyal advantage is shared among your colleagues and that the feeling of failure dominates a great part of the population that could actually do something to change?
• Can anybody, or group of individuals, feeling alone, work to change that? How? Specially when you look around and although you know there are people willing to help they need to take care of their lives (money, food, family)?

Or should I ask: Where's the love? (Black Eyed Peas Lyrics).

And before somebody thinks that the entire Brazil is lost, that we are under a Civil War and that monkeys and other animals are walking on our Jungle streets in the middle of the cities, no it is not... yes, we need help; yes people need to join forces; yes, we need to find ourselves and fix it; but it is still a great country to live, and yes, I love it!

Thanks: beraldo and sysdebug. And I'm happy to discover that advogato upgraded my status, I'm now a Journeyer.

World News Australia reports that Police forced three tourists to delete photos of a fence. Apparently the officers in question believed that such photos would be a threat to security. It’s interesting to note that the first sentence of the World News Australia report is “Officials say police who forced three tourists to delete photos of a huge security fence erected in Sydney for the APEC summit were not over-reacting” while later in the article it says “The police action against the tourists may have been “over the top” but was necessary, said New South Wales state Transport Minister John Watkins“. So which was it? Was it “over the top” or was it “not over-reacting“. Strangely the World News Australia web site shows a picture of the fence. If this fence is so secret then why are the pictures being published so that millions of people will see it? For that matter why even try censoring the pictures. Censoring the pictures effectively issues a challenge to everyone who has a digital camera and plenty of spare time (which means most university students among others) to get the best photos of the fence (feel free to leave comments with the URLs for your best pics). While this is happening protesters from Real Action On Climate Change have been protesting at the Loy Yang power station, according to their blog posts it seems that they were partially inspired by the APEC meeting. It seems that APEC leaders are keen on nuclear power. If they really believe that nuclear power is safe then maybe they should have their meeting at Maralinga. There would be little effort or expense required to secure Maralinga and it wouldn’t disrupt a major city. :-# But seriously if they wanted a secure location for a meeting with no protesters then an aircraft carrier would make an ideal location. The people who need to attend the meeting could get flown to a carrier that’s off-shore in the territorial waters of one of the countries concerned with a full battle group to deter any other ships from entering the area. It is reported that Sydney whores are expecting to do a lot of business during the APEC meeting. Maybe this is the reason why they wanted to have their meetings Sydney (which is rumoured to have the best brothels in Australia). I wonder if they are planning for a future APEC meeting in Bangkok…

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Being impressed by prices of these toys here in Japan, I decided to finally buy one. This decision was quite easy, but it implies much harder one - which one to choose. Looking at my money availability and what do shops here offer, I have five possibilities: Canon EOS Kiss Digital X (EOS 400D in Europe), Nikon D40x, Nikon D80, Pentax K10D or Sony 100. Well it's hard choice. However for now I prefer something with shake reduction, what limits selection to either Pentax or Sony (or some of the others with lenses which do the same). And from these two, Pentax looks like much better choice. As this will be my first SLR, I don't have to stick with same vendor to be able use my equipment, but I'm much more interested in availability of add-on lenses and other stuff. And in this are seem to win Nikon and Canon. So that are points for the other side of the match. I played with all these cameras in shop, but I really didn't find any of them much better than others. I just take few shots and nothing surprised me there. And I was able to switch them all from Japanese to English quite quickly ;-). So this step did not decide anything. Reading various reviews also didn't help much, as each camera has advantages and disadvantages... For now my temporarily winner is Pentax, but I think I should find some more convincing arguments before buying it :-). PS: I know there exists a bit cheaper variant of Pentax branded as Samsung GX-10, but I haven't seen it anywhere here in shops.

Those who read debian-private knew it, some others were informed too. I was (at least for Debian) in Vacation until last weekend. The main reason was that I didn’t have time at my workplace to work on Debian because of other quite urgent projects which were open. Tomorrow I will package bluez-libs 3.18 which was released by upstream yesterday and review some other packages and maybe sponsor them. In the evening I was also very busy this week, dinner here, dinner there, meet some friends, wait until girlfriend comes home from the theater. I didn’t really sleep more than 5 hours per night and this since about 3 weeks now. At least, my ~/TODO list became much shorter and I hope I will find more sleep now, more time together with Lisa and at work I will have 3-4 hours per day for Debian again. Ah, by the way, thanks to all people who were involved with updating packages.debian.org! Ah, 2nd by the way: I booked my flight to Berlin for 25.12.2007 and the flight back on 31.12.2007, see you during 24c3, send me an E-Mail if you want to go for a beer with me, keysigning, whatever

I have just given my parents a new computer, and part of the upgrade process lost their email passwords (which were stored in KDE preferences - this seems to happen every time KDE is upgraded). The only password that is not under my control is the password for their Optus account. So I had to get the password changed, I got my mother to phone Optus but they decided that my father had to make the request (not that I would have had any difficulty impersonating him, any of the details that they asked for which I might not have known could have been provided by my mother). So my father requested that my mother be listed as someone who is authorised to make changes to the account. It turned out that changing a password for a mailbox is a difficult operation and I needed to talk to the phone-support guy. He needed to get permission from my father for this (he didn’t seem to realise that he had just granted my mother full access so that she could authorise such things on future calls). After my father had given permission for the second time I got the password changed, the new password was “changeme“. The call-centre guy advised me to change it as “it’s a very common password“! An ISP with any clue in their call centre would get the password changed to a semi-random string. Then there was the process of changing the password. The web site didn’t work at all with Konqueror (the call-centre guy told me that only IE is supported). I used Iceweasel (Firefox) and it allowed me to change the password. The Optus web site is one of the worst I’ve ever seen, and redirecting to the MS site live.com as part of the process was only part of it. Another bad thing that Optus does is punish customers who do things that they don’t like. My original Optus contract specified unlimited uploads, the first time they cut me off for actually uploading a moderate amount of data (running Bittorrent) they disconnected me and claimed that it was a DOS attack. On a later occasion they disconnected me on a Wednesday because I had uploaded some files on the weekend. They alleged that the upload was continuing on the Sunday (although I had a very clear recollection of ending it on the Saturday), but we all agreed that the upload had ceased before the Monday. But apparently I needed to be disconnected on the Wednesday to teach me a lesson. The lesson of course is that Optus sucks really badly. They do have reasonable prices and at the time their cable network offered download speeds significantly higher than any ADSL plans could match, which is why I have continued using them (and subscribed again after buying a new house). Recently ADSL2+ has started to become common and prices have been falling. For my use and for most people who I know ADSL is now either cheaper than cable or close enough that it’s worth paying the extra to escape Optus. My parents are on an Optus plan that gives them 100MB per month of data transfer (which counts both download and upload) before they are limited to modem speed. This is enough for them, but I expect that when their Optus contract runs out there will be an ADSL plan that’s not much more expensive and they can cease using Optus too. I just wish there was a real choice of providers for the base phone service. Currently there is only Telstra and Optus, both of which are expensive and suck. Fortunately Telstra has an insane CEO who is determined to make sure that everyone in Australia learns that Telstra is a nasty monopoly that needs to be broken up or severely constrained.

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