Procmailrc, TRAP and LASTFOLDER I use procmail and lbdb. lbdb is invoked at the beginning of procmailrc harvesting From: addresses from all incoming mail, so that they can later be queried with mutt. It's really neat. However, if it's put at the beginning of procmailrc, it harvests From addresses from spam, too. This causes the ldbd databse to become very big, slow to query, and in some unlucky cases, to return lots of bad results. Problem is, I run the spam filter AFTER I delivered to the mailing lists. The rationale is that mailing lists already do their own spam filtering to some useable level. At least those I'm subscribed to. So, my current procmailrc goes like:

feed a copy through lbdb
filter list 1
filter list 2
...
filter list N for N very big
filter out spam
deliver to inbox

Now, is there a way I could invoke lbdb for every mail except what is caught by the spam filter? A way, I mean, that doesn't involve hooking into each and every of the N list rules an lbdb invocation? Here is the way. In .procmailrc, add:

TRAP=~/bin/scan-nonspam

Then write ~/bin/scan-nonspam:

#!/bin/bash
if [ $ LASTFOLDER:0:4  != 'spam' ]
then
    /usr/bin/lbdb-fetchaddr
fi
exit 0

For reference, this is the documentation of TRAP:

When procmail terminates of its own accord and not because it received a signal, it will execute the contents of this variable. A copy of the mail can be read from stdin. Any output produced by this command will be appended to $LOGFILE. Possible uses for TRAP are: removal of temporary files, logging customised abstracts, etc. See also EXITCODE and LOGABSTRACT.

And this is the documentation of LASTFOLDER:

This variable is assigned to by procmail whenever it is delivering to a folder or program. It always contains the name of the last file (or program) procmail delivered to. If the last delivery was to several directory folders together then $LASTFOLDER will contain the hardlinked filenames as a space separated list.

Recently, Josh Berkus blogged about The Myth of the Benevolent Dictator. In it he complained about people who try to posit that a benevolent dictator was "an unalloyed asset" to their project, and that there were many successful and valid forms project governance other than the singleton project leader. Furthermore, he argues that the best way is to form a community, and then ends by suggesting that people who say "dictatorship good" is really saying "democracy bad", and perhaps the motives of the person using that argument should be questioned.

Given that I was one of the first people (and probably the first person) to use that phrase to describe Linus's governance model, obviously I feet the need to respond to his thoughts on the matter.

First of all, the term "benevolent dictator" comes from an old saying, "the best form of government is the benevolent dictator --- there's only one problem, finding the benevolent dictator"[1]. And in my presentations where I explained the Linux project management model, I was always careful to say that there were other models that were used by other projects, and that it was interesting to study why certain management models worked for some projects but not others.

So by definition, if a project is successful with a single project leader ultimately responsible for making decisions to settle conflicts, then that leader is a "benevolent dictator"; if they aren't successful, then that would be an example of a dictator who wasn't able to be "benevolent", eh? :-)

In all seriousness, though, I agree with Josh when he says that the key part of an open source project being successful is gathering together a healthy community. But let's unpack that a little. In order for a community to be healthy, there needs to be general consensus on the values and cultural norms for that community. So for example, in the case of Debian, which Josh holds up as a successful community, not everyone has the ability to vote; you have to pass a fairly stringent process which tests your technical skills and your willingness to subscribe to Debian's core values as embedded to the Debian Social Contract. People who do not pass the New Membership process do not have the right to vote in Debian, even if they are the most rabid, fanatical users of Debian.

This brings up a key point about governance analogies; they all don't map cleanly into the real world for two closely related and extremely important reasons: (1) No one has a fundamental human right to be a member in some OSS project, and (2) No one is forced to stay in a particular OSS project. These are really two sides of the same coin, and what it means is that, as in Debian, "democracy" does not mean that everyone is entitled to political franchise, or the right to vote, and in a project which has a "benevolent dictator", the powers of the dictator is fundamentally limited by the simple fact that if he is too unreasonable, people are always free to leave or fork the project. These differences are extremely important when trying to reason about "democracy" or "dictatorship" as being good or bad as applied to open source projects.

Democracy is rarely the best way for an open source project to make decisions. For technical issues, you want the right answer, and majority vote isn't necessarily way to resolve a technical issue. As far as policy decisions, if the decision can not be made by consensus, then some percentage of the community will be unhappy with how the decision, and that can cause a huge amount of arguments and dissension. If the community has very clearly expressed values, then the number of times where such votes need to be made will be minimal.

For example, Debian has an explicit declaration of its values and mission in its Debian Social Contract; people who don't agree to the Social Contract aren't allowed to become Debian Developers and thus are not allowed to vote. But, one of the more controversial disputes that have threatened to tear apart Debian is the question of the non-free packages, and that's fundamentally because of an ambiguity in the Social Contract. On the one hand, Debian has declared that it is fundamentally 100% about Free Software, to the extent that it has adopted Richard Stallman's rather petulant request that the Linux operating system be called GNU/Linux (which admittedly is better than Lignux.) On the other hand, the Social Contract also explicitly specifies the existent of the non-free section in the distribution. Over time, this ambiguity have been the source of a lot of highly passionate debate and controversial votes that have satisfied neither the FSF fanatics nor the more Linux-like moderate position tolerating the use of proprietary as well as open source software. I submit that if Debian had either explicitly stated an FSF-centric position, and only accepted members that supported point of view, or explicitly subscribed to a position that users should be able to use whatever software they feel meets their needs, as Ubuntu has, it would avoided many arguments that have threatened to tear apart Debian.

More recently the fact that the Social Contract has been silent about whether or not Debian Developers should be paid or purely be 100% volunteer. This was never an issue in the Linux Kernel community, but for some reason it has been a highly divisive and disruptive issue inside Debian. Democratic votes have not really resolved the conflicts, and in fact some might claim that these votes have if anything hardened various Debian Developers' positions.

Going back to Josh's final point, "Next time you hear the words 'benevolent dictator' you probably want to think about the motives of the person saying it. Because the corollary to 'dictator good' is 'democracy bad', and is that a place you really want to go?", I am quite proud to stand by my convictions that for Open Source Projects, pure democracy is a bad idea. If a projects wants to be technically successful, it needs to be a meritocracy, and chose the best technical decisions; Linus does not decide by abiding with majority vote whether or not a patch should be accepted, and that's as it should be.

Even Debian's "raw democracy" doesn't let any random luser get to vote on who should be the Debian Project Leader. Decisions need to be made by people who are competent to make a valid choice. Even in real life, one could argue that the choice made by Americans, over of which 70% believed that Saddam Hussein was "very likely" or "somewhat likely" to be personally involved with the 9/11 attacks even though there has been absolutely no evidence to support this "gut feeling", made a rather disastrous choice in voting to re-elect George Bush to the presidency. Democracy without sufficient education, literacy, and intellectual curiosity to learn about what is happening in the world can result in truly disastrous choices being made. So certainly, democracy is not a panacea. In the real world, it may be the best choice of many bad choices, given how much people have suffered under military dictatorships. However, in the Open Source world, things are different because people are always free to leave one project and affiliate with another --- not an alternative most people living in dictatorships have historically had. Given these key differences, I think it is clear that for open source projects, democracy is indeed often a bad idea, and that if you if a project has a single person with a strong technical vision and good interpersonal skills, the benevolent dictator model can indeed be a very viable and successful.

Does that mean that other forms of governance can't work? Of course not! The rotating dictatorship used by Perl[2], the core-team-with-strongarm leader used by OpenBSD, the corporate dominated scheme of MySQL, the self-selecting core team model of Samba, all are successful models. I just have to strongly disagree with Josh's claim the single strong leader approach is somehow inferior to "democracy" as if democracy was somehow a magic bullet.


[1] For am early example of this quote, nine years ago, please see this message, where I'm pretty sure I authored the colon prefixed quote, and I know I was using the term "benevolent dictator" much earlier than 1998.

[2] In the early days of Perl, it also used the benevolent dictator model. Larry Wall is a great exemplar of how someone who has a strong vision of what he wanted to accomplish, and was humble and easy to work with, both on-line and in person, can make all the difference in the world for an up-and-coming open source project.

BMW has released a new prototype hydrogen powered car. The bmwworld.com web page about it claims the cruising range is 190 miles. Added to the 400-mile range of the normal fuel tank, the 745h can go 600 miles between fill-ups. The first issue is that 10 miles are not accounted for (maybe it finishes the 190 miles of hydrogen power at the top of a hill). But more seriously the hydrogen needed to drive for 190 miles would take as much space as petrol needed to drive for 646 miles (hydrogen needs 3.4* the volume to store an equivalent amount of energy). I wonder if that BMW has any space left in the boot/trunk? Now we have some green bloggers praising BMW. An internal combustion engine that burns hydrogen will not give no emissions other than water vapour, it will produce some nitrogen oxides. The processes to produce hydrogen for fuel all consume unreasonable amounts of energy (more than is required to charge a plug-in hybrid). BMW demonstrates their level of interest by giving the cars to some celebrities. This gets some PR but no analysis of the performance. They also introduce the prototype based on one of the most expensive models (the 745) which you almost never see on the roads. If they produced a 318 or 520 that ran on hydrogen it would demonstrate some level of interest in getting this working for the mass market. If BMW wanted to make their cars more environmentally friendly they would start by adopting some of the technology from the Prius. Rumour has it that part of Toyota’s plan to make money from Prius development is in licensing the technology that they patent. A couple of years ago I test drove a BMW 316 and a Prius. The Prius was very quiet and gave a smooth ride (you might call these luxury features), and also gave decent performance (it’s widely regarded that luxury cars should perform well - pity the BMW 316 is a slug). In Australia the concept of “badge engineering” of cars is well established. When government subsidies favoured large manufacturing runs the Ford Laser and Mazda 323 were essentially the same car. Maybe BMW could adopt this concept and sell a re-badged Prius i-tech with a few extra luxury features as a BMW 4 series (it’s a much better car than the 3 series BMW). Finally bmwworld.com has an amusing FAQ about hydrogen power, here are some of the mistakes that they make:

1. They say “About 45 billion kilograms (50 million tons) [of hydrogen] is produced every year enough hydrogen to fuel 250 million fuel cell cars“, but only if the average fuel-cell car uses 180Kg of fuel per year. According to Wikipedia hydrogen has slightly more than 3* the energy density per mass than petrol, so 180Kg of fuel would be equivalent to 540L of petrol per year. The Australian Bureau of Statistics states that in 1996 the average annual distance travelled by car (it’s not clear whether this is per car or per person) was 14,600Km while among the countries listed the lowest was Japan with 10,130. When efficiently using hydrogen in a Prius (that is quoted as using 5.4L of petrol per 100Km) you might expect that 540/5.4*100=10,000Km could be travelled on the 180Kg of hydrogen. So the FAQ claim that 250M cars could be powered by the current hydrogen production would only apply if the cars are of Prius efficiency and driven the typical distances of Japanese drivers, or the cars were 46% more efficient than the Prius and driven in the Australian manner. Of course in the US things are even worse with 17,862Km being the average distance driven which means that their hypothetical fuel-cell car would need to be 78% more efficient than a Prius.


2. They state that “the majority of merchant hydrogen is produced by a process called steam methane reforming“. Why not just run cars on methane then? Anything that burns can be used to fuel cars, and methane has a much higher boiling point than hydrogen so it would be easier to store and transport (see the Wikipedia page on methane).


3. In regard to hydrogen production they say “about 95% of the total global hydrogen production is captive meaning it is used at the site where it is produced“, that is of course because it’s difficult and expensive to transport hydrogen.


4. The final amusing fact is that it is noted that most hydrogen comes from fossil-fuels. What problem are they trying to solve here? Hydrogen isn’t going to help the environment if it comes from fossil fuels, it will be more expensive than other fuels. Apart from getting government grant money for BMW it doesn’t seem to do any good.

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We're in Albuquerque, NM now and have been for a couple of days. We made such excellent time across Oklahoma and Texas that we were able to stop and take a break for three nights.

Texas: Holy *crap* is Amarillo a dirty place. We spent three times what we've spend on any hotel this trip in order to get a place that we were sure was insect-free. And what we wound up with was a place over top of a bar. Luckily it wasn't all country, so we didn't mind too much. It was also (surprisingly) the best breakfast I'd had on the trip. They did hash-browns on a griddle, and had lots of ketchup (do I have to spell it catsup now?), tabasco, and pepper to go on it. Weirdly, they also had pre-mixed peanut butter and honey. Otherwise, the truck stop we stopped at had cockroaches on the floor, the bottled-water bottles were dirty on the outside, and the place smelled like an airport tarmac.

We left early and headed out to Albuquerque. Aside from the fact that whoever laid out the roads was certainly drunk at the time (We drove around in circles three times trying to get to a hotel we could see, but not find a way to legally drive to before giving up and going to a different hotel) this place is really pretty. I came here for my last meeting as a Regional Organising Consultant for Young Adult and Campus Ministry and got a chance to see a bit of the place and really wanted to show it to Angie. Instead we decided we'd had enough of driving and traveling. This hotel has laundry facilities and the town has a Whole Foods Market, so we stocked up on microwaveable foods, washed our clothes, watched TV and I finally finished Harry Potter during a nice long bath.

The next day (Yesterday), we headed out to the Puebo Cultural Centre to see the art pieces and learn a little about their successful resistance against the spanish resulting in actual land grants to the 19 local groups. We also got to see how different groups have influenced them over the years, with ancestry tracing something like 12,000 years back. From there we managed to find the old town and got to see the type of architecture that I wanted to show Angie. The little pink houses don't *just* exist in DisneyLand. ;) We went to a restaurant that looked really familiar - I think we ate there when I was here last. We had some wonderful New Mexico food and I introduced Angie to what the local sopapillas are like. Here's they're large puffy things, whereas the sopapillas in Texas and back home look like soft tortilla chips.

I've started uploading some pictures to Flickr, but it turns out that I hadn't done so since before Juniper's wedding and have over 400 pictures to send. Between hotel wireless being slow and f-spot being a fragile piece of crap I managed to upload something over 100 pictures of Leif to the family-only archives before giving up. I'll probably post the Opus pictures up on Facebook rather than flickr so that it's easier for other Opusers to find them

The next target is Flagstaff, AZ for Thursday night. We're meeting Karina and her husband for a day of wandering around the Grand Canyon, so we'll see if there's some interesting things between here and there. I suspect there will be. =)

*hugs*, all! Less than a week until I start my new job! I'm excited!

I had been intending to write an entire series of posts about our corporate switch to Linux on the Desktop. To date, I wrote only one introducing the project and our reasons for switching from Windows. That was back in April.

Today I'd like to start talking about it all some more.

We have standardized on Gnome for our desktops. Given the Windows background of our user base, it was pretty much a given that we would have to use either Gnome or KDE. Something like fvwm or a non-integrated environment just wouldn't be a good option.

We evaluated both Gnome and KDE. The very "clean" appearance of Gnome was a nice thing for us. KDE seemed to be to "chatty", talked about entering in audiocd:/ when it shouldn't have needed to, and generally violated the KISS and principle of least surprise too often. That said, I continue to run KDE for my personal desktop because Gnome just doesn't have the flexibility that KDE does. It is too bad that Gnome has gone on this remove functionality kick, and KDE hasn't gotten the KISS religion yet.

Anyway, Gnome worked well for the most part. We have set some defaults in gconf for things like panel icons. We also set a few mandatory defaults. I fixed a couple of bugs in the vfs system related to nfs4 support, which manifested themselves as icons for files newly saved to the desktop never showing up.

We wanted to present a customized menu to people based on what their job function is. That is, we are using a single system image, so all apps will be installed on all machines. But we didn't want people to have to see a ton of software that they don't use. That was easily enough accomplished for custom apps by creating desktop files with mode 0640 and setting the group to the set of people that should see the program on their menu. We removed a few stock programs (such as the terminal) from the menu as well, using dpkg-statoverride. That was also quite easily done. However, I will say that the entire Gnome XDG menu thing is woefully under-documented.

We use Firefox for the standard web browser. It is integrated well enough with Gnome and we have no problems there, aside from sites that are IE-only. We solve that with a Windows terminal server, which I'll discuss later.

Our network printing was already based on Cups. The individual machines are set up as Cups clients only, which works fine. We did find, however, that gnome-cups-manager automatically installs a tray monitor for cups. This monitor puts little printer icons on the tray when printers are in use. Unfortunately, it figures out which printers are in use by polling the server, and it is turned on by default out of the box, with no good way to disable it short of dpkg-statoverriding it to 0000. You can imagine that hundreds of users times dozens of printers times numerous polls per minute created quite the load on the server. This was a really braindead design and the people that wrote it should have known better. It is also quite useless to have icons coming on for all the printers on the network, which on some networks could be thousands, and not even on the same continent as the user.

Printing is generally a bit iffy in Gnome. They seem to be transitioning between about 3 different printing toolkits, all of which have different print dialog boxes with different supported features and different ways of selecting printers. One chief annoyance is that the print box in evince (the document/PDF viewer) does not let people access printer-specific features such as hole punching and stapling. So we installed gtklp and xpdf for people. The people that print heavy PDFs are huge fans of gtklp these days; it's a nicer solution than we had in Windows. Nobody really likes evince. We also have had some trouble with evince generating PostScript output that some printers can't grok. It sounds like all this should be much better in newer versions of Gnome, which if true, would be welcome news.

The Gnome screenshot tool makes it easy to save off a screenshot to a file, or to drag it into an email, but it is difficult to print it (you have to save it first). That was a common complaint around here, so I wrote a little wrapper around xwd and gtklp for printing screenshots. People really like that because gtklp gives them lots of options about orientation and size of the image if they want it, or a simple "Print" button to click if they don't care. We set a gconf default to bind this to Ctrl-PrintScr and it works well. KDE's screenshot tool is much more capable, and if we were using KDE, we wouldn't have had any problem with screenshots.

The bottom line on Gnome is that we, and are users, are happy with it after we've made these customizations. But we have had to do more customization that we should have. I still think that Gnome has been better for our users than KDE, but I do wonder how long we'll be able to survive with our "no KDE libraries" policy, as people want ksnapshot, kolour, etc.

I just noticed that my post about LED Headlights in an Audi Sports Car was linked from audi.host4blogs.com. Strangely they took some of the words from my post, added some other apparently random words to make it look like a response, and then linked to my post. Having summaries of my blog posts appear on splogs is nothing new. I don’t have any objection to it normally as summaries will in a small way promote my blog as long as they are intelligible. The host4blogs.com site has a couple of other car blogs that link to each other with content of the same quality. I guess I can’t file a DMCA take-down request as the text is not a summary of mine. I hope that Google will start taking action against the sploggers soon.

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Reviving parts of my old MuMer idea, I thought of this trading game yesterday. Before I start hacking: What do you think? Who would want to be beta-tester? Any other things to consider?The idea is to freely trade goods (think wood, stone, gold as currency etc.) online, on your trading partners website. The whole point will be that you will more or less stumble across other people to trade, e.g. on their blog, on some wiki page or their myspace or StudiVZ page. There you will see that he wants to trade MuMer goods, maybe with a list of things he d sell and buy, and for what price. From there (and only from there) it is only one click to the MuMer page where you can actually trade, maybe leaving a message as well.On the MuMer page itself, there would be no list of users or so. To find someone to trade you ll actually have to look somewhere else and trade again you have to go to the other persons blog again. (I imagine this can be reasonable enforced by checking the referrer.) So taking part in the game, you also draw some people to your web site.For the reward I could imaging that once you have a certain amount of specific resources, you can buy special items or even buy the skill to manufacture more special and hopefully attractive items.This is the rough sketch. What do you think?

"BOWN. Walter Sydney (Wally). Passed away on Monday, August 20th, 2007, aged 74 years. He will be greatly missed by all of his family and friends. The funeral service will be held on Thursday, August 30th, 12.30pm, Weston-super-Mare Crematorium. Family flowers only, donations if desired for Weston Hospicecare, c/o The Elms Funeral Directors, 50 Baker Street, Weston-super-Mare. Telephone 01934 616006."

(From the Weston & Somerset Mercury, 23rd August 2007 issue) So I'm not blogging much just now. I think usual service should resume Friday 31 August.

I just setup a DNS entry for panama.mini.debconf.org, on request of David Moreno Garza. He also got a mailing-list for that upcoming mini Debian Conference. Which reminded me to blog about debconf.org resources again, so that more people know/remember that there is something they can use whenever they organize a Debian meeting. If you happen to organize a meeting of Debian Developers / interested Debian people you can chose to use any debconf.org resource you need for it. This currently means:

DNS	a name within .debconf.org. Either pointing to your host, if you have one, or see below for hosting.
	Current style seems to be $something.mini.debconf.org, but we also have some miniconfX.debconf.org entries, so are pretty open. And in case it doesn’t fit into .debconf.org - there is always .debconf.net without restrictions (as its not really used currently).
Mailing-List	Want a mailing-list?
Hosting	Don’t have an own server for it? .debconf.org possibly has space for you.
	You would manage the content via a svn repository.
CMS	Conference Management System - AKA pentabarf. Available in future, more info on that point when we finally switched to a version that let’s us easily give access to other people without giving out all personal data. :)
Gallery	Use our gallery. Actually - don’t bother asking, just use it, as long as you use it for Debian related event pictures.

Want more? We have a page listing most of our resources, maybe you find something you need. Want something? Mail admins@debconf.org and describe what you want, most possibly we will make it happen. Or try to get one of us admins on IRC, you are looking for one of the nicks Ganneff, mhy, sgran, gwolf or h01ger. No, we do not bite … usually. :)

BMW has released a new prototype hydrogen powered car. The bmwworld.com web page about it claims the cruising range is 190 miles. Added to the 400-mile range of the normal fuel tank, the 745h can go 600 miles between fill-ups. The first issue is that 10 miles are not accounted for (maybe it finishes the 190 miles of hydrogen power at the top of a hill). But more seriously the hydrogen needed to drive for 190 miles would take as much space as petrol needed to drive for 646 miles (hydrogen needs 3.4* the volume to store an equivalent amount of energy). I wonder if that BMW has any space left in the boot/trunk? Now we have some green bloggers praising BMW. An internal combustion engine that burns hydrogen will not give no emissions other than water vapour, it will produce some nitrogen oxides. The processes to produce hydrogen for fuel all consume unreasonable amounts of energy (more than is required to charge a plug-in hybrid). BMW demonstrates their level of interest by giving the cars to some celebrities. This gets some PR but no analysis of the performance. They also introduce the prototype based on one of the most expensive models (the 745) which you almost never see on the roads. If they produced a 318 or 520 that ran on hydrogen it would demonstrate some level of interest in getting this working for the mass market. If BMW wanted to make their cars more environmentally friendly they would start by adopting some of the technology from the Prius. Rumour has it that part of Toyota’s plan to make money from Prius development is in licensing the technology that they patent. A couple of years ago I test drove a BMW 316 and a Prius. The Prius was very quiet and gave a smooth ride (you might call these luxury features), and also gave decent performance (it’s widely regarded that luxury cars should perform well - pity the BMW 316 is a slug). In Australia the concept of “badge engineering” of cars is well established. When government subsidies favoured large manufacturing runs the Ford Laser and Mazda 323 were essentially the same car. Maybe BMW could adopt this concept and sell a re-badged Prius i-tech with a few extra luxury features as a BMW 4 series (it’s a much better car than the 3 series BMW).

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Thanks mostly to David Berry and Karl Fogel, there is a debate unfolding in the comment section of my post on whether it makes sense to open source books and in what ways the model of free software is transferable (or not) to book publishing. It is worth reading if you are interested in this debate as the back and forth volley is pretty illuminating. Somewhat independent of the content, Karl Fogel wrote something that I love, mostly because I often try to remind people of this, although I have not said is as eloquently and tersely as Karl:

I do not understand how you can have libre freedom without free as in beer freedom. While the latter does not necessarily imply the former, the former always implies the latter. If everyone can share X freely with others, than the cost will always be driven down to zero (hence X will have both freedoms); if people cannot so share, then X is, by definition, not libre free.

Much more there, so check it out.

I’ve spent a bit of the bank holiday weekend by probably violating the warranty of a new 15” Macbook Pro (MBP) from work. I also was at the Debian bbq 2007 in Cambridge and met some friendly faces. :)

• I halved the HD to make way for Debian with Bootcamp and rEFIt. (I wonder how easy it is resize things again if needs be. Bootcamp does not seem to want to run again…)
• Unfortunately Debian’s grub isn’t patched for gpt (thanks cjwatson for the tip), so the install failed…
• The install CD got stuck inside and I discovered from mjg59 that holding down the mouse button whilst turning on the MBP ejects the CD. Phew…
• I’ve since installed Ubuntu Feisty, though since the X was failing to start with the nVidia video device, I decided to upgrade to gutsy. It works. :)
• Unfortunately a lot of other things do not work (without some tweaking), like sound, wifi and flash so…
• I’m now booting into the Ubuntu partition from MacOSX via VMware’s Fusion product. Niiice.
• I did try Debian lenny inside Fusion, but it doesn’t seem to do fullscreen at 1440×900. However, Ubuntu does. I guess the VMware guys tweak things.

More MBP & X40 porn So now I can boot into MacOSX and run Ubuntu or boot straight into Ubuntu from rEFIt. There are a couple of problems.

• I need to sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg between vmware and nvidia drivers when I boot between
• Nevermind the right click, how the hell do I do a middle click for a paste?? (Fixed)
• The keyboard on the MBP does suck. For example if I click the bottom right edge of the key ‘t’, no ‘t’ shows up. It feels wrong, though I guess I have to get used to it.
• The MBP runs hotter and louder than the X40. Of course the MBP is heavier too, hence the MBP isn’t what I class a ‘laptop’
• Effectively Ubuntu under VMware will be much slower than X40 with Debian lenny. So, this hardly feels like an upgrade. ;)
• I really don’t like the windowing MacOSX interface. I need to figure out how to compile (Xlib.h not there) and run a “tabbed WM” dwm on the MBP natively.
• A lot of the Apple software just sucks!

There are some things I quite like about the MBP compared to the X40:

• Bigger screen 1024×768 -> 1440×900
• Wifi that remembers the connection details
• Faster bootups
• I actually like the glossy screen (when there are no reflections on it)

Currently I remain not totally convinced about the Apple MBP. I’ll keep my Debian X40 my personal machine and the MBP for work. Now I can compile Webkit on Apple OSX (Debian can too) and see what’s happening in Ubuntu.

I got my UMTS (3G) card on monday and started to play with it. And from what I could read about the windows software that comes with the card - I am glad to have Linux. After all the only thing I had to figure out was the fact that everything just works and I just have to point my dialup app at the right interface… In Windows you have to install tons of megabytes of bullshit, possibly with ten reboots. Ha. For future reference, mainly for me but possibly others too - lets write down what I have: I got a Vodafone Option card, Model GE0201. It’s one for the new-style ExpressCard Slots, so it ships with an adapter to the older CardBus standard. Inserting the card into its slot (already in the adapter) the following dmesg output appears:

[15930.197929] pccard: CardBus card inserted into slot 0
[15930.198371] PCI: Enabling device 0000:06:00.0 (0000 -> 0002)
[15930.198385] ACPI: PCI Interrupt 0000:06:00.0[A] -> GSI 18 (level,low) -> IRQ 18
[15930.198416] PCI: Setting latency timer of device 0000:06:00.0 to 64
[15930.198424] ohci_hcd 0000:06:00.0: OHCI Host Controller
[15930.198480] ohci_hcd 0000:06:00.0: new USB bus registered, assigned bus number 6
[15930.198507] ohci_hcd 0000:06:00.0: irq 18, io mem 0x8c000000
[15930.764279] usb usb6: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
[15930.764308] hub 6-0:1.0: USB hub found
[15930.764320] hub 6-0:1.0: 2 ports detected
[15931.276444] PCI: Enabling device 0000:06:00.2 (0000 -> 0002)
[15931.276460] ACPI: PCI Interrupt 0000:06:00.2[A] -> GSI 18 (level,low) -> IRQ 18
[15931.276827] PCI: Setting latency timer of device 0000:06:00.2 to 64
[15931.276836] ehci_hcd 0000:06:00.2: EHCI Host Controller
[15931.277145] ehci_hcd 0000:06:00.2: new USB bus registered, assigned bus number 7
[15931.299893] ehci_hcd 0000:06:00.2: irq 18, io mem 0x8c001000
[15931.299916] ehci_hcd 0000:06:00.2: USB 2.0 started, EHCI 1.00, driver 10 Dec 2004
[15931.300351] usb usb7: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
[15931.300523] hub 7-0:1.0: USB hub found
[15931.300535] hub 7-0:1.0: 2 ports detected
[15934.837567] usb 6-1: new full speed USB device using ohci_hcd and address 2
[15935.033681] usb 6-1: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
[15935.036577] option 6-1:1.0: GSM modem (1-port) converter detected
[15935.036751] usb 6-1: GSM modem (1-port) converter now attached to ttyUSB0
[15935.039703] option 6-1:1.1: GSM modem (1-port) converter detected
[15935.039813] usb 6-1: GSM modem (1-port) converter now attached to ttyUSB1
[15935.043067] option 6-1:1.2: GSM modem (1-port) converter detected
[15935.043482] usb 6-1: GSM modem (1-port) converter now attached to ttyUSB2

Inserting the adapter alone already gives the output up to timecode 15931.300535, so it doesn’t seem to be a simple adapter only. I wonder what I get when I use it with random ExpressCard devices. (Not that I have any other than the option card atm). Looks like the card registers 3 GSM modem ports. Only 2 are usable, so don’t try to use ttyUSB1, doesn’t work anyway. In case the system doesn’t like the ports one may need to reload the usbserial module telling it the vendor and product id it should work for, but I did not need to do it. Now, getting online. The actual act is very simple, just let me write down some more detailed text as background info: There are 2 usable “modem” interfaces one can use. I chosed to use ttyUSB0 for internet connections, leaving ttyUSB2 to other apps. Like - getting status information or sending/receiving short messages. The first step one has to do is unlocking the card with your pin. The command for this is AT+CPIN=xxxx, replacing xxxx with the actual pin. (Type it into a minicom if you want). The card will “login” into the mobile system and change its flashing lights from “both lights flash” to “only umts light flashes”. Its also useful to tell your card which net to use for future connections. So type AT+CGDCONT=1,”IP”,”web.vodafone.de” and you did select the Vodafone net. There are a few other AT commands where you can tell the card the preferred way of operation, ie. should it prefer UMTS(3G) or GPRS connections or should it only support one of those:

at_opsys=0,2	Only GPRS
at_opsys=1,2	Only UMTS(3g)
at_opsys=2,2	Prefer GPRS over UMTS(3G)
at_opsys=3,2	Prefer UMTS(3G) over GPRS

I did use the 3,2 setting, but there may be situations where you want other settings. Type AT+CSQ to see your current signal strength. After having done all those preparations we want to get connected. Simple. Dial *99***1# and the card will connect. You only need to talk a bit of PPP and you have net. Of course noone wants to do all this by hand, so lets use wvdial for it. Its simple. Take the following config:

[Dialer Defaults]
Init1 = ATZ
Init2 = ATQ0 V1 E1 S0=0 &C1 &D2 +FCLASS=0
Modem Type = Analog Modem
Baud = 460800
New PPPD = yes
Modem = /dev/ttyUSB0
ISDN = 0

[Dialer pin]
Init3 = AT+CPIN=xxxx

[Dialer umts]
Dial Command = ATD
Carrier Check = no
Phone = *99***1#
Password = doesntmatter
Username = noonecares
Stupid Mode = 1
Init4 = AT+CGDCONT=1,"IP","web.vodafone.de"
Dial Attempts = 2

With it you type wvdial pin, wait a second and type wvdial umts and you have a working internet connection. Hit Ctrl-C to disconnect. Yes, thats all thats needed. Plugin card, type wvdial pin && sleep 1 && wvdial umts and have fun. Now, what to do with the second “modem” on the card. You could use it to get status info about your connection, like signal strenght. You could also point wammu/gammu at it and send or receive SMS. Ok, well. Wammu has a little bug currently and doesn’t really like the option card. I mailed its maintainer already and got a patch back, which fixes half of the problem, so full support should be there soon. (Guessing with the time he needed for the initial patch it should be there within days at max… :) ). Trying a KDE app (*shudder* :) ) named kmobiletools one can read SMS without any patch. One can even send SMS. But kmobiletools can’t delete SMS stored on the card.). Finally - testing the stuff in a real life situation: My trip to work, which is about 1.5hours in a german train (ICE). I am impressed, it’s way better than I feared. I was online for the whole trip, about 90% of the time with UMTS (3G), 8-9% GPRS and for 2% the card didn’t had any signal. Which was to be expected, having a multi-kilometre tunnel soon after trip starts. The card never lost its PPP connection and all applications did run fine. The card does have *huge* buffers for data, the 2% nothing did give me a ping time maximum of 150.000 ms but not a single lost package. Thats also what one experiences when the card switches from UMTS to GPRS - ping time goes up for some time until GPRS takes over, then it continues without any trouble and every pending stuff is send. (Except that GPRS ping times are slightly larger, of course). Soooo, summary for me is: It’s worth the money, as I can use it for about 3 hours every day I go to work. Sometimes thats 4 hours, depending on the time I leave work (bad train times). Having a price of about 40EUR per month for a real flat it sounds acceptable for me. PS: The only thing one should never try is to run pccardctl eject. While the kernel tells you it eject a card - you will end up with a zombie process, forever. And also unable to get the card working again, you have to reboot. So - just stop the apps accessing the card and then just unplug it. Sounds bad, but is the working way…

If you care about netconf and wonder what's the current status, you might want to ingest the status update I sent to the netconf-devel mailing list. The most important point probably is: if you want to work on netconf, I'll be readily available for questions on the mailing list, even though I cannot expend much time to hack myself over the next four months. But I will consider coaching anyone who would like to contribute and wants to be coached in doing so. So don't hesitate and let me know, and consider telling me a bit about what kind of projects you have worked on in the past. NP: Mono: Under the Pipal Tree

I received number of reactions on my photoalbum post. Several were saying "I'm using some great Perl tool which is not actively maintained anymore.". Well I know such tools. I also used BINS some time ago, but it did break something (I don't recall what exactly right now, it's quite far far away in past) and I was unable to fix it. That was reason I switched to Matew. The other replies were much better. One of them recommended trying lazygal (well it was recommended by it's author). I gave it a try and it seemed to fit my basic needs quite well and extending it's EXIF support was a piece of cake. I will continue to tune it to my needs, but I'm pretty close right now. The hardest thing for me will be to come up with some good looking themes, but I will most likely steal my ones for Matew :-).

Russell Coker very effectively debunks hydrogen for fuel. In my opinion, the only reason the oil companies and various shall we say pro-oil governments are getting behind hydrogen is because they know it's completely untenable. They can say "but look over here, we're researching clean energy" knowing full well that it's years away (if at all). It's a diversion, that's all. Meanwhile, we've had perfectly viable electric cars in the mid-1990's, yet fast-forward ten years, and apparently it's only just become commercially viable to have hybrids. Talk about regression. Something's really wrong with the world.

vim-addons Joey wonders why vim addons are not enabled by default using the new Debian infrastructure. For single-user systems, Joey is right: enabling addons by default would be best. But for multi-user systems, I think disabled-by-default is better. Otherwise, installing an add-on would change vim's behavior unexpectedly for all users. (Unlike a daemon, which runs once per system; a vim addon is run by each user, every time they start vim.) This is especially bad because vim users tend to have carefully personalized configurations. Should the defaults cater to multi-user systems at the expense of single-user ones? Probably not, since admins of large multi-user systems are generally willing and able to figure out how to change their configurations, while many single-user machine owners need something that "just works". Perhaps the default configuration should load all installed addons, but local admins should be able to easily change this to load only addons enabled by the current user.

One of the most important issues for a commodity fuel for vehicles is that it be convenient and safe to transport. For quite a while LP Gas has been available as a cheaper car fuel. Even with increasing petrol prices it’s acceptance is well below 100% due to extra expense in storing the fuel (high pressure and more insulation are required), the more expensive technology in the engine to heat the fuel before injecting it into the engine, and the extreme difficulty in creating something as convenient as a Jerry Can for transporting LPG. LPG is mostly comprised of Propane and Butane. Propane has the lower boiling point of -42.09C. Hydrogen however has a boiling point of -252.87C and therefore is much more difficult to store and transport. The next problem with hydrogen as a fuel is that it has a very low density. The energy density per volume of liquid hydrogen is 10.1MJ/L while the energy density of petrol/gasoline is 34.6MJ/L. Not only is liquid hydrogen difficult to transport but the vessels you transport it in need to be 3.4 times the size! Having a 3.4x larger fuel tank in a car may not be a huge obstacle, but then there is the issue of trucks used to transport it to fuel stations which are already at maximum size so the truck fleet will need to be 3.4x larger with more people driving them etc. Once these problems are solved there are a variety of safety issues. Hydrogen burns with an almost invisible flame, sustains a fire when at a concentration of between 4% and 75% of the air and ignites at a low temperature. For an explosion you need a concentration of between 18.3% and 59%. I won’t risk promoting foolish behaviour by describing details, but when younger I have performed experiments with ethanol and witnessed experiments with petrol that demonstrate that they are both far less dangerous. Page 22 of this document by the US Bureau of Transportation and Statistics gives more information about the fire risks posed by hydrogen fuel. Page 35 of the same document describes fuel cells as being 45% efficient and an internal combustion engine for methane gas as being 30% efficient thus giving overall efficiencies of 33% and 29.5% respectively. Of course using an Atkinson Cycle engine will give a significant efficiency benefit over an Otto Cycle engine and outweigh this. Also it should be noted that fuel cells tend to require expensive materials such as Platinum in their manufacture. Hydrogen is promoted by clean-coal advocates (not that any form of coal power is clean) and the nuclear industry (electrolysis is one way of using a huge amount of electricity). But there are many better options for powering cars that are available right now at minimal cost, these include bio-Diesel, ethanol, and plug-in hybrid or electric vehicles.

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The new policy for vim addons on Debian is that the addons should not be enabled by default. You have to install vim-addon-manager and use vim-addons to turn them on. So while I can apt-get install insecured and the daemon will automatically be run, I can't apt-get install vim-vimoutliner and edit .otl files in outline mode by default. Seems weird or backwards, no? The vim-addons program does solve several problems, like being able to disable addons, or selectively enable addons from vim-scripts. But I've read all the docs I can find about this, and I can't find a rationalle for why the addons should be disabled by default. Seems to me that addons could simply run vim-addons from their maintainer scripts. Any reason not to?

When I discussed the deprecation of cvs.debian.org, I forgot to mention that planet’s CVS repository was also part of the last users of this service. Thanks to mako, the move to Alioth is underway. The CVS repository has been disabled (crude hack, if you know a proper way to forbid commits to a CVS repository, please leave a comment) and its history has been imported in a new SVN repository As usual DD have write-access on this repository so that they can add/update their feeds and hackergotchis. Mako will change the live setup from CVS to SVN somewhat later today. Please start updating any documentation that refers to the CVS repository.