The basic smooth lithting series comes to an end with adaptation of 2-sided lighting and multiple lamps support. The code is written for clarity, so it could be optimized. If you have a lightning-fast lighting implementation under the hand, feel free to contribute it On a side note, I'm looking for a way to draw quadrics in OpenGL ES 2.0, so without using the GLU library. Do you know how to do this?

Quite a belated English blog (after the Thai version), due to busy personal life lately. I had visited Yangon during 4-11 Sep. to give some talks and tutorials on Debian packaging and mirroring. And I've shared some information with community. The visit was initiated by Ngwe Tun and the Myanmar L10N team. I found later that a Facebook event had been created for this. Localization The first day was a comparison between Myanmar and Thai supports in GNU/Linux, in which I briefed the status on Thai side, and Thura Hlaing on Myanmar side. It was nice that we had the Myanmar Computer Federation (MCF) director presiding the meeting til the end. That means GNU/Linux support has been awared at executive level. According to Thura, Burmese has gained support in GNU/Linux quite well. On the rendering side, all the reordering for the logical order is normally done with pure GSUB in the fonts, without special processing on the rendering engine. This is suboptimal in principle, but it's the most effective way, as Windows redering engine itself does not yet support Myanmar, either. For input method, Myanmar XKB map has been available in xkb-data for a long time, but to serve users' familarity with visual order typing, some reordering input methods have been developed, based on keymagic and ibus. But all are not context-sensitive like what's done for Thai in other frameworks. Fortunately, with the surrounding text API recently added to ibus, this has become possible. One unusual requirement for Myanmar script editing is the caret movements. It needs to move syllable-wise, not character-wise nor cluster-wise. So, I suggested them to have a look on UAX #29 to see how it should be amended. Myanmar locales are already done, both for GNU C library and CLDR. And even a GNOME applet for Myanmar lunar calendar is also available. This latter thing is what Thai can learn from. Burmese word segmentation is not supported in general. But R&D works have been done for this in its NLP lab. A serious issue left to solve is the existing abuses of Unicode. In Myanmar, there exist at least 14 variations of font hacks, abusing some free slots in Unicode charts as pre-composed clusters for information interchange (not for font internals), making plain text interchange impossible without the proper font for rendering. For program translation, the new Myanmar L10N team is trying to request for a mass submission to the current GNOME team. And for Debian, Thura Hlaing and Ngwe Tun has already started the translation process with Christian's help. Along my stay, I could see the team actively discussing on the IT glossary, trying to settle down the translated terms. This looked very fun. Debian Then, the next three days were a workshop on Debian packaging, where I have presented the basics of Debian package building, uploading, quality-controlling, modifying, creating and delivering. This aimed toward the development of a local distribution based on Debian. Each day in the afternoon was the time for setting up a Debian mirror, not only for convenient local distro developement, but also for general users. This is important because internet penetration is still low in Myanmar. The main media for software distribution is CD/DVD, which means only stable version of Debian can be spread, which is not good for desktop users. Having a mirror should improve the situation somehow. It should make dist-upgrading to testing/unstable easier. And it should make CD snapshotting using local distributions easier, too. For this, I also presented another quick slide on Debian mirroring & caching. In the last day, I was introduced to the staffs of Myanmar NLP Lab and their projects, which include Myanmar OCR (based on tesseract), information retrieval, machine translation, and other lingustic resources like dictionary, lexicon and text corpus. Furthermore, I was also offerred technical helps on developing a Lao/Esaan Tham font for a Lao and North Eastern Thailand variation of Tham script, which is Mon-based and is closely related to Myanmar script. (See some sample transliterations if you are curious how it looks like. It was part of my hacking during DebConf11 travelling.) Currently, its OpenType support is quite sufficient, but it still renders poorly on Mac OSX. To cope with this, I was given a Mac Mini as a present from Myanmar for its development, as well as some explanations on AAT features from a Myanmar font developer. And I am very grateful for that.

D-I localization first moved backwards when some changes were introduced to partman-nbd templates....then moves forward again. Full stats are here Status for D-I level 1 (core D-I files):

• 14 languages 100% for all sublevels: bg cs de es fa fr it ja ko nl pt ru th zh_CN
• 4 languages 99%: eo pl si ta
• 2 languages 97%: eu gu
• 2 languages 96%: hi tr
• 5 languages 95%: be bn sk sv uk
• 6 langauges 94%: ast bs ga ro
• 3 languages 93%: hu lo nb
• 2 languages 92%: id sl
• 5 languages 91%: et mr pa vi zh_TW
• others are 90% or below

Status for D-I level 2 (packages that have localized material that may appear during default installs, such as iso-codes, tasksel, etc.):

• 7 languages 100%: de es fa fr pt ru zh_CN
• 14 languages 99%: be cs da eo id it ja kk nl sk sl sv th uk
• 3 languages 98%: bg ca eu ro
• 1 language 97%: pt_BR
• 4 langauges 95%: el fi he nb
• 7 languages 94%: ar ast dz gl hr vi zh_TW
• 1 language 93%: is
• 8 languages 92%: bn bs hu ko ne pl si tr
• 9 languages 91%: ga gu ka km lt mk mr sr ta
• others are 90% or below

Status for D-I level 3 (packages that have localized material that may appear during non-default installs, such as win32-loader)

• 5 languages 100%: fa fr nl pt sv
• 20 languages 100%: be bg bs ca cs de el eo es fi ga gl he is ja ru sk sv th tr zh_CN
• 2 languages 97%: hu uk
• others are 90% or below

So, full 100% completeness (hall of fame) for: Persian (fa), French (fr), Portuguese (pt).

The last month I was supposed to work on a OpenStack related project, but for administrative reasons it has been delayed and I've tried to do small tasks to be able to finish them quickly and start the work on the main project when the issues get solved. As the delay has been longer than expected last Wednesday I've realized than on the last weeks I did a lot of small system administration tasks:

• With a co-worker I started to work on a GNU/Linux version of our firewall based on Shorewall to handle the rules and conntrackd and keepalived to make it highly available (I had to stop my work on the Debian GNU/kFreeBSD based firewall a long time ago, and this summer the old firewalls' hardware started to fail, so a migration from Linux to Linux makes sense now, as it will be faster and a future migration will be simpler, as we will have a cleaner set of rules and better documentation),
• I installed and configured an instance of a web based File Exchange server (F*EX),
• I installed and configured an instance of a pastebin clone,
• I installed and configured an instance of ProFTPD that works only as a SFTP server using virtual users (without shell access),
• I also installed an instance of a web based event management system called indico that is being used to manage a conference and probably will be used for other events in the future,
• I installed and patched some plugins in our Trac servers,
• I tried a groupware system called SOGo that we will probable deploy in a week or two,
• And updated and fixed configurations of some other services,

With all the changes I did I noticed that I had to do something with our Intranet server; it is just a reverse proxy for a lot of different web services and its main page was one static HTML page with links to them, nothing else. In the long term maybe we will replace it with something based on Drupal or Lifeay, but for now I just wanted something to be able to organize the links and provide some information about the services for the new users without having to write HTML (I really like Agile Documentation Tools that let me focus on the content and forget about the markup), and started to look at some of them. My first idea was to use ikiwiki, as it has all the features I was looking for: I can use Markdown or reStructuredText to write the contents, the source pages are easily handled on a Version Control System, it supports the use of templates for the HTML, etc., but it seemed to me that using ikiwiki was like killing flies with a cannon (that's a Spanish say, I guess it's easy to understand it in English, no?) and I decided to review other tools to build static web sites. To make a long story short, I selected some tools that met my requirements and looked nice on their demo sites; after my first review I thought that Hyde was going to be my bet, as it uses technologies I'm already familiar with, but after trying it I saw that I was going to have a problem with documentation (the current Hyde version lacks it) and it was going to be more complicated that using ikiwiki. Before giving up I decided to review simpler tools, just in case, and after looking some of them I ended up using poole, a simple python script (the source is just one file and it only requires python-markdown to work). Before moving to the content I tried to adapt a couple of free themes to be used by the tool, but I didn't liked the result, so I went back to the plain style provided by the tool and added a logo and a background. With that simple look and feel I started to work with the content, splitting it into eight markdown files and a python macro to include a file that has all the links used on the site. While trying to make the main page look good I noticed how little I know about CSS, but using search engines I was able to build a two column block into the main page and publish the contents and with the help of some CSS enabled co-workers I changed the look and feel of the site in about 30 minutes. In summary, if you want a really simple website, you know a little bit of python and don't want to spend much time learning how to use a website generator then Poole is a good option. If you want something more complex I still think that ikiwiki is a good option, but YMMV.

3D programming is great, but when something goes wrong, it can be quite hard to debug! I was trying to launch two different OpenGL programs one after another, the first for the normal rendering, the second for a post-processing effect (motion blur, etc.). It seemed the first program's output was cleared as soon as the second one was activated. I eventually found a behavior that is well summed up at http://www.gamedev.net/topic/541571-glsl-changing-between-shaders/page__view__findpost__p__4495411. You don't write:

glUseProgram( shader-A );
modelA->Draw();
glUseProgram( shader-B );
modelB->Draw();
glutSwapBuffers();

You write:

modelA->Draw();
glUseProgram( shader-B );
modelB->Draw();
glUseProgram( shader-A );
glutSwapBuffers();

and since the code is called multiple times (at each frame), this will cycle OK. (There seem to be an GL_INVALID_OPERATION error the very first time I call glUseProgram, too.) Anybody has an idea on why we have this behavior?

Just a quick note to remind everyone that the Rcpp class in San Francisco, which I am holding together with Revolution Analytics, will take place a week from today. We are happy to report that the number of registrations has met our initial targets. But as a number of open slots remain, we have decided to offer a few places at discounts of 25% for academics (with code acad1) and 50% for students (with code student). Course details are at the Revolution course page, registration is at the Eventbrite page. And just for completeness, here is what I wrote in the previous announcement:

The format will follow the workshop Romain and I gave during the tutorial day preceding this year's R/Finance conference. The style will once again be hands-on, with copious concrete examples and solid coverage of most aspects of Rcpp and related packages such as RInside, RcppArmadillo and others. The eight-hour schedule contains about six hours of instruction, split into four sessions of around ninety minutes. This leaves ample time for both lunch and coffee breaks, and for informal discussions and Q+A. The one-day class will be offered in San Franciso on Saturday, October 8, 2011. Please see the official course page for more details, concrete location info and maps as well as registration details.

Feel free to contact me at the usual email address with questions. Or with suggestions for the after-party in San Francisco :)

Forked from hivelogic-flickrtouchr, which is forked from flickrtouchr, flickrbackup is a simple tool to perform a backup of your photos in flickr. It's is in a very early development stage and code looks weird, but critical functionality is working :)

tiago@x61:~$ flickrbackup -h
Usage: flickrbackup [OPTIONS] -o OUTPUT_DIR
Backup your flickr photos.
Options:
  --version             show program's version number and exit
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -o OUTPUT_DIR, --output_dir=OUTPUT_DIR
                        set the local directory where you want to store your
                        pictures
  -e, --metadata-exif   store flickr metadata (title, description etc) as EXIF
                        tags in your local files [default: False]
  -x, --metadata-xml    store metadata as default flickr XML files [NOT
                        IMPLEMENTED]
  -u, --metadata-update
                        update flickr metadata to your local files. Use this
                        option with -x and/or -e [default: False]
  -g, --html-gallery    generate a local HTML gallery [NOT IMPLEMENTED]

One of the more classic jokes about not yet understood bugs is that the phase of the moon is somehow involved in causing it. Being bored, I decided to spend some time to see whether "date of bug filed" could somehow be correlated with "phase of the moon" for a given source package. Fast forward an hour of perl experimenting, and here we are:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use warnings;
use constant PI => 3.1415926535;
use feature "say";
use SOAP::Lite;
use Astro::Coord::ECI::Moon;
my $soap = SOAP::Lite->uri('Debbugs/SOAP')->proxy('http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/soap.cgi');
if (!defined($ARGV[0]))  
	die "E: must have a source package!\n";
 
my @bugs = $soap->get_bugs(src=>$ARGV[0])->result();
my $bugsdata = $soap->get_status(@bugs)->result();
my $moon = Astro::Coord::ECI::Moon->new();
my %count = ( 'new' => 0, 'first' => 0, 'full' => 0, 'last' => 0);
foreach my $bug (keys %$bugsdata)  
	my $time = $$bugsdata $bug -> date ;
	my $phase = $moon->phase($time);
	if ($phase <= 45 * PI / 180   $phase > 315 * PI / 180)  
		$count 'new'  = $count 'new'  + 1;
	  elsif ($phase <= 135 * PI / 180 && $phase > 45 * PI / 180)  
		$count 'first'  = $count 'first'  + 1;
	  elsif ($phase <= 225 * PI / 180 && $phase > 135 * PI / 180)  
		$count 'full'  = $count 'full'  + 1;
	  elsif ($phase <= 315 * PI / 180 && $phase > 225 * PI / 180)  
		$count 'last'  = $count 'last'  + 1;
	 
 
say "Number of bug submissions during new moon     : " . $count new ;
say "Number of bug submissions during first quarter: " . $count first ;
say "Number of bug submissions during full moon    : " . $count full ;
say "Number of bug submissions during last quarter : " . $count last ;

This uses the (not packaged in Debian) Astro::Coord::ECI::Moon perl module. Use like so:

wouter@carillon:~code/perl$ ./debbugsmoon nbd
Number of bug submissions during new moon     : 2
Number of bug submissions during first quarter: 10
Number of bug submissions during full moon    : 1
Number of bug submissions during last quarter : 3

Apparently there's a reasonable correlation between 'the moon is in the first quarter' and 'people file bugs on nbd'. Note: no, the above is probably not very scientific. That's not the point.

After spotting an upload of mira, who in turn spotted an upload of abe (the package, not an upload by me aka abe@d.o), mira (mirabilos aka tg@d.o) noticed that there are Debian packages which have same name as some Debian Developers have as login name. Of course I noticed a long time ago that there is a Debian package with my login name abe . Another well-known Debian login and former package name is amaya. But since someone else came up with that thought, too, it was time for finding the definite answer to the question which are the DD login names which also exist as Debian package names. My first try was based on the list of trusted GnuPG keys:

$ apt-cache policy $(gpg --keyring /etc/apt/trusted.gpg --list-keys 2>/dev/null   \
                     grep @debian.org   \
        	     awk -F'[<@]' ' print $2 '   \
                     sort -u) 2>/dev/null   \
                   egrep -o '^[^ :]*'
alex
tor
ed
bam
ng

But this was not satisfying as my own name didn t show up and gpg also threw quite a lot of block reading errors (which is also the reason for redirecting STDERR). mira then had the idea of using the Ultimate Debian Database to answer this question more properly:

udd=> SELECT login, name FROM carnivore_login, carnivore_names
      WHERE carnivore_login.id=carnivore_names.id AND login IN
      (SELECT package AS login FROM packages, active_dds
       WHERE packages.package=active_dds.login UNION
       SELECT source AS name FROM sources, active_dds
       WHERE sources.source=active_dds.login)
      ORDER BY login;
 login                   name
-------+---------------------------------------
 abe     Axel Beckert
 alex    Alexander List
 alex    Alexander M. List  4402020774 9332554
 and     Andrea Veri
 ash     Albert Huang
 bam     Brian May
 ed      Ed Boraas
 ed      Ed G. Boraas [RSA Compatibility Key]
 ed      Ed G. Boraas [RSA]
 eric    Eric Dorland
 gq      Alexander GQ Gerasiov
 iml     Ian Maclaine-cross
 lunar   J r my Bobbio
 mako    Benjamin Hill
 mako    Benjamin Mako Hill
 mbr     Markus Braun
 mlt     Marcela Tiznado
 nas     Neil A. Schemenauer
 nas     Neil Schemenauer
 opal    Ola Lundkvist
 opal    Ola Lundqvist
 paco    Francisco Moya
 paul    Paul Slootman
 pino    Pino Toscano
 pyro    Brian Nelson
 stone   Fredrik Steen
(26 rows)

Interestingly tor (Tor Slettnes) is missing in this list, so it s not complete either At least I m quite sure that nobody maintains a package with his own login name as package name. :-) We also have no packages ending in -guest , so there s no chance that a package name matches an Alioth guest account either

A fresh maintenance release version 0.9.7 of Rcpp went onto CRAN and into Debian earlier today. This release contains two contributed fixes. The first, suggested by Darren Cook via the rcpp-devel mailing list, corrects how we had set up exceptions specifications, reflecting a bit of Java-think on our part. The idiom is generally discouraged in C++, and we now conform. The second came in two excellent patches by R Core member Martyn Plummer which finally get us compilation on Solaris. This is much appreciated as our hands were tied here for lack of access to such a box. Otherwise, two new examples and a new unit test were added. The complete NEWS entry is below; more details are in the ChangeLog file in the package and on the Rcpp Changelog page.

0.9.7   2011-09-29
    o   Applied two patches kindly provided by Martyn Plummer which provide
        support for compilation on Solaris using the SunPro compiler
    o   Minor code reorganisation in which exception specifiers are removed;
        this effectively only implements a run-time (rather than compile-time) 
        check and is generally seen as a somewhat depreated C++ idiom. Thanks
        to Darren Cook for alerting us to this issue.
    o   New example 'OpenMPandInline.r' in the OpenMP/ directory, showing how
        easily use OpenMP by modifying the RcppPlugin output
    o   New example 'ifelseLooped.r' showing Rcpp can accelerate loops that may
        be difficult to vectorise due to dependencies
    o   New example directory examples/Misc/ regrouping the new example as
        well as the fibonacci example added in Rcpp 0.9.6
    o   New Rcpp-FAQ example warning of lossy conversion from 64-bit long
        integer types into a 53-bit mantissa which has no clear fix yet.
    o   New unit test for accessing a non-exported function from a namespace

Thanks to CRANberries, you can also look at a diff to the previous release 0.9.6. As always, even fuller details are on the Rcpp Changelog page and the Rcpp page which also leads to the downloads, the browseable doxygen docs and zip files of doxygen output for the standard formats. A local directory has source and documentation too. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the R-Forge page

A good proportion of I2C and SPI device drivers in the kernel contain some very similar code for accessing the register maps of hardware connected to those buses most hardware designers have solved the problem of providing very similar ways. Linux 3.1 introduces a new kernel API called regmap which factors out this code from the drivers, saving code and making it much easier to share infrastructure. There s been an implementation of this in ASoC for some time now, the regmap API makes it available to all drivers. The version of this API in version 3.1 is very simple, just factoring out the simplest level of physical I/O from the devices. Devices register with the regmap API by providing a struct regmap_config (which currently only allows the sizes of the register addresses and values to be specified) and the bus-specific structure to it. They can then use simple read and write operations on the device:

int regmap_read(struct regmap *map, unsigned int reg, unsigned int *val);
int regmap_write(struct regmap *map, unsigned int reg, unsigned int val);

The API handles everything to do with formatting the data for transmission and parsing data coming back from the device. Block functions are also provided to allow multiple registers to be read or written simultaneously. Even with this basic level of support we end up saving quite a bit of code as drivers are converted to use the API. The changes sitting in -next for version 3.2 take this a step further, adding support for more variations on SPI registers, a debugfs interface for dumping the device registers, register cache support courtesy of my colleague Dimitris Papastamos and trace points for dynamic instrumentation of the system.

Posted from Santa Rosa, California, United States.

An e-mail by Andreas Schamanek had me revisit the topic of archiving web pages. Andreas pointed me to the MHT format, which bundles HTML pages and their dependencies into a plain text file using MIME. Internet Explorer apparently already handles this format, and UnMHT provides software for the other browsers. As Firefox 6 is not yet supported, I went to try the Mozilla Archive Format extension, which seems to do the same thing and works quite well so well (on first sight) that I wanted to share it with you. NP: Tortoise: Standards

The new ncurses library that is currently sitting in the NEW queue will have a significant change that, if we ve done it right, should be an invisible change. If we ve got it wrong, then the BTS (and us) may be a little busy. What has happened is that the low-level terminfo library has been split out from the general ncurses library making a new package called libtinfo5. This also means that there only needs to be one libtinfo5 package because at this low level it doesn t care about wide characters, so there is no libtinfo5w (and that gets important later). libncurses is linked to libtinfo so from the point of view of using libncurses there should be no major change in how things are done. So, why bother? The way ncurses was built before causes a nice long conga line of trouble . There really are (was) two main ncurses library packages, libncurses5 and libncursesw5. The w meant it was for wide characters. So anything that uses ncurses needs to decide which one to link to or perhaps both. A problem came up with the readline library that needs to link to ncurses because programs that link to IT (such as python) want a wide library but other programs do not. One solution is to have two readline libraries, but then any other library would need to be compiled and built twice as well and so on and so on. readline didn t really want the full ncurses library, it only wants the terminfo part but there was (until now) no way of picking up that bit only. Once this new version of ncurses gets released then readline can link to libterminfo which is agnostic to wide and non-wide characters which means it is as well which them means everything else should, in theory work. If you are using ncurses for some low-level terminfo work only, you may want to have a look to see if you can link to libtinfo5 only which will mean depending on libtinfo5 and not libncurses5 or libncursesw5. I m just writing this up mainly and uploading the packages, the bulk of the work was done by Sven and Matthias as well as some help from our ever-helpful upstream Thomas.

Keith and I released version 1.0.2 of AltOS, the open source firmware and software system associated with our Altus Metrum hobby rocket avionics systems. This release includes a fix for the defect in version 1.0.1 that prevented rebooting an altimeter from idle to pad mode over the radio link. This affects both TeleMetrum and TeleMini boards, and re-flashing the altimeter firmware is required to pick up this fix. We also restored the pre-1.0 mode selection behavior for TeleMetrum at power on. This is also an altimeter firmware change, but does not affect TeleMini.

Today, German politicians decided, that Germany be liable for up to 211 billion Euros for the debts of other EU countries. Or, put differently: the politicians put the money of the current and future generations on the line for a country that lived way above its capabilities for too many years. When the EU was founded, it was explicitly stated that no country needs ever be liable for any other. I understand that politics is hard, and letting Greece (and others) fall down might carry heavy, unforeseen consequences. Also, I understand that the Greek people are mostly innocent in all this and that the fault lies with their politicians and other corrupt entities in the nation. However, what s happening these days is beyond the comprehensible. If I were in a non-Germany EU country, I d rejoice and continue making debts. It is likely that this won t be the last time that our politicians cave in to pressure by other nations who have a lesser understanding of budgeting and saving. Since I am German, I can only shake my head, look to Berlin and ask myself whether this is the final straw that broke the camel s back. How the heck do the people over there ever want to regain the trust of their people? Politics has become the game of pleasing each other, who cares about the people? And the German politicians are (once again, remember credit default swaps?) at the forefront of this stupidity. To me, there is only one solution to Greece s debts: make sure that what happened can never happen again, and then cut the debts, or slice them in half. Let the banks carry the weight, for it was them who gave out the loans too liberally. And if this forces a bank or two to default, let it happen, for fuck s sake. The consequences might be dire, but they ll subside. And that s surely better than trying to pretend that we can keep juggling this heavily inflated financial system. Instead, the executives, elected to carry the trust of the people, are setting precedents for other countries to follow Greece, for it is likely that they wil be bailed out. By us. That is not the way to teach anyone the basics of economy: you can only spend as much as you earn, without exceptions. Debts will only come around to hurt you. I could puke. NP: Godspeed You Black Emperor!: F# A#

Besides FusionForge stuff, I also kept busy with other things.

• A new electronic drumkit: I upgraded from a Roland TD-4K to the new TD-9KX2. Apart from the improvements of the sound module and the mesh-head pads, it has two goodies. First, an extra trigger input line. Which means I just had to plug a cymbal pad from my Guitar Hero drum controller (with a standard jack cable), so I get an extra pad. More cowbell! Second, it now has a MIDI-in port. Which means that I "just" have to write some code (probably using libcwiid) to get the signals from the GH controller to a convenient computer nearby, then turn them into MIDI signals and send them to the Roland kit. So that I get not one but six extra pads (actually, five and a pedal). Special effects, lasers, symphonic chords, cymbals of all sizes, steel drums and more cowbell!
• Big mistake: I borrowed a Zelda Twilight Princess game. I'm ashamed to admit that it ate my week-end, and it's likely to eat quite a bit of my time again in the near future, although I'll try to put it on a diet. Yeah, okay, I had sort of guessed that games had improved a lot since the days of Might & Magic, but wow, I didn't realise how much.
• Rapha l and I started the fundraising campaign for the translation of our Debian book to English. Pre-orders/pledges are collected on Ulule; we'll only get them if the threshold is met, but the counterpart is that we won't actually do the translation if the threshold isn't met: translation and proofreading and publication of a book take a tremendous amount of time, and that's going to be time spent away from our respective clients. Note that there's a second threshold, for the "liberation fund"; if that one is met, the result of the book will be released under a Free license (most probably a CC-BY-SA + GPL dual-license). There are a whole lot of options for contributing, with rewards according to the amount you choose: e-book, paperback book, updates to the e-book, dedication, and even a dinner with the authors (limited offer, while supplies last).

A summary of my FusionForge-ish activities this month:

• FusionForge 5.1 is now available in Debian testing ("wheezy"). 5.0 is still in Debian stable ("squeeze"), so support continues; nevertheless, the improvements are significant enough that I recommend new users to run the version from testing if possible. Note that you can install the packages from testing onto a system running stable, either by hand or with APT pinning (there are only a handful of packages you need to grab from testing to satisfy the dependencies).
• This was made possible by some bugfixing in the 5.1 branch of FusionForge. Nothing major in itself, but the accumulated fixes will probably be worth a 5.1.1 release soon.
• I didn't do much on the trunk apart from merging from 5.1, but others did: several new plugins appeared, notably as part of the Coclico project (which is approaching its end fast).
• Also, not yet pushed to trunk are two local branches I have: one is a plugin to integrate MoinMoinWiki (with permissions managed through the FusionForge roles), developed with a client of mine. The other will end up in reuniting the FusionForge database upgrade process across installation methods (the *.rpm packages and the source installation currently use a PHP script, the *.deb ones use a Perl script with transactions). It'll probably break many things when initially committed, so I'll keep it on a local branch until I feel it's mature enough.
• I updated the "sandbox virtual machine" image; it now uses Debian wheezy, and the testsuite now runs a more recent version of Selenium; more importantly, the testsuite now passes.

The following is a quick HOWTO for the brave Debian users who want to upgrade to GNOME 3. Assuming you have an up to date system running sid, and experimental listed in your APT sources, perform the following complicated steps to end up having a functional GNOME 3 desktop:

apt-get install -t experimental gnome

Thanks go to Joss for putting together new GNOME 3 meta-packages, and the rest of the Debian GNOME people for months of hard planning and packaging work, and painful testing transition handling. Before you ask, yeah, not all of GNOME 3.x is in unstable yet, but will soon be, as precedent transitions start clearing the way. And yeah, GNOME 3.2 will come just after the two remaining package sets enter testing. To compensate, you'll find that you have some GNOME leaf packages pending an upgrade to 3.2.0-1 while you read this.

This weekend we'll be having the 4th version of the Colombian Mini-Debconf. It will be held in the Otraparte Museum, in the city of Medellin. The cool thing this year is that we'll be having mostly Debian contributors than just users, with the kind participation of Anibal Monsalve, who is currently in the country.

There will be several 10-min lightening talks, followed by a key signing party and some actual work in packaging, and of course we'll be having some beers with Debian friends.

More info (in Spanish): http://wiki.debian.org/DebianColombia/MiniDebconf2011

Dear lazyweb, I'm encountering a routing problem on one of my Linux machine, for which I haven't found a solution so far. I have a machine which has several network interfaces in different network (it's our monitoring system). So I have eth0 with 192.168.1.2 and eth1 with 10.0.0.2, and an dns entry pointing from myname to 192.168.1.2. Problems occur, if hosts in the 10.x.x.x network try to access the hosts. Accessing it via it's IP address in that network works, however if they try to access him via his other IP address 192.168.1.2 (e.g. because they resolve it via dns), it leads to some problems: The host send their packet to his IP address (which works), however when my machine sends the answer, it takes a shortcut, and sends them directly via eth1 and with 10.0.0.2 as source IP. This however gets filtered by a (stateful) firewall somewhere in between, as packet send to 192.168.1.2 are suddenly answered by 10.0.0.2. So far I found two solutions: Adjust the DNS to resolve to different IPs depending on the source of the request (ugly) or tell all firewalls to always let packet from my host pass, despite the changes source IP (also ugly, and probably quite some work). Is there anything else I can do? What I would really like, would be a way to tell my linux box to always respond with the IP it was talked to, even if there would be a shorter way to the origin according to the routing rable. So, if a host 10.0.0.42 contacts my host via the IP 192.168.1.2, the answer packet should come from 192.168.1.2 via eth0 instead of instead of having a source IP set to 10.0.0.2, it should be send via eth1. Is that somehow possible? Update: Wow, that was fast! The ink of my blog is still fresh, and I already got the answer! The solution to my problem is policy based routing. Thanks to weasel, Peter and Dale for their pointers! More information available at http://lartc.org/howto/lartc.rpdb.html, http://www.itbuzzer.net/corner/2007/09/how-to-implement-source-routing-with.asp or http://wiki.georgweiss.de/Linux/source_routing.