This addition to my Bad Technology page is plumbing. I hate plumbing. It is really inconvenient if it goes wrong, plumbers are pretty rare these days and most of my attempts to fix anything to do with plumbing end up wet and/or messy and/or damaging the house. I was just starting to understand the sealed system at the old house and then we moved to a house with an open vent system with loft tanks and inverted loops and draincocks and stuff. Humanity has invented the internet and other great stuff, but it seems we can't invent a heating system that is reliable, affordable, environmentally-friendly, understandable, hackable and doesn't fail messily. On what may have been the coldest day since we moved here, the heating stopped. Testing the controls, looking at the system design and working through a troubleshooting list suggested that the sensors were working and the boiler was working but the valve that sends hot water to the tank or heating was just clicking and sending nothing to the heating. I tried calling our usual plumber. Voicemail. So, I popped the cover off the valve. In addition to the wet/messy/damaging worry, that also involves electrics. Water and electicity - an ideal combination(!) There were some springs, a round bit and a worrying number of wires (live, for all I know). Also dust. A lot of dust. Thick lumps of dust. Grab the air gun, blow out the dust. Set the controls to try the heating. Still no joy. The round bit seemed to be twitching and making the ticking noise. Tapped it with the screwdriver handle. Nothing. Hit it. It moved. Pump starts, boiler starts, sound of heating pipes expanding as the hot water enters them again. I think that's my first successful fix to the plumbing in three months. Be cautious, but give it a go - I guess that's the same tactic that works for my successful computer hacks.

Linspire will launch in the 2nd quarter of the year a interesting service: Click and Run - their 'linux software ready to go' warehouse, into the web. The site code and related stuff are proprietary, the thing they call a plugin (it isn't a new package manager and not a browser plugin) to run into the users machine will (or already is?) be free software. The site will deliver software for Debian, Fedora, Freespire, Linspire, OpenSuSE and Ubuntu.

I had two ideas based on their service, considering that the plugin software is quite good and reliable (i've no idea yet):

- non-free.debian.net - What if we launch a web service listing the packages into non-free and let the users install it through a simplified Click and Run plugin (we don't need multiple package managers support) ? That's clear we need to consider individual package and system upgrades, but i bet Linspire did it already. With this in mind, the new service would avoid the user need to edit the sources.list, learn how a package manager works and stuff like that. Those with non geek friends using linux when asked "How do i install java?" could answer "Go to non-free.debian.net and install it from there". It drives me to a strange world...

- CNR's everywhere - Consider a world where Red Hat put Red Hat Network to work over Fedora packages with a sane API to publish package metadata information (eg.: yet another rss2 extension) and the packages itself (we still can use http and ftp), we tune packages.d.o to do the same and there we go for others distributions. With a stable enough Click and Run "plugin" from Linspire we could sit and watch people building their own Click and Run based services providing signed software right from the projects, non-free software from partners, software by subscription, games, making profit from ads and more. I think that the API standardization could be something interesting to Linux Foundation try to push, while Click and Run would give the community the "plugin"and benefit from being the first and jumping on this new thing first. Thoughts?

With or without CNR's everywhere, i would still give non-free.debian.net a try since we don't need the CNR plugin too, but we can wait until the 2nd quarter and organize the ideas better. Volunteers?

(Stop the tests for now, it seems I made a mistake. Will fix it tonight and make an update.)

I have been working recently on an update to the ppp-udeb package (responsible for configuring PPPoE networking in D-I and the target system).

I think I have finished fixing the last bad bits from the ppp-udeb package[*], but currently I am unable to do a test of a complete installation due to bug #407702 in qemu. Still, I am confident it should just work.

So I am asking if there are people interested in testing the image I have prepared with the new ppp-udeb package. The image can be downloaded from:



http://users.alioth.debian.org/~eddyp-guest/ppp-2.4.4rel-5/mini-with-ppp-udeb-20070124.iso



(Security concerned people can check the signature and md5sums and go on, if they trust me :-) )

How to test

In order to test, just boot the image (no boot parameters are needed) and try to do a basic installation via PPPoE.

What should be (or would be nice to be :-) ) checked:

• in D-I environment
• bad/good login should be detected (good logins are silent)
• transitory problems when trying to do the initial connection (cable unplugged or PPPoE server down) should be detected
• in the installed system:
• target system boots fine with the PPPoE connection set up correctly
• hosts file and host name are set correctly
• permissions are set correctly on the network configuration files and the ppp configuration files (an output of "ls -lR /etc/ppp" in the target would be appreciated)
• loopback interface is configured correctly

Please respond as soon as possible (eddy.petrisor at_sign gmail.com).

[*] I did some tests myself but I can't test everything due to bug #407702 in qemu; some screen shots I made in qemu can be found at http://users.alioth.debian.org/~eddyp-guest/ppp-2.4.4rel-5/screen%20shots/


Update: thanks to some people that did the test, I found out that I made some wrong assumptions in my code. I will make another image tonight and make another call. This will hopefully fix the issue.

I was hoping to find a “green” dry cleaner in Edmonton and have had no luck finding one (so now it is just me and the bathtub and woolite). But I did happen upon this nifty five limes site that helps you locate those super-hippie-hot-spots in major cities in the US and Canada (Edmonton does not count as a major city). It is somewhat incomplete but there is a decent start there.

Suppose you want to try out Xen for the first time, and you're a bit paranoid careful because, well, you don't want to break your system. No problem, just download the Xen 3.0 Demo CD Image (a live CD). Or so I thought; it took me a loong time to even find a download link for that beast. There seems to be no ISO image for 3.0.4, but only for 3.0.3 (gah!). Anyways, the live CD seems to try to mount /dev/sda as my CDROM drive, which is... um... stupid, as that's a harddrive. A SATA harddrive to be more specific. A dm-crypt'ed hard drive to be even more specific. So there's no way the live CD can ever mount that. I was dropped into a minimalist shell, but couldn't figure out how to fix anything from there, and a quick look at the docs didn't reveal anything either. So here's my fix:

• Boot the normal OS, insert the live CD.
• Start the live CD in QEMU: qemu -cdrom /dev/cdrom -boot d
• Done. I had some problems with graphics in QEMU, so I chose the command line boot option of the live CD...

Nice huh? QEMU's hard drive is an IDE drive, it's called /dev/hda (instead of /dev/sda), thus the live CD works fine. (Yes, I'm sure this could be fixed "the right way" too, but this is a nice way to get quick results, i.e. a working Xen test setup)

Steve asks a pretty good question: what is the motivation to work on Free Software in general, and Debian specifically? There are actual scientific studies on that subject as academics try to wrap their head around this strange thing where people do not get paid, but still put in a hell of a lot of work. What motivates me to put in hundreds of, sometimes boring, hours working on this stuff? I honestly don't know. I started doing working on Debian with a desire to make some name and fame for myself; but frankly, if name and fame is what I'm after, I should have stopped doing this a long time ago and should have tried to go work for TV or something. Or I should have been working on some stuff which is central to Debian (either the OS or the Project). So while "name and fame" might've been the reason in the beginning, it's not my motivation today. It could be that I want to help shape the Debian operating system into something useful; that I want to contribute so that the system is something I like to use. But I don't think that's the case; if that was my motivation to work on Debian, I would have more interest in doing some infrastructure work, which I'm not doing: the m68k port is not exactly the most important port of the Debian project, and my most popular package, nbd-server, is installed by 101 popcon submitters, or 0.38% of them all. Why the server seems more popular than the client is a mystery to me, but well. It could be that the Debian project is this warm and fuzzy place which allows me to meet people from the comfort of my bed room, but I don't think that is the case. If I want to meet people, I'll go to a bar, or go sing in the choir, or go play my flute in the ensemble. That's a lot more direct, a lot easier than trying to set up some trip to Scotland, and a lot cheaper, too. And if I want a warm and fuzzy place, then with all due respect, Debian is not what I'm looking for. It could be that by working on Debian, I want to challenge my knowledge and in that way increase it; this would look good on my CV, and it could perhaps satisfy a desire to learn new stuff, all the time. But that's not entirely true. I don't need to be a Debian developer to challenge myself or to learn new stuff; and if I would really want to have something that looks good on my CV, I would be much better off by joinging a project that produces insane huge gobs of code, rather than a project which is perceived to do nothing more than 'just putting stuff in packages'. I think my real motivation is a bit of a mixture of all of the above. I still feel proud when people talk about things I've done, or when people praise me for the code I've written; and I still feel sad when people mock the m68k port, even if 'only jokingly' (because we've pulled off a lot). I often try to file good bug reports when I find issues with Debian, and purposely run unstable on my laptops to help find bugs quickly, in an effort to help turn Debian into something useful. There is a lot of flaming on Debian mailinglists, but there are also a lot of friends—who, contrary to those from the choir and those in the ensemble, actually know what I'm talking about if I say "I'm trying to port Debian to those ColdFire boards, which needs changes in the compiler, the linker, and the C library. Possibly also the assembler". And finally, while Debian work hardly challenges me anymore, it does still allow me to learn new stuff every day—which is quite useful in my day job. So, there you have it. I don't have a specific reason why I'm still a Debian Developer after five years; it's more of a general feeling that being part of Debian is the right thing to do. I guess you could also say I have this feeling that I can't abandon "them"—whoever these "them" might be. Obviously that's incorrect (I've seen much more important people, such as e.g. Herbert Xu, being replaced without much of a hitch), but the feeling still is there, nagging on me. So there you go. What's your motivation?

6.6.2004: Hello! I just started this little blog. There was this discussion on #kde-devel on devel's blogs (well, their lack) and something like planet debian or planet gnome. Clee went ahead and set up planetkde.org (man, this guy is fast). So it came to pass that i asked about some decent blog software; clee suggested pyblosxom, so i just installed it and it works (yay, don't you love Debian?). Now i'm setting it up to match my taste and all :).

If you want another example, one from a company who any developer would agree is an outstanding engineering organization, here's one: "Sun has maintained binary compatibility between operating system releases for nearly a decade, enabling existing Solaris applications to run unmodified on Solaris 10. This means that Solaris applications developed 10 years ago will run on Solaris 10 unchanged, taking full advantage of new and advanced Solaris features."

Yes, it's true that there is outstanding backward binary compatibility in Solaris. However, if you're going to try use that as an argument in favour of Solaris, try again. Have you ever actually used a Solaris system?

• The ugliness on a Solaris system starts with $PATH, which is all over the place: /usr/ucb/bin for the compiler, /usr/gnu/bin (IIRC) for bash, /usr/bin for sed. The FHS is nonexistent.
• Everyone who writes code for the Berkeley socket API knows that Solaris has to be different:
  

  #ifndef sun
  int yes=1;
  #else
  char yes='1';
  #endif
  

• Even if you do it that way, on Solaris you have to say -lsocket.
• I've heard claims that Solaris, partially because of the backward compatibility, is rather slow; that Linux beats the shit out of Solaris on the hardware (SPARC) that was more or less specifically designed for Solaris (and vice versa). Having used it for a short while once, I cannot think of a counterargument for that one.

If you're going to say that backwards compatibility is good and that we should incorporate backwards compatibility into Linux somehow, then please do not point people towards the two ugliest operating systems on the earth with a lot of garbage baggage for the sake of backwards compatibility...

Last July, I started an experiment, called Project Ummikko, with a friend of mine to see how well Linux is suited for a new user who has used Windows for many years, but is not a techie. I installed Debian, with GNOME, for her, and she went cold turkey: she started using Linux only, unless there was something she had to do, but could not achieve under Linux. It has been half a year, and it's time to report on the results. Translating and abbreviating her own words:

The good part of using Linux is that I don't need to worry about viruses or defragmenting the hard disk and so on. I would be happy to remain a Linux users for things like that. In basic everyday use I'm happy. The things that make me want to return to Windows are gaming, flash and other multimedia, and a feeling of helplessness. I want to play Alpha Centauri and adventure games I can borrow from friends. Flash doesn't work, and installing software from Debian via Synaptic is difficult, I'm not comfortable with it. With Windows, I'm used to being able to go online to find a program to solve some problem I have, or some plugin I'm missing, or some toy program I want, and after a few mouse clicks, I have it installed. There's many things that just don't work with Linux, like Second Life, or when my ISP would give two free movie downloads this month and next, but it only works on Windows and Mac. I have a feeling of being left out. I could manage with Linux, with the assumption that I have someone like Lasu to do installation and tweaking. The best thing about this experience? It was interesting to be able to make the experiement, the meta level has been the best thing. The best thing about Linux is the kind of maintenance things like no viruses or defragging, Linux doesn't rot like Windows does.

After we had the above interview, I upgraded her Debian, and this fixed at least most of the problems related to flash. Synaptic remains uncomfortable, and there's not much that can be done about Windows-only software. I was pleasantly surprised by the results. I had expected much worse problems, but I'm happy to report now that Linux really does seem ready for the average Windows user. The uncomfortability of Synaptic may be partly due to the fact that it is a different model from Windows: you get all your programs from one place, instead of anywhere on the Internet, partly due to just not using Synaptic much at all, and partly due to Synaptic not being perhaps as easy to understand as possible. I personally find Synaptic to be very nice, and use it regularly, but I am biased by having used Debian package managers for over a decade. Even if she had learned to use Synaptic, it would, of course, not have been enough: there's lots of Linux software that hasn't been included in Debian. My friend therefore feels that it would be nicer, more liberating, to be able to just download any old Linux software from a web page and install it easily. My conclusions: package management for Debian based systems could do with some work targetted towards neophytes. I am sure there are things that could be done to make package installation easier, less daunting, without dumbing down the system.

Ok then, this is my first serious blog entry. To break the ice, maybe an introduction would be appropriate: My name is Bastian Venthur I’m currently 26 years old and live in Berlin, Germany. I’m studying computer science at the Freie Universit t Berlin and I am Debian Developer since October 2006. I maintain a few packages, mostly KDE related and am quite active in reporting bugs. One of my current hobbies is to juggle. I started a few months ago and already master some neat tricks like Mills Mess, Over the Head and the famous four ball Async Fountain.

I left home a bit late and rushed to the train stop, but the journey was easy after that. There was quite a good turnout at the meeting: Chris (chair), Alex (clerk), Paul (treasurer), Brian (secretary), Malcolm, Paul, Andrew and myself IIRC. Continuing: A promo leaflet is on hold until after funding is sorted out; No mutuals responded to a funding request letter; The reply to the BASIS grant bid is expected some time in January; The database update is waiting on Plymco as far as I could tell. Financial: the clerking contract went about 700 quid over budget last year and has been reduced to a skeleton service until funds are sorted out again. Donations from the Coop Group and Midcounties were forecast but aren't in the bank yet. AGM: the aim is to return to more of an event next year. Holding it in October should hopefully avoid the transport and weather problems of the 2006 event. Fund-raising: Chris to draft a bid for the cooperation fund to try to secure enough money for a support worker. The priorities would be clerking and event organisation, with possibly marketing, communication and news-production tasks. Numbers to come from the support tracker that Alex has been using. Need some sort of corporation to apply. Alex, Brian and myself to assist. 12 February deadline. Reply expected in March. Future work: newsletter deferred to mid-March. News items to Alex. Paul (I think) mentioned that some Healthy Eating Partnerships seem to be promoting their box schemes as 'Food Coops' when they are not cooperatives at all. We need to contact partnerships and find out which is doing what. Alex handed out a few Principle Six speed-networking packs. Interesting idea. Paul mentioned Cornwall Switch which will find the best green energy supplier for you (even if you're not in Cornwall). Next meeting 16 April 2007.

I've been working a bit more on DBus inspector. Python is so much fun and PyGTK just rocks. I love you, guys. :-) Ok, not everything is working right yet. I tried making the app multithreaded, and putting the DBus handling into a second thread, but failed at that so far. Getting threading work right with Python and GTK and DBus is just too much, I guess. :-) Here's a screenshot: You can grab the code temporarily from this location. It's rather crude, undocumented (fortunately Python code is quite easy to read) and still lacks some interesting parts (e.g. icons to differentiate between services, interfaces, methods, signals, ... and of course actually displaying method signatures or even allowing you to invoke them...) - but it's a start. Note that DBus using applications support introspection at varying levels - NetworkManager doesn't have a useful introspection description, and gaim goes the other way by apparently exposing every single method during DBus, so you can do the craziest stuff (but it's hard to find the method you are actually looking for).

I've been working a bit more on DBus inspector. Python is so much fun and PyGTK just rocks. I love you, guys. :-) Ok, not everything is working right yet. I tried making the app multithreaded, and putting the DBus handling into a second thread, but failed at that so far. Getting threading work right with Python and GTK and DBus is just too much, I guess. :-) Here's a screenshot: You can grab the code temporarily from this location. It's rather crude, undocumented (fortunately Python code is quite easy to read) and still lacks some interesting parts (e.g. icons to differentiate between services, interfaces, methods, signals, ... and of course actually displaying method signatures or even allowing you to invoke them...) - but it's a start. Note that DBus using applications support introspection at varying levels - NetworkManager doesn't have a useful introspection description, and gaim goes the other way by apparently exposing every single method during DBus, so you can do the craziest stuff (but it's hard to find the method you are actually looking for).

Dave Cridland posted to maemo-developers again today, spuring me to spend my lunch time checking out his email client instead of doing something productive like eating. It's very interesting. Basically he edits the RFCs for Lemonade, which is a IETF standard for email on mobile devices. Basically it is a set of extensions for IMAP and SMTP that improve their performance over high-latancy low-bandwidth connections (like bad wi-fi or GPRS), such as forward-without-download and efficient re-synchronisation commands. Existing extensions such as a useful IDLE implementation are also used to push new mail notifications to the client. To test the ideas in the real world there is Polymer. Polymer is a simple IMAP client that uses the Lemonade extensions as much as possible, so is ideal for mobile use. There is more: it uses ACAP to store the settings on the Internet (Dave also provides free ACAP accounts) so it's configure once, run anywhere. I've just tried it on my laptop, and it works nicely. But it gets better. There is also Telomer, an email client using Lemonade and designed for Maemo. I've just tried it out, it may be seriously lacking in features at the moment, but it works. Features can be written over time, but it takes serious thought to get something as fast and usable as Polymer on mobile devices. I'll quote Dave:

That all said, once it's started, it connects to the mailserver over GPRS in about 10 seconds and pulls up the summary listing in 15, with a mailbox size of 2,882 messages. With a mailbox with 33,732 messages in, it's a little slower at around 25 seconds. That's still way faster than a desktop client on a LAN, of course, unless that desktop client is Polymer - in which case it'll seem remarkably slow.

This is what we need for a mobile email client. I know I've found my email client of choice on my new N800. NP: Wish You Were Here, Pink Floyd

So I installed Eclipse to do some web development in Java, and this dialog box appeared: I didn’t know what it was, and that was already reported twice (one, two), so I just clicked on Ok , and Eclipse worked correctly. But the next time I started Eclipse, the same box appeared: This time I pressed Cancel to see what happened. Eclipse did not load. So I ran Eclipse again and… well, I’ll spare you the dialog box. Needless to say, I was less than impressed. Now I’m hoping it will eventually get bored of always saying the same thing when starting Eclipse, and graduate to small talk: If not, it could at least take advantage of the fact that it’s being run on a Debian developer’s computer and show this:

Taiwanese phone manufacturer FIC, recently announced the timeline for the release of the FIC Neo1973 smart phone. It’s shaping up to be a very cool device. The phone is nice to look at, has a completely open software stack via the OpenMoko project and at US$350 it’s actually relatively cheap! Feature wise the Neo1973 is relatively similar to the iPhone, right down to using a touchscreen for the user interface. It will be interesting to see how many of the people who have been complaining about the restrictive and walled-garden iPhone model migrate over to the OpenMoko platform. The Neo1973 will work with any GSM cellular network in the world (as opposed to only Cingular in the states, and other apple partners elsewhere) and will allow you to run essentially any application that you want on the phone itself. The contrast in approach between Apple and FIC is stark, and I hope that FIC wins out in the end, although it will no doubt be an uphill battle for them to get anywhere near the mindshare that Apple receives. The one feature that really drew my eye to the Neo1973 is the built-in GPS chipset. For a while now I’ve been looking for a device that would allow me to reveal my current location (possibly obfuscated to a certain radius) to selected family and friends. Once the source code is released in a week or two I imagine that it won’t be long before someone (maybe me…) whips up an application to make this possible. Here’s hoping that the phone lives up to the expectations set for it and that I can come up with a suitable excuse to purchase one when they become available in early March! Update: Found a linuxdevices.com post with some good technical detail on the hardware

We had some wonderful weather yesterday. I've always said that I like snow. It can completely change the landscape in an instant. And it looks so beautiful.

Yesterday we had a nice snowstorm all day. Large, wet flakes. It was the most snow we've had at once in a few years right around here. It was beautiful just like always. It started early in the morning before we got up and continued until almost midnight. This morning, I went out into a big open area and measured the snow -- 7.5".

There are two problems with snow. One is that it's difficult to get anywhere. The other is that it blows into everything.

And guess what -- yesterday was our moving day.

Fortunately, on Friday evening, most of the furniture that needed to go in a pickup did. But we still had to wrap some things in plastic on Saturday. We didn't get everything moved that we wanted to. Between icy ground outside, travel at less than half the usual speed on the roads, and snow blowing everywhere, things were slow. But that's fine; we'll get the rest later.

This was the scene during the move:



Not long after that picture was taken, it was announced that church was canceled today. We kept moving things though.

Although we didn't get everything moved that we had hoped to, we got enough moved to consider ourselves moved in. We have one fully-functional bathroom. Jacob's bedroom and our bedroom are done. The kitchen will get its floor Monday and we'll get appliances Thursday. The only big thing left is guttering, plus there are still a few doorknobs and light fixtures pending. But it was enough that the three of us spent our first night here last night!

We're very appreciative of the help we got from family & friends, who helped us move and brought us food (since we don't have a fridge for the next few days).

Jacob doesn't like change very much (he cried when he noticed that some clutter in our apartment living room was gone). But he likes to learn about his environment. So today, he woke up at 6AM (and got us up at 6AM), spent an hour happily looking around, then promptly started fussing. That's how the day has been for him -- interest and crying.

At about 7:30AM, we were shocked to see a road maintainer plowing our road. Why shocked? Well, nobody else lives on this road for a couple of miles. It's not exactly a popular spot. And it hadn't been in all that great of shape before winter.

Later in the day, I went out to take some pictures. Here's one of our driveway:



Doesn't it look fun?

I decided to see if we could get out. The short answer is yes. The long answer is "yes, if you have patience." After rocking the car back and forth to get it turned around in the yard, I was able to keep up enough speed to get to the road and back. So Terah and I had lunch with my parents, then went into town to get another carload of stuff. There were children out playing everywhere, and well-worn sledding paths down hillsides. Too bad Jacob isn't old enough to enjoy this!

It was last April when we first started thinking about this. By June we had bought the property out here, and in October we moved to the apartment. It's been a long time feeling like we were living somewhere temporarily.

And, right now, it is great to be home.

Postr 0.4 is finally out. This has an all-new Flickr library that uses Twisted, so I don't need to use threads any more. I've had lots of contributions to this release, in fact the change log is too long to summarise... Special features include a Nautilus context menu, GtkUnique support, and a lack of thread related crashes. Thanks to Germán Poó Caamaño, Emmanuele Bassi, Dean Sas and Daniel Stone for their patches and feedback. You can follow the development in the Bazaar branch, or get the Postr 0.4 tarball.