Starting tomorrow I will be on vacation until the 28th of July. Excellent! So if you expect some thing from me, just keep it on hold until the next month :-P .

One week of sunbathing on the Bulgarian seaside. You might ask why Bulgaria and not Romania since both have access to the same sea?

It appears that my predictions about the price of a ticket for a vacation on the Romanian sea side exceeding the price of one in Bulgaria or Greece (including transport) came true (Some might say this was the case last year, too, but this year is more obvious). I'll see if the services will be better, afaik, they should be.

According to the latest news from the Ubuntu camp, Gutsy Gibbon will ship with our beloved eBox, and according to the last post in this thread in the Ubuntu forums, it’s going to be the official configuration tool for services. I went to aKademy with eBox lead developer and workmate, Javier Uruen, and we had the chance to attend to Mark Shuttleworth’s keynote, where he argued about the benefits of having a six-months release cycle for the most popular open source projects (i.e., KDE, Gnome and OpenOffice). I think this release cycle would suit eBox quite well too, and if synced with Ubuntu releases, would make life easier for both eBox developers and packagers, besides enlarging the free software “pulse”. In any case, we’ll continue to provide Debian-based installers where the base system won’t change that often, for those who are not willing to update their servers each six months. Anyway, this is a big leap towards world domination for eBox We are quite happy that eBox made into Ubuntu and we’ll be eager to work with the maintainers to integrate their changes back into eBox. disclaimer: I’m not an “official” eBox developer, so don’t take my opinions as authoritative, they come mostly from pub-talk with Javier

On Wednesday I had a viva for my Master by Research thesis on “Text classification by quality”. After a 15 minute presentation and almost two hours of questions from two of my examiners, I was told that I will receive my Masters degree (after minor corrections to the thesis). It is a great relief and a great reason to celebrate! In order of celebration I will embrace consumerism and get me two things: World of Warcraft: Burning Crusade expansion and a cat. Next week I will be going around animal shelters and cat owners in Riga in a search for a 1-2 months old black, male kitten. It has been my dream to have a cat again since my last cat died of old age 3 years ago. Unfortunately I lived in dormitories where they did not allow pets or in UK. But now, I can finally get one. I am very exited about that

Maj, Amita June and I had a long day on airplanes today, heading to San Francisco. My brother Ted and his partner Nabil have decided to have a commitment ceremony, which is I guess one way of saying "get married". It's casual and fun, just like Ted and Nabil themselves, but Ted means too much to us for us to miss this event. So we spent some miles, dropped everything, and headed out west. Amita's still young enough (under 2) that we can sit with her on our lap. Not only that, but if we get her a seat, we have to bring along a car seat -- more of a hassle than having her on our laps. Still, on a crowded flight it can be kind of hard. Maj is really good at packing for the plane -- putting together food, toys, books and other distractions to get AJ through a long flight. But today tested her skills to the limit -- we had a 2 -hour flight to Dulles, then another 6 hours out to SFO. That's too much for any grown-up, much less a 22-month-old. AJ had a hard time going to sleep at naptime, and we had some crying -- some loud crying. Otherwise, the flight was survivable. I picked up JPod, the last novel from Douglas Coupland, at the airport before we took off. It's a great read -- difficult, exposed, referential, glib. A good read. My dad -- Amita calls him "Pappou", Greek for "grandfather" -- met us at the airport. Amita's usually pretty standoffish with any adult who isn't me or Maj, but she's really comfortable with Pappou. She told him stories about flying while we waited for our bags. "Tita... Airplane! Tita... Raisins! Draw! Stickers!" She got a lot of time to do it, because our luggage took a long time coming off the plane, and two of our bags never came. But it was nice comin' home to my parents' house, who've built a big backyard patio since we were last here. We had pasta and salad on the lanai, and then AJ went down for an easy night's sleep. Soon for me, too. tags: travel amitajune maj lostluggage sanfrancisco dulles jpop douglascoupland

DemoCampMontreal3 DemoCampMontreal3 is next Tuesday, July 24th, at the SAT. I'm excited about the event, since Niko and I will be showing our new project in public for the first time. It looks like there will be a pretty good line-up, and I love going to SAT for DemoCamps. Of course, I'm flying into Montreal at 5AM that morning, but it'll be good nonetheless. tags: democampmontreal3 barcamp barcampmontreal sat

Blog reactions I was glad to see that Creative Commons had a nice response to my essay about Paying wiki contributors. I've had a few people give me private responses, and I think it's an interesting issue that's important for people thinking about wiki, and wiki commercialization, today. tags: cc wiki commercialization

For part of Stage 11, I watched the new Tour live coverage on Sat.1 who bought the German rights. When Sat.1 is busy, Pro7 will cover it. The two stations are owned by the same company, along with Kabel1, N24 and 9Live. The coverage was OK - the same French pictures as everyone else, but fewer extra features than ARD/ZDF. Commentary was a bit pedestrian, but that's like ZDF. I like Eurosport's commentary much more. International Herald Tribune reports that Eurosport's ratings tripled for stage 10 which is unsurprising. Eurosport and Sat.1 both seem to be on the same ~30% of German DVB-T as well as DVB-S. In comments on my last post about this, Thomas asked:

"You don't read German papers, do you?"

No. I've not even tried to buy one since moving to this village.

"I do, and I'm neither outraged nor surprised. It is a fairly logical step in light of the debate and the public reception of the tour, cycling pros, and Team T-Mobile in particular."

Is it public reception? Around 50% of those polled by ZDF disagreed with the decision (according to the IHT link above). Given all the ZDF spin on this, that's shockingly low. Is this driven by the silly debate of Bundestag members, rather than public opinion? (I've still not forgiven them for booting Eurosport off of ZDFvision. CDU seem to like messing ARD/ZDF about.) Are German papers in a feeding frenzy? In some days, they'll move onto football or boxing or something else. Get this in context: it's not like the old scandals where we had pro teams or wives being caught with car boots full of drug kits.

"I'd also bet that T-Mobile will quit as a sponsor."

It didn't seem like that from TV interviews, but I guess they wouldn't say yet. I think if they were going to jump ship, they would have done it after last year's worse problems. AIUI, their contract expires 2010 anyway and I wonder whether all the good publicity from their tour outing in England will help them stay until then.

"Some things belong in pharmacology textbooks and not on TV screens."

Does this mean drugs or incomplete drug tests? ;-)

"If I paid German TV fees, I'd be outraged that this comes that late. But then, I know better and don't have a TV in the first place."

Oh, well! Then I guess nothing would convince you to watch the tour! Philipp Kern commented:

"they did not threaten for a year actually. After the big doping scandal some months ago they explicitly announced that they will drop the Tour de France if a new doping case pops up. Granted, the person in question did dope before the Tour."

We don't know that yet - only one sample has been tested so far and even then, this test is controversial and has been successfully appealed against before. It's only a case. Also, maybe it wasn't the TdF, but here's a comment about ARD in 2006 threatening to drop cycling (scroll to 25.10.).

"The argumentation is that the Tour should not be a contest of the best doping substances like it could have been the last years. But I am probably biased because I don't watch the Tour, or sports in general."

No more biased than ARD/ZDF's producers, it seems. In an interview on itv4, a ZDF producer said they would drop any sporting event with a doping problem like cycling. So, if ZDF have dropped cycling for 1 in 189 participants being accused of doping, then if any footballer is accused of drugs offences, they cannot show any matches involving them. If you want to take football off ZDF, you know what to do... Thijs Kinkhorst reports in "Too much testosterone" that NOS also continues coverage, like our itv. Good on them. Let's applaud any drug cheats getting caught and punished, after we're reasonably sure.

Daniel Martin commented:

"Often, dustups like these are the result of upstream not caring about one or more of the following: 1) Licenses. Many people will release code with no license attached to it at all, which means (Thanks to the wonders of the Berne convention) that no one else can distribute it. 2) Patent restrictions (the gif patent issue is now dead, but there's still patents on some other graphic formats) 3) Restrictions against selling the software for commercial gain, using the software in the military, in biotech, etc. The netpbm copyright file seems to include instances of each of these. I don't know how it escalated into being unable to build based on upstream."

Thanks for the info. I'm still surprised debian doesn't keep a (maybe big) patchset rather than a fork on this one. I don't remember what put me off it, but maybe imagemagick isn't so bad...

What should have been a routine “remove DIMMs and run memtest until things work” procedure to solve a memory error became a lot more complex due to poor error handling in Xen. The following error occured because the tdb database /var/lib/xenstored/tdb was corrupt. To fix it you must rm the file and kill the xenstored process (which will otherwise recreate the file with the same corrupt data). It took me a few hours to work this out. # xm create -c smtp
Using config file “/etc/xen/smtp”.
Error: (28, ‘No space left on device, while writing /local/domain/0/backend/vbd/
18/768/online : 1′) Strangely the command “/etc/init.d/xend restart” does not restart xenstore or xenconsole (which is why running “/etc/init.d/xend stop” before rm’ing the file didn’t do any good). After fixing the above problem I encountered the following error condition. It seems that there is no support for restarting daemons such as xenstored. So I had to reboot the machine. After that it worked. # xm create -c smtp
Using config file “/etc/xen/smtp”.
Error: Device 0 (vif) could not be connected. Hotplug scripts not working. I’ve filed Debian bug 433780 about this.

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It seems that moving a cat is *really* expensive! We're not willing to consider sending her to a shelter just to be killed, but we're hoping to find someone in Montreal, Kingston or Toronto who can take her and love her.

She's 13 years old, declawed, likes to cuddle up. She can be a bit tempermental, but can be pet with a bit of practice. She's been feeling a bit put-out lately since Leif has been born, so someone willing to love her alot would be really appreciated. She's in good health and doesn't need any special pills or food beyond the usual "older cat" food.

Comments here or jbailey@raspberryginger.com if you're interested or know someone.

My nomination for the best use of the phrase “a retarded ponens/tollens showdown”:

Here is what you do not do. You do not start with a mystifying conditional like If the universe is only physical (or whatever), then there is no free will, because how do you know that? You don t. But you may think you do and so you get caught in a retarded ponens/tollens showdown: the universe is physical, ergo no free will, or free will, so the universe is not physical. But, again, through what method of divination do we validate this conditional? None. Because we already know it is false.

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Being a good Debian user

Notes: the bulk of this article was written on the 17th; updates were added in later; this article is really long, you might want to read it in more sessions

Debian's arm port uses hardfloat. This means that apps like rrdtool (graph function) take ages to run because there is no floating point unit. In order to make this faster you'll want to use soft-float emulation. But this support needs to be present in all depended upon libs, including libc, which is an ABI incompatible change which would break all binaries. I can't use the yet-in-development-and-unofficial armel port since the machine has to be up and running almost 24/7 and I can't afford downtime.

So what to do?

Well, obviously use another soft-float enable libc, like uclibc, in parallel withe the hrad-float enabled libc. Debian Sid contains uclibc development libs, but building the whole toolchain is a pain. There is no real support in the distro itself and building on the arm machine is kind of out of the question. I tried a little in a debootstrapped chroot on the native machine, but this was a pain and I was stuck tring to figure out how to disable whitles and bells for rrdtool since I didn't needed any of the perl, tcl or python support. So I stopped, went to bed and decided I'll continue the next day (the day I wrote the biggest part of this article). The future looked dark, trying to build a softfloat uclibc rrdtool on a system that wasn't prepared for that and from which softfloat was pulled away somewhere during etch's development stage....

Deciding to go with the competition - native building

From link to link I found out that gentoo has arm-softfloat-linux-uclibc port, among others, so I decided to use that on the target machine (a NSLU2) in a chroot. Well I stumbled on the low computing power, when I tryed to emerge sync the tree. I gave up un that and tried to use emerge-websync. It looked better, but I didn't got too far with this either since the machine ended up being overloaded, with figures varying from 3 to 8 for the load average (all of them).

Deciding to go with the competition - cross building

It was time to bring in the big guns and I decided I was going to crossbuild those binaries, probably statically since it meant lower risk for things to break on the target machine.


Since I observed that gentoo has a nice tool called crossdev which actually uses emerge (the equivalent of dpkg+apt in Debian world) to make the cross chain tool and saw that they have some really good documentation and a development version of an arm-softfloat-linux-uclibc, I decided I could .

So I went on and downloaded the latest stage3 tarball for x86 (so I can have a gentoo system to start with), made all the necessary things and created a gentoo chroot. I emerge sync-ed, updated portage, installed crossdev (following the nice instructions on the gentoo embedded site about the subject). This took a while, but it went like a breeze. I made the necessary arangements to be able to cross build packages (setting SYSROOT, making that nice xmerge script).

As my goal was to make an arm-softfloat-linux-uclibc binary for rrdtool I tried directly to xmerge rrdtool (of course, first just pretended -p).

Finding bugs in the packages

First bug

All went fine until I found freetype which for some weird reason detected the i486-pc-linux-gnu-gcc compiler as i486-pc-linux-gnu (observe the missing trailing -gcc). I looked over the logs and determined that the CC_BUILD environment variable was not set. So exported CC_BUILD=i486-pc-linux-gnu-gcc and xmerged the library.

(While trying to fix this issue I entered #gentoo-embedded on freenode and actually met Yuri Vasilev, whom I had met in Edinburgh, at DebConf. Look for the video about Ligusk if you are interested about his project to make a Debian like distribution based on Gentoo. It was nice to meet a friendly "face" - as much you can say that online.)


I reported the bug (already there is a patch, I haven't tested, but looks ok) and the workaround in the gentoo bugzilla... after creating an account, since I never used that BTS before.

Second bug

Next pain was libart_lgpl whose upstream, for some comfortability reason chose to detect the target type sizes (and basically ignoring inttypes.h) with a small program which was built with the cross compiler which later was supposed to be ran on the host. I don't think is necessary to say that i failed, of course, since the binary was an ARM binary, while the host was an x86 machine. Yupee! not.

Ok, two bugs, no softfloat rrdtool yet. I reported this second bug and tried to work around the issue. Since I didn't really used too much a gentoo system, I wanted to know details and what possibilities I had. I got some really nice tips from "solar" (aka Ned Ludd) on #gentoo-embedded. He pointed out that while building a package one can press CTRL+z, do some stuff, like altering the Makefile.in file in the build directory and then fg back. Ok, cool.

All I need now is somebody with direct access to an arm machine that can compile and run for me the program in question. seanius on #debian-devel was kind enough to do this for me and, to my surprize, I got the same output header file as I got in the host x86 chroot. But that detail is not important, let's just compile that rrdtool. Well, first libart_lgpl...

Ok, I CTRL+Z-ed the build process just after the configure stage ended, cd-ed into the build directory, I tampered with the Makefile.in file and changed that line from

./gen_art_config > gen_art_config.h

into

cp /gen_art_config.h.arm gen_art_config.h

Haha! In your face! Ok, nasty did was done so I fg-ed and went on confident that I will get my hands on that rrdtool very soon. The package build ended succesfully, without any other suprizes, so I went for the graal!


xmerging rrdtool, the bugs don't stop

xmerge -v rrdtool

Bla, bla, bla.... bla, bla, bla, what do you know, there are a few IEEE math function tests in the configuration script of rrdtool. They failed. I don't know why, but I have a feeling that this should be happening on softfloat or even maybe the rrdtool source is not that cross compile aware. I didn't care that much, so I did what I knew best, tampering with an ongoing build.

This time is was a little bit harder to catch since I had to wait for the source to unpack (well, there is a larger frame, but that is the rough timing) and at that moment CTRL+Z the build.

I didn't had much time to waste, so after looking shortly over the tests I realized I should just ignore the error and look for the "failing command" that was interrupting my beloved build. Muhahah!

Thank God for verbose error messages, I could find the place fast and chaged the two "exit 1" statements into two harmless 'echo "Ignoring IEEE math errors"', sic. I had to do this a few times since I got the timping wrong, at some point I got the syntax wrong (at which point I remembered the cp trick I did earlier and saved the modified file in /configure.rrdtool )...

xmerging rrdtool and the 4th bug

After passing past this stage, I got a compilation error which, judging from the command, meant that the linker tried to link the target (arm) binary against the host (x86) libraries.

Oooook, this is not going to stop me! I look at the Makefile.in to try understand why this happened and then realized it wasn't worth it for me to try to fix it the right way. So I cheated once again! Muhaha, I just ran some useful commands which I'll let you feast your eyes to:

ln -sf /usr/arm-softfloat-linux-uclibc/usr/lib/libart_lgpl_2.so /usr/lib/
ln -sf /usr/arm-softfloat-linux-uclibc/usr/lib/libpng12.a /usr/lib/
ln -sf /usr/arm-softfloat-linux-uclibc/usr/lib/libfreetype.so /usr/lib/

Ok, good to go. Of course, I had to stop again the build to copy the "fixed" configure script that ignored IEEE math errors, but that is already history.

And, believe it or not, actually the build succeded. I had a cross built rrdtool using shared libraries built against softfloat ucllibc. No guarantees about its correctness, but it built!

This is when I decided to start writing this article.

Still there are things to do

I will have to do a few things before being happy about the victory:

• check that all the resulted binaries are indeed ARM ELF files, and not Intel x86. It appears the shared libs are already.
• done, they are (checked the next day)
• figure out qpkg (is a utility from portage-utils which seems to be a way to make binary packages) to package somehow the result of this work or maybe just ignore it and use plain cp
• see how I can fit together both the softfloat uclibc binaries and the native debian binaries on the same filesystem, including ld.so configuration...
• but I fear this will be a nightmare, so I might decide to go with static compilation of rrdtool, which I don't think it will be quite straight forward given the experiences describe above; there could be also the size issue to take into account, and since the NSLU2 has only 32MB of RAM, this could be problematic
• I think I'll have to use a statically linked binary after all (note added late, the second day)
  
• see if the rrdtool binary really works and if all the work payed off, performance wise - it should, taking into account what I have heard from wookey during the debconf7 talk about the armel (warning, 73MB ogg file) port
• be happy with the solution I got or wait for the Debian armel port to catch up and switch to that asap
• if I'll have to do the switch I'll probably think of ways of migrating the whole system from arm to armel, and not to reinstall everything; this might prove useful for the whole debian armel port, when people are working on migration plans, since arm will be deprecated in favour of armel

Not so long time ago i used to be a hardcore photography taker. I would carry a camera everywhere i went, and took hundreds of pictures. I even had a darkroom where to develop my b&w films. But digital came, and it was easier to shoot, check, re-shoot, erase,… you know, all the “benefits” you get with a digital: you care less what you are shooting because it is inexpensive to erase what went not-so-good. It all started again getting into shape last month, before our trip to Spain and France, when i gave my girlfriend my Polaroid camera. She was amazed and bought some film for it. In Barcelona we found a lomography shop, where i purchased a fisheye2 camera. And it finally happened 2 weeks ago when i revisited a flickr.com page of a guy who lives in NY and takes pictures daily. I was amazed, and following some links i ended up learning about Lomography.com and the Lomo LC-A’s. It was monday last week when i purchased a sealed, unused Lomo LC-A for 80e and few hours later i had my first film in several years in the shop for development. Now it is 2 weeks later (almost) and i have purchased few other items: a wide angle for my serviced old Pentax ME-1, few 120 rolls for my Yashica D, some more 35mm rolls for it (i will mod the case with some foam to insert 35mm rolls and take full 3.8×6 takes), an Olympus XA, a Minox 35ML and a couple of old FEDs. All together for less than 350e. My flicker page already reflects the activity i have been enjoying here and there. I admit it needs some cleanup, some pro upgrade and some descriptions added, but with time i will get there.

My company, Atos Origin, will provide at least on build server (2 Xeon - 4 core server) for SvnBuildStat. I expect to be able to build KDE-base packages in a decent timing :). SvnBuildStat source are now on Collab-qa SVN repository. It was a Debian Games project before. Not in the topic and thanks to Madcoder I use the awesome Vimperator now. The Firefox Iceweasel extension provide a nice Vim like key binding for the browser. It’s so …errr… wOOt :).

Admittedly I’ve not been working much on Webconverger in the past couple of weeks. Sorry about that. However yesterday I started plugging away at a couple of things and this morning I have had a couple of business enquiries! Goes to show you’ve got to show some activity in the project otherwise people won’t contribute. I’ve been dragging my heels the last weeks as I am starting to realise a Webconverger image for each locale is too hard on my computing resources. So I am working on getting all the iceweasel-l10n-*, myspell-* etc. things in one CD. And dropping http://download.webconverger.com/i18n. Users will have to enter in locale definition in manually, else please purchase a customized CD. Ok, I’ve just released 2.26 which is now double the size with all the locales & dictionaries I could find crammed in there. Also I re-enabled printing. Download the Webconverger Web kiosk and tell me what you think. There is a Debian installer mode (for hard drive installs) I am experimenting with, so Webconverger will be less of a LiveCD/USB, and more of a “distribution”.

Today I decoded to disable ArchZoom. The reason is that it is not much used and anyway everything has been moved to Subversion. Also I never liked how it works and how slow it is (the main reason for this is Arch slowness). However Arch repositories are still available at http://arch.cihar.com/ and probably will be still available for long time.

A common meme is that the media is biased towards the political left. This meme was deliberately created to encourage well-meaning journalists to be more generous in their reporting of Neo-Cons in a misguided attempt at being fair and also as a mechanism for refuting criticism of any media reports that criticise Neo-Cons. The ABC has been criticised for being biased towards the left as part of this attack on fair media and have recently demonstrated that they are in fact biased towards the Neo-Con ideas by airing a pseudo-documentary about climate change The Great Global Warming Swindle. The fake documentary has been refuted by many scientists, here is one by George Monbiot published in The Age. I wonder whether this blog post will get Google adverts related to Nostradamus and UFOs - I’m sure that the google search engine has worked out that cranks are interested in that fake-doco.

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Patrick Sinkewitz has tested positive for testosterone, and German public broadcasters ARD and ZDF have instantly canceled reporting on the tour except for more doping "news". The Germans broadcasters are going out of their mind in their witchhunt. Luckily the rest of the world seems more sensible. A.S.O. asks whether they're supposed to stop doing tests if apparently one positive is enough for ARD and ZDF to cancel everything. Manager Luuc Eisenga of the T-Mobile team asserts that newspapers will keep on reporting about business news even if one company is accused of fraud. Dutch public broadcaster NOS says: "We're here to report on what happens in the tour, not to exercise moral judgement over it." I'm happy that I can just continue to watch the tour even if one cyclist crosses the line.

Just a few hours before the public release of the portal we work on one of the cluster machines get overloaded by issues no relevant for the point. The fact is once the machine started to not answer properly so it was fenced by some other node, but the problem was once this automatic action was held, the whole 6 machines GFS cluster went down letting all the machines unusable.

This, in addition to all of the previous issues we suffered on GFS, made us really thinking about purging GFS in favor of NFS. It was no an easy decision as it was fully against all our previous decisions but we weren't confident about GFS in the production systems. So we migrated it in a time record configuring everything by night so at six o'clock service would be held properly. And we managed to fulfill this purpose. We made it!

We are now tired after about 27 continuous working hours but the overall result was quite acceptable. I'm still proud about or design (not so much about my own decissions) which allowed us to make this king of changes so quickly.

But you can be sure I don't think we will never again think about installing GFS on any system as it seems not being production suitable (as RedHat even says so). And it is not only because the buggy GFS2 (at least, at present date) but for the sensation of instability all over the time we had it installed.

So in a few hours our architecture has been changed, but it was setup for the very moment we were accepting requests.

Eric S. Raymond has apparently begun work on a new version of Emacs' built-in version control (VC) mode which addresses one of VC's historical shortcomings: its file-centric model. VC was originally designed for RCS, which tracks each file individually.

"NewVC" now has the basic infrastructure to manipulate changesets for backends that support them (Subversion, Arch, Bazaar, Mercurial); there's no UI yet but it looks promising... This change was long overdue, committing several files in one go is a must-have nowadays even with less advanced tools like CVS and having a common framework can only be good. Over the years, a number of more advanced interfaces like PCL-CVS and psvn.el have been developed to compensate for VC's defects, all with subtly different keybindings, which makes for a rather annoying experience.

I bet the folks over at DVC aren't too pleased though, since NewVC will probably make DVC mostly irrelevant.

It seems to be carefully avoiding Weston (scared of The Kaiser Chiefs perhaps), but The Bicycology Bikeride 2007 will call at Bristol this weekend and Yeovil on Tuesday, before finishing in Exeter next weekend.