Maj, Amita June and I took a ride up to San Francisco to see our friends Jack and Tricia in China Basin. Jack started wikiHow, and we've become friends over the last year or so as we're both learning about growing big wikis bigger. We had good lunch from Specialties and talked about their recent trip to Oahu. Then we raced back to Mountain View in time to have dinner at Chevys with my brother Andy, sister-in-law Pam, their two daughters, my parents and Pam's mother Midge. A big party, but we managed to get along, even with 3 girls under 4 years old around. Maj had a cranberry margarita bigger than her head, and Amita June ate her complimentary ice-cream cone all by herself. tags: jack herrick tricia herrick wikihow specialties oahu

I support advertising on Wikipedia Mike Linksvayer has a great follow-up on my discussion in Journal/11 Niv se CCXV about advertising in Wikipedia. He notes quite astutely that a $100M/year budget, based on Web advertising, would put the Wikimedia Foundation ahead of almost any other non-profit organization in the world. $100M is a mind-boggling sum of money to leave uncollected. Think that number's gotta be off by a couple of digits? Mike points out that "In 2005 the Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla Corporation combined had revenue from all sources of $52.9M." Could Wikipedia get something on the same order of magnitude? Almost certainly. Among other things, he suggests that contributors to the current Wikimedia fundraising drive add a simple comment to their donations: "I support advertising on Wikipedia." Great idea! tags: wikipedia advertising mike linksvayer

l33t So, I got a notice from Aeroplan, Air Canada's frequent-flier-miles program, that with all the travel I'd done in 2006, I'd almost be eligible for their Elite benefits level. I'd done 24,341 miles of travel last year -- mostly with trips to California, Portland and Copenhagen -- and the elite threshold was 25K. Today I was reviewing my 2006 flying record and realized that I wasn't credited for one leg of one flight to the West Coast, so I called up and got the miles. Starting in March, I'm gonna be in the the l33t crowd at Aeroplan. Rad! tags: aeroplan air canada l33t

Happy New Year! Happy 2007!

And a really happy one!

After the cloud of ideas and subjects on the last post, giving the clear idea that I should keep this blog more up-to-date, here is an important note that is missing (including old news that I should had post but didn't, sorry for that). I'm aware that a few people are interested in how the Debian NM process evolves from person to person, on my last update on that topic, I told you that I was recommended to the DAM by my AM. Almost three months later (2006-11-18) Myon (Christoph Berg, Front Desk Member) couldn't find my final report, he pinged my AM and one week later everything was fine again and I got approved to the next step: DAMnation. On the Christmas' evening I got a nice gift from Joerg, DAM approval. Yesterday (2007-01-02) I got the nice e-mail with the subject: New Debian maintainer Felipe Augusto van de Wiel (Thanks to James Troup, aka, elmo). The entire process took me 8 months and 10 days. I would like to say thanks to everybody that helped me pass thru this experience: Otavio Salvador (my advocate and mentor), Christian Perrier and Luk Claes (Mentors and Uploaders), Clément Stenac (my AM), Christoph Berg (Front Desk), Joerg Jaspert and James Troup (DAMs). They are directly involved in my NM process, but they were not alone, thanks for every single person that helped me with tips and hints, that took some time to teach me and all the people behind different projects in Debian (I really start naming everybody but then I realize that it got very large for Planet): Debian Brasil, Debian Volatile (aba, zobel, sgran), Release Team, Debian Women, Debian i18n Task Force and Debian l10n Brazilian Portuguese, Debian Weekly News Team, buildd.net project, Alioth admins and staff, Debian Installer Team, Debian Kernel Team, Debian Mentors, DebConf Team, OFTC Staff, Debian QA Team, Debian Doc Team, Debian WWW Team, Debian Admin Team (DSA)! People, you know who you are, thank you VERY much! You can check my Status Page to see more details about my NM process and more information about the acronyms used on this post. Now, Brazil has 17 Debian Developers (not counting the one that already retired). :-)

Sven Mueller commented:

"There is a better solution for building packages if you don't have a local unstable machine up. Use pbuilder (w/ or w/o the pdebuild "frontend"). I had refrained from setting up pbuilder for quite a while, and was amazed how easy it was when I eventually did. The only "problem" is that you probably want to make sure that at least "debian/rules clean" works even under Debian/stable. But I personally like to keep my packages buildable under stable anyway (since I usually use backports of them on production systems)."

I tried pbuilder at first and it failed because of the aforementioned debootstrap stable/unstable difference. After I read up on debootstrap, I didn't really see what pbuilder added to the system besides more tarball processing, so I didn't bother trying it again after debootstrap worked. Am I missing out on anything important? Mark Brown commented:

"pbuilder provides management of the chroot environments (you can have several set up and it'll let you choose between and update them) and a convenient front end for building packages in a chroot (you can just point it at a package and say "go build this in a chroot")."

I'm probably being dense, but I still don't see a benefit. A chroot is more-or-less just a tree on the disk so I can have several set up anyway, updating them is just running update inside the chroot and I just mv the package into the chroot and say "go in that chroot and build this". Maybe pbuilder just isn't beneficial for me.

[RV Heraclitus SE Asia voyage: blog photos] Arrived at Ko Phuket a few days ago, I'm off the ship and at a hotel. In Bintan, we saw an interesting looking resort with plenty of coconut trees, logs and other stuff floating in the harbour, a snake oil merchant (with a live cobra), barges and transformer ferries, pouring rain and bad drainage. We left Bintan, went south for Selat Durian, then north past Singapore Straits, into the infamous Straits of Malacca and north past Malaysia and to the tourist island of Phuket. Along the way, we saw the coals of sunset, massive jellyfish in the dark green water, huge queues of massive ships covering the horizon as we passed the entrance to the Straits of Singapore, lights from Singapore in the distance, the pirate-free Straits of Malacca, where many large cargo and other ships passed us, the fleet of lights/boats that sprung up as if from nowhere some 50 miles off Phukey, the last sunrise on the ship (in a bay near Phuket) and an awesome NYE party on the ship. Leaving the Heraclitus has been hard, I'm gonna miss that black and red ship and the awesome crew who got us the 3000 or so nautical miles from Cairns to Phuket. Now it is time to visit some Thai Linux developers and return to Australia.

For the fifth time in a row, I started yet another year with 5k race by participating in the 22th New Year's Day 5k at the lakefront. The race had decent conditions. Chicago is currently having unusually mild weather, which is an extra bonus. It was well over 50 degrees yesterday, but a little cooler around fourty this morning, and unfortunately overcast. And luckily fairly little wind as it can be unplesant at the lake. Following some mild training runs both Saturday and Sunday, I took it relatively easy and finished around 20:15 or 20:20 -- I forgot to stop the Garmin at the finish, and the official results are not yet published. Not a bad time given that I haven't really trained since the last marathon.

Or, more specifically, bands I started listening to in 2006:

• Architecture in Helsinki
• Beulah
• Camera Obscura
• Casiotone for the Painfully Alone
• Christine Fellows
• Go Sailor
• Grandaddy
• Jap Jap
• Mirah
• Neutral Milk Hotel
• Reindeer Section
• Schwervon!
• The Mountain Goats
• The Pipettes
• The Polyphonic Spree
• Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players
• Track Star
• Tullycraft

I have just been installing a Xen domU on Debian Etch. I'll blog about installing dom0 later when I have a test system that I can re-install on (my production Xen machines have the dom0 set up already). The following documents a basic Xen domU (virtual machine) installation that has an IP address in the 10.0.0.0/8 private network address space and masquerades outbound network data. It is as general as possible.

lvcreate -n xen1 -L 2G /dev/vg

Firstly use the above command to create a block device for the domU, this can be a regular file but a LVM block device gives better performance. The above command is for a LV named xen1 on an LVM Volume Group named vg.

mke2fs -j /dev/vg/xen1

Then create the filesystem with the above command.

mount /dev/vg/xen1 /mnt/tmp
mount -o loop /tmp/debian-testing-i386-netinst.iso /mnt/cd
cd /mnt/tmp
debootstrap etch . file:///mnt/cd/
chroot . bin/bash
vi /etc/apt/sources.list /etc/hosts /etc/hostname
apt-get update
apt-get install libc6-xen linux-image-xen-686 openssh-server
apt-get dist-upgrade

Then perform the basic Debian install with the above commands. Make sure that you change to the correct directory before running the debootstrap command. The /etc/hosts and /etc/hostname files need to be edited to have the correct contents for the Xen image (the default is an empty /etc/hosts and /etc/hostname has the name of the parent machine). The file /etc/apt/sources.list needs to have the appropriate configuration for the version of Debian you use and for your preferred mirror. libc6-xen is needed to stop a large number of kernel warning messages on boot. It's a little bit of work before you get the virtual machine working on the network so it's best to do these commands (and other package installs) before the following steps. After the above type exit to leave the chroot and run umount /mnt/tmp.

lvcreate -n xen1-swap -L 128M /dev/vg
mkswap /dev/vg/xen1-swap

Create a swap device with the above commands.

auto xenbr0
iface xenbr0 inet static
pre-up brctl addbr xenbr0
post-down brctl delbr xenbr0
post-up iptables -t nat -F
post-up iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o eth0 -s 10.1.0.0/24 -j MASQUERADE
address 10.1.0.1
netmask 255.255.255.0
bridge_fd 0
bridge_hello 0
bridge_stp off

Add the above to /etc/network/interfaces and use the command ifup xenbr0 to enable it. Note that this masquerades all outbound data from the machine that has a source address in the 10.1.0.0/24 range.

net.ipv4.conf.default.forwarding=1

Put the above in /etc/sysctl.conf, run sysctl -p and echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/conf/all/forwarding to enable it.

cp /boot/initrd.img-2.6.18-3-xen-686 /boot/xen-initrd-18-3.gz

Set up an initial initrd (actually initramfs) for the domU with a command such as the above. Once the Xen domU is working you can create the initrd from within it which gives a smaller image.

kernel = "/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.18-3-xen-686"
ramdisk = "/boot/xen-initrd-18-3.gz"
memory = 64
name = "xen1"
vif = [ '' ]
disk = [ 'phy:/dev/vg/xen1,hda,w', 'phy:/dev/vg/xen1-swap,hdb,w' ]
root = "/dev/hda ro"
extra = "2 selinux=1 enforcing=0"

The above is a sample Xen config file that can go in /etc/xen/xen1. Note that this will discover an appropriate bridge device by default, if you only plan to have one bridge then it's quite safe, if you want multiple bridges then things will be a little more complex. Also note that there are two block devices created as /dev/hda and /dev/hdb, obviously if we wanted to have a dozen block devices then we would want to make them separate partitions with a virtual partition table. But in most cases a domU will be a simple install and won't need more than two block devices.

xm create -c xen1

Now start the Xen domU with the above command. The -c option means to take the Xen console (use ^] to detach). After that you can login as root at the Xen console with no password, now is a good time to set the password.

Run the command apt-get install udev, this could not be done in the chroot before as it might mess up the dom0 environment. Edit /etc/inittab and disable gettys on tty2 to tty6, I don't know if it's possible to use them (the default and only option for xen console commands is tty1) and in any case you would not want 6, saving a few getty processes will save some memory.

Now you should have a basically functional Xen domU. Of course a pre-requisite for this is having a machine with a working dom0 installation. But the dom0 part is easier (and I will document it in a future blog post).

As a start, I just want to quote and link to what Ganneff said last year already: Thanks, Have a good new year and continue the good work!

Then I look at the destruction these cats have caused. I look at the damage to the really nice dining suite we bought shortly before moving over here. The leather chairs are scratched terribly. The nice wooden table top has scratches in it as well, because they liked to use it as a playground. I was setting the table tonight because we ve got people coming round for dinner (it s been a while), and I saw first hand the extent of the damage. I was so pissed off I could have cried.

If you have a little patience, you can cut their nails either with a cat nail trimmer (5 euros I paid, and that s the best money I ever spent on these cats, aside from neutering) or plain normal human nail clippers.

I have been doing it for Vi and Emacs since they were kittens, and then for Jazz when he replaced Emacs and who had never had his nails trimmed. I even do it for Lola, who is declawed and a very alpha female cat, on her back paw's nails.

Sure, it takes patience, it is best not to do it by force, so wait until they are happily asleep and pet them, then cut one. Get them used to you touching their nails, by making them go out of their claw when you pet them. Do one nail at a time, until they are all used to it and will just let you go through the whole 4 paws at once.

You can google around for techniques, but start reading this. The whole about.com site is filled with great advice for cat owners.

My furniture is still in good shape after two years of cats at home, yes, they love to bite the curtains, they scratch my favourite chair, they drop stuff on the floor and break it, they help me in whatever I am doing (painting, sawing, making the bed...), and they steal cat toys away from me and hide them in secret cat hiding places.

But things are just things, stuff is just stuff, curtains are replaceable, so is furniture. Start trimming their nails the sooner the better, and do not regret these three furry friends found you.

While reading the discussion of Vista security on Bruce Schneier's blog it occurred to me that comparing the issues of DRM that face MS with the issues faced by SE Linux developers provides some benefits.

SE Linux is designed to enable the owner of a computer to effectively enforce security policies to protect their system integrity and the confidentiality of their data. Some of the SE Linux users (military users) use all the available features, but most people only use the targeted policy which provides a sub-set of the system integrity and data confidentiality protections that are available to give a greater ease of use.

Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux ship with the SE Linux targeted policy enabled by default. This policy is not something that most users notice. The main program that is commonly used which might have an issue with the default SE Linux policy is Apache. Fedora and RHEL systems that do not run Apache (which is most of them) can run SE Linux with almost no costs.

setsebool -P httpd_disable_trans 1
/etc/init.d/httpd restart

It seems clear to me that there is no good reason for disabling SE Linux by default. There are reasons for running a particular daemon in the unconfined_t domain via the FOO_disable_trans boolean. EG to run Apache without restrictions you would type the above commands.

In spite of the SE Linux targeted policy being so easy to use, the fact that it prevents certain daemon compromises from allowing immediate control of the system, and also prevents some kernel exploits from working, there are still some people who turn it off when installing Fedora and RHEL systems and advise others to do so.

Given this great fear of some people to use a technology that is specifically designed for their own benefit I find it difficult to imagine that any users will be inclined to accept the MS DRM technology that is specifically designed to go against their interests.

ESR claims that the 64bit transition is the critical period for Linux to move on the desktop. While he makes many interesting observations I don't find his argument convincing. Firstly current P4 CPUs with PAE can handle significantly more than 4G of RAM (64G is possible now). Secondly it's quite possible to run a 64bit kernel with 32bit applications, this means that you can use a 64bit kernel to access >64G of RAM with each 32bit application getting direct access to something slightly less than 4G of virtual memory. As ESR's point seems based on total system memory the 4G per application doesn't seem to be an issue. As an aside the only applications I've used which could benefit from >4G are database servers (in the broadest interpretation - consider an LDAP server as a database) and JVM environments. Again it would not be difficult to ship an OS with mostly 32bit code that has a 64bit kernel, JVM, and database servers.

I hope that Vista will be a good opportunity for mass transition to Linux. Vista offers little that users desire, many things that will hurt them, and is expensive too!

With Vista you pay more for the OS and more for the hardware (Vista has the usual excessive Windows hardware requirements plus the extra hardware for TPM encryption) without providing anything substantial in return.

What I want to see next is support for Security Enhanced X to protect desktop environments against hostile X clients. This will make a significant difference to the security of Linux desktop environments and provide another significant benefit for choosing Linux over Windows. While MS is spending their effort in making their OS act against the best interests of the users we will keep making Linux enforce the access controls that users need to protect their systems. Hopefully Linux users will choose to use SE-X, but if they don't they are given the freedom to make that choice - unlike the poor sods who use Windows.

Since I have been having a digital camera since a few weeks now, I've had a need for an application to manage my pictures. The two applications that people have pointed me to are f-spot and digiKam, which also seem to be the most popular applications in this category for Linux. Since I use neither KDE nor GNOME as my user interface, it doesn't matter much to me which I install; so I've tried them both. Their feature set is quite different; unfortunately, though, they both have some features which the other doesn't, which makes choosing for one or the other rather hard. Since their on-disk format is rather different, it's impossible to use them both at the same time—at least not if I don't want to enter commentary and tags each and every time; so I'll have to choose one or the other based on their features. Since that requires me to actually compare them, I thought I might as well make a blog post out of that. Note, though, that this comparison is in no way intended to be complete; it only compares those features which I really care about. Features digiKam

• Stores pictures in albums; these albums can be created hierarchically, and are created on disk as the directory lay-out in which to store pictures. One picture can be chosen as an example picture per album.
• Pictures can have tags, comments, and a score (on a scale of one to five stars) applied to them. Tags can be created hierarchically; the default tagset is empty. Tags can be made to have icons that are otherwise available to KDE attached to them, to make them more immediately visually recognizable, but selecting pictures to fulfill that function seems impossible.
• Has an interface to manage pictures in gallery and gallery 2; it can view, add, and remove pictures in that gallery.
• The selector dialog which is used to upload pictures is rather spartanic; it allows one to select pictures by filename and by album; pictures aren't even shown before upload (bug filed).
• Pictures can be filtered by tag, album, or date; I haven't been able to find an interface to filter pictures by score (it is possible to sort them by score in any view, though).
• A KDE application, so written in C++, which is a compiled language; i.e., rather fast.

F-spot

• Does not know the concept of albums
• Pictures can have tags and comments applied to them. Tags can be created hierarchically; the default tag set contains (amongst others) People, Places, and Events, suggesting that f-spot encourages the use of tags where Albums would be used in the case of digiKam. Tags can have icons which are otherwise available to gnome selected as their icon, or one can select a picture to fulfill that function (in fact, it selects the first picture which receives a tag to do that by default)
• Does not know the concept of scoring; instead, the default tagset contains a tag Favourites, suggesting a scoring system with a binary scale.
• Uploading pictures can be done by selecting them, and choosing the right option in the menu system. As a result, all filtering options otherwise available can be used to select which pictures to export (just filter the view, then select all pictures in the view).
• Uploading pictures will optionally also export comments that were applied to it.
• Since it does not know the concept of albums, pictures cannot be stored in a one-directory-per-album lay-out. Instead, pictures are stored in a one-directory-per-day layout, using a yyyy/mm/dd format. Unfortunately, this also means that no picture metadata (tags, comments) is easily available to command-line applications.
• Apart from the ability to upload pictures to gallery or gallery 2, does not interface with it in any way; gallery is a write-only storage medium to f-spot.
• Written for mono, a system that requires a runtime environment to translate instructions at runtime from some sort of virtual machine code, and which uses garbage collection all over; i.e., rather slow, especially after you've been using it for a while.

My opinion After having used f-spot for a few weeks before I tried digiKam, I have to be honest and say that I don't like the concept of albums. They do not add value; everything they allow you to express can equally well be expressed with tags. Additionally, one can categorize a picture in only one album, whereas it's possible to categorize pictures in as many tags as you would want. Just creating one album which contains all my pictures, with tagging used for categorizing, doesn't help either; that way, digiKam would store all my pictures in a single flat directory, which would become problematic when the number in the picture filenames wraps around. I do love the scoring thing in digiKam. A favourites tag just doesn't cut it; and creating five tags for scoring would make things like find all pictures that have a score of three or above rather cumbersome, and sort by score outright impossible. However, the fact that it's not possible to filter by score makes it all rather useless. The export to gallery function in digiKam is horrible. I have to select my pictures blindly; none of the metadata which I tack on them can be used to help select which pictures I want. Workaround: use whatever filtering is available to select the right pictures and add them to a temporary album from which I then upload all pictures, but that's silly (and requires disk space for no good reason). Additionally, there seems to be a bug in the interface, which means that I have to babysit an upload (with no workaround). And I can't even view my pictures to spend the time waiting. Bah. F-spot isn't without problems of its own. Due to a bug in mono, it crashes rather often on my PowerPC laptop. When that happens, it can't be restarted until the X server is restarted. Workaround: use Xnest, but that makes it impossible to view pictures in full-screen mode. Also, since f-spot is a GNOME application, its options dialog is as helpful as a pair of soccer shoes when you're out swimming. No surprises there. Conclusion Which one do I prefer? I'm not sure. The digiKam upload interface is positively annoying, especially the bug which requires me to click continue after every picture. For that alone, I might ditch it. On the other hand, it has a slew of interesting features (the scoring, to name one) that f-spot lacks, and that pull me more towards digiKam. I guess I'll have to give it a few days of thought. But hey, at least I know where I stand now.

Regarding my previous posting, the first thing that I wanted to release is called "Stuff To Do", and is a simple, elegant priority queue for getting things done. It lets you reprioritize, track time spent on tasks, generate reports on time spent, and most importantly, share with other users. You can create groups of people who can view one another's tasks, and give tasks to other users, all via a very intuitive interface (javascript is, however, required). It's all meant to stay out of your way as much as possible, even the time tracking requires only that you visit the browser window every so often to let it know you're there, rather than fiddling with (and sooner or later forgetting about) start and stop buttons. Perhaps it's not accurate down to the second, but the idea is to give you a general idea of what you've been up to, rather than something you have to slavishly click on all the time. The group interface is also meant to be easy to use to get a quick idea of what other people are working on, or share tasks with other people. For instance, if you're a project manager, you could create a bunch of tasks, and then just drag and drop them to other people in the system. You can't change other people's priorities (yet), because I think it's better if you simply ask them yourself - technology isn't a substitute for communication! While I work on the paypal interface (I looked into Google Checkout, but it's still got some limitations), I'm going to let people sign up for the group-enabled version with six months for free. It won't cost too much per user when I roll it out in any case, probably somewhere south of $20. The basic version is likely to remain free as long as I can cover hosting costs. I've been using it myself at work and home for the past month or so, along with a few of my colleagues, and it seems to fill a nice niche in between more heavyweight issue tracking tools like JIRA, and the index cards/bulletin board we'd been using. Check it out - I hope you like it! In any case, let me know what you think.

We had a great day on the coast yesterday, just the three of us -- Maj, me, and Amita June. We drove over Highway 92 from my parents' place in Los Altos Hills, a pretty steep and winding highway, down to Half Moon Bay on the peninsula's coastline. We were going to head up to Montara Beach, one of my favorite places in the Bay Area, but it's a bit of a drive and we had plans to be back in Mountain View for dinner. So instead we turned off at the nearest coastal access -- Venice Beach, right in HMB -- and parked for a little beach time. Unfortunately, the strong winds and storms that we've had in the Bay Area this week have also caused higher-than-normal surf. We couldn't actually get to the beach from our parking lot -- Frenchman's Creek was blocking the staircase down to the sand. We think it might have been diverted by the high surf and winds. Anyways, we had to walk about 20 minutes out of the way to actually get down to the beach. Which was, of course, fantastic. I don't think there's anything quite like a Costanoan beach on a December day. The Bay Area's Pacific coast is quite unfairly ignored by most visitors, but a drive down scenic Highway 1 from SF to Santa Cruz can give a really good idea of what most of coastal Northern California is like -- from Santa Barbara up to Eureka. Venice Beach has nice yellow sand, Amita June loved running through the sand in bare feet. We chased seagulls (Amita tried to talk chicken-language to them: "bok bok bok!") and kicked around a soccer ball we'd brought. The surf has been exceptionally high, and it was probably pretty reckless to do, but the tide was going out, so we took off our shoes and dipped our feet in at the top of the sand. Amita loved seeing the waves come in, and running away when they got close. After a lot of playing and a little bit of a tantrum when we decided to leave, we all headed to lunch at the Distillery in Moss Beach. The Distillery is a California historical site -- an old speakeasy, built on the peninsula's coast in the 1920s when Canadian rum-runners would drop off their wares under these remote cliffs. It's kind of hard to find -- down some teensy residential streets on the ocean cliffs -- but it's a local landmark. The view was excellent and the food was great -- I had a big tub of steamers, and Maj had a really good plate of seaweed-wrapped prawns. The only problem was the wait -- we got there just as the lunch rush was starting, and didn't leave until after 3PM. That would have been nice for a romantic lunch for two, but with a one-year-old you're on a pretty tight schedule. Back over the Coast Range and down again to the introspective Bay, we took long naps then headed over to brother Andy's house for turkey soup and some family time. I dunno if there's any kind of tired like sun-and-wind tired from the beach. tags: beach half moon bay maj moss beach amitajune distillery bay area

Katherine's father bought her mother a laptop for Christmas. I am ashamed to admit that although I was responsible for the specification it was purchased from PC World. There is a lack of shops in Northern Ireland where you can walk in and purchase a reasonably cheap laptop unfortunately. The model we ended up with was an Advent 8111 (Dixons link as it's saner than the PC World one). It's not actually a bad spec; Core Duo 1.6GHz, 1GB RAM, 80GB HD, wireless/ethernet/modem, 15.4" 1280x800 widescreen TFT. I think it claims up to 3 hours battery life and I certainly had 2+ out of it though not under heavy use. I decided that it was getting Linux; Katherine's mum isn't used to any form of computer so there are no preconceptions about Windows to get over. While I'm a Debian person myself I felt it was time to give Ubuntu a chance; mjg59 (and others I'm sure) has spent a lot of time trying to get it happy on laptops and make sure things Just Work. I didn't have a lot of time to sit fiddling with the setup, so a shiny out-of-the-box distro seemed ideal. I downloaded ubuntu-6.10-desktop-i386.iso and burnt myself a CD. Dropped it in the drive and it booted into the live CD installer fine. The install process was simple and it managed to resize the Windows partition without problems (I would have deleted it but I couldn't convince the Windows rescue CD creator to work and I don't want to burn my bridges until I'm sure Linux works out ok for the owner). Rebooting into the freshly installed system I was surprised at the time the boot process took. It certainly felt a lot longer than it takes my (lower speced) laptop to boot to a GDM prompt under Debian. Also the display looked a bit fuzzy. Further investigation led to the discovery that although X correctly detected a panel size of 1280x800 it was only using 1024x768. Much searching found me i915resolution which did some magic that made things work. However this doesn't appear to be part of Ubuntu proper so I'm not sure if was the correct solution or if I should have done something else? Getting to the point where I could download i915resolution was interesting too. My parents have a WEP encrypted wireless network (to prevent casual use rather than because it's secure). I was expecting Ubuntu (which detected the Intel wireless card fine) to pop up some sort of dialog saying it had found a network and would I like to connect (if I provided the key). Something network-managery. But no. Even when I went to the network control panel and added all the details the connection didn't seem to come up. I gave up and did it manually with iwconfig and dhclient (I needed it to work quickly and at present it won't need wireless usually). Once I had the display working happily my other task was to tame the modem. It's an Intel HDA thing and I'd hoped sl-modem-daemon would drive it. Of course it didn't. Although it's an Intel chipset it has a bloody Conexant codec on it. Which of course there are no free or Free drivers for. I ended up trying the trial Linuxant driver, which did work fine at 14.4k, but that's really painful so I gave up and paid for the full version. I'd really rather have voted with my feet and ended up with some proper modem hardware, but it would have been an extra set of wires and cost more. I hate Conexant. Anyway, the drivers work (though seem to break sound; I haven't had enough time to prod this and the modem is much more important to have working). Hopefully in time I'll convince them they really want ADSL, but at present I think it would be quite hard as they don't have a high expected use. Once the modem was working I needed an easy way to dial up. I started playing with modem monitor, which had been installed by default. However I just couldn't figure out how to get it to allow me to dialup and dial down - the activate/disable options stayed greyed out. So I installed GNOME PPP which seems to work fine and be easy enough to drive - put a nice link to it on the desktop and stored all the details so it's a double click to launch and then a click of the "Connect" button. My final issue was that once I actually took the laptop to Katherine's house to show her mum how to use it it started hanging on boot. Booting into recovery mode showed a soft lockup error message around the point where it was setting up the network interfaces. I think this might have had something to do with me hitting the wireless kill switch (no point having it on when there's no wireless in the house), as disabling the device in the BIOS made the problem go away. I didn't have enough time to do a fully exhaustive check, but will look at it in the future. I wait with interest to see how use of the laptop goes. Expected usage to being with is mainly web and email (provided by the Ubuntu defaults of Firefox and Evolution) so hopefully it shouldn't be too problematic now I've fought the install process. I was really quite surprised at the problems I encountered (well, aside from the modem drivers); I'd expected a much smoother install that would leave me with everything working fine out of the box. I haven't yet filed any bugs or done more investigation - I only had about a day to setup the machine so couldn't prod it more just yet. I will of course try to do so when I get a free moment, but if I missed some obvious stuff please do point it out to me! (As if you wouldn't...) Oh, and here's some lspci output for anyone interested in some more details about the laptop:

00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Mobile 945GM/PM/GMS/940GML and 945GT Express Memory Controller Hub (rev 03)
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Mobile 945GM/GMS/940GML Express Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 03) (prog-if 00 [VGA])
00:02.1 Display controller: Intel Corporation Mobile 945GM/GMS/940GML Express Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 03)
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) High Definition Audio Controller (rev 02)
00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) PCI Express Port 1 (rev 02) (prog-if 00 [Normal decode])
00:1c.1 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) PCI Express Port 2 (rev 02) (prog-if 00 [Normal decode])
00:1c.2 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) PCI Express Port 3 (rev 02) (prog-if 00 [Normal decode])
00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI #1 (rev 02) (prog-if 00 [UHCI])
00:1d.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI #2 (rev 02) (prog-if 00 [UHCI])
00:1d.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI #3 (rev 02) (prog-if 00 [UHCI])
00:1d.3 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI #4 (rev 02) (prog-if 00 [UHCI])
00:1d.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller (rev 02) (prog-if 20 [EHCI])
00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 Mobile PCI Bridge (rev e2) (prog-if 01 [Subtractive decode])
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 82801GBM (ICH7-M) LPC Interface Bridge (rev 02)
00:1f.2 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801GBM/GHM (ICH7 Family) Serial ATA Storage Controller IDE (rev 02) (prog-if 80 [Master])
00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) SMBus Controller (rev 02)
02:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless 3945ABG Network Connection (rev 02)
04:00.0 Ethernet controller: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. 88E8055 PCI-E Gigabit Ethernet Controller (rev 10)
05:01.0 CardBus bridge: Texas Instruments Unknown device 8039
05:01.1 FireWire (IEEE 1394): Texas Instruments Unknown device 803a (prog-if 10 [OHCI])
05:01.2 Mass storage controller: Texas Instruments Unknown device 803b
05:01.3 Class 0805: Texas Instruments Unknown device 803c (prog-if 01)

Only three things to say today:

Second anniversary

Today marks the second anniversary of the Debian Administration website. (I think that this is the first public mention of my intention to setup the site. It was the earliest I could find anyway.)

Edinburgh Trivia

Doing my own small bit for Debconf I went for a walk on Christmas Day. For two years I’ve lived in the area of Edinburgh known as Leith. (Famous for being a port, and being a port of call for hookers) During that time I’ve taken buses, and walked, up and down Leith walk hundreds of times. Almost every time I do I notice a large chimney by The Edinburgh Playhouse Theatre.. The top 20/30ft of the chimney can be seen from peeking over the top of local buildings, assuming you’re not blocked by other buildings. And now? Now I know what it sits upon. My little adventure in getting to know the city I’ve been living in; I wanted to find the bottom of the chimney and see what it was attached to. So if anybody coming to Debconf next year gets massively lost and curious about a large chimney en route to my house .. I can tell them all about it. It is the little things in life ..

Xen Shell

I’m not sure that there are many people using this, the freshmeat listing has a few subscribers but I’m never sure how well that translates. (Plus of course nobody rated the software so it might be they hate it?). Anyway there are almost certainly far fewer users of the shell than the main xen-tools package - but as of last night the shell now allows you to control more than one Xen instance. This is quite a large change, since previously it explicitly only supported one user controlling one Xen instance. Expect a new release shortly once I’ve tested it more, and updated the documentation.

I've been feeling sick since the day after Christmas. Maj says that when you push your body too hard, it gives you a cold to tell you to sit back and take it easy for a little while, fercryinoutloud. I think that's what happened to me -- almost as soon as I had some free time, I got a sore throat, body aches, stuffy sinuses, fatigue. It's been OK, though -- I've had a lot of time to sit at my parents' house, fool around on the computer without doing anything serious, and read books. I got a proposal for a new project done, and some API designs, but I also am almost finished with James Fenimore Cooper's The Pathfinder, which has been a real enjoyable book. I picked it up in Lake Placid while we were there at the beginning of the month, and I'm just getting around to finishing it. I guess I'm just getting myself on a Colonial New York kick. I've also watched about 400 episodes of It's a Big, Big World, a great kids show starring a good-natured stoner sloth and some spazzy monkeys. They deal with lots of interesting issues, but mostly the answer to their problems is, "Get over yourself, chill the hell out, and do some tai chi." Which I think is a pretty good piece of advice for everybody. tags: lazy pathfinder james fenimore cooper cold tai chi big big world the wisdom of sloths

Edinburgh So, I just registered for Debconf7, the 7th annual Debian conference, to be held in June 2007 in Edinburgh. I'm excited to go -- I've never been to Scotland, and I'm looking forward to the visit. Nor have I been to a Debconf before! I also submitted an abstract for a paper on the Debian Creative Commons Workgroup, a kind of extended history from the Debian Creative Commons Workgroup Report?. I want to cover the details of the relationship between Debian and CC, the history of the workgroup, and give some lessons learned from the process. I'd also like to draw some conclusions about using one of Debian's greatest assets -- our moral authority in the Free Software world -- to shape the future of FLOSS and Free Content. tags: edinburgh free software debian debconf7 cc free content

Mysteries of Web comics I guess there are just some things I'll never understand about the aesthetics and economics of Web comics. Like, why hasn't Patrick Farley, author of the great e-sheep comics, published anything since 2003? e-sheep is some of the most moving, intelligent, and deep work of any kind on the Internet. I'd really love to see more. Conversely, why did the lurid, absurd, and obnoxious Leisuretown go off the air entirely for a few years? And why did it come back? And if it's back, why hasn't the enigmatic Tristan A. Farnon added any new comics? Also, I still wonder if that's his given name, or if he's stuck with a BBS handle from back in the day when he thought All Creatures Great and Small was really cool. Leisuretown is another of the best things on the Web -- crude, angry, existential. I really like it. tags: webcomics leisuretown e-sheep

As of this writing, the DNS/infrastructure hasn't quite caught up, but ofbiz.apache.org ought to be live soon. "Apache Open For Business", aka OFBiz, has been promoted out of the incubator (the term the ASF uses for projects hoping to become full-fledged ASF projects) to its own top level project. As J Aaron Farr mentions, they managed most everything on their own, and were a project that wouldn't have looked out of place as part of the ASF even from the beginning of the incubation period, which made my job as a "mentor" pretty easy. What will be interesting is to track the project going forward. It has tremendous potential, because it focuses very much on providing not only the low level tools (which is still where most open source is), but also on creating good business models and processes, which is relatively newer terrain in the open source world. I think they face a couple of important challenges. First and foremost, a way to lower the barrier to entry. OFBiz is a big collection of code that in some ways tends to stand alone compared to the "mainstream" in that it uses its own tools in terms of the framework. Also, since it encompasses so much, it's a lot to come to terms with when you get started. This means that the initial step of the "learning curve" is pretty high, and I imagine that a lot of people stumble. Clearly, it's not a simple application, but I think efforts to make it more approachable will pay off in terms of attracting more users (and eventually, developers). The broader challenge is simply the fact that in some ways, this is uncharted territory for free software, so it remains to be seen what sort of "ecosystem" (if you'll pardon the buzzword) grows up around it. For instance, at this point in time, no one, least of all the core developers, sees it as a program that you simply download and run, but rather as a place to start from for integrators and developers who mould the code to fit the needs of the particular firm adopting it. That's working right now, but perhaps at some point it will be more of an out of the box system. Or maybe not - attempting to make it work well for a vague 'everyone' might just be chasing taillights and prove ultimately fruitless. Unfortunately, I still haven't had the opportunity to use it "in anger", as they say, so I don't have much to say about it technically, but from a business point of view, I really like their data model, and the system of processes they've put together, which allows you to capture a great deal of use cases in a very flexible way, which is no mean feat. In any case, a big round of congratulations to the core developers, and best wishes for the future!

In a few days, I hope to launch a little project that I've been working on, that was inspired by some concrete needs at work. That's nothing new, as I've often undertaken new projects after seeing needs out there in the 'real world'. What's going to be different this time, though, is that I'm not going to release it as open source software. Instead, I'm going to make the basic version available for free on the web, and charge money for more advanced versions, in various ways. That's a pretty big change for me, as I'm very dedicated to the idea of open source software. It's simply more fun than the proprietary sort, and I love cooperating with other people on things, and all in all, it's just easier to release stuff that way. However, I want to try something new... I want to see if I can make some money on a few ideas and projects that I have in mind. I've thought about it a lot, and the shortest, most direct feedback loop in the types of end-user applications I have in mind is going the 'commercial' route. If I can make a bit of money on the applications, I can spend a bit more time either improving them or developing new ones. If they were open source, the most I would get is other people contributing a little bit back, but that doesn't matter much, as none of these ideas are all that complex. I'm not giving up on free software... I couldn't. My hope is that by providing myself some extra income, that I will be able to produce some free software as a 'side effect', ala 37 signals or google, or any number of other groups that contribute a lot of 'side dishes' to open source, while saving the main course to make their money with. Hopefully you will see more in this space in the next few days.