Hi, I am Vipin. I am a generalist in the technology field, interested in everything from algorithm design to data visualization. I am a Free software advocate and only use FOSS tools unless absolutely required, one notable exception being Chrome. I run Debian as my primary(only) operating system and will be contributing to Debian this summer as a Google Summer of Code student. I will be developing a web interface to present the data collected by the Team Activity Metrics project. More on this later :) After a brief stint with tumblr and wordpress I have finally found a good blogging tool where I am in complete control of every minute detail of my blog and which fits in my workflow perfectly. I am not a ruby guy, which is probably one of the reasons why I had not tried Jekyll earlier but when Jaseem started his blog on github, it looked great and I ventured in. The design of this blog is inspired by those of Jaseem Abid and Dustin Curtis and I do recommend that you read them, they have some great articles. If you are getting started with Jekyll, the best way to do so would be by reading some existing open source code, assuming you have a top level overview of how things work. Read the documentation if you can t figure it out yourself. Trust me, the hacker in you will love it :) Blogs are great place to learn new stuff and whenever I am stuck, a quick search does lead me to articles lucidly explaining stuff I am looking for and I do think I can contribute to this learning process by writing articles that could benefit someone. Do share it if you find it good, I certainly do not mind getting slashdotted! Having said that, if you find flaws in my writings please do drop in a line as a comment or reach me on twitter. Do not flame me, educate me. I ll learn something new and your karma gets a boost :) Happy Hacking!

I must say that I do like free groups. At least whenever I play around with some theorem provers, I find myself formalizing free groups in them. For Isabelle, my development of free groups is already part of the Archive of Formal Proofs. Now I became interested in the theorem prover/programming language Agda,so I did it there as well. I was curious how well Agda is suited for doing math, and how comfortable with intuitionalistic logic I d be.
At first I wanted to follow the same path again and tried to define the free group on the set of fully reduced words. This is the natural way in Isabelle, where the existing setup for groups expects you to define the carrier as a subset of an existing type (the type here being lists of generators and their inverses). But I did not get far, and also I had to start using stuff like DecidableEquivalence, an indication that this might not go well with the intuitionalistic logic. So I changed my approach and defined the free group on all words as elements of the group, with a suitable equivalence relation. This allowed me define the free group construction and show its group properties without any smell of classical logic. The agda files can be found in my darcs repository, and the HTML export can be browsed: Generators.agda defines the sets-of-generators-and-inverses and FreeGroups.agda (parametrized by the Setoid it is defined over) the reduction relation and the group axioms. Here are some observations I (disclaimer: Agda-beginer) made:

• Fun fact: Free groups exist not only in classical logic.
  
• Without any automation as in Isabelle, even simple things get quite complicated. A simple substitution of an equality with subst requires me to specify not only the equality and the term I want it to apply, but also to repeat the common part of the terms. Or when using the associativity of list concatenation, I have to pass all three sublists to the lemma. Maybe I am a bit spoiled by Isabelle, but I d be worried that this would prevent large proofs.
• The levels are also annoying. Although my theory stays within one level, I have to annotate it everywhere. I d expect the type inference to figure this out for me.
• Equality reasoning with begin ... is quite nice and surprisingly well readable.
• Besides the additional work, it is nice to be able to do the proof in almost all detail. There is a limitation, though, as some steps are done automatically (if they happen to occur when evaluating/normalizing a term) and the others, even if similar-looking, are not.
  
• It d be great if one would be free in the choice of editor, but vim users generally have a hard time in the field of theorem provers.
  

If I were to extend this theory, there are two important facts to be shown: That there is a unique reduced word in every equivalence class (norm_form_uniq), and the universal property of the free group. For the former (started in NormalForm.agda) I m missing some general lemmas about relations (e.g. that local confluence implies global confluence, and even the reflexive, symmetric, transitive hull is missing in the standard library). For the latter, some general notions such as a group homomorphism need to be developed first. I planned to compare the two developments, Isabelle and Agda. But as they turned out to show quite things in different orders, this is not really possible any more. One motivation to look at Agda was to see if a dependently typed language frees me from doing lots of set-element-checking (see the mems lemma in the Isabelle proof of the Ping-Pong-Lemma). So far I had no such problems, but I did not get far enough yet to actually tell. Thanks to Helmut Grohne for an educating evening of Agda hacking!

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The Online Photographer has a meta-article on some discussion in the photography world. Summary: someone wrote an opinion piece on one site, and people on the discussion forum of another site got his name wrong, possibly repeatedly. And the quality of the discussion went down from there. The quality of the discourse of free software development is frequently of some concern. Debian has a reputation as being a host to, er, particularly vigorous discussions. That reputation is not unwarranted, but, I think, we've improved a lot since 2005. The problem is hardly restricted to Debian, however. How can we improve this? I don't know. As a community, I'm not even sure we agree what the problems are. Here's my list.

• unshakeable, dogmatic opinions; an unwillingness to consider others' points of view or their justifications; willful ignorance of anything that contradicts with the way one wants things to be; an uncompromising, winner-takes-all, last-poster-wins attitude to debates; in short, a lack of respect for anyone who isn't on one's own side
• an (unintended?) emphasis on discussion speed, leading to short missives, written quickly, without much thought, and without giving even a glimpse of how the conclusion or opinion was formed; this further leads to discussions that are hard to follow, because there are so many messages to read (the total word count would probably be about the same if everyone only wrote one or two essays)
• few good ways of dealing with bad behavior, unless it fits into some clear categories of bad behavior; no clear community consensus of what is acceptable behavior, outside of a small core that is obvious (there's probably several PhD's worth of reasons for this, and it's not just because of "geeks don't understand social interaction" or "everyone is from a different cultural background")

Insults, personal attacks, and other such outrageously bad behavior is uncommon. It crosses the line so clearly it becomes easy to deal with; I don't think handling this needs much attention. What can we do about this? I'm not sure. I have, for the time being, abandonded Debian mailing lists as a way to influence what goes on in the project, but that's just a way for me to clear some space in my head and time in my day to actually do things. My pet hypothetical solution of the day is that mailing lists might raise the quality of the debates by limiting the number of messages written by each person per day in each thread. This might, I think, induce people to write with more thought and put more effort into making each message count.

Time for a DXN#11 follow-up.

1. The recent xserver-xorg-input-synaptics rc4 upload solved a lot of issues, but the 1.6.0 release (just uploaded) should fix some more. Enjoy!
2. I ve also uploaded a new xorg-server, merging from upstream server-1.12-branch to get many XI2.2 bug fixes, along with an infinite loop bug fix (also seen with synaptics).
3. Many drivers can no longer work on ia64 due to the recent changes, so we requested they be removed, which happened promptly!
4. All XSF-maintained packages build happily against X server 1.12, meaning users can get back to running apt-get dist-upgrade blindly without having to fear the consequences. Pro tip: when you see something like xserver-xorg go away during a dist-upgrade, think twice before confirming!
5. xf86-input-mtrack was recently fixed; xf86-video-glamo and xf86-video-msm fail to build (#671028, #671806), so they stay uninstallable for now. Thankfully nothing appears to depend on them, so they can be temporarily removed from testing if needs be.
6. In the meanwhile, xserver-xorg-video-intel 2.19 was released. It will probably land into experimental first, until the new server and its drivers make it into testing.
7. Andreas Beckmann asked me to mention the status of the binary drivers, so here is my take about them: fglrx still doesn t support X server 1.12 (LOL!). The other, big fat blobby driver is installable, and supposed to work.

Just posted to d-d-a, here is the monthly report about my DPL activities.

---

Dear project members,
last bits of the past DPL term and first bits of the current term, all in one. Here is a report of what has happened in DPL land last April. Highlight: call for DPL helpers Before the report, though, let me point out that your friendly neighborhood DPL could use some help. As discussed during campaign, there are some intrinsic transparency and scalability limits in the DPL institution, when run by a single person. Before trying something new to fix that, I'd like to give a last try to an old "tactic": calling for help. If you're considering running for DPL or if you're simply interested in the job the DPL does and willing to help with that, please let me know. Ideally, if I find a group of people I'm happy to work with, I'd like to set up periodic IRC meetings with all "DPL helpers" to publicly discuss items in the DPL agenda and share the work-load. Ongoing discussions A big topic of last month has been the proposal by Francesca Ciceri to publish a diversity statement for the Debian Project. After a lively discussion on -project, we reached consensus on a text, and I've been happy to help with that. To finalize statement publication we now need to vote on it with a GR. I've helped drafting a corresponding GR proposal that has already been posted to -vote by Francesca. A final one, looking for seconds, will be posted there soon. Wrapping up March discussions on a revenue sharing agreement with DuckDuckGo, I've announced my intention to finalize the agreement and have done so shortly thereafter. The Iceweasel maintainer has deployed the corresponding search engine query string and other web browser maintainers could do the same, if they want to. In April I've also spent some time to move forward the long running conflict on Python maintenance, reported to the tech-ctte more than 2 years ago. With the help of people on the -python mailing list, I've now submitted to the tech-ctte an up to date list of potential maintenance teams. I hope the tech-ctte now have all the information needed to come to a decision. Speaking of which, I'm also discussing with tech-ctte members the possibility of having periodic ctte meetings; the idea is to ensure that outstanding issues are periodically reassessed, improving the reliability of tech-ctte decision times. I've also discussed at length with members of the pkg-multimedia-maintainers team the relationships with the unofficial debian-multimedia.org (d-m.o) repository, that have been a cause of tension for Debian multimedia users and maintainers for quite some time. On behalf of the team and of the Project I've now reached out to the d-m.o maintainer, hoping to come to some sort of amicable agreement on which packages belong where. Hardware replacement As anticipated in last report, I've started approving hardware purchases to implement the yearly hardware replacement plan prepared by DSA. During April I've approved requests to buy servers to replace the machines running the bugs-master, bugs-mirror, and UDD services. The total expected expenditure is about 15'000 USD. Communication I've delivered my classic Debian "18^W 19 years" talk at UNIVPM, a polytechnic university in center Italy; slides are available. I've then been contacted by people from the European Synchrotoron in Grenoble who, beside having recently migrated their infrastructure to Debian, are looking into organizing a workshop on Debian usage for large science facilities. I've been happy to help out providing a list of potential topics and speakers for the event. Also as anticipated last month, the Debian Project has been present at the OpenStack summit. Loic Dachary has represented Debian at the event and provided a nice report about his experience there. Speaking of which, I've also coordinated a news release about the availability of cloud technologies in Wheezy, taking the chance to point out the relationships between what Debian stands for and the ability to deploy your own private cloud. Sprints April has been a rather calm month on the sprint front, with the notable exception of the I18n team who is organizing a sprint for June in Paris. Miscellanea

• Google Summer of Code (GSoC) has now started and for Debian is already quite a success. Wrt last year we doubled the number of student applications and we jumped from 9 to 15 approved projects. More details about Debian in GSoC have been posted by Ana. I encourage all of you to take the chance of GSoC to bond with students and show them how nice is the Debian community to work with: that's the prime trait we need to exhibit to make sure we'll always have enough volunteers to run the Debian Project.
• The one month notice before opening up LDAP dnsZoneEntry has expired and the field has now been opened by DSA. Practically, this means that the full listing of *.debian.net entries can now be queried publicly via LDAP. If anyone would be so kind to provide a script that does so and produce a nice looking HTML index, we can now publish it somewhere and replace the perennially out of date wiki index

Thanks for reading thus far,
HDH! (Happy Debian Hacking)

---

PS the boring day-to-day activity log for April is available at master:/srv/leader/news/bits-from-the-DPL.txt.201204

A client just lent me a new Mac Mini with OS/X Lion to play with. I think it s interesting to compare it with regular PCs running Linux. Hardware The Mac Mini is tiny. It s volume can be compared to that of a laptop. The entire outside apart from the base is made from aluminium which helps dissipate heat, it s not as effective as copper but a lot better than plastic. The ports on the system are sound input/output, 4*USB, Ethernet, Firewire, Thunderbolt (replacement for Firewire), SDXC, and HDMI. It ships with a HDMI to DVI-D adapter which is convenient if you have an older monitor (or if you have a recent monitor but no HDMI cable as I do). To open the case you unscrew the bottom, this is much like opening a watch. Also like opening a watch it s not particularly easy to screw it back on tightly, I will probably return the Mac Mini without managing to completely screw the base in. The hardware is very stylish and intricately designed, what we expect from Apple. It s also quiet. In every way it s a much better system than the workstation I m using to write this blog post. The difference of course is that this workstation was free and the Mac Mini cost just over $1000 including the RAM upgrade. A Mac Mini could be a decent Linux workstation and if I see one about to be recycled I ll be sure to grab it! Installation The Mac OS comes pre-installed so I didn t get to do a full installation. When I first booted it up it asked me if I wanted to migrate the configuration from an existing server, I don t know how well this works as I don t have a second Mac system but the concept is a good one. Maybe having full support for such a migration process would be a good release goal for a Linux distribution. After determining that the installation is a fresh one I was asked for a mac.com email address or other form of registration. I skipped this step as I don t have such an email address, but it could be useful. Red Hat has Kickstart to allow configuration of an OS install based on a file from a server (via NFS or HTTP). Debian supports preseeding to take OS configuration options from a file at install time [1] and the same option can be used for later stages of OS autoconfiguration. One thing that would be really useful is to allow the user to enter a URL for configuration data for an individual account or for all accounts, so someone with an account on one workstation could upload the configuration (which would be either encrypted or sanitised to not have secret data) and then download it when first logging in to a new system. I can easily take a tar archive of my home directory to a new system, but people like my parents don t have the skill to do that. One of the final stages of system configuration was to identify the keyboard. The system asked me to press the key to the right of the left shift key and then the key to the left of the right shift key and then offered me three choices of keyboard. That was an interesting way of reducing the list of possible keyboards offered to the user and thus preventing the user from selecting one that is grossly incorrect. Cloud Storage When first logging in I was asked for an iCloud [2] login. iCloud doesn t seem like a service that should be trusted, it s based in the US and has been designed to facilitate access by government agencies. Ubuntu One [3] is a similar service that is run by a more reputable organisation, but the data is still stored by Amazon (a US corporation) which seems like a security risk. Ubuntu One isn t in Debian (which is strange as Ubuntu is based on Debian) so it was too much effort for me to determine whether it encrypts data in a way that protects the users against US surveillance. The cost of Ubuntu One storage is $4 per month with music streaming. A better option is to use a self-hosted OwnCloud installation for a private or semi-private cloud [4]. A cheap server from someone like Hetzner (E49 per month for 3TB of RAID-1 storage) [5] is a good option for OwnCloud hosting. A cheap Hetzner server is about $US64 per month (at current conversion rates) which is equivalent to about 16 users of Ubuntu One for music streaming. So if 20 people shared a Hetzner server they could save money when compared to Ubuntu One while also getting a lot more storage. I ve got about 300G of unused disk space on the Hetzner server that hosts my blog and when the system is migrated to a newer Hetzner server with 3TB disks it will have 2.5TB of unused space, I could store a lot of cloud data in that! The main features of iCloud and Ubuntu One seem to be distribution of random data files (anything you wish), streaming music to various playing systems, and copying pictures from phones as soon as they are taken. These are all great features but it s a pity that they don t appear to support distributed document storage. Apple Pages apparently allows documents to be immediately saved to the cloud. I d like to be able to save a file with Libre Office at home and then access it from my netbook using the cloud, of course that would require encryption for secret files but that s not so hard to do. One advantage with such distributed storage is that when combined with offline-IMAP for email it would almost entirely remove the need for backups of the desktop systems I maintain for my relatives. I could have all their pictures and documents go to the cloud and all their email stay on the server so if their desktop PC dies I could just give them a new PC and get it all back from the cloud! OwnCloud supports replication, so if I got two servers I would be covered against a server failure. But I think that for a small server with less than a dozen users it s probably better to just take some down-time when things go wrong and do regular backups to an array of cheap SATA disks. App Store Apple has an App Store in the OS. The use of such a store on a desktop OS is a new thing for me. It s basically the same as the Android Market (Google Play) but on the desktop. I think that there is a real scope for an organisation such as Canonical to provide such a market service for Linux. I think that there is a lot of potential for apps to be sold for less than $10 to a reasonable number of Linux users. A small payment would be inconvenient for the seller if they have to interact with the customer in any way and also inconvenient for the buyer if they are entering all their credit card details into a web site for the sale. But for repeat sales with one company being an intermediary it would be convenient for everyone. A market program for a desktop Linux system could provide a friendly interface to selecting free apps from repositories (for Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, or other distributions) and also have the same interface used for selecting paid applications. Conclusion This isn t much of a review of Apple OS/X or the Mac Mini. Thinking about ways of implementing the best features of Lion on Linux is a lot more interesting. I admire Apple in the same way that I admire sharks, they are really good at what they do but they don t care about my best interests any more than a hungry shark cares about me. Update I got the currency conversion wrong in the first version of this article. It seems that to save money via a shared Hetzner server instead of Ubuntu One about 20 users would be needed instead of 10. But that s still not too many and would still give a lot more storage. It would be a little more difficult to arrange though, probably anyone who is seriously into computers knows 10 people who would want to share such a service (including people like their parents who want things to just work and don t understand what s happening). But getting 20 people would be more difficult.

• [1] http://wiki.debian.org/DebianInstaller/Preseed
• [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icloud
• [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_One
• [4] https://owncloud.com/
• [5] http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver-produktmatrix-ex

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as I was mostly offline last week, this is a report covering two weeks. as in the week before, it's mainly a mix of build-arch & gcc 4.7 bugs.

• #662023 cairo-5c: "cairo-5c FTBFS No package 'librsvg-2.0' found"
  unreproducible, lower severity, then closed by maintainer
• #666311 src:freeradius: "freeradius: FTBFS: libfreeradius-radius-2.1.10.so: could not read symbols: Invalid operation"
  fix target dependencies in debian/rules, upload to DELAYED/2
• #666325 src:uudeview: "uudeview: FTBFS: ! LaTeX Error: File a4wide.sty' not found."
  add missing build dependency, found by Sebastian Ramacher, upload to DELAYED/2
• #666341 src:vgrabbj: "vgrabbj: FTBFS: make[1]: *** No targets specified and no makefile found. Stop."
  fix target dependencies in debian/rules, upload to DELAYED/2
• #666343 src:cairo-5c: "cairo-5c: FTBFS: make[1]: *** No targets specified and no makefile found. Stop."
  fix target dependencies in debian/rules, upload to DELAYED/2
• #666346 src:openjade: "openjade: FTBFS: make[1]: *** No targets specified and no makefile found. Stop."
  fix target dependencies in debian/rules, upload to DELAYED/2
• #666349 src:openais: "openais: FTBFS: make[1]: *** No targets specified and no makefile found. Stop."
  fix target dependencies in debian/rules, upload to DELAYED/2
• #666366 src:felix-latin: "felix-latin: FTBFS: ! I can't find file t3enc.def'."
  add missing build dependency, upload to DELAYED/2
• #667146 cutesdr: "cutesdr: ftbfs with GCC-4.7"
  add patch to add missing header, upload to DELAYED/5
• #667172 gambit: "gambit: ftbfs with GCC-4.7"
  add patch to add this-> qualifiers, upload to DELAYED/5
• #667186 goldendict: "goldendict: ftbfs with GCC-4.7"
  add patch to add missing header, upload to DELAYED/5
• #667190 gpsim: "gpsim: ftbfs with GCC-4.7"
  apply patch from Paul Tagliamonte, upload to DELAYED/5, then rescheduled to 0-day at maintainer's request
• #667191 gpt: "gpt: ftbfs with GCC-4.7"
  add patch to add missing header, upload to DELAYED/5, later integrated into maintainer upload
• #667198 handlersocket: "handlersocket: ftbfs with GCC-4.7"
  add patch to add missing header, upload to DELAYED/5
• #667200 hexxagon: "hexxagon: ftbfs with GCC-4.7"
  add patch from Paul Tagliamonte, upload to DELAYED/5
• #667207 ifrit: "ifrit: ftbfs with GCC-4.7"
  add patch to declare a function before its usage, do a QA upload
• #667211 itksnap: "itksnap: ftbfs with GCC-4.7"
  add patch to add this-> qualifiers, upload to DELAYED/5, then rescheduled to 0-day at maintainer's request
• #667219 kawari8: "kawari8: ftbfs with GCC-4.7"
  add patch to add this-> qualifier, upload to DELAYED/5
• #667221 kdesvn: "kdesvn: ftbfs with GCC-4.7"
  add patch from Paul Tagliamonte, upload to DELAYED/5
• #667223 kdocker: "kdocker: ftbfs with GCC-4.7"
  add patch to add missing header, upload to DELAYED/5, later sponsored maintainer upload
• #667225 kelbt: "kelbt: ftbfs with GCC-4.7"
  patch to add this-> qualifier, upload to DELAYED/5
• #667226 kgb: "kgb: ftbfs with GCC-4.7"
  add patch to add missing header, upload to DELAYED/5
• #667233 kvpnc: "kvpnc: ftbfs with GCC-4.7"
  add patch from Paul Tagliamonte, upload to DELAYED/5
• #669447 src:bsnes: "bsnes: FTBFS: ./ruby/audio/alsa.cpp:4:28: fatal error: alsa/asoundlib.h: No such file or directory"
  add missing build dependency, send patch to BTS, adapted version included in maintainer upload

The Gnome shell is a great step. Finally the Linux default Desktop is not only useful (as Gnome 2.X used to be), but also stylish and modern. It's a different kind of desktop, which seems to irk desktop habits of some peoples. I'm proud to show it off. This happened for the last time years ago while doing some funny config quirks of fvwm. Gnome 3.x is cool. (: Also the customisability via all the extensions is fun. What I do miss is the gnome weather (There used to be an incarnation with plenty of geographical sites, which got somehow got axed later.) and more packaged extensions for out of the box deployments (wish #661782). I seem to be too lunatic to find session settings in "System Settings" for having startup applications run or the used applications reopened (please yes evince show the same pdfs). The other minor critic is that "System Settings" is quite empty, but has on each system a funny advertisement for "Wacom Tablets". Ah and after a myriad of suspends and network-manager stops/restarts gnome-shell likes to segfault, which is no nuisance as it restarts.

To add insult to injury, homeopathy is not only inefficacious, it's expensive, too. A whole pack of an absurd dilution of a non-existent thing is the most expensive product on that advertising. Are we living an an age of insanity or what? If you want to know what really is homeopathy and why is dangerous, you can read here.

I attended a hackfest for the alleged purpose of furthering data transparency and other such entertainment. I expected a full-blown circus of idiocy based on the lead-up: instructions to sign up to websites for the purpose of Centralizing things, downloading iPhone SDKs, and other blatant evidence of Not Actually Getting It At All. Imagine my surprise when I get to the registration desk and they offer me a photography opt-out. Now everyone knows that privacy opt-outs don't work; either they're ineffective or they are effective at a cost far greater than anyone should pay, but I appreciated the gesture anyway. So I received a badge advertising my first name and the fact that I was unwilling to be photographed. Spoiler alert: I was photographed at least six times. I have now cleverly changed my hairstyle so that no one can recognize me. After people had arrived and rubbed elbows and consumed things, the grand dignitaries took the stage for spectacles of egoism so great that relativity made Dan Kaminsky look almost like a humble and reasonable human being. This was succeeded by some organizing, coding, and ridiculousness. The group I landed in contained two employees of the advertising industry and one of the U.S. government. There was also someone I refer to as "ultracompetent astronut". Some things that were apparent: people

• really don't understand the issues
• don't care about or understand licensing
• are prone to insistent on the necessity of Github even when they don't know how to use it
• don't see why opt-outs are inherently flawed
• are perfectly willing to trade in their privacy for minimal return
• are sometimes willing to trade their privacy for different privacy
• insist that I should write in Python even when it turns out that I could have been using a real language
• still think that the threat model is only about what information you leak or choose to divulge about yourself, and not about other people informing on you.

Two days ago, Conrad Sanderson released another bug-fix version 3.0.3 for the 3.0.0 branch of his excellent Armadillo C++ template library for linear algebra. The new RcppArmadillo release 0.3.0.3 which contains it appeared on CRAN yesterday. Beside Conrad's bugfixes we also added an example script for fastLm and faster linear model fits. The short NEWS entry follows below.

0.3.0.3 2012-05-03
    o   Upgraded to Armadillo release 3.0.3
          * fixes for inplace transpose of complex number matrices
          * fixes for complex number version of svd_econ()
          * fixes for potential aliasing issues with submatrix views
    o   New example script fastLm 

Courtesy of CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for 0.3.0.3 relative to 0.3.0.2 As always, more detailed information is on the RcppArmadillo page. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the R-Forge page.

I own two mobile phones at the moment, I use a Samsung Galaxy S running Cyanogenmod [1] (Android 2.3.7) for most things, and I have a Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 running Android 2.1 that I use for taking photos, some occasional Wifi web browsing, and using some applications. Comparing Android Hardware The hardware for the Xperia X10 is better than that of the Galaxy S in many ways. It has a slightly higher resolution (480*854 vs 480*800), a significantly better camera (8.1MP with a flash vs 5MP without), and a status LED which I find really handy (although some people don t care about it). The only benefit of the Galaxy S hardware is that it has 16G of internal storage (of which about 2G can be used for applications) and 512M of RAM while the Xperia X10 has 1G of internal storage and 384M of RAM. These are significant issues, I have had applications run out of RAM on the Xperia X10 and I have been forced to uninstall applications to make space. Overall I consider the Xperia X10 to be a significantly better piece of hardware as I am willing to trade off some RAM and internal storage to get a better resolution screen and a better camera. The problem is that Sony Ericsson have locked down their phones as much as possible and they don t even give users the option of making a useful backup they inspired my post about 5 principles of backups [2]. The fact that the Galaxy S allows installing CyanogenMod which then gives me the liberty to do whatever I want with my phone is a massive feature. It outweighs the hardware benefits of the Sony Ericsson phones over Samsung phones prior to the Galaxy Nexus and Galaxy Note. For an individual user the ability to control their own hardware is a feature. Such an ability wouldn t be much use if there wasn t a community of software developers, so if you buy an Android phone that isn t supported by CyanogenMod or another free Android distribution then whether it is locked probably won t matter to you. But for any popular Android phone that s sold on the mass market it seems that if it s not locked then it will get a binary distribution of Android in a reasonable amount of time. Comparing with Apple It seems that Apple is the benchmark for non-free computing at the moment. The iPhone is locked down and Apple takes steps to re-lock phones that can be rooted as opposed to the Android vendors who ship phones and then don t bother to update the firmware for any reason. The Apple app market is more expensive and difficult to enter and if an app isn t in the market then you have to pay if you want to install it on a small number of development/test phones. This compares to Android where the Google market is cheaper and easier to enter and anyone can distribute an app outside the market and have people use it. But for an individual this doesn t necessarily cause any problems. I have friends and clients who use iPhones and are very happy with them. In terms of software development it s a real benefit to have a large number of systems running the same software. As Apple seems to have higher margins and larger volume than any other phone vendor as well as shipping only one phone at any time (compared to every other phone vendor which seems to ship at least 3 different products for different use cases) they are in a much better economic position to get the software development right. As far as I can tell the hardware and software of the iPhone is of very high quality. The iPad (which has a similar market position) is also a quality product. The fact that the Apple app market is more difficult to enter (both in terms of Apple liking the application and the cost of entry) also has it s advantages, I get the impression that the general quality of iPhone apps is quite high as opposed to Android where there are a lot of low quality apps and many more fraudulent apps than there should be. The lack of choice in Apple hardware (one phone and one tablet) is a disadvantage for the user. There is no option for a phone with a slide-out keyboard, a large screen (for the elderly and people with fat fingers), or any of the other features that some Android phones have. The lack of a range of sizes for the iPad is also a disadvantage. But it seems that Apple has produced hardware that is good enough for most users so there aren t many complaints about a lack of choice. It seems to me that the biggest disadvantage of the closed Apple ecosystem is for society in general. Anyone who wants to write a mobile app to do something which might be considered controversial would probably think twice about whether to develop for the iPhone/iPad as Apple could remove the app at a whim which would waste all the software development work that was invested in writing the app. Google seem to have much less interest in removing apps from their store and if they do remove an app then with some inconvenience it can be distributed on the web without involving them so the work won t be wasted. How Much Freedom Should a Vendor Provide? The Apple approach of locking everything down is clearly working for them at the moment. The Samsung approach of taking the Google prescribed code and allowing users to replace it is good for the users and works well. The Sony Ericsson approach of taking the Google code, adding some proprietary code, and then locking the phone down is bad for the users and I think it will be bad for Sony Ericsson. People are more likely to tell others about negative experiences and negative reviews are more likely to be noticed than positive reviews. So while many people are reasonably happy with Sony Ericsson products (until they find themselves unable to restore from a backup) it s still not a good situation for Sony Ericsson marketing. It seems that there are benefits to hardware vendors for being really open and for locking their users in properly. But being somewhat open isn t a good choice, particularly for a vendor that ships poor quality proprietary apps such as the Sony Ericsson ones. In terms of application distribution Google isn t as nice as they appear. The Skyhook case revealed that Google will do whatever it takes to prevent apps that compete with Google apps from being installed by default [3]. Google is also trying to make money from DRM sales via Youtube which it denies to rooted phones [4]. Again it seems to me that the best options here are being more open than Google is and being as closed as Apple. Google might gain some useful benefits from applying DRM (even though everyone with technical knowledge knows that it doesn t work) but the Skyhook shenanigans have got to be costing Google more than it s worth. How to make Android devices more Free The F-droid market is an alternative to the Google App market which only has free software [5]. On it s web site there are links to download the source for the applications, including the source and binaries for old versions. In the Google App market if an upgrade breaks your system then you just lose, with F-droid you can revert to the old version. A self-hosted OwnCloud installation for a private or semi-private cloud [6] can be used as an alternative to the Google Music store as well as for hosting any other data that you want to store online. The Open Street Map for Android (Osmand) project provides an alternative to the Google Map service [7]. Osmand allows you to download all the vector data for the regions you will ever visit so it can run without Internet access. But it doesn t have the ability to search for businesses and the search for an address functionality is clunky and doesn t accept plain text, which among other things precludes pasting data that s copied from email or SMS. While Osmand provides some important features that Google Maps will probably never provide, it doesn t provide some of the most used features of Google Maps so uninstalling Google Maps isn t a good option at the moment. The K9mail project provides a nice IMAP client for Android [8]. Use K9 with a mail server that you run and you won t need to use Gmail. There are alternatives to all the Google applications. It seems that apart from the lack of commercial data and search ability in Osmand an Android device that is used for many serious purposes wouldn t lack much if it had no Google apps. Google seems to be going too far in controlling Android. Escaping from their control and helping others to do the same seems to be good for society and good for the users who don t need apps which are only available in proprietary form.

• [1] http://www.cyanogenmod.com/
• [2] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2012/02/07/5-principles-backup/
• [3] http://www.theverge.com/2011/05/12/google-android-skyhook-lawsuit-motorola-samsung/
• [4] http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2011/05/google-blocks-android-movie-rentals-from-rooted-devices.ars
• [5] http://f-droid.org/
• [6] https://owncloud.com/
• [7] http://osmand.net/
• [8] http://code.google.com/p/k9mail/

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When buying hardware for a Linux system, often we need to hunt for their support status by searching for PCI or USB IDs in the kernel source, or by looking up the printer model on the linuxprinting.org (now freedesktop.org) openprinting database, or similar things. This is something I'm used to, and not at all unexpected anymore. And after having done it a thousand times for several customers as well as for myself, it's become routine. So in that light, I was pleasantly surprised last monday when I delivered and installed a Xerox WorkCentre 3220 at a customer last week to see that they support Linux on the same level as they do Windows and MacOS: the "system requirements" part of the manual contains a section laying out the requirements for a computer running Linux, as does the "troubleshooting" section; and when there are Linux-specific bits to be said, there'll just be a Linux-specific section in the manual to tell you what to do. Also, the CD-ROM that came with the device has a Rock Ridge extension, which means that if you pop it into a Linux system you'll see an installer for CUPS and SANE drivers. The only criticism I have is that it's an installer, and not an LSB package or some such. But hey, for once I didn't have to fight to get a printer to work properly!

Since my yesterday upload sshfs is now comaintained with Dmitry Smirnov and in fact he prepared the latest upstream version which is 2.4.
If anyone else would like to join and help improve the package further then Dmitry created Git repository for that purpose.

Most popular web browsers cause quite a lot of I/O on a user s home directory and their cache s also take up quite some disk space with Google s Chrome/Chromium you can t even configure how much disk space should be used for the cache. This causes unnecessary network traffic and no more makes sense if the home directory itself comes over the network, e.g. via NFS or Samba. And on laptops it spins up the disks and unnecessarily costs battery power and therefore lowers the potential battery life. Such caches also costs scarce disk space on SSDs or flash cards as common in laptops, netbooks and other mobile devices, and often get backed up without any real use. To take some of this burden off our NFS servers at work I started to develop an Xsession.d hook which moves off such caches to the local disk and puts in symbolic links instead into the user s home directory when the user locally logs in. This hook quickly became a standalone Perl script named unburden-home-dir and the Xsession.d hook just a wrapper around it. Due to some unsolved issues I didn t feel it s good enough for Debian Unstable, so I uploaded it just to Debian Experimental back then. Pietro Abate s recent blog posting about unburden-home-dir on Planet Debian gave me the right kick to make another try to solve the remaining issues. And the mental distance gained over the time indeed helped and I could fix the remaining issues. So I added some polish to the package and uploaded it to Debian Unstable. If you used the previous version from experimental, you have to take care of a few things:

• Previously some configuration files sported unburden_home_dir as base name while others used unburden-home-dir as base name as that s also the package name. Now all configuration files use the package name, i.e. unburden-home-dir as base name.
• Conffiles under /etc/ should be renamed by dpkg automatically, but per-user configuration files ($HOME/.unburden_home_dir and $HOME/.unburden_home_dir_list) must be manually renamed to $HOME/.unburden-home-dir and $HOME/.unburden-home-dir.list.
• By adding UNBURDEN_HOME=yes to $HOME/.unburden-home-dir every user can decide himself if he wants the Xsession.d hook to be used when he logs in under X. On managed workstations with many users this eases testing of unburden-home-dir with just a few users a lot.

You can follow the development of unburden-home-dir also on GitHub and on Gitorious as well as on Ohloh. Enjoy!

S more patches today to the grooven vibes of Home Movies.

• 667221 (kdesvn)
• 667200 (hexxagon)
• 667190 (gpsim) - not really a patch, updated existing patch
• 667230 (kredentials)
• 667233 (kvpnc)

Consider helping out :)

As usual if I m trying to solve some issue there is a technology that solves it.
But it s in early stage of development, poorly packaged, stable versions lack most of the features, and basically it s recommended to use git snapshots and to patch all the software that is going to use it. I m talking about usbredir and SPICE.

I think Weblate is really ready to be released as 1.0 release. It runs pretty stable on https://l10n.cihar.com, I got some bug reports from others, but these were quickly fixed and now nobody complains. The issue tracker lists few improvements which I plan after 1.0 which will help in user experience and performance, but I see nothing what would be needed right now. So I'm ready to release (even before deadline I have set to this milestone). Anyway you're welcome to give it some testing and complain if anything is broken. One area where I desperately need feedback are checks, which probably still miss variations for some languages.

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I've enjoyed past extended weekend in S chsische Schweiz. I really like this area and we've again seen there wonderful nature and climbed thousands of steps :-). The weather was not that nice for taking photos, but still I can show few of them:

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