I bought some HTPC a few years ago to run XBMC, a neat media center solution. At the time, to avoid any problems, I installed it on top of a minimal Ubuntu Lucid installation with the official packages from the team XBMC. Recently, XBMC Eden has been released and XBMC has landed into Debian unstable. It was a good occasion to make the switch. TL;DR: Installing XBMC on Debian Wheezy is quite easy: it almost works out of the box. The big difficulty is the configuration of the remote control: either it works as you expect or you will have to scratch your head over the pile of layers needed to work with a remote control. The configuration of my HTPC is as follows:

• an Antec Micro Fusion 350 housing featuring a SoundGraph iMON IR receiver and LCD screen¹,
• a Zotac ION-ITX-D-E motherboard with an Intel Atom 330 CPU and an nVidia ION chipset,
• some Onkyo AV receiver connected through HDMI,
• a Logitech Harmony 555 as remote control.

Installation

Installing Debian Wheezy Installing Debian Wheezy² is pretty easy. Nowadays, getting a bootable USB key from a netinst image of Debian Installer for Wheezy is simplified:

$ sudo dd if=debian-testing-i386-netinst.iso \
>         of=/dev/disk/by-id/usb...

The installation was smooth with the exception of GRUB which was unable to install itself on the disk. This is a known bug when dealing with LVM and it comes with a simple workaround. I hope it will be corrected in time for Wheezy release. While this has little to do with the installation of XBMC, I wanted to test systemd which may become the default init in Debian (at least in Debian GNU/Linux). From README.Debian:

systemd can be installed alongside sysvinit and will not change the behaviour of the system out of the box. This is intentional. To test systemd, add init=/bin/systemd to the kernel command line and then rebooting, or install the systemd-sysv package.

The final system boots in about 15 seconds.

Configuring X Because video decoding in nouveau driver is still a work in progress, the use of the proprietary NVIDIA drivers is mandatory to be able to watch high resolution videos. Therefore, /etc/apt/sources.list should be completed with contrib and non-free repository. Then, you can install the appropriate packages: xserver-xorg-video-nvidia, nvidia-vdpau-driver and xserver-xorg. Here is my /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/nvidia.conf:

Section "Device"
    Identifier     "NVidia ION"
    Driver         "nvidia"
    VendorName     "NVIDIA Corporation"
    Option         "HWCursor" "False"
    Option         "NoFlip" "False"
    Option         "FlatPanelProperties" "Scaling = Native"
    Option         "DynamicTwinView" "False"
    Option         "ConnectedMonitor" "DFP-1"
    Option         "CustomEDID" "DFP-1:/etc/X11/edid.bin"
    Option         "NoLogo" "True"
EndSection
Section "Extensions"
    Option "Composite" "false"
EndSection

The CustomEDID option allows the driver to get an appropriate EDID even when the AV receiver is off. You can get yours, free of charge, with get-edid from read-edid package.

Installing XBMC Thanks to the work of Andr s Mej a, XBMC is now available in Debian Wheezy. To install it, just type aptitude install xbmc. I have dropped the following xbmc.service in /etc/systemd/system directory:

[Unit]
Description = XBMC media center
After = syslog.target
[Service]
User = xbmc
Group = xbmc
Type = simple
ExecStart = /usr/bin/xinit /usr/bin/xbmc-standalone -- :0
Restart = on-failure
[Install]
WantedBy = multi-user.target

Enable this service on boot with systemctl enable xbmc.service. You need to allow xbmc user to run X. The simplest way is to run dpkg-reconfigure -plow x11-common and to allow anybody to run X. sudo may be an alternative.

Configuration

Sound While I wanted to use PulseAudio, I want the AV receiver to be able to upmix stereo streams itself. With PulseAudio, it would always receive a 6-channel signal. Therefore, I directly use ALSA. First, unmute the appropriate outputs:

$ amixer scontrols   grep IEC958
Simple mixer control 'IEC958',0
Simple mixer control 'IEC958 Default PCM',0
Simple mixer control 'IEC958',1
$ amixer sset 'IEC958',0 unmute
$ amixer sset 'IEC958 Default PCM',0 unmute
$ amixer sset 'IEC958',1 unmute
$ sudo systemctl stop alsa-utils.service

The order of channels is incorrect. With the following /etc/asound.conf, we declare a new output, hdmi2, with a different mapping:

pcm.hdmi2  
  type asym
  playback.pcm  
    type plug
    slave.pcm "remap-surround51"
   
 
pcm.!remap-surround51  
  type route
  slave.pcm "hdmi"
  ttable  
    0.0= 1
    1.1= 1
    2.4= 1
    3.5= 1
    4.2= 1
    5.3= 1
   
 

In XBMC, this output should be used instead of the default one. hdmi should still be used for passthrough. To check if each speaker is mapped correctly, one can use speaker-test -D hdmi2 -c 6.

LCD display The LCD display integrated into the SoundGraph iMON is supported by the imon kernel module and the lcdproc package. I have only modified a few lines of /etc/LCDd.conf to make it work:

[server]
Driver=imonlcd
ServerScreen=off
[imonlcd]
Protocol=1
OnExit=2
Contrast=400

Remote control This is the most difficult part. I have a Logitech Harmony remote which is a great universal remote. Its support in Linux is acceptable: you can configure through Logitech website and use congruity to push the new configuration.

Remote controls and Linux Before Linux 2.6.36, most remote controls would need LIRC to work:

• The driver receives the signal from the IR receiver and make it available through /dev/lirc.
• lircd, with the help of a configuration file describing the protocol used by the remote control, will read the signal and turn it into the appropriate LIRC code.
• XBMC connects to lircd and receives incoming LIRC codes. It will translate them to an XBMC command. This translation is specified in Lircmap.xml.
• XBMC maps each command to an action (like Play, Fullscreen, ) using a keymap. This keymap can handle commands received by a remote control, but also by a keyboard, a mouse or a joystick.

Since Linux 2.6.36, remote controls will be mapped as a generic input device (just like a keyboard):

• The driver receives the signal from the IR receiver.
• The signal will be handled by a decoder. The configuration of this decoder is done in userland by ir-keytable. The decoder will turn the signal into the appropriate event (usually, some keypress).
• X will listen to those events and turn them into X key events.
• XBMC will receive them and use the appropriate keymap to turn them into actions.

And to add more complexity to the mix, in this last case, you can still use LIRC: lircd will listen to events generated by the kernel and turn them into LIRC codes. This can be very confusing. Moreover, the SoundGraph iMON IR receiver accepts two IR protocols: the iMON protocol and the RC-6 one. The Linux driver accepts both of them but uses the first one by default. The RC-6 protocol is the protocol used by many MCE remote controls. I hope you are still with me here.

The easy way To get a reasonable configuration out of the box, here is how to configure each layer:

Logitech Harmony remote

Configure it as a Microsoft branded Media Center PC: Windows Media Center SE.

iMON IR receiver

It must use RC-6 protocol. See below for more details.

LIRC

In /etc/lirc/hardware.conf, put DEVICE=/dev/input/by-id/usb-15c2_0038-event-if00 and DRIVER=devinput. In /etc/lirc/lircd.conf, just put include "/usr/share/lirc/remotes/devinput/lircd.conf.devinput".

XBMC

With the previous bits done, it should just work out of the box.

To switch to RC-6 protocol, install the ir-keytable package and use the following commands:

$ sudo modprobe rc-imon-mce
$ sudo ir-keytable -s rc0 -p rc-6 -c -w /lib/udev/rc_keymaps/imon_mce
Read imon_mce table
Old keytable cleared
Wrote 77 keycode(s) to driver
Protocols changed to RC-6

To make the change permanent, add the rc-imon-mce module to /etc/modules and create /etc/udev/rules.d/90-imon.rules with the following content:

# Override the keytable for iMON
ACTION=="add change", SUBSYSTEM=="rc", DRV_NAME="imon", \
   RUN+="/usr/bin/ir-keytable -s $name -p rc-6 -c -w /lib/udev/rc_keymaps/imon_mce"

The hard way Now, you may want to bind custom actions to some (physical or virtual) buttons. Basically, you are left with two solutions:

1. Start from the basic configuration with LIRC and add more buttons at each levels (there are five of them!).
2. Remove LIRC and start with the Logitech Harmony acting as a Microsoft MCE keyboard.

The first option can be quite difficult. You need to find an unused code for the Logitech Harmony. You can try to make it learn a new code if you have some RC-6 remote control. Then, you need to ensure that this code will be present in the keytable used by ir-keytable. If not, you need to add it. That s not easy since you need a to enable some debug stuff in the kernel to find the appropriate scancode. After that, the code needs to be translated in lircd.conf. You will then have to translate it again in Lircmap.xml. At least, you need to add it to a keymap in XBMC. The other way is not ideal but seems less cumbersome. The first step is to configure the Logitech Harmony as a Microsoft MCE keyboard: it has a lot of available keys. Because of the lack of multimedia keys, let s match the keyboard configuration of XBMC:

Button	Command	Button	Command
Channel Down	PageDown	Stop	X
Channel Up	PageUp	Skip back	Comma
Prev	Backspace	Skip forward	.
Up	DirectionUp	Play	P
Down	DirectionDown	Rewind	R
Left	DirectionLeft	Fast forward	F
Right	DirectionRight	Star	Delete
OK	Enter	Pound	W
Menu	C	Red	F1
Exit	Esc	Green	F2
Guide	Tab	Yellow	F3
Info	I	Blue	F4

Unfortunately, the keytables provided with ir-keytable are not complete enough. I have built a more complete table³. With this table and the bindings described above, most functions will work out of the box without LIRC. Additional keys can be configured in a dedicated keymap⁴. Here is an excerpt of mine:

<keymap>
 <global>
  <keyboard>
    <end>XBMC.ShutDown()</end>
    <f1>XBMC.ActivateWindow(MusicLibrary)</f1>
    <f2>XBMC.ActivateWindow(Videos,TvShowTitles)</f2>
    <f3>XBMC.ActivateWindow(Videos,MovieTitles)</f3>
    <f4>XBMC.ActivateWindow(Weather)</f4>
  </keyboard>
 </global>
 <FullscreenVideo>
  <keyboard>
   <opensquarebracket>SubtitleDelayMinus</opensquarebracket>
   <closesquarebracket>SubtitleDelayPlus</closesquarebracket>
   <f6>xbmc.runscript(script.xbmc.subtitles)</f6>
  </keyboard>
 </FullscreenVideo>
</keymap>

FTP Instead of using SSH, I prefer to drop new files with anonymous FTP. vsftpd fits this purpose. Here is my configuration file:

listen=YES
xferlog_enable=YES
use_localtime=YES
setproctitle_enable=YES
secure_chroot_dir=/var/run/vsftpd/empty
nopriv_user=ftp
ftpd_banner=XBMC
hide_ids=YES
ftp_username=xbmc
anon_umask=022
anon_root=/home/xbmc/media
anonymous_enable=YES
write_enable=YES
anon_upload_enable=YES
anon_world_readable_only=YES

It is currently not compatible with systemd (see bug #670308). I have removed the symlink in /etc/rc2.d and I have used the following unit file:

[Unit]
Description=Vsftpd ftp daemon
After=syslog.target network.target
[Service]
Type=simple
ExecStart=/usr/sbin/vsftpd /etc/vsftpd.conf
ExecReload=/bin/kill -HUP $MAINPID
ExecStartPre=-/bin/mkdir -p /var/run/vsftpd/empty
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Miscellaneous

1. In /etc/default/grub, reduce TIMEOUT to 0 to shorten the boot time.
2. Enabling dirty regions can help speed up XBMC.
3. aptitude install upower pm-utils to be able to shutdown/suspend from XBMC. Since XBMC was configured to be started outside any session, you need to explicitely give the appropriate rights by creating the following /var/lib/polkit-1/localauthority/50-local.d/xbmc.pkla:

   [Actions for xbmc user]
   Identity=unix-user:xbmc
   Action=org.freedesktop.upower.*;org.freedesktop.consolekit.system.*
   ResultAny=yes
   ResultInactive=yes
   ResultActive=yes
   

---

1. The readibility of the LCD screen is very bad. You should look at the VFD version. The IR receiver reception is poor. The provided remote control is a joke.
2. Debian Wheezy is not yet released. If you are unfamiliar with Debian, it may be cumbersome to maintain it until the freeze happens in a few months.
3. Some keys are missing from the provided table. For example, there is no exclamation mark. While there is a scan code for such a key in RC-6 protocol, there is no appropriate key code to translate to: on a QWERTY keyboard, the exclamation mark is on the same key as the number 1. It is possible to map it to some other key code, but the mapping would have been difficult to use.
4. For example, in ~/.xbmc/userdata/keymaps/harmony.xml.

For those interested, here is a way to install Debian and boot it with UEFI if you have an UEFI motherboard. Using UEFI with Debian requires expert knowledge so if you do not feel up to it, keep your BIOS system. 1 Background UEFI is a specification for motherboard's firmwares which is replacing the old BIOS. For now, UEFI motherboards still include a BIOS compatibility layer. The UEFI boot process is quite different from the BIOS one. It involves one specific piece of the motherboard's firmware, the UEFI Boot Manager, which is able to load boot loaders from FAT file systems on specially-typed partitions. It can offer a boot menu (boot: Debian from HDD, Windows from HDD, USB stick, DVD?), which can be configured from a running operating system. So, basically, to boot a system with UEFI, you need two things:

• to install an UEFI boot loader on a FAT-formated EFI System Partition;
• to tell the UEFI Boot Manager to create an entry for that boot loader.

2 Installation or preparation If you are installing a new Debian system, read the first part. If you already have a BIOS-bootable Debian system installed, read the second one. In both cases you will have to use Debian testing, because stable's GRUB has problems with UEFI. You can also use Debian stable while taking only GRUB from testing though. 2.1 Installation of a new Debian system There is no installer image for UEFI, so you can either:

• make your own, by installing an UEFI boot loader to an USB stick, which will load a regular installer kernel and initrd;
• use a regular BIOS installer image, using the compatibility mode of your motherboard.

The installer does not provide a convenient way to install an UEFI boot loader, so you are going to install a regular BIOS boot loader at first, and switch to UEFI later. Use the expert mode and format your hard drive with a GUID Partition Table (GPT). Create a small partition (1 MiB would be far enough), type it as a BIOS Boot Partition (this is the untitled flag above the bootable one in Partman), do not format it and do not mount it: this will be needed for BIOS booting. Create another small partition (same kind of size), type it as an EFI System Partition (this is the bootable flag), format it as FAT and mount it on /boot/efi: this will be needed for UEFI booting. Finish the installation as usual, installing GRUB for BIOS, and boot your new system. 2.2 Preparation of an existing Debian system for UEFI You need to use a GUID Partition Table on your hard drive. If you used an MBR, you lost; you may try to convert it to GPT using a tool such as gdisk, but that means operating without a net, loosing your current boot loader in the process. If there is no space left on your hard drive, use Debian Live to make some. Create a small partition (1 MiB would be far enough), type it as an EFI System Partition, format it as FAT and mount it (permanently, using the fstab) on /boot/efi (that directory will not exist, so create it first). 3 Switch to GRUB UEFI Install the package grub-efi-amd64. Prepare it by running the command (assuming your hard drive is /dev/sda):

# grub-install /dev/sda

That will do three things:

1. generate a GRUB image;
2. install it to the EFI partition at efi/debian/grubx64.efi;
3. try to configure the UEFI Boot Manager (the motherboard's boot menu) to load it on start-up

That last step will fail. This is expected, because the UEFI Boot Manager can only be configured from an operating system that was started from UEFI. So if you stop here, you get an unbootable system. Now, copy (a symlink would be relevant here, but that cannot be done on a FAT file system!) the GRUB image to that other path on the EFI System Partition: efi/boot/bootx64.efi. This is where the UEFI firmware looks for a boot loader when it has not been configured for a specific path, typically on removable media. Reboot to check that If that trick worked, you are now on UEFI-booted system. Run grub-install again, which should now succeed to configure the UEFI Boot Manager. Reboot to check that you get a debian entry on the motherboard's boot menu, and remove efi/boot/bootx64.efi which is no longer needed.

There already has been official announcement for this years GSoC at phpMyAdmin and it's time to share my bits. First of all more details about chosen projects are available on our wiki (missing bits will get updated soon). This year I'll be mentoring again three students. As usual, it was quite tough job to choose students and I hope we've chosen really good ones. Anyway we'll see this later during there summer :-). As we're currently on a (long) way to phpMyAdmin 4.0, basically all projects are somehow about cleanup and refactoring of quite historical code which lives in some dark places of phpMyAdmin. The only big difference is automated testing project, which is purely about writing new test cases and making tests cover more functionality. Anyway I'm looking forward to see first improvements from my students - Alex Marin, Yasitha Pandithawatta and Chanaka Indrajith.

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It's spring, and young(ish?) hackers' minds turn to OpenCL. What is the state of things? I haven't the faintest idea, but I thought I'd try to share what I find out. So far, just some links. Details to be filled in later, particularly if you, dear reader, tell them to me. Specification

• khronos

LLVM based front ends

• libclc
• pocl
• clover

Mesa backend Rumours/hopes of something working in mesa 8.1?

• r600g is merged into master as of this writing.
• clover

Other projects

• SNU This project seems be only for Cell/ARM/DSP at the moment. Although they make you register to download, it looks like it is LGPL.

It was almost 6 years in NetArt company (probably known better as nazwa.pl).
Time for changes. Starting on May I ll be working for Akamai. Wish me luck few hundreds of servers against almost 100 thousands looks like a real challenge

Back in 2004 when Simon and I went full time with Black Cat one of the first things I did was sort out an ADSL offering, including native IPv6. We were one of the first UK ISPs to offer this (possibly the first; I know A&A had been doing tunneled IPv6 for a lot longer, but I'm not sure exactly when they enabled IPv6 on the PPP session. Also Bogons were fairly quick to enable it as well). By the middle of 2004 I was fully IPv6 enabled; my colo box had a native connection, my entire home network (a /64 for the wired, a /64 for the wireless) was configured, BCN had multiple native IPv6 connections to other ISPs (such as peering over LoNAP). By and large it just worked; I remember at one point looking at a traffic graph link from someone in Australia and them indicating surprise that I'd come in over v6. I hadn't noticed anything different than normal, which is exactly how it should be. When we sold BCN in 2007 unfortunately one of the casualties was the v6 support. The ISP that took over the ADSL wasn't setup to be able to continue the v6 support, nor were RapidSwitch, who took over most of the hosting (I note with sadness that RapidSwitch still don't seem to be offering v6, though they keep saying it's a work in progress). So I stopped having any v6 for some time, refusing to slum it with a tunnel. This changed at the start of last year, when I sought out new hosting for the. I ended up selecting Bytemark, partly because I knew of their commitment to v6. I'd chosen Sonic as my US access ISP, again partly because they offered an IPv6 tunnel service (while not as nice as native v6 over the DSL I felt that a tunnel provided by the DSL ISP was acceptable for access). However a combination of not having a machine that was always on at home, and a dynamic IP on my connection, meant that I never got round to configuring anything permanent up. Recently I got around to buying a little low powered box to be always-on and this week I finally looked at configuring it up as the tunnel endpoint, planning to do some sort of screen scraping of the web interface to automatically update the tunnel broker information for the rare occurrences when my IP changes. The first nice surprise was that Sonic are now doing static IPs for free (previously you could only have a block of 8 for $20/month extra). That makes things a lot easier. So tonight I configured up the little server as the tunnel endpoint, installing radvd and some basic v6 firewalling. As expected my laptop sees the RAs, automatically configures everything up and my ssh sessions start to go over IPv6 instead. Looks like my phone also does the same. I'm not entirely sure what the NAT on the ADSL router is doing and if inbound connections will fail if there's nothing outbound holding the translation entry active, but I'm sure I can work around that if it turns out to be a problem. I care more about access than hosting anything on the end of my DSL anyway. This means I'm finally almost back to where I was nearly 8 years ago, just in time for World IPv6 Launch day.

I ve made the Testtools committers team own both the project and the trunk branch for both pyjunitxml and testscenarios. This removes me as a SPOF if anything needs doing in those projects any Testtools committer can now do it. (Including code review and landing). If you are a testtools committer and need PyPI release rights, ping me and I ll add you. (I wish PyPI had group management).

Today my system froze and failed to reboot. I plugged in an Ubuntu live USB stick and booted from it. Then I discovered the problem that my Intel SSD 320 broke. The output of hdparm is attached to the end of the blog post. You can see that the device size is reduced to 8 MB from 120 GB and the serial number is called BAD_CTX 00000159. The firmware of the SSD was up-to-date and the last firmware update should have fixed the 8 MB bug. The Intel SSD 320 is my second SSD. My first SSD was a Super Talent Ultradrive GX 64GB, which died after around fifteen month of heavy use. It left a big bunch of my data corruption behind. SSDs seems to be very unreliable. Both SSDs died, but I cant remember that one of my HDDs died. $ sudo hdparm -I /dev/sda /dev/sda: ATA device, with non-removable media
Model Number: INTEL SSDSA2CW120G3
Serial Number: BAD_CTX 00000159
Firmware Revision: 4PC10362
Transport: Serial, ATA8-AST, SATA 1.0a, SATA II Extensions, SATA Rev 2.5, SATA Rev 2.6
Standards:
Used: unknown (minor revision code 0x0029)
Supported: 8 7 6 5
Likely used: 8
Configuration:
Logical max current
cylinders 16383 16
heads 16 16
sectors/track 63 63
--
CHS current addressable sectors: 16128
LBA user addressable sectors: 16384
LBA48 user addressable sectors: 16384
Logical Sector size: 512 bytes
Physical Sector size: 512 bytes
device size with M = 1024*1024: 8 MBytes
device size with M = 1000*1000: 8 MBytes
cache/buffer size = unknown
Nominal Media Rotation Rate: Solid State Device
Capabilities:
LBA, IORDY(can be disabled)
Standby timer values: spec'd by Standard, no device specific minimum
R/W multiple sector transfer: Max = 16 Current = 16
DMA: mdma0 mdma1 mdma2 udma0 udma1 udma2 udma3 udma4 udma5 *udma6
Cycle time: min=120ns recommended=120ns
PIO: pio0 pio1 pio2 pio3 pio4
Cycle time: no flow control=120ns IORDY flow control=120ns
Commands/features:
Enabled Supported:
Security Mode feature set
* Power Management feature set
* Write cache
* Look-ahead
* Host Protected Area feature set
* WRITE_BUFFER command
* READ_BUFFER command
* NOP cmd
* DOWNLOAD_MICROCODE
SET_MAX security extension
* 48-bit Address feature set
* Device Configuration Overlay feature set
* Mandatory FLUSH_CACHE
* FLUSH_CACHE_EXT
* General Purpose Logging feature set
* WRITE_ DMA MULTIPLE _FUA_EXT
* 64-bit World wide name
* IDLE_IMMEDIATE with UNLOAD
* WRITE_UNCORRECTABLE_EXT command
* READ,WRITE _DMA_EXT_GPL commands
* Segmented DOWNLOAD_MICROCODE
* Gen1 signaling speed (1.5Gb/s)
* Gen2 signaling speed (3.0Gb/s)
* Phy event counters
* Software settings preservation
* SMART Command Transport (SCT) feature set
* SCT LBA Segment Access (AC2)
* SCT Error Recovery Control (AC3)
* SCT Features Control (AC4)
* SCT Data Tables (AC5)
* Data Set Management TRIM supported (limit 8 blocks)
* Deterministic read ZEROs after TRIM
Security:
Master password revision code = 65534
supported
not enabled
not locked
frozen
not expired: security count
supported: enhanced erase
2min for SECURITY ERASE UNIT. 2min for ENHANCED SECURITY ERASE UNIT.
Logical Unit WWN Device Identifier: 500151795951d4b9
NAA : 5
IEEE OUI : 001517
Unique ID : 95951d4b9
Checksum: correct


I just read reports about Boston marathon 2012. Incredibly though race this year as the heat raised up to 32-35 C (around 90 F?) for the last runners and 26 C at 10:00 at marathon start. The outcome is indeed impressive: the 2012 winner won with a "not so good" time of 2h12 while last year saw an unofficial world best time of 2h03'02" (there can't be any world record in Boston because of the race being one-way, thus prone to too favourable wind, plus a negative slope between start and finish). Even though this year is less likely to see great records (because this is an olympic year and the best runners won't run another marathon before the Olympics), we still had times around 2h05 in Paris, Rotterdam....and this year's best time in London with 2h04'44" (Dubai time is 2h04'23" but I do not count this one as a mass marathon). So, 2h12 in Boston just says how hard this race was. But, still, that's my dream marathon, even more than NYC marathon. And I'll do it, I promise....though I now have to run below 3h30 to qualify....unless I'm still running marathons when I reach 55, where the qualificaiton mark will be only 3h40 (which is exactly my PB as of now). Will I still be able to run in 3h40 in 4 years? Or will I succeed in running in less than 3h30 in the meantime? We'll see..:-) Until then....my first marathon for this year will be on June 9th, in Caen, as planned. Target: less than 3h40, despite the quite hard profile (and possible windy conditions as the first half of the race is along the famous Normandy beaches code named Sword, Gold and Juno, between Courseulles sur Mer and Ouistreham). So, until then, I'll forget about my nice races in forests and plains, and concentrate on interval trainings, boring sequences of 400m or 1000m runs, etc, etc. That will be the first time I'm doing this but everybody keeps telling me I need to do that if I want to lower my PB (and every marathoner wants to!).

The marketing industry divides itself up into a number of businesses. Some are boutique agencies, but most are owned by one of the world's four major holding companies. These conglomerates pursue an aggressive M&A strategy, snapping up smaller companies all the time.

• Advertising this is the generation of ads and commercials; often blatant and obvious, sometimes more subtle. The objective is generally to trick people into buying something.
• Media media companies handle the placement of advertising; they are brokers for ad space and commercial slots in magazines, newspapers, radio, TV, billboards, taxicabs and specialty vehicles, people handing out pamphlets and samples on the street, free-standing cardboard cutouts, website banners, and so forth. They handle product placement everywhere (TV, movies, celebrities, video games, &c.), ranging from the blatant in-your-face product logo to the more subtle authorship of entire screenplays just to showcase and promote particular products.
• Research The least glamorous, but not the least lucrative, market research is about figuring out what customers think they want. This takes the form of polls and surveys (phone, mail, web, email), focus groups, and a variety of surveillance and tracking methods of which the customer may or may not be conscious (loyalty programs, social media, special discount/rewards programs tied to your credit card, web bugs and cookies, specialized URLs and SMS numbers, POS questions)
• Public Relations When you need to manipulate public perception in a more covert way, you might hire a PR firm. This can be something like for when a CEO strangles his wife and suddenly there are lots of news reports about how the company produces the cleanest-burning fuels, and what great things it does for charity. It can be spin on all kinds of political events, corporate performance, and lobbying.
• Medical Because of the greater amount of regulation in the medical sector, medical marketing is handled separately. This includes the same advertising process, but with lots of fine print and more restrictions on the claims which can be made. It includes research, but with different rules on the confidentiality of data and the ways you can experiment on people. Then it extends to services not found in other sectors, such as funneling money from pharmaceutical companies to doctors (this is called medical education ), and acting as middlemen between pharmaceutical companies and the people who produce science shows for television.
• Branding Depending on who you talk to, branding is not just the process of shaping the public's perception of a particular company or product or service, or families thereof, but also convincing the employees of the relevant companies that the particular message being hawked is the truth. Logos are part of brand identity.

There are other sets of services, as well as variations on the above, particularly in terms of targeting certain age groups or ethnic groups, but also particular industries or sectors (movies, politics). There is direct marketing (spamming) through all the imaginable media. There is also paying people to blog about certain things without disclosing their sponsorship.

Karen Tse gave an interesting TED talk about how to stop police torture as an investigative tool [1]. Mostly it s about training and empowering public defenders. Phil Plait gave an interesting TED talk about how to defend the Earth from asteroids [2]. Julian Baggini wrote an interesting article for the Financial Times about the persecution of Atheists in the US [3]. Charlie Todd of Improv Everywhere gave an amusing TED talk about Improv events that he has run [4]. He is most famous for organising people to wear blue shirts and khaki pants in Best Buy, but he s done lots of other funny things. Paul Zak gave an interesting TED talk about trust, morality, and oxytocin [5]. One of the many interesting fact that he shared is that oxytocin levels can significantly increase when using social networking sites. So people who use Facebook etc are likely to be more trustworthy as well as more trusting. The Occupy the Judge Rotenberg Center movement aims to stop the torture of Autistic children in the US [6], Anonymous is involved in that too. Paul Lewis gave an insightful TED talk about the use of crowdsourced data in news reporting [7]. A lot of the analysis of citizen journalism is based on comparing bloggers with full-time paid journalists, but Paul describes how professional full-time journalistic work can be greatly assisted by random people filming and photographing things that seem noteworthy. Make sure your next phone has the best possible camera phone cameras will never be great but the quality of the camera you have with you is what matters. Sam Harris published an interesting interview with Tim Prowse who is a Baptist minister who faked belief for two years after becoming an atheist [8A]. He also references The Clergy Project a support group for atheists who are current or former members of the clergy [8B]. Cracked has an insightful article about 6 things that rich people need to stop saying [9]. How do the 1% not understand these things? Barack Obama and Nichelle Nichols (who played Lt Uhura in the original Star Treck) give the Vulcan Salute in the White-House [10]. Gabriel Arana wrote an insightful article about his experiences with the ex-gay movement [11]. The therapist who hurt him so much is still doing the same to other victims. S#!T Ignorant People Say To Autistics is an interesting youtube video about ignorant and annoying people [12]. Strangely I ve received little of that myself, I wonder whether women on the Autism Spectrum get a lot more of that than men. At GManCaseFile an ex-FBI agent has written an informative post about how the TSA is failing [13]. The Nieder Family has an interesting article about how patents are being used to prevent the creation of assisted communication (AAC) devices for children [14]. Apparently the company that has the patents wants all AAC devices to be really expensive and profitable for them. This is yet another example of patents doing harm not good. Renew Economy has an informative article by Giles Parkinson about the affect that solar power generation will have on power prices [15]. In short as solar systems produce power when it s most needed (during the day and at the hottest time of the day for warm climates) it will dramatically reduce the auction price for wholesale power. That will hurt the business of the power companies and also allow lower prices on the retail market.

• [1] http://www.ted.com/talks/karen_tse_how_to_stop_torture.html
• [2] http://www.ted.com/talks/phil_plait_how_to_defend_earth_from_asteroids.html
• [3] http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/d2239780-4d4e-11e1-8741-00144feabdc0.html
• [4] http://www.ted.com/talks/charlie_todd_the_shared_experience_of_absurdity.html
• [5] http://www.ted.com/talks/paul_zak_trust_morality_and_oxytocin.html
• [6] https://sites.google.com/site/occupythejudgerotenbergcenter/
• [7] http://www.ted.com/talks/paul_lewis_crowdsourcing_the_news.html
• [8A] http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/life-without-god
• [8B] http://clergyproject.org/
• [9] http://www.cracked.com/blog/6-things-rich-people-need-to-stop-saying/
• [10] http://colorlines.com/archives/2012/04/nichelle_nichols_throws_vulcan_signs_with_obama_in_the_oval_office.html
• [11] http://prospect.org/article/my-so-called-ex-gay-life
• [12] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fTBM_3sdwE
• [13] http://gmancasefile.blogspot.com.au/2012/01/tsa-fail.html
• [14] http://niederfamily.blogspot.com.au/2012/03/goliath-v-david-aac-style.html
• [15] http://reneweconomy.com.au/2012/why-generators-are-terrified-of-solar-44279

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Swift is the software behind the OpenStack Object Storage service. This service provides a simple storage service for applications using RESTful interfaces, providing maximum data availability and storage capacity. I explain here how some parts of the storage and replication in Swift works, and show some of its current limitations. If you don't know Swift and want to read a more "shallow" overview first, you can read John Dickinson's Swift Tech Overview. How Swift storage works If we refer to the CAP theorem, Swift chose availability and partition tolerance and dropped consistency. That means that you'll always get your data, they will be dispersed on many places, but you could get an old version of them (or no data at all) in some odd cases (like some server overload or failure). This compromise is made to allow maximum availability and scalability of the storage platform. But there are mechanisms built into Swift to minimize the potential data inconsistency window: they are responsible for data replication and consistency. The official Swift documentation explains the internal storage in a certain way, but I'm going to write my own explanation here about this. Consistent hashing Swift uses the principle of consistent hashing. It builds what it calls a ring. A ring represents the space of all possible computed hash values divided in equivalent parts. Each part of this space is called a partition. The following schema (stolen from the Riak project) shows the principle nicely: In a simple world, if you wanted to store some objects and distribute them on 4 nodes, you would split your hash space in 4. You would have 4 partitions, and computing hash(object) modulo 4 would tell you where to store your object: on node 0, 1, 2 or 3. But since you want to be able to extend your storage cluster to more nodes without breaking the whole hash mapping and moving everything around, you need to build a lot more partitions. Let's say we're going to build 2¹⁰ partitions. Since we have 4 nodes, each node will have 210 4 = 256 partitions. If we ever want to add a 5^th node, it's easy: we just have to re-balance the partitions and move 1 4 of the partitions from each node to this 5^th node. That means all our nodes will end up with 210 5 204 partitions. We can also define a weight for each node, in order for some nodes to get more partitions than others. With 2¹⁰ partitions, we can have up to 2¹⁰ nodes in our cluster. Yeepee. For reference, Gregory Holt, one of the Swift authors, also wrote an explanation post about the ring. Concretely, when building one Swift ring, you'll have to say how much partitions you want, and this is what this value is really about. Data duplication Now, to assure availability and partitioning (as seen in the CAP theorem) we also want to store replicas of our objects. By default, Swift stores 3 copies of every objects, but that's configurable. In that case, we need to store each partition defined above not only on 1 node, but on 2 others. So Swift adds another concept: zones. A zone is an isolated space that does not depends on other zone, so in case of an outage on a zone, the other zones are still available. Concretely, a zone is likely to be a disk, a server, or a whole cabinet, depending on the size of your cluster. It's up to you to chose anyway. Consequently, each partitions has not to be mapped to 1 host only anymore, but to N hosts. Each node will therefore store this number of partitions:

number of partition stored on one node = number of replicas   total number of partitions   number of node

Examples:

We split the ring in 2¹⁰ = 1024 partitions. We have 3 nodes. We want 3 replicas of data.
Each node will store a copy of the full partition space: 3 210 3 = 210 = 1024 partitions.

We split the ring in 2¹¹ = 2048 partitions. We have 5 nodes. We want 3 replicas of data.
Each node will store 211 3 5 1129 partitions.

We split the ring in 2¹¹ = 2048 partitions. We have 6 nodes. We want 3 replicas of data.
Each node will store 211 3 6 = 1024 partitions.

Three rings to rule them all In Swift, there is 3 categories of thing to store: account, container and objects. An account is what you'd expect it to be, a user account. An account contains containers (the equivalent of Amazon S3's buckets). Each container can contains user-defined key and values (just like a hash table or a dictionary): values are what Swift call objects. Swift wants you to build 3 different and independent rings to store its 3 kind of things (accounts, containers and objects). Internally, the two first categories are stored as SQLite databases, whereas the last one is stored using regular files. Note that this 3 rings can be stored and managed on 3 completely different set of servers. Data replication Now that we have our storage theory in place (accounts, containers and objects distributed into partitions, themselves stored into multiple zones), let's go the replication practice. When you put something in one of the 3 rings (being an account, a container or an object) it is uploaded into all the zones responsible for the ring partition the object belongs to. This upload into the different zones is the responsibility of the swift-proxy daemon. But if one of the zone is failing, you can't upload all your copies in all zones at the upload time. So you need a mechanism to be sure the failing zone will catch up to a correct state at some point. That's the role of the swift- container,account,object -replicator processes. This processes are running on each node part of a zone and replicates their contents to nodes of the other zones. When they run, they walk through all the contents from all the partitions on the whole file system and for each partition, issue a special REPLICATE HTTP request to all the other zones responsible for that same partition. The other zone responds with information about the local state of the partition. That allows the replicator process to decide if the remote zone has an up-to-date version of the partition. In case of account and containers, it doesn't check at the partition level, but check each account/container contained inside each partition. If something is not up-to-date, it will be pushed using rsync by the replicator process. This is why you'll read that the replication updates are "push based" in Swift documentation.

# Pseudo code describing replication process for accounts
# The principle is exactly the same for containers
for account in accounts:
    # Determine the partition used to store this account
    partition = hash(account) % number_of_partitions
    # The number of zone is the number of replicas configured
    for zone in partition.get_zones_storing_this_partition():
        # Send a HTTP REPLICATE command to the remote swift-account-server process
        version_of_account = zone.send_HTTP_REPLICATE_for(account):
        if version_of_account < account.version()
            account.sync_to(zone)

This replication process is O(number of account number of replicas). The more your number of account will increase and the more you will want replicas for your data, the more the replication time for your accounts will grow. The same rule applies for containers.

# Pseudo code describing replication process for objects
for partition in partitions_storing_objects:
    # The number of zone is the number of replicas configured
    for zone in partition.get_zones_storing_this_partition():
        # Send a HTTP REPLICATE command to the remote swift-object-server process
        verion_of_partition = zone.send_HTTP_REPLICATE_for(partition):
        if version_of_partition < partition.version()
            # Use rsync to synchronize the whole partition
            # and all its objects
            partition.rsync_to(zone)

This replication process is O(number of objects partitions number of replicas). The more your number of objects partitions will increase, and the more you will want replicas for your data, the more the replication time for your objects will grow. I think this is something important to know when deciding how to build your Swift architecture. Choose the right number the number of replicas, partitions and nodes. Replication process bottlenecks File accesses The problem, as you might have guessed, is that to replicate, it walks through every damn things, things being accounts, containers, or object's partition hash files. This means it need to open and read (part of) a every file your node stores to check that data need or not to be replicated! For accounts & containers replication, this is done every 30 seconds by default, but it will likely take more than 30 seconds as soon as you hit around 12 000 containers on a node (see measurements below). Therefore you'll end up checking consistency of accounts & containers on each all node all the time, using obviously a lot of CPU time. For reference, Alex Yang also did an analysis of that same problem. TCP connections Worst, the HTTP connections used to send the REPLICATE commands are not pooled: a new TCP connection is established each time something has to be checked against the same thing stored on a remote zone. This is why you'll see in the Swift's Deployment Guide this lines listed under "general system tuning":

# disable TIME_WAIT.. wait..
net.ipv4.tcp_tw_recycle=1
net.ipv4.tcp_tw_reuse=1
# double amount of allowed conntrack
net.ipv4.netfilter.ip_conntrack_max = 262144

In my humble opinion, this is more an ugly hack than a tuning. If you don't activate this and if you have a lot of containers on your node, you'll end up soon with thousands of connections in TIME_WAIT state, and you indeed risk to overload the IP conntrack module. Container deletion We also should talk about container deletion. When a user deletes a container from its account, the container is marked as deleted. And that's it. It's not deleted. Therefore the SQLite database file representing the container will continue to be checked for synchronization, over and over. The only way to have a container permanently deleted is to mark an account as deleted. This way the swift-account-reaper will delete all its containers and, finally, the account. Measurement On a pretty big server, I measured the replications to be done at a speed of around 350 account,container,object-partitions /second, which can be a real problem if you chose to build a lots of partition and you have a low number_of_node number_of_replicas ratio. For example, the default parameters runs the container replication every 30 seconds. To check replication status of 12 000 containers stored on one node at the speed of 350 containers/seconds, you'll need around 34 seconds to do so. In the end, you'll never stop checking replication of your containers, and the more you'll have containers, the more your inconsistency window will increase. Conclusion Until some of the code is fixed (the HTTP connection pooling probably being the "easiest" one), I warmly recommend to chose correctly the different Swift parameters for your setup. The replication process optimization consists in having the minimum amount of partitions per node, which can be done by:

• decreasing the number of partitions
• decreasing the number of replicas
• increasing the number of node

For very large setups, some code to speed up accounts and containers synchronization, and remove deleted containers will be required, but this does not exist yet, as far as I know.

If you are looking for xorg-macros in Debian, you should install xutils-dev.

I've recently been moving some important data into git-annex, and finding it simplifies things while also increasing my flexability. email archives I've kept my email archives in git for years. This works ok, just choose the right file format (compressed mbox) and number of files (one archive per mailbox per month or so) and git can handle this well enough, as email is not really large. But, email is not really small either. Keeping my email repository checked out on my netbook consumes 2 gigabytes of its 30 gigabyte SSD, half of which is duplication in .git. Also, I have only kept it at 2 gigabytes through careful selection of what classes of mail I archive. That made sense when archival disk was more expensive, but what makes sense these days is to archive everything. For a while I've wanted to have a "raw" archive, that includes all email I receive. (Even spam.) This protects against various disasters in mail filtering or reading. Setting that up was my impetus for switching my mail archives to git-annex today. The new system I've settled on is to first copy all incoming mail into a "raw" maildir folder. Then mailfilter sorts it into the folders I sync (with offlineimap) and read. Each day, the "raw" folder is moved into a mbox archive, and that's added to the git annex. Each month, the mail I've read is moved into a monthly archives, and added to the git annex. A simple script does the work. I counted the number of copies that existed of my mail when it was stored in git, and found 7 copies spread amoung just 3 drives. I decided to slim that back, and configured git-annex to require only 5 copies. But those 5 copies will spread amoung more drives, including several offline archival drives, so it will be more robust overall. My netbook will have an incomplete checkout of my mail, omitting the "raw" archive. If I need to peek inside a spam folder for a lost mail, I can quickly pull it down; if I need to free up space I can quickly drop older archives. This is the flexability that git-annex fans love. :) By the way, this also makes it easier to permanantly delete mail, when you really need to (ie, for contractual reasons). Before, I'd have to do a painful git-filter-branch if I needed to get rid of eg, mail for old jobs. Now I can git annex drop --force. Pro Tip: If you're doing this kind of migration to git-annex, you can save bandwidth by not re-transferring files to machines that already have a copy. I ran this command on my netbook to inject the archives it had in the old repository into the new repository, verifying checksums as it goes:

cd ~/mail/archive; find -type l -exec git annex reinject ~/mail.old/archive/    \;

Note on mairix compatability: I use mairix to index and search my mail. But it refuses to follow git-annex's symlinks to the content. So I have to point it at .git/annex/objects/. I also configured annex.backend to SHA256E, which keeps the extensions on my compressed mailbox files, which is necessary for mairix to realize they're compressed. debian packages I'd evolved a complex and fragile chain of personal apt repositories to hold Debian packages I've released. I recently got rid of the mess, which looked like this: dput local mini-dinstall repo dput→mini-dinstallrepo on my server →dput Debian The point of all that was that I could "upload" a package locally while offline and batch transfer it later. And I had a local and a public apt repository of just the packages I've uploaded. But these days, packages uploaded to Debian are available nearly immediately, so there's not much reason to do that. My old system also had a problem: It only kept the most recent single copy of each package. Again, disk is cheap, so I'd rather have archives of everything I have uploaded. Again I switched to git-annex. My new system is simplicity itself. I release a package by checking it into a "toupload" directory in my git annex repository on my netbook. Items in that directory are dput to Debian and moved to "released". I have various other clones of that repository, which I git annex move packages to periodically to free up SSD space. In the rare cases when I build a package on a server, I check it into the clone on the server, and again rely on git-annex to copy it around. Now, does anyone know a good way to download a copy of every package you're ever released from archive.debian.org? (Ideally as a list of urls I can feed to git annex addurl.) conclusion My email and Debian packages were the last large files I was not storing in git-annex. Even backups of my backups end up checked into git-annex and archived away. Now that I'm using git-annex in every place I can, my goal with it is to make it as easy as possible for as many of you to use it as possible, too. I have some inotify tricks up my sleeve that seem promising. Kickstarter may be involved. Watch this space!

this week I've started to look at the (not yet release critical) gcc 4.7 bugs. luckily there are still enough patches for them in the BTS but at the time of writing, at least 138 are not fixed & don't have a patch yet. so still some work ahead.

& for those who prefer to fix debian/rules files, lucas' last archive rebuild (where build-arch was used) still leaves enough work, & many bugs are not difficult to fix with a basic understanding of makefiles & debian build sytems.

• #662382 src:jigzo: "jigzo: Please Build-Depends on libpng-dev, change from libpng12-dev"
  do as the bug report requests, add a patch from FreeBSD, upload to DELAYED/10, then sponsored maintainer upload
• #662432 src:minetest: "minetest: Please Build-Depends on libpng-dev, change from libpng12-dev"
  do as the bug report requests, upload to DELAYED/5, later cancelled du to maintainer request/upload
• #666290 src:xml2: "xml2: FTBFS: gcc: error: unrecognized option '-V'"
  update debian/rules, upload to DELAYED/2
• #666301 src:xxdiff: "xxdiff: FTBFS: make[1]: rst2html.py: Command not found"
  add build-arch and build-indep targets to debian/rules, upload to DELAYED/2
• #666302 src:gurlchecker: "gurlchecker: FTBFS: cp: cannot stat debian/tmp/ui/gurlchecker.xpm': No such file or directory"
  use override target in debian/rules, upload to DELAYED/2
• #666329 src:c-icap: "c-icap: FTBFS: cp: cannot stat debian/tmp/etc/c-icap/c-icap.conf': No such file or directory"
  use override target in debian/rules, upload to DELAYED/2
• #667110 basic256: "basic256: ftbfs with GCC-4.7"
  add patch from Cyril Brulebois, upload to DELAYED/5, rescheduled to 15-day after maintainer reply, fixed in maintainer upload
• #667116 blahtexml: "blahtexml: ftbfs with GCC-4.7"
  add patch from Cyril Brulebois, upload to DELAYED/5
• #667178 gkrellkam: "gkrellkam: ftbfs with GCC-4.7"
  add patch from Paul Tagliamonte, upload to DELAYED/5
• #667180 gkrellmitime: "gkrellmitime: ftbfs with GCC-4.7"
  add patch from Paul Tagliamonte, QA upload
• #667194 gsmartcontrol: "gsmartcontrol: ftbfs with GCC-4.7"
  add patch from Paul Tagliamonte, upload to DELAYED/5
• #667216 jigzo: "jigzo: ftbfs with GCC-4.7"
  add patch from Paul Tagliamonte, upload to DELAYED/10, then sponsored maintainer upload
• #667217 jstest-gtk: "jstest-gtk: ftbfs with GCC-4.7"
  add patch from Paul Tagliamonte, upload to DELAYED/5
• #667280 minetest: "minetest: ftbfs with GCC-4.7"
  add patch from P. J. McDermott, upload to DELAYED/5, later cancelled du to maintainer request/upload
• #667315 openturns: "openturns: ftbfs with GCC-4.7"
  add patch from Denis Barbier, upload to DELAYED/5
• #667327 populations: "populations: ftbfs with GCC-4.7"
  add patch from Paul Tagliamonte, upload to DELAYED/5
• #667333 ptlib-wolf: "ptlib-wolf: ftbfs with GCC-4.7"
  add patch from Paul Tagliamonte, upload to DELAYED/5
• #667334 pwlib: "pwlib: ftbfs with GCC-4.7"
  add patch from Paul Tagliamonte, upload to DELAYED/2
• #667365 s51dude: "s51dude: ftbfs with GCC-4.7"
  add patch from Paul Tagliamonte, upload to DELAYED/5
• #667415 wmhdplop: "wmhdplop: ftbfs with GCC-4.7"
  add patch from Paul Tagliamonte, upload to DELAYED/5
• #667418 wvstreams: "wvstreams: ftbfs with GCC-4.7"
  add patch from Paul Tagliamonte, QA upload

One thing I thought about today is reference counting in combination with tail calls. Imagine a function like this:

function f(x)   return g(x+1);  

Now consider that x is a reference counted object and that x + 1 creates a new object. The call to g(x + 1) shall be in tail call position. In most reference counted languages, the reference to an argument is owned by the caller. That is, f() owns the reference to x + 1. In that case, the call to g() would no longer be in a tail call position, as we still have to decrease the reference count after g() exits. An alternative would be that the callee owns the reference. This however, will most likely create far more reference count changes than a caller-owns language (increase reference count in caller, decrease reference count in callee). For example, the following function requires an increment before the call to g().

function f1(x)   return g(x);  

Does anyone have any ideas on how to solve the problem of tail calls while avoiding the callee-owns scenario? Something that does not require a (non-reference-counting) garbage collector would be preferably.
Filed under: General

Obnam is my backup program. See http://liw.fi/obnam/ for details. Debian is hopefully going to be freezing the current testing version in June, in preparation for a release late this year. I'd like Obnam 1.0 to be included. In preparation for that I reviewed the currently open bugs and tagged the ones that I think are blockers. See list of 1.0 blocker bugs. Did I miss anything? Is anything there that isn't really a blocker? Other than that, the roadmap for 1.0 has the following things that aren't done yet:

• Verification test
• Performance

Performance is one of those things that's always going to be a problem. I'm hoping to optimize the sftp performance a big, but apart from that, I don't consider it to be a blocker for 1.0. The verification test I'm confident I will pass, but it needs to actually be performed. (See the roadmap for details of the test.) Anyone else have opinions of what needs to be done for Obnam 1.0? PS. There's a mailing list for Obnam now.

While writing my previous post I heard a huge noise at the front of my house. I found one man being restrained in a seated position on the ground at my front door, the man who was holding him down was accusing him of theft and asking me to call the police, and a woman was hanging around and crying. When calling the police I discovered that Optus (the Telco that provides the virtual service which Virgin Mobile uses) doesn t accept 112 as an emergency number! This combined with the fact that CyanogenMod 7 on my phone doesn t accept 000 as an emergency number meant that I had to unlock my phone before calling the police. Unlocking your phone late at night when there s a situation that needs police attention isn t as easy as you would hope. As an aside there are usually no penalties for testing the emergency service on your phone, people who install PABX systems and other significant telephony devices test emergency services calls as a matter of routine, so testing emergency calls from your phone is a really good idea. If anyone knows how to configure CyanogenMod 7 to support 000 as an emergency call then please let me know! Anyway the man who was held down claimed that a friend of his had given him a bag containing tools that he had lugged from some place not particularly near my house. The man who was holding him down said that he witnessed the other man stealing the tools from his neighbor not far from my house. The woman was apparently the girlfriend of the man who was accused of burglary. The end result was that the police arrested the man who was accused of burglary and his girlfriend. He didn t have any obvious injuries and the police said that the man who detained him did them a favor, so it seems unlikely that there will be any assault charges filed. Presumably the man who detained the burglar is explaining it all at the police station now, I hope the police gave him a chance to put on pants and shoes first. The man who made the burglary accusation said that his house was robbed last night which is why he was more observant than usual tonight. This makes me glad of my policy of rejecting every job offer which involves moving to the US. In Australia hand guns are really hard to get so there s no way that a house burglary will involve a gun and there s also no way that someone who wants to help the police will have a gun. So while it was unpleasant to have this happen at my front door it didn t involve any risk to me. It could have ended up with someone other than me getting a beating but the probability of serious injury or death for them was quite low. As everyone knew that no-one had a gun and no-one wanted to be charged with assault it made sense for everyone to avoid excessive force. From what I saw no excessive force was used. The police arrived fairly quickly and EVERYONE was glad to see them. All up it took a bit more than 30 minutes from the first noise to the police departing after arresting both suspects and filling out a bunch of paperwork. I was impressed by that! Related posts:

1. CyanogenMod and the Galaxy S Thanks to some advice from Philipp Kern I have now...

A Polish geek going by the handle of mmemuar has recently written a blog post claiming that people use Autism as an excuse for bad behavior [1]. He gets enough things wrong in one short post to make it worth debunking it. It seems that Google s translation of Polish isn t as good as some other languages, but unless Google mistranslated about a dozen sections such that they had the exact opposite meaning then mmemuar s post has a lot of wrong ideas. Does Anyone use Autism as an Excuse? I ve read a lot of blog posts written by people on the Autism Spectrum, read many forum discussions, and talked to more than a few people in person. So far I haven t yet encountered any evidence of people using an Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) diagnosis as an excuse. There are probably about 70,000,000 people who meet the diagnostic criteria (most of whom have not been diagnosed due to not having access to anyone who is qualified to do an assessment). The number of people who have been diagnosed is large enough that I couldn t claim that none of them have ever used it as an excuse. The number of self-diagnosed people is also large enough that there has to be some people who wouldn t get diagnosed if professionally assessed. But I don t see any evidence that using an ASD as an excuse is at all common. I imagine that some people would take someone merely mentioning the fact that they have an ASD diagnosis in a public place (EG a mailing list or a blog post) as some sort of an excuse. One problem with such an interpretation is that for every way in which people on the Autism Spectrum annoy other people it s the ones who aren t diagnosed (or who reject a diagnosis) that will do it the most. Being diagnosed with an ASD is correlated with annoying other people less. Another problem is that keeping quiet about such things when they get raised for discussion so often takes a psychological toll. When someone is diagnosed as an adult a fairly common reaction is to study Psychology and Sociology (usually through web sites such as Sociological Images which I highly recommend [2]) and try to get a better understanding of other people. Any time you assume that everyone else thinks like you then you will get things wrong, when someone gets an ASD diagnosis they will probably take more care to avoid making such mistakes. Is Autism Obvious? Mmemuar says if you were full of autistic, which is very easy to overheat the brain from excess signals at the input, it would be very obvious to all . There are some people who are utterly incapable of acting like an NT. But the majority of people on the Autism Spectrum have some ability to pass as NT, it just takes a lot of effort. So if someone is spending all their effort to walk, talk, and make eye contact in a way that most people expect then they will have little spare effort for other things. This can result in them having little patience for other people. The solution to this is to not require people to look average. Even apart from Autism there are people who fidget, don t make eye contact in the way you expect, and do other things a little differently. Being tolerant of such things won t hurt you and will generally make things easier for everyone. TheAnMish gave a good Youtube presentation about the way that she has to act normal [3]. Note that while her video represents her own personal experiences (which differ slightly from those of other Aspies particularly male Aspies) they are regarded as representative enough for her video to be shown by Tony Attwood (a world renowned expert on Asperger Syndrome) at a conference about women on the Autism Spectrum. As an aside I disagree with her use of the word normal without scare-quotes. Learning about Psychology through Sci-Fi In the end of the blog post and in some of the comments there is discussion about learning to understand people through reading sci-fi books. The first problem with this is that fiction books generally have a range of characters that is determined by the author s understanding of people, if you read multiple books by an author then you will usually notice the same character types. The second problem is that characters in fiction books are simplified to fit into a reasonable sized book, in real life people have lots of really boring reasons for doing what they do, in fiction only stuff that is interesting ends up in print. But the biggest problem is that fiction books just aren t a good way of learning about people. Whatever lessons might be in a fiction book will probably be missed by a reader who is concentrating on the plot. You can learn things about people by reading an analysis of literature by a Psychologist or a Sociologist, but apart from that you probably won t be able to learn things if you don t already know them. As an aside, my experience of reading sci-fi books suggests that some of the popular sci-fi authors have such a poor understanding of people that it impairs their ability to write believable fiction about human characters. If I was going to try and learn about people by reading fiction I d choose something that s been popular for a long time. If a book has been popular for more than 100 years and sold well in different times, cultures, and languages then it probably has something to say about the human condition. Catching up on Youth Mmemuar says absolutely nothing prevents you to the age of twenty he began to catch up on some of youth . Actually one significant thing is that the human brain develops in particular stages, the older you get the more difficult it becomes to learn things. So even if it was just a matter of learning things someone who was behind at age 20 would have some significant difficulty in catching up. But some things just can t be learned, for example someone who has extreme discomfort in making eye contact can t just learn to be happy with it. Also there are some things which people would have learned if it was possible. For example people who have Prosopagnosia (an inability to recognise faces) suffer extreme bullying in school, if they could just learn to recognise people then they surely would do so, so if they complete school without learning then it s probably going to be impossible for them. Prosopagnosia is one of many conditions which can contribute to social difficulties and therefore contribute to an ASD diagnosis. Can Aspies get Married? Some people think that people on the Autism Spectrum can t get married. In fact this belief is so widely held that some people who seem very obviously Autistic are convinced that they are NT simply because they are married! The fact that there are more than few books offering advice to people who have married someone who is on the Autism Spectrum is clear proof that such claims are bogus. The Relevance to Geek Communities People who meet the diagnostic criteria for Asperger Syndrome will almost certainly be Geeks due to the Restricted, repetitive patterns of behavior, interests, or activities section of the diagnostic criteria (the proposed revision for the DSM-V is the best reference I know for this [4]) as the modern use of the term Geek applies to anyone who has an extreme interest in something. The more Geeky a community is the greater the incidence of people who could be diagnosed with an ASD. Spreading ideas such as those of mmemuar will lead to people not being assessed for an ASD. I would have been assessed earlier if it wasn t for hearing an influential member of the Linux community say some things which were similar in concept (although not as deliberate). Having people not be assessed is bad for the individuals in question and bad for the community.

• [1] http://mmazur.7thguard.net/2012/03/24/w-kwestii-aspergera/
• [2] http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/
• [3] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFxWdpuyY6o
• [4] http://www.dsm5.org/ProposedRevisions/Pages/proposedrevision.aspx?rid=94

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