It's scary how much negative publicity a single user can cause for a whole project...90% of the time when I read about OpenSolaris, it's by a highly aggressive troll, also known as the "author" of cdrecord (the term "current upstream maintainer" is probably more appropriate).And it's always the same blah-blah, how much superior Solaris is to Linux.But what is much worse is the way he posts and hist persistence. (I'd link some postings, but they're all in german at Heise). At Heise News, whenever there is a posting related to Linux (e.g. because of Berlin considering a Linux migration, or a posting about ZFS), he reiterates that you shouldn't be using Linux but OpenSolaris. And then flames anybody who again mentions Linux or GNU. Because as we all know, GNU tar is bad, and POSIX tar is the only god...One reason to avoid OpenSolaris is just to keep a distance from him. I'm sure that there are some good things in OpenSolaris, too. And that there are some smart people working on it. But you have to understand: I'd be more willing to setup a FreeBSD, NetBSD or OSX system (or even a windows system) than maybe having to deal with him when I run into some problem where I might need assistance. When doing FL/OSS development, I want a nice community around me, and the part I see of the OpenSolaris community is not very well-behaved.You might want to read this blog posting on Linux and Solaris scalability by DaveM for some comments on similar Solaris FUD. Seems like J.S. isn't the only aggressive advocate who prefers to flame instead of trying to impress with technical issues, professionalism and personality.

Kevin Shanahan asked me to provide gs-gpl package based on the bleeding edge Subversion snapshot. Some of you might want it for your own enjoyment, too. At least I wanted it, since the merger of gs-esp/gs-gpl is now going on in the upstream (Kudos to Till Kampetter). So here it is. Add the following to your /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://people.debian.org/~mhatta/debian/gs-gpl ./
deb-src http://people.debian.org/~mhatta/debian/gs-gpl ./

Note that this is really FOR TESTING PURPOSE ONLY, and you should use this with caution. Or, you might waste not only your precious time but also equally precious inks and papers ;-) Needless to say, do not report any bugs to the Debian BTS. Also, I'll use this repositry to test the reorganization of Debian Ghostscript packages. Currently I plan to divide the current sumo gs-gpl package into several subpackages (like gs-gpl-x, gs-gpl-doc, libgs and so on). So, maybe I'll blow up and some dependency tangling or such will happen. You are warned.

Tag this post with del.icio.us!

The URL http://linuxresource.lemonup.com/ currently has a mirror of my blog. Disregarding the DMCA take-down notice I sent them a week ago (which is also mirrored on their own site) they have again copied the content from my site without permission (I only allow non-commercial use). But this time they go even further and claim copyright over my text! This is going way too far. Now I’m going to ask their ISP to deal with them. Update: Their site is now offline. Their ISP acted quite quickly and less than 3.5 hours after my complaint the entire site was offline (not only the section that had my posts). I suspect that it was the fact that they mirrored blog posts such as this one which made it appear to be willfull infringement which got such a fast response - but the only response I got from the ISP was to say that they would do what seemed right and not comment to me about it due to privacy reasons. This is not an ideal outcome. I would much rather have had them respect my license terms without such measures. I only contacted their ISP because the first take-down request took four days to complete (after receiving a response on day 0 so it wasn’t four days of holiday for the operator) and because they then mirrored my site again under a different URL. I am still unsure of whether this was a genuine mistake (as claimed by the operator) due to lack of communication between multiple people involved in running the site, or whether they just didn’t think I would catch them. I don’t have any malice towards the operators of lemonup, I have already offered some suggestions that may help them in future business ventures and would be happy to make some more suggestions if asked. In response to a comment. The traditional meaning of the word pirate is violent acts at sea that don’t have state sponsorship, this usually involves armed robbery but the main criteria is violence without state sponsorship. The slang use means anything which goes against the wishes of a copyright holder.

I just booked and paid my tickets to reach Edinburgh next month and attend DebConf7. I’ll be flying to New York on June, 16th through Delta from MEX. Then, I’ll go over the Atlantic with Flyglobespan, from JFK to Liverpool John Lennon Airport. From there, I’m still not completely sure, but I guess I’ll go by train to Edinburgh. Same way to return, on Sunday 24th, after spending a Saturday night in NYC. There’s a small thing that it’s still worrying me. I got the best deal ever from the US to the UK with Flyglobespan, but their first transatlantic flight will be by the end of May and I’m travelling in the middle of June. So, I’m bit skeptical on the matter. But reaching the UK from the US for only 550 USD, return, was impressive and I took the chance. If I don’t appear on DebConf on Sunday 17th around midday, it’ll be because I’ll be in NYC waiting for some answers from Flyglobespan. Anyway, I just moved and this travel expense was not easy. Actually, I wasn’t considering to attend, but after receiving sponsorship, I reconsidered and well, it couldn’t be possible at all without the support of the DebConf orga team, Gunnar, who lent me the sponsorship money for faster and local moves; my employer who is paying the MEX-JFK-MEX flight, but after all, my beloved fianc e, Raquel, who has been an incredible support for a guy like me (a fat, lazy, farty, stupid, anger-tending dude). I really, couldn’t be the happiest person I am today, without you: I love you, peque :-). Have I mentioned that any Debian friend visiting Mexico City can crash on our apartment? Yes! Just like bubulle’s hotel in Paris!

Tomorrow is my 1-year anniversary for having this blog. I started it with a post on Journal/15 Flor al CCXIV, and tomorrow is the same date, one year later. There's a lot going on on that day, though! First, it's Free Comic Book Day. That means you can walk into any participating comic book store and walk out with a free comic book. Cool! I'm going down to my nearby comics store, the small and cool Millenium. But there are more in the area, so I made a My Maps of Montreal comic book stores participating in Free Comic Book Day. My Maps is pretty boss. Second, tomorrow is the launch of the Design Montr al. Montreal was recently named a UNESCO City of Design, and tomorrow designers in Montreal will be opening their doors to the public. It seems like it should be a pretty fun event, with a wind-up party at the SAT. Cool. I'm going to be going to Creacamp, the new BarCamp-style event we have in Montreal to showcase creative women d'ici. It may be one, two, or three of us coming (Maj and Amita June are still on the fence), but I'm definitely going to come. tags: creacamp montreal free comic book day my maps design open doors

It looks like there are still a few spare beds in the hostel block booking for DebConf. So if you don’t have sponsored accommodation for DebConf, but would like to stay with other DebConf attendees, write to accommodation@debconf.org now. The spare beds will be allocated to people in the order emails are received; the price per night will be £12 (currently €17.60), which is a special reduced rate due to our large bookings.

The web site http://au.ratemyteachers.com/ allows Australian students to rate their teachers. Ratings are anonymous and give teachers a score out of 5 as well as allowing students to comment on teachers. The Sydney Morning Herald has an article about the site that describes the actions that the NSW Department of Education and the NSW Teachers Federation are taking to block the site. The solution to this however is really quite simple. There needs to be a formal method for students to rate their teachers which will be used when it comes time to give pay rises to good teachers and dismiss or transfer to non-teaching duties the teachers who can’t do their job. I encourage students to submit essays and debate topics about the anonymous news-papers published in the Soviet Union and other repressive states, why they were necessary (because criticism of the government was prohibited) and why they were morally right (a system with no method of correction will inevitably do bad things). Then teachers will have a choice of supporting the actions of the Soviet Union or the use of ratemyteacher.com, it will be interesting to see which option they choose. I think that it’s most likely that they will take the hypocritical path and support anonymous newspapers in the Soviet Union while attacking such free speech in supposedly free countries. It’s interesting that an article on the failures of Mentone Grammar has just been published. Maybe if Mentone had been listed on the ratemyteachers.com site the Taylor’s would not have made the mistake of sending their son there. Or maybe if the Mentone senior staff had been reading that site they would have been able to correct the problems before they became cause for a legal dispute.

When introducing gettext to Gammu, I hoped that next release will be completely translated to Czech. Unfortunately there is too much to translate and too few free time. After hard work on translating, I got to 27%. That's not much. Anyway it helped a lot in proofreading some texts and I hope I cleaned up a bit language used in Gammu. Also I introduced several calls to ngettext, what means that plurals in different languages should be now better. But this will only help, if somebody will be interested in translating Gammu. If you have free time, go ahead and improve translation to your language!

I thought the idea was that we shouldn't search for invalid patents, because ignorant infringement is punished less severely than wilful infringement? Joe Buck replied:

"Well, yes, there's the matter of triple damages for "willful infringement". That only kicks in once a court has found you liable, but it's an issue. There's been a change in the last few days though; a recent US Supreme Court decision should lead to a very large number of software patents getting tossed (though unfortunately they would have to be challenged one by one). My take: free software developers shouldn't go searching for bad patents. But people like the EFF and the SFLC should, the better to get those bad patents tossed."

Alexander Wirt posted the following request on -events-eu. Since I fear it won’t get the attention it deserves, I’m quoting his request here again.

Hi, unfortunatly there weren’t enough talks submitted for the Debian Day that I have to cancel it until there won’t be some new submissions in the next few hours.
So if you want to have a debian day, please submit a talk via the VCC (https://www.linuxtag.org/vcc/). Otherwise it will be canceled. Alex

Update: Mission accomplished. Looks like a few talks were submitted just in time to save the (Debian) day.

That's a picture of Jacob in his "suit", with his soft shoes. Both came from Indiana.

He's been really growing, and is big. He's about 7 months old now, and is a lot of fun to play with.

Sunday was child dedication day at church, and Jacob was dedicated that day, wearing his suit. (Here is an explanation of Mennonite child dedication if you're curious)

We took him to the front of the church (along with another family who also had a newborn). We promised to nurture him as a child from God, said a few words, and then the pastor -- as he always does -- carried Jacob down the sanctuary aisle.

Jacob watched as the pastor introduced him to the congregation. He said "these will be your Sunday School teachers, mentors, and friends." He pointed out Jacob's grandparents. And he said, "These are the pews your Great Grandpa Alvin sat in. If he were here today, I know he'd be proud of you."

After it was over, we went back to our seats, breathed a sigh of relief that Jacob wasn't screaming during the whole thing. And promptly had to take him to the nursery because he started screaming right about then.

Since it almost seems that I won't be at this year's DebConf in Edinburgh, there will be a slight problem holding my BoF there, where I planned to talk about incompatible changes to the packaging system, introducing new features. Thus, I'm calling for ideas that would require intrusive changes everywhere (translation debs are in, of course, as well as the stuff I already posted), so I can get a bit of an overview and become able to propose something that will not just work for me, but for others as well.

I'm Going to Play Some Number at the Lotto The Lotto Game is a really popular gambling game in Italy, run by the state itself. As in all good gambling game: you, the player, can win a lot of money while who is running the game (the Italian state in our case) will win a lot of money for sure, no matter what. Anyhow, to the facts, it's a well-known folklore that people win playing Lotto FOR SURE by playing numbers told while dreaming by parents, friends, kitties, whatever, ... As a scientist, I've no reason not to trust this folklore, why should I? As a strange coincidence (another fact that strongly hints I HAVE TO PLAY), this night I had a dream (well, it was more this morning while reading the planet, but it doesn't really matter..., folklore is folklore!). There were a lot, really a lot of people whispering this to my ears:

09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0

well, ok, they aren't in decimal notation, and they aren't even comprised between 1 and 90, ... but what would you expect from a bunch of geeks??? They are probably trying to exploit some overflow in the hands of the lotto extractor or something like that... But I won't desist, I'll play those number! Open questions:

• on which wheel(s) should I play the numbers?
• how should I handle overflowed numbers? throw them away? modulo 89 operations + 1?

any proficient Lotto player to answer them around?

I’ll be making my first big appearance as a Sun employee next Monday at CommunityOne in San Francisco (this is the day before JavaOne). In addition to participating in the keynote with Tim O’Reilly, Rich Green, and Tim Bray, I’ve put together a track called Linux vs. Solaris? designed to show that the gap between Linux and Solaris isn’t as wide as one might think:

All too often, technologies are pitted against each other in the popular imagination, and Linux and Solaris are no exception—”Linux vs. Solaris” certainly does make a catchy soundbyte. Despite the juxtaposition, Linux and Solaris have much in common—both are open source, have common ancestry, and are similar enough that both users and developers can move back and forth between them with comparative ease. The “vs.” mentality is caused as much by lack of understanding of the “other side” as anything else. In this track, we will focus on the similarities between Linux and Solaris rather than the differences, the goal being to increase understanding of Solaris among Linux users and developers and vice versa. Where we discuss differences, these differences will be expressed in terms of “how we can learn from each other”. We will also discuss the migration up the stack of developer platforms and address the question, “Do operating systems still matter?” The ultimate goal of the track is to change the conversation: Not Linux vs. Solaris, but open vs. closed.

The track includes four sessions. I’ll kick things off by answering the burning question: “What’s a Linux guy doing at Sun?” Next, Jeff Bailey of Canonical and Bart Smaalders of Sun will take us “inside the sausage factory” to show how Ubuntu and Solaris, respectively, get made. Next, Don Kretsch of Sun and Joe Little of Stanford will show us Solaris Express Developer Edition and Nexenta, two very different takes on OpenSolaris. And last but certainly not least, Josh Berkus, Robert Lor, Harpreet Singh, Tim Bray, and Greg Luck will highlight why the OS still very much matters even as software development moves up the stack. Of course, there are a number of other great tracks as well. If operating systems are your bag, you should also check out the OpenSolaris track. Fortunately, my times don’t overlap with Ben Rockwood’s introduction to OpenSolaris, nor will I have to miss the opportunity to see the amazing Bryan Cantrill, Adam Leventhal, and Mike Shapiro educate, entertain, and gesticulate wildly! If you’re in San Francisco or the Bay area or are already planning to be at JavaOne, you should definitely plan to attend CommunityOne too. Register today! (P.S. - It’s free!)

A couple of hours of today went on dealing with the effects of a big spam attack on a managed server. One user had installed the Joomla ExtCal component on their web site, while another reported that email was running slowly. The attacker was exploiting com_extcalendar/admin_events.php to send spam and trying to send 9000 emails meant they hit the maximum permitted sending rate quite quickly. As soon as I spotted it, I shut down outgoing mail, killed the sending process, disabled the exploited site and component, cleaned the spam from the queue and restarted mail. I'm searching the rest of the server for any other com_extcalendar installations and then I should contact the other exploited servers I've seen during this attack. It looks like there's an entire class of evil "Mambots" out there, using exploitable Mambo and Joomla sites to crawl in search of others. I don't think the exploited site's owner will be billed for the clean-up, because I can't find a security advisory for this. Neither the mambo site (whose site search doesn't work for me) nor the joomla site seems clear about security alerts. I didn't find a third-party advisory that was clearly about this (but there were a few maybe-relevant ones). The homepage at Mambo last released in 2005 and doesn't mention this in its release notes, while the homepage listed by Joomla 404s (and I don't enjoy using the Joomla site because, as it says,

"we are aware, and regret, that our website does not comply with many WCAG/508 requirements"

). If you are using com_extcalendar on your site, check whether it's safe, or replace it with a better calendar.

Last Saturday, I went with many friends to the local installment of FLISOL, a big install fest done across Latin America on the same day. It was a nice event, seeing a lot of people from the local community helping newbies to install their first GNU/Linux. Most of the installations were -not surprisingly- Ubuntus. I was very surprised of Feisty: the installer is really simple and powerful for desktop users, and once installed, there are a lot of things that I'd really like to see in Debian. But, everything cames with a price. Don't ever try to install it without enough RAM (the site says 256MiB). The graphical installer won't even boot (OOM killer kills the machine for you). If you download the alternate CD, which uses d-i, it will seem to work, but you'll notice a system which is a trashing hell: for starters, the restricted modules are kept in a tmpfs, eating over 30MiB of RAM! I tried unsuccessfully to trim it a little to make it work on a old laptop of a friend (only 64MiB of RAM), removing the tmpfs, killing daemons and stuff... But not even xfce will run on it: when I opened a terminal the whole X session will crash instantly. So now, I'm starting a etch install on it. It will involve some work to make a end-user-friendly desktop, but I'm confident there is a way of making it work. Ubuntu just works in most cases, but when it doesn't, it's much more difficult to tweak. YMMV.

Ok, so LPI will be at Debconf, giving discounted certifications to registered attendees. Is this good or bad? Mario likes the idea, Madduck is in the middle ground, not decided on his stance on this regard, and Joerg basically says it's not worth much to him personally. Actually, I'll quote Madduck, as he has an interesting point:

I am not looking for employment, and if I was, I'd certainly not want to work at a company that thinks certifications are the true proof of capabilities. So I guess that leaves me with a 'no' still.

When confronted with this topic, I always oppose certifications. Why? First of all, I think they are worth very little. I got three or four Brainbench certifications when they were free - And of course, noticed right away that such a simplistic test is worth very little. Of course, LPI is a better established name, and is usually respected - Lets be fair, and talk about LPI together in the line with Cisco's, Microsoft's, Novell's and similar certification programs.
I've worked with several people who have got certified in different technologies, and almost always, this works against them rather than in their favor - Such people usually are blinded to all but their technologies. My most recent experiences are with the network infrastructure people - Cisco people know how to push Cisco, but know very little about protocol details, and cannot recommend a tool that's not madesold by Cisco. Same goes for 3Com. Same goes for everybody else. Although many certification tests include general situations like Solve this real-world problem, they are hampered by the final exam syndrome: The certification candidate spent a couple of nights frantically reading the books, and the material sits eager to jump on his brain lobes. Of course, given a couple of weeks, he has forgotten most of it and confused the rest. No, I don't have hard data to back this up except for my experience - But I have some experience at least. Oh, and of course: This people can quote from memory in inverse alphabetical order each of the command-line options to ls, but might be unable to spit up a clever shell pipeline without sketching it in paper and thinking it over for some minutes.
What will this mean for most of Debconf's target audience? Well, just what Ganneff and Madduck said: Take the test if you want to get a new job more easily - but you should have more confidence in yourself.
Just as a final note: Whenever I've interviewed people to work with me or for people that trust me, from all of the received curricula, I start by throwing out every curriculum that has the certifications earned in a prominent place. People who give too much weight to certifications IMHO tends to be worthless to work with.

I already had the idea to get LPI certified - expensive fun. Thanks to Joerg and co. for organizing the cheap exams during Debconf, I already have signed-up for LPI101 in the morning and LPI102 in the afternoon and wrote our $$$-director of the comany a mail that I’d like to get 95 more at the end of this month. Finally a little reference to the blog of Martin F. Krafft - and especially “Why? I am a Debian developer”. I think this is just bullshit, sorry. LPI is dedicated for system administrators, BOFHs, techies, however. Not that stuff what a Debian developer is doing. I mean, a DD should have knowledge about Debian including knowledge about software development, documentation, how to build packages, write some scripts… But does he need to know how to manage iptables or know where you need to set the fontserver? I think no… LPI asks many questions about old stuff, like the XFS, ISA Cards, Analog modems usw. The normal user today doesn’t need to care about this things, even a Debian developer mustn’t. I think many DDs never have touched an ISA card. So, I will participate in the exams, please don’t blame me if I fail.

Alex Krupp talks about cell phone software and why it's not working These are good points, but I remain pretty certain that it will be an area that takes off. I think that, as things stand right now, some of the ingredients are:

• Discard what you know about what an application should be like. I think a lot of people approach things with an idea that might work on the web or a desktop, and "whittle it down" some. I think the best cell phone apps will be things that are created from the ground up with the cell phone environment in mind. For example:
• Radically simple. It has to be super simple and easy to use. You should get the basic functionality from it within one or two clicks of opening it (consider that the user already had to click 3 or 4 times just to open your application in many cases).
• By making an application that's radically simple, it becomes easier to port it to all the many phone platforms out there. If you aren't doing much that's fancy, you're not likely to run into strange limitations.
• The advantages will come from what makes mobile phones convenient: the fact that they are portable and can basically do simple network access all the time.
• Since it's networked, build applications that are half mobile, half on the web. Complicated interaction goes on the web, and the mobile portion does "the simplest thing that could possibly work".

My own simple example of an application that basically meets these requirements is a mobile shopping list (with the highly original name of ShopList that doesn't suck. By that I mean that you would either be already insane or be insane in short order if you tried to enter a shopping list into a phone via its keypad, so that is taken care of on the web. Sure, it's not a billion dollar startup idea, but I think I'm on the right track with how to create applications and what sorts of things to create.