One of the GNOME features I really liked since the beginning of my GNOME usage is the ability to mount various network file system by a few clicks and keystrokes. It enables me to quickly access NFS shares or files via SFTP. But so far these mounts weren't actually mounts in a classical sense, so they were only rudimentary useful.

As a user who often works with terminals I was always halfway happy with that feature and halfway not:

- Applications have to be aware and enabled to make use of that feature, so its often neccessary to workaround problems (e.g. movie players not able to open a file on a share)
- No shell access to files

Previously this GNOME feature was realised with an abstraction layer called GNOME VFS, which all applications needed to use if they wanted to provide access to the "virtual mounts". It did no efforts to actually re-use common mechanisms of Un*x-like systems, like mount points. So it were doomed to fail at certain degrees.

Today GNOME uses a new mechanism, called GVFS. Its realized by a shared library and daemon components communicating over DBUS. At first glance it does not seem to change anything, so I was rather disappointed. But then I heard rumors, that Ubuntu was actually making these mounts available in a special mount point in ~/.gvfs.
My Debian GNOME installation were not.

So I investigated a bit and found evidence about a daemon called gvfs-fuse-daemon, which eventually is handling that. After that I figured this daemon to be in a package called gvfs-fuse and learned that installing it and restarting my GNOME session is actually all needed to do.
Now getting shell access to my GNOME "Connect to server" mounts is actually possible, which makes these mounts really useful after all. Only thing to find out is, if e.g. the video player example now works from Nautilus. But if it doesn't I'm still able to use it via a shell.

The solution is quiet obvious, on the one side. But totally non-obvious on the other.

A common user eventually will not find that solutin without aid. After all the package name does not really suggest what the package is used for, since its referring to technologies instead of the problem it solves. Which is understandable. What I don't understand is, why this package is not a dependency of the gnome meta package. But I haven't yet asked the maintainer, so I cannot really blame anybody.

However: Now GVFS is actually useful.

I ve got some performance problems with a mail server that s using DRBD so I ve done some benchmark tests to try and improve things. I used Postal for testing delivery to an LMTP server [1]. The version of Postal I released a few days ago had a bug that made LMTP not work, I ll release a new version to fix that next time I work on Postal or when someone sends me a request for LMTP support (so far no-one has asked for LMTP support so I presume that most users don t mind that it s not yet working). The local spool on my test server is managed by Dovecot, the Dovecot delivery agent stores the mail and the Dovecot POP and IMAP servers provide user access. For delivery I m using the LMTP server I wrote which has been almost ready for GPL release for a couple of years. All I need to write is a command-line parser to support delivery options for different local delivery agents. Currently my LMTP server is hard-coded to run /usr/lib/dovecot/deliver and has it s parameters hard-coded too. As an aside if someone would like to contribute some GPL C/C++ code to convert a string like /usr/lib/dovecot/deliver -e -f %from% -d %to% -n into something that will populate an argv array for execvp() then that would be really appreciated. Authentication is to a MySQL server running on a fast P4 system. The MySQL server was never at any fraction of it s CPU or disk IO capacity so using a different authentication system probably wouldn t have given different results. I used MySQL because it s what I m using in production. Apart from my LMTP server and the new version of Postal all software involved in the testing is from Debian/Squeeze. The Tests All tests were done on a 20G IDE disk. I started testing with a Pentium-4 1.5GHz system with 768M of RAM but then moved to a Pentium-4 2.8GHz system with 1G of RAM when I found CPU time to be a bottleneck with barrier=0. All test results are for the average number of messages delivered per minute for a 19 minute test run where the first minute s results are discarded. The delivery process used 12 threads to deliver mail.

	P4-1.5	p4-2.8
Default Ext4	1468	1663
Ext4 max_batch_time=30000	1385	1656
Ext4 barrier=0	1997	2875
Ext4 on DRBD no secondary	1810	2409

When doing the above tests the 1.5GHz system was using 100% CPU time when the filesystem was mounted with barrier=0, about half of that was for system (although I didn t make notes at the time). So the testing on the 1.5GHz system showed that increasing the Ext4 max_batch_time number doesn t give a benefit for a single disk, that mounting with barrier=0 gives a significant performance benefit, and that using DRBD in disconnected mode gives a good performance benefit through forcing barrier=0. As an aside I wonder why they didn t support barriers on DRBD given all the other features that they have for preserving data integrity. The tests with the 2.8GHz system demonstrate the performance benefits of having adequate CPU power, as an aside I hope that Ext4 is optimised for multi-core CPUs because if a 20G IDE disk needs a 2.8GHz P4 then modern RAID arrays probably require more CPU power than a single core can provide. It s also interesting to note that a degraded DRBD device (where the secondary has never been enabled) only gives 84% of the performance of /dev/sda4 when mounted with barrier=0.

	p4-2.8
Default Ext4	1663
Ext4 max_batch_time=30000	1656
Ext4 min_batch_time=15000,max_batch_time=30000	1626
Ext4 max_batch_time=0	1625
Ext4 barrier=0	2875
Ext4 on DRBD no secondary	2409
Ext4 on DRBD connected C	1575
Ext4 on DRBD connected B	1428
Ext4 on DRBD connected A	1284

Of all the options for batch times that I tried it seemed that every change decreased the performance slightly but as the greatest decrease in performance was only slightly more than 2% it doesn t matter much. One thing that really surprised me was the test results from different replication protocols. The DRBD replication protocols are documented here [2]. Protocol C is fully synchronous a write request doesn t complete until the remote node has it on disk. Protocol B is memory synchronous, the write is complete when it s on a local disk and in RAM on the other node. Protocol A is fully asynchronous, a write is complete when it s on a local disk. I had expected protocol A to give the best performance as it has lower latency for critical write operations and for protocol C to be the worst. My theory is that DRBD has a performance bug for the protocols that the developers don t recommend. One other thing I can t explain is that according to iostat the data partition on the secondary DRBD node had almost 1% more sectors written than the primary and the number of writes was more than 1% greater on the secondary. I had hoped that with protocol A the writes would be combined on the secondary node to give a lower disk IO load. I filed Debian bug report #654206 about the kernel not exposing the correct value for max_batch_time. The fact that no-one else has reported that bug (which is in kernels from at least 2.6.32 to 3.1.0) is an indication that not many people have found it useful. Conclusions When using DRBD use protocol C as it gives better integrity and better performance. Significant CPU power is apparently required for modern filesystems. The fact that a Maxtor 20G 7200rpm IDE disk [3] can t be driven at full speed by a 1.5GHz P4 was a surprise to me. DRBD significantly reduces performance when compared to a plain disk mounted with barrier=0 (for a fair comparison). The best that DRBD could do in my tests was 55% of native performance when connected and 84% of native performance when disconnected. When comparing a cluster of cheap machines running DRBD on RAID-1 arrays to a single system running RAID-6 with redundant PSUs etc the performance loss from DRBD is a serious problem that can push the economic benefit back towards the single system. Next I will benchmark DRBD on RAID-1 and test the performance hit of using bitmaps with Linux software RAID-1. If anyone knows how to make a HTML table look good then please let me know. It seems that the new blog theme that I m using prevents borders. Update: I mentioned my Debian bug report about the mount option and the fact that it s all on Debian/Squeeze.

• [1] http://doc.coker.com.au/projects/postal/
• [2] http://www.drbd.org/users-guide/s-replication-protocols.html
• [3] http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/storage/7j376/specs.htm

Related posts:

1. I need an LMTP server I am working on a system where a front-end mail...
2. Some Notes on DRBD DRBD is a system for replicating a block device across...
3. paper about ZCAV This paper by Rodney Van Meter about ZCAV (Zoned Constant...

This is mostly note to myself, when I will set this up for next time. Every time I set up test environment for Gammu SMSD, I'm lost in PostgreSQL configuration. Simple reason is that I do not use it at all for any other reason. Adding user and creating a database:

# su - postgres
postgres@rincewind:~> psql template1
psql (9.1.1)
Type "help" for help.
template1=# CREATE USER smsd WITH PASSWORD 'smsd';
CREATE ROLE
template1=# CREATE DATABASE smsd OWNER = smsd;
CREATE DATABASE
template1=# GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON DATABASE smsd TO smsd;
GRANT
template1=# \q

Next stem is to allow anybody to connect as smsd user. There might be better ways to do that, however I've chosen the simplest one - to trust any local connection - as testing of Gammu SMSD is anyway the only thing this database server does. Edit /var/lib/pgsql/data/pg_hba.conf:

# "local" is for Unix domain socket connections only
local   all             all                                     trust
# IPv4 local connections:
host    all             all             127.0.0.1/32            trust
# IPv6 local connections:
host    all             all             ::1/128                 trust

Filed under: English Gammu 1 comments Flattr this!

By now hopefully you got a chance to see my Jeopardy! episode so it won't be much of a spoiler to mention that I didn't win. It went like this. I flew into LA on the night of October 31st. The taping was to take place on the next two days. Jeopardy! tapes two weeks of shows, two days a week for a total of 10 episodes. Contestants are randomly chosen for one of those 10 episodes but you don't find out which one you will be on until the last minute. Randomness and secrecy have become become a big part of the production process in games since the quiz show scandals of the 1950s. (Interesting fact: it is a Federal felony to tamper with a TV game show.) There were a group of just under 20 0f us altogether waiting to go on. All very nice people. Here in the New York area one tends to equate very intelligent people with "Type A" personalities but we got on well together. Interspersed between the tapings, we had short practice sessions to familiarize ourselves with the studio setup and this is where I first started getting a little apprehensive. Jeopardy! is not just about general knowledge, there is a physical element too in that you have to buzz in by pressing a button on a stick which is wired up to some producers console. You can't buzz in before Alex has finished reading the question and obviously you can't buzz in if someone is already answering the question. If you buzz at the wrong time, your buzzer locks for 0.75 seconds so just jamming your finger on the button. I didn't even get that far as on the entire first day I failed to buzz in at all despite changing hands, changing grip different ways and other strategies. I was pretty despondent by the second day but then miraculously I managed to get the hang of it. So when I was finally selected (for the 3rd game of that day.) I was back to my usual cool self. I was up against Dave Leach and Nicholas Campiz who were returning after having tied in the previous game. And the game did start well enough. Oh one thing you may notice is that Alex mispronounces my name Jaldhal. I knew he did that once or twice and even mentioned it to a producer but it was only viewing the episode right now that I see he does it consistently. I assumed such things would be fixed up in post-editting but I guess not. Oh well, after living in this country for so many years I've learned to be happy whenever two consonants are more or less in the right place. This particular mispronunciation is actually fairly common, even Indian people have been known to make it. The alternative theory is that Alex couldn't read my horrible handwriting which is also plausible. Anyway, I digress. I started off fairly well. My first mistake was in a category about alcoholic drinks. I answered vermouth when the correct response was gin. In my defense I'm a strict teetoler so none of these words mean anything to me. I also earned the disapproval of my superhero fan son by mistaking Dr. Strange for Dr. Doom. I did get the one about Spiderman villain Dr. Octopus so that mollified him somewhat. The highlight of my evening was strangely enough in a category about books of the Bible. I got a Daily Double. It was a risky move but I have always wanted to make a "true" daily double so I threw caution to the winds and wagered everything I had. To my surprise as much as anyones, got the answer right doubling my score. I was in a pretty good position for the Double Jeopardy but thats when Dave started dominating. If you haven't been watching previous games, Dave Leach is arguably the best player this season. Not only is he smart but he is almost supernaturally fast on the buzzer. You can't see because I kept my hands behind the podium but I again and again I would desperately try to ring in on a question I knew the answer to only to be beaten to the punch by Dave. This caused me to start getting a bit reckless and answering questions where I was less than certain which cost me dearly. One particularly dumb mistake was in a category where all the answers were supposed to start with the letter g. I said compass when I should said gyrocompass but actually I should have left that category alone entirely. By the time Final Jeopardy came around winning was no longer an option as Dave was too far in the lead. I was slightly ahead of Nicholas in 2nd place. This is where I again made a strategic error. My original plan to bet nothing in Final Jeopardy but the category was "1930s Novels" and I liked my chances. The clue was read out and it involved an anti-war novel whose author was blacklisted. I was elated. It had to be "All Quiet on the Western Front" right? The blacklist bit gave me pause as the author Erich Maria Remarque was German and this was obviously a reference to the anti-Communist blacklist in the 1950s USA. But somehow I remembered that he had spent the end of his life in Hollywood or maybe I just convinced myself that it was plausible. Evidently my thought process wasn't too crazy because all three of us came up with the same answer. All three of us were wrong. The correct answer was "Johnny Got His Gun" by Daltan Trumbo. In hindsight I knew this but it illustrates the strange ways the mind works. I knew because the video for Metallicas song "One" from "...And Justice for All" is based on the film adaptation of this book. However in a previous orientation session the lady who is the contestant coordinator for Jeopardy! had mentioned AQOTHWF as anexample of something and this got stuck in my brain crowding out the previously known fact. So when all was said and done I ended up in 3rd place. (I bet big whereas Nicholas was more conservative.) Oh well. Despite not winning I had a blast. I fulfilled my dream of appearing on Jeopardy! I met Alex Trebek. (And I should be receiving an autographed picture of us together soon.) My witty banter was sufficiently witty. I made enough money to cover my travel expenses and still have a nice amount left. And I got to meet lots of interesting and wonderful people. So I'm satisfied.

See you there
Filed under: Debian GNU/Linux, FOSDEM, LibreOffice

Probably most of you already heard about weakness in Wifi Protected Setup discovered recently.
Using it you can reduce PIN authentication probes from 100000000 to only 11000 making brute force attack possible and reveal password to network in about 4 hours (usually even sooner). Most AccessPoints are vulnerable thus with this attack you can brute-force almost any network around. Doesn t matter if it uses WPA/WPA2 nor which method PSK/Radius. It only needs to be WPS enabled and most of APs are. I ve just packaged reaver-wps tool for Debian (I m also an author of its ArchLinux PKGBUILD) and it s now waiting in new queue. If you want to try it before it enters unstable I put it also on my people.debian.org account.
After installing it all you have to do is enable monitor mode in your wifi card (you need aircrack-ng package for that):

airmon-ng start wlan0

Then start attack:

reaver -i mon0 -b xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx -vv

Of course name of interfaces may differ as their depend on your wifi driver. After -b switch you have to enter BSSID of the target AP. That s all. Happy ha^Wcracking I wonder if it really enter Debian archive, cause it s shipped with several libraries already included in Debian. Mainly Linux Wireless Extensions library, and some part of wpa-supplicant package (this are at least slightly modified). In fact there are chances that reaver will became the part of the aircrack-ng suite (they discuss it already), but that won t happen soon, so it still would be great to have this package in Debian.

We are about to lose hledger on armel, armhf, mips, mipsel, powerpc, s390, and s390x. If this affects you, we need working Template Haskell and GHCi support on your architecture.

I recently completed "Ready Player One", Ernest Cline's debut novel. It's a Sci-Fi fan-service novel that explores a dystopian future (yes, another one) where the majority of the populace hide inside a VR environment to escape their "real" lives. The sole-genius who authored the VR software hid a series of easter eggs inside, in the form of challenges relating to pop-culture and video game trivia circa the 80s. He constructs his will such that whoever first completes the challenges inherits the mega-bucks company who control the VR simulation. Mike Hoye has an excellent summary:

Ready Player One is a nerdculture bender of a book, about as hard to hate while you re in the middle of it as it is to love in hindsight; it s young adult literature for people who were born in the late seventies and haven t really grown up yet. Of which I am apparently one, it has become clear, but you re still left with the sense that you re reading a Cory Doctorow book whose discerning virtue is that the lead isn t a thinly-veiled Cory Doctorow. Which is a huge, huge improvement, make no mistake, but it s stills relentless, pandering fanservice.

(Whilst you are over on Mike's website you should really read this excellent piece on libraries and publishers.) Despite the points above, I enjoyed the book. My biggest complaint was that the ending was quite abrupt. Quite often when I read a story which is essentially about a journey, I am disappointed if the story ends when the journey does. I hope I am not spoiling too much here by revealing that someone eventually solves the riddles and inherits essentially the earth. But what do they do with it? What impact do they make on the miserable world, described only briefly in sparse passages dotted around the bulk of the text detailing the VR one? During the book, the characters opine on what to do with the fortune, but we never see that come to fruition. Perhaps in a sequel.

My post yesterday on how Google gains financial benefit from vendor GPL violations contained an assertion that some people have questioned - namely, "unscrupulous hardware vendors save money by ignoring their GPL obligations". And, to be fair, as written it's true but not entirely convincing. So instead, let's consider "unscrupulous hardware vendors have economic incentives to ignore their GPL obligations".

The direct act of compliance costs money
Complying with the GPL means having the source code that built the binaries you ship. This is easy if your workflow involves putting source in at one end and getting binaries out at the other, but getting to that workflow means having a certain degree of engineering rigour. If your current build process involves mixing a bunch of known good binaries you got from somewhere but you can't remember where with a hacked up source tree that exists on someone's hard drive and then pushing all of these into a tool that only runs on Windows ME, before taking the resulting image and replacing chunks of it by hand, compliance is effectively impossible.

We all know that this is against all kinds of best practices and probably causes so many problems that it's more expensive in the long term, but retooling and hiring someone to oversee all of this takes time and money, and given the margins on many of these devices that's probably enough to make you uncompetitive for a couple of product cycles. Maybe you'll be in a better position afterwards, but you don't know that there'll be an afterwards.

Suppliers who don't provide you with the source code may be cheaper than those who do
You can't be in compliance if you don't have the source code in the first place. The same arguments that apply to the hardware vendors also apply to the people selling you your chips, so there's also an economic incentive for them to avoid complying. And there's an obvious incentive for you to choose the cheaper chipset, even if they don't comply.

Getting the source may cost money
Buying a chipset doesn't necessarily get you the software that makes it work - several silicon vendors will charge you for the SDK. But many of these devices are effectively reference platforms, so are basically identical from a hardware perspective. So if one of your competitors paid for the SDK, you can just dump the binaries off their machine, flash them onto your own boards and save yourself a decent amount of money. You obviously don't get the source, and nor do you have the standing to insist that the vendor whose binaries you misappropriated give you the source.

In the absence of enforcement, GPL compliance only works if it's the norm
Let's imagine two companies, A and B. Both build a tablet device, and buy the full SDK including source code. Both find a bunch of bugs in the vendor SDK and fix a different subset of them. They ship. A provides source code. B doesn't. B can now take A's bugfixes and incorporate them, resulting in a more compelling product without any significant extra cost. You now have two products that can sell for the same price, but B's is better. A would need to prove that B copied their bugfixes rather than simply fixing them themselves , which probably isn't going to happen.

In a larger market, if B is the only vendor who does this then their advantage isn't large - some of A's work is misappropriated by B, but A does benefit from the engineering work contributed by C, D, E, F and G. A combination of social pressure and legal threats may bring B into compliance. But if infringement is the norm, A has no incentive at all to release the source - by doing so they'll be helping not only B, but also C, D, E, F and G. Everyone undercuts A and they go out of business quite quickly.

Moral: In the absence of enforcement, if everyone else is infringing, a single company who complies is at a disadvantage.

If compliance cost nothing then everyone would do it
You can argue that cheap tablets from China are infringing simply because nobody knows better. But what's HTC's excuse? They've clearly decided that there's a benefit in holding back their source code releases[1], balancing this against the risk of being sued. They know full well what they're doing. If compliance was free they'd ship the source at the same time as they shipped the binaries. Other significant vendors are also fully aware of their obligations but choose to ignore them anyway.

Summary
There are economic incentives to infringe the GPL, and therefore (all else being equal) an infringing device can be sold for less money. All else being equal, a cheaper device will sell more units. More sales means more devices selling adverts for Google. Google makes more money because Android vendors infringe the GPL.

Edited to add:

But don't just take my word for it - Jean-Baptiste Queru says the same here (search for "scrubbing" - is there any way to link directly to a Google plus comment?)

[1] The usual argument is "We will release the source code within 120 days", implying that it's a process that takes time and we should just be patient. Every single time I've started making threatening noises, the source has appeared within a week.

comments

uTidyLib is definitely something you would call a dead project - no new release for seven years, dozens of open bugs and submitted patches and no active development. On the other side it is still used by several packages in Debian, thus worth maintaining. This is also reason, why there are few crucial patches in Debian repository to make it work (for example on 64-bit architectures). While googling whether there is something new going on with uTidyLib, I've noticed two efforts. One is PyTidyLib, a complete reimplementation, which provides different API and thus does not seem to be used anywhere yet. Another (well almost two years old, but I did not look earlier) effort is to fork in on Github and make it work with MacOS X. Okay, when somebody took the "effort", lets try to merge Debian patches there, hopefully there will be a release sometimes. So here is the pull request. Update: I've just learned, there is another fork going on - https://github.com/lachlan-00/utidylib2

Filed under: Debian English 0 comments Flattr this!

FOSDEM is one of the largest gatherings of Free Software contributors in the world and happens each February in Brussels (Belgium). One of the developer rooms will be the CrossDesktop DevRoom, which will host Desktop-related talks. Are you interested in giving a talk about open source and Qt, KDE, Enlightenment, Gnome, XFCE, Windows, Mac OS X, general desktop matters, mobile development, applications that enhance desktops and/or web? We have extended the deadline for a few more days, until January 8th. If you want to submit a talk proposal, hurry up! I have to say I am very surprised to see very few Qt/KDE talk proposals. Is there nothing interesting the Qt and KDE world have to say to 5,000+ people?
There is more information in the Call for Talks we published a couple of months. If you are interested in Qt/KDE, come visit us at the KDE booth. If you add yourself to the KDE FOSDEM 2012 wiki page, we will be able to better organize the usual dinner on Sunday and/or smaller meetings for special interest groups .

Fenella Wagener wrote an article for the Herald Sun about an Autistic girl who won the best personality award from the controversial new Australian children s beauty pageant [1]. The girl s mother is complaining that an Autistic girl shouldn t win a prize for personality and is critizing the pageant organisers. A beauty contest involves queuing, being quiet, appearing on stage, wearing cosmetics and unusual/uncomfortable clothes. It probably also involves having someone else assist with dressing and applying cosmetics (being touched by another person). These are all things which tend to be difficult or impossible for Autistic kids. So any girl who can get on stage wearing make-up can probably do whatever is required to avoid being obviously excluded from a personality prize. As any such prize has to be largely subjective I don t think it would ever be possible to prove that someone was the correct choice for the winner, it would merely be possible to prove that some candidates excluded themselves. But whether the girl deserved to win isn t the real issue here. I think that beauty pageants should be restricted to adults, merely entering a child in such a contest is bad enough, but making nasty public statements about a child is horrible. If other children made a Facebook page claiming that the girl in question didn t deserve to win a best personality prize it would probably be reported as cyber-bullying. I don t think that publishing the name or photo of the girl in question is in the public interest either. Many news sites that have picked up the story have shown the same lack of journalistic ethics so now the girl has some high traffic sites with her name linked to this story, it seems unlikely that anything good she might do in the near future will get a higher ranking for her name in search engines. So any time she searches for her name on Google (which most people do regularly) she will be reminded that her mother thinks she has some sort of defective personality because she is Autistic. High school is generally bad for almost everyone on the Autism Spectrum. Presumably any parent who would abuse their child by allowing such an article to be published would also send them to a regular school (as opposed to Home Schooling which is probably the only good option for Autistic kids in Australia). I m sure that the standard practice at every high school nowadays is that the kids all use Google to discover things to tease each other about. So in a few years the Herald Sun article will probably be the basis of a high school bullying campaign. The girl in question is only 9, so she s got another 6 or 7 years before she can legally leave her mother. In Australia 16 is the minimum legal age to live without parents and the police won t forcibly return runaway children who are almost 16. The Journalistic Code of Ethics Here is a link to the Australian Media Alliance code of Journalistic Ethics [2]. Section 8 includes Never exploit a person s vulnerability or ignorance of media practice . I think that publishing the name and photograph of a 9yo girl in a way that is likely to lead to bullying in a few years is a clear example of exploiting a vulnerable person. The code of ethics has a guidance clause which says Only substantial advancement of the public interest or risk of substantial harm to people allows any standard to be overridden . Even if it was a proven fact that a beauty pageant was issuing awards to unqualified children there would not be any substantial advancement of the public interest in publishing that. Beauty Contests are Evil The Australian has an article about the same beauty contest by Caroline Overington which quotes adolescent and child psychotherapist Collett Smart calling for government intervention [3]. Catherine Manning has written a good article explaining some of the reasons for opposing child beauty pageants [4]. The American Psychological Association has published a report on the Sexualization of Girls [5], they have lots of references to psychological research which gives a variety of reasons for opposing child beauty contests. IMHO each of the reasons alone should be sufficient to convince people that child beauty pageants are bad. Finally the pictures of contestants who are less than 10yo but made up to look like they are 20+ are rather disturbing.

• [1] http://www.news.com.au/entertainment/fashion/child-beauty-pageant-under-for-awarding-autistic-girl-tahnee-myles-best-personailty/story-e6frfn7i-1226106345484
• [2] http://www.alliance.org.au/code-of-ethics.html
• [3] http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/features/ugly-truth-about-beauty-pageants/story-e6frg6z6-1226106209926
• [4] http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=12506
• [5] http://www.apa.org/pi/women/programs/girls/report.aspx

Related posts:

1. Child Abuse and Censorship In Australia we are currently in the middle of a...
2. Autism Awareness and the Free Software Community It s Autism Awareness Month April is Autism Awareness month, there...
3. Autism, Food, etc James Purser wrote Stop Using Autism to Push Your Own...

* This post is almost translation of my this post on Gujarati blog (with some corrections and additions etc). If you re not interested in Wikipedia, move on. So, as I mentioned here and here, Wikipedians in Ahmedabad planned event: Wikipedia Takes Ahmedabad. We gathered at Gandhi Ashram. Met Noopur again and some volunteers were already there at 8 AM. I never been to Ashram since long time. This place has something, you know it, folks! People started coming around 8.30 and we quickly divided them based upon their interests on 4 routes we already decided. Most of people went to old city s route 1 and our route 2 had odd 6 (and 2 coordinaters) people only. Good. Less is always good. Noopur and Anirudh gave introduction to wikipedia, creative commons license and some basic rules and todo. We then left for Swaminarayan Temple at Sahibaug. We asked for permission to take photographs and we got it after meeting main swamiji there along with nice sweets and he promised to send professional picture for wikipedia to use. We then left for Delhi Darwaja. Ahmedabad has numbers of old fort gates. We covered some of them and moved to Kalupur Railway Station. Palak and Chirag were caught by traffic police and we should take care of following rules from next time. Point noted for next photowalk. We then left for Zulta Minar. This is well known for its carving and some myths associated with it. We discussed some points regarding uploading pictures, categories and left for Raipur Darwaja. This place is famous for Bhajiyas. We didn t taste it but had again fun taking pictures, talking to police and had smile before we leave for home. Only bad thing I ve got in this walk is that due to some or other reason my phone s touch screen seems stopped working That s another topic, but I couldn t call Noopur/Anirudh for lunch etc due to that You can view all uploaded pictures at: Categories: Ahmedabad 1 Most of Ahmedabad is covered due to event. Time to write articles?

A bit over a year ago, I wrote about how an incredible number of Android tablets on the market were in violation of the terms of the GPL. I've had rather a lot else to do since then so it's now awfully out of date - but taking a quick browse through the current stack of cheaper devices indicates that things aren't all that much better. We've got source code for some chipsets that were missing it before, but to compensate we've got a whole bunch of new hardware that's entirely lacking. It's all pretty poor, really.

At the time, I wrote the following:

"(Side note: People sometimes ask why Google aren't doing more to prevent infringing devices. For the vast majority of these cases, Google's sole contribution has been to put Android source code on a public website. Red Hat own more of the infringing code than Google do. There's no real reason why Google should be the ones taking the lead role here, and there's fairly sound business reasons why it's not in their interest to do so)"

Factually speaking, nothing's changed. Each of these devices contains code owned by Google, and Google could absolutely take legal action against the vendors. Equally, so could Red Hat, Intel, Nokia and dozens of other companies who hold copyright on portions of the code carried on these devices, and so could thousands of individuals around the world. Nobody's obliged to enforce their copyrights, and in the absence of anyone else doing so it's unreasonable to insist that Google should do it.

However.

Google gives Android away. This seems like an odd thing for them to do, given that it's a significant engineering effort and costs a lot of money to produce. But remember what Android brings to Google - it's a platform with a well-integrated mechanism for distributing advertising to users. Scanning the market shows a huge number of ad-supported apps, and Google's getting money for every single one of those that gets shown. The more Android devices, the bigger the market for apps - and the wider their advertising reach.

In other words: unscrupulous hardware vendors save money by ignoring their GPL obligations. This lets them appeal on price, increasing the number of Android devices in use and increasing Google's profits. Google makes money off other people's violation of the GPL.

Could Google do anything to stop this? Yes. They could sue for copyright infringement, but that kind of thing's time consuming and awkward and any argument about the GPL always seems to end up as a big argument involving conspiracy theories. Instead, Google could attach some extra conditions to the Android trademark. Requiring that the trademark only be attached to GPL-compliant products ought to allow Google to take advantage of the existing well-tested mechanisms for seizing counterfeit goods, providing a direct economic incentive for companies to come into compliance. For added marks, they could restrict the adwords code to devices that use the trademark - if the vendor removes the trademark, applications depending on the adwords functionality would refuse to run and Google wouldn't make money off the infringing hardware.

Or, of course, they could just carry on making extra money as a result of vendors denying users the freedoms granted by the copyright holders. Although that sounds kind of evil to me.

Edit: You probably also want to read the followup post here.

comments

A discussion a couple of days ago about DPI detection (which is best summarised by this and this and I am not having this discussion again) made me remember a chain of other awful things about consumer displays and EDID and there not being enough gin in the world, and reading various bits of the internet and wikipedia seemed to indicate that almost everybody who's written about this has issues with either (a) technology or (b) English, so I might as well write something.

The first problem is unique (I hope) to 720p LCD TVs. 720p is an HD broadcast standard that's defined as having a resolution of 1280x720. A 720p TV is able to display that image without any downscaling. So, naively, you'd expect them to have 1280x720 displays. Now obviously I wouldn't bother mentioning this unless there was some kind of hilarious insanity involved, so you'll be entirely unsurprised when I tell you that most actually have 1366x768 displays. So your 720p content has to be upscaled to fill the screen anyway, but given that you'd have to do the same for displaying 720p content on a 1920x1080 device this isn't the worst thing ever in the world. No, it's more subtle than that.

EDID is a standard for a blob of data that allows a display device to express its capabilities to a video source in order to ensure that an appropriate mode is negotiated. It allows resolutions to be expressed in a bunch of ways - you can set a bunch of bits to indicate which standard modes you support (1366x768 is not one of these standard modes), you can express the standard timing resolution (the horizontal resolution divided by 8, followed by an aspect ratio) and you can express a detailed timing block (a full description of a supported resolution).

1366/8 = 170.75. Hm.

Ok, so 1366x768 can't be expressed in the standard timing resolution block. The closest you can provide for the horizontal resolution is either 1360 or 1368. You also can't supply a vertical resolution - all you can do is say that it's a 16:9 mode. For 1360, that ends up being 765. For 1368, that ends up being 769.

It's ok, though, because you can just put this in the detailed timing block, except it turns out that basically no TVs do, probably because the people making them are the ones who've taken all the gin.

So what we end up with is a bunch of hardware that people assume is 1280x720, but is actually 1366x768, except they're telling your computer that they're either 1360x765 or 1368x769. And you're probably running an OS that's doing sub-pixel anti-aliasing, which requires that the hardware be able to address the pixels directly which is obviously difficult if you think the screen is one size and actually it's another. Thankfully Linux takes care of you here, and this code makes everything ok. Phew, eh?

But ha ha, no, it's worse than that. And the rest applies to 1080p ones as well.

Back in the old days when TV signals were analogue and got turned into a picture by a bunch of magnets waving a beam of electrons about all over the place, it was impossible to guarantee that all TV sets were adjusted correctly and so you couldn't assume that the edges of a picture would actually be visible to the viewer. In order to put text on screen without risking bits of it being lost, you had to steer clear of the edges. Over time this became roughly standardised and the areas of the signal that weren't expected to be displayed were called overscan. Now, of course, we're in a mostly digital world and such things can be ignored, except that when digital TVs first appeared they were mostly used to watch analogue signals so still needed to overscan because otherwise you'd have the titles floating weirdly in the middle of the screen rather than towards the edges, and so because it's never possible to kill technology that's escaped into the wild we're stuck with it.

tl;dr - Your 1920x1080 TV takes a 1920x1080 signal, chops the edges off it and then stretches the rest to fit the screen because of decisions made in the 1930s.

So you plug your computer into a TV and even though you know what the resolution really is you still don't get to address the individual pixels. Even worse, the edges of your screen are missing.

The best thing about overscan is that it's not rigorously standardised - different broadcast bodies have different recommendations, but you're then still at the mercy of what your TV vendor decided to implement. So what usually happens is that graphics vendors have some way in their drivers to compensate for overscan, which involves you manually setting the degree of overscan that your TV provides. This works very simply - you take your 1920x1080 framebuffer and draw different sized black borders until the edge of your desktop lines up with the edge of your TV. The best bit about this is that while you're still scanning out a 1920x1080 mode, your desktop has now shrunk to something more like 1728x972 and your TV is then scaling it back up to 1920x1080. Once again, you lose.

The HDMI spec actually defines an extension block for EDID that indicates whether the display will overscan or not, but doesn't provide any way to work out how much it'll overscan. We haven't seen many of those in the wild. It's also possible to send an HDMI information frame that indicates whether or not the video source is expecting to be overscanned or not, but (a) we don't do that and (b) it'll probably be ignored even if we did, because who ever tests this stuff. The HDMI spec also says that the default behaviour for 1920x1080 (but not 1366x768) should be to assume overscan. Charming.

The best thing about all of this is that the same TV will often have different behaviour depending on whether you connect via DVI or HDMI, but some TVs will still overscan DVI. Some TVs have options in the menu to disable overscan and others don't. Some monitors will overscan if you feed them an HD resolution over HDMI, so if you have HD content and don't want to lose the edges then your hardware needs to scale it down and let the display scale it back up again. It's all awful. I recommend you drink until everything's already blurry and then none of this will matter.

comments

Via Boing Boing, I stumbled across an excellent audio/visual project called instagr/am/bient: 25 ambient pieces of music inspired by 25 photos on the instagram photo service. The original upload featured a high-resolution PDF of the pictures, with MP3 audio and low-quality embedded copies of each picture as each track's artwork. I was a little disappointed about this, as I thought the tracks would be best appreciated next to the higher-quality picture that inspired them. So, I fixed it: Instagr/am/bient (HD images) This was possible thanks the liberal licensing of the original, but also two excellent pieces of software: pdfimages (from the poppler-utils package) and eyeD3, which made it not just possible but trivial. See also the 9.5M accompanying PDF. I do like what people are creating with instagram; I also like the "tumble-blog" approach to sharing similar images. I occasionally rotate the indexpics on my site; perhaps I should do so more often, and publish the new ones on my blog, too.

I use Google Calendar to manage my calendars, and I really missed something to warn me whenever I have an appointment with an alert set. So here is an example of a Python program to do such a thing. It is written using the Google Data APIs Python client library and pynotify. I'll detail the code here, so you can build your own and adapt it to your needs. First, we need to import GTK+ and pynotify, and initialize it.

import gtk
import pynotify
pynotify.init(sys.argv[0])

Then, we need to import gdata Calendar API and connect to the calendar. I'll use the simple email/password way to login, which is clearly not the best, but it's also the simplest. Feel free to use OAuth 2.0. :-)

calendar_service = gdata.calendar.service.CalendarService()
calendar_service.email = 'mygooglelogin'
calendar_service.password = 'mygooglepassword'
calendar_service.ProgrammaticLogin()

Now we're ready to request stuff and notify! First, request the events from the default calendar.

feed = calendar_service.GetCalendarEventFeed()

Now we can iterate over feed and do various checks.

for event in feed.entry:
    # If the event status is not confirmed, go to the next event.
    if event.event_status.value != "CONFIRMED":
        continue
    # Now iterate over all the event dates (usually it has one)
    for when in event.when:
        # Parse start and end time
        try:
            start_time = datetime.datetime.strptime(when.start_time.split(".")[0], "%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S")
            end_time = datetime.datetime.strptime(when.end_time.split(".")[0], "%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S")
        except ValueError:
            # ValueError happens on parsing error. Parsing errors
            # usually happen for "all day" events since they have
            # not time, but we do not care about this events.
            continue
        now = datetime.datetime.now()
        # Check that the event hasn't already ended
        if end_time > now:
            # Check each alert
            for reminder in when.reminder:
                # We handle only reminders with method "alert"
                # and whose start time minus the reminder delay has passed
                if reminder.method == "alert" \
                        and start_time - datetime.timedelta(0, 60 * int(reminder.minutes)) < now:
                    # Build the notification
                    notification = pynotify.Notification(summary=event.title.text,
                                                         message=event.content.text)
                    # Set an icon from the GTK+ stock icons
                    notification.set_icon_from_pixbuf(gtk.Label().render_icon(gtk.STOCK_DIALOG_INFO,
                                                                              gtk.ICON_SIZE_LARGE_TOOLBAR))
                    notification.set_timeout(0)
                    # Show the notification
                    notification.show()

Running this program, you should see a notification if an appointment has an alert to be raised at that time. This should be enough to start to build something. If you don't want to program this into Python, you might want to take a look at gcalcli.

A few days ago, I pushed out version 2.11.13 of the Geode X driver. This is the driver used by the OLPC XO-1, by a plethora of thin clients such as the ThinCan, by low-power desktops such as the Linutop and by a few notebooks such as the eCaf EC800. While this release indeed features a few bugfixes (mainly to keep this driver compilable on the latest X server), the lion's share of the changes involve a complete overhaul of the build scripts, courtesy of Gaetan Nadon. The key motivation for this overhaul was to acknowledge the efforts made by third-party contributors to make the driver compile on BSD variants. Sure enough, this release finally compiles on FreeBSD and, low and behold, on Hurd. However, the hybrid nature of Debian's FreeBSD kernel-based GNU operating system variant posed an additional challenge, because it provides usable support for Video for Linux version 2 (V4L2), but without the full complement of Linux definitions. This resulted in one post-release commit (included in Debian and Ubuntu package 2.11.13-2), following which my assertion that we could now safely define this package as Architecture: any-i386 finally proved to be a safe one for Debian-based operating systems. At this point, I'm curious as to how many more operating systems, especialy BSD variants, can finally use this driver. Patches to further improve support of non-Linux systems are welcome.

GTA01 and GTA02 lovers should take a look at GTA04 project. For those who want to own one, it's time to act. It's not so affordable, but for a small production device it's not bad at all. Note that GTA04 is a motherboard replacement for the Neo Freerunner (GTA02) or the Openmoko Neo 1973 (GTA01). You need such a device to install the new motherboard. Default rootfs is Debian Squeeze + LXDE. Other Debian-based projects like Qtmoko have also been ported.

Don Marti wrote an amusing post about the lack of standards for Android phones and the fact that the iPhone has a better accessory market as a result [1]. I d like to see some Android phones get standardised in a similar manner to the PC. The big thing about the IBM PC compatible market was that they all booted the same way, ran the same OS and applications, had the same expansion options, connectors, etc. The early PCs sucked in many ways (there were many other desktop computers in the 80 s that were better in various ways) but the larger market made the PC win. The PC even killed the Mac! This is something we should remember now when discussing the iPhone. I d like to see different Android phones that can run the same OS with the same boot loader. Having HTC, LG, Samsung, and others all sell phones that can run the same version of CyanogenMod and have the same recovery options if a mistake is made when loading CyanogenMod shouldn t be any more difficult than having IBM, Compaq, HP, DEC, Dell, and others selling PCs that run the same versions of all the OSs of the day and had the same recovery options. Then there should be options for common case sizes. From casual browsing in phone stores it seems that most phones on sale in Australia are of a tablet form without a hardware keyboard, they have a USB/charger socket, an audio socket, and hardware buttons for power, volume up/down, and home with the settings and back buttons being through the touch-screen on the Galaxy S but hardware in most others. A hardware button to take a picture is available in some phones. The variation in phone case design doesn t seem to be that great and there seems to be a good possibility for a few standards for common formats, EG large tablet, small tablet, and large tablet with hardware keyboard. The phone manufacturers are currently competing on stupid things like how thin a phone can be while ignoring real concerns of users such as having a phone that can last for 24 hours without being charged! But they could just as easily compete on ways of filling a standard case size, with options for screen resolution, camera capabilities, CPU, GPU, RAM, storage, etc. There could also be ways of making a standard case with several options, EG having an option for a camera that extends from the back of the case for a longer focal length such an option wouldn t require much design work for a second version of anything that might connect to the phone. Also standards would need to apply for a reasonable period of time. One advantage that Apple has is that it has only released a few versions of the iPhone and each has been on sale for a reasonable amount of time (3 different sizes of case in 4 years). Some of the Android phones seem to only be on sale in mass quantities for a few months before being outdated, at which time many of the stores will stop getting stock of matching accessories. Finally I d be a lot happier if there was good support for running multiple Android phones with the same configuration. Then I could buy a cheap waterproof phone for use at the beach and synchronise all the configuration before leaving home. This is a feature that would be good for manufacturers as it would drive the average rate of phone ownership to something greater than 1 phone per person.

• [1] http://zgp.org/~dmarti/misc/little-android-phone-why-so-sad/