Dear Lazyweb, how the .... am I supposed to tell GNOME to use or not use an HTTP proxy for specific applications? Sample scenario:

• I want to use an HTTP proxy in Galeon (for anonymous browsing via Tor + Privoxy).
• I do not want to use an HTTP proxy in Epiphany (normal non-torified browsing).
• I do not want to use an HTTP proxy in Rhythmbox either. No need to tunnel all the Creative Commons podcasts and music I listen to through Tor.

Now guess what happens when I disable the HTTP proxy in Epiphany. It's disabled in Galeon, too. Enable it in Galeon, and Rhythmbox will use the proxy (thus slowing down huge downloads for no reason). Aargh. Is it really so hard to have per-application settings? I mean, this isn't exactly rocket-science, right? And yes, I do want to use all those applications at the same time. And no, I do not run a full GNOME desktop environment (I use IceWM, thanks), so I don't care about any GNOME-Desktop-Foo solutions — I just want each of those freaking applications to have their own settings.

MJ, the debconf7 travel page has far more flight information on it than anything else because it has been put together primarily by people who are figuring out international travel arrangements which will require flights. It could certainly use some more information for people travelling more locally. If you have some advice on how to get there from Europe or the UK without flying, please contribute it: the site is a wiki, you can sign up for an account and edit the page yourself.

All being well I now have a blog working using Typo, instead of Wordpress 2 - and no broken links! We'll see. Now to make sure that my server load doesn't rise through the roof this time. For future reference importing entries from Wordpress2 -> Typo will almost certainly give you this error: This can be fixed by changing: To this:

idproxy.net is a spanking-new service that lets people use their Yahoo! identity as an OpenID. Yahoo! released the API for their BBAuth service last fall, but it doesn't support any of the existing identity standards. So idproxy.net uses BBAuth to allow users to authenticate, and then use that identity to create OpenID URLs in the idproxy.net domain. I think this is a great idea -- I'm bitterly jealous that I didn't think of it. I've been experimenting with BBAuth since it came out, and I've wanted to make a plugin for MediaWiki that would use BBAuth to allow Yahoo! users to log into Wikitravel, but at this point I don't think I'll bother. Simon Willison has more info on his motivations for starting idproxy. Good luck to him. tags: idproxy openid simon willison yahoo bbauth

My Ubuntu-counterpart, Andreas Lloyd, has written a nice response to Lars Risan’s interesting discussion of tensions between Ubuntu and Debian and in it, he visits, with great detail (or as much as a blog post will allow), the limits of launchpad. It is exciting to see more anthropologists conducting in-depth research on F/OSS projects with a keen awareness of the ways technology mediate or make possible certain social relationships. . .

Hope this sticks in Thailand yet spreads to other nations struggling with exorbitant drug costs… Time will tell…

David Berlind: “With barely five days to go before long-anticipated January 30 launch of Vista is history, a familiar problem and the linchpin to adoption of any major operating system upgrade (Windows Vista qualifies) is crashing the party: backwards compatibility. Intuit, developer of one of the world’s most popular accounting applications used in small, medium and large businesses (Quickbooks), has notified its customers by email that Windows Vista is incompatible with some of the features of Quickbooks 2006.” Mary Jo Foley: “Is it Intuit’s fault that its older products don’t work on Vista? Or Microsoft’s fault for changing the operating system in a way that it breaks them?” George Ou: “As it turns out, it isn’t QuickBooks 2006 itself that has the problem with Vista but all the Intuit and third party add-on software that communicates with QuickBooks 2006 that’s the problem. More to the point, it’s the intercommunication between all those applications and the fact that they’re using forbidden techniques that have been banned since 2001 with Windows XP certification requirements that’s the issue. Intuit admitted to me that they declined to seek Windows XP certification for all these years and they’re just now making the necessary modifications for QuickBooks 2007. The reason this is relevant is because most software that is certified for Windows XP will automatically be compatible with Windows Vista.” David Berlind: “So, while Microsoft’s response doesn’t point the finger directly at Intuit as the culprit in this situation, it makes it clear that its certification programs programs that Intuit has apparently eschewed since 2001 are the centerpiece of its efforts to guarantee backwards compatibility.” Interesting discussion. Whose fault is it? It doesn’t really matter, as the end result is the same—Microsoft potentially loses customers (those who won’t upgrade to Vista because QuickBooks will break), and Intuit potentially loses customers (those who won’t upgrade to QuickBooks 2007 but rather will move to an on demand solution like NetSuite—customers tend to dislike forced upgrades). David Berlind’s observation is interesting though, namely that Microsoft has been using its certification programs to limit the scope of the backward compatibility problem to a well defined subset around which it can presumably do thorough compatibility testing. Note that Red Hat too only guarantees backward compatibility for a subset of its platform, and that the LSB doesn’t cover the entire Linux platform either, just the subset that’s import for application portability. What are the lessons here, from my point of view? First of all, and not surprisingly, backward compatibility matters, and it matters (or should matter) to both sides. Second, to achieve that backward compatibility, both sides have to work at it, and because a typical platform has so many moving parts, limiting the scope is key to understanding the “contract” between OS and application. Finally, some formal way of stating “I am following the contract”, such as a certification program, can make compatibility a lot easier to articulate to mutual customers. Related: On the importance of backward compatibility, More on the importance of backward compatibility

On thinkwiki.org I found 2 articles how to get rid of the IBM BIOS Bootsplash and your own working. One for Windows and one for Linux.

At first, you need 1ruj35us.exe or newer. With

# cabextract -F "*.IMG" 1ruj35us.exe

you will get a “1RUJ35US.IMG”, which is a floppy image. Next you need to create a 16 color 640×480 BMP and save it as “/tmp/logo.bmp”. Now we need to mount the floppy, let the “logo.bmp” take place there and generate a “logo.mod”:

# mkdir /tmp/floppy
# mount -o loop,umask=000 /tmp/1RUJ35US.IMG /tmp/floppy
# cp /tmp/logo.bmp /tmp/floppy/ && cd /tmp/floppy/
# wine prepare.exe logo.scr
# cd && umount /tmp/floppy/

If you don’t have wine, but a running windows in place, use Virtual Floppy Drive like described in the Windows instruction to get the picture on the disk image.
Now you only need to burn a CD(-RW) with “1RUJ35US.IMG” as boot image. This can be easily done with k3b or on console:

# mkisofs -b 1RUJ35US.IMG 1RUJ35US.IMG  cdrecord dev=<device> -

You only need to boot your Thinkpad from CD(-RW) by pressing F12 on boot and flashing new firmware with customer image. You are done! My bootsplash image can be found here, an ‘unbranded’ one here. hardware hacking, planet, thinkpad

So google has finally changed their algorithm somehow to remove Googlebombs. I wonder which approach they chose. Maybe they require the search term to actually occur on the destination page? Anyway, I wonder if we could now do the opposite - rank down pages by Googlebombing them. I wonder if we could e.g. all setup links to Windows (microsoft.com) and maybe even mention the word "Googlebomb", and Google will think we're trying to Googlebomb Microsoft this way? So at the end maybe the Wikipedia article becomes hit #1? That would be cool. P.S. Ever noticed that Google blocks lynx and wget by their user-agent string? (well, I get error 400 with lynx, which might be different, but I can use the --user-agent option of wget to bypass their filter, so at least that filter exists and is kind of pointless...)

I have become painfully aware of the fact that I cannot concentrate on anything for more than fifteen seconds before I am distracted by something. This ofcourse results in a severe decrease in productivity. I’ve also noticed this is a very common issue.
A list of things that distract me include IRC (Admit it, you too.), shiny objects, music containing lyrics, lack of sleep.
To do list; Cut down on IRC, spend one or two hours a day in a silent room with no shiny objects, sleep at normal hours.
I will lock myself in a work environment for one hour a day to do something 100% productive, and gradually increase the time as I get used to it.
How long will I be able to keep this up I wonder? PS: I have noticed that there are no decent laptop bags out there. I’m looking for something casual that can be used for everyday use as well as containing a laptop, that suits a 12″ laptop and is preferably not bigger than that, and that most importantly does not scream “HEY I HAVE A LAPTOP” (You’re just asking to get robbed). Inform me if you know of any.

I was recently asked to help someone understand the OpenSource movement, and the effects it might have on companies such as Oracle or SAP. I talked a bit that these companies can benefit from being independant of big vendors like Microsoft, while still not having to do everything themselves. But also on how opensource alternatives to their products will threaten their business in the long run and force them to be more innovative and constantly improve their product. I then talked about the 'viral' aspects in OpenSource; not about that GPL licensing bullshit (just read the licenses of stuff you want to use, and don't use them if you don't like the license...; this virality is highly overrated due to Microsofts FUD), but a very different kind of virality: Let's say you are supposed to evaluate different CMS solutions. So you install one or another that sounds promising. Most likely you'll install an opensource database like MySQL or Postgresql. And when you've decided upon a solution, you are quite likely to go with this database, and say to yourself: "if MySQL doesn't scale up well enough for our needs, we can still but an Oracle license". This would be probably different if you had had installed Oracle in the first place. Say a demo or so. But the demo versions of the CMS you tried already made you comfortable in using MySQL; it's easy to install (most likely included with your system anyway), and it just works. But would you have tried a CMS in first place that actuall required you to setup Oracle? Anyway, this "social" virality brought me to another point: developers and administrators. When you see numbers on the market share of Microsoft, they're still huge. Some 95% of users are using Microsoft as their primary operation system (I'm discounting the fact that a huge share of DSL modems here is running Linux, so actually many people are Linux users, and I'm also discounting the use of www.google.com, which would make 99.9% of people Linux users...). But these are the average users. But they aren't on their own. The software choice of the "average user" is influenced by a couple of factors, including:

• if anything goes wrong, whom can I call for help?
• company (administrative, security) policies
• word of mouth and (software) recommendations

But if you look at the computer geeks around you, what are they using? A huge share of the people I know are using Linux. Not everyone is using Linux as their main desktop system, but many are. Others are using Linux just for their development stuff, some only on servers. It doesn't really matter, Linux is huge with the geeks. When I look at the sofware my mom has installed on her Windows system (which also dual-boots Linux, and interestingly is the primary choice for watching a movie - Windows doesn't playback sound with some videos...): half of it is opensource. There is OpenOffice.org, Gimp, Gaim, Firefox, Thunderbird, Inkscape, LyX, Mplayer and a couple others. He favourite game? PySol. My dad already has switched to Linux as his main operating system. So why did they switch to so much opensource software? Because it's what I recommended them, and where I can help them. My mom needed a software to record something for her blog (yes, she's "podcasting" now) - of course I recommended her an opensource application, audacity. My mom is giving private lessons in math and physics; she's very successful at that. When one of her students got herself a laptop, she of course was given all kinds of (opensource!) software. For her highschool thesis she needed a vector graphics program - she ended up with inkscape. Now if my parents have some problem with Windows, who are they going to ask? I didn't manage to solve the video playback issues, my mom by herself switched to Linux for watching movies. It didn't work with Windows, I couldn't help her - she switched to something where she knews she'd get more support (and where the problem by chance didn't occur). Now let's have a look at the university. Our computer pool for the students is all Linux. There are a few windows systems for legacy purposes, I never found out if they are accessible to regular students; I only know they're supposed to exist. When doing some assignment, you're very often required to use some opensource software. For a thesis, you'll very likely be building upon some opensource system. The mathematics institute is still on solaris, but recently Gnome was installed there. Physics and electrical engineering also have mostly Linux systems, I've heard. For software development, it's pretty much a "develop on Linux, run anywhere", whereas Windows-only developers usually need to port their applications (or trust on Wine being able to run them good enough on Linux). So more and more people start developing on Linux, and get to love it's great development environment (after all, Linux was pretty much completely done by software developers...). And that is how Microsoft might already have lost the desktop war: developers, technical students and administrators (who usually also love their Linux boxes). They're only a small share of the userbase, but they're influential. In fact, other users rely on them being able to eventually fix their systems for them. But since these are using Windows much less already, they will be less capable of assisting others with Windows. They'll be putting Linux systems everywhere, and keep on encouraging them to make the switch. Of course it will still take some years, but you can expect more and more companies (and cities) to switch over, like the city of Munich. Windows support staff on the other hand might even become more expensive. I don't know of any numbers on the MCSE programme (Minesweeper Consultant, Solitaire Expert) - does anyone have numbers on "graduates" for that?

I have created an unofficial wiki for social Debian gatherings. Events will be listed and/or linked with an option to sign up and take part in planning. It can be found here

I finally completed a longstanding project converting this blog from Blosxom to Wordpress. Five years ago when I transitioned from a self-coded blog to blosxom, I loved the low tech “hackable” nature of Blosxom. Unfortunately, it hasn’t scaled well. I can imagine using Wordpress five years from now, but the Blosxom filesystem-only style organization just won’t hold up. At some point soon while it’s still fresh in my memory I will document the transition. Since nearly every Blosxom user has a unique set of quirks, each transition will have its own special problems. I’ve made every effort to preserve permalinks from the old blog, but I’m not sure they all made it over. If you are looking for something and can’t find it, please drop me a line. I also suspect that my most recent entries will repeat themselves for everyone who subscribes to this RSS feed. I apologize for any inconvenience.

These are the current translation ratios for French and Czech in unstable, after 10 days of "blitz l10n NMU". Still 26 strings left to translate for French. But one more fully translated package (acidlab, thanks Javier FS) which explains the small increase. All remaining packages (postfix, ddclient, logtool, conserver, libpam-rsa) are under work by either me or their maintainers. Funnily, working on all this, I accidentally discovered that the mail queue on puccini.debian.org, which hosts packages.debian.org, was completely stucked. A prompt action by Joerg Jaspert unflushed it leading to funny results like the D-I teal receiving three notifications in a row for various versions of tasksel transiting to testing. Stats for Czech will maybe not improve as quickly as I imagined. The Czech team has been motivated deeply by my announce and they began reporting many new translations or translation updates. However, I can't really NMU packages because they have translation updates that are one day old..:-) The Portuguese team jumped into the game during this day (46.605%)

I got some email from Dan Brickley on Friday asking for some help getting the MediaWiki OpenID extension working. It looks like the FOAF wiki now allows you to login with OpenID. Cool beans on that! tags: wiki foaf mediawiki openid

Wikicalc Speaking of people whose names match the production "Dan Brick*", Dan Bricklin just releases WikiCalc 1.0. WikiCalc is an awesome piece of software that provides shared spreadsheets with a Wiki flavor. I'm interested in using it for some new projects, so I'm really glad Dan's worked so hard on it. Congratulations to him and to sponsor SocialText for such good work. tags: wiki wikicalc socialtext dan bricklin

Lucinda I'm excited to see that one of my favorite people in Montreal has set up a blog. Lucinda Catchlove is a Montreal writer, and also a good friend with a clear voice and an honest opinion. I'm looking forward to seeing what her blog will have to offer. tags: friends montreal lucinda catchlove

Google in Montreal It's probably not an overstatement to say that Montreal's digerati are a-twitter with gossip that Google will be opening a small office in Montreal (note: link in French). It's only space for a dozen or so people in downtown, but more tantalizing is the prospect that they're shopping for commercial real estate capable of handling 200-300 employees. The blogosph re (or is it the blogod me...? I get those confused all the time) here is pretty excited about the news, but a post by star podcaster Julien Smith has been more controversial. In Montreal... Needs... Brains... he says that he thinks the Montreal tech scene isn't as dynamic and interdependent as in other cities. He thinks the city needs a Google office as a shot-in-the-arm for developing our technology culture. I don't believe that this is the case. Montreal has a vibrant tech scene with a lot of cross-pollination. There are a lot of formal and informal venues for discussion in Montreal. We have the monthly Yulblog and Wiki Wednesday, last year's BarCampMontreal and the upcoming BarCampMontreal2, as well as RoCoCo. There's also the quarterly Montreal Creative Commons Salon. On the informal side, Seb Paquet's had a few group lunches with some of the most interesting people in town, and le Sans Fil gives us great hotspots like La ka and L'Utopik for serendipitous or on-purpose path-crossings. I guess my main point is that Montreal's got a great Scene, and I don't think it needs a big infusion of Googloids to make it better. Is there more that could be done? Sure. I think we need to get a Web Montag going to pull together the various sub-cultures forming. And we should probably be using SAT more -- it's a great space. But I think we're doing pretty good overall. Side notes: Hugh MacGuire has a quick list of Montreals doing stuff, and Robin Millette has some ideas about Montreal Action. tags: montreal technology scene google

These are the current translation ratios for French and Czech in unstable, after 9 days of "blitz l10n NMU". 26 strings left to translate for French. As I, and their respective maintainers, uploaded a few packages today, this should improve as of tomorrow. Half of these are for libpam-rsa, for which Jos Parella already prepared the update which I'll upload soon. Stats for Czech should improve quickly now as I began working on a few packages and hot in touch with Miroslav Kure who will try to bump the translators work.

I'll be going to the LinuxDays in Luxembourg next week. As far as I know, there won't be an exhibition, so, no Debian booth. But I'll be giving a talk. It's not on one of my usual topics, but on security this time. The reason for this is, that I am giving this talk instead of Lukas Grunwald, who originally registered the talk but then couldn't give it. I am really looking forward to going there. I've never before been to Luxembourg and I am curious what it's going to be like. I am also looking forward to giving the talk, since it will be something very different from my usual ones and I am curious to see what differences there will be. If anyone of you is going to LinuxDays.lu too and wants to meet for coffee or a beer, drop me note!

Recently I complained about using dial-up in PR and I believe in response to my post, Joey Hess provided some great tips for making the dial-up experience a little more bearable. He, of course, was providing a set of solution to constraints, which is what the likes of Joey Hess do a lot of their waking (and according to a recent IRC conversation, even dreaming) hours. I as an academic am not involved so much in the business of finding real hard solutions but when I go to Puerto Rico, that is what I DO spend a lot of time doing. And I came up with 3 solutions this year, 2 of which I was particularly proud of (one of which may be useful to the blog readers), so I thought I would share them here: As I wrote about a few weeks ago, my mom has been plagued with a problem of choking on her saliva because she is not swallowing. It causes her and those around her a lot of angst. I tired many things but when I stopped trying and just started watching and observing to see when it seemed to be worse, I finally noticed that if she wore her dentures, the problem, while not totally resolved, was like 70-80% better. With her dentures, she would never choke on her spit and often times there would be not spit. I think the dentures changes the shape of her mouth so that she can swallow with less effort. I was pretty proud to notice this because it was the overwhelming problem of the season. Now, there is, of course, another problem. She loathes wearing those teeth and well, it has been a battle to convince her it helps (I think she sort of knows but does not want to admit it) but she is wearing them a lot more than she used to…. Maybe I will come up with a long-term solution to that problem later but I have failed in all of my attempts while still there which stretched from begging, to coy deception, to outright bribery. So in PR, we have an awesome mutt, who goes by one of three names, Isabela, Gordita (look at her tummy in the pictures to see why we call her chubster ) and Pucha. She is literally the joy of the house and she truly revels in this role. She is, in fact, like a hovercraft of love , in the sense that she will hover over you, as you are, for example, trying to get work done, and she will whimper, or lift her little paw, or more audaciously butt her head against your hand, until you assume the position and pet her, or preferably hug her. And she wants demands this sort of attention for as long as you can humanely sustain it. Ok this is not the problem part (though it can be a problem when trying to complete work and I usually just give up and give in to her or kick her out of the room). The problem was that the pucha would routinely despoil the same spot on the floor, usually every day, usually in dramatic response to leaving her in the house alone for more than 10 minutes. And I know this is willful because she is otherwise quite potty trained. She just likes to remind those who shower her with affection and love that she wants it to rain harder. The problem was that she was soaking and thus really rotting the wooden trimming (and poking around led me to discovering the third huge problem, termites, but more on that soon) and this had just had to stop. Giving her a light whallop in her chubby behind never helped (maybe she was too well padded?) and obedience school seemed like way too much effort and money. Eventually, I just threw her little bed right where she peed, and vualla, she stopped peeing there and thankfully she did not have the cojones to find another spot. I am not sure if this is long-term solution, but for now I am satisfied. Through the pucha, I found out that the wooden trimming in our house was ingested with termites. This caused a mini-heart attack, because well, termintes are a bitch to eradicate and they are a real problem in the tropics. I called the exterminators just to find out some information on termites and they assured me that once I ripped out the molding (which was my low-tech solution), I would not be putting the other wood in danger by accidentally flinging one of the little chubby white grubs over to another piece of wood and there is a lot of wood at home. Thankfully, since that is unlikely, with some help , I proceeded to tear most of the molding out only to disover a cornupia of bugs living there. It was so so so so so gross, really, gross that of course I am not replacing the trimming with wood but with some other bug-resistanant material. But that will have to wait till another trip.