The Seattle R User Group was kind enough to invite me to give a talk about R, C++ and Rcpp. So if you can make it to the Thomas building of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, WA, on December 7, I would love to see you there. I have some ideas about freshening up the presentation(s) based on material Romain and I have used in the past. This should make the why as well as how a little clearer; now I just have to find some to put this together. And if there are particular aspects you would like to see covered, please do get in touch with me.

Bike Scheme for Galway From the Galway Advertiser: Galway has emerged as a frontrunner in terms of its suitability for the introduction of a public bike scheme, similar to that already in action in Dublin, and which could see the setting up of 23 docking stations for 250 public bikes across the city at a estimated cost of 1.55 million. Tags: #Galway, #cycling

I am currently sitting in the train to Goslar, where the German Conference on Cheminformatics will take place. As part of the Free Software Session, I will give a session on DebiChem. This is the first I attend this conference and I am looking forward to meet Noel O'Boyle and hopefully others from the community.

In light of this, I have packaged and uploaded RDKit and Cinfony over the last weeks and also updated the Debichem task pages, introducing a Cheminformatics Task at the same time. I feel we still need at least tasks for Chemical Education (to expose e.g. Kalzium more prominently), and possibly Protein Docking and Crystallography. So if you have experience/opinions in these fields (or want to propose other fields), drop me a mail or contact us at debichem-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org.

I must admit that I ve never been a big fan of the dash as /bin/sh change. I have three main problems with the switch: POSIX compliance as an argument Complying to standards is a really good thing. But when everybody is ignoring the standard because they want the comfort of newer features, maybe it s a sign that the standard should be updated to include those newer features. Most of the bashims used everywhere in scripts were signifiant improvements, like the ability to write:
cp short1/path1,short2/path2 /very/long/common/path/to/a/file
instead of:
cp short1/path1/very/long/common/path/to/a/file short2/path2/very/long/common/path/to/a/file The option to improve bash was not fully explored We started with the premise that bash is bloated, slow, and cannot be improved. Maybe you can help me with that, but I could only find a few simplistic benchmarks comparing dash and bash, and I could not find any analysis of why bash is slow, and why it cannot be improved.
One of the obvious problems is that bash is also an interactive shell, and is linked to ncurses and terminfo, which increases the startup time. But have we investigated the possibility to have a /bin/bash-non-interactive binary that would not be linked to ncurses? The change was brought to users While it is OK for Debian (or Ubuntu, in that case, since that change was done in Ubuntu first) to force its developers to use POSIX-compliant scripts, the switch could have been made only to Debian-created scripts (by switching them from a /bin/sh shebang to a /bin/dash shebang, for example). I have trouble justifying that this change was forced on users as well. Next: linker changes and we are doing it again. A set of linker changes (see also the Ubuntu page) was already done in Ubuntu, and is very likely to be done in Debian as well. This switch requires deep changes in some buildsystems (it requires ordering of libraries and forbids indirect dependencies), and is rather painful (it was reverted before the Ubuntu 11.04 release because it was not possible to fix all the packages during the natty release cycle, but is done in the 11.10 release). Of course, there are justifications for this change. But I m not sure that it s worth all the trouble created for users.

I recently wanted to buy some MP3 files from Amazon (a whole album in my case, but you can also just buy single MP3 files if you want). Digital music downloads from Amazon are often much cheaper than buying the physical CD (from Amazon), and you can also instantly get the stuff within seconds, without having to wait for the physical CD to be shipped to your place. The good thing about Amazon's MP3 downloads is that the files are not infested with any DRM-crap (if that were the case I wouldn't spend a single penny on such useless junk, of course). This allows you to burn the MP3 files on CDs and/or play them on any device you like (MP3 player of choice, laptop, hifi-system, car, e-book reader with MP3 playback support, etc. etc). Granted, you can not re-sell the digital files on eBay later, this is the one little drawback you have when compared to physical CDs, but I guess most people can usually live with that. Also, it would be great if Amazon would provide Ogg Vorbis files instead (or in addition to) MP3 files, of course. Anyway, in order to download the MP3 files you buy from Amazon, they suggest to install the Amazon MP3 Downloader, which (surprisingly) is even available in a Mac and Linux version (only 32-bit though), but is (unsurprisingly) closed-source. This is no-go, of course, but luckily there is an alternative. The clamz tool (GPL, version 3 or later) allows you to easily download single Amazon MP3 files, or whole albums. First, you need to login to your Amazon account and then visit a certain Amazon page (which sets a special "congratulations, the Amazon MP3 Downloader has been successfully installed" cookie in your browser). See the clamz website for the respective URL for your country. For Germany, use this URL. The clamz installation is easy enough on Debian:

  $ apt-get install clamz

IMPORTANT: It seems you need at least version 0.5 for recent Amazon files as they apparently changed something, see #647043. Current Debian unstable as of today already has 0.5, though. After that is done, the rest is easy: In Amazon, click on "Buy MP3" or "Buy MP3 album", which will download a special AmazonMP3-1234567890.amz file. You can then let clamz download all the MP3s by typing:

  $ clamz AmazonMP3-1234567890.amz

Wait a few minutes, and you'll have a bunch of non-DRM MP3 files in your current directory. Easy. See the manpage for a bunch of options which let you configure clamz to your preferences.

After a tiring UDS in which I very nearly achieved my goal of mentioning Debian in every session and conversation, I ventured out to a nearby outlet mall. Imagine my surprise when this little chap ended up in my bag! and then I found out where the Angry Birds hang out when taking a break from destroying those evil pigs and after this twin impact, I needed some retail therapy. This is probably the second pair of shoes I have ever purchased for myself. Good week :-). And so to the delayed flight home

It's about time that Rapha l is interviewed in the "People behind Debian" series he initiated on his blog. Indeed, when he interviews people, Rapha l asks about other people they could suggest for next interviews. So, during mine, I suggested him to be a next "victim". As he couldn't interview himself, I volunteered for this. As you'll see below, Rapha l (who's a friend of mine as I'm a friend of his) likes to speak and that shows in the length of his answers :-) but you always know more about Debian when reading his blog posts, books, mails, etc. I personnally think that he is among the best promoters of the project for years and it was a pleasure for me to conduct this interview. My questions are in bold, the rest is by Rapha l. Who are you? Hi, Rapha l Hertzog, I'm a 32 years old French Debian developer who is married and who has a 2-year old son. I'm running my own company (Freexian) since 2005, I started it 3 years after the end of my computer science studies. I'm also a very proud author of the Cahier de l'Admin Debian, a French book about Debian. You often wrote about your attempts to make your living partly, if not completely, out of your Debian work. Can you describe the way you're trying to do this? My first try has been with Freexian. I always advertised this company as being specialized in Debian GNU/Linux. While Freexian is successful enough to provide me a decent income, I'm not really satisfied with the result because very few of my contracts are about improving Debian. I use Debian daily for the benefit of my customers, writing new customer specific (embedded) software, deploying a service on Debian servers, etc. But except for the occasional bugfix, all this work does not improve Debian (the only exception has been the dpkg multiarch implementation work sponsored by Linaro). The positive side is that I don't need to fill my entire schedule to earn enough money to live. So I'm regularly taking some days off work to be able to contribute to Debian. This is a freedom that I enjoy... My French book has also been a bestseller and depending on the years the royalties represented between 1 and 2 months of supplementary time that I can spend on Debian (that is between 2000 and 4000 EUR of income). Now since last year, I decided to actively work towards my goal of making a living out of my Debian work. I want to build on what has been most successful for me up to now, that is my book. My strategy has been to build an audience around my blog: with a direct contact with my readers I have the opportunity to sell e-books, and without any intermediary taking the biggest part of the price, I don't need a very large audience to be successful. I have also been experiencing micro-donations with Flattr, people who are enjoying my articles on my blog can use it to give a few cents for each article they find useful. With a large enough userbase, this could fund free documentation and would avoid the need for commercial e-books but we're not there currently and I don't know if it will ever reach the critical mass. Last but not least, I'm soliciting donations for my Debian work on the sidebar of my blog, and I have the chance to a have a few (regular) donators. You're a proud father since last year. How do you manage your commitment to the project with your family life? There are few things that I put above Debian in my life, but my family certainly is. I try to handle most of my Debian duties during work hours so that I can spend time with my family on evenings and during week-ends but in truth I never really disconnect from Debian. It happens quite often that I say to my wife I'll come in a few minutes, let me finish this and then I end up responding to a Debian mail, or an IRC query and take 30 minutes instead of the 5 expected ones. I try hard to avoid this but it's difficult. Luckily for me, my wife is very supportive of my Debian involvement and knows me well... By the way my wife is using Debian on her computer, and my son has already played with DoudouLinux (a Debian derivative!). Have you already been accused of self-promotion in your writings? If that would ever happen, what would you answer to that? Yes, more than once. I am proud of what I do for Debian, I enjoy sharing the result of my work. Because of this, some people believe that I'm selfish and egocentric. And this has somewhat increased since I have been soliciting donations: for me it's important to be transparent towards donators so that they see what I really do for Debian. But some people have the feeling that I'm getting undeserved attention and that I bring everything towards my own person. On the other side, as an author, I'm a public figure who is definitely seeking some attention... I don't have any miraculous answer, we are a large and diverse community, it's next to impossible to please everybody. I listen to all the concerns that people bring forward, I take them into account as much as possible, in particular when I believe they are reasonable/well justified, or when they come from people that I highly respect. But sometimes I have to plainly ignore them too... in particular when they are trying to impose their own political view on a topic that's not directly related to the only value that we all share: the social contract. Contributing to Debian is a challenge, we all have to make efforts to put aside our differences and to concentrate on the work that brings us closer to the best free software operating system ever built. You recently launched a campaign to free out the soon-to-be-published "Debian Administrator Handbook", an English version of your well-known book about Debian in French. Can you tell us more about this project? My French book has been very successful at helping people to get started with Debian, and like I already explained, it was also effective to fund a part of my Debian work. So I wanted to make it available world-wide by publishing an English translation of it. I tried to find an English-speaking editor willing to take on the challenge but I found none interested. Not put off by a setback, Roland (my co-author) and I decided to negotiate with our French editor Eyrolles to recuperate the necessary rights to translate the book into English. Handling everything ourselves represents a lot of work, but it also means that we have the freedom required to decide of the license of the resulting book. We would love to see it under a license compatible with the Debian Free Software Guidelines. But at the same time we firmly believe that we deserve a reasonable monetary compensation for the work on the book, so we conditioned its liberation to a predefined amount of money (25 K ) in what we call the "liberation fund". And since we wanted to be sure that we would have the required means to complete the translation, we used a crowfunding platform to seek support of people interested by the book. With such a platform you're only debited if the minimal requested amount is reached. Anyone can participate, pre-order the book and/or put some money in the liberation fund. As of today, we already reached the minimal funding goal (15 K ) so the book translation will happen. But the liberation target has not yet been reached so we don't know yet if the book will be free from the start... you can follow the progress right on the fundraising page or on the website dedicated to the book. PS: If you want to contribute to this project and also make a donation to Debian at the same time, you should check out this page. You're one of the main developers of dpkg, a critical tool for Debian systems. Can you tell us more about the current development challenges it is facing? What will be the new dpkg features for wheezy? The current challenges are not really technical. dpkg is a relatively mature piece of software and it will continue to work for the foreseeable future without needing much maintenance work. The real challenge is trying to setup a healthy developement community around it so that we can keep tackling new interesting problems (there are many listed in the roadmap and in the 225 wishlist bugs). There is a real problem of leadership and communication in the current team. We used to be three, and we're only two nowadays. Guillem is the legitimate leader since he's involved in dpkg's developement since early 2006 while I joined only in late 2007. But in the last 4 years, we did not manage to recruit anyone else on the team. Some persons tried to contribute significant new features (like Sean Finney with a rework of the way we handle configuration files) but they gave up frustrated after a while because we did not manage to review their work (and discuss the design) in any reasonable timeframe. Another famous case is Ian Jackson with his trigger work. His work got merged, but so late that in the mean time he blew up while trying to hijack the maintenance of dpkg. For a long time I was concentrating my work on the Perl part of dpkg (aka dpkg-dev mainly), so I did not feel qualified to review and merge work related to the C part and I was just a worried observator of this situation. I tried to improve it by setting up some basic review infrastructure, it should have brought some lisibility to the status of each change left to be reviewed... but it has not been used and it changed nothing. Over the years, I became much more interested in the C part. My first big contribution in C has been the rewrite of update-alternatives (from Perl to C). I made other small changes in between, but at the start of this year I had this great opportunity to work on the multiarch implementation (FYI, multiarch is the possibility to mix packages from several architectures on a single system). This really forced me to jump into the C codebase and learn a lot about how dpkg is implemented. Thanks to this I have been able to tackle other small projects (like the improved triggers). This would be all great if my multiarch work was already merged, but it's not. It's a large work, I do not mind waiting a bit in particular since Guillem is a highly skilled C programmer. His sharp analysis of new designs are invaluable, when he reviews code he always finds something to improve. I learnt a lot just by reviewing the code he wrote over the years. That said I have been waiting since April without almost no updates from him. With the release team asking us to hurry up, the situation is getting somewhat strained as I really want to see multiarch in Wheezy and I do not really want to short-circuit Guillem. Hum, I may have drifted a bit from your original question... what great new features can people expect? Well multiarch is supposed to be the big new feature, apart from that there aren't many things that matter to the end users. But there are already quite a few changes that are of interest to package maintainers (like hardened build flags, source package improvements, improved triggers, ). What's the biggest problem of Debian? Manicheism and a tendency to quickly polarize the discussions. In reality, there are very few situations where everything is all good or all bad. Ever since I have read The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People I try hard to put into practice the habits of interdependence . Instead of having only my point of view in mind, I try to understand the motivations from the other party ( Seek First to Understand, Then to be Understood ) in order to be able to put forward solutions acceptable to both parties ( Think Win-Win ). I highly recommend this book to anyone. And I invite everybody to at least try to follow those simple advices. Is there someone in Debian you admire for their contributions? There are many and I can't give an exhaustive list... here are some that I would like to highlight (in no particular order):

• Niels Thykier for the work he puts into Lintian, and his recent work on a britney test-suite (the software that creates testing out of unstable);
• Joachim Breitner for his britney reimplementation using a SAT solver;
• Adam D. Barrat for his work on britney2;
• All the release team members who take care of an endless stream of transitions;
• Christoph Berg for his continuous work over the years on various QA infrastructure (DDPO, Mole, );
• Enrico Zini for the way he helped reform the New Member process without any big disruption;
• Russ Allbery for his Debian Policy work and for being a model in terms of how we should interact on Debian mailing lists;
• Stefano Zacchiroli for being the most active leader that I have ever seen, and for the way he tries to steer important discussions to a constructive conclusion.
• etc.

Most of those people are working on improving Debian's infrastructure so that we can all be more effective and do an even better work. This kind of work is not always very visible but it's crucial to Debian's future. Thank you to Rapha l for the time spent answering my questions. I hope you enjoyed reading his answers as I did. And, anyway, it was fun to just play the game "the other way".

Dear lazyweb, I was searching through the internet what was I doing wrong, I wrote to the polipo-user list but my email got stuck on moderation, and my connection is really shitty (that s why I m using polipo the way I m using it). I have relaxTransparency and mindlesslyCacheVary set to true, but I don t need so aggresive caching in my development stages that are located under *.local and another development subdomain on the net. Already tried setting uncachableFile to /etc/polipo/uncachable and to ~/.polipo-uncachable, according to the web-config thing is properly setted up, but can t get it to recognize it s content. I first thought it was I was writing bad the regex, .*\.local but it does work in the /etc/polipo/forbidden file. Besides, adding complete domains to the uncachable file doesn t works neither. Could someone confirm this or throw me a hand on this? I m using 1.0.4.1-1.1 version which is the last one on unstable repos.

Hello Before entering Debian NM process (formerly New Maintainer process, now New Member process) , I ve often read that it was too long, too hard, or too bureaucratic. It s certainly true that becoming a Debian Developer takes some time. Even if you re already actively packaging. You have to answer a lot of questions regarding several aspects of Debian project. Some of them are not fun but necessary:

• Licensing is mostly boring but necessary: a mistake there may put the whole project in jeopardy. On the positive side, you also learn how to protect the software you write
• Debian social rules: Well, Debian project is inviting you to become a member. As they say When in Rome, do like the Romans . Learning Debian ways and customs will allow you to better cooperate and benefit from the project.
• Tools and skills: Even though I ve been actively packaging for Debian-perl team for quite a while, I did have some knowledge holes. I had to do some research to answer questions. Especially regarding security practices and all the packaging tools available in Debian.

All in all, the NM process was time well spent. I ve learned a lot. IMHO, Debian NM process isn t bureaucracy, it s more like a training. And an interesting one. So, if you re thinking about becoming a Debian Member, to paraphrase someone, what the bloody hell are you waiting for ? Many thanks to all people that helped me become a DD:

• gregoa whose attention to small details is uncanny
• xoswald who had to read all my answers and the bad jokes in there
• Enrico who reviewed the whole stuff and approved my application
• The debian-perl team for their warm welcome and helpful attitude

All the best

Debian has applied to the Google code-in program as mentoring organization. In the Google code-in, pre-university students (ages 13-17), have the opportunity of contributing to Debian, trying to complete different tasks. We are hoping to get accepted and improve our outcome from last year. To achieve this, we need the help of more Debian contributors proposing and mentoring simple tasks for the students. Please take a take a look at the archives in the mailing list and join us with your proposals.
The list of tasks is at http://wiki.debian.org/GoogleCodeIn2011/Applying, we are specially missing translation and training tasks! You can also join us in the IRC channel #debian-soc (irc.oftc.net)

It s been a long time since my last post about my desktop in a shell , but today I stumbled over something absolutely awesome I want to share with you. A bit of background: I am using mutt with a single imap server (where everything is forwarded to), because I disliked the idea of having multiple mutt instances running and did not want to play the <change-folder>imaps://other.server.tld/<enter> game too much.
Now today I had to delete some mail from an account I don t use regularly (and where the webmail sucks), so I switched my screen to mutt and actually did the <change-folder> game and was like wow because the account showed up in my sidebar and I could just jump between the folders of both accounts. So I thought how to automate this, so I could actually use mutt with multiple accounts (without offline-imap and friends, which is what you find on the web). It s damn easy:

# muttrc
set imap_user=account1
set imap_pass=password
set folder="imaps://imap.one.example.com/INBOX"
set spoolfile="imaps://imap.one.example.com/INBOX"
...
push <change-folder>imaps://account2@imap.two.example.com/<enter>

Well, what does this do? It advises mutt to use imap.one.example.com, but then just jumps to imap.two.example.com at the end of the config, resulting in both accounts being loaded into the sidebar and usable. That s it, one line and it is awesome! Please note, the password to both accounts is the same, you will have to fiddle around and put it in the URL somehow if it differs.

0 comment(s) this blog is flattr enabled

Revision one in the Subversion repository of the FAI project dates back to the 27th of June 2000. Over the last few months we were discussing the switch to Git. At the last FAI meeting we decided to finally switch to Git and I volunteered to drive the migration. Today I officially did the migration. I ve been using git-svn to handle the FAI svn repository for at least as long as I m wearing the FAI stable release manager hat. But the tags, author information, inside my git-svn checkout weren t ready for official publishing yet There are at least two different well known and referenced svn2git implementations out there. I decided to give the one hosted on github a shot because it s mentioned at http://help.github.com/import-from-subversion/. It basically uses git-svn and just does the few annoying steps for you that I d had to do manually otherwise. For more complex repositories the other svn2git implementation might be worth a try, especially since it s supported by the svneverever tool. svneverever supports more flexible rules regarding the repository layout (it was used for switching Gentoo s Portage from Subversion to Git). Luckily we didn t need it in our situation and I had experience with git-svn on the FAI repository already, so Converting the repository was as simple as running:

% svn2git svn://svn.debian.org/svn/fai --authors ../fai-svnauthors

The ../fai-svnauthors file contains all the svnuser = Realname <mail@example.org> mappings to get the author information right. Some 41 minutes later svn2git finished its work. Finally I pushed the result to the FAI repository at github. If you re interested in the repository size of svn vs. git:

• svn repository (server side): 155MB
• svn checkout (client side): 318.3MB (4.3MB trunk, 301MB tags, 13MB branches)
• git-svn checkout: 13MB
• git repository/checkout: 7.1MB

ERROR: WOUTER+TIMHOTEL@GREP.BE is not a valid email address True, because I entered it in lowercase.

1. Email address local parts (the bit before the @) are case sensitive. That means you can't just convert it to all caps and assume it will arrive.
2. local parts can be composed out of any character from the following list:
• alphanumeric characters (a-z, A-Z, 0-9), and
• !#$%&'*+-/=?^_ ~.

This means that if you're trying to validate an email address by adding a regular expression that does more than check whether there's not exactly one @ in the address, you're almost always wrong. Next time you try to tell me my mail address is invalid, go read the RFC first. Morons.

If you value your privacy, you might want to use a search engine like Ixquick which tries to protect your privacy. But if you value your privacy you probably have NoScript installed and have it hide <noscript> elements, as many pages hide tracking methods for users with deactivated JS in such tags. That makes every result page (but the first) inaccessible, because Ixquick has its non-JS navigation in noscript tags too. Now you could either activate JavaScript for Ixquick or work around this problem. Thanks to Greasemonkey and a little script I wrote, working around this issue is really easy. At this point, there is only this one script on dev.carbon-project.org, but in case I write another one, it'll end up there too. ;-)

So, there is some history of organisations doing a poor job at managing security bugs. We saw the This is not really a security hole jokes just to avoid having bad statistics in the front page. We saw the OMFG you must update to the latest version RIGHT NOW and no I m not telling why panic. We still frequently see security fixes hidden in unrelated public commits, just to make them harder to backport for distributors. But really, there is absolutely no match for that. Kudos for setting a new standard in the worse way of dealing with security issues, guys. Update: one of the developers has started insulting a pair of professional IT security experts who came and tried to educate him. Awesome reading, don t forget the popcorn.

I have been a long-time user of the Galeon web browser, which, while powerful for its time, is getting a bit long in the teeth and has been abandoned for a long time. As a result I need to find something new. As Galeon uses the Mozilla engine I figure switching to Iceweasel/Firefox will be the least amount of pain since they share similar formats for lots of the user configuration and data (with the exception of history). Switching to Firefox also gives me access to a lot of configurability and a vast sea of extensions all written in RDF, JavaScript and zoooool (ahem, XUL). Another plus was that I was already using Firebug for the occasional web development project. Looking at the Mozilla addons site is like entering someone's shed. There will be the few beautiful unfinished projects still being worked on, one polished finished scuplture gathering dust but still admirable, things with power plugs from a bygone era, some things that have a coin slot on them, some cryptic machines with no visible screws or manuals, some spiders and their cobwebs and a few rats and mice chewing through things. A place where you can find some excellent, well documented, useful and Free Software extensions alongside lots of crud. Luckily for me the good stuff that I wanted to use was already in Debian or the friendly Debian Mozilla extension maintainers team was willing to package them for me. In my quest for freedom from Galeon I first noticed that there is no up button in Iceweasel. Bummer, I use that a lot so I went searching for extensions. I soon found one extension, but it hadn't kept up with the ever-changing Mozilla APIs so it fell by the wayside. Thanks to the leavers of breadcrumbs I picked up the trail to a new shiny and working extension. Lo-and-behold I found Uppity, which was all about going up and as it turns out, much better at that than Galeon. Thanks to MozExt team, thats solved, next! The next glaring problem was the lack of Galeon-style smart bookmarks. Before you ask, yes, Firefox smart keyword bookmarks are not the same thing. This was rediculously hard to search for due to the wording used by both projects being same same but different. Some folks switched to Epiphany to get the extra search boxes on their toolbars. Like this guy I was not interested in that, mainly due to the addons I would be missing out on. I tried a few different tacks, even searching for a way to have multiple search boxes in the Firefox toolbars. I soon gave up on finding an extension that would do this like Galeon does so I figured its time to roll up the sleeves and learn some zzzoooool. I already know a little bit about JavaScript and CSS so... First slap a dash of a tutorial about adding toolbar buttons, add a slither of adding extensions without installing them, stare down some Mozilla reference manuals, thrown in a pinch of favicons, give up on a wild goose chase or two, add a big fat blob of zoooool and sautee in fugly hacks. Soon enough you will have something hardcoded that works like Galeon smart bookmarks but looks even better. I may eventually turn this into a proper and functionally equivalent extension for Galeon-stlye smart bookmarks but for now it will remain a useful hack. If you want to get your hands dirty with zzzoooooool and try this out after modifying it to use your personal search URLs, please feel free to contact me. For now the only remaining issue I can see is that the forward/back buttons in Iceweasel don't have the explict menu buttons. This is a minor issue for me so now it is time for me to figure out how to migrate my data and config¹ before permanently switching away from Galeon. Wish me luck! 1. Of course the data and config are fugly, but that is a something for another, much broader and more complicated hack

Wow, a lot (of travel) has happened in the last three months. Zoe has been to Chicago, Langkawi, Brisbane, and is now back in Mountain View. I'm actually feeling really guilty about our carbon footprint for this year. She spent the last about 3.5 weeks in Brisbane with Sarah after the wedding in Langkawi, until I flew there last weekend for my sister's wedding. Losing and finding Smudge helped pass the time, as did having Liam stay with me while he was visiting from Zurich. I could have done without the former, but really appreciated the timing of the latter. There was quite a noticeable vocabulary difference when I finally saw Zoe again. I can't keep up with all the words she can say now, and she's starting to grasp concepts as well. For example, she opened a small cardboard box, and declared it "empty". Apparently we say "uh oh" a lot, as this is one of her favourite things to blurt out whenever anything happens, ranging from my sister's bridal train dragging on the ground at her wedding, to vomiting all over herself in the back of the car. She's definitely not going to be a girly girl. When the flight from Brisbane landed in Los Angeles she yelled out a big "WHOA!" and then "Again!" while furiously doing the baby sign language for "more". Fortunately we were able to oblige for the flight from LAX to San Jose, and she again enjoyed the landing (she got to sit in her own seat for this one) and did a loud "Wow!" and "Again!" I'm looking forward to taking her on her first roller coaster ride. Her canine teeth still haven't come through yet, but I think they've just started to make an appearance. We're still trying to de-jetlag her at the moment, so it's unclear if the wake-ups throughout the night are because of jetlag or teeth issues (or a combination of both). She handled all of the travel fairly well, although she's now too long for a aeroplane bassinet. She didn't get a lot of sleep on the 12.5 hour flight from Brisbane to Los Angeles (which meant we got none), but she was pretty well behaved for the bulk of it. She's good enough on her legs now that she can just tear up and down the aisles without incident, so we made countless laps of the plane to keep her occupied. The return flight was on Halloween, and the cabin crew had gotten into the spirit with temporary face tattoos, some cabin decorations and some "costumes". The trip back home was actually epic in that it was littered with minor annoyances, but I'll save that for a separate blog post. This Christmas should be a fun one, as she'll be old enough to be a bit more interactive about the whole thing. She may also freak out sitting on Santa's knee, so we may not get quite as nice a photo as we got last year.

There are various presentations that state the goodness of PAV on Linux. Most revolve around using multipath-tools to assemble a volume if you don't have HyperPAV. But it turns out that the DASD device driver does multipathing for them internally in current kernels (which includes the squeeze kernel).

So all you need to do is setting those alias devices online. When you do that the kernel will log that it detected a new device, but you'll find that it won't create any dasd* device nodes for them, nor will it list partitions. lsdasd will only show you "alias" without mentioning the base volume, but you can fetch that information easily from the uid sysfs entry.

When George Papandreou announced its will to submit the European help program to the approbation of the Greek people, I don t know whether he wanted to scare people, but man, he really achieved something. From Wall Street to the Bundestag, through the lys e Palace, they are all in a state of advanced panic. There s a joke that s been circulating since: for next Hallowe en, disguise yourself as a referendum. Yes, these guys are afraid. Afraid of the people. They are afraid because it is now clear that their interests are not the same as the interests of the people. And what do you do when you are afraid? Well, you find yourself some way out, often by lying. And indeed, Mrs Merkel and Mr Sarkozy have been repeating over and over something that has been then repeated over and over by most so-called journalists: that Greeks can only choose between two endings:

1. they pay their debts to banks and rich people, and stay in the Euro zone;
2. they don t pay their debts to banks and rich people, and find themselves another currency.

That s it: Mrs Merkel and Mr Sarkozy are outrageous liars. There is another option for Greek people:

3. they don t pay their debts to banks and rich people, and they stay in the Euro zone.

It s as simple as that: nothing in European treaties can force a country to leave the Euro zone. And nothing in these treaties can force a country to honor their bonds. Greece is a sovereign state and, as such, can choose not to honor its sovereign debt. And choose to stay in the Euro zone: why would they want to go out? What does it have to do with the currency those bonds have been emitted in? If California were to cease payment of its public debt (something not likely to happen at all, hmm?), would it have to abandon the Dollar? But here is a thing that has been forbidden for a long time in European treaties: for a country to help financially another one to pay its debts. This rule was introduced by Jacques Delors (a man who knows what being European means) precisely in order to avoid the contagion we are facing currently because of stupid help plans all across Europe. Yes: the whole idea of Merkozy s grand plan to save Euro while helping Greece (a weird kind of help, starving people, really) is illegal. So in addition to being liars, Mrs Merkel and Mr Sarkozy are delinquents. So let Greece cease payment of its debt. A few banks will sink: so what? This will create less unemployment than letting our whole economy sink. European States will guarantee citizens savings up to 30 k , that s one of the other clever European rules (some countries guarantee more). Other people, rich people only, will lose their savings. Will that prevent you from sleeping? Not me. But that could prevent from sleeping a number of friends of Mrs Merkel s and Mr Sarkozy s. And wouldn t that be a good reason for lying and violating European treaties?

This story has been floating around for a week or so. The summary is that someone bought a system that has UEFI and is having trouble installing Linux on it. In itself, not a problem. But various people have either conflated this with the secure boot issue or suggested that UEFI is a fundamentally anti-Linux technology.

Right now there are no machines shipping to the public with secure boot enabled. None at all. If you're having problems installing Linux on a machine with UEFI then it's not because of secure boot. So what is actually causing the problem?

UEFI is a complicated specification, with 2.3.1A being 2214 pages long. It's a large body of code. There's a lot of subtleties. It's very easy for people to get things wrong. For example, we've seen issues where calling SetVirtualAddressMap() resulted in the firmware referencing boot services code, a clear violation of the spec on the firmware authors' part. We've also found machines that failed to boot because grub wasn't aligning its stack properly, a clear violation of the spec on our part.

Software is difficult. People make mistakes. When something mysteriously fails to work the immediate assumption should be that you've found a bug, not a conspiracy. Over time we'll find those bugs and fix them, but until then just treat UEFI boot failures like any other bug - annoying, but not malicious.

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