I've just learned of if this then that: a simple web tool that performs actions based on events. It's like a streamlined, easy-to-use subset of yahoo pipes. I'm going to try and use it to achieve a few bits of integration, such as tweeting when I write a new blog post.
My dear MirBSD co-developer Benny did not only get his Doctor title
but also recently married. There will be another post detailing this,
including better photos of the two Doctors and the cake (with a D mon
she made herself) on the wlog, but this is some fun beforehand:
Apparently, it is forbidden in France to drive GPL cars. (Without
safety valve but you have to admit the picture was fun. And we were
like since the thing actually meant is LPG in German. Just
like UTC is CUT (Coordinated Universal Time) in English, TUC (Temps
Universel Coordonn ) in French )
It s been busy at our co-op but I m never too busy to support calls for the freedom to install debian (or any other Free and Open Source Software Operating System) so I ve signed the FSF-led public statement on so-called Secure Boot .
This could be a feature deserving of the name, as long as the user is able to authorize the programs she wants to use, so she can run free software written and modified by herself or people she trusts. However, we are concerned that Microsoft and hardware manufacturers will implement these boot restrictions in a way that will prevent users from booting anything other than Windows.So please, read the full thing and consider signing it yourself. If you want to watch for further news on this topic, Matthew Garrett s Journal seems to be the bomb. Right, well, it s another busy week this week, so it might be the weekend before I find time to blog again, but posts will be a bit more frequent next week: watch this space!
I realise it has been nearly two months since I last posted anything here. The good news is I'm still alive!
Mostly the past couple of months has been full of cute victims to take pictures of, which has helped me setup a simplified portfolio site;
I still continue to prefer images of people and I was recently pleased with the delivery of my first "photobook". Over the past couple of years I've slowly decorated my flat with prints (4"x6" - A2) of my pictures, but seeing the pictures in a nicely bound book makes them feel so much more real.
I've also been doing a little more software development, mostly relating to the archiving of images and the workflow of taking RAW images, converting them, and finally uploading via rsync. I suspect the tools I've put together are Steve-specific, but I did have some fun with duplicate image detection and eilimination - something I've written about in the past.
ObQuote: "Better to write for yourself and have no public than to write for the public and have no self" - Cyril Connolly.
I was in Brazil last week and had the pleasure of participating in a teach-in at Occupy S o Paulo, a vibrant camp set up last week in the heart of the old down town. There are now under threat, please see below for details and spread the word.
***
On October 15, a group of nearly 300 activists began an occupation of S o Paulo in the Valley of Anhagabau, one of the sites of the first rallies for direct elections during the end of the Brazilian military dictatorship in the 1980s. After a week of peaceful encampment, educational and cultural programs, and creating a sustainable community for not just themselves but many homeless people in downtown S o Paulo, the Occupy S o Paulo movement is coming under increased police threat. Today, Monday October 24, the governor of the state of S o Paulo, Geraldo Alckmin is holding two special events. First, he is hosting Florida Governor Rick Scott (R). Second, Alckmin has decided to hold a parade of 3000 military police right next to the encampment (see photo above).
After a week of police harrassment and a pending court case for them to hold the right to pitch their tents, the Occupy S o Paulo movement sees this as an escalation of the harassment they have already faced by city police. Further, the presence of 3000 military police next to 300 occupiers is clearly meant to intimidate both occupiers and members of the public who have been coming up to the encampment and learning about the movement. Please take the time to call or email the governor and the secretary of public security of the state of S o Paulo to condemn this action. You can also send messages of solidarity to the S o Paulo occupation at occupysampaenglish@googlegroups.com.
To contact Governor Geraldo Alckmin s office of citizen and organizational relations:
Fill out a comment form at: http://www.saopaulo.sp.gov.br/en/fale/fale.php
As is natural for an LTS cycle, lots of people are thinking and talking about work focused on quality rather than features. With Canonical extending LTS support to five years on the desktop for 12.04, much of this is quite rightly focused on the desktop. I'm really not a desktop hacker in any way, shape, or form, though. I spent my first few years in Ubuntu working mainly on the installer - I still do, although I do some other things now too - and I used to say only half-jokingly that my job was done once X started. Of course there are plenty of bugs I can fix, but I wanted to see if I could do something with a bit more structure, so I got to thinking about projects we could work on at the foundations level that would make a big difference.
Image build pipeline
One difficulty we have is that quite a few of our bugs - especially installer bugs, although this goes for some other things too - are only really caught when people are doing coordinated image testing just before a milestone release. Now, it takes a while to do all the builds and then it takes a while to test them. The excellent work of the QA team has meant that testing is much quicker now than it used to be, and a certain amount of smoke-testing is automated (particularly for server images). On the other hand, the build phase has only got longer as we've added more flavours and architectures, particularly as some parts of the process are still serialised per architecture or subarchitecture so ARM builds in particular take a very long time indeed. Exact timings are a bit difficult to get for various reasons, but I think the minimum time between a developer uploading a fix and us having a full set of candidate images on all architectures including that fix is currently somewhere north of eight hours, and that's with people cutting corners and pulling strings which is a suboptimal thing to have to do around release time. This obviously makes us reluctant to respin for anything short of showstopper bugs. If we could get things down to something closer to two hours, respins would be a much less horrible proposition and so we might be able to fix a few bugs that are serious but not showstoppers, not to mention that the release team would feel less burned out.
We discussed this problem at the release sprint, and came up with a laundry list of improvements; I've scheduled this for discussion at UDS in case we can think of any more. Please come along if you're interested!
One thing in particular that I'm working on is refactoring Germinate, a tool which dates right back to our first meeting before Ubuntu was even called Ubuntu and whose job is to expand dependencies starting from our lists of "seed" packages; we use this, among other things, to generate Task fields in the archive and to decide which packages to copy into our images. This was acceptably quick in 2004, but now that we run it forty times (eight flavours multiplied by five architectures) at the end of every publisher run it's actually become rather a serious performance problem: cron.germinate takes about ten minutes, which is over a third of the typical publisher runtime. It parses Packages files eight times as often as it needs to, Sources files forty times as often as it needs to, and recalculates the dependency tree of the base system five times as often as it needs to. I am confident that we can significantly reduce the runtime here, and I think there's some hope that we might be able to move the publisher back to a 30-minute cycle, which would increase the velocity of Ubuntu development in general.
Maintaining the development release
Our release cycle always starts with syncing and merging packages from Debian unstable (or testing in the case of LTS cycles). The vast majority of packages in Ubuntu arrive this way, and generally speaking if we didn't do this we would fall behind in ways that would be difficult to recover from later. However, this does mean that we get a "big bang" of changes at the start of the cycle, and it takes a while for the archive to be usable again. Furthermore, even once we've taken care of this, we have a long-established rhythm where the first part of the cycle is mainly about feature development and the second part of the cycle is mainly about stabilisation. As a result, we've got used to the archive being fairly broken for the first few months, and we even tell people that they shouldn't expect things to work reliably until somewhere approaching beta.
This makes some kind of sense from the inside. But how are you supposed to do feature development that relies on other things in the development release?
In the first few years of Ubuntu, this question didn't matter very much. Nearly all the people doing serious feature development were themselves serious Ubuntu developers; they were capable of fixing problems in the development release as they went along, and while it got in their way a little bit it wasn't all that big a deal. Now, though, we have people focusing on things like Unity development, and we shouldn't assume that just because somebody is (say) an OpenGL expert or a window management expert that they should be able to recover from arbitrary failures in development release upgrades. One of the best things we could do to help the 12.04 desktop be more stable is to have the entire system be less unstable as we go along, so that developers further up the stack don't have to be distracted by things wobbling underneath them. Plus, it's just good software engineering to keep the basics working as you go along: it should always build, it should always install, it should always upgrade. Ubuntu is too big to do something like having everyone stop any time the build breaks, the way you might do in a smaller project, but we shouldn't let things slide for months either.
I've been talking to Rick Spencer and the other Ubuntu engineering leads at Canonical about this. Canonical has a system of "rotations", where you can go off to another team for a while if you're in need of a change or want to branch out a bit; so I proposed that we allow our engineers to spend a month or two at a time on what I'm calling the +1 Maintenance Team, whose job is simply to keep the development release buildable, installable, and upgradeable at all times. Rick has been very receptive to this, and we're going to be running this as a trial throughout the 12.04 cycle, with probably about three people at a time. As well as being professional archive gardeners, these people will also work on developing infrastructure to help us keep better track of what we need to do. For instance, we could deploy better tools from Debian QA to help us track uninstallable packages, or we could enhance some of our many existing reports to have bug links and/or comment facilities, or we could spruce up the weather report; there are lots of things we could do to make our own lives easier.
By 12.04, I would like, in no particular order:
My generous employer has kindly
offered to host the first Bug Squashing Party of the now commencing Wheezy Release BSP
Marathon. Yay!
We'll meet during the first weekend in December (Friday 2nd to Sunday
4th) in Hildesheim, Germany. There's a wiki page listing all
important information. Please also use this page to sign up if you want
to join us.
Today I attended the Stop HRL demonstration [1]. The government plans to spend $100,000,000 of federal money and $50,000,000 of Victorian state money to build a new coal power station. The state government has imposed some unreasonable restrictions on renewable energy which includes allowing a single person who objects within 2Km of a wind turbine to block the project while also not allowing anyone to object to coal power plants or fracking (both of which have proven health implications). Today VCAT had a hearing about this issue, HRL wants to double the size of the proposed coal power plant while Environment Victoria, Doctors for the Environment Australia, local climate action group Locals Into Victoria s Environment Martin Shield from Climate Action Moreland are opposing the plan.
What the government should be doing is permitting (if not encouraging) renewable energy production, particularly wind power which will drive down energy prices by undercutting the energy auctions due to it s almost zero marginal cost. The government should not be spending tax payer money on new coal projects due to climate change and air pollution in addition to the fact that coal is simply more expensive in the long term.
As usual it s disappointing that the National party which supposedly represents farmers is supporting the government in such things. The pollution caused by coal power and fracking ends up damaging farmland. The Liberal party doesn t have a majority on it s own in either house of the state government, so this proposed coal power plant could be stopped immediately if the National party supported renewable power, or even if they merely opposed giving $50,000,000 of state tax money to HRL.
The demonstration went reasonably well, there was about 80 people there when I arrived and by the time it ended there were more than 150 people. I took the above picture at the start and it missed many people who were off to the right. I think that s a good result for a demonstration that had little publicity and was held in business hours with really bad weather.
Update:
On Sunday the 13th of November at 13:00-14:30 there is a Going Backwards Under Baillieu demonstration at Parliament House. This is to mark the negative affects that the Liberal state government has had on the environment of Victoria.
I'm not the first one who thought about managing their dotfiles &
scripts in a (D)VCS in order to be able to have them in sync across
different machines, & I even haven't re-invented the wheel for doing so.
short report on my experiences:
Twenty-four hours ago I was in heaven. Or to more properly recapitulate and situate this, fourty-eight hours ago I was in hell.
Now this requires some context. Earlier in the year, I had tweeted briefly about
a Kurt Elling live concert still streaming on NPR,
and truth be told, I have listened to Kurt Elling a whole lot ever since.
The most recent album The Gate is fantastic,
the Grammy-winner Dedicated to
You (which retakes the very famous Coltrane/Hartman
album) is beyond words, and The Messenger is
worth it just for 'Nature Boy' and the funkiest-ever 'April in Paris'. I also saw him
as part of a larger and otherwise rather neat tour. But I needed
to see the man himself. So following what one can see from his touring calendar, I jotted down
two October dates. Kurt Elling at the Green Mill. Fine. That was
earlier in the summer.
Summer has a tendency of evaporating quickly, so here we were in October. And getting going late on Friday, so by the time we got the Green
Mill, a long line had formed and we ended up paying tribute to the line for fourty-five minutes with nothing to show. Sad. Home we went, and
no live music.
But somehow we mustered the energy to go again last night and thought we were early, arriving about 20 minutes before the show was
to start. Ha! Others had appeared at 3pm, by 5pm all seats were gone. We were literally the last ones the get in after a short spell in a
shorter line, and standing room-only it was. Oh, but what a treat we got. The set for these two days was Kurt Elling with the fourteen piece Kl vers Big Band from Denmark. They played for three marvellous sets,
and well over four hours (with two 25 minute breaks). Pieces often alternated between big band arrangements and smaller pieces by Elling's
standard rhythm band, and covered standards as well as Elling's catalogue. As I mentioned earlier on a short post (with pictures) on Google+, it
is essentially impossible to not fall for Elling's stage presence when being so close to the stage. The man is just that good.
Elling and the Kl vers Big Band will now play for six nights at Birdland in New York followed by
a night each in Washington, DC, and Boston. If you're around, do yourself a favour and go out to see them.
There is a program that I love: bb.
bb is a demo of the famous ASCII Art library, aalib.
dT8 8Tb
dT 8 8 Tb
dT 8 8 Tb
<PROJECT><PROJECT>
dT 8 8 Tb
dT 8 8 Tb
bb is a demo-scene-type program that shows how awesome
automatic ASCII art is. The personalities of the people who made bb
shine through. It's surely one of my favorite programs in Debian, up there
with alpine. It's been in Debian since 1998.
bb has a serious bug, however:
BB's "graphics" freeze when music starts.
Here's the issue.
load-module module-esound-protocol-unixWe could also possibly patch bb so that it asks libmikmod not to use its esound "support." I think the smarter thing to do is to adjust libmikmod. Since its esound support seems to be just plain broken, it should be removed. At very least, it should not be the default when ALSA output is available. There is a new upstream release of libmikmod, maybe the esound output is fixed. In Debian, libmikmod is orphaned. When a package is orphaned, it means that a new person must step in and adopt the package. Debian packages need ongoing care and commitment to fix issues and make changes like this that benefit the users. In this case, you'd need to understand some C and be willing to maintain a shared library. Maintaining a library in Debian requires attention to detail, but it is quite doable. Since you would be adopting an existing package, most of the work is already done for you. I would also be quite willing to answer questions. If you're not a Debian developer, I would happily sponsor uploads of this package into Debian so that the fixes are part of the distribution. So: who will maintain libmikmod and fix bb? Could it be you? It would make a really great birthday present if the amazing bb program worked in the next Debian release. Leave a comment if you have questions or are interested! P.S. In a pinch, I can be convinced to maintain libmikmod myself, but I think this is a great opportunity for someone new to Debian to make a big difference.
this week my activities were split between some freshly-reported pkg-perl
bugs, & looking at some of the older RC bugs. for most of the ones in
the latter category I found again ready-to-be-applied patches, many of them
from Ubuntu again. details:
Visiting California this week and having a great time. Experienced my first
earthquake; visited the Noisebridge hackspace with Seth and Mako; and
yesterday went up to Point Reyes and flew a kite from cliffs over Drake's
Bay.
Up there even the cows have a view.
Tomorrow, off to Google for the GitTogether.
There a many, many, e-book reader devices available these days, and they're quickly becoming pretty affordable. The currently cheapest device in Germany (that I know of) is the TrekStor eBook Reader 3.0, model number EBR30-a, at 59.- Euros via Weltbild or Hugendubel.
The device has an 800x480 7" TFT (yep, no e-ink), 2100mAh battery, it can display PDFs, EPUB, and TXT files (and Adobe DRM crap, which I don't really care about), it has an accelerometer which allows for landscape/portrait switching, it can play MP3, OGG, WAV, and WMA audio files (headphone jack), it can display pictures (BMP, GIF, JPG, even PNG, though that's not mentioned in the vendor's specs), and it has 2GB internal storage for books/music/pictures. Uploading of (non-DRM) content is done by a simple file copy, it enumerates as a standard USB mass storage device with FAT filesystem. It's a relatively nice reader for the price, I've read a few PDFs (datasheets, presentations) on it in the subway/train while listening to music from the device and it's quite OK for my purposes. So much for the review part.
However, I didn't really buy it for reading books on it, I was more interested in taking it apart, of course ;-) My hope was that it would turn out to be a really cheap device running Linux/U-Boot which would be perfect for playing around with embedded Linux stuff. Unfortunately, I wasn't so lucky (it seems).
I've posted a few photos of the device and its hardware components on my flickr account and over at randomprojects.org, together with all the information I was able to find out so far. Here's a quick summary:
There are public datasheets for most of the hardware components (see randomprojects.org for links), but unfortunately the most important one (for the CPU) is not yet found/identified. I was told that the CPU/SoC is probably based on an ARM9 (ARM926EJ-S) core and the firmware running on it seems to be some uCos-based RTOS (not Linux, unfortunately).
So far I was not able to find out the vendor name or website of the "FI E200" CPU/SoC (let alone any datasheets), any hints would be highly appreciated. I checked arm.com: Processor Licensees, but the only two companies whose name starts with "F" having licensed an ARM9 core are Fujitsu and Freescale, which doesn't fit, I think?
I could (and probably will) check the PCB for RX/TX lines on an UART and/or JTAG pads (none are obviously labelled), and given that it's and ARM9 core there is a good chance that OpenOCD can be used and that a standard cross-gcc for ARM will work. However, that is all pretty pointless until it's clear which SoC exactly is used, and thus whether there is already Linux and/or U-Boot support for it and/or whether datasheets are available so that the respective code could be written. Without datasheets, this is going to be a pretty painful experience, not really worth investing much time, IMHO.
If anyone knows more about the vendor/device and respective datasheets, please let me know. Thanks!
Valve's Portal game introduced an innovative teleporter system - where you basically can see through the teleporter and even walk seamlessly through it.
Ever wondered how this is implemented? Check this Mini-Portal demo, along with its companion tutorials!
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/OpenGL_Programming/Mini-PortalIn this first part, we cover a basic working version that we will improve over the next few days. [Find more tutorials at the OpenGL wikibook.]
// Runtime complexity O(n * br * diff), where "n" is the number of iterations until
// a fixed point is reached, "br" is the complexity of "run_britney" and "diff" is
// the runtime of the "last != current" comparison.
function find_fixed_point(initial);
last = run_britney(initial)
current = run_britney(last)
while last != current ; do
last = current
current = run_britney(last)
od
return current
end
[5] I assume the test called sat-britney-death (created by Joachim) was named that way for a reason. The second failure is caused by SAT britney not reading hints (yet?), so the approve tpu package test case should fail.
[6] A function that maps an archive into another archive erh, I mean, it maps a set of packages into another set of packages
[7] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed_point_%28mathematics%29
Assuming my claim to be true, the function will have more than one fixed point. The obtained fixed point depends on the initial state of testing.
As an example:
We all love stats, don t we? So, here we go!
Let s start with a graph:
It shows the number of packages in the NEW queue since last year. You can see a big drop during April 2011, and a reasonably low rate during the last six months. You could think fellow Debian Developers stopped to upload NEW packages. Sorry, you re wrong! 
Since Squeeze release, 3.832 .changes files with NEW components were processed by dak, with an average of 14,85 NEW packages per day. On the FTP Team side, we had 3.732 accepts (14,47 per day), 339 rejects (1,31 per day) and 178 comments to maintainers (0,69 per day).
So, let s find out which upload was the quickest ever. Try to gamble a bit before reading the answer, to see whether you are near to the real value
Alessio Treglia, you probably already know, because your gwc_0.21.16~dfsg-1 upload has been processed in 41 seconds (yes, forty-one seconds!). Here s an excerpt from ftp-master log to certify it:
20110516120252 process-upload dak Processing changes file gwc_0.21.16~dfsg-1_amd64.changesAlex was the super-fast FTP Team member behind the quickest accept, do you want to beat him? Join FTP Team
20110516120258 process-upload dak Moving to new gwc_0.21.16~dfsg-1_amd64.changes
20110516120339 process-new tolimar NEW ACCEPT: gwc_0.21.16~dfsg-1_amd64.changes
A few months after Zoe was born, it hit me that we didn't just have to raise a
baby to grow up happy and healthy, we were raising a girl, and had to
worry about making sure she had a healthy self-image and mind as well, and
having to worry about how the world she was coming into was going to have an
impact on that.
I think it might have been around the time that I became aware of the book Cinderella
Ate My Daughter that I had this realisation.
I started taking more of an interest in, what I guess I'd call feminist issues.
I became a seed
funder for the Ada Initiative, and I tend to prick my ears up when I hear
about feminist issues.
So when an email went by on the parents list at work about a screening of an
independent documentary film called Miss Representation, I
watched the trailer, and since I'm currently swanning around sans wife and
child, ponied up the $10 to go and see a screening of it in Palo Alto, which
was followed by a Q&A session with the writer/director/producer.
I basically went along on the strength of the trailer, and being a father of a
daughter, and didn't do much more reading into the who the
writer/director/producer was. It turns out that Jennifer Siebel is Gavin Newsom's wife. I
didn't figure that out until I got home and did my homework, so some of the
references she made in the conversation after the screening didn't make a lot
of sense to me at the time.
The documentary itself was very poignant, but I found that after about 40 or 50
minutes, I felt that the point was made, and I would have preferred to see more
about what to do about it. But I guess what to do about it is to be aware of
the problem. I had some trouble accepting the statistic quoted at the beginning
of the film that the average teenager spends more than 10 hours each day
consuming media. If they sleep for 8 hours, and go to school for 6 hours, that
means they're spending every other waking minute consuming media, and I just
don't buy that.
Apparently Jennifer is working on a couple of related follow-up documentaries,
so it'll be interesting to see what they're about and what they're like, and
how they're presented to the viewing public.
One of the things that disappointed me a bit was this film doesn't look like
it's going to do any sort of mainstream theatre run. I'm not sure why, but it
seems like the way they're going is for more of a grassroots, small screening
thing, possibly as a way of trying to get it added to (I presume private)
school curricula. It is getting a couple of showings on Oprah Winfrey's cable
channel OWN, but that doesn't seem like enough to me. I think it'd really cause
people to sit up and take notice if it got half-decent box office numbers and a
bit more press coverage as a result. It's the kind of thing I could see going
viral if it gets more exposure.
The other thing that really disappointed me was the lack of men in the
audience. I think I could have counted on both hands the number of men there.
But I have to say that I wouldn't have heard about it (yet, anyway) if it
weren't for that email that went by on the mailing list at work, so maybe it
just doesn't have much of a profile yet.
I view this documentary in the same calibre as Super Size Me, or anything
that Michael Moore has put out. It's a documentary trying to highlight an issue
with American culture. It should get as widespread a viewing as possible to get
the conversation going. Instead, as best I can tell, there's two DVDs billed as
"educational material", with what I consider prohibitive
pricetags.
I want to purchase a copy of the film for posterity (if nothing more, it'll be
interesting to show Zoe a snapshot of American culture from around when she was
born), but I'd also like to get my hands on the age-appropriate educational
stuff so that I can use it with Zoe. The likelihood of Zoe going to a school
that incorporates the material into its curriculum is slim (she'll be educated
in Australia), so I'd really like to be able to use it at home.
I'll end with this thought
provoking article that also did the rounds of the parents list at work a
few months ago.
Next.