The MeeGo community is frustrated with the news of the MeeGo brand being abandoned. Some are understandably angry or otherwise not happy about how Linux Foundation, Intel handled the Tizen announcement and community in general - or more like how they didn't handle it at all.Last week Openmind 2011 happened to be arranged in Tampere on the very same day as Tizen announcement came alive. It was good in the way that it lead to the fact that Nomovok's CEO Pasi Nieminen was able to initiate the "Reigniting MeeGo" session not just by talking vague things about future, but actually about the process which led to Tizen and the unfortunately brief initial PR about it. Pasi is intense on emphasizing the quality and role of Qt in Tizen as well, even though officially Tizen is all about HTML5 and apparently from Samsung's part at least EFL is provided as a native toolkit. However, the promise of Tizen compared to MeeGo is reportedly that the toolkit is not specified in compliancy documents, so HTML5 with WAC is the main/only "3rd party apps" layer whereas others can be offered case-by-case. This means that unlike before, the underlying system can be built on top of practically any distribution (theoretically) and using whatever toolkits and other techniques wanted. Obviously the "Nordic System Integrators" are probably all very keen of using Qt to produce more of Nokia N9 quality user experiences in various products.

Taking the corporate hat off, I as a community member am also puzzled. The only reason I was not completely blown by the news was that I didn't yet manage to get involved in MeeGo community on a daily basis, since I'm involved with a dozen communities already. Instead I've been more like scratching the surface with MeeGo Network Finland meetings, IRC activity, OBS usage for building a few apps for MeeGo Harmattan and MeeGo proper etc. But I can somewhat understand how people like Jarkko Moilanen from meego-fi feel. They have given a _lot_ to the MeeGo community and brand, all taken away without hearing or pre-notice.

So where to now for MeeGo community? Tizen is one obvious choice. However, for all the talks that even I started this post with, Tizen is still vaporware today, and the dislike of how community is being treated might make it easy to consider other options. Also, if Tizen's reference implementation has lesser meaning, it might also mean less to actually be "in" the Tizen community than in MeeGo. I met Jos Poortvliet at Openmind, and he invited people to openSUSE. There is a lot of common ground with MeeGo and openSUSE - strong OBS usage, RPM packaging, community side focused on KDE and therefore Qt.

I would like to now point similarly to Debian! If one is tired about corporate interests and not listening to community, there is no match for Debian's 15+ years history, purely volunteer based, trust based organization, and first of all scope. While openSUSE has traditionally focused on desktop (even though like Jos pointed out they are open to all new contributions and projects), Debian has always had the "universal" scope, ie. no boundaries besides producing free software operating system for various purposes. There are over 10 architectures maintained at the moment, including the ARM (different ports for ARMv4 and hard-float ARMv7) and x86 from MeeGo world. There are even alternative kernels to Linux, mainly the GNU/kFreeBSD port. There are multiple relevant plans and projects like the Smartphones wiki area, most noticeably Debian on Neo FreeRunner. I have run Debian on my primary mobile phone for over 2.5 years, although now in the recent months I've had dual-SIM in my Nokia N950 as well (Debian not yet running on Nokia N950 or Nokia N9 - but it can and will be done!).

What Debian may lack in both good and bad is corporate funding, if you don't count the still quite respectful contributions from Ubuntu to Debian (it's in Ubuntu's interests to contribute as much possible back to Debian, so that the delta remains small). For each and every aspect, it needs a volunteer - there are a thousand volunteer Debian Developers, and at least a double of that of people without the official DD status but who still maintain a package or two among the 25000+ packages in Debian. That means also that one my find it more lucrative to join a project that has paid people to do some of the "boring parts", more of fancy web tools, including for bug handling and build systems like the OBS (which I do love by the way). On the other hand, there is no other project in my opinion where what you do really matters as much.

To find out more about Debian from MeeGo perspective, please see the recent mailing list post Mobile UXes - From the DebConf11 BoF to the stars where I wrote most of the MeeGo (CE) part when I was asked to and known of my MeeGo involvement.

Last but not certainly least, there is the Mer project - originally "maemo reconstructed", ie. making Nokia's "not really distro" into a real distro by filling in the void places. Now it's obviously MeeGo reconstructed, and they aim to be the MeeGo they always wanted MeeGo to be! Read the post for details from Carsten Munk and other key Mer people. They share the love for Qt, and want the core to be as lean as possible. They also aim to incorporate the most community like aspect from MeeGo - MeeGo CE - as the reference vendor in Mer. They also aim to be Tizen compliant - and when Tizen comes alive, I wouldn't see why the Tizen reference implementation couldn't be used for saving resources. Maybe Nomovok and/or others could offer the Qt maintaining part.

So, it might be that Tizen itself is enough for most people's needs. The key point however in this post is not to fall in agony if one corporate based project takes big turns - it has happened before, it will happen in the future. There are always enough political and business reasons from some points of view to do Big Changes. But the wider community is out there, always, and it's bigger than you think. You should consider where you want to contribute by asking yourself why you are/were part of for example the MeeGo community. Aaron Seigo from KDE asked us all this question in the Openmind MeeGo Reignited session, and I think it's good to repeat.

Note to self: Next time you move houses across the country, do remember to pack a small "survival" backpack with clean clothes and other basics *before* everything is packed up.

There has been a lot of talk recently questioning the trust authorities that underpin the SSL/TLS world. After a few high-profile incidents, it is clear that there is something wrong with this structure.

While some people have suggested that DNSSEC might solve this problem, here are three Firefox add-ons that can be used today to enhance the security of HTTPS:

• Certificate Patrol applies the "trust on first use" principle familiar to most ssh users. It keeps track of the certificates you get for the sites you visit and displays a warning if important elements (e.g. the certificate authority) change.


• Perspectives uses a network of certificate notaries to issue a warning when you encounter a certificate that is different from what other Perspectives users see.


• Monkeysphere takes advantage of the PGP/GPG web-of-trust to verify the authenticity of certificates.

Unlike the Convergence approach which completely takes over certificate handling, all three of the above add-ons can be used together.

I ve been a long-time user of GNU Screen, as almost every person I know that spend a lot of time in a terminal. I must admit I was happy, I really was. I was used to my workflow with 4 terminals 8 25 and a bunch of screens, with several nested-screens. I used awesome-wm before, so definitely I felt I wasn t using all the space in my laptop screen (my laptop is a ThinkPad X61, so 1024 768 in a 12 inches-screen) but that was OK, after all my workflow was, well, good. Until 2 days ago, I was told to try tmux, in fact, I was told and why are you using screen? use tmux . As a daily-user of Screen my first reaction was I m used to , I can use it as I want , and a lot of excuses for just not trying something new. But then I made a little research (on Google, of course). In about 30 minutes I ended up with a multiplexer working as I wanted and as I never got Screen to work. Finally I was using just a terminal and using all the space available in my tiny-laptop-screen and plus: saving a lot of bandwidth with my permanent SSH connection (a really big plus now that I m living with a capped link to the net with a GSM-modem). I changed the Ctrl-b shortcut to Ctrl-a (b is too far for using it with only one hand), configured so I could use nested tmux es like screen when I push Ctrl-a a, activated visual monitoring and even got to use the tmux s buffer along with my X11 buffer when I press Ctrl-a >!! It s all in my ~/.tmux.conf, use it at will. Later I will make a screencast about using tmux, so more people can get a working tmux easily. ATM, I m even more happy than I was with GNU Screen, so, any other recommendation, people?

another weekly report about RC bugs I've fixed, this time mostly by applying patches from ubuntu:

• #564971 clamfs: "clamfs: ftbfs with gcc-4.5"
  add patch from Ubuntu / Colin Watson, upload to DELAYED/2
• #565088 nitpic: "nitpic: ftbfs with gcc-4.5"
  add patch from Ubuntu / Colin Watson, QA upload
• #615684 qucs: "qucs: ftbfs with gcc-4.5"
  add patch from Ubuntu / Daniel T Chen, upload to DELAYED/2
• #621933 src:libuninameslist: "libuninameslist: FTBFS: eval: 1: base_compile+= -c: not found"
  add patch from Ubuntu / Colin Watson, upload to DELAYED/2
• #624895 src:magnus: "magnus: FTBFS: include/Associations.h:153:3: error: using temporary as lvalue [-fpermissive]"
  add patch from Ubuntu / Matthias Klose, QA upload
• #624967 src:linpsk: "linpsk: FTBFS: ../../src/linpsk.cpp:693:67: error: taking address of temporary [-fpermissive]"
  add patch from Ubuntu / Matthias Klose, upload to DELAYED/2
• #624983 src:idesk: "idesk: FTBFS: DesktopConfig.cpp:134:40: error: no matching function for call to 'stat::stat(const char*, stat*)'"
  add patch from brian m. carlson, upload to DELAYED/2
• #642803 libmouse-perl: "libmouse-perl: test suite failure on ia64 causes FTBFS"
  upload patched package prepared by ghedo (pkg-perl)

A continuation of my intermittent series on Emdebian and prompted by a query from Paul Wise, I thought I'd cover some of the uses to which a device running Emdebian can be put. It is a bit long this one...

So, yes, there are general purpose computers which could run Emdebian but there are common features amongst general purpose computers:

1. Lots of different tasks must be supported - lots of different packages installed, each user could quite easily use a distinct set of packages from another user.


2. Multi-user support - even if any one machine is only used by one person, a general purpose computer must have support for adding another user - not just a system user, a real user with a login, shell, possibly bookmarks and browser history etc.


3. Connectivity - general purpose computers (and that includes mobile phones) must connect to a variety of other computers to be at all useful.


4. Multi-modal data input - there needs to be support for a mouse and a keyboard or touchscreen and just as likely, software support for accessibility interfaces like an on screen keyboard and switch inputs.


5. Storage for user data - the system admin can't know how much data users are going to add and if it is general purpose, it's probably going to support media players, image viewers, even office software. The data files managed and written by such software tend to be large and tend to accumulate into large collections. This means that a general purpose machine cannot anticipate the full storage requirements, so has to allow plenty of room for user data storage. If there's so much storage space available, why use an OS which is primarily designed to take up less space? Just use the full version, Debian.

Now compare with the common features of special purpose or single-purpose computers:

1. Single task only - a splash screen (without support for removal) covers all the boot information, the single task starts as a daemon and if the user quits the task, the task initiates a shutdown, not quit. Every effort is made to prevent the task from exposing the underlying OS, including auto-restarts if it does crash.


2. Single-user support - indeed, user is not the typical user. user in this case is a non-login user without a shell, created by the postinst of the task package purely to support running the task without root privileges (because if the task doesn't need privileges, it shouldn't retain privileges).


3. Single mode input - don't expect these machines to support 105 key keyboards. You'll be lucky to have 5 keys which are really just buttons. The button won't just enter 'J' into the machine, it will fire off a command to charge your bank or start a drill or shutdown a malfunctioning service. (Each button will often be multi-functional as well, depending on context). Some devices will replace the mouse with a touchscreen but many are fitted in places where touchscreens simply won't survive, where keys have to be able to withstand being submerged in water (or oil) for hours. Many machines simply won't have mouse support at all. Many will not have any typical external connectors. Indeed, units which go into dirty or wet environments certainly won't have standard external connectors of any kind. Think boats and factories. Internal battery packs with custom hot-fit replacements, buttons encased in 4mm of clear plastic, screens viewable only through protective mesh / filters.


4. Restricted connectivity - if the task doesn't need networking, no networking hardware is fitted. If the task doesn't need USB, no USB hardware is fitted. If the task doesn't need serial connections, there will probably be an internal serial connector but also a Warranty void if removed sticker. Don't expect an RS232 inside the case either, this will be a flat cable connector which you'll need to attach to a breakout board which correctly connects the cable wires to the RS232 port pins. That mapping is not standardised (why would it? only service engineers are approved to use it.)


5. Constrained user data - the task is in complete control and determines what the user can view, store and access. Storage can be expensive and a power drain, so if the task doesn't need Gb of storage, don't fit the machine with Gb of storage. Profit.

So what are these mysterious single-use computers running Emdebian? It's hard to tell because the task has no particular reason to tell the user anything about the OS. Perhaps a different way to phrase the same question would be: Why use a general purpose OS for a special purpose computer?.

• Single task does not mean single process - doing one thing can involve doing a couple of different things behind the scenes, so a multi-tasking kernel and userspace is extremely useful in providing a responsive machine without wasting money on unnecessarily powerful hardware. Multithreading support is also valuable.


• Software reuse makes good business sense - why write a single-usage operating system when the device needs a multi-tasking OS anyway and suitable ones already exist?


• Minimal software - no point packaging Xorg or GNOME when the user interface is a tiny QVGA framebuffer and the device only has 128Mb of RAM. By all means get the core system (cairo, pango, Qt, gettext, dpkg) from Emdebian but the actual code which performs the task of the device will generally be bespoke and, yes, that generally means proprietary, closed source, utterly non-free. This is where GNU/Linux wins over iOS and Windows - the graphical software is trivially separated from the core software and tested as such. If your device has only monochrome text output (and plenty of those still exist), what possible reason is there to use a graphical toolkit? Use the multi-tasking support of the OS to handle inter-process communication and understand the licensing - job done. Again, these devices have deliberately limited storage capacity, the smaller the OS, the lower the cost of the device, within certain constraints.


• Debugging compatibility - this is the big one. It's hard debugging the task software on device with the differences in architecture and connectivity. Why not use the same packages on the same OS on the development machines as on the devices? All the power and all the screen resources to properly investigate bugs, simple way to provide an emulator for translation support and other activities (like user interface training). There will always be bugs which have to be debugged on device - timing issues, hardware issues - but why not make at least a proportion of the likely bugs easier to fix by using binary compatible libraries on both the big desktop machines and the small devices?

This is why Emdebian Grip is popular for these machines - because Emdebian Grip is binary compatible with the equivalent Debian suite and when a bug appears in the high level user interface, it is much easier to debug that on the desktop than on device. Debian stable is a fantastic OS for commercial development - the stability of the OS makes detection of interface bugs much easier. It is rare that developers have to investigate whether bugs in their UI come down to a bug in the underlying OS. That saves time.

The machines themselves? I'm sure others can come up with other examples but these are some which come to my mind (no particular order):

• Control interfaces - solar power controllers, robot controllers - anywhere that a low power board can monitor responses from other machines and do something intelligent about reported errors. Temperature limit responses, pressure limit responses, encoding all of those in assembly or VHDL is hard, so use a system which provides for more creative result handling.


• Electric car charging points - very simple user interface, single task which doesn't complicate things by expecting the user to tap on something to start the main application - just process the card details, charge the customer and provide power.


• Similarlyelectronic point of sale devices - EPOS. The staff on the shop floor don't want to be waiting for an X server to start up and then using a menu. The device starts up and runs one task (checking barcodes, printing labels, counting stock), if the task is shutdown, the machine shuts down.


• Communication aids - my area, a machine which presents a simple UI on non-standard framebuffer hardware, lots of audio output but little other connectivity. Resilience is very important, so solid state is vital but why provide more solid state storage than the device can actually needs?

Anywhere where the device simply needs to DoTheRightThing in a variety of unpredictable circumstances, you're going to need a general purpose OS to gather the data and produce the right result. Anywhere where the device has only a single task, you're going to want to not provide access to the rest of the system. There's no point providing "general purpose access" when the device doesn't have "general purpose hardware". There's no point fitting general purpose hardware if the device does not use it. That is a waste of money, a waste of resources and causes unnecessary delays if one component or other becomes unobtainable or changes behaviour. Limit your exposure to hardware bugs and get the product out to the user more quickly and more reliably, everyone is happy. Fit non-standard hardware and you can fit custom hardware which better matches the profile of the device usage - why use standard speakers capable of CD quality across a vast frequency range when the device only makes very very loud alert noises which can be done at lower sample rates and with narrow range, high amplitude, speakers.

There are all sorts of estimates for the number of computers now in the average Western home. It's worth noting that the vast majority of those computers are not PCs or laptops or even game consoles and routers - all instances of general purpose machines with general purpose access / connectivity. A lot of the computers in your home are embedded in machines like white goods, media controllers (set top boxes and the like). Some of these will still use low level firmware written entirely in assembly or COBOL. More complex ones already have a general purpose OS inside yet constrain that OS with a simple, user-friendly interface which is tailored to the hardware actually fitted. It might be cool to connect to your set top box over Bluetooth but really, is that actually going to sell more units? Only if there are other high-end services written for the device which the average customer won't want to see pushing up the price of the base unit. Some machines (particularly in automotive uses) will need to be using Real Time operating systems and Safety Critical operating systems but even some of those are based on general purpose systems - just old versions which have been thoroughly tested.

Finally, consider that for a lot of these devices, the customer is not you. The customer is another business who then put the device into something else which is installed into a factory production line which produces something which goes into creating a consumer product you find in Tesco or on Amazon or bundled in with another service like your TV/broadband contract. There is absolutely no reason for these devices to provide general purpose computing to you, even if the device itself is part of something else which can provide such services.

Yesterday, I uploaded NBD 2.9.24-1 to Debian. The big new feature in that release is that it now has an 'includedir' global configuration variable, with which it supports a conf.d-style directory. This feature was implemented by request of Vagrant Cascadian, of LTSP fame. Only it didn't build on kFreeBSD. The reason? The particular test that I added for that new feature failed. It turned out to be a simple bug in the code, which just didn't trigger on Linux but which was a bug none the less. I hadn't noticed, since my main development machine runs Linux; this is why I added a test suite to the code. Bug fixed, new package is in incoming. Whee.

The basic smooth lithting series comes to an end with adaptation of 2-sided lighting and multiple lamps support. The code is written for clarity, so it could be optimized. If you have a lightning-fast lighting implementation under the hand, feel free to contribute it On a side note, I'm looking for a way to draw quadrics in OpenGL ES 2.0, so without using the GLU library. Do you know how to do this?

Quite a belated English blog (after the Thai version), due to busy personal life lately. I had visited Yangon during 4-11 Sep. to give some talks and tutorials on Debian packaging and mirroring. And I've shared some information with community. The visit was initiated by Ngwe Tun and the Myanmar L10N team. I found later that a Facebook event had been created for this. Localization The first day was a comparison between Myanmar and Thai supports in GNU/Linux, in which I briefed the status on Thai side, and Thura Hlaing on Myanmar side. It was nice that we had the Myanmar Computer Federation (MCF) director presiding the meeting til the end. That means GNU/Linux support has been awared at executive level. According to Thura, Burmese has gained support in GNU/Linux quite well. On the rendering side, all the reordering for the logical order is normally done with pure GSUB in the fonts, without special processing on the rendering engine. This is suboptimal in principle, but it's the most effective way, as Windows redering engine itself does not yet support Myanmar, either. For input method, Myanmar XKB map has been available in xkb-data for a long time, but to serve users' familarity with visual order typing, some reordering input methods have been developed, based on keymagic and ibus. But all are not context-sensitive like what's done for Thai in other frameworks. Fortunately, with the surrounding text API recently added to ibus, this has become possible. One unusual requirement for Myanmar script editing is the caret movements. It needs to move syllable-wise, not character-wise nor cluster-wise. So, I suggested them to have a look on UAX #29 to see how it should be amended. Myanmar locales are already done, both for GNU C library and CLDR. And even a GNOME applet for Myanmar lunar calendar is also available. This latter thing is what Thai can learn from. Burmese word segmentation is not supported in general. But R&D works have been done for this in its NLP lab. A serious issue left to solve is the existing abuses of Unicode. In Myanmar, there exist at least 14 variations of font hacks, abusing some free slots in Unicode charts as pre-composed clusters for information interchange (not for font internals), making plain text interchange impossible without the proper font for rendering. For program translation, the new Myanmar L10N team is trying to request for a mass submission to the current GNOME team. And for Debian, Thura Hlaing and Ngwe Tun has already started the translation process with Christian's help. Along my stay, I could see the team actively discussing on the IT glossary, trying to settle down the translated terms. This looked very fun. Debian Then, the next three days were a workshop on Debian packaging, where I have presented the basics of Debian package building, uploading, quality-controlling, modifying, creating and delivering. This aimed toward the development of a local distribution based on Debian. Each day in the afternoon was the time for setting up a Debian mirror, not only for convenient local distro developement, but also for general users. This is important because internet penetration is still low in Myanmar. The main media for software distribution is CD/DVD, which means only stable version of Debian can be spread, which is not good for desktop users. Having a mirror should improve the situation somehow. It should make dist-upgrading to testing/unstable easier. And it should make CD snapshotting using local distributions easier, too. For this, I also presented another quick slide on Debian mirroring & caching. In the last day, I was introduced to the staffs of Myanmar NLP Lab and their projects, which include Myanmar OCR (based on tesseract), information retrieval, machine translation, and other lingustic resources like dictionary, lexicon and text corpus. Furthermore, I was also offerred technical helps on developing a Lao/Esaan Tham font for a Lao and North Eastern Thailand variation of Tham script, which is Mon-based and is closely related to Myanmar script. (See some sample transliterations if you are curious how it looks like. It was part of my hacking during DebConf11 travelling.) Currently, its OpenType support is quite sufficient, but it still renders poorly on Mac OSX. To cope with this, I was given a Mac Mini as a present from Myanmar for its development, as well as some explanations on AAT features from a Myanmar font developer. And I am very grateful for that.

D-I localization first moved backwards when some changes were introduced to partman-nbd templates....then moves forward again. Full stats are here Status for D-I level 1 (core D-I files):

• 14 languages 100% for all sublevels: bg cs de es fa fr it ja ko nl pt ru th zh_CN
• 4 languages 99%: eo pl si ta
• 2 languages 97%: eu gu
• 2 languages 96%: hi tr
• 5 languages 95%: be bn sk sv uk
• 6 langauges 94%: ast bs ga ro
• 3 languages 93%: hu lo nb
• 2 languages 92%: id sl
• 5 languages 91%: et mr pa vi zh_TW
• others are 90% or below

Status for D-I level 2 (packages that have localized material that may appear during default installs, such as iso-codes, tasksel, etc.):

• 7 languages 100%: de es fa fr pt ru zh_CN
• 14 languages 99%: be cs da eo id it ja kk nl sk sl sv th uk
• 3 languages 98%: bg ca eu ro
• 1 language 97%: pt_BR
• 4 langauges 95%: el fi he nb
• 7 languages 94%: ar ast dz gl hr vi zh_TW
• 1 language 93%: is
• 8 languages 92%: bn bs hu ko ne pl si tr
• 9 languages 91%: ga gu ka km lt mk mr sr ta
• others are 90% or below

Status for D-I level 3 (packages that have localized material that may appear during non-default installs, such as win32-loader)

• 5 languages 100%: fa fr nl pt sv
• 20 languages 100%: be bg bs ca cs de el eo es fi ga gl he is ja ru sk sv th tr zh_CN
• 2 languages 97%: hu uk
• others are 90% or below

So, full 100% completeness (hall of fame) for: Persian (fa), French (fr), Portuguese (pt).

The last month I was supposed to work on a OpenStack related project, but for administrative reasons it has been delayed and I've tried to do small tasks to be able to finish them quickly and start the work on the main project when the issues get solved. As the delay has been longer than expected last Wednesday I've realized than on the last weeks I did a lot of small system administration tasks:

• With a co-worker I started to work on a GNU/Linux version of our firewall based on Shorewall to handle the rules and conntrackd and keepalived to make it highly available (I had to stop my work on the Debian GNU/kFreeBSD based firewall a long time ago, and this summer the old firewalls' hardware started to fail, so a migration from Linux to Linux makes sense now, as it will be faster and a future migration will be simpler, as we will have a cleaner set of rules and better documentation),
• I installed and configured an instance of a web based File Exchange server (F*EX),
• I installed and configured an instance of a pastebin clone,
• I installed and configured an instance of ProFTPD that works only as a SFTP server using virtual users (without shell access),
• I also installed an instance of a web based event management system called indico that is being used to manage a conference and probably will be used for other events in the future,
• I installed and patched some plugins in our Trac servers,
• I tried a groupware system called SOGo that we will probable deploy in a week or two,
• And updated and fixed configurations of some other services,

With all the changes I did I noticed that I had to do something with our Intranet server; it is just a reverse proxy for a lot of different web services and its main page was one static HTML page with links to them, nothing else. In the long term maybe we will replace it with something based on Drupal or Lifeay, but for now I just wanted something to be able to organize the links and provide some information about the services for the new users without having to write HTML (I really like Agile Documentation Tools that let me focus on the content and forget about the markup), and started to look at some of them. My first idea was to use ikiwiki, as it has all the features I was looking for: I can use Markdown or reStructuredText to write the contents, the source pages are easily handled on a Version Control System, it supports the use of templates for the HTML, etc., but it seemed to me that using ikiwiki was like killing flies with a cannon (that's a Spanish say, I guess it's easy to understand it in English, no?) and I decided to review other tools to build static web sites. To make a long story short, I selected some tools that met my requirements and looked nice on their demo sites; after my first review I thought that Hyde was going to be my bet, as it uses technologies I'm already familiar with, but after trying it I saw that I was going to have a problem with documentation (the current Hyde version lacks it) and it was going to be more complicated that using ikiwiki. Before giving up I decided to review simpler tools, just in case, and after looking some of them I ended up using poole, a simple python script (the source is just one file and it only requires python-markdown to work). Before moving to the content I tried to adapt a couple of free themes to be used by the tool, but I didn't liked the result, so I went back to the plain style provided by the tool and added a logo and a background. With that simple look and feel I started to work with the content, splitting it into eight markdown files and a python macro to include a file that has all the links used on the site. While trying to make the main page look good I noticed how little I know about CSS, but using search engines I was able to build a two column block into the main page and publish the contents and with the help of some CSS enabled co-workers I changed the look and feel of the site in about 30 minutes. In summary, if you want a really simple website, you know a little bit of python and don't want to spend much time learning how to use a website generator then Poole is a good option. If you want something more complex I still think that ikiwiki is a good option, but YMMV.

3D programming is great, but when something goes wrong, it can be quite hard to debug! I was trying to launch two different OpenGL programs one after another, the first for the normal rendering, the second for a post-processing effect (motion blur, etc.). It seemed the first program's output was cleared as soon as the second one was activated. I eventually found a behavior that is well summed up at http://www.gamedev.net/topic/541571-glsl-changing-between-shaders/page__view__findpost__p__4495411. You don't write:

glUseProgram( shader-A );
modelA->Draw();
glUseProgram( shader-B );
modelB->Draw();
glutSwapBuffers();

You write:

modelA->Draw();
glUseProgram( shader-B );
modelB->Draw();
glUseProgram( shader-A );
glutSwapBuffers();

and since the code is called multiple times (at each frame), this will cycle OK. (There seem to be an GL_INVALID_OPERATION error the very first time I call glUseProgram, too.) Anybody has an idea on why we have this behavior?

Just a quick note to remind everyone that the Rcpp class in San Francisco, which I am holding together with Revolution Analytics, will take place a week from today. We are happy to report that the number of registrations has met our initial targets. But as a number of open slots remain, we have decided to offer a few places at discounts of 25% for academics (with code acad1) and 50% for students (with code student). Course details are at the Revolution course page, registration is at the Eventbrite page. And just for completeness, here is what I wrote in the previous announcement:

The format will follow the workshop Romain and I gave during the tutorial day preceding this year's R/Finance conference. The style will once again be hands-on, with copious concrete examples and solid coverage of most aspects of Rcpp and related packages such as RInside, RcppArmadillo and others. The eight-hour schedule contains about six hours of instruction, split into four sessions of around ninety minutes. This leaves ample time for both lunch and coffee breaks, and for informal discussions and Q+A. The one-day class will be offered in San Franciso on Saturday, October 8, 2011. Please see the official course page for more details, concrete location info and maps as well as registration details.

Feel free to contact me at the usual email address with questions. Or with suggestions for the after-party in San Francisco :)

Forked from hivelogic-flickrtouchr, which is forked from flickrtouchr, flickrbackup is a simple tool to perform a backup of your photos in flickr. It's is in a very early development stage and code looks weird, but critical functionality is working :)

tiago@x61:~$ flickrbackup -h
Usage: flickrbackup [OPTIONS] -o OUTPUT_DIR
Backup your flickr photos.
Options:
  --version             show program's version number and exit
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -o OUTPUT_DIR, --output_dir=OUTPUT_DIR
                        set the local directory where you want to store your
                        pictures
  -e, --metadata-exif   store flickr metadata (title, description etc) as EXIF
                        tags in your local files [default: False]
  -x, --metadata-xml    store metadata as default flickr XML files [NOT
                        IMPLEMENTED]
  -u, --metadata-update
                        update flickr metadata to your local files. Use this
                        option with -x and/or -e [default: False]
  -g, --html-gallery    generate a local HTML gallery [NOT IMPLEMENTED]

One of the more classic jokes about not yet understood bugs is that the phase of the moon is somehow involved in causing it. Being bored, I decided to spend some time to see whether "date of bug filed" could somehow be correlated with "phase of the moon" for a given source package. Fast forward an hour of perl experimenting, and here we are:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use warnings;
use constant PI => 3.1415926535;
use feature "say";
use SOAP::Lite;
use Astro::Coord::ECI::Moon;
my $soap = SOAP::Lite->uri('Debbugs/SOAP')->proxy('http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/soap.cgi');
if (!defined($ARGV[0]))  
	die "E: must have a source package!\n";
 
my @bugs = $soap->get_bugs(src=>$ARGV[0])->result();
my $bugsdata = $soap->get_status(@bugs)->result();
my $moon = Astro::Coord::ECI::Moon->new();
my %count = ( 'new' => 0, 'first' => 0, 'full' => 0, 'last' => 0);
foreach my $bug (keys %$bugsdata)  
	my $time = $$bugsdata $bug -> date ;
	my $phase = $moon->phase($time);
	if ($phase <= 45 * PI / 180   $phase > 315 * PI / 180)  
		$count 'new'  = $count 'new'  + 1;
	  elsif ($phase <= 135 * PI / 180 && $phase > 45 * PI / 180)  
		$count 'first'  = $count 'first'  + 1;
	  elsif ($phase <= 225 * PI / 180 && $phase > 135 * PI / 180)  
		$count 'full'  = $count 'full'  + 1;
	  elsif ($phase <= 315 * PI / 180 && $phase > 225 * PI / 180)  
		$count 'last'  = $count 'last'  + 1;
	 
 
say "Number of bug submissions during new moon     : " . $count new ;
say "Number of bug submissions during first quarter: " . $count first ;
say "Number of bug submissions during full moon    : " . $count full ;
say "Number of bug submissions during last quarter : " . $count last ;

This uses the (not packaged in Debian) Astro::Coord::ECI::Moon perl module. Use like so:

wouter@carillon:~code/perl$ ./debbugsmoon nbd
Number of bug submissions during new moon     : 2
Number of bug submissions during first quarter: 10
Number of bug submissions during full moon    : 1
Number of bug submissions during last quarter : 3

Apparently there's a reasonable correlation between 'the moon is in the first quarter' and 'people file bugs on nbd'. Note: no, the above is probably not very scientific. That's not the point.

No I don t really know any SQL. In fact, even at vocational school, where we focussed on database normalisation anyway, I tried hard to avoid the topic. Feel free to access here my entire knowledge about SQL (I did use Amaya, Arena and Arachne though. Liked only Arachne out of these three, and then, only under DOS, not its Unix version. Maybe the WWW could be named AAA instead? But then, lynx(1) is the one true browser ) Ah, well. While at it the entirety of my Perl knowledge is here: perltoc(1) with quick links to perlfunc(1). The entirety of my (X)HTML and ECMAscript knowledge, DE: SELFHTML; although, the spec and DTD helped; and to write my notes on JSON, I took a peek at the formal ECMAscript spec as well propos, does anyone know a (good enough) indent(1) equivalent for ECMAscript, as I am trying to strip down some, inherited (GPL, yes) code for a hobby project, but Geo-people seem to produce illegible code?

After spotting an upload of mira, who in turn spotted an upload of abe (the package, not an upload by me aka abe@d.o), mira (mirabilos aka tg@d.o) noticed that there are Debian packages which have same name as some Debian Developers have as login name. Of course I noticed a long time ago that there is a Debian package with my login name abe . Another well-known Debian login and former package name is amaya. But since someone else came up with that thought, too, it was time for finding the definite answer to the question which are the DD login names which also exist as Debian package names. My first try was based on the list of trusted GnuPG keys:

$ apt-cache policy $(gpg --keyring /etc/apt/trusted.gpg --list-keys 2>/dev/null   \
                     grep @debian.org   \
        	     awk -F'[<@]' ' print $2 '   \
                     sort -u) 2>/dev/null   \
                   egrep -o '^[^ :]*'
alex
tor
ed
bam
ng

But this was not satisfying as my own name didn t show up and gpg also threw quite a lot of block reading errors (which is also the reason for redirecting STDERR). mira then had the idea of using the Ultimate Debian Database to answer this question more properly:

udd=> SELECT login, name FROM carnivore_login, carnivore_names
      WHERE carnivore_login.id=carnivore_names.id AND login IN
      (SELECT package AS login FROM packages, active_dds
       WHERE packages.package=active_dds.login UNION
       SELECT source AS name FROM sources, active_dds
       WHERE sources.source=active_dds.login)
      ORDER BY login;
 login                   name
-------+---------------------------------------
 abe     Axel Beckert
 alex    Alexander List
 alex    Alexander M. List  4402020774 9332554
 and     Andrea Veri
 ash     Albert Huang
 bam     Brian May
 ed      Ed Boraas
 ed      Ed G. Boraas [RSA Compatibility Key]
 ed      Ed G. Boraas [RSA]
 eric    Eric Dorland
 gq      Alexander GQ Gerasiov
 iml     Ian Maclaine-cross
 lunar   J r my Bobbio
 mako    Benjamin Hill
 mako    Benjamin Mako Hill
 mbr     Markus Braun
 mlt     Marcela Tiznado
 nas     Neil A. Schemenauer
 nas     Neil Schemenauer
 opal    Ola Lundkvist
 opal    Ola Lundqvist
 paco    Francisco Moya
 paul    Paul Slootman
 pino    Pino Toscano
 pyro    Brian Nelson
 stone   Fredrik Steen
(26 rows)

Interestingly tor (Tor Slettnes) is missing in this list, so it s not complete either At least I m quite sure that nobody maintains a package with his own login name as package name. :-) We also have no packages ending in -guest , so there s no chance that a package name matches an Alioth guest account either

A fresh maintenance release version 0.9.7 of Rcpp went onto CRAN and into Debian earlier today. This release contains two contributed fixes. The first, suggested by Darren Cook via the rcpp-devel mailing list, corrects how we had set up exceptions specifications, reflecting a bit of Java-think on our part. The idiom is generally discouraged in C++, and we now conform. The second came in two excellent patches by R Core member Martyn Plummer which finally get us compilation on Solaris. This is much appreciated as our hands were tied here for lack of access to such a box. Otherwise, two new examples and a new unit test were added. The complete NEWS entry is below; more details are in the ChangeLog file in the package and on the Rcpp Changelog page.

0.9.7   2011-09-29
    o   Applied two patches kindly provided by Martyn Plummer which provide
        support for compilation on Solaris using the SunPro compiler
    o   Minor code reorganisation in which exception specifiers are removed;
        this effectively only implements a run-time (rather than compile-time) 
        check and is generally seen as a somewhat depreated C++ idiom. Thanks
        to Darren Cook for alerting us to this issue.
    o   New example 'OpenMPandInline.r' in the OpenMP/ directory, showing how
        easily use OpenMP by modifying the RcppPlugin output
    o   New example 'ifelseLooped.r' showing Rcpp can accelerate loops that may
        be difficult to vectorise due to dependencies
    o   New example directory examples/Misc/ regrouping the new example as
        well as the fibonacci example added in Rcpp 0.9.6
    o   New Rcpp-FAQ example warning of lossy conversion from 64-bit long
        integer types into a 53-bit mantissa which has no clear fix yet.
    o   New unit test for accessing a non-exported function from a namespace

Thanks to CRANberries, you can also look at a diff to the previous release 0.9.6. As always, even fuller details are on the Rcpp Changelog page and the Rcpp page which also leads to the downloads, the browseable doxygen docs and zip files of doxygen output for the standard formats. A local directory has source and documentation too. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the R-Forge page

A good proportion of I2C and SPI device drivers in the kernel contain some very similar code for accessing the register maps of hardware connected to those buses most hardware designers have solved the problem of providing very similar ways. Linux 3.1 introduces a new kernel API called regmap which factors out this code from the drivers, saving code and making it much easier to share infrastructure. There s been an implementation of this in ASoC for some time now, the regmap API makes it available to all drivers. The version of this API in version 3.1 is very simple, just factoring out the simplest level of physical I/O from the devices. Devices register with the regmap API by providing a struct regmap_config (which currently only allows the sizes of the register addresses and values to be specified) and the bus-specific structure to it. They can then use simple read and write operations on the device:

int regmap_read(struct regmap *map, unsigned int reg, unsigned int *val);
int regmap_write(struct regmap *map, unsigned int reg, unsigned int val);

The API handles everything to do with formatting the data for transmission and parsing data coming back from the device. Block functions are also provided to allow multiple registers to be read or written simultaneously. Even with this basic level of support we end up saving quite a bit of code as drivers are converted to use the API. The changes sitting in -next for version 3.2 take this a step further, adding support for more variations on SPI registers, a debugfs interface for dumping the device registers, register cache support courtesy of my colleague Dimitris Papastamos and trace points for dynamic instrumentation of the system.

Posted from Santa Rosa, California, United States.

An e-mail by Andreas Schamanek had me revisit the topic of archiving web pages. Andreas pointed me to the MHT format, which bundles HTML pages and their dependencies into a plain text file using MIME. Internet Explorer apparently already handles this format, and UnMHT provides software for the other browsers. As Firefox 6 is not yet supported, I went to try the Mozilla Archive Format extension, which seems to do the same thing and works quite well so well (on first sight) that I wanted to share it with you. NP: Tortoise: Standards