Sometimes it s nice being wrong. Contrary to what I predicted, ZFS will be supported in Debian Squeeze using the official installer. This means that Debian Squeeze will be one of the first GNU distributions to support ZFS. In fact, even though ZFS support didn t make it to Debian-Installer beta1 by the time it was released, it is now available in the netboot images (this happens because netboot images fetch newer installer components from the internet). As a consequence of this my unofficial installer can now be considered obsolete. So why did I say something that turned out to be grossly inaccurate? It s not due to anyone s fault really. At that time, the version of Parted that included ZFS detection hadn t migrated to Squeeze. The unblock policy didn t appear to allow this migration. However, the Release Team kindly decided to make an exception that allowed this, and after Parted had migrated the changes in Debian-Installer itself went in quite smoothly.

A few months ago I realised it has been 10 years already since Spacelabs ¹ was founded. Today we will celebrate that with a reunion and probably reminisce about past projects, events and experiences. Therefore, I thought it would be nice to accompany this with a post. The past Spacelabs was founded to create something that sits in between research and consumer appliances. Since we are associated to the Electro-Optical Communication group these things often had to do with bandwidth. For example, showing the ease of use of plastic optical fiber or participate in GPRS/UMTS trials. However, due to the loose structure of Spacelabs, we ventured into many other projects of our own such a information system-enabled fridge with a barcode reader, a dynamic DNS system, etc. At some point we got our own Internet connection with an accompanying subnet. It has been fun and rewarding to learn how to setup and run a mini ISP. Spacelabs doesn t have any formal structure: when you are on the mailing list, you are a member. There are no regular meetings, no hierarchy, no obligations. So in some ways, we are a group that is much like a free/open source software community. I think that this approach has provided us the drive to work both on projects during our free time as well as our own ideas. I feel that Spacelabs has contributed so much to my life. It might not be the typical study association, but it was a big supplement to my studies, it was fun and it was completely ours. Not only did it teach me many, many technical things from networks to program languages to software design but it also gave me experiences on other levels, such as very attuned group work and responsibilities for key systems. The future Soon, everyone connected to Spacelabs will have finished their Master s or PhD (in my case) and nobody will be left to continue the project. Although this is a bit sad, I think we can be proud of what we have accomplished, learnt and experienced. I will miss our location high in the Potentiaal/E-hoog building overlooking Eindhoven, and our being together as a group. We are however not gone yet, there is still a lot to plan and to work on if we want to rescue the huge amount of servers and services that we have accumulated over the years if we were to leave

¹ Yes, the website is very much from the past.

Ever wondered how to easily convert e.g. 10 seamiles into kilometres? Use units:

$ units 
2411 units, 71 prefixes, 33 nonlinear units
You have: 10 seamiles
You want: km
        * 18.288
        / 0.054680665
You have: ^C
$

Of course this is interactive. There s also a non-interactive mode:

$ units '10 seamiles' 'km'
        * 18.288
        / 0.054680665
$ 

The line with the asterisk means that 10 seamiles are 18.288 kilometres or 1 kilometre is the 0.054680665th part of 10 seamiles. This quite non-intuitive output is caused by the fact that unit is designed to be used with units only:

$ units seamiles km
        * 1.8288
        / 0.54680665
$

Now this makes more sense: You have to multiply seamiles with 1.8288 to get kilometres and you have to multiply (not divide) kilometres with 0.54something to get seamiles. But this output is still a little bit cumbersome, and annoying if you want to use it in shell scripts. But for luck, units knows some nice options, especially -v ( verbose ) and -t ( terse ):

$ units -v '10 seamiles' km
        10 seamiles = 18.288 km
        10 seamiles = (1 / 0.054680665) km
$ units -t '10 seamiles' km
18.288

Now that s way easier to read and script! You can also script more complex things like

$ units -v '100 attoparsec/microfortnight' m/s
        100 attoparsec/microfortnight = 2.5509901 m/s
        100 attoparsec/microfortnight = (1 / 0.39200466) m/s

Unfortunately not all common units are unambiguous for units:

units -v '100 km/h' m/s
conformability error
        100 km/h = 1.5091905e+38 s / kg m
        m/s = 1 m / s

Well, h seems not to be units unit for hours , so lets tell it explicity that we want km per hour:

units -v '100 km/hour' m/s
        100 km/hour = 27.777778 m/s
        100 km/hour = (1 / 0.036) m/s

Looks more like what I expected. units behaves though a little bit strange when I try to convert litres per 100 kilometres into miles per gallon:

$ units -t '6L/100km' 'mpg'
conformability error
6e-08 m^2
425143.71 / m^2
$

Interestingly changing the verbosity helps already in this case:

$ units -v '6L/100km' 'mpg'
        reciprocal conversion
        1 / (6L/100km) = 39.202431 mpg
        1 / (6L/100km) = (1 / 0.025508622) mpg

Greetings from the Debian booth at LinuxDay.at and thanks to Y_Plentyn, rhalina and bzed for example ideas and the suggestion to write a blog posting about units. :-)

In the latest issue of Linux Journal, the readers choices were presented, and the winner among the multimedia player were VLC. Personally, I like VLC, and it is my player of choice when I first try to play a video file or stream. Only if VLC fail will I drag out gmplayer to see if it can do better. The reason is mostly the failure model and trust. When VLC fail, it normally pop up a error message reporting the problem. When mplayer fail, it normally segfault or just hangs. The latter failure mode drain my trust in the program. But even if VLC is my player of choice, we have choosen to use mplayer in Debian Edu/Skolelinux. The reason is simple. We need a good browser plugin to play web videos seamlessly, and the VLC browser plugin is not very good. For example, it lack in-line control buttons, so there is no way for the user to pause the video. Also, when I last tested the browser plugins available in Debian, the VLC plugin failed on several video pages where mplayer based plugins worked. If the browser plugin for VLC was as good as the gecko-mediaplayer package (which uses mplayer), we would switch. While VLC is a good player, its user interface is slightly annoying. The most annoying feature is its inconsistent use of keyboard shortcuts. When the player is in full screen mode, its shortcuts are different from when it is playing the video in a window. For example, space only work as pause when in full screen mode. I wish it had consisten shortcuts and that space also would work when in window mode. Another nice shortcut in gmplayer is [enter] to restart the current video. It is very nice when playing short videos from the web and want to restart it when new people arrive to have a look at what is going on.

Conrad Sanderson released version 1.0.0 of Armadillo, his templated C++ library for linear algebra, earlier this week. So congratulations to Conrad on reaching 1.0.0! I folded his version 1.0.0 into a new release 0.2.10 of RcppArmadillo, our Rcpp-based integration into R. Other small changes comprises a small fix to the build process, and additional output in the summary() function for the fastLm function. The short NEWS file extract follows, also containing Conrad's entry for 1.0.0:

0.2.10  2010-11-25
    o   Upgraded to Armadillo 1.0.0 "Antipodean Antileech"
         * After 2 1/2 years of collaborative development, we are proud to
           release the 1.0 milestone version. 
         * Many thanks are extended to all contributors and bug reporters.
    o   R/RcppArmadillo.package.skeleton.R: Updated to no longer rely on GNU
        make for builds of packages using RcppArmadillo
 
    o   summary() for fastLm() objects now returns r.squared and adj.r.squared

And courtesy of CRANberries, here is the diff to the previous release 0.2.9:

 ChangeLog                                                   17 ++++++++
 DESCRIPTION                                                 25 +++++------
 R/RcppArmadillo.package.skeleton.R                           4 -
 R/fastLm.R                                                  21 +++++++++
 inst/NEWS                                                   13 ++++++
 inst/doc/RcppArmadillo-unitTests.pdf                     binary
 inst/doc/unitTests-results/RcppArmadillo-unitTests.html      6 +-
 inst/doc/unitTests-results/RcppArmadillo-unitTests.txt      34 ++++++++--------
 inst/include/armadillo_bits/arma_version.hpp                15 +++++--
 inst/skeleton/Makevars                                       2 
 src/Makevars                                                 2 
 src/Makevars.win                                             2 
 12 files changed, 97 insertions(+), 44 deletions(-)

More information is on the RcppArmadillo page. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the R-Forge page.

Today there's one week left on my self-imposed no-gaming exercise . I like to make this kind of exercise for various things (not eating $foo for this amount of time, not doing $bar, etc.), so by itself the exercise was not a special event. But computer gaming is one of my favourite activities, so it was rather interesting. There were to goals to this: gaming is addictive (can I stop playing for three entire months?) and gaming eats time (how much time do I gain?). Last time I tried such an exercise (for a month), it ended early by me accidentally playing, of all things, nethack: someone told me at work hey, you know we have a nethack server? and before I realised what I was doing I was already playing nethack for half an hour. In an xterm. With no graphics, no sound, but with coloured ASCII chars. In truth, I started the new attempt rather accidentally. I travelled a lot this summer, and so I was already a month without playing games. Realising this, I said to myself: I already didn't play for a month, and it goes fine, let's see if I can make it a three months official no-gaming exercise. So, my Windows partition went away, my save games were put aside, my few Android games were uninstalled, and I was ready. How did it go? Very interesting. After two weeks, I was having lots of free time. Long-delayed tasks were finally taken care of, unread books were getting attention, and in general I had time on my hands. A month into the exercise, somehow my free time was creeping away. I took on some new (periodic) tasks, I was reading more, and by one and a half months I was back to zero on free time advantage. Lesson 1: people expand their schedule until it eats all their free time. After about two months, I was still doing fine, but I had a few times the classical addiction dreams: you dream you visit someone, and they're playing a new game, and ask you Don't you want to play? , or someone tells you about a nethack server, and without realising, you ruined your exercise. I had this kind of dreams while giving up other things, so it was definitely a withdrawal symptom. Lesson 2: you might have given something up, but your brain didn't (yet). With three weeks left, I said: it's time for me to start building a new gaming machine, so that when I'm done with the exercise, I can start playing right away. And this is where the problems started. For until then, I was not thinking about games at all. But once you install your new Win7, the graphics drivers, you start to wonder what new games were launched, what new expansions were released, and suddenly you realise you skipped many games, and how can you not play them? A week later, my Steam and GOG wish lists have increased greatly, and another week later I was already with many newly-bought games. Lesson 3: giving up computer games for a just few months is only partially a time saver: while the backlog of non-played games doesn't contain all games that you skipped, it's still a significant backlog. Such an exercise is rather more useful to shift free time around, than an absolute time saver. At this point, I was talking with colleagues about all the new games, the expected launches during the holiday season, etc. like I didn't stop playing games. The funny part was that in the second half of November, Slashdot had not one but two articles about people not being so much interested in games anymore. Believe me, if you cannot play games for a period while your friends very much talk about how awesome hot new game X is after a while you won't have this lack of interest problem anymore (of course, I'm extrapolating from my experience, etc. etc.). On top of that, on Planet Debian was another blog post about what game to play . All these were like a general reminder about playing games This moment (two weeks left) was also the hardest moment, with the sweetest temptations: machine installed, games installed, all set, just need to press New game. Lesson 4: abstaining from a thing is much harder if said thing is readily available, or in your face . Quite obvious in hindsight So here I am, with just one week left. It was an interesting thing to do, and it was definitely worth the effort, if not for time gained but for learning about oneself. Only one question remains: next week, which game shall I play first?

So you have two geeks in a university room after a relatively late and (at least for one of them) unproductive learning session. It s just natural that they decide to kick back and watch some mind-numbingly stupid geek series, which in this case happened to be Stargate SG-1 (so absurdly shitty its actually very entertaining).
The first lazy geek instinct is to just watch it on the laptop that has the file, which with its 11 display and shitty speakers doesn t turn out to be a great idea. The next try involves the other laptop, but a 13 screen isn t that big of an improvement.
Since the room our intrepid heroes are in happens to have a pretty decent built-in projector and a couple of small but still a lot better than a laptop s Bose speakers, the obvious next step would be using it. The only problem is the lack of a VGA cable. Inspired by the brief sight of MacGyver on the 11 screen, one particularly enterprising geek comes up with the challenge of making a VGA cable out of the only material available at the time: one horribly yellow cat5 ethernet cable.
Being the helpful little extra-dimensional entity that it is, the internet happily provided all the needed information and after some slight problems trying to appropriately deprive the cat5 of its connectors (no scissors and no blades of any kind in sight) and some annoying and manual sticking-cable-to-socket action our reluctant hackers get it right: The final solution looked like this: And if you re wondering where those white wires came from, one final touch of ber-hackerdom: This might seem like overkill, but after a nice nice 4 hour movies and series marathon, we can safely say it was totally worth it (but no, we didn t stand 4 hours of Stargate; even geeks have their limits). Just in case the Instructables page gets hosed at some point, here s the invaluable connection diagram, originally scraped off of a since dead Geocities page.

Recently, I was considering the following set of statements: Vector graphics are great, especially in print. Program documentation needs screenshots. Usual screenshots are not bitmaps. Some programs use gtk. Gtk uses Cairo to render most of its display. Cairo can generate PDF. PDF is a vector graphics format.
And while I was doing so, for some reason, I thought: Wouldn t it be great if I my gtk programs could generate vector PDF files of their screen content? And after some experimentation, I was able to extract this PDF file from the buttonbox example program (see here if you do not see anything below): This works without any modification to the original program. Instead, I am loading some code using LD_PRELOAD that overrides the cairo_xlib_surface_create function and creates a PDF surface instead. It also monitors calls to XCopyArea to observe where on the window gtk (gdk actually) paints the resulting image. Then I combine these PDF files (6 in this example, theoretically a lot more) using a latex document and I must say, the result is pretty good for a start: All lines are vector lines, the text really is text (and not just rendered pixels), so you can actually copy n paste from it. Of course this is but a proof of concept and has several problems:

• You can not use the program with my library loaded, as all output is redirected. A solution would be to create a proxy cairo surface that renders both on-screen and to the PDF file, or to make the library react to a signal and only start intercepting the calls when the image has arrived.
• You need a gtk theme with a cairo-using engine such as Murrina, because
  
• any drawing done directly with gdk is lost. This includes icons, but also the clearing of parts of the screen. At the moment, all is just put on top of each other.
• It is not a turn-key tool.

I don t think I ll fix that myself, as I had my fun. But maybe it can inspire a more useful tool exploiting this idea, and maybe there are cleaner approaches (for example special gtk theme engines, or by patching gtk).

Have you ever wondered which tool you should use to set the background of your X11 desktop? There are tons of it and every single one does need different command line options. And if you picked one, you could be sure, you ll once come to a machine or operating system, where that one isn t available. When I started to play around with the tiling window manager awesome, I also noticed that the awesome Debian package contains awesome s own desktop background image setting tool named awsetbg . Yet another one! I thought. But I was wrong: Today I noticed the word wrapper in awsetbg s man page. I became curious and had a peek into its source code. And indeed, it s an awesome desktop background image setting POSIX bourne shell compatible shell-script: It knows about not less than 15 other desktop background image setting tools and can be used as frontend wrapper for those who don t want to remember each tool s command line syntax:

• Eterm s Esetroot
• habak
• feh
• hsetroot
• chbg
• FVWM s fvwm-root
• ImageMagick s display
• qiv
• xv (non-free, .deb packages available from Mowgli)
• xsri
• xli
• xsetbg from xloadimage
• WindowMaker s wmsetbg
• xsetroot from x11-xserver-utils
• IceWM s icewmbg (currently disabled by default with comment broken )

Needless to say that most of them are also available in Debian. :-) You may wonder what s useful with it. Well, it does something you no more need to do yourself or in one of your own scripts: Checking which desktop background image setting tools are available on the machine you re currently working and using the appropriate command line options for tiling, fullscreen, whatever. Only drawback I found so far: In Debian, you need the awesome window manager package to be installed, if you want to get the script via APT. But on the other hand, it s just a shell script. You can easily put it into your $HOME/bin or so. :-)

This week it has been harder for me to start on this but KiBi s post Debian XSF News #1 pushed me to continue. Thanks for the cheers!

• #331637 ping Xrandr disabled while Xorg log says the opposite.
• #321357 tagged wontfix xset behaves as intended, there is no easy way to set keyboard autorepeat for single key
• #242442 close xclock -rv looks visible to me.
• #427346 close was already tagged unreproducible, I couldn t reproduce it either so I closed it.
• #169239 ping 8 year old wish probably too late ?
• #431449 ping xmodmap errors when launched by keyboard shortcut.
• #202923 close xorg has timestamps in server log messages.
• #252214 tagged wontfix Andrew Pimlott (reporter) said This bug probable needs a NOBODYCARES tag. so wontfix will do it.

The X Strike Force (still) needs you ! You can have a look at the X Strike Force Bug Closing Procedure and check XSF unstable bugs sorted by date.

The bug webinterface of the Universal Debian Database currently knows about the following release critical bugs:

In Total:	713
Affecting Squeeze:	283
Squeeze only:	74
Remaining to be fixed in Squeeze:	209

Of these 209 bugs, the following tags are set:

Pending in Squeeze:	18
Patched in Squeeze:	50
Duplicates in Squeeze:	18
Can be fixed in a security Update:	16
Contrib or non-free in Squeeze:	6
Otherwise fixed in Squeeze:	26

Ignoring all the above (multiple tags possible), 127 bugs need to be fixed by Debian Contributors to get Debian 6.0 Squeeze released. However, with the view of the Release Managers, 170 need to be dealt with for the release to happen. Please see Interpreting the release critical bug statistics for an explanation of the different numbers.

Developers are a crucial part of any successful software platform. In the same way that an operating system is just a means for people to use applications, a platform is just a means for developers to create applications and make them available to people. There are three primary ways in which Ubuntu can help developers do their work. They are all related, but distinct, and so we should consider them individually: 1. Developing for Ubuntu Today, Ubuntu bundles thousands of free software applications, for both clients and servers, most of which are packaged by Debian. Ubuntu also carries certifications for a variety of third-party ISV software, both open source and proprietary, which are coordinated through Canonical s partner program. In both of these cases, many of these applications are actually developed on other platforms, and ported to Ubuntu, either by the free software community or by the creators of the software. 2. Developing on Ubuntu Ubuntu is already quite popular among developers, who mainly run Desktop Edition on their workstations. They might be developing:

• web applications (with server-side and browser components)
• portable applications (e.g. using Java, or Adobe AIR)
• mobile applications (e.g. for Android or iOS)
• native applications, which might target Ubuntu Desktop Edition itself, or supporting multiple platforms through a framework like Qt

3. Distributing through Ubuntu Like other modern operating systems, Ubuntu isn t just a platform where applications run, but also a system for finding and installing applications. Starting with APT, which originated in Debian, we ve added Software Center, the ISV partner repository, and various other capabilities in this area. They all help to connect developers with users, facilitating distribution of software to users, and feedback to developers. So, where should we focus? Some developers might be interested in all three of these, while others might only care about one or two. However, most of the developer improvements we could make in Ubuntu would only address one of these areas. For this reason, I think it s important that we consider the question of the relative importance of these three developer scenarios. Given that we want Ubuntu to flourish as a platform, how would we prioritize them? I have my own ideas, which I ll write about in subsequent posts, but here s your chance to tell me what you think. :-)

As phpMyAdmin is heading closer to 3.4 release, we would like to invite translators to be able to bring this version localized as much as possible. We don't expect any message changes to happen in 3.4 anymore, so it's best time to start translating right now. You can find more information about translating on our website, but you can as well start translating right now at translation server. There are so many languages, but majority of languages are really in bad shape right now. This is your chance to contribute to the free software!

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I went ahead and got myself a Kindle for my birthday. Thanks to everyone for their comments in the last post. Here are my thoughts on it, in no particular order:
I like it a lot. I was worried that I would not actually enjoy reading with it, or that it would be significantly inferior to real books. However, I do enjoy reading with it, and I think they have achieved their aim of making it so that it 'just disappears' like a good book does. It's a very small and light device, even with the leather cover I got for it (always best with a small child in the house), so it's in no way heavy or uncomfortable. It's relatively more expensive and fragile than a copy of The Economist or a paperback, so I don't sling it around quite so casually, and do try and remember to keep it out of reach of said small child, which makes it a little less worry-free than an actual book. On the other hand, it's much cheaper than an ipad or samsung galaxy or something like that, so it's not the end of the world if something happens to it, although it would be unfortunate to be without reading material for the time it took to replace it!
The selection of material available for it is ok, but I'm just a bit disappointed - I thought offhand there were more books than there are. I regularly bump into things I might consider getting if they were available for it, but are not. On the other hand, there are quite a few books available for it for *free* because they're old and out of copyright. Stuff you might get for 99 cents at a used book store as a paperback, but it's pretty cool to be able to just zip it right to the device, for nothing at all. I am not convinced that the economics of it all has settled down yet. It's pretty absurd, for instance, that The Intelligent Investor costs nearly twice as much for the Kindle version as for the paperback! Especially since I can never resell it. I think a lot of the value I get from the device is derived from my situation: living abroad here in Italy, it's expensive and slow to get English language books, and now I can get them *instantly*, which is absolutely wonderful, and will significantly increase my reading. Also, should we ever move back to the US or elsewhere, it means a few less books to lug along or go through the sorrow of parting with. Were I in the US in a place with a decent used book store, and sure about staying in the same place for a while, I am not sure I would have bothered. I find it somehow a bit monotonous to read everything in the same form factor and with the same fonts. It takes something away from the character of a book, especially a well-done hardback. Of course, what counts is the content, but the presentation counts for something too, I think. I really do like the size and shape of the Kindle, and could see the 'smaller tablet' size catching on. Speaking of which, I'm curious to see how reading devices and tables will intersect. Clearly, a generic device that can also read books is going to be a lot more popular, but for now e-ink still has a few advantages: it's better for reading - I can stare at it much longer than I can at an LCD screen; also the battery life is much better, meaning I don't have to worry about/fiddle with charging it every day. Also, in some ways, it's nice not to have the siren-call of the web just a click away... I think though that at some point, generic devices will likely overtake dedicated readers. Who knows when, though.
Yes, it does have a browser, however, the screen refresh is so slow that I'd only really consider using it for reading web pages - wikipedia, say, rather than doing much with it. Still, I think it's nice to have and hope they continue the experiment.
Coming back to the comparison with 'real' books, I don't like the fact that I can no longer finish a book and then hand it to my wife if it's good. We could get her a Kindle too, but I'm still not sure they have the sharing thing worked out that well. 2 weeks - and then what? One way to do it might be that you can share it with anyone who you trust with one-click purchases. That'd limit it to family members or really trustworthy friends. Although... even there, I regularly loan books to friends, and would like to continue to be able to do so. Also, like I mentioned in the previous article, I'm leary of a future where my daughter doesn't have a multitude of books to peruse on our bookshelves. Bookshelves are a great way of making serendipitous discoveries that recommendation engines (those I've used at least) don't really account for. All in all, I'm very pleased with the Kindle, though, and look forward to seeing what the future holds.

The discussion in the comments on my post about a mobile phone for Sysadmin use [1] turned to the issue of picture quality. This is an issue for a sysadmin as photographing the screen of a crashed computer while being a rare occurrence can be an important part of solving a computer problem.Lon recommended a review of phone cameras by the Norwegian site Amobil [2]. This review only included devices that had already passed earlier review, so even the HTC Desire HD (which came last on the Amobil tests) still has a better camera than most phones on the market. It s a pity that no English-language site seems to have done such a review.The Amobil article (when translated) says: In the mobile industry is faced with the need for much extra processing for the images to look good, because there is no room for large optics and large image sensors that receive sufficient amount of light .IMHO that s overstating the case. I have yet to see a camera-phone that couldn t be redesigned in a trivial way to give a better camera functionality. It appears that the limiting factor is the thickness of phone which limits the maximum focal length and therefore the maximum area (I presume it s safe to assume that Fresnel lenses are not viable for cameras). My LG U990 Viewty is 14.8mm thick, I would be happy with something a bit thicker if it gave a better picture, 30mm wouldn t be a problem (my first few mobile phones were thicker than that and had no camera). Maybe a design could have the camera stick out such that the main body of the phone was 15mm thick while the camera part was 30mm. Also having the camera in a central part of the phone (underneath the touch-screen) probably loses at least 1mm of focal length. It seems that the amount of light captured will be the square of the focal length, so an ideal (IMHO) camera design could have twice the depth of a Viewty, 4* the light captured, and therefore have an 8MP camera with a better response in adverse light than the Viewty (which is pretty good for a phone but crap for a camera).I noted in the comments that it s a pity that camera-phones don t support storing pictures in RAW format, Paul pointed out that the Nokia N900 supports RAW pictures. I m glad to learn that at least one phone-camera manufacturer is doing the sane thing, now we just need to have RAW pictures as a check-list item on reviews to force others to do the same. I wonder whether a modified version of the Android OS could support RAW format Amobil published an article about some joint ventures between camera and phone companies [3]. Apparently LG are working on a phone with 3* Optical Zoom that uses Pentax optics, while the Olympus camera company is considering the purchase of a phone company with the apparent aim of producing a killer camera-phone.I wonder whether I should delay the purchase of my next phone for a few months to take advantage of some of these developments. If nothing else I expect some significant improvements in the screen resolution of phones in the near future. The maximum screen resolution that is common at the moment is 800*480 (WVGA), but the iPhone 4 supports 960*640 resolution which is 60% more pixels and I expect other manufacturers to release phones to compete with it in the near future.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2010/11/17/mobile-phone-sysadmin/
• [2] http://www.amobil.no/artikler/norges_beste_kameramobil/79081
• [3] http://www.amobil.no/artikler/flere_satser_paa_kameramobiler/79338

Election TomorrowOn Saturday we will have a Victorian state election. As usual for state elections most people will vote on issues related to the federal government, the mainstream media has little coverage of state politics and people seem to vote on what they see on TV. Presumably that means we have a good chance of having a similar situation to the last Federal Election where the Labor and Liberal parties each won 72 seats in the lower house and Labor formed a coalition with the Greens MP and three independents.The independent MPs didn t give much explanation of the reasons for their choices. But it seems that a large motivating factor was the Greens success in the senate, as Labor was more willing to work with the Greens that meant that if a Liberal based coalition had won in the lower house there was a good chance of a Double Dissolution.The Liberal party can t make dealsIn a world where sanity prevailed the result of this would be the Liberal party firstly adjusting their policies to appeal to Greens voters and secondly trying to make some deals with the Greens at a high level to allow the possibility of a Liberal/Green coalition government. While there are substantial policy conflicts between the Liberal and Green parties it does seem possible to get a coalition working if both sides accept that they won t get everything that they want. Forming government and getting only some of your policy implemented seems like a better option than being in the opposition and getting almost none of your policy implemented. Also there is no reason why we couldn t have a Liberal/Labor coalition government in the next decade it seems unlikely that any election will deliver a result that doesn t have Liberal + Labor comprising more than 50% of the seats in both houses.But it seems that sanity doesn t prevail. The Liberal party have put the Greens below Labor on their preferences for the upper house and on their How To Vote cards for the lower house [1]. This greatly increases the probability of Labor scoring an outright win. It also seems likely to drive a wedge against the conservative voters who want to conserve the environment.The Sad State of the Liberal PartyKevin Andrews (Liberal MP and former minister) wrote a strange and amusing diatribe titled The ideological drive behind the Greens [2]. Here is what I regard as the best part:First, those who vote Green as their primary vote: This is the Don s Party group that used to be in the ALP in the 60s and 70s: young university students or graduates, frequently working or still studying in academia, no kids, often gay, arts and drama type degrees or architecture where they specialise is designing environmentally friendly suburbs, agnostic or atheist, often US or Canadian refugees from capitalism, but well paid in professional consulting or media jobs. According to the CIA World Factbook [3] the median age of Australians is 37.5, the majority of the population were born in 1972 or later. The film Don's_Party was released in 1976 and was about the 1969 election. While Kevin Andrews was old enough to remember the 1969 election clearly the majority of the Australian population weren t even born before that election and isn t old enough to have watched the movie when it was in the cinemas. Kevin is making it quite clear that he and his party represent a time that is past. The rest of that paragraph is filled with strangeness that is a good sample of the rest of his article.The sad thing is that he seems to think that this appeal to the minority of people who are old enough to remember the 1969 election, bigoted enough to appreciate the discrimination against homosexuals (which is a long standing Liberal policy), and politically clueless enough to support McCarthyist policies against alleged communists.We need a decent and sane conservative party to represent the decent and sane Australian citizens who are politically conservative. I am beginning to doubt that the Liberal party could ever be reformed enough to become such a party.

• [1] http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2010/s3074524.htm
• [2] http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/41010.html
• [3] https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/as.html

You may wonder how I manage to write one Useful but Unknown Unix Something blog posting per day. Well, I don t. I write them in bursts, but don t want to flood Planet Debian and Planet Symlink with more than one such posting a day. The first bunch of postings were mostly slides (or part of a slide plus what I tell while showing the slide) from my Unknown but Useful Unix Tools talk and written somewhen last week. And this blog posting and yesterday s blog posting were written in a row, too. What does that have to do with Unix commandline tools? Well I use Blosxom as blogging engine and it s based on simple text files lounging around in some directories, and the last modification time stamp is the posting s date which is cached after first time seen by the entries_index plugin so that I can fix typos without resetting the posting s release date. Postings with a modification date in the future won t be shown before that time. So how do you set the last modification date to a date in the future? With touch from GNU Coreutils of course. Like date , touch also knows the option -d to explicity set a date and time instead of using the current date and time. Now in my humble opinion the cool feature is that you can easily describe dates by giving touch values like now + 1 hour , 12:00 tomorrow or so:

$ touch bla
$ ls -l
total 0
-rw-r--r-- 1 abe abe 0 2010-11-23 22:59 bla
$ touch -d 'now + 1 day + 23 hours - 42 minutes' bla
$ ls -l
total 0
-rw-r--r-- 1 abe abe 0 2010-11-25 21:17 bla
$

To see all the possibilities you have to describe relative dates with touch , date , and maybe other GNU Coreutils tools, check that you have info installed and call:

$ info '(coreutils.info.gz)Relative items in date strings'

Oh, and this whole story about setting modification dates manually to arbitrary values also means that the Tattletale Statistics: Blogtimes November 2010 image in my blog s side bar is absolute nonsense, at least this month. Well, never trust any statistic you haven t faked yourself. ;-) But on the other hand, the dates in the example may give a hint when I really wrote that blog posting. Or not. ;-) And I wonder what my backup tools think about last modification times in the future. Well, they probably only check for modification dates newer than last backup and therefore should be fine. *phew*

Surprisingly, my Monday blog post has received much more attention than I did expect and was source for at least one article full of speculations (in Czech). Hey, there was no new information in the post, nor some secret information leak (not that I know something what is not known publicly). Anyway meanwhile public announcement about UNIX copyrights has been made. I don't think it changes much, but it seems to be one if things people wanted to know. What I find more interesting (and hard to read and understand) is explanation of the currently publicly available bits from a transactional lawyer at The Standards Blog. At least it gave me basic idea why some things are so complex in this deal and just confirmed that I want to avoid need for contact with lawyers language as much as possible :-).

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Okay, so it's been five months since the last update. Sorry about that. I guess I could force myself to more regular updates. What have you missed? Only the branching of what will eventually (soon?) become FusionForge 5.1. Quoting from the default home page, and in no particular order:

• New Funky theme.
• New UI and features for the document manager (download as zip, locking, referencing documents by URL).
• New progress bar displaying completion state of trackers using a custom status field.
• Improved sorting in trackers.
• More flexible and more powerful role-based access control system.
• New unobtrusive tooltip system based on JQuery and Tipsy to replace old help window.
• New plugins: Blocks, to add free HTML blocks on top of each tool of the project; Gravatar, to display user faces; OSLC, implementing the OSLC-CM API for tracker interoperability with external tools.
• scmgit plugin: Personal Git repositories for project members.
• Simplified configuration system, using standard *.ini files.
• Reorganised, modular Apache configuration.
• RPM packaging.

We've also added many tests to our testsuite, and we'd welcome more. If you're interested in the new features coming to FusionForge, now would be a good time to try them and report the bugs you find. And if you don't want to upgrade your production server just yet, you can use a VM image that builds and installs everything automatically inside a VirtualBox (or another virtualization system). See details of my VM image for easy testing mailing-list post. That VM covers trunk rather than the 5.1 branch, but since the branching is still rather recent there isn't much difference yet. Another tidbit of information: since I recently realized the IPv4 horizon is less than a hundred days away, I've been engaging in a flurry of migrations from IPv4-only to dual-stack, one result of which is that fusionforge.org is now accessible via IPv6. Yay for less NAT and reverse-proxying. And I think that's it for now. There's one obvious piece of news I'm looking forward to announce, but it has to actually happen first

Since people seem to like it, I ll be trying to publish some news about ongoing work on the XSF side, on a (possibly) regular basis. Let s have a look at what happened since last time I blogged about X in Debian, mostly by checking what appeared in my =debian-x mailbox. Debian XSF News #1

• mesa 7.9 was uploaded to experimental by Julien Cristau.
• Jurij Smakov uploaded a bunch of xserver-xorg-sun* drivers to experimental for us.
• I started a debian/xsf-tools.git repository to gather some tools for people wishing to work on X-related packages. For now it contains the usual tagging script, an mrconfig file to ease downloading/updating all XSF packages, thanks to the mr tool, and some bits of documentation. I also added the git URL to the upstream repositories to debian/watch* for all packages.
• Christopher James Halse Rogers started a discussion about the Ubuntu plans for Natty release. This is mostly about DRI, and unfortunately, I haven t digged into mesa yet, but thankfully we had some answers from upstream there.
• I uploaded many xfonts-* packages, prepared by Julien Cristau.
• I uploaded many x11-* bundles as well. Why are we creating bundles? Because there are many tiny applications, which (from the distribution point of view) don t deserve their own package. For example x11-apps contains toys like xclock, xeyes, or xlogo.
• I uploaded many lib* packages, plus pixman. When there were no fundamental changes (as in: no need for an shlibs bump, which could prevent some packages from migrating), those were uploaded to unstable, others went to experimental.
• Some cherry-picked patches were added to libx11, from a stable branch. The 2:1.3.3-4 version has been unblocked for squeeze, and brings support for Compose O A and for Compose \ o /.
• I also reverted the removal of the (famous?) apple:badmap and apple:goodmap options for macintosh keyboards in xkeyboard-configuration (which produces the xkb-data binary package), thanks to a bugreport from Yves-Alexis Perez; it s been unblocked for squeeze as well. If someone notices an inversion of those keys after the upgrade, that s probably because one of those options was added at some point, was ignored and unnoticed, and finally taken into account. Depending on the case, it s sufficient to switch to the other one, or to remove it entirely.
• Many bug submitters were pinged by Julien Viard de Galbert. But another report should appear soon, following TXBW1 and TXBW2.
• More drivers were updated to their latest upstream versions, and uploaded to experimental.
• Thanks to an xserver-xorg-video-mga user (Ferenc W gner), we were able to extract and apply a patch from launchpad s #292214 to fix the dual head breakage. Since we haven t seen any complains since then, we ll probably ask for an unblock for squeeze.

What are the XSF plans?

• Keep close track of upstream work, possibly contributing there. We re mostly up-to-date with the RC1 for X11R7.6 and it d be nice to keep it that way, but that requires time/work.
• Keep on answering new bug reports quickly, before bug reporters vanish or switch to another system (a broken X can trigger this kind of reaction).
• Keep on pinging older bug reports. Anyone is welcome to join and help, there s no high profile required to do so, as confirmed by Julien Viard de Galbert.
• To make it easier, it would be nice to have some documentation written down, instead of relying on everyone s own memory. There s a lot of wiki pages about X in Debian, but they might be outdated, incomplete, or inaccurate. Building up some consistent documentation should help people understand how they can contribute, and how to do so.
• It d be nice to have some documentation targeted at users as well, so refreshing the old XSF FAQ would be welcome, as well as shipping it in some package for offline use.