It's been raining this weekend in Southampton. This afternoon's not been too bad - I went for a walk around the city walls. Just a few hundred years ago, the River Test would have come right up to them, and my flat would have been in a defensive moat full of sea water, I think. I re-read zack's rcbw page, and noticed the section on 'blog posts' - there is also a propaganda element to the idea, in improving Debian's internal culture w.r.t. NMUs. So with my grey Sunday afternoon, I have uploaded a couple of NMUs for RC bugs:

• Bug #585614 - a small missing dependency from mp3splt-gtk.
• Bug #591547 - pkg-config compatibility with autoconf >= 2.66

I am surprised that there are still such easy pickings from the RC bug list at this point in the release cycle. This Debian Developer lark is a piece of cake, innit?

I travel pretty regularly, about 35% so far in 2010. When it goes wrong, travel can be exhausting, frustrating, complicated, stressful and even debilitating. I m always looking for ways to make my trips run more smoothly. On a recent flight to Taipei, I wrote down a few of the techniques which I ve successfully put into practice and found helpful. This is not an exhaustive list; I ve omitted a lot of the common and obvious tips I ve seen elsewhere.

1. Make a packing list. This one may be obvious, but a lot of people neglect it. Perhaps they think making lists is boring and fussy, but really, it isn t. Without a packing list, it s easy to forget to do the things which will make your trip better. Use it every time, and bring a copy with you (or store it online) so you can add the things you wish you had brought or done. A simple, ever-improving packing list is the most effective technique I have found for making travel less stressful and more enjoyable.
2. Carry a water bottle with a tight-fitting lid. I use a 32oz Nalgene bottle, which fits nicely into the seat next to me or under an armrest, and gives me enough water for even the longest flights. I fill it up after passing through security, at a cafe, bar or lounge, and generally decline the beverages offered by the cabin crew. Staying hydrated helps me feel better during the flight, and leaves me with less malaise when I arrive. I don t need to manage a tray table or armrest full of cups and other debris, so I can sit more comfortably, with the tray table folded away.
3. Consolidate essential items using multipurpose equipment. For example, invest in a power adapter which has USB sockets onboard, and carry USB cables instead of wall chargers. Versatile items like this save on space and weight. I can charge two devices this way, but the equipment is smaller and lighter than even a single wall charger.
4. Learn how to sleep on an airplane. Getting some sleep on a long flight really helps to offset the effects of traveling. There are several resources out there with practical advice on how to do it. One thing which really helped me was to buy a high quality eye mask which blocks out all of the light in the cabin. The one I use looks a little funny and is not cheap, but is very comfortable and effective. It s made of memory foam with a soft, washable cover and works much better than the ones the airlines give away for free. I no longer bother with a neck pillow, and use the flaps built into the seat to lean my head against. I m surprised at how many people don t know about this common aricraft feature: virtually every long-haul seat has something like this, even in economy, though it may not be obvious how to use it.
5. Buy duplicates of things like toiletries, and keep them in your travel kit so you don t need to pack your everyday items (and risk forgetting them) each time. The less packing you need to do, the less time it will take, and the less opportunity there is for mistakes. This also saves time unpacking when you get home, and lets you buy a smaller size of the item where available.
6. Optimize border crossings Carry the forms you ll need for customs, immigration, etc. in your carry-on. They don t always provide them at the counter or on board the plane, and it s a hassle to rush to fill in the form at the last minute. If you have a few of them with you, you can fill them out early (perhaps even before you fly) and then hustle to the front of the queue. For countries you enter frequently (especially your home country), programs like Global Entry (US) and IRIS (UK) will save you a lot of time by allowing you to use an automated kiosk to cross the border.

Steve Jobs is a name that comes up a lot when talking to businesspeople, especially in the technology industry. His ideas, his background, his companies, their products, and his personal style are intertwined in the folklore of tech. I have no idea whether most of it is fiction or not, and I write this with apologies to Mr. Jobs for using him as shorthand. I have never met him, and my point here has nothing to do with him personally. What I want to discuss is the behavior of people who invoke the myth of Steve Jobs. In my (entirely subjective) experience, it seems to me that there is a pattern which comes up again and again: People seem to want to discuss and emulate the worst of his alleged qualities. Jobs has been characterized as abusive to his employees, dismissive of his business partners, harshly critical of mistakes, punishingly secretive, and otherwise extremely difficult to work with. Somehow, it is these qualities which are put forward as worthy of discussion, inspiration and emulation. Is this a simple case of confusing correlation with causation? Do people believe that Steve Jobs is successful because of these traits? Perhaps it is a way of coping with one s own character flaws: if Jobs can get away with such misbehavior, then perhaps we can be excused from trying to improve ourselves. Or is there something more subtle going on here? Maybe this observation is an effect of my own cognitive biases, as it is only anecdotal. As with any successful person, Jobs surely has qualities and techniques which are worthy of study, and perhaps even emulation. Although direct comparison can be problematic, luminaries like Jobs can provide valuable inspiration. I d just like to hear more about what they re doing right. Perhaps this is an argument for drawing inspiration from people you know personally, rather than from second-hand or fictitious accounts of someone else s life. I ve been fortunate to be able to work with many different people, each with their own strengths, weaknesses and style. I ve seen those characteristics first-hand, so I also have the context to understand why they were successful in particular situations. If there s one thing I ve learned about leadership, it s that it s highly context-sensitive: what worked well in one situation can be disastrous in another. Is your company really that much like Apple? Probably not.

German RIAA-Equivalent GEMA still has not reached an agreement with YouTube. As a consequence, about half of the YouTube videos I get links for are not accessible because they contain a song that is managed by GEMA.Sorry, I will not buy a song that I can't preview this way.International music companies such as Universal Music Group, EMI and Sony Music definitely should rethink their cooperation with GEMA, they are harming their business.

So the exoplanet Gliese-581-g has a name: Zarmina!. Steve Vogt, who led the discovery team, named it after his wife. Good move. About time we named these things. Although personally I think GL 581 d, its neighbour, has a better chance of being habitable. Everyone is assuming Zarmina is tidally-locked: that is, it has one side facing the star at all times. This would mean that while one side of the star is scorching hot, the other freezing cold, all you have to do is go to the "Terminator", the part of the planet in continuous dusk (or dawn) to find a nice climate. Not necessarily so: it can be in orbital resonance like Mercury, which rotates in a 3:2 ratio. A better idea is to look below any oceans, if it has them, for life. Either way, this Gliese 581 is the direction to point a TPF at. Tags names, exoplanets

shapado.debian.net Since a few hours, a Shapado instance for Debian is available at: Shapado is a Question and Answer (QA) website, meant to provide user support to the community, by the community. Another way of seeing it is as a skill exchange website: users can ask questions about stuff they don't know and other users, possiby more expert on that topic, can answer those questions; everyone can then use peer review to evaluate and sort answers. Several proprietary web applications are based on the above notions and have proven useful for user support in several contexts, including other Free Software distributions. Shapado on the other hand is Free Software released under AGPL; as such it's the best match to give a try to something similar in the context of Debian. Shapado has also a couple of other niceties, e.g. offers login via OpenID and supports questions/answers in multiple languages. Will it work for us?
Will it not?
It's up to the community. This kind of user support works when it reaches a critical mass of both "newbie" users in need of help and of "expert" users willing to help them. No matter your category, give it a try: go to the website and look around, you'll probably find a question to ask, a question to answer, or an answer to evaluate. Acknowledgements

• the Shapado developers
• Patrick Aljord for hosting support
• Fernando C. Estrada and Luis Uribe for admin / moderation work (by the way, they are looking for help)
• Jorge Castro for pinging me about this idea

---

Update: add mention of multi-language support

For some time, I've had this idea brewing for how the 'net would work without DNS. Initially I was mostly thinking of how to get rid of the dark side of the registrar business, but it appears that maybe it could help with security in general too. It may not be feasible at all, or I may have forgotten extremely crucial points. I'm not a DNS guru, so bear with me and consider this as a thought experiment. This is, however, a proposal for how the Internet could be made truly decentralized, or acentric. Made so, because it currently is very centralized on at least two counts: the DNS is an inherently hierarchical structure of authority; and so is the situation with the SSL certificates used for securing websites. Let's start with DNS, if you will. Basically, the idea is to replace the current Domain Name System, which is centralised in nature (even if subdomains can be delegated) with a fully decentralised system with no central authority. The point of current DNS is to map names to IP addresses in a unique way. It currently works by registering a this name is managed by such-and-such server, ask for details at such-and-such IP address message. Of course, since there's only one namespace (or a limited number thereof, if you consider that TLDs are different namespaces), there needs to be a central authority to resolve conflicts, because some names will be more popular than others. I propose to start with a cryptographic key pair (think GPG key). Anyone can create their key pair; we assume that it's extremely unlikely for two people to generate the same keys, and that it's also very hard for two people to generate keys with the same fingerprint. By (being the only one) knowing the secret part of a key, I am the authority on what can be signed with it. I could for instance sign records that say that www points to this set of IP addresses, and smtp points to that other address. Within my area of authority, which is to say within my domain. Which is identified by the fingerprint of my key pair. What do we have so far? A mechanism that allows in a decentralised way to verify who's authoritative on the F5566852EB92BD779CF137190EA756B5144843F5 domain . In DNS terms, more probably F55...3F5.some-tld. Now let's publish the signed records on a decentralised peer-to-peer network. I'm not up to date with the latest trends in that domain, but I think something like Gnutella or Freenet would qualify, since it doesn't need central hubs but only an initial list of nodes, and it does automatic discovery of new nodes. Projects such as the FreedomBox (name likely to be changed) will probably help with that. Anyway, when looking up www.F55...3F5.some-tld, the resolver gets the signed record (and the public part of the key) from the P2P network, checks the signature, and uses the contents of the record to determine the IP address. No central or delegated registry involved at any point. Lesser risk of a single point of failure, which means better resilience against outages. Also, a better resilience against DNS-based censorship, be it promoted by non-democratic states or by greedy corporations. Of course, F5566852EB92BD779CF137190EA756B5144843F5 isn't a terribly easy name to remember or transmit. But the string of hex could be presented to the user in some other form easier to recognize for people without geek super-powers. My favourite would be the bibi-binary representation, but I'm told that the bubble-babble method works equally well. It would still be unreasonable to expect people to remember such names, and especially to type them into their web browsers or e-mail agents. A possible solution to that would be to use a short form, such as 144843F5 (or its bibi-binary equivalent), complemented by a visual representation of the full fingerprint such as the one SSH does. That pair could be displayed on business cards, email signatures, glossy brochures, advertisements and so on, and allow users to just type the strange word or flash the 2D barcode, check that the funny picture matches (in case the strange word returns several results), and get the website they want. Which they can of course bookmark under a name they can remember, probably even the same name that everyone else uses to bookmark that website. And nothing precludes convenient directories mapping names to full URLs (like search engines currently do) as long as users check that the visual representation of the site they go to matches what they've seen elsewhere. That elsewhere could, of course, take advantage of the natural web of trust that emerges in of GPG-using communities. If I'm directed at a website whose key I don't immediately recognize, then I can see who trusts that key to be legitimate (by checking the signatures), and who trusts them, and so on. Ultimately, the decision is mine to make, and mine only. In any case, once I know what URL I want to visit, I can be sure this DNS replacement will give me the right IP address (or addresses). DNS servers replying with advertisement sites instead of correct ones, and DNS-based filtering, will be things of the past. Of course, having the right IP address only solves the attacks on the DNS part. Eavesdropping can also happen by diverting traffic at the IP level. But we have a trustable way to know information related to a domain, so let's use it: the signed record can also contain the fingerprint of cryptographic keys (SSL or SSH or whatever). So we can be sure we're actually talking to the correct server, rather than to some man-in-the-middle spy. With the same guarantees of correctness as the ones for the DNS, backed by the web of trust and out-of-band validation. Again, we get rid of the hierarchy of certification authorities , some of which have been known for helping organizations get at the (supposedly secret) data people exchange over the net. To summarize: with this scheme, if I know the site I want to access is F55...3F5, then I can be certain that a) I get the right IP address for it and b) I'm actually talking to it. And nobody in-between can intercept the traffic, if the site is properly administrated and its private key is kept secure. And from the site admin's point of view, there's no need to trust DNS registrars and SSL certification authorities not to fool around with the data, or blackmail me into paying increasing fees for keeping my URL working or my SSL key certified. There's still the problem of the allocation for the IP addresses themselves, but two major parts of the centralized and hierarchical net can be gotten rid of. There are proposals attempting to fix part of the problems already, but they're incomplete. DNSSEC only solves the authentication of DNS records, not the centralisation problem. Monkeysphere aims at adding a web of trust to the SSL certificates system, but the CA chain problem seems to persist (although I must admit I'm not up to speed with the actual details). This is of course only a rough draft, full of technical considerations yet certainly not exhaustive. I've thought about it though, and I believe there are no theoretical problems with the implementation of such a scheme (apart for the handling of expiration and revocations, probably). The main obstacle to mass-adoption I can envision is the UI part, and the entrenched habit of just typing a keyword into a search engine and implicitly trusting its results, then blindly trusting the website itself; but even if mass-adoption isn't reached, I can't see anything wrong with giving those who want to be careful a more secure Internet.

Being a buildd admin means one gets to sign successful build logs so that the built packages get uploaded from buildds to the archive, but that also includes filing bugs for packages which fail to build from source (Build-Attempted). Once that done, they can be marked as Failed, usually with a reason. A few words plus a bug number is usually convenient, so that people (maintainers, possible NMUers, other buildd admins) browsing https://buildd.debian.org/status/ can just click the bug number to reach the BTS. There were a few packages in Build-Attempted for alpha, for which I reported some bugs yesterday, which explains the crossing lines on the following graph: (That s an edited version of the buildd stats for alpha.) One has to be careful while filing bugs, since the severity depends on the target architecture(s) for which the package is failing, but also on its already being built there. Mostly, that boils down to serious for regressions (no longer builds) on release architectures, important otherwise. The only exception I m applying is packages failing on all architectures due to obviously missing build dependencies, since they can t be built again, even on the single architecture they re available for (and we want to guarantee that doesn t happen, we want to be able to binNMU them). There are currently no packages in Build-Attempted for alpha, kfreebsd-amd64, kfreebsd-i386, and sparc (architectures I take care of), but I m going to have a look at other architectures as well, since having portable software and reported (FTBFS) bugs sounds like a worthwhile goal.

xserver-xorg-video-intel There s a previous episode regarding this driver, but let s try and get a short summary regarding UMS (User Mode Setting, old-fashioned) vs. KMS (Kernel Mode Setting, new but also Linux-specific): upstream moved from UMS+KMS to KMS only (that means a single code base and allegedly fewer bugs). UMS vs. KMS timeline:

2.9	2.10	2.11	2.12	2.12+legacy	2.12+shadow	2.13
UMS+KMS	KMS	KMS	KMS	KMS+UMS	KMS	KMS

In order for UMS introduced back into 2.12+legacy to be useful for the ever-buggy i8xx chips, those were blacklisted for KMS in the i915 module as of linux-2.6 2.6.32-21. The plan didn t quite work out, so we moved to the shadow version, relying on KMS again. At that point, we asked for the removal of the kfreebsd-* binaries, since they were unusable. Kernel timeline:

k 2.6.32-20	2.6.32-21 k 2.6.32-23	2.6.32-24 k
KMS	KMS + blacklist for i8xx	KMS

Quick summary:

• You want to use the latest kernel from sid, with the latest -intel driver from sid as well. (That holds for other drivers as well.)
• You may want to check whether kernel bugs are fixed in experimental s kernel.
• You may want to check whether driver bugs are fixed in experimental s driver package (2.13). Feel free to open a bug upstream if there s none for your issue already, optionally telling us about it (through a bug in the BTS which can be marked as forwarded there).

libdrm Due to nouveau s ABI changes, libdrm s compatibility (for nouveau users) is a funny subject. Nouveau users are expected to have the following in mind (README.Debian is there already in the xserver-xorg-video-nouveau package).

2.4.21-1~squeeze3 (sid)	2.4.22-1 (experimental)
nouveau 0.15	nouveau 0.16 aka 1.x
2.6.32 k 2.6.33	2.6.34 k

We carry a big ABI-revert patch in our 2.4.21 package so that we get the bugfixes of that version while still using the 0.15 interface, which is what we have in the sid kernel for now. If we need more stuff from 2.4.22 for squeeze, we should be able to cherry-pick them, or even adjust the ABI-revert patch quite easily. For now (and in experimental anyway), the 2.13 version of -intel is going to depend on libdrm 2.4.22, but cherry-picking fixes should be easy; making it build against sid s 2.4.21 shouldn t be hard either. xserver-xorg-video-openchrome It s now possible to start X with the openchrome driver again, thanks to Nethanel s feedback on #597379, but that doesn t mean it s usable for real unfortunately, since users still report frequent crashes.

Prospective Debian contributors typically follow this process:

1. Read the New Maintainers' Guide.
2. Find something they want to package.
3. Create a package.
4. Email the debian-mentors mailing list asking for someone to review the package, and if it passes review, upload it.
5. Feel increasingly lonely and sad, as the days pass without a reply on the list.
6. (Optional) Blame themselves when no one seems to care, when in fact they submitted a perfectly fine package.

Okay, so I'm exaggerating that last point. But I'm very interested in improving the culture of Debian, like I promised as follow-ups for that Debian for Shy People talk. I was talking about the email list on the #debian-mentors IRC channel. I got this vote of confidence from andrewsh:

<andrewsh> silence is bad

When there are humans involved, silence isn't always golden. So now I have a plan: Niels and I promised that any email to debian-mentors will be answered within four days. Maybe we'll say, "Sorry, we all seem to be busy!" Or maybe we'll say, "I'll try to review that next Thursday." The goal is to replace self-doubt and worry among contributors with feedback and clear expectations. (Thanks to Karen Rustad for help with editing.)

I recently spent a little time adding support for isohybrid images to d-i. isohybrid is a tricksy boot sector hack that allows copying a CD image direct to a USB stick and booting it. I used it in anger for the first time yesterday, and it worked so well compared with the old method of booting d-i from USB sticks that I feel I need to blog about it so others can enjoy the fun.. The documentation on the web site has not caught up yet, but this is already usable with current d-i daily builds. For now only in the netboot mini.iso. That can be written directly to a USB stick or USB disk to make it boot d-i.

cat mini.iso > /dev/sdX

The netboot mini.iso is so named because it's functionally identical to netbooting d-i. Except without the need to set up a tftp server. Besides being a 16mb download that will fit on even your oldest USB stick, another advantage to using the mini.iso is that you don't even need to use a separate USB stick to boot the installer. You can write the mini.iso directly to the same disk that d-i will be installing to! (Particularly handy for installing debian to USB disks.) (This is also very handy for d-i development and testing, since a mini.iso can be written out to a USB key about as fast as a test machine will post..) adding firmware I also arranged for there to be a second partition on the mini.iso. The firmware partition is most easily accessed by unplugging and replugging the drive after writing the mini.iso to it -- then it will show up as /dev/sdX2 (or "Firmware" in a GUI). If you need to add firmware to d-i, you can just mount it and extract the firmware tarball into it. d-i will then automatically find, use, and install the firmware. isohybrid with other Debian CD images All this will also work with other larger Debian CD images, but we're not yet building the larger images with isohybrid, due to issues with jidgo. However, you can just run isohybrid yourself (from the syslinux package) on the CD image you download, and if it's got a recent version of d-i on it, d-i will be able to find and use the hybrid CD image after booting. That doesn't add the firmware partition to the image. If you need to do that, you could use this script.

Thanks to the efforts made by Steffen, and recently the great work from Daniel(Boinc s Ubuntu maintainer, and now member of pkg-boinc team) Squeeze will have boinc 6.10.58 \o/. If you are curious you can see all changes since 6.2.14(Current version on lenny) http://packages.debian.org/changelogs/pool/main/b/boinc/current/changelog The main feature for this release is that now nvidia and ATI users can use their GPU with boinc(they need to download the non-free libs and apply some workarounds). And if you read trough here, and you are a boinc user and want to help us, please send an email to pkg-boinc-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org, we need freshblood there

A month or so ago, I published a paper with Leah Buechley that is mostly an analysis of how the LilyPad Arduino has been used. I read an earlier draft last year and loved it so, when the opportunity arose, I was honored to help out as the paper evolved. LilyPad is a microcontroller platform that Leah created a few years back and that is specifically designed to be more useful than other microcontroller platforms (like normal Arduino) in the context of crafting practices like textiles or painting. Leah's design goal with LilyPad was to create a sewable microcontroller that could be useful for making things that were qualitatively different from what most people made with microcontrollers and that, she hoped, would be of interest to women and girls. Our paper tries to measure the breadth of LilyPad's appeal and the degree to which it accomplished her goals. We used sales data from SparkFun (the largest retail source for both Arduino and LilyPad in the US) and a crowd-sourced dataset of high-visibility microcontroller projects. Our goal was to get a better sense of who it is that is using the two platforms and how these groups and their projects differ. We found evidence to support the suggestion that LilyPad is disproportionally appealing to women, as compared to Arduino (we estimated that about 9% of Arduino purchasers were female while 35% of LilyPad purchasers were). We found evidence that suggests that a very large proportion of people making high-visibility projects using LilyPad are female as compared to Arduino (65% for LilyPad, versus 2% for Arduino). Digging deeper, qualitative evidence suggests a reason. LilyPad users aren't just different. The projects they are making are different too. Although LilyPad and Arduino are the same chips and the same code, we suggest that LilyPad's design, and the way the platform is framed, leads to different types of projects that appeal to different types of people. For example, Arduino seems likely to find its way into an interaction design project or a fighting robot. LilyPad seems more likely to find its way into a smart and responsive textile. Very often, different types of people want to make these projects. Leah and I believe that there's a more general lesson to be learned about designing technologies for communities underrepresented in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) -- and for women in particular. The dominant metaphor in the discussion on women in computer science is Margolis and Fisher's idea of "unlocking the clubhouse." The phrase provides a good description of the path that most projects aimed at broadening participation of women in computing projects seem to take. The metaphor is based around the idea that computing culture is a boys' club that is unfriendly to women. The solution is finding ways to make this club more accessible to those locked outside. It should go without saying that we share Margolis and Fisher's goal of increasing participation of women in STEM. That's LilyPad's point, after all. It it hopefully also clear that we're supportive of, and involved in, projects working to remove systematic barriers to participation by women and other groups. That work must continue. But I also think that Leah's work with LilyPad suggests another way forward based on addressing issues of self-selection that will affect even the most welcoming technological communities. Here's what we say in our paper:

Our experience suggests a different approach, one we call Building New Clubhouses. Instead of trying to fit people into existing engineering cultures, it may be more constructive to try to spark and support new cultures, to build new clubhouses. Our experiences have led us to believe that the problem is not so much that communities are prejudiced or exclusive but that they're limited in breadth--both intellectually and culturally. Some of the most revealing research in diversity in STEM found that women and other minorities don't join STEM communities not because they are intimidated or unqualified but rather because they're simply uninterested in these disciplines. One of our current research goals is thus to question traditional disciplinary boundaries and to expand disciplines to make room for more diverse interests and passions. To show, for example, that it is possible to build complex, innovative, technological artifacts that are colorful, soft, and beautiful. We want to provide alternative pathways to the rich intellectual possibilities of computation and engineering. We hope that our research shows that disciplines can grow both technically and culturally when we re-envision and re-contextualize them. When we build new clubhouses, new, surprising, and valuable things happen. As our findings on shared LilyPad projects seem to support, a new female-dominated electrical engineering/computer science community may emerge.

I have a strong belief that computing can be an empowering tool and that expanding users' control over technology is a critically important issue. Our paper argues that we should attempt to expand participation in computing by broadening the possibilities of computing, rather than only by broadening participation in extant, computing organizations, projects, and genres. Even if computing and electrical engineering communities were perfectly welcoming (which they are not) most people (both male and female, but disproportionately female) will choose not to participate. Building new clubhouses requires creativity of its proponents and risks charges of reinforcing stereotypes and existing status hierarchies. But, executed carefully and well (as I believe LilyPad has been), it suggests ways to reach the majority of people that no "unlocking" project will ever seem relevant to.

So we'll be doing a video recording of a musical in the second weekend of October. Since it worked so well last time, we're going to be doing it with DVswitch. One quite important bit of goodness that we had last time was the fact that we had an intercom; that is, some way for the camera people and the director to talk to eachother. I hadn't set that up; the theatre where the concert was just had that material, we could just use it. Since the place where we'll be doing this recording does not have such a thing, that meant that in order to repeat the success of last time, we'd be needing something else this time around. So I bought five USB headsets, set up an asterisk installation with conferencing, installed linphone-nox, and tried. Only to find that it didn't work. Fiddling with the settings didn't help. I got a bit angry, since there's sooo many sound systems in Linux that sometimes it's hard to figure out who's at fault. But no matter, whatever I tried I couldn't get it to work. After trying for a few hours, I tried using it on the PS3. The packaging did say 'PS3', after all, and perhaps it used some playstation-specific protocol? I'd be surprised if it did, since even their controller uses the standard USB HID protocol, but then it could be. Surprise, surprise, even on the PS3 I couldn't get the microphone to work. Open up another package, plug in the second headset, and yes, obviously, now the microphone works. Sigh. Oh well, that's what warranty is for.

A new month has just begun, it s again time for a few suggestions of free software projects to flattr. This is Flattr FOSS in action. Enough said, let s start with my suggestions:

1. The battle for Wesnoth is a great turn-based tactical strategy game (I spent countless hours on it a few years ago). It s been a long time I have not played on my computer, but opensource games should be encouraged. Lack of good games is one of the few recurring complaints that come back from people trying out Linux for the first time. And The battle for Wesnoth is a very active project, so there s no reason to not support them.
2. Shutter is the next-generation tool to take screenshots, it s quite popular at least in Ubuntu and it can easily replace the default gnome-screenshot application. You can apply various effects on the fly, and upload the resulting pictures directly on image hosting sites (Flickr, Picasa, etc.).
3. Awesome is a highly configurable window-manager for X. I use it as a tiling window manager (windows are arranged to always fill the entire screen). Its configuration file consists of LUA code so it s for power-users mainly Julien Danjou started Awesome but he has also written many other small nifty tools, discover them in his Flattr profile.
4. Sparkleshare is a new collaboration tool that will transparently synchronize a folder between several computers/persons and inform you in real-time of changes. Under the hood, it uses public Git hosting sites (like Github or Gitorious) to store and exchange the data. In some aspects, it s like Dropbox s shared folders. You can also read Linux Weekly News review of it.
5. My last suggestion is to support Harald Welte and his projects. Click here to see his Flattr profile. He is someone in the free software world. First of all he s a famous kernel hacker, he wrote much of the firewalling code (known as netfilter). He also initiated gpl-violations.org and ensured that the GNU General Public License was respected when he found out companies that failed to meet the terms of the license. Lately he has been reverse-engineering the whole GSM stack pointing out security problems as he discovers them with the goal to provide a free implementation of everything (first results are in projects OsmocomBB and OpenBSC). Isn t that impressive?

That s it for this month. By the way, did you tell your friends how easy it is to support free software with Flattr? Share this article with them and let them join Flattr FOSS too. No comment Support my work

I today deactivated my Facebook account. It was some effort, because I had developed some Facebook applications, and their page to reassign them to a different developer was broken (actually the whole application edit page was broken).I have always been a "responsible" user, keeping good control over my data, and usually just posting stuff that I'd tell anyone anyway. Facebook has also always been some kind of "marketing" tool for me, being able to support some friends by inviting people to go to their events etc.However, there are plenty of reasons to abstain from Facebook:

• They track you on millions of web pages via the like button. See earlier posts on how to block some of this tracking.
• They collect tons of data on you even when you do not join, by collecting data on you via your friends email accounts, phone books etc. For example it has been shown that, when one of your friends uses Facebook for iPhone, then Facebook already has collected your phone number.
• Facebook is flooding you with information that is entertaining at first, but actually quite useless. (e.g. who became 'friends' with whom). FBpurity is a good way to remove much of the trivially useless information.
• Facebook is a huge time sink if you are not responsible, e.g. refrain from using all the games, use FBpurity to filter our cruft etc.
• Facebook is giving you the impression of having lots of friends and of being social - while in fact, you are probably even spending less time with your actual friends than ever before.
• Facebook is a great tool - for mobbing. You can easily tell things to everybody except a certain person. Invite them all to a party, but hide it from the target until its over, then brag on how great the party was. And so on - and in fact, that is what happens to non-Facebook users already; this is the kind of social pressure that made Facebook so big.
• Facebook is a lot about bragging rights. Having the most friends, the coolest photos, the best links, the prettiest girls posting on your wall.

Facebook makes things easier, but also a lot more shallow. When someone took note and remembered your birthday, there was some effort involved that shows that they cared. With Facebook reminding people to greet, what is a birthday greeting on Facebook more than an automated message? It's about as personal as the annual christmas card by some large company. Face it: the "social" part of the "social web" is pretty shallow.As you can see above, I've been caring about these issues for some time; I post selectively, I filter much of the tracking, I don't use their games. With my Hiatus, I want to further improve, in particular

• use my spare time for useful projects instead of reading trivialities posted on Facebook. There is just so much tiny stuff that you could do with your time instead.
• spend more time with my true friends
• be more self-aware of my time use in general
• remind people that they know people outside of Facebook, too

There was a lot of news coverage like Credit card fees being imposed by councils, says Which? earlier this week. People seemed outraged that councils were making a small surplus over the year in total. Interviewees suggested that councils should just include the cost of taking payments in the amount charged. Of course, councils are sort-of not-for-profit, so they ll just set prices to include the credit card fees and make a small surplus on other cheaper forms of payment over the year in total. So everyone who uses bank transfers will pay more because credit card fees are high! Will that be next year s scandal? Presumably that s what happens in France, Germany and other countries where sellers can t charge more for credit card payment. That, or you just don t accept credit cards, like many German retailers never used to. What else can they do? It s a bit odd of Visa to claim it costs more to accept other forms of payment. Cheques are horrendously expensive if you only get a few, but seem to get cheaper if handled in bulk. Domestic bank transfers and cash also seem cheaper than Visa to me. Sellers seem to be asked explicitly to assume much more fraud risk in order to accept credit cards, too. Mind you, with the amazingly slack approach of most US retailers to cards (no chip-and-PIN and they usually don t bother to even check the signature I cut up the card I used in the USA when I arrived home), I m surprised there s not more card fraud. I m also a bit surprised Bath and North East Somerset (which neighbours my home district) is paying 2% on credit card transactions. Our co-op has been offered deals about as good as that and we don t do anything like as many transactions. We ve not yet taken one up because the setup paperwork is a pain and the setup and maintenance fees usually suck. It feels like it doesn t matter what you do with money, bankers still get rich. Even though I keep looking (like in 2007), it ll probably happen: we need to act again, because some overseas customers seem unwilling or unable to register with a site to pay (and some payment sites have ethical questions too), while international bank transfers are even more expensive and an even bigger pain. Besides card payments, we re considering opening a currency trading account and a Euro bank account. Anyone done these and do you think they re worth it or not? And do any Eurozone banks allow a UK company to open an account without a member visiting in person? I ve found few possibilities, after looking at banks in seven countries so far.

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

In Total:	767
Affecting Squeeze:	387
Squeeze only:	86
Remaining to be fixed in Squeeze:	301

Of these 301 bugs, the following tags are set:

Pending in Squeeze:	23
Patched in Squeeze:	41
Duplicates in Squeeze:	30
Can be fixed in a security Update:	32
Contrib or non-free in Squeeze:	10
Otherwise fixed in Squeeze:	24

Ignoring all the above (multiple tags possible), 177 bugs need to be fixed by Debian Contributors to get Debian 6.0 Squeeze released. However, with the view of the Release Managers, 232 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.

so long and thanks for all the fish, dear old F2C423BC It was about time. Last bits from keyring-maint finally convinced me to move away from my old 1024 DSA to a new 4096 RSA GPG key. I know it's bloated, but given that I expect the life time of the new (master) key to be 10 years, I saw no reason to switch to any weaker key. I'm lucky enough to live in a DD-crowded area and I've henceforth already collected some signatures ... but I need waaaay more signatures before even daring to think about asking for a replacement in the Debian keyring. So .... ... here's my transition document (shamelessly inspired from Russ' excellent text). If you have signed my old key, you should have a fairly straightforward trust path to my new key. If that is compatible with your signing policy, please sign my new key. Having been there, here are a couple of excellent recommended readings for doing the transition yourself:

• key creation guide - by Ana via keyring maint
• migration howto - by Daniel

After being noticed in blog comment about another theme for phpMyAdmin, I started to look for other hidden contributions for phpMyAdmin and I was surprised how many people did not even try to submit their code upstream. Have you ever considered trying to contact upstream? Quick search on SourceForge.net revealed: VisualMCD for phpMyAdmin

An Add-on for phpMyAdmin which enables user to create PDF Schema and Relation with a simple click and mouse moves. No more fastidious typing of table coords needed to create the PDF Schema.

Even though the SF.net history says it was released 440 days ago, it is actually dated back to 2003 and it obviously is not compatible with current code base. Also we have similar feature for few years now, so it was just duplicated effort. phpMyAdmin theme: Paradice

Paradice is a Theme for the popular web-based database administration tool phpMyAdmin. You will find the development version here. All official releases will be made by the phpMyAdmin project.

This theme is just developed externally, but you can get it from our themes page phpMyAdmin persian project

phpMyAdmin persian project

Something what seems to be dead from beginning. Anyway if you want to translate, please use our translation server. MySQL Form Generator pour PHPMyAdmin

C'est un outil pour crr un site autour d'une base. Un gnrateur de formulaire. Sur base d'une DB Mysql.Projet prvu pour tre intgr PhpMyAdmin.mysql -> formulaire HTML+javascript avec le code PHP pour trater les soumissions de donnes.

Something we still don't have in phpMyAdmin, however the project is inactive for more than year. pmahomme

Clean, modern and easy to use phpMyAdmin theme.

Theme which started this search, however it seems to fail for me right now. phpMyDesigner

Plugin for phpMyAdmin. PhpMyDesigner is a tool written in PHP and Ajax. This CASE with WEB interface. ( MySQL )

This actually does not fit into this blog, because it is one of projects that got merged and are now part of our code base. phpMySchema

phpMySchema is a tool written in PHP for generating an ERD or otherwise graphical view of your MySQL databse over the web. It is being developed to be used as a standalone script and as a module for phpMyAdmin.

Generally it looks like an interesting addition, however we can quite well compete with this after this year's GSoC, which added ability to export schema in various formats.

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