It is a while since we managed to get below the 1000 stable RC mark. Last weekend we managed the next mark, that is we are below 900 now! Obviously my effort during the RCBC did take us a fair step in that direction, but I don't want to take full credit for it. The last bit that got us below the 900 happened through an event of last weekend: The current point release of lenny. Be aware that the BTS doesn't know about proposed-updates, so bugs closed through uploads to there only are seen when they hit the main pool which is the reason for point releases. It were something around 25 RC bugs that were closed by that. I haven't checked who exactly is to thank here, but looking at the non-DSA packages one finds some perl packages and at least two font packages. Thanks to the corresponding teams for their help! I plan to continue these efforts, so if you think it's a good idea you might want to flattr it. I think this quote sums up the motivation behind this pretty well:

<jwilk> Yay, only 900 bugs to fix and we can release lenny! Oh wait...

/debian permanent link Comments: 0

I must admit, I do not really get the point of the ongoing discussion about having an official Facebook page. In my understanding it should be a source of information about Debian for Facebook users, technically a mirror of www.debian.org/News and debian-devel-announce@lists.debian.org. Yes, Facebook is a piece of non-free, data-harvesting sh*t. But there are users, maintainers and developers who use that service (they also use Twitter, Xing, Linkedin, StudiVZ, MeinVZ and so on). Why should we prohibit them to have an official source of information on their platform? If there is someone who wants to run that kind of service: go for it! Or would we prohibit someone to run a mirror of ftp.debian.org on a Windows machine just because the surrounding environment is non-free ? Most probably, that wouldn t be an official mirror listed on www.debian.org/distrib/ftplist, but it would still contain the official set of packages, signed with the official key of the archive. Btw, is @debian on Twitter official ? And please, do not compare this situation to SourceForge, GitHub, Google Code etc. It s just not the same! On SourceForge etc one relies on a non-free service as the primary way of distribution (that s not perfectly true for DVCS based services, as here one can push the tree to every service one has access to). On Facebook we d just have a mirror of the already freely available information. ) do not forget: almost every machine used for hosting/developing/whatsoever Debian has non-free hardware, firmware etc!

The unofficial rc bug tracker currently knows about the following bugs:

In Total:	420
Affecting Squeeze:	301
Squeeze only:	66
Remaining to be fixed in Squeeze:	235

Of these 235 bugs, the following tags are set:

Pending in Squeeze:	16
Patched in Squeeze:	53
Duplicates in Squeeze:	26
Contrib or non-free in Squeeze:	10
Claimed in Squeeze:	2
Delayed in Squeeze:	8
Can fixed in a security Update:	15
Otherwise fixed in Squeeze:	19

Ignoring all the above (multiple tags possible), 133 bugs need to be fixed by Debian Contributers to get Debian 6.0 Squeeze released. However, with the view of the Release Managers, 254 need to be dealt with for the release to happen. Please see my older post for an explanation of the different numbers.

Watching the Star Wars Trilogies (both old and new) has finally closed one of the major (in at least some of my collegues' view) holes in my cinematographic education. (I've seen some of the new trilogy when it came out, but not all.) Oh well ... while it's quite enjoyable to watch, it's probably at least as important to have seen them just to spot the references all over the place. Repo Man was where I found myself literally laughing out loudly all by myself. And not only because of the vintage special effects (1984). The Straight Story (Lynch) is just beautiful. Alvin Straight is your proverbial old uncle who may be a bit funny in the head but you just have to like him... If you like mind control stories, The Manchurian Candidate is for you. Now that would be a way for Debian to achieve world domination. Worth thinking about? Speaking of american politics, this reminds me of All the President's Men, which I've seen (and liked) a long time ago. I don't know enough about history to tell how close it is to reality, but it's at least a well made political thriller. Based On A True Story is the term usually used, isn't it?

After a somewhat longer than usual break, we now have a new release of Rcpp on CRAN and in Debian. This release adds quite few things. The main one may be the addition of density, distribution, quantile and random number functions for a rather large number of statistical distribution. Usage is pretty much as it would be in R, yet it is vectorised at the C++ level. A fair number of unit tests were added too, but some work is left to do there too.
Support for complex number was enhanced both in the expressive 'sugar' context and via a few binary operators that had been missing. We also started a new vignette to provide a 'quick reference'; unfortunately this is not quite complete yet. The NEWS entry follows below:

0.8.6   2010-09-09
    o	new macro RCPP_VERSION and Rcpp_Version to allow conditional compiling
        based on the version of Rcpp
    
           #if defined(RCPP_VERSION) && RCPP_VERSION >= Rcpp_Version(0,8,6)
           ...
           #endif
    o   new sugar functions for statistical distributions (d-p-q-r functions)
	with distributions : unif, norm, gamma, chisq, lnorm, weibull, logis,
	f, pois, binom, t, beta.
    o   new ctor for Vector taking size and function pointer so that for example
    	   NumericVector( 10, norm_rand )
	generates a N(0,1) vector of size 10
    o   added binary operators for complex numbers, as well as sugar support 
    o   more sugar math functions: sqrt, log, log10, exp, sin, cos, ...
    o	started new vignette Rcpp-quickref : quick reference guide of Rcpp API
        (still work in progress)
    o	various patches to comply with solaris/suncc stricter standards
    o	minor enhancements to ConvolutionBenchmark example
    o	simplified src/Makefile to no longer require GNU make; packages using
        Rcpp still do for the compile-time test of library locations
    

As always, even fuller details are in 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

omlet (or here) is a vim extension for writing OCaml code. In my opinion, it has a better indentation than the standard OCaml vim support. Unfortunately, it has a cost: the indentation vim code is more complex. And it has a few bugs :-( The main bug is that it doesn't like unbalanced comment opening "(*" and closing "*)" tags. From time to time, it enters an infinite (or very long) loop when there such a tag left in your file. It can be very far away from the point you are editing. It isn't too problematic, because unbalanced tags are a syntax error. But the problem is that it matches these tags inside strings also. So whenever you start using regular expression like "(.*)" the whole indentation fails. But there is a very ugly solution to this problem! Problematic code:

 let parse_rgxp =
   Pcre.regexp ~flags:[ CASELESS] 
     "^(?<license>[A-Z0-9\\-]*[A-Z0-9]+)\
      (?<version>-[0-9\\.]+)?(?<later>\\+)?\
      ( *with *(?<exception>.*) *exception)?$"

Solution, add ignore"(*":

 let parse_rgxp =
   ignore "(*";
   Pcre.regexp ~flags:[ CASELESS] 
     "^(?<license>[A-Z0-9\\-]*[A-Z0-9]+)\
      (?<version>-[0-9\\.]+)?(?<later>\\+)?\
      ( *with *(?<exception>.*) *exception)?$"

Very very ugly coder: you balance comment tags in dead code -- very very bad ;-) ps: another solution when the plugin enters the infinite loop, hit Ctrl-C. This will stop it and let you define your own indentation.

In the last few years the Israeli government founded some work on openoffice.org by Tk Open Systems Ltd. During the years, the work has resulted with an Israeli version , released after the official release and includes a lot of patches to improve support for Bidi and Hebrew specifically. Although most patches were submitted to the hamburg , a lot of them weren t used and are still waiting for inclusion. The funding the that projects stopped a year ago (9/2009), and the last release of the Israeli version is 3.1.1. Since then we had a quiet period in which 3.2 and 3.2.1 were released. While still enjoying the fruits of the projects in these version, it seems that it s time for the community to take over, as we lost hopes for yet another funds from the government. In may Netanel and I started talking about taking over the Hebrew translation, and in June we got Hebrew added to the openoffice.org pootle server. We started with about 80%, and got to 86% in time to get to the list of languages getting a language pack built for. This was a first achievement as Hebrew didn t have a language pack since early on the 2.x versions. I believe that working as part of the openoffice.org l10n group and with openoffice.org release schedule will only benefit for the Hebrew translation process. We used the language pack to test the translation and improve it. We also were able to get to 89% with the help of more volunteers.I believe it s now much more consistent than before. In the process with manually checked Writer thoroughly, while Calc and Impress got less attention due to the time frame. But we fixed some major translation issues in all of the three components. While testing the translation we also started to report Bidi issues we saw in 3.3 beta, hoping they will be fixed for the final release. For example, the main openoffice.org screen on windows has is getting repainted wrongly when moving the mouse over the options (text, spreadsheet..). This looks very badly as this is the main screen! See issue #97556 for details In addition to report new issues, we also started to keep track of the already opened issues regarding Bidi and Hebrew. I m following the issue system for a few years now, but seeing the list of issues organized in the wiki gave me a better orientation in the problems we have. E.g. finding some related or similar issues and mention each other in the comments, when someone goes to first one, he could also fixed the other as the problem is similar and probably comes from the same code. Organizing also the already closed bugs in 3.x, gave me a some kind of a changelog for the Bidi and Hebrew related issues. In that manner, version 3.1 was a very good for Bidi, thanks for a lot of efforts and work with the Bidi meta issue #79434. The wiki page is in Hebrew, but looks quite OK with Google translate (see here). Hoping to have 3.4 a major release (Bidi wise), I ve opened issue #114236 as another meta issue for Bidi related issues. I ve kept Hebrew specific issues out, as to get it more general and also relevant for Bidi users in other languages. Any help of those issues will be more than welcome (starting with votes and ending with patches).
Filed under: i18n & l10n, Israeli Community, Openoffice.org

AltOS The Altus Metrum Operating System Altos is the core of the software for all of the Altus Metrum products. It runs on the 8051-based micro-controllers within both the flight computer and the ground station devices. AltOS a small cooperatively multi-tasking operating system. AltOS Version 0.7.1 Released Bdale and I have just released AltOS version 0.7.1. Version 0.7.1 is the first release to include the new Java-based ground station software which runs on Linux, Mac OS X and various Windows flavors. AltOS Changes in 0.7.1

1. Deal with Windows and Mac OSX USB stacks. These two operating systems do interesting things with USB and found some boundary conditions within the AltOS USB stack which couldn t be tested on Linux. With test cases discovered, the panic calls were turned into code that dealt with these cases correctly.
2. Increase packet mode payload size and add callsigns. The callsigns are set by the master end of the packet link (normally the TeleDongle) so that the entire radio conversation conforms to regulatory requirements. Increasing the payload size makes data transfers go faster.
3. Place configuration data in fixed flash addresses. This change makes it possible to read the serial number and radio calibration data back out of the flash data when reprogramming a device.

TeleMetrum Changes in 0.7.1

1. Ensure GPS date information is written to on-board data logger. The GPS date information is used when constructing eeprom log file names; without this, the eeprom downloading tool would generate a filename based on the current date.
2. Allow TeleMetrum to be used as a programming dongle. This means the user can reprogram a TeleDongle or another TeleMetrum using the TeleMetrum as a programming dongle. Before this, only the TeleDongle could be used to program other devices.

AltosUI - Ground Station Software for Altus Metrum devices Version 0.7.1 is the first release containing our new cross-platform Java-based user interface. AltosUI can:

• Receive and log telemetry from a connected TeleDongle device. All data received is saved to log files named with the current date and the connected rocket serial and flight numbers. There is no mode in which telemetry data will not be saved.
• Download logged data from TeleMetrum devices, either through a direct USB connection or over the air through a TeleDongle device.
• Configure a TeleMetrum device, setting the radio channel, callsign, apogee delay and main deploy height. This can be done through either a USB connection or over a radio link via a TeleDongle device.
• Replay a flight in real-time. This takes a saved telemetry log or eeprom download and replays it through the user interface so you can relive your favorite rocket flights.
• Reprogram Altus Metrum devices. Using an Altus Metrum device connected via USB, another Altus Metrum device can be reprogrammed using the supplied programming cable between the two devices.
• Export Flight data to a comma-separated-values file. This takes either telemetry or on-board flight data and generates data suitable for use in external applications. All data is exported using standard units so that no device-specific knowledge is needed to handle the data.
• Speak to you during the flight. Instead of spending the flight hunched over your laptop looking at the screen, enjoy the view while the computer tells you what s going on up there. During ascent, you hear the current flight state and altitude information. During descent, you get azimuth, elevation and range information to try and help you find your rocket in the air. Once on the ground, the direction and distance are reported.

Three Operating Systems, One AltosUI AltosUI provides all of these features on the three target operating systems, Linux, Mac OS X (version 10.5 or newer) and Windows (XP, Vista or 7). The bulk of the software is written in Java and is built once and tested and delivered on all three target platforms. A tiny shim library is built on each system to provide access to the Altus Metrum devices connected over the USB link. Thanks to our contributors! We ve gotten lots of help getting this software built and tested:

• Tim Van Milligan at Apogee Components helped shake out portability and installation issues on Mac OS X and Windows Vista
• Adrian Adamson from Featherweight Altimeters helped with Windows install adventures as well as fixing data export from telemetry files after unfortunately losing eeprom data in a field in Kansas.
• Bob Finch has written a bunch of our documentation, provided packaging files for Arch Linux along with helping debug general Linux compatibility issues.

Future Plans With the basic AltOS and AltosUI functionality running, we ve got lots of ideas about where to take the system in the future. And, we d love to hear ideas from you as well. Some of the ideas we ve like to get done include:

1. Google Earth file export. We had a Linux-based C program to export a KML (Keyhole Markup Language) file that Google Earth can read and present to the user overlayed on satellite photo data.
2. Data Plotting. Being able to plot flight data right in the UI would be nice, and there are several Java plotting packages available to try out.
3. State-dependent display. When the rocket is on the pad, you only want to know if it s ready to fly. When the rocket is descending on a chute, you want to know where it is in the sky and how fast its falling. Presenting a limited amount of information that is most likely interesting to the user should make the display more useful.
4. Ejection charge testing. The TeleMetrum firmware has the ability to fire ejection charges over the USB or radio links. Safely hooking this up to the user interface will allow for wireless ejection system testing. The key here is safely , of course, which means figuring out a fool proof user interface.

I m sure there are any number of additions that could be made to this list; feel free to send along ideas that you ve got. Of course, all of this software is licensed under the GNU General Public License, so you can get the source and hack on it in the comfort of your own home.

About a week ago, Altus Metrum announced that our 2nd generation ground software was available, and that it runs identically on Linux, Mac, and Windows computers. Thanks to feedback from early users of this new software, particularly those who flew rockets at various sites over the holiday weekend and reported on their experiences, we're found and fixed several bugs, and made a significant improvement to the Windows installation experience. Version 0.7.1 is now available for download from our AltOS page. All existing TeleMetrum owners are encouraged to download, install, and begin using this new version immediately.

After a somewhat longer than usual break, we now have a new release of Rcpp on CRAN and in Debian. This release adds quite few things. The main one may be the addition of density, distribution, quantile and random number function for a rather large number of statistical distribution. Usage is pretty much as it would be in R, yet it is vectorised at the C++ level. A fair number of unit tests were added too, but some work is left to do there too.
Support for complex number was enhanced both in the expressive 'sugar' context and via a few binary operators that had been missing. We also started a new vignette to provide a 'quick reference'; unfortunately this is not quite complete yet. The NEWS entry follows below:

0.8.6   2010-09-09
    o	new macro RCPP_VERSION and Rcpp_Version to allow conditional compiling
        based on the version of Rcpp
    
           #if defined(RCPP_VERSION) && RCPP_VERSION >= Rcpp_Version(0,8,6)
           ...
           #endif
    o   new sugar functions for statistical distributions (d-p-q-r functions)
	with distributions : unif, norm, gamma, chisq, lnorm, weibull, logis,
	f, pois, binom, t, beta.
    o   new ctor for Vector taking size and function pointer so that for example
    	   NumericVector( 10, norm_rand )
	generates a N(0,1) vector of size 10
    o   added binary operators for complex numbers, as well as sugar support 
    o   more sugar math functions: sqrt, log, log10, exp, sin, cos, ...
    o	started new vignette Rcpp-quickref : quick reference guide of Rcpp API
        (still work in progress)
    o	various patches to comply with solaris/suncc stricter standards
    o	minor enhancements to ConvolutionBenchmark example
    o	simplified src/Makefile to no longer require GNU make; packages using
        Rcpp still do for the compile-time test of library locations
    

As always, even fuller details are in 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

(Disclaimer: Possibly one of my longest post ever, you may want to scroll to the bottom and only look at the pictures.) So, what s new in SD since last week? Fetching everything From http://bugs.freedesktop.org/, it was possible to download all the bugs I reported there (that means 2 ), but trying to download those reported by Julien led to a crash without any trace. Dichotomy FTW, I came up with a bunch of bugs which would lead to the same result, which confirmed that the amount of bugs processed at once wasn t the issue. Playing around with strace, it appeared that exchanges with the remote server were apparently fine, so an issue on the client-side SOAP machinery got suspected. So let s enable tracing:

use SOAP::Lite +trace => 'all';

Tada! The issue was indeed local: malformed XML got received, leading to a die call issued from the XML-RPC layer. Thankfully, one can set up a fault handler, which I used to display the range of bug IDs which triggered that bug, so that people can look into it and determine what to add to the blacklist until the underlying issue s been investigated (presumably, bugzilla s at fault). Speeding things up With that blacklisting of buggy bugs, one can then try to move to other queries, dealing with more bugs. Some examples follow:

reporter=kibi@d.o
product=xorg&component=Driver/VMWare
product=xorg&component=Driver/nouveau
product=xorg&component=Server/general
product=xorg&component=Driver/intel

Moving from 2 bugs to 10-100 bugs (Julien s or VMWare s) was OK. But then moving to several hundreds of bugs (Driver/nouveau = 500+ bugs) led to noticeable performance issues. Not to mention what happened when one reaches several thousands of bugs (Driver/intel = 2500+ bugs). Indeed, even with network exchanges cached into a local file, processing data was taking up to several dozens of minutes. I knew about Perl s -d:DProf, which helps figuring out where time is spent, but was pointed to -d:NYTProf (and its accompanying tool, nytprofhtml). Some hotspots got noticed:

• There s a huge pile of stuff relying on UUIDs heavily, and a cache is going to be introduced to avoid later calls once a value s been computed once. That s going to benefit all replica types, not just bugzilla.
• I didn t care much about date/time at the beginning, but that turned out to be a very bad idea: since the format returned by bugzilla wasn t matching a well-known format, time was spent in the DateTime::Format::Natural fallback, leading to a big performance penalty. Fixed with a trivial regular expression.

Things got better, but not good enough. There are several Prophet (the engine under the hood) backends, so one can play with:

PROPHET_REPLICA_TYPE=sqlite   # the default for SD
PROPHET_REPLICA_TYPE=prophet

Switching to prophet was a big win, but still not good enough. Indeed, many tiny files are written, and most of the time is spent in I/O. Although I m nothing like a performance guru, I guessed that running on an average laptop, with ext3 and its default commit interval of 5 seconds might not be helping, so I gave a quick try to -o remount,commit=60, and that seemed to help. Even though there are probably other tricks to find in that area (which hopefully won t require root privileges ), there s already a patch which landed in prophet s master branch, replacing File::Spec->catfile with an optimized version: that function alone was eating 10% of runtime In the sqlite case, disabling the auto-commit feature helped reducing the I/O load, but a proper patch is still lacking for now (running into locked database issues, or into missing tables after having created them isn t fun, so I postponed debugging that). Since performance issues looked like they could be solved eventually, I switched back to implementing missing features. Handling more than comments Currently 3 types of stuff are currently fetched from the bugzilla server:

• Bug status: plenty of properties.
• Bug comments: comments that are linked to bugs.
• Bug history: changes that impacted bugs.

(Yes, that means that attachments are totally ignored for now.) Until now, only bug comments were considered. The first comment was used to determine a pseudo-title (using its first line), the reporter, and the creation date. This approach was chosen to try and get a basic sync working quickly, so as to get:

• A list of bugs matching the query.
• All comments for each of these bugs.

Now, the algorithm is the following: from the bug status, determine a set of properties of interest; then walk the history backwards, and update the properties incrementally until the (presumed) initial state is reached. Then create the ticket using this initial state . Adding the incremental property changes to that initial ticket makes it possible to represent the bug s life as a list of Prophet::ChangeSet objects. That s where the fun begins, since properties in the bug status may not match properties in the bug history, so one needs to establish property correspondence. Also, some properties can be multivalued for added fun. I believe that s where most of the time is going to be spent while developing a new replica type in SD: once one knows how to get a hand on needed info on the remote server, the main question is what to do with it. For now, I decided to ignore many fields to make it possible to do a big sync like Server/general, property support will be improved later on. Screenshots Instead of pasting lengthy terminal excerpt, let s use some screenshots instead (sorry, I m not sure how to present such things in an accessible way, suggestions welcome). Cloning Julien s bugs, listing all open tickets, listing all tickets, searching using a regular expression: Displaying bug 42 (that s the local ID): Now, let s start the embedded web server through sd server --port 1234 and point the browser there. List of RESOLVED bugs: Status and comments for bug 42: History for bug 42: Compared to the original bugzilla page: Next time Some items which need work:

• Tweak properties to address the issues raised above.
• Start fetching attachments as well.
• Support further syncs. Currently, a big sync is done once, and there s no way to tell sd to sync new changes since last time, if any. This will probably lead to rewriting how fetching is currently done, which is: discover all bugs, then fetch all comments and all history items, for all of them. Properties like last_change_time will probably be of some help here.
• Have a look at what happens with other bugzilla instances, like Gnome s.

It has been a pretty exhausting time since my last blog post in my area of Debian land . If you followed the news you should have seen some of it. Last weekend there was the point release. For those I have the (good?) position to sit in the middle of the working queue, where the hardest part (sorting out which stuff to include, getting it all build, etc) is already done. Still, due to the amount of steps neccessary to take its usually a multi-hour thing. This one release was even slower, as we had to wait for hours until the package lists had all been built - unfortunately the thing writing that keeps berkeley db files of data around as cache - and uses the FULL path to the files as key. How stupidly annoying when the path changes during a server move. Ohwell. The other big part that got a tiny bit of press coverage was the move from www.backports.org over to backports.debian.org. This was actually waiting for me for a good longish while already (err, well, since well before DC9 this was decided to happen) but now I finally got myself moved. This turned out to be much more work than I ever feared (which is part of the reason why it took so long), but some numbers:

• At the start the code changes between the revision running on oldbpo compared to HEAD: 303 files changed, 21227 insertions(+), 468357 deletions(-) (There had been 1723 commits in the master branch since the last time bpo got it, thats about a quarter of all we have in master!)
• Database schema version oldbpo: 5, HEAD: 35
• sub-sub-sub-optimal damn old shell scripts for the cronjobs.

The db update alone took me a week to figure out which steps to do in which order. Good to have an automated system, if you the manage to have the updates run specific to the main archive. Ups. When I was done with the database (during which I managed to just erase all work done by formorer and rhonda on the webpage, ups^2) I had some code and config cleanups to do, and especially manage to get it all running with a new path layout. Much less complicated, but enough work to do, before I finally was far enough to get it all move so far that formorer could start testing it and we could turn off the old system. At this time I had to fix up our shell scripts for our cron jobs, but that (with one exception) was a nearly straight forward easy task. And on Wednesday I managed another goal - backports is fully running the master branch of dak, the exact same code as on ftp-master. The cronjobs are slightly different, as well as the config (of course, duh), but otherwise its the same. My current goal and the last things left on this move todo is to change the cronjobs so that debian as well as backports do run the SAME scripts, but their configs list which tools should be run when. Considering that my dinstall cron already contains something pretty much a state machine I think I m insane enough to get this in shell, but when I told that to Mark (you know, the second ftpmaster :) ), I heard something very much like vomiting (you know, 700km between us, this might mean something) and then the plea to use a real language for the task. Oh my. I like my shell. :)

---

There is one big black cloud on the horizon to see. I have to do something similar for security. They are at a dak (and database) version pretty similar to what bpo had. They do need to support this obnoxious spare new format too before they can support security for squeeze, so there is no way I can ignore that archive for much longer. I already asked DSA for a vm in which I can play (not good to interrupt security archive for long), but probably wont start on this before the upcoming FTPMaster meeting. Pretty busy otherwise. Wellwell, I hope it will be less painful, as I now know the steps already. :)

A few days ago I had the mixed pleasure of bying a new digital camera, a Canon IXUS 130. It was instructive and very disturbing to be able to verify that also this camera producer have the nerve to specify how I can or can not use the videos produced with the camera. Even thought I was aware of the issue, the options with new cameras are limited and I ended up bying the camera anyway. What is the problem, you might ask? It is software patents, MPEG-4, H.264 and the MPEG-LA that is the problem, and our right to record our experiences without asking for permissions that is at risk. On page 27 of the Danish instruction manual, this section is written:

This product is licensed under AT&T patents for the MPEG-4 standard and may be used for encoding MPEG-4 compliant video and/or decoding MPEG-4 compliant video that was encoded only (1) for a personal and non-commercial purpose or (2) by a video provider licensed under the AT&T patents to provide MPEG-4 compliant video. No license is granted or implied for any other use for MPEG-4 standard.

In short, the camera producer have chosen to use technology (MPEG-4/H.264) that is only provided if I used it for personal and non-commercial purposes, or ask for permission from the organisations holding the knowledge monopoly (patent) for technology used. This issue has been brewing for a while, and I recommend you to read "Why Our Civilization's Video Art and Culture is Threatened by the MPEG-LA" by Eugenia Loli-Queru and "H.264 Is Not The Sort Of Free That Matters" by Simon Phipps to learn more about the issue. The solution is to support the free and open standards for video, like Ogg Theora, and avoid MPEG-4 and H.264 if you can.

Backlight control is one of those things that you'd think would be simple, but ha ha this is computing so of course it's an utter disaster and everything is a huge mess. There's three main classes of backlight control in the x86 world, all of which have drawbacks:

• ACPI specifies a mechanism for backlight control, and the majority of modern machines implement it. It has the advantage that the brightness query interface is generally aware of anything else in the system which may have changed the brightness, so it's unlikely to get out of sync with reality if the platform tries to do something odd like change the backlight itself in response to an ambient light sensor or some other event. The main drawback is that there's typically a fairly small number of available backlight values, usually somewhere between 8 and 20.
• A platform-specific mechanism. This used to be more popular before the ACPI backlight interface took off, but some machines still require it. The idea here is that there's some sort of platform-specific way of requesting a backlight change, ranging from a vendor-specific ACPI method through to triggering system management calls by magic register writes. These methods usually (but not always) keep in sync with other firmware changes, but rarely provide any more brightness steps than the standard ACPI interface.
• Many mobile GPUs have backlight control registers built in. These usually give you a range of several thousand possible values, but using them will almost certainly leave you out of sync with reality if the firmware touches them at all. To make things worse, the firmware control of the backlight may occur after the gpu - so you could end up with two different controls that both need to be full in order to get maximum brightness. The worst case scenario is that the firmware gets confused by the values not being what it programmed and you end up with a hung machine.

Right now, if there's an ACPI backlight interface then that's usually the only thing we'll show you. We can do that because we can identify if there's an ACPI backlight interface when we parse the ACPI tables at the start of booting, and that information can be registered before we start setting up any other backlights. The problem comes when we have no ACPI backlight interface. We don't have any idea whether there's a platform mechanism until a platform driver loads, which could be at any time. As a result, we've been reluctant to expose GPU-level backlight control because doing so would often give you two separate backlight controls and no indication as to which should be used. Userspace doesn't really have a way to make that decision either, so everyone ends up unhappy.

This is especially problematic with some machines which provide no ACPI or known platform control (or, in the case of some Samsungs, only provide platform control if you have a special Linux BIOS that Samsung won't give you) but can control the backlight via the gpu. Right now you get nothing, because giving you something would potentially break other systems and the needs of the many etc. Sorry! But this is obviously problematic in the long term, especially because multi-GPU machines tend to have multiple ACPI backlight interfaces, so I've been working on a better approach.

When a backlight device is registered, it appears under /sys/class/backlight. If it's an ACPI device it has a symlink pointing to some random ACPI device. If it's a platform device it's pointing at something like "dell-laptop" which is approximately unhelpful when it comes to figuring out what it controls. If it's a GPU-level device then it probably points at the PCI device, which is helpful except in the case where you have multiple backlight controls on a single GPU. So, by and large, you have no good way to identify which backlight control is preferable unless you keep a huge list of all possible backlights along with some scoring.

The first thing I've added to improve this is a "type" attribute. This tells you whether a given backlight is firmware-level (like ACPI), platform-level (like the various laptop drivers) or performs raw register writes (like a GPU driver). That lets userspace decide which interface is preferable. It'll typically be the ACPI interface, because that's the most likely to keep synchronisation and so avoid bizarre brightness bugs. The next thing has been to start fixing up the parent links. There's nothing we can do for the platform level devices, but the ACPI drivers could at least point at PCI devices rather than into ACPI space. That means that multi-GPU systems can now identify which interface to use based on the currently active GPU. Finally, I've started pointing the GPU-level backlight controls at the specific output rather than merely at the PCI device. This probably makes little difference for laptops as such, but once we start exposing backlight control for monitors that support ddcci it'll make things much easier as we'll know which backlight control corresponds to which monitor.

I've then written a small library that accepts information about the output and picks the "best" backlight for the device. It's obviously based on a pile of heuristics and there's a couple of bits of API that I suspect need to be nailed down yet, but it means that this code only needs to be written once. It's then simple to glue this into X drivers, which means that they can expose a "Backlight" xrandr property on each relevant display. That means that backlight control is then handled at the session level with the X server acting as the privileged agent, which simplifies a bunch of things and means we can finally let hal die entirely. Long-term this means we'll have unified backlight control for all of your displays, which is a wonderful thing.

Summary: We kind of suck right now, but there's a reasonably clear path to getting better.

So, conventional wisdom is that once you experience something first hand, it sits close to you, so that you can learn from it, think about it, and possibly invoke it. This rings true for me, except for one particular type of experience finishing a large and complicated project like writing a dissertation, taking PhD qualifying exams, like writing a very complicated review article. Once it is done and over with and a few months have walked away, I no longer can fathom, at all, how I even did it. It is as if I went through the experience and then amnesia set in, erasing and wiping out the fibers of events, emotions, and thoughts that went into making and finishing the project. I find this unnerving, for various reasons. First, this di-juncture is not one I experience with other experiences, even unpleasant ones, like pain (broken collarbone, burnt hand, terrible earache), for I am able, nearly always, to shore up some shadow of those experience. More practically, when I am faced again with needing to conquer what feels unconquerable (which, unsurprisingly, is my current predicament), I have no experiential reserve to guide me. Instead, it is like I am standing at a new shore, for the first time. I tell myself, I have done and I can do it but there is no concomitant emotional register or memory that assures me that this is in fact true. Maybe a few more projects like these and there will be some imprint to steer me in the future but somehow I suspect my experiential amnesia will remain the same.

If you do care about having good samba packages in squeeze, you can help. If you're in a hurry and don't want to read the blah-blah, just skip to the end of this story and read the last paragraph. Thanks to the confidence of the release team, we (samba packagers) have been "authorized" to upload samba 3.5.4 in unstable, thus targeting having that version in squeeze. Up to July, we were indeed targeting 3.4.8 for squeeze, on the assumption that, as usual, samba upstream releases need some maturation before being strong guarantee that no regression happens. In July we were ready to move and finally upload in unstable the 3.5 packages we kept in experimental until then. The final decision was to be taken during DebConf10. It was roughly taken with Steve Langasek, but....I couldn't upload immediately (most people know that working on major packages during DebConf is a dream)...and had holidays afteer. In the meantime, the freeze happened so we got theoretically screwed... Still, I could manage to convince the release team that long term support for samba 3.5 will certainly be better than 3.4...and that functionality in that version (particularly several Win7-related fixes and a much improved code for printing support) and we got a notice "please upload to unstable and come back to us in a few weeks". That happened, finally. So, now, we need YOU, samba users and admins, to test these packages. Merging our packaging branches was hard (thanks, Steve Langasek, for your help) and glitches are always possible. So, please TEST these packages by installing samba, winbind, libsmbclient and friends from unstable....and report bugs, preferrably the release critical ones....

(... achieve Debian world domination without endorsing Facebook) Yes Raphael, we can.
Nobody said it would have been easy, to reach Total World Domination endorsing Free Software only, but that's not a reason to stop trying. I've recently stumbled upon a very nice article by Benjamin Mako Hill, titled Free Software Needs Free Tools, which I believe it's the best possible commentary to the proposal of having an official Debian Facebook page. Of course there is nothing wrong in having non-official, or let's call them "fan" pages, about Debian on Facebook. As a matter of fact we already have one, as you point out. And I also agree that it would be better to know who is behind that page. Individuals, including Debian Developers, are obviously free to use whatever media they please to spread the cause of Debian. After all, as individuals, each of us decide upon her own personal trade-offs (for instance, a trade-off of mine is to have both identi.ca and twitter accounts and to post only to the former with forwarding to the latter). There is no way to have an official Debian Facebook page and pretend that we are not, de facto, endorsing Facebook. That's why I believe having official Debian presence on Facebook, or on any other non Free Software platform, will just weaken our cause. It will send out the message that Free Software it's something which is good for others to use, but not necessarily for Debian as a project. That does not mean that we live under a rock and that we consider social networks useless to promote the Debian cause. It just mean that we should be picky in choosing social networks that respect our Free Software principles, as we are picky in choosing licenses that are DSFG-free. For instance, I'm glad to mention here that the Debian publicity team has recently obtained access to http://identi.ca/debian and will start using it soon. Subscribe! PS This post also gives me a chance to comment on a so called "community page" of mine on Facebook. As I've briefly commented a few days ago I've nothing to do with that page. TTBOMK its content is just automatically injected from Wikipedia. The "Stefano Zacchiroli is on Facebook" claim on the upper left is true only in the sense that there are other people with my name on Facebook. IANAL, but such a claim (not the page in itself) will probably be considered an abusive advertisement in many countries around the world. update: re-word the identi.ca/debian paragraph, to better blend with surrounding text
update: mention "Debian" in heading

Sometimes remote accounts are only reachable with a series of ssh/su/sudo commands. Using ProxyCommands in .ssh/config works for simple cases, but not with several hops, or if passwords have to be entered. The belier tool takes as input a series of user@hostname strings and will produce an expect script that does the actual login work.

$ cat input
user@host1 root pw1
user2@host2 pw2
$ bel -e input
$ cat host2.sh
#!/usr/bin/expect -f
set timeout 10
spawn ssh -o NoHostAuthenticationForLocalhost=yes -o StrictHostKeyChecking=no  user@host1
expect -re  "(% # \\$) $"
send -- "su - root\r"
expect ":"
send -- "pw1\r"
expect -re  "(% # \\$) $"
send -- "ssh -o NoHostAuthenticationForLocalhost=yes -o StrictHostKeyChecking=no  user2@host2\r"
expect -re  @[^\n]*: 
send -- "pw2\r"
expect -re  "(% # \\$) $"
interact +++ return

The generated host2.sh script uses ugly ssh options, but is easily edited. Now I need the same thing for scp... Update: Carl Chenet, belier's author, kindly pointed me to the documentation which has examples how belier can set up ssh tunnels to copy files.

Facebook is not very popular among free software hackers. When I announced my Facebook page on identi.ca (see here) I got a few replies suggesting it was odd for me to use Facebook. Indeed there are many good reasons why Facebook should be avoided: it is a centralized and proprietary service that is not very privacy-friendly. But the truth is that lots of people are using it (even Debian developers, can you recognize them on the picture?) and some are using their Facebook news feed as their main source of news. You might wonder how many persons that represents, so here are the figures: the Debian Facebook page has 48,361 fans and the Ubuntu one has 247,932 fans. That s right, an announce put on the Debian facebook page would reach more persons than the most popular announce list that Debian is currently running (debian-announce@lists.debian.org has about 29,000 subscribers). Unfortunately that Debian Facebook page is empty and I don t even know who the administrator is. The Ubuntu page on the contrary is properly configured to relay news from The Fridge and Jono Bacon is posting some custom updates from time to time. Debian contributors regularly mention world domination as the ultimate goal of the universal operating system (I even feature this in my blog header banner! ). But working towards world domination means in my opinion that we should communicate our ideals of freedom to as many people as possible, even if they are using a service that we don t want to promote. The Debian social contract acknowledges that some users have to use non-free software and we provide the non-free section for them. In the same spirit, I believe we must have a presence on Facebook. That does not mean that we endorse Facebook, and we should surely promote Joindiaspora once it s usable. But in the mean time we should reach out to Facebook users and allow them to follow us with the platform of their choice. That s the choice I recently made when I decided to setup a public facebook page featuring my free software work, my blog and my book. So if you are a Facebook user, click here to visit my page and click on Like if you want to follow this blog in your Facebook news feed. I also share interesting Debian or Ubuntu related articles that I discover while reading my RSS subscriptions. Below are the usual facebook widgets for the 3 pages quoted in this article (they might not show up if you read this article through an RSS feed):
<iframe allowtransparency="true" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" src="http://www.facebook.com/plugins/likebox.php?id=103161013077063&amp;width=292&amp;connections=0&amp;stream=false&amp;header=false&amp;height=62" style="border:none; overflow:hidden; width:292px; height:62px;"></iframe>
<iframe allowtransparency="true" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" src="http://www.facebook.com/plugins/likebox.php?id=9801962186&amp;width=292&amp;connections=0&amp;stream=false&amp;header=false&amp;height=62" style="border:none; overflow:hidden; width:292px; height:62px;"></iframe>
<iframe allowtransparency="true" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" src="http://www.facebook.com/plugins/likebox.php?id=6723083591&amp;width=292&amp;connections=0&amp;stream=false&amp;header=false&amp;height=62" style="border:none; overflow:hidden; width:292px; height:62px;"></iframe> 14 comments Support my work

The last few months have been busier than I expected, resulting in various failures to get stuff done. The good news is that things are a little more relaxed now and I'm gradually catching up, but if you've emailed me and I haven't replied then you should probably do so again.

A couple of updates - the source code for the Augen Android tablets I wrote about still hasn't been released, but the vendor does seem to be doing their best. Their supplier seems to be refusing to hand over the source code (they were given a tarball that was supposed to be it, but in fact just turned out to be the various GPLed bits of Android) and they're obviously stuck between a rock and a hard place. The obvious observation is that they should have done due diligence before starting to ship these things, but given that they're out in the wild and they're trying to improve things it seems reasonable to carry on working to try to obtain the source rather than insisting that kmart stop selling them.

Fusion Garage, on the other hand, are still failing to provide source and seem entirely unconcerned about it - they've failed to respond to any of my emails since the first. Augen aren't providing source because they can't, while Fusion Garage aren't providing source because they won't. Irked by this, I've decided to try Don Marti's suggestion and file a case with US Customs. I'll admit that I have absolutely no idea how seriously these cases get taken, and so I've no great expectation of any sort of interesting outcome. But even so, if you're in the US and try to buy a Joojoo then there's a chance that it'll be seized by US customs on the way in.