FOSDEM 2006 This year, the days before FOSDEM were the stressful ones, as I got to organize accomodation. Initially, we wanted to have similar appartments as last year, but by the time I was less busy at uni to actually look into it, most of them were already booked, so we had to put up with a youth hostel instead. The positive sides of this were the much lower expenses and a location in the city centre, making us actually look at Bruxelles a bit in detail this time. "Us" were the Hurd people, including Martin "earliest Hurd adopter present" Michlmayr. I got to FOSDEM by car again, picking up Marcus Brinkmann, Neal Walfield and Olaf Buddenhagen on the way in Cologne. Finding the youth hostel seemed to be pretty hard as we just had a street address and a map without street names, but we managed to find it pretty quickly to my great surprise (driving around in Bruxelles usually ended up being a complete disaster over the last years). After a strange encounter with a Guillem Jover lookalike in front of the hostel, we met the other guys (Thomas Schwinge, Marco Gerards, Stefan Siegl and Ognyan Kulev) and had a discussion about Neal's and Marcus' plan to move to a persistent system. After dinner, I met the other Debian people in the Roi d'Espagne and hat some longer chats with Jeroen van Wolffelaar, Rob Bradford, Martin Michlmayr and Jordi Mallach, who I finally met for the first time and who did not cop out of FOSDEM this year as usual... The pub is getting more and more crowded each year, all the hackers barely fit even though they opened the balustrade this time as well. It was great to see everybody again and have a few beers. Martin and I then managed to find the way back to the hostel by foot. We had no developer room, and no talks in the Debian room either, so FOSDEM was a pretty relaxed event this year. I met some more familiar faces like Noel Koethe and Andreas Mueller and listened to a couple of talks, most notably Richard Stallman's and Jeff Waugh's keynotes and Hanna Wallach's talk about FLOSSPOLS. Stefan Siegl also managed to get GNU Mach working for both my 3Com PCMCIA NIC and my Orinoco PCMCIA WLAN card, confirming his title as Hurd "hacker of the month". On Saturday evening, we (at this time, Guillem Jover, Gianluca Guida, Bas Wijnen and Jeroen Dekkers had joined) had dinner with the french Hurd guys (Manuel Menal, Marc Dequenes, Richard Braun, Arnaud Fontaine and others) in an italian restaurant. At 10:40 PM, the waiter told us in a rather unfriendly tone that they would close at 11 and presented us with the bill, along with handing out the menu again so that we could look up our share. By the time the bill arrived the french part of the table (at 10:55 PM), the guys were pretty surprised by this whole business and complained loudly that they did not have a dessert yet and insistent on having one. After some more minutes of discussion, the waiter gave in and served their desserts, after which each of them paid his share with his carte bleue. I believe we left the restaurant around 11:30. On Sunday evening, we had dinner again (the french guys had left Bruxelles already) and then drove back to Germany after having desserts and coffee in a bar. We left Bruxelles at around midnight and arrived in Duesseldorf at 2:30 PM, so we were glad that Neal offered us to stay at his place. We had breakfast the next morning with him and Isabel and then I proceeded to drive back to Frankfurt in the early afternoon. FOSDEM rocked, as usual. After being with the Debian crowd for the first three years or so, and mostly sticking with the Hurd crowd last year, I think I managed a pretty good balance between the two this year. This will not have been my last FOSDEM.

I'm still getting a fair bit of feeback on moreutils. The latest release (0.3; still in Incoming) includes a new C implementation of sponge, and the README lists seven additional tools that I am considering or am in the process of adding (mime, ifcfg, and, not, z, tmp, and add). That's only a subset of things that have been suggested to me lately, seems that deciding what to include and what not will be the challange with moreutils (well, that and getting a license statement on everything, something tools of this magnatude often lack). So I'm documenting them in the README for now to see which ones people want. Also, Chung-chieh Shan pointed me at h4sh which lets you speak Haskell to your shell. Craziness!

I received an inquiry if soundtracker will work on Nokia 770.Looking at the specs, it doesn't sound like it's impossible,might have performance issues related to FPU.I am not quite sure if it will run fast enough (as in being able to play-back MOD files real-time) with a floating-point emulation,and not sure if it has a FPU. Even if it had a FPU I'm not quite sure Debian package will have FPU support.Nice project to experiment, though.

It's strange, but ever since I have been a Debian Developer, people start assuming I'll be interested in any random study. They'll put up a web page (which often doesn't even validate), and then start asking strange questions that have no link with reality whatsoever. On the one hand, I have better things to do than to cooperate with random studies from people I've never heard of before and probably never will hear of again. On the other hand, only by understanding will people see the light, and only by cooperating with such studies will one help people understand. But seeing the same mistakes over and over again is annoying me. So, here's Wouter's HOWTO perform a study on Open Source or Free Software (and get away with it without annoying people)

• Make sure you tell people up-front how much time your questionnaire will take. It's annoying as hell to see that after pressing 'submit', there's a second page which is at least as long as the previous one. And a third. And a fourth. Especially if you didn't plan for that, and have to leave soonishly.
The best way to do this is to either have all questions on one giant page, or (if that makes it too long) test-drive your questionnaire with a chronometer nearby.
• If your questionnaire contains multiple pages, don't break the back button. One questionnaire I participated in did this, resulting in me going back to change the answer to a question, and then suddenly finding that I couldn't go to the final page anymore, because the system thought I was submitting that page.
• If you have multiple choice questions, make sure the answers make sense. Having a question like Where do you use Linux? with possible answers at home, at work and at school is nice, but not if you can not choose more than one of them at the same time.
• Additionally for those of you doing multiple choice: make sure you have at least one open question, so that people can leave feedback about things they consider you left out. You're free to ignore that feedback in the final results of your study, but it may help you in better understanding the FLOSS movement.
• If English is not your native language, find someone who is very fluent in English and have them check it out. This is important because if your question is unclear, I might give you the wrong answer—which will make the results of your study rather worthless.
• Test your questionnaire on someone else before you ask hordes and hordes of FLOSS developers to fill it out, especially if you're not too familiar with the FLOSS movement yourself. FLOSS is very popular these days, it must be possible to find someone in your vicinity who's working with it, or who at least has a feel for how the community works. Their feedback may help in avoiding questions that are based on incorrect assumptions, and/or get out little things you didn't see yourself first.
• Do not mail people in private, but instead ask people in public about filling out the questionnaire. Remember the "Open" in "Open Source".
• Finally, be sure to explain what the study is trying to discover, what is going to happen with its findings, and where I can read the results when they're there. Not that I want to see the results of any possible study I participate in, but one never knows—I might be interested.

That's the most important bits, I guess. I'll probably add more in the future, if I see more things that annoy me. But for the time being, if you break three or more of the above rules, don't expect me to participate—I have better things to do with my time than to help every undergraduate on this planet with his or her study

Several people replied to my last blog post about a silly TV station scheduling ST: Enterprise at 8 AM, pointing me to MythTV. Well, point taken. However, to do that, you need a specific piece of hardware—one which I don't have. And a cable to my computer, which, I presume, isn't going to happen very soonishly. The alternative would be to use the VCR to videotape it. Not as good a quality, but at least it should work, right? Try again. I did try, but the VCR ate the fscking video tape. Maybe I shouldn't be angry with Kanaal 2 and be angry with the fact that hardware will always let you down, but that's just too easy.

Enrico has asked the candidates quite a few questions this year via his blog. To be honest, Enrico, I think you'd be better off posting your list to the -vote mailing list - that way the questions and answers will be seen by everybody looking for them, and they'll be archived.

Julien Blache wrote yesterday about problems in Debian. Personally, I never though about this, because since I am a Debian developer (4 years now), I just worked on my side, mainly alone. The only interactions I had with other developers was by mail, sometimes with my blog (via Planet Debian) or through the BTS. I pretty never read mailing-lists (not enough time to found interesting topics in a ocean of uninteresting trolls), and was not on IRC (too noisy). But, when recently, I tried to work in a team and with other developers, I just discovered what Julien try to explain, and I am a bit disapointed. I don't agree with all that Julien wrote. To be short, I think some people don't think for the project but for theirselves and their ego. And that really sucks, cause I've a *BIG* ego too, and I don't do that. No, I don't and I won't.
But I could. So, I will return to technical work, 'cause code is the only thing that really matters.

I’ve just returned from Istanbul where I spoke at zg r Yaz l m ve A k Kaynak G nleri 2006 (Free Software and Open Source Days 2006). I was last in Istanbul in 2004, and as then, I had an amazing time. Photos will be appearing in my Flickr photostream over the next few days. Thanks again to everyone who took the time to show me around and otherwise entertain me, especially Boran Puhalo lu, Sinan Tunal o lu, Nazl pek Mavu o lu, a l Ulu ahin and Haldun Bayhantopcu.

As I feel like being part of the silent majority Julien spoke about, I take the time to write down what I think about that “Teletubies vs Trolls” thing. Despite of all the goodwill Rapha l is capable of, I think he’s fighting here a wall of air, and this is looking like a big waste of time. I must say that I agree with Julien on this point, all the time spent for fighting ghosts is not spent in real work. Forgive me Raphael but I think that working on technical issues is far more important than trying to set a “Debian Social Policy” - yes, let’s name it like it should be.
We have so much to do… Couldn’t we leave trolls out of this? Just let them cry and yell and scream, just don’t pay attention to them. I still think this is the very best behaviour to adopt. Well, just do not feed the trolls.

Well, the title might be a little too optimistic, s/victory/battle/ if you prefer. Surely the next battle against software patents (not only) in Europe is coming up.

In case you haven't heard about it yet, visit the nosoftwarepatents-awards. Each month five (software) patents will be presented, which were issued despite the law prohibiting software patents and despite (formal) protests against them.

This month features such highlights as a "centralized database" and a "context menu".

The idea is to show, that a.) software patents exists (despite patent advocators claiming they don't) and b.) what a sheer nonsense such are.

BTW, your webshop is also patented, in case you didn't know. Selling over the network, paying with credit cards, sending offers after requests ? All patented. Shut down your business now ;-)

The webserver I've been running for the past year or two, my own creation, had been acting strangely lately. It got stuck at times and refused to serve requests. I knew of the problem for some time, but due to time constraints, I haven't touched the code in a very long while. Therefore, the problem never got fixed - and as it stands, it never will be, as I've given up working on Thy (and pretty much everything else), until I finally finish my studies. Originally, thy was written because the machine that powered my domain was not strong enough to run apache. The hardware got replaced about two times since then, and the current one is adequate enough, and the switch was made: I'm now running Apache 2.0. A few rough edges still remain - like SSL is not configured yet at all, but other than that, I think everything else that used to work, still works.

As I mentioned on debian-project recently, Broadcom has been very supportive of our MIPS port. They donated several fast MIPS development boards (dual-core 800 MHz) to a number of Debian developers as well as machines for our mips and mipsel buildd network. Without those boards, we'd have a hell of a time keeping up and certainly wouldn't meet the Vancouver requirements. Broadcom recently released a new chip, the 1480, which is a quad-core CPU, and I managed to get hold of a development board based on this chip. I had some trouble with FedEx because they weren't sure how to handle a shipment worth several grant to an individual who is a volunteer working on a project which legally doesn't exist in the UK. However, the FedEx lady was really nice and said she'd sort it out... and the next day the board turned up. Unfortunately, SMP support in the MIPS kernel was broken so I was only able to run the board in non-SMP mode: it really sucks having a quad-core CPU and then you can only use one core! There were also DMA errors when using an IDE PCI card. Fortunately, the SMP problems got solved in the meantime, and using the generic IDE driver works. Now that I have the board running, I compiled GCC 4.1 and my next step will be to build the Debian archive to see how well GCC 4.1 work on MIPS.

Wolfgang was right about SPL not being free. MDR is a library that ArgoUML will use. ArgoUML is in contrib at the moment because of Swing issues so it can’t be built and run with free software, but there are a lot of progresses in free Classpath based runtime. But now that ArgoUML will switch to MDR, we have another problem: SPL. It seems that SPL is not DFSG-compatible. Bad. I filed an issue on the Netbeans website (Issue#73161) to ask if they could change the license to one DFSG-compatible. If it’s not possible, I’ll have to package MDR to non-free and leave ArgoUML in contrib.

It looks like I’ve earnt another ID: CVE-2005-4720 - Firefox 1.0.6 segfaults on this malformed .html page. Still no news about the security bounty though. I’m tempted to prod people .. but I haven’t managed to get round to it yet. On the one hand it’s bad to push for things like that. On the other hand there is no way I’d cash the cheque, and it would look lovely hanging on my wall…. Nothing much to say about the Debian Project Leader election yet. I think it is pretty clear to me that the idea of a “team DPL” was a failure. (At least I saw nothing happen any different.) I hoped the current/previous DPL would do great things, but to be honest didn’t see much evidence of it. (I know that personal issues came up, which is understandable, but it was disappointing to see the lack of promised status reports.) I also utterly refuse to vote for anybody who mentions in their platforms “we’re all social disfunctional”. I’m not. I’m good with people, animals, and myself. I don’t need somebody reinforcing geek stereotypes in even the smallest way. I did have the vague hope we’d have a female DPL, but alas that doesn’t look like it will happen for a while longer. Something to think about for the next year perhaps? Ummm .. I’m not sure how valid people would consider my opinions given that I’ve been mostly driven away from Debian mailing lists, and have never been a big IRC users .. so I will stop commenting now!

I would have thought that three years after the start of the war, Iraq would be yet another forgotten war, as it tends to happen when murder, bombings, famine and corruption become the routine in some country or area. It's been nearly three years since the holy coalition made up of United States and the UK, with a selected group of allies which included the Spain of our beloved Aznar, invaded the country to save the poor iraqi people from the fierce Sadam. After a few months of hard fight against the bloody dictator, Iraq would finally be able to live in peace and Democracy, and the world would understand the goodness behind the reasoning that made the superpowers start the second war in Iraq, against the opinion of the UN security council and an overwhelming majority of the people in the planet. Today, after years of bloodbaths in different parts of Iraq, we're witnessing the start of a civil war. I hope the mass media stop talking about "the terrorists" now, because what's been going on for the last week is random people against random people. It makes me sick to think how bad the near future looks in Iraq. All of this happened in the name of freedom, or so they said. And then, it was in the name of the War on Terror , because Iraq was infested with terrorists (they never told us how they planned to stop that from happening). In the meanwhile, little they talk about the most wanted man on earth, uncle Osama. Today's edition of EL PAIS includes a translation of an article by Ahmed Rashid in The Washington Post's edition of February 26, apropos of George Bush's visit to Pakistan and Afghanistan this week. He's Welcome In Pakistan is surely worth a read; I'm sure Miguel will enjoy.

It's been a little while since I wrote about Asterisk. It's about time to update the story. I've been using Asterisk at home for awhile, but now we're going to use it at work. The need We have approximately 150 internal extensions here, and they are being supported by a Nortel PBX. This PBX is being end-of-lifed, and it would cost well over $100,000 to replace it, once the cost of the two required Windows servers (!) was factored in. Not only that, but it still isn't as flexible as Asterisk. Along with that, we have a need for internal wireless phones. We have a large manufacturing area, and we have people that would like to be able to use a wireless phone anywhere on the shop floor or office areas. No single cellphone company provides a signal that is strong enough to reach everywhere in the building -- not to mention that there would be big airtime fees. So we are planning to deploy 802.11b wireless phones for this purpose. Hardware The decision was made to go ahead with Asterisk. We will be replacing all office phones with Polycom IP501 units. This means running about 90 new runs of CAT5 to people's desks. For our Asterisk server, we got a HP DL385 2U server with dual dual-core Opteron 2GHz CPUs. We've really had good luck with Linux on these DL385s, and with HP's support. We got redundant power supplies, disks, fans, etc. on that machine. The CPU on here is probably more than we need, but telephones are very important to us and we wanted to make sure that we don't have any issues down the road. We purchased two A104d quad-T1 interface cards with hardware echo cancellation. Very nice cards. The drivers have been a little troublesome. But Sangoma's tech support is awesome. They logged onto our box and I was watching as they were hacking on the kernel module right there. Tech support like that is rare. I highly recommend Sangoma. We really need only one of those cards, but they're the only component of the Asterisk server that isn't completely standard. So the second is on hand as a spare. For our analog phones, we are using two Adtran TA 750 channel banks. Each has a T1 interface and a 50-pin telco ("Amphenol") connector for a punch block. So we can run 24 channels off each of those. Our consultants (see below) suggested getting them used from Colspar Communications. We found them fully loaded with FXS cards for $250 each. We bought three -- two for production use and one for a hot spare. These are very solid and nice units. The only problem we had is that the voicemail indicator lamps (MWI lights) on our old analog phones wouldn't light up. Turns out that Asterisk with a T1 channel bank uses digital FSK lamp, whereas our older analog phones expected a certain line voltage to indicate messages waiting. After some Googling, I found add-on FSK lamps from American Science & Surplus for $1.50 each. Nice. In our other building, we have a gigabit fiber-optic link, so we purchased an AudioCodes MP124 SIP-analog gateway. It's working well so far, except it's not working with voicemail indicator lamps at all. It seems to be a firmware issue that is incompatible with Asterisk in some way. We're investigating now. For wireless phones, we're using the Hitachi IP5000. We're not terribly pleased with the quality of wifi phones in general, but this one seems pretty solid. And it doesn't crash every few minutes like the Zyxel model we tried. The Telco Our current phone system has about 23 analog lines for interaction with the outside world. We wanted to get a voice T1 with PRI channel for the Asterisk system. Our local telephone company is Sprint, and this has been the annoying part. First they tried to quote us an Internet connection. Then it took a very long time for them to even get us a quote for the voice T1. And now we have signed the contracts but are still waiting for an install date. Consultants While I had used Asterisk before, it was in a home setting. Not exactly business-critical, and not dealing with hundreds of extensions, T1 lines, and all the rest. So it seemed reasonable to get someone experienced with that sort of thing to help us out and make sure we weren't making mistakes that would cost us down the road. I posted on the asterisk-biz mailing list describing what we would like to do. I got a bunch of supplies from consultants, and we wound up selecting Asteria Solutions Group. At the beginning, we wanted some advice about server sizing, phones that work well in business settings, etc. I think that most consultants are not used to working with people that have significant Linux experience, and a good deal of Asterisk experience, already. Asteria was a little surprised with our situation at first, I think, but has been very helpful. They've educated us on the ins and outs of T1 technology, pointed us to Colspar (which saved us a ton of money on analog gateways), and helped us with some obscure questions. They were also fine to have a much smaller involvement with our project than they would probably normally have. I highly recommend them. Surprises You'll never believe just how hard it is to buy phones from Polycom. They won't sell directly to people, nor will they even list authorized retailers on their website. You have to call them, leave a message, and in a few days they'll let you know where to go. Some online retailers such as atacomm sell Polycom phones, but they're not authorized to do so, so you don't get any warranty or have the right to get firmware from Polycom. What's more, Polycom usually expects people to need configuration assistance with their phones. But I think that when I told them we need 90 IP-501s, had already configured 5 on our network, and needed no assistance, they were happy to work with us. Reactions We've deployed desk phones all over by now. So office workers have two phones on their desk right now (one from the old system, one from the new). We've heard a lot of positive comments from people about the new phones. And all the features of Asterisk -- music on hold, flexible queues, etc -- will be really helpful here. Cost Even with the cost of all new phones, new CAT5 runs and labor for that, consulting time, etc., we still expect Asterisk to be far cheaper than the latest Nortel PBX. Also... I recently wrote an article about Asterisk for Free Software Magazine. I'll let you know when/if it gets published.