The recent goal for Haskell' has been to actually start committing modifications to the Haskell98 report. Well, as mentioned on the mailing list, we've started making changes relating to Pattern Guards. The current draft of the Haskell' report will be auto-generated whenever someone submits a patch. Thanks for setting up the build system, Malcolm! Haskell' ("Haskell Prime") is the working name of the next Haskell language standard. Haskell is the best programming language in the world.

I have been told that qemu-system-mips(needs cvs version), qemu-system-mipsel(needs cvs version), qemu-system-ppc(non-free video.x is not included in Debian) do not work.I am yet to be told that qemu-system-sparc doesn't work, but it apparently doesn't.qemu-system-arm, qemu, qemu-system-x86_64 seem to be the only ones that work at the moment.

Debootstrap was very inspiring.There initially was knowledge about using debootstrap and creating chroots; but that was a bit crude.pbuilder was one effort which wouldn't have started without debootstrap.Debootstrap has been used in many different ways, but by centralizing debootstrap debugging and bug tracking on pbuilder, and running daily regression tests on debootstrapas pbuilder testsuite, quality is assured.I think in that sense, debootstrapchanged a significant portion of Debian and the way Debian project handles quality.6 years. Touches me. Sniff.

We went to see a performance of Too hot too Handel [1], a Gospel/Blues/Jazz/Rock rendition of the Messiah, at the Auditorium Theater on Saturday. Two choirs comprising 120 singers, a full jazz (big) band with drums, electric and acoustic bass, electric organ, piano and about twenty brass instruments as well as an equal number of strings in the symphonic section, plus vocalists Rob Dixon (tenor), Victor Trent Cook (counter tenor) and Alfreda Burke (soprena) made for a very full sound in this beautiful theater. For apparent scheduling problems, the performance was moved from the Christmas season (in which Haendel's original Messiah is rather popular) to the Martin Luther King birthday weekend, which is appropriate enough. Even though quite a few seats were empty, the musicians had little problem to get the audience onto their feat with a fine performance, and a rousing finale. Recommended. [1] Not sure where the Umlaut went missing there. Oh well.

Junichi, the Debian vesion of qemu doesn't work for ppc.

Sometime this month, debootstrap turns six years old. I was thinking about this last night as I tweaked a new xen instance that the hosting provider had installed Debian on using debootstrap, while in the other window using a debootstraped system to investigate a weird apt premissions problem. All very standard, and between this kind of thing, installing Debian with d-i, and building packages with pbuilder, a lot of us would be lost without debootstrap now. The story of exactly how it came about is interesting, though it's blurred by time in my memory. Maybe AJ will correct me, but I think it went something like this:

• Aeons ago, every Debian system was bootstrapped using a root filesystem tarball, which was built using the basedisks.sh script in the boot-floppies source. That ugly thing hardcoded a bootstrap sequence that managed to work most of the time, and had a lot of code to work around issues in various packages in bae. IIRC it needed a local mirror, and lots of babysitting to keep it working.
• When I suggested that boot-floppies be rewritten, and modularised, I'm fairly sure that I pointed to basedisks.sh as one thing that would make a useful standlone module, but I can't find proof of that.
• In late 2000, AJ posted to a thread about one of the first d-i demo systems with something he was calling "base-deb", that is a recognisable prototype of debootstrap. It downloaded debs from a mirror and built a chroot on the fly.
• After some back and forth over the next couple weeks regarding how it would work with d-i, AJ released the first version of debootstrap on January 30th.
• It's sorta hard to believe now, but there was a lot of push-back on the idea of bootstrapping Debian on the fly, rather than using the old tarball. Much of it was inertia; some of it was legitimate concerns about whether it would work robustly. IIRC these concerns kept coming up right through the release of woody in 2002, the first version of Debian to install using debootstrap. In fact, woody still included a basedebs.tar, although it was built using debootstrap.
• While various rough edges were filed off over the years, there were no really big changes after that to debootstrap until 2005 then debootstrap finally got smart enough to resolve dependencies, rather than using the hardcoded lists of what packages to install in what order, that it had inherited from the boot-floppies.

Debootstrap is one of my favorite examples of a tool that ends up being much more general purpose than was first envisioned (at least by me; AJ may have known all along). The collection of stuff that has grown up around it and the way it's changed how both Debian developers and users work is pretty impressive.

Today I woke up with a strong determination to do some badly needed house cleaning. A series of rushed travels have left a few rooms full of stuff all over the place, after I emptied a bag or two to be able to pack on time. Just before going to Tunisia, I decided my wallet was way too fat so I got rid of shopping receipts and other random shit I had in it. That included quite a few PGP keys from people I had been collecting in previous travels, and I had forgotten about. So, armed with my willingness to get rid of all of those dust puppies, first thing I find in the living room is the pile of wallet papers, and my clever procrastinating mind apparently thought it was time to postpone real cleaning; instead I needed to sit down and sign all of those really old PGP keys. Many of you reading this will have got a few emails from me this morning. It was about time! Some of the silly strips of paper dated back to the Open Source World Conference 2004 in M laga, when a decent group of Debian Developers gathered in a really small hacking room and talked about some Debian topics. Signing the keys has let me identify a few non-revoked ids which really should be, as the accounts are no longer valid, etc.; many others have greylisted me for a while and finally accepted my email. There was one mail recipient which may have gone a bit too far with the anti-spam policies, though:

9323170A74B     4007 Sun Jan 14 17:55:38  jordi@nubol.oskuro.net
(host mail-dtag.reichmann.net[62.104.43.214] said: 421 call 09001000057 for admin support (in reply to MAIL FROM command))
                                         alexander@schmehl.info

Alexander, I'm not doing calls to Germany to send your key, but I can resend if you want, once you open up your mail server... (my tries to knoepix.org also failed). It seems I have misplaced a few keys from the Ubuntu Summit in Sydney, but I think I know where to find that sheet. More in 2 or 3 years! PS: dust puppies are alive and well, they managed to survive yet another tough day.

I wrote SPI gives away opensource.org and opensource.net and Bruce Byfield wrote SPI to transfer domain names to OSI - I think it's interesting to see how differently we view the disagreement. One possible reason for the difference is that the email discussion around this resolution happened on private lists. I saw the December meeting notice a couple of days before the meeting, sent the board a request that they fix member communications and then started a discussion about giving away the opensource domains with:

"SPI still holds the opensource domains because SPI is a membership controlled organisation and OSI was a self-perpetuating board; and OSI had not done enough to balance their bad licence proliferation work. Why isn't that mentioned in the proposal? Why does 2006-11-18.dbg.mjs.1 not mention 2005-07-26.bp.1? Is it good to keep reposting rejected proposals until they pass? Why is the SPI board being asked again to surrender the domains while OSI is unreformed?"

The reason I started the discussion on spi-private was Josh Berkus writing

"If you think it's important that we should drag it onto spi-private, though, I suppose we should."

which rather suggested a private list was the appropriate venue. As Neil wrote:

"Some discussion has occured on the spi-private mailing list as to how the opensource.org resolution has been handled by the board."

That's putting it mildly. I wrote about the lack of public discussion (as mentioned in my previous report):

"I still don't see how some board members reconcile their votes to give away community assets with their promises. How the devil does board expect members to oversee it when board hides its operations from our view?"

There is a report on the discussion at the next meeting, which will hopefully put the reasons on the public record at last. Unsurprisingly, the first January 2007 meeting agenda omitted my member communications request, but board member Jimmy Kaplowitz accepted my reminder.

I just tried installing the hurd for qemu environment.the Debian official ports page seems to be up-to-date and good. Which is nice to know.

I've been trying to see what really works with qemu.I have not been successful with ppc, I do not seem to be able to get the kernel booting.arm seems to work, but Debian does not distribute kernel for versatilepb.i386, x86_64 seem to be fine.mips and mipsel can't find the root file system for some reason.Hmmm.I followed aurelien's excellent procedures, but it doesn't seem to work.Looking at the logs, I have a bad feeling that this kernel may be ignoring my command-line options, or qemu may be failing to pass the command-line options to the kernel.Something tells me that powerpc kernel needs some preptool hacking, and thus needs modification for command-linehandling, and I have a weird feeling that it might be similar for mips. Shrug.Hmm... so Debian ppc kernel has CONFIG_CMDLINE="console=ttyS0,9600 console=tty0", if I can change that, it would be more interesting.Debian mips qemu kernel has CONFIG_CMDLINE="" I wonder if anyone actually managed to use this kernel for qemu booting...

I am ansiouxly waiting for the Second Season of The IT Crowd. The first episode was supposed to have been aired on January 5th, but so far, no news. In this case, no news is not good news (at least for me).

In the meantime, feel free to explore pics from the IT Crowd set, and peek at the shelves, and see what treasures you recognize or find there. Here is a short, but to the point interview with Graham Linehan, its creator, which I want to partly quote:

Is the show an attack on 'geeks'? No way, no how. I know that's how some will take it but in the end it's very much a celebration of geekdom, geekery, whatever. I consider myself a geek and I'm proud of it.

They even want to know what your IT Crowd looks like. So send your pics to Aunt Irma!

Who knew that bus shelters could be so cool? Polar Inertia has some awesome photos of soviet era bus shelters…

Just a quick reminder: if you were planning on going to the X.Org Developers' Conference in the Bay Area, from the 7th-9th of February, then please make sure you've registered on the page. If you weren't planning to come and you work on X or related fields of endeavour (toolkits, desktops, maybe you're an IHV), then you should consider coming along as well. There'll be a mix of scheduled talks, random freestyle hacking, corridor schmoozing, dinners, after-dinner fun, and a whole world more.

If you'd like to come but your pockets don't go quite that deep, please consider applying for sponsorship. The Foundation is willing to pay for travel and accommodation to developers who couldn't otherwise attend.

Hope to see you in sunny(ish) California!

From The New York Times:

CARACAS, Venezuela, Jan. 10 President Hugo Ch vez was sworn in to a new six-year term at a ceremony here on Wednesday in which he described Jesus as “the greatest socialist in history” and pledged to speed Venezuela s metamorphosis into a Socialist country. “Fatherland! Socialism or death, I swear it!” Mr. Ch vez yelled as he was sworn in and given the presidential sash and a golden key to the tomb where the remains of Sim n Bol var, the South American liberator, are interred.

/me cheers

The biggest party in Bavaria and part of the current german government, CSU, has announced that they want to make the "production and distribution of killer-games" illegal in germany. They claim it's because of a recent highschool shooting (no fatalities except the shooter; there was one other highschool shooting in germany a few years ago with 16 fatalities. Yes, that is 17 fatalities in over 40 years, the 42 years old amok runner back then didn't play killer games, I guess, although he used a flame thrower...). This would make the production and distribution in Germany unlawful, since we include games such as overkill, tremulous and openarena. Other distributions such as SuSE probably include some games that classify as "killer games" as well. Also note that "distribution" is a rather wide term. Does it apply to web sites? ISPs? If there is an online killer game, is the ISP "distributing" it? Polticians (especially those from CSU/CDU/SPD) are such a bunch of idiots. Please do NOT ever again vote for CSU. Software patents, killer games, "Problemfrauen & Schadbären", surveillance cameras and other surveillance, military inside germany (note that in desaster cases such as the flooding some years ago we could already deploy soldats without extra laws), shooting down of civilian airplanes, transrapid, reducing math and natural sciences in highschools, "google earth threatens worldcup security", police installing trojans on home PCs (because criminals don't install virus scanners?), kicking "irritating" students out of school, study fees, ... Often they make George W. Bush look like a genius, don't they? They don't do any important stuff, but just say whatever a majority people might want to hear. They waste our money (Transrapid). They destroy our biggest resource (changes in school system and university system, which will reduce average knowledge in germany a lot). They do lots of stupid things, which heavily invade privacy or public safety (military, surveillance) with no benefits in safety and many of which even where only stopped because they violated our constitution. Do not vote for them! [Updates: Daniel, sorry for posting a non-english post to planet. I again put it into the wrong category; I intended to do a longer post (this one) in english later on. For clarification: CSU is the sister party of CDU, these parties have an arrangement not to compete by region and are closely affiliated. On the nation-wide level they have a joint list, which often is called CDUCSU. So they're not just an "affiliate", but a strong part of the ruling party. Holger Levsen pointed out we are likely going to violate some laws much earlier by distributing ("hacker-") tools such as nmap, ettercap or whireshark.]

• echo 1 > /proc/sys/vm/block_dump
  
  The above command sets a sysctl to cause the kernel to log all disk writes. Below is a sample of the output from it. Beware that there is a lot of data.
  
  Jan 10 09:05:53 aeon kernel: kjournald(1048): WRITE block XXX152 on dm-6
  Jan 10 09:05:53 aeon kernel: kjournald(1048): WRITE block XXX160 on dm-6
  Jan 10 09:05:53 aeon kernel: kjournald(1048): WRITE block XXX168 on dm-6
  Jan 10 09:05:54 aeon kernel: kpowersave(5671): READ block XXX384 on dm-7
  Jan 10 09:05:54 aeon kernel: kpowersave(5671): READ block XXX400 on dm-7
  Jan 10 09:05:54 aeon kernel: kpowersave(5671): READ block XXX408 on dm-7
  Jan 10 09:05:54 aeon kernel: bash(5803): dirtied inode XXXXXX1943 (block_dump) on proc
  


• Prefixing a bash command with ' ' will prevent a ! operator from running it. For example if you had just entered the command " ls -al /" then "!l" would not repeat it but would instead match the preceeding command that started with a 'l'. On SLES-10 a preceeding space also makes the command not appear in
  the history while on Debian/etch it does (both run Bash 3.1).
  


• LD_PRELOAD=/lib/libmemusage.so ls > /dev/null
  
  The above LD_PRELOAD will cause a dump to stderr of data about all memory allocations performed by the program in question. Below is a sample of the output.
  
  

  Memory usage summary: heap total: 28543, heap peak: 20135, stack peak: 9844
           total calls   total memory   failed calls
   malloc          85          28543              0
  realloc          11              0              0   (in place: 11, dec: 11)
   calloc           0              0              0
     free          21          12107
  Histogram for block sizes:
      0-15             29  30% ==================================================
     16-31              5   5% ========
     32-47             10  10% =================
     48-63             14  14% ========================
     64-79              4   4% ======
     80-95              1   1% =
     96-111            20  20% ==================================
    112-127             2   2% ===
    208-223             1   1% =
    352-367             4   4% ======
    384-399             1   1% =
    480-495             1   1% =
   1536-1551            1   1% =
   4096-4111            1   1% =
   4112-4127            1   1% =
  12800-12815           1   1% =
  

..or he's not telling us something. If the multi-year exclusive agreement is true, then the goals are probably unachievable. In the keynote yesterday, Jobs put out there that almost a billion phones are sold each year to consumers. Granted, most of these are regular phones without the whiz-bang and special features of the iPhone -- and are usually free to the consumer, subsidized by the contract agreements. Still, he set what most would consider a modest goal, of getting 1% of the cell phone sales - 10 million phones, by the end of 2008.

However, lets do some napkin math. A very small percentage of phones out there today are smart phones. C Net says that 37.4 million smart phones out there. This is probably a pretty conservative estimate by now -- the Gartner study was released in October. Let's give the smart phone people the benefit of the doubt and say that usage triples by the end of 2008. That makes about 100 million smart phones out there. 10 million is ten percent of that market.

Let's look at the math another way. Cingular has 58 million subscribers. Assuming that they gain 20% per year, they will have 68 million at the end of 2008. If Apple is aiming at 10 million phones, that is one out of every seven Cingular customers. Next time you walk down the street, notice count 7 people that you can notice have a phone. If Apple makes its goal, one of those 7 people will own a iPhone, and will have shelled out at least half a grand on it.

These are amazingly high goals for a company that is new in the market. Granted, the iPhone is pretty revolutionary, but I don't think Steve is that crazy. I'm betting that he has something up his sleeve that will help him meet or beat this 10 million goal.

One of the most typical religious traditions in Spain, within the Xmas celebrations, is the Kings’ day (”D a de Reyes”), which is celebrated every year on the 6th of January remembering the arrival of the three Kings to bring their presents to baby Jesus. It is quite typical to have presents that day, and one of the things I got this year was an external 2.5′’ HD case with multimedia playing capacity. I also got a 120 Gb 2.5′’ HD for it. The strongest point I had for it was that my brother already has one and it seems to support many file formats and codecs without problem. In my very short experience with it, just a few days for the moment, it has been able to reproduce all the films I have tried. The main drawback is that it only supports VFAT/FAT32 and NTFS partitions, and only 2 different partitions, no more. Thus, I had to cope with NTFS if I wanted to use the whole HD. I created one VFAT partition as big as supported by that filesystem (32 Gb, with a file limit of 4 Gb) just in case I need it when I go to some friends’ house, and another NTFS partition for the rest of the disk. The next point was to be able to read and write to it from my Debian-powered computer. Reading NTFS is no problem at all, as it seems to be built-in in the kernel by default, but for being able to write on it, I had to use ntfs-3g. It seems to work perfect for me, on an Intel-compatible 32bit computer.

Long-ago San Francisco Cacophony Society leader and early Burning Man organizer John Law is calling for the release of the Burning Man trademark into the public domain. An interesting story and some interesting questions about process. Burning Man is an event and a culture dear to my heart; I wonder how this is going to work out. Thanks to Scott Beale for his story on the subject; he knows the principals much better than I do. tags: burning man john law trademark public domain

Dear Lazyweb So, I was trying to read some documentation on my little Toshiba Port g and also lie down on the couch and also drink a beer, and these three activities weren't mutually compatible and I spilled some beer on my keyboard (and lap). Doh. I dried it off as best I could, and turned it upside-down like a teepee to dry overnight so the booze and moisture and sugar would go out of the computer instead of further in. Which seems to have paid off: the computer's running fine now. Except that the 'R' and 'G' keys don't work. They're not particularly sticky, they just don't register any key events when pressed. So, my question: what's my next step? Is there some trick I can do? Or am I just going to have to get good at lipograms? Drop me a line at evan@prodromou.name if you have any ideas. tags: lazyweb r g toshiba laptop beer keyboard

Father-Daughter Night Maj started French classes at the fantastico Montreal YMCA Language School. (I'm taking classes in German at the Montreal Goethe Institute starting next week; we came up with the idea of taking language classes independently.) Since Mama was out of the house from 5PM to 9PM, I got to do most of the evening prep for the night. Which was fun. I made Amita June and myself some ravioli and ros sauce, and we put a bowl in the fridge for Maj, too. Then we watched about 20 minutes of Babe, which had lots of cows and ducks and chickens and stuff she likes watching, but I was too worried that someone was going to get killed and eaten to enjoy watching it with her. So we did a bath -- she figured out how to make her rubber duck squirt water into the air, and that was worth about 20 minutes of giggles right there. Then we read some books, and by that point she was really ready for bed, and fell right asleep. We've been doing really good this week with going to sleep. I mentioned before that she's weaning from night nursing, so I'm doing most of the putting-to-bed and keeping-asleep work around here. It's been fun and rewarding; sleeping babies are great. tags: amitajune ymca babe maj french language lessons

Snow! It snowed today in Montreal! Just a little bit, but still. Hooray for us. tags: montreal winter snow

Googie I also stumbled across the word Googie architecture this evening. Interesting term and comfort food for the California native's soul. tags: googie architecture california

yulblog Tomorrow night (20 Niv se or 10 January for those of you who still use that oppressive Gregorian calendar) we've got the misnomered First Wednesday Get-Together for yulblog. The date was moved back from the very first Wednesday of the month to the second Wednesday to give some space around New Year's Day. I think the novelty has got people interesting in attending; I've talked to more than one person who's going to go. So, I'm going too. At the Quincaillerie at 980 Rachel, 8PM. tags: yulblog first wednesday quincaillerie

Effin' MyBlogLog So, I signed up for that MyBlogLog a while ago (see Journal/29 Frimaire CCXV), just to see how it worked. But I disconnected it from my own site since I thought the click-tracking was a little invasive. But I must have some cookies still left around, because I keep looking at sites like Read/WriteWeb, which has a nice article about OpenID, and I'm reading along and then there's a picture of me right on the page. Inserted from the MyBlogLog script, but it scares the crap out of me when it happens. Effin' MyBlogLog! tags: mybloglog readwriteweb