I received a surprising 13 responses to my previous post, which was certainly more than I expected and is one reason it's taken me a few days to follow up on it. (How do you pick someone from a group of 13 people based on just a paragraph or two? Clearly I'd like for someone to help all of these people get involved in Debian, but to do so solely by myself would be making a commitment that I just don't have time to come through on. So, it ends up being quite arbitrary. I pick who I think I'd most like working with and could make the most out of the opportunity, and even that is an arbitrary judgement based on very little.) One question asked by one of the people who emailed me was, "Why did you ask for someone who isn't involved in Debian already and who doesn't necessarily have the technical skills needed?" The answer to this question has several facets. For one, people already involved in a free software project tend to be busy people. The workload in projects tends to be concentrated in few hands, and many of those people who are already involved in a project don't need or want any more work. So, asking for someone not already involved in Debian increases the pool of people who might respond to such a request and actually be able to follow up on it. While this a valid reason, it still doesn't explain why I didn't just say, "it's okay if you're not already involved in Debian or don't know python" and not state a preference as to the skill level of the person who would respond to such a request. I did, however, have a specific reason for stating my preference. I asked specifically for someone who wasn't already involved in Debian and who didn't necessarily know python or consider themselves a competent programmer because I wanted to encourage people who don't consider themselves to already know enough to be a useful comaintainer to contact me. I've picked up a lot from following Geek Feminism on what sort of language turns minority groups like women away, and I wanted to ask in such a way that it didn't turn away people who aren't good at self-promotion or who are less sure of their skills, or who don't yet have the skills, men and women alike. Even I still sometimes internally question my own competence as a programmer, and my self-confidence has increased over the past few years. (For the curious, the responses I received were, at my guess, 85% male, 15% female. Whether that's a success or not depends on the demographics of those who read the post, but it is better than the ~98% male involvement in the FLOSS world altogether.) And I do think it's more of a contribution to the project to help someone new get involved than to try to convince someone who's already overcome the barrier to entry to take on some more work. We'll see how it turns out in the end. I have high hopes. (No pressure, soon-to-be-selected mentee.)

Release 1.0beta1 of Iceowl-extension (also known as Lightning), the calendaring extensions for Icedove, is now available in experimental. This version works with Icedove 3.0.1 which also lives in experimental at the moment. Open TODOs for Iceowl:

• reenable standalone build
• don't use internal cairo
• finish branding

Iceowl's current packaging git is here:

http://git.debian.org/?p=users/agx/iceowl.git

Any help on the above issues is greatly appreciated. Other open tasks that need fixing in order to get things in shape for Squeeze:

• Updating icedove-l10n and iceowl-l10n - both packages are looking for a maintainer
• Adding an icedove-dev package for 3.0 ...
• ... so we can build Enigmail for Icedove 3.0

Last night here at BSP I released nagios-plugins (1.4.14-1), which has a couple of fixes and enhancements. For more information, see the changelog.
The main change may, that with this version, the package should be installable on non-linux archs, where iputils-ping is not available. The downside of using inetutils-ping is, that its behavior is different from iputils-ping. As result of this, check_ping will timeout much often, even if there isn t any problem and you will have false positives. As suggested long ago, at least on this archs, you should consider to replace the use of check_ping with check_icmp.

For a long time we had a bug against the archive asking us to export a file similar to the Maintainers index, just for the Uploaders (aka Co-Maintainers). Back then it wasn t that easy, but this changed. A while ago I also got a patch from Emilio Pozuelo Monfort against the first bug asking for it (#120262 !, and so went to integrate it. Of course this told us about a deficit in daks code parsing the Uploaders field. No, it is not good to solely split on a comma, when we have at least one Maintainer with a comma in their name field. We now split on the end of a mail address, followed by a comma. This simple idea is from Alexander Reichle-Schmehl, I was always thinking of a more complicated parser for it But heck, why? Yes, this can easily go wrong, if people, for whatever reason, add a space in there. But it only harms them, not us, so I don t think it is a big problem. Let us help you shot in your own foot. :) The new file will be exported as Uploaders.gz right besides the Maintainers.gz we already have on every mirror in the indices/ directory, starting with the next dinstall run (that will start in 2 hours and some 42 minutes, at time of writing this entry). Until then you can find a version at my space, to poke around and find bugs. A good example is right at the top - a52dec. Bug already filed, they missed a comma between two Uploaders. Feel free to hunt for your own bugs. :) And while I am writing already: Are you working with data generated out of the Debian archive, but have to generate the data yourself? (Like people had with the Uploaders index in the past, for example). Feel free to ask for it to be generated during dinstall. If the data is available (or can be made) and makes sense to have for more than just a personal pet project, we are happy to merge patches, help with it, provide it. (And really, asking cost nothing, we can t do more than deny it).

It is well known that apt has an issue when it comes to resolving circular dependencies. Therefore, Debian bug reporters have set out to eradicate circular dependencies from the archive. This does, however, add significant bloat to the actual packages, and I am questioning why this is really necessary. For example, aide. aide has an aide-common package, depending on aide aide-binary. aide-binary is a virtual package by aide, aide-dynamic, and aide-xen. All three providers of aide-binary depend on aide-common again, which is a circular dependency. If I now follow the request posed in #545852 and remove aide-common s dependency on aide aide-binary, I ll have to cater for the case of the aide-binary bein absent in each and every helper script included in aide-common, which would drive the script s complexity up to a new level. I really hate that idea. Is it really necessary to work around apt s shortcomings by eliminating the case that apt doesn t handle well from the archive, and driving up other packages complexity (and the possibility of bugs in this added complexity)?

Debian BSP in Tokyo. Looking at packages... most of time spent with catching up with recent pbuilder changes and fixing cowbuilder / qemubuilder to go along with it.

Good people steal ideas, right? On that basis I setup a static domain to host the javascript and icons I use upon a few different sites & projects. This was preempted by the release of a new version of the excellent jQuery library. I also managed to put together a tremendous hack to solve a pretty annoying problem running multiple distributions from a single external kernel under KVM. Ubuntu users, in particular, will be well aware of dmesg SPAM coming from the use of CONFIG_SYSFS_DEPRECATED. In short the way that the kernel presents information beneath the /sys tree has changed over the life of the kernel - and this has a knock-on effect to the userspace supplied by different distributions and releases of GNU/Linux.

Some distributions need an "old" kernel and an "old" udev with "old" udev rules in order to create the appropriate device nodes such that the kernel will boot & mount its filesystems. (i.e. These need CONFIG_SYSFS_DEPRECATED to be set.) Conversely some distributions mandate a "new" minimum kernel version, and supply a "new" version of udev with "new" udev rules and they absolutely will not function when presented with an "old" kernel. (i.e. They must have kernels without CONFIG_SYSFS_DEPRECATED set.)

I've solved this problem via a kernel patch which is both evil and genius. The details are a little me-specific, but in short:

• devtmpfs is used to setup and mount an initial /dev tree before /sbin/init is launched..
• udev launches later and mounts a tmpfs over /dev such that it can start creating its own nodes.
• At this point evil begins: I've patched the kernel such that any attempt to mount a tmpfs filesystem at /dev is silently changed to mount a devtmpfss filesystem instead.
  • The alternative is that udev creates many nodes, but manages to fail to create the root & swap nodes such that the KVM guests fail to boot.

Ultimately udev doesn't get an empty /dev tree to play with, instead it finds one already pre-populated, such that any devices it cannot create are there regardless - because the devtmpfs implementation has already created them. Genius. And evil. So very evil. Meh. Steal that idea. I dare you .. (I'm impressed at how well devtmpfs works, and how easy I was able to make my "patch of evil"^tm. Just a few lines in fs/namespace.c.) ObSubject: The Last House On The Left

Bruce Everiss who is famous for being threatened with legal action by Evony has been writing about the supposed losses from game piracy, in his latest missive he copies the text from a number of blog comments without citing the original authors [1]. He copied my text without citing me as the author (which is at best shoddy journalism and by a fundamentalist attitude such as his could be considered as piracy). He also copied my text in with a bunch of other comments which he attributes to The thieves . It s unfortunate that Bruce doesn t seem capable of understanding irony, he wrote There is no doubt whatsoever that downloading and playing a game that should have been paid for is theft and then copied part of the text of my comment where I provided a dictionary definition of theft that directly contradicts his claim. If he was at all interested in quality writing he would cite his references and then when a dictionary is cited which disagrees with his opinion he would at least try to find a dictionary with a more agreeable definition. It shouldn t be THAT difficult to find a dictionary that has multiple definitions of theft of which one is agreeable to the MAFIAA [2]. Now if Bruce had properly read my comment he would have seen I ve started watching content from sites such as blip.tv (in the little time I have for such things) and I only play games that are part of the Debian distribution of Linux (free software) which makes it very clear to any reasonable interpretation that I am not a game pirate and probably not even a movie pirate. I did mention in a comment on Bruce s blog that the DVD experience of being forced to sit through a whinge about piracy was a factor that made buying a DVD a worse experience than downloading it, a concept that I expanded into a blog post on the relative technical merits of DVDs and pirate MP4 files [3]. That post received a number of interesting comments including one from Josselin Mouette which had some useful technical detail about subtitles and audio track storage. I had believed that there were some real technical advantages of DVDs but Josselin corrected me on this matter. Also one thing that is noteworthy is that Bruce seems to use a copyright picture in almost every post but he doesn t attribute any of them. It does seem unusual for someone to use commercial artwork without any copyright or trademark notices attached. This usually isn t a big deal for a blogger, a liberal interpretation of copyright and trademark law is usually expected in terms of blogging corporations will tend to be hesitant to invoke the Streisand effect by suing a blogger (EG Bruce blog came to fame when he was sued by Evony). But when a blogger is writing about the importance of not pirating anything it would seem sensible to go to the effort of citing trademark and copyright references and also mentioning the licence agreements under which the IP was used. I believe that any loss of customers and revenue by the MAFIAA and the gaming industry is due to the actions of the companies involved. They should just try to make their customers happy, otherwise they lose the customers. The same goes for bloggers. I read blogs written by people who disagree with me, and sometimes by people who offend me on occasion. But Bruce is making baseless claims while deliberately ignoring evidence. He is calling for strong anti-piracy measures while doing what could be considered as pirating my work. He uses words in ways that conflict with dictionary definitions, and he calls for an end to our current legal system by demanding punishment based on three accusations rather than any legal process. I even pointed out to Bruce that if there was a three strikes law regarding accusations of copyright infringement then his blog would be offline after three accusations by Evony. Sorry Bruce, if I was looking for irrational rants about copyright then I would look at what the members of the Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA) are doing [4]. The SFWA people demonstrate as much knowledge of computers and the Internet as Bruce does, but they are at least really good writers. If it was just me unsubscribing from Bruce s RSS feed then it wouldn t matter (I m one of tens of thousands of readers). But I expect that a large portion of the new readers Bruce acquired after being attacked by Evony will disappear when they see Bruce as the attacker and everyone who uses the Internet as a potential victim of the Three Strikes law.

• [1] http://www.bruceongames.com/2010/01/22/what-game-thieves-have-to-say-for-themselves/
• [2] http://mafiaa.org/
• [3] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2010/01/06/which-is-better-original-dvd-or-pirate-mp4/
• [4] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2007/09/23/dmca-and-sci-fi/

I know this is quite premature as we're just about to release 3.3, however development on 3.4 has already started in SVN and we've already implemented more than 20 requests from our features tracker. This is even bigger number than release 3.3 will have! Well the fact is that most of these things are cosmetic or tiny improvements, on the other side some of them were requested for very long time (the oldest one currently dates to 2003). The new features bring things such as direct blob download (thing we definitely should have earlier), links to documentation for SQL commands in highlighted SQL (what was quite easy, but nobody requested such thing and I added the feature after seeing that Adminer does this), possibility to directly bookmark most pages or exporting user privileges. See ChangeLog for more detailed list of features. You can try all new features on our demo server.

It seems that Sun doesn't care much about getting bugs fixed in Java.This bug for example causes rendering artifacts in Apache Batik, and is very visible with many SVG files. It causes circles to be rendered as approximated diamonds. It has been reported 9 years ago (the first time, there duplicates).I understand that there are both more important bugs, and that one must avoid introducing new bugs when fixing bugs. But there should be little dependencies on a broken circle rendering routine, so please just fix this cosmetic bug, too. One of the reports is even staged "Fix understood" ...A more important issue with Sun Java (known since 2005) is this bug, which effectively breaks Java IPv4 networking on Debian unstable now (which recently changed the IPv6-to-IPv4 fallback behaviour). So far, Sun has rated this as "request for enhancement". WTF?Sure, you can work around the bug easily - change /etc/sysctl.d/bindv6only.conf to use the value of 0 instead to re-enable IPv4 fallback - but after all, IPv4 networking is pretty much an essential Java feature.

So, as I'm not always sitting directly in front of machines that I'm working on I've been using various tools to get temporary network connections between completely seperate network blocks, for example, sitting on wireless outside of my home, connecting back in to the desktop at home, and then connecting to the virtual machines on that desktop - the virtual machines are on their own private network, which is bridged and then routed through the desktop. The desktop machine has an ipv6 tunnel setup using tinc to my main VPS. That in turn has a tunnel setup to he.net's ipv6 network... I then have my laptop configured to also use tinc to connect to my VPS, so lots of ipv6 over ipv4, really. From that I can then get a 'direct' ssh connection between my laptop and my desktop (OK, so it's actually going over 2 ipv6 over ipv4 tunnels to get there, but it "looks" direct), so, that gets me as far as the external network on that box. From here, we can run a vde_switch which is connected to a tun/tap interface that's part of the internal bridge, once we've got that running, I bring up another vde_switch on my laptop attached to another tun/tap interface purely for that network with a static ip configure on that interface... using the magic of dpipe I then connect the two vde_switches together using vde_plug, and as if by magic, I then have access to the internal networking of my virtual machines, meaning that I can now ssh directly in to the virtual machines without having to do anymore interesting ssh bouncing and port forwarding. It's a little sick, but it really does make remote working a lot easier to do, it's a vpn of sorts, I suppose, as all traffic is being thrown over ssh pipes or tinc (which in turn is encrypted using x509 certificates)... probably not the quickest of networks, but very very nice all the same.

In the last few days, I found the time to spend some with KVM and libvirt. Unfortunately, there is a subject that I haven t yet found a satisfying solution: Naming of block devices in guest instances. This is surely a common issue, but solutions are rare. Neither an article on Usenet (in German) nor the German version of this blog article has found solutions for the main question. I should have written this in English in the first place and am thus translating from German to english, hoping that there will be some answers and suggestions. KVM is quite inflexible when it coms to configure block devices. It is possible to define on the host, which files or whole devices from the host should be visible in the guest. The documentation suggests that devices should be brought into the guest with the virtio model, which needs suppport in the guest kernel. Importing a device as emulated ATA or SCSI device brings a performance penalty. The devices brought into the guest via virtio appear in the guest s dev as /dev/vd<x> and do also have their corresponding entries in /dev/disk/by-uuid and /dev/disk/by-path. The vd<x> node is simply numbered in consecutive order as hd<x> and sd<x>. /dev/disk/by-uuid is the correct UUID of the file system found on the device, at least if it s a block device partitioned inside the guest and formatted with ext3 (I didn t try anything else yet). The terminology of the /dev/disk/by-path node is not yet understood, and I am somewhat reluctant to assume the PCI paths of emulated hardware as stable. Looks like I am forced to configure inside the guest when I have changed the host s mass storage system (for example, after migration to a different file system or after new block devices have been added) to accommodate for the new order of the /dev/vd<x> or to have the UUID correctly configured. This is like calling for configuration errors. This is a reincarnation of the same issue that has been killed by LVM on Linuxes running on bare metal : The block device itself has a mnemonic name which is constant even in migration and copy actions. This works without file-system specific stuff like UUID or label, and wouldn t even be possible with a UUID (which won t be unique in this case). The mnemonic names of LVs are also available when the data is directly written to the raw device such as a CNFS buffer of a news server. I would love to have something like a paravirtualized device mapper interface which would allow to say in the host s configuration which of the host s LVs should be visible in the guest with which name in /dev/mapper. That way, the guest s configuration could remain stable during data wrangling operations on the host. One solution is to have a single LV for each guest and import this LV as /dev/vda into the guest. /dev/vda would then be partitioned like a real disk and have its own LVM installation. This would however need kpartx if one wants to access the data from the host, and loses flexibility when resizing file systems. These issues appear in every installation of KVM virtualization, and I would expect that there are gazillions of other possible solutions. I am interested in knowing how other people have tackled this issue and whether there are more possiblity that I haven t thought of before. Maybe there is a solution that doesn t leave me with the feeling of having implemented something ugly. Does the interface between the host s KVM and the guest s device mapper that I have been dreaming of maybe exist. Or is there any other possibility of configuring the device node s name in the guest Linux on the host side?

I received news a little while ago that my visa has been approved by the Brasilian consulate so I will be heading to Sao Paulo tomorrow for Campus Party. This enormous event takes place in a conference center filled with thousands of hackers camping out in tents. Apparently the connection speed is on the order of 10 gigabits. I'll be giving a talk on Open for Business, Open Source for America, a panel discussion with Simon Phipps (http://www.webmink.net) about the future of Open Source and a panel discussion about whether the corporate sponsored community model of Ubuntu has rendered the entirely organic community model of Debian obsolete (oooh, a hot one!) Since I'll have a smoking hot net connection at the show and will be camping there (should be interesting) I'll try to send updates. Stay tuned!

RCBW - #18 ... and RCBW is back! Here is this week squashes:

• bug #544879 - clutter - resurrect -doc package, fix gtk-doc related FTBFS
• bug #504980, bug #560513 - cryptonit - add missing #include for gcc 4.4 (bonus point: misc QA fixes)
• bug #504901 - dibbler - no longer valid gcc FTBFS
• bug #504869 - scim-bridge - closed (w maintainer) as unreproducible an already fixed gcc 4.4 bug
• bug #505390 - traverso - add missing #include for gcc 4.4
• bug #562846 - flim - drop Recommends on metamail (now gone)
• bug #526207 - jaula - closed as unreproducible a gcc 4.4 bug (recent flex adds cstdio by itself)

Most of the actually fixed missing include bugs above have benefited from patches by Martin Michlmayr, thanks! Also, this week squashing has benefited from a huge list of bugs which Luk has given me, some of the not-yet-fixed bugs there are a bit trickier than usual (e.g. missing #include bugs which got intertwined over time with const char * conversions bugs, which in turn require some far reaching code changes due to the propagation of function prototypes in unexpected code parts). Since I'll be leaving tomorrow morning for the BSP in M nchengladbach, I'll have a bit of time there to dive a bit more into the issues. Actually, what I fear most now is buying train tickets from Cologne to Moenchengladbach and back, since I'm totally unable to pronounce the name of the latter city (my German sucks, actually there is no such "my German" at all). Luckily, I've been told they've wonderful ticket-selling machines in Cologne See you there, and happy RC squashing!

I've been accumulating passwords recently. More than I could remember all in one go. I even got worried that I'd locked myself out of one of my own servers recently. So I decided to play it safe and store the passwords somewhere. However, plain text files, even on an encrypted disk, aren't the most secure plan, so I tried to go shopping for a tool that would store passwords in encrypted files and wouldn't be too inconvenient to use. I found a few (pwsafe, keysafe, keepassx, yapet and so on), but they all seem to be either graphical or using their own encryption scheme and (presumably) storage format. Being rather nervous about long-term data accessibility, I thus decided to roll my own script, that would be as simple as possible while doing just the required amount of work. I call the result sgeps, for simple GnuPG-encrypted password store . Note the initial s: I didn't invent any wheel.

• Data model: a list of key/value pairs (each being a string);
• Storage: serialisation using Perl's built-in Storable module;
• Encryption: the serialised data is GnuPG-encrypted;
• Hopefully secure: no password stored in plaintext files at any time.

The code comments should give an idea of the capabilities of sgeps:

  # Usage: sgeps --create                     to create the store
  #        sgeps --add <key>                  to add a key/value to the store
  #        sgeps --list                       to list existing keys
  #        sgeps --add --overwrite <key>      to replace a key/value

I trust both GnuPG and Perl to stay around for quite some time, so hopefully I can forget even the passwords I use very rarely and still be able to recover them later. Even in the event of a hard drive dying, since the encrypted store can now be backed up and burnt on DVDs. I just need to be careful about my GnuPG key. Interested people can grab sgeps from its Bazaar branch with bzr branch http://bzr.debian.org/users/lolando/sgeps/trunk/ or browse it on the web interface. I don't plan to make a Debian package for a hundred lines of Perl code, but if anyone is interested, feel free to include it in an existing package (moreutils maybe?).

Hello, Planet Debian. I'm pleased to have announced about the first Debian event in Thailand: Thailand MiniDebCamp 2010. This is a follow-up to Taiwan MiniDebConf 2009 in last September in Taipei. At the end of that event, we discussed about having a mini-DebCamp in Thailand during the New Year holidays. However, with many factors, it has been moved to this March. And the date has been settled on 13-19 March. The place will be Khon Kaen University (KKU) in Khon Kaen, a north-eastern province of Thailand (close to Lao, if you look for it in a map). In this event, we plan to arrange a Bug Squad Party for the Squeeze release, and some meetings between DDs and local people, to encourage more Debian activities in Thailand and nearby countries. Thailand has started its GNU/Linux development and usage since no later than 1997. Currently, we have projects like Thai Linux Working Group for upstream Thai resource developments; OpenTLE.Org and thaiopensource.org for local distros (Ubuntu-based); and some communities like ubuntuclub, debianclub, and more others for other distros. The user base is slowly growing, while developer base is yet growing more slowly. We have had domestic events occasionally. But certainly, an international one like this would effectively encourage more prospecters, as well as create closer cooperations with the global projects. We also hope this event to be a meeting point for developers from nearby regions. And internationalization, among other issues, can be discussed and worked out. So, please be invited to join and discuss. Please make sure to add your name to the Wiki page so we can prepare things for you, including accommodation. And feel free to propose your agenda in BarCamp style. It will be summarized some time before the event date. We also have a mailing list for updates and discussions.

Two years ago, I wrote about my switch from my beloved xmms to audacious. During this 2 years with Audacious, I suffered a bit. It was working quite fine, but I saw no big progress around it. Life happened, and I had to use a network system to play music. I started to use PulseAudio over TCP, but it does not work well, and does not work at all with Audacious (and even if the plugin is provided by upstream). So I decided to dump it. And some days ago I discovered Sonata, a MPD client. I never liked MPD so far because all clients I found were lame. But I really like Sonata. It allows me to listen music the way I still want: load everything in one playlist, listen everything randomly or type a song/artist to jump to it directly in the current playlist. It even has some nice feature (lyrics, so I'll be able to song out loud, covers, tag editing ) and is written in Python and GTK+ (some days I may even hack it!). You can rest in peace x11amp :-p

1. This afternoon I tried to unlock my old Three mobile phones for the purpose of getting cheap net access as described in my previous post [1]. I wanted to use Dodo 3G Internet (via the Optus network) for my parents which would cost them $139 per year and I wanted to use my old Three phone tethered to their PC as the 3G modem (cheaper than buying a new 3G modem). I took in 3 Three phones to the Three store to get unlocked, I actually have 4 old Three phones (my wife and I are each on our third Three phone) but I seem to have misplaced one. It turned out that the two newer phones (LG U890) can t be unlocked as they are permanently locked to the Three network. The older LG U8110 can be unlocked, doing this took 30 minutes of the Three employee speaking to other Three employees on the phone and I will now have to wait 4 days to receive an SMS with the unlock code. So the Three anti-competitive behavior of making it unreasonably difficult to get a phone unlocked and of selling phones that (supposedly) can never be unlocked wasted them 30 minutes of store employee time when other potential customers were queuing up as well as 30 minutes of employee time in their call center. If the call-center employee was based in Australia then as the minimum wage is $14.31 per hour [2] that would have cost them at least $14.31 for 2*30min of work, as a rule of thumb it s generally regarded that the costs of employing people are twice the salary (including costs of maintaining office/shop space, paying managers, doing paperwork, etc). So it probably cost Three about $29 to unlock one of my phones and tell me that the others can t be unlocked, when I find phone 4 it will cost them another $29. As $29 is my typical monthly bill this has got to make an impact on the profitability of Three. If they were smart they would have sent me an SMS when I got a new phone telling me whether the old phone can be unlocked and if so giving me the code to do so. For phones that can be unlocked I doubt that would make anyone unlock their phone who wouldn t do so anyway, and for phones that can t be unlocked they could encourage the owner to give the phone to someone who wants a phone for pre-paid use (thus locking in a new customer). It probably won t be worth the effort of cracking an LG U890 phone to save my parents $10 per annum. As I couldn t get the LG U8110 to talk to my laptop I guess that forces my parents to eventually use Three for 3G net access. But they could have just matched the Dodo price and got the same result without having me spend half an hour in their store. Update: I just enquired about ending my Three contract for 3G net access ($15 per month for 1G of data) in favor of the yearly prepaid option of $149 per annum for 12G. The prepaid option would save me $31 per annum and allow me to use more than 1G in the busy months. But it seems that I subscribed to a two year contract for that one and I have 6 months to go. Over those 6 months they will make about $15 extra in revenue from me while annoying me in the process, this probably isn t a good deal. As my 3G modem is locked to the Three network even if I didn t have a contract I would still be unable to use a different provider.


2. My mother phoned Optus about her Internet connection and discovered that she had supposedly renewed her Optus cable Internet contract in September last year. Presumably someone from Optus phoned my parents and asked what seemed like a routine do you want to keep using the Internet? question but was really a do you agree to a 2 year contract with a $250 penalty clause for exiting early? . This isn t the first time that Oprus has scammed my parents (previously they charged them rental for a phone that they never supplied), I guess that they have a practice of pulling such stunts on pensioners. I guess I ll have to call the TIO, which will end up costing them more than the $250 penalty clause. The irony here is that as Dodo uses the Optus network I would have used Optus by choice for my parents, but now that they are being scum I will willingly pay the extra $10 per annum to use Three (which while annoying aren t actually hostile).


3. Finally while Google is admirably living up to their don t be evil motto in regards to China [3] their conduct regarding Google Talk leaves a lot to be desired. Two employees of a company I work for use Google Talk for their instant messaging, this has a Windows client but also allows general access via the Jabber protocol. So these two guys wanted to talk to me via Jabber but Google would just send me email saying X has invited you to sign up for Google Talk so you can talk to each other for free over your computers , I received 5 such messages from a colleague who was particularly persistent. It seems impossible for the Google Talk server to send a chat request to my personal Jabber server (which works well with a variety of other Jabber servers). So I have now started using my Gmail address to talk via the Jabber protocol to other Gmail users. This means that I have a TCP connection to the Google servers open most of the time and Google can boast of having one more active Gmail user. But it doesn t seem to really provide them a benefit. I am going to keep using my main email address as my primary Jabber ID and only use my Gmail address for talking to Google Talk users and only when paid to do so. But as a result of this I recommend that everyone avoid Google Talk as much as possible. Use open Jabber servers such as the ones run by Jabber.org.

It seems to me that none of these companies are really gaining anything from trying to lock customers in. They would be better off spending their efforts on being friendly to people and making them want to be repeat users/customers.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2010/01/15/cheap-net-access-australia/
• [2] http://www.fairpay.gov.au/
• http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/new-approach-to-china.html

My subject line is a little over-dramatic, but only a little. Like many states, Kansas is facing a severe budget problem. Last year, the state cut many programs to the bone and beyond. Nursing homes, schools, universities, and charities have all been hard-hit. A 10% cut in Medicaid reimbursement rates and similar cuts to education have been devastating. Institutions are wondering how they can survive. Here s the thing: in rural communities, the very survival of the community is often dependent upon the survival of its schools, nursing home, hospital, or college. Take any one of those things away and the community begins a slow and painful death. This has happened over and over, and right now the Kansas legislature has a simple choice: Do they make a temporary 1% increase in sales tax, and also some increases in tobacco/alcohol taxes, or not? If they do, they can get funding back to normal levels. If they do not, funding will be cut even further, which will certainly cripple many institutions. There are a lot of people opposed to this tax. I m not one of them; I think it s key to the survival of our rural communities and the competitiveness of the state as a whole. 98.9% of Kansas is rural. See the gravity of the situation? Please, if you are a Kansas resident, write your representatives and leave a comment here saying you did (and what you wrote, if you like). The easiest way to find your state senator and representative is to go to a state website, then scroll down to information by county , click on your county, and then click on the districts to see a map if you need one. (The find by address feature seems to be hopelessly broken.) Here s what I wrote: Subject: Please raise my taxes I write with a request I don t make lightly: please raise my taxes, and support the 1% sales tax increase with the 3-year sunset provision. The consequences of failing to do so are terrible. Losing nursing homes or schools would mean the long-term death of many rural communities. Our community leaders are fearing not just for nursing homes being gone; there is a real threat of entire communities facing a slow extinction. The 10% Medicaid cuts already made are having a devastating impact on many quality institutions, and if left in place for any length of time could result in quality organizations closing, or refusing to accept Medicaid. And even deeper cuts are being contemplated. Even for those that plan well and have long term care insurance would be harmed if the nursing homes they might contemplate living in one day have closed due to today s Medicare cuts. I fear for our schools as well. Our two boys will be of school age
soon, and we live in a district that is of one of Kansas exceptionally strong rural schools. So far, our school is coping, but I am concerned about the drive to consolidate our rural schools, which would result in unreasonable travel distances and would be unlikely to duplicate the excellence of the schools we have now. I fear for our early childhood and university systems; without a good beginning in life, Kansas will face higher costs later. Without an affordable university system, Kansas will be less competitive. If small communities lose their schools, nursing homes, college students, or hospitals, some of them won t survive as towns. This hurts everyone in the state. When my wife and I moved from Indianapolis to rural Kansas in 2002, we, like many homebuyers, carefully studied the quality of schools and medical facilities available. If Kansas wants to be able to attract residents and the businesses that want a qualified labor pool, it must remain competitive. Forcing our best institutions to close a permanent problem over a short-term budget problem isn t going to help with that at all. It will hurt all of Kansas, rural and urban alike, if vast portions of our state become less attractive due to these problems. We likely would not have moved to the state at all if its rural communities were dead or dying. How many taxpaying Kansans will we lose if we let their communities suffer? Americans these days have plenty of choices where to live. I don t see many people choosing where to live based on a 1% difference in sales tax. I do see plenty of people making decisions based on quality of schools, hospitals, universities, roads, and even nursing homes. Please help save our rural communities and keep Kansas all of it competitive.