1. My Orange 3G mobile broadband USB modem won't operate properly with gnome-ppp because it doesn't use a real username or password and needs more customised chatscript support than gnome-ppp appears to be able to support.


2. I stopped using network-manager-gnome and started using wicd instead due to problems with nm-applet at that time, which doesn't see the USB modem (and doesn't drop wlan0 for it either). I'm not sure if nm-applet would now work with the USB modem.


3. I've got the modem working with sudo pon orange but I wanted a GUI.

Instead - and, frankly, just as an experiment to get used to auto-detecting things - I decided to write a little program that puts a status icon in place if HAL reports no modem capability, then raises a simple window to manage the connection when the modem becomes available. (I had a shell script using zenity that was almost good enough but without automated launch.)

The window is trivially simple, it just lists the available connections in /etc/ppp/peers and has a toggle button to connect or disconnect the selected connection. Almost no error checking, no configuration support for the pon scripts themselves. I might add a default connection using gconf later. Yes, I know it's HAL but PolicyKit/DeviceKit just seemed too complicated when it was simpler to use libhal's own dbus support.

I'm happy to just use this for me but if anyone else is interested in this kind of app, I might be persuaded to put the source code somewhere public and continue development with a view to uploading to Debian. Naturally, if gnome-ppp or wicd could be adapted to replace it, that would be good too. (I'll file wishlist bugs if it isn't just me who wants this - I only need this functionality for a few months and a quick and dirty version is enough just for me. By the time the bugs are fixed, I probably won't be using mobile broadband any more.)

Working on another laptop, I was missing my quiltrc settings. I think, I got them from a this email by Marco d Itri. Perhaps it is of help to somebody (for example, when I go searching for it again). BTW, I changed it locally to check only for debian folder in parent directories and create debian/patches automatically if needed: I d rather end up with a patches dir inside the debian folder instead of having it at a random place in the package sources when adding the first quilt patch. I wonder if we should ship this with the quilt package!?

I ve been having some cooling problems with my Thinkpad recently. It s an old model T41p which is outside the service period so IBM/Lenovo won t help me (at least not unless I give them more money). If I run it for a few minutes at maximum CPU when the ambient temperature is about 20C then it gets to 90C, apparently 93C is the temperature at which it turns itself off, so obviously I need to do something to keep it cool. On the really hot days of summer my air-conditioners can t keep any part of my house below 30C, so on such days I can t do any compiles on my Thinkpad or watch videos. My Thinkpad seems to idle at a temperature that is about 35C higher than the ambient temperature. At this rate the system could get close to it s maximum temperature on a 45C day by just idling! Not that I plan to have a warm Thinkpad on my lap if I ever happen to be outside on such a hot day. I suspect that a large part of the problem is the dust that has accumulated inside the machine. I asked about this on the LUV mailing list and Andrew Chalmers suggested The Chaos Manor review of taking a Thinkpad T41p apart [1]. The Chaos Manor guy wanted to replace his CPU with a faster one so he had to get access to all the same bits. I followed the instructions until I got to the stage of prying the heatsink off the video chip. I figured that I will never be able to attach it as well as it is currently attached so I will get different cooling problems if I go any further. Taking it apart to that degree was a moderate amount of work, getting the keyboard bezel off was the most difficult part, and taking the palm-rest off required removing bits of plastic that were stuck in place to cover screw holes which will probably fall off in a week or two. Probably everyone who owns a T41p that they regularly use has a similar problem to me as all such machines have been out of support long enough to have accumulated a lot of dust. So I recommend that other T41p owners not disassemble their machine as much as I did, but instead go for my plan B which is to blow compressed air through the CPU cooling system. Doing this merely requires removing the keyboard. One tip that I have heard is that you should hold the fan in place when blowing compressed air as the pressure of the air may spin the fan fast enough to generate enough electricity to damage the motherboard or damage it s bearings. But you might want to wait until I ve got my Thinkpad done before you blow compressed air through yours, it could very well be destroyed. The other option is to try and use software to control the temperature. Patricia Fraser suggested controlling the fan speed [2]. I did some experiments and found that increasing the fan speed dramatically slowed the increase in the temperature. A 10 minute build is almost certain to bring the temperature to dangerous levels in a default configuration, but it seems that if I set the fan to maximum speed before starting the build then I can mitigate this problem. Most programs that I work on will compile in significantly less than 10 minutes. Another possibility that occurred to me is that of limiting the speed of the system. It seems that ACPI has support for reducing the CPU frequency when the temperature rises too much, but Matthew Garrett has pointed out that this effectively increases the amount of energy used (and heat dissipated) for any given quantity of work [3]. So what I want to do is to cause the CPU to idle periodically when it gets too hot. I ve been idly considering writing a program that uses SIGSTOP and SIGCONT to control the operation of programs such as make, or writing a program that creates a new pty (like script) and pauses the output whenever the CPU gets too hot. Of course the easy option would be to figure out how to set the threshold temperature where the CPU speed is limited. Which is made slightly more complicated by my choice of kernel 2.6.30 for Ext4 support. Now the kernel doesn t work with my acpid and I m starting to get forced into an upgrade to Debian/Testing. Does anyone have any ideas?

• [1] http://www.chaosmanorreviews.com/open_archives/sl_20070205.php
• [2] http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/How_to_control_fan_speed
• [3] http://mjg59.livejournal.com/88608.html

If I run GNU time with some large program, I get the following output:
604.90user 13.16system 11:05.56elapsed 92%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 0maxresident)k
712inputs+0outputs (5major+76648minor)pagefaults 0swaps Question I would guess that maxresident would refer to maximum resident memory usage of the program that I ran, but why is it always zero?

We've got a walk-in wardrobe in the master bedroom of our new place, and the existing fittings were pretty crappy, so as part of the repaint, I ripped out the old stuff, and we bought some new elfa stuff from The Container Store. We did the initial design a couple of weekends ago, and went back today to actually buy the stuff. The whole process is pretty slick. You rock up with your measurements of the space, and a designer fiddles around with some special CAD software and does up a design for you, and that spits out a pick list of all of the bits you need, as well as what needs to be cut to custom lengths. A couple of hours later, you come back, and they wheel out a cart load of bits and pieces, you put it in your car and head home to put it all together. I was initially a bit worried about the assembly, but it's even easier than IKEA. You get tailored instructions for your design, and the only point at which it anchors to the wall is at the top, and then everything hangs from there, so it's pretty hard to screw it up, and it's all adjustable. Added bonus: in an earthquake, it moves with the tremors instead of toppling over or ripping itself out of the wall. I'm very impressed by the product, and absolutely love the result. It only took us a couple of hours tonight to slap everything together.

Funnily, I just discovered while digging in a user issue of my pet package geneweb, that "start-stop-daemon" has a "--umask" switch, designed exactly for doing what I currently do with a wrapper script in the package..:-) After all, it's only 3.5 years that it's sitting here waiting for me..:-) Looks like I'll have to do an upload for geneweb which I'll do happily as it will drop what I consider a quite bad hack.

"We are currently working on getting the code shipped out, we have your shipping address on file and will ship the code out as soon as it is ready, this will be by the end of this month."

2/10, must try harder. Even ignoring the fact that it's taking the best part of two months to get from shipping binaries to shipping source, it'll be interesting to see which version of the firmware the source release corresponds to given that the 1.1.0 update included a new kernel.

Speaking of firmware updates - as shipped, the nook was a disaster. The firmware update improved things greatly, but I'm still stuck with cases where books render with the last couple of words in a page left out, and the order of books in the local content library is now based on last modification time rather than, say, author name. The continuing lack of any way to implement catagorisation or provide worthwhile metadata means that it's frustrating having to remember which order the books in a series go in. The fact that there's even a distinction between content you've obtained from B&N and content you've obtained from elsewhere is mindboggling. You need to explicitly switch between the two, which means that collections are broken up if you've had the audacity to buy some books from B&N and some books from elsewhere.

Having now spent a while travelling with the nook, it's clear that it's still not an especially effective example of its type. If my Sony hadn't suffered an unfortunate accident, I'd be using it instead. The nook's hardware is significantly better and as a platform it's got much more potential, but it just doesn't do a terribly good job at its core role - reading books. It'll get better with time, but if you're in the market for something that actually works today then go elsewhere.

There's other little things that are upsetting at a conceptual level. The 1.0.0 firmware will flash unsigned firmware, which is useful[1] but also an obvious wtf. The filesystem is full of scripts that are world writable and executed as root. There's a libGLES, but the coverflow implementation appears to be handled entirely in software. There's a general feeling that the platform's been put together by people who either don't know what they're doing, don't care about doing it properly or were working under sufficient time constraints that getting it right wasn't an option. I'm really not impressed.

[1] Especially given that the 1.1.0 firmware will happily flash the 1.0.0 firmware...

I m unaware of any free tool to perform OCR on a PDF and embed the resulting data in the PDF itself so it is text-searchable. If anyone knows of one, let me know. In the meantime, I use Acrobat Professional for this essential functionality. High resolution PDFs produced by my scanner (HP Officejet Pro L7700) usually give the following error when I try to perform Acrobat OCR: This page is larger than the maximum page size of 45 inches by 45 inches. Surprisingly, there doesn t seem to be any way to resize the page size of a PDF within Acrobat. It s possible to print to a new PDF of the correct size, but this operation cannot easily be batched. If I apply the crop tool to resize the page in Acrobat, I get this error: Page size may not be reduced. Many report these issues in Adobe s forums. The most common responses suggest reconfiguring the scanner or buying a new one. I found nothing quick and easy after some googling for a simple ghostscript recipe to perform the batch pre-processing necessary to allow Acrobat to do the OCR. It s not hard to do, just a bit of a trial-and-error pain to get the right switches. For posterity, then, here is a simple command-line to make this happen (here under Windows, but could obviously easily be adapted for any other platform). First, download the latest ghostscript for your platform (at this time, 8.64 for Windows). Then: gswin32c -dQUIET -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sPAPERSIZE=letter -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=OUTPUT.pdf -dPDFFitPage INPUT.pdf And a simple inelegant script to batch process (again, under Windows/cygwin, but easily adaptable). Feel free to make more elegant:

#!/bin/bash
for x in "$@"
do
echo -n Processing $x ...
if [ ! -e "$x" ]
then
echo File $x missing. Exiting.
exit 1
fi
if [ -e gs_shrink_to_letter.pdf ]
then
echo Tempfile gs_shrink_to_letter.pdf exists. Exiting.
exit 1
fi
if ( gswin32c -dQUIET -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sPAPERSIZE=letter -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=gs_shrink_to_letter.pdf -dPDFFitPage "$x" )
then
echo Success.
mv gs_shrink_to_letter.pdf "$x"
else
echo Error occurred, exiting.
exit $?
fi
done

After converting your PDFs as above, you can then apply Acrobat batch OCR without a hitch.

Among the many columns and lesser sections of my favorite national newspaper I enjoy reading the Centenaria column Notes published one hundred years ago in Mexico City local newspapers. A couple of decades ago, we started having policletos on the streets "Polic as bicicletos". Cops on bikes. I don't know if we had policletos as a continuous presence before that, but I do remember it being somewhat controversial in the late 1980s or early 1990s. Anyway, this snippet (and sadly I cannot capture the 1910 writing style in English) was a joy to read:

January 18, 1910 Good results of using bicycles for surveillance As we have come to know, the service the first-class policemen are doing on bike, mainly during night time, has yielded great results, as the street policemen often fell asleep and woke up upon hearing a horse approaching, which does not happen anymore because the first-class policemen make much quicker rounds, and before the street policemen even think of it, their superior is standing in front of them. It also seems that robberies, so frequent during the nights, have ceased because the burglars, hastily breaking the locks, are caught by the bike-riding policemen, given the machines barely make any noise, and besides, they cannot run away because they are chased with no effort.

the ultimate text diffing helper I use Git not only for code, but also for text, my most common use case being co-authorship of scientific papers typeset in LaTeX. While reviewing other author changes, the usual line-by-line diff is often annoying since:

1. Paragraph re-formatting gets in the way (hello guys accustomed to compulsory Vim's gq or Emacs' M-q): it does not effect the final rendering, but it still hinders peer-review of changes.
2. Even in the simplest case of a single word change on a single line, it will take some time for your eyes to spot where, along the line, the actual change is.

Stuff like wdiff does help, but I've never looked at how to integrate it with Git, and I still find it a pain in the eyes due to the fancy ASCII arts used to denote additions and deletions (pain that I usually experience when looking at the output of debdiff). There are nice diffing GUIs or editor-integrated solutions out there, but what I've always dreamed of is a plain old cmdline geekism. Enter Git's --color-words, that can be passed to both show and diff commands. My favorite related Git aliases are as follows:

    [alias]
        wdiff = diff --color-words
        wshow = show --color-words

Here is a sample fancy output, yet very intuitive and console-based, of git show --color-words (text in red denotes deletions, text in green additions): Maybe not new to you, but it has been life-changing for me.

Quodlibet is a GTK+ audio library manager / player. In Debian, it makes up four binary packages: quodlibet, quodlibet-ext, exfalso, and quodlibet-plugins. It's big/popular enough to get a few bugs filed against it and for people to yell when things break, but not so big as to be overwhelming. Since the previous comaintainer has been inactive for some time, I've been thinking that it might be nice to have a comaintainer again. During my academic term at MIT or if I'm on vacation, I don't get to things as quickly as I should. The package has also gone through a period of inactive Debian maintainers and a period of inactive upstream maintainers, so it's accumulated a fair number of ignored bugs in the BTS. And in general, having others to fall back on is a good thing, as long as it doesn't lead to no one taking responsibility. So, here's a deal: I want a comaintainer. There's a catch, though: this person doesn't need to be already involved in Debian. In fact, I'd prefer it if she weren't. If you have a good grasp on the English language, enthusiasm for Debian, and a willingness to learn some technical skills, contact me, preferably via email, and let me know who you are. Quodlibet is written in python, but I'm explicitly not saying that you need to know python in order to help out. You'll gain the benefit of having someone willing to answer your questions and direct your efforts and an automatic sponsor for uploads you prepare. I can't say I have a ton of time to put into mentoring someone, but I'm willing to put in some, so hopefully such an arrangement will turn out well for all parties involved: you, me, upstream, and Debian.

In a comment on my post about (relatively) Cheap Net Access in Australia [1] sin from Romania said Somebody needs to whack the aussie ISP in the head with a cluebat. The prices that you pay are insane . In Eastern Europe you have optic fibers from Germany and other western European countries that carry vast amounts of data. As the demand for capacity increases it s not THAT difficult to lay more fibers. You also have competition between different companies that lay fiber. To get data to Australia you must lay cables under the sea, this is expensive and can t be done quickly. Therefore all international data transfers are expensive to cover the expense of laying the cables. I don t think that we have any real competition in the market for International connectivity from Australia either. Now the links between Europe and the US aren t cheap either, but I believe that there are economies of scale (as well as shorter distances) that make them significantly cheaper than the links to Australia. Also a good portion of the traffic that you generate as a customer of a European ISP will stay within Europe as there are heaps of good sites in Europe. The number of people living in Europe who speak English as their first language is more than twice that of Australia. The number of Europeans who communicate in English almost as fluently as the native speakers (such as about half the population of the Netherlands) is also quite significant. I expect that the amount of English-language material on the net that is published from the EU is more than three times greater than the quantity published from Australia. People who speak languages that have a more limited geographic spread (IE anything other than English, Spanish, French, and Portuguese) will have a higher portion of local traffic which is therefore cheaper for their ISP. So based on the relative population sizes we should expect to have Australians making a higher portion of their Internet bandwidth be expensive international data transfers than that of Europeans. Then of course there is the issue of server costs. Running servers in Australia is horribly expensive, while user access to the net is merely annoyingly expensive, the costs of hosting servers are significant and usually the offers have slower hardware and slower transfers (particularly to the important US and EU markets). My blog is hosted in Germany because the company that was offering me free hosting in Australia encouraged me to host it elsewhere due to the price. Also hosting in Germany gives me slightly lower ping times to the US and significantly lower ping times to Europe. As about half the readers of my blog are based in the US, a significant quantity of the readers are based in the EU, and Australia only contains a small portion of the readers the overall experience for readers of my blog is improved by having it hosted outside Australia. It would be better to have it hosted in the US (where most of my readers are located) but I was offered free hosting in the EU. It would be nice if there was a cheap and easy way of getting a mirror of my blog running in Australia with Geo-DNS so that people using Australian IP addresses would get a local server. Putting the static images on an Australian server would be trivial, setting up Geo-DNs would be painful and probably increase reliability issues later on but isn t insurmountable (I have root on both DNS servers). The Debian blog gives some basic information on how to setup GeoDNS [2]. Then I would need to set up a MySQL slave for Wordpress data and modify Wordpress to send it s writes to the master server which is probably impossible for me unless someone else has already written a Wordpress plugin for this, I m really not good at PHP programming. Another possibility would be one of the Wordpress cache plugins that maintain static files to avoid needless database lookups. Until/unless I do such things, every Australian reader of my web site (and those of my friends who do similar things to me regarding hosting) will slightly tilt the balance of Internet transfers in favor of expensive data from foreign servers instead of cheap content from local servers. Sometimes it just sucks to live on an island.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2010/01/15/cheap-net-access-australia/
• [2] http://dsa.debian.org/dsablog/2009/06/Setting_up_GeoDNS_for_security.debian.org/

Two days ago, I posted about looking for a new netbook or notebook, and asked for people s advice. Since then, I ve done some investigation based on these suggestions. Rejected Candidates First, I ve outright rejected several options. The Thinkpad X100e was out, mainly because it doesn t compare favorably to the Acer 1810TZ. The X100e s battery life is worse than the 1810TZ, it is heaver, and has a single-core CPU. Secondly, the EeePC 1201N was ruled out. Again, its battery life was quite a bit worse than the 1801TZ, and also worse than my existing Eee 901. Finally, the EeePC was out because of its extremely slow performance. Remaining Candidates I took information from notebookcheck for models I was interested in, and those suggested in the comments at the earlier post. After reviewing them, I made a comparison chart showing issues that matter most to me. Candidates: Battery Life Let s start with battery life. The X200s presents an interesting picture here. In the 9-cell battery, we can expect over 15 hours of life in idle mode, and 7 hours when surfing the Internet over wifi. This was best in class performance for the idle and surf tests, but when under load it drops to one of the worst ad only 2.57 hours. This could correlate with what Lars Wirzenius commented, saying the X200s battery life is poor: obviously it is doing a lot of power management in software to achieve its runtimes, and if a default Linux installation isn t doing that power management, battery life could be poor. The other standard in terms of battery life was the Acer 1810TZ, with 12 hours runtime in idle usage and almost 6 when surfing the net with wifi: that s an hour longer than my Eee 901. It was also the best performer under full load of anything on my chart. Disappointing results were turned in by the HP 2530p. Even with a 9-cell battery, it couldn t match the 1810TZ s battery life. The Dell E4200, with its 6-cell battery, fared even worse though I should note notebookcheck hasn t tested the E4200, so those figures come from elsewhere. Candidates: Size and Weight Looking at weight, the X200s and E6200 turn in amazing weights at under 3 pounds for a 12 notebook. HP s 2530p is the heaviest in the group at 3.84 pounds with the 6-cell battery (the 9-cell will be heavier but I couldn t find specs on it). The 1810TZ checks in at 3.1 pounds, a bit more than half a pound heavier than my Eee 901. Considering size, the E4200 is the thinnest in the group at just 0.79 inches thick. The 2530p is also thin, but is one of the deepest. The Eee 901 is smallest in terms of length and depth, but it is the thickest of all. Candidates: Performance Here you can really see why I complain about the Eee 901 being slow. On the PCMark 05 test, it had a third of the performance of the 1810TZ. The best performer was the X200s, followed by HP s 2530p. In terms of hard disk speed, the E4200 was fastest due to its SSD (though I suspect these tests are not fully evaluating write performance). The SSD on the EeePC 901 didn t help it; it finished with less than half the speed of the E4200. Conclusions From this chart, it looks like there are only three really interesting models: the X200s with its top-of-the-line performance and display, the HP 2530p, and the 1810TZ with its stellar battery life. The disappointing battery life on the E4200 rules it out for me. The battery life on the HP 2530p is modiocre, but it has a touchpad. For the 1810TZ, my main concerns are size of screen and the fact that the screen is glossy. I am not at all a fan of glossy screens. For the HP 2530p, we ve had an HP 2510p in at work. Its size is virtually identical to the 2530p, and felt a bit bigger than I d like. It was also lighter than the 2530p, but still a bit heaver that I d like to see. But the 12 screen might be worth it. The X200s lacks a touchpad, which is a major annoyance in my book. I have reports of 7-hour battery life on it with the L9400 CPU under Ubuntu. Another person has reported 12 hours on Arch Linux using a power saving guide (which looks helpful in general as well). Considering size and weight, the X200s is lighter than the 1810TZ, though only by a little if using the 9-cell battery. It s very slightly bigger in every dimension than the 1810TZ, but perhaps not enough to influence the decision. What are your thoughts?

Did I mention I hate flash? I do. It crashes a lot, and is overall a bad thing for the web, in my opinion. But I do enjoy watching videos on the web, and unfortunately, up to this day, flash is what most sites use to show videos. Months ago I read a couple of blog posts with nice hacks to make Firefox able to play youtube videos without using the flash player. Some recent discussions with colleagues at work got me itching to try my hand at something similar for Epiphany. So I went ahead, and wrote a new extension that does just that - in youtube video pages, it finds the flash player element, and replaces it with an HTML5 video tag pointing to the actual movie file. This causes the internal HTML5 media player built into WebKitGTK+, that is based on GStreamer, to play the movie. That means you only need to have the necessary GStreamer magic, and the extension enabled, to enjoy the movie. There are some caveats - in-video text messages are gone (though I m pretty sure we could get them added somehow), playlists, and other places which display videos other than the normal video watching page are not handled, youtube needs to think you have the flash plugin installed, at least, so the only way to make it work right now is to actually have a flash plugin installed. I think we could probably get away with the last problem somehow, by looking at what the totem youtube plugin code does, for instance, and replicating it.

One thing everyone forgot to talk about the WebKitGTK+ hackfest was that master Dan Winship added basic Content-Encoding support to libsoup, and patched WebKitGTK+ to use it. If you are using a recent enough version of those you will finally be able to visit web sites that send gzipped content despite the browser saying it could not handle it, like the Internet Archive. This was one of those cases in which the web shows all of its potential to behave weirdly. The HTTP/1.1 RFC says that if an Accept-Encoding header is not present, the server MAY assume the client accepts any encoding, so we were having many sites send us gzip content even though we did not support it. We then started sending a header saying we support identity, and nothing else! . It turns out the web sucks, so many servers were not happy with a full header, and started giving us angry looks (slashdot, for instance, would not render correctly because it started sending encoded CSS files!). We then simplified the header we were sending, which made those servers happy again. Some sites, though, completely ignored our saying we didn t support anything except identity, and sent us gzipped content anyway. Most of these were misbehaving caches (this was the case for Wikipedia), so would work after you asked for a forced reload, which would ignore the cache, but some servers, such as the Internet Archive s didn t really want to talk about encodings - they only wanted to send gzip-encoded content. So, in the end, our only way out was implementing the damn encoding support, which finally happened during the hackfest. Take that, web!

OSLC-CM V1 is a proposed standard for REST APIs of bugtrackers, and in our seek for more interoperability in the bugtracker space, we ve been very interested in it. OSLC-CM is quite young and only so far implemented in proprietary tools (although elaborated in an open way) on the server side, and as we believe in FLOSS, we ve started trying to implement basics of server side plugins for a few bugtrackers.
In addition to a demo server that s simulating the behaviour of a bugtracker, we have started implementing a Mantis plugin and FusionForge and Codendi trackers add-ons (all PHP and based on Zend framework, see this project on picoforge). All are very basic, but we hope they will be the basis for future OSLC-CM compatible servers in these tools. At the same time we ve been experimenting with the code already published in Mylyn to support OSLC-CM on the client side. Not everything is public yet in Mylyn, as the elements that have been developped for some connectors of Tasktop to the proprietary tools are being ported to the open source code of Mylyn.
We have thus been able to use the Junit tests classes of Mylyn and tweak them in a way to connect to an instance of the demo server for Mantis (including handling some Basic auth), and be able to retrieve the first bugs descriptions Now that this works, we ll try and add some Java code (maybe reusing Mylyn client libs) to doc4 (being developped as part of Helios) in order to start linking doc4 and Mantis so that this can be used in the Helios platform. This may involve mixing code of XWiki and Mylyn hmmm well, we ll see. Next steps may be also to try and implement a connector in Python that might be used in tools like bts-link. Then whichever Python or Java client libraries we have, will allow us to use them inside FetchBugs4.me to connect and harvest bugs of OSLC-CM compliant bugtrackers eventually. Lots of interesting developments ahead. Stay tuned.

I've been using an iphone since late 2007 as my primary phone and so I've gotten quite a few contacts and SMS conversations stored on it. Now that Collabora has given me a nice and shiny N900, I wanted to move my contacts and conversations over, but this proved to be a bit more work than expected. Please note that the following procedure worked for me, I have tried to take reasonable steps to prevent anything breaking, but if something breaks, you get to keep both pieces. I am not responsible and this comes with absolutely no warranty. Take backups. What you need

• the addressbook and SMS SQLite databases. On my phone, they live in /var/mobile/Library/AddressBook and /var/mobile/Library/SMS.
• A copy of my iphone-contacts-convert script. It's written in Perl and should be reasonably easy to understand. Put it in the same directory as AddressBook.sqlitedb.
• A copy of my iphone-export-sms script. It's also written in Perl and should also be reasonably easy to understand. Put it in the same directory as sms.db.
• The smstools program you can get from this thread on talk.maemo.org.

The address book conversion script takes the SQLite database structure and converts that into a VCF file. It should be completely safe to run multiple times (it only does SELECT from the different tables in the contacts database, and you have made backups, haven't you?). If it dies with an "Unknown property", "Unknown label" or other error, you can poke it and see if you can work out what's wrong or drop me an email and I'll see if I can help you. Assuming it doesn't fall over, it will spit out a series of VCards, which you should store in a file, which you then to the N900 and open in the address book. Assuming you have less than 1000 contacts, they should now all be in your address book. If you have more, you need to split the file. A couple of known limitations:

• It doesn't handle some of the attributes, like job title, notes, department, display names, prefix and suffix. None of my contacts used those, so I just didn't care. Patches to change this accepted. Also, it doesn't handle custom attributes and birthdays. I intended to handle birthdays, but forgot and I have few enough contacts with birthdays that I just did it by hand.
• When it hits something it doesn't know how to handle, it stops and you need to add the relevant handle to the code. I think it is mostly clear, how to, but again, feel free to contact me with any problems.
• Only tested on firmware version 2.2. Yes, ancient, but it's what my iphone is running.
• If you have contacts that are organisations, they will come up with a blank full name. Just edit them on the N900 (pressing edit and then save immediately works fine) and they'll be automatically fixed.
• No picture support. This looked a bit involved, so I didn't do this bit. Should be possible with a bit of effort.

The procedure for exporting and importing SMS-es is a bit more involved. First, export the sms-es by running the perl script. It spits out a tab-separated file which you should copy to the N900 along with the smsimporter program from the smstools thread. Run ./smsimporter foo.csv and you should get all your SMS-es put into the conversation app. I ended up compiling my own smsimporter based on the 0.2.1 from the thread with the UUID patch too. Read the whole thread and it should be fairly clear.

We listen pretty much exclusively to NPR in the car these days, and often when we're pottering around on the weekend, we catch A Prairie Home Companion. It's a light-hearted radio show, which makes us laugh. When we learned that it was coming to town, we lashed out on some tickets. We went to the recording of today's episode at the War Memorial Opera House. We had seats towards the back of the balcony on the fourth floor. The opera house is a beautiful building. The seating is incredibly steep. The stage was miles away, I wish I'd brought binoculars. The opera house normally holds 3200, but because there was no orchestra they could put in some extra seats. It was a full house. It was cool to get to see how the show is put together, and we had an entertaining time.

So I previously mentioned I'd knocked up a simple automation tool, for deploying policies (read "scripts") from a central location to a number of distinct machines. There seemed to be a small amount of interest, so I've written it all up:

• slaughter - Perl System Administration & Automation tool

Why slaughter? I have no idea. Yesterday evening it made sense, somehow, on the basis it rhymed with auto - (auto as in automation). This morning it made less sense. But meh. This list of primitives has grown a little and the brief examples probably provide a little bit of flavour. In short you:

• Install the package upon a client you wish to manage.
• When "slaughter" is invoked it will fetch http://example.com/slaughter/default.policy
  • This file may include other policy files via "IncludePolicy" statements.
• Once all the named policies have been downloaded/expanded they'll be written to a local file.
• The local file will have Perl-fu wrapped around it such that the Slaughter::linux module is available
  • This is where the definitions for "FetchFile", "Mounts", etc are located.
• The local file will be executed then removed.

All in all its probably more complex than it needs to be, but I've managed to get interesting things primarily with these new built-in primitives and none of it is massively Debian, or even Linux, specific. ObSubject: Jaws