Eclectic paper: dh-ocaml In my day job as a researcher, I mostly publish papers along the lines of my main research interests (theorem proving, web technologies, formal methods applied to software engineering, ...). Some time though, I just come up to some eclectic idea, not strictly related to my job, that I feel like cooking up as a paper to be reviewed by some scientific venue. It happened some weeks ago with dh-ocaml, the package implementing the new dependency scheme for OCaml-related packages in Debian. It took us (as in Debian OCaml maintainers) several years to get it right and satisfactory for maintainers, users, release team, etc. The problem which dh-ocaml addresses is that, differently than C and other system-level languages, OCaml breaks ABI compatibility very often, due to the need of ensuring type safety across different libraries at link time. Other similar strongly typed languages, such as Haskell, behave similarly. This is at odds with the implicit assumption of forward-compatibility (unless otherwise "stated", e.g. with soname changes) that is relied upon by versioned dependencies in distributions like Debian. This discussion, the analysis of possible solutions, and the description of the solution we have actually implemented in dh-ocaml (called ABI approximation) turned out to be interesting for the French functional programming academic community: the paper on dh-ocaml has been accepted at forthcoming JFLA 2010. It is no rocket science , but people maintaining programs and libraries written in languages with concerns similar to OCaml's (e.g. Haskell, hello nomeata) might want to have a look.

Our lease runs out at the end of January, and we're thinking about moving to a bigger place. In the four years we've been here (yeah, we just crossed the four year mark the other day) we've often thought about trying to buy as well. We go through these phases where we really feel like buying, then we run the numbers and run screaming back to the warm bosom of renting. A couple of months ago we had the most serious foray into buying. We'd just checked out the models for Mondrian and we really liked the floorplan for Bleu, and found the price to be the least breathtaking of anything we'd looked at in the Bay Area. I got as far as talking to mortgage brokers and running the numbers, and the things that killed it for us were the property taxes and homeowners association fees. The monthly repayments would have been doable, but it'd have really been a ball and chain. We're over here to see the country as much as anything else, and if the mortgage is going to be a significant impedance on our ability to travel, then there isn't really any point in doing it. So we sadly passed up on Mondrian. The three bedroom townhouses in our current complex are going for around the $2500 a month mark, which is a pretty serious jump on what we're paying now for our two bedroom one, so Sarah's been scouring Craigslist for anything better. She found a 2 bedroom plus loft condo being rented privately in Mountain View, which we took at look at on Wednesday. The immediately downsides are it's older (the kitchen and bathroom are really a bit dated) and has no data cabling (this is something I've really loved about our current place) and no microwave oven included. The upsides are it's significantly bigger (about 500 square feet larger), the kitchen has heaps of cupboards, it has a washer and dryer, a lock-up garage, a small, fairly private yard (the rent includes a gardener), and it has what looks like a communal garden bed (the thing that really caught my eye were the compost bins). So I think overall, as long as we can live with the kitchen and bathroom, it's going to be an improvement on where we are now. The windows are all double glazed, so it should be fairly well insulated. It's got a gas furnace and gas hot water, and I think the landlord pays for the water, so I think the utilities would at best come out the same as what we're paying here. We've decided to put an application in for it and see what happens. The landlord is living overseas, so we're dealing with a real estate agent for the letting. Apparently we'd be paying the rent via PayPal or something. He's got a home warranty arrangement for maintenance, which sounds like it'll be pretty good. Meanwhile, Sarah was scouring Redfin and found a house nearby that is for sale (a short sale), which is pretty reasonably priced. We've called up a real estate agent, and we're taking a look at it tomorrow, just because we can.

Above is the picture of the RFID device in my new UK passport. The outer wire loop is 72mm * 42mm which is by far the largest RFID device I ve seen. It appears that they want the passport to be RFID readable from distances that are significantly greater than those which are typically used for store security RFID devices. I couldn t properly capture the text on the page which says THIS PAGE IS RESERVED FOR OFFICIAL OBSERVATIONS, IF ANY . The plastic layer that protects the RFID device leaves a 3mm margin that could potentially be used for official observations. Assuming that they don t write in really small letters I guess this means that either they don t make official observations on the passports nowadays or that any such observations are stored electronically where the subject has no good way of discovering them and objecting. Above is a picture of the front cover of my passport which shows the RFID logo. Both images have links to the full resolution pictures. On Sunday I leave for a two week business trip to San Francisco, this will be my first trip with my new passport. I m thinking of taking some aluminium foil to wrap around my passport when it s not being used. I don t expect to really gain any benefit from doing so, it s a matter of principle.

I took advantage of the four day weekend for Thanksgiving, and finally got around to upgrading mirror.linux.org.au from Debian Etch to Lenny. The upgrade went fairly well. Notably, Drupal completely blew up, but it looks like we were still running the package from Sarge, as Drupal wasn't in Etch at all. I cut my losses, installed Drupal 6 and put something basic together from scratch. MoinMoin upgraded fairly painlessly, and I figured out how to fix Cacti for my installation at home at the same time, so that was a general win all round.

Yes, finally we made it! Thanks in particular to Carl Chenet and to Luca Bruno we were able to reduce the reportbug bugs count below 150!

It was a very long road (when I joined the team there was 230-something bugs opened) and I hoped to achieve this some time ago, but the fought goals are the most relevant ones.

Of course, the just released version 4.9 contains quite some bug fixes and enhancements: if you have the chance, give it a look and report any regression or feature request you see fit, but not too much: I want to enjoy the barrier just broken :)

A couple of days ago I was lamenting the state of webstats, although I was a little vague as to my purpose. Specifically I was wanting to find out about the screen resolutions and user-agents viewing a couple of sites. To get screen resolutions you really need to inject javascript into your pages, which is icky. Still its a small price to pay, and chances are most people won't notice. Of course there are drawbacks:

Javascript dependency.

If the visitors don't use/enable javascript you see nothing.

You cannot capture everything.

e.g. HTTP status code isn't available.

To solve this problem completely you therefore need to have access to both your apache logs and your javascript-captured information. Probably. As a proof of concept I've injected the following javascript into most pages of three sites. This code:

• Finds the screen resolution.
• Finds the HTTP referer.
• Finds the current page's title.
• Then submits that to a server-side collection script, via a one-by-one pixel IMG

The script that receives the data writes out the data to a small per-domain SQLite database, which I can then use to generate prettyness. However I suck at being pretty, in most ways, so I've only got functional:

• Debian-Administration.org Statistics

All of this is dynamic and most of the data is anchored to "today", as thats proof of concept enough. Were piwik not written in vile PHP I'd use that - I don't see anything similar out there which is Perl.. The big decision is now "Keep it dynamic" vs. "Output static pages". (vs. call off the experiment now I know that I'm safe to assume "big resolutions"). (Naming software is hard. Recent stuff I've done has had an skx prefix primarily for google-juice. e.g. Randomly I notice that if you search for my personal site on Google's UK engine I come top. Cool.) ObSubject: The Bourne Identity

Earlier this summer, I wrote a blog post on taking a principled position on software freedom where I argued that advocates of free/libre and open source software (FLOSS) should take a principled position because the pragmatic benefits associated with open source --- "better quality, higher reliability, more flexibility [and] lower cost" in OSI's words --- are simply not always present. More often than not, FLOSS projects fail. When they survive, they are often not as good as their proprietary competitors. Over the last year, I've been back at MIT taking classes, reading extensively, and otherwise learning how to act like a social scientist. My research goals, which I'm now beginning to focus on, are to help build a stronger understanding of the social dynamics in free software and free culture communities. With a slightly skeptical view toward my involvement with groups like the FSF and my work in the FLOSS community, at least one academic tried to suggest that taking a principled position in favor of software freedom might compromise the positivist social science research program in which I am engaged. "An advocate is too biased," they said. After many months of thinking seriously about this warning, I believe that this criticism can be addressed. After all, a principled position in favor of software freedom is a statement of how things should be, not a description of how they are. OSI will argue that open source leads to inherently better software. This statement, of course, is one that can be empirically tested and, in fact, there seems to be plenty of evidence that it is often wrong. On the other hand, the FSF's position that software should be free is ethical in nature. One can disagree with it, just like one can disagree with any other ethical position, but it can not be proved either right or wrong --- only convincing or unconvincing, logical or illogical in the context a certain set of other values that others might or might not share. Research has shown that the vast majority of FLOSS projects fizzle. A advocate who argues that FLOSS is inherently better is left trying to explain this fact and make excuses. As a result, OSI-style beliefs can certainly be a source of problematic bias in a social scientist. However, a person who believes that software should be free is welcome to recognize that it both fails and succeeds and to ask why. A principled idealist can argue in favor of behaviors that may be disruptive, difficult, or inefficient. Indeed, Stallman has never suggested that free software will be easier or better. Indeed, he routinely asks people to sacrifice their convenience for freedom. My goal, as a social scientist, is to understand why some FLOSS and free culture projects succeed and why many fail. I never take FLOSS's success for granted and, in fact, believe that proprietary software may often leads to better software in OSI's terms. Unlike an advocate who tows the OSI line, embracing evidence of the effectiveness of proprietary software is no way in conflict with my belief that software should be free. In fact, my desire to see software freedom grow becomes the driving force between trying to understand FLOSS's shortcomings! I am no more biased --- which is not to say completely unbiased --- than the person who both thinks that crime is wrong and who wants to study criminal behavior. In an analogous sense, starting out with the belief that all people are naturally law-abiding may be a problem in a way that beginning with the belief that people should be law-abiding is not. Starting from the fomer assumption, one has to explain away evidence to the contrary. Starting from the latter assumption, one can build an understanding of what drives people to obey or violate laws which, in turn, can help build a stronger society. To me, the question is not why FLOSS will succeed. Indeed, I believe its success is an empirical matter that remains very much up in the air. For me, the question is how it might. Embracing a principled position lets us face the facts and puts advocates and practitioners in a position to devise laws, social structures, and technologies to insure that it does.

RCBW - week #12 Here is this week squashes, by yours truly:

• 23/11/2009 bug #553122 - libtcl-chiark-1 - add missing ldconfig invocation, for *.so in linker locations
• 24/11/2009 bug #528152 - tulip - replace ttf-bistream-vera w/ dejavusans (patch from James Westby)
• 25/11/2009 bug #533993 - solfege - remove net need for xmllint (patch from Ubuntu by Alessio Treglia)
• 26/11/2009 bug #531220 - nut - fix ntp.conf postinst processing to avoid overwriting user settings
• 27/11/2009 bug #523912 - mit-scheme - add missing build-dep + tricky build due to bootstrap
• 28/11/2009 bug #521964 - libapache2-mod-lisp - fix APR version detection, patch by Antonio Radici
• 29/11/2009 bug #553257 - pidgin-hotkeys - remove unappropriate e-Xclusion in dh_shlibdebs

The funniest part of this RCBW issue is probably that Luk has started handing over RC bugs to me: from time to time I just get a /query from him with bug numbers In fact, this is more useful than one can imagine, because a considerable amount of time in periodic RC squashing is taken by triaging the RC bug list to choose your targets. Of course there is no guarantee that I'll be willing/able to fix handed-over bugs but, as a RM, Luk has evidently well-trained feelings about how hard would be to fix a given bug. All in all, for this week it worked well: 4 of the above 7 came from SchindlerLuk's list. ... and of course, let's welcome Simon on board! He is definitely doing a better job at spotting packages that should be removed from the archive rather than resurrected (potential negative effect that a NMU can indeed have on a package, de facto "saving" it from testing/release exclusion). In fact, the dilemma of "NMU vs Request Removal" raises various tricky questions. For instance, while we currently have pretty clear guidelines on how and, more importantly, when doing NMUs, we are more stringent on "Non-Maintainer Removals". Quoting from the Package Removal Requests wiki page:

    In all cases, if there is a maintainer and it's not you, mention the
    maintainer's opinion or, if you don't know it, mention how and when you
    tried to contact him.

It is of course reasonable to be more stringent on a measure that is way more invasive than a "simple" NMU. But if we start to rely on NMU-time as an important trigger for removal requests, then we could probably use a more aggressive and more distributed process for removals.

Folllowing an idea by Kai Hendry, I re-implemented my Linux application screen-message, which does nothing but display a piece of text that you enter as large as possible, in HTML. So whenever you are in need of screen-message, but don t have it installed at the moment, put your browser into fullscreen mode, go toand type away.I only tested it with the web browser galeon, so I expect it to work with Firefox and related browsers. If it does not work with Internet Explorer, I can t help it but patches are welcome. The file is stored in the screen-message Darcs repository at http://darcs.nomeata.de/screen-message.upstream.PS: If anyone wants to donate a shorter domain for this, you are welcome. But I guess all good domains with sm in them are taken...

In Debian, if there exists a bug in a version of a package in SID (let's take as an example GRUB2 version 1.97+20091125-1), and it has a severity marked as Critical, then it won't touch testing until such a bug is fixed... It is as simple as that.

What happen when?:

a) You are not sure which Debian release you are using.
b) You are not sure how Debian handles bugs reported with severity: critical.

Answer: http://pvanhoof.be/blog/index.php/2009/11/27/debian-wtf

:S

After all the U-turns by politicians, I got confused about how Three Strikes is developing. I think the current status is Mandelson trying to sneak it through as a Statutory Instrument and protect some of the most protectionist foreign interests ever seen. I ve written to my MP to express my disagreement. Andrew Heaney of TalkTalk has submitted a petition to abolish the proposed law that will see alleged illegal filesharers disconnected from their broadband connections, without a fair trial . It s not worded brilliantly, but it covers the vital point without a fair trial so I think it s still worth signing here. Thanks to Glyn Wintle for the updates on fsfe-uk. Meanwhile, unaccountable copyright collections agent PPL have picked the ideal moment to start harassing local community events. Please give generously: EMI only earned 298,000,000 last year. If you ve a bit more time, you could send a Message To Mandelson at ORG. I might not agree with ORG s structure, but they do make some cool protest sites. (Javascript required to view, as far as I can tell.) Even more flamboyantly, the Electronic Frontier Foundation is calling on people to phone up and Stop the Pirate-Finder General!

Cory Doctorow wrote an interesting little column for Make magazine about Wikipedia and the way that it contains facts about facts [1]. One of the issues with this is that you can t (or at least shouldn t) make corrections based on your own knowledge of a subject, you need to cite references. Cory gives a hypothetical example where a world renowned expert couldn t simply fix an error in Wikipedia, but they could give an interview with the New York Times decrying the quality of Wikipedia and citing the correct data then once the NYT article was published it could be referenced as an authoritative source and the page updated. Mako wrote about the Wikireader (an offline reader for Wikipedia) and advocated a facility for writing changes while offline and uploading them [2]. From the perspective of improving the state of the art in computer science and making new features available for more users this sounds like a great idea. But in terms of fitting in with the way Wikipedia works it doesn t seem viable to me. Any time that you need to use an offline Wikipedia reader it seems that it will either be impossible or unreasonably difficult to gain the net access necessary to find the reference that Wikipedia requires. Sure you could fix spelling errors, reformat paragraphs, etc but not do anything serious. I wonder how many people actually put any serious effort into Wikipedia with the sole purpose of making it more readable. In terms of my own editing I have made a number of changes that improve readability, but all of them were due to reviewing pages for technical accuracy. One of the comments on Mako s post suggested that instead of having an option to directly edit pages there be an option to take notes on pages which could then be used for later editing. Maybe something like a two button combination to flag a particular paragraph as being of dubious accuracy so that the user could later do some Google searches for references. Of course another problem with this is the delay in updating a Wikireader. For most reading of Wikipedia it doesn t matter if the content is 6 months old, so we should expect that most users of the Wikireader don t have the latest data. The Wikireader company offers an update service of posting a new memory card twice a year [3]. Given postage delays etc we should expect that the average age of the content is about 4 months for people who subscribe to the update service, and probably a lot greater for people who download the updates. The popular pages of Wikipedia change fast, in the space of 4 months a page can change significantly. In terms of general Wikipedia operation I wonder if it would be beneficial to have a button to flag content as possibly not meeting the Wikipedia guidelines. It seems that the number of people who can recognise low quality pages is going to be significantly higher than the number of people who have the skill and time to fix them. I m sure that there are many people who would just love to be able to choose from a list of Wikipedia pages that have received many negative votes. Such votes could be stored offline and uploaded later, but again that would rely on having recent content on the reader (it would be annoying for a recently fixed page to keep getting voted down). One area where offline editing of a Wiki would work well is that of niche Wikis. For example if I downloaded a copy of the Debian Wiki (which would only take a tiny fraction of the space in a Wikireader) then I could easily update it every week and the incidence of other people editing a page in the mean time would often be low. I could write long updates that make significant changes to SE Linux related pages while offline without needing any references and in many cases without much risk of conflicts. Implementing a distributed version control system to manage such updates shouldn t be difficult in principle, although the VCS might have to run on a laptop or desktop system after taking raw data from the Wikireader (tools like GIT seem memory hungry and might not fit on a small device). Also Mako refers to the already indefensibly large gap between the number of readers and editors on Wikipedia . Like Mako I don t have a TV watching personality. I agree that it is desirable to facilitate read-write access for everyone, but that doesn t have to involve write access to Wikipedia. I am not convinced that there is a difference between the number of readers and editors of Wikipedia that indicates a problem here. As something becomes more popular the number of people who use it without being committed to it increases, and it also becomes more integrated into society. I don t think it s a problem that many people use their writing time for other tasks such as blogging rather than editing Wikipedia. Wikipedia makes a great reference for blog posts and blog posts drive readers (and thus potential editors) to Wikipedia. Finally I think we should consider the fact that different people have different skill sets. Maybe the Wikipedia reader base gained a significant portion of the people who have the skills to make good editors a long time ago and now the majority of new users just don t have the skills. If that is the case then having the ratio of readers to editors change in favor of readers while the number of readers expands would be a good thing. I don t think that I am being elitist in acknowledging that different people have different skill sets, and that some portion of the population will lack the skills necessary to make good contributions to Wikipedia (good enough to outweigh the mistakes that they make). I think that valuing the contributions of all people in society does not require that we value all contributions to Wikipedia.

• [1] http://www.make-digital.com/make/vol20/?pg=16
• [2] http://mako.cc/copyrighteous/20091123-00.comment
• [3] http://thewikireader.com/update.html

Connecting a NOKIA 6310i mobile phone via serial DLR-3P cable and the serial connector of the laptop (for Bluetooth see part II): After installation of the gnokii package(s) the the configuration file says:

model = 6510
connection = dlr3p

Then gnokii reports:

$ gnokii --identify
GNOKII Version 0.6.28
IMEI         : XXXX
Manufacturer : Nokia
Modell       : 6310i
Product name : NPL-1
Revision     : V 5.22

The story behind it Recently, I decided to set up a subscription with a VoIP provider, Phonzo, here in Norway. On their webpage, Phonzo advertised a VoIP service which actually gave you the SIP information and allowed the user to connect their own equipment to this service. That s really cool , I thought. I can play with Asterisk on the PSTN now! . They also advertised an offer with rent of a Linksys SPA2102 included, at a very affordable rate. Now, I suspected that the box might be locked as I d heard they were with some providers so I searched all over their webpage for any hint that it might be. None was to be found and since they included the specific model designation of the adapter rather than mentioning a generic Analogue Telephone Adapter , I basically assumed it wouldn t be crippled. But when it did arrive (impeccable delivery time, and telephony worked out of the box, btw), I found to my dismay that the box was indeed locked. So I sent a polite email to customer service, saying basically that I know this is a matter mostly interesting to enthusiasts, but they ve advertised an SPA2102 , and what I have receieved is a crippled SPA2102 . They basically replied It says rent , so it belongs to us. I replied Renting does not exempt you from marketing laws; you ve sold me something else than what I paid for . I got the reply: We can t open it, it contains sensitive information and it s not crippled, it s optimized for Phonzo service[sic] (!). Yeah, that s really what they said. A few more emails back and forth, and nothing of value came forth. When I received a letter from customer service saying Stop your nonsense, we re providing you a service and the adapter is a part of it I realized I wasn t getting anywhere there. I ve sent an email to the address in the SSL certificate (who also seems to be one of the founders) hoping I d get in touch with someone of relevance, but I don t have great hopes. (There s a copy of the correspondance in Norwegian, if you re interested.) So over to my plan B. The Linksys SPA2102 has two interfaces for an administrator: The first is the HTTP interface bog-standard, with an admin password. The second is the Interactive Voice Response menu you know the kind, Press 1 for x, 2 for y, . Now, this menu has several different options, including one to enable HTTP access on the WAN port . By default, this option is set to False, and changing it requires an administrator password. But how do you enter an alphanumeric password on a DTMF dialpad? Aha the admin passnumber is derived from the admin password! The mapping is 1=1, [2ABCabc] = 2, [3DEFdef] = 3, , (everything else) = 0. This reduces the keyspace quite dramatically! So basically, what I ve done is kludged together a shell script which tries the different combinations and sounds them out using a software DTMF tone generator, with earphones serving as acoustic couplers. (For now, I ve skipped numbers containing a 1 . The number 1 only represents itself, and thus its value is quite low.) It then tries port 80 on its WAN IP every 100 attempts to see if a passnumber has succeeded. The shellscript is accessible here: http://simula.gunkies.org/~toresbe/dtmfbruteforce.bash. The phone adapter has two lines, but the second one is locked by Phonzo however, it is not possible to disable the IVR menu on this thing, so I have full use of the box while this is happening. (It nearly goes without saying that I ve spoofed the DNS so it connects to my Asterisk box. ) I m now averaging about one passkey per second. According to my calculations of each passkey representing the number of symbols per digit raised to the power of the number of digits, I am trying 16807 passwords per second and will be trying 117649 passwords per second when I get to six digits. I have a quite technical readership so please do correct me in the comments if I ve made an error in either the calculations or anywhere else. If there are any Phonzo users out there with an SPA2102, I would very much appreciate it if you contacted me brute force works a whole lot better when it s parallelized. I am currently at #302362. I have not yet been contacted by anyone in the same situation.

So I got a little bit further with my little toy. Bluetooth Bluetooth works. The packages gnome-bluetooth and bluez are installed and the kernel module bluetooth is loaded. hciconfig reports this:

# hciconfig
hci0:	Type: USB
	BD Address: XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX ACL MTU: 310:10 SCO MTU: 64:8
	UP RUNNING PSCAN
	RX bytes:11354 acl:105 sco:0 events:286 errors:0
	TX bytes:4012 acl:99 sco:0 commands:66 errors:0

I tried to connect to a SAMSUNG and a NOKIA mobile phone. After enabling visibility of the phone the bluetooth-applet (gnome-bluetooth) showed the device. However I got an error saying The name org.openobex was not provided by any .service files when trying to access the mobile device. This was solved by installing obexd-server obex-data-server. Then I was able to access the phone contents via Bluetooth. Virtualization I recently tried to debug the mopac7 build error. I installed the qemu(-qemu-kvm) emulator. Loading of the kvm_intel module failed with kvm: disabled by bios . But this was easy to solve by enabling the Intel virtualization technology in the BIOS: push and hold the ESC key during startup until the laptop tells you to press the F1 key. Then enable the related BIOS option and done.

This is it. We know the faces of people who will count in Europe during the 2009-2014 period. And we can count on them to make the EU weigh even less than it did until now. Jos Manuel Dur o Barroso, president of the European Commission. For 5 years, this ultra-liberal brought in his fanatic views of the free market, leading to unprecedented removals of regulations and legislations that could prevent large corporations to extort money from citizens. He holds a non-negligible responsibility on the (still unsolved) bank crisis of 2007. Yet, citizens voted en masse earlier this year for the EPP all across Europe, leading to his renewal. You get the commission you deserve. Herman Van Rompuy, president of the European Council. This is no secret that this transparent non-leader was the choice of Sarkozy after Tony Blair turned out to be an unsustainable choice. Yet, none of the 26 other members of the Council dared to raise a single finger against this choice. Sarkozy has completely lost his credit in France, but that doesn t prevent this council of cowards from trusting him, apparently. It s not as if there weren t good candidates, like Jean-Claude Juncker or Vaira V e-Freiberga. But having a competent, Europe-friendly president who actually knows his files and speaks many languages would have cast shadows on those who don t (see below). Catherine Ashton, foreign ministry of the EU. If there was any worse possible choice, I don t know which. This was the only position supposed to be affected to a socialist. And since the Labour party is still member of the PASD, despite their insane liberal economic policy and their full-scale paranoia leading to unprecedented freedom hunting in the UK, the position was given to someone from this party. And among them, they chose a person with a reputation of sloppiness and incompetence, who doesn t speak correctly a single foreign language. It is probable that, just like Van Rompuy s going to be Sarkozy s puppet, she s going to be the UK Foreign Office s servant. And we continentals all love the Foreign Office s policy, which is often in complete opposition to what the rest of Europe feels like. Jerzy Buzek, president of the European Parliament. You don t know him? Neither do I. A weak parliament goes with a weak parliament president. This way, the European Council has its hands free for behind-the-curtains arrangements, rather than letting the citizens representatives take action. Martin Schultz, president of the PASD group at the European Parliament. In order to ensure his place as president of the Parliament for the second half of the period, he betrayed his own people, and accepted any rotten compromise the EPP would propose for the key positions. Socialists have never been so weak in Brussels, and the total absence of leadership has something to do with it. Makes you proud to be European, heh? And of course you already know the real faces of Europe for the next years. Sarkozy, Merkel, Berlusconi, Brown. The main leaders from Western Europe, with their rotten governments who swore to slay any of the remaining personal freedoms in each of their countries. What a great image for EU in the world. What a great example to set. But again, you get the leaders you deserve. That s the whole point of democracy.

I thought I should share my current favourite Ubuntu patch. While hunting for easy RC bug fixes yesterday, I stumbled across mit-scheme_7.7.90+20090107-1ubuntu1.patch [roughly 9MB]. It contains a Debian .deb to bootstrap the Ubuntu mit-scheme package (bug filed). Nice. Now, to be fair, Debian has a bootstrapping problem for mit-scheme as well - it requires itself to build, but is currently uninstallable in unstable (although zack's on the case). Having looked at the problem, I think the best thing to do in the long term would be to package mit-scheme-c (which appears to be a superset of the upstream tarball for mit-scheme?) and then use that to build the other package. This would also provide a version of mit-scheme for arches other than i386. If maintainer-built binary packages are going to get thrown away at upload time, that would have been the only way to solve the bug, I think. (I don't mean to fuel the Debian vs. Ubuntu flames; it would have been nice if the MOTUs could have fixed this in less of a hacky, license-violating way, but they did at least get the package to build, which is more than Debian can do at the moment. I intend to keep a closer eye on Ubuntu bugs and patches for the various packages I work on, because keeping divergence to a minimum should benefit both distributions.)

If you are getting the problem which is written in the title of this post related to a recent upgrade in Debian SID of GRUB2 to version 1.97+20091125-1, then you have to modify your grub.cfg and remove the /boot/ part of the entries referred to the kernel image and initrd in the grub.cfg configuration file.

For more info: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=558042

My work sometimes causes me to have reason to change small things in open source projects which I then have to submit for consideration upstream. Often this is as simple as providing a patch on the relevant mailing list and moving on.

Sometimes however the change is larger and I really would like to see the feature or bug fix accepted by the project. I am fortunate that my employer is enlightened enough to not only accept this but actively encourage participation in open source communities.

Most of the time the patches are accepted, with changes or updates, in a reasonable timescale. Certainly for kernel work I have got used to a submission/accept time measured in hours!

On occasion the change gets dropped on the floor or missed and you have to resubmit (even if its just to get told its uninteresting and to go away ;-). Unfortunately there are a small number of projects where getting something merged is an experience in frustration.

The particular project which has caused me the most trouble along these lines is Qemu. Daniel and I did the work to support the Samsung ARM based 2410 and 2440 System on Chip (SoC) and a couple of boards they were used on. Of course we then presented the patch to the Qemu mailing list. That was in November...No, not this year, or even last, we are talking 2006!

Unsurprisingly there were numerous issues with our first cut, we improved the patches and resubmitted them and received absolutely no feedback. Eventually we provoked the maintainer to respond, we took his feedback into account and resubmitted. After a year of so of this Daniel got bored and gave up.

Being a complete idiot and apparently sucker for punishment I decided to re-try. I completely restructured the port and started by just trying to get the absolute minimal core changed accepted. It took some time to provoke a response (oh and they altered RCS which meant I had to change my submission again, but they did change to git so that is acceptable ;-)

Earlier this year resulted in my all time favorite maintainer response. Eventually I managed to find out he actually objected to the patch because the SoC we were using actually required a slightly different processor capability set (the emulation is ARMv5 by default and the SoC in question is ARM v4te, hey I had not noticed any practical difference, and Qemu is an emulator not a simulator...but OK)

Remember this is the first time this objection has been raised in 30months of patch submission. Fine, I create a patch which adds V4te emulation and submit that. I eventually get a response, to which my reply is a little frustrated I will admit.

I have since resubmitted the patch with the corner cases fixed, it has been ignored, and I never have received a reply to my direct questions. On this three year anniversary of the original submission I am simply going to give up, something I detest doing.

I am one of those dull people that finishes what he starts, that is pretty much my role in Simtec these days, ensuring stuff we start gets finished or at least drawing the line and calling it complete. To end up with a complete failure offends my personal values.

Now please do not think I hold any ill feelings towards anyone concerned, open source maintainers perform their roles without pay and, by extension, without responsibility to anyone but themselves. I am sure people are too busy to care about the itch I wanted scratched and that overall their project has not really lost all that much by not having me as a contributor.

I know I could have forked the project, or maintained my own tree or any number of other technical solutions but at the end of 1,100 days I have finally exhausted my enthusiasm and can move on. Speaking of which, time to resubmit a kbuild change which got dropped ;-)