It's looking all good, so we're game to tell the world: Sarah is 13 weeks pregnant! She had the nuchal translucency ultrasound today (which, due to the tight timing required for it, I was totally bummed to be unable to attend). The scan came back all clear, which is an enormous relief. In the nausea department, poor Sarah has had a much worse time than with the first pregnancy. Particularly on the flights to and from Australia. This makes me think it's going to be a girl (just because the nausea characteristics are totally different from the first time around). It's amazing how fast they grow in just a few weeks. Here's the ultrasound from 10 weeks: And here's the ultrasound from 13 weeks:

At times I am secretly (actually more openly) jealous of my colleagues in the English department who get to teach literature day in and day out. What a treat. So I always make sure to sneak at least one fictional story whether short such as Kurt Vonnegut s Unready to Wear in Welcome to the Monkey House, which is superb or something longer and way more verbose than Vonnegut who is the epitome of sparsity, such as Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson (Cryptonomicon is too long). I have just been informed by Phil Lapsley of one of the only fictional accounts on phone phreakers Loving Little Egypt and I might just make this the fictional account for my hacker class I am teaching next semester. I can never get enough of phreaking and since there is so little on the topic, this can top things off. Has anyone read it? Any thoughts? Any other fictional accounts on phreakers?

At times I am secretly (actually more openly) jealous of my colleagues in the English department who get to teach literature day in and day out. What a treat. So I always make sure to sneak at least one fictional story whether short such as Kurt Vonnegut s Unready to Wear in Welcome to the Monkey House, which is superb or something longer and way more verbose than Vonnegut who is the epitome of sparsity, such as Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson (Cryptonomicon is too long). I have just been informed by Phil Lapsley of one of the only fictional accounts on phone phreakers Loving Little Egypt and I might just make this the fictional account for my hacker class I am teaching next semester. I can never get enough of phreaking and since there is so little on the topic, this can top things off. Has anyone read it? Any thoughts? Any other fictional accounts on phreakers?

We ordered a couple of the new HP DL160 G6, cause they can be equipped with a lot of RAM. Unfortunately it s always the same with HP and the bandnew ProLiant 100 series the driver for the NICs is missing/too old in the latest stable debian release. The DL160 G6 is shipped with a Intel 82576 GBit NIC, which isn t recognized by Lenny, see also #522922.
I installed the system with another NIC installed (not really, but this is a way it works :) and wanted to get free the PCI-X slot again. So I did backport dkms and downloaded the latest igb driver. A short look into /usr/share/doc/dkms/HOWTO.Debian did advice me the way to create the DKMS driver package. Just after a couple of minutes I did roll out the igb-dkms_2.0.6_all.deb to the target maschine(s).
On the target systems I just installed dkms, the DKMS package and appropriate linux-headers and sim, salabim there was the interfaces. :)

In preparation for LCA, I'm going to be giving my new Antifeatures talk a few times to smaller local audiences. The first is going to be today in Boston (apologies for the late notice!) at Northeastern University at 11:45 and it's being hosted by the ACM chapter there. The second one will be at my alma mater Hampshire College in Amherst this Friday. A draft flier (ignore the unpluralized "antifeatue") is below.

Some time ago, I made an attempt at a gvfs package with disabled HAL support. The latest upstream version allows to use DeviceKit-Disks instead, through the gnome-disk-utility library. This change was supposed to bring a lot of improvement, among which:

• improved LUKS support;
• better management of permissions, using ConsoleKit and PolicyKit 1;
• simpler software stack, getting rid of gnome-mount.

Unfortunately, it turned out as a real fiasco, since there is no support for IDE CDs using ide_mod in DeviceKit-Disks. Upstream only uses libata, and Fedora has no requirements for compatibility with kernels shipped more than 2 months ago. The change had to be backed out. What you don t know yet is that Michael Biebl is awesome. Not only did he find some ways to comply with Bastian s requirements, but he implemented IDE CD support in DeviceKit. Which was not really easy. So, I d appreciate if some adventurous people could test the experimental gvfs packages in which there is still DeviceKit support. Please look for any regressions in them, especially with regard to removable media handling.

Yesterday s RAM mystery was solved after dozens of people have written in with helpful comments. Thank you all. I need to find time to create a proper, commentable blog soon so that you all can get the credit you deserve! I now have the full 4GB of RAM available:

$ free   head -2
            total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:       4063324    1657440    2405884          0     149080     643732

Yay! The suggestions ranged from timing issues to defective modules, from 64bit OS via south/north bridge limitations to sacrificing chickens to god spongebobs. In the end, several people put their finger on a concept called memory hole remapping , and that turned out to be the ticket. Here is what I learnt: This motherboard and the CPU memory controller supports (which means can address ) 4096MB of RAM. Since extensions cards, such as the graphics card and the network controller, also need addressable slabs of memory for their RAM or registers, ranges in the upper memory regions are mapped to the RAM of those cards. The file /proc/mtrr gives a clue over what s happening:

reg00: base=0x000000000 (    0MB), size= 2048MB, count=1: write-back
reg01: base=0x080000000 ( 2048MB), size= 1024MB, count=1: write-back
reg02: base=0x0c0000000 ( 3072MB), size=  256MB, count=2: write-combining
reg03: base=0x0d8000000 ( 3456MB), size=  128MB, count=1: write-combining
reg04: base=0x0e8000000 ( 3712MB), size=   64MB, count=1: write-combining
reg05: base=0x0ec000000 ( 3776MB), size=   64MB, count=1: write-combining

Registers 0 and 1 represent the addressable RAM available to the operating system. At position 3072, we find two slabs of 256MB each, most likely corresponding to the two graphics cards in the system. I think that the 128MB in register 3 is the AGP aperture. Registers 4 and 5 correspond to 64MB slabs each, most likely relating to the two network cards I have installed. The result is that addresses in memory beyond 3072MB are routed to the extension cards, which overshadow the original system RAM and leave it unusable. When I turned on the memory hole remapping feature in the BIOS, I empowered the BIOS to remap the memory space. The way it does this is BIOS-dependent, but most likely, it will remap the overshadowed memory region to the end of the total memory space. This is a software-only remapping, but the effect is that the system appears to have more memory. /proc/mtrr now reads:

reg00: base=0x000000000 (    0MB), size= 4096MB, count=1: write-back
reg01: base=0x100000000 ( 4096MB), size= 1024MB, count=1: write-back
reg02: base=0x0c0000000 ( 3072MB), size= 1024MB, count=1: uncachable
reg03: base=0x0c0000000 ( 3072MB), size=  256MB, count=1: write-combining

I am not entirely sure how to interpret this yet, but you can see that there are now an additional 1024MB at position 4096 (register 1), so the system seems to have 5GB of RAM available. Register 2 describes memory between 3072 and 4096 as not cacheable, because it maps to extension cards. I do not know how register 3 fits into the picture. By remapping, we cross the 4096MB mark. To make use of the additional memory, we will need PAE enabled to give you 36 bits, or a 64bit operating system: 2^32 is 4096M, so with only 32 bits available, 4GB is all the memory that can ever be addressed (dirty hacks excluded). Fortunately, this system has been running the Debian amd64 port even before it was officially released, and thus, once the BIOS remapped the memory, I could fully make use of it. Mystery solved, some knowledge acquired, many of you left to thank!

This blog post is about fixing the bug #246992: 'arch all package available before arch any dependancy'. What does that mean: we will keep multiple versions of arch all and source packages per suite as long as older arch 'any' package are still available because maybe newer versions haven't been built by the buildds yet. That means that packages from the unstable suite will always be installable in the future.

The old code in make_suite_file_list.py has been replaced by generate_filelist.py and dominate.py. The first one is generating the file lists for apt-ftparchive and the second one removes obsolete packages from the database. The code in make_suite_file_list.py has been written by people that are no longer members of the ftpteam. Its main control function has a nice name: do_da_do_da(). The new script dominate.py still ships with a small function doDaDoDa() as a reminiscence to our forefathers.

My code has been merged into dak and will be activated on ftp-master.debian.org soon. It can't re-add packages that have already been removed in the past but is will make the archive more friendly in the future. Unfortunately it will leave more cruft in the archive that cannot be cleaned fully automatically. We will need your help to find such corner cases. Please report any errors in the archive as a bug report against the virtual package 'ftp.debian.org'.

More information about the topic can be found in ftpteam's wiki.

To celebrate the move to our new office building, there will be another Debian Bug Sqashing Party! The event will take place from 27.11. to 29.11. Here is the Google Maps link. The BSP starts on Friday afternoon at about 17:00. As always, everybody with moderate Unix skills is welcome to participate. Some Debian or programming knowledge is also desirable. For Debian Newbies, there will be a packaging introduction on Friday evening. Please be prepare your Notebooks for a Wireles LAN setup, as we're still not done with the cabling after our move to the new office building last week. Last, but not least i'm glad we will be able to sponsor some pizza for the hungry developer crowd ;-) More information about BSPs is available here:

• http://wiki.debian.org/BSP2009/Munich
• http://wiki.debian.org/BSP
• http://people.debian.org/~vorlon/rc-bugsquashing.html

I know it has been a long time since my last post. I am sorry about that, but life has it s complications every now and then (as you know)... Well, on to the article. Recently I had to reimplement in C a prefork server I wrote in Ruby for an internal project at Propus. Not that the Ruby version wasn t enough (after all, although being in Ruby, I was using Unix plumbing, much in the fashion Ryan tell us about in the now famous I like Unicorn because it s Unix article)... The problem is that, in one of our clients, the only version available for Ruby was 1.8.1. Yeah I know But we were not allowed to upgrade and, although it didn t seem at first, the same server presented a nasty memory leak in 1.8.1 that was not present in 1.8.7 and 1.9.1. I still don t know where the problem is I suspect some of the C-to-Ruby glues around TCP sockets might be blamed, but after a couple of days trying to figure it out, I decided it was easier just to reimplement it using C. It actually took less than a day to get the C version going nothing fancy and, apart from memory footprint, just the same functionality and about the same speed of the Ruby version. But it was enough to remind me I really don t like all the scaffolding one has to raise in order to make something useful in C. It s not just a matter of SLOC (of course, C version was more than 3 times longer than Ruby one)... I am talking about all the manual memory management, pointer operations and the disgusting experience of dealing with strings in C. I know some people are addicted to that sort of thing like heroin, but to me it just slows development. This experience made me think about learning a second compiled programming language. I do some Perl, a lot of Python and (of course) most of my work in Ruby, but those are all interpreted languages. For compiled languages I always resorted to C So I am officially looking for a language to learn. So far, the best candidates are OCaml (I got a little excited about JoCaml a few months ago, now I might get serious about it), Haskell, Lisp, Objective-C, Ada, and Vala. Of these, I ve been reading a lot about OCaml It seems a fine and expressive language, with decent foundations, object-oriented extension, broad standard library and (with JoCaml) concurrency Also it might give me the proper excuse to finally wrap my mind around a functional language! People keep me pointing to Java and Erlang Well for using Java I would much prefer using JRuby. Erlang, ITOH, has a weird syntax (at least to me) and it seems much of what makes it great will, eventually, be part of Ruby (or already is using libraries) either that or I ll just wait for Reia to be ready. Besides, neither can be compiled to native code (ok, that argument can be stretched both ways, so just ignore it). So, what do you think? Any advice?

I have just filed Debian bug report #556644 against the version of openssh-server in Debian/Unstable (Squeeze). It has a patch that moves the code to set the SE Linux context for the child process before calling chroot. Without this a chroot environment on a SE Linux system can only work correctly if /proc and /selinux are mounted in the chroot environment. deb http://www.coker.com.au squeeze selinux I ve created the above APT repository for Squeeze which has a package that fixes this bug. I will continue to use that repository for a variety of SE Linux patches to Squeeze packages, at the moment it s packages from Unstable but I will also modify released packages as needed. The bug report #498684 has a fix for a trivial uninitialised variable bug. The fix is also in my build. Also I filed the bug report #556648 about the internal version of sftp being
incompatible with SE Linux (it doesn t involve an exec so the context doesn t change). The correct thing to do is for sshd to refuse to run an internal sftpd at least if the system is in enforcing mode, and probably even in permissive mode. deb http://www.coker.com.au lenny selinux Update: I ve also backported my sshd changes to Lenny at the above APT repository.

This evening I investigated #555941 in libxml-filter-xslt-perl, and was able to downgrade it to "important". I'm working on a proper fix, but it's not RC any more. (Gunnar, I don't mean to make you feel bad! I've been inactive for a while myself - I'm just making up for lost time.) And now for conversation via blog! Clint, I'm inclined to agree about ego, fiefdoms and so on. But I'm unconvinced that personal relationships themselves are harmful. Actually, I was thinking more about "professional relationships" - I don't care much whether mentors take their mentees to an art gallery, provided they work with them over a period of time, and therefore get to know the quality of their packaging. (I was a bit careless in my phrasing last night.) Having said that, let's do that as well! Indeed, building relationships so that we don't flame each other to a crisp the rest of the year is the very reason we hold DebConf, right? (Apart from the beer. And the holiday.) I reckon the mentoring system would be more effective if we started thinking along these lines, and this in turn would help address the wider problem of resources within various parts of Debian. Maybe not directly, but it could free up other people to work on the complicated stuff. We could probably turn debian-mentors into a sort of "team" in its own right. (Apologies if someone's suddenly made debian-mentors active again behind my back.) And if I ever get approved by DAM (ahem), I intend to propose a deal to the debian-mentors list that each upload of an updated package will cost them one RC bug NMUdiff, and uploads of new packages will cost two. ;)

We'd like to host DebConf 2011 in Munich, Germany.However, this is a far from trivial challenge:Rent in Munich, in particular for conference rooms, is far from cheap. In my opinion, unless we get some really big sponsor (and I'd still prefer spending sponsor money to fund developer trips to the DebConf instead!), the only chance we have is to get some rooms at the university.However given the development of the recent years (budget etc.), it has become a lot more difficult to actually get rooms at the university for such events. Unless the event is considered to be fully a part of the universitys "work", we might have to pay rent to the university. Which again isn't that affordable.Anyway, if you are in Munich, working at one of the universities, or in any way interested in supporting DebConf 2011 in Munich, please join the DebConf11 Germany mailing list. Also check our meetings scheduled on the DebianMuc Wiki page, currently every Monday, 18:00, at the new LiMux offices in Sonnenstr.P.S. There will also be a Bug Squashing Party in Munich end of November: Munich BSP November 2009

Sigh I am starting to fill up my annual report for my real-life work. You know, that chore you must do every year where you score little bullets next to each completed project and talk well about yourself. For my workplace, fortunately, I do not have to lie and convince people I am worth rehiring - As this year I achieved definitividad as a T cnico Acad mico Asociado C de Tiempo Completo at my University, I can say for sure I have long-term job safety. UNAM is the best place for me to work, and I am most grateful Even if I do want to advance for the future, even though I would strongly like at some point to start working in a real academic position My job is mostly operative, limited to keeping things running smoothly in our network and servers. I work in a social sciences (Economics) research institute, and even though I have taken on an interesting project that is viewed from the social sciences I do expect to finish with a very interesting product in the near future, my interest lies in computing as a science. Anyway, back on track This is the time of year to start evaluating many things, many factors, from many different sides. And yes, for me that involves measuring how am I faring in my involvement in the projects I most care about Specifically, Debian, but also several other Free Software projects, even if my involvement in them is mostly organizational. I am once again going through a tough period in my personal life, and the impact it carries is obviously deep. However, I am not fond of finding excuses for my underachievement or underperformance. And that's what I feel now. Even more when I see posts such as Zack's and Tim's status updates, and when I see that we continue to be on a history-high streak of RC bugs. Regarding the several teams I am (at least formally) involved with in Debian, I have been away from the pkg-perl group for far too long... It is still my first group when it comes to identifying myself with - Both as on a personal level, as I consider them as good friends and great people to work with, and I do feel the responsability to share the load with them, as maintaining >1300 packages (even if they are so highly regular) is just not an easy task. But for over a year, my involvement has been basically zero. I have been a bit more active on pkg-ruby-extras, maybe paradoxically as it is a smaller team and with less packages (as I know it is much less probable for somebody to keep my packages in adequate shape if I don't do it)... and also because I am working more with Ruby than Perl nowadays. And finally, about Cherokee, I decided during DebConf9 to redo the packaging to fully use DH7 instead of our old-style quasimanual style. I have had several bursts of activity, and am almost-almost-ready to do the first newstyle upload... But so far, have been unable to do so. Of course, keyring-maint: With Jonathan's help, I have come to terms with most of the processes. Both Jonathan and I have been swamped lately, but at least I think I am finally helping speed up the process instead of holding it down. We do, yes, have several pending updates - but are working our way up the queue, and I hope not to leave people waiting for too long. And yes, we have discussed several ways of documenting and automating several of the tasks we currently sustain, and that should come soon I have been also leaving maybe a bit too much responsability aside on EDUSOL, for which today we are entering the second week of activity, and I'm very sorry to see our server is just too overloaded to even reply to even answer to me And even lacking admin powers myself, I should have worked earlier on setting up redundancy on a more automatic way (as we have an off-site backup we can promote to live and redirect to, but I am unable to do this... Given that I am the techie person on board/the only "professional" sysadmin). This year I also quietly finished the bulk of the Comas rewrite. What? Comas? Still alive? Yes, and you can expect me to show it off to more people soon, and get it used for more conferences. I will talk more about it (and its motivation, and its current status) later on But basically, the only two things that Comas shares in common with the mod_perl-based system most of you got to know (mainly at CONSOL 2004-2008 or at Debconf 5 and 6, although I know of several other conferences which used it) and the current incarnation are The (most) basic database structure and the name. The project underwent a full rewrite, and is now a far more flexible, far easier to install, Ruby-on-Rails based application. And most important, it does no longer involve your name being Gunnar Wolf as a prerequisite for successfully setting it up ;-) Regarding DebConf, I have promoted a Central American MiniDebConf, and we are right on track for holding it in late March in Panam City. Everybody's invited, and we will have (surprise, surprise!) the very professional involvement of Mr. Anto Recio as local team, as it seems he didn't have enough with last year's DebConf9 and wants to suffer further. What am I lacking here? Motivation. I have been quite pessimistic, possibly turning some people away, even though we have a good first sampling of interested people's profiles and expectations. If you want to get involved, tomorrow (Tuesday 17-nov) we will have a meeting at Freenode's #sl-centroamerica, 17:00 GMT-6. Please note we do need involvement from the Central American communities, it is more than just a motivational issue. Last meeting it seemed Anto and I were the only people pushing the MiniDebConf - and frankly, that would be a basis for not even holding it. We need motivation from the very people involved in it! Anyway You can see I have (and it seems to be a constant in my life) a series of contradictions going on. However, the excercise of putting it all into writing helps me understand better where I am standing. When I started writing this post I felt much heavier, much more at a loss Right now I feel I want to refocus my energy on the same projects and teams I have been involved with, yes, but feel it at least more plausible. Hope so.

Some people are going on about personal relationships again. Personal relationships and ego are two things which I consider antithetical to free software ideals and goals, mainly because they tend to promote the justification of ownership and territoriality. In other words, they cause fiefdoms. Ironically, the same thing results from asociality.

Debian is primiarly organized into mostly one-person "projects," namely packaging a piece of software. But in the past few days on Planet Debian, there has been discussion about how existing packages in Debian need more help. Tim Retout wrote:

There's a huge role for non-DDs to play in getting fixes into Debian, but as far as I remember, the emphasis of the mentors documentation is on packaging rather than bug fixing.

I think this is a serious problem across Free Software. Open source contributors are grouped into projects. If you're burning out on what you're working on lately, or you are looking to become a new contributor, it's hard to know what projects need your help. As someone who knows Python and Debian packaging, it would be nice to be able to search Debian for Python-language packages that need help. I also think that Tim hit on a really important social point later in his post:

It seems to me that the mentor relationship works better when DDs get to know particular people

Tim's right that personal relationships make a big difference. I got serious about my NM application when I asked someone I already knew to sponsor my packages. But not everyone can be so lucky as to have a Debian Developer as a friend. And many projects aren't as friendly as Debian; there's no official mentorship available. I think that we need to start paying a lot more attention to personal relationships all across Free Software. (I'm working on a web tool in this space. Join me in #openhatch on irc.freenode.net to discuss it, or just stay tuned until I write it up tomorrow.)

Heh, thanks zack for your welcome. :) I'm afraid I don't make bug fixing look as easy or as organised as you do. Some cheating to finish off the weekend: #548860 was reopened accidentally, #555898 was already fixed in another package, and #555939... actually, that did need a fix, but I just munged the test suite to expect some new error output. Then I spent this morning writing half a testsuite for svn-buildpackage, and this evening just zoning out. Sometimes I wonder whether fixing RC bugs is actually improving the quality of the release, or just letting us make a buggy release sooner. Non-RC bugs get pushed to the back of the queue. Hmm. But the pkg-perl team has around 170 packages with bugs in, and not that many people fixing bugs. I have to agree with corsac on the general point that just about everywhere in Debian could use more people. There's a huge role for non-DDs to play in getting fixes into Debian, but as far as I remember, the emphasis of the mentors documentation is on packaging rather than bug fixing. I was barely aware that I was even allowed to prepare an NMU. And from what I know of the NM process now, a huge list of RC bug fixes would go a long way to establishing credibility as a potential DD - longer than a huge list of poorly-maintained packages. It seems to me that the mentor relationship works better when DDs get to know particular people, and regularly sponsor uploads for them. This way they are in a better position to advise and sponsor any NMUs that might come along, and eventually to advocate them as an NM candidate. But it also seems to me that debian-mentors is not geared up for this at the moment. To conclude, it's 1am, and I shouldn't be posting controversial thoughts on my blog. :)

I m widely know (by my peers, not globaly know, as you may guess) for being a well controlated person when it comes to spending my sacred and beloved money. Actually, I m so well controlated that I m sometimes seen as someone who hates to spend money. Sometimes I m almost convinced that people thinking that way about me are right, but then I get back to my conscious mind and realize that they think like this because people tend not to agree with what they don t practice and, generally speaking, society has been continuosly teaching them to become as consumists as possible. Obviously, I m not completely protected against consumism, as I m human and have as much desires as anyone else, but I think I m doing well on keeping myself from being taken to the path which lead us to bit the bullet and spend our money on something. What contributes to this control also demonstrates how we re used to learn better only from mistakes, as I already spent too much money on things which I initially thought I desperately needed, but which after I realized weren t actually all that much needed after all. I have been trying to avoid wasting money on an e-book reader for months. At the beggining it was a piece of cake, as there wasn t a real option (mind you that I live in Brazil, not in the USA or some other so called first world country). However, in the last few months, the scenario has been changing and it seems that these days there are actually some options available. I have been researching privately about options for months and have become well aware of all the advantages and disavantages of all the options available today. Sorry, I won t be pointing the right option to you, as your best option probably will be different from mine and recommending things isn t the point of this post. Technically speaking, the options available today seems to provide me with what I need. There are no doubts that almost any of them would be good (but not all of them would be the right ) choices and actually would represent a real improvement over the current situation. So, one might ask, why not go ahead and just buy the damn thing ? For most of the people out there, it would seem to be the right thing to do, as I would be doing conscious and well researched purchase after all. Well, I would be doing something good for myself for sure, but the government actually would need to show me some respect and prove me they have some respect for me as well. Amazon, for example, is shipping the Kindle for other countries and Brazil is one of them. I would surely just go ahead and buy it the day the shipment was announced and that was almost what I did. What prevented me from doing so was the insane/absurd takes government is applying on anything one wants to import from another country. Even after converting the price from dollars to the local currency (reais), the price is something like three to four times higher that the original price in the origin country. It s insanely prohibitive for the vast majority of citizens and one could wonder why this is so when this is a device used basically for reading. Mind you that the government has big tax reductions for importing books, for example, which are seen as culture related items and so get to win some advantages over other non-culture related items. To summarize it all, if you want to convince yourself how not to spend money on something, even when you really want to, just do the math regarding the amount of the taxes you would need to pay and I assure you there will be no regrets when latter you think why you did not bought it.

I've always preferred dead tree to reading things on screen; I just find it easier. I've tried reading fiction in the past off a laptop and just didn't find it as enjoyable an experience; whether it was the form factor (hard to curl up with a laptop, even a netbook), the quality of the screen or the interface I don't know. Equally with technical documentation if it's something I'm using a lot I prefer a printed copy to flick through. However e-ink based e-readers are becoming much more common and affordable and I figured I should give the whole ebook experience another try.

I spent 3 weeks in October in the Bay Area on work, so I borrowed my Dad's Sony PR505 for the trip. First problem is that it's picky about USB charging - works fine if attached to a computer, but using a Blackberry charger looks like it's fine but then results in what looks like a hanging reader. However once charged it lasts for ages - I charged it before I went and only hooked it up to my laptop once during the trip to transfer some new content onto it. The form factor is also quite good; a bit heavier than a book, but not excessively so. Holdable in one hand, big enough screen that I wasn't squinting at it. Slightly too big physically to easily go in a coat pocket the way a paperback would unfortunately, but perfectly fine for taking to read at breakfast every morning in the hotel.

The screen was also much better than I'd expected. I knew the technology was different and supposed to be easier to read than traditional LCDs, but I was sceptical. Overall I had no problems with it. I was even quite impressed with the Sony's zoom function - one of the PDFs I was reading was too small when view full screen, so I zoomed in so it was readable. The nice feature was that then the "next page" button gave me the next bit of text to read, rather than the actual next page, so it remained very easy to navigate through as I read. A small touch, but very welcome.

This isn't intended to be a review of the Sony reader; that just happened to be the model I was easily able to borrow. I happened to see a Kindle in use on the plane and I was struck by how much bulkier it seemed, though having looked at the relative specs it seems this is entirely due to the keyboard rather than any difference in screen size. The Nook was also announced during my trip and I'd quite like a play with that as it looks quite nice.

Despite my positive experience with the Sony I'm not planning to go out and get one just yet. And that's the lack of sensibly priced content. When I bought my first mp3 player I could take my exising CD collection, rip it and be able to play it on my new device. This meant I got an immediate benefit of having my entire music collection with me all the time, just by buying the player. If I buy an e-reader then in order to get all my existing books on it I have to go and buy them again. What's worse is they'll cost me the same or more than I paid for the paperbacks. I can't go and exchange my Pratchett collection for the electronic versions for a nominal fee. I can't easily scan them in myself and produce some decent ebooks. I can't even go and buy the entire set for 20; I'd have to spend something like ten times that. With mp3s I can continue to buy the real item and also have it on my portable player. Or, while albums still don't seem to be much cheaper electronically than on CD, there is at least the ability to buy a single track if that's all I want. Books don't have a comparison. I'm not going to want to buy a single chapter, am I?

There are some sites out there that can provide cheaper ebooks - Rachel Willmer runs ebookprice.info which lets you compare pricing from different vendors. There's also Project Gutenberg if you're looking for out of copyright books. Finally Peter Corlett pointed me at the Baen Free Library, which I haven't downloaded anything from but will definitely investigate at some point. I still maintain that none of these are enough and that content provision will continue to be a hinderance for e-reader mass adoption until there is some fundemental change in the way its provision is handled.