I have been reading comments on Sandro's post about the use of email addresses. I am not sure about what he really wanted to express exactly, because I can't see anything wrong when someone from other distro upload a package into the archive and they use their distro's mail addresses so it is clear that I don't agree with the first point of his post. Now, regarding the second point, I don't understand why when being a DD and an Ubuntu Developer at the same time some people prefer uploading to Debian archive using @ubuntu.com but well, anyone is free of doing what they think is correct and this is not something which is in the policy so it's OK. But reading the first point made by Stefano's post made me understand why.

I got surprised when I read the Jon's post about debian kernel contributors and I looked for the word debian in http://lwn.net/Articles/247582/ and nothing was found. I subscribed for a while, just for curiosity, in the Linux Kernel Mailing List and I was able to read some mails from people I know they are in Debian and just because the patches weren't signed off with debian mail addresses Debian does not appear in such a post at lwn.net. I'd like to add that, for not being misunderstood, I do respect all kernel contributors, because their contributions are really important for the whole community and we are aware of Debian's contributions. My point is that it should be accepted that there exists an impact when using one or another email address and it should be considered (when you are part of both projects, in this case, Debian and Ubuntu).

In Ubuntu Server Edition 9.10: No hardware required, Matt Zimmerman announces that from now on, "every release of Ubuntu Server Edition is simultaneously available on EC2". Amazon's EC2 documentation says: "the ability to create and publish kernels and ramdisks is restricted to Amazon EC2 and selected vendors". Canonical appears to be one of those vendors. Their newest EC2 AMI's contain modules from an Ubuntu build of linux-xen (2.6.27-23). Eric Hammond, who has been for a while making both Ubuntu and Debian images for EC2 says

Historically on EC2, neither Debian nor Ubuntu have had completely Debian and Ubuntu stacks from the kernel up. Instead, we've had to make do with patching the runtime on top of older kernels (2.6.16, 2.6.18, 2.6.21) built for other distros (Fedora Core). Amazingly, we've managed to hold this together and keep it running well for a couple years on EC2.

He goes on to describe current problems with eg, Debian's new udev version and the available EC2 kernels. Furthermore, anticipating today's news:

When the point comes where I am not publishing the base Ubuntu server AMIs, it will not make sense for me to publish new Debian AMIs either.

Those wanting to run Debian on EC2 will be stuck with duct-taping together Debian with the available kernels. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe Ubuntu is actually working with Debian's kernel team, and will be letting them use Canonical's access to publish AKI's of official Debian kernels. Or maybe Ubuntu is working with Debian's kernel team to include identical linux-xen kernel in Debian, so the Ubuntu AKI's could be used. But appearances are that this is another case where Ubuntu has managed to take a situation that was less than ideal for all concerned, and turn it into an advantage for Ubuntu, while at the same time being a unfixable loss for Debian. My mouse's perspective is that a) we maybe only have so many losses left in us (altho we did get thru that whole dinosaur thing ok!) and b) King Kong is still oddly dependent on his mammilian heritage to be up there with his head in the cloud, tearing at Godzilla and stamping on us.

Hello, Planet! (Thanks to lamby for adding me to Planet Debian.) If you don't know me... I'm not surprised. I do some occasional pkg-perl work, but I've really been slacking (and changing jobs, and moving halfway across the UK). Last week I fixed one RC bug, in libgnupg-interface-perl. Better than none, I suppose. It turned out to be quite interesting; the tests failed when the package was built on the buildds, but not locally. Other people had done the hard work, and figured out that this was happening when there was no tty; I just had to debug why the particular perl variable was getting unset. I'm somewhere near the end of the NM process; one of these days, I'll be able to upload my own packages, and those of other people. I'm still working out where best to apply myself within Debian - I do want to share some of the pkg-perl upload burden (because gregoa is an absolute hero, and deserves to be able to take holidays). The status of Debian mentoring in general intrigues me; there seem to be so many places where more minds are needed, and perhaps this makes encouraging and training new developers especially important. More on this later.

So, Debian have kindly funded some new hardware for the AVR32 port, it is the 300 ICnova board, probably one of the best AVR32 boards you can buy to date. The first thing I noticed after finally taking delivery of this a few days ago, it how small it is. I was expecting it to be pretty large, especially seeing as how much stuff it has on it. In fact, it's just smaller than the current NGW100 board I have. So why then new board you ask? Well firstly, I don't own nor have physical access to a board with a display, so this makes testing the all important X server rather difficult [1]. Secondly, the board I currently have is pretty slow due to its lack of RAM, and the fact that it's only 16bit.. This makes using it for porting things rather painful. Finally, the port is getting to the stage where it really needs a porter machine, so that's what this machine will become eventually. Whilst I'm here, I'm going to take this opportunity to prod people about the AVR32 port. ;) The port is currently at a complete standstill since I've run out of buildable packages. This is solely due to the GCC port being buggy (I'm currently fighting with a GCC internal compiler error whilst building Qt4, did I mention that delta is a godsend?) and lots and lots of packages with outdated config. guess,sub files. I currently have around 120 bugs filed for this, so if one of your packages is one of them please fix it. Also, if one of your packages has an Architecture field which avr32 should be in (it should be in most since it's just another linux architecture) please add it. I'd also like to point people at AVR32 dependency status. This is a summary of unbuildable packages and what other packages are stopping them from building (thanks to KiBi for writing this). If you see one of your packages at the bottom of one of the graphs, that means your package is blocking a load of packages from building, and that's bad, m'kay :) I'd very much appreciate help from other people with this, especially for the silly build failures that are trivial to fix. For those who are interested, the port currently stands like this:

• BD-Uninstallable: 2213
• Failed: 495
• Installed: 5336

Now for some useful and interesting AVR32 port related links..

• AVR32 port status
• AVR32 filed bugs
• A pretty graph ;)

Finally, a picture of the new board, and a big thanks to Debian for funding this! [1] Unfortunately X doesn't seem to work at all yet, it just segfaults. :(

Some rant, others don t. I m more with Zack, here, though there has been one @ubuntu maintainer that puzzled me: ubuntu-mozillateam@lists.ubuntu.com. I m still wondering how I should be taking it.

It s an oft-voiced suggestion that rather than looking at the bad things that happen in our communities, we should focus on the good things. There s a number of highly successful geek women already should we not be concentrating on encouraging more of them, rather than scaring people away with tales of thoughtlessness, discrimination and outright abuse?

Let s draw an analogy. One day, a $20 charge appears on your credit card. You didn t make it. You report it to your credit card company, who assure you that they take fraud seriously and then do nothing. A few days later, another $20 charge. Your credit card company tells you that such events are rare, unrepresentative of the general credit card experience and continue to do nothing. A week afterwards, another charge. This time your credit card company describes how they re planning on implementing a brand new anti-fraud system, but that this is unrelated to any events that may currently be occuring and will give no details as to when it s going to be rolled out. And proceed to ignore any further reports you make about fraudulant transactions.

Would you stay with this company? Or would you take your business somewhere else?

The problem with the Let s look to the future rather than spending too much time getting stuck in the present argument is that it assures people that things will get better without providing a roadmap for getting there. It does nothing to validate their concerns or make them feel wanted within a community. It assumes either that people will stick with a community that doesn t respond to their complaints, or that it s possible to construct a community that s welcome to an assortment of genders, ethnicities and lifestyles without any of those people being represented in the first place.

Ignoring people s concerns is an excellent way to drive them away from your community. Doing so because of a potential future that s probably conditional on you having those people in your community is short sighted and self defeating. Ignoring the present doesn t benefit the future. It benefits the status quo.

(Originally posted here)

Sandro Tosi writes to complain about Debian/Ubuntu members using their Ubuntu email address for Debian packages. zack responds, wondering what's wrong with that. I generally agree with Zack. However, back when Jon Corbet was producing summaries of kernel contributors (here's one for 2.6.23: Who wrote 2.6.23), I thought it was a shame that the many Debian contributors who work on the kernel were not represented. I suspect most Debian kernel hackers are paid to work on the kernel, and sign off their patches with an address at their employer's domain.

1 I posted like 3 o 4 messages to an Ubuntu mailing list in my life; it happened when they discussed DEP-3, which I think can help in syncing patches between the 2 distros (or, if you want, in removing one more excuse for not doing that). When I did that, I posted with my @debian.org address. If I have upload rights to Ubuntu, I would certainly use my @debian.org address, to show to the Ubuntu community where I come from. Now, why then should a @ubuntu.com guy do anything different when uploading to Debian, no matter which rights he has earned in the (Debian) project? Or better, sure he can do it differently, but why should we ask he to do that? 2 DDs have different "philosophies" about which address they use in Maintainer/Uploaders fields: some of them consistently use @debian.org address in every package they (co-)maintain; some other use some of their non-Debian addresses. Shouldn't the latter choice be completely orthogonal to whether they have a @ubuntu.com address? 3 As Gaudenz has shown in his master thesis (there's a very nice DC9 talk about that), Debian has surely lost a lot of "contributors" (people that interact on lists, BTS, ...) in favor of Ubuntu, but has not lost "uploaders" (Gaudenz' names were actually different, but I can't remember them and the slides are in German, which I can't read :-/). In fact, there is a flow of people which become uploaders to Debian, that come from Ubuntu; that flow most likely compensates the decrease in the number of Debian contributors which become uploaders. So, let's face it, we will have at least for a while people coming from Ubuntu uploading to our archive, possibly/hopefully because they like more our free ideals and democratic project management. These are my personal reasons for finding some rants pointless. (But still, that rant finally gave me the opportunity to mention Gaudenz's work, which I've found pretty impressive!)

• Christmas Songs on the Radio
• 64-bit Flash Support (edit: or lack thereof)
• Blog posts discouraging people from contributing to Debian

I was referred to Creating a World Without Poverty during a discussion on advogato some months ago, but it took rather a long time to obtain the book for various reasons and then I forgot about this review until a recent discussion on new Cooperatives-UK Chief Ed Mayo s site. Better late than never, here s my review of it. Let me know what you think of this book. About the Book Author Muhammad Yunus is founder of the Grameen Bank, Bangladesh, one of the microcredit pioneers, but that story has been told in another book Banker to the Poor. The prologue of this book starts with the creation of Grameen Danone a joint venture between the bank and the France-based Groupe Danone then part one describes problems in capitalism and introduces the idea of Social Businesses as a complement to what the book calls Profit-Maximising Businesses (PMBs), or what most people know as usual shareholder companies. Part two then covers the Grameen Group from its start in banking, through an impressive list of short company case studies some Social, some PMBs, some joint-ventures up to the first year or so of Grameen Danone. The final part then talks about creating a marketplace which is open to Social Businesses, harnessing Information Technology to spread these ideas (more on this in a later article on this site) and using those innovations to banish poverty from the world. The epilogue is the Nobel Prize Lecture Poverty Is a Threat to Peace which seemed to read almost as a simplified summary of the book s main ideas. Annoyance I got quite annoyed with this book because I feel there is a lurking absurdity in its main big idea:- On the one hand, the argument seems to be that profit-maximising businesses are problematic because of their single-minded focus on profit-maximisation. This is an argument that I largely agree with, as you may remember from my short review of Joel Bakan: The Corporation. On the other hand, it proposes to remedy this by creating Social Businesses with equally single-minded focus on social problems this seems like a recipe for disaster! If profit-maximisers threaten to wreck the environment, human rights or whatever else isn t in their goals, why won t Social Businesses using similar single-purpose company formation rules just as easily threaten to wreck whatever mentioned isn t in their goals? If this book is correct and entrepreneurs are multi-faceted human beings who will act to promote social aims (which they must if they are to invest in Social Businesses), then the only robust way forward is to promote businesses that do not try to simplify that multi-faceted nature, whether for profit-maximisation or for a subset of social aims. The best form of businesses that I know for trying to represent all interests of their owners are cooperatives. Dismissed after less than a page Cooperatives are examined in part one of the book and dismissed after less than a page (p35) because they are not inherently oriented towards helping the poor or producing any other specific social benefit (which is a misleading claim because concern for community is a basic principle of cooperatives which all should uphold), they can be owned equally by the wealthy as well as the needy (why is this a problem?) and they can sometimes be demutualised into PMBs. Ultimately, if that s the will of the people, that can t be completely prevented, but recent developments have found ways to make that much less attractive (so-called anti-carpetbagging rules). Doing what people want is not usually a problem in other spheres it s democracy. What s really infuriating is that the author proceeds to describe Social Business which are aimed at specific social benefits (rather than all), can only be owned by the needy but can access the resources they need by donations from the wealthy or by forming joint ventures with them (even very unequal ones) and can be desocialised into profit-maximisers (p178). The same problems which were used to reject cooperatives exist just as badly, if not worse! Conclusion: a bit disappointing So, ultimately, I found this book a bit disappointing. There are lots of good ideas, but when presented with a ready-made round wheel for the basic problem of tempering profit maximisation, this book reinvents an oval one. I suppose I shouldn t be surprised. The misleading criticism of cooperatives is sadly typical of much of the current social enterprise movement, which I mentioned as a drawback in the recent case study of our co-op by Cooperatives-UK. I don t know if social enterprise enthusiasts are informed by the thinking of people like Muhammad Yunus, or if the high-profile authors simply reflect the movement. Have you read this book? Did you spot this contradiction? Do you feel it has other problems that I m ignoring? Or is it a work of genius and I shouldn t be disappointed with it?

Version 0.6.7 of the Rcpp package---a set of C++ classes making it easier to glue C/C++ code to R---is now on CRAN and Debian. This is a fairly incremental release that contains just a few small changes that arose since the previous release in August. One change is that a new type RcppList was added which allows us to build R 'list' types in C++. In particular, this makes it possible to have data structures of different types and dimensions. We had not previously accomodated this as our data structures where more regularised (i.e. think matrices or vectors of various types). The need for this came out of the work with the recently started RProtoBuf package which interfaces the Google ProtoBuf library. The incredible Romain Fran ois has joined the project and added a number of nice tricks; this will need another blogpost sooner rather than later. In the meantime, check out the RProtoBuf pages at R-Forge. Another small change was the addition of a self-contained example of a function callback from C++ into R which wasn't all that well documented before; this was in response to a user request. Finally, I started RcppList as a first step in reorganising the code a little better and split the class header and body off into separate files. This required changes to the infrastrucure files Makevars, cleanup, ... and I promptly forgot the Makevars.win Windoze variant which will require a 0.6.8 release real soon.

First I thought a recent xorg update was just not recognising the trackpad and mouse buttons on the Acer Aspire1. Then I thought something was wrong with the Emdebian Grip installation of Squeeze, then I tried upgrading the kernel to 2.6.30 and just now I tried a Graphical Rescue Mode boot of the Lenny Debian Installer.

The trackpad is non-responsive, the mouse buttons are non-responsive. The trackpad still shows up in various system messages but simply doesn't move the pointer or activate any menus. Keyboard shortcuts still work but no mouse. (I gave away my USB mouse but I guess that's the next test.)

Could this be something other than the hardware failure that it appears?

Finally, it happened! I became a Debian Developer! I wish to thank everybody involved in this process: from those who helped me in my initial packaging efforts, to who actually created the account. Many thanks to the pkg-perl team for accepting newbies and helping them: props to Damyan Ivanov, Gregor Herrmann, Gunnar Wolf! Thanks to Debian-Med and Debian CLI: they always believed in me, and I had a great time in these teams. A special thanks goes to Andreas Tille, who advocated my NM candidature. Thanks to my two AMs, Bart Martens and Bernd Zeimetz. Even if my NM was long, difficult and not so flawless, it all went good, at the end . A special thanks to Enrico Zini: he was the first DD signing my GPG key, thus allowing me to have more "rights" (being a DM), and experience some more responsibility than I previously had. Thanks to his "Become a DD. NOW!" right after checking my ID in Palermo -- Enrico, it finally happened! Thanks to Christoph Berg, Ron Lee, and Stephen Gran, which handled the final steps of the overall process. And now, dapal is here to break the world. Be warned!

I know I wrote about Android already today, but there is another thing that concerns me right now. I am owner of an Android-based phone (an HTC Dream) and recently switched my mobile network provider. The problem is that my new provider is a virtual provider and as such there is no real network of that provider. Now Android has a feature to turn off broadband connections when in roaming mode, which itself is a great idea and can save you from paying quite a lot of money when the phone connects to 3G abroad, but this feature also turns off broadband connections when roaming locally. All this is being discussed in bug report #3499. After noticing this problem I became curious on how Android detects that it is roaming and I found the GsmServiceStateTracker.isRoamingBetweenOperators method to be responsible for that magic, but soon noticed that the method is not only inefficient, but also doesn t work as intended. This is hardly related to the bug mentioned above, but let s have a look at the code in question:

/**
* Set roaming state when gsmRoaming is true and, if operator mcc is the
* same as sim mcc, ons is different from spn
* @param gsmRoaming TS 27.007 7.2 CREG registered roaming
* @param s ServiceState hold current ons
* @return true for roaming state set
*/
    private
    boolean isRoamingBetweenOperators(boolean gsmRoaming, ServiceState s)  
        String spn = SystemProperties.get(PROPERTY_ICC_OPERATOR_ALPHA, "empty");
        String onsl = s.getOperatorAlphaLong();
        String onss = s.getOperatorAlphaShort();
        boolean equalsOnsl = onsl != null && spn.equals(onsl);
        boolean equalsOnss = onss != null && spn.equals(onss);
        String simNumeric = SystemProperties.get(PROPERTY_ICC_OPERATOR_NUMERIC, "");
        String operatorNumeric = s.getOperatorNumeric();
        boolean equalsMcc = true;
        try  
            equalsMcc = simNumeric.substring(0, 3).
                    equals(operatorNumeric.substring(0, 3));
          catch (Exception e) 
         
        return gsmRoaming && !(equalsMcc && (equalsOnsl   equalsOnss));
     

Okay, let me summarize what this piece of code does wrong, at least from my understanding:

• It takes both the network operator alphanumeric identifier and alphanumeric long identifier and compares both to the alphanumeric identifier coming from the SIM card, whilst
• it could simply use the network and SIM card numeric identifiers and compare those, which should be a lot cheaper than comparing those strings
• Then it takes the first three characters/digits of the numeric identifiers (which indicate the country) and compares those

Now in my case my SIM card doesn t seem to provide the phone with a alphanumeric identifier, so the first two comparisons always fail for obvious reasons and, looking at the inline-if in the last line of that method my phone will always indicate that I am in roaming mode, even when I am not. The problem is not only the logic which seems to be wrong, but I rather see the inefficient comparisons used there to be a major problem in embedded systems like mobile phones. This is the first piece of Android code I have had a look at, but if all other code is as ugly and inefficient as these few lines Android really needs some major fixes. Related to this I have reported bug #4590 and forked the git repository in question over at github, to fix this method, should be a matter of 5 minutes.

I ve recently been diagnosed with Asperger Syndrome (AS) [1]. Among other things this means that I am genetically predisposed to have an interest in solving technical problems and give lectures about how I solved them, but that I tend not to be a people-person . AS is generally regarded as an Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), but there is a lot of debate among the experts about the exact relationship. Some people (such as the psychologist who assessed me) believe that AS is a synonym for High Functioning Autism (HFA), however one theory I ve heard is that HFA people are more sensory oriented and Aspies differ by being information oriented in that case I would not be regarded as HFA. I m not bothered by this issue, I m sure that in a few years time the experts will have some consistent definitions for such things that most people can agree on. There is no Boolean assessment for AS, the assessment is based on a sliding scale of number of criteria. People who are almost Aspies but don t quite pass the test (or more commonly don t get assessed because they don t think they would pass) are sometimes referred to as Asperger Cousins (AC), this is a slang term that is not formally recognised but is often used in online discussions. I m sure that a significant portion of the readers of my blog would regard themselves as being at least ACs if they investigated the issue. The test at Glenn Rowe s web site [2] can give you an idea of how you rate by some criteria but note that this is not at all conclusive and it s based on the theories of Professor Simon Baron-Cohen [3], not all of which have general agreement. Leif Ekblad is running a project to analyse long-term changes to the Aspie score of adults [4]. The main quiz for that project seems quite popular for self-diagnosis, but again it s not conclusive. I think that diagnosing oneself for an ASD is not nearly as crazy as most things which might fall in the category of being one s own psychologist, but I still strongly recommend getting a formal assessment if you believe that you are an Aspie. In Australia it costs about $600 and there s a waiting list of about 3 months. Chaotic Idealism has an insightful post about the pros and cons of self-diagnosis [5], if you suspect that you may be an Aspie then I recommend that you read it before doing the tests.

• [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspie
• [2] http://www.glennrowe.net/BaronCohen/MaleFemale.asp
• [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Baron-Cohen
• [4] http://www.rdos.net/eng/Aspie-quiz.php
• [5] http://chaoticidealism.livejournal.com/70133.html

I have been reading a great many posts about Android lately, some consisting of criticism, some of praise and some simply addressing issues in the Android community . Let s have a look at those. Matt Porter s Android Mythbusters presentation and Harald Welte s reaction
I haven t seen the presentation live, but I had a look at the slides. Impressing work done by Matt putting all this information together. However, we all knew that Android only (ab-)uses Linux, without making use of the GNU userland for a long time, didn t we? In his presentation Matt has shown things such as Android s udev replacement that uses hardcoded values for device node creation and (on his blog) Harald has then come up with a statement I have found to be very strong:

The presentation shows how Google has simply thrown 5-10 years of Linux userspace evolution into the trashcan and re-implemented it partially for no reason. Things like hard-coded device lists/permissions in object code rather than config files, the lack of support for hot-plugging devices (udev), the lack of kernel headers. A libc that throws away System V IPC that every unix/Linux software developer takes for granted. The lack of complete POSIX threads. I could continue this list, but hey, you should read those slides. now!

Now both of these statements target technical details, but the root of the problem seems to be elsewhere. Where is my Android 2.0? Okay, that heading might not be making any sense in the context of this post at a first glance, but let me elaborate on that. Google and the Open Handset Alliance refer to Android as being an Open Source operating system, but the project is different from real Free Software projects: development takes place in a closed group and the results are shared with the community later on, when they are deemed to be ready. This means that innovation also takes place behind closed curtains and that the community is not involved in the actual development process at all. Lately we have seen the result of that, as Motorola is bragging about working close with Google on Android 2.0 ( Eclair ), but the AOSP source trees, open for everyone to have a look at, show no signs of version 2.0. In fact no changes that might even remotely suggest the release of a new major version have been made public in the past few weeks. So where is the openess there?
Actually, the Motorola Droid has already shipped with Eclair on 6th, but still, there is no indication that Eclair will be made available to the broader public. In short Android seems to be developed behind closed curtains, with hardly (read no) community input whatsoever and is sometimes released as Free Software, not what I would describe as an open development process. The Android Market problem As we have seen in the past Google is enforcing their copyright on proprietary applications that ship with pretty much every Android device, such as the Android Market. This has become really clear when Steve Kondik received a cease and desist letter when packing the Google-proprietary applications into his ROMs. Okay, it s Google s right to enforce their copyright and there is nothing wrong with actually doing so, the thing I really have a problem with is something else: the Market is proprietary. Now what this means should become rather clear. You can have an Android device without Google s proprietary bits, but with default settings you just do not have any way of installing additional software. In my opinion the Market should be freed by Google themselves, or the community has to react and come up with a free replacement to overcome the vendor lock-in. Oh, you might know a replacement called SlideMe (or Mobentoo) already. Well, that bugger is proprietary too, so not a solution at all. Nokia and Maemo to the rescue In most discussions about the openness of Android someone throws in Nokia and Maemo, as a solution to the dilemma. Reading all those positive comments I simply had to give it a try, but all my hopes were destroyed within a few minutes. Let s start with the good news and let alone the reason why my hopes were destroyed for another minute or two. Maemo is based on Debian GNU/Linux and various Free Software components, such as GTK+, gstreamer, esd and friends. Most of the system is Free Software which is a good thing(tm) and reading all of this really got me into Maemo. Okay, some applications seem to be proprietary, but I am sure that could be fixed rather easily, so I could once for all use a truly open phone. and then came the SDK installer shell script:

#!/bin/sh
# Copyright (C) 2006-2009 Nokia Corporation
#
# This is proprietary software owned by Nokia Corporation.
#
# Contact: Maemo Integration <integration@maemo.org>
# Version: $Revision: 1110 $

Now there is one question you should ask yourself: Why would someone trying to promote his platform as being open make the *installer* script for its SDK proprietary? Come on, it s an installer script, how much of your secret juice could be in there? What s the problem with people modifying it and working on this installer script in an open development environment? I had high hopes for Nokia actually doing a bit better than Google, but it seems they ve failed to do so. It may be me overreacting, but a proprietary SDK installer shell script scares me enough not to install the SDK and have a look at it for now nor to think about buying a Maemo-based device in the near future. Please Nokia, either get the facts straight or provide us with a free SDK to your free & open platform. So, in short, Google is bad at working with the community and creating a truly open development process, and Nokia simply fails in terms of not scaring off prospective developers for their open platform with the proprietary SDK installer. Do you have any solutions in terms of an open phone environment, apart from what OpenMoko has come up with?

I wanted to let my readers know that I migrated from my previous hosting to a new one. There was nothing wrong with the previous one, but I wanted to go out shopping for something cheaper and still as reliable. Lots of friends gave me good recommendations for Linode and the price was tempting so I thought : Why not ? . The most noticeable advantage, apart from the price reduction, was the speed improvement, as I got myself a more powerful VPS and then now I have more room for new experiments. Later I also noticed some little but very welcome improvements. These are just minor details, but together they account for a great experience. So, I m here to let you guys now that if you want a good, reliable, speedy, and still cheap hosting provider for your VPS, just give Linode a try. I m sure you won t be disappointed.