I just released Cupt 1.2.0 to Debian experimental.

It now has the ability to create and load Cupt system snapshots (in a sense of installed packages) and the algorithm to try handle changes which require X MiB to download when you have only Y MiB of free disk space available, and X > Y.

For first, see new 'snapshot' subcommand, for second, set new 'cupt::worker::archives-space-limit' option.

Now the 'I-wish-a-feature-in-Cupt' list is again empty. Test, enjoy, report bugs, submit new wishes.

I love the fact that phones are ready to get a decent OS. I bought the phone for better connectivity and to get GPS goodness. 90 days later seems a good time to review the pros and cons:

Pros:
• The phone sees updates (Android 1.6 has recent 2.6.29 build with much nicer battery status and search box).
• Easy to pick google calender together with useful gmail integration.
• Often use the phone for a quick websearch (cinema programs on the run, news, shop opening times, ..) - to lazy to power up real laptop.
• The touchscreen interface isn't too bad, but missed the nice resize effect seen on other touchscreens OS.
• Connectbot is a half decent ssh client.
• The consumed data is very low - never managed to touch the 1GB download bandwith limit.
• gmaps is fun to look up and helpful in finding directions.
• Last but not least important phone functions as easy dialing and good voice transmission are working.

Cons:
• The worst omission is a decent pdf reader. No way to read latest papers on arXiv.org.
• The next big missing thing that worked since years with mobile phones is bluetooth file sending and receiving out of the box.
• A more minor bugger - but still quite annoying: contacts sent to you as vCard don't get easily imported in contacts.
• The camera from the HTC magic is not really pleasant.

Of course Android still seems like an alien sandboxed Linux, but I must say that the average usage capability of the mobile phone is very nicely enhanced. P.S. Using allmost daily also Google Talk, Ultimate Stopwatch & Timer, Finance, GPS Status and the ultra cool Google Sky Map.

I am at the Debian FTPMaster meeting in the LinuxHotel Essen currently. We arrived Sunday evening and will stay until 1st November, giving us a nice week of time to work on outstanding archive issues. Currently we are 4 persons, Mark and me as FTPMasters and Frank and Chris as FTPTeam members. 2 more FTPTeam members join us Wednesday evening, so we only miss 2 members of our team in the end. Monday started out very well, with us merging a 7000 (plus something) lines patch, completly changing our database handling code. While we do have the archive disabled since we started working on it (and haven t reenabled it yet), we had a surprisingly small amount of errors to fix up. Though we do still have to test various codepaths, so it will still be a bit before normal service is back. But yay, we are now with a database layer that actually understands types (and has various other advantages). Today started with us getting to the next intrusive patch set waiting for our attention, the source v3 format. At the time of writing this blog post the patchset is merged (with changes to the way it originally looked) and we are now cleaning up and fixing the introduced bugs. Though I just heard live the first rejection of a sample v3 format package, so that looks pretty good too. And while that bugfixing is going on we are also working on the lintian autorejects and still have many other points on our agenda. I try to keep you updated, and we sure will send a report after the meeting, but I think it can already be said that every single cent spent here is worth it.

I had to struggle a bit with the mobile stick I just got from Vodafone and thought it might be useful to write it down somewhere. The Huawei K3520 (recognized automatically by Linux 2.6.31 as a E620 USB Modem ) seems to work without many problems, the only hardware related issue being that sometimes, seemingly at random, the memory stick part will be loaded and sometimes just the USB modem part. The Vodafone Germany specific configuration, on the other hand, wasn t so easy to find online. The working config I currently have with NetworkManager 0.7.1 is:

Number: *99# (this is the default, but it warrants an explicit mention since I ve found other examples online with *99***1# , and that didn t work)
Username: vodafone
Password: vodafone
APN: web.vodafone.de (this seems to vary wildly from country to country) The rest is either default or empty.

And lastly, taken from this LP bug, I had to change to in /etc/dbus-1/system.d/NetworkManager.conf, to avoid the Looks like pppd didn t initialize our dbus module error. After all this the connection still needs a push to work (it rarely if ever works on the first try and I haven t dug deep enough to decide if this is a Vodafone, a driver or a NetworkManager problem), but after connecting everything is shinny.

Today is Monday, October 26. Someone at Yahoo will go home tonight and, on the way out, turn off geocities.com. Update: Tue, 27 Oct 2009 15:17:50 -0400 Geocities is finally offline. Pages say:

Sorry, the GeoCities web site you were trying to reach is no longer available.

To commemorate it, I bought geociti.es. I intend to do what I can to keep the Geocities pages on the web. I am part of the Archive Team, an independent group of amateur archivists racing to rescue the web from destruction at its own hand. In late 1994, Geocities began offering free web hosting as Beverly Hills Internet. A decade ago, Yahoo bought Geocities. In December 1998, one-third of all web users visited the website. As recently as March 2009, 11.5 million unique visitors arrived there. Today, according to Alexa Site Info, Geocities ranks somewhere between the New York Times and the Washington Post in pageviews. And today, Geocities.com shouts:

GEOCITIES IS CLOSING ON OCTOBER 26, 2009.

Tomorrow, Geocities' website will be closed for good if Yahoo sticks to that promise. The amount the Archive Team has downloaded is around one terabyte. That's all we seem to be able to reach; many pages were deleted months ago when the archiving effort began. The archiving is continuing as I write this. Think of it. Fifteen years of history, memories for millions of people, the birth of a generation on the web. More personal embarrassment than all the POG games put together. It fits on an $80 piece of storage equipment -- at least, that's what we managed to find before Yahoo erases it all. Initially, when I met Jason Scott of the Archive Team, he told me he wanted to download Geocities and share it by mailing hard drives around. I told him I wanted to hoist it back on the Web. He came around, and we and the rest of the Archive Team have put Geocities back online. Geociti.es is not the greatest website in the world, no. This is just a tribute. P.S. Major thanks to John Joseph Bachir for the paperwork assist.

Remus Cernea was invited at Realitatea TV and the attempt to ridicule his and Mr. Pot rc 's (a counter roma/tzigane candidate) candidacies was obvious. The show was supposed to start at 23:00 and started 15 minutes later, all of that after a huge chunk of air time for a candidate from a big party.

In spite of that and the little time he spoke, Remus managed to avoid being trapped and managed to send his message accross.


For undecided Romanians, here are the recodings of the show:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C02T-e2Gt28&feature=channel
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TSqRPBkA2GE&feature=channel
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dACUQnjM85Y&feature=channel

It'll disappear any moment soon... May you rest in peace :

When the Intel Atom was revealed to the public I didn't came around to say: "Wow!", because that piece of hardware promises to be a generic-x86 1.6 GHZ CPU with a total power consumption of 2 Watt, which is amazing considering that x86 hardware generally wasn't an option if you wanted to build a low-power system. But then the first chipsets were presented to the public and the Atom became a farce, because you don't want to have a chipset that eats over 25W for a CPU which consumes 2W. That was basically laughable.

Recently I managed to find out that there is a new chipset out there, the Intel i945GSE, which runs at about 11W TDP, including the soldered-on-board N270 atom cpu. And I convinced myself that this could get my new homeserver. So together with a 2.5" drive I could get a system which runs with about 15W maximum power consumption, which is amazing, given that the Arcor Easybox my provider gave to me seems to have similar maximum power consumptions. And it isn't able to provide me with the great flexibility, the new Atom system is.

So I bought the following components:

• Intel Essential Series D945GSEJT
• A Mini-ITX M350 case, which is amazing, because its about the size of a Linksys router and should still provide a good thermal environment.
• 2GB Kingston HyperX DDR2 533 MHZ S0 DIMM
• a Western Digital Scorpio 320 GB hard-drive

It took a while to get those components together, especially because I previously decided for an Antec case which I ordered from K&M Elektronik, but as they didn't keep their delivery promise I came to the M350. What a luck.

Running Debian on this machine is the easy part, you would think. This is true, for some exceptions. First: Lenny runs fine. I've installed the notebook hd in my desktop and then put it in the atom, when I got the first hardware and it worked right away. Except of a grub message, which is disturbing and which I didn't manage to fix right now (grub says "Error: No such disk" just to get the menu a seconds later anyway and boot the system flawless).

What didn' t work exactly reliable was the included network chip. Its quiet a shame to say that, but if you buy an Intel board, wouldn't you expect that it would run Intel components? Unfortunately this is not true for the atom board. It has a Realtek RTL8111 network chip, which isn't properly supported by the 2.6.26 kernel (that means the kernel think it is and loads a rtl8169 module, which isn't able to properly detect a link).
The workaround for this is to use a 8168 module from Realtek and compile it for your kernel, but as I equipped this system with an Atheros 2424 PCIe chipset for playing WLAN AP, too, I had to upgrade to 2.6.31 anyway and there the chip is fully supported by 8169.

Making the system an access point has been surprisinly easy as well. The greatest pain was to find a Mini PCIe WLAN card, because after all this isn't very common. However I found one based on an Atheros 2424 chipset and bought it. I additionaly bought an SMA-antenna connector that I could mount into the case (the M350 has a preparation hole for it) and an SMA antenna.
Setting this up, has been fairly easy. You need to know, that running master mode with newer mac-subsystem-drivers in Linux doesn't allow setting master mode directly. Instead you need to use an application to manage everything, which is capable of running cards over netlink. Thats hostapd. The unfortune is, that the lenny version is too old and so I built myself a (hacky) backport of the sid version, which isn't that hard anyway, because rebuilding against Lenny is enough. Additional you need a kernel 2.6.30 with compat-wireless extensions, or an 2.6.31, because previously the ath5k driver didn't support the master mode. After that getting hostapd up is a matter of a 4 - 15 lines configuration file. For me its now running in 802.11g with WPA and a short rekeying interval with 14 lines of configuration.

After all I'm satisfied with the system. Without any fan the CPU constantly runs at 55 C, which is okay, given that it must operate within 0 and 90 C according to the tech specs. The system and the disk are somewhat lower (47 and 39 C). The power of this system is more then enough. Its booting quick and working with it works without latencies, even when the system is doing something. What I haven't yet tested is weither the power consumption actually fulfills the expactations. I will do so, once I got a wattmeter.

The Linux kernel regulator API requires that each system sets up the connections between the various voltage and current regulators in the system and the devices they supply, known as consumers within the regulator API. This is done using the struct device for the consumer device as the key for consumer access. This works well for things like platform devices which are generally always allocated at system startup but is not really usable with buses like I2C which only allocate the struct device late on during system startup. To help work with these buses Linux 2.6.32 will follow the clock API and allow the use of the dev_name() for the device instead. A new field dev_name has been added to struct regulator_consumer_supply which should be used instead of dev this is now the preferred mechanism. It is a simple string and so does not depend on any other initialization. For those backporting the relevant commit is 744ea1d0b59bf084f19559b8f199b644fbb0899c.

The debian GNU/Linux kernel s firmware content is one of the most troubling bugs, and (as I understand it):

• it mostly came from upstream (so fixing it only in debian isn t sustainable),
• it s something some FSF supporters kick us for (often while ignoring other not-aiming-for-100%-free systems and turning a blind eye to the non-program problem in their own back yard) and
• it s actually pretty hard to fix and even harder to get paid for fixing.

The latest Bits from the kernel team included: A constructive discussion was held about the outstanding firmware issues, how the team addresses them and how we might work with upstream to address our DSFG issues with kernel sources. The fuller minutes expand it a little: The main topic was concerned with continued splitting of non free firmware and ensuring Debian kernels remain useful even with our DSFG challenges. Discussion about upstream firmware releases and general agreement was reached to talk to Dave Woodhouse about this (as he did most of the upstream firmware splits) . Action item for Vince and Max to talk to Dave Woodhouse. Good luck and thanks for working on this! Another interesting point for our co-op is that xen dom 0 patches will be included in the squeeze kernel release subject to ongoing stabilisation work. The feature will be marked as deprecated and will not appear in future releases. vserver (which I still use on one server) is also going away, but that s less of a surprise. It appears that OpenVZ is the only one with continuing support in the debian kernel, so I guess I d better take another look at it (after it failed messily last time I tried). Will you be changing your virtualisation approach? Do you think debian will get any encouragement for its firmware-splitting, or more flaming for not going far enough?

After one year of development, today I uploaded my first package to CPAN: version 4.0 of Bryar.pm, a modular and extensible blog engine powered (by default) by Template Toolkit and originally written by Simon Cozens. I am officially a Perl developer! This is the software which I use for my own blog. Among the many changes in this release: caching, support for FastCGI, improved support for HTTP validators and a sitemaps generator.

A try with OpenWRT 8.09 in April to setup a WDS with additional AP functionality and encryption, like described in the documentation, failed. So I keeped with my halfbroken solution running on DD-WRT, which is going a bit too commercial these days in my eyes.
Now I have found time to try OpenWRT again for this purpose, since the issue was fixed really fast. I just did setup a stock 8.09.1 installation and then dropped the following into /etc/config/wireless:

config wifi-device wl0
option type broadcom
option channel 5
option disabled 0
config wifi-iface
option device wl0
option network lan
option mode ap
option ssid OpenWrt
option encryption psk2
option key keyforclients
config wifi-iface
option device wl0
option network lan
option mode wds
option bssid 00:16:B6:19:63:C8
option ssid OpenWrtWDS
option encryption psk2
option key pskforWDS And guess what? It worked like a charm! So I could replace the odd DD-WRT boxes. Anyways ... does anybody have an idea where to find the sourcecode of anything > v23 SP1?

For software, the question whether some software can be considered free is relatively easy to decide: Check the license of the code against the list of free licenses of your trust (the OSI list, the FSF list or the judgement applied by debian-legal) and that s (mostly) it. When it comes to web services in the broader sense, including hosters, communication providers, social networks etc., this are not so clear. In this blog entry, I ll try to list the various requirements that a service should fulfill and which I usually consider before deciding to use a service.The RequirementsA) Availability of source codeComing from the Free Software movement, this is the first requirement that comes to mind. If a web service claims to be free, then I want to be able to inspect how it is working, suggest and implement improvements and set up my own instance. For example, Canonical s software housing setup Launchpad was itself not Free Software until very recently. Having access to the source code is also the reason why I prefer gitorious over github for git hosting.B) Access to my dataDepending on the kind of service, it might hold data from me or about me that are important, such as my emails on a webmail service. If I won t have a way to easily retrieve my data to back it up or to move to a competitor, I ll think twice before trusting my data to this service.C) Free data formatsIf there is accessible data, it should be in a format that I can easily get and use with a choice of (Free) software. Not sure if such a service exists, but an online office suite only supporting its own proprietary file format (possibly with its own proprietary offline office suit) would be no option for me.D) An APIFor an extensively used service, I will want to have the possibility to optimize my user experience by automation. This requires that I can use the service not only in person, but also from tools I write. A very good example for this is Twitter: Besides registration, there is no need to use their web site at all and still use all the features, using the tools I find most fit for a task.E) Choice of providersCompetition is good. If a service is only provided by a single company, and I become dependent on the service, I become dependent on the company. A few years ago, SourceForge was mostly the only provider of gratis, comprehensive software project hosting. By now, there are a few alternatives, such as alioth, savannah or google code, which is appreciated. Note that when it comes to the proprietary instant messaging services (ICQ, yahoo messenger, MSN messenger), there is no choice of providers: To talk to my buddies on a certain network, I am bound to that provider. The same applies to social networks (Facebook, StudiVZ, XING), and is one of the reasons why I shun these yet. F) Federation between providersIf there is a choice of providers, and the service in question provides some kind of communication, it is very desirable if I can interact with users of the service on other providers. A very good example for this is e-mail: People @gmx.net can send mails to people @aol.com, and I can have @joachim-breitner.de and still communicate with everyone. This was not always the matter of course: Before Internet e-mail was common, people on AOL could not get in touch with people at CompuServe. These days, the problem persists with instant messaging (Jabber a.k.a. XMPP being the notable exception) and social networks. Also sites like gitorious or github could support federation if they would allow to create branches of repositories that are hosted elsewhere, allowing their users to use the familiar interface with all repositories they work with.Analysis of a few servicesSo far the theory. Let s see how various services fare.e-mailBeing from the old times of the Internet, when everything was better, it does not surprise that this passes all requirements: There is a large amount of Free e-mail servers and clients to choose from, my data is easily moved via well-known protocols such as POP or IMAP and save in standardized format. There is an abundance of service providers, and they all talk to each other. One could argue that the openness of email causes problems like spam, but I d say that this might be a design issue, but not inherent to the above criteria.Pretty much the same analysis applies to Jabber/XMPP.ICQI joined when I was young and unwise. Now I am stuck to AOL to keep in touch with a relevent part of my online correspondence. To use it on the operating system of my choice, other people had to reverse engineer the protocol and any time, AOL could change how its servers work and I ll be locked out. I can not get in touch with people on other networks, my buddy roster is not easily backed up and restored, and no, we can not see the source of the ICQ servers. I d wish I could switch over to Jabber completely, but there are always a few important people who do not use that yet.Github/GitoriousAlthough gitorious is slightly older, github managed to become more famous. These web sites allow developers to publish their source code and other contributors to easily branch, work on their changes, and propose them for merging in the main code. They are based on git, so I can get my data. There is a choice of providers. I am not sure how well I can access their functionality (merge requests etc.) programmatically. As said before, they do not interact well, and only gitorious has published its code.Facebook/StudiVZVery disappointing. I have heard that Facebook offers you a rich API, but otherwise, they fail every category. This is one of the reasons why I am not to be found on these networks yet.Twitter/identi.caTwitter, similar to Facebook, excels in the category API , but fails in the others. A better alternative is identi.ca: The software behind it is free, I can download contact data etc. It even supports federation via OpenMicroBlogging, although that did not break through yet it, it seems.OpenIDAnother very good example for what I want is OpenID, a service that allows websites to accept a user s credentials from another site. This saves the user from having to create accounts everywhere. There are free implementations, multiple providers, I can easily switch between them. A great feature of OpenID that goes a bit beyond federation is delegation: On the start page of my homepage http://www.joachim-breitner.de/, I saved who my OpenID provider is. Now I can use http://www.joachim-breitner.de/ as my OpenID, and even if I change my provider, this stays valid! This is a feature that not even XMPP easily provides.ConclusionWhether a web service is really free is a complicated question and has a graded answer. One has to balance the benefits of using a web service against the freedoms it is missing. I hope that in the long run, services fulfilling most or all of these requirements will prevail, so that I ll be networking socially and blogging microly with a good conscience.

After having ported reportbug-ng from PyQt3 to PyQt4 over a year ago, reportbug-ng lost it s localization, since the gettext based translations where incompatible with Qt4 s translation system. This weekend I finally had the time to have a closer look at this problem. To make a long story short: I have ported the gettext based system to Qt4 s system. All the old .po files where converted to .ts files, but almost all strings are marked as obsolete so that they don t appear in the translated program. But since they are still available in the .ts file, it is easy to get the translations up-to-date. So far only English and German are complete, but eventually other translations will be added. PyQt4 makes it by the way really hard to get non-Qt strings translated.

My employer uses the IBM Tivoli Storage Manager for backups and since we use Debian everywhere possible we needed packages of its client program, which is only distributed as RPMs. The initial conversion made with alien was unsatisfactory for many reasons, and the ugly original packaging did not help either. For this reason I spent a few hours to create an high quality Debian package for the Tivoli Storage Manager client. The client binaries cannot be redistributed, so when it is built from source it unpacks the RPMs and copies from there the files it needs to build the binary package. This work has been sponsored by Seeweb, a provider of web hosting, dedicated hosting and colocation services.