I thought this was a bug in gtk but it turns out to be a usability feature introduced in GNOME - all the menu and button icons are disabled. Yuk!

I liked buttons and menus with icons, I've spent a lot of time writing the code to put customised icons on buttons (it is helpful to show an icon on a button that only exists in one app and which does an action specific to that one app to help the user know what the button will do - how else is the user to know without making the button label twenty lines long?) and it's weird if some show up and some do not. Plus the disabled menu icons were only ever partially disabled which was even more confusing. A picture is worth a thousand words - if some pictures aren't any good it's not reason to ditch every picture regardless of quality! Even worse to make it a default that cannot be turned back on cleanly.

The fix involves a partial fix in the System Appearance Interface tab and a hack in gconf-editor to complete the fix.

I now have icons on buttons and on menus, despite GNOME trying to be "helpful". I'll be updating a few screenshots that inadvertently ended up with naked buttons.

How long will it be before a package includes a GConf snippet that enables icons again just because the app is hard to use with all buttons and menu items looking the same? Heck, I might even do it in one of my own packages.

pommed v1.29 is a bugfix release, kind of. The fix is an architectural one related to the video mode switch feature. When pressing the video switch key, your graphical pommed client of choice checks which VT its X server is running on and whether this VT is the active one before executing your video mode switch script. To check that the VT is currently active, it is necessary to open one VT (we use the one our X server is running on) and perform an ioctl() call on it. Depending on your setup (login manager or startx, basically), your user will or will not have any right on the device node associated to the VT. Which means the VT state checking code would always fail in some setups. This is now fixed by moving that code into pommed itself, with a DBus method for the clients to call. You ll need to update both pommed and the clients for this to work, for obvious reasons.

We are often just one attitude away from success -- Anonymous

Debian 5.0.2 wine, which was made to support DebConf9, is finally available to be bought on the internetz. Currently the shop user interface is German language only, but I've heard that this will be fixed eventually.

Enjoy!

Everything is in the title I have uploaded Qt 4.6.0 beta 1 packages to Debian experimental. Amd64 and i386 packages are built (unfortunately, alpha and s390 architectures failed to build).If you wonder if KDE 4.3.2 is working with these packages, the short answer is yes.

Our co-op uses the git revision control system pretty extensively, both directly and through etckeeper. With more workers, we re keeping more shared copies of our git repositories. So inevitably, we ran into permissions problems. Thanks a lot to Moser for pointing out the git repo-config core.sharedRepository true option. I ve also had a bit more of a look around git config (because repo-config is an alias for that) and wonder about the logAllRefUpdates and whitespace settings. Anyone have favourite values for these or other cooperative git tips?

Best wishes to everyone in Debianland for a happy and prosperous Gujarati New Year (Vikram Samvat 2066, called Plava) This year the local mandirs continued their recent trend of coordinating their Diwali/new year plans and there was a big mela planned. Unfortunately the weather didn't really cooperate but the kids got to manhandle some explosives and after all isn't that the reason for the season? Presentwise, I got a DIY 4-shelf bookcase from Sears, the Catalyst Book plus a much-needed woolen hat. I've decided that I am going to quit my job. It's a soul-sucking dead end but in these tough economic times it pays bills so I've agonized about this for a long time. This was supposed to be the year we moved out of Jersey City but it has yet to happen. And it never will unless I take some sort of decisive action. So I'm going to do it. Wish me luck!

• Gooooood morning, Vieeeeeetnam! #
• Accenture day 3 I've finally figured out all control surfaces of my chair. Bliss. Might as well work now #
• Prowling for a good lunch spot around Accenture iffice. Got several suggestions week full of testing ahead #
• http://bit.ly/6taB9 Nice! A good rescue image of Ubuntu made by DELL #
• http://www.ltvzinas.lv/ nopietni upgreidots. ?oti pat?kami. #
• Added a plugin to my Wordpress to auto-post a summary of my tweets every week. Should 'liven' the blog a bit and allow better comments. #
• Google Chrome sicks it does not support SuperGenPass #

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RCBW - week #7 RC bugs squashed this week by yours truly:

• 12/10/2009 bug #547812 - bzr-builddeb - python 2.6 transition
• 13/10/2009 bug #547818 - gaphor - python 2.6 transition
• 14/10/2009 bug #547850 - python-pysqlite2 - python 2.6 transition
• 15/10/2009 bug #547878 - sqlobject - python 2.6 transition
• 16/10/2009 bug #528630 - scanssh - proper version triaging in the BTS
• 17/10/2009 bug #543047 - read-edid - build-dep for aclocal-1.10
• 18/10/2009 bug #547848 - python-pullparser - python 2.6 transition (package gone now)

After having whet my appetite last week with the Python 2.6 transition, this week I mostly focused on that. 5/7 of the bugs above have been NMUs to help getting closer to an upload of Python 2.6 to unstable. Next week I'll probably be on RCBW-vacation, as theoretically I'm supposed to be traveling. I say theoretically because, 2 days from the departure, I'm stuck in bed with a 38 Celsius fever. Great. Anyhow, see you on these pages in 2 weeks.

A few of us are working on spam removal from Debian lists archives. The wiki page linked above explains how to report spam on Debian mailing lists. This is in short as easy as bouncing a mail to a specific address, from your favourite MUA. These "reported spams" then need to be reviewed. Once a given message has been identified as "spam" by enough DD's (there are many false positives in the candidates, particularly in non English-speaking mailing lists), it is removed from the archives. Many mails have already been removed and any help is welcomed. Since Frans Pop launched this for debian-boot, back in May, I use 1 or 2 hours every Sunday to this work. After working on debian-boot only, I gradually worked on reported spams in other lists. As of now, I only have 4 lists where I still have work to do:

• debian-user (115 of 2420 reviewed)
• debian-user-spanish (177 of 1157 reviewed)
• debian-devel (136 of 1075 reviewed)
• debian-chinese-gb (159 of 556 reviewed)

The Chinese and the Spanish ones are tricky because identifying spam there is much less easy (for Chinese, I'm quite conservative and only tag very obvious spam....for Spanish, I read enough of the language to be able to target spam). What about you? Will you be able to help the few of us who work on getting clean archives (noticeably, Sandro Tosi, Giacomo Catenazzi, Cord Beermann, Luk Claes, Frans Pop, Bastian Blank, Luca Falavigna, Michael Koch, Bernd Steinmetz, Thoomas Viehmann, Florian Ernst, Adam D. Barratt, to name thos ewho reviewed more than 1000 mails)? Working on lists in your own language might be a good idea (I'm particularly thinking about lists in German, Spanish, Chinese and French).

I am currently making a shared library out of some existing C code, for eventual inclusion in Debian. Because the author wasn't thinking about things like ABIs and APIs, the code is not too careful about what symbols it exports, and I decided clean up some of the more obviously private symbols exported. I wrote the following simple script because I got tired of running grep by hand. If you run it with

 grep-symbols symbolfile  *.c

It will print the symbols sorted by how many times they occur in the other arguments.

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use File::Slurp;
my $symfile=shift(@ARGV);
open SYMBOLS, "<$symfile"   die "$!";
# "parse" the symbols file
my %count=();
# skip first line;
$_=<SYMBOLS>;
while(<SYMBOLS>) 
  chomp();
  s/^\s*([^\@]+)\@.*$/$1/;
  $count $_ =0;
 
# check the rest of the command line arguments for matches against symbols. Omega(n^2), sigh.
foreach my $file (@ARGV) 
  my $string=read_file($file);
  foreach my $sym (keys %count) 
    if ($string =~ m/\b$sym\b/) 
      $count $sym ++;
     
   
 
print "Symbol\t Count\n";
foreach my $sym (sort  $count $a  <=> $count $b  (keys %count)) 
  print "$sym\t$count $sym \n";
 

• Updated Thanks to Peter P schl for pointing out the file slurp should not be in the inner loop.

One thing I noticed when I got my new LG U990 Viewty [1] mobile phone is the way the core telephony functionality has suffered while features for web browsing etc have been added. It seems that the core phone functionality (making and receiving calls and maintaining a list of names and phone numbers) has generally decreased since about 2004 when I got my first camera-phone. The Nokia GSM phones that I used prior to getting a 3G phone seemed to have a combination of signal reception, voice quality, and basic telephony features that beat all the 3G phones I ve used. The only way the 3G phones were better for core telephony features is in managing the list of recently called numbers. In my past two LG phones I ve been able to easily call an alternate number of the person I last called this feature was dropped in the Viewty. Some of my relatives have camera-phones that have an extremely poor ability to get a signal, they can t get a GSM signal in places where my Viewty can get 3G! Obviously making a usable phone was not a design priority for those devices! Then there s the issue of battery life. Early mobile phones had NiCd batteries that lasted a week, later mobile phones had Li batteries that lasted a week as a standard feature. Nokia sold phones with replacement batteries, so if you wanted to make lots of phone calls while on the move you could have a second battery charged and ready for use. Now the latest BlackBerry [5] apparently has batteries that only last for one day I haven t investigated the options for storing a second battery but a casual glance indicates that changing a battery will be a lot more difficult than on an old Nokia phone. I ve been wondering, why don t they just sell some mobile phones that don t support making phone calls? Smart phones that aren t very good at telephony is really only going half way, do it properly and just rip out the phone functionality! Or they could use the word phone to apply to devices that already exist to do mobile stuff. You could have an Amazon Kindle phone [2] that allows you to read documents, and a Nokia N800 tablet phone [3] for general Internet access including web browsing and email really the only smart-phone feature that is missing from the Nokia is a camera. For that matter my EeePC 701 [4] is probably about twice as heavy as my first mobile phone, maybe it could be called a phone too. If you have two phones, one for making phone calls and the other for doing smart-phone stuff then it won t matter so much if the smart-phone (which can t make phone calls) has it s battery run out. One likely objection to the idea of selling phones that can t be used for making phone calls is that it might confuse the users. However the current situation is that there are significant differences in the signal reception ability of mobile phones, the people who sell them don t know what the difference is, and the rare reviews that analyse signal strength (as done by Choice [6]) are become outdated rapidly and never cover all phones on the market. So I think it would be a great improvement if the phone sales people could say don t buy phone A if you want to make phone calls because it can t do that because currently anyone who just wants to make phone calls has a matter of luck to determine whether they get a phone that works well. The really sad thing however, is that some people apparently have usage patterns that are similar to my satire above. I have heard of people having two phones, one for smart-phone functionality and another for making calls. What we need is to have manufacturers put more effort into making hardware that can receive week signals, from now on I will consult the Choice review of this before making any mobile phone purchase or recommendation. If only a few million other people would do the same then the manufacturers would improve their products. The next thing we need is to have better software to run the phones. The deficiencies in the software on my Viewty could easily be fixed if everyone had source code access. Benjamin Mako Hill writes about some of the problems with closed-source on mobile phones [7]. He mentions security (in terms of our trust in the phone manufacturers), and the general ideal of having control over your own device. One specific problem he doesn t mention are the ways that mobile phones are deliberately crippled by the manufacturers, 3G phones have precious main menu space occupied by the services that are most profitable to the telephone company without regard to what the users desire. Another problem for people who desire free software is file format support. Camera-phones that save video to AVI format instead of OGG reduce our ability to use free software in other places as a general rule every time you transcode a video you either lose some quality or increase the file size so the format that the phone uses will be carried through many other computers and devices. Smart-phones generally have the ability to view a range of data types, the ability to view MS file formats is common (which excludes free competitors). My Viewty has an entire menu section dedicated to Google services (Gmail, blogger, youtube, etc). That s nice for Google who presumably paid well for that, but not so good for me as I don t use any of the Google features on my phone. Now a menu that had a caching IMAP client, an RSS feed reader, a Wordpress API client, a Jabber client, and a caching Wikipedia client would be really useful. My current phone is just under a year old, so I won t be buying a new phone until January 2011 (unless I break or lose my Viewty). Hopefully then there will be some better options. Before anyone suggests that I buy another phone to help with the coding, my current free software coding projects are all behind schedule

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2009/05/31/lg-u990-viewty/
• [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kindle
• [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N800
• [4] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2008/07/21/review-of-the-eeepc-701/
• [5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlackBerry
• [6] http://www.choice.com.au/
• [7] http://mako.cc/copyrighteous/20091017-00

http://mako.cc/copyrighteous/20091017-00

If we've kept up with projections, by the end of this year, the world will be home to 3 billion mobile phones. That's nearly one phone for every other living human being. Although these phones open up a world of important new opportunities in communication, creativity, and cooperation --- and it's important not to understate this fact --- they also represent a step toward a sort of technological dystopia not unlike Stallman's Right To Read. Phones represent one of the most locked-down, proprietary, and generally unfree technologies in wide distribution. The implications for software freedom and technological empowerment are dire. But despite the fact that mobile phones represent what may be the greatest threat to software freedom today, the free software community has --- with a number of notable exceptions that I want to both thank and draw increased attention to --- been mostly silent on the issue. I know passionate advocates of software freedom who work tirelessly to rid themselves and the world of a handful of binary blobs in the Linux kernel --- important work that we all benefit from. And yet, even some of these "hardliners" don't seem to hold their phones to their same standards as their laptops. Ubuntu's decision to ship a new binary driver remains more controversial than the fact that the vast majority of the world's computer using population knows nothing other than phone-based computers that remain almost unthinkably unfree and which remain almost entirely unfreeable when compared to personal computers. For most of the world's computer users', there is no option of, and essentially no hope for, freedom on their current devices. It shocks me that anyone, especially free software advocates, would happily put up with such non-free computers.[1] I think part of the reason lies in the fact that most users of mobile phones, and even most phone users that care about software freedom and technological autonomy, don't think of their phones as computers. Thinking that our phones as computers will not solve any of the problems I've alluded to. But doing so remains an essential first step toward any solution. Although we must still work to build viable, widely accessible, and compelling free phones, we must first convince both users and developers that this is an important goal. Reminding people that our phones, both free and non-free, are powerful general-purpose computers remains an important and still largely unfufilled part of this process. We must find ways to remind ourselves and others of the fact that modern phones are powerful computers with powerful interfaces that are useful for a unimaginable variety of arbitrary applications. We must focus on the fact that these computers have microphones, sensors, and other sensors and that we trust them with our closest secrets and most sensitive data. We must not forget that, in almost all cases, these computers remain controlled, completely and ultimately, by companies that very few of us trust at all. I'm not sure how we will accomplish this task. But more of us need to think long, hard, and creatively about this problem. I'll be calling my phone "my computer" as a first, very personal, step. I have done this over the last week and it has led to some conversations with slightly confused acquaintances. Of course, this doesn't make my phone any less free. But it does mean I'm talking more about the non-freeness most of us have put up with too silently. At this stage, that seems like progress.

[1]	Like many free software advocates, my phone is also a computer running a combination of free and non-free software. I use it unhappily and am doing what I can to change this.

Today I NMUed over a dozen of Python packages with bugs which blocked the Python 2.6 transition. I really want to thank Kumar Appaiah for his work. He provided patches for all the bugs I NMUed today and lots more. I really did not much more than applying, testing and uploading his patches, but Kumar probably invested days of labor to create the patches and test them. Thanks to his effort, the number of 2.6-blockers shrinked considerably so that we now have like ~15 open blockers and ~50 closed ones!

While working on Debian, I often don't realize how some important packages lack manpower to handle issues. Examples that touched me are 'apt' and 'perl'. As someone told many times, it would be good if someone with free time, especially newcomers to Debian, help triaging/reproducing bugs in the BTS, writing patches etc. This activity usually doesn't require helper to be a DD or DM, and will usually be more appreciated than preparing 11th web server or 30th window manager to Debian archive. Just ask maintainer(s). Also, you may want to read http://wiki.debian.org/HelpDebian to get the wider picture.

I tried to quickly find a table with Debian packages with highest bug rates over the Debian BTS, but failed, so I constructed my own one, with the help of UDD. This list contains BTS packages with number of bugs > 100 and is available here. The top ten:

          source            rc_bugs   all_bugs 
--------------------------+---------+----------
 wnpp                             0       3024
 installation-reports            10       2119
 apt                              4        682
 linux-2.6                        0        617
 aptitude                         0        576
 iceweasel                        3        490
 openssh                          1        417
 evolution                        0        362
 util-linux                       1        344
 dpkg                             1        343

Garik Israelian gave an interesting TED talk about spectrography of stars and SETI [1]. He assumes that tectonic activity is a pre-requisite for the evolution of life (when discussing the search for elements that are needed for life) and that life which is based on solar energy will have a similar spectrographic signature to the chlorophyl based plants that we are familiar with. I doubt both those assumptions, but I still found the talk very interesting and I learned a lot. Julian Dibbell wrote an interesting Wired article about an ongoing battle between the Cult of Scientology and 4chan [2]. I don t often barrack for 4chan, but they seem to be doing some good things here but of course they do it in their own unique manner. The article also links to a hilarious video of Tom Cruise being insane, among other things he claims that Scientologists are only ones who can help at an accident site. Has Tom Cruise ever provided assistance at a car crash? The Independent has an article by Robert Fisk about the impending shift away from the US dollar for the oil trade [3]. This is expected to cause a significant loss in the value of the US dollar. Robin Marantz Henig wrote an interesting article for the NY Times about the causes of anxiety [4]. It focusses on Jerome Kagan s longitudal studies of babies and young people. One thing that I found particularly interesting were the research issues of recognising the difference between brain states, internal emotional state, and the symptoms of emotions that people display (including their own description of their emotions which may be misleading or false). The tests on teenage social interactions that involved fake myspace pages and an MRI were also interesting. Juan Cole wrote an insightful Salon article titled The top ten things you didn t know about Iran [5]. The Iranian government doesn t seem to be a threat to anyone outside their country. Clay Shirky wrote an insightful post about TV being a heat-sink for excess spare time and considers the number of projects of the scale of Wikipedia could be created with a small portion of that time [6]. It seems that the trend in society is to spend less time watching TV and more time doing creative things. In a related note Dan Meyer has an interesting blog post about trolls who say You Have No Life [7]. The Making Light blog post about Barack Obama s Nobel Peace Prize has some insightful comments [8]. I doubted that he had achieved enough to deserve it, but the commentators provide evidence that he has achieved a lot. I wonder if he will receive a second Peace Prize sometime in the next 10 years. The Making Light blog post about bullies and online disputes predictably got diverted to discussion school bullying [9]. The comments are interesting. Making Light has a mind-boggling post about homosexuality and porn [10]. US Senator Tom Coburn s (R-OK) chief of staff Michael Schwartz made the case against pornography. All pornography is homosexual pornography , said Schwartz, quoting an ex-gay friend of his. Among other things there are many good puns in the comments. Cubicle Jungle is an amusing satire of the computer industry [11]. It s shocking how long it goes before it gets to the part that s obviously fiction. The WikiReader is an interesting new device [12]. It costs $99US and has a copy of Wikipedia on an SD card, they have a subscription service that involves posting you a new SD card every 6 months, or you can download an image from their server. They state that they have a filtered version of Wikipedia for children, I wonder how they manage that, I also wonder whether they have an unfiltered version for adults. The device runs on two AAA batteries and is designed to be cheap and easy. Naturally it doesn t support editing, but most of the time that you need Wikipedia you don t need edit access or access to content that is less than 6 months old. Exetel are scum, customers who complain are cut off [13]. Making Light has an interesting post about a New Age scumbag who killed at least two of the victims who paid $10,000 for a sweat-lodge workshop (others are in hospital and may die in the near future) [14]. The NY Times has an interesting article about Jamie Oliver and his latest project [15]. He is trying to reform the eating habits of the unhealthiest area in the US. The 15 pound burger sounds interesting though, I wouldn t mind sharing one of those with 14 friends

• [1] http://www.ted.com/talks/garik_israelian_what_s_inside_a_star.html
• [2] http://www.wired.com/culture/culturereviews/magazine/17-10/mf_chanology
• [3] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/the-demise-of-the-dollar-1798175.html
• [4] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/04/magazine/04anxiety-t.html
• [5] http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2009/10/01/cole/index.html
• [6] http://www.shirky.com/herecomeseverybody/2008/04/looking-for-the-mouse.html
• [7] http://blog.mrmeyer.com/?p=4811
• [8] http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/011728.html
• [9] http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/011635.html
• [10] http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/011685.html
• [11] http://sites.google.com/site/cubiclejunglestory/
• [12] http://www.thewikireader.com/
• [13] http://www.progsoc.org/~wildfire/aum/2009/10/15#easytolisten
• [14] http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/011748.html
• [15] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/11/magazine/11Oliver-t.html

Thanks to people who reacted to this post of mine. As expected, when one posts such angry post, reactions come. Guess what: that was intended..:-) So, I got more background on this KDE pulls MySQL in issue. The issue is more subtle than just KDE upstream being dumb and using a MySQL daemon or database for desktop operations. In short, akonadi uses mysqld to manage its cache, from what I understood. So, what's needed is indeed the mysqld binary and not necessarily having it running as a *daemon*. Bug #513382 explains it all. I really hope that MySQL and KDE maintainers will settle to find a solution for this. Apparently, other distros managed to get such issue solved and I would hate Debian being laughed at because we are the only ones where "thy laptop shalt be a database server". Really, I won't be getting deeper into that issue, because I don't have the expertise but, really also, we can't seriously ship Squeeze with the current setup. What's unclear from the pointed bug report is whether someone is doing something about this. Yes, the issue is not new. I actually went on it because I was installing a new laptop and noticed questions about MySQL. My former laptop already had MySQL for other reasons, so I never noticed that my KDE packages were suddenly pulling more stuff in. Thanks to Sune Vuorela, from the Debian KDE team, and Eckhart W rner, from upstream KDE, for bringing more light on this. Ah, and thanks also to people who reworked the design of kdm login screen. It's really nice..:-) (and this is not sarcasm, here, I really mean it).

Another trio concert at CSO, but very different from the most recent classic piano trio. Tonight was once again a chance to see Dianne Reeves (wikipedia) but this time accompanied simply by two guitarists: Russell Malone and Romero Lubambo (wikipedia). Given that Dianne Reeves (who we had seen in just a few month earlier in our neighbourgood) has plenty of stage presence, the format made for a more intimate concert yet with plenty of groove at times too. The three had been touring in Europe for 25 shows, and it was a really nice performance and a great way to end the week. Recommend if you can catch them somewere.

Nice coreboot news the Free Software x86 firmware ("BIOS") is featured on the cover of issue 186 of the Linux Journal. Anton Borisov's article Coreboot at Your Service! explains the basic ideas behind coreboot, how to build an image for your board, which payloads are available and how they are used, e.g. GRUB2, SeaBIOS if you need legacy BIOS callbacks (e.g. for booting Windows), Etherboot/GPXE, or more fun stuff such as space invaders or tint (a tetris clone) in your flash ROM chip... If you read the article and think the build process is a bit complicated and ugly, do not despair! We're currently in the process of converting the whole coreboot code base to use kconfig (the widely-known configuration tool used by the Linux kernel, busybox, and other projects), so in the very near future the whole process for building a coreboot image will work like this:

  $ make menuconfig
  $ make

Flashing the image can then be done using an EEPROM programmer and/or via the user-space utility flashrom (available for Linux, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, etc.)... It's nice to see that coreboot is getting more and more coverage in "mainstream" media and is growing both in number of deployments and in number of supported chipsets and boards. We are desperately in need of more developers though, there are just way too many chipsets, boards, and datasheets out there; we're happy about every patch and every new tester or developer who likes to mess with code that runs in the very first few (micro)seconds after power-on. If you think kernel hacking and related low-level development is nice, you might also be interested in writing code where there's no RAM yet (as coreboot has to initialize it), there's no serial port for debugging (coreboot has to initialize it), no PCI devices have been set up, most of your auxiliary hardware is not yet up (ethernet NIC, parallel port, audio, IDE, SATA, USB, you name it). It's a fun environment to work in and you'll learn a lot about PC hardware, even if you (so far) thought you knew everything there is to know. Feel free to join us on the mailing list or on IRC in #coreboot on Freenode.