Search Results: "rul"

24 October 2009

MJ Ray: Three Strikes: Out?

The Guardian reported this week that rights holders will have to obtain a court order before punishing persistent offenders by reducing or cutting off their internet connections. This is an important step in the right direction. For too long, rights holders and their agents have been able to make allegations without fear of repurcussions, even though loss of internet access can be a terrible problem for customers, especially as more government services move online. In the US, we ve even seen rights holder agents acting against legitimate publishing by TV production companies these groups really are out of control! There are still unanswered questions about who pays when an allegation is made, with the cost usually being left with the customer, either directly (through having to pay the ISP an admin fee for the allegation) or indirectly (through higher ISP fees). Hopefully the courts would rule fairly on who should pays the costs in each case. The next step would be to prohibit things like Karoo s Three Strikes as unfair terms in consumer contracts.

22 October 2009

Gunnar Wolf: How can we advance without a tax increase?

There has been a lot of buzz recently in Mexico after a tax increase that has been announced for next year. The two main points I have seen criticized are:
Value Added Tax (IVA) increase from 15% to 16%
There was a great improvement regarding the original proposal by our de-facto ruler (why de-facto? Because it is still unclear whether he won the popular vote. He has about the same legitimacy as George Bush during his first term: Legal but illegitimate): In Mexico, there is a category of items regarded as fundamental, which are exempt of IVA (tasa cero). This category includes food and medicines Of course, this category makes up the bulk of the poorer people's consumptions, so they pay much less IVA than people with higher living standards. For a very long time, there has been a push to remove this exemption. This has been fortunately clearly understood and fought against. So, the presidential initiative, as I was saying, contemplated a global 2% tax which would not be IVA, and which would be applied universally. This tax would be earmarked to be applied to social programs, and was euphemistically called Impuesto de Combate a la Pobreza (poverty combat tax). Many people applied the concept of duck typing (if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck... It is a Value Added Tax). As many analysts, I believe this tax was meant to be the foot in the doorstop, leading to point out in a couple of years that anyway nothing is IVA-exempt anymore and the world has not come to an end, and we should apply universal IVA... So, the reduction in the increase (2% 1%) is not the most notable thing here The notable (and good!) thing is that they didn't succeed into killing the tasa cero.
3% tax on telecommunications
Many friends have started rallying (with the IMHO least effective way of protest you can find on Earth, just by stating their adherence in their Twitter and Facebook profiles. Wow, great deal!) that the original proposal included a 4% tax on telecommunications, and it appears that 3% will be applied. They say, quite fairly, that telephone and Internet access are no longer considerable a luxury, but a need to power the society into becoming better prepared, more competitive. My friends state as a contrast the Finnish ruling broadband access as a citizen right. What they seem not to realize is that the proportion of taxes in Mexico (collected from the responsible taxpayers, which is not by far the way for the bulk of the money in this country) is close to 30%, taking into account the big taxes (IVA, ISR/IETU) and the host of smaller ones. In Finland, the percentage of taxes payed by every person and remember that tax evasion is way lower than here!) is over 50%.
So What is my opinion on this? What would my ideal tax scheme be?
  • Nobody likes taxes. But the country needs far more infrastructure, far wider inverstments. We need higher taxes But we need those taxes to be collected from people with higher income. And yes, that would mean I would most probably pay more (as I do sit relatively high on the income scale Qualified work, even if you do not seek money for the sake of it, pays much better than non-qualified work; remember the minimal wage in Mexico is around MX$50 a day - Less than US$4 or 3).
  • The increases should be applied to the income tax (ISR). It is supposed to be around 30% for income levels over MX$5000 a month, with a very slight increase after that point. Income tax is highly deductible now, and most people with high income manage to ellude most of it. Many cases have been documented of companies as small as Walmart paying less than MX$1000 a year due to several (intentional? you bet!) holes in the legislation. That is where the bulk of the extra government income should come from!
  • For a couple of years, since I registered as a taxpayer (people receiving money exclusively as salaries under a given limit don't have to declare taxes) I have decided not to hire an accountant to make the numbers look prettier, and just do the numbers myself over the platform provided by SAT/Hacienda (the tax collecting authority). Yes, that means I am paying more than what I could But it also means I am paying what I should! And it is an expensive point of view, but I strongly invite others to do the same. If we criticize Walmart for making numbers look prettier, shouldn't each of us do the same? Shouldn't we all care to pay what we are supposed to, so that the government has enough funds to carry out its tasks?
Yes, I am painfully aware that an important portion of what gets into the government disappears due to corruption and ineptitude. Still, the only position from where I can criticize is from being clearly legal. The same point as I do with software: I cannot ask people to comply with my Free Software licensing if I use ilegally propietary software, can I? So no, I don't use any. Even legal propietary software, free-as-in-beer (i.e. Flash player). So, please think this over before you join the Lemmings into complaining about the tax increase. Yes, this is a bad moment to increase taxes. Yes, Mexico is the worst faring country in all of America in its response to the crisis; the GDP will probably fall between 8% and 10% this year and 2010 will not be much better. Yes, it would be better to increase competitivity. But, yes, we pay ridiculously low amounts of taxes And those of us who can afford a little reduction in our expenditure should do it. And those who make gross money should just stop it. Oh, and last point, regarding the #internetnecesario Twitter hashtag: Don't be Lemmings. Internet should be recognized a basic need for a free society. But right now in our country, it completely is a luxury, even if you cannot live without it. If you are Internet-addicted as myself, you most probably will not notice the 3% increase. FFS, We will pay MX$360 instead of MX$350 a month for my Infinitum connection. Will we really notice? In Mexico, middle and upper class are Internet-enabled. Lower classes are not. Things should change, no doubt. But it is not at all comparable to an universal IVA. Things should change and universal connectivity should be a given. But right now, calling Internet a basic good... is just out of touch with reality.

18 October 2009

Stefano Zacchiroli: RC bugs of the week - week 7

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

Russell Coker: Mobile Phones Are Computers

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

17 October 2009

Benjamin Mako Hill: The Computer in My Pocket

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.

14 October 2009

Robert McQueen: Telepathy Q&A from the Boston GNOME Summit

The first Telepathy session session on Saturday evening at the Boston GNOME Summit was very much of a Q&A where myself and Will answered various technical and roadmap issues from a handful of developers and downstream distributors. It showed me that there s a fair amount of roadmap information we should do better at communicating outside of the Telepathy project, so in the hope its useful to others, read on MC5 Ted Gould was wondering why Mission Control 4 had an API for getting/setting presence for all of your accounts whereas MC5 does not. MC5 has a per-account management of desired/current presence which is more powerful, but loses the convenience of setting presence in one place. Strictly speaking, doing things like deciding which presence to fall back on (a common example being if you have asked for invisible but the connection doesn t support it) is a UI-level policy which MC should not take care of, but in practice there aren t many different policies which make sense, and the key thing is that MC should tell the presence UI when the desired presence isn t available so it could make a per-account choice if that was preferable. As a related side point, Telepathy should implement more of the invisibility mechanisms in XMPP so it s more reliably available, and then we could more meaningfully tell users which presence values were available before connecting, allowing signing on as invisible. Since MC5 gained support for gnome-keyring, its not possible to initialise Empathy s account manager object without MC5 prompting the user for their keyring password un-necessarily (especially if the client is Ubuntu s session presence applet and the user isn t using Empathy in the current session but has some accounts configured). Currently the accounts D-Bus API requires that all properties including the password are presented to the client to edit. A short-term fix might be to tweak the spec so that accounts don t have to provide their password property unless it s explicitly queried, but this might break the ABI of tp-glib. Ultimately, passwords being stored and passed around in this way should go away when we write an authentication interface which will pass authentication challenges up to the Telepathy client to deal with, enabling a unified interface for OAuth/Google/etc web token, Kerberos or SIP intermediate proxy authentication, and answering password requests from the keyring lazily or user on demand. Stability & Security Jonathan Blandford was concerned about the churn level of Telepathy, from the perspective of distributions with long-term support commitments, and how well compatibility will be maintained. Generally the D-Bus API and the tp-glib library APIs are maintained to the GNOME standards of making only additive changes and leaving all existing methods/signals working even if they are deprecated and superseded by newer interfaces. A lot of new interfaces have been added over the past year or so, many of which replace existing functionality with a more flexible or more efficient interface. However, over the next 4-6 months we hope to finalise the new world interfaces (such as multi-person media calls, roster, authentication, certificate verification, more accurate offline protocol information, chat room property/role management), and make a D-Bus API break to remove the duplicated cruft. Telepathy-glib would undergo an ABI revision in this case to also remove those symbols, possibly synchronised with a move from dbus-glib to GVariant/etc, but in many cases clients which only use modern interfaces and client helper classes should not need much more than a rebuild. Relatedly there was a query about the security of Telepathy, and how much it had been through the mill on security issues compared to Pidgin. In the case of closed IM protocols (except MSN where we have our own implementation) then we re-use the code from libpurple, so the same risks apply, although the architecture of Telepathy means its possible to subject the backend processes to more stringent lockdowns using SElinux or other security isolation such as UIDs, limiting the impact of compromises. Other network code in Telepathy is based on more widely-used libraries with a less chequered security history thus far. OTR The next topic was about support for OTR in Telepathy. Architecturally, it s hard for us to support the same kind of message-mangling plugins as Pidgin allows because there is no one point in Telepathy that messages go through. There are multiple backends depending on the protocol, multiple UIs can be involved in saving (eg a headless logger) or displaying messages (consider GNOME Shell integration which previews messages before passing conversations on to Empathy), and the only other centralised component (Mission Control 5) does not act as an intermediary for messages. Historically, we ve always claimed OTR to be less appealing than native protocol-level end-to-end encryption support, such as the proposals for Jingle + peer to peer XMPP + TLS which are favoured by the XMPP community, mostly because if people can switch to an unofficial 3rd party client to get encryption, they could switch to a decent protocol too, and because protocol-level support can encrypt other traffic like SRTP call set-up, presence, etc. However, there is an existing deployed OTR user base, including the likes of Adium users on the Mac, who might often end up using end to end encryption without being aware of it, who we would be doing a disservice by Telepathy not supporting OTR conversations with these people. This is a compelling argument which was also made to me by representatives from the EFF, and the only one to date which actually held some merit with me compared to just implementing XMPP E2E encryption. Later in the summit we went on to discuss how we might achieve it in Telepathy, and how our planned work towards XMPP encryption could also help. Tubes We also had a bit of discussion about Tubes, such as how the handlers are invoked. Since the introduction of MC5, clients can register interest in certain channel types (tubes or any other) by implementing the client interface and making filters for the channels they are interested in. MC5 will first invoke all matching observers for all channels (incoming and outgoing) until all of them have responded or timed out (eg to let a logger daemon hook up signal callbacks before channel handling proceeds), all matching approvers for incoming channels until one of them replies (eg to notify the user of the new channel before launching the full UI), and then sending it to the handler with the most specific filter (eg Tomboy could register for file transfers with the right MIME type and receive those in favour to Empathy whose filter has no type on it). Tubes can be shared with chat rooms, either as a stream tube where one member shares a socket for others to connect to (allowing re-sharing an existing service implementation), or a D-Bus tube where every member s application is one endpoint on a simulated D-Bus bus, and Telepathy provides a mapping between the D-Bus names and the members of the room. In terms of Tube applications, now we ve got working A/V calling in Empathy, as well as desktop sharing, and an R&D project on multi-user calls, our next priority is on performance and Tube-enabling some more apps such as collaborative editing (Gobby, AbiWord, GEdit, Tomboy ?). There was a question about whether Tube handlers can be installed on demand when one of your contacts initiates that application with you. It d be possible to simulate this by finding out (eg from the archive) which handlers are available, and dynamically registering a handler for all of those channel types, so that MC5 will advertise those capabilities, but also register as an approver. When an incoming channel actually arrives at the approval stage, prompt the user to install the required application and then tell MC5 to invoke it as the handler. Colin Walters asked about how Telepathy did NAT traversal. Currently, Telepathy makes use of libnice to do ICE (like STUN between every possible pair of addresses both parties have, works in over 90% of cases) for the UDP packets involved in calls signalled over XMPP, either the Google Talk variant which can benefit from Google s relay servers if one or other party has a Google account, so is more reliable, or the latest IETF draft which can theoretically use TURN relays but its not really hooked up in Telepathy and few people have access to them. XMPP file transfers and one-to-one tube connections use TCP which is great if you have IPv6, but otherwise impossible to NAT traverse reliably, so often ends up using strictly rate-limited SOCKS5 -ish XMPP proxies, or worse, in-band base64 in the XML stream. We hope to incorporate (and standardise in XMPP) a reliability layer which will allow us to use Jingle and ICE-UDP for file transfers and tubes too, allowing peer to peer connections and higher-bandwidth relays to enhance throughput significantly. Future Ted Gould had some good questions about the future of Telepathy
Should Empathy just disappear on the desktop as things like presence applets or GNOME Shell take over parts of its function? Maybe, yes. In some ways its goal is just to bring Telepathy to end users and the desktop so that its worth other things integrating into Telepathy, but Telepathy allows us to do a lot better than a conventional IM client. Maemo and Sugar on the OLPC use Telepathy but totally integrates it into the device experience rather than having any single distinct IM client, and although Moblin uses Empathy currently it has its own presence chooser and people panel, and may go on to replace other parts of the user experience too. GNOME Shell looks set to move in this direction too and use Telepathy to integrate communications with the desktop workflow. Should Telepathy take care of talking to social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, etc? There s no hard and fast rule Telepathy only makes sense for real-time communications, so it s good for exposing and integrating the Facebook chat, but pretty lame for dealing with wall posts, event invitations and the like. Similarly on the N900, Telepathy is used for the parts of the cellular stack that overlap with real-time communications like calling and SMS, but there is no sense pushing unrelated stuff like configuration messages through it. For Twitter, the main question is whether you actually want tweets to appear in the same UI, logging and notification framework as other messages. Probably not anything but the 1-to-1 tweets, meaning something like Moblin s Mojito probably makes more sense for that. Later in the summit I took a look at Google Latitude APIs, which seem like something which Telepathy can expose via its contact location interface, but probably not usefully until we have support for metacontacts in the desktop. Can/will Telepathy support IAX2? It can, although we d have to do a local demultiplexer for the RTP streams involved in separate calls. It s not been a priority of ours so far, but we can help people get started (or Collabora can chat to people who have a commercial need for it). Similarly nobody has looked at implementing iChat-compatible calling because our primary interest lies with open protocols, but if people were interested we could give pointers its probably just SIP and RTP after you dig through a layer of obfuscation or two.
If you want to know more about Telepathy feel free to comment with some follow-up questions, talk to us in #telepathy on Freenode, or post to the mailing list.

11 October 2009

Josselin Mouette: So what?

So, Waldi filed #545032, arguing the udev rules shipped in devicekit-disks are broken. He even added a conflict in dmsetup because of that. Whenever you ask him about this issue, the only things he answers are: It would be nice if all of this was true, but: The result: GNOME is currently not installable on a system with LVM. There is no foreseeable possibility to fix that. Great. Thanks.

Joachim Breitner: arbtt: Now with Documentation

Yesterday I did what Free Software authors supposedly don t do. I wrote documentation. In fact, I had a relatively detailed README already, but I thought this would be a good opportunity to create a more elaborate documentation, using the ubiquitous DocBook. You can read the HTML documentation for arbtt online, where it s automatically updated when I push to the darcs repository. You can see, I use the same CSS file that most Haskell-related DocBook documentation seems to use.One motivation to use DocBook was that I can extract manpages from it, which should be present if I package arbtt for Debian. I was about to complain that references from the manpages to other part of the documentation can not work sensibly, but using the profiling feature of docbook-xsl, I can replace them by a textual reference to the user s manual if the file is processed for manpage output. Have a look at my changes for that if you want to know how it works.For some reason, the <refentry>-tags that make up the manpages are split to separate files when generating chunked HTML output, but they do not appear in the table of contents. You have to find a spot in the text where they are linked, as they are now in the section Program references , to find them. This is unfortunate, I expect that a few readers might miss this important part of the documentation. Am I doing something wrong?For the configuration file, I put an EBNF-style grammar description in the documentation. There is a special DocBook module for that, but I m not satisfied with it. On the right hand side of production rules, it has only special support for nonterminals, but no tags to semantically mark up choice, repetition etc. I followed the lead found at the YAML specification and put <quote>-Tags around literal parts of the grammar, but this is not valid according to the DocBook DTD. Speaking of the DTD: I guess since the EBNF-stuff is just a module, the tag <productionset> is not a valid content of <figure>. So, if I choose to use the EBNF module in a sensible way, I will not have a valid DocBook file.All in all, I am satisified with the result. Especially that nobody can say any more I like your program, but I can t contribute, because I don t know Haskell . Just improve the docs! :-)

10 October 2009

Dirk Eddelbuettel: R for system administration and scripting

On several occassions, R had suggested itself as a language for <it>systems scripting</it>. By this I mean random little adminstrative task such as (re-)moving or maybe renaming files or directories and the like. One of such cases just happened a few minutes ago. The aforementioned Garmin Forerunner 405 can cooperate quite nicely with Linux using the gant reader for the ant wireless communication protocol between the usb hardware dongle and the Garmin 405. (Sources for gant are both this file and this git archive.) I had meant to blog about this tool and the resulting files one of these days anyway, but today I just want to mention that the default filenames created by the program were somewhat horrid such as 20.09.2009 101112.TCX to denote the 20th of September of this year at 10:11h and 12 seconds. As we all know, filenames with spaces are bad for the environment as well as plain annoying. So I had made the simple change in the C sources to switch to a saner format such as 20090920-101112.TCX (and I see that the git archive now contains a similar fix). But that still left me with some 80+ files with the dreaded names. There are of course many ways to skin this cat and to rename the files in bulk. However, I found the following four lines to be fairly succinct 
#!/usr/bin/r
files <- dir(".", pattern=".*\\.TCX$")
res <- lapply(files, function(f)  
    pt <- strptime(f, "%d.%m.%Y %H%M%S.TCX")  # parsed time
    ft <- strftime(pt, "%Y%m%d-%H%M%S.TCX")   # formatted time
    file.rename(f, ft)
 )
as they show, among other things, So about five lines and two minutes later, some eighty-ish files were renamed and sanity was restored. Hm, and I took me five times as long to blog this. Lastly, I do not mean to imply that Python or Perl or Ruby or (insert favourite tool here) cannot do it equally well. I simply meant to say that programmatically creating new filenames is definitely easier in R than it would have been in shell. And as an added bonus, we even get fully parsed time objects that I could have tested for. But then tests and documentation never get written on a Saturday.

Stefano Zacchiroli: RC bugs of the week - week 6

RCBW - week #6 RC bugs squashed this week by yours truly: This week I've cheated for at least two reasons:
  1. the first 4 entries in the list above are bugs of "mine", since within the Debian OCaml Maintainers team we migrated to a new package toolchain called dh_ocaml (with a lot of advantages I've anticipated before my summer break). The migration to that triggered (thanks, Lucas! :-) ) more than 30 FTBFSs which had to be dealt with. So, even if not cheating, it is at least breaking the NMU tradition of RCBW, but they were still RC bugs looking for a fix! All in all, I'm impressed by the fact that in about a week we dealt with most of them.
  2. the lxml fix above is severity "important" and as such, not RC. I attacked that because I intended to help out with the Python 2.6 transition which is still, at the time of writing, 41 bugs away from hitting unstable. I confess I did not find the task particularly fun (which is a requirement for me when I work on packages which are not mine) yet, we'll see next week ...
The feeling of the week I've to share is that I'm more and more impressed to not have received any complaint about my NMU activity, and I'm approaching the 50 NMUs. Actually I've received several "thank you" replies (you rock guys and you know who you are). On one hand this is probably a good indication that I haven't (yet) done any serious mistake; I do love peer-review! On the other hand, and more importantly, this is dispelling inside me the folklore / cultural block we have in Debian that "NMU is bad", while NMUing should become a way to help each other routinely. Really.

Jaldhar Vyas: Barack Obama is a Keynesian

pointless award I haven't written about politics since the election for several reasons. First and foremost, Obama won fair and square. While I might wish the other guy had won, I can't whine and pout or threaten to move to Canada like some people. The vox populi chose and that choice has to be respected. Secondly, one of the worst aspects of the current American political scene is the paranoid obsession with personalities in which the president is not just an implementor of policies good or bad, but personally responsible for the entire state of the cosmos. It started with Nixon, started getting alarming with Clinton and reached batshit levels of insanity with George W. Bush. But just because the left does it it, doesn't mean we have to follow suit. Although I figured Obamas policies would end up a trainwreck, I wanted to see what he actually did before calling him on it. The Nobel comittee isn't hoping and changing with me. In a decison that is bizarre even by the lax standards of a prize that long since jumped the shark, the President is to receive the Nobel Peace prize for...not being George Bush? It's difficult to see what substantive reasons they could have for their choice. But apparently one of these days he is going to make extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples...democracy and human rights are to be strengthened. Well let's see now: Perhaps I am being a little unfair in not taking into consideration all the great things the president is going to do real soon now. It's just that I'm worried that this might be an attempt to sway him in the task of winning the war in Afghanistan (and more likely than not carrying it into Iran and Pakistan.) I take solace in the knowledge that heretofore Obama has shown a refreshing inclination to throw people under the bus when they are no longer convenient. If he can do that to the guy who says he wrote his book than some silly Norwegians won't be a problem.

5 October 2009

Joerg Jaspert: Back from Taiwan

I m back from Taiwan since Thursday already. It was a nice trip, the whole week and I do like Taiwan. We had a transit stop in Bangkok, pretty annoying useless stop (I m sure the smokers disagree, seeing how fast they got into the smokers lounge :) ). One nice detail at Bangkok airport are the ramps down to the Gates. If you use a wheelchair, you might end up having some fun in case you ever lose control of it. Better don t. The ramp down directly ends in a set of stairs, with nothing between which would stop you. Makes too great a jump down, hehe. We arrived in Taipei Thursday (the 24th) evening and so got rid of our luggage and went out for Dinner. Which was the only time in Taiwan I wasn t happy about the food, only one of the dishes was ok, the rest not for me. But the rest of the group did like em, so maybe it was just me after a long flight. On Friday we had nothing planned, except for Dinner, so took a very relaxed day. Somewhere around noon we went out for food, after that a bit sightseeing around the hostel . There are two attributes that are always true for Taipei:
  1. It s a busy place, lots of people. No matter where.
  2. It has more scooters than you ever saw before. (True, there are two times more scooters than cars).
Oh, and of course there are the same rules of the road than in Mexico: Something might be written on paper, but better don t count on that. Red traffic lights are followed (mostly), and then its whoever is stronger. But if everyone is following this, it does seem to work out. :) Friday evening we had Dinner in a place run by Taiwan aborigines where we met the other people attending the mini-DebConf. Oh, and as it was the third time I had to use them, I was slowly growing accustomed to chopsticks, a thing I was never able to get done before. (Ok, fine, if its the only way to get food and all the others are stealing your food if you can t handle them, now thats a good reason to learn to eat with chopsticks fast :) ). Saturday and Sunday we had the mini-DebConf as part of the ICOS. I took no pictures there, but a number of other people have, you can find them on gallery.debconf.org. It was a pretty nice event where I held one talk about the Debian archive and lead one discussion round about SPI and non-profit organizations behind OpenSource Projects. The slides for the archive talk are available (beware of the kittens!), the SPI stuff only had a small introduction, no slides here. Oh, before I forget it: Taiwan does feel very hot. And we found a nice notice in our hostel Monday til Wednesday was planned for just play the Tourist game and see stuff . There was a plan made to visit the Taipei 101. It turned out that Canonical has an office within that building, as well as Google. So people planned to visit their offices too. Just - what the hell would I want to visit a Canonical office? Or a Google one? Besides that it was much too early in the day and promised to be boring, so h01ger and myself skipped it. Luck did mean it good with us, we managed to get Sabrina as a local guide for the day and so went to the Taipei 101 later. The 101 is a pretty nice building, though I would have loved to be able to get up to the real top. And not just in the upper part. Anyways, we had been lucky and had a pretty nice view from it. Getting up from the 4th floor to the 89th is also an experience one has to take: The elevators go up with 1010m/min, which makes it a 37second trip only. Down is much slower, only 600m/min, pretty boring (though you do feel it more than enough in your stomach. I wouldn t want to do lift-boy job there). After the 101 we went and visited the Lungshan temple and in the evening a night market. As it was Monday the market was empty. (Where empty translates to enough people around that you never ever feel alone. Nor think its dead). Good that, I don t think I want to experience it during weekends when its busy We had a pretty good time there, with all the various little shops. Fun how many old-style game places there are. Like, playing basketball, throwing things at other things to win stuff, all those non-computer-using games. In a country where lots of the high tech comes from this is not exactly what you would expect. On Tuesday our trip continued as good as it started on Monday, as we had the pleasure to keep Sabrina as guide for Tuesday and Wednesday. So our Tuesday started out with a visit to the National Palace Museum. Which has a large enough collection that you can spend multiple days exploring it. We didn t have the time nor memory for all of that, so left it after half a day. Lunch we took in a Japanese restaurant and here it was the first and only time during my Taiwan visit that I used a fork. Well, none of the dishes would have worked otherwise. The afternoon we spent in the Yangming Park, so we actually saw a bit of nature near Taipei. Tuesday did end early for us, as we planned to attend the TOSSUG meeting, where I met some more people from debian.org.tw and had an interesting chat about non-profit organizations in Taiwan, their way of operation and what to think of when trying to create a new one. I ve also got a nice debian.org.tw shirt, but I won t ever be able to wear it. They didn t expect someone that large when producing them, oh well. (Hrr, people, if you make Debian shirts of any kind, always do some XXL too. There might be fat, large guys like me visiting. :) ) Anyway, they have another thing, one which I like very much. They created a map of usergroups of other open source projects in Taiwan. It s a foldable map style, titled FLOSS Community Manual , and a lot of different Projects/Usergroups/ are listed there. While its all written in Chinese and I can t read it, it does list them, then describes what they are/do (I think), gives contact information and further links. The backside of it also seem to list events happening there. You can find more information (so you can read it :) ) at their website. Does seem a very nice idea to take. Sometime during the evening I also managed to pick up a Chinese name. Or better, Andrew did so for me. I don t even know how to type it, so copy&paste it has to be. :) There: . And that is: Wednesday was our last day in Taiwan, unfortunately. We went out of Taipei, visting the Golden Mountain City. Another nice place, with a market and a history, but as our Taxi was leaving at 1630 we didn t have much time for sightseeing. You could spend a lot there. Especially not as we still needed to buy postcards, something people left home always request from one. Tssk. I really enjoyed the time I had there. Not only was the organization of the conference we attended good (especially the mini-DebConf is what I saw. The event around it, while named International, was so much chinese spoken, that I couldn t make much of it), but the details around the whole stay had been nicely taken care off. And then people in general did appear very friendly. Now, it might have to do a bit with me not being exactly their height, but I dont think that is all of it. Even without such a conference as an opportunity I think I will visit the country again, but that time I will have much more time available. Like two or three weeks. And I certainly will see more than Taipei City then. Like the whole country. :) (And hope I am lucky again with local guides :) ). So thank you SLAT, Andrew, Arne, (Sabrina), Rita, (Candy) and all the people who worked for the event which names I forgot. Oh, if you didn t find it yet with all the links, a set of my pictures is available from here.

4 October 2009

Stefano Zacchiroli: RC bugs of the week - week 5

RCBW - week #5 RC bugs squashed this week by yours truly: This week has been quite though to deliver: I was traveling (actually I still am) during the week-end, starting Thursday afternoon, to go back to Italy (for a scientific/family event) and then back again in Paris. I mostly entirely caught up with the (self-imposed) RC back log in a couple of hours today and Thursday on the train. See? it is doable :-) Interestingly, the RC bug graph is going sharply down this week. Of course it has nothing to do with RCBW (most likely a big transition went in or something such), but it is a huge morale helper!

Joachim Breitner: arbtt goes Binary

Three weeks ago, I announced the automatic rule-based time tracker here, and it seems that there are actually users out there :-). Since then, it has recorded more than 240 hours of my computer s uptime in about 15000 samples. Until now, this data was stored in a simple text file, one line per entry, and relying on Haskell s Show/Read instances to do the serialization. Although not quite unexpected, this turned out to be a severe bottleneck: Already, it takes more than 25 seconds to parse the log file on my computer.Following an advice given to me on the #haskell IRC channel, I switched to a binary representation of the data, using the very nice Data.Binary module. The capture program will automatically detect if the log file is in the old format, move it away and convert the entries to binary data. And voil , the statistics program evalutes my data in about two seconds! This should be fast enough for quite a while, I hope.In my binary instances, which you can find in Data.hs, I prepended a version tag to each entry. This hopefully allows me to add more fields to the log file later, while still being able to parse the old data directly and without conversion. To still be able to manually inspect the recorded data, the program arbtt-dump was added to the package. The new version is uploaded to hackage as 0.3.0.One thing still worries me: With the old format, I could easily throw away unparseable lines in the log file (e.g. from a partial write) and still read the rest of it. With the new code, there is no such robustness: If the file breaks somewhere, it will be unreadable in its whole, or at least to the broken point. I m not sure what to do about that problem, but given the very low number of bytes written each time, I hope that it will just not happen.

1 October 2009

John Goerzen: MoinMoin as a Personal Wiki, Zen To Done, And A Bit of Ikiwiki

Since I last evaluated and complained about wikis last year, I ve been using moinmoin for two sites: a public one and a personal one. The personal site has notes on various projects, and my task lists. I ve been starting out with the Zen To Done (ebook, PDF, paper) idea. It sounds great, by the way; a nice improvement on the better-known GTD. My To Do Page Anyhow, in MoinMoin, I have a ToDos page. At the top are links to pages with different tasks: personal, work, yard, etc. Below that, are the three big rocks (as ZTD calls them) for the day: three main goals for the day. I edit that section every day. The Calendar And below that, I use MoinMoin s excellent MonthCalendar macro. I have three calendars in a row: this month, next month, and last month. Each day on the calendar is a link to a wiki page; for instance, ToDos/Calendar/2009-10-01. The day has a red background if the wiki page exists, and white otherwise. So when I need to do something on or by a specific day, I click on the link, click my TaskTemplate, and create a simple wiki page. When I complete all the tasks for that day, I delete that day s wiki page (and can note what I did as the log message if I like). Very slick. The Task Lists My task pages are similar. They look like this:
= Personal = <<NewPage(TaskTemplate,Create new task,@SELF)>> <<Navigation(children,1)>>
<<BR>>
 So, my personal task page has a heading, then it has an input form with a text box and a button that says Create new task. Type something in and that becomes the name for a wiki page, and takes you do the editor to describe it. Below the button is a list of all the sub-pages under the Personal page, which represent the tasks. When a task is done, I delete the page and off the list it goes. I can move items from one list to another by renaming the page. It works very, very nicely. Collecting Part of both ZTD and GTD is that it must be very easy to get your thoughts down. The idea is that if you have to think, I ve got to remember this, then you ll be stressed and worried about the things you might be forgetting. I have a Collecting page, like the Personal or Work pages, that new items appear on when I m not editing my wiki. They get there by email. MoinMoin has a nice email system. I ve set up a secret email address. Mail sent there goes directly into MoinMoin. It does some checks on it, then looks at a combination of the From and Subject lines to decide what to do with it. If I name an existing page, it will append my message the the end. If it s a new page, it ll create it. I have it set up so that it takes the subject line as a page name to create/append to under ToDos/Collecting/$subject (by putting that as the name on the To line). So, on my computers, I have a newtodo script that invokes mail(1), asks for a subject, and optionally lets me supply a body. Quick and painless. Also, I ve added the address to my mobile phone s address book. That way I don t have to carry around pen and paper. Need to get down some thought ? No problem. Hit send email, pull the last address sent to, give it a subject and maybe a body. Very slick. Wiki Software As a way of updating my posts from last year: I ve been very happy with MoinMoin overall. It has some oddities, and the biggest one that concerns me is its attachment support. It doesn t let you specify a maximum upload size, and doesn t very well let you restrict attachment work to only certain people. But the biggest problem is that it doesn t track history on attachments. If a vandal deletes the attachment on a page, it s GONE. They expect to have that fixed in 2.0, coming out in approximately November, 2010. I also looked at Ikiwiki carefully over the past few days. Several things impressed me. First, everything can be in git. This makes for a very nice offline mode, better than Moin s offline sync. The comment module is nicer than anything in Moin, and the tagging system is as well. Ikiwiki truly could make a nice blog, and Moin just couldn t. It also puts backlinks at the bottom of each page automatically, a nice feature. And it s by Joey Hess, who writes very solid software. There are also some drawbacks. Chief on that list is that ikiwiki has no built-in history of a page feature. Click History and it expects to take you to gitweb or ViewVC or some such tool. That means that reverting a page requires either git access or cut and pasting. That s fine for me, but throwing newbies to gitweb suddenly might not be the most easy. Since ikiwiki is a (very smart) wiki compiler, its permission system is a lot less powerful than Moin s, and notably can t control read access to pages at all. If you need to do that, you d have to do it at the webserver level. It does have a calendar, but not one that works like Moin s does, though I could probably write one easily enough based on what s there. A few other minor nits: the email receiving feature is not as versatile as Moin s, you can t subscribe to get email notifications on certain pages (RSS feeds only, which would have to be manually tweaked later), and you can t easily modify the links at the top of each page or create personal bookmarks. Ikiwiki looks like an excellent tool, but just not quite the right fit for my needs right at the moment. I ve also started to look at DokuWiki a bit. I was initially scared off by all the plugins I d have to use, but it does look like a nice software. I also re-visited MediaWiki, and once again concluded that it is way too complicated for its own good. There are something like a dozen calendar plugins for it, some of which even are thought to work. The one that looked like the one I d use had a 7-step (2-page) installation process that involved manually running SQL commands and cutting and pasting some obscure HTML code with macros in it. No thanks.

26 September 2009

Stefano Zacchiroli: RC bugs of the week - week 4

RCBW - week #4 RC bugs squashed this week by yours truly: You're welcome to join the initiative!, in doing so please tag the blog post as "debian" and "rc".

24 September 2009

Biella Coleman: I Pity the Fool



I Pity the Fool, originally uploaded by the biella.
When I fly, I often do so with Continental Airlines because 1) I tend to like their international flights 2) they have many flights at convenient times to San Juan, PR where I head to around 4-6 times a year. Like most airlines, their food is nothing to be desired but their gluten free option is about some of the worst food I have ever tasted. The chicken is cooked to death but otherwise entirely buck naked. Like there is nothing on it, they throw some rice in the container, and sometimes (and only sometimes) a packet of Mrs. Dash. The best part of the meal, is a coconut macaroon. After about five years of this meal (usually putting it to the side but sometimes forgetting my food and suffering from hunger) I decided it was high time to take action; I could no longer confront the bleak reality of nude rubbery chicken. So I wrote them letter. I kept it brief and knew boring would not advance My Cause, so I just decided to add some rhetorical flourish and, naturally who else came to mind than the grand master of rhetorical flourish, Mr. T. After providing the basics, like describing the truly offensive nature of nude and rubbery chicken, I drove the nail deep into wood by stating : I pity the fool that has has to survive through their gluten free meal and that naked chicken sucked more than the word suck could ever really convey (though I did duly note my appreciation for the gluten free option and that I generally liked their service). After sending off the letter I forgot about it almost immediately nor did I fly with them again for many months (not because I boycotting, I just found cheaper flights). I recently flew to Puerto Rico and lo and behold have found the gluten free option has taken a drastic turn for the better. In fact, not only was the chicken no longer naked it was in fact, fully clothed, blackened chicken, spiced to no end. And the cherry on top was a gluten free blueberry muffin and some nice fruit. Go Continental. I will never know if my letter touched the soul of some Continental office employee, working in some nameless faceless, practically windowless office park, one whose life of labor is a bit like that gluten free chicken that I so despised, rubbery and naked, in other words with no flavour or spice. But I will forever think that a dash of spice, that with the aid of the badassery that is Mr. T, one can lightly kick corporate ass to take action.

Biella Coleman: I Pity the Fool



I Pity the Fool, originally uploaded by the biella.
When I fly, I often do so with Continental Airlines because 1) I tend to like their international flights 2) they have many flights at convenient times to San Juan, PR where I head to around 4-6 times a year. Like most airlines, their food is nothing to be desired but their gluten free option is about some of the worst food I have ever tasted. The chicken is cooked to death but otherwise entirely buck naked. Like there is nothing on it, they throw some rice in the container, and sometimes (and only sometimes) a packet of Mrs. Dash. The best part of the meal, is a coconut macaroon. After about five years of this meal (usually putting it to the side but sometimes forgetting my food and suffering from hunger) I decided it was high time to take action; I could no longer confront the bleak reality of nude rubbery chicken. So I wrote them letter. I kept it brief and knew boring would not advance My Cause, so I just decided to add some rhetorical flourish and, naturally who else came to mind than the grand master of rhetorical flourish, Mr. T. After providing the basics, like describing the truly offensive nature of nude and rubbery chicken, I drove the nail deep into wood by stating : I pity the fool that has has to survive through their gluten free meal and that naked chicken sucked more than the word suck could ever really convey (though I did duly note my appreciation for the gluten free option and that I generally liked their service). After sending off the letter I forgot about it almost immediately nor did I fly with them again for many months (not because I boycotting, I just found cheaper flights). I recently flew to Puerto Rico and lo and behold have found the gluten free option has taken a drastic turn for the better. In fact, not only was the chicken no longer naked it was in fact, fully clothed, blackened chicken, spiced to no end. And the cherry on top was a gluten free blueberry muffin and some nice fruit. Go Continental. I will never know if my letter touched the soul of some Continental office employee, working in some nameless faceless, practically windowless office park, one whose life of labor is a bit like that gluten free chicken that I so despised, rubbery and naked, in other words with no flavour or spice. But I will forever think that a dash of spice, that with the aid of the badassery that is Mr. T, one can lightly kick corporate ass to take action.

22 September 2009

Uwe Hermann: Using CRM114 for spam filtering on Debian GNU/Linux

I've been using CRM114 as spam filter for a while now, and I'm quite happy with it. Due to bug #529720 though (incompatible upstream file format changes) I decided to start my setup from scratch with a recent CRM114 version from unstable. Here's a short HOWTO, hope it's useful for others. First you need to install crm114 and set up a few files in your $HOME directory. 
  $ sudo apt-get install crm114
  $ mkdir ~/.crm114
  $ cd ~/.crm114
  $ cp /usr/share/doc/crm114/examples/mailfilter.cf.gz .
  $ gunzip mailfilter.cf.gz
  $ cp /usr/share/crm114/mailtrainer.crm .
  $ touch rewrites.mfp priolist.mfp
Edit ~/.crm114/mailfilter.cf and set the following variables (some are optional, but that's what I currently use): 
  :spw: /mypassword/
  :add_verbose_stats: /no/
  :add_extra_stuff: /no/
  :rewrites_enabled: /no/
  :spam_flag_subject_string: //
  :unsure_flag_subject_string: //
  :log_to_allmail.txt: /no/
The :log_to_allmail.txt: /no/ option should probably stay at "yes" for the first few days until you have tested your setup and everything works OK. The ~/.crm114/allmail.txt file will contain all your mails, in case something goes wrong. Now set up empty spam and nonspam files like this: 
  $ cssutil -b -r spam.css
  $ cssutil -b -r nonspam.css
Test the setup by invoking mailreaver.crm as follows, typing some test text and then pressing CTRL+d: 
  $ /usr/share/crm114/mailreaver.crm -u ~/.crm114
  test
  [CTRL-d]
  ** ACCEPT: CRM114 PASS osb unique microgroom Matcher **
  CLASSIFY fails; success probability: 0.5000  pR: 0.0000
  Best match to file #0 (nonspam.css) prob: 0.5000  pR: 0.0000
  Total features in input file: 8
  #0 (nonspam.css): features: 1, hits: 0, prob: 5.00e-01, pR:   0.00
  #1 (spam.css): features: 1, hits: 0, prob: 5.00e-01, pR:   0.00
  X-CRM114-Version: 200904023-BlameSteveJobs ( TRE 0.7.6 (BSD) ) MF-35EB8B9A [pR: 0.0000]
  X-CRM114-CacheID: sfid-20090920_151224_574131_D290E589
  X-CRM114-Status: UNSURE (0.0000) This message is 'unsure'; please train it!
The output should look similar to the above. If there are errors instead, you should check your settings in ~/.crm114/mailfilter.cf. Now you have to setup a procmail rule for crm114: 
  :0fw: crm114.lock
    /usr/share/crm114/mailreaver.crm -u /home/uwe/.crm114
  :0:
  * ^X-CRM114-Status: SPAM.*
  IN.spam-crm114
In my case this rule is also followed by a spamassassin rule, so all my mail goes through two different spam filters (will look into dspam and bogofilter also I guess, the more the better). Finally, in .muttrc I have the following configs so I can press SHIFT+x to mark a mail as spam, and SHIFT+h to mark it as non-spam (ham). 
macro index X '  formail -I X-CRM114-Status -I X-CRM114-Action -I X-CRM114-Version   /usr/share/crm114/mailreaver.crm -u /home/uwe/.crm114/ --spam'
macro index H '  formail -I X-CRM114-Status -I X-CRM114-Action -I X-CRM114-Version   /usr/share/crm114/mailreaver.crm -u /home/uwe/.crm114/ --good'
macro pager X '  formail -I X-CRM114-Status -I X-CRM114-Action -I X-CRM114-Version   /usr/share/crm114/mailreaver.crm -u /home/uwe/.crm114/ --spam'
macro pager H '  formail -I X-CRM114-Status -I X-CRM114-Action -I X-CRM114-Version   /usr/share/crm114/mailreaver.crm -u /home/uwe/.crm114/ --good'
Important: crm114 is most effective if you start with empty CSS files (as shown above) and only train it by marking mails as spam/ham when it gets them wrong. The process will take a few hours or maybe a day (depending on how many mails per day you get), then the misclassification rate gets very low... Update 2009-09-23: Changed --spam/--nonspam to the correct options for mailreaver/mailtrainer, --spam/--good.

19 September 2009

Luciano Bello: aUSBusing

When your laptop is being repaired (and it s still there, since August 28) you need imaginative ways to be connected. Here is my Nokia N800 as something near to a desktop computer. Just few notices:
  • life battery is really short when you plug too many things to the USB interface.
  • usbcontrol rules
  • solder a female-female USB adapter is easy and funny (it came from a broken motherboard)
  • after some weeks using Maemo, ideas about developing applications to it come to my mind
  • the mail client and the browser included with Maemo suck
  • my ocular health is being damaged

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