If you're organizing a DebConf12, and especially if you're new to it, please have a look at the DebConf BoF HOWTO. One of its main take away messages is: don't be exclusive, think of the kittens. Since last year, and to the might powers of DSA (and their kittens), we now have a more stable place for the gobby server: gobby.debian.org. I've just amended the howto to point to that, and updated the info about which gobby package to use (nowadays clarified, thanks to Phil). Enjoy your BoF-s!

I've made some tweaks and fixes to my Gettings Things Done for Hackers booklet on personal productivity, and updated the website and the ebooks (see sidebar on the site). I've also published it on the Amazon Kindle store in case anyone wants to buy it ($1.99). The book remains licensed under the CC-BY-SA 3.0 license, and the Mobipocket version on my site is the same as the one Amazon publishes, modulo any changes Amazon's automation may have done. The Kindle store version is really there for only overly generous people.

I am transitioning my GPG key from an old 1024-bit DSA key to a new 4096-bit RSA key. The old key will continue to be valid for some time but I prefer all new correspondance to be encrypted with the new key. I will be making all signatures going forward with the new key. I have followed the excellent tutorial from Daniel Kahn Gillmor which also explains why this migration is needed. The only step that I did not execute is issuing a new certification for keys I have signed in the past. I did not find any search engine to tell me which key I have signed. Here is the signed transition statement (I have stolen it from Zack): For easier access, I have also published it in text format. You can check it with: To avoid signing/encrypting with the old key who share the same email addresses than the new one, I have saved it, removed it from the keyring and added it again. The new key is now first in both the secret and the public keyrings and will be used whenever the appropriate email address is requested. I now need to gather some signatures for the new key. If this is appropriate for you, please sign the new key if you signed the old one.

While on a recent trip to Italy, I gave a talk two times about Getting Things Done for Hackers. I made a few slides, which I've made public in case anyone's interested, but, really, the website is a better replacement for slides.

I've been using a Google account since years, but having a "more serious" one along. The time has come to make the switch and elect the other as main one.

Google has a lot of services, and I'm using several of them, so changing the main account requires to migrate data of those services to the new account, given it's not possible to merge two accounts. To know the full list of services your account is signed in, go to your Account Product page. Some migrations are easy, others hell no: so I'm writing this post to keep track of the migration as it's going on.

First of all, there's a really good post about this migration at LifeHacker: it contains a lot of info I'm using here, but not all the services I need. Additionally, Google has a list of services and methods to migrate from one account to another.

Just to be generic, I'll call AccountSRC the original account and AccountDST the one I want to migrate to.

Migrate GMail

GMail is probably the most important service I have, and also the most difficult one to migrate. I have a lot of filters, so the first step is to migrate them:

1. Login into GMail for AccountSRC
2. Gear icon > Settings > Labs
3. Enable the "Filter import/export" plugin
4. Reload GMail to enable the plugin (if not done automatically)
5. Gear icon > Settings > Filters
6. At the bottom of the page, Select all
7. Export: this will download an XML file with the filters in it
8. Login into GMail for AccountDST
9. Enable "Filter import/export" plugin
10. Load the file containing the saved filters
11. Import all (or select which one) filters; this will also create automatically the labels defined in the filters.

I currently have a forward rule from AccountDST to AccountSRC: so let's revert the forward direction: from AccountSRC to AccountDST. This will allow the new account to receive the mails sent to the old one.

1. Login into GMail for AccountDST
2. Gear icon > Forwarding and POP/IMAP > Disable forwarding: this will stop redirecting mails from AccountDST to AccountSRC
3. Login into GMail for AccountSRC
4. Gear icon > Forwarding and POP/IMAP > add a forwarding address
5. Enter AccountDST as the address to forward mails to
6. A verification code is sent to AccountDST and you'll need to enter that code in AccountSRC to verify you have access to both mailboxes
7. Once verified, select "Forward a copy of incoming mail to" to AccountDST and to delete the GMail copy on AccountSRC

Migrate Contacts

Contacts are available inside GMail:

1. Login into GMail for AccountSRC
2. On the combobox on top-left, select Contacts
3. More > Export
4. Export all the contacts in Google CSV, since it's specific to be re-imported
5. Login into GMail for AccountDST
6. Contacts > More > Import
7. Select the previously saved file and import it

Migrate Reader

Migrating Reader subscriptions is easy:

1. Login into Reader for AccountSRC
2. Reader Settings -> Import/export
3. Export your subscriptions in OPML format
4. Now login into Reader for AccountDST
5. Reader Settings -> Import/export
6. And import the saved OPML file

Migrate Blogger

Login to Blogger for AccountSRC; then, for each blog you have there do this dance:

1. Select the blog
2. Go into Settings > Permissions
3. Add AccountDST as a new author: this will send an email to AccountDST GMail account
4. Accept the invitation (this will ask you to create a new Blogger account for AccountDST if you don't already have one)
5. Go back to to Blogger with AccountSRC
6. Blog > Settings > Permissions
7. Grand admin rights to AccountDST

like in the last two weeks, this week's bug squashing was mostly related to the gcc 4.7 FTBFS bugs:

• #667139 coin3: "coin3: ftbfs with GCC-4.7"
  send debdiff to the BTS
• #667238 lfhex: "lfhex: ftbfs with GCC-4.7"
  add patch to add missing include, upload to DELAYED/5
• #667263 linamc: "linamc: ftbfs with GCC-4.7"
  patch to enable missing include, upload to DELAYED/5
• #667272 mcmcpack: "mcmcpack: ftbfs with GCC-4.7"
  add patch to add this-> qualifiers, upload to DELAYED/5
• #667277 milkytracker: "milkytracker: ftbfs with GCC-4.7"
  add patch to add missing include, upload to DELAYED/5
• #667281 minitube: "minitube: ftbfs with GCC-4.7"
  add patch to add missing include, upload to DELAYED/5
• #667284 mm3d: "mm3d: ftbfs with GCC-4.7"
  patch to add include and this-> qualifiers, upload to DELAYED/5
• #667289 mswatch: "mswatch: ftbfs with GCC-4.7"
  add patch to add missing include, upload to DELAYED/2
• #667292 musique: "musique: ftbfs with GCC-4.7"
  add patch to add missing include, upload to DELAYED/2
• #667295 netperfmeter: "netperfmeter: ftbfs with GCC-4.7"
  add patch to add missing include, upload to DELAYED/2
• #667298 nmapsi4: "nmapsi4: ftbfs with GCC-4.7"
  add patch from Francesco Cecconi (add missing includes), upload to DELAYED/2, then solved with a maintainer upload
• #667302 numptyphysics: "numptyphysics: ftbfs with GCC-4.7"
  add patch to add missing include, upload to DELAYED/2
• #667303 nxcl: "nxcl: ftbfs with GCC-4.7"
  add patch to add missing include, upload to DELAYED/2
• #667318 owx: "owx: ftbfs with GCC-4.7"
  add patch to add missing include, upload to DELAYED/2
• #667337 qbankmanager: "qbankmanager: ftbfs with GCC-4.7"
  add patch to use class name, upload to DELAYED/2
• #667343 qterm: "qterm: ftbfs with GCC-4.7"
  add patch from Paul Tagliamonte (missing include), upload to DELAYED/2
• #667347 rafkill: "rafkill: ftbfs with GCC-4.7"
  add patch to add missing include, upload to DELAYED/2
• #667348 ragel: "ragel: ftbfs with GCC-4.7"
  patch to this-> qualifiers, upload to DELAYED/2
• #667373 simgear: "simgear: ftbfs with GCC-4.7"
  apply patch from Matthias Klose, upload to DELAYED/2
• #667428 zoneminder: "zoneminder: ftbfs with GCC-4.7"
  add patch from Cyril Brulebois, upload to DELAYED/2
• #669432 src:milkytracker: "milkytracker: FTBFS: ./zzip_file.h:34:18: fatal error: zlib.h: No such file or directory"
  add missing build dependency, upload to DELAYED/5

My spare time has been limited lately, so progress on producing Mac-bootable Fedora install images has been a bit slow. Thankfully it looks like everything's gong to land in time for Fedora 17[1] so hurrah for that - all that's missing right now are the last couple of patches that make sure the boot picker displays useful labels on the drives.

So how is this accomplished? Here's a hex dump of the first few K of the image.

00000000  45 52 08 00 00 00 90 90  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00   ER.............. 
00000010  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00   ................ 
00000020  33 ed fa 8e d5 bc 00 7c  fb fc 66 31 db 66 31 c9   3...... ..f1.f1. 
00000030  66 53 66 51 06 57 8e dd  8e c5 52 be 00 7c bf 00   fSfQ.W....R.. .. 
00000040  06 b9 00 01 f3 a5 ea 4b  06 00 00 52 b4 41 bb aa   .......K...R.A.. 
00000050  55 31 c9 30 f6 f9 cd 13  72 16 81 fb 55 aa 75 10   U1.0....r...U.u. 
00000060  83 e1 01 74 0b 66 c7 06  f1 06 b4 42 eb 15 eb 00   ...t.f.....B.... 
00000070  5a 51 b4 08 cd 13 83 e1  3f 5b 51 0f b6 c6 40 50   ZQ......?[Q...@P 
00000080  f7 e1 53 52 50 bb 00 7c  b9 04 00 66 a1 b0 07 e8   ..SRP.. ...f.... 
00000090  44 00 0f 82 80 00 66 40  80 c7 02 e2 f2 66 81 3e   D.....f@.....f.> 
000000a0  40 7c fb c0 78 70 75 09  fa bc ec 7b ea 44 7c 00   @ ..xpu.... .D . 
000000b0  00 e8 83 00 69 73 6f 6c  69 6e 75 78 2e 62 69 6e   ....isolinux.bin 
000000c0  20 6d 69 73 73 69 6e 67  20 6f 72 20 63 6f 72 72    missing or corr 
000000d0  75 70 74 2e 0d 0a 66 60  66 31 d2 66 03 06 f8 7b   upt...f f1.f... 
000000e0  66 13 16 fc 7b 66 52 66  50 06 53 6a 01 6a 10 89   f... fRfP.Sj.j.. 
000000f0  e6 66 f7 36 e8 7b c0 e4  06 88 e1 88 c5 92 f6 36   .f.6. .........6 
00000100  ee 7b 88 c6 08 e1 41 b8  01 02 8a 16 f2 7b cd 13   . ....A...... .. 
00000110  8d 64 10 66 61 c3 e8 1e  00 4f 70 65 72 61 74 69   .d.fa....Operati 
00000120  6e 67 20 73 79 73 74 65  6d 20 6c 6f 61 64 20 65   ng system load e 
00000130  72 72 6f 72 2e 0d 0a 5e  ac b4 0e 8a 3e 62 04 b3   rror...^....>b.. 
00000140  07 cd 10 3c 0a 75 f1 cd  18 f4 eb fd 00 00 00 00   ...<.u.......... 
00000150  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00   ................ 

This is the boot sector. One of the fun things about ISO9660 is that it doesn't have a boot sector in the usual x86 sense - firmwares are expected to read enough of the filesystem that they can find the bootloader in it and run it directly. x86 isn't really smart enough to manage that, so it uses something called El Torito[2]. In any case, this is usually empty space on an x86 CD. But with an increasing number of systems shipping without optical drives, real CD installs are decreasing in popularity. We use a piece of software called isohybrid that allows the building of ISO9660 images that can be written directly onto a USB stick. Asking a machine to boot off them will execute the boot sector located here, which then loads a real bootloader that's capable of reading ISO and booting the OS. It'll just be ignored when it's on a real CD.

There's one difference here, though. The isohybrid bootsector has been modified so that the first 32 bytes are just noops, and this has been inserted:

00000000  45 52 08 00 00 00 90 90  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00   ER.............. 

45 52 ("ER") indicates the presence of an Apple partition map. This will become important later. 0800 indicates that it's using 2048-byte sectors. The 9090 is a lie to convince the firmware that it's not a zero-sized disk without representing dangerous code. We need an Apple partition map because some older Macs won't boot off CD unless the CD has one. But it's sitting right at the start of the boot sector, and this code is going to be executed. Thankfully, the entire Apple header decodes to

00000000  45                inc bp
00000001  52                push dx
00000002  0800              or [bx+si],al
00000004  0000              add [bx+si],al
00000006  90                nop
00000007  90                nop
00000008  0000              add [bx+si],al
0000000A  0000              add [bx+si],al
0000000C  0000              add [bx+si],al
0000000E  0000              add [bx+si],al
00000010  0000              add [bx+si],al
00000012  0000              add [bx+si],al
00000014  0000              add [bx+si],al
00000016  0000              add [bx+si],al
00000018  0000              add [bx+si],al
0000001A  0000              add [bx+si],al
0000001C  0000              add [bx+si],al
0000001E  0000              add [bx+si],al

which is completely harmless - we can execute all these instructions without any interesting changes in state. They'll all be undone by the rest of the boot sector.

000001b0  14 05 00 00 00 00 00 00  4c 1e ed 76 00 00 80 00   ........L..v.... 
000001c0  01 00 00 3f a0 89 00 00  00 00 00 50 14 00 00 fe   ...?.......P.... 
000001d0  ff ff ef fe ff ff a4 00  00 00 70 04 00 00 00 fe   ..........p..... 
000001e0  ff ff 00 fe ff ff 44 05  00 00 c0 08 00 00 00 00   ......D......... 
000001f0  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  00 00 00 00 00 00 55 aa   ..............U. 

This is the MBR partition table. The aim here was to produce media that would boot via BIOS just as well as it does via EFI, and it turns out that there are some systems that refuse to BIOS-boot off GPT media. So we need an MBR partition map. The first entry covers the entire disk and is of type 0. This is important, because some EFI implementations are strict about MBR parsing - if there's an MBR with overlapping partitions, the entire MBR will be ignored. Inconvenient. Fortunately, we've got the source code to this code, and it turns out that partitions of type 0 are ignored when performing this check. So, there's a partition of type 0.

Why does it cover the entire disk? Once we've booted the OS, we need to be able to read the ISO image contained on the USB stick. That means the kernel needs to be able to mount it, which means we need a partition entry that covers the entire disk. Linux is perfectly happy mounting a filesystem from a partition of type 0.

So, the next partition. This is an EFI boot partition that points at the embedded VFAT El-Torito image. Some firmware will decide that we've got an MBR and so will only boot off a partition that exists in it. So, here's an MBR partition to keep them happy.

The final partition covers the embedded HFS+ image. It's there purely for convenience - it means we can access it under Linux in order to update its contents for testing purposes.

00000200  45 46 49 20 50 41 52 54  00 00 01 00 5c 00 00 00   EFI PART....\... 
00000210  09 27 93 7e 00 00 00 00  01 00 00 00 00 00 00 00   .'.~............ 
00000220  fe 4f 14 00 00 00 00 00  30 00 00 00 00 00 00 00   .O......0....... 
00000230  de 4f 14 00 00 00 00 00  2a 26 0f 37 23 c9 7f 4f   .O......*&.7#..O 
00000240  90 df 5e fe 0a 60 1c b0  10 00 00 00 00 00 00 00   ..^.. .......... 
00000250  80 00 00 00 80 00 00 00  ec 70 63 c1 00 00 00 00   .........pc..... 
00000260  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00   ................ 

And here we have the GPT header. Nothing complicated here, other than it indicates that the first partition descriptor is at LBA 0x10, ie byte 0x2000 - that's further into the disk than normal. That leaves us enough space to fit the Apple partition entries.

Why have a GPT at all? The EFI spec says that machines should boot fine from an MBR partition. Sadly, not all seem to. It also lets us represent the HFS+ partition in a way that makes the Mac firmware happy.

00000800  50 4d 00 00 00 00 00 03  00 00 00 01 00 00 00 10   PM.............. 
00000810  41 70 70 6c 65 00 00 00  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00   Apple........... 
00000820  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00   ................ 
00000830  41 70 70 6c 65 5f 70 61  72 74 69 74 69 6f 6e 5f   Apple_partition_ 
00000840  6d 61 70 00 00 00 00 00  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00   map............. 
00000850  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 0a  00 00 00 03 00 00 00 00   ................ 
00000860  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00   ................ 

2K into the disk, here's an Apple partition map. It's 2K into the disk because we set the sector size to 2K in the partition map header. Why did we do that? Because the default is 512 bytes, and if we'd put the partition map at 512 bytes it would have been on top of the GPT header. Why 2K rather than 1K? A couple of reasons. First, the Apple partition map is only used when we boot off an actual CD, and the CD sector size is genuinely 2K. Secondly, because CDs have a sector size of 2K, 2K is a value that's actually been tested in the real world. It's nice to avoid tempting fate.

00001000  50 4d 00 00 00 00 00 03  00 00 00 29 00 00 04 70   PM.........)...p 
00001010  45 46 49 00 00 00 00 00  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00   EFI............. 
00001020  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00   ................ 
00001030  41 70 70 6c 65 5f 48 46  53 00 00 00 00 00 00 00   Apple_HFS....... 
00001040  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00   ................ 
00001050  00 00 00 00 00 00 04 70  00 00 00 33 00 00 00 00   .......p...3.... 
00001060  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00   ................ 
*
00001800  50 4d 00 00 00 00 00 03  00 00 01 51 00 00 08 c0   PM.........Q.... 
00001810  45 46 49 00 00 00 00 00  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00   EFI............. 
00001820  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00   ................ 
00001830  41 70 70 6c 65 5f 48 46  53 00 00 00 00 00 00 00   Apple_HFS....... 
00001840  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00   ................ 
00001850  00 00 00 00 00 00 08 c0  00 00 00 33 00 00 00 00   ...........3.... 
00001860  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00   ................ 

The Apple partition map entries. One partition covers the entire disk, the other the embedded HFS+ filesystem. Why do this? Because not all Macs understand EFI El Torito, so won't EFI boot a CD unless there's an Apple partition map. Why have an HFS+ partition at all? Because the same Macs won't boot off FAT.

00002000  a2 a0 d0 eb e5 b9 33 44  87 c0 68 b6 b7 26 99 c7   ......3D..h..&.. 
00002010  d0 84 a5 d4 aa 89 e0 40  81 f9 fc e4 04 e9 c2 99   .......@........ 
00002020  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  10 4b 14 00 00 00 00 00   .........K...... 
00002030  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  49 53 4f 48 79 62 72 69   ........ISOHybri 
00002040  64 20 49 53 4f 00 49 53  4f 48 79 62 72 69 64 00   d ISO.ISOHybrid. 
00002050  41 70 70 6c 00 00 00 00  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00   Appl............ 
00002060  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00   ................ 
*
00002080  a2 a0 d0 eb e5 b9 33 44  87 c0 68 b6 b7 26 99 c7   ......3D..h..&.. 
00002090  68 d5 e0 27 72 83 c6 4c  a7 ae 92 dd ed 6c 89 71   h..'r..L.....l.q 
000020a0  a4 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  13 05 00 00 00 00 00 00   ................ 
000020b0  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  49 53 4f 48 79 62 72 69   ........ISOHybri 
000020c0  64 00 41 70 70 6c 65 00  41 70 70 6c 00 00 00 00   d.Apple.Appl.... 
000020d0  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00   ................ 
*
00002100  00 53 46 48 00 00 aa 11  aa 11 00 30 65 43 ec ac   .SFH.......0eC.. 
00002110  68 d5 e0 27 72 83 c6 4c  a7 ae 92 dd ed 6c 89 71   h..'r..L.....l.q 
00002120  44 05 00 00 00 00 00 00  03 0e 00 00 00 00 00 00   D............... 
00002130  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  49 53 4f 48 79 62 72 69   ........ISOHybri 
00002140  64 00 41 70 70 6c 65 00  41 70 70 6c 00 00 00 00   d.Apple.Appl.... 
00002150  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00   ................ 

Three GPT entries - one covers the entire CD, one covers the embedded FAT filesystem, one covers the embedded EFI filesystem. That ensures that they're all accessible to the firmware.

00008000  01 43 44 30 30 31 01 00  4c 49 4e 55 58 20 20 20   .CD001..LINUX    
00008010  20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20  20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20                    
00008020  20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20  46 65 64 6f 72 61 2d 4c           Fedora-L 
00008030  69 76 65 43 44 20 20 20  20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20   iveCD            
00008040  20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00           ........ 
00008050  c4 12 05 00 00 05 12 c4  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00   ................ 
00008060  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00   ................ 
00008070  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  01 00 00 01 01 00 00 01   ................ 
00008080  00 08 08 00 40 00 00 00  00 00 00 40 15 00 00 00   ....@......@.... 
00008090  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 17  00 00 00 00 22 00 1d 00   ............"... 
000080a0  00 00 00 00 00 1d 00 08  00 00 00 00 08 00 70 05   ..............p. 
000080b0  01 09 30 36 f0 02 00 00  01 00 00 01 01 00 20 20   ..06..........   
000080c0  20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20  20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20                    

The ISO9660 superblock. This is completely standard. From here on there's nothing terribly surprising - the CD filesystem itself is entirely normal. The only slight oddity is that we have three embedded El Torito images. The first of these is a BIOS-bootable disk image. That'll be executed whenever the CD is put in a non-EFI machine. The second is a VFAT EFI boot image. That's used for the majority of EFI systems. The third is an HFS+ EFI boot image. There's no strict requirement for the HFS+ one to be an El Torito image - CD booting on Macs is already handled by the Apple partition map. Storing it as an El Torito is purely for convenience, since it guarantees correct alignment and avoids us having to parse the entire ISO9660 image to find its location when generating the partition maps.

In summary: Three partition maps, three bootable images, support for BIOS, UEFI and Mac platforms, works whether it's burned to a CD or written directly to a USB stick. I'm pretty pleased with that.

[1] Other than an awkward bug where something goes horribly wrong during Radeon graphics init, so Radeon-based Macs aren't working too well at the moment. We're working on it.

[2] The world decided that writing a real ISO9660 driver for BIOS was hard, so came up with El Torito. El Torito is a spec for embedding disk images inside ISO9660. There's a pointer to the disk image in the Cd header, so the BIOS simply reads a few blocks off CD, finds that pointer and then sets up a bunch of disk i/o interrupts to point at the embedded filesystem rather than a real disk. From that point on, the El Torito image simply behaves like a floppy or hard drive. This was a reasonable compromise given how resource limited older BIOS implementations were.

For reasons that aren't entirely clear, UEFI doesn't mandate that implementations support ISO9660. So even though our firmware is now sufficiently capable that the only thing standing between it and emacs is someone being sufficiently bored, we still use El Torito. Fortunately the spec allows multiple El Torito images to be embedded, so we can include one that's bootable by BIOS systems and another that's bootable by UEFI systems.

comments

Hello Like all kids, my kids really enjoy watching cartoons. Unfortunately, most of them are broadcast during the morning, sometimes very early in the morning. Since I don t want my kids to wake up (or wake me up ) too early in the morning to watch cartoon, I record the most interesting programs with vdr (I also edit out commercials before my kids watch them) To limit my carbon (or equivalent radio-active waste) footprint, I do not want to leave the computer on 24/24, so the machine has to power up by itself before a recording time. So I ve setup vdr to automatically setup the wake up time of the computer and shutdown the machine once the recording is finished. Note that this machine is also my main home machine, so it must not shutdown while I m working on it (typing this blog, for instance). This should have been easy and fairly documented. Well, it was not that easy. A lot of doc mentions nvram-wakeup which is more or less obsolete. Other docs were in German. So, here s a summary of the setup so other can benefit from my experience. First, this was done on a Debian/sid machine, this post should be usable on other distros, provided some adaptations. These adaptations are left as an exercise to the reader (which is marketing lingo for I don t have a clue ) First add this line in /etc/default/vdr:

 ENABLE_SHUTDOWN=1

When vdr has nothing to do, it will run some shutdown scripts, including /usr/share/vdr/shutdown-hooks/S90.custom, which is a link to /etc/vdr/shutdown-hooks/S90.custom. The output of this script will be eval ed by vdr, so vdr knows what to do next (e.g. abort shutdown, display a message to user, retry later ). Here are the possible output of a vdr shutdown script (list taken from vdr-wiki):

• To abort the shutdown, exit with an errorlevel != 0.
• If you want a message to be displayed on the OSD when aborting a shutdown,
  then write to stdout:
  ABORT_MESSAGE=<message to display>
• If you want to defer the shutdown, write to stdout:
  TRY_AGAIN=<minutes to wait before next shutdown request>
• To overwrite the command that will be executed to shutdown the machine
  after all shutdown hooks have been processed, write to stdout:
  SHUTDOWNCMD=<new shutdown command>
  i.e.:
  echo "ABORT_MESSAGE=\"I do not want to shutdown now!\"" ; exit 1

This script will mess with /sys/class/rtc/rtc0/wakealarm so it must be run as root. But vdr will launch this script and does not run as root. Instead of setting a suid bit, let s setup sudo to enable this script to gain root privilege from vdr. Add this line in /etc/sudoers (with visudo):

vdr ALL= NOPASSWD: /etc/vdr/shutdown-hooks/S90.custom *

And here s a commented Perl script that handle the shutdown test:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use IO::File ;
use 5.10.0 ;
use English;
use Path::Class; 
use Sys::Syslog qw(:standard :macros);  # standard functions & macros
openlog('vdr-shutdown', "", "user");

Here s the call to sudo to gain root privilege (if not already run as root):

if ($EUID)  
    system('sudo','/etc/vdr/shutdown-hooks/S90.custom', @ARGV) ;
    syslog(info => "vdr-shutdown: sudo myself returned $@") ;
 

Get the next timer info from the command arguments provided by vdr:

my ($next_timer,$interval) = @ARGV ;

Setup the next alarm in the mother board:

if ( $next_timer)  
  my $dev_fh = IO::File->new("> /sys/class/rtc/rtc0/wakealarm");
  die "cannot open $dev_fh: $!" unless $dev_fh ;
  my $newtime = $next_timer - 300  ;  # Start 5 minutes earlier
  $dev_fh->print( "$newtime\n" ) ;
  $dev_fh->close ;
  syslog(info => "vdr-shutdown: set wakeup to $newtime") ;
 

Now, let s check if someone is logged on the system. Weirdly enough, forking a command from this Perl script does not work when it s run by vdr. Calling the who command always return empty. The trick to find if anyone is logged is to check the content of /dev/pts directory. No files in there means that nobody is logged:

my @pts  = dir('/dev/pts')->children;
syslog(info => "vdr-shutdown:  found pts @pts") ;
if (@pts > 1)  
    syslog(info => "vdr-shutdown: retry later: someone is logged") ;
    say 'ABORT_MESSAGE="someone is logged, shutting down deferred"';
    say 'TRY_AGAIN=30'
 
else  
    syslog(info => "vdr-shutdown: nobody is logged, halting") ;
 

Now some cleanup then exit:

closelog() ;
exit 0;

This script has been working for one month, and not a single programs was missed. My kids are happy. I m not so happy because I now have a lot of commercials to edit out All the best
Tagged: debian, Perl, vdr

I've been using the Getting Things Done personal productivity system for myself for some years now, and have now written up my understanding and experiences of it as a little website. Gettings Things Done For Hackers, for your reading pleasure. Any feedback welcome, preferably by e-mail or as comments on the site.

In the last few days, people on the debian-devel mailing list have been debating again (and again, and again...) how much the ports and architectures used only by an handful of people should influence the direction of the project. With this post I want to briefly summarize my position. The reason we support niche architectures and toy ports is that that some people are interested in doing the work, and that these do not hinder development of the architectures that people actually use. When m68k started inconveniencing too much the real world development, the port was killed and the sky did not fall, notwithstanding the complaints of the few retrocomputing enthusiasts who still used and developed it. I do not mind if some people like to play with kFreeBSD and Hurd as long as they do not inconvenience me too much, both as a user and as a developer. While it is true that targeting multiple architectures helps finding bugs, after we have covered all the useful combinations of endianity, size of variables and char signedness the incremental benefits of adopting a new architecture just for its sake are minimal. I am a Red Hat customer (also because of Debian shortcomings), I do not like it much and I do not want to be one forever: please do not kill my hopes.

I've just uploaded version 3.9.3.0 of Debian Policy. The really big change in this version is the 1.0 version of the copyright format specification, but that will get a separate announcement once the www team has had a chance to put it in place on the web site. There are a bunch of other fixes, though, including some normative changes. Here's the upgrading checklist (duplicated from my announcement, but formatted a bit prettier):

2.4

New archive sections education, introspection, and metapackages added.

5.6.8

The Architecture field in *.dsc files may now contain the value any all for source packages building both architecture-independent and architecture-dependent packages.

7.1

If a dependency is restricted to particular architectures, the list of architectures must be non-empty.

9.1.1

/run is allowed as an exception to the FHS and replaces /var/run. /run/lock replaces /var/lock. The FHS requirements for the older directories apply to these directories as well. Backward compatibility links will be maintained and packages need not switch to referencing /run directly yet. Files in /run should be stored in a temporary file system.

9.1.4

New section spelling out the requirements for packages that use files in /run, /var/run, or /var/lock. This generalizes information previously only in 9.3.2.

9.5

Cron job file names must not contain "." or "+" or they will be ignored by cron. They should replace those characters with "_". If a package provides multiple cron job files in the same directory, they should each start with the package name (possibly modified as above), "-", and then some suitable suffix.

9.10

Packages using doc-base do not need to call install-docs anymore.

10.7.4

Packages that declare the same conffile may see left-over configuration files from each other even if they conflict.

11.8

The Policy rules around Motif libraries were just a special case of normal rules for non-free dependencies and were largely obsolete, so they have been removed.

12.5

debian/copyright is no longer required to list the Debian maintainers involved in the creation of the package (although note that the requirement to list copyright information is unchanged).

copyright-format

Version 1.0 of the "Machine-readable debian/copyright file" specification is included.

mime

This separate document has been retired and and its (short) contents merged into Policy section 9.7. There are no changes to the requirements.

perl

Packages may declare an interest in the <perl-major-upgrade> trigger to be notified of major upgrades of perl.

virtual

ttf-japanese- mincho,gothic have been renamed to fonts-japanese- mincho,gothic .

Please review and update your packages as necessary the next time you make an upload.

You are scaring away much more than that. I just came across an invitation for BugCon 2012. BugCon is a Mexican conference devoted to computer security I cannot comment on its level or value because, although it's a topic that has long interested me, I must recognize each day I feel less of an expert, nowadays finding myself at the level of a "sysadmin who tries not to be too dumb for his own job security". Oh, and also because it would be completely off-topic for this post. If you look at Vendetta's (the main organizer) blog post, it will probably give you the impression that the conference is just an excuse for the afterparty: Lets go see some b00bs! Do you think your fellow female hackers will have any interest in joining a bunch of sex-starved, hormone-infested teenagers who only want to pwn a website and grab more pr0n? Do you think females will feel welcome (or even mildly safe) between you? I would not think so. And I also think you are alienating any professional who might have any interest in joining your community, be it as a member, as a mentor, or whatnot. I cannot right now do a coherent post on this topic, but I can reference you to what I have seen (and read) over the last almost 10 years, when the issue was first brought up to our attention. I am very glad to see that, at least in the Free Software area, there has been a real change of mindset. I hope you are in time to think about it and rectify.

• Timeline of incidents in Geekfeminism. Note that while it seems we see more as time passes, I am almost sure it's because we are more aware of the problem, not because it occurs more often. I hope I'm not mistaken.
• Debconf ftp-masters talk. Myself a Debian person, my first contact with this problematic was being at the DebConf3 ftp-masters talk And the discussion and action that followed. This led to the creation of the Debian Women group, one of the most (socially, not technically) influent parts of Debian. Great thanks and admiration to their members, as well as to the (male and female alike) people who have worked to form it and make it heard.
  I think Debian Women sparked other similar projects such as GnomeWomen (and there is a list with further projects in there), but I cannot authoritatively say who was there first.
• Planet Fedora up-skirting photo (the original post is still available) showed the communit does no longer tolerate this behaviour. Good!
• The Open Source Boob Project. One of the most childlike attempts at humor that surely alienated many would-be female geeks.
• Another conference season, another dumb sexist, a post by Piers Cawley addressing this issue after attending the CouchDB + Ruby: Perform like a Pr0n star talk. Quoting him, Apparently, the difference between 80s truck salesmen and Matt s audience is that at least 80s salesmen had the grace to look embarrassed.
• Liz Keogh: "I am not a pr0n star: Avoiding unavoidable associations", a hacker woman that clearly felt offense by the CouchDB Pr0n Star joke, and did a thorough and interesting analysis, extending the effects to your work environment.
• Just Say You're Sorry Already (regarding the same incident on CouchDB+Ruby)
• Richard Stallman's EMACS virgins joke incident. It's sad how it's impossible to get Stallman to acknowledge he can also make mistakes and make feel people insulted.
• [update] And of course, MadameZou mentions the very important 2002 HOWTO: HOWTO encourage women in Linux?

Oh, and not the description of an incident, but a very interesting and thoughtful take on this: [pdf] Interesting analysis by Hannah Wallach on the numbers and motivations of women in Free Software groups. I don't know if Hannah has published this in article form, but many interesting points can be understood by looking at the presentation. My good friend Vendetta: I don't mean this post (longer than what I originally intended) as a way to say you and the conference you are organizing for the third year (IIRC) already is unprofessional or targetted to pimply teenagers. I know the work you have put in it. I hope you see the points I'm trying to drive You are of course free to have whatever afterparty you have. But, if as the main organizer, you are giving the images of nice chicks at Hooters more weight and relevance than to the conference itself... you are doing yourself a disservice. I hope you can rectify it, and make BugCon attractive to hacker women as well.

A small tutorial I made about an effect I used in the previous interviews (in English), so, for consistency, I had to recreate it, even after Kino was no longer available in Debian Wheezy.

<iframe allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" frameborder="0" height="360" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/6y-6V1Dj1p0" width="480"></iframe>

I'll probably upload more videos like this about cinelerra, pitivi, gimp, audacity and other software I use for the work I do for our Sceptici n Rom nia / Skeptics in Romania podcast (The podcast is in Romanian, but we are preparing also a project for the international audience, too).

And in case you are wondering, yes, this podcast is part of the reasons I wasn't able to do any work for Debian lately!

Update: I managed to make sound work. For some weird reason, a mute switch option of some the many (and who knows how useful) switches of my sound card was enabled. Now the damn thing works. Did I mention that since I did the upgrade all my sound cards (I have a USB sound card, too) have listed as available inputs all the inputs of my internal sound card (mic, front mic, line in, CD, etc.) in Audacity? That makes for a very confusing and loooong sound input sources list! The upside is that I can finally record clips from televisions that do not provide such a feature and FastVideoDownload doesn't handle.

I also seem to have found a possible fix for the caps-ctrl issue in Xfce4 (obviously, setting "-option ctrl:swapcap" in ~/.Xkbmap, instead of that Alt modifier).

---

As I said in my previous post, I will tell you what do GNOME 3 and Windows 7 have in common.

Before everything else, I want to make it clear that when I am saying GNOME 3, I am referring to Debian Wheezy's GNOME 3, since I recently upgraded from Squeeze on my laptop. I'll probably drop a line or two about that, too.

First, I'll tell you about the (boring, probably for many) experience with Windows 7. As I said before, my new job requires me to use a Windows machine, so up until a few months ago I was using Windows XP with some additional software and tweaks to make it usable. Then came the Windows 7 upgrade . I am using quotes since the more appropriate term would be fresh installation on a new partition , not even close to what Debian users are used to call an upgrade.

So after a fresh Windows 7 installation, my first shock was the fact there was NO Quick Launch*. Some of you might be laughing, but I had never used Windows 7 up until then, just saw it on a laptop of a friend of mine (Ovidiu, one of the guys with whom I am doing this podcast, went to Denkfest with, and made these interviews). That was the first shock. Initial discussions about this with Windows users lead me to believe Quick Launch was dead and for some unexplained reason, I believed them. Later, much later, a week ago, to be precise, I found out that you can bring back the Quick Launch through some convoluted way**. Up until that point I had to have some icons pinned to the task bar, but some others on the desktop (and I hate that) because some of them, like Cygwin, if pinned, would start a cmd console, since Win 7 pins the process, not the starting script.

Among other things which broke in Win 7 and used to work fine in XP, the Virtual Dimension application which provides me with a virtual desktop, was the first one which was broken. I have been using a liniar 4 desktops-wide virtual desktop for over 5 years and I am worthless and inefficient if all my apps are on the same desktop. Mail application is always on the first desktop, work and file managers are on the second, the third is for extras and multimedia editing while the fourth is my gateway to the internet, containing the browser, instant messenger, or whatever.

The shortcuts I use to get to the various desktops are Win+1 ... Win+4 keyboard shortcuts, but the M$ Evil Empire decided that those shortcuts are going to start or bring foreward the first, second and so on applications pinned on the task bar. And you can't change those shortcuts***. Nor is disabling just those possible since they are all disabled through a huge switch which disables ALL Win+x keyboard shortcuts, among which Win+E (file expolrer) and Win+D (Show Desktop) were also. Luckly, Win+L (lock screen) was not disabled. So I disabled al those Win+ shortcuts, since I need virtual desktops.

Now, imagine if I had to start a Cygwin console and I had all sorts of apps open! Win+D was disabled, so I had to minimize the apps covering the desktop shortcut for Cygwin, click on the icon to start it, bring back the minimized windows and go on with my work. What a waste of clicks, mouse movement, energy and time, just because some dudes thought a Quick Launch-like feature was useless****.


You might wonder already what do those '*' sings mean. Well, sadly, that's what GNOME 3 / gnome-shell and Windows 7 have in common.

Gnome 3 was a shock for me. An empty desktop right after upgrade. No panels, no shortcuts*, no power indicators, no wicd indicator, no virtual desktops, no desktop icons, (I have a few dirs and docs there). Sounds like an Evil Empire decision, doesn't it?

Luckly I have been using Tilda as my always-ready console and I could fire up iceweasel from the console in order to understand where my panel disappeared.

I then realised that the upgrade brought me Network Manager, that app which wicd replaced. As a consequence, I had no working wlan since Network Manager made sure to mess up with the network manager I chose.

After looking through the documentation of Network Manager and realising I either had it set up to leave wlan0 alone or I didn't understood NM's documentation, I simply stopped the service, which let Wicd its job flawlessly.

The first thing I searched was Gnome 3 panel or something of that sort and I was confronted with the obvious option to appeal to the Forced Fallback Mode which was disabled. I figured I either had an old version, or Debian disabled this feature (hoping they provided an alternative). There was also the option to conform to this convoluted way of working** with Actions and such uselessness like that. I still wonder, what is the purpose of the Favourites bar on the left side, since it's accessible only after wasting a lot of mouse movement and time? For Joe's Pesci sake, I use focus under mouse just to avoid needless mouse and keyboard manipulation. Why? Why? WHY would I want every time I need to start or SWITCH to another application to move the mouse to the upper-left corner then take my hands off the mouse to type, move the mouse downwards or move across the whole width of the screen to get to my beloved virtual desktops and pick the app I want?

Making a long story short, after even trying XFCE4 (which for some unknown reason resets almost immediately my keyboard layout to the default layout with the Caps on Caps, instead of my preferred and set Ctrl on Caps - yes, it's global), I managed to find GNOME Shell Frippery** which made the experience better.

Later I found out that GNOME 3's file manager, Nautilus, has decided that an up on level button is useless, since the default is to use that uncopy-pastable button location bar instead of a sane text location bar. And it seems the GNOME developers decided this*** and I should conform to it.

To add insult to injury, those icons on my old panel are apparently useless**** and even in the fallback version I can't get them back. Or so the GNOME developers decided.

At some point this sunday, don't know how or why this change happened, producing sound was impossible. I know the problem is pulseaudio since when I kill the pulseaudio daemon from the console I can play audio. BTW, great timing, just when I needed sound the most, before releasing episode 32 of our podcast (yay, I reaslised that xfce just decided to reset my caps to be caps, after setting to ctrl a few minutes ago).

I know I praised pulseaudio when I first tried it, but failing to make it work out of the box or after some tinkering is a deal breaker for me, so I removed it. Now I find it that is a default in GNOME, yet all it manages to do is prevent audio from working. At least on my machine.

Other problems? Gnome Power Manager manages to hang and block my session, GNOME managed somehow to fail to start at some point. Yeah, and that sound problem which I didn't fix yet, didn't went away after removing all the pulseaudio packages which could be removed (e.g.: ryhtmbox depends on libpulse0, same do some other apps like audacity, so I couldn't remove all pulse related packages).

I got involved with Debian and GNU/Linux because it was tweakable and customisable, didn't use to force all sorts of option on me and now I find with its increasing popularity it becomes more and more like a product of a corporation which decides to change some things just to change and totally disregadring user experience and uses.

So, in the light of all of these problems I think it's time to probably consider trying KDE. Is it any good lately?

It s been busy lately, and I haven t had the time to blog. With the change in job, various travel, and settling into a new routine, I ve not done as much writing of late. But life marches on, and before memories grow too fleeting, I think I should share a few. We recently changed the arrangements for the boys. Instead of them each having their own room in which they sleep and sometimes play, we purchased a bunk bed. Oliver graduated from his crib to the lower bunk, and Jacob has the higher bunk. This has, predictably, created a few opportunities for behavior issues. Overall, it s going well, and they appreciate their new, more open, play room. Both boys sleep with their stuffed animals. Jacob calls his my friends . He still likes his butterfly, which he has had since he was an infant. He sometimes talks about how much he loves his friends, and how they like to get hugs, and how they are happy. Jacob continues to enjoy reading. He has a toy low-res camera and he even recorded a video of himself reading Brown Bear, Brown Bear. Oliver s vocabulary is coming alive and is fun to watch. Jacob has taken to trying to teach Oliver how to say things. One day, Jacob saw a number like 451 on the side of a train, producing a conversation like this: Oliver, can you say four hundred and fifty-one? Four dred iffy on! You got it!!! YAY! Today as I was walking past Oliver s train track on the floor, he grabbed me by the hand, had me sit down, and kept holding on to make sure I d stay right where he wanted me as he pointed and talked all about his trains. Aww. One cold and windy Saturday morning, the boys were getting restless. What to do, we thought? I decided to bring out one of the manual typewriters from my collection. Oliver loved watching it do things as he pressed buttons. Jacob enjoyed spelling mom . New problem: boys fighting over how long each one s turn at the typewriter is. This has gone on for a month now. Ahh, winter. A few weeks ago, Jacob informed us that he built an antenna out of blocks. He was REALLY proud of it, and even, incredibly, insisted I take his picture with it! I m pleased to have a 5-year-old that calls this structure an antenna instead of a skyscraper or tower or some such thing ;-) We took a train trip to Portland, OR, recently. That s about 2.5 days on the train each way. It went pretty well we had quite a bit of excitement though it got a little long for the boys at times. One evening, Jacob excitedly noted that the sky was almost really dark blue, just like my song! Wow. That was a song he made up in New York in summer 2010. Jacob enjoyed collecting leaves as we walked around in Portland. He would then stash his pile of leaves outside the door of whatever building we d enter, then hope to find them still there when we got back out. It usually worked out OK for him.

I think I'm currently supposed to be out buying a TV at the moment. Or something else expensive. Instead I'm lying on the sofa listening to Whale and drinking tea. That's much better in my opinion, but it reminded me that I hadn't mentioned that I bought a projector. I had the loan of a projector for a while when I was in Belfast. It was a huge thing that made a lot of noise, but was pretty cool for watching films with. When I moved to the US I decided not to bother with a TV to start with - using my laptop did just fine for most things. Except films. They really benefit from a bigger screen. Especially if you want to watch them with someone else. So I started looking at pico projectors, because I wanted something small and cute that I could throw in a bag with my tiny laptop. At the time the best the pico projectors could do was 840x480, which I felt wasn't really that great. However back in January TI announced their DLP Pico HD chipset, offering a resolution 1280x800. I kept a look out for projectors using this to appear, and eventually, in July, Amazon claimed to have availability of the Vivtek Qumi. So I bought one. And I'm very happy with it. I'm not a heavy user, and there are some niggles, but it's small and does exactly what I want. In low light conditions it'll happily throw an image all the way across the room, which is more than it's rated at. There's a mini-HDMI connector on the back, so it's a doddle to plug it into my laptop using the supplied HDMI to mini-HDMI cable. The laptop auto-detects the device and extends the desktop appropriate, as you'd expect. It'll also do media playback itself - there's a USB host port and a micro SD slot on the back. This works ok, and the included remote means you can easily set the projector somewhere above your head and still be able to easily control it. Unfortunately the built in speakers are fairly useless. There's a 3.5mm socket for external speakers, but having to plug something else in detracts from the convenience factor of the built-in media player. Also my unit had the power switch installed upside down (the little red line indicating the power is on actually shows up when it's off), but that's the only complaint I've got about the build quality. There's a little neoprene case to store the thing in as well. So, er, yeah. I think I can continue to make do without a normal TV for a while longer and avoid the nightmare that I suspect are the shops on Black Friday.

Due to some still unknown bug, all the iLOs of two of my HP blade enclosures became confused and stopped accepting TCP connections. This not only made them unusable, but also prevented upgrading the firmware to an hopefully fixed version... My solution: reset them from the OS by running:

ipmitool mc reset cold

HP's support solution: remove and reseat each blade.

During the OpenRheinRuhr I noticed that a friend of mine didn t know about zgrep and friends. So I told him what other grep variations I know and he told me about some grep variations I didn t know about. So here s our collection of grep wrappers, derivatives and variations. First I ll list programs which search for text in different file formats:

grep through what	Fixed Strings	Wildcards / Basic RegExps	Extended RegExps	Debian package
uncompressed text files	fgrep	grep	egrep	grep
gzip-compressed text files	zfgrep	zgrep	zegrep	zutils, gzip
bzip2-compressed text files	bzfgrep	bzgrep	bzegrep	bzip2
xz-compressed text files	xzfgrep	xzgrep	xzegrep	xz-utils
uncompressed text files in installed Debian packages	dfgrep	dgrep	degrep	debian-goodies
gzip-compressed text files in installed Debian packages	-	dzgrep	-	debian-goodies
PDF documents	-	-	pdfgrep	pdfgrep
POD texts	podgrep	-	-	pmtools
E-Mail folder (mbox, MH, Maildir)	-	mboxgrep -G	mboxgrep -E	mboxgrep
Patches	-	grepdiff	grepdiff -E	patchutils
Process list	-	-	pgrep	procps
Gnumeric spreadsheets	ssgrep -F	ssgrep	?	gnumeric
Files in ZIP archives	-	-	zipgrep	unzip
ID3 tags in MP3s	-	-	taggrepper	taggrepper
Network packets	-	-	ngrep	ngrep
Tar archives	-	-	targrep / ptargrep	perl (Experimental only for now)

And then there are also greps for special patterns on more or less normal files:

grep for what	uncompressed files	compressed files	Debian package
PCRE (Perl Compatible Regular Expression)	pcregrep (see also the grep -P option)	zpcregrep	pcregrep
IP Address in a given CIDR range	grepcidr	-	grepcidr
XPath expression	xml_grep	-	xml-twig-tools

One question is though still unanswered for us: Is there some kind of meta-grep which chooses per file the right grep from above by looking at the MIME type of the according files, similar to xdg-open. Other tools which have grep in their name, but are too special to properly fit into the above lists:

• ext3grep: Tool to help recover deleted files on ext3 filesystems
• xautomation: Includes a tool named visgrep to grep for subimages inside other images.

Includes contributions by Frank Hofmann and Faidon Liambotis.