Not so long ago, I was lamenting to some Debian developer about how LONG it took for me to write stuff, of any quality at least. And aside from my own slowish pace, the academic publishing process is slow as molasses. The two together make for a deadly combo. This friend reminded me that Debian took a heck of a long time to release and at the time, this reminder actually made me feel a lot better. Well, after years of toiling, updating, bug squashing, and lots of lots of arguing, Lenny is coming out and those of us in NYC are celebrating. Though this has been circulated on the Debina-nyc list, it never hurts to circulate a little wider, especially for this event.

Attention New York City Debianistas, The astrological confluence of 1234567890[0], the impending release of
Lenny[1], and the odd sighting of a horned mythical beast that
cryptozoologists are calling a new FTP-master-assistant/slave being
sighted in the mist off the shores of the East River[2] will result in
all emacs users to transcend and all vim users to be transponded to
their respective motherships, which are scheduled for near-orbit on that
night. You will only be taken if you have a sip of beer on the 13th, before
6:31:30pm at the Pacific Standard[3]. If you come late, you may suffer nano for all eternity. Micah ps. All nano users will be Left Behind to tend to the servers that we
did not bring with us on the Rapture rickshaw. ps. lets keep the the post-apocalyptic space editor battle that will
erupt between the S.S. Church of Emacs, and the H.R.H VIMperator
mothership for later, and drink with revelry together now. 0. date -d @1234567890
1. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2009/02/msg00000.html
2. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2009/01/msg00004.html
3. http://www.pacificstandardbrooklyn.com

I use Google Reader to manage most of the sites that I regularly read. Today it occurred to me that it would be very useful to have some functionality whereby feeds in a common folder could be read in one aggregated display, a bit like how planetplanet works. I then learned that Google Reader does exactly that already: It's fairly obvious to use in the normal reader, a little bit more subtle in the mobile version (you must click the folder once to load it up in a new page, then click it again to see the aggregated contents). That prompted me to try and tidy up my subscriptions and sort them in a way that took advantage of this feature. Deciding that the Google Reader interface was too primitive to properly organise all of my subscriptions (there are about 100 or so of them), I exported my subscriptions as OPML and imported them into liferea. I then dutifully pruned the list and sorted the remainder into a heirarchy of folders. In most cases I categorised things according to their topic: e.g., "computing", "friends", etc.; with two important exceptions: feeds that I track for debugging purposes but don't actually read (such as my own weblog) I put in a folder "don't read". Feeds that I have decided I need to read every post to (and there are very few of those) I moved into a top-level folder called "essential". I note that liferea 1.4.18 at least does not support the planet-style aggregation feature for folders that Google Reader does. On re-importing to Google Reader, I discovered another facet of it's behaviour that I'd neglected to pay attention to: it does not support heirarchical folders. (How could I use this software for so long and not really understand how it works?) In fact, folders are more like tags, with feeds existing in multiple folders. To make matters even more confusing, there is an entirely separate notion of tags, which applies to items inside subscriptions. Regarding the concept of an "essential" list. If you cut down your firehose consumption to just feeds which met the "essential" criteria, would you find yourself short on information, or just short on noise? Sometimes I read a book that for one reason or another (perhaps just one: excellent writing?) I cannot put down. I utterly devour the book and finish it much more quickly than average. Wouldn't it be nice if other information could be consumed so vociforously? When trying to read things such as academic papers or bid proposals, someone unused to them may find them very hard going. Someone with more practise might managed to "read" such a document much more quickly. Perhaps there is a point to all the firehose noise: maybe we need long immersion in the culture or context to train ourselves up so we can optimally consume the good stuff?

Today is Monday, what means it is time for Gammu release. Main improvements are this time in DBI driver and dummy phone driver. This allowed increasing number of test cases and they revealed number of bugs in code, which were fixed. The good thing is that we now have covered 30% of code by testcases. There is still place to improve, but I think this is good milestone, because most of untested code lies in drivers for different phones, which are hard to test automatically without having real phone connected to test server. Other thing I would like to highlight is DBI backend in SMSD. It is still new, but you should consider using it instead of old MYSQL or PGSQL backends, because it behaves much more nicely to your database and won't ruin system performance that easily (though there are still things to improve). Unfortunately it is not available on Windows right now, but I hope this will change in future. Full list of changes follows:

• Fix some memory leaks found by cppcheck.
• Implemented reconnecting/retrying in DBI driver.
• Fix memory leaks in SMSD found by valgrind.
• Fix decoding of another Nokia message type.
• Support for passing received message ID in DBI.
• Dummy phone now supports phonebook, calendar, todo, filesystem.
• Experimental SMSD monitor support on Windows.
• Added ID for Nokia 2680 (bug #813).
• Number of retries of message send in SMSD can be configured.
• Updated SQL files to new version (mostly added useful indexes).
• Dropped own logic for generating IDs for SMS and rely on SQL server (only in DBI driver for now).

You can download from usual place: http://cihar.com/gammu/, Debian users will find packages in experimental soon, SUSE, Fedora and Mandriva users can check experimental repository in OpenSuse Build Service.

The phrase "Total Fire Ban" is bandied around a lot these days -- mostly on days with high temperatures, low humidity, and high winds. To me, it isn't a particularly hard concept to understand, either: in the immortal words of Metallica, "Fire bad, Aircon goood!". And yet, some people just don't seem to get it. This afternoon, my brigade got a page for a fire call to a reported "smoking log" behind town. When we got to where the log was, indeed, smoking, it was obvious that a group of people had had a large party around a bonfire last night. Given the prevalence of large-scale fire incidents at the moment, anyone who feels that lighting up a bonfire, cracking open a large quantity of alcohol, and then leaving the damn fire going in the morning, is a good idea, really needs to have their head examined. In other firefighting-related news, despite being the on-call brigade for our district this week, we've not been called to assist at any of the fires currently burning both to our north and south. It's frustrating that having been trained to fight bushfires, and with so many areas currently needing some serious firefighting, my district isn't getting asked to help out. On the other hand, they don't appear to be hurting for resources at these fires (with several hundred RFS personnel, not to mention NSWFB and NPWS people, at the Peats Ridge fire; also, some 200 RFS personnel have been dispatched to Victoria), so it's good to know that there's plenty of bush firefighting volunteers around if things get bad around here.

I've been banging my head against this all day and it doesn't make any more sense than it did when I started. I have a need to write some code that can manage job control on a terminal. More specifically, I need to run a single process and stuff it into the background at will, so that it gets suspended when it tries to read from the terminal. So, there's a controller process and a subprocess process.

 controller  ----------> subprocess
               manages

The man-pages and glibc info documentation make this look simple: disable TOSTOP if it's enabled via tcsetattr() so that the subprocess can write to the terminal, then start the subprocess in a new process group (by fork()ing and calling setpgid()). Once it's going, you can put it in the foreground or background by calling tcsetpgrp() to set the terminal's foreground process group to the subprocess (to put it in the foreground), or to the controller process (to put the subprocess in the background). Whenever the subprocess is in the background, it will be sent SIGTTIN if it tries to read from the terminal. I have everything working -- except for the very last sentence of that last paragraph. I can see my processes being put into the right process group, and I can see them going into the foreground and the background. For instance, here the first line is the controller process and the rest of the lines are the process group of the subprocess (this one started a few other processes).

STAT CMD                           PID  PGID TPGID  PPID   SID
Ss+  ./src/aptitude              26989 26989 26989 26980 26989
S    ./src/aptitude              26991 26991 26989 26989 26989
S    /bin/sh -c /usr/sbin/dpkg-p 27027 26991 26989 26991 26989
S    /usr/bin/perl -w /usr/sbin/ 27028 26991 26989 27027 26989
Z    [dpkg-preconfigu] <defunct> 27034 26991 26989 27028 26989
S    /bin/sh -e /tmp/lynx-cur.co 27039 26991 26989 27028 26989
S    whiptail --backtitle Packag 27043 26991 26989 27028 26989

If I try to move the background process into the foreground, it is marked as the foreground process in this session:

STAT CMD                           PID  PGID TPGID  PPID   SID
Ss   ./src/aptitude              26989 26989 26991 26980 26989
S+   ./src/aptitude              26991 26991 26991 26989 26989
S+   /bin/sh -c /usr/sbin/dpkg-p 27027 26991 26991 26991 26989
S+   /usr/bin/perl -w /usr/sbin/ 27028 26991 26991 27027 26989
Z+   [dpkg-preconfigu] <defunct> 27034 26991 26991 27028 26989
S+   /bin/sh -e /tmp/lynx-cur.co 27039 26991 26991 27028 26989
S+   whiptail --backtitle Packag 27043 26991 26991 27028 26989

Note that the background process is not suspended, even though it's busy reading from the tty. If I manually suspend the process group with kill -TTIN -26991, it stops as expected:

STAT CMD                           PID  PGID TPGID  PPID   SID
Ss   ./src/aptitude              26989 26989 26991 26980 26989
T+   ./src/aptitude              26991 26991 26991 26989 26989
T+   /bin/sh -c /usr/sbin/dpkg-p 27027 26991 26991 26991 26989
T+   /usr/bin/perl -w /usr/sbin/ 27028 26991 26991 27027 26989
Z+   [dpkg-preconfigu] <defunct> 27034 26991 26991 27028 26989
T+   /bin/sh -e /tmp/lynx-cur.co 27039 26991 26991 27028 26989
T+   whiptail --backtitle Packag 27043 26991 26991 27028 26989

So the signal isn't being blocked or ignored. I can also run programs in a normal shell, outside my harness (e.g., links &) and watch them auto-suspend, but the same thing doesn't happen when I start them directly under my controller process. It's not even that they're starting as foreground processes: I start them in the background, and they never see a SIGTTIN. Does anyone have a clue what's going on? Hopefully it's as simple as a flag I have to set somewhere... Oh, and for extra fun, this is all happening inside a VTE terminal widget. That shouldn't make a difference (after all, it's what gnome-terminal uses, and SIGTTIN behaved as expected when I tested it there), but who knows, it might be relevant. [UPDATE] I did a little more testing: I was bringing the subprocess into the foreground whenever the terminal was active, so I couldn't try typing into the terminal while the subprocess was in the background. If I do that, it does get SIGTTIN and it suspends. So it looks like select() doesn't count as a read for the purposes of job control. I doubt there's much I can do to get around that.

So I know, I know. There are a lot of annoying memes circulating on the net/facebook/[pick your spot] and well, sometimes the best thing to do is stop the damn thing by ignoring its existence. But I have to say, I have completely, totally and absolutely have loved reading the 25 things notes on facebook. It just provides a window into the extraordinary character that emerges from the collection of mundane events/likes/pleasures that make up people s lives. Reading them took me back to elementary school when and where I was an avid slam-booker. I have very fond of collecting and reading the tidbits of thoughts and information people left behind in my notebook. What also struck me about these recent 25 thingie notes is how odd or not as interesting, I think, it would be to have them recited to you over coffee or at dinner. Now I could be wrong here but I think the list-like quality would just not fly in a conversational context. A few facts with more embellishment would work but a whole string of thoughts would just sound flat and out of place. A reminder that format does matter for engendering certain types of knowledge. So here is my list.. 1. I looked like a boy for the first three years of my life (but a cute one, I think).
2. I love dogs so much that I often think that if I had a criminal streak, I would be a dog nabber.
3. I would routinely bring home dogs from the street when I was a kid. Many of them ended up dead after being hit by cars (they liked to return to the street and this only happened to 2 of them).
4. My favorite concert was Jimmy Cliff in a parking lot. There was lots of rain and lots of weed.
5. I like have a penchant for tall men. My mom claims it was because I lacked a strong father figure in my early childhood years. Who knows if that is the case.
6. I knew the instant that I took an anthropology class I wanted to be an anthropologist. I guess I made it happen (and it was one of the few moments of clarity in life).
7. I started the first environmental club in my high school and my car was called the recycle-mobile because there were always cans in the back seat.
8. I love the ocean; swimming, snorkeling, diving, sailing, and just watching it, though the cold ocean is not always by cup of tea.
9. I had terrible insomnia for a year and slept for a good chunk of it on a couch. I like the snuggle feeling I got from sleeping against a back.
10. I am very indecisive person. It is annoying as i tend to worry a lot about whether I made the right decision.
11. I was a shy kid and barely talked until meeting my best friend in kindergarten, Yael
12. I also failed the psychological test to get into school but my mom managed to get me in anyway.
13. I often wonder if I would have been a nun if I had lived prior to 1900s to escape various domestic obligations. I think it might have been fun to be a nun.. Fun to be a nun also has a nice ring to it.

14. I am currently struggling with an Etsy addiction and the UPS delivery guy asked if delivering packages would be a daily occurrence.. I just find all the stuff amazing and it brings me back to my artist days when I used to paint and spend a heck of a lot of time in the darkroom.
15. I have recurrent issues with nausea and have been hospitalized for it a few times. It is gut wrenching and really uncomfortable when it happens.
16. When I left NYC in 1997 I thought i would never come back. I am here now and quite happy.
17. I was obsessed with Ultimate Frisbee for many man years. I played more than I studied and finally gave up as it was ruining (or perhaps ruined?) my neck. I still miss it.
18. I LOVE tostones and would eat them everyday if they were not, you know, so bad for you.
19. I have been using IRC for 7 years and consider some of my best friends to come from there.
20. Some folks have asked how I became interested in politics and I am pretty sure it was Doonesbury.
21. When I was like 4 we went to some fair and I swore that I almost got flung off some rickety ride but this could be totally wrong. It was really frightening.
22. The coldest night of my life was spent in Los Nevados, Venezuela and the scariest car ride I ever took was leaving Los Nevados in a jeep and something that resembled a road.
23. A few sucker fish once tried to stick on me while I was doing a decompression stop after a dive. My dive buddy smacked the fish, which had devil faces, with the regulator, saving me from what would have been a really sort of sucky situation.
24. I am trying to learn how to surf and am really sorry that I did not do so when a teenager since I don t exactly have the time to really learn.
25. Since I am not sure how to end, I will do so with a

So I know, I know. There are a lot of annoying memes circulating on the net/facebook/[pick your spot] and well, sometimes the best thing to do is stop the damn thing by ignoring its existence. But I have to say, I have completely, totally and absolutely have loved reading the 25 things notes on facebook. It just provides a window into the extraordinary character that emerges from the collection of mundane events/likes/pleasures that make up people s lives. Reading them took me back to elementary school when and where I was an avid slam-booker. I have very fond of collecting and reading the tidbits of thoughts and information people left behind in my notebook. What also struck me about these recent 25 thingie notes is how odd or not as interesting, I think, it would be to have them recited to you over coffee or at dinner. Now I could be wrong here but I think the list-like quality would just not fly in a conversational context. A few facts with more embellishment would work but a whole string of thoughts would just sound flat and out of place. A reminder that format does matter for engendering certain types of knowledge. So here is my list.. 1. I looked like a boy for the first three years of my life (but a cute one, I think).
2. I love dogs so much that I often think that if I had a criminal streak, I would be a dog nabber.
3. I would routinely bring home dogs from the street when I was a kid. Many of them ended up dead after being hit by cars (they liked to return to the street and this only happened to 2 of them).
4. My favorite concert was Jimmy Cliff in a parking lot. There was lots of rain and lots of weed.
5. I like have a penchant for tall men. My mom claims it was because I lacked a strong father figure in my early childhood years. Who knows if that is the case.
6. I knew the instant that I took an anthropology class I wanted to be an anthropologist. I guess I made it happen (and it was one of the few moments of clarity in life).
7. I started the first environmental club in my high school and my car was called the recycle-mobile because there were always cans in the back seat.
8. I love the ocean; swimming, snorkeling, diving, sailing, and just watching it, though the cold ocean is not always by cup of tea.
9. I had terrible insomnia for a year and slept for a good chunk of it on a couch. I like the snuggle feeling I got from sleeping against a back.
10. I am very indecisive person. It is annoying as i tend to worry a lot about whether I made the right decision.
11. I was a shy kid and barely talked until meeting my best friend in kindergarten, Yael
12. I also failed the psychological test to get into school but my mom managed to get me in anyway.
13. I often wonder if I would have been a nun if I had lived prior to 1900s to escape various domestic obligations. I think it might have been fun to be a nun.. Fun to be a nun also has a nice ring to it.

14. I am currently struggling with an Etsy addiction and the UPS delivery guy asked if delivering packages would be a daily occurrence.. I just find all the stuff amazing and it brings me back to my artist days when I used to paint and spend a heck of a lot of time in the darkroom.
15. I have recurrent issues with nausea and have been hospitalized for it a few times. It is gut wrenching and really uncomfortable when it happens.
16. When I left NYC in 1997 I thought i would never come back. I am here now and quite happy.
17. I was obsessed with Ultimate Frisbee for many man years. I played more than I studied and finally gave up as it was ruining (or perhaps ruined?) my neck. I still miss it.
18. I LOVE tostones and would eat them everyday if they were not, you know, so bad for you.
19. I have been using IRC for 7 years and consider some of my best friends to come from there.
20. Some folks have asked how I became interested in politics and I am pretty sure it was Doonesbury.
21. When I was like 4 we went to some fair and I swore that I almost got flung off some rickety ride but this could be totally wrong. It was really frightening.
22. The coldest night of my life was spent in Los Nevados, Venezuela and the scariest car ride I ever took was leaving Los Nevados in a jeep and something that resembled a road.
23. A few sucker fish once tried to stick on me while I was doing a decompression stop after a dive. My dive buddy smacked the fish, which had devil faces, with the regulator, saving me from what would have been a really sort of sucky situation.
24. I am trying to learn how to surf and am really sorry that I did not do so when a teenager since I don t exactly have the time to really learn.
25. Since I am not sure how to end, I will do so with a

So I know, I know. There are a lot of annoying memes circulating on the net/facebook/[pick your spot] and well, sometimes the best thing to do is stop the damn thing by ignoring its existence. But I have to say, I have completely, totally and absolutely have loved reading the 25 things notes on facebook. It just provides a window into the extraordinary character that emerges from the collection of mundane events/likes/pleasures that make up people s lives. Reading them took me back to elementary school when and where I was an avid slam-booker. I have very fond of collecting and reading the tidbits of thoughts and information people left behind in my notebook. What also struck me about these recent 25 thingie notes is how odd or not as interesting, I think, it would be to have them recited to you over coffee or at dinner. Now I could be wrong here but I think the list-like quality would just not fly in a conversational context. A few facts with more embellishment would work but a whole string of thoughts would just sound flat and out of place. A reminder that format does matter for engendering certain types of knowledge. So here is my list.. 1. I looked like a boy for the first three years of my life (but a cute one, I think).
2. I love dogs so much that I often think that if I had a criminal streak, I would be a dog nabber.
3. I would routinely bring home dogs from the street when I was a kid. Many of them ended up dead after being hit by cars (they liked to return to the street and this only happened to 2 of them).
4. My favorite concert was Jimmy Cliff in a parking lot. There was lots of rain and lots of weed.
5. I like have a penchant for tall men. My mom claims it was because I lacked a strong father figure in my early childhood years. Who knows if that is the case.
6. I knew the instant that I took an anthropology class I wanted to be an anthropologist. I guess I made it happen (and it was one of the few moments of clarity in life).
7. I started the first environmental club in my high school and my car was called the recycle-mobile because there were always cans in the back seat.
8. I love the ocean; swimming, snorkeling, diving, sailing, and just watching it, though the cold ocean is not always by cup of tea.
9. I had terrible insomnia for a year and slept for a good chunk of it on a couch. I like the snuggle feeling I got from sleeping against a back.
10. I am very indecisive person. It is annoying as i tend to worry a lot about whether I made the right decision.
11. I was a shy kid and barely talked until meeting my best friend in kindergarten, Yael
12. I also failed the psychological test to get into school but my mom managed to get me in anyway.
13. I often wonder if I would have been a nun if I had lived prior to 1900s to escape various domestic obligations. I think it might have been fun to be a nun.. Fun to be a nun also has a nice ring to it.

14. I am currently struggling with an Etsy addiction and the UPS delivery guy asked if delivering packages would be a daily occurrence.. I just find all the stuff amazing and it brings me back to my artist days when I used to paint and spend a heck of a lot of time in the darkroom.
15. I have recurrent issues with nausea and have been hospitalized for it a few times. It is gut wrenching and really uncomfortable when it happens.
16. When I left NYC in 1997 I thought i would never come back. I am here now and quite happy.
17. I was obsessed with Ultimate Frisbee for many man years. I played more than I studied and finally gave up as it was ruining (or perhaps ruined?) my neck. I still miss it.
18. I LOVE tostones and would eat them everyday if they were not, you know, so bad for you.
19. I have been using IRC for 7 years and consider some of my best friends to come from there.
20. Some folks have asked how I became interested in politics and I am pretty sure it was Doonesbury.
21. When I was like 4 we went to some fair and I swore that I almost got flung off some rickety ride but this could be totally wrong. It was really frightening.
22. The coldest night of my life was spent in Los Nevados, Venezuela and the scariest car ride I ever took was leaving Los Nevados in a jeep and something that resembled a road.
23. A few sucker fish once tried to stick on me while I was doing a decompression stop after a dive. My dive buddy smacked the fish, which had devil faces, with the regulator, saving me from what would have been a really sort of sucky situation.
24. I am trying to learn how to surf and am really sorry that I did not do so when a teenager since I don t exactly have the time to really learn.
25. Since I am not sure how to end, I will do so with a

We have started to look into kdb+ as a possible high-performance column-store backend. Kx offers free trials -- and so I have played with this for a day or two, both the general system, data loads and dumps and in particular with the interface to R, Based on the few files (one C source with interface code, one R file to access the C code, one object file to link against, one header file and a simple Makefile), it took just a couple of minutes to turn this into a proper CRAN-style R package. Anyway, the reason for this post was that the R / kdb+ glue code works well ... but not for datetimes. I really like to be able to pass date/time objects natively between systems as easily as, say, numbers or strings (and see e.g. my Rcpp package for doing this with R and C++) and I was a bit annoyed when the millisecond timestamps didn't move smoothly. Turns out that the basic converter function in the code had a number of problems: it converted to integer, only covered a single scalar rather than vectorised mode, and erroneously reduced a reference count. A better version, in my view, is as follows:

static SEXP from_datetime_kobject(K x) 
 
	SEXP result;
	int i, length = x->n;
	if (scalar(x))  
		result = PROTECT(allocVector(REALSXP, 1));
		REAL(result)[0] = (kF(x)[0] + 10957) * 86400;
	  else  
		result = PROTECT(allocVector(REALSXP, length));
		for(i = 0; i < length; i++)  
		    	REAL(result)[i] = (kF(x)[i] + 10957) * 86400;
		 
	 
	SEXP datetimeclass = PROTECT(allocVector(STRSXP,2));
	SET_STRING_ELT(datetimeclass, 0, mkChar("POSIXt"));
	SET_STRING_ELT(datetimeclass, 1, mkChar("POSIXct"));
	setAttrib(result, R_ClassSymbol, datetimeclass);
	UNPROTECT(2); 
        return result; 
 

This deals with vectors as well as scalars, converts Kdb's 'fractional days since Jan 1, 2000' to the Unix standard of seconds since the epoch -- including the R extension of fractional seconds -- and as importantly, sets the class attributes to POSIXt POSIXct as needed by R. With that, a simple select max datetime from table does just that, and vectors of timestamped records of trades or quotes or whatever also come with proper POSIXct behaviour into R. Note that it needs TZ to be set to UTC, though, or you get a timezone offset you may not want.

We have launched the Debian PostgreSQL Packaging Project at http://pkg-postgresql.alioth.debian.org/. We are a group of people interested in maintaining Debian packages related to PostgreSQL.

Obviously, Debian already contains a large number of packages related to PostgreSQL. The idea behind this project is to get the involved maintainers together, concentrate resources, exchange ideas, and allow more people to get involved in small ways. See our web site about participating.

Welcome back for the last part of the reviews. You may want to look at the previous parts : part 1 and part 2. Jigdo-ivory, a JavaScript Jigdo client Presentation Debian CDs and DVDs take up a huge mount of space on download servers. Using jigdo to download those images can significantly reduce the amount of bandwidth and space needed on the central servers. Unfortunately, jigdo currently needs special client software to be downloaded/installed first. Adding support directly into a browser-based application could potentially make a very big difference for first-time users here. Jigdo was created in 2001. It allowed to create ISOs from .debs grabbed from regular mirrors. It eliminated the need to duplicate the entire contents of the package repository into ISO files for each release, or even more importantly, for weekly snapshots of testing/unstable/whatever. You may find the complete proposal from the student here. The original idea originated from the Debian-CD people, who wanted to explore ideas about creating a light web client. The project was mentored by Steve McIntyre, who developed a new version of the Jigdo tools, jigit, which is much more efficient. Student Dustin Rayner was a 5th year senior undergraduate student at the Oklahoma Christian University in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. I studied Computer Engineering for 3 years as a Computer Engineering student before deciding to pursue a Mathematics and Computer Science degree. Result This project was unsuccessful due to numerous issues. First, because of an inadequate technical preparation of the original proposal. The Debian-CD people were too optimistic with the possibilities of Javascript. In the end, the copying and checksumming part of the Jigdo process were implemented but the checksumming (with a Javascript implementation of md5) was so slow that it was unusable (think 50kb/s on a regular laptop at full CPU charge). The student did the right thing to investigate Java and ActiveX but it was too late unfortunately and he ultimately lacked the experience and knowledge in the relevant technologies. If the proposal is tried again, the student would be requested to have much more experience with Java (and possibly ActiveX). Those would be much more efficient for the task, as they are the most used technologies among on-line anti-virus scanners, which have a workload somewhat similar to Jigdo. I could not find further public involvement of Dustin Rayner within Debian. Aptitude-gtk, usability and GTK+ GUI for the Aptitude package manager Presentation A GTK+ GUI for Aptitude that will work alongside improved current ncurses and command-line interfaces. This will offer an alternative to Synaptic with an interface design geared toward usability and advanced functionality. Debian currently supports multiple non-command-line package managers, the most used being Synaptic and Aptitude. Synaptic uses a GTK+ interface but offers no command-line mode. Aptitude offers a command-line mode but no X interface, although it offers a ncurses interface.
Comparing the interfaces of Synaptic and Aptitude reveal many design differences. Although Synaptic may be more accessible to beginners, Aptitude offers many interface behaviors and functions that are useful to the regular to advanced users : fully hyperlinked tabbed navigation between packages and versions of packages, mostly modeless interface, interactive dependency conflict resolver The proposal was introduced by the student in coordination with Daniel Burrows, the mentor and developer of Aptitude. Student Obey Arthur Liu was a 22 year old french student of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics at Grenoble Institute of Technology - ENSIMAG, in France. Did I mention that he s also yours truly ? If you want to know more, you might be interested in my previous post. Result This project was successful. The interface was mostly done and functional by the end of the summer. Daniel merged the code into the main post-lenny branch. Development is still ongoing and packages are released into Experimental. For further information, just read the rest of my blog. I could find some further public involvements of Obey Arthur Liu within Debian. Doh! Lintian for fuller automated setups Presentation lintian, the Debian package checker, at the moment presents possible problems in three categories: errors, warnings and informational messages. This leads to several problems, most importantly that the severity and certainty of a check can t be expressed separately. In the course of this project, the student should design and implement in lintian an improvement of the current situation, for example by using a two-letter code (one for certainty, one for severity). This project would make lintian errors much more fine-grained and help in maintaining pertinent quantitative analysis of package quality. The project was mentored by Marc Brockschmidt. The project proposal was commonly introduced by the Lintian team. Student UPDATED: Jord Polo Bard s has done a lot of work with translation in Catalan, his native tongue. He can usually be found on #debian-catalan. He also maintains a few packages as a DM. Result This project was successful. The classification was entirely done. Jord also helped with the new lintian.debian.org website. The Lintian team was very satisfied with the revamped errors list and new website. They have an immediate impact on packages quality reporting. Jord is still active within Debian, helping package a few games. Debexpo, a generic web-based package repository Presentation mentors.debian.net is currently a very specialized web-based repository that allows everybody to contribute software packages to Debian without the need to be a Debian Developer (or Debian Maintainer). It has successfully helped simplifying the sponsoring process in the last years. However it needs to be refactored and in the process should be turned into a generic piece of software that can be used for other Debian source/binary package repositories, too. Mentors is a very good initiative to recruit new packages maintainers (and needs your help!) and the software underlying it could be reused for many different purposes (think PPA). The project was mentored by Christoph Haas. The project proposal was commonly introduced by the mentors team. Student Jonny Lamb was a Computer Science student in the United Kingdom. He was already quite involved within Debian, maintaining a lot of significant packages. Result This project was successful. The whole proposal was perfectly executed. Jonny now continues to develop debexpo, with the mailing-lists and commit logs showing interesting activity. Of course, help for debexpo is appreciated to get it into full shape. Jonny has since become a Debian Developer (here is his AM report). Congratulations to him. It s nice to end on a nice note isn t it ? Now that we re done with the individual reports, I m going to write down my recommendations report. Hopefully it will help with next year s Summer of Code.

After everybody though that Midnight Commander is dead and the next release of it will be released together with hurd, it is very cool to announce that a new team of developers are active again. We've taken over officially the development in December and now, after two months of work a new version of mc is available: 4.6.2. This is mostly a bugfix release addressing several very nasty bugs which are also present in the debian package. Here the notes what has changed in this release:

• MC Core
  • Changed HQ url to point to new website www.midnight-commander.org (Closes: #137, #138)
  • Added a micro helper library in order to go slowly avay from glib (Closes: #157)
  • Use static strings as section entries in ~/.mc/history WARNING!: This will break old files (Closes: #50)
  • Fixed a repaint issue when clicking on the "View" Button instead of using F3 (Closes: #35)
  • Removed obsolete autoconf macros (Closes: #133)
  • Fix escaping for command line completion (Closes: #147)
  • prevent mc from segfaulting when getting invalid timestamps on files (Closes: #96)
  • Fixed a keybord issue when running mc via a putty console (Closes: #203)
  • setted pty fd to closeonexec (on subshell) (Closes: #174)
  • Fixed file renames, when copying/moving is performed into deleted directories. (Closes: #181)
  • Add an option to show executables first in the panels (Closes: #173)
  • Fixed concatdirand_file if there is a parameter = NULL (Closes: #180)
  • Allow out-of-tree builds (Closes: #224, #208)
• Editor
  • Syntax highlighting for:
    • debian files (debian/changelog, debian/control, debian/copyright, ..) (Closes: #142)
    • updated sh syntax highlighting (Closes: #143)
    • updated pascal syntax highlighting (Closes: #65)
    • differentiate between c and cpp files for highlighting (Closes: #16)
    • updated python highlighting to support python 2.6 (Closes: #216)
  • Removed some unneeded variables (Closes: #168, #151)
  • Do use a ro test if a file exists (Closes: #206)
  • Fixes some missbehaviour in regex matching (Closes: #207, #211 )
    • start at front of line and not on cursor position
    • . shouldn't match a newline
• VFS
  • Fix some bashisms in some extfs scripts (Closes: #146)
  • Fixed various problems with symlinks and files with chars which needs escaping over fish (Closes: #10, #87, #149, #53)
  • Added 7zip extfs descriptor (Closes: #92)
  • Switched from o3totxt to odf2txt as o3totxt is outdated (Closes: #218)
• Locale
  • Updated german translation (Closes: #167)
  • New Belarussian translation (Closes: #170)
  • Updated russian translation (Closes: #159)

As you see.. quite a long list of fixes Have fun and check the new release out right here!

Stewart has made some predictions for the future of computing [1]. He predicts that within 2 years the majority of consumer machines will be laptops and have SSD (not rotational media). I predict that by the end of next year more than half of all new consumer machines that are being sold will be laptops (defined as being portable machines with the display and keyboard forming part of a single unit), and that more than half of such machines will have SSD as the primary storage (IE used for booting and for most common file access). I predict that by the end of 2010 the majority of all computers shipped (in all form factors including games consoles and servers) will have SSD as their primary storage. I predict that in late 2010 rotational media will start to go away for most tasks, but for at least the next year the model will be SSD for small/light/fast operations and rotational media for large capacity. I m not disagreeing with Stewart, just being more precise. Also while Val made some good points about the reliability of SSD [2] I don t think that this will be an obstacle in the low-end of the market. There is no little evidence of computers failing in the consumer market due to being unreliable - it seems that Microsoft has conditioned people to expect unreliability. I predict that Sun will not release ZFS under the GPL in time for anyone to care. The release of OpenSolaris was way behind schedule and I don t expect anything different this time around. Stewart predicts that in five years Linux will have significantly more desktop market share than Apple. I agree and also predict that Apple will convert to the Linux kernel. I predict that Apple will become the first Linux distributor to make any significant hardware sales for the mainstream computer market (Linux bundled with hardware has already done well for mobile phones, routers, Tivo, and similar devices where the user doesn t know what OS is running). I predict the death of Windows mobile. I predict that in five years the mobile phone/PDA market will be dominated by Android with a variety of other Linux based phones. I predict that some time after five years the iPhone will go away. Chris Samuel has made some predictions too [3]. He predicts that within two years The distinction between laptops, netbooks and mobile phones will get even more blurred with consumers demanding mobiles with more power and lighter and lighter laptops/netbooks . I believe that the difference between laptops, netbooks, and mobile phones is primarily one of IO (size of keyboard, sockets for peripherals, and size of screen). For desktop use the only application I use which requires more RAM or CPU power than my EeePC 701 can provide is Firefox. A combination of more efficient javascript interpretation and better coding practices by web designers would solve that problem. A significant portion of the mass of a laptop is dedicated to suppporting IO ports and maintaining the structural integrity of the device. A common feature in science fiction is lapotops that can be rolled up, stretched to size, etc (the Thinkpad Butterfly keyboard was an attempt at a first step towards this which failed due to issues of mechanical strength). As some Netbook class systems already have 3G networking built in it seems a logical extension to have telephony functions built in to a laptop. I predict that laptops with full telephony support will go on sale in 2010. One promising feature in regard to laptop IO is the new Display Port [4] video port. It will only be an incremental improvement to the space taken for IO capacity, but I am not expecting anything revolutionary in the near future. I predict that HDMI will be a failure in the market and DVI will never gain critical market share, it will be VGA and Display Port on most systems by 2012. Predicting that technological developments won t happen is always risky, but I predict that the mechanical issues which separate the heavier laptops and desktop-replacements from netbooks (in terms of making a large display and keyboard that won t break frequently) won t be solved within five years. In the same note, I don t expect anyone to try building a mobile phone which can have a full-size screen and keyboard connected to it (although it would be possible to do so). So I expect that the phone/PDA, Netbook, and laptop distinction will remain for at least the next 5 years. One thing that would make sense is to have a small device (PDA or mobile phone) store data that is security relevant and connect it to full-size machines for serious work. So for example you could use a desktop machine for Internet banking (maybe in an Internet cafe) and have your mobile phone ask you to confirm the transaction and then authenticate you to the bank server. I predict a larger role for PDAs and mobile phones as computers as soon as people start to take security seriously. I won t try and guess when that might be, but I predict that it won t be for at least five years. I predict that increasing oil prices will significantly make a significant impact on the price of computers before the end of 2010. Not that I expect the prices to suddenly jump upwards, it s more likely that prices will steadily increase while at the same time new technology to reduce production expenses in other areas is introduced. I also predict that increasing oil prices will increase the desire to maintain systems for longer periods of time without maintenance. For example my Thinkpad T41p has had a few significant part replacements (a couple of motherboards, half the case, and a few keyboard replacements). This is OK while plastic costs almost nothing and the manufacturing expenses are also very low. But in future I expect that people will want laptops that can run for years without needing part replacments and which have a service life of 10 years or more. This requirement for strength will counteract the demand for laptops that are as light as netbooks.

• [1] http://www.flamingspork.com/blog/2008/11/09/technology-predictions/


• [2] http://valhenson.livejournal.com/25228.html


• [3] http://www.csamuel.org/2008/11/09/technology-predictions


• [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Displayport

Okay, I'm again not ready for release on Friday, so I will probably switch to Monday releases ;-). But I think it's good to announce some news which you can expect in next Gammu version. Besides usual bunch of bug fixes (many of them were revealed by testing with Valgrind) the new testing version will have few interesting features. For Nokia users on Linux is great news, that Gammu can now use directly FBUS USB interface (through libusb-1.0. This is especially good news for DKU-2 cable owners, as before they did not have possibility to use Gammu without compiling separate (and broken) module. This connection type is called fbususb and is heavily inspired by implementation in Gnokii, but uses newer libusb API and behaves more nicely when CDC ACM driver has already hooked some interfaces. I would specially like to thank to Peter Stuge for testing this feature (I'm still without a Nokia cable). The second big news is monitoring of SMSD state. SMSD now exports shared memory segment, where some information about it's runtime can be found. Little program called gammu-smsd-monitor can display you these information. The third update is for python-gammu users, which now gain ability to interact with SMSD through new gammu.SMSD object. For now it can inject SMSD messages and get SMSD status (see previous paragraph), but more features can come in future. I want to use this for creating some GUI for SMSD, which will allow to send messages and monitor it's state. But this is still future and if you want to write something like this, you're welcome!

I have been told that not enough information about the Plone user interface sprint at Informaat is getting out. That is not due to a non-disclosure agreement for attendees; all of us have just been too busy working and enjoying ourselves to get to such mundane things as writing reports or blog posts. This sprint is somewhat different than normal sprints: the goal is not to produce as much code as possible, but to lay a foundation for the user interface for future versions of Plone. This requires a lot of thought and prototyping to figure out the right concepts, both in the user interface itself and the backend code on top of which it is built. A lot of this work is done on top of the work done by the little known deco group. There are a few guiding ideas behind the work done at this sprint:

• separate all the knobs and toggles related to content editing and page manipulation out from the normal view.
• there are three different modi of interactiving with a page: view, edit, and construction (modifying layout, managing tiles). These require different types of user interface and should be handled separately.
• make the interface as simple as possible. If possible try to use a progressive complexity approach: keep things as simple as possible, and only expose more advanced options once users are ready to use them.
• always try to use simple semantic markup. There is very rarely a need to add extra elements of pollute the markup with layout or positioning-related information; that should all be done in CSS.

We divided the activities in five areas: content editing, control panels, page assembly, backend and tests. The first day was almost entirely spent on brainstorming, which is very rare for a Plone sprint. This was extremely useful, and provides us with a solid foundation for the rest of the sprint, and ongoing improvement of the Plone user interface.

One of the points I made in my presentation at LCA this year was that for power management to be effective, it needs to be something that works without anyone having to think about it. One aspect of that is ensuring that it doesn't get in the way of the user, since otherwise the user will eventually get irritated and turn it off. Part of my work at Red Hat is coming up with ways to not only offer power management functionality, but to make it sufficiently useful and inobtrusive that manual configuration is almost never required.

Screensavers are an interesting case. We have a good idea of whether most hardware is "doing something" or not, based on whether it's generating traffic or an application has it open. This is less true of screens - the resource making use of the display is the user, and it's entirely possible for the user to be reading or watching something[1] onscreen without us getting any feedback from them. It's common to see people noticing that their screensaver is activating and hitting the mouse or keyboard to stop it. What's the correct solution?

One solution is to have the user increase the screensaver timeout. This is a poor solution - it's one of those "Think about what you're going to be doing with the computer before starting to do it" ideas that I dislike a lot. Computers are there to serve the user, not the other way around. The other downside to this is that the timeout will be left at a large number and monitors will be turned on for significantly longer than necessary.

Another is to pay attention to what the user's doing. If they keep hitting the keyboard just as the screensaver's activating, it's because they want a larger timeout. It's not difficult to give them that. I spent a while today playing with various complex implementations, but I finally came down to a simple one:

• If the user generates activity while the screen is blanking or immediately afterwards, bump the timeout by 10 minutes. Perform a further increase each time they do this.
• If the screen is successfully blanked and the user doesn't immediately unblank it, reset the timeout to the original value

Another option would be to double the timeout each time the user unblanks the screen, and that may be what I end up going with. A more complex solution might be to keep track of the user behaviour and tie it to time of day (if the system goes idle at 3:30, you might as well blank straight away - they've gone to grab a coffee or something), but I'm leaning towards thinking that that's overkill.

To test this out, I've actually gone to the extent of setting my default screensaver timeout to a minute. We'll see whether it gets irritating. I suspect that there's some more fine tuning to do, and I may want some kind of decay function rather than immediately pushing the timeout back to the original value.

Next job is to think about whether there's any reason to not just enter DPMS straight away if the user's selected a blank screen...

[1] I'm thinking along the lines of IRC conversations or logfiles rather than films - media players should be talking to the screensaver already

No that's nothing about IBM and HPC, but it's still cool:


Taken brand new this morning from the shop (with that smell of a new engine still there). Mh, the plate is now "DJ ..." while the other one was "DD ...": would it be a sign something is changing? The hell no! ;)

That means I'm recovering well, I'm now walking without any crutches or tutor, and my knee is almost bending like the other one (well, still some degrees behind, but still), but it still hurts at every step I take. In about a week I'll be able to back swimming with the team (competition will be for next year though).

That even means I'll have to come back to work :( I'm now used to get to sleep late, wake up even later, "work" all day on stuff I like (Debian, the book, or so) so it will be a shock at the beginning, even because I'll be assigned to a new client, so all different.

Enough words, now it's time to go and have a ride on the "beast" :)

Theo's post on hardlink backup tools made me think. In his post, Wanted: Incremental Backup Solutions that Use a Database , he proposed making a incremental backup solution on Database (RDBMS). He's right that hardlinking files so much is putting load on filesystem, especially when fscking. One thing is that although conceptually RDBMS is handling relations, physically (and practically) they are doing similar stuff with hardlinked filesystems. They are just optimized differently, tuned for their 'fsck' behavior with many hardlinks. So, there could be a filesystem which can be tuned for hardlinking. Of course, just because I thought about it it doesn't mean I have come up with a good solution to the problem.

On Tuesday afternoon I gave a talk on behalf of KaiGai Kohei about SE Linux and the LAPP (Linux Apache, PostgreSQL, PHP/Perl) stack. KaiGai has blogged about this [1], unfortunately Google Translation does a poor job of Japanese and has particular problems with KaiGai s work (could anyone who knows Japanese and English well please submit some tips to Google). KaiGai s post is useful for links to his notes which are good background reading. My talks about SE-LAPP and SE-PostgreSQL have been getting some notice, Bob Edwards referenced SE-PostgreSQL in his talk about database security. It s good to see KaiGai s great work getting the notice that it deserves. I hope that it becomes a standard feature of the PostgreSQL code base in the near future! Also Casey Schaufler, James Morris, and I have bought KaiGai a present of some Tasmanian wine, in recognition of his great work.

Patio Maravillas is a self-managed government-independent social center in Madrid, placed in a squatted building that long ago belonged to school. The place currently belongs to a Real Estate company, Grupo 2 Reunidos. According to the law, the place has to be used for providing services to the community, which hasn t happened for 10 years. Nobody knows what plans they do have for the building, but there are suspicions that it might be related to property speculation. Nothing new on the horizon. The police are throwing them out of the building tomorrow morning, incidentally coinciding with the opening of the Foro Social Mundial (World Social Forum), for which Patio Maravillas was going to be one of the hosting buildings. Madrid isn t really known for supporting social movements in general, and has a conservative government, so feel free to think that the coincidence is not random. Patio Maravillas has been giving courses and workshops to the community since July 2007, and is very well considered and supported by different organizations. Supposedly whatever happens tomorrow will be without violence, but knowing how the Spanish Police behaves in this situations that is not very likely. The event will be streamed and probably recorded, and information will be twittered, so hopefully nothing serious will happen. I really hope the best for them. I d love to be able to be there with them, but as it is really not possible for me, I m giving them all my support from here. Good luck! Keep up the good work!