Last year whilst shopping for a birthday present for my dad, I took a chance on some ex-display headphones that were on sale at my local Richer Sounds. Up until then the best pair of 'phones I owned were some AKG-512 closed headphones. Otherwise I used a parade of low-end Sennheiser or Sony in-ear buds for listening on the move. The AKGs were a slight upgrade on the in-ear buds, but not much. They were noticeably bassier. Whether that was an improvement or not was up for debate. The Sennheiser HD438s are quite an upgrade on the AKGs. It's the biggest improvement I've ever heard when listening to my music. It's the first time I've ever noticed a significant improvement using different headphones, confirming that my ears are good enough to benefit from better equipment. Until then I simply wasn't sure. This goes to show that my existing equipment is not that great. No surprises there, but my lifestyle at the moment doesn't really have any room in it for anything better. I'm also glad I've amassed a nice music collection and discovered so much that I enjoy listening to before investing in the equipment with which to listen: I've heard new things in all my old favourites these these 'phones. Perhaps I will with a future upgrade, too.

I just read this excellent blog post called "Linux Future" which defines a term "FLOS" to describe what the current direction of Linux development appears to be. Specifically, it addresses the divergence from what one might call the "UNIX" philosophy in new core technologies like systemd. I think sticking a new name to define this philosophical direction is a great idea. "FLOS" is something that both proponents and haters can rally around. It acknowledges the move away from the UNIX way of doing things, and doesn't overload a term like Linux, "ownership" of which is claimed by both camps (and others who just want to keep their heads down and get on with things!) The next step, after embracing it, would be to define the strategy and the roadmap. Where is FLOS going? What's the endgame? Perhaps with such a vision we may end up with some technologies which will stand the test of time, like Apple's CoreAudio (10 years old) or Microsoft's win32 API (now 20 years old), rather than the ludicrously high plumbing turnover we endure right now. (Oh my goodness, I finally wrote an actual Linux blog post.)

Having obtained a respectable set of headphones last year, I started pondering about high definition music. Could I hear the difference between a track mixed at CD quality, 16 bit samples / 44.1kHz sample rate, and the same track mixed at a higher bit or sample rate? A number of artists have made HD audio releases available in a variety of formats, most of which are now obsolete (see: SACD, DVD-Audio) and/or hard to demux to something more modern. However some artists have made digital HD audio releases. The last two Nine Inch Nails records were released in HD and are more readily available. "Ghosts - " had a standard-quality digital release but a high quality Blu-Ray release was also available, commercially. All versions were Creative Commons licensed, so people have legimitely demuxed the Blu Ray release and made it available in other formats. One was uploaded to archive.org, although it sadly lacks precise lineage information:

• Ghosts - 24bit/96kHz FLAC

"The Slip" was released in HD audio digitally. However, I noticed that nobody had uploaded the HD release to archive.org, and having developed an interest in archiving, I did:

• The Slip 24bit/96kHz FLAC

I tried performing some listening tests on my desktop computer, which has an M-Audio "Audiophile" 24/96 PCI sound card. However, in non-blind tests, I failed to distinguish the SD and HD versions of these songs. A friend suggested that despite the card's quoted rates, the signal-to-noise ratio was such that you wouldn't get high enough fidelity to play 24/96 properly. I can only take their word for it My preferred music player can only decode 24/44.1 but I recently learned that my phone, an Apple iPhone, can decode up to 24 bit, 48kHz. I decided to downsample the above two releases in order to try further listening tests on my phone. I uploaded both to archive.org:

• Ghosts - , 24bit/48kHz ALAC
• The Slip 24bit/48KHz ALAC

So far in non-blind tests I have not noticed a particular difference. Whether it's my equipment, my ears, these particular tracks or whether HD audio being audibly better than CD quality is a myth, I am not sure yet. I'm planning to do some proper ABX testing of various lossy codecs and bitrates prior to a major CD ripping exercise, so I may try proper ABX testing of HD audio at the same time. (I'm collecting together past and future log posts about archiving under the tag 'archiving').

is that you cannot use funny desktop programs such as Xsnow or XPenguins. :-(

---

That is, you can run them, of course, but since you almost never see your desktop because it is by design entirely covered with windows, they are just useless, which is too bad because they rock otherwise.

With release of first alpha for phpMyAdmin 4.0, it's time to resurrect my regular translation status posts. So let's look at which translations are at 100% right now:

• Czech
• English (United Kingdom)
• Galician
• Greek
• Spanish
• Turkish

There are also several languages which need just few strings to be complete:

• Danish
• Dutch
• French
• German
• Russian
• Slovenian
• Swedish

As you can see, there is still lot of languages missing, this might be your opportunity to contribute to phpMyAdmin. Also you are welcome to translate phpMyAdmin 4.0 using translation server. If your language is already fully translated and you want to help as well, you can translate our documentation as well.

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It's been over four years since I bought my ASUS Eee PC 1000h. I have used it almost daily ever since. Back when I bought it new models from different brands were being released every few months due to the netbooks hype.

In spite of being resource-limited due to its 1.60 GHz Atom CPU and only 1 GB of RAM, I've managed to do pretty much everything with it. Building software is slow and watching HD videos is nearly impossible, even more so when streamed from the internet and played with flash. Its limited memory capacity makes the kernel swap tens of megabytes before the KDE4 desktop is fully loaded. After launching some day-to-day applications there are usually hundreds of MBs in swap.

In spite of all this, I run the KDE4 desktop and have been able to do things such as running up to two Debian virtual machines with several services (apache httpd, mysql server, openldapd, squid, etc.) and a Windows XP one all at the same time, under virtualbox. I could have probably booted another Debian virtual machine but that would have most likely rendered the DE unusable. Oh, and did I say that this is under the "VT-x"-less N270 CPU?

This so-called netbook has proved to be rock-solid. Every component is still fully functional except for its 7-hours lasting battery that didn't stand a full year of day-to-day use. The keyboard is still intact and so is everything else.

Last year I thought I was going to have to seriously consider buying a replacement after seeing what I think are some signs of the end of its life: After a routinely deep cleanup the keyboard stopped working properly, to the point that I couldn't even login because half the keyboard would send the signal of a totally unrelated key. I bought an external, but still small, USB keyboard which I used until after the next deep-cleanup somehow made the built-in keyboard work again.

The second sign came soon after the keyboard issue. The AC adapter was, well, no longer supplying power to the machine. Trying to buy one online proved to be futile. Replacement supplies for ASUS equipment are hard to find here in Mexico and importing them from the US results in the item being twice (or more) as expensive due to import taxes. They are even more expensive when one finally adds up the cost of shipping.

Hopefully, after spending some hours hunting down the failure in the adapter it turned out to be a problem with the wires. Cut wires repaired, the adapter was working again. The unit itself wasn't at fault.

Back to 2013, this netbook is ageing and every time I've looked at potential replacements I've found none that I like. I look for another netbook/ultrabook/laptop/whatever that is rock-solid, with a 10.1" or 11" display, and has a similarly compact but not oh-so-small-that-I-can't-even-type-by-only-using-my-fingertips keyboard.

The only devices that have caught my eye are the ASUS transformers (with the dock). I'm not interested in a device that only has 1 GB of memory and something between 32 to 64 GB of storage, however. I'm limited enough with my eee's 160GB hdd.

For my needs, the pre-installed Android would have to go away and I guess it would be fun to get a transformer to run under a standard Debian linux kernel. Since I'm not interested in doing that kind of kernel work the transformers are out of the question.

Based on this I think I can only partially agree with Russell Coker when he states that

If tablet computers with hardware keyboards replace traditional Netbooks that's not really killing Netbooks but introducing a new version of the same thing.

Tablets with hardware keyboards may, perhaps, be the next generation of the less than 10" netbooks, but to date I've yet to see something with a display smaller than 13" that is an upgrade over the 1000h Eee I own.

Harald Welte has written about the distraction of phone calls and how it impacts engineering work [1]. He asks why people feel that they are entitled to interrupt him given the cost to his work. Some years ago while working as a programmer I was discussing such things with a colleague who worked for the consulting part of the same company. He was really surprised when I told him that a phone call at the wrong time would cost me at least 30 minutes work and possibly an hour or more. His work was also quite technical and demanding but the difference between software development (where you need to think about a lot of program state to consider where the problem might be) and consulting (where you have to deal with a smaller number of configuration file options and sometimes getting debugging information to someone like me) is considerable. So the attitudes towards receiving calls also tends to be quite different. Computer work requires more concentration, thought, and knowledge of system state than many (most?) career choices. If someone finds that an unexpected phone call costs them no more than a few minutes work then it s quite reasonable of them to phone other people whenever they feel like it generally by default people think that everyone else is just like them. In terms of managing interruptions to my work, I generally encourage people to email me and that works reasonably well. So I don t have too many problems with distracting phone calls. I used Jabber for a while a few years ago but I didn t reinstall my Jabber server after it became corrupt because of the distraction. I believe that was due to using Jabber in the wrong way. I should have just started a Jabber client when I wasn t doing anything important and then killed it when I started doing some serious coding. Having a Jabber message interrupt me when I m watching a TED talk or reading blogs is no big deal. In fact I could tell everyone who has my phone number that if they see me on Jabber then they can just phone me if they wish while knowing that it won t distract me from anything serious. I wonder if I could configure a Jabber client to only receive messages when a program such as mplayer is running. I have configured my laptop and workstation to never alert me for new mail. If I m not concentrating then I ll be checking my email frequently and if I am concentrating I don t want a distraction. I have configured my phone to give one brief vibration when it gets mail and not make any sound, I will only notice that if I m not concentrating on anything. It s a standard Android feature to associate ring tones with phone numbers, it s a pity that the K9 MUA doesn t allow associating email addresses with notifications. There are some people who s email could usefully trigger an audible alert. There is an K9 feature request from 2009 to allow notifications only when the IMAP flag Flagged is set which would allow the mail server to determine which users are important, but there s no sign that it will be implemented soon. I ve started playing with Google+ recently due to Ingress team interaction being managed through it. Google+ seems quite poor in this regard, it defaults to making a ring tone for lots of different events. Turning that off is easy enough but getting notifications only about things that are important to me seems impossible. I would like to get an audible alert when someone makes a Google+ post with an Ingress code (because they expire quickly and because they only seem to be posted at times when I m not busy) but not get audible alerts about anything else. I m sure that most people who use Google+ would like to have different notifications for various types of event. But the Android client has options for whether there should be vibration and/or noise and for which events get the notifications. No options for different notifications for different events and for treating some community posts differently from others. It seems that the default settings for most programs suit people who never need to spend much time concentrating on a task. It also seems that most programs don t offer configuration options that suit the needs of people who do concentrate a lot but who also sometimes receive important phone calls and email. It s ironic that so many applications are designed in the least optimal way for the type of people who develop applications. The Google+ developers have an excuse as doing what I desire would be quite complex. But there are other programs which should deal with such things in a user friendly manner.

• [1] http://laforge.gnumonks.org/weblog/2013/01/16/

As usual, I've changed my plans for Weblate 1.4. Simply before I got to implementing features I wanted to have there, I've already implemented bunch of other things, which are worth releasing. So my plan is to release Weblate 1.4 next week with current feature set (you can check list of fixed issues) and focus on 1.5 development then. Some major features which will be available in Weblate 1.4:

• Added various configuration options to allow more customization.
• Added sitemaps to allow easier access by crawlers.
• Improved notification emails (added links and HTML version with colored diff).
• Provide hints for production setup in admin interface.
• Indicate failing checks or fuzzy strings in progressbars.
• Support for per project ACL.

As a clear consequence, some of the big features were moved to 1.5, but I've added also some other things I'd like to implement, see 1.5 milestone on GitHub.

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I just returned home from Aaron Swartz s funeral in Chicago. Aaron was a good friend. The home I ve returned to is an apartment that was Aaron s before it was mine, that I have lived in with Aaron during several stints, and that I still share with many of his old books and posters. Although, I ve spent what feels like most of the last five days reading things that people have written about Aaron, I m still processing and digesting myself. Right now, I m very sad and at a loss for words. While I reflect, I wanted to share this video recently put online by Finne Boonen. The video was made in 2006 at a Web 1.0 Elevator Pitch Competition held at Wikimania 2006 about a year after that both Aaron and I moved to Cambridge and met. The goal of the contest was to pitch Web 1.0 DotCom business ideas to a team of real Web 1.0 investors like it was still 1999. Aaron and I formed a team along with SJ Klein (who I traveled to the funeral with this week), and Wikimania general counsel and interim executive director Brad Patrick. The video shows how as Danny O Brien has reminded us Aaron was funny. He came up with many our teams best lines in addition to checking our Web 1.0 boxes for tech guru and Stanford dropout. Our pitch for 1-800-INTERNET.COM is in the video below. The transcript was done by Phoebe Ayers in Facebook and the video is also available in WebM. <iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/NzFjWY6Fd_g" width="420"></iframe>

SJ: You know, Mako and I had some pretty good ideas for improving connectivity to the internet, and we think we can reach 90% of the world s population. So think about this. You re sitting in a Starbucks, and you need to connect to the internet. But you can t, because there s no internet. But what is there, near every Starbucks? There s a payphone! You pick up the payphone, and you call . 1-800-INTERNET. You can connect to our bank of researchers on our fast T1 connections and get any information you need! So, we don t actually have 1-800-INTERNET yet, we have 1-800-225-3224, so the first thing we need to do is buy the number. So here s Mako, who is our web designer from UC Santa Cruz and Bradford, our financial guru, and Aaron, who s handling all of our technical implementation. But Mako, you should explain the earballs. Mako: So, so, so yeah, so most people on the Internet are going for the eyeballs, but they ve just left all of these earballs. So I have some experience in web design, and it s true that this isn t really a website, but we still need good web design. So, so, I ve actually got a really experienced team, we can go into later, and we have some really great earcons not icons, but earcons.. And it s going to be all together, not apart like some of the websites. It s going to be together. Brad: so how does this work technically? Aaron: Well, I mean, so I only spent one year at Stanford but that s Ok, because there are new developmental technologies, we re going to throw away all that old stuff, we re going to use really reliable and efficient well-designed code that everyone can clearly understand, and write the whole thing in Perl. I know this is a risk, but I am confident that Perl is going to destroy those old C websites. No one will write websites in C anymore once we do this, it s going to be so much faster, and so dynamic, everythings going to be like, on top of everything. It s going to be great. Bradford: So here s the business model. It s really really simple, and it s a really really great idea. It s all about the licensing. Because what we re going to have are these underlying audio ads, While you re on the phone you re going to hear this subliminal advertising message. And the way it works is really really cool, because it s really really low volume, it s high impact! And it s even better, because we license it, and the way it works is when a caller calls 1-800-Internet, they re hearing the ad, but so is the representative, so we get to bill em twice! So that s it: All: 1-800-INTERNET.COM

We did not win and I still believe that we were robbed.

phpMyAdmin just got a new theme. It's available for download on our themes page. New theme reflects look of new Windows and I have to admit it looks quite nice: As you can see, it also offers four color variants, configurable in it's layout.inc.php file. PS: More details on theme can be found on deviantART.

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As I couldn t retain my curiosity for Ubuntu s Raring Ringtail release, I ended up having a dual boot with Ubuntu 13.04 and Debian Sid. Even thought at the moment 13.04 is only 24% complete, it s already a pretty promising release. However, one thing that heavily annoyed me is that global menu and HUD (still) don t work out of box with Eclipse IDE. Being part of Debian Java team (working on Eclipse) I had to do something about it. To make it as simple as possible for you, I made a package which enables mentioned features. Package is made for/tested and working on 32/64 bit architectures on 12.04/12.10/13.04 Ubuntu.

• sudo add-apt-repository ppa:absinthesyringe/eclipse
• sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install eclipse-enable.appmenu

In following days I ll push a Eclipse patch which will enable global menu and HUD support out of box, thus eliminating need to install this package in future.

release is the tool that I use to manage software releases. This version adds support for signing a tarball with multiple PGP keys at once. For WebAuth, we have an official signing key, but I also wanted to add my personal signature. The minimum supported version of Python was also bumped to 2.5 (see below for why). You can get the latest version from my scripts page. Normally, I wouldn't announce this to everyone, since it's a fairly minor change, except I had a question and a quick Python note. The question: how does one get GnuPG to verify multiple signatures? When I run GnuPG on the resulting detached *.asc file created by this new code, I get the following:

gpg: WARNING: multiple signatures detected.  Only the first will be checked.
gpg: Signature made Thu 10 Jan 2013 03:58:43 PM PST using RSA key ID 5736DE75
gpg: Good signature from "Russ Allbery <rra@stanford.edu>"
gpg:                 aka "Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org>"
gpg:                 aka "Russ Allbery <eagle@windlord.stanford.edu>"
gpg:                 aka "Russ Allbery <eagle@eyrie.org>"

That's nice, I suppose, but it's not as helpful as it could be. Why not verify both signatures and report all of the results? I searched both the gpg man page and the Internet for some option I'm missing, without any luck. (Searching Google for that exact message amusingly turns up lots of verbatim output from Debian repository verification and almost nothing else.) If anyone knows, send me email (rra@stanford.edu or any other convenient address), and I'll update this post with the answer. UPDATE: gpg can currently only verify multiple signatures if the signatures are from keys with the same class and digest. I was attempting this with a 2048-bit RSA key and a 1024-bit DSA key, which gpg does not support. (Yet another reason to replace the WebAuth signing key with a newly-generated key.) Thanks to Philip Martin and Bernhard R. Link for the information! The note is that, way back when I was first learning Python, one of the things that bothered me the most was the lack of safe program execution. The best available was os.spawnv(), which left something to be desired. If you too were bothered by this but don't program in Python enough to keep track of the current state of the art, there's now a subprocess module that has much saner interfaces that work properly, do reasonable things, and avoid the shell. It was added in Python 2.4, with some nicer interfaces added in Python 2.5, so it's fairly safe to use at this point.

As there is still some development ongoing in Weblate, it's time to share information about some of the features you can expect in upcoming release. Recently, Weblate gained ability to display changes which caused string to be fuzzy. This currently only works with Gettext PO files as no other format provides this information. If this is available Weblate shows differences between current and previous string, what allows translator to easily spot what has been changed. Example can be seen on Uzbek translation of phpMyAdmin (until somebody translates that). While working on this feature, I've realized, that Django does not include this information in PO files. Fortunately it was pretty easy to fix and I've created a pull request to implement this. Looking at this file made me fix another thing which annoyed me since I've used translations in Django for first time - it generates POT file for every language, making the updates really slow. Fortunately it was also easy to fix and pull request is here. So if you feel makemessages is too slow, this is patch for you. But back to Weblate as there are more changes. For example automatic locking now works more fine grained and uses AJAX to update lock period. This means translation will be unlocked much faster if you close browser with Weblate. Also searching for messages has been updated to include substring search as well as it is sometimes more useful than fulltext search.

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Finally, I've found some time to update phpMyAdmin packages in Debian to 3.5 series. For long it was not possible due to licensing reasons, but recently this issue was resolved upstream by using jqPlot instead of Highcharts. While packaging new version, I've also replaced all embedded libraries to use corresponding packages from Debian. I've done some testing and everything seems to work fine, but still this frightens me as some versions are slightly different than upstream. Anyway new version is available in experimental for now. Ubuntu users can get it from phpMyAdmin PPA.

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I've just confirmed my flight and hotel bookings for FOSDEM 2013, so I'm looking to meet all great people there again. This year my schedule is not that packed as I have no talks (Weblate lightning talk was not accepted) and also there will be no big phpMyAdmin team meeting, so get in touch if you want to discuss anything with me. As most of the rooms still don't have a schedule, I can't give you hint where I will be present, but I definitely won't miss Friday beer event and Dieter's talk about phpMyAdmin in MySQL room. The rest pretty much depends on who I will meet :-).

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I'm looking for a new position as a Software Developer in eastern Switzerland, southern Germany or remote. Please have a look at my CV if some of the following buzzwords sound interesting to you:

Java, Python, Debian packaging, Git, Gerrit, Eclipse, JUnit, Java QA tools, Hadoop, HBase, ZooKeeper, Lucene, REST, ATOM, HTTP, Guava, Guice, LaTeX, Emacs, OTRS, GnuPG, SSH, Web Crawling and Indexing, Big Data, Scrum, functional programming, web development (Apache Webserver, MySQL, PHP, HTML, CSS, Javascript), D, Scala, PostgreSQL, semantic technologies, XMPP

This is my monthly summary of my free software related activities. If you re among the people who made a donation to support my work (836.78 , thanks everybody!), then you can learn how I spent your money. Otherwise it s just an interesting status update on my various projects. Debian Packaging I uploaded Zim 0.58, WordPress 3.5 (and I had to file a ticket about the availability of sources of minified javascript files again) and another security update for python-django (696535). Speaking of python-django, I forwarded one bug report of Anders Kaseorg concerning Django s bash completion (#695811). I also sponsored the upload of ledgersmb 1.3.25-1. Other Debian work I contributed some patches to improve debian-installer support in live-build. I also added a work-around for bug #652946 in live-installer and committed a fix for this same bug in a jessie branch of partman-target. I also prepared a bugfix for a counter-productive behavior of choose-mirror (#695261, it was not possible to override the codename of the release to install via preseed if you install from a CD with a full base system). I discovered an oddity in the Packages.diff/Index file for the architectures armhf and s390x, I reported it to ftpmasters in #696792. (All those issues were discovered while working for a customer) Debian France I spent quite some time on Debian France this month again. I started by setting up an internal gitolite to manage our accounting/administrative documents. Then I updated galette, the web application that we are using to manage our database of members. In the process, I filed two bugs that we discovered. I immediately tested Galette by registering 4 members that joined during the former mini-Debconf in Paris. We have plans to automate the membership renewal process so we have opened a Paypal account. This month we also cleared the last steps so that I and Sylvestre Ledru have full control on the Debian France bank account. I also registered the new officers at the Tribunal d instance de Sarreguemines . Salt bug reports During the last mini-debconf, I discovered Salt (thanks to Julien Cristau!) and since I had to switch some servers of mine, I took this opportunity to upgrade to wheezy and try out salt at the same time. It took much more time than expected but the result is pleasant. The configuration of all my servers is now well documented/specified in a central Git repository, and moving services is much easier than before. In the process, I filed quite some bugs (#2865, #2851, #2866 and #2875), most of them have been fixed in the 0.11.1 release that just happened. Thanks I wish you a happy new year and all the best for 2013! See you next month for a new summary of my activities.

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I'm still working on perl-cross-debian (just uploaded 0.0.2) and there's more to do on that with upstream but part of the reason to work on perl cross-building is to do what I can to help with the ARM64 port.

So, I went back to Wookey's talk at DebConf12 which leads to the current list of cross-build results for arm64 and started through the list.

coreutils is listed as failing but that was an archive error (MD5sum hash mismatch), so that just needs a retry. I don't have access to that buildd, yet, so nothing I can do there.

Next on the list (excluding those just waiting for build-deps) was klibc.

  aarch64-linux-gnu-gcc -Wp,-MD,usr/klibc/.__static_init.o.d  -nostdinc -iwithprefix 

include -I/ PKGBUILDDIR /usr/include/arch/x86_64 -Iusr/include/arch/x86_64 

-I/ PKGBUILDDIR /usr/include/bits64 

-Iusr/include/bits64 -I/ PKGBUILDDIR /usr/klibc/../include 

-Iusr/klibc/../include -I/ PKGBUILDDIR /usr/include -Iusr/include 

-I/ PKGBUILDDIR /linux/include -Ilinux/include 

-I/ PKGBUILDDIR /linux/arch/x86/include -Ilinux/arch/x86/include 

-D__KLIBC__=2 -D__KLIBC_MINOR__=0 -D_BITSIZE=64 -fno-stack-protector -fwrapv -m64 -Os 

-fno-asynchronous-unwind-tables -fomit-frame-pointer -falign-functions=1 -falign-jumps=1 -falign-loops=1 

-W -Wall -Wno-sign-compare -Wno-unused-parameter -c -o usr/klibc/__static_init.o usr/klibc/__static_init.c

aarch64-linux-gnu-gcc: error: unrecognized command line option '-m64'

make[4]: *** [usr/klibc/__static_init.o] Error 1

Turns out that this is a build failure I understood, at least initially. A little digging and a trivial patch was begun:

--- a/usr/klibc/arch/arm/MCONFIG

+++ b/usr/klibc/arch/arm/MCONFIG

@@ -30,6 +30,13 @@

 ifeq ($(CONFIG_AEABI),y)

 KLIBCREQFLAGS += -mabi=aapcs-linux -mno-thumb-interwork

 else

+# aarch64

+ifeq ($(CONFIG_AARCH64),y)

+KLIBCREQFLAGS +=

+KLIBCOPTFLAGS += -mgeneral-regs-only

+else

 KLIBCREQFLAGS += -mabi=apcs-gnu -mno-thumb-interwork

 endif

 endif

+endif

+

Alongside a trivial change to debian/rules

ifeq ($(DEB_HOST_ARCH),arm64)

DEB_MAKE_ENVVARS := ARCH=arm CONFIG_AARCH64=y CPU_ARCH=armv8-a CPU_TUNE=generic

endif

OK, then things get a bit more awkward,

....

code/debian/cross/klibc/klibc-2.0.1/linux/arch/arm/include -Ilinux/arch/arm/include -D__KLIBC__=2 

-D__KLIBC_MINOR__=0 -D_BITSIZE=32 -fno-stack-protector -fwrapv -fno-exceptions -Os 

-march=armv8-a -mtune=generic -mgeneral-regs-only -W -Wall -Wno-sign-compare -Wno-unused-parameter 

-c -o ../foo.o usr/klibc/arch/arm/crt0.S

usr/klibc/arch/arm/crt0.S: Assembler messages:

usr/klibc/arch/arm/crt0.S:19: Error: operand 1 should be an integer register --  mov r0,sp'

usr/klibc/arch/arm/crt0.S:20: Error: operand 1 should be an integer register --  mov r1,#0'

Hmm. Assembly, well, yes, I've done assembly before, I know what mov should normally do, sp is likely to be the stack pointer .... where's my AARCH64 assembly PDF again... PRD03-GENC-010197 ...

OK, so maybe the r0 and r1 should be x0 and x1, hmm, that at least doesn't raise assembly errors. So a tentative change:

--- a/usr/klibc/arch/arm/crt0.S

+++ b/usr/klibc/arch/arm/crt0.S

@@ -15,9 +15,13 @@

 #ifdef __thumb__

 	.thumb_func

 #endif

-

+#ifdef __aarch64__

+_start: mov x0, sp

+	mov x1, #0

+	bl __libc_init

+#else

 _start:	mov	r0, sp

 	mov	r1, #0

 	bl	__libc_init

-

+#endif

 	.size _start,.-_start

Next stage, however, leaves me quite a bit more lost:

....

klibc-2.0.1/linux/arch/arm/include -Ilinux/arch/arm/include 

-D__KLIBC__=2 -D__KLIBC_MINOR__=0 -D_BITSIZE=32 -fno-stack-protector -fwrapv -fno-exceptions -Os 

-march=armv8-a -mtune=generic -mgeneral-regs-only -W -Wall -Wno-sign-compare -Wno-unused-parameter 

-c -o usr/klibc/arch/arm/setjmp.o usr/klibc/arch/arm/setjmp.S

usr/klibc/arch/arm/setjmp.S: Assembler messages:

usr/klibc/arch/arm/setjmp.S:32: Error: unknown mnemonic  stmia' --  stmia r0, r4,r5,r6,r7,r8,r9,r10,fp,sp,lr '

usr/klibc/arch/arm/setjmp.S:33: Error: operand 1 should be an integer register --  mov r0,#0'

usr/klibc/arch/arm/setjmp.S:34: Error: operand 1 should be an integer register --  mov pc,lr'

usr/klibc/arch/arm/setjmp.S:42: Error: unknown mnemonic  ldmia' --  ldmia r0, r4,r5,r6,r7,r8,r9,r10,fp,sp,lr '

usr/klibc/arch/arm/setjmp.S:43: Error: unknown mnemonic  movs' --  movs r0,r1'

usr/klibc/arch/arm/setjmp.S:44: Error: unknown mnemonic  moveq' --  moveq r0,#1'

usr/klibc/arch/arm/setjmp.S:45: Error: operand 1 should be an integer register --  mov pc,lr'

make[5]: *** [usr/klibc/arch/arm/setjmp.o] Error 1

So now I'm out of my depth of AARCH64 assembly (apart from the recurrence of mov r0 vs mov x0 etc.). If the above is useful then maybe someone can work out what is wrong with setjmp.S or whether AARCH64 just means that klibc needs to gain a arch/arm64/ directory and not try to duplicate each entire assembly block within #ifdef clauses.

I don't really know where else to put an incomplete investigation like this, so it's here for anyone to find.

(Oh, and if you're reading those arm64 cross-build logs, then a few hundred occurrences of ldconfig: /usr/lib/aarch64-linux-gnu/*.so is for unknown machine 183. in every build log (success or fail) is apparently entirely normal until more packages get fixed. Really slows down scanning the build log.

I may try busybox or libusb next. libusb looks like a classic "you might have told me to cross-compile but I'm going to use g++ anyway because I know best" cross-building problem, indicative of yet another BDBS. sigh.

Resources:
Getting started with 64-bit ARM development
ARMv8 images for developers
AArch64 for everyone, Marcin Juszkiewicz
Howto/HelloAarch64 - Linaro wiki
AArch64 gcc options

AreWomenHuman has an interesting article about ViolentAcrez and the wide support for trolling (including by media corporations) [1]. Chrys Stevenson wrote an important article for the ABC about the fundamentalist Christians who are trying to take over the Australian education system [2]. Tavi Gevinson gave an interesting TED talk titled A teen just trying to figure it out about her work starting Rookie magazine and her ideas about feminism [3]. Burt Rutan gave an interesting and inspiring TED talk about the future of space expploration [4]. One of his interesting points is that fun really is defendable in regard to tourism paying for the development of other space industries. Stephen Petranek gave an interesting TED talk about how to prepare for some disasters that could kill a significant portion of the world s population [5]. Some of these are risks of human extinction, we really need to spend some money on it. John Wilbanks gave an intresting TED talk about the way that current informed consent laws prevent large-scale medical research [6]. He says I live in a web world where when you share things beautiful stuff happens, not bad stuff . Joey Hess was interviewed for The Setup and the interview sparked a very interesting Hacker News discussion about workflow for software development [7]. Like most developers I prefer large screens with high resolution, I have an EeePC 701 which works reasonably well for an ultra-portable system but I largely don t use it now I have an Android phone (extremely portable and totally awful input usually beats moderately portable and mostly awful input for me). But Joey s methods are interesting and it seems that for some people different systems give the best result. Jeff Masters gave an insightful TED talk about the weather disasters that may seriously impact the US in the next 30 years [8]. Governments really need to start preparing for such things, some of them are really cheap to mitigate if work is started early. Bryan Stevenson gave an inspiring TED talk about the lack of justice in the US justice system [9]. Wouter Verhelst wrote an insightful article about some of the criticisms of Linux from Windows users [10]. He references a slightly satirical post he previously wrote about why Windows isn t ready for desktop use. Paul Carr wrote an interesting article comparing disruptive business practices of dot-com companies to the more extreme aspects of Ayn Rand s doctrine [11]. In reading some of the links from that article I discovered that Ayn Rand was even more of a sociopath than I had previously realised. Lindy West gave an amazing Back Fence PDX talk about dealing with nasty blog comments from the PUA/MRA communities [12]. After investigating them she just feels sorry for the trolls who s lives suck. Hang from the Vlogbrothers explains gender, sex, sexual orientation, etc [13]. Rick Falkvinge wrote an interesting article about recent political news from Brazil, they had a proposed law that was very positive for liberty on the Internet but it was sabotaged by the media and telcos [14]. We should try to avoid paying any money to the media industry so that they can go away sooner. Amy Cuddy gave an interesting TED talk about body language, power, and the imposter syndrome [15]. Caleb Chung gave an interesting TED talk about toy design which focussed on Pleo a robotic dinosaur with a SD card and USB socket to allow easy reprogramming by the user [16].

• [1] http://tinyurl.com/bswjwkf
• [2] http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2012/10/22/3615647.htm
• [3] http://tinyurl.com/8x3map2
• [4] http://www.ted.com/talks/burt_rutan_sees_the_future_of_space.html
• [5] http://www.ted.com/talks/stephen_petranek_counts_down_to_armageddon.html
• [6] http://www.ted.com/talks/john_wilbanks_let_s_pool_our_medical_data.html
• [7] http://joeyh.name/blog/entry/out_and_about/
• [8] http://tinyurl.com/ctnunyd
• [9] http://www.ted.com/talks/bryan_stevenson_we_need_to_talk_about_an_injustice.html
• [10] http://grep.be/blog/en/computer/ui/windows_desktop_followup
• [11] http://pandodaily.com/2012/10/24/travis-shrugged/
• [12] http://vimeo.com/50006487
• [13] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xXAoG8vAyzI
• [14] http://tinyurl.com/a62ruf3
• [15] http://tinyurl.com/8lyyqmm
• [16] http://www.ted.com/talks/caleb_chung_plays_with_pleo.html

Year 2013 has just started and it's time to think how to spend my free time during this year. Weblate Weblate was my toy project number one in last year and I expect it to stay for next year as well. I have several ideas for new features, but all that depends on free time. I will most likely spend my hackweek on that as well. phpMyAdmin I think my involvement will stay at about same level at phpMyAdmin - doing few random bugfixes, mostly security ones, taking care of infrastructure for translations and wiki and mentoring few GSoC students. Gammu and Wammu Gammu and Wammu has not seen much activity from me in past year and it will probably not change. I don't use the program anymore and this pretty much limits my interest in adding new features. In case somebody active will pop up on mailing list, I'd be happy to transfer the project ownership. Mobile apps I'd like to make some progress here, I was also thinking about making some of them working on Android as well, but this involves lot of learning and time is always an issue here. Anyway this might be good challenge for hackweek as well. Debian No changes expected here :-). Others I consider pretty much anything else from my software projects abandoned or finished.

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