My public radio station is engaged in a most obnoxious spring pledge drive. Good time to listen to podcasts. Here are the ones I'm currently liking.

• Free As In Freedom: The best informed podcast on software licensing issues, and highly idealistic. What keeps me coming back, though is that Karen and Bradley never quite agree on things, and always end up in some lawyerly minutia culdesac that is somehow interesting to listen to. They once did a whole show about a particular IRS tax form, and I listened to it all. (Granted, I often listen to this while cleaning house, but as Bradley would say, at least I'm not listening to it while driving.)
• This Developer's Life: At least the early episodes before it got popular are a unashamed imitation of This American Life, and I have quite enjoyed them. Although I often roll my eyes at the proprietary developer mindsets on display in the show. For example, often they'll have a bug and not root cause it, because well, they don't have the source code for the Windows layers. Still, beneath that it's mostly about the parts of software development that are common to all our lives. A particular episode I can recommend is #10 "Disconnecting" -- the first 20 minutes is a perfect story.
• Off the Hook: This is actually a live radio show, quite well done, with call-ins and everything. So much more polished than your typical podcast. It's hosted by Emmanuel Goldstein! And it's been going on for over 20 years, so why did I never hear about it before? Probably I'm not quite in the right hacker circles. Since it's out of NYC and very anti-authoritarian, I've mostly been enjoying it as a view into the Occupy protests.
• StarShipSofa: The best science fiction podcast around. Probably not news to anyone who ever looked for such a podcast. Long, and tends to be frontloaded with a lot of administrivia, which I fast-forward to get to the stories.
• Spider on the Web: The best music and science fiction podcast around. Mostly on hiatus since Jeanne died, but I hope Spider picks it back up. A good examplar is "Bianca's Hands"
• Long Now Seminars: Consistently interesting. I visited their space last time I was in SF only to learn they'd had a talk the night before, which would have been a bummer, except they ran the bits of the Clock for us.
• Linux Outlaws: After 18 years using Linux, I find the level of discourse in most Linux podcasts typically rather annoying. Including this one, but when Fab gets on a rant, it's all worth it. Sometimes some interesting guests.
• This Week In Debian: Sadly no new episodes lately, and I've been too lame to respond to repeated interview requests. Probably it needs to move away from being an interview show if it is to continue; there are only so many DD's who can give excellent interviews like liw did.

You have probably noticed that phpMyAdmin is again participating in Google Summer of Code 2012. This year we don't want to bring dozens of new features like we did in past year, but rather to improve quality and maintainability of existing code. This is all in sync with our plan for phpMyAdmin 4.0. So if you are student interested in improving phpMyAdmin and have knowledge of PHP (especially with some refactoring experiences), you would be welcome to join us. More information is available in our applicant guide. PS: Please note that for removal of frames we already have few applications right now, so you might want to focus some other parts to have higher chance to get accepted.

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One of features I wanted to introduce with Weblate is ability to do some quality checks while translating. We want contributors to have easy access to translating, but still we need to ensure some quality of translations. That's why Weblate comes with set of quality checks which are performed on every translation unit. The current set of checks (see documentation) is pretty basic and more might be easily added in the future pretty easily. There are two ways how checks are used in Weblate. During translating, if any of checks fires, translator stays on current translation with warning that something might be wrong. This is not a hard error as he still can be correct, but should at least prevent accidental mistakes like corrupted format strings or missing trailing colon. The other way is to do review of a translation. Failing checks are shown on each translation page or you can browse them by project to give you overview what can be wrong. For example with phpMyAdmin this helped me discover that there were few languages where almost half of translated strings are actually not translated but simply copied from English. There were also other problems like inconsistent translations across branches. All in all using these features helped me to improve quality of translations in phpMyAdmin quite a lot and I hope we will keep it for the future.

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Sarah's Mum had accrued too much annual leave and had to take some time off work, so Sarah did some (very mild) arm twisting and convinced her to come over for 3 weeks, and do a 5 day cruise to Mexico out of New Orleans. Unfortunately, my annual leave situation wasn't quite so abundant, and I had a lot going on at work, so regretfully I didn't join them on the cruise, and instead went to New Orleans for a four day weekend when they returned. From all reports, the cruise was very good. Zoe handled it well, although she did say "home" a lot. One of the two stops in Mexico was to check out some Mayan ruins, which looked awesome from the photos. The other stop involved a dolphin encounter. I was incredibly envious of all that they got to do, and would have loved to have gone with them, as I've never been on a cruise ship either. I can also report that no cats were lost during this bachelor stint. I had a night flight on the Wednesday evening to get there, which was scheduled to get in at around midnight, and I'd booked a motel room near the airport for that night, and we'd booked a vacation rental home for Thursday to Sunday nights. Unfortunately, my flight ended being delayed something like 2.5 hours, so I didn't get into New Orleans until around 2am. The house we rented did the trick nicely. It was a small "shotgun" duplex in what looked like a nice neighbourhood. It was advertised as being close to the street car line, but they were doing some work on the tracks, so the street car didn't seem to be running as far down the line as it usually did, so it ended up being a bit more of a trek to get to it. It was also extremely slow, and there was a marathon on the Sunday, which closed everything down for a long time, making it a generally pretty unreliable form the transport. We ended up renting a car for Saturday and Sunday, which was something of a saga in itself, as Enterprise didn't have any cars at the location we'd booked one, so after a couple of hours cooling our heels there (Zoe was incredibly well-behaved, all things considered), they shuttled us over to another location and we ended up with a minivan instead of a compact, which for the same price, allayed our concerns about being able to transport all of our luggage to the airport on Monday morning. We had a very early morning flight on Monday morning to come back, which got into SFO at around 9am, and I went directly to work from there. Thursday We all arrived at the house, separately. It ended up taking them 2 hours to disembark the ship when it came back into port, with Customs taking an eternity to process everyone. I think we went exploring the local area that afternoon, and took a street car into the city to check out Bourbon Street, having a Cajun dinner at Remoulade. Friday In the morning, we went to check out Lafayette Cemetery Number 2. Sarah took Zoe back to the house for a nap, and Sarah's Mum and I continued back to explore the French Quarter some more, walking down the length of Royal Street (which was vastly different from Bourbon Street, just one block over). We had lunch at the French Market. The cemetery was interesting, as pretty much all of the graves were these huge above ground tombs, that seemed to have multiple family members interred in them. Apparently the cemetery filled up quite quickly courtesy of a Yellow Fever outbreak. After lunch, Sarah's Mum and I continued wandering around the French Quarter. We went and took a look at the Mississippi River, and I had an encounter with a grifter who was so good at his job I couldn't bring myself to argue with him over the $20 he diddled me out of. We tried to get to the Civil War Museum, but it closed at 4pm. We looked at the Robert E. Lee Monument, which seemed to be draped in drunks, and then I think we rendezvoused with Sarah and Zoe back on Canal Street for dinner at The Court of Two Sisters (which apparently we were under-dressed for, as Sarah and her Mum said we were getting a lot of dirty looks from other patrons). Saturday On Saturday morning, we had the aforementioned car rental experience from hell, and by the time we had the car it was lunchtime, so Zoe napped in the car after lunch on the way out to Oak Alley Plantation, where we were introduced to the delightful beverage known as the mint julep, and took a tour of the house and wandered the grounds. Sunday On Sunday, Sarah and her Mum did a swamp tour, and Zoe and I went to the zoo. As I said earlier, there was a marathon that completely closed down Saint Charles Avenue, which is where the street cars run, so after walking down to where the street cars started operating (which ended up being most of the way down South Carrollton Avenue), the driver informed me that the street cars were queuing up at the corner of South Carrollton and Saint Charles, and I should get off her street car and get on the one at the front of the queue. I did this, but the driver of the front street car informed me that she wouldn't be leaving for an hour and half. At this point, I started considering a bus instead. Zoe and I went to check out the Mississippi River, which was quite close to where we were, and then I went back, and despite a street car having left (without any passengers) the driver of the current street car couldn't tell me when she'd be leaving, so I started walking down Saint Charles Avenue. Unfortunately, Zoe's going through a phase where she wants to be carried everywhere, so I was lugging her all over the place on my hip. Sarah didn't take a stroller with her, and instantly regretted it. Lesson learned. Eventually we managed to get onto a bus, which dropped us off at Audubon Park, which had Audubon Zoo at the other end of it. There was a playground near the Saint Charles Avenue end of the park, so Zoe had a bit of a play on that, and then we continued through the park to the zoo. Mercifully, the zoo had dodgy strollers for rent, and there was no way in the world I wasn't going to rent one of them, so that made getting around with Zoe a lot easier on my back. We had a really good time at the zoo. There was some sort of a music festival on in the parklands within the zoo grounds, and that included a jumping castle, which Zoe expressed a desire to have a go on. She had a fabulous time on it. I think she probably spent about 15 minutes in there, without any tears. I was very impressed. I took a brief video of some of her antics. It was getting close to Zoe's nap time, and she was getting tired, but fortunately Sarah and her Mum were able to pick us up from the zoo after their swamp tour and Zoe got to nap back at the house. Monday We had a very early start. Unfortunately, our flight (with United) was a couple of days after United and Continental officially merged, and despite having checked in online, we had to queue up with everyone else (for an extended period of time) to drop off our checked luggage. Then there was a 45 minute line for security screening. We pulled the "toddler going to melt down" card and jumped to the head of the line, but Sarah's Mum had to wait. The flight ended up being delayed because people were stuck in the security line. Overall impressions of New Orleans Fabulous architecture. There were so many gorgeous houses on Saint Charles Avenue and the surrounding area. I'd have loved to do an architecture tour. Crap (but cheap) public transport. $3 gets you a day pass. The street cars are cute, but slow and unpredictable. The drivers were remarkably unhelpful. The buses were okay. Great food. Zoe seemed to have a liking for the spicy stuff. I gave her some fresh alligator jerky, and after some initial coughing and spluttering at the spiciness of it, she came back for more. Post-Katrina recovery. We really only saw a very small part of the city, but there were still some houses with boarded up windows, and some vacant blocks where buildings had been demolished, but largely you'd not have been able to tell that large parts of the city had been underwater, from casual inspection. I really enjoyed the trip, even though it was brief, I feel like I got a good feel for the place. We were there just after Mardi Gras, and there were still beads everywhere. Draped all over fences. Over power lines. Trees on the parade route were absolutely covered in beads. I'd have loved to have been there for Mardi Gras. My friend Brandon, who is an excellent street photographer, took some great photos that capture some of it. Photos from Sarah's cruise and our time in New Orleans are here.

The winter has been busy everywhere, and not much happened in FusionForge land. However, this is over, and we've started pushing again, with a focus on making our next 5.2 release ready. We've started a stabilisation branch and set up Jenkins jobs to run our various testsuites on it. Packages built from that branch have also been uploaded to the "experimental" suite in Debian (they need a manual approval before they actually appear there, but that shouldn't take too long). They should be installable and working even on Debian Squeeze (stable), although they focus mostly on Wheezy (testing). My personal goal is to have a solid 5.2 release and include it in Wheezy so it can be part of an official Debian system. What this all means is that we welcome tests and reports of breakage; users of 5.1 or earlier versions in particular are encouraged to test upgrades (in virtual machines or development environments, obviously, if the production server is sensitive). We also welcome translators; there are many new plugins, which means many new translatable strings. We'll probably do release candidates before the final release; I'll announce them here (in addition to the fusionforge.org website). Stay tuned!

phpMyAdmin 3.5 should be released on April 7, 2012, so let's again look at translations status. Here comes sixth round of translation status update. Since last update we have two more translations summing up to 11 translations at 100%:

• Czech
• English (Great Britain)
• Estonian
• French
• Greek
• Japanese
• Russian
• Slovenian
• Spanish
• Swedish
• Turkish

There are few which are really close to 100% and I hope they will get there soon:

• Chinese
• Danish
• Dutch
• German
• Italian
• Polish

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 3.5 using translation server.

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During the last month I worked as upstream maintainer of LADI Tools and now I m happy to introduce the first stable release! So, to answer the usual question What s new? , here is a short description of the changes introduced (taken from the NEWS file included in the release tarball): Laditools 1.0 Lady O Apart from wladi and g15ladi, most of ladi* tools have been renamed:

• ladicontrol -> ladi-control-center
• ladilog -> ladi-system-log
• laditray -> ladi-system-tray

Moreover, a new component has joined the LADI Tools suite: ladi-player. LADI Player is a convenient, graphical VLC-style application providing an all-in-one control interface to start, stop and monitor JACK as well as the session handler. It also provides basic controls for managing studios. Goodbye PyGTK! All the code was ported to GTK+ 3 and the new GObject Introspection mechanism. Code refactoring and cleanup The code has been reorganized in order to allow the use of Python objects by 3rd party applications. To start writing code using the classes provided by laditools, simply do the following: from laditools import * Two-in-one solution for LADI System Tray Formerly laditray was an implementation of GtkStatusIcon to put a nice right-clickable icon into the system tray to allow users access JACK controls easy way. It s been mostly rewritten and now it shows an AppIndicator icon (if the library is available), or fall back to the Freedesktop.org s old-fashioned System Tray Protocol Spec-compliant icon. Project s new homepage The project s homepage is now hosted by Launchpad.net, the code is hosted by repo.or.cz and it s available here for browsing.
Please use the following links to contact the development team:

• Bugs and patches
• Translations

New up-to-date packages will hit both Debian and Ubuntu soon!

J rg is a very active contributor within Debian, and has been for a long time. This explains why he holds so many roles (FTPmaster and Debian Account Manager being the 2 most important ones) Better known as Ganneff (his IRC nick), he s not exactly the typical hacker. He has no beard and used to drink milk instead of beers. Check out his interview to learn more about some of the numerous ways one can get involved in Debian, managing its infrastructure and without having to be a packager. Raphael: Who are you? J rg: My name is J rg Jaspert and I m 35 years old working for a small company doing system administration and consulting work for our customers. I m married for a little while now and sometime soon a little Ganneff will be crawling out of my wife. (Whoever didn t think of the movie Alien now is just boring). Raphael: How did you start contributing to Debian? J rg: I started using Debian somewhere around 2000, 2001. Before that I had the misfortune to try SuSE and RedHat, both with a user experience that let me fully understand why people think Linux is unusable. (Due to my work I m in the unfortunate situation to have to use RedHat on two machines. Funny how they are still utter crap and worse than bad toys). And all of this lets get a Linux running here came up because I was trying to find a replacement for my beloved OS/2 installation, which I had for some years. So after I got Debian installed, good old Potato, I got myself active on our mailing lists, starting with the German user one. A bit later I replied to a question if someone can help as staff for a Debian booth somewhere. It was the most boring event I ever visited (very nice orga, unfortunately no visitors), but I got a few important things there:

• a signature from a DD on my key (Hi grisu),
• a discussion with an upstream author with some useful piece of software to package and
• an impression that this can be fun, if there are just some visitors for an event. So I tried again and did help as staff on a LinuxTag booth a while later.

The software I packaged, found me a sponsor and voila, maintainer I was. Some more packages got added and at some point my sponsor turned out to be my advocate. The NM process run around 2 months, and mid April 2002 I got THE MAIL. Raphael: Some Debian developers believe that you have too many responsibilities within Debian (DAM, FTPMaster, Debconf, Partners, Planet Debian, Mirrors, ). Do you agree that it can be problematic, and if yes, are you trying to scale down? J rg: It s DebConf, tssk. And yes, I do have some extra groups and roles. And you even only list some, leaving out all I do outside Debian. But simply counting number of roles is a plain stupid way to go. Way more interesting is how much work is behind a role and how many other people are involved. And looking at those you listed I don t see any I am a SPOF. Let s look at those you listed: DAM: Here I did start out assisting James to get the huge backload down which had accumulated over time. Nowadays I am merely the one with the longest term as DAM. Christoph Berg joined in April 2008 and Enrico Zini followed during October 2010, both very active. Especially Enrico, lately with the redesign of the NM webpages. FTPMaster: The basic outline of the FTPMaster history is similar to the DAM one. I joined as an assistant, after the oh-so-famous Vancouver meeting in 2004. Together with Jeroen, we both then got the backload down which had accumulated there. He did most of the removals while I had a fun time cleaning up NEW. And we both prepared patches for the codebase. And in 2007, as the last action as DPL, Sam made me FTPMaster. Since then I haven t been alone either. In fact we have much more rotation in the team than ever before, which is a good thing. Today we are 3 FTPMasters, 4 FTP Assistants and 1 Trainee. Though we always like new blood and would welcome more volunteers. DebConf: I am very far outside the central DebConf team. I am not even a delegate here. Currently I am merely an admin, though there are 4 others with the same rights on the DebConf machines. I ve not taken any extra jobs this year, nor will I. Probably for next year again, but not 2012. Planet: I am one of three again, but then Planet is mostly running itself. Debian developers can just edit the config, cron is doing the work, not much needed here. Occasional cleanups, every now and then a mail to answer, done. In short: No real workload attached. Mirrors: My main part here is the ftpsync scriptset. Which is a small part of the actual work. The majority of it, like checking mirrors, getting them to fix errors, etc. is done by Simon Paillard (and since some time, Raphael Geissert is active there too, you might have heard about his http.debian.net). Having said that, there is stuff I could have handled better or probably faster. There always is. Right now I have 2 outstanding things I want to do a (last) cleanup on and then give away. Raphael: You got married last year. I know by experience that entertaining a relationship and/or a family takes time. How do you manage to combine this with your Debian involvement? J rg: Oh well, I first met my wife at the International Conference on OpenSource 2009 in Taiwan. So OpenSource, Debian and me being some tiny wheel in the system wasn t entirely news to her. And in the time since then she learned that there is much more behind when you are in a community like Debian, instead of just doing it for work. Even better that she met Debian people multiple times already, and knows with who I am quarreling Also, she is currently attending a language school having lots of homework in the evening. Gives me time for Debian stuff. How that turns out with the baby I have no idea yet. I do want to train it to like pressing the M key, so little-Ganneff can deal with NEW all on its own (M being Manual reject), but it might take a day or twenty before it gets so far. Raphael: Thanks to the continuous work of many new volunteers, the NEW queue is no longer a bottleneck. What are the next challenges for the FTPmaster team? J rg: Bad link, try this one. Also, no longer sounds like its recent. It s not, it s just that people usually recognize the negative only and not the positive parts. Well, there are a few challenges actually. The first one, even if it sounds simple, is an ongoing one: We need Debian Developers willing to do the work that is hidden behind those simple graphs. Yes, we are currently having a great FTP Team doing a splendid work in keeping that queue reasonably small this is a/THE sisyphean task per excellence. There will always be something waiting for NEW, even if you just cleaned the queue, you turn around and there is something else back in already. Spreading this workload to more people helps not burning one out. So if one or more of the readers is interested, we always like new volunteers. You simply need to be an uploading DD and have a bit of free time. For the rest we do have training procedures in place. Another one is getting the multi-archive stuff done. The goal is to end up with ONE host for all our archives. One dak installation. But separate overrides, trees, mirrors, policies and people (think RMs, backports team, security team). While this is halfway easy to think of in terms of merging backports into main it gets an interesting side note when you think of merging security into main . The security archive does have information that is limited to few people before public release of a security announce, and so we must make sure our database isn t leaking information. Or our filesystem layer handling. Or logs. Etc. Especially as the database is synced in (near) realtime to a DD accessible machine. And the filesystem data too, just a little less often. There is also a discussion about a good way to setup a PPA for Debian service. We do have a very far developed proposal here how it should work, and I really should do the finishing touches and get it to the public. Might even get a GSoC project on it. So far for some short to middle term goals. If you want to go really long term, I do think that we should get to the point where we get rid of the classical view of a source package being one (or more) tarballs plus the Debian changes. Where a new version requires the full upload of one or more of those parts of the source package. I don t know exactly where it should end up. Sure, stuff like one central DVCS, maintainers push there, the archive generates the source tarballs and prepares the mirrors do sound good for a quick glance. But there are lots of trouble and pitfalls and probably some dragons hidden here. Raphael: The Debian repositories are managed by DAK (Debian Archive Kit) which is not packaged. Thus Debian users pick tools like reprepro to manage their package repositories. Is that how things should be? J rg: Oh, Mark Hymers wants to do a package again. More power to him if he does, though yes, DAK is not exactly a quick-and-easy thing to install. But nowadays it is a trillion times easier than the past thanks to Mark s work people can now follow the instructions, scripts and whatever they find inside the setup directory. Still, it really depends on the archive size you are managing. A complex tool like dak does not make sense for someone who wants to publish one or a dozen of his own packages somewhere. Thats just like doing a finger amputation with a chainsaw it certainly works and is fun for the one with the chainsaw but you probably end up a little overdoing it. I myself am using dpkg-scan[packages sources] from a shell script but also mini-dinstall in places (never got friend with reprepro when I looked at it). Works, and for the few dozen packages those places manage it is more than enough. Also, using dak forces you into some ways of behaviour that are just what Debian wants but might not be what a user wants. Like inability to overwrite an existing file. One of the reasons why mentors.debian.net won t work with dak. Or the use of a postgres database. Or that of gpg. Sure, if you end up having more than just a dozen packages, if you have many suites and also movement between them, then dak is sure a thing to look at. And how should things be : however the user and admins of that certain install of reprepro, mini-dinstall, dak, whatever want it. This is not one-tool-for-all land Raphael: What is the role of Debian Account Managers (DAM)? Do you believe that DAMs have a responsibility to shape Debian by defining limits in terms of who can join and what can be done within Debian? J rg: Quote from https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2010/10/msg00010.html:

The Debian Account Managers (DAM) are responsible for maintaining the list of members of the Debian Project, also known as Debian Developers. DAMs are authoritative in deciding who is a member of the Debian Project and can take subsequent actions such as approving and expelling Project members.

Now, aside from this quote, my OWN PERSONAL OPINION, without wearing anything even vaguely resembling a DAM hat: DAM is the one post that is entitled to decide who is a member or not. Usually that is in the way of joining (or not), which is simple enough. But every now and then this also means acting on a request to do something about whatever behaviour of a Debian Project member. I hate that (and i think one can easily replace I with WE there). But it s our job. We usually aren t quick about it. And we don t act on our own initiative when we do, we always have (numerous) other DDs complain/appeal/talk/whatever to us first. The expulsion procedure , luckily not invoked that often, does guarantee a slow process and lots of input from others. Are we the best for it? Probably not, we are just some people out of a thousand who happen to have a very similar hobby Debian. We aren t trained in dealing with the situations that can come up. But we are THE role inside Debian that is empowered to make such decisions, so naturally it ends up with us. Raphael: You did a lot of things for Debian over the years. What did bring you the most joy? Are there things that you re still bitter about? J rg: The most joy? Hrm, without being involved in Debian and SPI I would never have met my wife.
Or my current job. Or a GR against me. Not many running around with that badge, though I m still missing my own personal Serious problems with Mr. Jaspert thread. Bad you all.
Or visited so many places. Think of all the DebConfs, QA meetings, BSPs and whatever events.
Or met so many people.
Or learned so many things I would never even have come near without being DD. Raphael: Is there someone in Debian that you admire for their contributions? J rg: Yes.

---

Thank you to J rg for the time spent answering my questions. I hope you enjoyed reading his answers as I did. Note that older interviews are indexed on wiki.debian.org/PeopleBehindDebian.

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I use R a lot. It's one of the primary tools I use in my day job as a scientist analyzing large datasets. If you use LaTeX with R (as I often do), you probably use Sweave to interleave R output and figures with your text describing those figures using the noweb method of literate programming. Sweavealike is a plugin for IkiWiki that tries to do some of the useful things for IkiWiki that sweave does for R and LaTeX. You use it like the following:

[[!sweavealike  echo=1 code="""
a <- 1
a <- a + 10
print(a)
"""]]

which produces this result when run:

> a <- 1
> a <- a + 10
> print(a)
[1] 11

You can also generate figures with it:

[[!sweavealike  fig=1 echo=1 results="hide" code="""
plot(1:10,(1:10)^2,xlab="x",ylab=expression(x^2),main="Example Figure")
"""]]
> plot(1:10,(1:10)^2,xlab="x",ylab=expression(x^2),main="Example Figure")

The plugin itself uses the neat Statistics::R perl module to handle all of the heavy lifting. I personally plan on using this plugin to help write some more entries in my learning R series of posts that I'm beginning to work on. Hopefully I'll find and fix most of the bugs as I embark on that process so anyone else who uses the plugin won't, but feel free to e-mail me if something isn't working as it should. Finally, you shouldn't run this plugin on a publicly editable IkiWiki instance, because that would be a trivial local user exploit as R can run arbitrary code, read and write to arbitrary files, exhaust all memory, etc.

Most of my private online life happens on netbooks and besides the web browser, SSH is my most used program especially on netbooks. Accordingly I also have hosts on the net to which I connect via SSH. My most used program there is GNU Screen. So yes, for things like e-mail, IRC, and Jabber I connect to a running screen session on some host with a permanent internet connection. On those hosts there is usually one GNU Screen instance running permanently with either mutt or irssi (which is also my Jabber client via a Bitlbee gateway). But there are some other less well-known tools which I regard as useful in such a setup. The following two tools can both be seen as SSH for special occassions. autossh I already blogged about autossh, even twice, so I ll just recap the most important features here: autossh is a wrapper around SSH which regularily checks via two tunnels connect to each other on the remote side if the connection is still alive, and if not, it kills the ssh and starts a new one with the same parameters (i.e. tunnels, port forwardings, commands to call, etc.). It s quite obvious that this is perfect to be combined with screen s -R and -d options. I use autossh so often that I even adopted its Debian package. mosh Since last week there s a new kid in town^WDebian Unstable: mosh targets the same problems as autossh (unreliable networks, roaming, suspending the computer, etc.) just with a completely different approach which partially even obsoletes the usage of GNU Screen or tmux: While mosh uses plain SSH for authentication, authorization and key exchange the final connection is an AES-128 encrypted UDP connection on a random port and is independent of the client s IP address. This allows mosh to have the following advantages: The connection stays even if you re switching networks or suspending your netbook. So if you re just running a single text-mode application you don t even need GNU Screen or tmux. (You still do if you want the terminal multiplexing feature of GNU Screen or tmux.) Another nice feature, especially on unreliable WLAN connections or laggy GSM or UMTS connections is mosh s output prediction based on its input (i.e. what is typed). Per line it tries to guess which server reaction a key press would cause and if it detects a lagging connection, it shows the predicted result underlined until it gets the real result from the server. This eases writing mails in a remote mutt or chatting in a remote irssi, especially if you noticed that you made a typo, but can t remember how many backspaces you would have to type to fix it. Mosh needs to be installed on both, client and server, but the server is only activated via SSH, so it has no port open unless a connection is started. And despite that (in Debian) mosh is currently just available in Unstable, the package builds fine on Squeeze, too. There s also an PPA for Ubuntu and of course you can also get the source code, e.g. as git checkout from GitHub. mosh is still under heavy development and new features and bug fixes get added nearly every day. Thanks to Christine Spang for sponsoring and mentoring Keith s mosh package in Debian.

Via Axel Beckert I learned today that GNU Screen is 25 years old, and although development is slow it has not ceased. Back in 2008 I started to post about some annoyances with GNU Screen. At the time I posted a simple patch to implement the unbindall primitive. I posted some other patches and fixed a couple of bugs, but although there was some positive feedback initially over time that ceased completely. Regretably I didn't have the feeling there was the need to maintain a fork properly, so I quietly sighed, cried, and ceased. In 2009 my code was moved upstream into the GNU Screen repository (+documentation update). We're now in 2012. It looks like there might be a stable release of GNU Screen in the near future, which makes my code live "for real", but in the meantime the recent snapshot upload to Debian Experimental makes it available to the brave. 2008 - 2012. Four years to make my change visible to end-users. If I didn't use screen every day, and still have my own local version, I'd have forgotten about that entirely. Still I guess this makes today a happy day! Wheee! ObQuote: "Thanks. For a while there I thought you were keeping it a secret. " - Escape To Victory

As Christian already wrote, there s an Aptitude revival ongoing. We already saw this young team releasing aptitude 0.6.5 about 6 weeks ago, more commits have been made, and now we re heading towards an 0.6.6 release quickly. But this revival mostly covers the well-known and loved curses interface (TUI) of aptitude and not the seldomly installed GTK interface, which unfortunately never really took off: While aptitude itself (i.e. the curses and commandline interface) is installed on nearly 99% of all Debian installations which take part in Debian s Popularity Contest statistics, aptitude-gtk is only installed on 0.42% of all these installations. One reason is likely that aptitude-gtk still hasn t all the neat features of the curses interface. And another reason is probably that it s still quite buggy. Since nobody from the current Aptitude Team has the experience, leisure or time to resurrect (or even complete) aptitude-gtk, the plan is to stop building aptitude-gtk from the aptitude source package soon, i.e. to remove it from Debian for now. Like the even less finished Qt interface of aptitude, its code will stay in the VCS, but will be unmaintained unless someone steps up to continue aptitude-gtk (or aptitude-qt, or both), maybe even as its own source package. So if you like aptitude-gtk so much that you re still using it and want to continue using it, please think about contributing by joining the Aptitude Team and getting aptitude s GUI interface(s) back in shape. Another option would be to find a mentor so that resurrecting (one of) aptitude s GUI interfaces could become (again) a potential project at Debian s participation at Google s Summer of Code. Please direct any questions about aptitude-gtk or aptitude-qt to the Aptitude Development Mailing List. Or even better, join the discussion in this thread.

One of the things that Collabora does is work with other open source projects to improve things for open source software in general. I was chatting with Michael Meeks of SUSE fame and we had a chat about my recent decision to buy Microsoft Office 2010 for the city council. One of the overriding problems with the comparison was the lack of support for macros within OpenOffice and I was glad to hear about improvements being made in that area. However, there was still an issue. Doing improvements like this cost lots of time, and therefore for a commercial open source company, money. A question arises as to who can pay for this. A district council has limited funds, and can't devote it to (essentially what equates to) a large search and development software engineering task. Companies themselves won't want to take the risk that comes with the large development without a buyer, as once the work is done, it is open source so is harder to monetize. In the mean time, millions of pounds of public money is being siphoned into a private company, and vendor lock in continues. An easy out for a councillor can be to say "Central Government should pay" but given the current state of the economy, I can't see is happening in the immediate future. However, there is a consultation on Open Standards that's currently accepting submission until May, and if that insisted on ensuring that open standards are adopted throughout the UK, it may help unlock this chicken and egg problem.

I gave a brief introductory talk about Android at this month s LUV meeting. Here are the slides with a brief description. All the screen-shots were made on a Samsung Galaxy S running Cyanogenmod version 7.1 [1] (Android version 2.3.7). With that build of Cyanogenmod you can press the power button for about 1.5 seconds to get a menu which gives an option to take a screen shot. The aim of the talk was to give an overview of what Android can do. I also gave some random commentary about Android such as explaining why it doesn t make a good phone. Most of the pictures in this post have links to the Android applications in question. Essential and Important Apps I started by explaining why having root access to your system is really important, including the issue of backing up an Android phone [2]. Cyanogenmod includes a terminal program which allows you to run su - . Running a shell as root isn t generally that useful, what you really want is to be able to run programs such as Titanium Backup which can only work properly if given root access. When you run an OS that allows root access you can run su - at a terminal prompt and you can also have an application use a GUI to request root access. I recommend rooting and modding an Android phone immediately after buying it. However that takes some time which is somewhat equivalent to money and is a significant hidden cost to purchasing an Android phone. The business models of telephone companies seem to involve hidding users for unexpected fees and extra fees for excess bandwidth can be really expensive. 3G Watchdog is one app that can monitor bandwidth and disable data transfers if too much is used. Onavo is an alternative that allows tracking data use on a per-application basis, but it only runs on Android 2.3.x while 3G Watchdog works on Android 2.1. EBay has an official app which is handy for searching for items. So far I ve only used it to get price estimates and have used a PC for buying. K9 seems to be the best MUA for Android. The MUA that ships with Android 2.1 isn t nearly as good and K9 is good enough that I didn t even bother testing the MUA from Cyanogenmod. The above picture shows a list of mail in my SE Linux folder. The Opticron Grapher is a good graphing calculator. I won t claim it s the best because I didn t seriously test such programs, but for the basic tests I ve done it has worked well. The Google Maps client comes with every Android system, the above shows the location of the LUV meeting. Osmand is an Android client for the Open Street Map project. Here is the web site for the Open Street Map project [3]. One significant advantage of OSM over the Google Maps is that OSM is free, the data is all contributed by users like Wikipedia. Another significant advantage is that you can download as much data as you need to your phone, for example the entire dataset for Australia is about 200M. Storing 200M of data on your phone is no big deal when you consider the availability of phones with more than 16G of storage and the ability to use a map when offline is a real benefit. So far I ve used Osmand while waiting for a train at an underground station and I plan to use it to track my progress the next time I m on a cruise. Serval is a mesh networking application for Android that supports VOIP phone calls and distributing messages and files. It s designed to be used in disaster areas, but there are lots of other potential uses of the technology. The Serval Project blog has an article about the presentation they gave at LCA 2012 [4].
Periodic Droid is my favorite Periodic Table viewing program. The Tomfusion AU Weather forecast app seemed to be better than the one from the BoM last time I checked. It s probably the best weather app for Australia.
The Opera Mini browser is often faster than other browsers because it uses a compressing proxy run by Opera. It s not so good for privacy though I have been using Wapedia for browsing Wikipedia. Since giving the talk I discovered the Official Wikipedia browser from the Wikimedia foundation [5] which is a better fit for my needs and I ve uninstalled Wapedia. As an aside modern phones have 16G of storage or more and could easily have a copy of the entire English text of Wikipedia on internal storage. It would be good if someone like Jason King (who is known for work on stand-alone DVD images for Wikipedia) was to write an Android program to do this. Handy Apps
Androsensor is a program to display output from most (all?) of the sensors on your phone. The results aren t as accurate as one would hope, for example Earth s gravity is 9.81m/s^2 not the 10.26m/s^2 my phone registered. But they are a useful indication.

The Zxing Barcode scanner is one of many programs that will scan barcodes with the camera in an Android phone. It can launch a Google search on a product code or open a URL from a
QR Code. The above pictures show it scanning a Coke can (the can and other background was displayed on the full screen before the screen capture program activated), doing a Google search on the can barcode, and looking up a QR code that was on an advertisment outside the LUV venue. Cruise Cams allows you to download pictures from cruise ships. Some cruise ships have several cameras on different parts of the ship uploading pictures regularly so that people around the world can see what s happening. The c:geo opensource program allows you to get information on Geocaches and see a compass or map showing the location. This program has been getting an increasing number of features to do everything you might want to do related to Geocaching. The above picture shows some caches that are close to where I made the screen-shot, in a park a couple of Km from the meeting location. The Google Sky map uses augmented reality techniques to display stars in the direction that your phone is pointing along with their names and the names of the constellations.


The Marine Traffic program shows the locations of ships as well as lots of information about them. The above pictures show me discovering that the Pacific Sun was nearby, viewing it s location on Google Maps, seeing the details, and then viewing fan pictures. The developer s web site allows viewing all the same data without an Android phone [6]. Anyone can join the project by buying an Automatic Identification System (AIS) receiver and configuring a PC to take data from AIS and send it to the MarineTraffic.com servers. As an aside they seem to be missing coverage in western Victoria, so it would be good if someone near Apollo Bay or Warrnambool could install an AIS receiver and help out. Satellite AR uses augmented reality to show the location of satellites and other things in spare. Unfortunately the screen capture process turned off the camera as I had a sign advertising fast food positioned in an amusing location in the background.
Shipmate publishes a set of programs giving information on cruise ships, they have one program for each cruise line. Above is the program for the Princess cruise line, the above pictures give information on the Dawn Princess. Unfortunately the program wasn t usable without net access when I tried to use it on a cruise ship. Games Air Attack HD is an entertaining game that demonstrates the capability of Android phones to run action games. Like many Android games it has a free version and paid versions if you want more. Angry Birds is one of the most well known games for touch-screen devices. It has also spawned a huge line of merchandise.
Labyrinth Lite is one of the many Android games based on the old mechanical game where you tilt a toy to roll a ball-bearing through a maze. It s free and is better than most of the free games in that genre. Minecraft Pocket Edition allows you to play Minecraft on your phone. The demo version doesn t allow saving the game, you have to buy the game for about $5 if you want to do that. It also lacked the full features of the game last time I checked, it didn t have monsters.
Paradise Island is one of many business simulation games for Android. It s more playable than most and has very detailed graphics, but the down-side is that it s a memory hog and will crash if you don t have enough RAM. It s one of the games that are free to download but encourage you to pay money to level up, for some players it s probably a very expensive game. Tower Raiders 2 is one of the better tower defense games for Android.

• [1] http://www.cyanogenmod.com/
• [2] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2012/02/07/5-principles-backup/
• [3] http://www.openstreetmap.org/
• [4] http://www.servalproject.org/archives/862
• [5] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.wikipedia
• [6] http://www.marinetraffic.com/

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Linux 3.3 was released today. This was the biggest release for the regulator API for quite some time thanks to the contribution of device tree bindings for the API by Rajendra Nayak, the first substantial framework update for a long time, but otherwise was fairly quiet:

• OpenFirmware bindings for the core and for the fixed regulator driver, contributed by Rajendra Nayak. Device tree bindings for the Freescale MC13892 PMIC were also added.
• A new regulator_bulk_force_disable() operation contributed by Donggeun Kim.
• A new driver for the Dialog DA9052 PMIC.

This weekend, I launched an extremely ambitious effort to collect evidence of extremely ambitious efforts. The result was a short program that searched the web and revealed the:

• Manhattan Project for the 21st century
• Manhattan Project for Advanced Batteries
• Manhattan PRoject for AI
• Manhattan Project for AIDS
• Manhattan Project for Alzheimer's
• Manhattan Project for autism research and treatment
• Manhattan Project for Big Cats
• Manhattan Project For Bio-Defense
• Manhattan Project for Biomedicine
• Manhattan Project for Bioterrorism
• Manhattan Project for cancer
• Manhattan Project for Cellulases
• Manhattan Project for chemists
• Manhattan Project for climate change
• Manhattan Project for Cold Fusion
• Manhattan Project for computers
• Manhattan Project for creativity
• Manhattan Project for Cyber-defenses
• Manhattan project for Detroit
• Manhattan Project for the development of post-nuclear superweapons in seven fields
• Manhattan Project For Economics
• Manhattan Project for the economy
• Manhattan Project for ending the prostate cancer as a socio-economic crisis in our country and a public health disaster among African American men
• Manhattan Project for Energy
• Manhattan Project for Energy Independence
• Manhattan Project for the Environment
• Manhattan Project for Excellence in Radiochemistry
• Manhattan Project for exploiting extraterrestrial technologies and communication
• Manhattan Project for Finance
• Manhattan Project for fluoride damage
• Manhattan Project for fuel
• Manhattan Project for Fuel Cell Manufacturing
• Manhattan Project for future generations
• Manhattan Project for genetics
• Manhattan project for global hunger
• Manhattan Project for Global Peace, Prosperity and Stability
• Manhattan Project for Green Innovation
• Manhattan Project for Guitar Exercise
• Manhattan project for Hawkeyes
• Manhattan Project for a healthy nation
• Manhattan Project for Homeland Security
• Manhattan Project for Iowa
• Manhattan Project for IT
• Manhattan Project for Legal Education
• Manhattan Project for life
• Manhattan Project for Maine,
• Manhattan Project for materials that could resist corrosion by fluorine or its compounds
• Manhattan Project for medical treatment in the field of obesity
• Manhattan Project for Michael
• Manhattan Project for Miracles
• Manhattan Project for modular instruments
• Manhattan Project for National IDs
• Manhattan Project For Natural Disasters
• Manhattan Project for the NES
• Manhattan Project for Network Computing
• Manhattan Project for network security
• Manhattan Project for the Next Generation of Bionic Arms
• Manhattan Project for online identity
• Manhattan Project for Our Time
• Manhattan Project for Pb-Free Electronics
• Manhattan Project for Public Diplomacy
• Manhattan Project for Racial Achievement Gap
• Manhattan Project for real time biomedical research on human populations
• Manhattan Project for the restoration of motor function
• Manhattan Project for a revival of the Sacrament of Penance
• Manhattan Project for simulation with pseudo-random numbers
• Manhattan Project for the social and behavioral sciences
• Manhattan Project for stove testing and design
• Manhattan Project for systems engineering
• Manhattan Project for Texas Water
• Manhattan Project for transforming patient care for men and ending prostate cancer
• Manhattan Project for the war on terror
• Manhattan Project for Wildcat Service Corp
• Manhattan project for wind, electric, solar, geothermal, hydro and other renewable sources of enengy we've not even thought of yet
• Manhattan Project for XBLA
• Manhattan Project for yourself
• Manhattan Project for Zinnias

[Previously in this series: frailty, the invisible hand, science as dance.]

As announced 3 weeks ago, the Debian project was present at Chemnitzer Linuxtage. Several talks and workshops where held by people related to the Debian project. At the booth we had talks and discussions with exhibitors and visitors, unfortunately I didn t had much time to visit more than small parts of two lectures. Unfortunately (for the visitors) we didn t had any merchandising on board, while we received several requests. On Sunday Axel surprised us with some leftovers from fosdem of debian.ch merch. At the booth we had a demo machine running Babelbox and xpenguins, which attracted visitors very well. We received also more than one Just thank you by satisfied users. :) Four different talks and one workshop were held by Debian people, but they were not specific to the Debian. The workshop was about OpenStreetMap, lectures was about commandline helpers, grep everything, quality analyzing and team management in opensource projects and Conkeror and other keyboard based webbrowsers. Many thanks to Jan Dittberner, Andreas Tille, Christian Hoffmann, Florian Baumann, Christoph Egger, Axel Beckert, Adam Schmalhofer, Markus Schnalke, Sebastian Harl and Patrick Matth i for running the booth, answering a wide range of questions or just chatting with visitors . A special thank to TMT GmbH & Co. KG for providing the complete equipment and sponsoring it s transportation. At the end we have to send a big thank to the organizing team of the Chemnitzer Linuxtage. It was fun and a pleasure to find new friends and meet old ones of the Free Software community. A small sidenote was anybody aware that OpenSuSE Package search is using screenshots.debian.net?

After the rush of new features in version 3.2 this has been a fairly quiet cycle for the regmap API, the main change being the wider usage by drivers. In terms of development of the subsystem itself this release sees:

I ve just seen a mailing list post from someone who needs an ancient printer to work with their old software. As the printer is no longer manufactured and changing the software is expensive this puts them in a difficult situation which can be profitable for someone who happens to own an ancient printer that still works. This sort of thing is not uncommon at all. Ebay is a nice auction and online store site but it doesn t cater for long term personal adverts. I ve got a lot of old computer equipment that I keep because it might be useful at some time and it s a shame to throw away working equipment. I d like to be able to list that stuff on a sale site and have the adverts stay online for years just in case someone wants to pay a decent amount of money for it. If there was such a site I would also list all the systems in my test network, I can test software just as well with different hardware if someone wants to pay decent money for what I ve currently got. Storage space is pretty cheap and searching for keywords isn t that difficult either. The cost of running an online personal sale site for items that sell every few years isn t going to be much greater than running one that sells items after 10 days. But the profit in many cases will be a lot greater, an old printer that sells for $10 on Ebay could go for $200 or more if the seller could wait for a buyer who had some enterprise software that absolutely depended on that particular printer. Does anyone know of such an online sale site? If not does anyone want to start one? Related posts:

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The Debian Project s annual conference is slowly coming closer. Visiting places around the world since 2000, DebConf will take place this year in Managua, Nicaragua, in July and will again provide an opportunity for people who contribute to Debian to meet in person for face-to-face collaboration and discussions. At DebConf we try to bring together as many Debian contributors as possible, including those who could not afford to attend from their own resources. You can help make DebConf12 a success by your organisation becoming a sponsor, or by donating money as an individual. Individual donations can be made online in either US dollars or euros. If you are interested in becoming a sponsor, you can find more information about DebConf12 sponsor page or directly contact <sponsors@debconf.org>. In addition to monetary donations, sponsorship can be provided in the form of in-kind donations, or by lending equipment for the conference period.