This morning at LCA Andrew Tanenbaum gave a talk about Minix 3 and his work on creating reliable software.

He cited examples of consumer electronics devices such as TVs that supposedly don't crash. However in the past I have power-cycled TVs after they didn't behave as desired (not sure if it was a software crash - but that seems like a reasonable possibility) and I have had a DVD player crash when dealing with damaged disks.

It seems to me that there are two reasons that TV and DVD failures aren't regarded as a serious problem. One is that there is hardly any state in such devices, and most of that is not often changed (long-term state such as frequencies used for station tuning is almost never written and therefore unlikely to be lost on a crash). The other is that the reboot time is reasonably short (generally less than two seconds). So when (not if) a TV or DVD player crashes the result is a service interruption of two seconds plus the time taken to get to the power point and no loss of important data. If this sort of thing happens less than once a month then it's likely that it won't register as a failure with someone who is used to rebooting their PC once a day!

Another example that was cited was cars. I have been wondering whether there are any crash situations for a car electronic system that could result in the engine stalling. Maybe sometimes when I try to start my car and it stalls it's really doing a warm-boot of the engine control system.

Later in his talk Andrew produced the results of killing some Minix system processes which show minimal interruption to service (killing an Ethernet device driver every two seconds decreased network performance by about 10%). He also described how some service state is stored so that it can be used if the service is restarted after a crash. Although he didn't explicitely mention it in his talk it seems that he has followed the minimal data loss plus fast recovery features that we are used to seeing in TVs and DVD players.

The design of Minix also has some good features for security. When a process issues a read request it will grant the filesystem driver access to the memory region that contains the read buffer - and nothing else. It seems likely that many types of kernel security bug that would compromise systems such as Linux would not be a serious problem on the HURD. Compromising a driver for a filesystem that is mounted nosuid and nodev would not allow any direct attacks on applications.

Every delegate of LCA was given a CD with Minix 3, I'll have to install it on one of my machines and play with it. I may put a public access Minux machine online at some time if there is interest.

I blogged 5 days ago about the annoying beeper and different methods that were supposed to turn it off.

I asked for a clean solution, but I received suggestions for some hacks. Now I decided to make a new post since there was a comment added today and I remembered about a possible hack (dpkg-divert) I was thinking about.

Now here are some of those hacks and the reason behind rejecting them.

• I thought at some point of using dpkg-divert, as opposed to deleting the module, but this is suboptimal. And I am not sure dpkg-divert would work for such a whacked "use case"
  
• Using a hardware method is also suboptimal, for several reasons:
• I will hear the beep if I don't plug in the dummy jack
• the same goes when I am using a headset - the volume is loud and seems to not be affected by the general sound volume, so it would be disruptive and annoying while listening music and typing the wrong command;
• the Intel HDA sound driver lacks headset jack detection in the current Debian kernel. This means there is no effect if I plug such a jack
  
• The default beeping should be disabled by default, still, that would partly solve my problem. I could set that in my .inputrc file or system wide, still, that would mean a beep on some occasions (like gdm log in) - not sure if this would mean it would be more scarier, since it happens rarely or not :-)

Still, the question remains, why don't the originally proposed methods work, especially blacklisting?

Update: the headphones jack works with some small changes, bug submitted (#407252)

Enrico reported this morning that liferea dies on Sam’s entry about file parsing vulnerabilities (talk about irony). So, what does silly me do almost right after? Well, I went and read Planet Debian on liferea, of course. And, behold, liferea 1.2 doesn’t crash! I really must finally get my experimental packages ready and uploaded. Update (5 seconds later): Nope, I was wrong. It does crash.

I want a cell phone that runs Linux. I've been wanting one for a long time. Why should I care what OS it runs? Well, I have two main reasons: 1) because I want to support commercial ventures related to free software, and 2) I want to write applications for it, and I don't want to be beholden to some vendor to sell me a development kit, and tell me what I can and cannot write. I want to apt-get install the developer kit, write some code, and upload it to the phone. Rock. I've been paying only scant attention to the cell phone market since I got a Treo 600, which I like a lot. It is _not_ a Linux-based phone. It runs PalmOS, which is a pretty crufty OS, but I've been using it since 2001, so I have a lot of data in there. It should be pretty easy to get the data out, though, so I'm not worried. I really like the Treo's thumb-keyboard; It's qwerty, and I can type pretty fast on it. Numeric keypad based phones are lame. I hardly ever type in numbers anyway. Apple recently announced the iPhone, which I shouldn't even mention because it doesn't allow 3rd party applications, doesn't run on a free operating system, and is probably very buggy since they've never done anything like that before. Enough about Apple. As I poke around the intern-webs, I find that some stuff has been happening over the year when it comes to Linux-based phones, but I'm having a hard time figuring out exactly what is happening. It's surprising how little information is out there. Despite this great list of starting places from linuxdevices.com, the rabbit trail never leads to a "buy this phone" button. Look! There's an open Linux-based phone platform called OpenMoko. At least, I think that's what I pieced together from the scant information available on their web site. Maybe OpenMoko is the phone and openembedded is the platform? I had a very nice conversation with some folks on freenode who explained a bit about this really cool project to me. It looks like they even have a phone that it sounds like is going to be released soon, and it's discussed on LinuxDevices.com. That phone looks pretty sweet. It has a GPS built in too. I like the touch-screen idea that I guess it has, based on the pictures, and it's not way too expensive. Maybe that's the phone I'll get. All it's missing is a "buy it now" button. Oh, and "apt-cache search openmoko" doesn't turn up anything. So on to the Green Phone by Trooktech. This looks pretty good, but not as a replacement for my Treo, since the primary interface is a numeric keypad instead of a qwerty keyboard. It looks like you can actually buy a development version of the phone, but it's not overly free; you cannot develop commercial applications on it without paying them a licensing fee. Lamers. According to some folks on freenode, this phone is just a prototype for vendors like this one. (But do you see a "buy this phone" button on that page?) There's a nice article that talks about several of these devices, including the Nokia N800, which is a Linux-based handheld computer / web appliance. I played with one the other day, and it's pretty sweet. Too bad it isn't a phone, or I'd buy one today. So it looks like there's no open, Linux-based, qwerty phone out there yet. If you know otherwise, let me know. Perhaps one is coming out next month. I think I can wait that long.

I’m often asked why I’m so obsessed with backward compatibility and, as a result, why I’ve made the issue such a central part of the LSB over the past year. Yes, it’s hard, particularly in the Linux world, because there are thousands of developers building the components that make up the platform, and it just takes one to break compatibility and make our lives difficult. Even worse, the idea of keeping extraneous stuff around for the long term “just” for the sake of compatibility is anathema to most engineers. Elegance of design is a much higher calling than the pedestrian task of making sure things don’t break. Why is backward compatibility important? Here’s a great example, via Joel Spolsky (note: from 2004):

Raymond Chen is a developer on the Windows team at Microsoft. He’s been there since 1992, and his weblog The Old New Thing is chock-full of detailed technical stories about why certain things are the way they are in Windows, even silly things, which turn out to have very good reasons. The most impressive things to read on Raymond’s weblog are the stories of the incredible efforts the Windows team has made over the years to support backwards compatibility: “Look at the scenario from the customer’s standpoint. You bought programs X, Y and Z. You then upgraded to Windows XP. Your computer now crashes randomly, and program Z doesn’t work at all. You’re going to tell your friends, ‘Don’t upgrade to Windows XP. It crashes randomly, and it’s not compatible with program Z.’ Are you going to debug your system to determine that program X is causing the crashes, and that program Z doesn’t work because it is using undocumented window messages? Of course not. You’re going to return the Windows XP box for a refund. (You bought programs X, Y, and Z some months ago. The 30-day return policy no longer applies to them. The only thing you can return is Windows XP.)” I first heard about this from one of the developers of the hit game SimCity, who told me that there was a critical bug in his application: it used memory right after freeing it, a major no-no that happened to work OK on DOS but would not work under Windows where memory that is freed is likely to be snatched up by another running application right away. The testers on the Windows team were going through various popular applications, testing them to make sure they worked OK, but SimCity kept crashing. They reported this to the Windows developers, who disassembled SimCity, stepped through it in a debugger, found the bug, and added special code that checked if SimCity was running, and if it did, ran the memory allocator in a special mode in which you could still use memory after freeing it. This was not an unusual case. The Windows testing team is huge and one of their most important responsibilities is guaranteeing that everyone can safely upgrade their operating system, no matter what applications they have installed, and those applications will continue to run, even if those applications do bad things or use undocumented functions or rely on buggy behavior that happens to be buggy in Windows n but is no longer buggy in Windows n+1… A lot of developers and engineers don’t agree with this way of working. If the application did something bad, or relied on some undocumented behavior, they think, it should just break when the OS gets upgraded. The developers of the Macintosh OS at Apple have always been in this camp. It’s why so few applications from the early days of the Macintosh still work… To contrast, I’ve got DOS applications that I wrote in 1983 for the very original IBM PC that still run flawlessly, thanks to the Raymond Chen Camp at Microsoft.

I can almost feel the revulsion among my readership right about now. However, next time you’re in Best Buy or CompUSA, look at the shelf of Windows applications, then compare it to the shelf of Mac applications, and perhaps you’ll better understand why it’s important. Beyond the results speaking for themselves, I’ll argue that it takes a better engineer to move a platform forward while at the same time making sure things don’t break. It’s pretty easy to wash your hands of something and declare it to be someone else’s problem.

I have Dreams I would be embarrassed to admit in public... that suddenly are not so embarrassing anymore!

I dream of winning 1 million Euros in the lottery, starting a Debian Foundation, buying a whole building in the best area of Madrid, making myself a nice home in the attic, with a huge terrace for Vi and Jazz, and having the Debian headquarters there. With that amount of money it would either be the Foundation or the building... So it really is wishful dreaming.

But sometimes I let this dreaming go on further, and I dream of winning more money, buying a whole island, starting a new country there, and calling it Debian Land, getting all DDs a Debian Passport, sponsoring their holidays with their families there, in the Debian Island, with great Internet connection, sun and wonderful beaches, so that they can gather, without waiting for Debconf, or just enjoy a break.

I learnt yesterday that The Micronation of Sealand is for sale and that the people behind The Pirate Bay want to buy it: With the help of all the kopimists on Internets, we want to buy Sealand. Donate money and you will become a citizien.

So I guess I am not the only one who dreams of starting a country where one can be really free. And Sealand is so close to the Debian Developer Centre of Mass... it s so tempting...

They even have a Plan B: If we do not get enough money required to buy The Micronation of Sealand, we will try to buy another small island somewhere and claim it as our own country (prices start from USD 50.000). That s exactly what I was dreaming of, and it doesn t sound so stupid anymore.

I just need to be more constant in my lottery playing, and have some faith.

The other week, I ordered a Microsoft Optical Desktop Elite for Bluetooth keyboard from Amazon. It was actually sold by ComputerGeeks.com (I didn't realise until then that Amazon was acting as a front-man for other retailers for some items). I'd been eagerly awaiting its arrival, and thought that the FedEx package that arrived yesterday might have been it, but that turned out to be the iPod I'd ordered. So today I rummaged through my email and found the email that the Geeks.com people had sent me with a username and password for their website, so I could track the order, and lo and behold, according to the link to FedEx, it had been delivered on Wednesday and left on the front porch! I just popped down to the leasing office to check if it hadn't actually ended up there (they have a very nice package receiving service) but it hadn't. I'm totally miffed that they just left it on the front porch, when the tracking information shows they tried to deliver it at 7:58 PM the day before, and determined "customer not available or business closed" (the leasing office closes at 6:00 PM) and so retried the next day and went for leaving it on the front porch at 5:00 PM, when they could have left it at the leasing office. Anger. It sounds like this happens a lot, because Geeks.com's customer service page even has an FAQ item for it. You'd think that if it happens enough to warrant a FAQ item, and it reads like they have a good policy of reshipping items that go AWOL like this, that they'd just save themselves the time and money and use the shipping service that requires a signature. Pity it's a long weekend and Geeks.com don't operate (their call centre) on the weekends. Patience is a virtue.

iPhone is cool in a lot of ways (except in the freedom side, but not too different than the current iPods). I wish to buy one until the xmas and replace my now obsolete looking LG model. I think if Apple is trying to promote this product as 'more an iPod than a phone' - as Steve Jobs said in an inteview. They give it the wrong name, it should be called: iPod Phone. Yes, same deal as they did with the iPod video thing until they 'merged' the feature on the iPod brand. Remember that it would save them from the current trouble with Cisco/Linksys too.

The multitouch screen on that thing looks promising. I'm sure that there are a lot of cooler screens in development out there right now, but if Apple (or the real manufacturer behind the screen) can manage to make larger ones, i can see some time in the next year the motto: "Do you remember where did the computer go?" "Where did the keyboard and mouse go now?". Ok, maybe a bit too optimistic (they could keep the keyboard and throw away the mouse), but i think the iMacs could be a interesting target for the multitouch thing. Considering they've iSight already in place, with a larger multitouch screen in a good position and shiny cool gestures software, there we've minority report ready desktops, some time after laptops. Can you hear chairs?

Or, Cleanliness is next to godliness The last time when I blogged about Spam fighting Mail Filtering With CRM114 Part 1, I left y'all with visions of non-converging learning, various ingenious ways of working around a unclean corpus, and perhaps a sinking feeling that this whole thing was more fragile than it ought to be. During this eriod of flailing around, trying to get mailtrainer to learn the full corpus correctly, I upgraded to an unpackaged version of crm114. Thanks to the excellent packaging effort by the maintianers, this was dead easy: get the debian sources using apt-get source crm114, download tghe new tarball from crm114 upstream, cp the debian dir over, and just edit the changelog file to reflect the new version. I am currently running my own, statically linked 20061103-Blame Dalkey.src-1. Cleaning the corpus made a major difference to the quality of discrimination. As mentioned earlier, I examined every mail that was initially incorrectly classified during learning. Now, there are two ways this can happen: That the piece of mail was correctly placed in the corpus, but had a feature that was different from those learned before; or that it was wrongly classified by me. When I started the chances were almost equally likely; I have now hopefully eliminated most of the misclassifications. When mailtrainer goes into cycles, retraining on a couple of emails round after round, you almost certainly are trying to train in conflicting ways. Cyclic retraining is almost always a human's error in classification. Some of the errors discovered were not just misclassifications: some where things that were inappropriate mail, but not Spam; for instance there was the whole conversation where someone one subscribed debian-devel to another mailing list, there was the challenge, the subscription notice, the un-subscription, challenge, and notice -- all of which were inappropriate, and interrupted the flow, and contributed to the noise -- but were not really Spam. I had, in a fit of pique, labelled them as Spam; but they were really like any other mailing list subscription conversations, which I certainly want to see for my subscriptions. crm114 did register the conversations as Spam and non-Spam, as requested, but that increased the similarity between Spam and non-Spam features -- and probably decreased the accuracy. I've since decided to train only on Spam, not on inappropriate mails; and let Gnus keep inappropriate mails from my eyes. I've also waffled over time about whether or not to treat newsletters from Dr. Dobbs Journal or USENIX as Spam or not -- now my rule of thumb is that since I signed up for them at some point, they are not Spam -- though I don't feel guilty about letting mailagent squirrel them away mostly out of sight. A few tips about using mailtrainer:

• Make sure you have a clean corpus
• Try and make it so that your have roughly equal numbers of Ham and Spam
• Don't let mailtrainer quit after a set number of rounds. I use a ridiculous repeat count of about 100 -- never expecting to reach anywhere close to that. Instead, I set the streak to a number = number of Spam + number of Ham + 10. This means that mailtrainer does not quit until it has processed every email in the corpus correctly without needing to retrain. Letting mailtrainer quit after it repeated the corpus twice, but before it got a streak of correct classifications left me with a filter with horrible accuracy.
• Make sure you have a clean corpus (yes, really)
• While the ratio of similarities between .css files to the differences between .css files is a fun metric, and I use it as an informal, rough benchmark while training, it is not really correlated to accuracy, so don't get hung up on it, like I was. Usually, the value I get when training from scratch on my corpus is somewhere around 7.5; but over time the ratio degrades (falling to about 5), while the filter accuracy keeps increasing.
• Train only on errors. The good news is that both mailtrainer and mailreaver already do so, so this is easy rule to follow. The reason is that you should only be doing minimal training, in case you have to modify/change the underlying rule in the future. So your filter should be trained to correctly classify the mails you get, but don't shoot for overwhelming scores.
• Use mailreaver. It has the nice behaviour of asking for retraining when it is unsure of some mail, and it caches mail for some time which really helps in training and rebuilding .css files. The reason mailreaver learns faster than mailtrainer is just this feature, I think.
• Stash mails you train on in your corpus, and don't hesitate to re-run mailtrainer over your corpus again after you have been training the unsure emails. When you train single emails, the changed filter may no longer correctly classify some email in the corpus you train with. Running mailtrainer over the corpus adjusts the filter to correctly classify every mail again. I generally retrain about once a week, though I no longer retrain from scratch, unless I change the classification algorithm.

So, the Apple iPhone has been launched, it was brought to my attention as actually being announced by the MD at work, who appears to have become a complete apple freak (poor bastard... or is that rich bastard to be able to afford apple's mediocre offerings and be happy about it?). Anyways - from reading the story from BBC News and the official website, here's my conclusions. First off, when marketing a phone, how about you actually mention it's phone capabilities as the number one priority? I'd like to know about the sound capabilities, the battery life, the overall user feel for it as a phone... maybe I'm odd, but a phone has a purpose, it should make and receive calls, and it should do that job *well*, with good quality voice, a decent (filtering) microphone (it's a mobile, you'll be walking whilst speaking on it, reducing the background noise is a selling point), but apple appear to have mostly avoided talking about this. Instead, the first thing that you're told about from the news story is the unique user interface - great, so we have a touchscreen "whoop, de, do!". Worse still, from the official site, the first thing that springs out is that it's a "Wide Screen iPod" - it's a phone, if I wanted an iPod I'd buy a damned iPod - as it stands, for my music needs I have an iAudio M3 which suits my portable music experience really rather well. I choose that on the basis that it provided ogg support out of the box, didn't require any magical software (I run linux on my machines, it presenting itself as nothing more than a USB hard disk was fantastic, and means that I can use it for other things when needs arise). For a phone I want something that actually behaves like a phone, looking at the iPhone it's primary purpose appears to actually be a media player - that's not good. With the iPhone only having a touch screen interface, and from everything that I've read there's no stylus and the "finger is the ultimate pointing device", I'm just expecting that within the first 2 weeks you're going to have a scratched or smudged screen from usage alone, add in the fact that it's a mobile phone, and therefore generally treated with contempt (neccessity rather than luxery), and that most people carry mobiles in their pockets without any form of protection (easy and fast access) and you've got a recipe for disaster! The touch screen is going to be hit (wether you like it or not) whilst the phone is in your pocket, it will wear - there's no question in my mind about it. Touchscreens aren't designed to be smacked around 24/7, they're touchscreens - they respond to touch! So, assuming that you're shiny new iPhone is sitting in your pocket a lot of the time that's a lot of usage of the touchscreen - they're not designed for constant pressure (think about what happens to pockets in trousers when you sit down...), so I don't think that, overall, the sensitivity of the screen is going to last very long. It's only got a fairly narrow screen too, so what about those of us with not entirely slender fingers? When composing SMS messages on it with the on screen qwerty keyboard, do you really think that you're going to get the right keys every time? Small, on screen, buttons and pubs do not mix - and I'd hasten a bet there's a fair number of SMS messages sent from, or on the way back from, the pub, with a predictive text system at least you can almost work out what the heck the person was trying to say - this is a whole new ball game. The iPhone also makes the phone functionality only available after you've hit the part of the screen that says "Phone", now, I don't know about other people, but if I'm being given a number, I tend to just start hitting the right buttons on the phone, I can store the number later (via the call register or whatever) and hit call, now there's an extra step to getting in touch with people. From the official site we have the words """ iPhone also introduces an entirely new user interface based on a large multi-touch display and pioneering new software, letting you control everything with just your fingers. """" - now, err, just when did a phone require you to use anything other than your fingers? Please tell me, I'm dying to know - I've never yet needed to use my feet to operate my phone, have you? This is marketing gone insane - and what worries me is that people actually believe this bullshit. Apple may have "revolutionised" the computer industry with "Mac OS X" (this is actually not something that I believe, and OS X actually makes me more frustrated than being sat infront of a windows desktop - and believe me, that's difficult), but this is a phone, how about they try making it about the phone first, and the next generation tart audio player second? I'm willing to be convinced that I'm wrong, but I definately won't be going out of my way to aquire an iPhone just because the marketing spiel looks good.

My Notetak application is slowly maturing. Some day in the relatively near future I expect it to get so mature that I need to start refactoring the code so that it isn't utter crap. So far I've developed Notetak by doing random quick hacks, as they have occurred to me, without caring much about maintainability, unit tests, or such. This is fine for the crude prototype phase Notetak is currently going through, but it's getting to the point where making changes meets with internal resistance, since I first need to figure out a way to avoid breaking unrelated things. Now that I have some idea of how the application should behave, refactoring it to be nicely coded is easier. Heck, it's still only 374 lines of Python, plus a .glade file, so rewriting it from scratch should only be an evening's work. Anyway, I'm pretty happy with it now. It fits fairly well into my simple GTD workflow, it's pretty quick to work with, and generally doesn't get in my way. I miss undo/redo, and the UI is ugly, and there's no pretty icon, but the core functionality is there, and is satisfactory. (374 lines of Python to build a useful GNOME application is pretty good, I think. The combination of GTK+, PyGTK, Python, Glade-2, and libglade, is a very powerful combination indeed.)

I’ve just released pommed v1.1, which adds support for (some) PowerBook laptops. If your laptop is not supported, send us the content of /proc/device-tree/model and we’ll send you a test-tarball. gpomme received some improvements in this release:

• spanish translation
• now behaves correctly on multiple head setups
• supports loading an alternate theme using -t
• the background tile has been redone, it’s now nice & clean

The original tarball (available on Alioth, pommed project) contains an alternate theme for gpomme, named Tango. It’s not included in the Debian package because the Tango icons from FreeDesktop.org are licensed under CC BY-SA 2.5 which we don’t consider DFSG-free. It’s a nice, clean theme for gpomme which you’ll probably prefer over the default one. Copy it to /usr/share/gpomme/themes and run gpomme -t Tango to use it. If anybody knows where to find the SVG sources for the Crystal icon theme, I’m all ears. Thanks to Eduardo Bellido Bellido for the spanish translation and the multiple head patch for gpomme. Thanks to Daniel G. Siegel for the Tango theme.

I am deeply missing a real wiki.debian.org/Hardware page. The current one is a joke. It would be nice to have something in the style of the Gentoo hardware page with nice pages which show what works and what doesn't.

I know about the Debian GNU/Linux device driver check page which is a good start, but:

• in most places (installation reports in and out of Debian) you will not see lspci -n output
• there is more to it than lspci (think lsusb, think stuff behind new/strange/uncommon buses - like the sound chips on some Apple ppc based machines)
• you need a running linux system (a live CD can be used for the test), but:
• Debian's live CD is in its infancy (I know, Knoppix should do fine)
• most live CD-s are i386 only (it doesn't matter that much, since amd64 machine should work with i386 live CDs)
  
• most places where you can buy hardware from:
• either they don't have the hardware in stock,
• either want an answer immediately,
• or they don't allow you to access the machine
• (I think) the database is outdated and people are not adding stuff to it
  
• there is no way to make a search based on the product name of the whole system and/or the component

Current situation (bad stuff)

wiki.debian.org/Hardware is a joke. For example, I was expecting to see a Network compatibility list, but instead I see some useless info.

What annoys me the most in this matter are dead links or links to dead/inactive projects.

Information is scattered all over the place (redirects and directories can help), is mixed/ungroupped, or is outdated.

Current situation (good stuff)

The information partly exists. Probably, in time, the wiki will be cleaned up, but until then you have to dig for the information.

There are plenty of sites and pages with information, but, still, you need to weed out the old/irrelevant stuff.

What to do about it

Before you say anything, no, there is no need for yet another Linux compatibility list project.

Ideas:

• contribute to the wiki
• add a wiki page for every machine you installed under Hardware/Compatibility/ Laptop,Desktop,Misc /$PRODUCTNAME (would it make sense to have it under Hardware/Compatibility/ Laptop,Desktop,Misc /$PRODUCTNAME/$DIST ?); link your page to the installation-report (you did fill an installation report for every installation you did, didn't you?)
  
• reorganize pages with directories (as proposed above)
  
• remove dead llinks
• add redirects for pages that just say "See foo"
  
• unify pages that contain almost the same information
  
• automatically make a wiki page for each (successful and unsuccessful) Debian installation-report based on the machine type (would need some logic to weed out the home made systems) - but only select the success/fail rate based on strictly hardware issues
• help Kenshi with his efforts for better hardware support

Update: Justin told me about the Ubuntu Laptop Testing Team project which is kind of nice. There is also a scraper script which was supposed to help making queries like "info about laptop X" and "which laptops have these features", but that script didn't work for me.

Note: This post grew larger than originally intended. It drifted away from Vista to general rants about Microsoft and the content industry towards the end of the post, so just skip the rest if this is not of interest to you.
The latest thing I heard about Vista is that Microsoft bribes bloggers with Vista notebooks. As the article points out, this is plain wrong. Apart from crossing the line by not only giving away their own product to reviewers for free, but by actually providing an additional benefit (in the form of the notebook), they also did it wrong because - as the article on tech.blorge.com linked above points out - they don’t understand the way blogging “works”. Too many will be more or less angry because they didn’t get a free notebook (if anything at all).

In my opinion though, this is by far the least important mistake they made with Vista. All their content protection stuff is far worse. It basically does what current copy protection mechanisms already do, but to a much larger extend: Bother the legitimate users while users of pirated copies are uneffected. I don’t think they can avoid pirated copies for a minute. A friend already has a nice HD video player (HDDVD IIRC) and a nice HDCP capable TFT-display, both bought in december. Problem is that the HDCP protected connection resets every few minutes, causing a dropout in both video and sound for a few seconds each time. Seems HDCP compatible player and HDCP compatible display doesn’t necessarily mean that the two work together. Fortunately, in this case, there is some “secret” code you can enter on the players remote to disable HDCP completely. Of course, technically, this is not legal use, but if he didn’t use that hack, he wouldn’t be able to watch his legitimately bought video with his legitimate player and display. Given this problem, I can only shudder when thinking what will happen on Windows Vista with all those encrypted and signed communication channels (drive->memory->videocard->display, just to name the most obvious ones). And there is also the degradation of totally unrelated audio and video stuff while some “premium content” is played. Assume that I play some premium audio stuff. According to the hardware and driver specs for Vista, the availability of any premium content means that any non-encrypted channels need to be turned off or artificially degraded (like downsampling video from 1080p to VGA and upsampling it again since the display might be limited to only display 1080p). This is oh-so-stupid.
And there is also their EULA, as reviewed by Ed Foster. I won’t go into details here, but let’s just say that the EULA is the final nail in Vista’s coffin for me. I’ve been a Windows user since Windows for Workgroups came out (though I’ve used Linux on my machines since 1993 - and almost exclusively since 1998), but I won’t buy Vista, not even when it would be included with a new PC. By the way: This also most likely means that I won’t buy any HD video stuff at all, since the Vista content protection stuff was mostly dictated by the big Hollywood studios. Seems like I will be saving quite some money over the next years. (Which I actually need to do anyway.) Other interesting links regarding Vista:

• The Inquirer - Charlie Demerjian: Microsoft Vista is not an option
• The Register - Scott Granneman: Surprises inside Microsoft Vista’s EULA
• Juha Saarinen: DRM behind lack of Windows Vista drivers… and fear the new content protection
• Techworld.com - Chris Mellor: Vista crippled by content protection
• The Register - Andrew Orlowski: Vista’s Suicide Bomb: Who gets hurt?

I said they did it all wrong because they forgot that they are selling Windows not to the content industry but to the consumers. Sure, the consumers want to see what Microsoft calls premium content, but I’m also sure that they don’t want all that content protection nonsense Microsoft built into Vista for the sake of the content providers. They lost the balance between avoiding pirated copies (which I think the content protection stuff will have no big effect on) and bothering users of legitimate copies. Heck, I already use “pirate” copies of most of the (Windows-based) games I play because I don’t want to be bothered by their original-CD-checks, even though I own at least one legal copy of all the games I play. Would I need to download pirate copies of the HD movies I want to watch because I don’t want to be bothered by whatever side-effects VCP will have, even if I own legal copies of the same movies? Dear Microsoft, dear Content-Industry (TimeWarner, Disney, whoever), please re-think who you want to sell your content to. I already avoid DVDs which carry additional copy protection (apart from CSS), and if they were available at all, I would prefer to buy DVDs without even CSS. The same is true for CDs (except that they obviously don’t have CSS). Consequently, I’m likely to avoid buying HD videos which impose unpleasant restrictions on me, including those that disable the S/PDIF output of my player (no matter wether PC or standalone) since I paid a lot of money for decent HIFI equipment two years ago and I sure as hell won’t want to by new equipment within the next few years. Luckily, I didn’t yet buy any HD video gear, though my notebook, when equipped with a HDDVD or Blueray drive should be capable of playing HD video - if MS and the content industry wouldn’t impose stupid restrictions.

disk = [ 'phy:/dev/vg/xen1,hda,w', 'phy:/dev/vg/xen1-swap,hdb,w', 'phy:/dev/vg/xen1-drbd,hdc,w', 'phy:/dev/vg/san,hdd,w!' ]

For some work that I am doing I am trying to simulate a cluster that uses fiber channel SAN storage (among other things). The above is the disk line I'm using for one of my cluster nodes, hda and hdb are the root and swap disks for a cluster node, hdc is a DRBD store (DRBD allows a RAID-1 to be run across the cluster nodes via TCP), and hdd is a SAN volume. The important thing to note is the "w!" mode for the device, this means write access is granted even in situations whre Xen thinks it's unwise (IE it's being used by another Xen node or is mounted on the dom0). I've briefly tested this by making a filesystem on /dev/hdd on one node, copying data to it, then umounting it and mounting it on another node to read the data.

There are some filesystems that support having multiple nodes mounting the same device at the same time, these include CXFS, GFS, and probably some others. It would be possible to run one of those filesystems across nodes of a Xen cluster. However that isn't my aim at this time. I merely want to have one active node mount the filesystem while the others are on standby.

One thing that needs to be solved for Xen clusters is fencing. When a node of a cluster is misbehaving it needs to be denied access to the hardware in case it recovers some hours later and starts writing to a device that is now being used by another node. AFAIK the only way of doing this is via the xm destroy command. Probably the only way of doing this is to have a cluster node ssh to the dom0 and then run a setuid program that calls xm destroy.

Happy New Year! Happy 2007!

And a really happy one!

After the cloud of ideas and subjects on the last post, giving the clear idea that I should keep this blog more up-to-date, here is an important note that is missing (including old news that I should had post but didn't, sorry for that). I'm aware that a few people are interested in how the Debian NM process evolves from person to person, on my last update on that topic, I told you that I was recommended to the DAM by my AM. Almost three months later (2006-11-18) Myon (Christoph Berg, Front Desk Member) couldn't find my final report, he pinged my AM and one week later everything was fine again and I got approved to the next step: DAMnation. On the Christmas' evening I got a nice gift from Joerg, DAM approval. Yesterday (2007-01-02) I got the nice e-mail with the subject: New Debian maintainer Felipe Augusto van de Wiel (Thanks to James Troup, aka, elmo). The entire process took me 8 months and 10 days. I would like to say thanks to everybody that helped me pass thru this experience: Otavio Salvador (my advocate and mentor), Christian Perrier and Luk Claes (Mentors and Uploaders), Clément Stenac (my AM), Christoph Berg (Front Desk), Joerg Jaspert and James Troup (DAMs). They are directly involved in my NM process, but they were not alone, thanks for every single person that helped me with tips and hints, that took some time to teach me and all the people behind different projects in Debian (I really start naming everybody but then I realize that it got very large for Planet): Debian Brasil, Debian Volatile (aba, zobel, sgran), Release Team, Debian Women, Debian i18n Task Force and Debian l10n Brazilian Portuguese, Debian Weekly News Team, buildd.net project, Alioth admins and staff, Debian Installer Team, Debian Kernel Team, Debian Mentors, DebConf Team, OFTC Staff, Debian QA Team, Debian Doc Team, Debian WWW Team, Debian Admin Team (DSA)! People, you know who you are, thank you VERY much! You can check my Status Page to see more details about my NM process and more information about the acronyms used on this post. Now, Brazil has 17 Debian Developers (not counting the one that already retired). :-)