Solutions Linux was great. At least I had a great time, seeing a lot of people that I meet too seldom. A short making up is:

• Setting up a babelbox is hackisk ;
• Debian France related: the board remains the same for one more year, bubulle and jcristau are now part of the core team;
• Bull is even worse that what I could have ever imagined (see what they came with here).

There was not as many visitors I would have hoped, but that was still a nice time. edit: it seems only the video card was broken after all, because I carried the computer forgetting to remove the DVI to VGA adapter. So that's a 50 loss, not a 350 + one. I'm relieved

I have a number of upcoming talks at conferences in the next few weeks and months that I thought I'd mention in case people want to attend or meet up:

• Debian Quality Assurance, Free Software World Conference 3.0, 7-9 February 2007, Badajoz, Spain. I will briefly give a summary of QA activities in Debian and of the work accomplished at the Debian QA meeting in Extremadura in December 2006.
• Running Debian on Inexpensive Network Storage Devices, FOSDEM, 24-25 February 2007, Brussels, Belgium. I will mainly talk about installing Debian on the Linksys NSLU2 and Thecus N2100, both very interesting devices.
• Compiler testing using Debian as a real-world testcase, Gelato Itanium Conference and Expo, 15-18 April 2007, San Jose, California. I will talk about the work I did testing GCC 4.2 and Osprey by compiling the entire Debian archive on Itanium (and other architectures).
• Release management in free software, Google, 19 April 2007, Mountain View, California. I will present some results from my research. I'll probably present good and bad practices found in large free software projects.
• I'll probably tour Norway in May to talk about my research on release management but details have not been finalized yet.

I will update my talks page as more details become available. I hope to see some of you at these conferences.

All being well I now have a blog working using Typo, instead of Wordpress 2 - and no broken links! We'll see. Now to make sure that my server load doesn't rise through the roof this time. For future reference importing entries from Wordpress2 -> Typo will almost certainly give you this error: This can be fixed by changing: To this:

Recently someone asked me for advice on what they can do to improve their career without getting a degree.

I have performed a quick poll of some people I know and found that for experienced people there seems to be little need for a degree. People who have extensive experience but no degree report no problems in finding work, and employers don't report any reluctance to hire someone who has the skills but no degree.

One thing that a degree is very good for is making a career jump. This is most notable when you get your first professional job, school results and references from part-time work don't help and a degree is a massive benefit. But if you have proven your abilities in the field then most employers will be more interested in checking references and the interview process than in qualifications. If you are only interested in getting a job that is one level above where you are at the moment then lacking a degree should not be a problem.

Another possibility for someone who lacks a degree is certification such as the Linux Professional Institute (LPI) provides and the Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE). One advantage of the RHCE certification is that it is based on fixing misconfigured Linux systems, no theoretical questions, just the type of work that real sys-admins do for their job - this means that people who do badly in traditional exams can be expected to do well, and it also means that the RHCE certification accurately depicts real skills in fixing problems (and it should therefore be more valuable to employers). The LPI exams can be taken by anyone, but to sit for an RHCE you have to be sponsored by an employer.

There are ways of getting career benefits without strictly going upwards. One way of doing this is to move to a region where the pay scales are different. Some years ago I moved from Melbourne, Australia to London to increase my salary. When in London I did work that was a lot less challenging and was paid considerably better for doing so. One thing I discovered is that in London Australians were widely admired for working really hard, I don't think that Australians work harder than British people on average, but people who will move to the other side of the world to advance their career are generally prepared to work hard!

If you spend some time working in another region and then decide to return home you will probably find that employers are more interested in hiring you for what you have learned in another region. Whether you actually learn things that are of value to potential employers when working in another country is debatable, it probably depends on the individual. But when applying for a job you want to make the most of every opportunity that is available - if someone wants to hire you for the special skills you learned in another country then that's OK. ;)

Another possibility is moving to a different industry sector. Some industries have career bottlenecks at different levels. If there is no possibility of moving upwards in the area where you work then getting a job with the same skill requirements in a different industry might open up more opportunities. An example of this is working as a sys-admin in a medium sized company that is not IT based. If you are the only sys-admin in the company then there is no possibility of promotion, moving from such a company to an ISP (or other IT based company) would then give the possibility of becoming a senior sys-admin, team leader, or even the manager of the ops team (if management is your thing).

A final option that few people consider is becoming a contractor. Contractors tend to earn significantly more than permanent employees when they do the same work (so becoming a contractor provides a significant immediate benefit) and as the duration of contracts is usually small there is less attention paid to degrees etc (what does it matter if the contractor will only be there for three months?). Of course most contracts last significantly longer than the initial term, some contractors end up working in the same position for 10 years or more!

There are some down-sides to being a contractor, one is that they get less interesting work (offering someone a choice of projects if they become a permanent employee or the project that is deemed to be least interesting if they insist on being a contractor is not uncommon). Another down-side to being a contractor is the way that contractors are used. The ideal way of running a company is to have mostly permanent employees and to use contractors for special skills, short-term projects, and for emergencies when they can't hire permanent employees. When a company has almost no permanent employees it usually means that something is going badly wrong. This means that if you select a random contract role there is a good chance that it will be one where things are going badly wrong. The money from contracting is good, but it can be depressing when projects fail.

Knowledge@Wharton: “Today [Steve] Ballmer sees two major competitors for Microsoft — the open source software movement and advertising-supported software. According to Ballmer, the threat comes not from specific companies, but from the business models represented by these two trends. ‘Right now, the emblem of the first one is Linux and the emblem of the second one is Google. But it’s not the companies, it’s the phenomena’ that present the greatest challenge to Microsoft.” Microsoft is very good at competing against companies, but how do you compete against “phenomena”? That isn’t as clear. (Jonathan Schwartz wrote about this in 2004.) And at least, from Microsoft’s perspective, the second phenomena is emblemized by a company. Linux isn’t even a company. The usual tactics won’t work.

Really. After MJ Ray summarized very useful information about building methods, I finally reconsidered my method for building packages. I usually use pbuilder but I'm pretty much annoyed with its slowness when unpackaking the base.tgz file. As a consequence, when I'm in a hurry, I sometimes just "debuild" packages on my live system. Booooo. Of course, this often leads to errors (two, recently, with samba. Booooo). On the other hand, using pbuilder is a very clean way to build packages...but is very slow, which is a pain when working on the "blitz NMU" uploads which I blogged about a few days ago. So, discovering cowdancer which is able to dance fast along with the safety of pbuilder was exactly what I was needing. Thanks, again, Junichi for that nice piece of work...and MJ for blogging about it!

niq commented:

"FWIW, in the real westcountry (West Devon, near the cornish border) we've missed the storms. A bit of wind in the morning, and some drizzle, but nothing substantial."

Yes, seeing what happened further north - roofs ripped up in Manchester - and east - house collapse in King's Lynn (pic 9) - then it seems we got off lightly this time. I hear that Germany declared it a hurricane, but I haven't confirmed that online. Euronews coverage. As far as I can see, there's snapped aerials and all the windows look like someone has sneezed over them, but damage mostly stopped after the fences were ripped to bits. I heard that the sea overtopped the wall in Weston, but I can't find pictures. I'll see myself what town is like later today. Update: niq, you didn't get an email notice because your mailserver is cocked-up:

"550 Error: 23Your subject line looks like spam"

Damnit, it's your phrase in the subject line!

Several months ago, I set up a low-powered box to act as a fileserver and media center. I don't get cable TV and I have no interest in doing so, so I don't need a PVR. However, I do have a rather large music collection (and new speakers to play it on); I want to be able to put Internet radio on in the background (since we can't get NPR over the air), and a quick-and-dirty slideshow program for my digital camera photos could be nice too. So, I decided to try out the free media center, mythtv. I've summarized the notes I took here for the benefit of other people who don't watch TV.

Setup was fairly straightforward -- I installed the packages from debian-multimedia.org and configured them. I had a bit of trouble getting myth to actually start, but looking over the documentation apparently resolved it (my notes contain no details).

Mythtv has some very well-thought-out aspects. By all accounts, it makes an excellent PVR; since I don't watch TV, this is the last time I'll mention PVRs in this post. :) The interface looks exactly the way you want a TV-based system to look, with bright colors, big fonts and big interface elements. There's even a cute OpenGL mode with fancy screen transitions (I left them disabled because my video driver is unstable even without 3d effects running -- thank Via).

However, it became painfully obvious after a bit of use that MythTV is really meant as a TV program, with everything else being an afterthought. Here are just a few of the problems I noted:

• MythTV can't play internet radio; the functionality simply doesn't exist.
  
• You can do only one thing at once. Perhaps this is fine for TV, but given that it is not uncommon that I want to, say, play music while reading the news, or while ripping another CD, this is a gaping hole in functionality for me.
  
• MythTV can display news (RSS) feeds. However, the news feeds aren't in alphabetical order in either the viewer or the setup screen (where you pick what to see). This makes it rather painful to pick the feeds you want out of the dozens of presets.
  
• The built-in browser crashes with SIGABRT on startup, making the news feeds useless anyway.
  
• The built-in support for ripping flac files is confusing to activate (you have to pretend you're making an Ogg and choose "Perfect" quality!) and doesn't give you control over the process (for instance, replaygain can't be added to the ripped files).
  

That's just a small sampling of the problems I ran into. I ended up just setting up a normal desktop system with a wireless keyboard/mouse, and I'd recommend the same thing for anyone else who doesn't need a PVR. The non-TV features in Myth have a strong smell of being extras for people who occasionally switch away from the TV, rather than a well-integrated media system in their own right.

Erich commented:

"Pbuilder is great (and cowbuilder even more so). First of all, it makes setting up and upgrading chroots easier (even easier than dchroot etc.), but it will also handle dependencies and do install/removals (well, technically it won't remove stuff, the chroot is just thrown away afterwards). That way, pbuilder helps getting build dependencies right, and ensures the package is currently buildable (not with some library package you still happen to have on your system, but that has been removed from Debian; not uninstallable for some reason etc.). This makes the job easier for porters, since a FTBFS is less likely to be an error in packaging by the maintainer... At some point I had like 6 pbuilder chroots... woody, sarge, unstable, woody with some backports, sarge with SELinux backports, unstable with experimental. Sure, we don't need debhelper either? After all, it just does some cp and mvs, doesn't it? There IS some benefit in having stuff automatized in a standard way; even though we could all do our chroots ourselves, I want to express my thanks to the pbuilder (and cowbuilder) authors and maintainers for making life EASIER for me. A lot easier. I could live without, but I would probably not keep that many chroots."

Ken Bloom added:

"One important feature of a pbuilder chroot is that pbuilder installs build-dependencies as you ask it to build debian packages, and removes them as soon as it finishes building the packages. In this sense, pbuilder is specifically intended to replicate the buildd environment, so you can find out whether your packages will break on a buildd (e.g. whether you've remembered to include all of the build-deps in debian/control, because things will break on the buildds if you forgot to add a build-dep because the build-dep was just lying around on your system (or in your unstable chroot)."

Sven M ller wrote:

"Well, pbuilder has several benefits, but the most important one to me is that it restarts from a clean system (only base packages + build-essentials installed) on each build. Sure this adds to the time needed for the build, but it also makes sure that I get all build-deps right and that the whole build process is as reproducible as possible."

Ben Hutchings commented:

"The major difference between pbuilder's approach and simply building in a chroot'ed installation is that pbuilder tries to build on a minimal system plus the specified build-dependencies. If you always build with pbuilder or similar it's much less likely that you will miss a build-dependency or otherwise produce a package that can't be auto-built elsewhere."

I take the clean chroot point as a clear benefit, but it still strikes me that there are easier ways to do the same thing (rsync --delete) without all the waiting around for pbuilder on my slow mipsel. I guess that's the difference with debhelper: debhelper use doesn't seem to slow me down.

Several people have wondered why were Nadezhda's and my site offline this weekend. Well, it surely raised my ego ;-) What happened?
As many of you know, this blog is hosted in my home machine - A Mac Mini connected by DSL. A couple of weeks ago, my ISP announced the doubling of our connection speed (it was 512/128k, it got increased to 1024/128, so it's not exactly doubled, specially if you are used to saturating the upstream channel... but anyway). From then on, we started suffering all kinds of connectivity problems. The connection would drop several times a day, it would be sluggish at times... I decided to wait a bit, to let them upgrade their whole network.
Anyway, it didn't happen. Nadezhda was pissed at it, as she is our main user - And just to make sure I was not doing NAT wrong in my server, I decided to set up my DSL modem (a SpeedStream 5200) as a router instead of a switch. Yes, Ta^3, some people never learn ;-)
In short: I hosed the connection, and had to work with Prodigy Infinitum's staff on getting it back online. Contrary to the popular belief, Infinitum support is up to the task, customer-friendly and helpful (although they insisted on me shutting down my Linux server and configure it from MacOS - I don't blame them, after all. Thank $deity I didn't have to set up a Windows machine after all!).
But after recovering connectivity, the speed still sucked.
I was prompted to use a temporary account, which they provided me, and the connection was just perfect, 10KBps upstream, 105KBps downstream. WTF?! Well, the girl told me that my login/password pair had a problem (?!) and I needed to change them. Ok, no sweat, we changed them, so I'm no longer gwolf_at_prodigy - I had not even used that mail address, so no worries.
What happened? Well, as my username/password is the same for all of Prodigy's services (dialup, Wifi hotspot and DSL), and as I have lent it to a couple of people over the years, I just guess they penalized me :-/ But... Why wouldn't they tell me about that? Not even after changing my login/passwd (no, they would not keep even the old login) Why wouldn't they request me not to share my credentials? Go wonder.

Gunnar, the apache configuration files for example are a mess, and certainly wouldn't become harder to edit if they were some real XML. Similar things apply to other applications. And if you reread my first post, I never suggested to use XML for all configuration files, but just for those who need some nesting structures. If you don't need nesting, some other format with proper character encoding information is fine with me. It should just be standardized e.g. with respect to quote handling, whitespace handling etc.

key = value

and

key="value"

are already sufficiently different that most applications can only read one or the other. P.S. I couldn't reach your blog the last few days; today it worked after a long time and with some error message on top: "not well-formed (invalid token)" seems like you're having some problems with the XML for your blog? :-)

Partly in preparation for an upcoming baby, and partly by watching mid, I started thinking about cameras. I’ve decided that my little old Canon PowerShot S230 is getting a little worn out (its second battery can’t hold a charge that lasts longer than a few dozen photos). So, after a lot of advice from mid, I decided to get a Canon Digital Rebel XTi (also known as the EOS 400D). Also, partly on his advice and partly on the advice of a few Amazon reviews, I decided not to get the kit lens (EF-S 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6; not the one with the USM), and instead got another lens that sometimes is sold along with the XTi body (EF-S 17-85mm f/4-5.6 IS USM). I also got a 2GB compact flash card. As someone who’s always had point-and-shoot cameras, this is a really awesome camera. Part of it is that all of my cameras up until now have been 3.2MP or less and this one is 10.1MP. But a lot of it is that I get to control things like shutter time, and that the lens has image stabilization (IS), so I don’t get nearly as many blurry pictures. But I’ve had the most fun playing with the aperture, which creates some really neat effects that just weren’t possible with my point-and-shoot. Pixel, however, was unimpressed: Anyway, I can see now why people spend so much money on cameras, and especially on lenses. And I can tell already that I’m going to want a tripod. Also, I understand now why mid has a 4GB CF. My 2GB CF holds about 200 RAW images, which would be plenty with a point-and-shoot. But with this camera, it goes quickly, since it’s so easy to take multiple pictures in quick succession. Thus far, I haven’t really run into any problems with the camera itself, other than feeling like I need or want more accessories.

Gunnar doesn't like the idea of recommending XML for configuration files, why do you need to be able to edit a XML-file with a non-XML-aware editor if you don't like the raw syntax? If you don't like the raw syntax, use an editor that gives you a different representation. Or use some transformation. Write a tool that converts YAML to XML and back, if you like YAML better. (Btw, this is another reason to use a common library for configuration file handling - let people choose their configuration file formats!) Writing XML in the raw with a good schema-aware editor with syntax highlighting is actually quite nice. Have you ever edited an XML file with eclipse? You really should do that... I once opened my Openbox (a rather minimalistic window manager) configuration file in eclipse. Guess what, it was giving me useful syntax completion! It had loaded and used the referenced schema file. It's not as if I think XML is the ultimate thing; (nor is Eclipse an editor I'd use for configuration files; startup takes years and it frequently crashes for me. vim also has some XML support...) IMHO there is a lot in XML that should be stripped (such as attributes); I like JSON syntax better, except it's in turn lacking essential information such as character encoding, namespaces and schema information. I also don't thin JSON allows comments. But when handling information from multiple sources (and multiple schemes), XML is really useful. It removes most of the quessing needed for handling other formats. And that is what I'm precisely advocating: use standardized formats. Consider for example the apache configuration. Do you know of any tool that can parse the apache configuration files other than apache? Some parts look like SGML/XML, but they don't have much more in common than using < and >. When you are in need of automating something with apache, you'll be annoyed by this. If apache would be using something where you have a reliable parser ready for - that would be nice. Have a look at the xchat.conf configuration file. It uses "key = value", but they have these extra spaces there and don't use quoting, this means the file can't be loaded by many parsers, e.g. bash. Now lets use at buttons.conf - compeltely different syntax, "KEY value" blocks, separated by empty lines... Btw, note that configuration handling with XML to me means also keeping comments somehow... most applications will nuke any comments in their configuration files; which is funny since most configuration syntaxes do have a notion of comments, but did you ever come across an application using sh-style configuration (i.e. that you could source in bash/dash/zsh), that keeps comments? P.S. The YAML homepage is not YAML. It's valid XHTML. Only if you strip out all the tags and attributes and use only the text content within the /html/body/pre tag, then you have something which probably is YAML. This compatibility with HTML is probably why XML was at all successful.

I've been thinking lately about how to improve my process for making a release of one of the projects I work on. Actually, calling it a process is to glorify it. Each of my projects basically does things differently, but they do share some common steps:

• Commit all changes, after they've been tested.
• Update README, NEWS, and maybe other documentation files for the release.
• Create tarball.
• Put tarball somewhere under my public_html.
• If I have a Debian package of the project, update the packaging, and build and test new version of package. Put the resulting files also in public_html.
• Update the relevant web pages with version numbers, links to tarball, etc.
• Announce, possibly on a mailing list, in my web log, or on IRC.
• Maybe sign and upload the Debian packages to Debian.

That's a lot of tedious manual steps. I would like to automate everything so that I only need a single command, possibly excluding the upload to Debian. I have the beginnings of script that does most of this, but it is not very flexible. Actually, that's not true: I have several scripts that overlap, and together they most of the above. It's a bother to have to remember which script does what, and is suitable for which project. They're all horrible to improve upon. I use Bazaar (bzr) for version control in all of my own projects. A couple of days ago, I looked at the builddeb plugin for bzr, which creates a Debian package (source and binary) from within a bzr branch. It doesn't do more than that, however, and I'd like to do much more. While thinking about this some more, I realized that something tied to bzr isn't very appropriate. While I currently favor bzr, I'd really like to not tie my development processes too closely to it. If nothing else, one of the projects I'm involved in is piuparts, which is currently maintained in Subversion, and I'd like to use my automation for that as well. Further, sometimes I package other people's software for Debian. While most of the work is similar to when I package my own software, there are some subtle differences, and again, it'd be nice to use the same automation for this as well. And, finally, sometimes I work on fixing bugs in other people's Debian packages, and most of the automation is relevant to that work as well. I've decided that a single, atomic command is not acceptable. What I need is a suite of commands for each of the small tasks, plus one or more scripts to combine them together. The flexibility of combining small commands should make it easy to adapt things for different workflows and scenarios. After some hacking, I came up with Unperish. It's currently in its early stages, but I intend to keep using it and improving it, until it takes all the pain away from making a release. At least for me, but hopefully it will be of some use for other people.

Slightly belated, but still: Happy new year everyone! We spent the holidays with my parents, pretty relaxing, didn't do much but lie on the couch, do crosswords and watch my sisters dwarf rabbit, that my mom hat to "rabbit-sit". Christmas was as usual a three-generations celebration and quite nice. On the 4th we went to see Irie Révoltés. Absolutely great concert!! We danced our hearts out. But, you know what? The best is not only seeing a great concert, but having the next day off. Sleeping in 'til way past noon, waking up with a beep in yours ears, a smelly pile of cloths beside your bed and every muscle sore. Have a wonderful breakfast with eggs and sausage, spend half an hour under a hot shower and spend the rest of the day humming melodies and tending to your aching muscles. Wonderful! Unfortunately the new year didn't continue that great. I caught a nasty cold and spent the last four days in bed. But, oh well, it's getting better, I can almost breathe soundlessly again!. Generally, this is going to be a very important year! In the middle of December I registered my Magister (comparable to a master's) thesis. I've got six months to finish it, so the first half of this year will be used for that. Once the thesis is handed in, the final (really final this time) exams start, first a very long written one, than an oral one, this will take until October. After that ... well, we'll see. I've set my mind on a PhD, since I'd like to pursue an academic career, so the next step will probably be trying to get a PhD grant. First things first though ... Resolutions Finally this is probably the first new year I really made some new year's resolutions. I'll put them here, so I can nail myself down to it over the year:

1. First off, there are some things that I simply hope to keep the way they are:
   • I live in a wonderful relationship that I hope will simply go on forever :)
   • Also, I have quite a cool job (several actually), that I hope I can keep for another while.
   • I changed my eating habits quite drastically during the last months. I used to love everything "Just add water": teas, soups,puddings ... RAMEN!! Luckily it didn't reflect on my weight, which is pretty constant, but still I know that stuff is 90% chemical crap and who knows what it will lead to. (I know the optimal human would have three eyes, but I am actually quite happy with my average two.)
     So, I've cut down on that quite a bit and now have a subscription with an organic farm nearby that delivers so called Abokisten (subscription boxes?) that are delivered weekly and contain different vegetables, fruit, a loaf of bread and some cheese. The boxes' content is kind of randomized, so you get something different every week. It's a pretty neat service, since the food is really great, the price is reasonable, it's delivered right to my door, and (most of all) it makes me cook! So, here's another Keep that up!
2. So much for the keeping, now for the changes/tasks: I guess the first is, of course, my thesis and exams. I plan to do those as good as possible. I'll be something of a challenge though. This is the first time I do such a large "project" (the thesis takes six months) all on my own, and (most worrying) at home. So here's a test on self-discipline!
3. Although I've done a lot of acting in my "younger years" (haha) I've always been rather unmusical. This has been nagging on me for quite a while, so I've taken up playing the Blues Harp last month. I picked that instrument since I love the Blues and it's also easy to learn but still very flexible (and cheap). So far it's been huge fun but the art is, as always, keeping it up.
4. There's this little blog I'm maintaining, that has been horribly neglected over the last year, so another resolution is to post here more often. (This way posts also won't have to be so horribly long, such as this one.)
5. I couldn't help but notice that that geek girls top ten which Erinn mentioned (congrats by the way :)) contains but one European women. So here's something to do as well. There's quite a bunch of pretty impressing ladies over here, too. (Even AFTER 1950,dear CNET) And it seems, they need a bit more visibility. Maybe there are some things that can be done about that too ...

So, lots of plans. I hope publishing them here will help sticking to them. This also concludes my "little post", I hope the next will follow in a more timely manner.

Aigars Mahinovs mentioned that it would be nice if applications would not clutter the home directory with their config files as much. I agree a lot. Dotfiles for configuration suck badly. If you start a new application (or if you are in an early stage and have a small userbase), please follow the Freedesktop.org XDG base directory specification. I.e. use .config/applicationname instead of .applicationname for configuration files (unless an overriding environment variable is set), and .local/share/applicationname for data files. And for cache files, use .cache/applicationname (anyone writing a patch for firefox?) What I'd also like to propose is to reduce the number of different configuration file syntaxes. It sucks having to find out which syntax an application uses again and again, because every application is different. We probably won't be able to convince everybody on one format, but we could maybe cut it down to, like 3 formats, please? There is no reason that one application needs to start comments with "#" and another with ";" while a third application uses "//" but doesn't allow "/* comment */"... A small set of syntaxes (preferrably with standardized parsers) should be good enough for just about every application:

• key=value pairs, quotations optional, comments match "^\s*#"
• ini-style configuration files with limited nesting
• JSON syntax (nesting, all strings quoted)
• XML files (arbitrary nesting, mixed contents, repeated elements)

If we had just these few syntaxes and an appropriate schema description language, we could write generic configuration file editors. That would be very nice. Also we avoid having config file parser bugs by using libraries, and if someone prefers using e.g. gconf or dconf, this could be handled by the library, transparently for the application. (Note that many application lack error handling when writing their configuration files, especially when the disc is full... - they really should be using a library. IIRC xchat also has some bugs of this kind, I remember having tried to patch some of them once when we were preparing for the sarge release, just to find out that there might be many more of them...)

Steve Jobs: “You don t want your phone to be an open platform.” More Steve Jobs: “These are devices that need to work, and you can t do that if you load any software on them. That doesn t mean there s not going to be software to buy that you can load on them coming from us. It doesn t mean we have to write it all, but it means it has to be more of a controlled environment.” It’s widely understood that Microsoft beat Apple in the PC game because Apple was a tightly integrated, closed platform, whereas Microsoft was an open ecosystem where anyone could play (albeit at their own peril). Clearly, the strategy has not adapted well to digital media players. Why? Because people are tired of products that don’t work. Anyone who has ever had to glue a PC back together for a family member knows what I mean. Does “open” have to mean “poorly integrated” though? Clearly, I don’t think so, given how much I’ve invested in Linux over the years and how much I’m investing in the LSB now. And the job the distributions do in the Linux world is nothing short of amazing, if you think about it—taking thousands of moving parts written by thousands of different people and crafting them into what appears, for the most part, to be an orchestrated whole. Personal experience bears this out too—it’s not that the entire Windows Media ecosystem produces bad products (iTunes pales in comparison to Rhapsody), it’s that the integration points are extremely fragile (e.g., I tried Rhapsody To Go with a Plays For Sure device, which was an awful experience). In other words, just like a chain, an open ecosystem is only as strong as its weakest link, because it’s the links where things break. Sure, there are bad products. I’ve owned no less than two MP3 players in the last few years, and they were pretty terrible. It’s the very, very simple things too. For example, I listen to a lot of podcasts. There’s (gasp!) a Podcasts menu on the iPod, whereas on every other device I’ve owned, podcasts are interspersed with the music, making them difficult to find and, adding insult to injury, mixing gobbledygook into my otherwise well organized collection. Furthermore (gasp!), the iPod keeps track of which podcasts I listen to, and in concert with iTunes, automatically deletes the ones I’m done with. Them’s lasers! Ah, iTunes. Despite the fact that anyone in the world can write a podcatcher (it’s just RSS with enclosures, fer godsakes), the only one I’ve ever used that works worth a damn is iTunes. Everything else is just “integrated” with bailing wire—create a Windows Media playlist, drop it in this directory, etc. The situation on Linux is a bit better, but guess what—Rhythmbox, Banshee, etc. didn’t work with either of the open media players I owned, even though the integration point for one of them was the file system. No, the players on Linux support the iPod best because that’s what everyone has, and if I’m going to pay extra for the iPod, aren’t I primarily buying the integrated experience? (On a related note, I’ve never understood why people pay top dollar for Macs and install Linux on them. But I digress..) Once you taste the fruit of the integrated experience, it’s easy to get sucked in all the way. I eventually tired of all the wasted time and money trying to use an open media player and broke down and bought an iPod. Not too long after, I canceled my Rhapsody subscription. Why? Because I couldn’t use it with my iPod. My overall music experience is diminished (I’m a big believer in the celestial jukebox), but I want one music platform, not two. And the iPod is the one with critical mass. Anything else is swimming upstream. Are open platforms doomed then? I think that’s, as they say, throwing the baby out with the bath water. The key is to have open interfaces, and the key to having open interfaces that work is cooperation between the vendors that implement them. Perhaps surprisingly, the iPod is a good example of how it can be done. The biggest reason for my iPod purchase: I can hook it directly into my car stereo instead of using an FM transmitter. Apple isn’t getting into the car business—it’s decided to cooperate with other companies to make this work. And you don’t hear too much about people calling their technophile relatives to come glue their cars back together. (And talk about the importance of not crashing..) The lesson here, it seems to me, is that an ecosystem is never the sum of its parts—it’s either a whole lot more or a whole lot less. Furthermore, it’s the responsibility of the vendors (and community) that make up that ecosystem to ensure the result comes up on the right side of the equation in the final analysis.

Laptops don’t usually have as much ports as desktop computers. I used to connect my MIDI keyboard to the computer via a game port adapter. Now the game port has been to some extent replaced by USB connectors, especially in laptop computers, so I decided to get myself a MIDI-USB adapter. After searching the web investigating which device would be the best for my Debian system, I decided for the MidiSport Uno, which is elegant, compact, and compatible with Linux. Yesterday I was finally able to test it, and it works perfectly. The only thing I don’t like is that its firmware doesn’t seem to have a free license. After some initial trials with fxload, which didn’t work due to some pipe error, I realized that it wouldn’t work under the current udev system (I’m using a 2.6.18 kernel right now), but the rule for udev I added seems to work. Ubuntu’s package for it has also helped me a lot. After installing it, I was able to test that it worked both with a direct cat from the MIDI device and using rosegarden. There seems to be also an OSS driver supporting the MidiSport 1×1/2×2 with a GPL’d firmware, but I haven’t tried it yet. It would be nice to be able to have a GPL’d firmware in it.