I've recently been making my way through the Proudhon Reader, a collection of writings by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon recently published by AK Press. Proudhon, known as the father of Anarchism is most famous for his declaration: "Property is theft." The simple declaration is based on pages of explanation which, simplistically, can be boiled down to the idea that workers should all equally share in the fruits of their labor. While Proudhon's influence on Marx is hotly debated, this idea is fundamental to Marx's idea around the alienation of labor. If we are working to produce a product that is then owned by the proprietor, rather than the worker, we are alienated from our labor. Many May First/People Link members, such as Palante Tech, Openflows, Union Web Services, and Agaric Design are all committed to fighting this alienation by organizing as worker-run cooperatives. Nobody is the boss, all workers share in all profits. However, Proudhon got me thinking about free software shops that aren't worker-run cooperatives. If you are employed by a for-profit corporation as a worker and your only job is to write code that is released under a free software license, are you alienated from your labor in the Marxist sense? The fruits of your labor might be owned by your company, but they are freely licensed to the world (which, of course, includes you). There is still surplus value accrued to your company (if you do good work for your company, you will be contributing to their reputation from which they will profit). However, if you are primarily writing code, the vast majority of your labor is producing a product that you are fundamentally not alienated from. Proudhon, while sprinkling the word revolution throughout his writings, was notably not particularly revolutionary in his calls for action. He was reformist. Rather than calling for a direct confrontation with capitalism, he called for worker-run collectives to be formed throughout the world to make capitalism irrelevant. While many people point to corporate use of free software as an argument for why free software and capitalism are perfectly compatible, the truth may be more complicated. Fundamentally, and in a non-confrontational way, free software seems to undermine one of the basic tenants of capitalist: worker alienation. Now we just need to work on all the other ways corporate work places are alienating...

I'm honored and pleased to be the person who gets to complete ls. This project, begun around when I was born, was slow to turn into anything more than a simple for loop over a dirent. It really took off in the mid and late 80's, when Richard Stallman added numerous features, and the growth has been steady ever since. But, a glance at the man page shows that ls has never quite been complete. It fell to me to finish the job, and I have produced several handy patches to this end:

• http://bugs.debian.org/666198 adds -y (necessary for compatability with old shar archives)
• http://bugs.debian.org/666244 adds -e (entangled directory display option, quite nice)
• http://bugs.debian.org/666684 adds -j (suitable output format for twitter, cell phones, other 21st century media)

The only obvious lack now is a -z option, which should make output filenames be NULL terminated for consuption by other programs. I think this would be easy to write, but I've been extermely busy IRL (moving lots of furniture) and didn't get to it. Any takers to write it? Due to the nature of these patches, they conflict with each other. Here's a combined patch suitable to be applied and tested.

diff -ur orig/coreutils-8.13/src/ls.c coreutils-8.13/src/ls.c
--- orig/coreutils-8.13/src/ls.c    2011-07-28 06:38:27.000000000 -0400
+++ coreutils-8.13/src/ls.c 2012-04-01 12:41:56.835106346 -0400
@@ -270,6 +270,7 @@
 static int format_group_width (gid_t g);
 static void print_long_format (const struct fileinfo *f);
 static void print_many_per_line (void);
+static void print_jam (void);
 static size_t print_name_with_quoting (const struct fileinfo *f,
                                        bool symlink_target,
                                        struct obstack *stack,
@@ -382,6 +383,7 @@
    many_per_line for just names, many per line, sorted vertically.
    horizontal for just names, many per line, sorted horizontally.
    with_commas for just names, many per line, separated by commas.
+   jam to fit in the most information possible.
 
    -l (and other options that imply -l), -1, -C, -x and -m control
    this parameter.  */
@@ -392,7 +394,8 @@
     one_per_line,      /* -1 */
     many_per_line,     /* -C */
     horizontal,            /* -x */
-    with_commas            /* -m */
+    with_commas,       /* -m */
+    jam            /* -j */
    ;
 
 static enum format format;
@@ -630,6 +633,11 @@
 
 static bool immediate_dirs;
 
+/* True means when multiple directories are being displayed, combine
+ * their contents as if all in one directory. -e */
+
+static bool entangle_dirs;
+
 /* True means that directories are grouped before files. */
 
 static bool directories_first;
@@ -705,6 +713,10 @@
 
 static bool format_needs_type;
 
+/* Answer "yes" to all prompts. */
+
+static bool yes;
+
 /* An arbitrary limit on the number of bytes in a printed time stamp.
    This is set to a relatively small value to avoid the need to worry
    about denial-of-service attacks on servers that run "ls" on behalf
@@ -804,6 +816,7 @@
    "escape", no_argument, NULL, 'b' ,
    "directory", no_argument, NULL, 'd' ,
    "dired", no_argument, NULL, 'D' ,
+   "entangle", no_argument, NULL, 'e' ,
    "full-time", no_argument, NULL, FULL_TIME_OPTION ,
    "group-directories-first", no_argument, NULL,
    GROUP_DIRECTORIES_FIRST_OPTION ,
@@ -849,12 +862,12 @@
 static char const *const format_args[] =
  
   "verbose", "long", "commas", "horizontal", "across",
-  "vertical", "single-column", NULL
+  "vertical", "single-column", "jam", NULL
  ;
 static enum format const format_types[] =
  
   long_format, long_format, with_commas, horizontal, horizontal,
-  many_per_line, one_per_line
+  many_per_line, one_per_line, jam
  ;
 ARGMATCH_VERIFY (format_args, format_types);
 
@@ -1448,6 +1461,9 @@
       print_dir_name = true;
      
 
+  if (entangle_dirs)
+      print_current_files ();
+
   if (print_with_color)
      
       int j;
@@ -1559,6 +1575,7 @@
   print_block_size = false;
   indicator_style = none;
   print_inode = false;
+  yes = false;
   dereference = DEREF_UNDEFINED;
   recursive = false;
   immediate_dirs = false;
@@ -1644,7 +1661,7 @@
      
       int oi = -1;
       int c = getopt_long (argc, argv,
-                           "abcdfghiklmnopqrstuvw:xABCDFGHI:LNQRST:UXZ1",
+                           "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvw:xyABCDFGHI:LNQRST:UXZ1",
                            long_options, &oi);
       if (c == -1)
         break;
@@ -1667,6 +1684,10 @@
           immediate_dirs = true;
           break;
 
+   case 'e':
+          entangle_dirs = true;
+     break;
+
         case 'f':
           /* Same as enabling -a -U and disabling -l -s.  */
           ignore_mode = IGNORE_MINIMAL;
@@ -1697,6 +1718,10 @@
           print_inode = true;
           break;
 
+   case 'j':
+     format = jam;
+     break;
+
         case 'k':
           human_output_opts = 0;
           file_output_block_size = output_block_size = 1024;
@@ -1765,6 +1790,10 @@
           format = horizontal;
           break;
 
+   case 'y':
+     yes = true;
+     break;
+
         case 'A':
           if (ignore_mode == IGNORE_DEFAULT)
             ignore_mode = IGNORE_DOT_AND_DOTDOT;
@@ -2510,7 +2539,7 @@
       DEV_INO_PUSH (dir_stat.st_dev, dir_stat.st_ino);
      
 
-  if (recursive   print_dir_name)
+  if ((recursive   print_dir_name) && ! entangle_dirs)
      
       if (!first)
         DIRED_PUTCHAR ('\n');
@@ -2526,7 +2555,8 @@
   /* Read the directory entries, and insert the subfiles into the  cwd_file'
      table.  */
 
-  clear_files ();
+  if (! entangle_dirs)
+     clear_files ();
 
   while (1)
      
@@ -2615,7 +2645,7 @@
       DIRED_PUTCHAR ('\n');
      
 
-  if (cwd_n_used)
+  if (cwd_n_used && ! entangle_dirs)
     print_current_files ();
  
 
@@ -3464,6 +3494,10 @@
       print_with_commas ();
       break;
 
+    case jam:
+      print_jam ();
+      break;
+
     case long_format:
       for (i = 0; i < cwd_n_used; i++)
          
@@ -4418,6 +4452,24 @@
   putchar ('\n');
  
 
+static void
+print_jam (void)
+ 
+  size_t filesno;
+  size_t pos = 0;
+
+  for (filesno = 0; filesno < cwd_n_used; filesno++)
+     
+      struct fileinfo const *f = sorted_file[filesno];
+      size_t len = length_of_file_name_and_frills (f);
+
+      print_file_name_and_frills (f, pos);
+      pos += len;
+     
+  putchar ('\n');
+ 
+
+
 /* Assuming cursor is at position FROM, indent up to position TO.
    Use a TAB character instead of two or more spaces whenever possible.  */
 
@@ -4627,11 +4679,13 @@
   -D, --dired                generate output designed for Emacs' dired mode\n\
 "), stdout);
       fputs (_("\
+  -e, --entangle             display multiple directory contents as one\n\
   -f                         do not sort, enable -aU, disable -ls --color\n\
   -F, --classify             append indicator (one of */=>@ ) to entries\n\
       --file-type            likewise, except do not append  *'\n\
       --format=WORD          across -x, commas -m, horizontal -x, long -l,\n\
                                single-column -1, verbose -l, vertical -C\n\
+                               jam -j\n\
       --full-time            like -l --time-style=full-iso\n\
 "), stdout);
       fputs (_("\
@@ -4667,6 +4721,8 @@
   -i, --inode                print the index number of each file\n\
   -I, --ignore=PATTERN       do not list implied entries matching shell PATTERN\
 \n\
+  -j                         jam output together, makes the most of limited\n\
+                             space on modern systems (cell phones, twitter)\n\
   -k                         like --block-size=1K\n\
 "), stdout);
       fputs (_("\
@@ -4733,6 +4789,7 @@
   -w, --width=COLS           assume screen width instead of current value\n\
   -x                         list entries by lines instead of by columns\n\
   -X                         sort alphabetically by entry extension\n\
+  -y                         answer all questions with \"yes\"\n\
   -Z, --context              print any SELinux security context of each file\n\
   -1                         list one file per line\n\
 "), stdout);

It remains to be seen if multi-option enabled coreutils will be accepted into Debian in time for the next release. Due to some disagreements with the coreutils maintainer, the matter has been referred to the Technical Committee (Flattr me) Traditionally new ls contributors stop once enough options have been added that they can spell their name, in the best traditions of yellow snow. Once ls -richard -stallman worked, I'm sure RMS moved on other other more pressing concerns. The current maintainer, David MacKenzie, was clearly not done yet, since only ls -david -mack worked. But he was being slow to add these last few features, and ls was very deficient in the realm of spelling my name (ls -o -hss .. srsly?), so I took matter into my own hands in the best tradition of free software.

I am usually fortunate at conferences and aside from the obligatory "group photo" manage to completely avoid being in photos and videos of the event. However recently I attended the Linaro connect event in San Francisco and somehow got volunteered to be on a panel.

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.

And a personal reboot. <article> All my life, so far, I've always prided myself on not having any regrets. I've told people that if I had to live my life over again, I would not change how I had acted or anything I had done. Over the last few days I've come to regret my actions. They have caused me to hurt a dear friend and, then, ultimately lose them. It all stems with not being honest. To my friend. And to myself. By not telling myself the truth about how I feel, or what I want, it has meant I have not told others the truth either. They have then acted on what I said, and when I've changed my tune or wanted more (or less), they are rightly upset. I wish I could say that this was a new thing. Like some kind of habit I picked up because it was shiny. Unfortunately as I review my life, and the various people who have come into and out of it, I can see that my inability to be truthful has been mostly constant. To be unable to articulate my needs has caused various amounts of pain to others. Sometimes that pain has come back to me, as with my friend, magnified. Other times I have escaped it. This is a personal apology from me to all that I've hurt. Some of those people are (now) deceased. Some of them no longer talk to me / interact with me at all. For what it is worth. Sorry. For those of you who are still with me, on this journey, thank you for putting up with how I have been in the past. The journey is not over but I hope the rest of it will be more truthful and, ultimately, less hurtful. Anand </article>

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.

Subscribe to my newsletter to get my monthly summary of the Debian/Ubuntu news and to not miss further interviews. You can also follow along on Identi.ca, Google+, Twitter and Facebook.

One comment Liked this article? Click here. My blog is Flattr-enabled.

Washington s Blog has an informative summary of recent articles about corporate psychopaths [1]. Including the fact that some banks deliberately hire psychopaths. Anu Partanen wrote an insightful article for The Atlantic about the difference between Finnish and American education systems [2]. It seems that Finland has achieved great educational success by aiming for equality with no private schools and giving the teachers and principals enough responsibility to do the job properly. Ramona Pierson gave an interesting TED talk about how she recovered from being run over by a drunk driver with the help of the residents of a senior citizens home [3]. Quyen Nguyen gave a very interesting TED talk about the use of fluorescent dyes in cancer surgery [4]. They can make cancer glow one color and nerves glow with a different color which makes it a much easier task to remove ALL the cancer without cutting the smaller nerves. James Fallows wrote an interesting article for The Atlantic about the experience of having his wife s Gmail account cracked [5]. She stored EVERYTHING in her Gmail account so this was a lot worse for her than for the typical Geek who doesn t use such accounts for storing much. James describes what the attacker did, how they did it, and what needed to be done to recover. When running a mail server it s worth considering what you would do to help a user who was attacked in that way. Charles Stross has written an interesting blog post trying to predict some future psychological and social changes [6]. Matthew Wright of Beyond Zero Emissions has written an informative article about how solar panels on home roofs save everyone money [7]. Mikko Hypponen gave an interesting TED talk about different types of online attack and how they can affect us [8]. Among other things he describes how online attacks can result in people dying. Scott Rickard gave an interesting TED talk about using maths to create SONAR pings without repitition and also the worst music ever created [9]. I found it entertaining to watch Michael Lindel (the director of chamber music for the New York Symphony) play the music, he obviously didn t enjoy that performance. Sheena Iyengar gave an interesting TED talk about the way people make choices [10]. It s useful for anyone who is going to prepare a set of options for someone else to choose from. ASD Aid is a project that uses Lego to encourage kids on the Autism Spectrum to socialise [11]. They have training manuals for using Lego in therapy. Unfortunately they have not been supported by the Lego corporation. Bilal Bomani gave an interesting and informative TED talk about NASA research into renewable aviation fuel [12]. The most interesting thing to me was the way that they were aiming for a sustainable lifecycle that didn t use resources that coule be used for food and which required minimal input once it was started. Alain de Botton gave an interesting TED talk about Atheism 2.0 [13]. He suggests that we adopt some ideas from religious organisations including lectures (sermons), celebrations, and rituals. It s interesting to think of a technology conference as a pilgrimage. Homaro Cantu and Ben Roche from Moto restaurant in Chicago gave an interesting talk about some of the unusual foods that they have produced [14]. If I visit the US again I will try and go to Chicago to eat there!

• [1] http://tinyurl.com/7lwx3z7
• [2] http://tinyurl.com/dyec99u
• [3] http://www.ted.com/talks/ramona_pierson_an_unexpected_place_of_healing.html
• [4] http://www.ted.com/talks/quyen_nguyen_color_coded_surgery.html
• [5] http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/11/hacked/8673/1/
• [6] http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2012/01/world-building-302-psychology.html
• [7] http://beyondzeroemissions.org/media/releases/solar-programs-pay-themselves-and-reduce-cost-electricity-120117
• [8] http://www.ted.com/talks/mikko_hypponen_three_types_of_online_attack.html
• [9] http://www.youtube.com/v/RENk9PK06AQ
• [10] http://www.ted.com/talks/sheena_iyengar_choosing_what_to_choose.html
• [11] http://asdaid.org/
• [12] http://www.ted.com/talks/bilal_bomani_plant_fuels_that_could_power_a_jet.html
• [13] http://www.ted.com/talks/alain_de_botton_atheism_2_0.html
• [14] http://www.ted.com/talks/homaro_cantu_ben_roche_cooking_as_alchemy.html

Related posts:

1. Links March 2009 Cory Doctorow has written a column for The Guardian titled...
2. Links February 2012 Sociological Images has an interesting article about the attempts to...
3. Links January 2012 Cops in Tennessee routinely steal cash from citizens [1]. They...

Svalbard The things you find when cleaning out a disk; preparing for re-installation of your laptop on a larger disk once the laptop comes back from repair... I thought I had posted this in early January, but apparently not. As it would be a shame to just throw this away, here goes: I am sitting in the Oslo airport, waiting for boarding back home to start. Seeing the sun after a week of darkness still feels strange. Inital trouble It's been a very interesting week, starting with our trip to Oslo in the other direction. We spent New Year's Eve in Oslo, timing our forced overnight stay before reaching Svalbard to coincide with something interesting. The close timing of our travel meant that there was exactly one flight to Oslo we could take. Never having heard of Air Baltic before and finding out that they are a discount airline, my gut feeling told me to be be wary. I refuse to fly with those airlines on principle, not wanting to support their business model while hurting airlines with decent treatment of customers. Unfortunately, I was forced to book with them in this case. As it turns out, my gut was right. More on that below. Our plane was late in landing and my luggage was lost. As it was New Year's Eve, the staff at Oslo airport understandably wanted to be home, not at work. Still, getting them to file a report was tedious and finding out days later that the report was incomplete was, well, not good. The express train from the airport to Oslo central station had closed early without any advance notice or local signs, presumably because of NYE. The gates were simply closed and that's that. We figured out how the bus system worked, got our tickets from a vending machine, saw the one bus to central station drive away, and proceeded to wait in the outside waiting area; at least we had a front spot in the queue. While we don't get cold easily, it was funny to see Norwegians in thin clothes stand around in the biting wind, apparently being comfortable. A young mother with a baby, who didn't anticipate being forced to wait outside at -15C, as opposed to just sitting down in a train, had no warm clothes for her son; something that was fixed by wrapping him in spare clothes from Ilona's luggage. After waiting for about thirty minutes for the next bus to appear, it parked twenty or thirty meters away from the designated parking spot. The rough queue disintegrated and if not for Ilona's leaving me with luggage and backpacks and storming off to fight the masses, said mother with baby and ourselves would have waited for another thirty minutes. More than hundred people were left stranded at the airport to celebrate there or on the bus. Meh. We hurried, by taxi, from central station to hotel to harbour and arrived about five minutes to twelve. NYE itself was nice. We stood on top of the opera house and watched a rather impressive show of fireworks through the thickening mists. Norwegian fireworks pack lot more punch than German ones; you actually feel your clothes shake when they go off. Getting to Longyearbyen The flight from Troms to Longyearbyen had free in-flight Wi-Fi and flying over the edge of satellite coverage demonstrated how far we were from everywhere else rather impressively. Arriving at Longyearbyen, I fixed the lost luggage claim with the help of an extremely nice woman working at the airport. She confirmed that Air Baltic is legally required to reimburse me after an arcane system based on a virtual IMF currency to the tune of about 1.500. That may sound like a lot, but seeing as I had most of my scuba gear with me, that's not even half of what my luggage was worth. I was forced to get by New Years with what I had on my body and went shopping the next day when I could buy at least a few things. I got by with spending about 180 by going for non-fitting bargain bin clothes, wanting to reduce impact on Air Baltic. Shortly after that, my luggage arrived, unannounced. Air Baltic refused to reimburse me even though they are legally required to, again the airport staff confirmed this. But unless I sue in the country of destination, Norway, I won't see any money. Long story short: Avoid Air Baltic if possible. They will break the law to cheat you out of money when they have a reasonable expectation of getting away with it. Update: Yep, seems they got away with it unless I take legal measures. You have been warned. Longyearbyen itself was very nice. We started off with a short, guided taxi tour around the city, seeing literally everything of it as there's not a lot of Longyearbyen to start with. Dogsledding Next day, as noted earlier, we went shopping and spent the "evening" with dogsledding which turned out to be tons of fun. We helped with harnessing the dogs which is somewhat cumbersome as the dogs are so eager to burn off their energy that they want to run all over the place, not being put into a harness and snapped onto the pull-line. Never having been dogsledding before I was a bit wary, but riding over not too rough terrain is almost trivial once you get the hang of it; listen to what the musher in front of you yells and emulate the same shouts with your own dogs. If the dogs become too fast, step onto the brake pad which simply drives spikes into the snow. If the dogs slow down while going uphill, skate with one foot to help them. That's it for speed. As the dogs are following the musher's sled anyway, steering the dogs was not a concern. Fun fact: The musher used a laser pointer to steer his dogs; simple, efficient, and presumably fun. We learned, by demonstration, that sledding dogs can eat snow, take a leak, and take a dump while running at full speed and pretty much all at the same time. The dogs are left either in cages or on long chains far away from the city as they tend to bark and howl a lot. We were surprised to learn that, even when there are seals left to hang dry as dog food nearby, there are no problems with bear attacks. Apparently even the extremely aggressive and hungry one year old males will not go near dogs. Still, while out in the ice and snow, our guide carefully flooded all crevices and cliff bases to root out female bears with young ones early. They hide their children from the wind and they will attack, dogs and all, if we get too close. That's why our musher carried rifle in his sled and flare gun on his body. Snowmobile The next "morning", we drove around by snowmobile. This turned out to be extremely boring as it was a curated trip with over half a dozen snowmobiles in our group; a stark contrast to our two-sled tour the day before. The last time I went snowmobiling, we raced each other up and down a two-star black (i.e. steep, bumpy, and curvy) ski slope, jumping several meters when racing over larger bumps and crossing streets, so riding single file at 30 km/h was... anticlimatic. Again, the guide had rifle and flare gun with him. We spent the afternoon and evening walking around the city. Ice bears, part I As the ice caves and the glacier were still closed, we decided to have another walk around the city. Having planned make it a quick tour, we lost track of time due to lack of sun and ended up walking around for seven hours. A note about that trip.. If you are alone with your wife, unarmed, climbing up a very steep and slippery mountainside over a sheet of ice with deep snow underneath and loose rocks in between, and then start shining around with your flashlight under the stilts of an abandoned mine that looks like in a horror movie, the correct answer to "What are you doing?" is never ever "Looking for ice bears". Even if it's the truth, this is not an acceptable answer. I crawled up the last part on all fours, camera and tripod in hand while Ilona stayed about two dozen meters below the mines' entrance, refusing to go another step towards the mine. As soon I made it up the creaky and shaky, for a lack of a better word, let's call it ladder, she forced me to come down again. Bleh, but I guess I deserved that. Armed photographer Next day, we got final confirmation that we would not be allowed to rent snowmobiles to explore the hinterland on our own and that other for some, and I quote, "crazy Russians", no one would even attempt to cross over to Barentsburg. Thus, we ended up renting a car for the ~20 kilometers of total road length. That turned out to be a great idea as it allowed us to get away from the light and take some very nice long exposures. It was then that I got a rental rifle, as well. There is a law against leaving the town unarmed and I was not about to test my luck too much. Turns out that, as part of Germany's WWII reparations, Norway received our all hand guns and as they still function perfectly when dirty and in cold climate which makes them still popular in Svalbard, today. The Karabiner 98 Kurz which I received is built incredibly well. It's somewhat scary inasmuch every detail is designed to make this weapon ready to fire. If you hurry or are inexperienced, you will end up with an unlocked and loaded rifle after putting in the bolt. Putting the safety in and not chambering a bullet takes conscious effort and knowledge of the weapon. This is in stark contrast to other weapons I had the chance to dissect, which all defaulted to being safe. Even other military weapons such as the AK74 and the M4A1 are inherently more secure, designed to be locked and safe. The Mauser K98... not so much. As an aside, they didn't bother to remove the Reichsadler and Swastika from the rifle, contending themselves with striking out the German registration number and stamping the rifle with a Norwegian one. I guess Norwegians don't really "care" about these signs as much as we Germans do. In a way, that's a good thing I guess, at least as long as it's an indication of indifference towards the sign, not one of forgetting or ignoring the underlying issues. Still, I was very glad to have rented the rifle. While Ilona tended to stay in the running car with heat and lights on, I went out and away from the car. Even when standing near a street, a medium snow storm will make you appreciate the four powerful arguments against being eaten by a random bear which are at the ready over your shoulder. We even went to the shooting range so I could get some practice. The procedure is very trusting, as is anything in Longyearbyen. After accessing the interior of one of the houses in a particular way which I won't specify here, you simply switch on the floodlights, put up the red flag, position a target and write your name into the guest book. Once you're done shooting, toss a few coins into the bowl next to the guest book, remove the targets and flag, turn off the lights, close the door and that's that. Unfortunately, the way in was under a few meters of snow so I couldn't get in any practice shots. Ice bears, part II Later, as I was standing on a wind-polished slate of ice taking pictures of the Seed Vault (located here), I heard an ice bear roar behind (i.e. to the north of) me. I consciously remember hearing the bear, I consciously remember facing the other way around, half-crouched, rifle raised in the direction of the roar. I also consciously remember smacking the safety off and chambering a bullet after having regained control of my body. I do not remember spinning around on a wind-polished slate of ice, so treacherous I hand to balance with my arms and didn't even lift my feet when walking over it, without losing balance or footing, nor do I remember crouching and raising the gun. Evolution really is amazing; no matter what primal chord that roar struck, it certainly saved a ton of people over the years. In my case, thankfully, there was no bear to be seen down the slope. There may be no sun or anything, but the snow reflects the starlight so you tend to see surprisingly far and as I was on on the mountainside and the roar came from down from the coast, and as I had my rifle, I decided to finish the photo session while keeping the slope in close view. In hindsight, I am still glad I decided to do that as the shots came out rather nice. Next day, we drove out to Mine 12, the farthest you can away from Longyearbyen. The dump truck transporting coal alternated between driving a full load of coal back to the city and being its own snowplow. One quick trip to get coal, one slow and empty trip to plow away snow, rinse, repeat. If not for that, our 4WD would never have made it all the way up to the mine. Neither snow storms in North America nor around the Alps prepared me for what people on Longyearbyen consider normal wind in their backyard. This is where the word wind-swept was invented. The main reason that Svalbard is inhabited at all, other than the Gulf Stream, is coal. We have been told that the coal up there is of extremely high quality and while I can't say much about that, I can say that it's hard as stone. This is nice as it does not smear when you get coal all over yourself. Just shake out your jacket and pants and you are good as new. On our way back, we met two locals who had just prepared the glacier and ice caves for tourists. Had I known that in advance, I would have tried to go with them to take pictures completely away from all artificial light. Oh well, can't have everything. Speaking of not being able to have everything, the outdoor hot tub in our hotel which integrated ice bar and BBQ grill was still under several meters of snow so we couldn't use that, either. Finally, the few divers who are in Longyearbyen didn't have time to take me onto a trip while I was there. As I already missed my opportunity to dive the Arctic circle when the one diver on Gr msey happened to be on the mainland and barely missing it by diving Str tan instead, this was kind of a bummer. On the plus side, this has given me a goal to pursue and achieve. Random notes For the rest of my notes, I will resort to a largely unsorted list of bullet points as there's just too much to talk about in prose.

• There are a lot of things in Norway that are similar to the Iceland (where we spent our honeymoon over June, experiencing permanent sunshine)
  • Norway uses Torx screws everywhere and for everything. This makes sense and I can't understand why Germany is lagging behind so severely.
  • There is free coffee everywhere.
  • The coffee is horrible.
  • Roads are built onto an artificial ridge, increasing wind speed. This ensures that sand, snow, and debris are always swept off the road and can't pile up too much.
  • As easy as it is to lose track of time when the sun is always up (in Iceland, we come down from a mountain after an extended walk at 01:30 in the morning and never realizing how late it was until we wanted to drive a few more kilometers), it's just as easy to lose track of time when it's always dark. We went for a "short" walk to take a few pictures and, on coming back to the hotel, realized that it had taken us seven hours.
  • You start to realize where sagas, trolls, little people and other folklore is coming from when exposed to raw nature. Especially once vision becomes bad and you see shadows dance in the snow (and sand, in Iceland's case) storm.
  • The concept of Common Land is pervasive. Just walk anywhere, no one cares.
  • No one has ever heard of OpenStreetMap, which is weird as people up there rely on GPS a lot.
• Locals tend to keep all lights on 24/7. I guess that's understandable.
• There is an eerie shine all over the land as the snow reflects and re-reflects the little light given off by the moon and stars.
• Almost all houses are built from wood. Drift-wood in the early days, imported wood today. The few concrete cause massive problems when the cold makes their floors and walls crack. Also, concrete is very hard to heat when it's sitting right on the perma-frost.
• Houses are not built on the ground, but on stilts. Drill a few holes into the ground, put long trunks into them, wait a few months for the perma-frost to freeze them into place and build your house on that. This insulates your house and gives you storage space below. Simple and efficient.
• Winter is so cold that people in Longyearbyen are forced to build water, sewage, and electricity infrastructure over ground, on stilts, and put in active heating. Else, it would burst or rupture.
• Our hotel had the taps running 24/7 as they already had a pipe burst a week before we arrived.
• The air is incredibly dry even though Longyearbyen is a coastal city. This is great as snow does not stick to anything, including clothes and camera lenses during long exposures against the wall in a snowstorm. Not so much when you suddenly realize that this means all rocks will be loose, scraping your shin open quite thoroughly.
• It's very hard to judge distances in permanent darkness; you will usually underestimate distances by a lot.
• This also means that you should not trust people when they tell you that Mine 2 is "not far away".
• Ice bear danger is real.
• Locals will not tell you about hiking trails unless you assure them that you are armed.
• Snow storms are amazing, impressive, and frightening. They will also make distances appear a lot farther, all of a sudden.
• While Longyearbyen does not have any sales or alcohol taxes and alcohol is still more expensive than in Germany.
• Stating that you won't drink before the sun goes down is a neat trick.
• Coldness and dryness mean your lips will burst open within seconds after holding a flashlight in your mouth as I usually do. As it's dark all the time, I tended to do that a lot. I learned quickly not to, though.
• I saw an arctic fox run through Longyearbyen, we saw two reindeer and we saw what we think are ice bear tracks behind our hotel.
• Timing your travel to catch the Quadrantids is useless when there are several independently moving layers of clouds for a full week.
• The Aurora Borealisis an elusive thing. We have a few long exposures with it showing, but we didn't see anything with our bare eyes.
• The few minutes when we saw stars, meteors, the moon, Jupiter, and Venus all at once were worth it and more.
• Survival is no joke up there. They keep a coal mine running just to power their local plant.
• That plant has its own storage facility for coal in case the mine shuts down.
• There are several independent "fire houses" that can provide energy and heat in case the power plant shuts down.
• The seed vault is somewhat boring on the outside, but it's one of the most important sites on Earth and visiting it was nice.

All in all, it was well worth it. PS: If you know anyone working with Google Maps, ask them to consider improving their coverage of the Arctic. This is a real pity. As is the rest of the Arctic and the fact that Google Earth cheats you out of the North and South Pole by stretching adjacent tiles into and over them.

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.

Sarajevo gave a rainy look the next morning. That wasn't too bad, as I was able to walk around a bit without it being too crowded. Incidently I also saw the corner where Franz Ferdinand was shot in 1914, which started the first world war - Europe has many links beyond todays state borders, in good and bad times. It's not like transeuropean politics (or communications) are something too new.
Bazar in Sarajevo
Franz Ferdinand was shot here in 1914
Trolley buses
River, tram and city
nice building hidden by cars - should our cities be dominated that way?
more of the old city After having spent the morning exploring the old part of Sarajevo and along the river, I used the time after hotel checkout to use the tram link and take a few more pictures. I arrived at the train station as planned, but the train I wanted to take didn't go that day (in spite of checking it within the hotel in the morning). So, I ended with another bus trip (this time unplanned) to Banja Luca. Again, bus trips are worse than train trips - one cannot move in the vehicle, and there are delays for every stop. The events in Banja Luca are discussed elsewhere, so nothing about that here (except that DebConf was great - I enjoyed it very much).

Ever wondered how much memory a program needed? Install the "time" package:

$ /usr/bin/time ls
[...]
0.00user 0.00system 0:00.00elapsed 0%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 4000maxresident)k
0inputs+0outputs (0major+311minor)pagefaults 0swaps

Unfortunately the "time" bash built-in makes it necessary to use the full path. Thanks to youam for the tip. Update: aba notes that calling \time works as well. Thanks!

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/

Related posts:

1. Choosing an Android Phone My phone contract ends in a few months, so I m...
2. Galaxy S vs Xperia X10 and Android Network Access Galaxy S Review I ve just been given an indefinite loan...
3. Standardising Android Don Marti wrote an amusing post about the lack of...

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?

Debian Med prepares a metapackage for multi-purpose image machines, containing packages for bioinformatics that can be used in command line or via scripts, and that do not depend on too many other packages. I would like to prepare such an image for the Amazon cloud in the most secure manner, and the simplest way is to build it automatically in order to not have to clean anything at the end of the process. I tried for months so use the Debian installer, but banged my head against walls repeatedly, as it was impossible to re-partition the volume on which the installer was started. In the end, I figured out that this was not necessary. For instance, one can start an image containing the installer on a micro instance (-t t1.micro), with an additional volume of one gibibyte (-b /dev/sdb=:1:false) to install Debian on, and preseed the installer via instance metadata (-f preseed.txt) using a file prepared in advance. When the installation finishes, the instance terminates instead of stopping (--instance-initiated-shutdown-behavior terminate), and its volumes disappear, except the one where Debian was installed (/dev/sdb=:1:false). Debian-installer in Stable is not often updated, and its size is very small. One can therefore think of releasing one machine image per zone and architecture. I did so for T ky (ap-northeast-1) on amd64. It contains the kernel, its initrd, and a GRUB 1 menu for pvgrub, that passes the following options: console=hvc0 auto=true priority=critical url=http://169.254.169.254/latest/user-data DEBIAN_FRONTEND=text. Two key pieces are missing in the resulting system. When the kernel is installed or updated, the GRUB 1 configuration file for pvgrub must be refreshed. Also, the system must be able to retrieve a public SSH key provided through the instance metadata, to allow one to log in without using a predefined password. These two functions are provided by the cloud-init package, available in Ubuntu and Fedora. I am looking for volunteers to maintain or co-maintain cloud-init in Debian.

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.

I ve written before about my initial investigations into the Kindle, and I ve learnt much more about the software and how it communicates with the Amazon servers since then, but it all requires detailed technical explanation which I can never seem to find the motivation to write down. Extracting reading data out of the system log files is however comparatively simple. I m a big fan of measurement and data so my motivation and goal for the Kindle log files was to see if I could extract some useful information about my Kindle use and reading patterns. In particular, I m interested in tracking my pace of reading, and how much time I spend reading over time. You ll recall from the previous post that the Kindle keeps a fairly detailed syslog containing many events, including power state changes, and changes in the Booklet software system including opening and closing books and position information. You can eyeball any one of those logfiles and understand what is going on fairly quickly, so the analysis scripts are at the core just a set of regexps to extract the relevant lines and a small bit of logic to link them together and calculate time spent in each state/book. You can find the scripts on Github: https://github.com/mattbnz/kindle-utils Of course, they re not quite that simple. The Kindle doesn t seem to have a proper hardware clock (or mine has a broken hardware clock). My Kindle comes back from every reboot thinking it s either at the epoch or somewhere in the middle of 2010, the time doesn t get corrected until it can find a network connection and ping an Amazon server for an update, so if you have the network disabled it might be many days or weeks of reading before the system time is updated to reality. Once it has a network connection it uses the MCC reported by the 3G modem to infer what timezone it should be in, and switches the system clock to local time. Unfortunately the log entries all look like this:
110703:193542 cvm[7908]: I TimezoneService:MCCChanged:mcc=310,old=GB,new=US:
110703:193542 cvm[7908]: I TimezoneService:TimeZoneChange:offset=-25200,zone=America/Los_Angeles,country=US:
110703:193542 cvm[7908]: I LipcService:EventArrived:source=com.lab126.wan,name=localTimeOffsetChanged,arg0=-25200,arg1=1309689302:
110703:193542 cvm[7908]: I TimezoneService:LTOChanged:time=1309689302000,lto=-25200000:
110703:183542 system: I wancontrol:pc:processing "pppstart"
110703:193542 cvm[7908]: I LipcService:EventArrived:source=com.lab126.wan,name=dataStateChanged,arg0=2,arg1=:
110703:183542 cvm[7908]: I ConnectionService:LipcEventArrived:source=com.lab126.cmd,name=intfPropertiesChanged,arg0=,arg1=wan:
110703:183542 cvm[7908]: W ConnectionService:UnhandledLipcEvent:event=intfPropertiesChanged:
110703:193542 wifid[2486]: I wmgr:event:handleWpasupNotify(<2>CTRL-EVENT-DISCONNECTED), state=Searching:
110703:113542 wifid[2486]: I spectator:conn-assoc-fail:t=374931.469106, bssid=00:00:00:00:00:00:
110703:113542 wifid[2486]: I sysev:dispatch:code=Conn failed:
110703:183542 cvm[7908]: I LipcService:EventArrived:source=com.lab126.wifid,name=cmConnectionFailed,arg0=Failed to connect to WiFi network,arg1=:
Notice how there is no timezone information associated with the date/time information on each line. Worse still the different daemons are logging in at least 3 different timezones/DST offsets all interspersed within the same logfile. Argh!! So our simple script that just extracts a few regexps and links them together nearly doubles in size to handle the various time and date convolutions that the logs present. Really, the world should just use UTC everywhere. Life would be so much simpler. The end result is a script that spits out information like:

B000FC1PJI: Quicksilver: Read 1 times. Last Finished: Fri Mar 16 18:30:57 2012
- Tue Feb 21 11:06:24 2012 => Fri Mar 16 18:30:57 2012. Reading time 19 hours, 29 mins (p9 => p914) ... Read 51 books in total. 9 days, 2 hours, 29 mins of reading time
I haven t got to the point of actually calculating reading pace yet, but the necessary data is all there and I find the overall reading time stats interesting enough for now. If you have a jailbroken Kindle, I d love for you to have a play and let me know what you think. You ll probably find logs going back at least 2-3 weeks still on your Kindle to start with, and you can use the fetch-logs script to regularly pull them down to more permanent storage if you desire.

One of the earliest features I wrote for the Debian bug tracking system (Debbugs) after joining the team was support for forcibly merging bugs. Originally, merging two bugs required that the bugs be in exactly the same state before merging them; forcemerge removed this requirement. Unfortunately, the way I originally implemented this was shortsighted, and merely forced the merge partners to have the same values as the merge master. This meant that owners, blocking bugs, and many other things were silently changed, which meant that people weren't notified of changes, and bugs could end up in an inconsistent state. A while ago, I decided to fix this by calculating the changes required to actually merge the bugs, making those changes, and then merging the bugs normally; thus, doing everything that a maintainer would normally have done for them. This necessitated abstracting out the entire control apparatus into the Debbugs::Control module. Now that it's complete, you can do the following:

> forcemerge 1 2
Bug #1 [foo] new title
Bug #2  Done: foo@bugs.something  [foo] foo
Unset bug forwarded-to-address
Severity set to 'wishlist' from 'grave'
3 was blocked by: 2
3 was not blocking any bugs.
Removed blocking bug(s) of 3: 2
2 was blocked by: 4
2 was not blocking any bugs.
Removed blocking bug(s) of 2: 4
Bug reopened
Removed annotation that bug was owned by bar@baz.com.
Removed indication that 2 affects bleargh
Removed tag(s) unreproducible and moreinfo.
Merged 1 2
> thanks
Stopping processing here.

and bug 2 now is merged with 1 and matches the state of 1. [The above is the control output from the appropriate bit of the 06_mail_handling.t test.] This change also means that I'll be able to finally write support for control@ operations at submit@ time. Also, all of the bug modifications that happen at submit@ or nnn@ time (setting title, found, etc.) will be implemented as calls to Debbugs::Control so we can eventually keep a postgresql database updated in addition to the flatfile database.

During the last week, I created ghc-heap-view, a library to investigate the actual memory representation of Haskell values. It is inspired by vacuum and the GHCi debugger, but goes beyond them by allowing the user to look inside thunks and functions and see what other values they refer to. Let me demonstrate it by running the included demo: ghc-heap-view-demo Here are a four different lists, where the first three are already evaluated.
The first one, l, was defined as a top level constant as

> l = [1,2,3]

and is now found at 0x00000000006d1750/2 (where the /2 is the pointer tag information) and fully evaluated:

  ConsClosure  info = StgInfoTable  ptrs = 2, nptrs = 0, tipe = CONSTR_STATIC, srtlen = 1 , 
                 ptrArgs = [0x00000000006d16e0/1,0x00000000006d1730/2],
                 dataArgs = [], descr = "ghc-prim:GHC.Types.:" 

The second one, l2, is locally defined

> let l2 = 4:l

and now found at 0x00007fdce19fe4b0/2. See how the cons-cell references l!

  ConsClosure  info = StgInfoTable  ptrs = 2, nptrs = 0, tipe = CONSTR_2_0, srtlen = 1 ,
                 ptrArgs = [0x00000000006dca50/1,0x00000000006d1750/2],
                 dataArgs = [],
                 descr = "ghc-prim:GHC.Types.:" 

And the binding

> args <- map length  fmap  getArgs

evaluates to the one , global empty list at 0x00000000006db640/1:

  ConsClosure  info = StgInfoTable  ptrs = 0, nptrs = 0, tipe = CONSTR_NOCAF_STATIC, srtlen = 0 ,
                 ptrArgs = [],
                 dataArgs = [],
                 descr = "ghc-prim:GHC.Types.[]" 

And now we have, at 0x00007fdce19fe4c8, the concatenation of them, but unevaluated:

> let x = l ++ l2 ++ args

The thunk keeps a reference to l2 and args, but not l, as that is at a static address, unless you are running this in GHCi:

  ThunkClosure  info = StgInfoTable  ptrs = 2, nptrs = 0, tipe = THUNK_2_0, srtlen = 1 ,
                  ptrArgs = [0x00007fdce19fe4b0/2,0x00000000006db640/1],
                  dataArgs = [] 

Now to some more closure types. m and m' locally bound of type the unboxed type Int#, with values 42 resp. 23.

> let f = \x n -> take (I# m + I# x) n ++ args
  t = f m' l2

So here is (0x00007fdce1937d50/2), referencing its free variables args and 42:

  FunClosure  info = StgInfoTable  ptrs = 1, nptrs = 1, tipe = FUN_1_1, srtlen = 65553 ,
                ptrArgs = [0x00000000006db640/1],
                dataArgs = [42] 

And t is a thunk that applies f (also referenced here) to an unboxed value (23) and l2:

  ThunkClosure  info = StgInfoTable  ptrs = 2, nptrs = 1, tipe = THUNK, srtlen = 0 ,
                  ptrArgs = [0x00007fdce19fe4b0/2,0x00007fdce1937d50/2],
                  dataArgs = [23] 

Lastly, here is the standard example for self reference:

> let x = id (:) () x

This is what x (0x00007fdce1947940) looks like, at least without -O:

  ThunkClosure  info = StgInfoTable  ptrs = 0, nptrs = 0, tipe = THUNK, srtlen = 1 ,
                  ptrArgs = [],
                  dataArgs = [] 

So it is unevaluated. Let us evaluate it using seq. Now we have, still at 0x00007fdce1947940:

  IndClosure  info = StgInfoTable  ptrs = 1, nptrs = 0, tipe = BLACKHOLE, srtlen = 0 ,
                indirectee = 0x00007fdce194cc98/2 

The thunk was replaced by an indirection. If we look at the target, 0x00007fdce194cc98/2, we see that it is a newly created cons-cell referencing the original location of x:

  ConsClosure  info = StgInfoTable  ptrs = 2, nptrs = 0, tipe = CONSTR_2_0, srtlen = 1 ,
                 ptrArgs = [0x00000000006db620/1,0x00007fdce1947940],
                 dataArgs = [],
                 descr = "ghc-prim:GHC.Types.:" 

After running the garbage collector (performGC), we find that the address of x is now 0x00007fdce19f30d0/2 and that the self-reference is without indirections:

  ConsClosure  info = StgInfoTable  ptrs = 2, nptrs = 0, tipe = CONSTR_2_0, srtlen = 1 ,
                 ptrArgs = [0x00000000006db620/1,0x00007fdce19f30d0/2],
                 dataArgs = [],
                 descr = "ghc-prim:GHC.Types.:" 

Future plans The output of ghc-heap-view is not really pretty yet; even the indentation in this blog post was added manually by me, so this really needs a pretty printer providing a nicer, possibly more compact representation, including something like what vacuum provides. Maybe vacuum can be ported to use this library, and also include the thunk s and function s references in the output. Maybe also the GHCi debugger can be extended to show more information about unevaluated expressions using this. Internally, the library is not very polished yet either. It only handles those closures types that I have seen so far, and is likely to break horribly if run in a threaded or debugging enabled runtime. How it works Obviously, this is not standard Haskell 98 code, but rather deep trickery involving the GHC API and some C code. Initially I tried to use the API that vacuum and the GHCi debugger rely on, which is an operation

unpackClosure# :: a -> (# Addr#, Array# b, ByteArray# #)

which takes any Haskell value and returns the address to its info table, the pointers and the non-pointer-data in the closure. Unfortunately, it was not complete in that it was meant only for data closures and will for other closure types, e.g. thunks, return no data and no pointers (as can be seen in the code). So I implemented my own version of this operation:

foreign import prim "slurpClosurezh" slurpClosure# :: Any -> (# Addr#, ByteArray#, Array# b #)

where the returned ByteArray# contains the complete closure, including extra information fields such as the arity of a function. The Array# is again the list of pointers in the closure. At first glance, this is a duplication, as the pointers are of course also contained in the ByteArray#. But as soon as the GHC runtime reigns again, a garbage collector run can happen, the referenced values will move somewhere else, and the words that once were pointers in the ByteArray# become useless. But the corresponding entries in the Array# are updated by the garbage collector, as it knows that these are pointers, and not just words. This way, we get both a faithful copy of the closure on the heap and useful references to the contained data. Here is a demonstration of this effect:

$ ghci -XMagicHash -package ghc-heap-view
GHCi, version 7.4.1: http://www.haskell.org/ghc/  :? for help
Loading package ghc-prim ... linking ... done.
[..]
Loading package ghc-7.4.1 ... linking ... done.
Loading package ghc-heap-view-0.1 ... linking ... done.
Prelude> let  a = [1,2,3,4]; b = 5:a 
Prelude> :m + GHC.HeapView 
Prelude GHC.HeapView> rawHeapData <- getClosureRaw b
Prelude GHC.HeapView> rawHeapData 
(0x000000004080d658,[1082185320,140040739366568,140040739365928],[0x00007f5dc68626a8,0x00007f5dc6862428])
Prelude GHC.HeapView> System.Mem.performGC
Prelude GHC.HeapView> rawHeapData 
(0x000000004080d658,[1082185320,140040739366568,140040739365928],[0x00007f5dc41b3ad8,0x00007f5dc41b3b28]) 

The function rawHeapData is a thin wrapper around slurpClosure# which turns the primitive array in normal lists. Note that the second component of the triple is unchanged, but the third is updated by the garbage collector. Of course this means that the Show instance for the data type that ghc-heap-view uses to reference values is not referential transparent either. The foreign function import above is of type prim , i.e. does not call a C function but rather a Cmm function. Cmm is a reduced C that GHC uses internally to compile the Haskell code to, and most primitive operations are implemented in this language although I do quickly call regular C from my Cmm code to do the more complicated stuff, mainly figuring out what words of the closure are pointers. The knowledgeable reader might notice that I am passing a boxed value of type Any to the foreign function. This is currently not possible with foreign prim functions, and to actually use that code, you need the patch in GHC ticket #5931. But you can use ghc-heap-view without that as well (and the Cabal package will by default use that path), using the following hack to obtain the pointer to a Haskell value on the Heap as an unboxed type that can pass to the primitive operation:

foreign import prim "slurpClosurezh" slurpClosure'# :: Word#  -> (# Addr#, ByteArray#, Array# b #)
data Ptr' a = Ptr' a
aToWord# :: Any -> Word#
aToWord# a = case Ptr' a of mb@(Ptr' _) -> case unsafeCoerce# mb :: Word of W# addr -> addr
slurpClosure# :: Any -> (# Addr#, ByteArray#, Array# b #)
slurpClosure# a = slurpClosure'# (aToWord# a)

This works because a Word and a Ptr' have the same closure layout, only differing in the fact that one stores an a, and the other stores a Word#. Once we obtained the raw representation of the closure, we do the parsing in Haskell. Using the info table and the raw closure, we have enough information to tell which words have to be replaced by the appropriate pointer (which might already have been updated by the garbage collector) in the pointers list. This work was supported by a scholarship from the Deutsche Telekom Stiftung.

Flattr this post

The statistics of the "who wrote Linux x.y.z" series date back to at least 2.6.20. According to my experience talking with users and Free Software enthusiasts, those statistics really make a dent in the public perception of who is giving back upstream. Obviously, one should not take a single upstream, even if it is as important as the Linux kernel, as a measure of how much a given Free Software entity is giving back upstream overall. But users still seem to be fascinated by them. As a result, I have often had to answer the question: why Debian doesn't show up on those statistics?. My answer has always been something along the lines that Debian Developers who maintain Linux kernel packages, the almighty Debian Kernel Team, do that mostly as part of their volunteer engagement in Debian. As a consequence, they do not earmark their contributions as if they worked for a company and they add up to the hobbyist count instead (although you can you can routinely spot individual Debian Kernel Team members among the most active contributors for specific Linux releases). The above is the true and honest answer. But every time I've given it, I couldn't help feeling that the user who asked went home with a "yeah, well" afterthought. If you don't want to take my word of it, fine. Here is what Greg K-H had to say about Debian contributions in a recent blog post about the stable Linux kernel:

I would personally like to thank the Debian kernel developers, specifically Ben Hutchings, Maximilian Attems, Dann Frazier, Bastian Blank, and Moritz Muehlenhoff. They went above and beyond what any "normal" developer would have done, ferreting patches out of the kernel.org releases and the different vendor kernels and bug tracking systems, backporting them to the 2.6.32 kernel, testing, and then forwarding them on to me. Their dedication to their user community is amazing for such a "volunteer" group of developers. I firmly believe that without their help, the 2.6.32 kernel would not have been the success that it was. The users of Red Hat and SuSE products owe them a great debt. Buy them a beer the next time you see them, they more than deserve it.

I'll take good care of following his wise advice. Please do the same.

---

(Thanks to Sylvestre for pointing me to Greg's blog post.)

I have an old motherboard that requires creating a DOS boot floppy in order to upgrade its BIOS. Fortunately, it's not too hard to do this with FreeDOS and a USB stick.

The instructions below are based on an FDos wiki article.

Downloading the dependenciesThe first step is to download the required files from your motherboard manufacturer:

• the latest BIOS image
• the BIOS flashing program

and then install the tools you'll need:

apt-get install makebootfat syslinux

Preparing the "floppy" imageStart by collecting all of the files you need to install FreeDOS on the USB stick:

cd /tmp

wget http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/distributions/1.0/pkgs/commandx.zip
wget http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/distributions/1.0/pkgs/kernels.zip
wget http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/distributions/1.0/pkgs/substx.zip
wget http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/distributions/1.0/pkgs/unstablx.zip

for ZIP in *.zip; do unzip $ZIP; done

cp ./source/ukernel/boot/fat16.bin  .
cp ./source/ukernel/boot/fat12.bin .
cp ./source/ukernel/boot/fat32lba.bin .

cp /usr/lib/syslinux/mbr.bin .

and then create a directory for the files that will end up in the root directory of the "floppy":

mkdir /tmp/fs-root
cp ./bin/command.com /tmp/fs-root/
cp ./bin/kernel.sys  /tmp/fs-root/

and copy the BIOS image and update program into that same directory (/tmp/fs-root/).

Creating a bootable USB stickPlug in a FAT-formatted USB stick and look for the device it uses (/dev/sdb in the example below).

Finally, run makebootfat:

/usr/bin/makebootfat -o /dev/sdb -E 255 -1 fat12.bin -2 fat16.bin -3 fat32lba.bin -m mbr.bin /tmp/fs-root