My iAudio X5 player now runs Rockbox. Installation was fantastic. Just copying some files via mass-storage. I found navigation in rockbox hard to get used to (took me ages to find the full settings menu, the way I've found is like this: while playing, press the joystick a second, then press the record button.), but the info screen is very nice: There are different themes for the playback UI, which include information on the next song to be played. Very nice. I'm looking forward to UIs that make use of the color screen. Rockbox offers tons of features not available in the original firmware. Rockbox is said to have gapless playback, I prefer its crossfading. Replaygain is also available. But even if some of that is not yet working: use the source, Luke! I can't comment on the battery life yet, haven't used it on battery yet. This will obviously be a key factor; but the player has a battery life of up to 15 hours, so I used to recharge it only every other week. ;-)

A few weeks ago I published a small HOWTO for using loop-aes to encrypt your hard drive, usb thumb drive etc. As I have bought a new 300 GB external USB disk drive on Friday, I have tried something new this time: disk encryption using dm-crypt / LUKS. It has been suggested to me multiple times that dm-crypt is superior to loop-aes, however I didn't get a real reason. Yes, it doesn't require any kernel patches and is easier to setup. But has any serious cryptographer looked at it sharply, yet? Did it withhold his eye contact? Anyways, here's how I encrypted my 300 GB drive. I largely followed the guide at the EncryptedDeviceUsingLUKS wiki page...

1. Make sure you run Linux 2.6.16 or better. Previous versions suffer from an implementation problem which affects the security of dm-crypt, see Linux Kernel dm-crypt Local Cryptographic Key Disclosure.
2. Enable the following options in your kernel:
   • Code maturity level options
     • Prompt for development and/or incomplete code/drivers
   • Device Drivers -> Multi-device support (RAID and LVM)
     • Device mapper support
     • Crypt target support
   • Cryptographic options
     • AES cipher algorithms
3. Overwrite the whole drive with random data in order to slow down attacks on the encryption. At the same time perform a bad blocks scan to make sure the hard drive is not going to die too soon:
   badblocks -c 10240 -s -w -t random -v /dev/sdb
   Replace /dev/sdb with whatever is correct on your system. If you're really paranoid, and are willing to wait one or two days, do this:
   dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sdb
4. Install the required packages:
   apt-get install cryptsetup hashalot
   The current cryptsetup in Debian already supports LUKS, which was not the case a while ago, if I'm not mistaken.
5. Create one or more partitions on the drive:
   cfdisk /dev/sdb
   I created one big 300 GB partition, /dev/sdb1.
6. Setup LUKS:
   cryptsetup --verbose --verify-passphrase luksFormat /dev/sdb1
   Enter a good passphrase here. Don't spoil the whole endeavour by chosing a stupid or short passphrase.
7. Open the encrypted device and assign it to a virtual /dev/mapper/samsung300gb device:
   cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/sdb1 samsung300gb
8. Create a filesystem on the encrypted device:
   mkfs.ext3 -j -m 1 -O dir_index,filetype,sparse_super /dev/mapper/samsung300gb
   I used ext3 with some optimizations, see mke2fs(8).
9. Mount the encrypted partition:
   mkdir /mnt/samsung300gb
mount /dev/mapper/samsung300gb /mnt/samsung300gb
   That's it. Everything you write to /mnt/samsung300gb will be encrypted transparently.
10. For unmounting use:
    umount /mnt/samsung300gb
cryptsetup luksClose /dev/mapper/samsung300gb

After unmounting, nobody will be able to see your data without knowing the correct passphrase. Drive is stolen? No problem. Drive is broken, and you want to send it in for repair without the guys there poking in your data? No problem. You leave the USB drive at home and some jerk breaks into your house, steals your drive, rapes your wife, and kills your kids? No problem. Well, sort of, but you get the idea ;-) There's more things you can do, thanks to LUKS: have multiple passphrases which unlock your data, change/add/remove passphrases as you see fit, etc. Comments?

Beagle 0.2.1 is out. Beagle is a very useful desktop search engine for GNOME (but you can use it with KDE, too, or even without any desktop environment like I do). Despite the low version number it is already quite stable and usable, and has lots of features. It can index all kinds of files and information on your computer (txt, pdf, doc, emails, IM logs, IRC logs, source code, images, music, and whatnot) and provides a very nice (new) search interface (see screenshot). Yes, Google Desktop Search and Spotlight do the same thing, but neither is available for Linux, and neither of them is Free Software. They can "phone home" without telling you and do other funny things. With Beagle you can easily check what it does (use the source, Luke!). Oh, and Beagle can now also parse Ruby files, a simple filter I had written and submitted has been included in the latest release (well, actually it was there in 0.2.0 already, but I didn't tell anybody ;-)).

Finally, cryptsetup in Debian has support for LUKS (Linux Unified Key Setup). Thanks to Michael Gebetsroither, who maintained an inofficial cryptsetup-luks package for some time now. A few minutes ago, an updated version of Debians cryptsetup package (which is now based on Michaels inofficial package) was uploaded to unstable.

Finally, cryptsetup in Debian has support for LUKS (Linux Unified Key Setup). Thanks to Michael Gebetsroither, who maintained an inofficial cryptsetup-luks package for some time now. A few minutes ago, an updated version of Debians cryptsetup package (which is now based on Michaels inofficial package) was uploaded to unstable.

Finally, cryptsetup in Debian has support for LUKS (Linux Unified Key Setup). Thanks to Michael Gebetsroither, who maintained an inofficial cryptsetup-luks package for some time now. A few minutes ago, an updated version of Debians cryptsetup package (which is now based on Michaels inofficial package) was uploaded to unstable.

Don t you love it when it looks simple and then it is actually simple, but you are not up to the task?

I am loving the xlibs-dev transition, really, I mean it! Two of my packages, fkiss and xdigger got bit by this issue, and I immediately fixed the bugs with a little help from a script provided by Moritz Muehlenhoff. really cool.

So I follow instructions in The Debian Wiki, run the script, check with pbuilder, upload and profit! Fun! End of world hunger! Err, almost. So I get all excited and decide to look at the bugs. And I find a nice one: #346347. Not bad, gpsim FTBFS, Luk also took a look at it and didn t really like what he saw, it neede no xlibs-dev or substitute for them and sitll FTBFS.

But wait! Just by looking at gpsim s bugs page, I find out that there s a New Upstream Version(tm) (#248931) available since 1 year and 241 day ago. Also, NMUs that have not been acknowledged for as long as almost two years... Not nice. And there s even a patch (#345215) for building it on, GNU/kFreeBSD... how sexy!

So I get all obsessive about it. But newer upstream needs a newer libgtkextra-dev version (#347397), which of course was not packaged (don't we all love Murphy?) and that s where I am stuck at. I loathe libraries. But still I gave it a try. And failed. Several times.

Fun? Yes! Profit? Nope! Do you want to take a look at it? Easy. It s all here.

Amaya also FTBFS. And I want to NMU amaya. Badly. Since I first heard about amaya, and realized that I am named after a web browser (sucky as it might be) and after getting many IRC highlights (every time that amaya FTBFS is mentioned on IRC), I have been wanting to use/adopt/NMU it. Amaya NMUs amaya, how recursive can it get?

I will go to bed now, and try not to keep thinking about it, not because I want to become an early riser, Gunnar, no need to worry! But reading about it I thought it would be healthier for me to wake up everyday at the same hour, so that s all I am aiming for. If you know me, you might be rolling on the floor laughing as you read this. So am I! But, if you know me, keep in mind that I have been drinking coffee with no sugar since August... Hey! You are not laughing anymore?

Vi and Emacs are doing fine. Emacs was not pregnant after all, or so the vet told me. It was hard to see her slowly become herself after surgery. Vi was perfectly OK all along, but she looked terrible. Anyway, she felt better by 6am the next day and came to bed, perfectly groomed, and purring like nothing had happened. A week has passed and she has started doing the gory part today... she s biting away the scar tissue, and it bleeds a bit. Oh my Spaghetti Monster!

So following Florian’s chastisement of my “threatening” fellow Debian developers, Charles Plessy becomes annoyed by a bug in apt-file (its default configuration expects curl, but wget is what’s installed on most systems), at which point Luk Claes then starts threatening to NMU whether the maintainer likes it or not. Naturally that’s not the correct thing to do for a report the maintainer’s addressed and said is not a bug, 0-day NMU policy or not. Naturally, pointing this out brings Charles back into the fray, to complain further. A followup to that produces this off-list reply from Charles:

On Fri, Jan 13, 2006 at 05:13:15PM +1000, Anthony Towns wrote :
> I'm not disputing whether it's a bug or not, the maintainer is. If
> you are *helping* the maintainer, then fine: do an NMU.
Dear Anthony,
I would love to, but I am not a developer. And I am amazed to see that
more energy is spent in arguing rather than solving the problem. I hope
Luke will NMU this package and close those shameful bugs.
> In my experience you almost always get a better response from people if
> you assume they've got a good reason for doing what they have been doing,
> rather than just trying to add extra punctuation to your sentences.
> Admittedly, punctuation is pretty cool...
That kind of sentence reflects your inclination for ad-hominem attacks.
They poison the -devel list.
Best,

So yay for people who aren’t developers, in the n-m queue or maintaining a package, who don’t understand Debian’s processes, yet still think it’s great to pontificate about what Debian’s processes are, go on about how developers are “arrogant experts” and who think “punctuation is pretty cool” is a “poisonous ad hominem attack”. But what I hate most is people who think they’re contributing to Debian by mailing people privately to tell them how horrible they are. Gag. For those playing along at home, the proper process to follow in a dispute with a maintainer is to bring it up to the technical committee, not to try forcing the situation, whether that be by reopening bugs or playing bug ping-pong. It’s really not complicated. It’s even documented (5.8.3 of the Developers Reference).

So following Florian’s chastisement of my “threatening” fellow Debian developers, Charles Plessy becomes annoyed by a bug in apt-file (its default configuration expects curl, but wget is what’s installed on most systems), at which point Luk Claes then starts threatening to NMU whether the maintainer likes it or not. Naturally that’s not the correct thing to do for a report the maintainer’s addressed and said is not a bug, 0-day NMU policy or not. Naturally, pointing this out brings Charles back into the fray, to complain further. A followup to that produces this off-list reply from Charles:

On Fri, Jan 13, 2006 at 05:13:15PM +1000, Anthony Towns wrote :
> I'm not disputing whether it's a bug or not, the maintainer is. If
> you are *helping* the maintainer, then fine: do an NMU.
Dear Anthony,
I would love to, but I am not a developer. And I am amazed to see that
more energy is spent in arguing rather than solving the problem. I hope
Luke will NMU this package and close those shameful bugs.
> In my experience you almost always get a better response from people if
> you assume they've got a good reason for doing what they have been doing,
> rather than just trying to add extra punctuation to your sentences.
> Admittedly, punctuation is pretty cool...
That kind of sentence reflects your inclination for ad-hominem attacks.
They poison the -devel list.
Best,

So yay for people who aren’t developers, in the n-m queue or maintaining a package, who don’t understand Debian’s processes, yet still think it’s great to pontificate about what Debian’s processes are, go on about how developers are “arrogant experts” and who think “punctuation is pretty cool” is a “poisonous ad hominem attack”. But what I hate most is people who think they’re contributing to Debian by mailing people privately to tell them how horrible they are. Gag. For those playing along at home, the proper process to follow in a dispute with a maintainer is to bring it up to the technical committee, not to try forcing the situation, whether that be by reopening bugs or playing bug ping-pong. It’s really not complicated. It’s even documented (5.8.3 of the Developers Reference).

Don t you love it when it looks simple and then it is actually simple, but you are not up to the task?

I am loving the xlibs-dev transition, really, I mean it! Two of my packages, fkiss and xdigger got bit by this issue, and I immediately fixed the bugs with a little help from a script provided by Moritz Muehlenhoff. really cool.

So I follow instructions in The Debian Wiki, run the script, check with pbuilder, upload and profit! Fun! End of world hunger! Err, almost. So I get all excited and decide to look at the bugs. And I find a nice one: #346347. Not bad, gpsim FTBFS, Luk also took a look at it and didn t really like what he saw, it neede no xlibs-dev or substitute for them and sitll FTBFS.

But wait! Just by looking at gpsim s bugs page, I find out that there s a New Upstream Version(tm) (#248931) available since 1 year and 241 day ago. Also, NMUs that have not been acknowledged for as long as almost two years... Not nice. And there s even a patch (#345215) for building it on, GNU/kFreeBSD... how sexy!

So I get all obsessive about it. But newer upstream needs a newer libgtkextra-dev version (#347397), which of course was not packaged (don't we all love Murphy?) and that s where I am stuck at. I loathe libraries. But still I gave it a try. And failed. Several times.

Fun? Yes! Profit? Nope! Do you want to take a look at it? Easy. It s all here.

Amaya also FTBFS. And I want to NMU amaya. Badly. Since I first heard about amaya, and realized that I am named after a web browser (sucky as it might be) and after getting many IRC highlights (every time that amaya FTBFS is mentioned on IRC), I have been wanting to use/adopt/NMU it. Amaya NMUs amaya, how recursive can it get?

I will go to bed now, and try not to keep thinking about it, not because I want to become an early riser, Gunnar, no need to worry! But reading about it I thought it would be healthier for me to wake up everyday at the same hour, so that s all I am aiming for. If you know me, you might be rolling on the floor laughing as you read this. So am I! But, if you know me, keep in mind that I have been drinking coffee with no sugar since August... Hey! You are not laughing anymore?

Vi and Emacs are doing fine. Emacs was not pregnant after all, or so the vet told me. It was hard to see her slowly become herself after surgery. Vi was perfectly OK all along, but she looked terrible. Anyway, she felt better by 6am the next day and came to bed, perfectly groomed, and purring like nothing had happened. A week has passed and she has started doing the gory part today... she s biting away the scar tissue, and it bleeds a bit. Oh my Spaghetti Monster!

Martin- ric Racine asked in the comments to my previous mini-essay on crime-related damage compensation about how immaterial losses, such as pain and suffering, are given monetary value in court. In this essay, which is again part of my essay series on Finnish criminal justice, I will try and sketch an answer. As usual, I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice, and this is not an exhaustive treatise on the subject. Finnish law is very vague about how immaterial damage is compensated. It basically only gives a list of the forms of immaterial loss for which compensation can be ordered by a court. The main categories related to physical injuries are kipu ja s rky (usually translated somewhat inaccurately as pain and suffering) and pysyv haitta (permanent handicap). Kipu refers to the instant pain suffered when the injury is created, and s rky refers to the longer-term but not permanent pain present after the kipu has ended until the injury is healed. A new act of parliament will amend this at new year, specifying these in greater detail. It amends the existing Damage Compensation Act by defining a list of things that are to be given special weight when measuring the monetary value of personal damage. For pain and suffering, those things are the type of the injury, the type and duration of medical treatment it required, and how long the pain and suffering lasted or is expected to last. For permanent handicap, however, the list is a little different: the type and extent of the injury, and the age of the injured person at the time of injury. This is basically just writing out the existing legal praxis. There is currently no specific standard against which the courts compare individual cases. However, since one is desperately needed, the courts generally use a substitute. There is a governmental board whose job is to set a standard monetary valuation for different types of injuries sustained in traffic accidents. That standard is intended to be used by insurance companies, but in practice, courts also use them as a guide when considering injuries caused by criminal acts. In relation to pain and suffering, the standard categorizes injuries as follows:

Category A (petty injury)

will heal fully leaving no marks in a week or two, requires no hospitalization, causes at most two weeks’ inability to work – scratched skin, small cut, minor bruises etc.

Category B1 (minor injury)

requires no resuscitation nor intensive care, requires up to a week of hospitalization without surgery, causes at most two months’ inability to work, causes only insignificant permanent disability – significant bruising, loss of few teeth, simple bone fractures etc.

Category B2 (medium injury)

may require resuscitation but not intensive care, requires one to three weeks of hospitalization, no complications in treatment, no need for reconstructive surgery in later care, causes at most seven months’ inability to work, causes only minor permanent disability – simple fractures of the long bones, fractures of facial bones, etc.

-Category C1 (major injury)

requires cardiovascular or pulmonary resuscitation, requires short-term respirator use or tracheostomy, in the case of a limb injury, requires demanding surgery, requires reconstructive surgery in later care, requires up to eight weeks of hospitalization, causes up to eight months of inability to work, causes significant permanent disability – loss of all teeth, complicated bone fractures etc.

Category C2 (especially major injury)

requires long-term mechanical respiration or resuscitation, major complications in treatment, requires extensive surgery, requires hospitalization for longer than eight weeks, causes a year of inability to work, causes major permanent disability – loss of limb, significant brain damage, loss of fertility, severe burns etc.

Category C3 (extraordinary injury)

extraordinary complications in treatment, long-term hospitalization, causes complete disability, causes helplessness – extreme brain damage causing dementia, loss of both upper limbs or both lower limbs, causes permanent pain, permanent quadriplegia, causes complete blindness

As you can see, all categories are described both by the treatment required and by listing sample injuries. These descriptions are complementary, and not identical. In categories A and B, the treatment-based descriptions are conjunctive (all requirements must apply), and in C, they are disjunctive (at least one must apply). I did not translate the descriptions completely; see the Finnish original source if you need more detail. The traffic injury standard currently specifies the following monetary values for each category:

Category	Compensation
A	see below
B1	200–1,000
B2	1,000–2,900
C1	2,900–7,300
C2	7,300–16,700
C3	at least 16,700

Due to a quirk in the traffic injury ccompensation system, Category A is not compensated in the case of traffic injuries. This does not apply in criminal cases, where Category A is usually taken as “up to 200 ”. Of course, the specifics of the case will sometimes require departing from this standard in criminal cases (the aggravation in the crime often is taken as a reason to up the monetary damage estimate). Permanent damage is similarly handled by courts by referring to the standard set for the statutory employee’s accidental injury insurances (see the Finnish sources 1 and 2 for details). I already mentioned above a new act of parliament. That act, which will enter into force January 1, 2006, creates a new Personal Damage Advisory Board (henkil vahinkoasiain neuvottelukunta), which will follow legal praxis and give recommendations, much like the above-described standard, which courts and other instances deciding on compensation for personal damage can take as a base standard against which individual cases can be measured. The advisory board’s recommendations are likely to supplant the traffic damage standard described above in the future.

Several times over the last few months, I've had a common experience: I write documentation (gasp!), and then nobody reads the damn stuff. This offends me primarily because (like most geeks) I despise writing documentation. However, I write it because I despise having to explain myself a dozen times over. Better to write it down, and then I never have to worry about it ever again. Then, after I've taken the effort to actually document something, nobody reads the stuff, and they just ask me directly -- and then get offended when I grunt "RTFM" at them and go back to my code. But you start to think: "why am I wasting my time reading these docs, when I could just save myself a few hours of my life and answer their questions as they appear?" Now that I've gotten into the documentation habit, lack of documentation elsewhere also offends me. I want to know something, so I go looking for some form of written expression related to the topic at hand (Google Is Your Friend) and come up completely dry. For free software, I can more-or-less live with it -- I follow TechnoYoda's advice, and Read The Source, Luke (and then document it). For other stuff, though (lock-in software, social processes) I've got no hope. I'm reduced to pouting in IRC channels until someone tells me what I need to know (and then I document it). But you start to think: "why do I waste my time looking for documentation, when it never exists anyway, and I could save myself some time by just asking directly in IRC or on a mailing list?" As we all know, there are two documentation-related universal truths in IT:

1. Nobody ever writes documentation.
2. Nobody ever reads documentation.

I got to thinking -- is there a causal relationship here somewhere? Did people write documentation in the olden days, but gave up because nobody ever read it, or did people originally always read the manuals, but stopped looking for documentation because it never existed (or when it did, it was content-free and useless)? Or did both of these truths appear independently, or are they both aspects of a single truth: "Everybody Hates Documentation"?

Repeat with me: I HATE HARDWARE! My laptop's hard disk drive (iBook G4, purchased last year before going to Debconf4) has 369K+ load cycles completed, which means it has a very good chance of starting to fail some time soon. Great. Specially not because of loosing data or anything, but because changing a disk on one of this bastards is like finding a needle on a hayloft. Harry Potter's books are getting insane as a movie source. The Goblet of Fire is quite lengthy, but when turned into a movie it becomes a complete piece of craziness. During the whole movie you feel like someone is talking behind your ear: "run, run, cut this, run, not time for elves, no time for tournaments, forget about this, does not fit (mao, anyone?), run,... Arf arf arf, YES! We made it 2.5h !!!" It leaves me wondering how on earth they are going to turn the 5th "most boring HP book in the saga" book into a movie, and how they will manage to turn the 6th one into a 2.5h movie again, without dropping half of the superinteresting things happening there. Oh, well, I guess I have to read the books again.

Martin-Éric Racine proposes development of a new spell checker for Fennic languages (mainly Finnish and Estonian). Since he forbids use of his contact addresses from anybody who is not his customer, I have to write this in public. I was involved in 1998 in a project with similar aims, Oikoluku-SF. It never accomplished anything. My personal belief is that the main problem is getting enough linguistic data to encode the morphology of Fennic languages. All such existing data is to my knowledge non-free. The rest is just a matter of programming: the algorithms are not rocket science.