Well I m back from LCA 2013 and what a great week it was. I learnt plenty of things over the week, including:

• Cloud computing into the government will be coming but will be hard to do in a significant way
• It wasn t just me that found the GTK 2 to 3 API change hard going
• OpenStack is the next cool kid on the block and there is a lot going on here
• Try out novaprova for testing C programs
• SELinux shouldnt slow my computer down and yes ill try it soon
• git-annex looks very interesting, I m just trying to find a use-case for it for me
• The development methods for Free Software have come a long way since a decade ago
• Test and release processes are important on large software projects
• Pretty much everyone I knew has changed companies, at least once.
• For multi-process communication, 0mq looks interesting

It was great to actually meet people who I ve known for years (over 10 for some) only as emails or irc chats as well. I ve not been to Mount Stromlo for almost as long and its somewhere I d like to visit again. Argh, the wordpress editor is still not fixed

Following my last rant about configuration management, I've had a closer look at Salt, both for my personal use, as well as for a client who would like to deploy something that is not Puppet. Salt has some very good ideas, for instance:

• Configuration is just data in YAML format, which makes it really easy to whack up stuff and also to generate it using other means;
• There's a lot of plugability: runners, renderers, states, modules, returners, outputters, all of which can be replaced with custom implementations;
• It builds on remote execution. In fact, in the docs, they talk first about remote execution and then about configuration management. Not only does this makes a lot of sense, it also gives the admin the additional benefit of having quick, remote access to all hosts in the infrastructure. I like that as it means I don't also have to deploy a parallel-execution solution.
• Salt supports both, a push and a pull model for configuration management. In fact, the push model is part of its remote execution base and it's implemented through persistent connections from the clients to the master. This neatly solves all problems relating to firewalling and NAT, and it also means that the master always has a pretty good understanding of who's around. It feels good to me. And there is no NIH going on with respect to pulling: there is no daemon, you have to use cron. Good.

But there are also a couple of downsides to Salt:

• The default templating engine is Jinja. While that may be an excellent choice for applications in inherently insecure environments, such as the Web, they are quite painful in the context of Salt: no multi-line logic, whitespace control is a nightmare, and a completely unfamiliar set of conditionals and filters, rather than access to e.g. Python. This is only the default, and mako is an alternative, but it seems like a poor choice and that does not instill confidence.
• I don't think that the method of targeting hosts that Salt uses is scalable. I don't want to intersperse my configuration with if-then-else statements referencing hostnames (what would that mean if a hostname changed or a new host was added?). Instead, I want the configuration to be fully parametrised and assemble the parameters from a node database, ideally a hierarchical one. I have a solution for that which works with Salt, called reclass.
• I don't think much of "pillars", which are Salt way to provide random data (parameters) to nodes, again because data needs to be targeted at hosts, rather than defined for a host. This is also solved with reclass.
• Logging and error reporting in Salt are abysmal, inconsistent, and useless. This is offset a little bit by the ability to use pdb, but it's not ideal.
• Exceptions are not properly handled, the file descriptors aren't closed when daemonising, children are not reaped as they should, and the exit code will almost always be zero, even on failure.
• State requirements are not enforced where they are required, but only come into play when a higher order function is called.
• The code reinvents module loading and does that in very complex ways, while putting tight limitations on what's possible. State functions and modules cannot be namespaced, for instance, nor can they easily make use of each other. There is also no way to quickly define macros without resorting to the templating language (and thus a completely different syntax and paradigm), and the concept of having modular, self-contained states (e.g. one for sudo, one for SSH, etc.) with all their dependencies in one hierarchy is not really part of the design. Also, it's not trivial for a state definition to export an interface for other states to use.
• While we're on the topic of code and design, there's a lot of duplicate stuff in need of refactoring (e.g. saltutil._sync, and it seems that this even causes a lot of crypto work to be done over and over again. It also doesn't help that salt-call, which is used to execute commands on the clients (e.g. pull configuration), works completely independently of the daemon process running on each client (although the same code base is being used).
• And why aren't state and execution modules implemented as classes? Instead, the module is itself treated as an entity, and a home-cooked "virtual" system is used to determine which platforms support which modules. Object-oriented programming principles gives you all of that, and more.
• Fortunately, the Salt authors didn't cave in and write the entire communication layer themselves. Instead, they employed ZeroMQ, but it's still quite common for a client to become unreachable (permanently), e.g. due to an IP address change, or networking problems. What's worse is that the master does not keep track of who's listening.
• While we're on the subject of standing on the shoulders of giants, Python's msgpack apparently cannot handle Unicode. Yay.

Those are the big issues. There are many small issues two, but those won't be around for too long as the project is moving along quickly and the community is vibrant. This is surely an important point that speaks for Salt. However, the above issues seem to hint at design choices that might well turn out to stand in the way later. Following a day of frustration, I now feel the overpowering urge to write my own configuration management system, because of course I feel that I could do it better than everyone else. Does this sound familiar to you? Let's just say hypothetically that I would, then I'd want to reuse as much existing functionality as possible. For instance, I'd want the entire remote execution framework to be independent from any configuration management implemented on top. So what does this mean? What would such a remote execution framework need? Here are some thoughts:

• I'd want to keep it the way of Salt, i.e. the clients maintain persistent connections to the master, and the master regularly pings the clients, for housekeeping. And the clients know to expect such pings at regular intervals, so can reset themselves in case they don't hear from the master. Or scream.
• Of course, authentication and encryption need to be part of this. Ideally, key and roster management are already available in the tool that's being reused. I don't want to have to have a new PKI for this
• The protocol would probably be something like XMLRPC, with an extensible list of modules on the client to do the work. Data would be standardised to JSON-format.
• Asynchronous execution would be a plus. I am even tempted to say that it should be all built asynchronously, even though I don't really know a use case for this.
• The clients should be able to feed back information to the master, where data can be accumulated, allowing for cross-node configuration (cf. http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.sysutils.salt.user/2098). This could be implemented using master-side polls to keep the protocol easier.

Doesn't this sound like a Unix botnet to you? ;) I could imagine whacking this up with a bit of Python, some shell glue, socat and SSH: the server would have an authorized_keys file with forced commands connecting the client to the server process via sockets. Or I could imagine using twisted for that. But I would prefer if something like this already existed. Anyone? Comments are broken on my blog, and I cannot be bothered to work on them. If you have any input, please write to me. I will (eventually) condense all feedback into a new article. NP: Mouse on Mars: Parastrophics

Executive summary: Most things work fine.

Things we know are broken:

• Some Samsung laptops. The samsung-laptop driver is a slightly weird thing. By 2010 (when it first appeared) most vendors had moved over to using some level of firmware abstraction, either using ACPI or WMI. Samsung still seemed to be stuck around a decade earlier - they were providing a region of memory at a known address, and you'd read that address to find a bunch of offsets. Then you'd write magic values based on those offsets to magic system IO ports based on those offsets and something would happen. Those writes were triggering System Management Mode, a special x86 CPU mode where the processor executes code from memory that the OS can't see, without telling the OS that it's doing so. There's nothing especially new in this (SMM first appeared in the 386sl back in 1990), but it also means that you depend on the system vendor not changing the interface without telling you. Turns out that Samsung apparently changed their platform interface when they moved to UEFI, but didn't actually do anything to prevent old drivers from breaking things - performing exactly the same series of accesses on some modern Samsung laptops gives an uncorrectable machine check exception (in the best case) or destroys your firmware (in the worst case). Given that the driver was written to Samsung's specifications, this is pretty obviously Samsung's fault, but that's probably little consolation to anyone who ended up with a dead laptop. Although, given Samsung's track record, this may not be surprising.
  
  On the bright side, some of the machines that are affected by this predate Secure Boot, so at least it's not a Secure Boot bug.
  
• Some Toshibas won't boot Linux. This turns out to be some staggering incompetence on the part of Toshiba (or, more likely, their third-party vendor) - they managed to leave the signing key out of the database that's used to validate binaries, and managed to leave the signature database signing key out of the database that's used to provide whitelist or blacklist updates. The good news is that this is a blatant violation of Microsoft's Windows 8 certification guidelines, and that seems to have encouraged Toshiba to actually fix their BIOS. The bad news is that any of the affected machines that are currently available are still broken, and Toshiba don't seem to be willing to actually give you the firmware update yet.
  
• Some Lenovos will only boot Windows or Red Hat Enterprise Linux. I recommend drinking, because as far as I know they haven't actually got around to doing anything useful about this yet.

Not an amazingly positive list, but as far as I know that's about it - other than some Samsungs, one range of Toshibas and one range of Lenovo desktops, Linux should be fine. If you have any other UEFI system that's unable to install Fedora 18, let me know and we'll do our best to work out what's going on.

comments

Brianna Laugher wrote a blog post about the speaking stack used in the free software activism BoF at LCA 2013 [1]. Occupy Wall St uses what they call a progressive speaking stack this means that white men step back in the queue and people from marginalised groups step forward [2]. During the free software activism BoF the speaking queue that was used was that people who hadn t already spoken had priority over those who had spoken before. This was a really good idea and could be used a lot more in LCA and other conferences. It is fairly common that a small number of delegates take up the vast majority of question time. I suggest that all white men watch the questions and observe how many are asked by white men and how many are asked by everyone else. Also note the way that questions are asked, who shouts a question, who wins when two delegates ask at the same time, and who waits until the end of the talk. The Reasons for a Speaking Stack In Occupy Wall St there is a real benefit in giving priority to members of minority groups. The political needs of white men are generally reasonably well publicised due to disparities in media coverage. As the aim of the occupy movement is not to replace one group of white men with another there is an obvious need to get opinions from members of minority groups. Bugs in software generally affect members of all groups equally (with the exception of bugs related to accessibility features). But even so I think it is important to encourage diversity among people who ask questions. When someone is in the audience sees that no-one who is in their minority group is asking questions they will get the impression that they are just watching someone else s conference. We should aim to have a conference for everyone. How to Implement it When taking questions for one of my talks I generally try to give priority to people who find it difficult to be heard. But doing that requires some concentration and I often don t have any to spare when giving a demanding technical talk. I think that this needs to be managed by the moderator/MC/microphone holder. Someone who doesn t need to think much about the content of the talk can concentrate on choosing the best people to ask questions. Also a significant issue is questions that are called out during a talk. Some speakers insist that questions are only asked at the end of their talk. But I prefer some degree of interaction with the audience so my talks often end up being more about having a conversation with the audience than reading from a script. The difficulty with an interactive talk is that it strongly favors those who are prepared to shout a question over those who wait their turn. I think I ll try to make a strict policy of having people raise their hand to ask a question in future to address this issue, but I will need assistance from someone who s not concentrating on the technical issues. For a conference I think it would make sense for the people who hold the microphones to keep a mental list of who s asked questions. If someone asks their share of questions on the first day of the conference then they would deserve a lower priority for questions on later days. This would also encourage delegates to consider whether their question is really worth asking during the lecture or whether they should save their question quota and talk to the speaker afterwards. Also we could ask delegates to exercise restraint. One suggestion I heard was that people should set themselves a quota of 3 questions per conference or 1 per day. In a conference with ~600 delegates and ~33 sessions per day if everyone asked a question each day that would be about 18 questions per session more than is typical. So it seems that anyone who asks a single question per day is still likely to be asking more than 1/600 of all questions. Exceptions There are occasions when multiple questions and comments make sense. One example is where a member of the audience has significant expertise in the topic in question. Another is when a speaker completes significantly before the end of their allotted time and some questions from the MC or an experienced member of the audience can help them spend all their time educating the audience. But I think there needs to be a compelling reason that has a clear benefit for the audience. General Benefits How many of the repeat questions are useful to the audience? It seems to me that there is a correlation between multiple questions and questions that are more about the person asking than about clarifying issues that are likely to matter to the audience. Would such limits improve the quality of the discussion even for people who don t care about diversity? Also I have asked a disproportionate number of questions in the past. I am reducing the number of questions that I ask although I think I asked more than 3 at this conference.

• [1] http://tinyurl.com/aens6vr
• [2] http://tinyurl.com/3s8exu4

As most people reading this have probably seen, xkcd found a particularly entertaining Wikipedia argument. (It is all true. There are at least 40,000 words arguing over whether to capitalize an "i" in a page title. I went and looked last night and spent several hours following the conversation.) This is, of course, funny, and I'm sure lots of people went away smiling at an excellent example of bikeshed painting on the Internet. But I think it's rather more serious than it appears to be. In fact, I would go so far as to say that it is a visible manifestation of a deeply-rooted problem that is the core of why I personally refuse to contribute to Wikipedia in any way that requires me to invest non-trivial time or become a member of that community. To explain that statement requires a bit of background. One of the very first services I found when I joined the Internet in 1993 was Usenet. Originally, I talked about comics collecting and then Magic: The Gathering, but I eventually ended up involved in Usenet governance. I spent more than ten years deeply invested in Usenet hierarchy administration; roughly, the process of agreeing on names for and sometimes moderators for global Usenet discussion groups, as well as all the supporting infrastructure for Usenet news server administrators to agree upon and share articles in those groups. Usenet newsgroup creation was, throughout that period, a consensus-driven process. There was a voting system that was used to measure consensus, but the voting system was largely designed to ensure that rough consensus existed (it was heavily skewed towards not changing anything). We took great pride in that fact. I'm sure that one could find many articles from me proudly championing the concept of a consensus-based decision-making process against many alternatives. That means I was also there when the toxic flaws at the heart of a consensus-based process completely destroyed it and, as a side effect, destroyed the community of people who had formed around it. I will never again invest my time and energy in a community that operates solely via a consensus process unless that community is small enough that consensus can actually work (which means not much more than twenty people). Consensus decision-making in large groups destroys communities and hurts people. These sorts of extended arguments on Wikipedia are not rare anomolies. They happen with some frequency; just by going through the debate xkcd references and looking at pointers, you can easily find others (Sega Genesis, cat ownership vs. companionship, endless notability debates... there are many). They look funny from outside, but from inside they're hugely demoralizing. Even when they don't get heated and spill over into personal animosity (and if they don't do that, you're lucky), they consume astonishingly vast quantities of time exactly not the resource that you want to be squandering in volunteer projects. And they do so without giving back anything emotionally. I know these arguments very well. One of the most contentious and angry arguments in the history of Usenet newsgroup creation was the argument over whether, when breaking up a group into multiple more focused groups, to rename the original group to end in *.misc or leave its existing name. This argument went on for years and led to deep, lingering hatred between the participants. It's the same sort of thing. These arguments happen in the way that they happen because there is toxic waste at the center of Wikipedia's governance process. And that toxic waste hurts people, wastes their time, and destroys their willingness to volunteer. It undermines community, which is sad and ironic because the whole point of consensus decision-making is to create, support, and empower community. But it doesn't work. It doesn't work for two very simple but very closely-related reasons: it's impossible to ever end an argument, and there is no incentive for anyone to shut up. As a result, it is nearly impossible to get the decision-making to cohere into something that is timely, consistent, unambiguous, and final. These are not optional requirements of a decision-making process. Without them, people will lose faith in the decision-making process itself, and some people will learn that, as long as they never stop talking about something, they can prolong the debate indefinitely and possibly eventually get their way. Now, of course, I'm deeply involved and invested in Debian. And on the surface, it may look like Debian also uses a consensus-based decision-making process. But while Debian decision-making has some problems, it's much healthier for a few reasons that are useful to examine:

1. Individual packages in Debian are not managed by consensus, but rather fall under the authority of the package maintainer, who is either a single person or a small team. (Consensus works in small teams; it's great if the number of people involved is five or less.) This drastically limits the number of decisions that are subject to a large-scale consensus process. Nearly all decisions in Debian are made directly by the person doing the work, and only in exceptional circumstances can some larger process be invoked. This, on the surface, sounds like it could be similar to Wikipedia, but note that appeals to a larger process are much rarer in Debian than they are in Wikipedia. There is a strong bias in favor of letting the person working on the package do their job however they want to do it. This is more social than structural, but it's a core value (and we should be very careful about changing it). As a result, Debian operates less by mass consensus and more as a federation of semi-autonomous fiefdoms. This sounds worse: it sounds authoritarian and non-democratic. But it's significantly more functional, and it doesn't waste people's time.
2. On appeal, and for broader questions that necessarily cut across multiple packages, there are several people in Debian who are perceived as having clear authority to make timely and relatively final decisions, who are almost never overruled, and who can therefore effectively end arguments. These include core teams like ftp-master or the release team, formal appeal bodies like the Technical Committee, and the Debian Project Leader. Not all of this ability is written in black and white in the governance process, but that's not the important part; the important part is that it works in practice to provide timely, consistent, unambiguous, and final decisions most of the time. (Some parts work better than others, and we do struggle with timely, but I've seen much, much worse.)
3. There is a well-established ultimate appeal (a General Resolution), the ultimate appeal process is very specific and concrete, there is little or no ambiguity or human interpretation involved in analyzing the results, it is time-limited, and it's almost universally respected. Everyone abides by the result of a GR if matters get to that point, and while it's theoretically possible to propose another GR immediately to overturn the first one, this doesn't happen in practice. There's also substantial pushback against invoking the GR process for anything that isn't really important.

We still occasionally devolve into endless discussion, usually on some technical topic that cuts across the distribution and usually when the options haven't cohered enough for any authority to make a useful decision (often because it's too early for it to be possible to make a final decision). Those cases, such as the recurring systemd vs. upstart discussion, are still quite frustrating. But they're also relatively rare and largely ignorable because they have to be about just the right sort of issue. Wikipedia has these sorts of arguments all the time, and they're much less ignorable, because consensus is invoked for every minor dispute on any page in the entire project. You have to participate in endless consensus process or risk having your work undone, reverted, or removed. We would all like all decisions to be made by consensus, since we don't want anyone in a volunteer project to lose (and because we all love to convince other people we're right). And for small teams, consensus is wonderful. But that's precisely because governance in small teams is very easy; humans are naturally adapted for decision-making in small teams and have a huge variety of natural tools, tendencies, and abilities devoted to making those sorts of decisions. You rarely need any formal decision-making process; most decisions will just happen. You need a decision-making process when enough people are involved that mutual social pressure can't bring a dispute to resolution, and when you're in that situation, consensus is a horrible process. Due to my past experiences, I'm almost certainly at the extreme in dislike of consensus processes. Most people are not going to refuse to participate in communities solely on that basis. But be aware that 40,000 words of discussion about something that an outsider will not consider particularly important is not an accidental phenomenon. It's not something that just happens randomly on the Internet. It's an effect, and symptom, of a governance process, or lack thereof, and it's something that you can do something about if you want to.

At the end of my talk on Monday about the status of SE Linux [1] I described some of the things that I want to do with SE Linux in Debian (and general SE Linux stuff). Here is a brief summary of some of them: One thing I ve wanted to do for years is to get X Access Controls working in Debian. This means that two X applications could have windows on the same desktop but be unable to communicate with each other by any of the X methods (this includes screen capture and clipboard). It seems that the Fedora people are moving to sandbox processes with Xephyr for X access (see Dan Walsh s blog post about sandbox -X [2]). But XAce will take a lot of work and time is always an issue. An ongoing problem with SE Linux (and most security systems) is the difficulty in running applications with minimum privilege. One example of this is utility programs which can be run by multiple programs, if a utility is usually run by a process that is privileged then we probably won t notice that it requires excess privileges until it s run in a different context. This is a particular problem when trying to restrict programs that may be run as part of a user session. A common example is programs that open files read-write when they only need to read them, if the program then aborts when it can t open the file in question then we will have a problem when it s run from a context that doesn t grant it write access. To deal with such latent problems I am considering ways of analysing the operation of systems to try and determine which programs request more access than they really need. During my talk I discussed the possibility of using a shared object to log file open/read/write to find such latent problems. A member of the audience suggested static code analysis which seems useful for some languages but doesn t seem likely to cover all necessary languages. Of course the benefit of static code analysis is that it will catch operations that the program doesn t perform in a test environment error handling is one particularly important corner case in this regard.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2013/01/28/selinux-status-lca2013/
• [2] http://danwalsh.livejournal.com/31146.html

I like App Engine, my wedding website runs on App Engine as well as a couple recent commercial projects. However, there are some annoyances that make a lot of the useful things I learned at Google not applicable.

1. Chunked responses
   App Engine doesn't have a way of doing chunked responses.
   1.5. Processing after sending the response My annoyance here is that I can't send an early response and wait for some resource. Say I want to do 5 url fetches that I cache for a short period of time. If I want to reply in 250ms, I want to use any of the results I've gotten and reply to the user. Then once the rest of the fetches come in, I want to put them in the cache, so they will come back quickly the next time.
2. Counters
   App Engine has crappy support for counters. You can shard your counters into the datastore: https://developers.google.com/appengine/articles/sharding_counters#counter_python or you can use taskqueues: http://blog.appenginefan.com/2009/10/non-sharded-counters-part-2-using-task.html . Now, how do you graph these counters over time, well, that is left as an exercise for the reader. Google has special datastores for stores and retrieving counters.
3. Backends
   Backends in appengine are versioned separately from frontends. This sounds like a good idea, but to run the devserver with backends, the backends need to be in the same source tree. Thus backends share the same url space. Backends also share the same app.yaml, so again the url space is shared. Thus, if you make a change that you want to coordinate between the frontend and the backend, you need to change the application version in app.yaml, then rename all the backends in backends.yaml. If backends are supposed to be in the same source tree as frontends, then they should be prefixed with the application version. If backends should be versioned separately from frontends, then they shouldn't share url handlers from app.yaml.
   3.5 Uploading backends is slow
   Each backend is uploaded through appcfg.py separately. So if you are crazy and have one backend per backend level, then you need to upload 4 copies of the source code each time the backends get updated.
4. Logging
   I want structured logs. Instead what you have to do is use the python logging module to write out human readable logs, then parse them out into the structure you want.
   http://code.google.com/p/google-app-engine-samples/source/browse/trunk/logparser/logparser.py
   

As a preemptive counter, 1.5 could be dealt with using backends and a background thread, except backends don't scale to the number of queries, so my use case above isn't fixed.

To delay execution of some commands in a shell script, the sleep command comes handy.
Even though many shells do not provide it as a built-in and the GNU sleep command is used, there are a couple of things to note:

• Suffixes may not be supported. E.g. 1d (1 day), 2m (2 minutes), 3s (3 seconds), 4h (4 hours).
  
• Fractions of units (seconds, by default) may not be supported. E.g. sleeping for 1.5 seconds may not work under all implementations.
  

This of course is regarding what is required by POSIX:2001; it only requires the sleep command to take an unsigned integer. FreeBSD's sleep command does accept fractions of seconds, for example.

Remember, if you rely on any non-standard behaviour or feature make sure you document it and, if feasible, check for it at run-time.

In this case, since the sleep command is not required to be a built-in, it does not matter what shell you specify in your script's shebang. Moreover, calling /bin/sleep doesn't guarantee you anything. The exception is if you specify a shell that has its own sleep built-in, then you could probably rely on it.

The easiest replacement for suffixes is calculating the desired amount of time in seconds. As for the second case, you may want to reconsider your use of a shell script.

So, today an endurance test can be declared as finished. In early 2008, for the first time, I paid for a cellular phone (as my previous ones were all 100% subsidized by the operator in a fixed plan). I got a Nokia N95. And, although at the beginnning I was quite thrilled with my smartphone (when such things were still a novelty), it didn't take much to me to start dumbing it down to what is really useful to me: A phone with a GPS. And the GPS only because it is the only toy I want in such a form factor. Anyway, despite the operator repeatedly offering me newer and more capable models, I kept this one, and as soon as I was free of the forced 18 month rental period, switched to a not-data-enabled, pay-as-you-go plan. I don't want to be connected to the intertubes when I'm away from a usable computer! But yes, five years are over what a modern phone wants to endure. Over time, I first started getting SIM card errors whenever the phone was dropped or slightly twisted - As I'm a non-frequent phone user, I didn't care much. Charging it also became a skill of patience, as getting the Nokia micro-connector to make contact has been less and less reliable. Over one year ago, the volume control (two sensors on the side) died after a phone drop (and some time later I found the switches broken from the mainboard loose) - A nuisance, yes, but nothing too bad. I don't know how, but some time ago the volume went down when using the radio, and as I can't raise it again, my phone became radio-disabled. And today, the screen died (it gets power, but stays black). I can blind-operate the phone, but of course, it is really not meant for that. So, I expect this Saturday to go get a new phone. Between now and then, I'll be cellphone-deprived (in case you wonder why I'm not answering to your messages or whatever). I would love to get a phone with a real keyboard (as I prefer not to look at the screen when writing messages, just to check if everything came out right and fix what's needed). I understand Android phones are more likely to keep me happy as a free software geek, and I'd be delighted to use Cyanogen if it is usable and stable But my phone is *not* my smart computer and it should not attempt to be, so it's not such a big deal. I will look for something with FM radio capability, and GPS. Of course, I want something cheap. It would be great to get it at no cost, but I don't expect I'll find such a bargain. Oh, and I want something I can find at the first Telcel office I come to, am I asking for too much? :) Anyway - I'll enjoy some days of being really disconnected from any wireless bugs (that I am aware off).

Let's suppose that you went to a show of your favourite some time ago and you were able to sneak in a camera (well, in those times, cell phones weren't able to record much more than 176x144 pixels at 12fps). But, then, you suddenly found that some people uploaded (short) fragments of that very same show to youtube and, collecting those, you may be able to create a "multi-camera" version of the video that you can record to keep of your memorable concert. The multi-camera, in the sense above, is not the same as multiple angles (like some DVDs), but something like a TV broadcast, where the stage is filmed by cameras positioned at some places and the image that is broadcast is switched from time to time according to that who is singing, or playing etc. So, Dear Lazyweb, do we happen to have any Free Software (preferably already packaged in Debian) that is able to help with the task of "aligning" (in time) videos from various (different) sources so as to produce one multi-camera video? What would my options be? I asked this on youtube for a person that did exactly what I want and their answer was Sony Vegas, which I fear that does not exactly would be allowed in Debian. Any comments are welcome, thanks, and if I am successful, I will upload the final video.

The War on Time Whoosh! I ve been incredibly quiet on my blog for the last 2-3 months. It s been a crazy time but I ll catch up and explain everything over the next few entries. Firstly, I d like to get out a few details about the last Ubuntu Developer Summit that took place in Copenhagen, Denmark in October. I m usually really good at getting my blog post out by the end of UDS or a day or two after, but this time it just flew by so incredibly fast for me that I couldn t keep up. It was a bit shorter than usual at 4 days, as apposed to the usual 5. The reason I heard for that was that people commented in previous post-UDS surveys that 5 days were too long, which is especially understandable for Canonical staff who are often in sprints (away from home) for the week before the UDS as well. I think the shorter period works well, it might need a bit more fine-tuning, I think the summary session at the end wasn t that useful because, like me, there wasn t enough time for people to process the vast amount of data generated during UDS and give nice summaries on it. Overall, it was a great get-together of people who care about Ubuntu and also many areas of interest outside of Ubuntu. Copenhagen, Denmark I didn t take many photos this UDS, my camera is broken and only takes blurry pics (not my fault I swear!). So I just ended up taking a few pictures with my phone. Go tag yourself on Google+ if you were there. One of the first interesting things I saw when arriving in Copenhagen was the hotel we stayed in. The origami-like design reminded me of the design of the Quantal Quetzel logo that is used for the current stable Ubuntu release. The Road ahead for Edubuntu to 14.04 and beyond St phane previously posted about the vision we share for Edubuntu 14.04 and beyond, this was what was mostly discussed during UDS and how we ll approach those goals for the 13.04 release. This release will mostly focus on the Edubuntu Server aspect. If everything works out, you will be able to use the standard Edubuntu DVD to also install an Edubuntu Server system that will act as a Linux container host as well as an Active Directory compatible directory server using Samba 4. The catch with Samba 4 is that it doesn t have many administration tools for Linux yet. St phane has started work on a web interface for Edubuntu server that looks quite nice already. I m supposed to do some CSS work on it, but I have to say it looks really nice already, it s based on the MAAS service theme and St phane did some colour changes and fixes on it already. From the Edubuntu installer, you ll be able to choose whether this machine should act as a domain server, or whether you would like to join an existing domain. Since Edubuntu Server is highly compatible with Microsoft Active Directory, the installer will connect to it regardless of whether it s a Windows Domain or Edubuntu Domain. This should make it really easy for administrators in schools with mixed environments and where complete infrastructure migrations are planned. You will be able to connect to the same domain whether you re using Edubuntu on thin clients, desktops or tablets and everything is controllable using the Epoptes administration tool. Many people are asking whether this is planned for Ubuntu / Ubuntu Server as well, since this could be incredibly useful in other organisations who have a domain infrastructure. It s currently meant to be easily rebrandable and the aim is to have it available as a general solution for Ubuntu once all the pieces work together. Empowering Ubuntu Flavours This cycle, Ubuntu is making some changes to the release schedule. One of the biggest changes made this cycle is that the alpha and beta releases are being dropped for the main Ubunut product. This session was about establishing how much divergence and changes the Ubuntu Flavours (Ubuntu Studio, Mythbuntu, Kubuntu, Lubuntu and Edubuntu) could have from the main release cycle. Edubuntu and Kubuntu decided to be a bit more conservative and maintain the snapshot releases. For Edubuntu it has certainly helped so far in identifying and finding some early bugs and I m already glad that we did that. Mythbuntu is also a notable exception since it will now only do LTS releases. We re tempted to change Edubuntu s official policy that the LTS releases are the main releases and treat the releases in between more like technology previews for the next LTS. It s already not such a far stretch from the truth, but we ll need to properly review and communicate that at some point. Valve at UDS and Steam for Linux One of the first plenaries was from Valve where Drew Bliss talked about Steam on Linux. Steam is one of the most popular publishing and distribution systems for games and up until recently it has only been available on Windows and Mac. Valve (the company behind Steam and many popular games such as Half Life and Portal) are actively working on porting games to run natively on Linux as well. Some people have asked me what I think about it, since the system is essentially using a free software platform to promote a lot of non-free software. My views on this is pretty simple, I think it s an overwhelmingly good thing for Linux desktop adoption and it s been proven to be a good thing for people who don t even play games. Since the announcement from Valve, Nvidia has already doubled perfomance in many cases for its Linux drivers. AMD, who have been slacking on Linux support the last few years have beefed up their support drastically with the announcement of new drivers that were released earlier this month. This new collection of AMD drivers also adds support for a range of cards where the drivers were completely discontinued, giving new life to many older laptops and machines which would be destined for the dumpster otherwise. This benefits not only gamers, but everyone from an average office worker who wants snappy office suite performance and fast web browsing to designers who work with graphics, videos and computer aided design. Also, it means that many home users who prefer Linux-based systems would no longer need to dual-boot to Windows or OS X for their games. While Steam will actively be promoting non-free software, it more than makes up for that by the enablement it does for the free software eco-system. I think anyone who disagrees with that is somewhat of a purist and should be more willing to make compromises in order to make progress. Ubuntu Release Changes Last week, there was a lot of media noise stating that Ubuntu will no longer do releases and will become a rolling release except for the LTS releases. This is certainly not the case, at least not any time soon. One meme that I ve noticed increasingly over the last UDSs was that there s an increasing desire to improve the LTS releases and using the usual Ubuntu releases more and more for experimentation purposes. I think there s more and more consensus that the current 6 month cycle isn t really optimal and that there must be a better way to get Ubuntu to the masses, it s just the details of what the better way is that leaves a lot to be figured out. There s a desire between developers to provide better support (better SRUs and backports) for the LTS releases to make it easier for people to stick with it and still have access to new features and hardware support. Having less versions between LTS releases will certainly make that easier. In my opinion it will probably take at least another 2 cycles worth of looking at all the factors from different angles and getting feedback from all the stakeholders before a good plan will have formed for the future of Ubuntu releases. I m glad to see that there is so much enthusiastic discussion around this and I m eager to see how Ubuntu s releases will continue to evolve. Lightning Talks Lightning talks are a lot like punk-rock songs. When it s good, it s really, really amazingly good and fun. When it s bad, at least it will be over soon :) Unfortunately, since it s been a few months since the UDS, I can t remember all the details of the lightning talks, but one thing that I find worth mentioning is that they re not just awesome for the topic they aim to produce (for example, the one lightning talks session I attended was on the topic of Tests in your software ), but since they are more demo-like than presentation-like, you get to learn a lot of neat tricks and cool things that you didn t know before. Every few minutes someone would do something and I d hear someone say something like Awesome! I didn t know you could do that with apt-daemon! . It s fun and educational and I hope lightning talks will continue to be a tradition at future UDSs. Social Stefano Rivera (fellow MOTU, Debianista, Capetonian, Clugger) wins the prize for person I ve seen in the most countries in one year. In 2012, I saw him in Cape Town for Scaleconf, Managua during Debconf, Oakland for a previous UDS and Copenhagen for this UDS. Sometimes when I look at silly little statistics like that I realise what a great adventure the year was! Between the meet n greet, an evening of lightning talks and the closing party (which was viking themed and pretty awesome) there was just one free evening left. I used it to gather with the Debian folk who were at UDS. It was great to see how many Debian people were attending, I think we had around a dozen or so people at the dinner and there were even more who couldn t make it since they work for Canonical or Linaro and had to attend team dinners the same evening. It was as usual, great to put some more faces to names and get to know some people better. It was also great to have a UDS with many strong technical community folk present who is willing to engage in discussion. There were still a few people who felt missing but it was less than at some previous UDSs. I also discovered my face on a few puzzles! They were a *great* idea, I saw a few people come and go to work on them during the week, they seem to have acted as good menial activities for people to fix their brains when they got fried during sessions :) Overall, this was a good and punchy UDS. I ll probably not make the next one in Oakland due to many changes in my life currently taking place (although I will remotely participate), but will probably make the one later this year, especially if it s in Europe. I ll also make a point of live-blogging a bit more, it s just so hard remembering all the details a few months after the fact. Thanks to everyone who contributed their piece in making it a great week!

On Linux, network interface device naming has been somewhat chaotic: depending on a number of factors, eth0 today might not be eth0 tomorrow. For me, this has never been a problem in practice. At work, our physical servers have a bank of on-mainboard network ports, all managed by the same driver and so are assigned names predictably. For our virtual machines, the same is true: 99% of the time they have one network interface, but when they have more than one, they are of the same type and so are assigned predictably. At home, even on desktops and laptops with multiple network devices being added and removed at a time, I've never actually hit a problem where one was mis-identified. However, it must have been a problem for some people because it has been solved three times now. Sadly, these incompatible solutions cause headaches in all of my use cases. At work we have a puppet snippet that relies on knowing the interface name for a host's "primary" interface. In our case, "primary" means something like "the one the default route is over". We used to hardcode eth0 into this recipe. I don't feel too bad about that, as the puppet folks do the exact same thing in many of their scripts. This breaks for newer physical hosts where one of the three schemes are in play and the interfaces are named/numbered em1 and counting. We worked around it by parameterizing the interface name in our recipe and defining it in our nodes.pp for the troublesome hosts, but that just moves the problem around. My more permanent solution is to define a facter fact primary_interface that tells puppet what the correct interface should be. Here's my first attempt:

Facter.add("primary_interface") do
  setcode do
    ifs = Dir.new("/sys/class/net").each.to_a - \
      Dir.new("/sys/devices/virtual/net").each.to_a
      # filter out ones with no link
      ifs.reject! do  i 
        begin
          File.read("/sys/class/net/# i /carrier") != "1\n"
        rescue Errno::EINVAL
          true
        end
      end
    ifs[0]
  end
end

Of course, there is plenty of room for improvement with this solution: if ifs has more than one element at the end, a lexographic sort may prove more accurate; if there is an existing network default route up, that might be a strong clue too. It's also very Linux specific. My question though is whether this is a sensible approach in the first place?

Well, today was another day of sleeping, zoning, and having no brain for programming (and no willpower for that or exercise, which is even more frustrating), so you all get more musing about missions and work. Tomorrow, I will re-engage my normal schedule and turn the television off again, because seriously, two days of recovery should be enough even for a whole afternoon of meetings. Perhaps the best concept in the scrum methodology for agile project management is the concept of the product backlog and the product owner. For those who aren't familiar, a scrum project has, as one of its inputs, a prioritized list of stories that the team will implement. During each planning session (generally between once a week and once a month), the development team estimates and takes from the front of the product backlog the top-priority stories that can be completed during that period of time. The product owner is responsible for building the list of pending development stories based on business needs and keeping them sorted in priority order so that the work of the team follows the goals of the larger organization. But the product owner does not get to say how difficult the stories are; the development team estimates the stories, and the product owner may change order based on those estimates (to do simpler things earlier, for example). We've been doing scrum to some extent or another for quite some time now, and while there are a variety of things that I like about it, I think this is the best part. And I think it has very useful concepts for management in general. The product backlog is effectively a problem stream of the sort that I talked about in my last couple of posts. It's a set of problems that need to be solved, that matter to other people. And, if the team is doing scrum properly, the problems are presented in a form that describe a complete unit of desired functionality with its requirements and constraints, but without assuming any sort of implementation. The problem is the domain of the product owner; the solution is the domain of the development team. I am increasingly convinced that my quality of life at work, and that of many other people doing similar sorts of development and project work, would be drastically improved if managers considered this role the core of their jobs. (Ironically, at least in our initial experiences with scrum, it was quite rare for regular managers to be product owners; instead, individual line staff or project managers act as product owners. I think this speaks to how confused a lot of managers are about their roles in a technical development organization. This seems to be improving.) The core of the sort of work that I do is a combination of ongoing maintenance and solving new problems. Both of those can be viewed as a sequence of (possibly recurring) stories; I know this because that's largely how I do my own time management. Apart from HR and staffing, the core role of a manager is almost exactly what scrum calls "backlog grooming": communicating with everyone who has input into what their group is doing, finding out what their problems are, translating that into a list of things that the organization needs to have done, prioritizing them, breaking them into manageable chunks, ensuring they are fully specified and actionable (read: well-written stories), and communicating their completion back to other stakeholders (and then possibly iterating). This lept out at me when I started thinking about our larger strategic vision. That strategic vision is a sort of product backlog: a set of development stories (or, in this case, epics that would be broken down into a large number of smaller stories). But most strategic plans have glaring flaws if they're evaluated by the standards of scrum product backlogs. They're normally written as marketing statements and aimed at the clients or customers rather than at the staff. From the staff perspective, they're often hopelessly vague, not concrete, actionable epics. Often, they are almost entirely composed of grand, conceptual epics that any scrum team would immediately reject as too large and nebulous to even discuss. And often they're undefined but still scheduled: statements that the organization will definitely complete some underspecified thing within the next year or two. Scrum rightfully rejects any form of scheduling for unspecified stories and epics. Additional vagueness and sketchiness is tolerated the farther the story is from the current iteration, so they can be put into the future backlog, but scrum makes no guarantees about when they'll get done until they've been sized and you can apply a reasonable velocity estimate. If you want to put a date on something, you have to make it concrete. This is exactly the problem that I have with long-range strategic plans. We already know this about technology development: long-range strategic plans are feel-good guesses, half-truths, and lies that we tell other people because we're expected to do so, but which no one really believes. The chance that we can predict anything about the shape of projects and rate of delivery of those projects three years from now is laughable, and certainly none of the work that would be required to make real estimates has normally been done for those sorts of long-term strategic projects. There are a lot of scrum advocates who would go farther than I in asking for a complete revolution of how technical projects are planned. I'm not sure how realistic that is, or how well the whole scrum process would work when rolling up work across dozens, if not hundreds, of scrum-sized teams. But in the specific area of the role of managers in a development organization, I think we could learn a lot from this product backlog concept. Right now, there is a constant tension between managers who feel like they need to provide some sort of visionary leadership and guidance (the cult of Steve Jobs) and line staff who feel like managers don't understand enough about specific technology to lead or guide anything. But if you ask a technical developer whether, instead, it would be useful for managers to provide a well-structured, priority-ordered, and clean problem stream from the larger organization so that the developer can trust the problem stream (and not have to go talk to everyone themselves) but have control over the choice of implementation within the described constraints, I think you would find a great deal of enthusiasm. As a further bonus, scrum has a lot of advice about what that problem stream should look like. I think some of the story structuring is overblown (for example, I can't stand the story phrasing structures, the "AS A... I WANT TO... SO THAT..." shackles), but one thing it does correctly emphasize is the difference between problem and solution. The purpose of the story is to describe the outcome from the perspective of the person who will use the resulting technology. Describing the constraints on the solution, in terms of cost or integrations, is actively encouraged. Describing the implementation is verboten; it's up to the project team to choose the implementation that satisfies the constraints. If managers in general would pick up even that simple distinction, I think it would greatly improve the engagement, excitement, and joy that developers could take in their work. There's very little that's more frustrating than to be given an interesting problem in the guise of a half-designed solution and be told that one is not permitted to apply any of one's expertise in elegance, robustness, or durability to replacing the half-baked partial solution. Or even be allowed to know the actual motivating problem, instead of the half-digested form that the manager is willing to pass on.

This morning I gave a status report on SE Linux. The talk initially didn t go too well, I wasn t in the right mental state for it and I moved through the material too fast. Fortunately Casey Schaufler asked some really good questions which helped me to get back on track. The end result seemed reasonably good. Here s a summary of the things I discussed: Transaction hooks for RPM to support SE Linux operations. This supports signing packages to indicate their security status and preventing packages from overwriting other packages or executing scripts in the wrong context. There is also work to incorporate some of the features of that into dpkg for Debian. Some changes to libraries to allow faster booting. Systems with sysvinit and a HDD won t be affected but with systemd and SSD it makes a real difference. Mostly Red Hat s work. Filename transition rules to allow the initial context to be assigned based on file name were created in 2011 but are not starting to get used. When systemd is used for starting/stopping daemons some hacks such as run_init can be avoided. Fedora is making the best progress in this regard due to only supporting systemd while the support for other init systems will limit what we can do for Debian. This improves security by stopping terminal buffer insertion attacks while also improving reliability by giving the daemon the same inherited settings each time it s executed. Labelled NFS has been accepted as part of the NFSv4.2 specification. This is a big deal as labelled NFS work has been going for many years without hitting such a milestone in the past. ZFS and BTRFS support but we still need to consider management issues for such snapshot based filesystems. Filesystem snapshots have the potential to interact badly with relabelling if we don t develop code and sysadmin practices to deal with it properly. The most significant upstream focus of SE Linux development over the last year is SE Android. I hope that will result in more work on the X Access Controls for use on the desktop. During question time I also gave a 3 minute lightning talk description of SE Linux.

LCA 2013 [1] is starting so it seems like time to finish my write-up of LCA 2012. As usual it was a great conference, although I got sick immediately after getting there which reduced my ability to attend. Android A major unofficial theme of the conference was Android. Most delegates seemed to have Android phones, the Samsung Galaxy S and Galaxy Nexus seemed to be the most popular phones. Many delegates had two or more phones for development purposes. A large portion of the casual conversation at the conference concerned Android. There were a couple of really interesting talks about the Serval mesh networking project [2] which involves Android phones running in ad-hoc Wifi mode for long range communication without any official base station. Serval allows transferring messages, pictures, and voice calls. If you need to get longer range you can mount one phone in a convenient place and other phones will decide to use it as a relay there is no need to have a dedicated relay device (such as a mobile phone tower or Wifi access point). Serval is supposed to work with Wifi access points but due to Java not exposing some networking details to the higher levels of software the code that was available at the time of the conference didn t support networks other than a /24, which meant that the conference Wifi network didn t work with Serval. As an aside most people at the conference who installed Serval were using a development version that was newer than the version on the Android market. I can t remember what the extra features were though. Serval was designed for emergency situations, it can be installed on phones (and pushed to other phones via Wifi) in the field and allow communications when the infrastructure is broken. Also it s designed with some aim of circumventing censorship which among other things means that there are no facilities for tracking use. I think it would be really handy to be able to in some way track viewing of or interest in images that are transported via the mesh (maybe by something similar in concept to Google +1). Then in a crowd sourced environment people who take photos would be encouraged in their work by audience appreciation. One thing that interests me is the possibility of using Serval on a cruise ship. A cruise ship is an environment where mobile phone calls are unreasonably expensive, cabin phones aren t much use (who pays for a cruise and hangs out in their cabin?), and where there is usually a Wifi network installed. If a ship has a single bridged Wifi network that allows connecting to Wifi before authenticating for Internet access (which is probably the common case) then you could transport VOIP over that network without paying and without incurring any expense on the cruise company. One of the Serval developers assured me that this should be possible, of course a cruise ship with 3,000 passengers probably doesn t use a /24 for their Wifi so the current versions of Serval won t work At the geek my dinner event (a party where everyone brought $20 of food/drink which was cooked by volunteers) an artist showed me some art work that she created on her Samsung Galaxy Note (which was the biggest phone on sale at the time), it was very impressive. She recommended Picasso Mirror Draw, Sketch Free, Sketch Book Mobile Express, and Freenote as free graphical programs for Android. Samsung has a Noteworthy Project advertising campaign based on the artistic uses of the Galaxy Note which has some good videos of artists [3]. Chris Neugebauer and Paris Buttfield-Addison gave an informative and amusing talk about Android UI development (this link has the video) [4]. It s a pity that I missed seeing that one live but fortunately the video is of high quality. Accommodation As I ve become interested in Sociology I couldn t help but notice the pictures that accompanied the rules about cleaning the dormitory (which were displayed over the kitchen sink), it seems to imply that cleaning is only women s work. I wonder whether the people who created that poster deliberately chose pictures of women or whether they just chose the first available pictures from a collection of stock photos. Someone who was near my dorm room seemed to not realise how their alarm impacts other people. For the first two mornings I was woken repeatedly after 6AM by someone who was pressing the snooze button on their alarm. When sleeping in close proximity to other people the reasonable options involve some combination of having no loud alarm, immediately turning the alarm off and getting up (not pressing snooze to have it go off repeatedly), and setting the alarm for a time when almost everyone wants to get up (EG 1 hour before the first session). Networking Chris Neugebauer organised the Unprofessional Delegates Networking Session which was a great event. It was an event held at the same time as the Professional Delegates Networking Session with the difference being that you had to pay $5 for food and there was no free drink. A lot of great people attended the UPDNS so I m glad I don t pay for the PDNS. It seems that we won t have a UPDNS this year unfortunately. Conclusion LCA is always great fun and very educational. I recommend attending every year.

• [1] http://www.linux.conf.au/
• [2] http://developer.servalproject.org/site/
• [3] http://noteworthyproject.com/
• [4] http://chris.neugebauer.id.au/2012/01/25/lca2012-android-is-not-vi-user-experience-for-geeks/

We had our tech leads retreat on Friday, including the discussion about "why," and I thought it was excellent, although I'm still trying to understand some parts of it. Part of why I'm still working on that is, well, you know that introversion thing? I had five and a half hours of meetings on Friday, and the tail end was an intense four and a half hour retreat, during which I was a major participant the whole time. And tried to say some difficult and intense things, both about the "why" conversation that I posted about and about why the tail end of last year was particularly difficult for me. All that went very well. I was very happy with the overall meeting. Sometimes, I half-convince myself that I'm overstating the degree that introversion or that interpersonal interaction affects me, or that I'm using it as an excuse to duck out of things that aren't really what I want to be working on. Then I do something like this, and find myself completely dead on my feet at the end of the meeting. Not physically tired, but utterly and completely drained. I went home and did something completely right-brain and creative and needed that so desperately that I stayed with it until two in the morning, slept in today until past noon, and still have, despite a couple of minor attempts, absolutely no capability to write code or focus on accomplishing anything. I'm fairly sure I'll still be feeling the after-effects on Monday and Tuesday. I'm a little annoyed at having both missed a day of releasing something to the world (I'd managed to post something every day this year until yesterday) and blowing off exercising yesterday evening for only the second time this year. But I think part of coming to terms with what introversion means is being kind to myself about this. That's something Cain talked a lot about in her book, and it's the advice I'd give to any other introvert, but it's something I'm not applying as well as I could. Being an introvert doesn't mean to not do meetings. It means to pick the ones that are important, do them with all your heart, and then be kind to yourself afterwards just as if you'd put in extreme effort to do something quite energetic and difficult. Because you have. So, I'm trying not to be annoyed at myself. And I think we need to be better about teaching people about this, because apart from Susan Cain, I don't remember many people writing about this, or understanding it. Occasionally there are screeds against meetings, but not a lot of discussion about when it's worth expending the energy, and about how to be kind to oneself and recharge after putting one's energy into the social interactions that are important. I did want to mention that while retreats seem to have a bad reputation in tech circles (and I've heard of a lot of retreats that I would hate), the ones that we do in our group are great. We spent about an hour talking about the things I posted about on Thursday, then a couple of hours talking about the larger organizational roadmap and searching out things that aren't on our upcoming work roadmap that feel like large missing pieces, and then a couple of hours identifying and enumerating our technical debt and deciding what major pieces of technical debt we're going to tackle in the next six months. It's a lot of concrete, specific discussion of what we're going to spend time on and what we're going to defend resources for by pushing back against other priorities. If I had to sum it up in a sentence, I'd say that these retreats are all about listing vaguely equal things that exceed our total capacity and making the decisions about which of them we're going to do and which of them we're not going to do so that we don't have to keep wasting time on revisiting unresolved decisions. The actual mission discussion turned into a discussion by each of us of what we most value in work, stated in terms very similar to what I used in my post, and that was wonderful. I found out things about my co-workers that I didn't know, and which will help me a great deal in improving their enjoyment of their work. I think we came away with a better idea of how to support each other in creating that engagement and excitement, and I think that's the best possible outcome. Since, like I said, I think that's the only real mission statement a group should have. We did, still, talk about having a mission statement anyway. Apparently having a shared statement is really important to people who aren't me. I'm still struggling with this, since it doesn't make sense to me and doesn't feel useful to me. But maybe it's a sort of validation and confirmation that we're allowed to focus on what we care about? But the group mission statement we came away with isn't about any specific technology and focuses on exactly the things that I care about: elegance, robustness, durability, and solving whatever problems the university has. As part of that discussion, we reached a surprising and really satisfying unanimity of opinion about what values we care deeply about. It's a value statement as opposed to a distillation of job descriptions, so if a mission statement is valuable for other people, that's one I'm quite happy with. Even if I don't understand why people want to have one. I'm less satisfied with the roadmap and strategic plan for our larger organization, but I'm starting to realize that's because I'm utterly not the target audience and it's not going to engage or interest me. It's more of a marketing statement that's focused externally, and my proper role in that is to try to help ensure that it reflects the enthusiasms and engagement of the line staff, not to try to turn it into a document that will be inspiring for the line staff. Which ties into what I was writing about previously: in my ideal world, these sorts of focuses flow upwards from the people who will be doing the work, not downward from a high-level manager deciding on an inspirational direction.

After this announcement about the future of GNOME in Debian, I received several requests to look at SolusOS and their Consort fork of GNOME. On the paper, this doesn t look like a too bad idea, since they only forked gnome-panel and metacity, the two key components that are no longer maintained upstream. Still, starting a plain fork at the very moment when the former maintainer decided to give the key to anyone who wanted to, looked like a very destructive way of acting. Even if the fork gains momentum (which remains speculative), the amount of effort to rename packages makes you think twice before such a switch. I decided to go talk about it with them on IRC nevertheless. Mind you, they work on a GNOME fork and a Debian derivative, but deliberately use their own IRC server (you ll soon understand why). Just in case you would want to cooperate with SolusOS, you d have to use their infrastructure. It is an euphemism to say that the conversation didn t go well. This could have ended there, but thankfully for your already widening eyes, Ikey (the charming person I had the opportunity to discuss with) made the log public, in an attempt at public shaming that would soon gather his followers, chanting out loud how the revolutionary SolusOS would quickly replace every other Linux distribution. (As a side note, of the hundreds of such claims that were made public in the last 10 years, only one came true, and it was from a billionnaire who hired dozens of developers. Just saying.) Then you can understand why the specific IRC server: it is to K-line people who don t behave with enough deference to Ikey, because kickban is not enough. This log and the claims made in the comments look very ironical, if only for presenting a person working in a team of 10+ on the most popular desktop on one of the most popular desktop distributions, as a beggar. Even more ironical when it is the person who spent the most time on making GNOME Classic available and working nicely for wheezy. So when a dozen kids go chanting that Consort is so much better than GNOME and will replace it, while it just re-does the work I already did, let me at least smile. So what is SolusOS, after all? If you want to see where this story is going, there s a place that tells you: the consortium and consort-panel repositories. Here you will find interesting things:

• the work started from a tarball, instead of forking the git repositories (just in case you wanted to pull some of their patches);
• there is only one active contributor, who happens to be the founder of SolusOS, and the same person who K-lines people on his IRC channel;
• he seems to commits stuff randomly, without any cleanup, and with a lot of 4-letter words;
• most commits are here to rename everything to the Consort brand;
• even in debian/changelog, he retroactively renamed every mention of the former package names;
• some changes were made prior to creating the repository, so they are completely lost in history;
• among those changes I noted the reversion of a GNOME 3.0 change, which is to require Alt+right-click to edit a panel (and anyone who thinks this is a bug has never had to manage a help desk where disappearing notification areas were in the Top 5 incidents);
• nevermind the change was done in a hackish way and even mentions that in a comment, while the upstream commit is still available in git history;
• this also includes committing directly Debian-specific patches without a further look at why they hadn t been pushed upstream.
• For example, he pushed the menus renaming, which is a very Debuntu-specific stuff which will yield empty menus on other distributions.
• Or a bugfix that will only build with Debian s modified libwnck.

I ve stopped looking there. We re facing an ego issue, but not something that can improve the desktop for our users. In the end, I m sorry for those who genuinely thought we could do better by sharing some maintenance load with SolusOS, but it doesn t look like a big loss anyway.

My 1Tb laptop drive started misbehaving a few weeks ago, just spending a lot of time spinning when it should have been reading frequently changed files (like the browser cache). I was tempted to blame the browser at that point as no other packages appeared affected.

Wednesday night, a routine package upgrade on unstable brought in a bunch of qt4 updates which I wanted and a virtual box update that I didn't see much point in delaying ... 15 minutes later I couldn't work out why the virtualbox dkms task was still running, spotted it spinning in depmod and found some alarming messages in dmesg about short reads and errors reading from the hard drive. Hmm. The hard drive was out of control at this point, it quickly became apparent that no disc access was going to be possible and I couldn't get to a terminal to kill the current tasks, so I killed the power. The fsck which followed reboot showed more of the errors I'd seen in dmesg and fell back to the manual intervention stage. A few hours of confirming attempts to fix the errors, fsck finally finished. A short amount of usage showed that although fsck had finished, the drive was not happy and was starting to give short reads on other parts of the filesystem, resulting in ~40% of the filesystem appearing to be read-only when the rest was read-write. Somehow, I didn't think this was a welcome feature as the areas affected appeared to be quite random.

The drive in question was a replacement for the original 300Gb drive supplied with the ThinkPad, so a quick bit of switching of drives into a caddy and I could rsync my data off the large drive onto the smaller one. The rsync itself took a lot longer than it should have done because it got lots of short reads too. (Principally in /lib/modules/3.2.0-4/ and in the browser cache directories which had been the original symptom as well as most other places where one could have expected processes to have open files when the drive failed).

Now the 1Tb drive was a pig to fit into the Thinkpad originally because it was too big for the bay but I fitted it anyway. Yes, that was probably a mistake. It certainly meant that in order to fit it I had to not put the drive into the useful caddy provided by Lenovo which makes removal of the drive simple. Indeed the drive was wedged into the bay so tightly that it wasn't going to come out with normal levels of persuasion. This probably contributed to the failure of the drive, so live and learn.

With help from Andy Simpkins (it's always handy to have a hardware engineer on hand at times like this), the keyboard was lifted out, the case was dismantled and just enough room was made to get a screwdriver in behind the sata drive and lever it out of the bay. OK, rebuild laptop, put replacement drive into the caddy (because the smaller capacity drive is also a lot smaller in height than the 1Tb and therefore has plenty of clearance between it and the bay) and move on to the software recovery stage.

Hint: if this happens again, before turning off the broken system for the last time, just remember to download a recent Debian ISO to a USB stick - it saves having to ask someone else or find another machine to do the download. (Thanks Andy...)

OK, so after the usual complaints on reboot that there was no operating system, F12 got the boot order menu up and I was in Debian Installer Rescue Mode. Reinstalling grub failed initially for a few reasons:

1. 
   I'd deliberately not copied /dev /proc and /sys from the old harddrive but I'd also forgotten to create empty ones on the new drive...
2. /etc/fstab helpfully referred to / as a UUID which no longer applied, so that had to be edited
3. grub was confused and couldn't find the root filesystem

A few iterations later, I had a working /dev directory inside the /target chroot, bind mounted from the /dev outside the chroot, I was able to mount proc and sys, so grub was finally happy to reinstall itself and then update the initramfs setup for the new drive.

Reboot, another fsck, all appeared well. I was able to login via the terminal but not in X. Hmmm. Stop xdm, startx manually from the terminal, problems with /tmp/ - permission denied. Oops. Yes, it does help to create /tmp with the right permissions....

The final stage was to complete the dpkg --configure -a from the original failure. I've yet to reinstall the 3.2.0-4 kernel, so I'm back on 3.2.0-3 but that's OK.

So now I'm back on the original drive, albeit temporarily without any swap whatsoever (because I didn't partition the replacement drive to create /dev/sda5 before doing the copy) and now I remember the second reason I wanted to replace the original drive with the 1Tb drive - the original drive is as NOISY as hell. The whole edge of the laptop vibrates constantly, to the point that I can feel the vibration under the keys as I type. It's not that the drive is loose in the bay, it's just a constant vibration.

But, I have kept all my data and I have a usable laptop for the BSP this weekend. I will be looking at an SSD drive to replace this one though and having also found my old Acer laptop with power supply, I can now reference this entry when I transfer the system a second time.

(This is going to be long and rambling. Hopefully at some point I'll be able to distill it into something shorter.) In preparation for a tech leads retreat tomorrow, several of us at work were asked to watch Simon Sinek's TED talk, "How great leaders inspire action". I'll be honest with you: I hated this talk. Sinek lost me right at the start by portraying his idea as the point of commonality among great leaders (don't get me started on survivorship bias; it's a pet peeve) and then compounded the presentation problem with some dubious biology about brain structure. So, after watching it, I ranted a bit about how much I disliked it (to, as it turns out, people who had gotten a lot out of it). (Don't do this, btw. It's nearly always worthwhile to suppress negativity about something someone else enjoyed. I say this to increase the pool of people who can remind me of what I said the next time I forget. Which, if my normal pattern holds, will be about five minutes from now.) Thankfully, I work with tolerant and forgiving people who kindly pointed out the things they saw in the video that I missed, and we ended up having a really good hour and a half discussion, which convinced me that there's an idea under here that's worth talking about. It also helped clarify for me just how much I hate the conventional construction of both leadership and success. This talk is framed around getting other people to do things, which is one of the reasons why I had such a negative reaction to it. It's right there in the title: leaders inspiring action. This feeds into what at least in the United States is an endemic belief that the world consists of leaders and followers, and that the key to success in the world (in business, in politics, in everything else) is to become one of the leaders and accumulate followers (most frequently as customers, since we have a capitalist obsession). This is then defined as success. I think this idea of success is bullshit. Now, that statement requires an immediate qualification. Saying that the societal definition of success is bullshit is a statement from privilege. I have the luxury of saying that because I am successful; I'm in a position where I have a lot of control over my own job, I'm not struggling to make ends meet, and I can spend my time pondering existential questions like how to define success. If I were a little less lucky, success would be whatever put food on the table and kept a roof over my head. I'm making an argument from the top of Maslow's hierarchy. But that is, in a roundabout way, my point: why is defining and constructing success still so hard, and why do we do such a bad job at it, even when we're at the top of the pyramid and able to focus on self-actualization? The context of this talk for my group is pre-work for a discussion about, in Sinek's construction, the "why?" of our group. Why are we here, what is our purpose, and what do we care about? By the mere fact that we are able to ask questions like that, you can correctly surmise that we're already successful. The question, therefore, is what should we do with that success? I normally hear one or more of the following answers, all of which I find unsatisfying or problematic.

• Do more of the things that made us successful. This is useful in that not being successful sucks, so one does want to do some amount of maintenance, but it's also profoundly unsatisfying to me personally. What's the point in being successful if one can't use that success to do something more interesting, exciting, or fulfilling? It feels like an argument from fear: the most important thing to do with success is to ensure that one stays successful.
• Use that power to change the world. Now, I want to be very careful here: there are some people who embrace this approach to success and do, in fact, change the world for the better. I would never want to say that this is a bad choice in general. But the problem I personally have with this approach is that the failure rate for changing the world is quite high. You are probably not going to change the world. That doesn't mean don't try; sometimes you do, and when it happens, it's awesome. But the way my mind works argues against setting this as an explicit goal for me. Setting explicit goals that I fail at messes me up: I care too much about not failing and then I burn out. It works better for me psychologically to treat this as a possibility and a side effect of another goal.
• Teach other people how to be successful. Full points for altruism. But let's face it: most of being successful is basically luck, and there's that survivorship bias problem again. It's occasionally possible to do some actual scientific studies and figure out what leads to success, but most of the time you'll instead make up good-sounding stories about things that you believe strongly in and present them as your method for achieving success. I'm sure they're great stories, and they're probably quite inspiring. But they also probably don't have much to do with why you're successful.

So, what should I do with success? Or, put another way, since I have the luxury of figuring out a "why?", what's my "why?" This question comes at a good time. As I've mentioned the last couple of days here, I've just come off of two days of the most fun I've had at work in the last several years. I spent about 25 hours total building a log parsing infrastructure that I'm quite fond of, and which may even be useful to other people. And I did that in response to a rather prosaic request: produce a report of user agents by authenticated unique users, rather than by hits, so that we can get an idea of what percentage of our community uses different devices or browsers. This was a problem that I probably could have solved adequately enough for the original request in four hours, maybe less, and then moved on to something else. I spent six times that long on it. That's something I can do because I'm successful: that's the sort of luxury you get when you can define how you want to do your job. So, apparently I have an answer to my question staring me in my face: what I do with success, when I have it, is use that leeway to produce elegant and comprehensive solutions to problems in a way that fully engages me, makes the problem more interesting, and constructs infrastructure that I can reuse for other problems. Huh. That sounds like a "why?" response that's quite common among hackers and software developers. Nothing earth-shattering there... except why is that so rare in a business context? Why isn't it common to answer questions like "what is our group mission statement" with answers like that? This is what I missed in the TED talk, and what the subsequent discussion with my co-workers brought to light for me. I think Sinek was getting at this, but I think he buried the lede. The "why?" should be something that excites you. Something that you're passionate about. Something that you believe in. He says that's because other people will then believe in it too and will buy it from you. I personally don't care about (or, to be honest, have active antipathy towards) that particular outcome, but that's fine; that's not the point. The point is that a "why?" comes from the heart, from something that actually matters, and it creates a motivating and limiting principle. It defines both what you want to do and what you don't want to do. That gives me a personal answer. My "why?" is that I want to build elegant solutions to problems and do work that I find engaging and can be proud of afterwards. I automate common tasks not because I particularly care about being efficient, but because manually doing common tasks is mind-numbing and boring, and I don't like being bored. I write reliable systems not particularly because that helps clients, but primarily because reliable software is more elegant and beautiful and unreliable software offends me. (Being more usable and frustrating for clients is also good; don't get me wrong. It's just not a motive. It's an outcome.) What does that mean for a group mission statement, a group "why?" Usually these exercises produce some sort of distillation of the collective job responsibilities of the people in the group. Our mission is to maintain core infrastructure to let people do their work and to support authentication and authorization services for the university, yadda yadda yadda... this is all true, in its way, but it's also boring. One can work oneself up to caring about things like that, but it requires a lot of effort. But we all have individual "why?" answers, and I bet they look more like my answer than they do like traditional mission statements. If we're in a place where we have the luxury of worrying about self-actualization questions, what gets us up in the morning, what makes it exciting to go into work, is probably some variation on doing interesting and engaging work. But it's probably a different variation for everyone in the group. For example, as you can see from above, I like building things. My happiest moments are when someone gives me a clearly-defined problem statement that fills a real need and then goes away and leaves me in peace to solve it. One thing I've learned is that I'm not very good at coming up with the problem statements myself; I can do it, but usually I end up solving some problem that isn't very important to other people. I love it when my employer can hand me real problems that will make the world better for people, since often they're a lot more interesting (and meaningful) than the problems I come up with on my own. But that's all highly idiosyncratic and is not going to be shared by everyone in my group. I'm an introvert; the "leave me alone" part of that is important. Other people are extroverts; what gets them up in the morning is, in part, engaging with other people. Some people care passionately about UI design. (I also care passionately about UI design, but the UI designs that I'm passionate about are the ones that are natural for my people, who are apparently aliens from another galaxy, so I'm not the person you want doing UI design for things used by humans.) Others might be particularly interested in researching new technology, or coming up with those problem statements, or in smoothly-running production systems, or in metrics and reporting... I don't really know, but I do know that there's no one answer that fits everyone. Which means that none of our individual "why?" responses should become the group "why?". However, I think that leads to an answer, and it's the answer I'm going to advocate for in the meeting tomorrow. I believe the "why?" of our team should be to use the leeway, trust, and credibility that we have because we're successful to try to create an environment in which every individual member of the team can follow their own "why?" responses. In other words, I think the mission of our group should not be about any specific technology, or about any specific set of services, or outcomes. The way we should use our success is to let every member of our team work in a way that lights their fire. That makes them excited to come into work. That lets each of us have as much fun as I had in the past two days. We should have as our goal to create passionate and empowered employees. Nothing more, but nothing less. This is totally not how group mission statements are done. They're always about blending in to some larger overall technological purpose. But I think that's a mistake, and (despite disliking the presentation), I think that's what this TED talk does actually get at. The purpose is the what, or sometimes the how. It's not the why. And the why isn't static; technology is changing fast, and people are using technology in different ways. Any mission statement around technology today is going to be obsolete in short order, and is going to be too narrow. But I think the flip side is that good technological solutions to the problems of the larger organization are outcomes that fall out of having passionate and inspired employees. If people can work in ways that engage and excite them, they will end up solving problems. We're all adults; we know that we're paid to do a job and that job needs to involve solving real problems for the larger organization. All of that is obvious, and therefore none of that belongs in a mission statement. A mission statement should state the inobvious. And while some visionary people can come up with mission statements around technology or around how people use technology that can be a rallying point for a team or organization, I think that's much rarer than people like to think it is. If you stumble across one like that, great, but I think most teams, and certainly our team, would be better served by having the team mission statement be to enable every individual on the team to be passionate about their work. What should our group work on next? Figure out what the university's problems are, line those needs up with the passions of the members of the team, ask the people most excited about each problem how they want to solve that problem, and write down the answers. There's our roadmap and our strategy, all rolled into one.

For some time I ve been wondering how the wire size for power supplies limits the power. So I ve done some quick calculations to determine if it s a problem. The first type that is of interest are the Inverters that are used to convert 12VDC to 240VAC (mains power) to allow electric devices to be operated in a car. I ve seen some reports from dissatisfied user about Inverters not supplying as much power as expected and I ve had problems with my 150W Inverter not always supplying my Thinkpad (which definitely doesn t draw 150W). The second type is phone chargers as charging a phone in a reasonable amount of time is always a problem. Inverter Rating Fine Print vs Laptop PSU My Thinkpad Power Supply claims Efficiency Level IV which according to the US EPA document describing the efficiency marking protocol for external power supplies [1] means that it is at least 85% efficient when supplying 50W+. The peak output of the PSU is 4.5A at 20V which is 90W peak output, 90/0.85 == 106W power drawn. One would hope that wouldn t be a problem from a 150W PSU. But the fine print on the PSU says that it can provide 110W continuously and 150W for 10 minutes. So according to my calculations I m within 4W of overloading the PSU if my Thinkpad uses full power. It also says that it is designed for 13.8V input. I have no idea how the performance of the Inverter changes as the supply Voltage changes between the 12.6V that a 6 cell lead-acid battery is designed to provide and the 13.8V charge from the car alternator. But I have had occasions when my Inverter stopped working correctly presumably due to being unable to supply as much current as my Thinkpad draws. As an aside I measured the Voltage in my car (with the engine off) at 12.85V from the cigarette lighter socket and 13.02V directly from the battery. I wonder if there is some sort of overload protection on the cigarette lighter which has a side effect of reducing the Voltage. Resistance in wires reduces the Voltage, but all Voltage meters are designed to have a high resistance to prevent that from being an issue. If anyone has an explanation for the 0.17Volt drop then please write a comment! Can a Car Provide 130W from the Cigarette Lighter socket? If the Inverter is also 85% efficient (and it might be less as it has no indication of efficiency on the box) then when supplying 110W it would draw 110/0.85 == 129.4W (I ll round it up to 130W). The power in Watts is equal to the Voltage multiplied by the current in Amps (W=V*I). Therefore I=W/V so if the car battery was at 12.85V then 130W/12.85V == 10.12A will flow. The current that goes through a circuit is equal to the Voltage divided by the resistance (see the Wikipedia page on Ohm s law for more information). This also means that the resistance equals the Voltage divided by the current. 12.85V/10.12A == 1.27 Ohms. Note that this is the resistance of the entire circuit, all the wires going to the battery, the circuitry inside the Inverter, and the internal resistance of the battery. The Inverter s cable is 1M long (2 meters of wire) and each wire is about 3.5mm in diameter including the insulation which means that the copper wire is probably equivalent to a single core conductor that is about 1mm in diameter. According to one of the online guides to resistance [2] wire that is 1.02mm in diameter will have a resistance of 0.02 Ohms per meter which gives a resistance of 0.04 Ohms. 0.04 Ohms is 3% of the total resistance of the circuit which doesn t seem like it will be a real problem. In practice I ve noticed that the connector gets extremely hot when it s in use while the cable doesn t get warm enough to notice. I suspect that the quality of the connector limits the power that is available but I don t have an easy way of measuring this. Inverters that are rated at 300W are designed to attach directly to the battery. An Inverter that is rated at 300W would draw 300W/0.85 == 352W from the battery. That needs 352W/13.02V == 27.04A and therefore a circuit resistance of 13.02V/27.04A == 0.48 Ohms total resistance. I wonder whether dirt on the battery terminals would give a significant portion of that. Phone Charging I ve also been wondering about why mobile phones take so long to charge, and now I ve finally done the calculations. The latest standard for mobile phones is to use USB for charging. The Wikipedia page about USB says that the standard is for USB 2.0 to supply up to 500mA at 5V +-5%. That means 0.5A*5V == 2.5W +- 5%. If we assume that the internal power supply in a phone is also 85% efficient then that means 2.5*0.85 == 2.125W going to the battery. My Samsung Galaxy S3 has a battery which is rated at 7.98Wh. According to the Wikipedia page about Lithium Ion batteries the charge/discharge efficiency is 80% to 90% I ll assume that it s 85% for further calculations. If the battery in the phone is 85% efficient and the phone is doing nothing but charging then the charge time for a regular USB port would be 7.98Wh/0.85/2.125W == 4.42 hours (4 hours 25 minutes) of charge time. That probably means something closer to 5 hours to totally charge the phone while it s running. There are dedicated charging ports for USB which can supply up to 1.5A. The 3rd party charger which came with my phone was rated at 1A and would hopefully be capable of completely charging the phone in less than 3 hours (but in practice isn t). It s interesting to note that MacBooks expose the amount of current drawn from a USB port with a GUI, so it should be possible to measure a phone charge rate by connecting it to a MacBook (which is cheaper than cutting up a phone cable). My old Samsung Galaxy S has a battery which is rated at 5.55Wh, by the same calculations it would take slightly more than 3 hours to charge on a standard USB port or 1.5 hours on my newest USB charger. In practice it has never got anywhere close to that, I presume that the phone is designed to draw less than 500mA. Phone Cable Resistance The charger that came with my Galaxy S has a cable that is about 1.75M long, the cable is flat and measures just over 1mm thick and about 2mm wide. Presumably the wire is equivalent to a single core that s about 0.4mm in diameter thus giving it a resistance of about 0.134 Ohm per meter, or 1.75*2*0.134 == 0.469 Ohm for the cable. The charger is rated at 0.7A. To supply 0.7A at 5V the resistance would be 5V/0.7A == 7.143 Ohm so about 6.6% of the total resistance of the circuit would be in the wire from the charger to the phone. The charger that came with my Galaxy S3 has a round cable that s just over 3mm thick and about 90cm long. If each wire in the cable is equivalent to a solid wire that is 0.912mm in diameter then it would be 0.0264 Ohm per meter of wire or 0.9*2*0.0264 == 0.0475 Ohm. The total circuit resistance would be 5V/1A == 5 Ohm. So 0.0475 Ohm is less than 1% of the circuit resistance. Voltage Drop The Voltage across a part of a circuit is proportional to the resistance (see the Wikipedia page on Series and Parallel Circuits for a good explanation). Basically this means that if 1% of the resistance of a circuit is in the wire then 1% of the Voltage drop will also be in the wire, so if we have a 5V supply with my Galaxy S3 cable then each of the two wires in the cable will have a difference of about 0.025V between the ends and the phone will receive a supply of 4.95V, the difference isn t something that is worth worrying about. But the cable from my Galaxy S has a resistance equivalent to 6.6% of the circuit resistance which means that the theoretical charge time will be 6% longer than it might be or 6% more current will be drawn from the mains than should be needed. Conclusion The charger that came with my Samsung Galaxy S isn t much good. Wasting 6.6% of the power in the wire is unreasonable. Phones keep getting more power hungry and batteries keep getting larger. There are third party phone batteries and external batteries that are charged by USB which have more than twice the capacity of the stock phone batteries this means more than twice the charge time. This problem will keep getting worse. The problem of a phone in active use drawing more power than the charger can provide (and running out of battery while on the charger) seems likely to stay with us. So while an Android phone has the potential to be a great little embedded server it seems that hacking the power supply is going to be a required first step for realising that potential. The decision to make 5V the USB power standard was reasonable at the time as it was the voltage used for most things on the motherboard. The decision to use USB as the phone charging standard was also reasonable, it allows phones to be charged anywhere. The combination of those two decisions isn t good for the user. If a higher Voltage such as 12V was used then 5* the power could be supplied through the same wires at the same level of efficiency. It would be really good if cars came with built in Inverters and supplied 240VAC or 110VAC depending on the region they were manufactured for. It s becoming a fairly common feature to have a cigarette lighter port in the car boot as well as at least two ports inside the car. When a car has three sockets and only one device to actually light cigarettes (which I suspect is only provided to fill an empty socket) it s very obvious that people want to connect random devices. Also having USB charging ports inside the car would be a really good idea (one for each seat would be good for Ingress).

• [1] http://tinyurl.com/cd6jpcv
• [2] http://www.daycounter.com/Calculators/AWG.phtml