Terah has been having thyroid troubles for some time now (you can read about it on her blog). Today was the day for it to be removed. This procedure is somewhat delicate. Running through each half of the thyroid are nerves that control the vocal chords. Also embedded in each half are tiny parathyroids, which regulate the body s calcium levels. Losing either of these things in one half of the thyroid is no big deal, but losing either of them entirely can be serious. For this reason, the general plan was for Terah to have half of her thyroid out, unless it was obvious in surgery that it would be a health risk to leave the other half in, or that it was obvious that the removal of the first half had successfully preserved the nerves and parathyroids. Jacob and Oliver spent the night with my parents last night an event that Jacob was incredibly excited about. I came home last night to find him running in circles in the kitchen. I had this conversation with him: Me: Jacob, are you excited about something? Jacob: Yes! Me: What are you excited about? Jacob: I don t know. (He usually says this when he doesn t want to say, but I figured it was his pending overnight stay) .. a minute later .. Jacob: I am excited about something blue. Me: [genuinely confused] Hmmm . I don t know what blue thing you might be excited about. Can you tell me? Jacob: A blue house! Me: Oh, is it grandma and grandpa s blue house? Jacob: YEAH! Now you ve got it! I m so excited! He was still running in circles the whole time. So Jacob and Oliver left, and Terah and I worked on the house. This morning, we arrived at the hospital at 6:15 to check in. At usual, the staff there was incredibly friendly and helpful. And two of them made connections: one of the intake nurses had taught at the college where my dad works, and another nurse knows his cousin. Living where we do, we were not surprised by this. (You sort of wonder how many connections you ll make at a place like this.) The surgery area is right next to the ER, and people waiting for people in surgery normally wait there. Having got my fill of the TV playing infomercials for the morning in the 5 minutes we sat there, I arranged to wait in the cafeteria (which is large and quiet in the middle of the morning) and they just called my cell phone when Terah was done. I was with Terah for as long as possible, then ate breakfast in the cafeteria, walked over to the doctor s office next door for my weekly allergy shots, and then waited with my Kindle in the cafeteria. They called, and a little while later the surgeon explained how the surgery went: far easier than they had expected. He was confident the left side surgery went well, and so took out the whole thing and was confident the right side removal also went well. I went to wait in Terah s room for her to exit recovery, and our pastor and his daughter showed up to wait too. When she arrived, she was very tired but said a few words before going to sleep. Our pastor gave the two of us a minute before coming in, and read a selection from Psalm 139 before leaving. I then mostly waited with my Kindle some more until she woke up. I brought back some lunch from the cafeteria, and eventually Terah woke up. We chatted just a bit (it was mostly me talking). I went to pick up the boys, and brought them to the hospital. They were glad to see her. But then, the dilemma: I had promised Jacob that we would eat in the hospital restaurant , but it was only 4 and they didn t start serving supper until 5. Jacob somehow remembered that we went exploring in the hospital when Oliver was born 11 months ago, and had been talking about doing this already. So off we went: Jacob sometimes helping me push Oliver s stroller, sometimes running on ahead, enjoying himself and spelling out letters on big signs on the walls. We got a whole bunch of smiles and compliments. Oliver was laughing, and Jacob was happy and well-behaved. We went towards the cafeteria at 4:30 and I got Jacob some of their free lemonade. He was complaining about not eating, and I remembered that he noticed a nurse walking out of there with an ice cream cone while we were exploring. Obviously the soft-serve machine was already up, so I got him and me ice cream cones. I m sure he ll be talking about the hospital ice cream for days. Anyhow, it took him about half an hour to eat it, so it was perfect timing for supper. We ate, went back to see Terah, and then headed out. I do believe that these may be the only two boys I know of that actually think of a hospital as a fun place to go. It wouldn t surprise me at all if Jacob asks to go back there. Both boys fell asleep on the way home. Jacob, unfortunately, had a rather significant accident, possibly due to the large amounts of free lemonade he insisted on drinking. And it was hot outside. So I carried Jacob in, and he sort of groggily looked at me. I suggested he take a nap on the rug in the kitchen (his room is upstairs) while I bring Oliver in. He sort of collapsed onto the rug and was back asleep a few seconds later. I got Oliver in, and brought down new shorts and an overnight pullup for Jacob. Put them on, had him use the toilet, and got him in bed. By that time, Oliver was awake and hungry. So I got him fed, and neither one of them quite went to sleep easily but they did. I watered the flowers and garden, did a load of laundry, etc. Jacob had been worried about the surgery, though had trouble verbalizing it. I think he s better about it now, though some of his trouble falling asleep tonight was probably still worry about that. Hopefully he ll be better once Terah is back home, which should hopefully be tomorrow.

"Today is the greatest day I've ever known," this is the line that is spinning around today in my head because of many little things that happened. And it's this time of the month anyway for putting up another band feature into this little blog of mine. So here they are, one of the great bands of the nineties, and like many of them, back after a break again: The Smashing Pumpkins, and these are their featured songs:

• Today: The song with the initial mentioned catchphrase. Unfortunately not the official video because in those versions the music is strangely broken. If you want to match it yourself, you can still watch it here: Today (true video, broken music)
• Disarm: From the same great album, and one of their songs that gives me goosebumps.
• Bullet With Butterfly Wings: Another of their great songs and videos for which they are known.

Hope you enjoy this small distraction once a month. I hope I can keep up with it, it's not a question of material, there are too many great bands out there that I'd like to share with others. :)

Actually they're more interested in freedom, to be no longer slaves to humans. I don't think it's any spoiler to mention that an electric sheep does appear in the book.

This is a classic science fiction story of a dark not-so-distant future. In fact given that it's over 40 years old it could be set in some alternate now. Some disaster has occurred and many have either left earth or died. Some andriods, or andys have escaped and bounty hunters are after them.

You may not know the book by its correct title, but you may of heard the movie that is based upon it, called Blade Runner. Like most movies based on books, it takes some of the concepts and ideas of the book but in my opinion is a pale imitation.

I'm glad I read this book. It hasn't aged that much and it's very though provoking. Sci-Fi often uses some alternate reality to put a mirror up to what happens in the real world and this book is no exception.

And a token link to Debian, if you want you own electric sheep you can install the screensaver electricsheep package which draw pretty fractals on your screen.

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Having invested in some introspection into my reading habits, I made up my mind to dial down my consumption of bite-sized nuggets of online information, and finish a few books. That s where my bottleneck has been for the past year or so. Not in selecting books, not in acquiring books, and not in starting books either. I identify promising books, I buy them, I start reading them, and at some point, I put them down and never pick them back up again. Until now. Over the weekend, I finished two books. I started reading both in 2009, and they each required my sustained attention for a period measured in hours in order to finish them. Taking a tip from Dustin, I decided to try alternating between fiction and non-fiction. Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins This was the first book I had read by Tom Robbins, and I am in no hurry to read any more. It certainly wasn t without merit: its themes were clever and artfully interwoven, and the prose elicited a silent chuckle now and again. It was mainly the characters which failed to earn my devotion. They spoke and behaved in ways I found awkward at best, and problematic at worst. Race, gender, sexuality and culture each endured some abuse on the wrong end of a pervasive white male heteronormative American gaze. I really wanted to like Priscilla, who showed early promise as a smart, self-reliant individual, whose haplessness was balanced by a strong will and sense of adventure. Unfortunately, by the later chapters, she was revealed as yet another vacant vessel yearning to be filled by a man. She s even the steward of a symbolic, nearly empty perfume bottle throughout the book. Yes, really. Managing Humans by Michael Lopp Of the books I ve read on management, this one is perhaps the most outrageously reductionist. Many management books are like this, to a degree. They take the impossibly complex problem domain of getting people to work together, break it down into manageable problems with tidy labels, and prescribe methods for solving them (which are hopefully appropriate for at least some of the reader s circumstances). Managing Humans takes this approach to a new level, drawing neat boxes around such gestalts as companies, roles, teams and people, and assigning them Proper Nouns. Many of these bear a similarity to concepts which have been defined, used and tested elsewhere, such as psychological types, but the text makes no effort to link them to his own. Despite being a self-described collection of tales , it s structured like a textbook, ostensibly imparting nuggets of managerial wisdom acquired through lessons learned in the Real World (so pay attention!). However, as far as I can tell, the author s experience is limited to a string of companies of a very specific type: Silicon Valley software startups in the dot com era. Lopp (also known as Rands) does have substantial insight into this problem domain, though, and does an entertaining job of illustrating the patterns which have worked for him. If you can disregard the oracular tone, grit your teeth through the gender stereotyping, and add an implicit preface that this is (sometimes highly) context-sensitive advice, this book can be appreciated for what it actually is: a coherent, witty and thorough exposition of how one particular manager does their job. I got some good ideas out of this book, and would recommend it to someone working in certain circumstances, but as with Robbins, I m not planning to track down further work by the same author.

(This is partly a repost of material I've posted to bug reports and to debian-release, put together with some more detail for a wider audience.) You could be forgiven for looking at the RC bug activity on grub2 over the last couple of days and thinking that it's all gone to hell in a handbasket with recent uploads. In fact, aside from an interesting case which turned out to be due to botched handling of the GRUB Legacy to GRUB 2 chainloading setup (which prompted me to fix three other RC bugs along the way), all the recent problems people have been having have been duplicates of one of these bugs which have existed essentially forever:

• #554790 - grub-pc/install_devices uses unstable device names
• #583271 - device.map uses unstable device names

When GRUB boots, its boot sector first loads its "core image", which is usually embedded in the gap between the boot sector and the first partition on the same disk as the boot sector. This core image then figures out where to find /boot/grub, and loads grub.cfg from it as well as more GRUB modules. The thing that tends to go wrong here is that the core image must be from the same version of GRUB as any modules it loads. /boot/grub/*.mod are updated only by grub-install, so this normally works OK. However, for various reasons (deliberate or accidental) some people install GRUB to multiple disks. In this case, grub-install might update /boot/grub/*.mod along with the core image on one disk, but your BIOS might actually be booting from a different disk. The effect of this will be that you'll have an old core image and new modules, which will probably blow up in any number of possible ways. Quite often, this problem lies dormant for a while because GRUB happens not to change in a way that causes incompatibility between the core image and modules, but then we get massive spikes of bug reports any time the interface does change. Since these bugs sometimes bite people upgrading from testing to unstable, they get interpreted as regressions from the version in testing even though that isn't strictly true (but it tends not to be very productive to argue this line; after all, people's computers suddenly don't boot!). Any problem that causes the core image to be installed to a disk other than the one actually being booted from, or not to be installed at all, will show up this way sooner or later. On 2010-06-10, there was a substantial upstream change to the handling of list iterators (to reduce core image size and make code clearer and faster) which introduced an incompatibility between old core images and newer modules. This caused a bunch of dormant problems to flare up again, and so there was a flood of reports of booting problems with 1.98+20100614-1 and newer, often described as "the unaligned pointer bug" due to how it happened to manifest this time round. In previous cases, GRUB reported undefined symbols on boot, but it's all essentially the same problem even though there are different symptoms. The confusing bit when handling bug reports is that not only are there different symptoms with the same cause, but there are also multiple causes for the same symptom! This takes a certain amount of untangling, especially when lots of people have thought "ooh, that bug looks a bit like mine" and jumped in with their own comments. Working through this was a worthwhile exercise, as it came up with an entirely new cause for a problem I thought was fairly well-understood (thanks to debugging assistance from Sedat Dilek). If you had set up GRUB 2 to be automatically chainloaded from GRUB Legacy (which happens automatically on upgrade from the latter to the former), never got round to running upgrade-from-grub-legacy once you confirmed it worked, and then later ran grub-install by hand for one reason or another, then the core image you installed by hand would never be updated and would eventually fall over the next time the core/modules interface changed. Fixing future cases of this was easy enough, but fixing existing cases involved figuring out how to detect whether an installed GRUB boot sector came from GRUB Legacy or GRUB 2, which isn't as easy as you might think. Fortunately, it turns out that there are a limited number of jump offsets that have ever been used in the second byte of the boot sector, and none of the GRUB 2 values clash with the only value ever used in GRUB Legacy; so, if you still have /boot/grub/stage2 et al on upgrade, we scan all disks for a GRUB 2 boot sector, and if we find one then we offer to complete the upgrade to GRUB 2. Unless anything new shows up, that just leaves the problems that were already understood. Today, I posted a patch to generate stable device names in device.map by default. If this is accepted, then we can do something or other to fix up device.map on upgrade, switch over to /dev/disk/by-id names in grub-pc/install_devices at the same time, and that should take care of the vast majority of this kind of upgrade bug. I think at that point it should be feasible to get a new version into testing, and we should be down from 18 RC bugs towards the end of last month to around 6. We can then start attacking things like the lack of support for mdadm 1.x metadata. Since my last blog entry on GRUB 2, improvements have included:

• Substantial work on info grub, with, among other things, new sections on /etc/default/grub and on configuring authentication.
• A workaround for GRUB's inability to probe dm-crypt devices, thanks to Marc Haber.
• Several build fixes for architectures I wasn't testing, and a fix for broken nested partition handling on Debian GNU/kFreeBSD. I'm now testing GNU/kFreeBSD locally.
• Rather less cruft in fs.lst, partmap.lst, and video.lst, which should speed up booting a bit by e.g. avoiding unnecessary filesystem probing.
• upgrade-from-grub-legacy actually now installs GRUB 2 to the boot sector (!).
• Ask for confirmation if grub-pc/install_devices is left empty.

The next upstream snapshot will bring several improvements to EFI video support, mainly thanks to Vladimir Serbinenko. I've been working on making grub-install actually work on UEFI systems as one of my goals for the next Ubuntu release, and I hope to get this landed in the not-too-distant future.

again, a short overview regarding my RC bug activities:

• #462810 liballegro4.2: "liballegro4.2: alsa plugin doesn't work with many sound cards"
  apply patch from BTS and upload to DELAYED/2
• #535260 libdbd-oracle-perl: "Does not work anymore with instantclient 11.1"
  upload new upstream release prepared by JuNix (pkg-perl)
• #573078 gtkvncviewer: "Doesn't start without gnome-keyring"
  add missing dependency and upload to DELAYED/2
• #576463 pulseaudio: "pulseaudio: Support tmpfs /var/run"
  investigate and add a comment to the BTS
• #578458 src:libcoro-perl: "libcoro-perl: FTBFS: E: Caught signal 'Terminated': terminating immediately"
  more trial-and-error "debugging" (pkg-perl)
• #581552 vtun: "vtun: want ipv6 support"
  apply patch from BTS and upload to DELAYED/2 (later downgraded to wishlist but I left the NMU with maintainer's permission)
• #583072 libgnupg-perl: "libgnupg-perl: Hangs on test"
  fix unrelated packaging problem and upload the patched package (pkg-perl)
• #583463 src:libmoosex-types-structured-perl: "libmoosex-types-structured-perl: FTBFS: tests failed"
  upload new upstream release prepared by Ansgar (pkg-perl)
• #583985 upse: "upse: FTBFS against audacious 2.3"
  grab patch from Ubuntu and upload to DELAYED/2
• #584377 src:libtest-valgrind-perl: "libtest-valgrind-perl: FTBFS: tests failed"
  add comment to the BTS and tag (pkg-perl)
• #584391 src:libdbix-class-perl: "libdbix-class-perl: FTBFS: tests failed"
  upload new upstream release prepared by Ansgar (pkg-perl)
• #584910 ftp.debian.org: "RM: libgtk2-sexy-perl -- ROM; obsolete, no rdeps"
  RM (pkg-perl)
• #585468 jifty: "jifty: license of */share/web/static/js/json.js is considered non-free"
  replace non-free json.js with a free alternative (pkg-perl)
• #585744 zoneminder: "zoneminder: FBTFS (sid cowbuilder chroot, i386)"
  file new FTBFS bug

How to have a (Debian) summit without turning into a secret cabal It seems rather uncontroversial that sponsoring various kinds of Debian meetings (conferences, sprints, BSPs, etc.) is a good way to spend, actually invest, Debian money. Historically, that has not always saved the Debian community from muttering about "cabal-ish" meetings in very few specific occasions. (No, there is no cabal, in case you wonder.) I've always believed in the good faith of people and I don't think that we have ever had "secret meetings" on purpose. Nevertheless the question of how to have meetings in a community-compatible way is a sound one. Answering properly to such a question is something that it's harder than what it might seem at first sight (at least for me). In particular, organizers have to carefully balance the high efficiency that meetings offer (e.g.: communication bandwidth is higher than when working remotely, people have less distractions, more enthusiasm, more fun!, etc.) with the risk of cutting out the rest of the community which cannot attend the meeting, for whatever reason. Note also that since Debian is not a company, we cannot just require that everybody who is interested attend the meeting. As DPL, I'm starting to get quite some requests for meeting sponsorship, and that's just wonderful: it means that we have thrilling groups of people that are eager to get together and hack to improve Debian! Still, in doing so, we should all try to minimize the above risk; that's why I've started to apply the following Debian meeting guidelines, as a kind of prerequisite for sponsoring.

1. Before the meeting: the meeting should be announced to the most relevant public mailing list(s); ideally, the tentative agenda of the meeting should be included in the announcement.
   That will enable people interested in the meeting topics to provide their inputs and more generally to know what is going on.
2. During the meeting (preparation): expenses should be minimized, as a form of respect for all people that donate to Debian. Since we value their contributions, we do our best not to waste them. (TTBOMK, we've always done that, but making it explicit won't hurt.)
3. After the meeting: meeting minutes should be sent to the most relevant public mailing list(s), usually to d-d-a for meetings that cover topics of general development interest.
   As an obvious consequence, minutes should be taken during the meeting; it is a bit of extra burden, but the risk of leaving the rest of the community in the dark is just not acceptable a community as wide and diverse as ours.
4. In general, think about communication, e.g.: (micro)blog about the meeting, contact press/-publicity to prepare a news item about it, enable others to attend virtually on IRC or other media, etc.

For now, the above is just a brain dump.
Now, what do you think? Are the above reasonable demands? What else should we ask for?
Feel free to leave a comment or mail me about that.

Well the latest version of PSmisc is almost finished, so I pushed the tar archive up to the spot for the translators, waiting for the updates before it gets released.

It reminded me that perhaps a lot of people don't know how their programs get translated. Perhaps there are some that could even contribute. The nice thing about the translation systems is that you don't need to know programming to help.

PSmisc uses the translation project as its method. The program itself uses gettext for the translation part which makes a single text file called a POT file. A translator takes this text file and makes a po file, such as it.po for the Italian translation and then translates, which basically means editing the file, reading each first line of a set and writing the translation on the second line.

For the programmer, once it is setup it is pretty simple to use, just mark your translatable lines and follow some simple rules, mainly about not embedding too much in a string. I've used this system for years for quite a few of my programs and there is little added work for me.

Unfortunately, translating is hard work and should be a long-term commitment. Having a look at the translation project's Translation Matrix and you can see that some languages do suffer, though there are some very good results there too. Particular kudos goes to the Vietnamese group which I think is just Clytie who does a marvellous job and is often the first translation file I get.

For the Debian project, there are many places where translations can occur. There doesn't seem to be a centralised place for this, but some of the places they use translation work are:

• Translating The Debian website
• Debian Description Translation Project
• Debian debconf (configuration questions when you install packages)
• Translating Debian News

We ain't dead. A long time has passed since I last wrote on this topic, and much happened unfortunately (for this effort) in other areas. This doesn't mean that this effort is being abandoned. So here is the next big step: A gitweb theme using Kalle's proposal. I enabled it on my own gitweb installation so that people can see it live and test it. Feel free to clone it from there, too. Enjoy!

Recently, I started to write some web tool to track the status of ongoing transitions in unstable. I thought I could use some code from the Buildd status project (to see how it fetches the status for each package). Unfortunately, this caused some nightmares for some WB admin (because they used to rely on the generated BDB files and not the PGSql database, where the former is a snapshot of the latter stored in a funny format). Those BDB files were considered deprecated and status pages were looking for some love. Besides, the BDB files were kept in sync by regenerating them regularly (every 15 minutes, AFAIK). So, the information stored there was up-to-date only for a couple of seconds and then outdated, waiting for the next run to be updated. Last weekend, I rewrote the status pages from scratch to make them use the PGSql database. I kept the same user interface (and pages arguments) to make it a drop-in replacement for the old one. Today, thanks to the WB admins, the new status pages replaced the old ones! There are no new visible features for now (except the backend and some links) but I have a list of new features that I intend to implement. These new features will be implemented in my local copy first and then integrated if WB admins want them. And, as some of you already noticed, the new status pages are aware of non-free packages (because it happens that the data is present in the PGSql database thank WB admins for that!).

I have been recently approached by several friends, from different countries. Mexico and the violence seems to be a frequent news topic all over the world. I live in Mexico City, as ~25% of the country's population does. This is not an easy city, of course, and I won't deny it has tons of problems of its own. However, Mexico City (and even more so the approximately of it that is politically located in Distrito Federal, the formal country capital) is very lucky in this regard. Still, in most of the country, the violence is mostly in the news, mostly a worrying perception that is every day more insistent. My parents live in Cuernavaca, Morelos, ~80Km south from us. Morelos has been known for decades for being the druglords' getaway and safe haven, so it remained a mostly peaceful state for most of this time. This has changed, and at some points during this year, militarization feels quite creepy... Fortunately, just for a couple of weeks, and then back to what seems like normal. The real problems in Morelos is the undeniable corruption of its successive governments, the lack of regard for the population, the inexistent urban planning... However, I know from several friends living in the North of the country (and all along the very long border - The most drug-related violent states nowadays are Chihuahua, Durango, Sinaloa, Tamaulipas and Nuevo Le n, with only two states in the South Michoac n and Guerrero) that violence is really felt by local population on the streets. Some friends say they have grown used to hearing shootings (Durango), others say that it is now usual that the cartels openly strangle the city's vial system with the express purpose of showing off their strength (Monterrey, Nuevo Le n, one of Mexico's most important cities and taken in the past as a token of industrialization and first-world-like life conditions... Just don't look towards the poor areas). About Chihuahua, I'd rather not even talk, as by all accounts (official even) it rivals Iraq in the lack of control the government has of its territory. Still, with all that as background... I am afraid of what I read today in the news. I know a single declaration is not enough to worry about (as said in El Quijote, una golondrina sola no hace verano , a single swallow does not mean it's summer), but those things always start small... Until they explode. La Jornada reports that The retired general Luis Garfias Maga a recommends suspending constitutional guarantees in the country to be able to properly fight violence. The last century we had a sad and long history of cases where the military took over civilian power and suspended the constitutional rights in basically every nation in Latin America Except for Mexico. Not one of those cases was overall successful. Not one of them went by without raging abuses, without terrible consequences. I don't see imminent we will go over to a military rule nor anything close to it, but the environment is getting each time closer to how it was like before said rights suspension. We should learn that it is just not the way, it leads nowhere. I am convinced, and will keep insisting on it at every ocassion, that the only possible way to fight violence is by reducing the social distance, and that should be achieved most importantly by reducing poverty, but also by making it harder to become incredibly rich. Mexico's percentage of poor people has grown over the last decades, but at the same time, the amount of wealth concentrated in very few hands has grown much faster. A society with terribly rich and terribly poor people leads to hatred, leads to desperation, leads to violence. A flatter society, even if the overall standard was to be somewhat lower, tends to a better equilibrium. And yes, I know the original problem with drugs is that Mexico is a great transit area for drugs to reach the USA (and I could also rant about drug legalization I won't, it's late and I must go to work), but the main fuel for young people to leave everything behind and take the risk of starting a life of open ilegality is the lack of future they face all life long. That leads many to risk their lives attempting to cross the border to the USA (Mexico "exports" 500,000 people every year), but also lures them to jobs where they will have easy money... In exchange for their lifes, ultimately. Anyway... Just to repeat and round off: The answer to this problem is not repression, is not policial or military strength. Our only way out is through social justice.

People s the deadline is fast approaching. Don t worry though, the best ideas come under deadlines and your proposal need not be lengthy. So get those typing hands out and submit a proposal (a few sentences suffices) for a presentation!
The annual Debian conference is being held in NYC this year. First time
setting foot in the imperial empire. Are you doing something related to
free software that might be interesting to share, show off or talk about
at Debconf? I bet you are! We are looking for art installations,
performances, movie screenings, maybe you are wanting to host a
roundtable/panel discussion, coordinate a workshop (you dont have to
know the subject deeply to do this!). I know the deadline is soon, but don t let that scare you. The
submission requirement bar is very low, and we are flexible! here is the submission information: [1] ********************* Calling all potential contributors to DebConf10! One more week until
the final submission deadline! The DebConf team is excited to announce that we are now accepting
proposals for contributions to this year s Debian conference! We
invite you to submit proposals for how you would contribute until the
deadline: soon There are many ways you can contribute, you could present a technical
paper, host a panel discussion, put on a tutorial, do a performance,
an art installation, a debate, host a meeting (BoFS, or Birds of a
Feather Session), or other possibilities that you devise. This year we
are also accepting proposals for tracks=E2=80=94a thematic grouping around a
particular subject, and people to coordinate those tracks. If you are
looking for ideas of things that you could contribute, or have ideas
for things that you would like to see happen at DebConf, have a look
at the Contribution Brainstorm[0] page. DebConf talks will be broadcast live on the Internet where possible,
unless otherwise requested. Videos of the talks will be published on
the web along with the presentation slides and papers. =3D=3D Step 1. Submit Proposal =3D=3D Proposals should provide an overview of your proposed contribution,
similar to an abstract, and be no more than 600 words. Since
contributions can cover a range of issues, please describe what your
proposal covers, be it political (Free Software, law, advocacy,
access, etc.), technical (d-i, OpenPGP, etc.), social (Debian
structures and groups). It s okay to hit all three of these. Your
proposal should also include some information on why you re qualified
to present, or coordinate this topic. For example, you can include
links to posts you have made to Debian mailing lists or other material
that indicates your qualifications. Proposals and their abstracts will
be accepted until May 1st, 2010, 23h59 UTC. To submit your proposal, go to Penta[1] and register as an
attendee. Once you are registered, there is a Submit a proposal
link. You will see your proposal on the site. You can choose between
different presentation types. If you are unsure what type you should
use, please read our glossary of definitions[2]. If it s not there for
some reason, or you have questions, please contact us immediately at
mailto:talks@debconf.org. =3D=3D Step 2. Committee Review =3D=3D The review committee for this year will make its decision by May 1st,
2010. All correspondence will be done by email. =3D=3D Step 3. Paper Submission =3D=3D Like last year, we are asking for papers to be submitted along with
the presentations. A full paper is optional, however we strongly
encourage you to submit one if possible as we intend to provide
written information along with transcripts of the sessions for later
viewing. Having written papers in advance will allow us to get
translations done to help non-native-English speakers feel more
comfortable with the topics presented. Papers are due by July 1st,
2010, and should cover the topic in reasonable depth (3 pages A4 text,
plus pictures and diagrams). We will use LaTeX to typeset the
proceedings. Please submit your paper formatted in LaTeX. Should you
be unfamiliar with LaTeX earlier submission in plain text is also
fine. =3D=3D Step 4. Live Presentation =3D=3D Longer presentations may have a break in the middle and should include
workshop items that directly involve the participants. If using slides
or any other presentation, please consider that your audience will
consist of people who use free software, and your choice of
application to prepare and display the slides should reflect this if
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DebConf Talks Team [1] introduction written by Micah Anderson

Something I've wanted to do for a while now, is somehow combine my blog with all of my projects/git repositories, and now I've done it! Welcome to my new site :) So, I got bored a few nights ago, and started trying to find some kind of project management type system to host my git repositories in. After searching for a while I stumbled across Gitorious. I'd heard of Gitorious before, but I'd never really looked at it, nor did I know that it's codebase was infact completely open. So I thought I'd give it a try to see what it was like Now I have to admit, my first impressions of it weren't exactly great. Firstly, it uses Ruby, which I can't say I'm much of a fan of (but that's a different discussion :p), nor am I a fan of installing all of the 'packages' it needed, via gem. Deploying it is an absolute nightmare, it has 4 different daemons, all of which have hideous init scripts that don't really work properly, and low and behold you try and put the git repositories and the site itself under different users, figuring out what needs to run as what and what needs what permissions is very much a game of trial and error. In Gitorious' defence, there /are/ numerous guide lurking around on the internet explaining how to do these things. But once I'd got over these niggles, and had actually deployed it, it worked quite nicely, and really did exactly what I wanted, so I decided to stick with it. It then occurred to me that it probably wouldn't be too hard to stick a blog onto it, after all, it's written using Rails, which is supposed to be easy, right? So with no knowledge of Ruby, let alone Rails, I got stuck in. Fortunately, it turns out Rails is in fact pretty easy to use, (at least once you've got used to it implicitly doing everything behind the scenes..), I'm even starting to think I prefer it to Django... So there we have it, a brand new site, and one that looks considerably better than my old one.. even if it is just Gitorious in disguise _ The only thing I'm disappointed Gitorious doesn't have, is some kind of bug tracker, but then, I'm not sure I'd use one given most of my projects just go through Debian.

Well, it s been some time since I last wrote here and things are quite hectic, due to some real-life happenings. Announcement For those people that are insterested in a small PDF viewer, based on an actively maintained backend, and that doesn t bring your computer to a halt when you try to zoom your documents when you need to see some details, then you might want to give this version of xpdf a try. I already received some reports for some bugs and fixed them, with one of them being a problem related by a kind user of Gentoo. Motivation Some people have asked me why this even needs to exist in the first place and I agree that it would be better if it didn t: I would love to spend my time actually using my computers rather than fixing my computers for better tasks (read: studying Mathematics, etc). The upstream maintainer of xpdf uses it as one source of income and keeps it running across many system (even legacy ones). I imagine that this one of the reasons why he tries to keep xpdf almost self contained, with many parts that could be delegated to other libraries, and with some abstraction code that makes the code compile even in the presence of very broken compilers. Of course, this means, in part, that as long as you take more duties, maintaing the code becomes more and more complex. He told me that he doesn t offer an open development tree because he wants to give his customers some advantages over the public version and his reasons are perfectly justifiable, of course. He also manifested the interest of possibly basing xpdf on a more modern toolkit and, when I asked him what that would be, he mentioned that, perhaps, it would be Qt. The development of xpdf will, quite probably, take newer directions. Unfortunately, xpdf has not seen a new upstream release since 2007-02-27. It did, though, have some patchlevel updates released. Taking care of the maintainance of the code is a high concern for distributions. Some people, though, would like to keep it simple (me included). Unfortunately, some efforts to maintain it had not had the necessary coordination and duplication of effort has occured. Proposal I am willing to become a patch aggregator for the code in xpdf with a poppler backend. I would love to give it some refactoring too, drop some of the legacy code that is not used (and only serves to make the code hard to read), and adopt some good coding style standard (I particularly like the one from the Linux Kernel with the proper adaptations for C++). I have already contacted the people at Gentoo, and I would love to get people from Fedora, Ubuntu, and Suse involved also. Alas, the last time I tried to mail their mailing lists, I got messages telling me that my messages were rejected or waiting for moderation, because I was not a subscriber. I never heard back, since. I appreciate it if you could help spread the word. Thanks.

I am, by nature, a tinkerer. I love to build things to see how they will work or because I have an idea that I think is fun. I am not so much of a natural business guy. I go build something "because it's there". Or rather, it's there in my mind, and I want to make it. I earn money, however, via consulting work. There are problems with this line of business though, namely that it doesn't scale very well unless, besides being good at a skill, you've also got the skills to build up a consulting business, which is very much about adding and managing people, something I'm not all that passionate about and would rather avoid. So what happens is that you go through slumps with less than full capacity, and then things pick up again, and before you know it, you hit your upper limit and can't take on any new work, putting a ceiling over your potential earnings. Sure, you can raise prices a bit, but that'll only get you so far. For a while now, I've been considering this problem, and I think some sort of product would be an ideal way out. Stories like Balsamiq's are inspirational, and along the lines of what I think might be nice. Don't get me wrong, I like my clients and like to help people solve problems a lot, but it's a stressful job in that you're never very far from having no income. I'm not much of an entrepreneur, though, in the sense of someone with a nose for making money. I tend to think about building something cool first, and not really worrying about making money with it. Predictably, some of the sites I have created are popular, but don't make any money. Sure, they have some ads, but that doesn't really make much unless you get really huge page views or have some sort of content that attracts users who will click on very lucrative advertisements. I've started to think that perhaps I should constrain myself in new initiatives to creating things that have a direct source of revenue: you want to use it, you pay. In my daydream world, I'd probably just hack on open source all day long, but there's no money in that for someone like me who is not the author of some huge, famous piece of software, nor a particularly great hacker in any case (I've met some, like Andrew Tridgell, and it's a really humbling experience). So that brings up the question of what to do with the aforementioned sites. One option would be to sell them off via a site like flippa.com, another would be simply to just let them sit there and stew, but they do take up some resources on my server, and require some maintainance now and then, and they're a bit of a distraction too (I start wondering about things to add or how to fiddle with them). Maybe there's a way to make money from some of them, but I'm too blind to see it. The ones I'm thinking about, are, in no particular order:

• http://langpop.com - this one gets decent traffic, but programmers are about the best people in the world at ignoring advertisements.
• http://leenooks.com - the Linux Incompatibility List attempts to point out hardware that people should avoid if they intend to run Linux on their computers. Happily, there is less need for this site than when I conceived of it some 10+ years ago, but I think it's still a helpful resource.
• http://linuxsi.com - (in Italian) this one is a place that highlights stores and consultants who are "Linux friendly". Want to buy a computer with Linux? There's probably a store near you. I have had fun with this site, but, once again, no revenue.
• http://squeezedbooks.com - "open source" business book summaries and discussion. There are plenty of competitors in this space who make their money by churning out summaries and charging for access for them. I had hoped to build a community interested in reviewing and discussing books out in the open. There is a lot of fluff in business books, mostly because you can't sell a 10 page book that describes your idea, but need to pad it out with lots of examples and repitition and so on to make an actual book out of it, but that doesn't mean the idea at the heart of the book in question isn't an interesting or new one.

In the past few days, I ve been playing with icegrind, a little valgrind plugin that Taras Glek wrote to investigate how Firefox startup spends its time in libxul.so reading/initialization, mostly. I invite you to check out his various posts on the subject, it s an interesting read. After some fiddling with the original icegrind patch in the bug linked above, I got some better understanding on the binary initialization phase (more on that in another post), as we could call it, and hit some problems due to problems in icegrind and elflog. The latest version of the icegrind patch as of writing solved my main problem half way (though it needs further modifications to work properly, see below). What icegrind actually does is to track memory accesses in mmap()ed memory. When the program being profiled mmap()s a file, icegrind looks for a corresponding sections file next to it (e.g. libxul.so.sections for libxul.so ). The sections file contains offsets, sizes, and sections names, that will be used by icegrind to report the accesses. Whenever the profiled program makes memory accesses (whether it is for instructions or data) within the mmap()ed range, icegrind will add the corresponding section name in a log file (e.g. libxul.so.log for libxul.so ). Please note it will only do so for the first access in the given section. To generate section information for ELF files, Taras also hacked an elflog program that scans an ELF binary (program or library) and will output sections for symbols present in its symtab. This means the binary needs not to be stripped, though the full fledged debugging symbols are not needed. It outputs the sections names in a form that would be reusable in a linker script after a build with the -ffunction-sections and -fdata-sections compiler options, but that s mostly irrelevant when what you are after is only to see what is going on, not to reorder the sections at link time. There are glitches in the way elflog works that makes the section names for .bss symbols wrong (they will start with .symtab, .shstrtab, .comment, etc. instead of .bss). Also, technically, the .bss section is not mapped from the file. Note icegrind has rough edges, is still experimental, and isn t very user friendly, as in unix permissions, because its input and output files need to be next to the file being mmap()ed, and when that is a library in /usr/lib, well, you need write access there ; or you need to copy the library in a different directory and adjust LD_LIBRARY_PATH. Anyways, it s already useful as it currently is. If you want to play with it yourself, here are steps that worked well for me:

• svn co svn://svn.valgrind.org/valgrind/trunk valgrind -r 11100
  When I first tried icegrind, valgrind trunk was broken ; revision 11100 is known to work properly, at least for icegrind.
• cd valgrind
• wget -O - -q https://bug549749.bugzilla.mozilla.org/attachment.cgi?id=449748 patch -p0
  You need to open icegrind/ice_main.c, go on the last line of the track_mmap function and replace mmaps with dest_mmaps.
• mkdir icegrind/tests ; touch icegrind/tests/Makefile.am
  The valgrind build system is a bit lunatic.
• libtoolize ; aclocal ; automake --add-missing ; autoreconf
• ./configure; make
• wget http://hg.mozilla.org/users/tglek_mozilla.com/startup/raw-file/6453ad2a7906/elflog.cpp
• g++ -o elflog elflog.cpp -lelf
  You will need the libelf-dev package.
• make install ; install -m 755 elflog /usr/local/bin
  as root, to install in /usr/local.

Once you re done with this setup, you are ready to start playing:

• elflog --contents libxul.so > libxul.so.sections
  Be aware that if libxul.so is a symbolic link pointing to a file in another directory, as it happens in the dist/bin directory in mozilla builds, the sections file needs to be in that other directory.
• LD_LIBRARY_PATH=. valgrind --tool=icegrind ./firefox-bin -P my-profile -no-remote about:blank

Obviously, you don t have to play around with Firefox. You can try with other libraries, or even programs. You ll see in a subsequent post, however, that to get more interesting information, the elflog output is unfortunately not enough.

I just read an interesting article about the dispute between Microsoft and Apple about types of PC [1]. Steve Jobs predicted a switch from desktop PCs to portable devices, while Steve Ballmer of Microsoft claimed that the iPad is just a new PC. Defining a PC I think that the defining characteristic of the IBM Compatible PC was it s open architecture. Right from the start the PC could have it s hardware expanded by adding new circuit boards into slots on the motherboard (similar to other PC systems of that era such as the Apple 2 and the S-100 bus). The deal with IBM included Intel sharing all it s CPU designs with other manufacturers such as NEC and AMD from the 8086 until the mid-90 s. AMD specialised in chips that were close copies of Intel chips at low prices and higher clock rates while NEC added new instructions. Compaq started the PC clone market as well as the laptop market, and system software for the IBM compatible PCs was primarily available from IBM and Microsoft in the early days, along with less popular variants such as CP/M86, Novell Netware and others. In the late 80 s there was OS/2 as an alternate OS and Windows as one of several optional GUI environments to run on top of MS-DOS or PC-DOS. In the mid 90 s PCs were used for running protected mode OSs such as Linux and Windows/NT. Now if we look at a system such as a Netbook then it clearly misses some of the defining characteristics of the desktop PC. I can t upgrade a Netbook in any meaningful way changing a storage device or adding more RAM does not compare to adding an ISA/MCA/EISA/VL-Bus/PCI/PCIe expansion card. With my EeePC 701 I don t even have an option of replacing the storage as it is soldered to the motherboard! A laptop allows me to add a PCMCIA or PC-Card device to expand it, but with a maximum of two cards and a high price this isn t a great option. What is Best for Home Users? For a while now my parents have been using 3G net access for their home Internet use [2]. So it seems that a laptop provides greater benefits for their use now than it previously did when they used Cable and ADSL net access. My parents have been considering getting a new monitor (1920*1080 resolution monitors are getting insanely cheap nowadays) and driving such a monitor effectively might require a more capable PC. I recently bought myself a nice refurbished Thinkpad for $796 [3], it seems likely that I could find a refurbished Thinkpad at auction which is a little older and slower for a lower price, even buying an old T41p would be a reasonable option. This would give my parents not only the option of using the Internet when on holidays, but also in a different part of their house when they are at home. The Apple iPad would probably be quite a reasonable Internet platform for my parents if it wasn t for the fact that it uses DRM. While it s not a great platform for writing, my parents probably don t do enough that it would be a huge problem for them. So I might look for a less restrictive tablet platform for my parents. At the moment the best resolution for a tablet seems to be 1024*768, but I expect that some tablets (maybe with a hybrid tablet/laptop design like the Always Innovating Smartbook [4]) with a higher resolution will be released soon. I hope that the iPad and other closed devices don t get any serious market share, but it seems likely that OSs such as Android which are only slightly more open will have a significant market share. Ultra-Mobile Design vs PCs Design One significant problem with ultra-mobile devices is that they make significant engineering trade-offs to get the small size. For a desktop system there are lots of ways of doing things inefficiently, running the AMD64 or i386 architecture which is wasteful of energy and having lots of unused space inside the box in case you decide to upgrade it. But for a laptop there are few opportunities for being inefficient, and for a tablet or smart phone everything has to be optimised. When the optimisation of a device starts by choosing a CPU that s unlike most other systems (note that there is a significant range of ARM CPUs that are not fully compatible with each other) it makes it very difficult to produce free software to run it. I can salvage a desktop PC from a rubbish bin and run Linux on it (and I ve done that many times), but I wouldn t even bother trying to run Linux on an old mobile phone. It seems that in the near future my parents (and many other people with similar needs) will be best suited by having a limited device such as a tablet that stores all data on the Internet and not having anything that greatly resembles a PC. In many ways it would be easier for me to support my parents by storing their data in the cloud and then automatically backing it up to removable SATA disks than with my current situation of supporting a fully capable PC and backing it up to a USB device whenever I visit them. I m also considering what to do for some relatives who are about to go on a holiday in Europe, they want to be able to send email etc. It might not be possible just yet, but it seems like an ideal way of doing this would be to provide them with something like an iPad that they can use with a local 3G SIM for the country that they stay in and they could then upload all their best photos to some server that I can backup and send email to everyone they know. An iPad isn t good for this now as you don t want to go on holidays in another country while carrying something that is really desirable to thieves. Ultra Mobile Devices are Killing PCs It seems to me that Google Android and the Apple iPad/iPhone OS are taking over significant parts of the PC market. The people who are doing traditional PC things are increasingly using Laptops and Netbooks, and the number of people who get the freedom that a PC user did in the 80 s and 90 s is decreasing rapidly. I predict that by 2012 the majority of Linux systems will be running Google Android on hardware that doesn t easily allow upgrading to more open software. At the moment probably the majority of Linux systems are wireless routers and other embedded devices that people don t generally think about. But when iPad type devices running a locked-down Linux installation start replacing Ubuntu and Fedora desktop systems people will take notice. I don t think that the death of the PC platform as we know it will kill Linux, but it certainly won t do us any good. If there were smarter people at Microsoft then they would be trying to work with the Linux community on developing innovative new ways of using desktop PCs. Of all the attempts that Microsoft has made to leave the PC platform the only success has been the X-Box which is apparently doing well. Tablet devices such as the iPad could work really well in a corporate environment (where MS makes most of it s money). On many occasions I ve been in a meeting and we had to adjourn due to someone needing to go to their desk to look something up. If everyone had an iPad type device at their desk that used a wired network when it was available and encrypted wireless otherwise then for a meeting everyone could take their tablet without it s keyboard and be able to consult all the usual sources of data without any interruption. Could a high-resolution version of the iPad kill MS-Windows in the corporate environment?

• [1] http://www.theage.com.au/digital-life/tablets/the-ipad-is-just-a-pc-ballmer-to-jobs-20100604-xioj.html
• [2] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2010/02/03/3g-broadband-for-home-use/
• [3] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2010/02/15/new-thinkpad-lenovo-web-site-sucks/
• [4] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2010/01/11/always-innovating/

Left: British Petroleum's logo. British Petroleum gained international notoriety last April because of the catastrophic oil spill it is still unable to contain in the North of the Gulf of Mexico; so far, the oil has reached the coasts of Louisiana and Mississippi, and keeps growing and spreading, as probably the worst-ever oil spill. So far, the sea surface covered by oil is larger than several countries in the world. Some sites have very interesting maps that might help understand the importance and size of the spill: BP Gulf Oil Spill Maps in The Daily Green, Deepwater Horizon Incident, Office of Response and Restoration, USA National Ocean Service, Article on Slashdot about quantifying and dealing with the deepwater spill. Right: Mexico's de facto government's logo. One of the most pushed projects of Felipe Calder n's government (that was fortunately canceled) was to pursue the tesorito de las aguas profundas (little treasure that lies deep in the water); they strongly pushed for a reform in the oil legislation, which is 100% government-funded since 1938, to allow for private investment in orded to build platforms reaching oil deposits 3000m below the Gulf's surface. Yup, precisely like the one that produced this massive spill, although most would probably be bound to much less strict regulation and controls to what they have in the US. Is the similarity between the two logos just a strange coincidence?

I m currently running google-chrome-beta version 5.0.375.55-r47796 on Debian/Unstable. It s the fastest web browser I ve used in recent times it s the first time that I ve run a browser that feels faster than my recollection of running IBM WebExplorer for OS/2 on a 486-66 system! It has a good feature set, and it s the only browser I ve used that in a typical configuration will make proper use of the screen space by not having a permanent status bar at the bottom of the sceen and by having tabs in the title-bar. But it s not perfect, here is a list of some bugs: Above are three partial screen captures of Chrome, the first is when maximised and the second is when the window isn t maximised. Notice the extra vertical space above the tab in the title bar in the second picture. The third picture shows the right side of the titlebar and you can see a space below the three buttons where you can drag the window around no matter how many tabs you open that space below the three buttons is reserved. If the Chrome developers had removed the extra vertical space in the titlebar and reserved slightly more horizontal space then you would be able to drag the window around. While an anonymous commentator made a good point that the extra vertical space can be used to drag the window around when the maximum number of tabs are open, it seems that there are other ways of achieving that goal without wasting ~18 vertical pixels. Doing so would be a lot less ugly than what they did with finding text in the page. When I visit a web site that uses cookies from an Incognito Window (which means that cookies etc aren t stored) there is no option to say allow all cookies . This is really annoying when you get to a web site such as the IBM one which stores 5 cookies when you first load the page and then at least one new cookie write for every page you visit. Given that cookie data will be discarded as soon as the window is closed it seems like a good idea to have an option to allow all cookies for Incognito Windows even if all cookies aren t allowed for regular windows. Blocking all cookies would be OK too, anything but having to click on Block or Allow multiple times for each page load. The J and K keys don t work in a view of Venus version 0~bzr95-2+lenny1 (the latest version in Debian/Lenny). I once had a situation where I entered a . at the end of a domain name (which is quite legal there is always an implied dot) and Chrome then wouldn t take note of my request to accept all cookies from the domain. I haven t been able to reproduce that bug, but I have noticed that it stores the settings for whether cookies should be stored separately for domains that end in . , so www.cnn.com. is different from www.cnn.com . Iceweasel seems to just quietly strip the trailing dot. Of course this is better than Konqueror which won t even load a URL with a dot at the end. Chrome can be relied on to restore all windows rapidly after a crash, unlike Iceweasel which restores them at it s normal load speed (slow) and Konqueror which doesn t tend to restore windows. This is good as it does seem to crash regularly. In a response to my post about Chrome and SE Linux [1] Ben Hutchings pointed out that the --no-sandbox option to chrome disables the creation of a PID namespace and therefore makes debugging a lot easier, if I get a lot of spare time I ll try and track down some of the Chrome SEGVs. The JavaScript compiler is either buggy or it s not buggy in situations where people expect IE bugs. When using the Dell Australia web site I can t always order all options. When trying to order a Dell R300 1RU server with hot-plug disks in a hardware RAID array it seems impossible to get all the necessary jumpers which is a precondition to completing the order fortunately I only wanted to blog about how cheap Dell servers are so I don t actually need to complete an order. Dell s web site is also difficult in Iceweasel on occasion, so it s obviously more demanding than most sites. It might be a good test site for people who work on browsers as it s both demanding and important. When I select a URL to be opened in a new window (or when JavaScript does this) then the new tab is opened with about:blank listed as the URL. If the URL is for a PDF file (or something else that is to be downloaded) then the URL entry field is never updated to give the real URL. I believe that this is wrong, either the new tab shouldn t be opened or it should have the correct URL on display there is no benefit with a tab open to show nothing but about:blank in the URL entry field. Also if a URL takes some time to load then it may keep about:blank in the URL entry field for some time. This means that if you use the middle mouse button to rapidly open a few new tabs you won t be able to see what is to be loaded in each one. Sometimes I have several tabs loading and I m happy to close some unimportant ones if they are slow but some are worth waiting for. Overall that s not too bad. I can use Dell s site in Iceweasel, so the only critical bug is the cookies issue in Incognito Windows which makes the Incognito feature almost unusable for some sites.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2010/05/19/google-chrome-and-se-linux/

I've been fortunate enough to be able to attend every DebConf since DebConf 7 in Edinburgh, Scotland. This year is the first DebConf ever held in the USA - it'd be a shame if I couldn't attend since it's relatively close :) I'm extremely busy at work and thus won't be able to participate in DebCamp like I originally planned but I did get approval to go to DebConf10 itself so: Hope to see you there!