... or as some fellow DD said, one year ago: "j'ai 1000 ans". So what happened during last year, the DVCS way:

$> cd "Sylvain Le Gall"
$> darcs whatsnew
hunk life.txt 0
+ Yvain, my son, talks and walks, this is quite amazing to see your
+ child growing up.  My wife is pregnant, release expected in July
+ ;-)
+ 
+ I traveled quite a lot this year: Spain, Tunisia, Belgium,
+ Roscoff and Huelgoat (Brittany) 
hunk debian.txt 0
+ I went to Debconf 9 and attended Debcamp before. I met a lot of
+ very interesting people there. I spent the Debcamp time to
+ implement Zack proposal to compute OCaml package dependencies
+ using dh-ocaml. It WORKS ;-) It was a pleasure to work with Mehdi
+ Dogguy and Stephane Glondu on this subject.
+ 
+ The dh-ocaml work allowed me to be the co-author, with Stephane
+ and Mehdi, of Zack's article on the subject. 
+ My first publication!
+ 
+ I went to FOSDEM 2010 and helped attend the Debian booth. Quite a
+ nice experience I was there with my good old Open Brick NG (need
+ to blog about it one day).
+ 
+ Found some time to enable the LLVM OCaml bindings in LLVM Debian
+ package.
+ 
+ Voted for the first  OCaml-aware DPL! (NB: this was not the
+ reason for my vote)
hunk work.txt 0
+ I worked on extending a tool that I delivered before. OCaml is
+ quite a good language when it comes to do maintenance. You can
+ extend something and have dozens of compiler errors where your
+ changes propagate. Once every error has been corrected, your
+ changes are OK. Of course, this requires to use OCaml types,
+ pattern matching and a bit of unit testing.
+ 
+ I was delighted when Jun Furuse ask me if he can organize 
+ OCaml Meeting 2010 in Japan. The first OCaml Meeting spin-off. 
+ 
+ OASIS has been growing quite a lot since the year before and got
+ enough importance. Thus I decided to give a talk about it at CAML
+ Consortium in December and then at OCaml Meeting 2010. 
+ 
+ I decided to have some English training. I was missing some oral
+ fluency.
+ 
+ I organized the OCaml Meeting 2010 in April. It was quite a lot
+ of work, especially to prepare my own presentation, but the
+ meeting was a success and probably my best birthday gift with the
+ OCaml Hacking Day organized just after.
$> darcs record -a
What is the patch name? "32 year old"

Unfortunately, this release is late. My birthday was on April 16th, but it was OCaml Meeting this day, which was my top level priority at this time. See you next year!

I d like to extend a warm welcome to our selected students for the 2010 Debian Google Summer of Code! They should pop up on Debian Planet soon and you re welcome to come talk to them on #debian-soc on irc.debian.org Aptitude Qt by Piotr Galiszewski, mentored by Sune Vuorela Qt GUI for aptitude. Currently, KDE users need to use Aptitude via the console interface, or install the newly developed GTK frontend, which does not fit well into KDE desktop. Making Qt frontend to Aptitude would solve this problem and bring an advanced and fully Debian-compliant graphical package manager to KDE. Content-aware Config Files Upgrading by Krzysztof Tyszecki, mentored by Dominique Dumont When a package deliver configuration files, the problem of merging user data with new configuration instructions will arise during package upgrades on users systems. Sometimes merging can be done with 3 way merge, but this process does not insure that the resulting file is correct or even legal. This project intends to create standards, tools an heuristics to make the scary config file conflict resolution debconf prompt a thing of the past. Debbugs Bug Reporting and Manipulation API by David Wendt Jr., mentored by Bastian Venthur Currently debbugs supports a SOAP interface for querying Debian s Bug Tracking System. Unfortunately this operation is read-only. This project would create an API for debbugs which supports sending and manipulating bug reports, without having to resort to email. This project does not intend to replace email as mean to manipulate the BTS but rather to enhance the BTS to allow other means of bug creation and manipulation. Debian High Performance Computing on Clouds by Dominique Belhachemi, mentored by Steffen Moeller The project paves a way to combine the demands in high performance computing with the dynamics of compute clouds with Debian. Combining the Eucalyptus cloud computing infrastructure with the TORQUE resource manager and preparing the components for dynamically added and removed instances provides the user with a attractive high performance computing environment. Such a system allows users to share resources with large compute centers with minimal changes in their workflow and scripts. Debian-Installer on Neo FreeRunner and Handheld Devices by Thibaut Girka, mentored by Gaudenz Steinlin This project aims to improve the installation experience of Debian on handheld devices by replacing ad-hoc install scripts by a full-blown and adapted Debian-Installer. The Neo FreeRunner is used as it is the most convenient and open device from a development standpoint, but other devices will also be explored. Hurd port and de-Linux-ization of Debian-Installer by J r mie Koenig, mentored by Samuel Thibault The primary means of distributing the Hurd is through Debian GNU/Hurd. However, the installation CDs presently use an ancient, non-native installer. The goal of this project is to port the missing parts of Debian-Installer to Hurd. To achieve this, all problematic Linux-specific code in Debian-Installer will be replaced by less or non-kernel dependent code, paving the way for better support of other non-Linux ports of Debian. Multi-Arch support in APT by David Kalnischkies, mentored by Michael Vogt Hardware like 64bit processors are perfectly able to execute 32bit opcode but until now this potentiality is disregard as the infrastructure tools like dpkg and APT are not able to install and/or solve dependencies across multiple architectures. The project therefore focuses on enabling APT to work out good solutions in a MultiArch aware environments without the need of hacky and partly working biarch packages currently in use. Package Repository Analysis and Migration Automation by Ricardo O Donell, mentored by Neil Williams Emdebian uses a filter to select packages from the main Debian repositories that are considered useful to embedded devices, excluding the majority of packages. The results of processing the filter are automated but maintaining the filter list is manual. This project seeks to automate certain elements of the filtering process to cope with specific conditions. This project will also generalize to more elaborate and intelligent algorithms to improve the transitions of the main Debian archives. Smart Upload Server for FTP Master by Petr Jasek, mentored by Joerg Jaspert Making packages upload smarter, more interactive and painless for uploaders by switching from anonymous FTP and Cron jobs to a robust protocol and modern package checking and processing daemon. This daemon would test early and report early, saving developers time. More details coming soon on http://wiki.debian.org/gsoc Congratulations everyone and have a fruitful summer!

Last weekend, I went to the Grenslandhallen in Hasselt, to see Belgium compete against Estonia in a Fed Cup tie of the World Group playoffs. The winner of this tie would gain a seat in the top-tier World Group next year, which opens the possibility of winning this competition. The Belgian team was the strongest possible one, with all four best Belgian female tennis players Yanina Wickmayer, Kim Clijsters, Justine Henin, and Kirsten Flipkens. On paper, the team should not have had any problems beating the Estonian team. Unfortunately, Justine fractured her pinky finger during practice on wednesday; and while it did not make it impossible for her to play, it did reduce her fitness somewhat, which meant that on Saturday, Kim and Yanina had to defend the Belgian colors. They did and won, but then Kim injured some muscle in her foot, which made it hard for her to walk on Sunday, let alone play. With only Justine, Yanina, and Kirsten available, coach Appelmans chose to put Justine on the field. Though she made a valiant effort, she unfortunately did not manage to beat an unleashed Kaia Kanepi, who it must be said played a terrific match. As such, it fell on Yanina to bring home the tie in the fourth singles rubber against Maret Ani. Being a bit nervous in the start of the first set, she made some unnecessary errors; but after a few games, she came through and started to play much better. Unfortunately, by that time the score was already at 5-1. Yanina won her first service game of the match to bring it to 5-2, but it wasn't enough, and Ani won the first set somewhat easily. She couldn't put anything on the table against a storming Wickmayer, however, and after two more sets, the outcome of the match and, by extension, the tie was clear: a win for Belgium. I can't help but note that Wickmayer has been a great player for the Belgian fed cup team these past few years, however. Since her first Fed Cup participation in 2007, she holds what is, given her ranking at the time, a rather impressive 9-4 win-loss record in Fed Cup. If it wasn't for Wickmayer, the Belgian team would not be where it is now. It was Wickmayer who won her three matches against Canada, one as part of a doubles team, to prevent demotion from world group II to the Europe/Africa zone back in 2009, with a 3-2 score. It was Wickmayer who won the crucial third rubber against higher-ranked Radwanska in February to beat Poland, with the latter even holding the home field advantage. And it's now been Wickmayer who won two of the three rubbers against Estonia that were needed to win the tie. So Congrats, Yanina!

Yesterday, my co-worker notified my about a promotion of 3DSupply and I recognized, that they have new design and you have also the choise to select from various models and colors for your shirts. I like the new site much more than the old.
For just speading they word, they offer to give a shirt (or any other item < 20 Eur) for free. So it seems to be a good idea to equip my dear wife, which is a teacher of catholic religion, with a new Jesus shirt.
Update: Today I got a reply from 3DSupply, stating that they deny the shirt request, cause I don t have 10 posts in the last 6 month. As this is unfortunately true, due my always limited time, I can t find this hard requirement in their terms. Looks like my blog doesn t match their minimal requirements and I m advised to equip my girls somewhere else with geekware. :o)

Sam Harris gave an interesting TED talk about whether there are scientific answers to moral questions [1]. One of his insightful points was that when dealing with facts certain opinions should be excluded it would be good if journalists who report on issues of science could understand this. Another insight was that religious people most strongly agree with him regarding the issue of whether there are factual answers to moral questions but they think that God just handed the answers to their ancesters rather than making it an issue that requires consideration. He cites the issue of gay marriage as being a distraction from moral issues such as genocide and poverty. He asks how have we convinced ourself that every culture has a point of view worth considering? . He asks how the ignorance of the Taliban on the topic of physics is any less obvious than on the topic of human well-being. Dan Gilbert gave an insightful TED talk titled Why Are We Happy? [2]. One interesting fact he cites is that people who become paraplegic are no less happy in the long term than people who win the lottery. He points out that a shopping mall full of Zen monks is not going to be particularly profitable and uses this fact to explain the promotion of natural happiness over synthetic happiness in our society. Dan Barber gave an amusing and informative TED talk How I Fell in Love with a Fish [3]. He speaks about ecological fish farming and how the fish are more tasty as well as the farm being good for the environment. The farm in question is in the south-west of Spain, hopefully there will be more similar farms in other parts of the world soon. Gary Lauder gave an interesting brief TED talk about road signs [4]. His main point was to advocate a road sign saying take turns , but there are already signs in the US at freeway on-ramps saying that 1 or 2 cars may enter every time the light turns green which is a similar concept. The innovative thing he did was to estimate the amount of time and petrol wasted by stop signs, add that over a year based on the average income and then estimate that an annuity covering that ongoing expense would cost more than $2,000,000. This makes two stop signs at an intersection have an expense of $1,000,000 each. He suggests that rather than installing stop signs it would be cheaper to buy the adjacent land, chop down all trees, and then sell it again. Alan Siegel gave an insightful TED talk about simplifying legal documents [5]. He gives an example of an IRS document which was analysed with a Heat Map to show which parts confused the readers the IRS adopted a new document that his group designed which made it easier for taxpayers. He advocates legislation to make legal documents easier to understand for customers of financial services. Tim Berners Lee gave an interesting TED talk about Open Data, he illustrated it with some fantastic videos showing how mashups have been used with government data [6] and how the Open Street Map project developed over time. Martin F. Krafft gave an interesting Debconf talk about Tool Adoption Behavior in the Debian project [7]. One thing that I found particularly interesting was his description of the Delphi Method that he used to assemble a panel of experts and gather a consensus of opinion. The post-processing on this talk was very good, in some sections Martin s presentation notes are shown on screen with the video of him in the corner. As an aside, I think we really do need camera-phones. The Big Money has an interesting article comparing the Mafia Bust Out with the practices of US banks [8]. Mark Roth gave an exciting TED talk about using Hydrogen Sulphide to trigger suspended animation [9]. They are now doing human trials for suspending people who have serious injuries to reduce tissue damage during the process of surgery. Pawan Sinha gave an interesting TED talk about how brains learn to see [10]. He started by talking about curing blindness in people who have been blind since birth. But he then ended by showing some research into the correlation between visual processing and Autism, he showed that an Autistic child had significantly different visual patterns when playing Pong to an NT child. Adora Svitak gave an insightful TED talk about what adults can learn from kids [11]. She made some particularly interesting points about the education system requiring that adults respect children more and expect them to do better than their parents which is essential for all progress in society. The NY Times has an interesting article on animal homosexuality [12]. In terms of research it focusses on lesbian relationships between albatrosses. But a large part of the article is devoted to the politics of scientific research into animal sexuality. BrowserShots.org shows you what your web site looks like in different web browsers [13]. Cory Doctorow wrote an insightful article titles Can You Survive a Benevolent Dictatorship about the Apple DRM [14]. He describes the way the Apple Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) doesn t stop copyright violation but does reduce competition in the computer industry. He is not going to sell his work on the Apple store (for the iPad or iPhone etc) and suggests that customers should choose a more open platform. It s unfortunate that he didn t suggest a better platform.

• [1] http://www.ted.com/talks/sam_harris_science_can_show_what_s_right.html
• [2] http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/dan_gilbert_asks_why_are_we_happy.html
• [3] http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_barber_how_i_fell_in_love_with_a_fish.html
• [4] http://www.ted.com/talks/gary_lauder_s_new_traffic_sign_take_turns.html
• [5] http://www.ted.com/talks/alan_siegel_let_s_simplify_legal_jargon.html
• [6] http://www.ted.com/talks/tim_berners_lee_the_year_open_data_went_worldwide.html
• [7] https://penta.debconf.org/dc9_schedule/events/381.en.html
• [8] http://www.thebigmoney.com/articles/money-trail/2010/03/19/bust-out?page=full
• [9] http://www.ted.com/talks/mark_roth_suspended_animation.html
• [10] http://www.ted.com/talks/pawan_sinha_on_how_brains_learn_to_see.html
• [11] http://www.ted.com/talks/adora_svitak.html
• [12] http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/04/magazine/04animals-t.html
• [13] http://browsershots.org/
• [14] http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/456751-Can_You_Survive_a_Benevolent_Dictatorship_.php

Haskell provides type classes to support polymorphism. A type class defines a few methods, which can then be implemented for a concrete type in the type class instance. This is a powerful system, but it also has it drawbacks. Most notably, each type can have at most one implementation of the type class. But sometimes you need to use a different implementation. If, for example, you used the Binary class to store data on disk. Now you changed your data type and the binary instance, and you can not read the old data any more. One solution is to re-name your type using newtype and implement another type instance for that. Often, this is enough. But still, instances are not first-class-citizens. You can not pass them around or modify them, as you can pass around and modify data and functions. Under the hood of the compiler, things look different. The ghc puts the methods of the instance in a dictionary and passes that implicitly to any functions having a (Class a) constraint. (Other implementations exist though) If one could make that behavior explicit, one could easily modify the instance before passing it to the function. But this is unfortunately not possible. But it is possible to pass an explicit dictionary along the data. I use the Monoid class as an example, and define a representation of the dictionary to-be-passed, as well as the dictionary of the default instance:

data MonoidDict a = MonoidDict
    ed_mempty :: a
  , ed_mappend :: a -> a -> a
   
monoidDict :: Monoid a => MonoidDict a
monoidDict = MonoidDict mempty mappend

(For conciseness, I ignore the mconcat method.) My first idea was to pass this instance along with data: (MonoidDict a, a). But this would not work because there are methods, such as mempty, who need the dictionary without getting passed a value to use. Therefore, I need to put the dictionary both in the covariant and the contravariant position:

newtype WithMonoidDict a = WithMonoidDict (MonoidDict a -> (MonoidDict a, a))

We need functions to clamp a dictionary to a value, and to extract it again:

wrapWithCustomMonoidDict :: MonoidDict a -> a -> WithMonoidDict a
wrapWithCustomMonoidDict dict val = WithMonoidDict $ const (dict, val)
extractFromCustomMonoidDict :: MonoidDict a -> WithMonoidDict a -> a
extractFromCustomMonoidDict dict (WithMonoidDict f) = snd (f dict)

Note that both expect the dictionary, so that it can be fed into WithMonoidDict from both sides . For convenience, we can define variants that use the standard instance:

wrapWithMonoidDict :: Monoid a => a -> WithMonoidDict a
wrapWithMonoidDict = wrapWithCustomMonoidDict monoidDict
extractFromMonoidDict :: Monoid a => WithMonoidDict a -> a
extractFromMonoidDict = extractFromCustomMonoidDict monoidDict

We want to be able to pass the wrapped values as any other value with a Monoid instance, so we need to declare that:

instance Monoid (WithMonoidDict a) where
  mempty = WithMonoidDict (\d -> (d, ed_mempty d))
  mappend (WithMonoidDict f1) (WithMonoidDict f2) = WithMonoidDict $ \d ->
  let (d1,v1) = f1 d
  (d2,v2) = f2 d
  in  (d1, ed_mappend d1 v1 v2)

Note that mappend has the choice between three dictionaries This is not a good sign, but let s hope that they are all the same. Does it work? Let s see:

listInstance :: MonoidDict [a]
listInstance = monoidDict
reverseInstance :: MonoidDict [a]
reverseInstance = monoidDict   ed_mappend = \l1 l2 -> l2 ++ l1  
examples = do
  let l1 = [1,2,3]
  let l2 = [4,5,6]
  putStrLn $ "Example lists: " ++ show l1 ++ " " ++ show l2
  putStrLn $ "l1 ++ l2: " ++ show (l1 ++ l2) 
  putStrLn $ "l1  mappend  l2: " ++ show (l1  mappend  l2) 
  putStrLn $ "Wrapped with default instance:"
  putStrLn $ "l1  mappend  l2: " ++ show (
  extractFromMonoidDict $ wrapWithMonoidDict l1  mappend  wrapWithMonoidDict l2)
  putStrLn $ "Same with reversed monoid instance:"
  putStrLn $ "l1  mappend  l2: " ++ show (
  extractFromCustomMonoidDict reverseInstance $
  wrapWithCustomMonoidDict reverseInstance l1  mappend 
  wrapWithCustomMonoidDict reverseInstance l2)

Running examples gives this output:

Example lists: [1,2,3] [4,5,6]
l1 ++ l2: [1,2,3,4,5,6]
l1  mappend  l2: [1,2,3,4,5,6]
Wrapped with default instance:
l1  mappend  l2: [1,2,3,4,5,6]
Same with reversed monoid instance:
l1  mappend  l2: [4,5,6,1,2,3]

Indeed it works. Unfortunately, this approach is not sufficient for all cases. It is perfectly valid to have functions with signature (Monoid a => Int -> Int). Obviously, this function would have no access to the explicit dictionary, because no value of type a is passed to or from it.<monoid a="a"> I wonder if it would be possible to extend the syntax somehow to be able to properly pass an alternative dictionary to such functions. But given that not all compilers use dictionary passing, my hopes are low.

Haskell provides type classes to support polymorphism. A type class defines a few methods, which can then be implemented for a concrete type in the type class instance. This is a powerful system, but it also has it drawbacks. Most notably, each type can have at most one implementation of the type class. But sometimes you need to use a different implementation. If, for example, you used the Binary class to store data on disk. Now you changed your data type and the binary instance, and you can not read the old data any more. One solution is to re-name your type using newtype and implement another type instance for that. Often, this is enough. But still, instances are not first-class-citizens. You can not pass them around or modify them, as you can pass around and modify data and functions. Under the hood of the compiler, things look different. The ghc puts the methods of the instance in a dictionary and passes that implicitly to any functions having a (Class a) constraint. (Other implementations exist though) If one could make that behavior explicit, one could easily modify the instance before passing it to the function. But this is unfortunately not possible. But it is possible to pass an explicit dictionary along the data. I use the Monoid class as an example, and define a representation of the dictionary to-be-passed, as well as the dictionary of the default instance:

data MonoidDict a = MonoidDict
    ed_mempty :: a
  , ed_mappend :: a -> a -> a
   
monoidDict :: Monoid a => MonoidDict a
monoidDict = MonoidDict mempty mappend

(For conciseness, I ignore the mconcat method.) My first idea was to pass this instance along with data: (MonoidDict a, a). But this would not work because there are methods, such as mempty, who need the dictionary without getting passed a value to use. Therefore, I need to put the dictionary both in the covariant and the contravariant position:

newtype WithMonoidDict a = WithMonoidDict (MonoidDict a -> (MonoidDict a, a))

We need functions to clamp a dictionary to a value, and to extract it again:

wrapWithCustomMonoidDict :: MonoidDict a -> a -> WithMonoidDict a
wrapWithCustomMonoidDict dict val = WithMonoidDict $ const (dict, val)
extractFromCustomMonoidDict :: MonoidDict a -> WithMonoidDict a -> a
extractFromCustomMonoidDict dict (WithMonoidDict f) = snd (f dict)

Note that both expect the dictionary, so that it can be fed into WithMonoidDict from both sides . For convenience, we can define variants that use the standard instance:

wrapWithMonoidDict :: Monoid a => a -> WithMonoidDict a
wrapWithMonoidDict = wrapWithCustomMonoidDict monoidDict
extractFromMonoidDict :: Monoid a => WithMonoidDict a -> a
extractFromMonoidDict = extractFromCustomMonoidDict monoidDict

We want to be able to pass the wrapped values as any other value with a Monoid instance, so we need to declare that:

instance Monoid (WithMonoidDict a) where
  mempty = WithMonoidDict (\d -> (d, ed_mempty d))
  mappend (WithMonoidDict f1) (WithMonoidDict f2) = WithMonoidDict $ \d ->
  let (d1,v1) = f1 d
  (d2,v2) = f2 d
  in  (d1, ed_mappend d1 v1 v2)

Note that mappend has the choice between three dictionaries This is not a good sign, but let s hope that they are all the same. Does it work? Let s see:

listInstance :: MonoidDict [a]
listInstance = monoidDict
reverseInstance :: MonoidDict [a]
reverseInstance = monoidDict   ed_mappend = \l1 l2 -> l2 ++ l1  
examples = do
  let l1 = [1,2,3]
  let l2 = [4,5,6]
  putStrLn $ "Example lists: " ++ show l1 ++ " " ++ show l2
  putStrLn $ "l1 ++ l2: " ++ show (l1 ++ l2) 
  putStrLn $ "l1  mappend  l2: " ++ show (l1  mappend  l2) 
  putStrLn $ "Wrapped with default instance:"
  putStrLn $ "l1  mappend  l2: " ++ show (
  extractFromMonoidDict $ wrapWithMonoidDict l1  mappend  wrapWithMonoidDict l2)
  putStrLn $ "Same with reversed monoid instance:"
  putStrLn $ "l1  mappend  l2: " ++ show (
  extractFromCustomMonoidDict reverseInstance $
  wrapWithCustomMonoidDict reverseInstance l1  mappend 
  wrapWithCustomMonoidDict reverseInstance l2)

Running examples gives this output:

Example lists: [1,2,3] [4,5,6]
l1 ++ l2: [1,2,3,4,5,6]
l1  mappend  l2: [1,2,3,4,5,6]
Wrapped with default instance:
l1  mappend  l2: [1,2,3,4,5,6]
Same with reversed monoid instance:
l1  mappend  l2: [4,5,6,1,2,3]

Indeed it works. Unfortunately, this approach is not sufficient for all cases. It is perfectly valid to have a function with signature (Monoid a => Maybe a -> Maybe a), whose behavior depends on the instance of a, even when being passed Nothing and returning Nothing. Such a function woul<monoid a="a">d have a problem here, because the dictionary would not be passed to the function.
</monoid> I wonder if it would be possible to extend the Haskell language somehow to be able to properly pass an alternative dictionary to such functions. But given that not all compilers use dictionary passing, my hopes are low.

If you re convinced that cloud is a useless buzzword, being used to describe everything under the sun, old and new, then well, you re right that is, except for the useless part. It s true that this word is being (ab)used in many different products, services and technologies, which do not seem to relate to each other in any concrete way. Cloud in the abstract is being defined in many different ways, based on different fundamental characteristics of cloud technology . Nonetheless, there is something genuinely important going on here, and this is my view of what it s about. The hype Countless business which only had web sites or web applications in 2008 now call them cloud services . They aren t delivering any new benefits to their users, and they haven t redesigned their infrastructure. What do they mean by this? Cloud is defined, some say, by where your data is kept, and cloud means storing your data on remote servers instead of internal ones. Millions of Gmail and Flickr users have been in the cloud without even knowing it, and so has everyone who reads their mail over IMAP, or uses voicemail. In short, cloud is just data that is somewhere else. Last September, I watched a presentation on Cloud computing where Symantec pitched their anti-virus product as having something like three different cloud computing technologies. These, it turned out, all involved downloading files over the Internet. In this view, cloud is essentially about the network, derived from our habit of using a drawing of a cloud in our network diagrams for so many years. Wikipedia currently shares this view, as its Cloud computing article opens with Cloud computing is Internet-based computing . No Internet, no cloud. Maybe cloud is just SaaS, and any service provided on a pay-per-use basis over the Internet is a cloud service. It would seem that cloud is about paying for things, especially on a utility basis. The cloud is computing by the hour; it s something you buy. Others maintain that cloud is just virtualization, so if you re using KVM or VMWare, you ve got a cloud already. In this view, cloud is about operating systems, and whether they re running on real or virtual hardware. Cloud means deploying applications as virtual appliances, and creating new servers entirely in software. If your servers only have one OS on them, then they re not cloud-ready. If this vagueness and contradiction irritates you, then you re not alone. It bugs me, and a lot of other people who are getting on with developing, using and providing technology and services. Cloud is not just a new name for these familiar technologies. In fact, it isn t a technology at all. I don t think it even makes sense to categorize technologies as cloud and non-cloud , though some may be more cloudy than others. Nonetheless, there is some meaning and validity in each of these interpretations of cloud. So what is it? A different perspective Cloud is a transition, a trend, a paradigm shift. It isn t something which exists or not: it is happening, and we won t understand its essential nature until it s over. Simon Wardley explains this, in presentation format, much better than I could in this blog post, so if you haven t already, I suggest that you take 14 minutes of your time and go and watch him do his thing. This change doesn t have a clear beginning or an end. Early on, it was a disconnected set of ideas without any identity. We re now somewhere in the middle of the bell curve, with enough insight to give it a name, and sufficient momentum to guess at what happens next. In the end, it will be absorbed into the way things are . What s going on? So, what is actually changing? The key trends I see are:

1. People and organizations are becoming more comfortable relying on resources which do not exist in any particular place. Rather than storing precious metals under our beds, we entrust our finances to banks, which store our data and provide us with services which let us use our money . In computing terms, we re no longer enamored with keeping all of our programs and our data on our hard drive: as it turns out, it s not very safe there after all, and in some ways we can actually exercise more control over programs and data out there than in here . We can no longer hoard our gold, or drive off would-be thieves with a pistol, but that wasn t a productive way to spend our energies anyway. While we can t put our hands on our money, we can know exactly what s happening with it from minute to minute, and use it in a variety of ways at a moment s notice.
2. IT products are ceding ground to services. In many cases, we no longer need to build software, or even buy it: we can simply use it. As computing needs become better understood, and can be met by commodity products, it becomes more feasible to develop services to meet them on-demand. This is why we see a spike in acronyms ending in aaS . Simon explains the progression in detail in his talk, linked above.
3. Hardware, software and data are being reorganized according to new models, in order to provide these services effectively. Architectural patterns, such as hardware/OS/framework/application are giving way to new ones, like hardware/OS/IaaS/OS/PaaS/SaaS/Internet/web browser/OS/hardware . These are still evolving, and the lines between them are blurry. It s a bit early to say what the dominant patterns will be, but system, network, data and application architecture are all being transformed. No single technology or architecture defines cloud, but virtualization (at the infrastructure level) and the web (at the application level) both seem to resonate strongly with cloudy design patterns.

These trends are reinforcing and accelerating each other, driving information technologies and businesses in a common direction. That, in a nutshell, is what cloud is all about. So what? This transformation is disruptive in many different ways, but the angles which most interest me at the moment are:

• Operating systems Cloud seems to indicate further commoditization of operating systems. We will have more operating systems than ever before (thanks to virtualization and IaaS), but we probably won t think about them as much (as in software appliances). I think that the cloud world will want operating systems which are free, standard and highly customizable, which is potentially a great opportunity for Ubuntu and other open systems.
• Software freedom As Eben Moglen and others have pointed out, this trend has significant consequences for the free software movement. As the shape of software changes, our principles of freedom must evolve as well. What does it mean to have the freedom to run a program in the cloud? To copy it? To change it? What other protections might people need in order to exercise these freedoms in the future?
• DevOps I see a strong resonance between cloud which is blurring the lines between hardware and software, infrastructure and applications, network and computer and DevOps, which is bringing together the people who currently work in these different categories. Cloud means that we can no longer afford to treat these elements separately, and must work together to find better approaches to developing and deploying software, knocking down barriers and mapping new territory. Fortunately, cloud also means developing powerful new tools which will power this revolution.
• Clients A majority of cloud related activity seems to be focused on what happens to back-end servers, but what about the computers we actually touch, on our desks, and in our pockets? How will they change? Will we end up reverting to a highly centralized computing model, where clients are strictly limited to front-end user interface processing (e.g. a web browser)? Will clients join the cloud and be providers of computing resources, not only consumers? What new types of devices will we need in order to make the most of cloud?

I d like to explore some of these topics in future posts.

Once again, I was invited by several different groups to be present at FLISOL, a quite interesting phenomenon: FLISOL (Latin-american Free Software Installation Festival) is s very large-scale, very loosely coordinated thing put together for five years already in over 200 cities in basically every Latin American country. Go to the FLISOL page, it is quite interesting to try to understand it! Now, I don't like FLISOL. I managed to avoid it in 2005 and 2006; in 2007, I was present at a FLISOL, although I didn't know beforehand it was the reason for the conference I was invited to. In 2008 and 2009 I took part for reasons I should not go into right now. This year, again, I will not be part of any of its activities (regardless of rumors to the contrary I was invited to be present at a panel on ACTA, but I have not followed the topic enough to be aware of anything besides the very basic aspects, I have no authority to speak about it; I told the organizers I would like to be there as part of the audience, but not present the topic. And I am quite work-stressed, so I doubt I'll make it). Why am I against FLISOL? FLISOL itself, as I said, is a positive and interesting phenomenon, and I have enjoyed the conference cycles which often happen together with it. What I am against is installfests In my opinion, in the stage we are at today, instead of promoting Free Software, an install-fest just works against it. Free Software Linux-based distributions at least is widely known already, as a concept, even though most people dare not come anywhere close to it. Few people outside our already consolidated groups recognize programs such as the Mozilla and OpenOffice suites as being also Free Software, and valuable, quality alternatives for their everyday needs in the environments they currently use. If we need to show how to install and understand the GNU/Linux ecosystem to people who have not got close, it is not IMHO to end users. Installing a GNU/Linux system is easy enough for anybody interested in doing it, or at least, for him to request a one-on-one help session, handholding and understanding the basic ideas. We need, in any case, for the computer corner shop technicians to be somewhat acquinted, at least with the basics, at least with one popular distribution (and with the fact that there are many, and that they are different). People who have not had the curiosity and courage to try to install Linux by themselves do not need to be evangelized (a verb that should be out of our vocabularies by now, as that phase in our movement should be over by now) End users have simple needs: Things should work, and be as surprise-free as possible. They don't want to depend on a specific time-starved person (or even on a small group of people, all of which have a sanctity delirium/aura). When they go to technical support, they expect the problem to be solved Not even understanding what was wrong. End users are willing to pay a small fee to anybody to help them solve their problems. The key word is anybody. If we (myself, or me and my 10 friends who were there at the gathering, or any sufficiently defined small group) are the only support point for the OS, it is no good. Online support forums are not good either, in my experience, as the end user will prefer just lugging the computer to the nearest technician and get it fixed. Even if fixed means just installing one more readily-available package (not to mention, of course, when an update breaks something). I have witnessed, after an install fest, people walk very happy with their new system as a new toy. After a week or two, they cannot install the latest virus^Wscreen saver, or a legitimate program they need for their work. As it does not work, they take the computer to the technician... Who will end up formatting his system and installing something more usual. On the other hand, some people prefer installing a dual-boot system That guarantees the user will feel he is carrying some kind of moral superiority on his computer, and will often remember he has something Not Evil. This will often happen, of course, at boot time When they see GRUB at boot time, and rush to select Windows before That Strange Thing starts up. Anyway... Go ahead, install Free Software, enjoy the day. The conference cycles are usually interesting, and are the best part of it all I'm not saying you should stop doing it. But I'd urge you to take the focus away from the mass-installs, which become often just lost work (even detrimental to furthering Free Software). Try to see things as a non-technically-interested user would. Try to design ways to get corner shop technicians interested. Maybe that can be useful in the long run.

Upgrade Requirements Debian/Squeeze (the next release of Debian) will be released some time later this year. Many people are already upgrading test servers, and development systems and workstations that are used to develop code that will be deployed next year. Also there are some significant new features in Squeeze that compel some people to upgrade production systems now (such as a newer version of KVM and Ext4 support). I ve started working on an upgrade plan for SE Linux. The first thing you want when upgrading between releases is a way of supporting booting a new kernel independently of the other parts of the upgrade. Either supporting the old user-space with the new kernel or the new kernel with the old user-space. It s not that uncommon for a new kernel to have a problem when under load so it s best to be able to back out of a kernel upgrade temporarily while trying to find the cause of the problem. For workstations and laptops it s not uncommon to have a kernel upgrade not immediately work with some old hardware, this can usually be worked around without much effort, but it s good to be able to keep systems running while waiting for a response to a support request. Running a Testing/Unstable kernel with Lenny Policy deb http://www.coker.com.au lenny selinux In Lenny the version of selinux-policy-default is 2:0.0.20080702-6. In the above APT repository I have version 2:0.0.20080702-18 which is needed if you want to run a 2.6.32 kernel. The main problem with the older policy is that the devtmpfs filesystem that is used by the kernel for /dev in the early stages of booting [1] is not known and therefore unlabeled so most access to /dev is denied and booting fails. So before upgrading to testing or unstable it s a really good idea to install the selinux-policy-default package from my Lenny repository and then run selinux-policy-upgrade to apply the new changes (by default upgrading the selinux-policy-default package doesn t change the policy that is running we consider the running policy to be configuration files that are not changed unless the user requests it). There are also some other kernel changes which require policy changes such as a change to the way that access controls are applied to programs that trigger module load requests. Upgrading to the Testing/Unstable Policy While some details of the policy are not yet finalised and there are some significant bugs remaining (in terms of usability not security) the policy in Unstable is usable. There is no need to rush an upgrade of the policy, so at this stage the policy in Unstable and Testing is more for testers than for serious production use. But when you upgrade one thing you need to keep in mind is that we don t to support upgrading the SE Linux policy between different major versions of Debian while in multi-user mode. The minimum requirement is that after the new policy package is installed you run the following commands and then reboot afterwards: setenforce 0
selinux-policy-upgrade
touch /.autorelabel If achieving your security goals requires running SE Linux in enforcing mode all the time then you need to do this in single-user mode. The changes to names of domains and labeling of files that are entry-points for domains is significant enough that it s not practical to try and prove that all intermediate states of partial labeling are safe and that there are suitable aliases for all domains. Given that you need to reboot to install a new kernel anyway the reboot for upgrading the SE Linux policy shouldn t be that much of an inconvenience. The relabel process on the first boot will take some time though. Running a Lenny kernel with Testing/Unstable Policy In the original design SE Linux didn t check open as a separate operation, only read/write etc. The reason for this is that the goal for SE Linux was to control information flows. The open() system call doesn t transfer any data so there was no need to restrict access to it as a separate operation (but if you couldn t read or write a file then an attempt to open it would fail). Recent versions of the SE Linux policy have added support for controlling file open, the reason for this is to allow a program in domain A to open a file and then let a program in domain B inherit the file handle and continue using the file even if it is not normally permitted to open the file this matches the Unix semantics where a privileged process can allow an unprivileged child to inherit file handles or use Unix domain sockets to pass file handles to another process with different privileges. SELinux: WARNING: inside open_file_mask_to_av with unknown mode:c1b6 Unfortunately when support was added for this a bug was discovered in the kernel, this post to the SE Linux mailing list has the conclusion to a discussion about it [2]. The symptom of this problem is messages such as the above appearing in your kernel message log. I am not planning to build a kernel package for Lenny with a fix for this bug. The command dmesg -n 1 will prevent such messages from going to the system console which is something you want to do if you plan to login at the console as they can occur often.

• [1] http://lwn.net/Articles/330985/
• [2] http://marc.info/?l=selinux&m=122538041011707&w=2

I've now released DAViCal 0.9.9, after five pretty intensive weeks of work. This includes a number of features that were implemented to support dotCal, which has now replaced their old Cosmo backend with DAViCal to break through a performance bottleneck. That turned into a six-week challenge, because Cosmo had wandered some distance from where calendaring standards are currently going, and so there was a lot of work under the covers of dotCal to switch from using various Cosmo-specific features to do the same thing, using open calendaring standards like CalDAV. One standard that Cosmo did support, and which DAViCal now supports also, are WebDAV tickets. Unfortunately the draft RFC for webdav tickets expired, and was never very well thought through, but the functionality is useful, in order to be able to hand people a secret 'ticket' that they can use to grant specific privileges to a single calendar. There's no UI in the DAViCal admin pages for this yet, but expect one to arrive in 0.9.9.1. Something that dotCal lets people do in the web calendar, is to add subscriptions to other dotCal user's calendars, which is a very nice feature, and certainly one we didn't want to lose. In Cosmo this was done by simply duplicating the calendars on a regular basis - a very resource intensive approach! So in order to support this in DAViCal I decided to add support for the WebDAV 'BIND' method, allowing calendars to be linked from one place into another, without requiring all the events to be duplicated. Mixing that up with the WebDAV tickets, it turns out to be very easy to make that stuff work in a read/write manner, and so I did that as well. Again, unfortunately there is no UI to see this at 0.9.9, but something should be in place for 0.9.9.1 because I know that this combination will be particularly useful to people using principal-centric CalDAV clients like the iCal, and especially like the iPhone, which can't see delegations, and where this would be an especially useful feature. The other major feature added in 0.9.9 is the long-awaited work on the Scheduling Extensions for CalDAV. This is currently an expired draft, but I've checked with Bernard Desruisseaux and there will definitely be a new draft out very soon with a few minor changes, and then there will be a push to finalise it as an RFC. Most of the work on this was done by Rob Ostensen, who has been working on a few DAViCal features now, and it was great to meet up with him in person at LCA 2010. Rob has also added support for pulling groups from LDAP into DAViCal 0.9.9 too, which will please a few people. This is the 0.9.9 release for a reason, too: it implements pretty much all of the functionality that a CalDAV server can usefully do at this point. The work that Rob did to get the scheduling extensions done was really the only hole in coverage of what current clients can do, and in the 0.9.9 series I plan to polish up what we have, add some basic UI to expose the tickets and binds (since no clients really do that at all, other than dotCal, which is proprietary :-). I'll also be working on implementing the bones of CardDAV support, and Rob will be moving on to implementing some parts of the iSchedule draft for server-to-server calendar scheduling. Enjoy!

I was riding home tonight along Howard street. I passed a cop on a bicycle, then started speeding up so I would make the next green. I made the green I was shooting for, but unfortunately was caught at the next couple lights. So the cop (who I think took the pedestrian signal as a means to go at 4th and howard) caught up to make at 6th street. At that point he said to me "Boy, you are in shape!". Ahh, it's good to be home :)

The TEDxVolcano The TED conference franchise has been extended to TEDxVolcano [1], this is a small conference that features people who are stranded by the Eyjafjallaj kull volcano in Iceland. As usual TED is an inspiration to us all, so there is obvious potential for other conferences to be organised in similar situations there s no reason why a free software conference can t be organised in Europe right now! What You Need to run a Conference If a conference will have limited attendance (EG due to a volcano preventing anyone from flying to the area) then filming everything is very important. I ve seen adverts for digital cameras that support Full HD resolution (1920*1080) for as little as $AU400. $AU600 will get you a digital camcorder that does Full HD which will offer some benefits for recording long movies (such as the ability to store the video on an external hard drive). If I was stuck in a foreign hotel with not much to do then I would be prepared to buy a digital camera or camcorder for the purpose of running such a conference (my current digital camera is 5.1MP and only has 3* optical zoom, it s a nice camera but I could do with something better. A tripod can cost up to $100, but I recently bought myself a 15cm tall tripod for $10 that would do at a pinch. Once you have high quality video you can easily upload it to something like Blip.TV. Of course you get a better result if you do some post-production work to merge images of the slides for the lecture into the video, but that is a lot of work and probably requires a camera that outputs uncompressed video for best results. The next issue is getting a venue. Different hotels cater for different parts of the market, some cater to tourists, some to business travel, some to conferences. If you want a venue at short notice you may be able to get a good deal if you find a hotel that is adversely affected, for example I m sure that there are some quite empty conference hotels in Europe right now but the tourist hotels are probably reasonably busy (why not do some tourism if you are stuck). I expect that hotels really don t want to have empty conference rooms and are prepared to offer good deals for bookings at short notice. Of course you would want to try to ensure that hotel rooms aren t too expensive in that hotel as some delegates will want to stay in the hotel which hosts the conference. The minimal staffing for a micro conference is probably two people, one for taking payment, directing people, etc, and the other to film the lectures and moderate panel discussions. Rumor has it that attending without paying is a problem at conferences, for conferences that are planned in advance corporations will try and send multiple employees on the one ticket and have them share a name-tag one issue with this is that there is a fixed quantity of food supplied and if extra people appear then everyone who paid gets less, another is that people who pay really hate to see freeloaders. The best reference I ve found for people not paying at conferences is Jon Oxer s description of how Leslie Cachia of Letac Drafting Services brazenly stole a book from him [2]. Name-tags are needed for any meeting with more than about 15 people. I m not sure how to get proper name-tags (ones that pin on to clothing and have printed names maybe the bigger hotels can add this to the conference package). But a roll of sticky labels from an office supply store is pretty cheap. Costs in Wellington Along with a few other people I considered running a small security conference immediately before or after LCA 2010, that ended up not happening but I will consider doing it in future. When considering that the general plan was to get a hotel to provide a meeting room for 10-30 people (we had no real idea of the demand). When investigating the possibilities for running a conference in Wellington I discovered that the hotel fees for a conference room can either be based on paying a fixed fee for the room plus additional expenses for each item or you can pay a fixed rate per person. It seemed that there was the potential to save a small amount of money by paying the fixed fees and avoiding some payments for things like tea/coffee service. But the amount that could be saved would be small and it would incur extra effort in managing it saving $5 per person is a good thing if you have 600 delegates, but if you have 30 then it s probably a waste of time. So it seemed best to go for one of the packages, you tell the hotel what time you want the lunch and snack breaks and how you want the tables arranged and they just do everything. The cost for this seemed to be in the range of $nz35 to $nz55 per delegate per day. There is some flexibility in room arrangement, so a room that seats 12 people in the board-room layout (tables in a rectangle facing the center) would fit 25 in the classroom layout (tables all facing the front) or 50 in the theater layout (chairs facing the front with no tables). So the hotel could accommodate changes in the size at relatively short notice (whatever their notice period for buying the food). The cost for a catered conference dinner seemed to be about $nz45 per diner. In many cases it would be possible to get a meal that is either cheaper, better, or both by going somewhere else, but that wastes time and effort. So that gave an overall conference cost of about $nz135 for a two day conference with a dinner at the end of the first day. Given that the cheapest budget rate from Wotif.com for a 3 star hotel in Wellington is currently $nz85 per night it seems that $nz135 for a two day conference including dinner is pretty cheap as the minimum accommodation cost would be $nz170. Also note that the hotels which I considered for hosting the conference had rates for their hotel rooms that were significantly greater than $nz85 per night. The hotels all offer other services such as catered cocktail parties , these would be good things for any company that wants to sponsor the conference. Different cities can have vastly different prices for hotels. But I expect that the way conference rooms are booked and managed is similar world-wide and the ratio of conference costs to hotel booking fees to also be similar. Most of the hotels that cater to conferences seem to be owned by multi-national corporations. It would probably make sense to charge delegates an extra $10 or $15 above the cost of running the conference to cover unexpected expenses. Of course it s difficult to balance wanting to charge a low rate to attract more people with wanting to avoid the risk of a financial loss. Conclusion The hard part is getting speakers. If you can get speakers and panel participants who can fill the time slots and have interesting things to say then all the other parts of organising a micro conference should be relatively easy. When the cost is less than $150 per delegate then a syndicate of a few people can easily agree to split the loss if the number of delegates turns out to be smaller than expected, a potential loss of $2000 shared among a few people shouldn t be a huge problem. Also if the conference is booked at short notice (EG because of a volcano) then the hotel shouldn t require any deposit for anything other than the food which is specially ordered (IE not the tea, coffee, etc) that limits the potential loss to something well under $100 per delegate who doesn t attend. Anyone who has enough dedication to a topic to consider running a conference should be prepared to risk a small financial loss. But based on my past observations of the generosity of conference delegates I m sure that if at the conference closing the organiser said unfortunately this conference cost more than the money you paid me, could you please put something in this hat on the way out then the response would be quite positive. Note that I am strictly considering non-profit conferences. If you want to make money by running a conference then most things are different.

• [1] http://blog.ted.com/2010/04/tedxvolcano_exp.php
• [2] http://jon.oxer.com.au/blog/id/224

Some people use '--without-recommends' switch and the problem is gone. I think that's overkill.

This post will tell how (would I recommend) to deal with unwanted recommends. The following text tells about cupt package manager, and though ideas are applicable to any package managers, the techniques may differ.


Stage 1. Facing problems

Suppose we want to install the package kde-minimal:

-8<-
$ sudo cupt install kde-minimal
[sudo] password for jackyf:
Building the package cache... [done]
Initializing package resolver and worker... [done]
Scheduling requested actions... [done]
Resolving possible unmet dependencies...
The following 16 packages will be INSTALLED:

dolphin kappfinder kde-minimal kdebase-apps kdebase-bin kdebase-data kdepasswd
kfind kinfocenter konqueror konqueror-nsplugins kwrite libkonq5
libkonq5-templates libkonqsidebarplugin4 plasma-widget-folderview

The following 1 packages will be UPGRADED:

konsole

Need to get 6024KiB/6024KiB of archives. After unpacking 14.9MiB will be used.
Do you want to continue? [y/N/q]
->8-

Umm, kinfocenter? No, we don't want it to be installed.

Stage 2. Searching for a reason

Now we will use the 'reason tracking' feature of libcupt's resolver. Let's add '-s' switch (simulating) and '-D' switch (tracking reasons):

-8<-
$ cupt -s install kde-minimal -D
Building the package cache... [done]
Initializing package resolver and worker... [done]
Scheduling requested actions... [done]
Resolving possible unmet dependencies...
The following 16 packages will be INSTALLED:

dolphin
reason: kdebase-apps 4:4.3.4-1 depends on 'dolphin (>= 4:4.3.4-1)'

kappfinder
reason: kdebase-apps 4:4.3.4-1 depends on 'kappfinder (>= 4:4.3.4-1)'

kde-minimal
reason: user request

kdebase-apps
reason: kde-minimal 5:55 depends on 'kdebase-apps (>= 4:4.3.1)'

kdebase-bin
reason: kdebase-apps 4:4.3.4-1 depends on 'kdebase-bin (>= 4:4.3.4-1)'

kdebase-data
reason: kappfinder 4:4.3.4-1 depends on 'kdebase-data (= 4:4.3.4-1)'

kdepasswd
reason: kdebase-apps 4:4.3.4-1 depends on 'kdepasswd (>= 4:4.3.4-1)'

kfind
reason: kdebase-apps 4:4.3.4-1 depends on 'kfind (>= 4:4.3.4-1)'

kinfocenter
reason: kdebase-apps 4:4.3.4-1 recommends 'kinfocenter (>= 4:4.3.4-1)'

konqueror
reason: kdebase-apps 4:4.3.4-1 depends on 'konqueror (>= 4:4.3.4-1)'

konqueror-nsplugins
reason: kdebase-apps 4:4.3.4-1 recommends 'konqueror-nsplugins (>= 4:4.3.4-1)'

kwrite
reason: kdebase-apps 4:4.3.4-1 depends on 'kwrite (>= 4:4.3.4-1)'

libkonq5
reason: kdebase-apps 4:4.3.4-1 depends on 'libkonq5 (>= 4:4.3.4-1)'

libkonq5-templates
reason: libkonq5 4:4.3.4-1 depends on 'libkonq5-templates kdesktop'

libkonqsidebarplugin4
reason: konqueror 4:4.3.4-1 depends on 'libkonqsidebarplugin4 (>= 4:4.3.4)'

plasma-widget-folderview
reason: kdebase-apps 4:4.3.4-1 depends on 'plasma-widget-folderview (>= 4:4.3.4-1)'


The following 1 packages will be UPGRADED:

konsole
reason: synchronized with package 'kdebase-apps'


Need to get 6024KiB/6024KiB of archives. After unpacking 14.9MiB will be used.
Do you want to continue? [y/N/q]
->8-

Now, the output is much bigger. Every package has reason(s) to change its state appended. Let's look at the chain: kinfocenter is installed, because... kdebase-apps is to install. Ok, look further, kdebase-apps is to install because... of kde-minimal. The final chain is 'kde-minimal -> kdebase-apps -> kinfocenter'.

Stage 2.5. Analyzing reason

After determining a full chain one may try to think - is this dependency chain looks OK? Maybe, some Depends/Recommends should be turned up to a less strict dependencies? If that so, it's a good idea to fire a command 'reportbug <package>' to report an unwanted dependency.

In this example, the dependency chain looks OK (at least, to me :)).

Stage 3. Installing a package without unwanted dependency(ies)

The resolution of the problem depends on the answer to the question "Why I don't want this package to be installed?"

Case 1. Only this time/package

If the answer is, say, "Because dependency 'kdebase-apps -> kinfocenter' doesn't make sense on this system", then you do:

-8<-
$ sudo cupt install kde-minimal kinfocenter-
[sudo] password for jackyf:
Building the package cache... [done]
Initializing package resolver and worker... [done]
Scheduling requested actions... [done]
Resolving possible unmet dependencies...
The following 15 packages will be INSTALLED:

dolphin kappfinder kde-minimal kdebase-apps kdebase-bin kdebase-data kdepasswd kfind konqueror konqueror-nsplugins kwrite libkonq5 libkonq5-templates libkonqsidebarplugin4 plasma-widget-folderview

The following 1 packages will be UPGRADED:

konsole

Need to get 5463KiB/5463KiB of archives. After unpacking 13.2MiB will be used.
Do you want to continue? [y/N/q]
->8-

And that's all, kinfocenter won't be installed.

Consequences:

1. This answer implies that you are not against installing kinfocenter if some other package needs it. So, while installing other packages which recommend kinfocenter cupt will suggest you to install kinfocenter again.

2. If you will want to upgrade the package, and the new version contains the same relation, cupt will not suggest to install kinfocenter.

Case 2. Forever

If the answer is "Because I don't want to see kinfocenter in my system ever", then the good choice is APT pinning system.

Place the next three lines into your APT preferences file (usually, /etc/apt/preferences or any file in /etc/apt/preferences.d directory):

-8<-
Package: kinfocenter
Pin: version *
Pin-Priority: -10000
->8-

-10000 is a very low priority, usual priorities are (0 - 1000), so cupt will not ever suggest you to install kinfocenter because of soft (Recommends or Suggests) dependencies. Moreover, if in some actions cupt will need to choose between, say 'kde-virtual kde-virtual-alternate', where kde-virtual depends on kinfocenter and kde-virtual-alternate does not, then cupt will choose kde-virtual-alternate. The exceptions possible in (very unlikely to happen) cases, when non-installing kinfocenter will result in very bad solution for selected actions. The less priority kinfocenter has, the less chances it has to be installed when not requested explicitly (as in 'cupt install kinfocenter').

The Problem I ve just upgraded my Dell PowerEdge T105 [1] from Debian/Lenny to Debian/Squeeze. Unfortunately the result of the upgrade was that everything in an X display looked very green while the console display looked the way it usually did. I asked for advice on the LUV mailing list [2] and got a lot of good advice. Daniel Pittman offered a lot of great advice. The first suggestion was to check the gamma levels, the program xgamma displays the relative levels of Red, Green, and Blue (the primary colors for monitors) where it is usually expected that all of them will have the value of 1.0. This turned out to not be the problem, but it s worth noting for future instances of such problems. It s also worth noting the potential use of this to correct problems with display hardware, I ve had two Thinkpads turn red towards the end of their lives due to display hardware problems and I now realise I could have worked around the problem with xgamma. He also suggested that it might be ICC, the command xprop -root grep -i icc might display something if that was the case. I m still not sure what ICC is about but I know it s not set on my system. The next suggestion was to use the VESA display driver to try and discover whether it was a bug in the ATI driver. It turned out that the VESA driver solved that problem, I was tempted to continue using the VESA driver until I realised that the VESA driver has a maximum resolution of 1280*1024 which isn t suitable for a 1680*1050 resolution display. After reviewing my Xorg configuration file Daniel noted that my frame buffer depth of 16 bits per pixel is regarded as unusual by today s standards and probably isn t tested well. As 24bpp is generally implemented with 32bits for each pixel that means it takes twice the frame-buffer storage (both in the X server and in some applications) as well as twice the memory bandwidth to send data around. So I generally use 16bpp for my systems to make them run a little faster. (II) RADEON(0): Not using mode 1680 1050 (mode requires too much memory bandwidth) I tried using a depth of 24bpp and then I saw messages such as the above in /var/log/Xorg.0.log. It seems that the display hardware in my ATI ES1000 (the on-motherboard video card in the Dell server) doesn t have the memory bandwidth to support 1680*1050*24bpp. I tried using the gtf to generate new mode lines, but it seems that there is no 24bpp mode which has a low enough vertical refresh rate to not exhaust memory bandwidth but which is also high enough for the monitor to get a signal lock. The Solution My current solution is to use 15bpp mode which gives almost the same quality as 16bpp and uses the same small amount of memory bandwidth. It seems that 15bpp doesn t trigger the display driver bug. Of course one down-side to this is that the default KDE4 desktop background in Debian seems perfectly optimised to make 15bpp modes look ugly, it has a range of shades of blue that look chunky. What I really want to do is to get a better video card. Among other things I want to get a 1920*1080 resolution monitor in the near future, Dell is selling such monitors at very low prices and there are a bunch of affordable digital cameras that record video at that resolution. Even if I can get the ES1000 to work at 1920*1080 resolution it won t support playing Full HD resolution video I can barely play Youtube videos with it! I ve previously described my experience with the awful Computers and Parts Land (CPL) store [3] where they insisted that a PCIe*16 graphics card would work in my PCIe*8 system and then claimed to be doing me a favor by giving me a credit note for the full value (not a refund). This convinced me to not bother trying to buy such a card for the past year. But now it seems that I will be forced to buy one. What I Want to Buy I want a PCIe*8 video card that supports 1920*1080 resolution at 24bpp and has good enough performance with free Linux drivers to support Full HD video playback. Also PCIe*4 would do, and I m prepared to compromise on support of Full HD video. Basically anything better than the ES1000 will do. Does anyone know how I can buy such a card? I would prefer an ATI card but will take an NVidia if necessary. Note that I have no plans to cut one of the PCIe sockets on my motherboard (it s an expensive system and I m not going to risk breaking it). I will consider cutting the excess pins off a video card as a last resort. But I would rather just buy a PCIe*8 video card. Note that I am not going to pay cash in advance to a random person who reads my blog. Anyone who wants to sell me a second-hand card must either have a good reputation in the Linux community or ship the card to me on the condition that I pay after it passes the tests. Update: The first version of this post said that I upgraded TO Lenny, not FROM it.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2008/07/05/new-dell-server/
• [2] http://lists.luv.asn.au/wws/arc/luv-main/2010-04/msg00141.html
• [3] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2009/05/02/cpl/

OK maybe the title is a bit of a reach, but she is pretty and my topic is dull.

A new bug fix versions 0.7.12 of Rcpp is awaiting inclusion into CRAN and Debian. It is also available from here. This is another bug-fix version related solely to a build failure on Windows. Trying to protect paths with spaces has the side-effect of breaking backticks use, which unfortunately is already in use by a number of package that since broke during CRAN autobuilds. No other changes were made. As always, full details are in Rcpp Changelog page and the Rcpp page which also leads to the downloads, the browseable doxygen docs and zip files of doxygen output for the standard formats. A local directory has source and documentation too. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the R-Forge page

I ve been AWOL for most of the debian project leader election campaigns this year, but I still want to vote, so I ve been dredging the emails on the last day. Maybe someone still has to vote and reads this, or maybe it ll help someone to interpret the result. What I ve done this year is to make a quick tally of platform points and campaign answers that I liked and disliked for each candidate, then total them up to get an order. If anyone gets a negative (more dislikes than likes), then I ll rank them below NOTA. Platforms: Margarita Manterola, Stefano Zacchiroli, Wouter Verhelst, Charles Plessy. Some of the questions:

• Do you plan on taking on a 2IC or a team? No SZ, WV, CP, MM
• What do you think are valid goals to spend donated money on? How would you think is a valid way to thank (hardware) contributors? What qualifies a Debian Partner ? Spend on what we cannot receive by donation CP. Partner is defined on website CP. Spend on maintenance, development, contributions, use MM. Spend on keeping the project running and emergency reserve SZ. Partnership programs usually require an yearly subscription fee SZ. No specific spending list WV. No formal list of partners WV
• How much time do you currently/would you devote to Debian? Couple of evenings per week and a couple of days per month CP. A daily hour, more in future MM. 1-2 hours/day + 2-4 hours/week SZ. Varies WV.
• infrastructure to finance Debian related projects? Why not use other infrastructure? CP, MM. Don t SZ, WV.
• Please finish In ten years I d like Debian . to still be thriving as the Universal OS MM. to be *THE* renowned distribution in terms of freeness and democracy SZ. to be mainstream CP. to still be the distribution I consider to be the best one out there WV
• Do you think current frequency/amount of heated discussions is acceptable for the Debian project? What would you do to reduce those? too agressive, use social pressure MM. Acceptable? No. Normal? To some extent, yes. DPL must set a good example SZ. Stricter policies CP. No amount of ad-hominem attacks is acceptable, see platform WV.
• Which project and external Debian-related communications media do you follow? and contribute to? lists, IRC, planet MM, WV. lists, Planet CP. lists, IRC, planet, DN, identi.ca SZ.
• How, as DPL, you would (or even could) address the social issues around releasing? add manpower MM. status reports SZ. public disappoval of bad behaviour WV. reshape the archive CP
• should we try to coordinate our release process with Ubuntu s? Yes MM, SZ. Why not WV. More info CP
• Will you withdraw delegations of DD not behaving correctly? On recurrence MM, CP. No(?) SZ. No WV.
• Is there any part of Debian that should be restricted to a small subset of developers? Yes WV, CP, MM. No except security reasons SZ.
• Personal mentoring? Good idea MM. Recycle NM process CP. Use teams SZ. NM already is mentoring WV.
• Standardization, large scale changes, innovations valuable questions, but the responses are too complex to summarise here, sorry.
• How would you enforce Debian Community Guidelines? wouldn t SZ, MM, WV. No clear answer from CP.
• is planet.d.o a good thing? Not necessarily WV. No clear answer from SZ, MM. No reply from CP.
• How do we face the challenge to do more every year? improve our way of working and get more people to help us do our jobs MM. open Debian s door wider CP. have enough people to work on Debian WV. use our communication media SZ

Make of that what you will. It surprised me which way the scores came out, but there was one answer with such a massive problem (in my opinion) that I ranked its giver equal with the next candidate down anyway. If you re a debian developer (DD), have you voted yet?

For those of you who don t know, I occasionally write for Linux Format. As I ve got an article coming out in the next issue (available on April 29th), I thought I d have a check to see if the PDF s are available in the subscribers area yet. Unfortunately, they re not, however, I did notice that my first article for Linux Format has now been released to the general public. If you head on over to Issue 121, you ll find my tutorial Security: Protect your server has a Click here to read! link underneath it. One of my other articles for them, Super Snooper , has also found it s way onto TuxRadar, and, while it doesn t have the pretty artwork (or a mugshot, or any mention of me, it seems!) that the magazine does, it s still well presented on the site! Let me know in the comments if you ve any feedback to either of them! Along the same lines, I m thinking that I want to write a book (mainly so that I ll eventually come first in Google, rather than what used to be second and now for some reason seems 7th ). But what should I write about? I ve a few thoughts, and the one that I feel like I want to write the most is about becoming a Google Ninja (using Analytics, Website Optimiser, etc etc to their full potential) but I don t know would people be interested in buying that?

Conditions for ordering: Not yet. The umbrella will be available ca. end of May, I'll give details about ordering it then. Information so far: CHF 25 per umbrella (ca. EUR 17 / USD 23), including ca. CHF 6 donation to Debian (via debian.ch); at least at first, I plan to ship in lots of 5 or more to save postage. International travellers should coordinate... (if you're close to Basel, Switzerland, you will obviously be able to get one directly as well.) So, stay tuned for the next announcement here.