Tonight procps-ng, a fork of procps by developers from Debian, Fedora and SuSE was released. The main goal of the team for this release was to reduce the number of patches we all carry in our respective distributions and learn from each other. As an added bonus, we had one of the original authors of top, Jim, join the team and greatly enhance top. While the upstream version is now released, the debian package is not quite ready to go as it involves removing a lot of patches and adjusting some others. The build system is also now a reasonably standard (but different to previous) setup that means the packing scripts need adjusting. The best place to find out what is different is the procps NEWS file. The source code is available from Gitorious at https://gitorious.org/procps

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• Useful but Unknown Unix Tools: watch (noone.org)

The bug webinterface of the Ultimate Debian Database currently knows about the following release critical bugs:

In Total:	1812
Affecting Wheezy:	1161
Wheezy only:	163
Remaining to be fixed in Wheezy:	998

Of these 998 bugs, the following tags are set:

Pending in Wheezy:	47
Patched in Wheezy:	191
Duplicates in Wheezy:	47
Can be fixed in a security Update:	31
Contrib or non-free in Wheezy:	16
Claimed in Wheezy:	0
Delayed in Wheezy:	4
Otherwise fixed in Wheezy:	89

Ignoring all the above (multiple tags possible) 631 bugs need to be fixed by Debian Contributors to get Debian 7.0 Wheezy released. However, with the view of the Release Managers, 1053 need to be dealt with for the release to happen. Please see Interpreting the release critical bug statistics for an explanation of the different numbers.

I probably don t have to present Mark Shuttleworth he was already a Debian developer when he became millionaire after having sold Thawte to Verisign in 1999. Then in 2002 he became the first African (and first Debian developer) in space. 2 years later, he found another grandiose project to pursue: bring the Microsoft monopoly to an end with a new alternative operating system named Ubuntu (see bug #1). I have met Mark during Debconf 6 in Oaxtepec (Mexico), we were both trying to find ways to enhance the collaboration between Debian and Ubuntu. The least I can say is that Mark is opinionated but any leader usually is, and in particular the self-appointed ones! Read on to discover his view on the Ubuntu-Debian relationship and much more. Raphael: Who are you? Mark: At heart I m an explorer, inventor and strategist. Change in technology, society and business is what fascinates me, and I devote almost all of my time and wealth to the catalysis of change in a direction that I hope improves society and the environment. I m 38, studied information systems and finance at the University of Cape Town. My hearts home is Cape Town, and I ve lived there and in Star City and in London, now I live in the Isle of Man with my girlfriend Claire and 14 precocious ducks. I joined Debian in around 1995 because I was helping to setup web servers for as many groups as possible, and I thought Debian s approach to packaging was very sensible but there was no package for Apache. In those days, the NM process was a little easier Raphael: What was your initial motivation when you decided to create Ubuntu 7 years ago? Mark: Ubuntu is designed to fulfill a dream of change; a belief that the potential of free software was to have a profound impact on the economics of software as well as its technology. It s obvious that the technology world is enormously influenced by Linux, GNU and the free software ecosystem, but the economics of software are still essentially unchanged. Before Ubuntu, we have a two-tier world of Linux: there s the community world (Debian, Fedora, Arch, Gentoo) where you support yourself, and the restricted, commercial world of RHEL and SLES/SLED. While the community distributions are wonderful in many regards, they don t and can t meet the needs of the whole of society; one can t find them pre-installed, one can t get certified and build a career around them, one can t expect a school to deploy at scale a platform which is not blessed by a wide range of institutions. And the community distributions cannot create the institutions that would fix that. Ubuntu brings those two worlds together, into one whole, with a commercial-grade release (inheriting the goodness of Debian) that is freely available but also backed by an institution. The key to that dream is economics, and as always, a change in economics; it was clear to me that the flow of money around personal software would change from licensing ( buying Windows ) to services ( paying for your Ubuntu ONE storage ). If that change was coming, then there might be room for a truly free, free software distribution, with an institution that could make all the commitments needed to match the commercial Linux world. And that would be the achievement of a lifetime. So I decided to dedicate a chunk of my lifetime to the attempt, and found a number of wonderful people who shared that vision to help with the attempt. It made sense to me to include Debian in that vision; I knew it well as both a user and insider, and believed that it would always be the most rigorous of the community distributions. I share Debian s values and those values are compatible with those we set for Ubuntu.

Debian would always be the most rigorous of the community distributions.

Debian on its own, as an institution, could not be a partner for industry or enterprise. The bits are brilliant, but the design of an institution for independence implies making it difficult to be decisive counterparty, or contractual provider. It would be essentially impossible to achieve the goals of pre-installation, certification and support for third-party hardware and software inside an institution that is designed for neutrality, impartiality and independence. However, two complementary institutions could cover both sides of this coin. So Ubuntu is the second half of a complete Debian-Ubuntu ecosystem. Debian s strengths complement Ubuntu s, Ubuntu can achieve things that Debian cannot (not because its members are not capable, but because the institution has chosen other priorities) and conversely, Debian delivers things which Ubuntu cannot, not because its members are not capable, but because it chooses other priorities as an institution. Many people are starting to understand this: Ubuntu is Debian s arrow, Debian is Ubuntu s bow. Neither instrument is particularly useful on its own, except in a museum of anthropology

Ubuntu is Debian s arrow, Debian is Ubuntu s bow.

So the worst and most frustrating attitude comes from those who think Debian and Ubuntu compete. If you care about Debian, and want it to compete on every level with Ubuntu, you are going to be rather miserable; you will want Debian to lose some of its best qualities and change some of its most important practices. However, if you see the Ubuntu-Debian ecosystem as a coherent whole, you will celebrate the strengths and accomplishments of both, and more importantly, work to make Debian a better Debian and Ubuntu a better Ubuntu, as opposed to wishing Ubuntu was more like Debian and vice versa. Raphael: The Ubuntu-Debian relationship was rather hectic at the start, it took several years to mature . If you had to start over, would you do some things differently? Mark: Yes, there are lessons learned, but none of them are fundamental. Some of the tension was based on human factors that cannot really be altered: some of the harshest DD critics of Canonical and Ubuntu are folk who applied for but were not selected for positions at Canonical. I can t change that, and wouldn t change that, and would understand the consequences are, emotionally, what they are. Nevertheless, it would have been good to be wiser about the way people would react to some approaches. We famously went to DebConf 5 in Porto Allegre and hacked in a room at the conference. It had an open door, and many people popped a head in, but I think the not-a-cabal collection of people in there was intimidating and the story became one of exclusion. If we d wanted to be exclusive, we would have gone somewhere else! So I would have worked harder to make that clear at the time if I d known how many times that story would be used to paint Canonical in a bad light. As for engagement with Debian, I think the situation is one of highs and lows. As a high, it is generally possible to collaborate with any given maintainer in Debian on a problem in which there is mutual interest. There are exceptions, but those exceptions are as problematic within Debian as between Debian and outsiders. As a low, it is impossible to collaborate with Debian as an institution, because of the design of the institution.

It is generally possible to collaborate with any given maintainer [ ] [but] it is impossible to collaborate with Debian as an institution.

In order to collaborate, two parties must make and keep commitments. So while one Debian developer and one Ubuntu developer can make personal commitments to each other, Debian cannot make commitments to Ubuntu, because there is no person or body that can make such commitments on behalf of the institution, on any sort of agile basis. A GR is not agile . I don t say this as a critique of Debian; remember, I think Debian has made some very important choices, one of those is the complete independence of its developers, which means they are under no obligation to follow a decision made by anyone else. It s also important to understand the difference between collaboration and teamwork. When two people have exactly the same goal and produce the same output, that s just teamwork. When two people have different goals and produce different product, but still find ways to improve one anothers product, that s collaboration. So in order to have great collaboration between Ubuntu and Debian, we need to start with mutual recognition of the value and importance of the differences in our approach. When someone criticises Ubuntu because it exists, or because it does not do things the same way as Debian, or because it does not structure every process with the primary goal of improving Debian, it s sad. The differences between us are valuable: Ubuntu can take Debian places Debian cannot go, and Debian s debianness brings a whole raft of goodness for Ubuntu. Raphael: What s the biggest problem of Debian? Mark: Internal tension about the vision and goals of Debian make it difficult to create a harmonious environment, which is compounded by an unwillingness to censure destructive behaviour. Does Debian measure its success by the number of installs? The number of maintainers? The number of flamewars? The number of packages? The number of messages to mailing lists? The quality of Debian Policy? The quality of packages? The freshness of packages? The length and quality of maintenance of releases? The frequency or infrequency of releases? The breadth of derivatives? Many of these metrics are in direct tension with one another; as a consequence, the fact that different DD s prioritise all of these (and other goals) differently makes for interesting debate. The sort of debate that goes on and on because there is no way to choose between the goals when everyone has different ones. You know the sort of debate I mean Raphael: Do you think that the Debian community improved in the last 7 years? If yes, do you think that the coopetition with Ubuntu partly explains it? Mark: Yes, I think some of the areas that concern me have improved. Much of this is to do with time giving people the opportunity to consider a thought from different perspectives, perhaps with the benefit of maturity. Time also allows ideas to flow and and of course introduces new people into the mix. There are plenty of DD s now who became DD s after Ubuntu existed, so it s not as if this new supernova has suddenly gone off in their galactic neighbourhood. And many of them became DD s because of Ubuntu. So at least from the perspective of the Ubuntu-Debian relationship, things are much healthier. We could do much better. Now that we are on track for four consecutive Ubuntu LTS releases, on a two-year cadence, it s clear we could collaborate beautifully if we shared a freeze date. Canonical offered to help with Squeeze on that basis, but institutional commitment phobia reared its head and scotched it. And with the proposal to put Debian s first planned freeze exactly in the middle of Ubuntu s LTS cycle, our alignment in interests will be at a minimum, not a maximum. Pure <facepalm />. Raphael: What would you suggest to people (like me) who do not feel like joining Canonical and would like to be paid to work on improving Debian? Mark: We share the problem; I would like to be paid to work on improving Ubuntu, but that s also a long term dream Raphael: What about using the earnings of the dormant Ubuntu Foundation to fund some Debian projects? Mark: The Foundation is there in the event of Canonical s failure to ensure that commitments, like LTS maintenance, are met. It will hopefully be dormant for good Raphael: The crowdfunding campaign for the Debian Administrator s Handbook is still going on and I briefly envisioned the possibility to create the Ubuntu Administrator s Handbook. What do you think of this project? Mark: Crowdfunding is a great match for free software and open content, so I hope this works out very well for you. I also think you d find a bigger market for an Ubuntu book, not because Ubuntu is any more important than Debian but because it is likely to appeal to people who are more inclined to buy or download a book than to dive into the source. Again, this is about understanding the difference in audiences, not judging the projects or the products. Raphael: Is there someone in Debian that you admire for their contributions? Mark: Zack is the best DPL since 1995; it s an impossible job which he handles with grace and distinction. I hope praise from me doesn t tarnish his reputation in the project!

---

Thank you to Mark for the time spent answering my questions. I hope you enjoyed reading his answers as I did.

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It seems that in theory cruises can make for quite economical vacations. The cheapest prices tend to be around $100 per person per night for an inside cabin (IE no window) with two people (there is a significant extra fee for having a cabin with only one person). If you book a room in a half-decent hotel with a pool in some moderately desirable place then you will probably pay about $200 per night which might get you free breakfast but won t include lunch or dinner. Cruises include all the free food you can eat for at least 16 hours of the day with maybe an extra fee for getting food in the middle of the night. When a cruise ship stops at the port you can pay for an expensive shore trip arranged by the cruise company or have a cheap trip that involves walking on the beach or taking a taxi to somewhere local. Of course there are lots of extras that can make a cruise really expensive, but if you don t plan to eat at speciality restaurants or drink much alcohol then that shouldn t be a problem. I ve just booked a short luxury cruise, mostly as a trial of the cruise concept. The process of doing so was difficult enough that even if I hadn t previously needed a holiday then I d probably need one now. It would be interesting to compare the amount of time that a reasonable person would be likely to spend choosing a holiday and purchasing it for the different types of holiday, I expect that cruising would be a long way behind everything that involves flying to a foreign city and staying in a hotel. The Issues of Booking When booking a regular holiday you choose where to visit, then choose the time of year, the accommodation, and travel. While the order can vary it s generally a sequential process without too many variables at any stage. With a cruise one of the first decisions is to choose the cruise line, different lines cater to various market segments it s clear what Disney cruises aim for but often not so clear for others. Apart from Disney the other cruise lines don t seem to make clear statements about who they are and aren t targeting. Then there are a variety of ships run by each cruise line which in many cases offer different features, do you want 1 pool or 4? Do you want ice skating? The cruise lines that I have investigated don t offer clear comparisons of their ships. As a cruise ship is essentially a hotel, a collection of restaurants, and some other entertainment you can t just arbitrarily choose one the way you might choose a random hotel with a suitable price and rating. Now while you can choose a hotel and generally get a room when you want a cruise booking has to be made when the ship is in a convenient port. So your holiday needs to be scheduled around the availability of the ship. CruiseCritic.com is an excellent source of information on cruises and has a very active and useful advice forum [1]. The forum appears to be dominated by retirees, presumably because retirees have time to just wait for a ship they like to visit their local port while people who have to schedule holidays around work projects etc. When booking a hotel I have found that Wotif.com is really good for comparing hotels and finding a reasonably cheap one and they also have periodic mail-outs about special deals. I have made a couple of short vacations based on Wotif offering me unusually good prices on a hotel in a place that I was mildly interested in visiting. There are also special deals on cruises, but it s a lot more difficult to take them. Firstly as cruises aren t as interchangeable as hotels it s not as appealing to take an offer of a cruise you didn t previously consider because it s going cheap. The second factor is that according to cruise reviews there is more variation among cabins than there is among hotel rooms. The design of the ship that is needed to cram everything in the available space means that some cabins apparently have noise pollution from various activities on the ship while others are considered to have problems for people prone to sea-sickness. Discounts probably only apply after people who pay non-discount rates have had a chance to book what might be considered the better cabins. Of course it could be a good thing to have most of the ship booked out, CruiseCritic.com has some reviews of individual cabins and presumably there are people who compare hundreds of cabins to discover what is ideal for them. The Problem with Princess I have booked a Princess cruise. I chose it because it was going cheap, but the first two travel agents that advertised it were unable to take my order because Princess only allows US based agencies (which means the discount agents on the net) to sell to US customers I don t think that the people who run the Princess cruise company know what the Internet is about. So I booked the cruise through the Princess web site, they took my money, told me that a good chunk of that money would never be returned if I cancelled, and then sent me to the web page for providing all the information that they need which is a lot. The big problem was when their web site absolutely demanded a passport number and said that I would not be allowed to board without one even though their FAQ (and common sense) indicated that a cruise which doesn t involve any international travel has no need of a passport. Taking someone s money and then telling them that they can t attend due to not having a valid passport is one way of making a future passenger very unhappy. I called the support people (which was Carnival) and had to listen to some really strange hold music it was difficult to determine if the music was produced by someone with unusual tastes in electronic music vastly different from my own preference or whether the computer which manages the phone calls was producing noise instead of music. Eventually I got through to an operator who was very helpful and stored my drivers license number which was adequate. While on the topic of their web site, when booking a cruise with Princess they list which types of cabin (interior, balcony, etc) are available and list the price for the cheapest category of cabin in each price. However if the cheapest category is all sold out then it will still list that cheapest price and thus be advertising a price that can t be booked. This is misleading and annoying. Further Hassle But the difficulty doesn t end here. On a cruise you have to book in advance for which dinner seating you desire which is usually only early or late but some ships offer anytime . Then if you happen to be travelling with people who are in a separate cabin and paying separately (which one would expect to be fairly common) there is no obvious way of synchronising dinner preferences the ship people might assign people to different tables. I admit that I haven t fully explored the post-booking part of the Princess web site, maybe I can arrange a shared table but for the moment my pain threshold for the cruise booking process has been exceeded. Other Cruising Stuff Insight Cruises (formerly Geek Cruises) offers a variety of educational cruises including science, astronomy, chess, art, history, and some other things [2]. From a casual inspection of their web site it seems that the cruise prices are around $300 per night for a 2 person cabin and the registration fees for the conferences are between $1200 and $1500. Most readers of my blog will consider this to be unreasonably expensive as registration for a Linux conference tends to be a lot less than $1000. But when compared to typical for-profit conferences $1500 isn t anywhere near the high end of the range. Also while someone who is choosing a cruise holiday can easily get a cruise that costs less than $200 per day for a 2 person cabin, for commercial conferences it s not uncommon to spend more than $300 per night for two people on accommodation and food. So the only noteworthy part about the cost is that accommodation will be quite expensive if you aren t sharing a room. If you want to run a conference on a cruise there are companies which specialise in such things, Landry and Kling is one company that specialises in planning corporate events [3]. They do seem to aim for the high end of the market, including chartering a small cruise ship or half a large cruise ship that means ~1000 passengers. While there are some conferences with more than 1000 delegates it seems that most conferences top out at about 500 delegates. However I know that some conferences have limited the number of delegates to the maximum capacity of the biggest lecture hall available as some cruise ships have a theater with more than 1000 seats it seems that similar conferences could potentially arrange a half ship charter. A half ship charter apparently allows exclusive access to one of the theaters (at least when it s not needed for evening entertainment) and exclusive seating at the main dining room. It s a standard feature that cruise ships have all the equipment you might need to run a conference. Autism on the Seas is a brand used by the Alumni Cruise company for their holiday packages for special needs children [4]. They sell cruise tickets at the regular list price and the commission that they receive when acting as a travel agency is enough to hire staff to look after the kids while presumably still running at a profit. It seems to me that a similar model could be used for a computer conference, make a profit on cruise ticket sales and then have no extra costs for the conference for people sharing a room that would be cheaper than most Linux conferences I ve attended. For smaller conferences and un-conferences there is no minimum reservation size. One down-side for a computer conference is the cost of Internet access, according to Wikipedia a personal installation of satellite net access costs $5 per megabyte and ship pricing for their Internet access is up around $30-$100 per hour per person! But in the old days when attending a conference meant a week of no net access we survived somehow. It also seems to me that if a company had a small development team it could be productive to put everyone on a cruise ship with a server for testing and version control. They could do 9 hour days on board and still have lots of time for relaxation as it s only a few minutes walk to the pool. Of course this wouldn t work if some members of the team wanted to stay home due to slow and expensive net access.

• [1] http://www.cruisecritic.com/
• [2] http://insightcruises.com/
• [3] http://landrykling.com/
• [4] http://alumnicruises.org/Autism/Autism_Home.htm

There's been a lot of noise with Microsoft requiring Secure Boot for Windows 8 OEMs. For those of you unfamiliar with it, Secure Boot requires that the boot chain is signed, and this 'feature' must be enabled by default. Although I have been unable to find specific details, it appears that the chain of trust needs to extend from BIOS/UEFI all the way down to the kernel. Obviously, requiring a signed boot chain makes using FOSS platforms like Ubuntu or Debian an impossibility short of having the UEFI Platform Key and resigning the entire chain.

Steven Sinofsky's MSDN blog has a fairly good overview how it works. Canonical and Red Hat also have a good white paper on why secure boot is a serious problem for Linux distributions. Even if secure boot itself can be disabled, it *greatly* rises the bar for general end-users to successfully install Ubuntu on their machine. In addition, it is the responsibility of OEM and BIOS manufacturers to provide the option to disable it.

There already has been a long history of OEMs removing BIOS options or introducing DRM; for instance, locking out VTx on Sony laptops, or restricting laptops to only accept 'branded' wifi and 3G cards. Given this track record, can OEMs realistically be trusted to have this option available?

What most people don't realize is that secure boot itself is not a new concept; its simply part of the Trusted Computing initiative, and has been implemented on embedded platforms for many years. If you own any iPhone, or one of the vast majority of Android devices, you are using a device that either has the secure boot feature, or something very close. This especially painful in Android as Google's security system restricts users to a *very* limited shell and subset of utilities which can be used on non-rooted devices. WebOS, Maemo, and to my knowledge Meego give the end-user full unrestricted access to the boot chain and you can swap kernels and even the entire OS out if one was so motivated.

Although it is still an ongoing problem, several vendors such as HTC, Samsung, Motorola (kinda), and even Sony. In the Android community, having unlockable bootloaders has been a welcome middle ground in the traditionally restrictive and locked-down world of cellular devices.

While some may argue that such locks are necessary to protect consumers, it is perfectly feasible to create devices with unlocked bootloaders that are still secure. The Nook Color's is an Android powered eReader. It's stock firmware doesn't allow sideloaded applications or even access to a user shell via adb, but the BootROM on the device attempts to boot from the microSD card before eMMC, making it possible for enterprising users to easily modify the underlying OS (as well as making it physically impossible to brick the device due to a bad flash). Barnes and Nobles even sells a book on rooting the Nook Color; it was right next to the devices on display at the time. In addition, they've continued the tradition of easily modifiable devices with both the Nook Simple Touch, and the Nook Tablet.

One of the most impressive attributes is the possibility of running Ubuntu on it. The absolute poster child for this is the Toshiba AC100. For those of you unfamiliar, it ultralight netbook that shipped with Android 2.1/2.2 with easy access to the built in flash via the mini-USB port on the side of the device. Due to the valiant efforts of the AC100 community, Ubuntu was ported to this device, and became a supported platform with images available on cdimages.ubuntu.com. If you were an attendee at UDS, you likely saw several AC100s all running Ubuntu.

This brings me to the point that motivated me to write this post in the first place. One of the most impressive tablets I've seen to date is the ASUS eeePad Transformer, an Android tablet with fully dockable keyboard. I have one of these devices, and its one of the most impressive and usable Android tablets I own. Sadly, such a powerful device was hobbled from its true potential due to ASUS's decision to ship the device with a locked and encrypted bootloader. Surprisingly, the Secure Boot Key (SBK) was acquired and released to the wild, making it possible to reflash the device. Sadly, even with the SBK, the device's bootloader is still extremely hobbled compared to the AC100 making flashing a slow and difficult process.

In response, ASUS refreshed the eeePad's hardware to the new B70 SKU, which has a new Secure Boot. Despite this, a root exploit was recently found to allow people to circumvent these restrictions and install customs ROMs. It is however only a manor of time before ASUS responds and releases a new update that fixes this bug.

Steven Barker (lilstevie) on xda-developers successfully created a port of Ubuntu to the Transformer. Currently, installing Ubuntu on the Transformer requires nvflash access, so its not possible to use his image on the newly liberated B70 devices. I am certain that a new method of installing via an update.zip will be developed for those of us with hobbled devices.

It is a showcase of what is possible when you have open hardware, and also proves one indisputable point: any 'trusted boot' or DRM scheme can and will be defeated; at best you piss off your userbase, and at worst, you force users to exploit bugs to gain control of their device. As it is impossible to reflash these devices from the bootloader, a failed kernel flash WILL brick these devices, increasing warranty and support costs as users try to return their now broken devices.

In closing, while there have been some victories in ongoing war of open hardware vs. trusted comptuing, the road ahead still remains very murky. Victories in the mobile market have shown that there is a market for open devices. Google's own Nexus One was sold as a developers phone and as a way to encourage manufacturers to raise the bar. It sold well enough to recoup its development costs.. While there is no official statements, the Nokia N900 is suspected to have broken all sales expectations, backed up by the fact that Angry Birds sold extremely well on the Ovi Store for the N900.

From the article in question:

What reaction have you had in terms of sales and customer feedback?

Angry Birds had already been launched on App Store before it came out on Ovi Store, and it had a great review average from iPhone reviewers and users alike, so we expected a good reception from N900 users as well.

Even so, we were quite surprised by just how the N900 community immediately took the game to heart. The game obviously made many people very happy, and that is really the greatest achievement that anyone who creates entertainment for a living can hope for. Well, maybe the greatest achievement is huge bundles of cash, but making people happy comes a close second.

In the first week that Angry Birds has been on the Ovi Store, it has been downloaded almost as many times as the iPhone version in six weeks. Given that most N900 users have not even used Ovi Store yet, we are confident that there will be many more downloads in the months to come, and are sure that the N900 version will be very profitable.

That being said, with Microsoft pushing secure boot and trusted computing down everyone's throats with Windows 8, it is hard to say what the future might hold for those of us who want to own our devices.

Last Friday (11 November 2011), I was at the Cooperatives-SW annual conference at the Cube Cinema in Bristol, titled Growing Your Co-operative and sponsored by the Co-operative Membership South and West. It was another sold-out event, featuring headline talks from Co-op Party member and Labour MP Kerry McCarthy, Eli Sarre of Essential Trading worker co-op (pictured), Carole Theyer of Sparks Inc and Jim Pettipher from Co-operative Futures. There were also some great workshops I went to a finance workshop led by Ian Rothwell from Co-operative and Community Finance and a regulations one with Paul Martin of Kabin (details may appear on their event page) and a brilliant lunch from Runcible Spoon (and those of you who know me will know I have been livid with some co-op event lunches!) with some time to chat and network, although I also went to a fringe meeting about the RISE problems. The event concluded with the formal AGM of Co-operatives SW (electing a new chairperson and approving transfer to a new co-op corporation) as well as a bit more chat afterwards. I felt it was a great event and well worth my time being there. I m glad that some people from outside the co-op movement, from community businesses like the Strawberry Line Cafe and a few people considering joining or forming co-ops, were there and I hope it was good for them too.

We've had sporadic Altus Metrum customer reports about RF susceptibility issues with their TeleMetrum installations. In almost every case, these problems have been completely resolved by either making sure the system battery has sufficient charge before launch, or through the application of standard engineering techniques such as twisting wire pairs to reduce differential coupling. However, even when every technique we could think of had been applied, once in a while someone still had issues. Around the time of LDRS this year, the incidence of such reports seemed to increase. One customer, in particular, had an installation in which he virtually always saw continuous resets of the board once his 54mm airframe was put on a launch rail, and several customers reported seeing board resets during ejection charge firing. Keith and I saw a board reset during main charge firing happen in person at NCR's Oktoberfest, and with a couple days available to work together after that launch, we decided it was time to figure out what was really going on. Here's what we've learned. In bench testing, it quickly became clear that the problem was the 3.3 volt power supply rail getting pulled down far enough to reset the CPU. This most frequently happened during ejection charge firing, when the input of the LDO regulator is pulled down by the near-short presented by the e-match when a pyro FET is turned on. To keep the 3.3 volt rail voltage up during firing, we include a 100uF bulk capacitor on the regulator's output. In all of our prior bench testing, we never saw the 3.3 volt rail droop significantly. Clearly something had changed... or maybe several things had changed? The first thing I wondered about was whether the new Kalman filtering code, which requires more compute cycles from the processor, might be consuming enough more power to pull the rail down faster during charge firing. After poking around at it, though, we have no data to suggest the new code makes a measurable difference in power consumption. The next thing we pondered was that at least some of the e-matches we and others are using in the hobby now come from the fireworks industry, where it is apparently considered a feature for the match to retain continuity after firing. This means the input of the LDO gets held down for longer than with the e-matches we used to use and Quest Q2G2 igniters that open when fired. But that still didn't make sense as the root cause, as we chose the FET firing time such that even with a dead short across the igniter terminals, the 3.3 volt rail wouldn't be pulled down far enough to cause trouble during firing. One of the big changes between v1.0 and v1.1 on TeleMetrum was that the newer boards incorporate a better reset circuit. This helps ensure the GPS chip always comes up running at power on, which was a problem at temperature extremes with older boards. However, a side-effect of this change is that a v1.1 board will reset any time the 3.3 volt rail drops below 3.15 volts, whereas older boards didn't trip until a much lower voltage. So the recent increase in reports might just be related to more v1.1 boards being placed in service? While experimenting on the bench, we observed that injecting RF energy into the input of the LDO regulator had the effect of pulling down the output voltage, presumably because the internal reference source accumulates charge and is fooled into thinking the output is too high. Since our designs all have the power switch contacts ahead of the LDO, the wires going out to the switch and back are effectively an antenna... as are, to a lesser extent, the wires going to the e-matches. There is some variability from part to part in just how badly the LDO reacts. But by attaching a tuned length of wire as an antenna to the LDO input and playing around, we were finally able to reproduce the problem reliably on a test board at my bench! On further analysis, we realized that the output of the USB battery charger chip and the input of the LDO both expect a 1uF bypass cap to ground. At some point, those looked redundant and we eliminated one of the two. Unfortunately, we weren't internalizing the fact that the switch leads were between the two caps, and the one we left was on the output of the charger and not at the input of the LDO. Placing a suitable bypass cap right at the input of the LDO turns out to have a truly dramatic effect on RF immunity! Once we realized that RF getting into the LDO input was the problem, Keith pointed out that we used to see "noise" in the accelerometer data on earlier boards that was caused by the 3.3 volt rail moving slightly during radio transmit, which we fixed with a hardware change on v1.1. We are now convinced that this was at least partly related to RF coupling to the LDO input, not just the change in power consumption on the LDO output. We didn't realize what was going on in earlier testing because we often didn't have ematches wired up, so RF coupling was minimal. But going back to flights logged with v1.0 boards that included deployment, and studying the magnitude of the "steps" in acceleration data observed when the transmitter was on, Keith was able to compute the amount the 3.3 volt rail must have sagged if the real acceleration wasn't changing... which in some cases was as much as 180mV! We think this proves that RFI could cause the LDO to drop its output voltage below the reset controller set point on v1.1 boards. Based on these observations, I'm making two hardware changes for the next version of TeleMetrum (version 1.2), and Keith is also making a software change. We have tested all of these changes on real boards both on the bench and in test flights, and the net effect is a major improvement in the RF immunity of TeleMetrum. The first hardware change is moving to a slightly lower trip voltage on the reset controller. Instead of 3.15, the new part trips at 3.00 volts nominal. This gives us more "headroom" to tolerate 3.3 volt rail droop during charge firing, and will allow the board to operate longer on a given battery charge. This change is not relevant for v1.0 and prior. The second hardware change is adding an appropriate bypass capacitor right at the LDO input. This requires a PCB update, but it's possible for me to update existing production boards by adding an 0402 cap right across the appropriate pins on the regulator chip. The software change prevents our altimeters from turning on the radio transmitter while an ejection charge is firing. Since the RF transmitter draws substantial additional power, this should help keep the 3.3 volt rail from drooping. This may not really matter, but it feels like the right thing to do. This change will be part of our next stable firmware release. We think most TeleMetrum customers need not worry about these updates. But if you have seen odd resets on the rail or during ejection charge firing in flight with a TeleMetrum v1.1, feel free to contact me about updating your existing board to include these improvements.

See also parts 1, 2, 3, and 4. This is the biggest highlight of our trip to Greece for me. I enjoy having the chance to meet people, visit for awhile, and make new friends and that certainly happened in Greece. In one of the shops we happened to step into, I noticed a radio behind the counter. That s not unusual itself; radios often catch my eye these days. But this radio was tuned to 21.070, an amateur radio frequency. So I asked the shop owner if he happened to be a ham. And indeed he was. He was Lakis (SV5KKU), and Terah and I had a great time visiting with him. Terah took some photos of us, and then we made our purchases and headed out. I had brought my HT (handheld radio, weighs a few ounces and is powered by batteries) with me, and Lakis told me about the repeaters in the area. I had known about some of that since I had emailed Panos of the amatuer radio club in Rhodes before leaving home (I found his name via Google). A couple of days later, on Tuesday, we found ourselves back in Lindos. It was mid-afternoon, so the shops were quiet. After a late lunch, I thought it would be nice to drop in on Lakis one more time, since we were scheduled to fly back the following morning. I m not sure how long we stayed it must have been at least an hour and enjoyed the fresh orange juice he prepared. After we got back to our hotel Tuesday, I learned that our flights on Wednesday were canceled due to a nationwide air traffic controller strike in Greece. After 3 hours on the phone with Delta (more on that experience later), we got rescheduled to fly back Friday. On Wednesday morning, I remembered that the Rhodes amateur radio club meets every Wednesday evening, and now I would be able to go! I knew how to contact Lakis by email and on the radio, and he kindly offered to pick me up and take me there. So that evening, I got a tour of his impressive mountaintop installation, and then it was on to the club the Radio Amateur Association of the Dodecanese (SZ5RDS). There I met Panos, whom I had emailed earlier (and I think surprised him a bit). It was a friendly group, and they translated into English for me every so often so I knew what was being discussed. When I was about to leave, they gave me this: The translation, partly from my memory and partly with the help of Google Translate, is:

Radio Amateur Association of the Dodecanese, SZ5RDS Our friend and radio colleague KR0L JOHN GOERZEN, who visited the island, has our recognition as an HONORARY CLUB MEMBER. PRESIDENT KAVALAKIS PANAGIOTIS SV5AZK (Panos) SECRETARY PAPADIMITRIOU CHRISTOS SV5DDT RHODES Oct. 5, 2011

(I hope that any Greeks reading this will send me corrections.) I truly appreciated that gesture and meeting all the people in the club. On the way back to the hotel, Lakis and I stopped by a restaurant, which I believe had the best souvlaki I ve ever tasted thanks! We brought some back for Terah. She had chosen to stay at the hotel that evening and had a small hotel meal earlier, but enjoyed the souvlaki and pita. Terah had explained to the ma tre d that I wasn t along that evening because I had gone to an amateur radio club meeting. Judging by the surprised reaction, this was probably the first time they had heard that particular comment! Experiences like this make travel fun and worthwhile. Thank you very much, Lakis and everyone in the club I hope to have a chance to visit again.

The bug webinterface of the Ultimate Debian Database currently knows about the following release critical bugs:

In Total:	1869
Affecting Wheezy:	1211
Wheezy only:	155
Remaining to be fixed in Wheezy:	1056

Of these 1056 bugs, the following tags are set:

Pending in Wheezy:	54
Patched in Wheezy:	197
Duplicates in Wheezy:	48
Can be fixed in a security Update:	33
Contrib or non-free in Wheezy:	12
Claimed in Wheezy:	0
Delayed in Wheezy:	10
Otherwise fixed in Wheezy:	87

Ignoring all the above (multiple tags possible) 684 bugs need to be fixed by Debian Contributors to get Debian 7.0 Wheezy released. However, with the view of the Release Managers, 1105 need to be dealt with for the release to happen. Please see Interpreting the release critical bug statistics for an explanation of the different numbers.

http://lists.debconf.org/lurker/message/20111110.144615.333c5288.en.html Date: 2011-11-10 16:46 +200
To: DebConf Team
CC: debconf-discuss
Subject: [Debconf-team] Debconf13 in Riga, Latvia bid
Hello all, I will be concise and to the point. This email is a formal bid to organize Debconf13 in Riga, Latvia. You can find all the relevant information on the appropriate wiki page: http://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/DebConf13/Latvia All the plans have been solidified over the last few months and the backup options are there only for unforeseen disaster scenarios (like a big fire burning down the primary venue or something like that). The only details that are not nailed down are the final location for the day trip and formal dinner as the vendors did not want to give us such quotes and tentative reservations so far in advance, but even there we have primary and backup options planned already. We are trying to keep everything about this bid simple and predictable, so we hope you ll enjoy it.
Best regards,
Aigars Mahinovs

You're on a small island in the middle of a vast ocean. There's nothing but dirt, stone and grass on the your island, which is part of a tiny archipelago. One of the nearby islands features a dark cave, with what looks like a coal seam near the entrance. You can glimps two small trees on another island nearby. All around your little clutch of islands is what appears to be vast, unending ocean in all directions. It's midday and you need to make yourself safe for the night. You can use the wood from the trees to craft a pickaxe. With this, you can fetch some coal from the seam. With the coal, you can create some torches, to see in the dark. You might have enough wood left over to make a door, if you're lucky. Or perhaps you should save it to craft a boat, or a sword. Groans from something unknown emanate worryingly closely from the darkness of the cave. You're lucky: one of your two trees has dropped a sapling. You eagerly plant it. In a few days time, you might be able to harvest some more wood. You've been granted a temporary reprieve, but the law of diminishing returns means at some point, and soon, you'll run out of wood. Swimming is time-consuming. By the time you have assembled a meagre supply of wood and coal, it's almost sunset. You nervously dig a burrow in the mud of your original island, light it with a torch and block the entrance back up. Night passes slowly as you listen to things crawling around in the darkness outside. I first learned about Minecraft from this blog post by Mike Watson last year. Mike did a great job of demonstrating the narrative power of the game and his post left a lasting impression on me. Every now and then I dip in to Minecraft to see what's new since the last time I played it. In the last few months version 1.8 was released and so I started a new map to check it out. I ended up with a corker of a randomly-generated map. Inspired by Mike's post, I thought I'd write a bit about it. In a follow-up post I will provide the map itself.

During summer, I somehow managed to collect huge backlog on Gammu. This consisted on few hundredths of emails to reply, bug reports, not reviewed records in phone database and so on. Today I can finally say this is mostly over and I should be able to react more quickly. Though this does not change anything on previous statements about limiting my involvement there. Processing emails went quite smoothly, luckily some of them resolved themselves or others have helped on mailing list. With bug reports it is more troublesome, because there are topic which I don't want to touch and thus looking for volunteers to work on that. Maintaining Gammu packages in Ubuntu PPA so that users would be able to install latest version easily is one of such tasks, which are waiting for somebody. Anyway I feel much better without those unread emails and I hope not to collect so huge pile of them again :-).

Filed under: English Gammu 0 comments Flattr this!

The bug webinterface of the Ultimate Debian Database currently knows about the following release critical bugs:

In Total:	1893
Affecting Wheezy:	1250
Wheezy only:	180
Remaining to be fixed in Wheezy:	1070

Of these 1070 bugs, the following tags are set:

Pending in Wheezy:	47
Patched in Wheezy:	190
Duplicates in Wheezy:	51
Can be fixed in a security Update:	33
Contrib or non-free in Wheezy:	10
Claimed in Wheezy:	0
Delayed in Wheezy:	3
Otherwise fixed in Wheezy:	87

Ignoring all the above (multiple tags possible) 709 bugs need to be fixed by Debian Contributors to get Debian 7.0 Wheezy released. However, with the view of the Release Managers, 1144 need to be dealt with for the release to happen. Please see Interpreting the release critical bug statistics for an explanation of the different numbers.

It s seeming increasingly likely that reports regarding the future of Banshee, Tomboy, and the rest of the Mono stack in the default Ubuntu desktop install are accurate. Ubuntu 12.04 will likely be the first Ubuntu release since 5.10 not to ship with any Mono apps in the default install ending a run of 12 releases over 6 years. The decision seems to have come about during the default apps session at the Ubuntu Developer Summit just ended in Orlando, Florida. Prior to heavy vandalism, the only reasons cited for the change in the UDS session log are Banshee not well maintained and porting music store to GTK3 is blocked on banshee ported to GTK3 . Other reasons mentioned but not in the session logs are complaints that it doesn t work on ARM. I m using a lot of conjecture in this first paragraph because the news about the decision appeared on the blogosphere before anywhere else. The first many Banshee or Tomboy developers read about it was reading a flurry of activity on the Tweetosphere from the anti-Mono activists declaring victory. So first, a word on the cited reasoning. Banshee works fine on ARM, since Mono works fine on ARM. Xamarin, the company behind most upstream Mono work, earns their income almost entirely from ARM versions of Mono, running on the varied ARM implementations found in smartphones. Every major Banshee release is personally tested on my Genesi EfikaMX, an ARM system with a Freescale i.mx51 processor. I ve also demonstrated Banshee running in an Ubuntu chroot on my HP Touchpad, an ARM-based tablet. What is known is that Banshee has some problems running on Texas Instruments OMAP4 processors the target ARM platform for Canonical s ARM work. None of the Banshee upstream developers, Mono upstream developers, or Mono Ubuntu team has ever been able to reproduce the cited problems, since problems specific to an exact ARM chip are impossible to reproduce without the requisite hardware and none of us owns an ARM system matching Canonical s target. That Banshee is still a GTK+2 app is true. A port to GTK+3 is almost complete, but blocking on a single technical bug deep within GTK# s guts, which could be fixed by someone with sufficient knowledge of GTK+ semantics. Nobody with the required GTK+ knowledge has stepped forward with a fix at this point in time. As for the final point, that Banshee is not well maintained, this seems like a directed personal insult against the active and responsive Banshee maintainer, Chow Loong Jin, and upstream bug triager David Nielsen, in addition to the immeasurable hours contributed free of charge for the benefit of Ubuntu users by various other members of related Mono app and library teams, including myself. I need to stress at this point that my annoyance with this decision has nothing to do with the actual app changes. Keeping Tomboy and gbrainy, at a cost of about 25 meg of unsquashed disk space, is a hard argument to make compared with those two plus Banshee for 40 meg. Dropping gbrainy and Tomboy, and switching to Rhythmbox, will save about 30 meg of unsquashed space, all told.I m unconvinced that Rhythmbox is a technically superior app to Banshee several features which were gained by the first app swap will be lost again but that s another long tedious argument to be had. No, what has me deeply angered is the shambolic way the changes were made and announced. Significant accommodations were made by Banshee upstream in order to make life easier for Canonical to integrate Banshee into their OS. For one thing, that s why the Ubuntu One Music Store support is a core Banshee feature, not part of the third-party community extensions package. If Banshee was being considered for replacement due to unresolved technical issues, then perhaps it would have been polite to, I don t know, inform upstream that it was on the cards? Or, if Canonical felt that problems specific to their own itches required scratching, then is it completely beyond the realm of possibility to imagine they might have spent developer resources on bug fixing their OS and sending those fixes upstream? Or even and call me crazy providing access for upstream to specialized hardware such as a $174 Pandaboard to empower upstream to isolate and fix unreproducible bugs specific to Canonical s target hardware? And here s where it gets more astonishing for me Canonical paid money to ship one of the community-based packagers responsible for the stack, Iain Lane, to Orlando for UDS, and didn t think it was worth bothering to perhaps inform him hey, the stuff you work on is in danger of being axed from the default install, maybe you should go to this session . So I m not cross that the stuff I work on has been removed from the default install. I intend to continue working on it as I have for the last 4 years, through my work in Debian. No, why I m cross that I heard about it from fucking Boycott Novell. Regardless of your opinions regarding Banshee or its stack, if you read the above and don t see it as an abysmal failure of community engagement by a company whose community manager wrote a book on the damn topic, then there s something seriously wrong with your understanding of how community labour should be seen as a resource. Maybe someone at Canonical should try reading Jono s book. It s not a first-time offence, and this mail from a PiTiVi developer regarding changes in 11.10 makes for useful further reading. [edit] There is some worthwhile discussion going on on the ubuntu-desktop mailing list covering the technical issues surrounding the decision, I would suggest it s a good place for ongoing technical discussion.

This is a follow-up on a previous post: I used a bit of a rainy Sunday to read some docs and write some Python, and I now have a script that converts events from a Guitar Hero World Tour drums controller to MIDI. A brief explanation of how it works: in its standard configuration, the drums controller has five pads and a pedal, and it uses a Wiimote to communicate the events (what pad was hit with what force, or what button was pressed/released, or the position of the mini-stick) to the Wii itself. This communication happens over Bluetooth and not over a dedicated cable or protocol, so it is possible to remove the Wii and use a standard computer with Bluetooth (built-in or via a dongle) instead, and the computer will receive messages. There's some decoding to do, but fortunately people have reverse-engineered the frames, and come up with the libcwiid library and its Python binding, which hides the complexity of the decoding and just delivers structured data to the programs that use it. Then we analyze this data and extract the relevant info from it (with some juggling of bits): "the X pad was hit with force Y". From there, it's a simple matter of mapping the pads to a MIDI note and the force to a MIDI velocity, and of sending the appropriate MIDI message to the target, for instance with the libportmidi library. What you do with the MIDI output is your call: I use it to add more pads to my electronic drum kit, but it could equally be used to drive a software synthetizer, or an external sound module. Or a light-show machine. Or fireworks. Or a model railway. Or whatever. Here's the current version of the wiigh2midi.py script (for updated versions, see the Bazaar repository).

#! /usr/bin/python
import cwiid, time, asyncore, pypm
class Wiimidi:
    wiimote = None
    midiout = None
    lastaction = time.time()
    wii2color =   27: 'kick',
                  25: 'red',
                  17: 'yellow',
                  15: 'blue',
                  14: 'orange',
                  18: 'green'  
    color2midi =   'kick': 36, # Bass drum
                   'red': 38, # Snare drum
                   'blue': 48, # High tom
                   'green': 43, # Low tom
                   'yellow': 42, # Closed hi-hat
                   'orange': 52, # Crash cymbal
                    
    def connect_wiimote(self):
        print "Press 1+2 on the Wiimote..."
        try:
            self.wiimote = cwiid.Wiimote()
        except:
            self.wiimote = None
            return None
        print "Connected."
        self.lastaction = time.time()
        self.wiimote.rumble=1
        time.sleep(.2)
        self.wiimote.rumble=0
        return self.wiimote
    def disconnect_wiimote(self):
        if self.wiimote is not None:
            print "Closing connection to the Wiimote."
            self.wiimote.close()
            self.wiimote = None
        return
    def connect_midi(self):
        for i in range(pypm.CountDevices()):
            interf,name,inp,outp,opened = pypm.GetDeviceInfo(i)
            if outp == 1:
                if name == 'UM-1G MIDI 1':
                    self.midiout = pypm.Output(i, 0)
                    return
        for i in range(pypm.CountDevices()):
            interf,name,inp,outp,opened = pypm.GetDeviceInfo(i)
            if outp == 1:
                print i, name," ",
                print
        dev = int(raw_input("Type output number: "))
        self.midiout = pypm.Output(dev, 0)
    def wiimote_callback(self, messages, timestamp):
        self.lastaction = time.time()
        m = messages[0][1]
        # rx = m['r_stick'][0]
        ry = m['r_stick'][1]
        l = m['l']
        # r = m['r']
        which = ( (l << 1) & 16) + (ry >> 1)
        softness = l & 7
        if softness == 7 or which == 0:
            return
        # print "rx=%d\t ry=%d\t l=%d\t r=%d\t rest=%d" % (rx,ry,l,r,rest)
        # print "which = %d, softness = %d" % (which, softness)
        strength = 7-softness
        color = self.wii2color[which]
        midi_vel = 16*strength
        midi_note = self.color2midi[color]
        self.midiout.WriteShort(0x9a,midi_note,midi_vel)
        self.midiout.WriteShort(0x9a,midi_note,0)
        # print "%s %d -> %d %d" % (color, strength, midi_note, midi_vel)
    def main(self):
        self.connect_midi()
        while True:
            if self.wiimote is None:
                self.connect_wiimote()
                if self.wiimote:
                    # Tell Wiimote to display rock sign
                    self.wiimote.led = cwiid.LED1_ON   cwiid.LED4_ON
                    # We only care for the extension data
                    self.wiimote.rpt_mode = cwiid.RPT_EXT
                    self.wiimote.enable(cwiid.FLAG_MESG_IFC   cwiid.FLAG_REPEAT_BTN)
                    self.wiimote.mesg_callback = self.wiimote_callback
                    self.lastaction = time.time()
                else:
                    print "Retrying... "
                    print
            asyncore.loop(timeout=0, count=1)
            if self.lastaction < time.time() - 3600:
                print "An hour passed since last action..."
                self.disconnect_wiimote()
            time.sleep(0.05)
        print "Exited safely."
# Instantiate and run
inst = Wiimidi()
inst.main()

There are a few obvious improvements to be made: first, handling guitar controllers in addition to drums. Second, handling the buttons could provide extra "pads", to trigger sound effects for instance (thunder, lasers, voices ), or to initiate program changes, or to change the mappings of the pads. Maybe storing the mutable parts (default MIDI adapter, pad-to-note mapping) in a configuration file. Maybe add a user interface to ease the configuration. Patches welcome, otherwise maybe I'll do that myself on another rainy Sunday. Notes and references (in other words, the giants on whose shoulders this program stands):

• As mentioned, this script uses the pyPortMidi binding, available in Debian Wheezy as python-pypm (and easily backported to Squeeze).
• It also uses the Python bindings to CWiid, available in Debian as python-cwiid.
• I based the pad-to-MIDI mapping on the relevant part of the General MIDI specification.
• The bit-mangling operations used to map cwiid messages to plain data were worked out by comparing the tables from the Wiibrew wiki on the classic controller and the drums controller.
• The skeleton of the script was initially based on MythPyWii, although not much of it still remains.

More cowbell!

Ugh, in the last year and a half I've only posted once. With the move to Ireland, starting a new job, and then using too much Google+, I forgot about this blog thing. So, to start with something easy, I'll tell you about some films I watched recently. This weekend I had a marathon of films, after sometime without watching any, I watched two at home and two at my favourite cinema in Dublin: the IFI, which I recommend to anyone living here. First, on Friday, I watched Brazil, the 1985 classic from Terry Gilliam. It was a long overdue obligation to watch it, and some discussions with a friend about cinema made me finally do it. It was an amazing film. Among the many memorable scenes, and cinephile winks, I liked the one copying the famous Odessa steps sequence. The problems related to its US release reminded me a bit of the problems with the edition of Touch of evil, although in the case of Brazil, what the big studio did to the film was to butcher it. On Saturday I continued on the Gilliam streak and re-watched 12 Monkeys, which I had forgotten completely. Another great film, with a clearly bigger budget, it does not rely on the money but in the plot, art, and acting to be memorable. Also, I love the main theme, a tune from Astor Piazzolla called "Suite Punta del Este". Just after finishing the film, I read that some people from the local Couch Surfing group were meeting at the IFI to see one of the many features of the Polish film festival that took place this weekend. So I went and saw A short film about killing, a powerful and shocking movie about the death penalty. Considered by many to be one of the most horrifying depictions of a killing (two, in fact), it didn't shock me as much as some other films had done, maybe it was because of the cinema overdose... Anyway, it was another must-see. IMDB asserts that the Polish government suspended the death penalty in Poland for five years after the release of this film, but I could not find sources to confirm this. This morning I woke up pretty early, which is completely uncommon for me on a Sunday. So I decided to use the tickets offered by the IFI for a pre-screening that I had assumed I would not use, since I had to be in the cinema at 11! This time it was an Irish documentary about Bernadette Devlin, called Bernadette: Notes on a political journey. It was really interesting, even if I had never heard about this important figure of Ulster politics in the sixties. Sadly, because of my ignorance on the topic (and some northern accents that I have trouble understanding), I missed many parts of the film. In any case, it has increased my appetite to know more about the Troubles, which had started when I visited the Republican neighbourhood of Belfast, specially Falls road. Tags: Life, Planet Debian

Dear lazyweb, I was searching through the internet what was I doing wrong, I wrote to the polipo-user list but my email got stuck on moderation, and my connection is really shitty (that s why I m using polipo the way I m using it). I have relaxTransparency and mindlesslyCacheVary set to true, but I don t need so aggresive caching in my development stages that are located under *.local and another development subdomain on the net. Already tried setting uncachableFile to /etc/polipo/uncachable and to ~/.polipo-uncachable, according to the web-config thing is properly setted up, but can t get it to recognize it s content. I first thought it was I was writing bad the regex, .*\.local but it does work in the /etc/polipo/forbidden file. Besides, adding complete domains to the uncachable file doesn t works neither. Could someone confirm this or throw me a hand on this? I m using 1.0.4.1-1.1 version which is the last one on unstable repos.

ERROR: WOUTER+TIMHOTEL@GREP.BE is not a valid email address True, because I entered it in lowercase.

1. Email address local parts (the bit before the @) are case sensitive. That means you can't just convert it to all caps and assume it will arrive.
2. local parts can be composed out of any character from the following list:
• alphanumeric characters (a-z, A-Z, 0-9), and
• !#$%&'*+-/=?^_ ~.

This means that if you're trying to validate an email address by adding a regular expression that does more than check whether there's not exactly one @ in the address, you're almost always wrong. Next time you try to tell me my mail address is invalid, go read the RFC first. Morons.

I have been a long-time user of the Galeon web browser, which, while powerful for its time, is getting a bit long in the teeth and has been abandoned for a long time. As a result I need to find something new. As Galeon uses the Mozilla engine I figure switching to Iceweasel/Firefox will be the least amount of pain since they share similar formats for lots of the user configuration and data (with the exception of history). Switching to Firefox also gives me access to a lot of configurability and a vast sea of extensions all written in RDF, JavaScript and zoooool (ahem, XUL). Another plus was that I was already using Firebug for the occasional web development project. Looking at the Mozilla addons site is like entering someone's shed. There will be the few beautiful unfinished projects still being worked on, one polished finished scuplture gathering dust but still admirable, things with power plugs from a bygone era, some things that have a coin slot on them, some cryptic machines with no visible screws or manuals, some spiders and their cobwebs and a few rats and mice chewing through things. A place where you can find some excellent, well documented, useful and Free Software extensions alongside lots of crud. Luckily for me the good stuff that I wanted to use was already in Debian or the friendly Debian Mozilla extension maintainers team was willing to package them for me. In my quest for freedom from Galeon I first noticed that there is no up button in Iceweasel. Bummer, I use that a lot so I went searching for extensions. I soon found one extension, but it hadn't kept up with the ever-changing Mozilla APIs so it fell by the wayside. Thanks to the leavers of breadcrumbs I picked up the trail to a new shiny and working extension. Lo-and-behold I found Uppity, which was all about going up and as it turns out, much better at that than Galeon. Thanks to MozExt team, thats solved, next! The next glaring problem was the lack of Galeon-style smart bookmarks. Before you ask, yes, Firefox smart keyword bookmarks are not the same thing. This was rediculously hard to search for due to the wording used by both projects being same same but different. Some folks switched to Epiphany to get the extra search boxes on their toolbars. Like this guy I was not interested in that, mainly due to the addons I would be missing out on. I tried a few different tacks, even searching for a way to have multiple search boxes in the Firefox toolbars. I soon gave up on finding an extension that would do this like Galeon does so I figured its time to roll up the sleeves and learn some zzzoooool. I already know a little bit about JavaScript and CSS so... First slap a dash of a tutorial about adding toolbar buttons, add a slither of adding extensions without installing them, stare down some Mozilla reference manuals, thrown in a pinch of favicons, give up on a wild goose chase or two, add a big fat blob of zoooool and sautee in fugly hacks. Soon enough you will have something hardcoded that works like Galeon smart bookmarks but looks even better. I may eventually turn this into a proper and functionally equivalent extension for Galeon-stlye smart bookmarks but for now it will remain a useful hack. If you want to get your hands dirty with zzzoooooool and try this out after modifying it to use your personal search URLs, please feel free to contact me. For now the only remaining issue I can see is that the forward/back buttons in Iceweasel don't have the explict menu buttons. This is a minor issue for me so now it is time for me to figure out how to migrate my data and config¹ before permanently switching away from Galeon. Wish me luck! 1. Of course the data and config are fugly, but that is a something for another, much broader and more complicated hack

Just watched the whole Douglas Engelbart demo from 1968. Somehow I'd only heard of this as the first demo of the computer mouse, and only seen a brief clip on youtube. All three 30-minute reels of the film are available online, and well worth a watch in full. The mouse is the least of it, the demo includes an outlining text editor, model-view-controller, hypertext, wiki, domain specific programming languages, a precurser to email, bug tracking, version control(?), a chorded keyboard. (Ok, that last one didn't really take off.) Probably a dozen other things I've forgotten. All in a single interface, and all before I was born. Just like any tech demo, there are fumbles and mistakes, which is reassuring to anyone who has tried to give a tech demo. There's also the awesome crazy hack shown here. They could only afford these tiny, round CRTs, so they pointed a television camera at it, and the camera image was piped to their television console. (So add KVM switch to the list of firsts!) The demo was done in San Fransisco, with the computer system remote in Palo Alto, so in this image you see the text on the CRT overlaid with the video from the camera. Engelbart points out that the delay this added to the system acts as a short-term memory that filtered out flicker in the original display (and made the mouse have a mouse trail). To me it gives the whole demo a unique quality, as if it were underwater. Despite the piping around of audio and video signals, and the multiuser system, the glaring thing missing from the demo that we have these days is networking. Although there is this amusing bit at the end where they compile a regular expression and then apply it, in order to search for documents containing certain terms, and end up with a hyperlinked list of 10 results, ordered by relevance. Yes, think Google.